SearchFest 2016 Mini-Interview: Mat Siltala

Mat Siltala will speaking on “The Art and Science of Social Brand Building” at SearchFest 2016, which is being held March 10th, 2016 at the Sentinel Hotel in Portland, Oregon. For more information or to purchase tickets, please click here.

1) Please give us your background and tell us what you do for a living.

Well, I have been in this industry for quite some time. This will date me, but believe it or not, I built my first website back in 1997. I started my first web business in 1999, and after it was a miserable failure (see what I did there) I learned a lot and started an e commerce business in 2003 that my partners and I still own and operate today, (Man, SEO was EASY back then hahah) Besides that business, those same partners and I own Avalaunch Media. Avalaunch Media is a full service digital marketing agency. We specialize in (and are known mostly for) visual creative content, but also specialize and have amazing teams in Search Engine Optimization and Pay Per Click. Originally I founded Dream Systems Media in 2007, but as the company grew up, we needed better branding (there was literally no thought given to DSM – come ask me about the story, I will be happy to tell you) so Avalaunch Media was born in 2012 and we have grown to over 30 employees and contract workers. We recently built a new building in a place called Thanksgiving Point, Utah and are already about to outgrow it! I credit the success of this company to my partners, my biggest accomplishment was surrounding myself with people smarter than me 🙂 haha. I live in Arizona and work out of my home office (mostly because I am not a fan of the Utah cold) but I am in the Utah office as much as my travel schedule will allow. I speak at a lot of Search Marketing conferences, or at other conferences ON Search Marketing. This takes a lot of my time, and I love networking and making new connections and spending time with my dear industry friends (especially at events as awesome as SearchFest). 🙂

2) If you were in charge of creating a week’s worth of Facebook posts for a (using an example you’re not familiar with) razor company that’s relatively well established, how might your program that account?

Ha, good one. I am almost afraid of what my beards Twitter account would do to me, if he knew I were answering these questions for a Razer company. I like to dig and do research so the very first thing I would do is dig a little. I would see what type of content/posts they have already. Using analytics & insights I would check out which content has done well in the past, and try to create more content similar to it (no need to re-invent the wheel here – for example; things like: researching the competitors and see what they are doing that is working well, or isn’t, to learn from their failures/successes and do it better – not ripping them off, just taking things they *almost did ok, and doing them better). I would brainstorm all content ideas with my team, and then work on creating the posts, as well as all visuals for the posts. Finally, I would schedule them using Facebook’s post scheduler. Rinse & Repeat. Of course there are things that I make sure are being done with the Brands content like community – ie; UGC & lifestyle content as well as bringing in the funny and practical with things like memes & products in context.

3) For this same razor company that might get several hundred comments on a post, how would you efficiently engage with the audience at a level that’s also time effective?

Most smaller companies do not have the budget to pay someone full time to monitor this kind of stuff, so you must be disciplined with your time. You need to set up a schedule for something like this, or it will not work. Set some time, like 2 or 3 times daily to review posts AFTER they have marinated a little bit, and then comment on the most liked comments so you don’t have to sort through them all. No more than three times a day – I think would be a good way to go for monitoring and engaging, but AT MOST maybe 4 times during the most peak hours. There are also some pretty amazing social monitoring tools out there that can alert you to specific things (you set parameters) and help you be more effective with your time. One tool that comes to mind that could help with monitoring needs similar to this was created by (disclosure) my good bud, Andy Beal – Trackur. The biggest tip I have with monitoring is making sure you never ignore the negative stuff. Hit it head on, and most of the time you can squash something before it becomes a bigger deal.