360i
Challenge
Traditional content approval processes are not conducive to the current digital marketing landscape. Agencies are creating content calendars months in advance while pushing content through internal, external, and legal approvals, which are often too slow to fit the speed of social media. Approvals between clients and the agency were previously completed through cumbersome email chains or spreadsheets, causing lost content, inaccurate approvals, and numerous other logistic challenges.
For reporting and analysis, manual labor from interns who would sit and index streams of data is inefficient and often too expensive to collect the amount of data required to fully understand the marketplace. Many of the most important metrics to determine a brand's reach and impact required day-by-day capturing of fan counts, posts by competitors, or manual counting of interactions in social media. These metrics are vastly valuable for day-over-day, week-over-week, or month-over-month analysis, but it's just not scalable long term.
Many agencies would become crippled over logistics rather than focusing on their core competency and purpose, to create strategic and engaging content for the brand objectives...not 360i.
360i sought a technology and software partner to alleviate their pains found within content creation, approvals, and capturing analytics. The process started with an exhaustive examination into SMMS providers and ended with Meltwater Social as the selected partner.
"Through their partnership, 360i has guided Meltwater Social down the path of building additional time saving human efficiency features and reporting methodologies that may be otherwise unavailable in other SMMS tools."
Solution
"This partnership strengthens 360i's holistic social offering, enabling us to develop innovative programs for our clients that harness the full power of integrated earned and paid social media," said Bryan Wiener, CEO of 360i. "After conducting an extensive evaluation of different social software systems, we determined that Meltwater Social was the best strategic partner because of the strength of their current offering and commitment to our shared vision of the future of social media."
360i started by onboarding a few brands to the Meltwater Social platform. Within a few weeks, community managers became comfortable using Meltwater Social and started using the software platform to improve content workflow with these specific clients.
Community and account managers worked collaboratively with clients to stage and prepare content options for the upcoming publishing calendar. 360i analysts and strategists utilized rich client and competitor profile data to determine best practices and content strategy recommendations while relaying insights to help fine-tune upcoming content. This synergy accomplished two things by allowing an audit trail to form between agency and client while also giving visibility into benchmarking against similar content or competitive products and their social efforts.
"For us, Meltwater Social's ultimate value is aggregating content and data in one place and centralizing communication protocols to enhance workflow and reduce cost and labor."
Matthew Wurst, Head of Brand Marketing Operations, 360i
The Impact
The first tangible benefit for 360i was the reduction in time spent in the content approval process. While the number of hours saved varied by community, some community managers saw their client approval timelines improve by 90%. 360i now only spends 10% of the time it used to spend coordinating the logistics for content approval. The large time savings allowed community managers to stop focusing on logistics and start thinking more creatively on more accounts. By having all of the content housed with changes, rich media attachments, and approvals in Meltwater Social's content planning module, everyone working together always knows the status.
360i strategists and analysts were able to quickly gather larger and more complete data samples to provide robust month-over-month guidance. Labor is now reallocated from manually collecting data to producing industry-leading analytic reports to further guide and educate clients regarding the changing social media landscape. They were also able to gather multiple verticals or resources vs. just a few.
As an industry leader, 360i continuously seeks discoveries to further assist clients. Through their partnership, 360i has guided Meltwater Social down the path of building additional time-saving human efficiency features and reporting methodologies that may be otherwise unavailable in other SMMS tools.
