Social Driver, a digital marketing agency in the District, recently hired four new team members, bringing its total number of employees up to 20. Anthony Shop, cofounder and chief strategy officer for Social Driver, says that the company is still looking to fill additional roles in the next one to two months, including two software engineers or web developers, an account leader/strategist and a graphic designer.
"We're also looking for junior associates, which is like an internship on steroids," Shop explains. "It's our entry-level program. Our junior associates do extremely substantive work." Those hired into the internship program "spend three to six months as junior associates and then move into a more permanent role."
Social Driver, which formed a little over three years ago, helps its clients "figure out digital to innovate within their industry," Shop says. "We're getting to focus the work we do on innovation using digital and social technologies. That has driven a lot of our growth."
Honda and the National Association of Convenience Stores (NACS) are recent Social Driver clients. "The NACS ran a digital campaign around a class-action lawsuit. It was the first time its members could opt out of a class-action suit via mobile," Shop explains. Two years ago, Social Driver had a turn on the national stage when Michael Dell rolled out the
solution it created for Current Motor in the middle of SXSW.
Shop and company cofounder Thomas Sanchez (the two are also married) have found a niche--as many marketing startups have done--in bringing the agility of a startup to large corporations. "Large organizations are thirsty for innovation," Shop says, "but bureaucracy and [corporate] culture don't lend themselves to being first and moving rapidly."
One of Social Driver's tools is the "pop-up innovation lab," where Social Driver employees physically set up shop inside its client's office. "[The labs] are lean, agile and open source," Shop says. "They are embedded in an organization for six to eight weeks and at the end of that time, they roll out some prototype or process. [The pop-up lab] incubates innovation. If you can take innovation to a large organization that reaches millions, that's when innovation scales."