When I first joined Commercial Integrator, I sat down with Executive Editor Craig McCormack for a crash course on the professional audiovisual industry and learned who to follow, what names to know and where to look for sources.
One of the first things he mentioned was the community of pro AV personalities on social media, specifically Twitter. You #avtweeps have built a solid community of AV professionals on social platforms like Twitter and Instagram, and that has undoubtedly helped me find stories that I’m hoping you all want to read.
Some of you folks have a pretty good following and thousands of followers. A lot of you are tweeting at least once a day, and many of you are tweeting all day.
Do any of you get work done? Just kidding.
On the flip side, company accounts can be a little bit lackluster, stale and sometimes just inactive. Where is that same energy, passion and enthusiasm for the industry in corporate marketing offices?
For an article on social media strategy, I spoke to Brandon Breznick, assistant communications manager at Premier Mounts. In addition to just being silly on the internet, they leverage that active community of AV professionals to help build their brand.
Although the company didn’t have a booth at ISE, they still had a presence at the world’s largest AV trade show by tapping into those personalities and individual brands.
They utilized the social media prowess of Alesia Hendley, who covered this year’s event via Premier Mount’s Twitter profile.
Day 3 #ISE2020 with my #AVtweeps @PremierMounts 🙏🙏🙏 https://t.co/CiLCUsoNiK
— Alesia Hendley (@thesmoothfactor) February 13, 2020
“Anytime you can get the social word-of-mouth from a personality — we’ve seen engagement be pretty high when you’re leveraging that personality,” Breznick told me.
Turns out this is already a thing in marketing, and it’s called influencer marketing. If you follow any social media influencers, you may have noticed them repping some big national brands. That’s extremely valuable and can help multiply your marketing efforts.
I don’t know what it is, but there are truly some personalities in this industry. There’s a longtime business adage that an organization’s best assets are its people, and there are some interesting ones in this industry. Use that to your advantage in the marketing office.
