Screwing Up While Travelling The World

As you may have noticed I’ve been a pretty shitty blogger lately. My last post was November 9, and then it was just me soliciting some Google Wave invites. It’s time for a comeback!

Before heading into the story of what I’ve been up to instead of blogging (it’s a pretty good story), I would like to apologize to the students at Medieinstitutet who waited forever for answers to the interview questions I had promised to give them on my blog. Why on the blog, you ask? Well – I think it’s good practice to give interview answers on the blog instead of directly, since more time can be allocated to the interview when I also get a great blog post out of the barter. It’s win win. I have done this with Hyper Island and Berghs School of Communications earlier and I kind of like it.

For reasons that I’ll tell you more about below, I never managed to squeeze in that hour or so for writing the post, and finally a friendly reminder on Twitter had me sent me into “oh shit, got to answer that!”-mode. I fired off some half assed answers and they were rightly not very satisfied with those. In fact, they were so late now with their case study because of me that they ended up doing this for their presentation instead:

…which is probably pretty similar to what I would have done myself in their situation.

So – in this rather long blog post I will give you the answers to these questions. But first a brief recap of what I’ve been up to instead of answering your interview questions.

What Walter’s Been Up To

First, I have started an advertising agency. Honesty as an idea was started in February 2009, but the fully operational agency was launched October 1, which means that I’ve been extremely tied up here with recruiting, meetings, moving, building web sites, and – believe it or not – working for clients! Both of my blogs pretty much died in the process.

I’ve also done quite a bit of travelling. First of we were on a research trip to Manila, the capital of the Philippines, which was probably an amazing country from what I could tell from within the hotel, meeting rooms and the occasional restaurant. Average sleeping time was 3-4 hours during the stay. This was the view from my hotel room anyway.

I flew to Manila via Helsinki and Hongkong, which meant that I was hit by the Finnair strike. My plane back home was canceled and I had to go half way around the world to get home. After that 24.5 hour trip, I had to go pretty much straight to a lecture in Stockholm and fire off the last of my energy. Before heading off to sleep.

After a good nights sleep in Stockholm and four days of meetings, I went back to the airport to fly off to Slovenia for the SEMPL12 conference.

…and press in a language that I don’t understand. I hope they said nice things.

Right about now, I was pretty darn beat. I took a day off and went to Venice before heading back to Stockholm.

And here I am now. We’ve just had a two hour walk-through of all projects and the last couple of weeks progress. We have also had brief meetings with our new art director. And I’m really really happy to be back!

So – with that excuse for the inexcusable (I should have told you in advance about my choked schedule), I will now answer your questions in more detail.

And Finally, My Q&A With Medieinstitutet

Q1: Have you felt that you have to educate the client in social media strategy in order to gain trust for your communication strategy?

A1: Yes. We still have to educate clients regarding why social media is important and how it works. Contrary to what a lot of people claim, there are really no “experts” in this field. Doing well in this field is a combination of acquiring the best knowledge there is in combination with having an attitude of trial and error. Basically, you have to be a brave entrepreneur, but a well educated one. We have very little to gain from sitting on this knowledge and keeping it for ourselves. The more knowledge and we share, the easier it it for us to come across to the client. The “trust me”-approach is very common in this field, but I don’t believe in it at all. Luckily for us, three out of the seven people at Honesty are quite descent lecturers, so we have a bit of an advantage here.

Q2: What does your client want to communicate in general?

A2: This question can be answered very generally. Many of our clients want to make more money or save money. Others want to build their brand in order to achieve the same thing in the long run. Occasionally there are other goals such as distributing public information, gathering customer information, etc. The common denominator is that there is some sort of conversion that they want to achieve. This means that we have to take care of the entire chain from expectations and first contact to alignment and recurring contacts. This in turn means that we cannot see any channel as solitary, but always have to conduct the entire orchestra to play the same tune so to speak.

Q3: How do you analyze the market for new medias? Where do you get your updates?

A3:The most comprehensive information about the market for new media can be found in… new media. It’s a cliché but it is true. The information on how the market develops and how it changes is gathered mainly by analyzing the trends on the web and with the different social medias.

