This is the first of a series of Social Media Leadership blog posts where we will be featuring interviews held with industry experts to explore topics including top social media tools, trends, critical business applications and more.

This week, we are featuring Mike Lewis, VP of Marketing and Sales from Awareness Inc.  Awareness provides enterprise customers with social media marketing software that allows them to control, centralize and measure the ROI of their social media activities in one platform. We contacted Lewis because he is a well respected leader in the industry on new media, innovative technologies and bringing products and services to market.

Here is what Mike had to say during our interview:

Backupify: Tell me about Awareness Inc.’s Social Marketing Hub. How is this product being utilized by your customers to help them better manage and track their social media efforts?

Lewis: Awareness Inc. started off as a blogging and community provider. When founded in 2007, the company heard from many clients expressing a strong interest in social networking but wanted to be able to create their own customer networking communities. Over the next few years, Awareness Inc. developed the Hub which allows customers to publish content to many channels at once, interact with community members and measure the results all in one spot – their very own customer network. The draw to this idea is the ability for their clients to tie things together in one central place and optimize it. The idea stuck and now Awareness Inc. is popularly known for their Social Marketing Hub.

Backupify: What social tools are your customers most interested in using? Have you noticed an increase in usage of any of these tools in the past year?

Lewis: The big social tool right now is definitely Facebook – right behind Facebook is Twitter. After Twitter, for most companies, would be their company blog. The Hub helps customers optimize Facebook and other networks by showing what content is resonating the most on each platform. The Hub not only measures what is going on within a company’s social networks but it also gives them actionable data they can use to optimize what they do on each channel.

Backupify: What are some specific trends you are seeing in the social media space? How does Awareness capitalize on this?

Lewis: The big thing companies are trying to do from a marketing standpoint are email, blogging, utilizing social networking channels, observing web analytics and developing a CRM system – and all at the same time. The biggest challenge with doing this is that people become overinformed and don’t know what to do with the data once they have it. The Hub helps clients slice and dice the data into digestible parts to help them understand what it means.

On a further note, social media is just one part of the marketing problem. The question people should be asking is, “How does social media translate into my overall marketing efforts? What is the right way to look at my data?” We’ve found people are still very much in learning mode and slowly moving into execution mode.

Backupify: Out of all the social media tools both your customers and your internal team use, which one is the most critical to business? How important is it to be able to secure this data in the case of an accidental deletion, server downtime, account hack, etc.?

Lewis: In terms of social platforms, Facebook is the most business-critical platform for our customers. In terms of tools, the Hub is the most important. We’ve also found that many are concerned with their audit trails and being able to backup and archive their data – this is especially critical for bigger companies. Any security measures that add to their outreach efforts – from archiving to adding more compliance managers in the social media involvement process – is important today.

In a lot of cases, people need to know when something was published and must have a running backup of all content they push out. The issue of accountability then comes into play: Who is to say who did what on social media? Without an audit trail, this is impossible. When you think of regulated industries such as financial services and government agencies, these security measures are not just critical, they HAVE to be taken.

Backupify: How important do you see support tools like Backupify being to online marketing and communication efforts?

Lewis: I think Backupify is very important to the overall marketing mix. Especially with the industries that are using you today, it is absolutely critical for them to archive their online data; they take this matter very seriously. The challenge to many marketers is that they have not yet seriously looked into backing up their online data – it’s not the first thing a marketer thinks of. They’re thinking of email blasts and things like that, not what they back up. The more sophisticated marketers, especially in larger companies, will see it quicker. The challenge is how fast that will trickle down.

Awareness Inc. joined the social media space just as it was sprouting and gaining interest. They have since seen it flourish into an amass of data that people know they need to be a part of and understand but many just don’t know how to do that. Lewis and his co-workers are tasked with helping their clients understand all the available channels, how to interact and then what to do with the data after something is published.

The next phase of this evolution is the realization that archiving, backups and audit trails are becoming more important. For some industries that face heavy regulations, this is critical and they cannot even join the conversation without first having set in place stringent policies and archiving tools.

To learn more about Awareness and their Social Marketing Hub, check them out here. To experience how Backupify can help with your business’ social media records retention and archiving initiatives, check us out here.

Tagged as: Leadership, Social media, Tools