Recently, I was chatting to a friend about a client project I was working on, when my friend stopped mid sentence: “… oh yes, I saw that on Twitter!”
Nothing uncommon there – I often see things my friends are up to on Twitter or Facebook before I talk to them about it in person.
He continued: “I love it when you tweet about your clients. You always put ‘client, brackets‘ is doing so and so. It’s like you want people to know you’re being forced into talking about your clients. Ha!”
This genuinely shocked me. In fact, I got quite defensive. That’s not the reason at all. There’s two reasons that would never happen.
1. If it’s not worth sharing, I don’t
I’ll be completely honest: unless I believe a project is worthy of sharing I just won’t bother. At Rabbit I hope that never happens, but in the past I have worked on things I didn’t like, or colleagues have asked me to promote projects that I’d rather have my digital heart ripped out and trodden on before I was associated with in public.
2. I always declare an interest
I use (client) to show that I have a vested interest in a project. If a particular brand is paying my wages it just seems dishonest not to mention it. Social media’s about transparency, right? Otherwise I could chat on all day about how great MORETH>N insurance is, or the amazing health benefits of MBT shoes, and you’d be none the wiser that I was being paid to do it (clients, obvs).
On a side note – should agencies charge clients for use of their staff social media profiles? As Mat Morrison has previously written:
“If it’s valuable then clients should pay us to do it. If it’s not valuable we shouldn’t do it.”
I’m inclined to disagree since I think a model for payment in these situations is wide open to abuse and almost impossible to implement. That said, if I was advising a brand on choosing an agency I’d tell them to Google their would-be agency team to see what their online profile is like, as being active on certain networks is as important to online comms as great journalist contacts are to offline (side note on side note: bmibaby did this to Dirk and I to see if we really were active where we said we were).
So to be clear: if I mention a client project it’s because I like it or I’ve enjoyed working on it, and I’ll disclose an interest for courtesy’s sake. Not because I’ve been asked to, or coerced into it.
You?
first thing: You have a digital heart? What are the logistics of this? does it sit next to your regular heart?
second thing: I always wonder about the profile side of things; I work with plenty of people that fully understand Twitter, Facebook alongside a myriad of other web tools both social and non-social (bla bla, all web is social). While their own personal profile may not be that huge, the work that they’ve done is visible all over the place.
I suppose my (almost entirely lost) point is that personal (and agency) branding is important but the dilemma comes in how this gives value to a client. If the work that you’re undertaking is of value then they should pay you for it, you’re adding value to their brand which is what they hired you for. The difficulty comes when you start to look at whether other people should be paid for adding value – If your message is reposted by someone far more influential than you (or your agency) then surely their input is worth more than yours – how do you then decide who gets the money? (obviously the agency that are hired do – but you see where I’m going with this).
I totally agree with you re-being transparent and disclosing a tweet/blog post is on behalf of a client; I do the exact same thing (see here for e.g. http://twitter.com/blogtillyoudrop/status/10074903606)
In social media, transparency is key… So yes, to (client)
Totally agree Louise, great post. I think the key is: “is this tweet interesting to my followers.” If it is, then it’s worth the tweet (with disclosure if it’s a client). But there’s some stuff we do for clients that however much I like it, won’t interest the people that follow me on Twitter one bit. That would be a quick way to lose followers.
Ah — you’ve taken my quote slightly out of context there. In the original post, “Should we ask employees to retweet client stories? I asked readers to perform the following thought-experiment:
1) Ignore the ethics — should clients pay for what we do? And should we do stuff for clients that they don’t pay for?
2) Bring ethics back in — If we’re paying our staff to relay messages to their networks on behalf of our clients, what makes this different from spam?
You see? There were two parts. I was trying to point out that there is a benefit to the agency and the client in our staff tweeting about their campaigns — even if this is subsequently written off as a value-add or over-servicing, or simply ignored.
I think that paid stuff is open to abuse, too — although I’m pleased to say I’ve now got an ad.ly account, and could, in theory, pay high-follower-count twitterers like @KimKardashian to promote my shizzle.
I think that it’s absolutely fine for employees to choose to promote stuff to their networks, btw (w/ appropriate disclosure.) My point — which I also made in that post — is that employees must be left to manage their own social networks as they see fit. As their employers we should give them the training and tools they need to build their personal brands; but that this doesn’t give us the right to ask them to use their networks on our clients’ behalf.