THE 14TH ANNUAL SHORTY AWARDS

The Shorty Awards honor the best of social media and digital. View this season's finalists!
From the 7th Annual Shorty Awards

Pandemic Labs – Small Social Media Agency of the Year

Entered in Small Agency

Objectives

Pandemic Labs has been designing and executing social media marketing campaigns since 2007. We operate as the social agency of record with our clients, focusing not on small projects, but on multi-year relationships with major brands where we create, sustain, and execute holistic social media marketing strategies that drive awareness, demand, and revenue (ADR). From that foundation, we build special projects and campaigns that further catapult our clients into the minds of their target consumers.

Pandemic Labs stands above other social agencies for three main reasons:

1. We are obsessed with measurement and KPIs. Our strict focus on measurable impact ensures our social media strategies don't just "sound cool" but also provably drive business results.

2. We are global. We have staff in Boston, Dubai, and Manila. We actively run social media campaigns for clients in over 26 countries and multiple languages. This is unheard of for boutique social agencies of our size.

3. We have proprietary technology. When we want deep insight or answers to questions that current tools don't offer, we build our own tools. This allows us to stay ahead of trends and capitalize on opportunities.

Our primary goal is to drive success for our clients. We believe that if we put them first and make them successful, they'll continue their partnerships with us. That's why we're so proud of the length of many of our relationships. 2015 marks our 8th year working with ViaCord, our 6th year with The Ritz-Carlton, and our 3rd year with Sonic Automotive.

Strategy and Execution

Pandemic Labs has a long history of building creative and innovative social media campaigns. From our award-winning "World Concierge" program for The Ritz-Carlton on Foursquare to our The Story Beyond the Still UGC contest with Canon, our work has not only been groundbreaking, but also effective. And effectiveness is what we take most seriously.

Our primary consideration when working in social media is driving business results for our clients. Sometimes the way to do that is innovative, and sometimes it's done by excellence at the smaller, always-on aspects of social that are so often overlooked.

Every social asset for every one of our clients is designed to achieve and measured against specific business outcomes, and this focused approach has led to enormous and consistent success for our clients.

In Shareablee's 2014 "State of Luxury in Social Media" report, they show that The Ritz-Carlton is the most engaging hotel brand in the world, outstripping many brands with bigger audiences and bigger budgets.

A July 2014 report by Engagement Labs shows The Ritz-Carlton significantly outperforming other hotel brands in terms of impact, engagement and responsiveness.

Additionally, The Ritz-Carlton has been honored with numerous other awards such as Travel + Leisure's SMITTY award presented to The Ritz-Carlton for best Brand Twitter.

Our work with The Ritz-Carlton at a brand level is strengthened immensely by the quality of the creative use of Facebook Pages by individual Ritz-Carlton properties such as The Ritz-Carlton, Amelia Island, The Ritz-Carlton Resorts of Naples, and The Ritz-Carlton, Riyadh. Ritz-Carlton properties have won numerous awards over the years, such as The Ritz-Carlton Resorts of Naples recent Adrian Awards win for their "Weddings at The Ritz-Carlton Resorts of Naples" initiative, which used the hashtag #NaplesNuptuals to raise awareness for the resort's seamless in-house planning services and expertise as well as showcasing the destination and world-class facilities.

These awards and accolades are certainly nice to have, but what's most important is that they clearly demonstrate how we are driving client success by dominating in engagement and consumer connection across social channels.

Viacord is a client with very different business objectives than The Ritz-Carlton and therefore our strategy is different, but we are consistently seeing success. The ViaCord Facebook pages outperforms their industry average by nearly 20%, and in 2014 we began making custom educational content to appeal to their target audience (pregnant women), such as Viacord's Prenatal Yoga education, where Viacord worked with a prenatal yoga expert to give advice, tips, and examples across their blog and social media assets.

Now entering our 3rd year as social media agency of record with the Fortune 500 titan, Sonic Automotive, we have broken new ground on how to effectively use social media and online reputation management to drive sales and service leads for over 105 car dealerships across the country. The logistics required for this undertaking could easily overshadow the creative, but we ensured success across the account and Sonic is now cemented as the automotive retail leader in the social space. In fact, Sonic's social media assets are now one of the top 10 largest drivers of traffic to Sonic dealership websites.

Our commitment to excellence and the advancement of social media marketing is not only specific to each of our clients. We strive to build subject matter experts and thought leaders at all levels of Pandemic Labs. Co-Founder and Creative Director, Matt Peters, travels worldwide speaking on "The Science of Social" and how to better use data and automation to improve social media marketing. VP of Client Services, Ed Gazarian, is an internationally respected expert on the intersection of social media and the luxury consumer.

It's one of the open secrets of Pandemic Labs that we train the best social media operators in the industry. To facilitate this, we have Pandemic Labs University (PLU) every month where experts in related marketing fields present to the entire agency on a specific topic. This process ensures knowledge transfer from the best minds in the business to the entire agency and promotes competency across different teams and different levels of seniority.

At Pandemic Labs, social is what we do. We make sure we learn the most, work the most, and play the most. Our corporate culture drives the successes and results talked about above and also ensures an employee churn rate that is among the lowest in the industry. In conclusion, we hire the best, train the best, and keep the best, which leads to year after year of award-winning client success.

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Entrant Company / Organization Name

Pandemic Labs

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