How Flint Group replaces guesswork with a test-and-learn social strategy

Six years ago, public relations and social media operated on completely separate teams at Flint Group, a full service agency based in Fargo that spans traditional and non-traditional channels. As the landscape evolved, the agency recognized how much more powerful the work became when PR and social disciplines joined forces. Today, those pros sit on one integrated PESO (Paid, Earned, Shared, Owned media) team, allowing them to move faster, identify opportunities earlier and build connected campaigns that drive deeper impact for Flint Group clients.

Anna Larson (@msannagrace), Director and Strategist at Flint Group, views social media as one piece of a larger marketing ecosystem. By anchoring their strategy in Sprout Social’s platform, the agency uses real-time social intelligence to build awareness, strengthen loyalty and manage brand reputation from the very start of every campaign.

Honoring expertise through data

For Anna and her team, great marketing requires a test-and-learn mindset and a constant willingness to adapt. They do not ignore their deep marketing background. Instead, they use their deep marketing background and expertise alongside Sprout to layer data over their experience and validate their instincts and hypotheses. This foundation helps them transition from guesswork to confidently scale tactics that protect and transform their clients’ brand relationship with its audience.

"Some of our most successful client outcomes have come from being willing to experiment, measure and optimize. Our ultimate goal is to be a true strategic partner and help our clients achieve meaningful results." — Anna Larson, Director & Strategist, Flint Group

The how

Anna and her team focus on specific workflows across Sprout’s platform of products to combine organic strategy,creator strategy, and reputation management.

• Driving alignment through Social Intelligence: Because the social and PR teams operate as one unit, they use Sprout Social Listening to protect brand equity and inform broader communication strategies before a concern escalates. When a practitioner flags a real-time shift in sentiment or an emerging risk on forums, that insight moves from the social dashboard directly to the PR strategists. From there, the team uses the data to build crisis statement frameworks, prepare media responses and brief executives with empirical audience evidence. This integrated flow of social intelligence also allows the team to scan conversation trends for positive customer narrative they pitch as verified, human-interest feature stories to industry publications.
• Challenging assumptions with listening: Clients often overestimate negative online sentiment—criticism tends to be more memorable than praise. The Flint Group team uses Social Listening to analyze the broader conversations across social platforms, Reddit, forums and web mentions to uncover the reality of brand perception. By building Listening topics that track their client's brand name keywords and then filtering that aggregate data inside the Sentiment Performance Report, they can isolate the specific volume of positive, negative and neutral messages. The data frequently reveals that the majority of conversations are actually neutral to positive. Social Listening gives the agency the evidence needed to challenge assumptions, provide context and help clients make decisions based on data rather than perception. 
• Accelerating creator discovery: Evaluating influencer partnerships used to require hours of manual research across multiple platforms and spreadsheets. Within their test-and-learn strategy, the team treats influencer selection as an optimization experiment rather than a guessing game. By establishing baseline brand safety metrics and brand fit scores in Sprout Social Influencer Marketing, they treat creator profiles as hypotheses to test against actual audience alignment for each campaign. Sourcing niche micro-influencers allows them to isolate variables in audience demographics and improve campaign performance. They build structured creator lists to compare performance metrics side-by-side, then use the One-Sheet Builder to package these data-backed recommendations for client review before launching the campaign, keeping discovery, data and presentation tools in one clear place.
• Evaluating cross-campaign sentiment in the Smart Inbox: Many teams treat message monitoring as an organic-only exercise, but Flint Group uses the Smart Inbox to analyze audience reactions to paid campaigns alongside daily community management in assessing campaign performance and ROI for clients. Viewing paid, organic and incoming care conversations together gives them a complete picture of audience perception. This centralized view makes it obvious when a small messaging adjustment, creative tweak or targeting change is needed to improve campaign performance and protect brand reputation.

The business impact

By integrating social data into their public relations framework, Flint Group has turned social intelligence into an essential tool for reputation management. This approach provides both agility and confidence, especially when handling crisis preparedness, and delivering value to agency clients across multiple dynamic campaigns.