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Soulati-'TUDE!

What Is A Heartful Business?

04/20/2016 By Jayme Soulati

ALT="Soulati, heartfulness in business"What the heck is a heartful business? I’ve been using it consistently ever since we launched our podcast, The Heart of Marketing. We = John Gregory Olson and moi, in case you didn’t know.

What I love about this word is that it’s always indicated as misspelled on Microsoft Word and the blog posts I write everywhere. This means it’s not a mainstream word and thus isn’t trendy…so let’s create a new trend in the way of thinking, OK?

Let’s be strategic about your business, and let’s have a discussion about what being heartful is all about.

Here goes…

We’ve been running a series on the workplace on The Heart of Marketing podcast. I’m providing the links to our very popular three so far right here. When you click, you’ll get to our website, GetHeartMarketing.com, and you can listen from there. These discussions between John and I are very popular, and I like talking about workplace culture, too. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Business Tagged With: culture in business, happiness, heart in business, heart marketing, heartful, heartfulness., Jayme Soulati, workplace series

A Nuclear Energy Twitter Case Study

04/12/2016 By Jayme Soulati

ALT="Soulati Media, Hitachi, nuclear energy, Twitter"In the fall of 2015, I agreed to join my long-time colleague, Caren Kagan Evans, CEO of ECI Communications, as the Twitter professional on nuclear energy for the Nuclear Industry Summit 2016. The Twitter handle @2016NIS was brand new for this event; there wasn’t a single tweet or follower, and ECI Communications was hired, as part of an entire event strategy, to ensure that the Twitter stream was active on a daily basis and earning power up to and through the global event. Daunting, eh?

The Summit culminated April 1, 2016 with 1,656 tweets (I have no idea if this is a lot or not!). This story shares my experience as the only person permitted to tweet on behalf of #NIS16. The State Department, Nuclear Energy Institute, and influencers in the nuclear energy sector monitored the stream closely. I felt the pressure, but pummeled through and focused on the task at hand.

The Objective

Twitter was to be the pulpit for the Summit – to inform, share, educate, invite, engage, and coalesce folks under the guise of the Nuclear Industry Summit 2016.

Nuclear Energy Twitter Strategy

  • I had to immerse in the subject matter quickly and identify those who were safe to retweet with positive and neutral content.
  • I had to maintain a neutral balance without injected opinion, and was thoughtful about retweets of events oriented to nuclear energy.
  • I was to be informative and be the announcer for everything on the brand new website ECI Communications created for this specific event. It’s full of several new videos, presentations, exhibitor information, Summit agenda, awards, a Flickr account for all the Summit photography, as well as industry reports and documents.

The Tacticals

I’ve been on Twitter since 2009, I know the ins and outs of launching Twitter streams from scratch; still, this project was global with key government officials from countries around the world as well as other influencers in the sector.

I identified the influencers and slowly began to get my feet wet. Previously, I had no prior knowledge about nuclear energy; thus, I painstakingly reviewed each influencers’ Twitter stream to learn who the players were, what they were tweeting, and whether I could engage enough to get them to follow me back.

At the same time, I had to ramp up knowledge by immersing in articles written by academia, bloggers and journalists to understand a semblance of the issues. To earn confidence that I would tweet pro-nuclear content versus the negative content presented by anti-nuclear folks, I was more careful than ever before about re-tweeting. I opened every link before it was tweeted, and if it was something juicy, I shared it with my team via email. Often the stories were already known, but a few times I was able to share a story that had not surfaced yet.

The topic of nuclear energy is highly controversial. I set up two search streams for ‘nuclear energy’ and ‘energy media’ to identify news of the day. Probably 70 percent of the news in nuclear energy came consistently from Asia and Europe. There is a lot of global activity on this topic as nuclear non-proliferation and nuclear security remain hot-button issues for the entire world. In addition, there are new nations coming into the nuclear age with new plants coming online while European plants are shutting down. It is a fascinating industry, and the general populace in the U.S. is not up to snuff on the facts about nuclear energy.

I bumped into scholars, academia, students, organizations, companies, countries, journalists and bloggers, atomic/solar/wind energy experts, non-profits, governments, and utilities in the Nuclear Industry Summit stream always careful to be gracious, professional, helpful, and cautious.

The First and Last Tweets

The first tweet posted soon after the New Year, and I averaged 22 tweets per day with scheduled tweets every 30 minutes on a daily basis. I monitored the stream all day, never closing out of Hootsuite and often relegated to Twitter.com to look at the streams of my followers to ensure I was in touch with the leaders in the field.

