We are the driving force behind multi-lingual, cross-platform social media activity across multiple international territories. At the heart of everything we do is the ethos of social capital; that every social interaction we make should nurture self-reliant, peer-to-peer communities that mutually benefit our clients and create a sustainable affinity between brands and their consumers. We moderate to protect; engage to build advocacy and listen to provide strategic intelligence for our clients’ online communities. We do this 24/7/365 and in 20 languages, allowing our clients to reap the rewards of social dialogue with over 4 billion people worldwide. Our commitment to building social capital is not exclusive to our client work, but permeates everything that we do: It is the reason we host fortnightly knowledge share lunches, and why we regularly share our expertise at industry events. It is why we built an influencer map of New York using proprietary software to help New Yorkers better understand their social community, and why we developed an ROI calculator to provide Facebook marketers with a tool that accords a dollar value to their social activity (soon to be rolled out for all major social channels). It is why we’re members of UKCCIS (a child safety advisory board to the British government) and the IWF, through which we’ve been integral in shaping policy around the safety of children online, and why we’re regularly involved in media panels on this topic. Before we do anything, we ask ourselves ‘will this benefit our community?’, whether it’s our immediate community, our colleagues, clients and friends, or the much wider social media industry. We also eat a lot of cake, and have a Spotify playlist that would make the folk at Pitchfork green with envy. Heritage: We have 14 years’ practical experience of building and nurturing online communities, from moderating the humble forum to developing and adapting to the numerous paradigm shifts in the industry over the years. We now create and monitor content using every major social platform and many territory specific channels such as Orkut, VK and Sina Weibo on a daily basis. Longevity, Quality and Trust: Our clients trust the quality of our work and that is reflected in the longevity of our relationships and the prestige of our client roster. The BBC – one of the world’s most esteemed broadcasters – is a good example: We began working with the BBC in 2005 and, almost 9 years and 3 retenders later, we are a more integral social partner than ever. During our long tenure we have helped the BBC launch and manage 45 message boards, over 80 blogs and scores of social media channels with titles as diverse as ‘Russell Brand’, ‘the Asian Network’ and ‘Ulster Radio’. In an independent study verified by the BBC, out of almost 400,000 pieces of content processed by our moderators, we were found to have moderated 99.7% of comments accurately, making us the most accurate moderation providers on the market. We help our clients to integrate all of their disciplines into one coherent social voice: Sony had the unenviable task of disseminating messaging from multiple disciplines within the company, across 78 social channels, in over 30 European markets and over 20 languages. Working closely with the Sony C-level and local social leads, we built a multi-lingual in-house community management team to streamline Sony’s social communications from marketing, PR and customer service departments across Europe. In doing so, we’ve helped to create a consistent social voice for Sony Europe; improved Sony’s engagement rates; increased efficiency of customer service response and vastly reduced the cost of Sony’s customer service program. We are innovative: We use a plethora of social tools to moderate, engage with, listen to and understand our clients’ communities. If a client comes to us with a problem that has no existing tech solution, we’ll build it. That’s how such proprietary applications as MappR, StitchR, Sharecounter, Eucalyptus and our ROI calculator were born and integrated into our existing reporting suite. We used MappR to visualize the influencer landscape of the New York social media community, which generated over 400 tweets and 2,000 organic views. We are experts: And not just in the broad social media sense: We’ve built a number of internal teams who are expert in deploying social across a variety of disciplines. Our gaming division boasts such clients as Activision and Xbox, and our broadcast professionals list the BBC, the New York Times and MTV among their customers. We create experts using a program comprising mentoring, partnerships and secondments. Our child safety expert, Tom Walker, for example, has enjoyed an 18-month secondment to Childline, the UK’s only free 24-hour counselling service for young people. He is our account lead for the NSPCC and NCA accounts, and performs an ambassadorial role to the IWF. He is also currently enrolled in a mentoring program with John Carr - the world’s preeminent child safety expert. Due to Tom’s expertise on the topic of child safety, he has made several media appearances, including interviews on Radio 5 Live and Radio 1 and regularly speaks at industry events on the subject. Ping Pong: We played Ping Pong before it was cool, and we’ll challenge any agency to a game ;)
