I started work as Ackermann’s Director of Social Media back in April, and although I was very excited about helping to grow and develop this area of work for an agency I’d long admired, I have to admit that I was also a little nervous about it. Why? Well, many businesses and organizations are still unfamiliar or even downright skittish about this newfangled “social media thing,” meaning I knew that I would sometimes have a challenging time communicating specific opportunities in this medium to clients, both current and potential. Additionally, I knew that the economy has many businesses in a hunkering-down mode, rather than in a position to allocate any resources to try something new.
But here we are, less than six months later, and despite the economy, Ackermann’s digital division is thriving. Our social media client roster today includes Berkshire Hathaway-owned Clayton Homes, which just tapped us as their very first social media-specific Agency of Record, expanding our existing role as their Public Relations AOR. We are also hard at work on behalf of Oak Ridge Associated Universities (ORAU), creating and preparing to launch a major national public health campaign for the Centers for Disease Control. The campaign is comprehensive, and we are involved in all of it, including the significant and innovative social media component, which we designed.
Since starting my job, I’ve been lucky enough to get to work on digital strategy with the super-smart folks at Ruby Tuesday, and I now know way more about golf than I did six months ago, before I worked with Tennessee National on their emerging social media projects. Other great clients for whom we are currently doing social media work on either a comprehensive or project basis include Cellular Sales, Invisible Fence, WonderWorks, Wilderness at the Smokies, Resurrection, Second Harvest, and CMSS. We’ve also written social media policies for several major brands in recent months, and are currently at work on several more.
In just the past week or two, we’ve formalized relationships with some brand new, social media-specific clients across several very different industry sectors, including healthcare, law, sports, entertainment, media, and non-profit. I look forward to very soon being able to share some of the details of what we’ll be doing on behalf of these companies and organizations, because frankly, I’m pretty excited about getting to work with them
So, it appears my concerns in the early days of my still relatively new position here at Ackermann were unfounded. In fact, what I’ve learned over these past few, incredibly productive and busy months is that in every economy, there are those businesses and organizations with leadership able to look beyond today, push past their personal comfort zones, and invest in tomorrow. That takes confidence and vision, and seeing how it’s done has made my job thus far not only interesting, challenging and fun, but very inspiring.
