In an attempt to change its less-than-stellar reputation, the PPA recently hired a local company, Chatterblast, to create a customer-focused social-media strategy, and manage it on a daily basis.
Matthew Ray and Evan Urbania founded Chatterblast in 2009 recognizing that social media could become the backbone of successful marketing strategies, and that many companies would have no idea where to start.
"For a lot of businesses and corporations, social media has become a little bit of a pain. . . . I would hate to see organizations give up," Ray says.
Now, with six employees, and having worked with more than 40 businesses, they just moved into larger offices on 13th Street in Center City. Chatterblast counts politicians, restaurants, universities like Drexel, lifestyle brands like Fusion Cross-Training, and nonprofits like ActionAIDS as clients.
Chatterblast helps them to understand and most effectively use sites like Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, Flickr, Foursquare, and YouTube to build new clients, create initiative awareness, improve reputations, or in the case of the PPA, enhance customer service.
"Social media requires too much attention when you are trying to run a business," says Fusion Cross-Training owner Gavin McKay. "It's a whole other world."
"We don't think it's a silver bullet," says Urbania. "It's a piece of the marketing mix."
Which sometimes means doing the actual tweeting and casting and writing YouTube videos for clients.
But, adds Ray, tweets "can't just really be thrown to an outside organization. The clients know the product best."
Chatterblast also educates, by training staffers on how to handle social media and crafting creative content in-house.
They use software that charts metrics to measure their effectiveness.
