Talk with Tom, won’t you?

Getting involved with a social media experiment

This past January, Emma became chummy with a fella named Tom Martin hailing from one of my favorite cities, New Orleans, Louisiana. Tom is a social media consultant and digital marketing specialist who writes, speaks and helps clients by demystifying the digital marketing landscape at Converse Digital. His current project, Talking with Tom, really got our attention at Emma for a few reasons.

Tom’s experiment
Tom is a believer in content marketing. A brand can strengthen customer relationships and develop high quality leads by providing relevant content that establishes you or your company as an expert or influencer in your field. You may have noticed a lot of buzz lately about content marketing. Truth is, email marketing is and always has been a medium that requires lots of planning, strategy and creativity to keep your readers interested. There are just a lot more ways these days to distribute and draw attention to your content.

Our customers often tell us that creating content is one of their biggest marketing hurdles. Many people assume creating compelling content requires a team of people, deep pockets and tons of time. And sometimes, it does. But we think Tom may be on to one way to simplify that process and, dare we say, even have fun creating content. Tom is proving that it can be done with a great idea, an iPhone, easy-to-use online software and a simple plan for spreading the word.

Emma’s involvement
And why was Emma compelled to sponsor Tom’s project, you ask? Good question. Along with a healthy curiosity in hearing answers from a rather impressive list of experts to Tom’s question: “What’s next {in digital media}?,” we like Tom’s message. We wanted to help him prove that he could create interesting content and get results by using technology available to businesses of every size. Also, Tom is an influencer and subject matter expert, so we’d like to see if having brand association with him will give our own brand more exposure.

What’s next … your turn
Tom has some exciting interviews still in the pipeline. I’m so tempted to name-drop here, but I won’t risk being the WikiLeaks of the Talking with Tom project. Suffice it to say, you’re going to be interested in hearing from these experts. We’ll also be checking in with you along the way to get some thoughts from you as the project unfolds. In fact, we could use your thoughts right about now. Tom did a great job of plotting out his influential interviewees, but we just couldn’t help asking him how influential he’s willing to get. We drew up our own little dream list of possible interviewees for a 53rd bonus interview, and Tom agreed to land the interview with the personality *you* choose.

So you get to help us choose who gets the #LastWord on What’s Next? by voting now.

You also might want to visit the Talking with Tom site and spend some time with the 28 interviews he’s already posted (they’re around two minutes each). Stay tuned to the project by checking back here on the Emma blog, following @TomMartin and @EmmaEmail on Twitter, and subscribing to the Talking with Tom email list.

The next six months will be exciting. Almost as exciting as being able to call Tom our new friend.

And go ahead … vote now!