Posts Tagged 'social'

Round about this time last year we were celebrating with the good folk at The COGs awards having won the award for Best Web agency. Step forward a year and we have another good reason to raise our glasses – or, more accurately, four good reasons having been shortlisted in four categories: Company of the Year, Mobile, Social and Web.

The GOGS recognise that many of the great campaigns couldn’t happen without the hard work that goes on behind the scenes to implement the brilliant idea and make it happen. They are voted for solely by the client so thank you to everyone we have worked with who took the time to vote for us.

It’s been quite a year. As well as continuing to work closely with our long standing partnerships to help shape their future digital output we’ve also welcomed on board a raft of new clients including TalkbackThames, ITV, SyCo, The X Factor, Screenpop, Scandinavian Airlines, Bluewater Shopping Centre, BOC, Gear4 and Protect Your Bubble to name but a few.

Nothing pleases us more than delighting our clients so cheers to you and thanks for your vote.

Let’s set the scene, tastefully designed meeting room, inspiring brands and phrases on the wall, spectacular views from the 15th Floor, it’s the monthly marketing meeting.

“I’ve got a great campaign idea”, says the marketing manager. “It’s brilliant, unique and sure to hit home with our customers and prospects.”

“Brilliant”, exclaims the marketing director, “but what social media channels does it embrace? Is there a Twitter api element? How does it tie in to our Facebook page? How many more followers are we going to get?”

“Well we don’t really need social media integration with this idea, I was thinking we’d leave it up to the customer to decide whether they’d engage via social channels”, the marketing manager sheepishly replies.

Queue dumbstruck colleagues and looks of bewilderment around the table.

New campaigns from companies big and small today are awash with references to social media, “come find us on Facebook”, “for latest news, see our Twitter page”, “To find out whether we decide to change the colour of our logo from red to burgundy watch our Youtube video”but is this relentless pursuit of today’s marketers to embrace social media actually having a detrimental effect on the quality of the marketing campaigns as a whole?

Too often social media is used as part of a campaign framework without thought to what it will bring and who might engage. It requires careful thought, and methodical execution to get it right, yet we continue to see countless examples of the social media after thought from brands who should know better.

For some brands there is no doubt, that campaigns with a social media focus have delivered impressive performance.  Look at Whopper Sacrifice or The Streets new mix tape release as a great example of how to embrace social media as part of your marketing campaign. But for every success story there are countless let downs, fan pages abandoned after a month, twitter feeds that never get past the first 5 messages, and Youtube channels with nothing but an old advert on auto play. Be it content, delivery, or execution, creativity is important for all elemnts of campaign activity, a brilliant advertisign campaign will only extend to social media if the thought has been given to how it’s executed in these platforms, who it’s targeted at, and why they would want to engage with it.

But if the creative juices for social media just aren’t flowing, there is another solution.

Why not leave it up to the fan to decide. Coca-Cola’s ‘fan made’ Facebook page is testament to what can happen if you leave the fans in control. So if the campaign idea is brilliant, you think your target audience are sure to want to engage with it, perhaps the social media element should simply be to sit back, relax and allow others to share your content with their peers?

Like this post? Why not follow our musings on Twitter @pancentric ? (Sorry couldn’t resist)

The famous ‘power of blogs’ experiment.

So here we are, live at BIBA 2011 (#BIBA2011), demonstrating how powerful blogs can be for your marketing efforts, and how well they perform in search engines.

Right now as all eyes rest on the screen behind me (pics to follow), we’ve taken a random blog title generated by the lovely BIBA audience, and we’re going to see whether this blog post will have indexed in the Google search rankings by the end of this BIBA conference breakout session that Pancentric have been co-hosting. For the good of digital marketing, not to mention my reputation, let’s hope this works.

Today we’ve discussed the merits of social media in the B2B space, how the insurance community can realise the potential social media presents businesses, and how social media fits more broadly with other digital marketing activity. We’ve heard from BIBA themselves how working with Pancentric to develop their social media offering has delivered some stand-out results for them both in terms of reach and awareness. Neil Grimshaw from the Ravenhall group has also been telling us how his use of social media has led to some influential connections and greater visibility for his business services. Our very own Tim Mears has presented some interesting social media case studies, demonstrating how social media plays an important role on the purchasing decisions of millions of online consumers, and now we find ourselves at the ‘experiment’…

To demonstrate how quickly Blogs index posts, we’re going to put this one live now, and in just 30 minutes time, we’ll search for our post in Google, and hey presto it will be there.

Digital, don’t fail me now.