In this week’s Q&A, we sat down with Natasha Khan Kazi, the Director of Social Media at JustFab and ShoeDazzle, to learn about her companies’ goals, best practices for Social Media, Marketing, and Brand Development. What is your role in the company?
In this week’s Q&A, we sat down with Jodi Gersh, the Director of Social Media for Strategic Brand Marketing from USA TODAY, to learn her best practices for Social Media, Social Tools, and Product Development. What is your role at USA Today? My current role at the company is Director of Social for Strategic Brand Marketing for our national brands. Up until about 8-9 months ago I was Director of Social and Engagement for our local news – so basically I moved from working with all of our local journalists in Gannett [which owns USA TODAY], to working more with our larger national campaigns. What is the makeup of your social team? I don’t specifically have a social team, but I work with other teams – so there’s the editorial social team, which is comprised of about 6-7 people, they mostly manage the national social channels – and of course there are all the local folks that manage their own social channels. I work with our editorial staff as well as a social agency, and now I started working with our internal sales, brand marketing and branded content groups to work on when and how to post that content on social. In addition, I work with a social agency on the bigger events – like the Olympics or the Super Bowl. What social networks do you currently publish on? So USA TODAY is pretty much everywhere, currently we put the biggest emphasis on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Snapchat – but we are pretty much on every social channel that exists. Our most important ones are Facebook; obviously, since it has the largest audience, it has to be an important network. But we’re also putting a lot of attention into Snapchat, just in terms of trying to learn how younger audiences are using Snapchat and how they might want to engage with brands on Snapchat – which I think is somewhat of a mystery to many brands out there. What are your business objectives for social media? There are a few – first and foremost I think a lot of it has to do with brand awareness and engagement, so letting people know who we are, what we do, and the kind of content we have. We know that audiences are on social media, so if we want to be part of the conversation we need to be there as well. I think for a long time the industry looked at referrals, but I feel that overall reach is a more important objective because we want to be able to get our great content in front of as many people as we can. If they’re new to USA TODAY then we want to let them begin that relationship with us and see what we have. If they have known USA TODAY forever, then they are already a fan and a follower of ours so we’re just trying to put our great content – and our staff that engages with folks – on social media where the people are. I think in terms of business objectives brand awareness and reaches are my personal biggest objectives. For the business overall, since we are working with branded content and sponsored content, then there’s a certain weight put to how many people are actually reading, clicking or engaging with those stories and content – so that’s obviously important. How are you currently measuring your objectives? There are a lot of social media tools out there; we have a few that we work with that basically look at overall impressions, reach and engagement. We’ve got a social analytics team here that pull in data from a variety of different API’s then we sit down and look at that weekly to see how we’re growing on social media and how our engagement is doing – whether it’s increasing or decreasing. So we pretty much measure by how people are viewing and taking action on that content. What challenges do you face? I think if you ask any media organization they’ll have a long list that will probably always starts off with Facebook’s algorithms. I understand that Facebook is a business and that they’re also in it to make money, so the years of getting free publicity from Facebook are over. However, you worked very hard to grow your audience over the years and now you can’t even reach the people that are following you, let alone reach new people. So one of the biggest challenges I would say is trying to engage with our existing fans and followers when the technology sometimes gets in the way. So you kind of have to do the pay to play model where you are putting money behind some of your posts and growth campaigns, and I think if large businesses, especially media, are really hoping to reap the benefits of social platforms, they’re going to have to start to increase their social budgets for those networks. What is one campaign that you are most proud of? There are a lot of fun campaigns, and a lot of things