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Jack Francis
Social Media Manager, Born Social
Born Social are a global social media agency that work with a broad range of clients such as Kopparberg, Veet, and Nando's. Their core activities are focused on social media strategy, creatives, and community and influencer management, as well as other campaigns such as generating website traffic and supporting events for clients. The company has seen a great deal of growth over the last four to five years. "The trend for longer-form video and video as a concept itself is something that we found has exploded," Social Media Manager Jack Francis told us.
Jack Francis, Born Social’s Social Media Manager, tells us more:
""At Born Social, we achieve different objectives on social media. That could be to drive actions towards a website, increasing brand awareness, facilitating any sort of campaigns that are going on. We specialise in social media as an agency but we collaborate all the time with PR, creative & paid media agencies in order to bring all aspects of a campaign to life."
The agency was founded in 2014 and the team had a lot of experience in creative and project management roles prior, knowing what the pain points were when communicating within a team and with clients.
Previously, the team was using a range of Google platforms to present content plans, creatives, and graphics, plus Microsoft Word, and even Keynote.
Using these tools worked well for presenting, but not for collaboration, "especially longer form video assets, more comprehensive or complex files that just weren't able to be uploaded to Google Slides," Jack explained. "Clients weren't able to feedback on these in a cohesive way."
Getting long-form video files to clients was also a challenge. With MP4 files being too long to fit into a Google Slide they were having to convert files to a GIF, sacrificing quality - and sound - along the way. "We would have to follow up again with WeTransfer; it was just layers upon layers of communication," Jack said.
In terms of communicating between teams and with clients, there were a lot of tools being used. Feedback and amendments would come in through email, Slack, WhatsApp, with issues around how many strands of feedback there were and, how concise and detailed that feedback would be.
Summing up life before Oroson, Jack said, "We've struggled over the last two to three years to find an effective platform that really enables us to have a one-to-one discussion with a client; making sure that they can feed back (in a way that’s clear) , and that they feel like they're being listened to."
Social media managers and creative teams are the people who use Oroson day-to-day, with clients also being brought in to leave their feedback.
Better client feedback processes
"Clients would often come to us asking to see what things are going to look like," Jack noted, "having an effective way of feeding back on a video idea or if something needs adding to a video has helped."
Improved campaign management
Using the boards in Oroson, campaign managers are able to get a clear overview of their projects. Teams use Oroson to create monthly content calendars and organise work by week, meaning those who need to get an overall visualisation can easily see what's coming up in a creative way.
Stronger version control
Having everything collected in one place has been a big and positive change for Born Social. "We've found it useful to have version one, two, and three so that the clients can refer to different versions across each board," we're told.
A deeper understanding of client needs
With the number of versions involved in a creative piece, it’s now easy to follow the process along so they can learn and adapt to what the client expects and how they like to work. Jack explained, "When the client has certain requirements for a type of video, or best practices and learnings, we can see that on a much more linear timeline and be more reactive with it."
Open communication channels
"Oroson is great for allowing creatives to speak directly to the clients," Jack said. "It's often a lot easier for a creative from an external company to speak to someone on our side, and that can happen all within Oroson."
Easier to bring in new collaborators
Being able to simply share a link with stakeholders and not having to create an account or password has improved client relations. The team finds it really convenient to tell clients, "Just use this link, all you need is your name and your email; don't worry about creating an account!"
“Having everything collected in one place has been a big and positive change for Born Social.”
Having looked around for a long time to find the right tool, Born Social are seeing great success with Oroson. Here's how it's helping their business:
There are lots of different features packed into Oroson, and Born Social are using plenty of them, such as:
"Just play around with it!" counselled Jack. When Born Social rolled out Oroson, they found it effective to allow team members time to get comfortable with Oroson, giving them the chance to understand its capabilities and how they can use it to make the process of sharing content simpler. Their team has now found it to be very intuitive and also very versatile.
"Whether you're an agency, it's just social media, or you work more broadly with content, there are feedback loops with clients. I'd recommend Oroson because it saves the hassle that comes with collating feedback from multiple streams and provides one place where both the client and an internal team can work together efficiently. Everyone can do what needs to be done in a clear and precise manner."