FIN Wycherley is CEO at Supersize Media, an Edinburgh-based social and digital marketing agency for SMEs.
She says: “Social and digital media are the largest technology opportunities for any business in Scotland, since the invention of the printed press.
“Nowadays, a small business can use a range of platforms to service clients from Leith to L.A.
“The basic building blocks of business have not changed. You still need trust and relationship building, now more than ever. But with just over 3.1bn internet users and 3.6bn mobile users, the world has suddenly got a whole lot smaller.”
She submitted this on Friday, June 26 2015.
What exactly is it you do?
I work with small-to-medium-sized business owners and teams to create a ‘tribe-building strategy’ around their brand – online, using social and digital marketing techniques, coaching, workshops and webinars.
Once built, either the client implements, measures and tweaks, or we do.
Clients will come to us with a range of requirements. It’s our job to give them the best strategy that works for their budget, skills, resources and time availability.
With our focus on small businesses, it’s always a great challenge to come up with brilliant low-cost strategies that can give people enormous brand awareness and conversions in their specific targeted sphere.
If you know your way around some of the big social media platforms, you can grow the business enormously. But do it wrongly, and you can equally inflict tremendous harm.
What did your working day today or yesterday comprise?
Yesterday morning started with my usual briefing on all that’s happening on social media.
It changes so often, you can’t afford to take your ‘eye off the ball’ at any point.
You always have to study new platforms and changes to see what might work for your client’s strategies, online.
After that, I continued building a new training programme to help SME’s and charities navigate Twitter and Periscope effectively.
During the afternoon, I had a three-hour strategy meeting with a client who thought they needed a hand with social media. Instead, they walked away with a completely new way of delivering their services so that they didn’t need to rely on their consultancy work any more.
We will have more planning sessions to flesh out the details over the next few weeks … but only once their head has stopped spinning!
I had two networking meetings lined up for the evening but a family emergency meant I had to cut the business day short at around 17:00.
Later in the evening, though, you would have found me updating my 50,000-strong tribe on social media.
I believe it’s not good enough to talk the talk of social media, you have to walk the walk too.
How different or similar is your average working day to when you started?
When I started, I focused on helping businesses with their blogging strategy and implementation. It is such an important part of a company’s social media activities, and so labour-intensive, as well as technically onerous, that I knew there would be a great demand.
Unfortunately, I made the mistake of assuming the companies all knew what they were doing with social media so they could amplify and boost the blog post. I quickly realised that with only five followers on Twitter and three friends on their own personal Facebook profile page, there was a long way to go before they were ready to start building blogs.
A lot of folks were being told by traditional marketers: just update something interesting and relevant regularly.
But without the training, the skills, a plan or a handy set of KPIs, they had no way to make that happen effectively.
Many folks make the mistake of underestimating social media due to the ‘free’ nature of the initial offering. They quickly realise that, unless they bring their A-game to their tribes of well-wishers, prospects and fiercely-loyal advocates, the ROTI (Return on Time Invested) will be precisely zero.
How do you see your job evolving?
I am building a very fluid team according to client needs. I’ve got lawyers in California, a pizza franchise in Alaska, a tourism destination outlet in Perth, South-West Australia, and a diversity of clients in the UK. Each one, once the training has finished, realises that sustainable implementation is too time-consuming and not part of their core skills.
They then outsource to my team, so I hire talent to match.
I will pretty much always be focused at the strategic level with a bigger and bigger role in project management with clients. I also anticipate a lot more conferences, video and podcasting work to get the word out on what’s possible.
Eventually, when there is more actual talent (as opposed to any Tom, Dick and Harry offering ‘social media marketing without any real marketing skills), I may consolidate into one or two specific verticals but for now, the market is still wide open.
What gives you the most job satisfaction?
I get my job satisfaction from seeing the look in the client’s eye as they move from hardened social media sceptic to raving fan.
That’s my money moment, right there. Love it!
