SoMe Reviews

When I put in my two weeks notice to the co-founders three and a half weeks ago, I was told they would like to set up an exit interview to discuss why I was leaving. There has been zero effort by either of them to schedule that interview or learn at all the reasons behind my leaving, so I have decided to put the full details here. Company growth is stagnant. In the 8 months I was there, I saw very little change in the size of clients' budgets. Additionally, I saw 3 people leave/fired and only 2 hired. For an agency a little over 5 years old, 11 total employees proves incremental growth, and in my opinion, is being held back by poor leadership. Communication and organization from the co-founders is abysmal and is a running joke among the entire company. On one occasion, I set up a conference call between myself, an outside vendor, and one of the co-founders. All accepted the Google calendar invite, but the co-founder never called in or even mentioned the absence after missing the meeting. Two employees have been with the company significantly longer than any others, creating an "inner circle" with the co-founders that allows them to be privy to information before anyone else and creating a broken chain of command that makes it hard to provide constructive criticism without it being turned around on yourself. One of these employees still requires their hand held through basic digital marketing analytics, taking significant amounts of specialists' time explaining minute details and causing the specialists' time management to be questioned. As an example, the time I was spending on client work was negatively compared to another specialist who was a contractor not working in-house and therefore, was not pulled aside in-person multiple times per day to answer the seemingly endless questions of the employee mentioned above. If you're looking for work/life balance, keep looking. You are required to be flexible with your time while the company does not offer flexibility on their end. If you come in early, don't expect to leave early. And in the same breathe, launch campaigns or check on the performance of ads during weekends, holidays, sick days, and paid time off with no reward or recognition. Company culture falls to the wayside and is nowhere near that of the previous two agencies I worked for. Besides the occasional birthday celebration for 15 minutes or the in-office "mini retreat" once per month that is comprised of a 3-hour PowerPoint presentation and snacks, there is nothing that aligns with what you might recognize as "agency life". There are some major problems at SoMe that need to be recognized and addressed before I would recommend applying here and I encourage you to mention all of the above if you happen to interview.

Having worked in small and large agencies SoMe Connect makes everything 100x harder than it needs to be. The top dogs in leadership have all been grandfathered into their positions not because they're masters of their crafts but because they've been at the company the longest. This isn't always a bad thing however, in this instance, they refuse to learn anything new or take advice, feedback, or approach literally anything with a different lens that may make their job and those they work with easier. The "do it because I said to do it" and "I want it this way" mentality not only limits leaderships ability to grow and learn but it really stifles and frankly enrages the specialists. It's not a supportive culture, it's not a fun place to come into work every day. You have chores most of which other employees ignore leaving the kitchen and other communal work spaces a messy disaster. Clean your own dishes. They over work everyone, expect you to be on call, all the time, whenever they're needed which is absolutely understandable, but then you get docked for leaving work 15 minutes early to catch an appointment or scolded for taking sick days to care for terminally sick family members.