that you internally know were really great and a lot of fun but didn’t necessarily reach the level or business goals that you wanted. I think one campaign though that everyone here can agree with was last years ‘Back to the Future’ anniversary. USA TODAY had a very prominent role in ‘Back to the Future 2’, where they are holding the paper in a bunch of scenes and it plays a very prominent role in the movie narrative. We ended up doing a huge campaign where our actual newspaper, on the day that the movie had on the paper, we changed the whole front of our paper and made it look like the one from the movie. I think we killed it on those couple days, we were trending on social and engaging with a lot of people who were saying things like “old brands still get it” and “USA TODAY realized that this is a big pop culture event.” We had a lot of fun, I was tweeting with tons of people that day trying to help them figure out how to pick up the paper or order it online because it sold out. Then we had a lot of fun with some social videos of people roaming around different cities dressed as Doc holding the paper – we just had a lot of fun with it and I would say everyone here would agree that it was definitely successful. What social networks are you most excited to try new things with? If you asked anyone here, everyone is going to say Snapchat; Snapchat is like the shiny object even though it’s been around for a couple years now. Everyone wants to sort of figure out the best way to work with it, but personally, I think that it’s messaging apps, Snapchat is a messaging app to an extent, but I mean things like WhatsApp, Line, WeChat and even Facebook messenger who recently opened up their API to build chat bots on the platform. I think if brands can figure out a way to not just send out headlines through these things but have a chat bot that’s a really fun and engaging way to get updated on what’s happening in the world. Research shows younger folks are interested in this one-to-one or one-to-group conversation versus just broadcasting everything out on Facebook or Twitter – so they’re heavily using chat apps. I think I saw a stat last week that chat apps have surpassed social networks in terms of that demographic. So I’m most excited to figure out how to play in that space and how USA TODAY can be fun and colorful and give snack bites of news and I think that platform would work really well for that. What advice do you have for other social media marketers out there? You have to have budgets and you have to explain to your managers and executives why it isn’t going to work to just rely on free social platform use anymore. You really have to pay to play which I think is ok if you think about how these other businesses try to do it – like Facebook. We got used to using it [Facebook] for free and I think that we shouldn’t have ever really thought that anything would be free in life; we can’t just use their platforms and expect them to help us grow our businesses. It is important to think about budgets and planning between growth campaigns and promotional campaigns and the best ways to spend that money. But I also think that social media marketers need to think about experimenting more and not necessarily throw everything at a wall and see what sticks, but to pick one or two places and just try some experiments – low cost, low level effort – and just see if there are different places or ways that you want to either use new platforms or maybe break out your brand into more niche sub brands – just play around and not be afraid to fail as long as you haven’t invested millions of dollars. What predictions do you have for the future of social media? I think the next couple of years are going to see a lot of changes, probably five years. Every year you read the end of year predictions for the next year and they were almost always the same – video is going to be the next big thing, mobile is going to be the next big thing – and it was that for many, many years. I would laugh that you could pull out your previous years blog post on predictions and use it again because the next year was kind of the same prediction, but I think this year and probably the next couple years are going to be a little different – I think things like Facebook instant articles, Google AMP and Apple news, are new ways that the larger platforms are trying to make the experience better for the users. I think those types of native, on the platform, types of articles or products are going to grow and there’s going to be more people who are utilizing them. Whether or not it gets to a point where everything is on platform and nothing is on your own site – I don’t want to go that far. But one prediction I have is sort of that native content that exists on Facebook, Twitter, Google and Apple, we’re going to see more of that, and that’s probably the future of social media.
