In this week’s Q&A, we sat down with Nailah Blades, the CEO from Wylie & Co., to learn her best practices for Social Media, Social Tools, and Product Development.
What is your role at Wylie & Co.?
I am the founder and CEO of Wylie & Co., we are a social marketing agency and we work with consumer lifestyle brands such as Sonos.
What is the makeup of your social team?
Its actually a boutique agency, so it’s me and I have two other brand managers on the team. From time to time we’ll work with contractors as well.
What social networks do you currently publish on?
We primarily publish on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and Pinterest but also work with Google Plus, Tumblr, Snapchat, and we’ve done some work with YouTube. We really work across the board, but I’d say Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and Instagram are the four big ones that we’ve been doing a lot of work on.
What are your business objectives for social media?
With the agency, our three main goals for any social media platform are to target, engage and connect. With targeting we partner with the brands to create these unique experiences for their prospects and customers and connect with their target audience. We also help them connect with new and alternative flood lines in terms of engagement we create the content, foster engagement and build communities – we always focus on building communities that convert.
How are you currently measuring your objectives?
We use social for our analytics and for some of our larger clients, for example with Sonos we use Sprinklr, so we’re able to use some of their analytics as well.
What challenges do you face?
I think the biggest challenge, and probably common to a lot of people in the field is that social media just keeps changing so fast so everyday there’s a new Facebook algorithm or there’s a new platform or something that was working one week is kind of not moving anymore – so I think it can be challenging to keep up on the trends and I think that with the bigger challenge is making sure that you’re only assessing the trends that work best for your client. Even though it may seem like a good idea to jump into everything, not everything is going to work for your client based on their brand, who they’re speaking with and their product. So I think making sure that maintaining the balance and not jumping on every bandwagon.
What is one campaign that you are most proud of?
We work closely with Sonos, so they launched this great campaign called, Music Makes it Home, so you can find it at musicmakesithome.com, and they commissioned a study and did a lot of research into the effect that music has on our lives and how much of a difference music has on our day to day lives and our relationships – so they talked about all of these different families and measured what they did when they didn’t have a Sonos and access to music at their fingertips and then later they gave them a Sonos and measured how it was with having one. So they just saw a phenomenal result for food tasting better, people spending more time together, people just happier and in love and it really just completely created more positive experiences and you saw how music created that. So it was a great campaign that socialized the community and there was a lot of great engagement and people got really excited about how music made their homes better, which led us to a lot of new users to our brand.
What social networks are you most excited to try new things with?
I personally love Instagram; I’ve always been a big Instagram person and think it really allows the brand to have the opportunity to approach their content from a more editorial standpoint so you get to see your own magazine editor and I think that’s a great way to approach it. It’s also a great way for brands to showcase what their lifestyle is and kind of go behind the scenes and showcase their particular aesthetic. So personally, I always was excited to see how Instagram would grow and where brands will take that. I think looking into the future and the changes that are happening now, I’m most excited about forms like Snapchat and also live videos like Facebook Live and all of the other live video platforms. I think that has really opening up the content creator hat and really becoming a full on publisher and I think that’s really cool – so I think it’ll be really interesting to see how brands get more comfortable and get on board.
What advice do you have for other social media marketers out there?
I think my biggest piece of advice is to always remember to tie social media or any marketing activities to business goals, so I think a lot of times it can be easy to have social just going and hopping on new platforms and then looking back and realizing that it has nothing to do with the business goals that the business has set for itself. I think social media doesn’t exist in a bubble and it shouldn’t be a silo, so I think it’s really important to make it interact nicely with other core business functions and tie everything together. Also, having fun! I know its work, but it’s so fun in social media and I know a lot of marketers probably got into social media because they love driving conversation and building communities – I mean that’s why I got into it – so I think it’s important not to forget that and have fun with it!
What predictions do you have for the future of social media?
Going off of the trends I think that video is huge right now I think it’s just getting bigger with the all of the live video platforms – things like Facebook and Periscope keep it growing and I think it’s really interesting that you’re seeing it being used in a lot of different way. For example the way you saw Facebook live being used to film a police interaction that ended tragically, it’s kind of becoming this tool for community socialism so I think that that’s going to be a fascinating thing to see grow. Also, like a couple weeks ago when the democrats had a sit-in, and the CSPAN was cut of so one of the representatives filmed it on Periscope so that’s interesting how social media is becoming part of our lives and becoming its own media. Also I’m seeing a lot of growth of private communities, like faith groups for example. I think people and consumers are always looking for community, so I think brands want to provide that safe space whatever issues are tied in with the brand – that’s something that their audience and consumers will be really receptive to.
