Cheesy - Huge guy gets paid for dicking about
- Summary:
- Astonishing though this may seem, an agency admits it took 45 days to develop a single Tweet. If that seems bizarre then read on.
Business Insider's Aaron Taube's We Got A Look Inside The 45-Day Planning Process That Goes Into Creating A Single Corporate Tweet is either a brilliant parody, comedy gold or one of the cleverest bits of media duped rhetoric I've read in years. Readers will have to decide, but here's some nuggets:
What I found is that while the actual act of pushing out a tweet or posting something on Facebook takes a relatively short period of time, social media managers spend countless hours monitoring the internet in search of trends to chat about and customer comments in need of response.
Well that's news to many of my colleagues who regularly bitch and moan about British Airways, RyanAir, EasyJet, HSBC, Vodafone, AT&T, Verizon....the list goes on. It is a rare occurrence for any of these brands to get back to people in any meaningful way. It does beg the question: no impact analysis of negative comment? Moving swiftly on.
Hang on a minute - Cunningham gets paid for dicking about? Is that part of the job description? Is it part of the media agency brief or statement of work? But it gets better."Social media is definitely perceived like you’re just dicking around on the internet all day, and I do a fair amount of that," said Andrew Cunningham, a Huge community lead. "But the thing is, it just never ends. It’s a 24-hour-a-day job whether I like it or not."
Huge - and yes - the firm really does exist - puts a lot of effort into delivering to its clients exactly what they want, even if that means the process of delivering a Tweet takes about the same amount of time as the gestation period of a hamster.
You should read the mind boggling explanation for yourself but the Tweet shown at left took 45 days from inception/conception to finally emerging upon the world's stage. If that seems incredulous then how well did said Tweet perform?
Thus far, the post has yet to be retweeted, but it has generated two favorites.
Cunningham said that about one-third of Huge's social media posts are planned in this fashion with the rest being written on the fly. The exception to this rule is TD Ameritrade, which as a banking brand has a much stricter approval process.
What a colossal waste of time, effort and money but then...maybe that explains all the dicking about bit?
It's not all bad news. The official Camembert Cheese tweet stream includes this witty epithet:
While our Camembert may take 45 days to age, this tweet certainly didn’t!
— President Cheese (@presidentcheese) May 27, 2014
So how's all this working out for people at Huge?
Still, there are some benefits to what Cunningham calls a "connected lifestyle." Being on social media all day requires Huge's team to stay on top of the latest trends, allowing them to get paid to do the things they'd be doing in their free time.
Uuuuuh....that would be free time when he's not dicking about?
But seriously folks, if this story is kosher, and some think it might be Onion inspired, then it tells you all you need to know about outsourcing your social media to agencies.
And yes - I could not resist the story title. :)
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