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Theresa Pittius (left) and Cassie Galasetti own Social Sidekick Media in Red Bank.(Photo: Courtesy Chris Kucinski Photography)

Theresa Pittius andCassie Galasetti own Social Sidekick Mediain Red Bank.

When did you decide you wanted to be an entrepreneur?

Pittius: Funnily enough, I started working in middle school, volunteering at the Monmouth County Library shelving books and running a pretty darn successful babysitting business for myself in Lincroft and surrounding towns. (The Baby-Sitters Club series was a huge hit back in the '90s and I read each one religiously!) My work ethic has always been very strong, and through the many different occupations I've had over the years, I quietly kept note that I was working harder than most of my fellow employees. There were times when my bosses were coming to me for answers, and I always found it odd, so when I was in my mid-20s I started my first company and was hooked.

Galasetti: I worked hard at various jobs during college and out of college where I picked up a lot of skills along the way. I worked in TV, publishing, marketing, public relations, advertising and entertainment. For me, I think I needed all of the background first before venturing out on my own.

Why did you start this business?

We were both working separate jobs at the time that we met. We noticed each other's work on social media, but it wasnt until I (Cassie) reached out to Theresa to compliment her work that we started to become friends. We were both working on our own until we decided to go full-force together. We quickly learned that our individual strengths complimented one another extremely well. We both wanted to have free reign over our success; I guess the rest is history!

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Were there any challenges that made you think twice about striking out on your own?

Never. We are both extremely efficient and highly dedicated individuals. Every new challenge has been exciting for us to experience and overcome!

If you could do it again, what would you do differently?

Maybe learn a little more about the accounting side of things. We agree thats the most intimidating part of running a business. As creative professionals, bookkeeping is not an area where we truly excel, but we were able to quickly find that out and hire strong accountants to back us up.

Whats the best business advice you have ever received?

Pittius: "Treat others how you wish to be treated." My grandmother, Carol Sullivan, started a business in Red Bank in the '60s and was my mentor in life. She always had life lessons, and this one stuck with me. Dealing with all types of business owners, they all have one thing in common: they want to be treated with respect and held in your best interest. I take that with me every day when I visit my clients. Owning a business is stressful enough without having to deal with unpleasant people!

Galasetti: Surround yourself with good people. Take risks. Dont take things too personally. Watch, listen and learn. Write every dream and goal down on a piece of paper and read them often.

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What personality trait helps you the most?

Creativity, dedication, open-mindedness, innovative, hardworkingand (the big one in our line of work) deadline oriented.

Whats the hardest part of the job?

We are constantly working. We will try to meet for something fun (kickboxing, lunch, etc.) and just end up talking about work because we are so passionate about what we do. Being able to turn off that constant energy is tough, especially on holidays when we know we have to focus on family.

The easiest?

Working with each other! We have the same vision and dedication and want whats best for our business and clients.

What surprised you the most about running the business?

That many potential clients dont set aside the time and budget for crucial business tools like social media and PR.

Describe your most unusual customer, job or work experience.

We were working on a social media campaign for our Philadelphia clients and ran (literally) around the city with a photographer taking pictures at all of the Philly landmarks with our client's product. Try taking a product photo next to the Liberty Bell during a class trip! It was nearly impossible, but really fun. We were basically doing an on-the-go photoshoot. We got a ton of looks from people, but now they all know the name of our client's brand, if they werent aware of it before!

How would you like the business to grow and change?

We have very high hopes for Social Sidekick. As other small businesses continue to learn and understand the importance of hiring a professional to run their social media and PR, we will continue to work with more and more new clients. We like our boutique agency feel, but we do see ourselves growing with another staff member or two in the near future. We also have a very wide variety of clients from divorce attorneys to surgeons to restaurants, theaters and dance schools, but we definitely want to work with a clothing retailer or art gallery something colorful and fun.

In one sentence, tell us why customers should go to you?

We help small businesses receive the attention that a major company would die for.

What do you love about the community where your business is located?

Small businesses are the backbone of Red Bank. There is just something about watching a business grow from their grand opening to their one-year anniversary party or even second location.

When you leave work, do you leave the office behind, or are you always in contact?

Were always connected! Were a text, call, tweet, comment or DMaway. Every day is different, so we need our communication tools by our side at all times.

What do you do in your off time?

Pittius: I teach private voice and acting to local performers at a professional track training studio I own,Red Bank Performance Prep. I have a background in musical theaterand love boosting confidence in kids and teens (and adults!) and strengthening talent while training my students every week.

Galasetti: I love to travel, especially to Central America. I also write for many blogs, magazines and local newspapers, so that keeps me pretty busy!

When you leave the business behind some day, what will you do?

Pittius: Start another one!

Galasetti:Travel full time!

