Title: Director of marketing and social media
Company: JDA Software
Years in current job: 2
For the past two years, Cindy Kim has been ramping up social media efforts at JDA Software, a supply chain management software company based in Scottsdale, Ariz., with 23 offices around the globe.
“The first year was about setting the foundation—we had done nothing with social,” said Kim, director of marketing and social media at JDA.
Kim led a program to integrate social media into Focus 2011, JDA's annual users conference, which was held in Orlando, Fla. “It took four months of planning, from the top down, to integrate social media across all channels,” said Kim, who developed the content strategy and training for the initiative.
“Last year was a little difficult because social media was not at the maturity stage. We did promotions on the [conference] content. We had a Twitter contest, and we did onsite video postings. But we didn't have the visibility at the time to see the impact social media could make at the conference.”
This year was a different story. Kim worked with her team to develop a comprehensive social media plan around the Focus 2012 conference, including developing a team of expert bloggers both inside and outside the company; conducting more than 22 video interviews with customers onsite that were posted to YouTube and other social media channels; developing a content strategy around customer needs; and recruiting senior executives to participate in social media.
At this year's conference, held April 29–May 2 in Las Vegas, Twitter mentions topped 900, up from 342 at last year's event.
“It was a different level of trust in social media marketing this year,” Kim said.
Also this year, Kim helped develop a social media ambassador program at JDA, identifying and training experts around the globe, and created a Blog Buddy program, in which social media experts are paired with senior executives to help them optimize their blogs.
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