DMR #19: Jenn DePaula – Can social media really be ‘done for you’ by an agency?

David: Can social media really be 'done for you' or do you have to retain control over your own voice? How do you use Instagram and Pinterest as marketing channels and why are some businesses using Squarespace instead of Wordpress? Those are just three of the questions that I intend to ask my especial guest today, Jenn dePaula. Jenn, welcome to DMR. Jenn: Hello, thank you for having me. David: Well, thank you very much for joining us. Well, Jenn is the co-founder of Mixtus Media, a Nashville-based social media and content marketing firm that specializes in serving authors and book publishers. Jenn, I'm interested, why do you actually end up focusing on the publishing industry in terms of where you offer you services? Jenn: Well, we initially started, I got my career started off in the music industry back in 2000. 2000 was really kind of a turning point for the music industry in turning into a more digital focused industry. I think they clawed and heaved their way up the hill of digital publishing and it seems like it's still going on just that battle of physical content which is the CD and just other items that musicians sell to the digital frontier. For the first 10 years of my career, we were really going through with musicians how the best market their content, their music to in a digital form and just the struggles and the lessons learned through that, we started noticing that our authors are going through much of the same thing. Over the last few years, just with Kindle coming along on the Nook and all these other digital devices for people to consume books, they were going through many of the same struggles that musicians were going through even five years ago. Through our experience with working with musicians and obviously the book world and the music world are different beasts, but they serve an audience that's consuming their product digitally. It's really, it's been an education not only for publishers, but also for authors as well because they aren't used to having to market themselves. They aren't used to having avenues such as social media and blogs and other digital ways to connect with people. Usually, they just had to hand off their manuscript to a publisher and that was that.