An Interview with Sara Morgan from Wedzilla.com
1. What is Weddzilla.com and what is your role within Weddzilla?Weddzilla.com is the first website in the wedding industry to fully integrate the wedding planning process into popular social networks. Weddzilla.com leverages the power of community to simplifying the wedding planning process for our Nearlyweds. It’s all about connecting them with their perfect vendors and making their wedding planning easy, social, and fun.
For vendors, creating a profile on Weddzilla.com means instantly increasing their visibility. Our focus is on bringing offline word-of-mouth to an online platform and the tools we give vendors access to will help connect them with Nearlyweds in a more efficient way.
2. How is Weddzilla.com changing the game for online wedding planning?
Social media is changing the way brides and vendors interact and Weddzilla.com is at the forefront
3. What is the one feature you would highlight for Wedding Professionals to use?
Our Weddfieds are the game changer for vendors. They allow wedding professionals to be proactive in connecting to the Nearlyweds that need their services anytime they want, without paying for leads. You can set your search parameters by zip code, budget, and wedding date. We notify vendors every time a Nearlywed creates a post that matches their search criteria and they’ll be able to start connecting with the brides they want to work with directly through Weddzilla.com.
4. What is the one feature you would highlight for Nearlyweds to use?
Our Nearlyweds are loving how easy the Weddmark (a visual bookmarking tool) makes collecting and organizing inspiration from all over the web. You can watch a demo here.
And of course they love the fact that each new item they Weddmark between now and September 30, 2010 gives them one entry in the “Weddmark Challenge” and a chance to win a $1,000 gift registry from Macy’s!
5. Do you host any Webinars or educational series to help Nearlyweds or Vendors?
Yes! We want to be a resource for brides and vendors alike. Our current educational series focuses on social media. I can't tell you how many times I have talked with wedding professionals and heard them say "I know that I need to be engaging brides via social media, but I feel overwhelmed and don't know where to start."
That’s why we created our social media presentation called “Social or Die.” Making social media a part of your daily business routine is a lot simpler than you may think and our “Social or Die” presentation is takes a straight-shooting approach to help wedding professionals “get real” about how to grow their business through social media.
6. Tell us about your experience (or an anecdote) about working with an up-and-coming internet company. What has the journey been like?
I love this question!
Using the word “journey” to describe my career with Weddzilla.com is so appropriate. It’s been such an adventure! I started working with Weddzilla.com because I believed so much in the concept of the company and I’ve loved working here because of the company culture. We really are like one big (albeit dysfunctional) family!
Every Friday we have a weekly roundup call to make sure we keep in touch with everyone on our team no matter where they are. My favorite part of the call is when one of our team members has to sit on the “Hot Seat” and everyone gets to fire one question at them. The question can be on any topic and needless to say, the calls always end up very interesting! The lucky “Hot Seat”-er also has to accept a work-related challenge with a funny wager attached if they don’t meet their goal by the following Friday. People have had to shave only half their beard for the day, go to work in a Mu Mu, and even reenact the “Dennis Quaid is Here!” skit from the Ellen Degeneres for You Tube. Just another day in the life at Weddzilla.
7. Tell us about your gurus. How did you pick them? What will they be bringing to the Weddzilla community?
We love our gurus. And honestly, we don’t use them enough...but that is about to change! When we started creating the concept of Weddzilla we wanted to align ourselves with the best experts in the industry, but wanted more than faces. We wanted expertise with weddings, but also wanted them to believe in the power of social media.
The Weddzilla Gurus are our team of celebrity wedding professionals that will be sharing their expertise and extensive experience with the Weddzilla Community. The Gurus are not only trendsetters in their respective fields, but are trusted names in the wedding industry.
Plus, they all have HUGE personalities and that comes through in their blog posts and interaction with our Weddzilla community. They are all seriously passionate about what they do...it’s inspiring! And it’s why they have all gotten where they are today.
8. Why have you made social media such an integral part of Weddzilla.com?
Social media isn’t a trend, it isn’t going anywhere. It’s changing the way people interact and the way companies do business. The wedding industry is built around a very social community of brides and vendors. We wanted to create a site that took offline word-of-mouth and social networking and put it into an online format to create that same sense of community through our site. It’s all about engagement, continuous conversation, and instant feedback. Social media is connecting us to everything, allowing us to get instant information, reviews, feedback, and is always evolving. We believe that deep integration into the social networks, into the individual Nearlyweds communities is the next must use “tool” that all brides are going to want to use. It’s all about planning your big day with the people you care about, hang out with online, and interact with...and Weddzilla aims to continue to stay on the forefront of technology and social media.
9. I notice you have a Weddzilla You Tube channel...any good videos we should be looking out for?
We actually just started putting up some videos to our channel. We want to make it a hub for cool wedding videos from our brides, or anything else wedding related. We’d love to have our users suggest videos to us to add to our site or as a favorite. In addition to wedding related videos you can find tutorials on how to use Weddzilla better, highlights from our launch party, and will be adding more content soon.
10. What’s on the horizon for Weddzilla? Tell us what we should be looking out for from you guys.
Up first is the Guru Awards - that is going to be really cool. We are all about social media and blogs play a huge role in the wedding community and we can’t wait to award 25 great blogs our Blog Guru 2010 title!
On the horizon are an iPhone app for Nearlyweds...if you thought the Weddmark was cool..wait till you see the iPhone app...It’s going to be addicitive!
We have a whole bunch of new site features coming soon. The Ideabook, a new twist on the store, and we will be introducing “Wedding helpers” soon which allow our nearlweds to really get social and get their communities or, “wedding helpers” involved in the planning process.
Sometime later this year or early next year I’m finally going to let my team take vacations too! :)
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1 comments:
Wow! This is very cool. It's so crazy to think how online-centric and socially connected wedding planning has become in just a few short years. I helped my cousin plan her wedding just 5 years ago and there was only basically that one wedding site that was the "leader in the industry" to provide guidance and advice. As I planned our own wedding over the past 2 years I noticed how much more reliant we were on connecting with other brides and on their online peer reviews. Wedzilla sounds like a step toward the future and definitely a more efficient way to plan a wedding in the 21st century! :)
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