Introductions & networking megathread - Build your brand cohort

  • 8 February 2022
  • 6 replies
  • 106 views
joe.huber
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Userlevel 5
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Connect with one another and share your goals!

This group is designed to help you hit your awareness goals this year, so please let us know if there’s anything we can do to make that happen!

In the replies, let me know who you are!

I’ll start. I’m Joe Huber and I’m the customer community strategist at Sprout.

My wife Bliss and I live in the Chicago suburbs with our daughter London and our dog Haywood. I’ve been at Sprout for 5 and a half years!

Some things I’d love to hear from all of you:

  • Name
  • Title
  • 1-3 sentence bio
  • What your goals are for the year
  • What you’d like to see from Sprout to get there
  • What you’d like to get out of this group

6 replies

caracbbb
Rank
Userlevel 2

Hi, all! My name is Cara and I am the Director of Communications at the BBB Serving Arkansas. I’ve been in the Better Business Bureau system for 6 years now and I have learned so much in this short amount of time. We are a non-profit organization with the vision of a marketplace where buyers and sellers can trust each other. 

I live in central Arkansas with my fiancé, son, two cats, and an extremely rambunctious puppy. We enjoy getting outside, gaming, music, binge watching, and Razorback football. 

My goal this year with our social platforms is to continue to expand our reach and relevancy, and to try new features. They also want me to venture into the world of Tik-Tok. *gulp*

Sprout Social has been a huge resource for me in this role. I look forward to engaging here and watching webinars from the Sprout team this year. I hope to learn more about creating engaging content that is “brand-safe” and “CEO approved”. I think this will be a great cohort and, while we are an extremely established brand, I hope to gain insight for keeping our brand relevant and building within our local market from this group. 

I look forward to chatting with you all! Feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn as well!

A
Rank

Hello! My name is Ashley Gatchel and I am the Marketing Manager for Stake Center Locating. Stake Center Locating is a utility locating company - an essential part of underground infrastructure damage prevention! The stuff we use every day, but never think about. 

 

I’ve been in marketing for 7 years, but started with Stake Center Locating about 7 months ago. I’ve been in B2B marketing for about 6 of the 7 years I’ve been in marketing. I live in North Carolina with my fiancé and dog, Bella. I am also a part-time RYT-500 (just means I’ve studied 500 hours) yoga teacher. I love how much mindfulness yoga has brought to my life and the act of teaching has helped cultivate some marketing and leadership skills. 

 

Part of my goal when joining Stake Center was to create brand awareness. A strong brand identity was created before my arrival, but wasn’t really spread. My goals for this year are to increase active engagement on social media, which has been very hit or miss overall. I am still working on deciphering what each platform audience wants to see. 

 

Sprout has been incredibly helpful in bringing me some key metrics to help create content strategy. We are really struggling on Twitter, so I think I’d like some more ideas around what to do to gain followers/engagement on Twitter aside from the typical advice of tweet more. I’ve incorporated tagging others to try to leverage their audience, industry related news, funny tweets, tweeting more - we still only have 44 followers and hardly ever any engagement. It might just be that there isn’t a real audience for us there, but I’d like to know if there’s anything I could be doing that I’m not. 

Out of this group I’d like to just network and hear what other marketers goals are around social. I love seeing and hearing new ideas. Then of course hear from Sprout on how we can further our brand awareness leveraging social media.

I’ll go ahead and leave my LinkedIn profile here also in case anyone would like to connect: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ashleyadams88/ 

C
Rank
Userlevel 1

Kia ora (Hello)! I am Caitlin Kooyman and I am the Assistant Brand Manager at ZIWI - a New Zealand made pet food company focused on providing peak nutrition without compromise, globally.

I have worked in marketing for 7-8 years now, starting in market research (while completing my masters), then moving onto the digital marketing team at Toyota New Zealand and finally joining the ZIWI team 1.5 years ago. I am based in Auckland, New Zealand, where I live with my partner and our ever-expanding vegetable garden. When I’m not working I’m either reading, sewing or whipping something up in the kitchen.

During my first year at ZIWI, my focus was on building the foundations of our social media workstream, which has involved the development of robust reporting, an always-on content strategy, BAU spend plan and a TOV guide. This year, we are really looking to grow our social presence, by increasing our reach and following, with the aim of having greater brand awareness and saliency at point of purchase.

I am very new to Sprout Social so I am hoping to learn a lot about the platform and how to best utilize its different features, as well as grow my professional network and engage in some valuable knowledge sharing. I love hearing different perspectives and ideas!

Here is my LinkedIn for anyone who is interested in connecting: https://www.linkedin.com/in/caitlinkooyman/

Ngā mihi (Thank you),

Caitlin

joe.huber
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Userlevel 5
Badge +1

Welcome @caracbbb, @ashley.gatchel, and @caitlin.kooyman! I’m so excited you’re here and I can’t wait to dig into some of the content we’ll have up front and then create frameworks we’ll use throughout the year to help one another hit their targets!

J
Rank

Hey everyone! :vulcan:

  • I tend to just go by Joe Ray. I spend most of my time chatting and connecting on Twitter. I’m also here on LinkedIn.
  • “Marketing/communications coordinator” is my title, but I oversee content, organic social, website, communications planning, and our weekly newsletter, and am helping develop our strategic marketing plan this spring.
  • Three fun facts: Buffalo born and raised (always blue cheese with chicken wings, never ranch!). Worked in sports for 5 years, burned out, now I work at a school for grades 5-12. Huge MCU fan.
  • Biggest goals for brand social this year: expand our engaged social audience beyond current students and families. Really need to tap more connections with prospective families and with alumni.
  • Honestly some of the webinars from Sprout have already been helpful this year. I’ll keep tuning in to more.
  • Looking to build connections and share ideas more than anything - especially if you work at a private middle/high school like me, or if you’re in higher ed!
kmw1067
Rank

Hello! I am Kim and am the digital marketing manager at Minerva Surgical. I spent 14 years in medical device product development and marketing and left to join this exciting growing company! I joined Minerva last summer because of their dedication to women’s health and mission to make lives better. The main goal this  year is to bring awareness to Abnormal Uterine Bleeding though digital marketing. We are currently only posting organically but planning to start paid media, social and search in Q2. I love using Sprout to schedule and plan out content. I use some of the reporting features but look forward to using them more and learning more tricks with the software. I look forward to learning everything Sprout from this group

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