Kimberly Jimenez is quick to tell you what kind of job she has: the coolest in the world. She’s a social media marketer, and within the four years she’s lived in the contiguous United States, she’s worked for Prolifik and The Dovetail Companies, and started her own business consulting for small and mid-sized companies.
Self-Starting and Going Fast
Kimberly was working and studying Dietetics when her fiancé Chris Harris needed help bootstrapping his new startup, The College Moving Company. To get the phone ringing, Kimberly started reading up on social media marketing. Her research soon took up every spare moment, and she began to track what was working for the company in terms of return on investment.
When she learned that 80% of social-driven site visits were coming from Facebook, Kimberly dug deeper, and found that College Moving Co. had a $24K ROI through Facebook in its first summer of operation. She fell in love with analytics and reporting, and quickly landed a social media internship at Prolifik, where she became the social media director.
One day Kimberly received a Facebook message from The Dovetail Companies suggesting that she would be a strong candidate for the company’s marketing department. She hadn’t yet finished her degree, but a 5 million dollar marketing budget persuaded her to take a break from school. Although she loved the team at Dovetail, she worked 60 hour weeks to grow the department, and quickly realized that a corporate environment wasn’t for her.
Kimberly had been helping clients on the side, and because she wanted to finish college, she decided to take the risk and go out on her own. The day Kimberly quit Dovetail, she was asked to take the 12-property company on as a client.
Educator and Content Creator
Because social media has so recently become a program of marketing, there is no universal understanding of how it really works. Kimberly is committed to educating businesses about what social media is and what it isn’t. She is constantly confronted with the misconception that social media is the key to every cash flow problem, or a magic trick to get clients through the door.
On the other hand, many businesses consider social marketing as scammy, gimmicky, or distrustful, and Kimberly has to communicate white-hat concepts and the value that social media strategy and reporting can bring to an entrepreneur’s ROI.
I help clients to see the potential of using social media. After learning about content and how it engages business, most buy in. I convert them to the dark side of social. I don’t bash old media, but the investment dollars and time vs. online can’t compare.
Kimberly invests a lot of time into creating content, and she wants only to invest more. She creates free resources to cover integral topics, answer questions, offer tutorials, and broadcast videos to get the word out. Kimberly knows that businesses want to learn, and because they may have a different concept of what social media is and what it can do, education is big. Social media is a tool, not a be-all and end-all, so she’s writing an ebook to tell people how it all ties together.
Using Tools to Your Disposal
You wouldn’t know it, but English isn’t Kimberly’s first language, and she’s self-conscious about approaching strangers without preparation. Online tools may not be for everyone, but social media allows her to reach out online before meeting her contacts at events.
As a guide for meeting people in person, she uses the Refresh application, which helps come up with talking points with people you expect to meet. The app creates a profile that aggregates a person’s LinkedIn, Facebook, and website, using updates to provide users with a feed of recent activity. Using Refresh gives Kimberly a feel for what’s going on with the people she admires, and provides easy ice breakers for starting a conversation.