Guest Post by: Jo Stratmann
During 2010 we saw a significant jump in the demand for pan-European social media strategy and execution. In some cases we’ve championed centralised operations and in others we’ve worked with local social media agency partners.
We thought it might be useful to provide a social media agency list to help you find the very best in-country agencies out there. Here’s our starting list of Europe’s top social media agencies. We’ve focused on independents and pure-plays where possible. Please let us know what other firms (and countries) deserve inclusion and we’ll keep it updated.
France
Affinitz – an independent social media agency with over 10 years of experience, Affinitz offers their own community platform which has been implemented by the French Military to create their own social network, and they have also developed a blogosphere for French lawyers. Affinitz also offer services for Facebook, with clients that include Virgin Megastores.
Social Strategie – a pure-play social agency that offers a variety of approaches to social strategy and community management.
Vanksen – a digital agency that offers social media, the group also has offices in Luxembourg, Switzerland and the USA. They have considerable experience working with perfume brands such as Chanel, Givenchy and Roxy, and have recently launched the Facebook page for Citroen France.
There’s also some interesting discussion about this on Quora.
Germany
KKLD* – as a creative advertising agency KKLD* has been working since 2005 in fields other than digital. Their clients for social media include BMW, Mini, Lufthansa and Telekom (T-Mobile).
Nodes – a pure-play social media agency with a team of 15, Nodes is particularly focussed on Facebook, and has developed apps, games and landing pages for clients that include VW Denmark, McDonalds, GSK, Pepsi and Dove.
TLGG – proclaim they are “Germany’s first social media agency”. Their clients include Subway, Triumph Motorcylces. Their work with Nutella has brought the brand’s Facebook fan count up to 110,000 and places it 10th out of all German brands on Facebook.
Italy
Ambito5 – the 5 refers to the different areas of digital that Ambito5 covers, however social media occupies a large portion of their portfolio. Clients for this team of 16 include Gucci, Sony and Virgin Active.
TheBlogTV – this innovative agency focus on user generated advertising, primarily via video and TV shows, but also offers community creation and management. Their crowdsourced video content has been used by Fiat, Honda and lastminute.com
Populis – the 6 different languages that the homepage is available in give a clue to the expansive range of Populis’ content, with articles and videos created by native speakers. Based in Italy and Ireland, their professional Italian blog network Blogosfere is the largest of its kind.
The Netherlands
Favela Fabric – more of a social business consultancy, they seem open collaboration and value creation. Clients include KLM, Shell and ABM AMRO.
Finchline – this social media monitoring and analysis agency focuses exclusively on media and comments made in Dutch, reducing noise and clutter. They also offer free social media boot camps twice a month.
Tribewise – in addition to social media services, Tribewise are offering a white paper which describes 20 case studies of Dutch companies that have started utilising social media (a registration is required to access it).
Yocter – a pure social agency, Yocter offer companies advice and presentations on how to best use social media, and is an innovator of their own software solutions. Their name comes from the term yocto, the smallest SI prefix at 10−24 (still a long way off from the inverse of a googol!)
Norway
Face2Face – are using social media to take their 1:1 field marketing experience online. Their social strategy has been used by the Oslo Camerata orchestra, and their Word-of-mouth clients include American Express and Shell.
Isobar Norway – Norwegian social media agencies Sermo and Suddenly Oslo have recently become part of the super-agency Isobar Norway. Sermo’s clients included Dell, Siemens and Universal Music.
Spain
Layerbit – this full service digital agency is based in Madrid, Houston and Buenos Aires. Their social media activity includes community building, and importantly also covers Tuenti, the “Spanish Facebook”, another example of the value of using local experts in different markets.
UK social media agencies
At present, coming from a larger market, UK agencies are running the most pan-European campaigns. There are probably 20 UK agencies with around 10 people on average. This list includes a couple of them alongside the bigger independents. I have put in the agencies we most respect because of what we’ve heard directly from clients and the work we’ve seen them produce.
FreshNetworks – That’s us. We’re not #1 in Europe yet, but we’re working on it.
Nudge – A nine person team with a Facebook focus. I particularly liked their PoweRBrands Facebook page for a graduate recruitment.
We are social – One of the UKs first social media agencies to get to scale. Most well known for their excellent Marmite campaign.
iPlatform – especially good for Facebook fan page builds – a number of large advertising and digital agencies outsource Facebook dev to them.
Made by Many – They don’t call themselves a social media agency but they did do an inspired website takeover for SXSW last year and I’m looking forward to whatever they have in store for 2011.
1000 Heads – A word of mouth agency that must know every Nokia lover on the web – they’ve been managing their social campaigns for a few years now. Also good on offline/online integration.
eModeration and Tempero – both have excellent moderation capabilities built over 5+years (a number of social media agencies outsource moderation to them). More recently both have been developing community management capabilities.
NixonMcinnes – Brighton’s best social media agency, now calling themselves a social consultancy – so I hope you don’t mind being included.
Also worthy of note:
– Once independent but now part of a group: Headshift (Dachis – I loved their One and Other work), Jam (Engine) and Techlightenment (Experian – but a tad skewed towards social tech rather than social agency).
– PR firms turned social: Wolfstar, ImmediateFutures and 33Digital (a small team punching above their weight). It’s hard to find a PR agency that is not turning itself “social” at the moment, but I think these have made the shift better than most.
Anyway, that’s our starting point. Have we missed you out? Or are you a client working with an agency worthy of note due to scale or the quality of work they are delivering? Feel free to let us know.
Image courtesy of shutterstock
Original Post: http://www.freshnetworks.com/blog/2011/01/picking-a-social-media-agency-in-europ/
