Carousel30: Convergence of disciplines on social media

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WHITE PAPER The Convergence of Marketing, PR and Customer Service by Greg Kihlström, VP of Strategy & Kaitlin Carpenter, Marketing Associate

Transcript of Carousel30: Convergence of disciplines on social media

WHITE PAPER

The Convergence of Marketing, PR and Customer Serviceby Greg Kihlström, VP of Strategy &Kaitlin Carpenter, Marketing Associate

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Table of Contents Introduction ........................................................................................................................................................................... 2 What this White Paper Aims to Achieve .............................................................................................................................................................. 2 What’s Happening on Social Media and Mobile Devices ........................................................................................................ 3 The New Normal .................................................................................................................................................................................................. 3 The Convergence .................................................................................................................................................................................................. 4 Many Companies are Still Living in the Past ......................................................................................................................................................... 4 The Problem .......................................................................................................................................................................... 6 From a Customer Perspective .............................................................................................................................................................................. 6 An Organizational Perspective ............................................................................................................................................................................. 6 Some Companies Doing It Right ............................................................................................................................................. 7 Zappos: Every Employee is an Ambassador ......................................................................................................................................................... 7 Dell and Starbucks: Customer Service as a Path to Innovation ............................................................................................................................ 7 Best Buy: Convergence on Twitter ....................................................................................................................................................................... 7 Home Depot: Education as Customer Service ...................................................................................................................................................... 7 Mistakes to Learn From ......................................................................................................................................................... 8 An Example........................................................................................................................................................................................................... 8 What Went Wrong ............................................................................................................................................................................................... 8

Customer Service ............................................................................................................................................................................................. 8 Public Relations ............................................................................................................................................................................................... 8 Marketing ....................................................................................................................................................................................................... 8

What You Can Do Better ...................................................................................................................................................................................... 9 Best Practices ....................................................................................................................................................................... 10 Practice What You Preach .................................................................................................................................................................................. 10 Give Back ............................................................................................................................................................................................................ 10 Create Value ....................................................................................................................................................................................................... 10 Share Control ..................................................................................................................................................................................................... 11 Maintain Balance................................................................................................................................................................................................ 11 Be Consistent ..................................................................................................................................................................................................... 11 Break Down Internal Silos .................................................................................................................................................................................. 12 Conclusion ........................................................................................................................................................................... 13 About Greg Kihlström .......................................................................................................................................................... 14 About Kaitlin Carpenter ....................................................................................................................................................... 14 About Carousel30 ................................................................................................................................................................ 15

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INTRODUCTION A paradigm shift has been happening in the world of corporate communications for many years now. For a variety of reasons, the convergence of marketing and public relations is well documented and much discussed. This white paper adds another dimension to that discussion, which is equally important to any enterprise organization: customer service.

When we silo our proactive marketing messages from our real-time social media conversations, we as businesses lose. Siloing those communications from customer feedback and complaints, we run the risk of:

• Sending the consumer different, conflicting messages • Losing a chance to have a genuine conversation with loyal customers who are looking for a forum to share their

thoughts and ideas • Losing the customer altogether

WHAT THIS WHITE PAPER AIMS TO ACHIEVE There have been many other articles, books and white papers written on the history, present challenges, and future of PR and marketing’s convergence. This white paper does not pretend to be the authoritative source on that topic.

What it does aim to achieve, however, is to place this PR/marketing convergence in context with the growing need for organizations to take customer service, including idea generation, feedback and complaints, into account when planning communication strategies and internal communication structure.

This white paper also aims to get a conversation started about how best to do this on both the enterprise and the small and medium-sized business level. The best examples of this type of integration are yet to come, but the hope is that by furthering the conversation we will see continued innovation.

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WHAT’S HAPPENING ON SOCIAL MEDIA AND MOBILE DEVICES

THE NEW NORMAL Social media has become an essential part of how we operate, as businesses and consumers, and customers are now savvy to our techniques. Putting an iPhone in a blender and creating a viral video isn't new. Tweeting at the airline for more information when your flight is delayed isn't new. Getting a special discount when you like a company’s Facebook page isn’t new. Likewise, consumers’ use of mobile devices from smartphones to tablets is nothing new either. The new normal is that consumers want to access content, buy products and receive customer service wherever they are with whatever they’re holding.

