the operating manual your team can actually ship from.
tone of voice, format library, response trees, escalation rules, posting cadence — the strategy translated into something a new hire can pick up on a tuesday and run by friday. not a 90-page pdf. a working notion site, with examples next to every rule. the same deliverables a b2b digital marketing agency would charge a strategy retainer for.
a doc the new hire can ship from on day three.
every section has a rule, a working example, a counter-example, and a "if you must break this, here's how." nothing abstract — if a section can't be applied to a real post by the end of the page, it gets cut.
tone of voice system.
the brand voice broken into 4–6 dials (warm↔sharp, formal↔familiar, plain↔playful, etc.), each with a calibration scale and side-by-side examples. one page anyone can use to red-pen a caption in 30 seconds.
format library.
every post format you'll actually use — talking-head reel, lifestyle still, founder pov, BTS, carousel teach, meme, story poll — with a structure, hook menu, length cap, and three reference posts. so nobody re-invents the wheel monthly.
response trees.
the decision tree for replies and DMs: positive comment → response template; negative comment → triage flow; sales-intent DM → handoff script. trained against real comments from your account, not made up.
escalation & crisis rules.
what counts as a crisis, who decides, who speaks, and how fast. one page, four levels of severity, three sample responses per level. printable, signed off by your founders, kept where everyone can find it at 2am.
cadence & calendar rules.
post frequency by channel, optimal windows for your audience (not generic best-practice), pillar mix per week, story-vs-feed ratios, and the rule for when to break the rules. plugged into your scheduler of choice.
visual & design rules.
the bits of the brand book that live on social — type sizes for in-feed legibility, safe zones, accent usage, motion presets, captions style, thumbnail rules. lifted from your identity, sized for instagram and tiktok specifically.
roles & sign-off matrix.
who briefs, who writes, who shoots, who approves, who posts, who replies. RACI without the consultancy bloat — one page, real names, real backups when someone's on leave.
onboarding starter kit.
a one-pager and a 20-minute loom that gets a new hire from "I just joined" to "I shipped a post" in their first week. the playbook teaches itself — you shouldn't have to.
what's actually in the book.
14 sections, indexed so anyone can ctrl-f to the rule they need without scrolling through 80 pages of preamble. living document — version-controlled, dated, and patched as the brand grows.
the
operating
manual.
how the manual gets built.
a four-to-five-week sprint, written in the open. you'll see drafts as we go — no big reveal, no surprises on delivery day.
audit & intake.
we read everything you've shipped in the last 90 days — captions, replies, DMs, story arcs, paid creative — and pull the patterns that are working from the ones that aren't. plus a 60-min interview with whoever runs the day-to-day.
voice & format drafts.
we draft the voice dials and the format library first — these are the two sections that pay back fastest. you get a working version inside notion to comment on, edit, and pressure-test on real briefs.
community & ops.
response trees, DM scripts, escalation rules, RACI matrix. we co-write these with whoever actually replies in your inbox today — they know where the edge cases live, we just shape them.
walkthrough & v1 lock.
90-minute working session with your full team. we walk every section, role-play three real scenarios, and edit live. anything that feels theoretical gets cut. v1 locks at the end of the session.
onboarding & quarterly patch.
we record the loom, write the day-1 to day-7 starter checklist, and hand the doc over. then every quarter we run a 60-minute patch session — what's outdated, what's missing, what the team keeps forgetting.
six brands, one playbook — and the inbox finally stopped burning.
a multi-brand QSR group had six community managers replying in six different voices, escalating everything to the founders, and missing 30% of sales-intent DMs. we wrote one master playbook with brand-specific voice dials and a clear severity ladder.
inside two months: response time halved, founder escalations down 70%, and DM-to-sale routing live. the playbook now ships with every new community-manager hire.
a doc your team will actually open on a tuesday.
our last brand book was a pdf nobody opened. this is the only doc i've seen the juniors actually edit. that's the test.
questions, answered straight.
can't find it here? email hi@socialmafia.agency — replies in under 24 hours.
stop re-explaining the brand on every brief.
— typically reply within 24 hours · dubai (hq) · mohali · adelaide