What's your story?
Being able to tell your tale is critical for any business, and especially for startups. We need to be able to tell compelling narratives to get customers, investors and to develop our team. Recently, we had five great storytellers on stage, showing us to how it's done.
One of our favorite stories of the night was from Kyra Reed, Digital Strategy & Social Branding at Adler Integrated. We're profiling this story because it shows how a strong community creates greater prosperity - which is one of our core beliefs.
Kyra started working at The Roxy - a famous nightclub on Sunset Blvd - in 2006. At that time, the Roxy wasn't that hot, and Sunset Blvd wasn't exactly a top destination for Angelinos. So they started to use social media to change their rep.
"We shifted the attitude from "You should be grateful that you're at the Roxy" to "The Roxy is grateful for its fans." They would use Twitter for customer service: upgrading members of their online community to better seats and ensuring positive experiences. That was the first part; the second part was trickier. Kyra and Nick (the owner of the Roxy) realized that the theatre would only be as strong as the street it is on.
"We were trying to make the Sunset Strip a destination," explained Kyra, "An experience...where I'm going to get out of my car and spend the whole day here, and spend my money in several places."
They met fellow business owners through Twitter; especially The Viper Room and the local comedy store. Together, they started cross promoting and encouraging more people to visit the area. The Viper Room was new to Twitter, and The Roxy gave them a "shoutout" to its 10,000 follows. That led to a lot of love between the businesses. Eventually, they teamed up to create an event called "The Tweet Crawl."
"There were maybe 15 people there the first time. But we were loud. It sounded like a hundred." That event morphed and evolved into the highly successful Sunset Strip Music Festival, currently in its 6th year. It's the highest grossing day for businesses on the Sunset Strip.
"I remember how we brought food trucks to the festival," said Kyra, "And the restaurants really didn't like that. But I said 'look, we can argue over every dollar - do I get 50¢ of this dollar or the whole thing? Or we can work together so that this entire community is getting more dollars. Seven years ago, The Sunset Strip Music Festival was The Roxy's biggest fantasy. And now it's a reality - 6 years in a row!"
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About Tuesday's event:
Media Leaders’ host Josh Ochs fielded questions to a panel of agency experts including:
- Kim Koury, Owner, Spin Public Relations
- Kyra Reed, Digital Strategy & Social Branding, Adler Integrated
- Chris Baccus, Executive Director of Digital, Golin Harris
- Chad Bennett, Founder and CEO, Populus Brands
- Apryl DeLancey, Director of Marketing & Social Media, Blaze PR