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From an advertising perspective, Rebecca Leib and Jeremiah Owyang of Altimeter Group1 say:

“Gone are the days when marketers could spoon-feed pre-fab sales pitches to apathetic consumers. Welcome to the empowered buyer: a savvy and dynamic customer, armed with information, multiple options, and devices, and backed by an ever-expanding network of peers and references.”

This goes well beyond advertising and marketing, however. For instance, it’s not the customer’s problem if your company uses one social media channel for PR, one Web channel for e-commerce, and a phone line for customer service. They’re going to make it your problem that you haven’t adapted to the new normal.

THE CONVERGENCE What is new is how customer service, PR and marketing have converged into one immense, transparent space. Patrick Coffee of MediaBistro2 reports that within five years, there will no longer be a discussion about the difference between PR and marketing. These three points of reaching and engaging customers are no longer happening in separate rooms, in separate departments, or through separate funnels of information. Instead, everything is happening on social media. Customer service reps are responding to customer complaints on Twitter, advertisers are sharing special promotions via Facebook, and media coverage is amplified to new audiences with the click of a share button.

Today more than ever before, these elements are coming together, and it has become a requirement that you incorporate that into your digital strategy. Either you will do it proactively, or an incident will happen that will make it apparent that this is the new normal.

Taking this a step further, it’s not even about all of this happening on social media. In a few years, social media will not be even referred to as a distinct medium from other sources. It’s the same with devices. Tablets, smartphones and computers will still be designators of form factors, but we will be less caught up with how we are connecting and with what anymore. Being able to connect at any moment will be the norm. LG’s new Internet refrigerator is a testament to that, and while that is quite a novel interface at the moment, it shows that we are moving toward a society where connection to the Internet is a given.

MANY COMPANIES ARE STILL LIVING IN THE PAST Take a look at how many companies are structured. Sales & Marketing are almost always separate from Customer Service. Within Sales & Marketing, Public Relations will most likely be separate from Marketing. Online commerce might be separate from brick and mortar commerce.

Then you get the agencies involved. Do you have a traditional agency, a digital agency, and a PR firm on retainer? Do you further break that down into media, social media and search engine marketing? How do you ensure that your external

1 Rebecca Leib & Jeremiah Owyang. Altimeter Group. The Converged Media Imperative: How Brands Must Combine Paid, Owned, and Earned Media. July 19, 2012 2 Coffee, Patrick. Media Bistro PRNewser. Will Media Convergence End the ‘PR or Advertising’ Debate?

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agencies and vendors are communicating frequently enough and sharing knowledge? And more importantly, when something is happening in real time, do you have a process in place to foster communication?

Depending on the size of your organization, there could be five internal teams, four agencies, or more, all dealing in the same converging space that includes marketing, PR and customer service; no wonder customers aren’t always getting what they need. In a study by Maritz and evolve243, of 1,300 survey respondents who are active on Twitter, only one-third received a response when posting a complaint on Twitter. This means that 66% of customer communications and requests for a conversation went completely unanswered and unfulfilled.

There has to be a better way to address customer needs and allow corporations to continue their various efforts to communicate and sell products.

3 Maritz Research and evolve24. Twitter Study. September 2011

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THE PROBLEM The biggest problem for businesses right now is that all of your messages exist either side-by-side or on similarly branded profiles in the digital space, yet few customers understand or care that different teams are responsible for different messages. It is not their problem to figure out if something is public relations, customer service or purely promotional.

FROM A CUSTOMER PERSPECTIVE Your customers don’t spend lot of time on your website or searching for your brand. According to The Nielsen Company, almost a quarter of people’s time on the Internet is spent on social networks4 – far more than anywhere else.

Your customers are reading about you on social media, sharing their opinions – good and bad – and influencing other potential customers. In fact, 62% of consumers have already engaged in a customer service transaction using social media5. Yet, according to a study by Genesys referenced in an article on Forbes.com, over half of Fortune 500 companies are not using social media for customer service6, and as many as 27% don’t even link to their profiles on Twitter or Facebook from their main corporate websites.

You don’t get to decide whether you merge customer service with PR and marketing with social media. You only get to choose how well you do it.

For example, take customer complaints coming in on Twitter. How is a company supposed to manage customer service where anyone can see their responses? Those complaints are online in the public space. Whether you handle them well or poorly reflects your company’s image with everyone who sees it, not just the customer with the problem.

That’s where marketing and PR become entangled, and it can be difficult for all of these separate departments to manage situations as such.