Small Business Spotlight runs Mondays. If youre a small-business owner in Monmouth and Ocean counties interested in taking part in this Q&A, contact business producer Dennis P. Carmody at dcarmody@gannettnj.com.

SOCIAL SIDEKICK MEDIA, BRANDING AND PUBLIC RELATIONS

Describe your business: We are a boutique social marketing agency founded on ambitious goals and a passionate spirit. We assist in launching your company on social media platforms, help with managing existing accounts, get your name in the press and execute a total overhaul of your brand. Social Sidekickis your one-stop shop. We provide clients with strategic, inventive and measurable results to bring you to the next level of your industry.

Owners: Theresa Pittius andCassie Galasetti

Location: Red Bank

Website: socialsidekickmedia.com

Founded: January 2016

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Red Bank social marketers unafraid of risk - Asbury Park Press

Influencer marketing is now an integral part of social marketing; it may even become an anchor for marketers trying to navigate around the scourge of ad blocking and bot fraud this year.

However, while influencer marketing has proven to yield excellent return on investment, rising costs have some experts asking how much is too muchto pay for influencer campaigns. Content discovery platform Bloglovin surveyed 100 marketing pros to get a sense of the current state of influencer marketing.

The marketers surveyed by Bloglovin take advantage of influencer marketing for a few main reasonsraising brand awareness, reaching target audiences and the original content created by social media influencers. Fewer than 20 percent of those surveyed said they werent working with influencers yet, but they planned to this year.

Marketers who sponsor influencer content on social have discovered that traditional advertising, such as display ad campaigns, simply cant impact audiences the way influencer campaigns can. The personalized and authentic content created by social influencers encourages audience loyalty. In fact, for 75 percent of marketers surveyed, quality/authenticity was the most important factor in choosing an influencer. 70 percent also selected for audience size, 64 percent for engagement and more than one-half for the influencers aesthetic.

The bottom line is that influencers provide real value to marketers. Aside from the essential boost in brand awareness and new audience reach, more than one-half of survey participants reported that influencers help grow their social following and increased sales, while still nearly one-half reported increases in website traffic.

For more information on the preferred ways to locate influencers, the best social sites for influencer content and investment growth data, download the full report.

Image on homepage courtesy of Shutterstock.

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Influencer Marketing Is Becoming an Essential Business Strategy (Survey) - Adweek

The findings of a survey among 400 Facebook users, conducted by researchers from the University of Edinburgh Business School and the Universities of Bath and Birmingham, suggests that marketers look beyond their social followers and take heed of those followers' own online social network.

Many people on Facebook include older and younger family members in their Friends list, as well as employers, and as a consequence are often reticent to Share posts with risque or potentially offensive content.

A quarter of those surveyed (25%) said they would be extremely worried about their parents or employer seeing them Share or Like a sexually explicit ad for Durex, and three-quarters (75%) said they would be very unlikely to Share or Like the ad on the brand's Facebook Page.

"In the same way they might avoid pictures of them appearing drunk, or posting offensive comments for fear of being embarrassed or judged by their bosses or grans, Facebook users are also less likely to 'like' or 'share' brand content that could cause offence," said Dr. Ben Marder, Lecturer in Marketing at University of Edinburgh Business School.

"Social media provides a novel environment for showing off brand connections. But whereas in real life people carefully select which brand are best to show off their appreciation for and to whom, on social media everyone can see what you 'like' at once".

Tags: engagement, marketing, social media

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Research warns marketers to consider social media followers' diverse network - BizReport

Email marketing is still the highest-grossing marketing channel per dollar spent, but return on investment is impossible without a list of subscribers to send marketing messages to.

Ascend2, a marketing research firm, investigated the most effective email list acquisition tactics in its latest monthly report by polling 255 B2B and B2C marketers on the list growth strategies that result in the greatest benefits with minimum effort.

Social media advertising was the top-ranking email list growth strategy, according to the study-- with 45% of respondents selecting it as an effective tactic. Social media presents an opportunity for marketers to acquire customer data and curate email lists on a channel where consumers spend a large amount of time, and it does so limited effort on the part of the marketer.

Just 37% of marketers selected social media as a channel requiring the most effort to be successful, likely because Facebook has made people-based marketing a straightforward process for marketers that can afford the ad spend.

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Content marketing presents brands with an opportunity to share news and thought leadership, and was selected as the second-most effective list growth strategy according to Ascend2s report. Following closely behind social media, 42% of respondents indicated that content marketing was a fruitful email acquisition tool.

The problem with content marketing, however, is the large amount of resources that need to be funneled into the channel to create fresh content.

Content marketing was actually selected as the email acquisition strategy that required the most effort, according to Ascend2, garnering 50% of respondents selecting it as a resource-draining solution.

Not surprisingly, many marketers are turning to user-generated content (UGC) to bridge the divide between providing consumers with new material with minimal effort. Stackla, a popular UGC marketing platform, recentlylaunched an email plugin to help email marketers curate content created by fan.

