What does a head of social actually do? Wunderman Thompson’s Beth Carroll explains

Social has grown from a niche specialty to an important pillar of agency businesses. But to outsiders, the sector is still murky. Beth Carroll, Wunderman Thompson’s (soon to be VML) recently appointed head of social, sheds some light as part of our series demystifying industry roles.

I’m one of those strange people who got into social back when no one was interested in it. In the very early days, when no one really worked in social, we used to meet up in dark corners of pubs and talk.

I met two guys, Eddie and Jim, who were running an agency called Threepipe. They wanted to hire one of the first heads of social; I was working in PR and it made sense at the time for social to sit within a PR environment. I went and joined them and helped them build that capability. When I left, it was a social-digital agency with PR around the edges.

Social was evolving to be about content. So, I moved to a content agency called Seven and spent four years there. Then social evolved again and it became much more about the advertising side of things. That’s when I joined Iris and helped it build out its social capabilities. I’ve been there for the last three years.

I was looking for an agency that could bring all of that together. At the moment, you need a much more human approach to delivering social. I looked at smaller, central agencies, moving back into a content agency, TikTok-first social agencies. It felt like Wunderman Thompson had that shared ambition to do things really differently but also had the weight of the big teams to be able to deliver it at pace as well.

A lot of agencies will say that they can deliver the full stack. But Wunderman Thompson is one of the only agencies that has deep specialisms across every social discipline – from a full data team to a 100-strong team of social specialists; I’ve got 70 community managers here – it felt like the only home for me to be able to deliver what I’m aiming to.

The big task is to build on the groundwork that has already been done on Wunderman Thompson’s social position.

Right now, the introduction of TikTok is one of the most significant shifts in the way audiences expect brands to talk with them. We need to make a big shift in terms of how we are creating content. At the same time, a lot of audiences have never been more receptive to engaging with brands – the ones that do it the right way – people want to spend time with brands who create kind of more human content. We’re calling the model we’re building a ‘human to human’ approach.

It’s about a move from brand messaging focused on what we want to say and pushing into an audience’s feeds to content that’s designed to build much deeper engagement around the topics our audience really cares about.

We’re building much more nimble, social-first teams able to deliver that kind of work. Pairing social media managers with content creators. They’re social-first people – they were always on the platforms, always delving into the trends, always knew what the latest topics were – now they’re able to build on those plans and execute at pace. I think the only thing that makes that model work is if you spend time getting the strategy right from the outset.

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I’ve led a team since I was a PR account manager and my management style is very similar to how we approach social work. It’s all about being human-to-human and building connections. Wunderman Thompson has a 100-strong team of social specialists as well as 70 community managers. When you’ve got lots of people you need to bring together, you’ve got to find ways to activate those connections.

We also spend a lot of time working with our clients to make sure they’re super clear on what their tone of voice is and how they can stand out as a brand.

Part of new business is an educational process with clients. It’s about making sure clients are kept up to speed on the latest nuances of social and how we can transform what they’re already doing to make sure it stands out from the crowd.

It’s really important to be clear from the outset that social needs to be approached in a different way now.