Katrina Craigwell joined the team of Attention (view their blog here) in September of 2008. She specializes in social media outreach and branded presence development across social and rich media networks. She oversees the day-to-day needs of various clients and operates as team manager where needed.
Prior to joining Attention, Katrina was a member of the marketing team at AlleyCorp, a network of Web startups based in New York, where she focused on creating marketing collateral for the network’s various sales teams.
For two years, beginning in 2006, Katrina worked in public relations at the Independent Film Channel (IFC) where she supported the department and managed online outreach for the network’s on-air and online content. Katrina led outreach for IFC’s webseries and served as executive producer of a series of online video panels promoting IFC News’ Election Coverage. The panels brought together personalities from Political Lunch, AOL and College Humor, to discuss the most recent election.
Katrina regularly appears as a guest speaker for the NYU School of Professional Studies’ Digital Media Marketing program. She covers social media and how to best use the landscape for authentic promotion. She was also a panelist for the Digital Media and the Independent Filmmaker symposium, at the 2009 American Black Film Festival.
Katrina graduated from University of Toronto’s Trinity College with a BA in International Relations.
The Digital Mindshare team is quite impressed with the experience of this dynamic digital marketing pro –even more impressive considering that she just celebrated her 24th birthday.
DM: What brought you into the industry?
KC: It was actually kind of a fluke. I joined IFC (Independent Film Channel) after I graduated from college, taking a supportive role in the PR Department. At the time, I really didn’t know what the term “social media” was. I was so young, though, so I was completely comfortable in the online world, Facebook, blogging, etc. So when IFC began developing online content in 2007, it just came naturally to me to use online/digital resources to drive traffic to the site. We used emails, and did “online outreach” (which we now all call social media) with influential bloggers in music, pop culture, etc. We got a buzz going really quickly, getting over four million page views of our new content in just ten days after the launch. The outreach with bloggers was really incredible – we gave them passwords for exclusive access to the content before the general population could view it, and then blog about it. We wanted to make sure the bloggers knew how important they were in the process.
Also, IFC had a news department, and in early 2008 they started doing a lot of election coverage. We wanted to create buzz about this online. We invited our audience to talk about the most important issues of the election to them on our site IFC.com. We produced a series of panels, featuring folks from Political Lunch, AOL, College Humor…people with a wide variety of backgrounds. We set up a very productive link partnership with AOL, and it was one of the most highly-viewed pages when it launched.
So that was my introduction to working in “social media.” After leaving IFC, I spent a short amount of time working for a group of startups, before joining Attention. From my early experience, I still love working media accounts, so I handle a lot of TV accounts in addition to more traditional consumer accounts.
In just a few short years, I’ve seen the whole process brought together in a way that combines traditional PR methods with social media to enhance a client’s reach. It’s been a really effective way to get the message out.
DM: Digital Media is still considered “techie” by a decent amount of people, and the traditional tech world has historically been male-dominated. How do you find being a woman working in the digital space?
KC: I’ve had the opportunity to do quite a bit, and also have been able to find great working partners wherever I’ve gone. Rather than being a male or a female, or being a certain ethnicity, or any of that, in my experience, the priority is that the quality of work is high, as well as your creativity. Also, it helps a lot if you are fun to work with!
I haven’t run into any barriers that have set me back so far. I think people are conscious of the fact – especially in my generation – that the qualities of the staff are diverse, and the more diverse, the more comfortable we are. I’m a half-black, half-Jewish woman, and I’ve never been anything but part of the team.
You can affect a lot by how you perceive yourself and present yourself. Whatever you are, if you are happy, meaning you like your job and are happy to be part of a team, that’s important.
DM: What has been your biggest professional challenge so far?
KC: I recently learned how to delegate – which was difficult for me. I was thrown quickly into situations where I had to manage a team. I’m very comfortable working with people, but hadn’t had a lot of management experience. I’ve been able to work through this and feel more comfortable.
Also, I have a real drive to get a lot done, and tend to feel anxious if I’m not doing enough to become a CEO by the time I’m 27! I’m trying to make sure I make solid career decisions. I’m just a typical New Yorker; we’re all pretty career driven and ambitious.
DM: How do you keep up with all the changes in the digital space?
KC: People ask this all the time, and yes, it is overwhelming. You do have to keep up, but actually – my priority is not so much about “keeping up” with every single new thing as it is being effective for my clients. I like to say that social media is the easiest, fastest, most collaborative means of communication we have seen in a long time, so when you are working for a client, instead of just reading, reading, reading, trying to figure out how to keep up, think instead, “What is the fastest social media tool I can use to accomplish our goals for the client?” And of course you have to first lay out the goals.
If it takes you more than 30 seconds to a minute to figure out what platform you should use for your company/client, that’s too long. It’s about figuring out how you use these tools in the most efficient ways to achieve your goals.
You need to remember that Google has elevated the value of social media in their search algorithm. So if your client gets bad press, then upload some tagged photos to their Flickr, Twitter feed, etc., and right away you can affect their online profile. If your client has a product they want reviewed, then send it to product review sites.
Ask: What is the goal? Whether the client is a shoe company, a TV network, a branding agency, or a book publisher, what are the goals, and how do I use social media tools to accomplish those goals effectively?
DM: What do small business clients need to focus on when getting started in a social media marketing effort?
KC: If you are a small business, especially if you are just starting out, you need to define your goals, and identify the fastest, easiest, most collaborative ways to achieve these goals.
Small businesses now have the ability to set their online profile in ways they never have before, thanks to social media tools. So if a business wants to be covered by the right press/blog, it can proactively affect what comes up in the search results.
Regardless of which tools you want to use, you can set yourself up to have a very effective online profile.
I would also say, don’t overwhelm yourself. Just work three steps of your social media at a time. See what works with those three steps, and then move on to the next three, until you are really comfortable in the space. These sites will be here tomorrow, so there is no rush to sign on to all of them on the very first day of business.
The first thing is to do some soul searching to determine what the essence of your company is, and then figure out how you want to communicate that.
DM: At the other end of the spectrum, what do large business clients need consider when implementing social media into their marketing plans?
KC: One of the biggest challenges for more established companies is dealing with the comfort level they have regarding the digital space. Sharing information is still really foreign to executives at the highest levels, as is the tightly-held, lingering belief that the corporation has to keep tight hold and control of the “message.”
I think that the smartest thing a large company can do is hire someone in house who knows the space, who knows where this is coming from, and who can teach and train everyone in the executive offices. Set them up with their own personal Twitter feed, walk them through Facebook, go to a company event, take some photos, tag and upload them…etc.
This approach can really help a company become more of the culture internally, which then makes it easier to influence the top decision makers – who may have been initially reluctant – to become more comfortable in the digital space.
At the end of the day, if a large brand has a new product but is running out of money to market it, or is having some bad press, or wants to survey a new consumer community, the best way to do these things is through the use of social media tools.