In between the first and last tweets, the stream became the microphone for the entire Nuclear Industry Summit 2016 to amplify everything on the website as well as news releases to promote the event, and to also pitch and engage media. The tweets were helpful in earning traffic to the website; in fact, I’m going to take a guess that prior to the first news release, Twitter was responsible for 85 percent of the website traffic, and it grew daily closer and closer to the Summit.

It was always intended to live tweet at the Summit, and that’s what I did. I sat in all the sessions and used TweetChat.com to set up my ‘studio’ so the hashtag #NIS16 populated in every tweet automatically and also enabled me to track others using the hashtag, too. (If ever you’re tweeting a live event, do check out Tweet Chat.)

At the Summit Expo, I took photos with my iPhone of each exhibit booth. I posted tweets and images for all of the event’s sponsors and added more tweets and images of other exhibitors from around the world.

The final tweets included newly added materials on the website posted after the closing ceremony, as well as information to alert people to the Flickr account and videos.

Key Takeaways

The reason this Twitter strategy was a success is due to my years in social media and my time-seasoned experience (I don’t mean to blow the horn here). Twitter can be extremely tactical for many folks; in fact, Twitter is a highly strategic channel that requires a thoughtful approach to relationship building and engagement. A less-seasoned professional may not have the strategy under their belt to understand the best way to approach a stream being built from 0 to 100 mph in three months.

Prior to marketing automation, this is how we engaged on Twitter – with 1:1 conversation on a consistent basis. People shared appreciatively, and actually read content, too. Those were the basics, and today, this is not being taught.

I could have done a better job had I known more about nuclear energy going in. That was the biggest issue I had, but we were hired to showcase the event. Few people understand how beneficial it is to have subject matter expertise when you tweet; yet, specialty experts who do don’t have the social media knowledge. That’s why I vote for ‘a me’ – someone with the how-to knowledge versus the subject matter expertise. When you seek someone with the how-to, they are going to be seasoned in their craft, and the knowledge will come. (We only had three months though, so it wasn’t necessary to be an expert in nuclear energy for this project.)

The field of nuclear energy is nascent on social media. That was a challenge to earn engagement; perhaps as time goes by, the field will begin to use Twitter more profusely, especially as emerging teams and nations want to share their good news.

A Twitter stream planned to promote a global event needs credibility. It is very important to have a handful of ambassadors who can make introductions and invite others to follow and share. It is always nice to have more of that at any time given the challenges of building from ground zero.

After a short several weeks of scouring the topic and industry, I soon realized the global sector was more active than the U.S. domestic sector. I predicted we would have more international attention at the Summit and more international journalists attending the Industry Summit than U.S.-based journalists. I was right; it’s what Twitter told me!

I love Twitter for what it delivers, how it engages, how it introduces relationships and shares knowledge. The biggest key factoid I can share after this career-high experience is that behind every Twitter avatar that is a logo is a person. I was honored to be that guy for this event.

Filed Under: Social Media Strategy Tagged With: Caren Kagan Evans, ECI Communications, Jayme Soulati, nuclear energy, nuclear industry summit, Twitter, Twitter strategy

The Heart Of Marketing #Podcast Debut! @Soulati @DigitalJGO

02/09/2015 By Jayme Soulati

ALT="Heart Of Marketing Podcast Logo--Soulati"It’s with the greatest of #RockHot pleasure I introduce a new product I’ve been dying to publish for several years. With my co-host John Gregory Olson, a peer in the marketing sector and blogger extraordinaire, I’m so pleased to announce the debut of The Heart Of Marketing Podcast!

In our first 6.5 episodes already available on iTunes for your listening pleasure, we explore a variety of topics oriented to heart marketing, marketing with heart, who’s doing marketing with love, and how a mid-tier business gets to the heart of the matter.

Care to listen in to our pre-launch episode where we do the intros and giggle through the whole thing? Well, I do the giggling and John lures me back to center!

Episode 000 of The Heart Of Marketing Podcast

You Subscribe And We Give!

Our official launch is today, February 9, 2015 and it’s Heart Month, Valentine’s Day and, yep, Jayme Soulati’s birthday. There’s a special promo we’d like to share. When you subscribe to our podcast in iTunes (Stitcher is coming soon!) and  (see below how to do that), John and I will donate $1 per subscriber up to $500 to The American Heart Association! W00t!

When you listen and give us a rating (we like 5 stars!) and review, there very likely could be a special something saying thanks and we love you coming your way. Of course, that’s not a definitive because that would be like buying votes! Gahh!

Open For SuggestionsALT="Podcast menu for Heart of Marketing, screen shot"

There is so much we can talk about in our 30-minute show, but it’s no fun coming up with the topics without your input. So, please, in the comments below or via my contact form on my site, send along your suggestions for show topics.

If you’d like to be a guest on the show, feel free to send along a pitch, too.

