Interview with Lyndsey Hayes at Wesco HMB, Inc.

1. Tell me a little about your position and the type of company you work for:
I work for Wesco HMB, Inc. as a Marketing and Advertising Assistant. We are in the fire suppression field and deal with buying, recycling, and selling Halon and other clean agents. Our business is worldwide in scope and is counted on by the largest and most demanding companies and organizations in the aerospace, defense, petrochemical, marine, and fire protection industries. I have a lot of responsibilities at this job including creating the advertisements, marketing materials and organizing tradeshow information. I also run all of our social media and am in charge with maintaining the website. I also create and send out the monthly email blast and write for our E-Newsletter.

2. Do you think Internet Marketing is important to your business? Why or why not?
When I was hired, it was because I assured the owners that I could help them increase traffic and visibility on the internet. I don’t know anyone who picks up a phone book anymore, so if you don’t have a web presence you could potentially be missing out on a lot of business. I implement internet marketing on various levels to help with search engine optimization.


3. Do you think Social Networking is important to your business? Why or why not?
The hardest part about my job is convincing my boss that I’m doing something beneficial for him and the company by spending a few hours each day on Twitter, Wordpress, Facebook, and LinkedIn. People of different business may not understand how this will help them, but opening a door of communication is beneficial for everyone. Business is built on relationships, so if you can think of a way to communicate more with your customers, do it. That is why social networking is helping our business and helping to connect to our associations that we belong to and potential leads for new business.

4. What types of Internet Marketing tactics are used by your company?
Like I mentioned, we have a very successful Adwords campaign running, where we are ranking in the third position. By this I mean when you Google one of our many keywords, we come up first or second on the side bar in Google. I have been slowly but surely changing all of the meta description tags on all of the pages of our website to increase website visibility. I also have compiled a list of keywords that does well for our industry, and have been writing in our blog and twitter using them. We have also bought multiple domain names to try and dominate the search field for Fire Suppression Clean Agents. Link building is also a key factor, because Google deems you more ‘legit’ and with a higher ranking when a link to your website appears on another. Of course Social Media is playing a large part in all of this and we’ve been having a ball tracking our extra sources of clicks from these sites. We’re basically just trying to get our name out there.

5. Does your company belong to any Social Media sites? Which ones and why?
Wesco has a Twitter, Facebook, Wordpress Blog, and LinkedIn. Twitter is the one I try to use the most because people interact the quickest on there. They seem to generate the fastest responses and it’s easy to find people in your field. I have read hundreds of great article already because people that I’m following have posted them. It opens a very non-formal door to potential customers and keeps your name in their head. Our blog is a great news outlet because we can update it with thoughts, company news, or other stories that we find beneficial to our industry. It can be as long as we want it and people can comment as long as they’d like also. That is the one downfall to Twitter, how much you can write. We’re working on a website revamp (as you’ll see we need it!), so we will be running a direct RSS feed on our homepage which will automatically update as soon as we update our blog. Again, with LinkedIn, our blog is directly correlated to our page, so that any news updates show up automatically as well.


6. Do you think Internet Marketing and Social Media have influenced your company either positively or negatively? Please Explain.
No one thought that we’d find people in our industry on here, but to our surprise there are thousands of them interacting with each other through social media. I have only been working here for a month and implementing the social media for under 3 weeks. Already we have seen 4 big leads come out of it. I have created relationships with some big counsels and associations; As well as been able to make a presence in a couple of new markets that we are pursuing. It has given us the chance to have a voice and opinion, and let people respond as well. Our SEO is improving already and we have just moved up one level in the Google search, above one of our major competitors! That is huge and that is largely in part to keywords being used on our social media sites! Hopefully with the launch of our new user friendly website, to come in the following months, we will have even more increased traffic with the integration of our blog and other social media sites which will be linked on our front page. We have created a circle of media around ourselves and our websites. I hope that we see our success continue to grow by using these techniques.