About Darling Social Services

Pat Clifton, Ed Cartwright and Dan Stevens founded the company in 2008.

Pat is a marketing consultant and former marketing manager at Independiente. Dan and Ed are founders and directors of PR agency Darling Department and talent management company Darling Artists.

We are ably supported buy our Social Media Manager, Rachel Jones.

Creating a Campaign Strategy

We take into account the client’s overall campaign ambitions; timing and key events within that campaign; the core market for the band or brand in question, and the assets at our disposal.

We will create a bespoke social networking strategy to best complement the overall campaign.

Advising on Content
Generation & Deployment

We look at the best way to generate content from the point of view of the client and the community. Thus, a band might be better suited to creating video or mixtapes; another might work better text blogging.

On the flipside, a brand’s community might respond better to watching audio – visual material than to receiving text updates; we advise accordingly, and where relevant, can also commission and deliver these for our client.

Database Management

Whilst an engaged online community is of unquestionable value, the use of email databases is still a powerful direct marketing tool.

We implement strategies using content to convert community into email addresses and can manage these databases on our client’s behalf.

Managing the Process

Given the ambitions we set ourselves for the campaign, we manage the whole social media and networking process to achieve those aims.

This includes sending out day to day updates, harvesting followers from other platforms and growing communities through content deployment.

Promoting Commerce

The development of these communities must be focused on the client’s commercial targets.

We therefore promote our client’s product through the platforms that we manage, be it the pre-order for an album or tickets, a particular sales initiative or links to direct to consumer portals.

Report Back on our Results

As well as weekly reports discussing progress, we provide statistics tracking the growth or otherwise of all the platforms where the artist is represented.

Armed with that information, we’re able to quantify our success and advise on areas for propagating growth where necessary.