I had the opportunity to speak with Jacquelyn over at Espresso, a company that touts itself as the stalkerati when it comes to figuring out how to best engage its clients’ customers.
Espresso’s infiltrators spend their days and nights investigating your category and industry, as well as what on earth your customers spend their days and nights doing. With this information firmly in hand, they design strategies across four channels – digital, social, experiential, and traditional – that are focused more on sharp shooting than mass blasts of fire.
Now, what caught my eye and sparked my attention was their take on the question that everybody’s asking these days: “What exactly is Social Media?” Take five minutes and give it a glance. Better yet, sniff out the R-rated version if you’re looking for a serious wake up call – either way you will find both not only entertaining but descriptive and on point to the question at hand.
Here are some words of Social Media wisdom from the Espresso Team…
1. What is ‘Social Media’ to you?
Social media is, in my opinion, a fancy name for something that the web has always been. I’ve been working in digital since the 90s, so I’ve been watching it grow pretty consistently, and it’s always been social. It’s just that now, given the market penetration of high speed internet, you are seeing the bulk of North Americans online a lot. Naturally, clever entrepreneurs are seeking new and interesting opportunities to create venues through which people can conduct the habits they’ve been conducting since the dawn of time: hunting and gathering. The subject of this hunting and gathering is information – whether it’s for entertainment, socializing, product reviews, whatever – there is much sharing to be done. The social web allows for speed, ease, and efficiency in going about this very human process, and it’s extremely fun and challenging thinking about inventive ways to involve consumers in these processes on behalf of our clients!
2. Where did this idea to create “What is Social Media?” stem from?
We actually hired our managing director of US operations, Marta Kagan, because she had created a deck called “WTF is Social Media?” It really spoke to us as an agency, and we found it to be both smart and entertaining. She found us online, told us she wanted to work with us given our corresponding views on marketing, communications, and advertising – what we refer to as brand infiltration – and, after a few meetings, we knew it was a match. Upon hiring Marta, we decided one of the pieces we’d use in her introduction to the market as our US office lead was a sequel to her original deck.
Why? It’s simple, really. We see a gap in the market between people trying to sell social services and clients who want to understand the why of using it. It isn’t our objective to sell, sell, sell anything – it’s our objective to help clients to understand why and how they might use this channel, depending on their target’s usage habits, patterns, technographic profiles, etc. We want to share general information about the channel itself with clients in order that they might be able to get better insight into the answers to those questions for their own business needs.
3. How do you monitor your Social Media efforts?
We monitor using a variety of search tools and methods, both generic and specific to our client’s industry, as well as using research studies and polling data or online focus groups if phase one research suggests it will be useful. We take the data obtained and conduct our own internal analysis on it, in order that we can share accurate brand perception with our clients.
4. How do you measure your marketing efforts?
All marketing efforts can, in our opinion, be measured. When we originally design our programs, we are careful to include measurement opportunities in every single tactic. There is no one correct way to design these things into programs – each concept requires its own thinking around how the specific target of a campaign might interact with the tactic or execution. The measuring opportunities are designed to optimize this.
5. Do you practice what you preach?
Absolutely. We live and breathe online, from top to bottom within the agency. We use social tools to improve our collaboration amongst the internal team and our clients. We profile all our staff on our site so that clients might get to know them. Staff are encouraged to blog on the company site via internal contesting. I think that the tools that exist today truly allow companies to be social from the inside out – it creates major efficiencies and more opportunities for truly collaborative creativity.
6. Where does your inspiration stem from?
Life. Every time I walk down the street, I think about ways the shops I pass could make their businesses better. It truly takes everything in my power to not constantly send people decks with ideas on how they could optimize their slow times or create new revenue streams – I kid you not! I personally don’t work for the money, I work for the creative outlet. I love everything that comes from helping clients to think more strategically about communicating.
7. Do you follow any particular blogs?
I follow about a bazillion blogs. I honestly couldn’t tell you my favorites. I read constantly and am completely obsessed with information. I am actually on a break from doing a PhD in Information Science – work is a bit hectic right now, but I really love to study this kind of thing.
8. How did you learn all this stuff?
By doing it. You can’t possibly understand how to communicate with people if you’re not communicating yourself. There are so many psychological, sociological, anthropological questions to be asked about information – figuring out answers around this stuff and relating it back to a company’s business objectives? There couldn’t be anything dreamier one could spend her days doing!
Post A Comment?