Conversation Bridges Traditional Marketing and Facebook for Clients

Conversation is a marketing firm founded in New York City in 2008 by Frank O’Brien and now has offices in Los Angeles, Miami and London. The firm was created to try to unite traditional marketing strategies with emerging media and non-traditional marketing, O’Brien tells us, and works with companies and brands of all sizes. Having reached profitability without outside funding, Conversation is a full-service agency -- that created an internal division devoted to social media, called BuzzTxt, after Facebook-related projects grew to account for about one-fifth of its business. Today, BuzzTxt is 80% focused on Facebook and 20% on other networks like Twitter, and manages more than two dozen social media accounts a month resulting in upwards of 10 million brand/consumer interactions a month, according to O'Brien. Here's our interview with him, part of our ongoing profiles of Page management and marketing companies; we've most most recently covered Big Prize Giveaways and Wildfire. Inside Facebook: What products and services does your company provide to clients using Facebook? What types of clients are you aiming to reach? Conversation is a full service agency that bridges traditional and emerging media bringing the “mix” back to marketing. Facebook and social media is a major emerging component of this commitment to engage consumers through emerging media. Conversation provides social media campaign strategy, campaign development, management, and outreach. We feel as though social media is something that can and should be leveraged by all companies big and small across all industries. We’ve produced successful campaigns for several categories including consumer packaged goods, retail, pharmaceutical, skincare, and financial services. We believe that social media is platform agnostic and that social media has created a greater shift in consumer behavior. We help clients identify how to utilize social media to reach their core consumer group. IFB: Can you share some highlights of how your company has helped clients meet their goals using Facebook The Children's Place came to us in the Fall of 2009 looking to grow their fan base and engage existing fans. Conversation implemented several strategic recommendations utilizing the agency's wide range of services to grow the client’s fan base from 18,000 fans to more than 500,000 in just under six months. The initial goal of 100,000 fans was reached in just three weeks. IFB: Overall, can you share metrics on the scope of your business? Conversation manages more than 10 Million brand/consumer interactions a month simultaneously running more than thirty client campaigns at a given time. IFB: What metrics do you use to determine the success of a given campaign? Depending on client goals, success metrics vary. In most cases, fan count and daily engagement is used as a core metric. IFB: What have been your biggest challenges building on Facebook platform? What mistakes have you made and learned from there? Facebook continually updates their platform, rules, and regulations. Aside from monitoring content and managing fans, it is important to stay on top of changes that Facebook makes before they make them so that you can proactively address changes in design and content management. IFB: Beyond your own efforts, what Facebook changes have noticeably helped your company? Facebook’s platform changes continually help agencies and clients. Updates to the user Wall and removing restrictions around FBML development were major changes that helped us utilize the platform more effectively. IFB: On the other hand, has Facebook made any recent changes that have noticeably hurt your company? Agencies need to be adaptive and aware of the world that they play in. There are always updates on the horizon that we need to be aware of and ready to address. That said, Facebook has not made any updates to date that have been detrimental to our company (and we are aware of a few that are on the horizon and poised to address them when they are made.) IFB: If you could ask Facebook to make a single change, what would it be? Grant access to more information of users who have liked a Page or joined a group. Give the ability to target these users with segmented messaging and grant them the ability to provide more personal information such as their email address or phone number. IFB: How does your work on Facebook relate to your work on other platforms? Social media fits in with most of our client campaigns the same way traditional media or outreach does. We recommend using social media as a vehicle for obtaining impressions — it is ultimately up to us as an agency to develop a communication strategy that provokes an action. IFB: Do you have any specific plans that you can share? We’re currently working on an end-to-end Facebook e-commerce platform and have plans to integrate Facebook more seamlessly with offline in-store applications.

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Conversation Bridges Traditional Marketing and Facebook for Clients

Sara Inés Calderón

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Sara Inés Calderón