AN ORGANIZATIONAL PERSPECTIVE Rhonda Hurwitz recently wrote that with marketing alone, organizations suffer from three primary types of siloing7:

• The Outsourcing Silo, or improperly engaging agencies to do work without integrating them with communications and feedback channels.

• The Department Silo, or tasking one separate department with running social media without proper integration and support from the rest of the company.

• The Employee Silo, or preventing or discouraging employee participation in fear that someone might say the wrong thing.

4 The Social Media Report: Q3 2011. Nielsen. 5 Rollason, Harry. Why Social Media Makes Customer Service Better. Mashable. September 29, 2012. 6 Knapp, Alex. Big Companies Aren’t Using Social Media for Customer Service. Forbes.com. September 24, 2012. 7 Hurwitz, Rhonda. Beyond ROI: The Need to Improve Social Media Integration. Forbes.com. September 18, 2012.

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SOME COMPANIES DOING IT RIGHT To get a better idea of how it should work, let’s look at a few companies that are doing some interesting things using social media and user generated content.

ZAPPOS: EVERY EMPLOYEE IS AN AMBASSADOR Zappos is an online shoe retailer. It doesn’t have physical locations, so it depends entirely on online interactions. Zappos doesn’t require employees to have an official company Twitter account to deal with customers or talk about the brand. Instead, in addition to requiring every employee to take four weeks of customer service training8, Zappos encourages employees to use social media and has a special website dedicated to employee tweets. This way, even if you are not a Zappos customer, just a friend of Joe, who works at Zappos, you still see positive messaging about Zappos because you see Joe’s personal account. Seeing Joe’s tweets about Zappos may in turn persuade you to become a customer.

DELL AND STARBUCKS: CUSTOMER SERVICE AS A PATH TO INNOVATION Both Dell and Starbucks have websites where customers can submit ideas for everything from a new store location to a new product. Dell IdeaStorm and My Starbucks Idea work as both innovation resources and hubs for customer feedback. It heads off potential customer service issues, generates positive PR, and brings customers back to their websites again and again.

BEST BUY: CONVERGENCE ON TWITTER Electronics retailer Best Buy has taken several key actions to fuse customer service, PR and online marketing. One of the main steps was encouraging its 180,000 employees to take part in social media – to be responsible and simply use their best judgment when offering advice outside of the work place.

Two years ago they introduced one Best Buy Twitter account for customer service, called @Twelpforce. Additionally, any employee can contribute, answer customer questions and give product advice from their personal account. Now, much of its customer service is handled via this Twitter account and is all catalogued on a special page of Best Buy’s website so you can search through it. Having all of those questions and answers in one place is a valuable resource for future customers looking for product or service information. It’s also great PR because true brand evangelizers are the ones giving product advice.

Best Buy also has an internal online community – the Blue Shirt Nation. It’s a social network just for Best Buy employees to share their knowledge and experiences. Best Buy has a much lower turnover rate for employees using Blue Shirt Nation, and those same employees become more loyal evangelizers of Best Buy, positively spreading the word about the company.

HOME DEPOT: EDUCATION AS CUSTOMER SERVICE Home improvement store Home Depot has a similar approach. Its YouTube channel features how-to and do-it-yourself videos, which head off many customer service and product questions before they even need to be asked. It solidifies Home Depot’s reputation as a source of knowledge in its community and to its customers. Also, as videos are viewed and shared, they’re doubling as marketing materials.

What could make this even better? How about taking user suggestions or even user-generated content for the most frequent problems or questions?

8 Bhargava, Rohit. 9 Ways Top Brands Use Social Media for Better Customer Service. Mashable. October 28, 2011.

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MISTAKES TO LEARN FROM

AN EXAMPLE When you know of a company doing a great job of listening to and engaging customers, there’s another that may be doing it better. We’ll leave full names and company names out of this, though you might have heard this story already.

In 2009, Dave C. had to check his $3,500 guitar for a flight on a major airline. The guitar was broken in flight, and when he called the airline’s customer service department, they refused to repair or replace it. Dave took his customer service issue to YouTube and posted a video of him singing about how that particular airline breaks guitars. The video got millions of views, generating media coverage and creating terrible PR for the airline. At the time, it wasn’t prepared to handle customers taking their issues to social media and paid a hard price for it.

