These spotlights are opportunities for you to get to know some individuals who were recommended to me for the article I wrote for Mashable, 4 Essential Traits for Social Media Success in Your Career. The purpose of my project, detailed here, is to profile some social media professionals to keep an eye on in the coming year.
Spotlight: Jessica RandazzaTitle: Senior Associate
Employer: Digitas
Who paid it forward: Peter Shankman
What Peter had to say about Jessica: “Jessica is smart, smart, smart. She’s very good at the Social Media world, getting great ideas and running with them.”
Jessica has traversed the United States and has settled recently in New York City. She attended the University of Alabama to study Public Relations and Advertising and graduated from the University of Alabama – Birmingham. She began her career in public relations with Publicis Consultants | PR in Seattle, focusing on food/nutrition and health/wellness accounts. Earlier this year, she moved to the East Coast to become a Senior Associate with Digitas, where she focuses on consumer accounts and agency strategy. She blogs at JessicaRandazza.com as well.
Jessica’s beginnings in social media: Jessica’s first professional experience was with Publicis. There, she was a social media manager and Account Executive. When she started there, she was spending a lot of time blogging and in her spare time she worked toward getting a Facebook page up and running for a nonprofit client. She was an early adopter for Twitter as well. She also started reaching out and learning online strategy, going to conferences, and broadening her knowledge base by making professional connections with other PR professionals who were working with social media.
Some of Jessica’s thoughts on public relations and social media: Jessica believes that communications, marketing, public relations, media, and analytics need to become more integrated and all brought into the overall social strategy. Traditional media for impressions, along with consumer engagement, and use social media as a way to observe, communicate, interact – make your brand better. She says that throwing everything into social media is foolish because you can’t approach everything the same way. Every audience or client is different and has different needs.
Where Jessica sees social media going in the future: Over the next 12 months, Jessica thinks we will see more brands getting into it, but that it will have to silo out at some point and become more focused. Consumers will become resistant to getting marketing messages via social media, and more genuine content will need to be created. She says we will need less brands and more brand ambassadors; the messages need to come from real experiences. She believes there is something appealing about someone who can recommend a brand and be genuine about it. People want communication from brands that comes from ‘real faces’.
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