Search engine optimization (SEO) was selected by 38% respondents as the third-most effective email acquisition tactic, but 45% of respondents asserted that it required the most effort. Social logins and sign-up forms were a productive strategy for 36% of respondents, while 30% asserted it drained resources.

Contests and giveaways require the least amount of effort, according to Ascend2, but only 34% of respondents believed they were an effective acquisition tactic.

However, contest and giveaways were viewed as more successful than partnerships or paid search/remarketing campaigns while also requiring less effort.

Read the original here:
Social Media, Content Marketing Most Effective For Growing Email Lists - MediaPost Communications

IMBD homepage on March 22, 2017.

You would think the First Amendment is a bulletproof defense against censorship of the Internet. But then you are not reckoning with the awesome political power of the Screen Actors Guild.

The union representing Hollywood stars and role players somehow persuaded California lawmakers to enact a law that would bar the popular IMDb website from revealing the ages of actors. Its a law that sounds crazy even by California standards, yet Governor Jerry Brown signed it last fall.

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Youve probably heard of the entertainment-focused IMDb. Owned by Amazon.com, it was founded by a British computer programmer and movie buff in 1990, when the Internet was in diapers. Today, its among the worlds most popular websites, with over 250 million visitors every month.

The basic IMDb service is free. Its content, like that of Wikipedia, is crowdsourced. Members love to post information about their favorite movies, directors, stars, and this is the important fact the actors ages.

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Many stars arent happy about that. Its not just vanity, they say; Hollywood is rife with ageism, and older actors dont want directors to think theyve passed their sell-by dates.

IMDb has a paid version of its service called IMDbPro that has become the Hollywood equivalent of LinkedIn, the social network for business. Actors and others pay about $150 a year to see and be seen by the industry elite, and to hunt for jobs. And a role might be harder to come by if its known that a certain actor is on the far side of 50.

But you cant ban the whole Internet from publishing someones age. Or can you? California legislators figured out a way around that by framing their law as a defense against age discrimination. They wrote a publishing restriction that applies only to a commercial online entertainment employment service provider, allowing paying members to demand that his or her age be deleted from that site.

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You wont be surprised to learn that IMDb and IMDbPro are virtually the only sites on earth that fit the criteria described in the law. Sure enough, as of Jan. 1, IMDb had received more than 2,300 takedown requests, including 10 from people whove won Oscars and another 71 whove been nominated for Oscars, Emmys, or Golden Globes.

IMDb hasnt honored a single one of these requests, insisting the law is flagrantly unconstitutional. Besides, it wont work. The same information is usually available elsewhere online, for the price of a quick Google search. And so IMDb argues the law harms its business by driving its users to other sites, without achieving its purpose.

IMDb filed suit against the law in federal court, and in February, US District Court Judge Vince Chhabria issued an injunction against it until the case can be heard.

There is an exceedingly strong likelihood that IMDb will prevail, the judge predicted. Thats putting it mildly.

The IMDb law is merely the nuttiest recent effort by governments here and abroad to censor unwelcome Internet content. Other examples are less ridiculous but equally pernicious.

Google, for instance, is headed to court in France, hoping to fend off a ruinous global expansion of the right to be forgotten. A 2014 ruling of the European Court of Justice held that citizens of the European Union can demand the deletion of embarrassing search results that are no longer relevant to a persons life. For instance, if a Frenchman went bankrupt 10 years ago, he could ask Google not to display this fact when someone ran a search of his name.

Google has complied with over a quarter-million such requests, but only in Europe. The Frenchmans bankruptcy would still come up if someone ran his name through Google in the United States. But in 2015, a French court ruled that Google must wipe embarrassing search results worldwide. Its a radical attempt to force the entire world to play by Europes censorious rules.

Some American lawmakers would be happy to comply. Last month, a couple of New York state legislators filed a bill that would require Internet search services to remove, on request, listings that hurt a persons reputation, and which are no longer material to current public debate or discourse.

Im sympathetic; weve all done things wed like the world to forget. But its no different from trying to block the publication of Brad Pitts age. Thats not the governments job.

Other ongoing disputes over online expression are more complex. Even now, European companies are pulling ads from Facebook and YouTube because users of those services sometimes post racist and anti-Semitic messages that are illegal overseas but protected here.

You cant blame advertisers for fleeing such stuff, even where its legal to publish it. And Internet companies arent bound by the First Amendment. They have every right to bar materials that dont meet their ethical standards, or those of their customers. Websites are also entitled to use their own judgment in flagging stories that might be considered fake news; I might disagree with their decisions, but I dont see it as censorship.

But governments cant ban the online publication of truth, at least not on this side of the Atlantic. Somebody tell the Screen Actors Guild.

Excerpt from:
Internet censorship, Hollywood style - The Boston Globe