It’s very easy for communication on social media to backfire when everything is so interconnected. Insufficient customer service can be instantly broadcasted from one person to four million. Giving poor customer service on Twitter allows everyone to see it, and you could easily lose customers. Customers unhappy with your Facebook page can start their own Facebook page about – but not supporting – your company.

WHAT WENT WRONG While we don’t know exactly what went wrong with the major airline in the example of Dave C., we can make some general recommendations based on what we know about typical communication and organization within a company.

Customer Service Let’s just assume that a “customer service” department was in charge of handling Dave C.’s compliant. In reality, it is more complicated than that, but just go with it for the purpose of keeping the story brief. Bags get lost often enough, and sometimes contents get damaged as well. Hopefully not too often, but it happens, and there are processes and procedures in place at any airline to deal with this. I’m sure they were doing what was standard operating procedure at that time to assess the damage and determine responsibility.

But I can almost guarantee that this customer service department was not monitoring YouTube, Facebook, Twitter or any other channels to see what people with lost or damaged baggage were saying about the company. They were most likely hard at work doing what they were tasked with doing: handling other customer service complaints.

Public Relations In this scenario, a public relations team is primarily tasked with pushing out messages and dealing with issues when they become a crisis. In this situation, it’s quite possible that this event, while significant in Dave C.’s life, did not register as a public relations crisis with the airline, and thus might have either been ignored or flagged as low priority.

Marketing This leaves us with a marketing department, most likely, a digital marketing department that’s separated from both public relations and customer service. It’s their job to monitor social media for conversations (good and bad) about the company, so it’s likely that the marketing team was the first to watch the video.

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So what happens next? Does this officially “count” as a PR disaster? Probably not. Does this qualify as a customer service issue? Definitely. Marketing contacts customer service, which is already working on the issue and probably doesn’t want to explain to the marketing department that they messed up. The problem grows because there is a vacuum between what the distinct roles of Customer Service, PR and Marketing were.

WHAT YOU CAN DO BETTER Now imagine if the same department (or cross-departmental team) was tasked with responding to customers and making sure those online complaints got translated into offline actions. This is no small organizational feat. With larger and older the company, this could be perhaps a monumental undertaking, but the benefits are truly worth it.

Sixty percent of people around the world have said that they expect brands to respond to their customer service-related social media comments9 when only 1/3 actually get responses. As you can see, there’s a huge gap in expectations. It’s time for all companies to begin looking at how the new normal in consumer communications affects them. For startups, this is a lesson that has to be implemented from the start.

9 Mickens, Daniel. 60% of Consumers Expect Brands to Respond on Social Media. MAshable. July 18, 2012.

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BEST PRACTICES Many of the mistakes, oversights and missed opportunities stem from lack of coordination between internal teams and departments, and what is needed is a new generation of companies and leaders that begin to transform their organizations into more “social-minded organizations.” In an excellent white paper that touches on this subject, Oracle10 explains the problem:

Because conversations and activities that take place on the social Web cut across organizational lines, companies often run into problems with the internal ownership of social initiatives. Social-minded organizations, however, put customers first and organizational boundaries second—which means combining efforts across departments (particularly marketing, support and IT).

Below are seven best practices to successfully fuse customer service, PR and marketing in the social space, ensuring they’re all equally effective.

PRACTICE WHAT YOU PREACH You can’t expect customers to come to your company as a resource if you’re not authentic and putting your company 100% into the conversation. If you ask for customer feedback, be prepared to use that feedback to change your company for the better. The Dell IdeaStorm website works because Dell actually uses the best ideas. If they didn’t, customers would have no incentive to visit the site and participate. Ultimately, you will get as much out of social media as you put into it.

GIVE BACK Your customers are willing to “follow” you or “like” your page so that they can post photos of themselves in your restaurant or “check-in” on their mobile device when they’re in your store. With that said, you too need to be willing to put yourself out there. Follow your customers back and respond to their posts and comments. Don’t just send a post out into space every week and forget about your company blog until the next week. Your followers spend time on you, so you need spend time on them.

