Teal Newland Shares Insights into StumbleUpon's Social Strategies - Technorati

Our guest on this round of Social Brands & Influencers is Teal Newland, who has over 10 years of internet strategy experience.

She was the head of multinational sales at Microsoft, She worked with Disney Interactive in Global Digital Brand Strategy and Social Media. She was also the Global VP/Group Director of Brand Content at Digitas and is currently the Vice President of Global Revenue, Partnerships & Marketing at StumbleUpon.

Here are some of the questions we asked Teal during the interview:

• Tell us about your background in content and advertising. Two of the hottest topics in marketing today!
• For those who don't know - how are SU paid ads different than Twitter or Facebooks? Advantages/disadvantages for the user vs the advertiser?
• You know when people are cool with ads - the way stumbleupon shows ads "paid discovery" is similar to how IG is rolling out ads. How should marketers think about planning and executing native content ads rather than direct response ads.
• I've used Paid Discovery and found it to drive a lot of traffic, but not as high conversion rate as other paid social sources. What are some tips for advertisers to follow to see the best ROI of their paid discovery campaigns?
• What are the top tools you would recommend for advertisers to measure the value of their advertising campaigns?
• Although most companies understand how to promote their content via their “owned” channels, such as their Facebook Page, their Twitter account or LinkedIn Company Page, many are missing out on the opportunity to get their content in front of a larger audience through paid social promotions. What are other distribution channels you would recommend marketers to think about to get found by a larger audience? How should marketers think about the right distribution strategy for their content? Are there frameworks that are successful?
• For a successful native advertising experience, what type of content or ad creative type is most successful?
• Should your content plan change to improve mobile engagement? If so, how?
• Sometimes people use "branding" "marketing" and "advertising" all interchangeably. (Big pet peeve!) You have a background in all three and how you're current role seems to work to help businesses combine all three! The perfect storm! How do you define each term and what are ways to think about effectively achieving all three goals in one campaign?
• As marketers become more sophisticated in delivering the right message at the right time - personalized content - that could be crossing the fine line between cool vs creepy. How should marketers think about personalizing content for their audience? Good/bad examples you've seen?
• With the rise of mobile, people discover multi-devices now. How has that affected content consumption? What should marketers think about to make sure their content is found when people are on any of their devices?
• On social media, the half life of content is typically pretty short (half life: the point in time when a link has gotten half the engagement it will ever get), I saw stats that content discovery sites like SU and Tumblr have one of the longest half lifes, why do you think that is? How can marketers take advantage of that fact?
• What are some content traits that makes a story spread?
• If brands want to take their content strategy to the next level, how should they think about optimizing their strategy? What is one of your favorite brand examples of storytelling via native ads?
• Advertising trends for 2014?
• What are the most important elements to consider when creating advertising coupled with editorial?
• Native advertising can be very native. When a consumer finds out they have been "fooled" are there risks of losing trust?
• If you don't outsource any of your marketing, you probably know your brand and story better than anyone else. If you are working with an agency, how do you make sure they stay "on brand" when they are producing content or ads on your behalf?
• Users say they hate ads. But in reality, they hate bad ads. How can advertisers make sure they are not creating bad ads?
• It's that time of year... What is your new year's resolution? Business and/or personal?