The OMGosh we did it still amazes us both. Our show has been in the works since September 2014. While the barrier to entry is pretty high for a podcast, the medium is so fun and natural for us both, and we’re really jazzed to share with you.

How to Rate, Review, Subscribe to The Heart Of Marketing Podcast

1.Click on this link in iTunes.com to get to the home page of our podcast. Open in iTunes via the app.

2. Listen to an episode — I like Episode 000 above (introductions), and I also like Episode 001 about Taylor Swift.ALT="Heart Of Marketing podcast ratings screen shot"

3. Click on the ratings and reviews section (we like 5 stars if you can afford them!) and drop in a few words in the reviews section.

4. Click Subscribe and you won’t miss an episode!
ALT="Subscribe screen shot for Heart of Marketing podcast"

Filed Under: Heart Of Marketing Podcast Tagged With: heart marketing, heart of marketing, Jayme Soulati, John Gregory Olson, launching a podcast, podcast

Should Bloggers Write With Key Words?

06/10/2014 By Jayme Soulati

ALT="confidence thermometer, Jayme Soulati"Back in the day on Spin Sucks, I wrote a piece about authenticity and my fear that analytics would rule the word (that was “world” but that works better!). Alas, my fears are now reality.

Bloggers who want to get anywhere online need to write with key words handy. It’s what my colleague and digital marketing partner Jon Buscall of Jontus Media dictates every day.

In fact, he’s been lecturing me that I don’t blog with key words enough. My writings are what strike me. I’m writing for my peers. Indeed. [Read more…]

Filed Under: Blogging 101 Tagged With: Blog, Digital marketing, Jayme Soulati, Jon Buscall, Jontus Media, Public Relations, Social Media, SpinSucks

The Happy Friday Series: How Is Happiness?

12/20/2013 By Jayme Soulati

jayme-soulati.jpgFor practically a year, just a few weeks shy, we’ve read all semblances of happiness interpretation in this series. My heart is brimming with thank yous to each of you for your contribution; do you know what an accomplishment it’s been to bring in single authors once weekly to share a personal happiness story? It’s huge, especially in this era of blogging when folks have little time and engagement is minimal.
There were personal stories so revealing and shocking to some; there were stories about loved ones gone with happy memories that remain; there were other stories about family and friendships, and hobbies that brought smiles.

Based on all these wonderful stories, is happiness elusive? The 40 or so authors who have graced these pages in the last year, have had many obstacles facing them; yet, they found happiness.

I’m going to try and add another perspective to happiness with this story:

Are You Happy?

Used to be when someone asked me, “Jayme, are you happy?” I’d scoff and say, happiness is relative, it’s elusive and fleeting. I didn’t have an answer; I had a poor taste because I didn’t know HOW to answer.

As I challenged people to write for this series, some jumped at the chance; others struggled for just the right topic. I was in the latter category knowing I really didn’t have anything to write until this post right here.
What that experience, earning my white belt in taekwondo, taught me was the opportunity to truly feel a variety of emotions that burgled up into pure happiness. Although another mom attempted to publicly minimize my accomplishment, it didn’t matter; I knew how much I had struggled to achieve and stuck with the challenge in spite of my limitations. I got out of my adult comfort zone and pushed the barrier envelope. How often do you do that? When I arrived home that evening, I immediately sat down to write knowing I had to capture my feelings.

Today, as drama in life continues to unfold, I hold that experience in highest regard. It may sound funny, but do you know how you survive turmoil? Do you know how you remove obstacles from the path often littered with negativity and people who attempt to belittle?

You focus and recall the happiest moment you can, when you were on top. When you face the obstruction, squeeze your hand and let all the empowerment from that happy place and time rush back to overwhelm the negativity and fuel you your own powerful strength. When you take charge of that moment using these tools, you will continue to grow from within to the next level. Your happy feelings will consume the negativity, and the people facing you will be disarmed. It works, I know this from doing it; and, I will continue to practice it the rest of my life.

I thank Sharon Gilmour-Glover of Jump-Point for that tip; she is one helluva woman with incredible teachings from her 13 years as a management consultant and change agent.

I do believe happiness comes in levels. When my 12-year-old squeals like only little girls can do, I giggle inside and register that sound as happiness and excitement. When I earn a new client, I’m happy the fruits of my labor worked. When I belly laugh with genuine sincerity, it washes through me from the tips of my toes to the ends of my curls.

Today, right now, if someone were to ask, “Jayme, are you happy?”

I would say, “No, I am at peace.”

Filed Under: Happy Friday Series Tagged With: happiness, Happy Friday Series, Jayme Soulati, Jump-Point, Sharon Gilmour-Glover, Taekwondo

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