CREATE VALUE Public relations and marketing don’t occur in a vacuum. You get positive customer feedback and generate media coverage, and ultimately conversions, because you’re giving people something that they value. It can be as simple as special offers to your Facebook fans, answering questions on Twitter, or offering tips on a blog. It just needs to be something your particular audience will value. When the Best Buy Twelpforce answers customers’ questions, they’re filed in a searchable database, a valuable resource for future customers with questions, and all of these actions help to build trust with consumers with the aim of generating a conversion. On the flip side, if they are doing such a good job with customer service, why is Best Buy still suffering some revenue/income issues11? There are obviously many factors at play, especially if we’re looking at one company in

10 Oracle. Is Social Media Transforming Your Business? March 2012. 11 Crum, Chris. Best Buy Earnings: Net Income Down 90%. Web Pro News, August 2012

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particular. While Best Buy is doing many things right, we cannot say that good customer service is the only influence in customer purchasing, nor is it the only thing that affects the profitability and long-term strategy of a large retail operation.

SHARE CONTROL Don’t be afraid of letting customers take initiative. There are two ways to do this: encourage them to network and influence others, and let them help you generate ideas and content. Some of the best marketing campaigns allow users to submit their own content. Take the Doritos Super Bowl commercial contest for example. Doritos trusts that its customers will create ads that are as good as or better than what Doritos could produce; every year their customers meet their expectations of great commercials. Regarding customer service, this type of control has been shared for quite some time. Online forums or message boards allow customers to help each other and participate in a cooperative dialogue. Companies like Apple and Adobe keep a close eye on these forums; the value that they provide customers and the time they can save customers are significant. Learning to better incorporate social network activity into a customer support channel helps you adapt to the changing way that consumers are wanting (and trying) to connect with the brands and companies they trust. In this article, Rohit Bhargava uses the example McKenzie Eakin, LIVE community programs manager for Xbox, to illustrate the value of customer service on social media:

Unique customers engaged with Xbox on Twitter x The percent of people who say they would have called instead of tweeting x Average cost per call = $$ saved in call center costs.

It’s a simple formula, but it works.

MAINTAIN BALANCE As you use social media for your customer service, PR and marketing, use a content strategy to balance those separate initiatives in the same space and ensure they all remain effective. Make sure you’re continually evaluating how you use social media, whether you’re effectively addressing your customer service, PR and marketing goals, and if you’re not, evaluate what you can change to be more effective in the future. Levels of communication might fluctuate as each discipline has varying priorities varying by the day or week. For instance, a new product launch might bring (hopefully) a lot of good press or (hopefully not) a lot of customer service complaints or tech support, thus you’ll have to coordinate your content strategy and editorial calendar to both anticipate and address the distinct needs of each.

BE CONSISTENT One of the worst things a company can do is be inconsistent. This doesn’t mean you can’t try new ideas, but don’t start initiatives you’re not going to follow through with. If you start a corporate blog, don’t stop posting after a few

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weeks. If you create a Twitter feed, make sure someone keeps it active. Once your customers expect something from you, you can’t let them down.

A content strategy helps you balance your social media channels between marketing messaging, public relations and customer service. Work across departments and divisions to create a realistic content plan that includes an editorial calendar for marketing campaigns, while being flexible enough for last-minute public relations releases.

Also, if you have a Twitter presence that you link to from some channels, make your linking consistently across your portfolio of Web presences. This makes it easy for customers to know where and how you prefer to be contacted.

BREAK DOWN INTERNAL SILOS Your social media strategy will never be as effective if it’s coming from three different departments, with three different strategies and three different messages. It’s time to unify your communications channels so that your customers engage with you where they are and get the response they need from you when they need it. When a customer visits your website, they need to see unified branding and messaging across it and your social media platforms, too. And you won’t have unified messaging if your social media is coming from one person who isn’t actively involved with your customer service, your public relations, and your marketing departments. As Sarah Skerik of PR Newswire12 puts it:

All groups with the organization who are creating content for public consumption need to be hand-in-glove. Coordinating efforts can create search engine lift and a calendar of consistent messaging that delivers a cumulative effect. The alternative – i.e. unrelated, scattershot efforts – are at the least inefficient, and at worst, confusing to the audience.

Is there a clear chain of command for who should respond if a customer service issue comes up on Twitter? Social media happens fast, and you need to have someone authorized to reimburse Dave C. for his guitar before his YouTube video gets four million views. Is your marketing department producing good content that could go on Facebook or a blog? Would more of your employees be talking about the company on social media if you gave them the green light and some basic guidelines, like Best Buy and Zappos did?

These things will happen when you break down those silos, and work together within your company to address customers’ needs in the places they already are.

