Top marketing agencies ranked by social media influence
* Featured, Digital Marketing, Social Media — By Ally Manock on April 14, 2011 9:55 amWe’re very used to the usual Top 100 Marketing Agencies Lists that are published by the likes of New Media Age et al – they’re usually ranked based on billings, turnover etc – but what happens when we look at social media influence?
Influence continues to be a hotly debated topic in the marketing industry, especially when it comes to social media, and Peer Index is one of the tools vying for the position of the definitive measure. The tool is similar to Klout and claims to help you “understand your social capital”.
Peer Index is fast becoming a very popular tool, with the likes of The Independent using Peer Index’s List to show who is hot and who’s not on Twitter, with Sarah Brown (@sarahbrownuk) topping the list.
Peer Index uses three scores – authority, activity and audience – which are normalised to give a score. The normalisation is non-linear, so to get a score of 90 you need to be in the top 0.001% of the community. Peer Index starts by looking at your Twitter profile and the tool allows you to register and link up more of your online profiles (Facebook, Quora and more) to gain better analytics and a more accurate score.
I thought I’d have a little fun by creating a list with Peer Index’s new group feature using . The top marketing agencies in the UK. The top marketing agencies in my list are ranked by social media influence. I added all the major digital, social, search and integrated agencies with a digital slant that came immediately to mind, and looked at which agencies appeared on other Twitter users’ lists, to fill in the gaps.
I first blogged about the list on Brand Republic’s The Wall and it created a lot of buzz within the industry, with lots of agencies wanting to get onto the list and a few annoyed at their low rank!
Some agencies, like giants Ogilvy and cool kids Made by Many, shone brightly at the top of the list…but there were also some of the big boys like McCann London and Mediacom UK languishing right at the bottom of the list.
Since then, Mediacom have directed us to their social media department’s Twitter feed (which is currently at no. 29) and their main account seems to have jumped up since the publicity (to no. 41).
Here is a live version of the list:
We’ll be keeping an eye on the list to see how it evolves!
Tags: brass agency, Peer Index, social media influence, top marketing agencies
2 Comments
Interesting but I’m sceptical as to the actual benefit ranking agencies like this has, especially when you have companies like W+K, Dare and Razorfish lurking near the bottom.
To quote a recent eConsultancy article ‘I explained that there are about 1,000 people in the UK social media industry that actually do work and another 10,000 that talk about the work that the 1,000 do.’ it makes you think whether the ones near the bottom are the ones doing the work for their clients and the ones near the top are the ones doing the work for their themselves. A valid strategy for this type of agency indeed, but maybe not the best allocation of resources?
However, it’s natural for any agency that has social running through it’s veins to become influential in the scene. But for anyone to look at this as a rank of how effective their actual work is would have to take it with a pinch of salt.
Completely agree that you should take this with a pinch of salt…it’s a little bit of fun
However, I don’t necessarily agree that agencies who get their own self-promotion right aren’t doing great work for their clients. The likes of Made by Many etc. at the top are doing really good work.
Just because some agencies at the bottom of the list are well known (e.g. Razorfish), doesn’t mean they are automatically great at social media. That’s one of the nice things about this list, it isn’t biased to the bigger agencies.