Digital Mindshare is pleased to present Emily Sobol in this week’s spotlight. Emily began her career in media relations, working for numerous magazines. After a few years, she was lured into the online world and started at BuzzMetrics as a research analyst of consumer generated media. BuzzMetrics ultimately merged with Net Ratings to become Nielsen Online, part of the The Nielsen Company. Emily grew with the company and helped start Nielsen Online Digital Strategic Services. In October 2008, Emily left Nielsen to join a small online creative agency, enter:new media, and leads the communications division, as well as overall strategy and business development.
DM: What initially led you from media relations into the online world?
ES: When I was doing traditional PR the aim was to get product mentions; this was the golden egg, like getting a “gifts for dads” in a publication just before Fathers Day.
I think of PR as closing a deal. You’re not just pitching at the wind. It’s very strategic. There is a lot of branding involved in PR, but when I was in the industry, the idea of PR people pitching blogs was just unheard of.
But there was also a lot of chatter in 2002-2003 about how people are more influenced by word-of-mouth (WOM) and recommendations from friends, family, etc. So, I started to think, if people are paying more attention to WOM than the placement we had worked so hard to get, maybe I had better look into this further.
I stumbled across an article in the New York Times that quoted the president of BuzzMetrics. It was all about the power of WOM. I “Googled” the company and saw that it was a small startup…and they were hiring! I was just two years out of school at this point, but in college I had done quite a bit of research, and had not lost the “bug” for it.
So I went to work for the company. What BuzzMetrics did was create a proprietary technology, or tool, to harvest, spider out, and pull information about many different things from message boards and blogs, and put it into database.
The analyst teams then had access to a great tool. We could search for what our clients were interested in through the use of keywords. The system could accommodate complex keywords, qualifiers, time frames, etc., so we could present qualitative and quantitative analysis to them in the form of reports, and they didn’t have to read through everything out there in the Internet.
They used the information to get consumer insights: The myths and misperceptions, things they wished the product could do. There was also a potential to get competitive analysis by seeing what people liked (or didn’t like) about competitive products.
DM: It must have been really great to be there during the evolution of social media.
ES: At first, it was way more about message boards and forums…then all the sudden was BLOGS. So we started to do influencer analysis, naming the 50 most influential bloggers in a particular space.
The methodology we used to determine “influence” was amount of traffic and inbound links to the blog. We could advise our clients on how to reach out to these bloggers in a very friendly and honest way.
BuzzMetrics ultimately merged with Net Ratings to become Nielsen Online, part of the The Nielsen Company. I started there as a Research Analyst, then was promoted to Senior Research Analyst. But then things changed: Clients were saying, “This information is really cool, but what do I do with it?”
So, we started a consulting division, called Nielsen Online Digital Strategic Services. This became a group within Nielsen dedicated to helping brands develop data-grounded online strategies in a host of key areas: online content, reputation management, brand advocacy, and customer satisfaction.
We took the research a bit further: So, Client X, these are the most influential people in the space…AND here is what you can do with them. You could invite them to your corporate headquarters to get their feedback, or you could send product to the bloggers.
Sometimes, it was something so simple as seeing through our analysis that something about the product was confusing to users, so the client needed to add more content to their own website.
Then, it became even more sophisticated: Brands were able to manage and even improve their offline reputations by using tools like Twitter to identify what they were doing wrong, and fixing it.
DM: You really grew with the company. What led to your next professional move?
ES: I loved all of this, but once Facebook, Twitter, etc. started to evolve, I decided that I didn’t want to just talk to brands about how to do it…I wanted to do it for them! Part of my personality is, when I am actually doing something, I feel more connected to it and want to see it be successful.
We spend so much time working, and I decided that I needed to be where I felt most connected, where my actions could make a business super-successful. So I joined enter:new media, which is a boutique social media marketing agency in Manhattan. We help clients drive measurable brand value through an integrated approach to application development, viral content, community management and media relations.
Working with clients in this way, I get to embrace professionally all the things I enjoy about new media. I still can be that strategic planner that I was at Nielson, but now we can activate the ideas ourselves. I think of it as strategy activation, development and production…with the entire process handled in house.
We truly believe that everyone working at enter:new media, whether on the communications team, or as a producer or designer, is first and foremost a marketer. We all work together, even when we talk to companies or brands about our services. The clients really love that it is all done collectively together.
A great moment for me at work, now, is when I see that the number of Twitter followers has shot up for one of our clients. Or when we create a smart promotion on Facebook, where we are able to drive people totally off the platform to buy something. We’re making an impact, and that was what I was craving professionally.
DM: What is the target market for enter:new media?
ES: The company is being really smart and strategic. We didn’t want to be another company that was riding the wave of the “social media buzz” and just saying we were experts in that. We said, let’s do really good work, get more and more business from client referrals and internal contacts, and get some really awesome case studies under our belts…then we can take it to the next level.
We’re really there, ready to be a bigger company, but still taking it slow as far as our growth model. We have a nice mix of clients, from small startups to the medium and large-sized brands. We love working with all different sizes of companies.
The larger brands in our client list are great in that they have really forward-thinking people on their in-house marketing teams, so they “get” what we do and give us a lot of leeway to make things happen.
Also – we still like to work with much smaller brands/budgets. I mean, the whole idea of social media is that it is so much more accessible for smaller clients in terms of what they can do to market their products and services. A small company started by an entrepreneur is not buying a 30-second ad on NBC – but they can do cool things online.
DM: Which type of client do you prefer to work with?
ES: Personally, I enjoy the smaller brands because I love to create awareness campaigns.
There is so much you can do for a small brand – you can really see an upward movement when you look at buzz, number of blog hits, traffic to public profile. You really get to start at zero and get it going.
DM: In your opinion, has it been at all difficult to be a woman in the digital space?
ES: I really never think about it. I have never run into a situation where it has impeded anything I have ever done. I am in a Facebook group called Digital Divas, and we meet for happy hours, etc. I definitely l have an interest in meeting other women in the space. We have a mutual understanding of the industry, we can bounce ideas off of each other…I’m excited about that.
DM: What keeps you grounded as you continue to grow professionally in the industry?
ES: I am all in favor of good ideas, but I have a really firm belief in things being measured by taking that idea to completeness. Yes, I will support and applaud your idea – but I will applaud you 100 times over when you execute it. Too many people in the digital space who get a lot of credit for just waxing poetic about something, but there are a whole other bunch of people who are quietly acting on ideas and getting it done.
White papers, speaking at events, etc. is really important, and being visionary is awesome, but I really like giving the credit to people who are actually doing stuff. I always want to remember to give credit to the more junior people on the team. In this type of marketing, there is so much “nitty-gritty” work that has to add up to make the campaign successful. It’s very tactical…there are a lot of employees who are quietly carrying out the plan for hours every day, making it happen.