Billy Jones, Senior Director of Brand Marketing of Hootsuite, takes us through the creative process and gives us an exclusive peek behind the curtain on the social media management platform's latest rebrand.
Social media is a dynamic, polarising and unprecedented force of culture. Seemingly moving at the speed of light, it drives societal trends, fosters connection around the world and creates a level playing field for everyone to be seen.
It also opens new opportunities for brands to ignite their business – if they are able to stand out. It’s no longer enough for brands to simply be present on social; to succeed, brands need to show up authentically, create quality content and use their platform to take a stand and uplift audiences.
As the creators of the social media management space, this is a reality that we’ve been on the pulse of – and advised our customers of – for more than a decade.
Yet, we came to realise that we were missing the mark in one area – by letting our expertise do the talking, we were missing an opportunity to show that we are social. In today’s rapidly evolving digital climate, it was no longer enough to say we get social better than anyone else – we needed to walk the walk.
Taking the wild world of social head-on – our evolution to a social-first brand
When we took a step back and thought about how we could be more social, it became evident that our look and feel was where we needed to start. At Hootsuite, we have solidified our position as the experts in helping businesses to succeed on social – providing our customers with guidance on how to adapt to social media’s visual evolution and keep up with consumer demand for eye-catching creative.
We identified this as a unique moment in time to put our guidance into practice, and embrace the wild world of social to cement ourselves as the social-first leader in the space.
Being social-first means appearing on social in the same way that the average user would. Imagery and video content, from an organic social post to a full-blown paid campaign, needs to reflect real people doing real things and, in turn, complement the content on a user’s feed – not interrupt it with outdated or unappealing brand creative.
For Hootsuite, the first step in becoming social-first involved developing mood boards that would inform our overarching aesthetic. Building off our logo and new brand color palette, our creative teams began pulling inspiration to complete our vision.
Through this, we found that a lot of the examples making up our mood boards were produced by photographer and visual director, Amy Lombard – who we immediately knew we had to partner with. Everything Amy shoots has a modern aesthetic that is thumb-stopping; while her look has the craft of someone at the top of their profession, it also has the social-first authenticity and grit that you would see on an Instagram feed.
Tapping into the creator economy to craft a unique story
From day one, we engaged Amy as a true partner; rather than dictating a shot list, we took a collaborative approach to telling the Hootsuite story and worked together to identify the touchpoints we knew we needed to cover with our content. By pairing Amy’s bold and colorful style with our own vision for social-first visual storytelling, we were able to craft a unique narrative that showed we didn’t just get social – we are social.
This vision came to life through a series of brainstorming sessions, where we mapped out short stories that would position Hootsuite and our product in a unique way. Working with Amy Lombard and the amazing production team at Avenue 44 Productions, we combined photography and videography to bring these stories to life.
For example, to show social marketers how Hootsuite helps them to schedule posts and take more breaks, we came up with the line “go home and drop your phone - we’ll keep the brand afloat,” depicted through a simple visual story:
To truly take a social-first approach to photography, our approach extended beyond the style of Amy’s work alone to ensure we weren’t only depicting real people, but also hiring them.
By engaging casting director Lucky Tennyson, we combed through hundreds of talent – including content creators and influencers themselves – to create a pool of diverse and social people, who would help our work and new brand feel authentic. From drag star Blair St. Clair to Broadway Dance Center standout Jordan Berkman and many more, each talent had a vibe and attitude that was social-first.
By engaging real people, all with a shared passion for social, we were able to produce content more compelling than we could have ever imagined – while evolving an overwhelming sense of unity and emotion on set.
Across the talent, producers, directors and set designers, there was a deep connection to Hootsuite’s larger purpose of leveraging the power of social media to uplift people, and a shared sense of commitment to seeing the campaign succeed. This really proved the value of leading with purpose and vision over objectives or KPIs.
With the rebrand now in market and this work brought to life, we clearly accomplished our initial challenge of showing how we can be more social throughout the creative process.
The creative work feels like content that you’d see on Instagram or TikTok – pushing against the expected conventions of B2B and SaaS and expanding our messaging beyond ‘we get social.’ By working with the brightest and most creative minds in the industry, we no longer have to tell that story; we’re letting the work speak for itself to show that we are social.
