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?
