Dachis Group Buys U.K. Social Business Consultancy Headshift

Dachis Group, the social technology consultancy founded by former Razorfish CEO, Jeff Dachis, has announced the acquisition of U.K.-based consulting firm Headshift. The company said the purchase will allow it to meet increasing client demand, and enable it to better service global customers, which include brands such as Philips Healthcare, Coca-Cola, and Intuit. It now has a presence in London, Sydney, and Austin.

Dachis and Headshift offer similar services — aiming to help clients understand and utilize social technologies and platforms throughout their operations and their businesses — for purposes beyond marketing and customer communication. The acquisition signals Dachis’s intent to move beyond the role of a traditional digital agency, and follows a trend of agencies broadening their services in order to cater to wider client demands.

In January, for instance, agency holding company WPP invested in analytics and optimization firm Omniture. The move exhibited WPP’s ongoing strategy of investing and acquiring technologies to enhance its consulting capabilities.

Dachis Group CEO Jeffrey Dachis told ClickZ News that Headshift is “100 percent aligned” with the thinking of his company. “It’s not about social media. We’re talking about socially-calibrated organizations. Social media marketing gets a lot of attention, and there are some great practitioners in that space, but there aren’t many examples of that activity translating into concrete, tangible results,” he said.

As well as developing internal solutions for high profile law firms such as Allen & Overy and Freshfields, Headshift has worked with consumer-facing clients such as the BBC, Channel 4, and AXA. Bryant said the split between internal and external work through the firm is roughly equal, but predicted a continued “blurring and bending” of the boundaries between the two. Dachis added, “We don’t really look at it in terms of internal and external. It’s a holistic approach to business.”

Headshift currently employs around 40 permanent staff. Bryant said he expects the group to continue to grow over the next 12 months, but that no further acquisitions are in the pipeline.