Does your business have a Director of Community? Can your clients go behind the scenes of your offices by watching your YouTube videos? Social media has taken internet marketing to a whole new level of engagement—and traditional advertising is trailing in its wake. Growing companies are harnessing the power of social media and internet marketing successfully, but exactly what does that look like today?
Greg Cangialosi, President and CEO of leading emai-service provider Blue Sky Factory, makes it his business to know how other businesses get the word out — and how far it goes. By watching the trends, Blue Sky Factory has shifted all of its marketing efforts and dollars out of online ad buys, Google search marketing and trade magazine advertising and put them exclusively into social media.
“We focus all of our energy on social media and events,” Cangialosi says. “It’s not about Facebook or LinkedIn, those are just tools to touch base with customers, the media, etc. It’s about moving more towards that engagement marketing landscape.”
Community is the key. The emerging trend in today’s success stories is that companies have pulled back the curtain and are showing their customers and clients that they’re just people, too. Cangialosi says the successful companies he knows develop company “evangelists” and community organizers that often emerge from followers of their blogs and Facebook pages. In fact,
Blue Sky just hired a “Director of Community” to bring all of the community-building channels together from LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook to the company’s blog and videos, to live events and more.
“Once you’ve successfully developed company evangelists over different channels, it makes sense to put somebody in charge of that in your organization,” Cangialosi says. “You have built communities around your Twitter, Facebook, blogs, all these mediums—and the amplification of signal out of these is amazing in terms of branding timeshare and overall social equity out there.”
Other companies call the position “media masters,” who interface with account management teams, human resources, and all divisions within a company to keep on top of what’s going on and share it with their online communities.
“With new brands, it’s about bringing personality to the forefront and their people to the forefront,” Cangialosi says. “At the end of the day, people work with people, not with companies. We [Blue Sky] are a tech company, but that’s not our focus. We don’t compete in the market on tech; we compete on service and people, and we do it pretty well, I think.”
Tags: director of community, marketing, media masters, social media