Issue link: http://digital.copcomm.com/i/256240
28 Post • February 2014 www.postmagazine.com ucts to new mothers. It's run by twin celebri- ties Tia and Tamera Mowry. Since mOcean was doing design and promotional work for them anyway, Akhavan says it made sense to design an aggressive social media push on behalf of Need Brands that incorporated posts, pictures, feeds, Tweets, blogs, videos, and lots more on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Google+, YouTube, Instagram, and on that company's Website as well. mOcean handles all design, production, and post work on media for these cam- paigns. They have begun doing similar work for a children's educational and interactive toy company called Rolling Robots. Her team has helped that company embrace social media using several platforms, including Google Hangouts to conduct interactive workshops between its two facilities on weekends in recent months. Additionally, of course, with such exper- tise, mOcean is aggressively using social media to extend its own brand across the social media universe, even going so far as to create a sexy, virtual octopus-girl mascot named Misty Mocean with an intense back story all her own, sharing the fun with clients, friends, and colleagues in such a way as to make her "the sassy voice of mOcean" on social media, according to Akhavan. While the concept is playful and fun, the approach has also earned Misty Mocean 650 Facebook friends so far, and thus been helpful in the company's overall marketing efforts. EYEBALL Eyeball (www.eyeballnyc.com), a 20-year- old, bi-coastal strategic design agency, had similar notions regarding the idea that it needed to offer social media services to cli- ents, along with wider Web design and devel- opment services, and so, it recently acquired a company in Miami and re-branded it as Eyeball Digital, dedicated to these and other digital production and post production-relat- ed tasks. According to Eric J. Bertrand, CEO of Eyeball Digital, the rise of social media made this move "a logical extension" of a company that traditionally had offered first design ser- vices, and then expanded into offering brand strategy, creative, post, editing, motion graph- ics, and music services to support clients. His view is, now that powerful social media platforms exist, and Eyeball's clients are both interested in, and can benefit from those platforms, it simply made sense to add such services to the company's menu. In a larger sense, therefore, Bertrand feels the definition of the term "post production" has taken on a new meaning. "We view 'post' as meaning that we take clients from an initial relationship, deliver an initial campaign or service, and then add additional services as they need them that might not historically have been considered post production, or not previously existed, such as social media, Web and app design, and search engine optimization (SEO), all of which you need in the new technology world and all of which we are now doing with Eyeball Digital," Bertrand explains. "Everybody needs a Website, and then, once you have that, you need social media to push people to the site, and then, SEO so that people know you are out there pushing the brand. Our clients have to connect with their own client base, their constituents, and they need social media to do that. So we feel the combination of social media and search engine optimization has become very symbiotic — you need one to get results from the other." Therefore, Eyeball Digital has built a syn- ergy whereby the company uses its core creative foundation on brand campaigns for clients to build logos and various visuals, and then it "implements them," in Bertrand's words, on the digital side in Web projects and social media campaigns in various ways. The company implemented wide social media marketing strategies, ranging from a Website to Facebook and Twitter campaigns, this year for a documentar y film that debuted at the Sundance Film Festival called Alive Inside, which Eyeball executive pro- duced while also handling animation and post services. Eyeball also helped develop an iOS app for a non-profit documentary/sto- rybook/game/album called John Lennon: The Bermuda Tapes, and then ran the social media launch for that project; pushed a fan- building social media project for the New York Cosmos professional soccer team; and ran a comprehensive social media campaign around Tumblr and various digital banners across the Web for the "Month of Mozar t" promotional event for radio station WQXR, among other projects. Ber trand cautions that a lot of this stuff is new and evolving, par ticularly which plat- forms are best to focus on. "Pinterest, for example, wasn't around about 36 months ago, and now it is one of the largest and fastest growing platforms to use," he sug- gests. It's a field chock full of strategies about how to "drive" people to give clients "likes" on Facebook and "follows" on Twitter, and how to figure out which "landing pages" to send them to and which ones to not send them to, and so on — all areas that fall far from traditional post production areas of exper tise. But his point is that "it's a tremendously powerful development, which still includes the human element of community, of getting people together, and it is only going to grow. So com- panies would be wise to figure out how to take advantage of it, in my opinion." Eyeball created a social media campaign for the multimedia project, John Lennon: The Bermuda Tapes. Social media