Social isn’t a channel, medium, skill or content strategy; it’s a behavior. Not a new behavior, but a new way of instantly connecting and collaborating with communities of shared interest. How we connect to this world will define our ability to make brands more valuable to people and people more valuable to brands.

This real-time environment requires a careful alchemy of insights, creative, conversation and amplification, which is exactly what SocialWork guides us to deliver through the strategic planning, creative development, execution, paid media community management and insights phases of our work.

SocialWork comprises three equally important trains of thought that contribute to success in the social spaces:

1. Getting to social-ready work
2. The role of paid media
3. Executing in the social spaces

Getting to social-ready work
Understanding how social fits into people’s lives as part of our insights and strategic planning ensures that the social layer is properly considered throughout the ideation phase of our work. It’s more than simply coming up with an idea for a TV ad and convincing a brand that the more outrageous ones would make a great viral video. Sometimes social is THE idea, sometimes it supports an idea and sometimes social is not involved at all.

The role of paid media
It’s naive to believe that social media and social networks are the end of advertising and the advent of a new era of technology-driven word-of-mouth marketing. Paid media has a tremendous role to play in the success of many social media programs. Contextually relevant, strategically placed advertising within social platforms can go a long way to driving awareness, grabbing attention and bringing the right people to the social presence that has been carefully crafted for them.

Executing in the social spaces
At the heart of SocialWork is a framework for how we approach social media planning, execution and evaluation. It’s a real-time acronym for the real-time social media world and lays out the steps to follow for a winning end-to-end social strategy. We call it TRIGGER:

Truth – listen, analyze and understand the online conversations around a brand or topic; use these insights to design the social experience

Recruitment – use media and other amplification opportunities to efficiently attract people to your social experience

Interaction – you’re always on and must be in constant contact with those who have honored you with the time they spend in your social presences

Give Value – provide ongoing opportunities and experiences that make it worthwhile for your community to stay engaged

Get Value – activate the community to take a win-win business action

Enrich – reward a loyal community with exclusive, medium-specific opportunities

Return – extract insights from the space that help the brand’s business and informs its future decisions

For examples of BBDO Proxmity SocialWork in action, check out our Case Studies page here.