It all started when I was just 12 years old. One of my classmates was showing his first website in class when I decided I could do it too! Next thing you know, I was creating my own web portal for Siemens phones, Beinspired.cz. My site quickly started getting up to 3,500 unique visitors per day. I was doing business with a leading Czech representative of the brand, selling advertising space. By the time I was 14, I was earning my own money and having fun building online communities.

After Beinspired.cz, I began cooperating with Jan Řežáb. I was often on the road, traveling between Brno and Prague for business, until I decided to make the commitment at 17: I moved to Prague. Still studying long-distance from Plzen, I stepped right into the world of mobile content. Things started happening as I experienced both amazing achievements and an urgent crises in my new world. These ups and downs helped me shape my own business approach that now allows me to remain active inside and outside of work.

Just 18 months after moving to the capital, I started my own company for mobile marketing in the Czech Republic and Slovakia. Licensing technologies from abroad, we created complex strategies and implementations for important clients like O2, Komerční banka, Coca-Cola, and others. Mobile marketing was a blast then, but after a while it became too stagnant for me. I needed room to grow.

At the beginning of 2010 I returned to community building with new clients and a new platform; social media. My team’s first project definitely didn’t go as planned when we found out that our web standards didn’t work at all. This sent me into a period of concentrated study when I spent countless hours testing mechanics for future campaigns.

Many cups of coffee and countless hours behind the computer screen helped us come up with new ideas, ready to share them with cyberspace. I picked clients carefully in order to build respect in the community, rather than take on bunch of companies who only wanted a high number of fans. After two years of selective projects, my team of social media addicts transformed into an agency called Bubble. With the help of our happy customers, we started to grow very quickly.

A new idea began to brew soon. Based on the very problems Bubble and its clients were constantly trying to solve, PostHeads was built to make the overall social media experience easy and efficient. With the introduction of Bubble and PostHeads, 2012 was a landmark year for my team and me.

It seems like a lot of guys behind the popular social media projects started in mobile, for example, Jan Řežáb (Socialbakers) and Jakub Mach (Zoomsphere). Is it just a coincidence, or do you think there’s something about mobile that drives people towards social media?

I’ve always wished that I could have been around when the Internet really started getting popular in the Czech Republic. It just seems like it could have been a goldmine of opportunities!

For me, the difference between mobile and social media is in getting real time results and direct communication. I’ve always been intrigued by people’s choices, reactions, and behavior online. It keeps me motivated to provide something new for folks to try out and talk about. Another great thing about working in social media and Facebook Page management in particular, is the opportunity to meet new people and learn about their line of work. Even if I’m not the one writing the content plans, I get a kick out of the great products that come through our agency.

Only since rebranding Phomedia to Bubble have you been getting a lot of attention from the industry. Could it be because you’re just too busy?

My plan was to lay low on the scene until we were sure that we had mastered and prepared ourselves with the right team of individuals, our own successful online communication and presentation, a colorful client portfolio, and case studies. We wanted to show that even our own online presence could be used as a case study for our skills.

Essentially, this is why we attracted much attention from the media. We’ve got everything we need to really start getting out there now, and we’re excited to see where this road will take us.

You have quite a few big brands in your portfolio, such as Jameson, Škoda, and Oriflame. Which has been your favorite project so far and why?

One of my favorite projects has been “The Search for Jameson” because of the opportunity to cue in the popular TV campaign and the chance to help create a brand story that fans and their friends wanted to share. You can find all information about this campaign on our website and see more video case studies.

The video shows another project for Jameson: Movie Masters’ Tournament. The best option is to build your long-term communication space and create separate actions in the interests of your fans. You should avoid professional gamers, and instead focus on real fans of the brand. There’s nothing worse than bringing thousands of random players to your game who are in it just to win an iPad.

How do you show your clients that the quality of fans is more important than the quantity? Is less really more?

We try to show clients that a small community can create much better results than just a huge number of fans sitting around doing nothing. The quality over quantity concept can be shown through a report as simple as an Excel spreadsheet, much like those from Facebook Insights. By correctly analyzing this data, one can easily understand that having a large quantity of uncommunicative fans can actually harm their brand image in the long run.

Fans or followers who actively participate in commenting, liking, and sharing can willingly spread positive message about your brand. This shoots us back to the concept of having a strong content plan, full of interesting and engaging content for people to participate in and tell their friends about.

Social media success can be measured in many ways, but figuring out which results are actually useful seems to be a little more challenging. How do you show your clients their ROI and what results do your clients look for in their reports?

In Bubble we focus on less traditional analytics than average reporting service. We see social media as a chance to make connections and to build relationships with potential customers, which is why we believe that educating fans about the brand is a key element in content planning.

Our analytics are based on page reach and communications: total reach, impressions, weekly visitors, interactions (comments, likes, shares, and messages), clicks, negative feedback, conversion or consumptions rate etc. We study many types of data and determine which ones are the most beneficial for the client’s online success.

You’ve been working on PostHeads for quite some time now. What makes your product stand out against the competition?

PostHeads stands out against its competition because it’s a complex care system. We’re talking post inspiration to implementation with tools that other systems have scattered, incomplete, or based on numerical values rather than communicative measurements.

We based the system on the problems and dilemmas we faced in creating content plans as an already existing agency. Most of our lost time and energy was going into the struggles of content planning. After all the emails and files were transferred, a lot of time just disappeared! This is why we thought of making an approval system with comments, post approval/rejection, and a variety of posting options.

To stick to our theme of saving time and being efficient, we noticed that visiting Facebook Pages to answer comments and messages is often distracting and inefficient. That is why we decided to add yet another communication feature to our social media tool. The engagement console allows PostHeads users to communicate with fans directly from the system.

With all functions finally in place, PostHeads can really save up lot of time wasted on communication blunders as well as measure brand success online with a whole new breed of analytics.

In one of your interviews you mentioned that PostHeads brought new demand for your agency services. Can you be specific?

Yeah, it seems that the more people learn about the PostHeads story, the more they want to know about Bubble. Since they’re both built solely on experience, one eventually leads to the other.

As for which clients were inspired by the idea, recently Robert Bosch has converted. With the addition of our native English speaker, others are sure to start getting curious about where it began.

In my opinion, social media is about knowing the content and teaching it to others. Do you think it’s possible to run a successful campaign in a foreign market without local people in office? Have you experienced this before?

I don’t think it’s very realistic. Of course it depends on what exactly you’re trying to achieve, but having local people involved is crucial because of their experience with the product. Nevertheless, we aim to keep on selecting our clients carefully, and not to become a project factory.

Where do you get your inspiration?

I get inspired mostly in sleep and when I visit new places. I recently discovered the importance of doing things outside of my regular routine. It’s a great way of finding new ideas and setting some of that impulse we all need to get things free.

I also enjoy following the social media channels of successful people, as well as my Reeder where I look for the most interesting articles, which I can share or take notes on. For example, Digital Buzz Blog, Big Spaceship, Harvard Business Review, The 99 Percent, The Content Strategist, Venture Beat, and of course Mashable and Techcrunch. I also search for documentaries about the making of, or behind the scenes of successful campaigns.

Name a recent social media campaign you admire and why.

I recently fell in love with the Oreo Daily Twist campaign, because it’s exactly the way I picture Bubble going about social media.

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