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Pizza, banking, sex and hashtags – sounds like a week in the life of someone working in research – right? Despite what you may think, working in research and insight is not all pie charts and excel spreadsheets, if you do it in the right place. I’ve been working in We Are Social’s R&I team for a couple of years now, and I can safely say that the only thing that’s a dead cert when I arrive in the morning is the quality of excellent jumpers on display around the R&I table.
This week, I’ve been working on a report for one of the biggest brands in UK banking, a new business pitch and a social conversation audit in the food industry. One paragraph into writing this blog and I’ve been pulled into a brainstorm for another food brand. New projects, pitches and client requests hit your inbox or skype chats, on a daily and sometimes hourly basis.
Everyone in the R&I team works on a combination of reports, projects and audits across our client base, so we have to get used to analysing content ranging from topics as broad as football to cars, entertainment to booze. We work closely with the client services, strategy and editorial teams, helping to identify what works best for each of their clients, presenting back our findings to determine what they should change and what they should do more of (and less of – e.g. hashtagging on Facebook – give it up, it’s pointless).
Every member of the R&I team also has the opportunity to do their own research for PR purposes too. Right now we’re looking at sex and airlines; not together, though that would be interesting. Previous pieces have covered reactions to the latest iPhone, or taking your favourite jumper (yes, them again – it’s a bit of a team theme) onto Newsnight to talk about the General Election, a la Paul ‘David’ Greenwood, senior R&I Director.
The thing I love most about social, aside from the opportunity to spend the day stalking on Facebook without getting fired, is that there’s always something new going on. In just a few years, I’ve seen new platforms emerge, some die and some succeed (I have my eye on Periscope at the moment). Every week there seems to be a new platform update (Facebook now supports GIFs!) or product launch (sponsored Instagram posts) – and it’s our job in R&I to make sure we’re capturing the impact of all of this, and feeding it back into our client strategies. It’s brilliant when you see the agency creating really amazing work that’s been inspired by social listening too, such as Netflix’s Spoiler Foiler campaign or SummerSOS for F&F.
Outside of the work stuff, we have football clubs, office yoga, chair massages, an annual ski trip (or Winter Conference, as I think we’re supposed to call it) as well as a load of parties both on a monthly and quarterly basis. I don’t think I should really go into any more detail on these in an agency blog post, suffice to say they are always good fun.
The roles we’re currently recruiting for in the R&I team at We Are Social require some experience, with the Analyst role focusing on day-to-day delivery of reports and insights, and the Director managing a team to disseminate strategic insight throughout the agency. But we’re not just looking for people who are great at excel and want to crunch numbers – the value our team provides is much deeper than that. Robust research underpins all our work at We Are Social, we provide our teams with an understanding of communities and their behaviour, both on and off line, with insights that inform everything from our strategic to our creative approach. So, if you want to be a crucial part of an agency that creates truly social ideas, this could be the job for you.
To join the Research & Insight team, get in touch with Lisa Berardi.