Digital agency offers overnight social media brand pages babysitting service
A Sydney digital agency is launching what it claims is an Australian first – a service babysitting brands’ social media pages overnight.
G Squared – which was set up in 2009 – says it will monitor pages after staff have knocked off for the night.
George Photios campaign director of G Squared said incidents such as this week’s apology by Qantas after an eight-year-old boy saw a hardcore pornographic image uploaded by an online user to their Facebook brand page, had led the agency to offer the service.
“The only brand doing this at the moment are Telstra with their 24/7 support but most companies don’t monitor their pages at night and that was exposed with Qantas this week and similar events have also happened to a number of other companies,” said Photios.
The statement that Telstra are the ‘only’ brand monitoring 24/7 is incorrect.
Plenty of other Australian brands actively monitor their brands 24/7.
Other companies doing this well too, such as Preface.
http://www.prefacesocialmedia.com.au/
Good to see brands getting smarter about SM. Finally.
I’m not sure this is a first.. As CEO of Quiip I cant help but point out that as a dedicated community & social media management company we’ve been offering 24/7 services for over three years. We work with a range of agencies, direct clients and government departments – so we can attest plenty of brands do monitor out-of-hours. Although as highly-skilled CMs I wouldnt call our services babysitting!
Hi all, thanks for your thoughts. I’m also a campaign director at G Squared and would like to clarify a couple of things about my colleague’s comments.
@Rango, Telstra advertise their social media outlets as a 24/7 customer service channel. We are offering 24/7 customer service, not just 24/7 monitoring. Most large companies don’t monitor their pages after-hours.
@Alison, we manage these pages in-house, not internationally. To respond most effectively and to understand the Australian market, we believe that these pages need to be managed within Australia. After performing our due diligence, we believed this to be an Australian-first (in-house). However, we are happy to stand corrected.
Unsure if this is a total failure at industry research prior to launching a product, or poorly executed PR stunt.
One Small Planet are wonderful at providing 24/7 social media support and do so for a range of our clients and well known Australian brands – and they do a lot more than just “baby sit”
@ Hugh – you raise a good point. But I shall lay some of the blame on the media channel that reports ‘industry firsts’ due to them being claimed in press releases, rather than as a product of investigative journalism…
Hi jorn,
There was some discussion in the office ahead of publication.. You may notice we were careful to list it as being claimed as an industry first with that claim being sourced to the agency. We did not state it as fact.
Cheers,
Tim – Mumbrella
@George – we have a team of 12 staff and capabilities to offer a local team (within Australia), Australians based overseas and/or experienced foreign Community Managers (not offshoring – highly respected CMs based in the UK, North America and Europe).
As specialists with high risk & sensitive community content we are well aware of the need to understand the Australian market, along with the linguistic, cultural and geographical nuances required when communicating online.
Yes we have central office and a distributed team – as we believe this is the future of workplace practices. Is the “Australian first” that your team work from one-location? If so, the article doesn’t make this clear and I’d be surprised if it’s a first. But I’ll leave that for the other agencies & companies to comment on.
Hi, As LJ mentioned, in fact we at One Small Planet http://www.onesmallplanet.com.au have been monitoring and engaging on social media platforms for many businesses and brands for many years now.
Not sure Alison ever referred to international outsourcing did she, George? Quiip is an Aussie born and bred consultancy (and one of the best) leading the CM space for clients and practitioners alike. She was merely politely pointing out agencies here, in Australia, have been providing this consultancy product for a while. Onshore. Out of hours. In community management.
For Alison and her “Highly skilled CM’s”:
Like if you think this is an oxymoron.
Share if you think it’s delusional.
If you would prefer us to justify it, please send us a message and we’ll pass it onto the team!
@Alison – thanks for the additional info. Our team work from one location in Sydney, Australia which we believed to be an Australian-first. As mentioned, happy to stand corrected but at this stage I can’t find any evidence to the contrary. It’s great that there are other agencies out there who encourage thorough community management and I’m very much looking forward to the journey!
Best of luck and I’m sure we will cross paths in the near future.
I love it when people devalue my chosen career by calling me a glorified babysitter.
So this is only an Australian first because they all sit in the same office? Never mind the fact Quiip and others have been doing this for years. I guess all those years I was on overnight forum duty weren’t valid because I was working from home.
Sorry if my response seems crankypants, but CMs are some of the most overworked, undervalued people in the biz. These days everyone is an ‘expert’.
If I was outsourcing to a digital agency, I would certainly expect the team to have a thorough understanding of the Facebook promotion rules. Just saying.
Smart move, saw the issue and clever to position themselves
Thanks Tim. I stand corrected, as does Mr McLuhan who is increasingly proven wrong for his belief that the medium is the message. In the world of Web 2.0, the content originator carries the responsibility, not the aggregator. Just because something’s reported doesn’t mean its of value and/or substantiated.
Thankfully it’s not all like that. I still look to Encore for validation of what matters, and will be more critical of the prose on mUmBRELLA.
Now rifling through my library to declare damnation on Mr McLuhan and if I can find him, Toffler.