jacobelyacharjournalist

 

In the past two years, a start-up company Hurrdat Social Media has seen tremendous growth as it has worked with 45 different clients in numerous parts of the world.  This author had a chance to talk to the company’s Chief Marketing Officer Austin Brown to talk about the company’s formation, its’ signature strategy: Hyper Local Targeting and their vision for 2012.

 

Jacob Elyachar: How did Hurrdat Social Media form?

Austin Brown: We were formed in August 2010 by Blake Lawrence. It was after an internship he had with a company named FileBound Document Management in Lincoln, Nebraska.  His job there was to do their social media marketing, he did a really successful job and got them over $600,000 in new leads for business, which is kind of a light bulb where we should be doing this for multiple businesses and multiple services.   We started the business in August 2010 and I jumped on board that fall, our other business partner: Adi Kunalic was also there.

 

So at the beginning, it was a team of three and we were working throughout senior year when I was at the University of Kansas and both Blake and Adi were at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and we have been growing ever since.

 

JE: If readers went to your company’s website, they would see four strategies that start with “WE.” Could you describe to readers about the meaning behind the four “We’s strategies?”

AB:  The four strategies that we implement into our businesses’ social media are “We Write, We Send, We Monitor and We Analyze.”  What that means is that we write the content; we distribute across various businesses in forms of social media; we monitor the conversations and engage with the customers; and we deliver analytics at the end of every month showing results and how we can build a strategy based off of last month.

 

JE: One of Hurrdat’s main partnerships is with professional athletes. Could you tell readers about the work you do with professional athletes?

AB: Part of our business is our services where we help businesses on a day-to-day basis and the other part is working with professional athletes.   We are a solution for local small and medium-sized businesses to receive endorsements through professional athletes.   What we have developed is platform that we have for over 120 athletes and it keeps growing that connects those businesses to the athletes that receives endorsements through their tweeting.

 

JE: How does Hurrdat go after potential clients?

AB: We have a couple of potential clients.  One would be the business for our services and the other could be an athlete for the engagement and the other could be business for the endorsement.  For the services’ side, we have been doing a lot of grassroots networking social referral based growth.  We’ve been fortunate enough to grow to work with 45 clients and we have not been using any traditional marketing tool.   Marketing has been through personal connections and referrals by our current clients to future clients.

 

When it comes to athletes, we have approached them through their agents and connected through their agencies and made those connections.  Through the businesses with endorsements, we go through ad agencies and university multimedia sources.

 

JE: If viewers went to your website, they would find five sets of tiers that describe your services.  Could you please describe what they mean?

AB: How we implemented the five tiers was just the experience we had with that some businesses have different needs than others.  We started off with the first tier that is basically the business writes the content and then we distribute it and monitor the conversations.  So it is very basic and very affordable.  In between, we increase the level of engagement on social media and increase the level of activity of the business on social media.  We have up to tier five, which means we write two-to-three messages a day on Facebook and Twitter, Hurrdat monitors the conversations 24/7, blog once a week and do hyper local targeting which is our specialty.

 

JE: Could you please define Hyper Local Targeting?

AB: Hyper Local Targeting is a strategy that we use for social media that lets us go out to conversations on Twitter in search for relative key words that matter to the business.  If there was a conversation going on about a specific topic that is relative to the business, we will jump in on the business’s behalf and create a relationship that might turn into a potential customer and an online relationship turning into an offline customer.  

 

JE: Could you describe the obstacles that the company has faced in your first two years and how did you overcome them?

AB: Our first year of business, we, I guess, would struggle with the idea of outsource social media.  A lot of businesses haven’t even heard of our services or that we exist.  The biggest part of our first year was gaining traction and showing people who we are and the type of work that we do.  Fortunately, it started picking up and we almost hit a tipping point that it started to snowball on its’ own.

 

We also struggle with the idea of the endorsement side of athletes with platform.  How we are going about that is developing the partnerships that allow it to be a product solution rather be a one-on-one connection with multiple clients.

 

JE: Do you have any advice to give to people who are interested in working with this type of company and other social media companies?

AB: Fortunately for our generation and I guess any generation is that social media is accessible to anyone.  You don’t really need much except for a computer and an Internet connection.  I say to get going on it and to get experience.  Obviously, in any career, you need some sort of background to show that you have a proof of concept and that you are valuable to a customer.  So whether it means doing it for a family friend or for a business that you know of that will let you work on it on the side, measure it, track results and engage with potential customers and start to build on that.  Anyone has the opportunity to work in social media but you have to do it the right way.  You have to show that you can do this type of work with a very nitch type of skill with writing sentences in 140 characters.  It’s hard to engage with potential customers but some have the opportunity to do that as a full-time business.

 

For more information on Hurrdat Social Media, visit their Website at: http://hurrdat.com/