Jimmy Gilmore – Writer – Director

Prob­a­bly the most fun thing about the agency embrac­ing social media has been the inter­nal learn­ing around the agency’s blog. Along with Jonathan, I play a cen­tral role in edit­ing and admin­is­trat­ing it.

Being a copy­writer, you may think I’m going “yeah, it’s funny to see an AE strug­gle with the blank page.” (It’s not, because that means we’re going to miss a dead­line if they don’t come up with some­thing quickly.) Actu­ally, what I love is that our inter­nal dia­log is reversed, spread out, and more demo­c­ra­tic while blogging.

The way things usu­ally work is with process. And process is great and  great process can cre­ate great work at an agency. But when that process is flipped on it’s head, with employ­ees eval­u­at­ing  the exe­cu­tion and con­tent of arti­cles writ­ten by peo­ple not with in our depart­ments or that are higher up the pyra­mid, it forces every­one to engage in a thought­ful inter­nal dia­log. Here are a cou­ple examples:

One of our senior account exec­u­tives wrote a piece about a cam­paign we had both worked on. I had some very spe­cific feed­back on some of his con­tent. It seems both of us had come away with dif­fer­ent lean­ings from a sig­nif­i­cant job. And we may have never had that dis­cus­sion with social media.

In another post, our Direc­tor of Account Ser­vice, describes the impor­tance of mon­i­tor­ing and how it’s struc­tured for our clients. Social Media is some­thing I’m involved with on a daily basis but busi­ness end is some­thing I’m not.

Work­ing on arti­cles with our agency pres­i­dent has been the most inter­est­ing. Not only am I learn­ing a dif­fer­ent per­spec­tive on the indus­try but I get to col­lab­o­rate and learn from some­one I rarely get to work with. This helps me to see the busi­ness through her eyes and hope­fully she’s able to gain a wee bit of prospec­tive from me.

If you don’t have an blog for your busi­ness, I encour­age you to start one. It’s a great way for clients to learn about your busi­ness but it can also be a great tool for inter­nal learn­ing too.