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Lad Bible's Adam Clyne launches Coolr agency to help clients integrate Facebook’s Workplace

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By Jessica Goodfellow, Media Reporter

September 18, 2017 | 4 min read

Adam Clyne, the former chief operating officer of the Lad Bible and ex-digital chief for EMEA at Weber Shandwick, has launched a new agency, Coolr, designed to help clients integrate Facebook’s enterprise platform Workplace into their organisation.

Coolr is an approved partner for Facebook's Workplace

Coolr is an approved partner for Facebook's Workplace

The agency specialises in internal communications, to help clients “digitally transform” their businesses from within and keep apace with the changing world the comms and the impact of “a whole new wave of millennials coming into your workforce”, Clyne described.

“We think Workplace is the best solution to do that,” he told The Drum.

Coolr is an approved partner of Facebook’s Workplace platform, meaning the agency is trusted to rollout deployments of the enterprise system for companies of any size.

However, there is no commercial aspect of the partnership. If a client signs up to Workplace, Coolr does not get a cut of that deal from Facebook.

Facebook launched Workplace in October, a social enterprise networking service to rival the success of Slack. A month later, Microsoft unveiled its own offering in the enterprise messaging space, Microsoft Teams.

Clyne believes that Facebook’s offering, which has the same look, feel and use as the main social app, has a “huge advantage” in this space due to its “familiarity”. This, he said, means Workplace gets large adoption very quickly, since a company doesn’t need to execute “exhaustive” training programs to implement it.

So if it’s an easy system to understand, what is the need for an agency devoted to helping clients implement it? And isn’t Facebook itself doing this?

“Some companies need consultancy to get under the skin of what the product is about,” said Clyne. “We are able to go a lot more in-depth than a platform could.”

What’s more, Clyne believes that Facebook - with its many different products and services - needs partners to scale its Workplace offering properly.

“Once you are operating at scale, it is complex, so you need to put in a whole process and structure to figure out how best to launch it. Every company is different, we have to adapt and fine tune it,” he added.

Clyne has close connections at the social network - Nicola Mendelsohn, vice-president EMEA at Facebook, is his sister.

Coolr has already signed up multiple clients, successfully launched Workplace into various organisations and is at advanced negotiations with others (including both consumer brands and agencies). It recently launched Workplace into Regatta; deploying the platform across it brands, stores and offices worldwide.

Keith Black, chief executive of Regatta, commented: “Workplace has been of huge assistance in helping us collaborate internally and has been a great way of enhancing our culture of transparency and sharing”.

Coolr has launched with a team of five, including Samira Khalifa as head of digital, who previously led the Workplace deployment into food services giant Compass Group; an organisation with over 65,000 UK employees.

Clyne left the Lad Bible in December last year after just six months in his role as chief operating officer. Following his departure, the role was made defunct at the online publisher.

Prior to joining the Lad Bible Clyne was head of digital across EMEA for PR firm Weber Shandwick, a role he held for 18 months.

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