12 Skerik, Sarah. PR Newswire Beyond PR. Is Content Marketing a New Public Relations Discipline? August 22, 2012.

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CONCLUSION While we have been dealing with the convergence of marketing and public relations through social media for a while now, the addition of customer service further complicates this evolution and requires even more internal cooperation for the enterprise organization. There are plenty of examples of companies doing it well, but there’s still room to innovate and grow. For those companies who are still catching up, there has never been more pressure to do so.

While this involves organizational change, the potential reorganization of internal communication and feedback channels along with a reevaluation of external agency communication, the underlying principle is quite simple: Go to where your customers are. They’re always connected, whether it’s social media, mobile devices, a laptop or a desktop at work. Boundaries of devices or channels are a thing of the past. You can now consider your customers always connected. That’s where they hear about your company. That’s where they complain about your company. And that’s where they engage with your company.

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ABOUT GREG KIHLSTRÖM Greg is the founder of Carousel30 and a strategist and creative director who has received numerous awards and honors from the Webby Awards, ADDYs, American Marketing Association, iMedia Connection, Summit Creative Awards, and others after over 14 years of experience in the advertising industry. He has been published in best-selling books by Rockport Publishers and Crescent Hill Books and industry related magazines such as Communication Arts and Graphis, has exhibited work in galleries around the country, and has been featured on prestigious industry and design related websites.

Greg has been featured in Advertising Age, Website Magazine, Web Designer Magazine, The Washington Post and Voice of America and has participated as a judge in renowned design competitions around the country. Greg frequently speaks at industry events on a global basis and has led panel discussions at such events as Internet Week New York, Internet Summit, Mid-Atlantic Marketing Summit, Digital Capital Week and the Virginia Tech Conference on Social Media and Tourism in Italy. He is a regular contributing writer to iMedia Connection, a leading online publication for the digital marketing community. While at Carousel30, he has worked along with many top brands, on a number of campaigns, including AOL, AARP, Ben & Jerry's, Geico Direct, Miller Lite, MTV, Starbucks, The Nature Conservancy, TV One and Washington Wizards.

He is on the board of directors of the DC Ad Club — the premier organization in Washington, D.C. for the advertising industry, where is also serving as a mentor in the Club's Career Catalyst program and has served on the ADDYs and Communications Committees for the past two years. He serves on The Trust for the National Mall's Communications Advisory Committee along with a group of marketing experts from agencies around the country. He is also an active member in the American Marketing Association, the International Academy of Visual Arts, and the Art Directors Club of Washington, DC.

ABOUT KAITLIN CARPENTER Making sure the daily grind only refers to her coffee, Kaitlin brings an open mind and a desire to never stop learning and incorporating new ideas into her work at Carousel30. With a focus on social media communications, she assists with planning and operating digital marketing and communications campaigns for a variety of clients, including social media tactics, digital public relations and online media buying. Before joining Carousel30, Kaitlin worked on several student initiatives at her university, such as a public relations campaign for Community Family Life Services, interned on Capitol Hill, and spent a year volunteering at an English language school for adults. Kaitlin received her Bachelor of Arts in Public Communication at the American University School of Communication after completing an Honors senior thesis on social media communication.

Kaitlin has worked on numerous campaigns with Carousel30, such as social media trainings and campaign operations for the Trust for the National Mall, whose website traffic has grown from twenty-five to more than one hundred thousand visitors per year. She operated social media and website updating for the U.S. Forest Service's International Year of Forests campaign in 2011 and strategized and implemented a multi-medium advertising campaign for The Nature Conservancy's Don't Move Firewood campaign. Kaitlin also consistently contributes to the planning and tactics management of The Washington Center's social media and online advertising campaigns.

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ABOUT CAROUSEL30 Carousel30 is a digital agency that focuses on building audience engagement and conversions for top brands. Our diverse team translates business objectives into digital strategies that incorporate websites, mobile apps, social media marketing, email marketing, display advertising and other efforts.

Since our founding in 2003, we have had the opportunity to work with and help grow our clients’ business, while leading the digital marketing industry as it continues to mature. We've worked with top brands around the world, including Toyota, AOL, Geico, CQ Roll Call, The Nature Conservancy, United Nations, National Audubon Society, AARP, MTV and more. We consistently provide clients with engaged audiences and tailored experiences that connect them to the people, brands, causes and products they love.

As a full-service agency, our offerings include:

• Digital Strategy • User Experience • Creative • Technology • Digital Marketing

Carousel30 is headquartered in historic Old Town Alexandria, Virginia, with additional offices in Princeton and Raleigh.