In this week’s Q&A, we sat down with Malikah Kelly, the Digital Content Manager from Steve Madden, to learn her best practices for Social Media, Brand Development, and Marketing to Drive ROI. What has your experience been like in the retail industry? So I’ve been in the [retail] industry for almost 10 years now. I started off with blogging and editorial content straight out of college - since then I’ve worked with several different companies on eCommerce, social media, digital marketing, and online brand development. What is the break up of your ideal social team? You definitely need to have a good mix of really creative, content oriented people who can do amazing photography and create beautiful graphics. You need people who are business minded – people who will be thinking about generating ROI and about how everything social relates back to the overall companies objectives. Then you need the data nerds – people who are into the data science and the intelligent use of the content in analytics. Content is really important for building a following and maintaining engagement - you really need analytics expertise so you know how to optimize engagement and see how it ties back to the company’s strategic goals. What type of social networks would be important for brands or publishers? Honestly, it depends on what your industry is and what your brands priorities are. There is a trend of people getting caught up in being where it is “hot” or “trending” but they forget what their core demographic and strategy is. Right now, everyone is obsessed with Snapchat – but they are forgetting that it is a heavy millennial platform, and if that’s not your core customer it’s not really the place you should be focusing. Maybe your core customer is based more on Facebook or Pinterest. The right social media marketing mix has to include multiple platforms and that mix really depends on what the company’s goals are. How do you think that would impact businesses objectives? I think that the cool thing about social [media] is that it’s such a good way to grab attention and get your products, brand or company in the right peoples faces. It’s so much easier than traditional print advertising to get traction with – so it can have a huge impact for relatively little investment, just from getting people to see your content or finding brand ambassadors to really support and be evangelical about your brand. How would you measure the traction from these social media platforms? Definitely likes, number of followers, comments, and other forms of engagement are important but it really just depends on what the brand strategy is. For example, going back to Snapchat, the ultimate form of engagement would be a screenshot because they [the consumers] know it’s going to disappear but they want to save it. Whereas on Instagram it’s more likely to be a comment, and on Facebook it’s more likely to be a share – the nature of the beast really does vary a with the way these platforms are, how to figure out how your brand is using social and what it [these platforms] helps to accomplish. What challenges have you faced? The hardest thing is always creating new content and keeping it really interesting but also cohesive. You want to make sure you’re telling a story that makes sense for your brand and you’re being true to your brands values – but at the same time you don’t want to make it look boring or stale. You have to think of way to make it look fresh, cool, and exciting without making it too different that you start alienating your customers or they don’t recognize who you are [as a brand]. Where do you get that inspiration? I personally get inspiration from everywhere; I’m on social all the time. I try to spend a good time looking at retail, looking at products, seeing what’s on the floor, and every season I’m on WGSN or WWD looking at Fashion Week recaps. Everything from fashion to travel I just try to be immersed in everything going on in the world – it helps you know what’s relevant, stay on top of things, stay inspired and come up with cool ideas. Is there a campaign you’re most proud of? I’ve done a lot of cool campaigns that I really liked but probably one of my favorites was when I was living in Italy and working for a brand called, NEIMASITAWI – a small Italian luxury brand that had recently been started at the time I was working with them. I was brought to work on their marketing strategy and digital campaign – so we did a video and photo-shoot in this amazing old Italian villa and we sourced all of these really cool leather accessories and authentic lighting booths. The clothes were so beautiful – she was an amazing designer – they were all gorgeous Italian silks and cashmeres. We really had no budget so we just had to be really creative and scrappy but it just turned out so gorgeous from the scenery to the props to the gorgeous clothing that we were able to use. It was definitely a success and turned out visually stunning. What advice do you have for social media marketers? I think that it is really important to stay nimble because the industry is changing so much, and just to age myself a little bit – when I started doing this [marketing] there was Facebook, Instagram wasn’t even invented and Snapchat was probably just a thought in someone’s mind. Now there are so many things that we spend out time thinking about like how to maximize presence and how to monetize, but you don’t know what it [the market] is going to be like next year or five years from now. You really have to be on top of it and adaptive because social media is changing so quickly. Do you have a prediction for the future of social media? I think that we’re going to see more disappearing content, so more apps similar to Snapchat where the content is just temporary. I think the cool thing about that is it requires urgency – I know I can look at my friends Instagrams or Facebooks all day and their stuff is always going to be there so I don’t necessarily have to rush to see it, but every time someone sends me a snap I look at it right away because I know that it’s going to disappear. I think we’re going to see a lot more apps that use that similar technology just to increase the urgency of looking at content and the amount of time you spend on the app because you feel that pressure to quickly jump on to see what people are posting.