We constantly follow and check international and local blogs, Tweeps, networks and sites to find and gather new information. It’s quite amazing how much you can find through social media about social media and in this fast and changing landscape social media are really the only channels with even a remote chance of keeping up. “No man is an island” has never been so true!

Another set of good information sources are Googles different tools, like Google Keyword Tool, Google Insights & Google Trends. These tools provide in-depth information on how people search and trends regarding this.

If you want to dig deeper into this I would again and sincerely recommend having a chat with Simon Sundén, and if you want I can ask him to blog more about this specific topic?

Q4: How do you recruit? How is the composition of people in your agency and how do you plan your requirement?
A4: I think that this particular answer in my email to you was actually quite inclusive, so I’ll leave it pretty much as it was:

Currently the agency is a “Oceans 11″-setup. We have two superstar creative directors, Martin Marklund & Petrus Kukulski. We have one person specialized in creating traffic from search and social media, Simon Sundén, and we have one person specializing in digital concept development and conversion. I have both technical background, strategic background and creative background and work with strategically coordinating our efforts. We also have a Client Director, Emil Clase, who makes sure that our clients have a really smooth ride with everything. Now, we have also just received a kick ass art director to the team. That’s pretty much it.

In the long term we want to build more cutting edge units like this one. In the short term we’re looking for more designers and art directors. We’re setting up one production unit which will not primarily focus on concept development, but will rather function as a studio working with execution. For this studio, we are currently looking for two hard working people, one art director and one copywriter, with love for the craft and fingertip precision. At some point soon we’ll also recruit programmers, particularly specialized in PHP, Open Source and Java-programming. Also, production managers and project managers are “around-the-corner”-recruitments.

Q5: In your opinion, why are women over 35 a minorty in the business when a majority of the students in the related educations are female?

A5: like I said in the email, this question carries a logical inconsistency. For the comparison to be relevant I would have to know when the majority of 35 year olds went to school, and what the ratio was back then, but generally I think that it is an interesting question with the demographics of our business. I see several problems in this area with our business. People with origin outside of Sweden and low-income backgrounds are vastly under-represented. And there are many more skews like this one. Women in the industry is one example. We have our eyes on a few kick ass female creatives, one female production manager and one female strategist for our recruitment scheme. Still – and this is important to point out – the big picture is what is important. What the person delivers and how the person fits in the team is number 1.

Q6: How does sociala media work in a b2b perspective in comparison to b2c, is there any difference?

A6: A few bestselling books could probably be written on this subject, so any answer here will be a general one. But as expected, the answer is both yes and no. The B2B-perspective is a more confined space where we, if we’re not lazy, can know much more about our target community. Meanwhile, people in business are precisely… people, and can therefore be reached like people. Perhaps in other situations than in their roles as business people. How can we make their jobs easier, more meaningful, and more productive? Not to mention, more fun?

In some B2B-cases, the work is also about B2B’sC’s (business to business’ customers), aiming at creating larger demand in the clients customers. On the other hand, this is also really common practice in B2C as well. Consider for example what marketing to children looks like (immoral or not).

Q7: How do you best measure the effects of a social media campaign?

A7: We love measurement and analytics of social media campaigns! We can set up KPI’s in several dimensions of course, all depending on the overall goal that the client wants to reach, but here are some examples:

1. Traffic increase to specific sites / parts of sites
2. Campaign site traffic sources
3. Search based traffic
4. Conversion on any of the above
5. Data on activity from Facebook Insights, number of fans, posts?
6. YouTube Insights. All data we can get from external links, embeds, demographics…
7. Twitter reach. Of course one can count RTs, but what’s important here is to see how far we’ve reached on good topics. Tools like TwitterAnalyzer can be used here.
8. Mentions in social media. Check mentions on blogs, in forums, on Twitter, Facebook. Pretty much all social media is open for gathering this data.

So, in conclusion, while these answers are short and not complete in any way, I hope that you have received some sort of picture of our way of thinking here at Honesty. Again, I’m really sorry that you got your answers so late and that we messed up your presentation. Good luck with your studies, and feel free to come back with any questions you might have.

See you soon!