Guest post by Carrie Johnson, Marketing Manager at Creative Edge
Creative Edge is an online collection of videos and books filled with the most current and thorough information available about graphic design, web design, photography, and more. In short, it’s online training for creative people. We are new to the market, celebrating our first year this month, and we use social media to reach potential customers and stay in touch with existing customers. To that end, we have been working with a social analytics company called PeopleBrowsr to help us design, implement and monitor our social media initiatives.
There are a lot of companies offering software, design, and photography training online, but what we do is a little different. We aggregate the training videos from many different producers. Our full collection of video training and reference books comes from over 40 publishers, including Peachpit, 
O’Reilly Media, Adobe Press, Focal Press, Course Technology PTR, Total Training, Apple Certified Training, Wiley, Class On Demand, VTC, and many others. By pulling together the best of the best, we can offer a comprehensive learning library for our subscribers.
O’Reilly Media founder Tim O’Reilly first introduced us to PeopleBrowsr. Tim has been a big advocate of ours and saw that with limited resources and a new brand in a crowded space, we would face an upward battle gaining traction in social media outreach. He knew of PeopleBrowsr and thought they could help us ramp up quickly and efficiently measure success.
PeopleBrowsr offers full service social media support. For us, they focus primarily on Twitter-based outreach. We meet with them every 2 weeks to walk through the target audiences we are focusing on, PeopleBrowsr then goes back and searches through their systems to find the best matches for us in the Twittersphere, and they put together a plan for how to attract them to our Twitter feeds. Following each initiative, they help us measure its effectiveness, which for us means increasing our brand awareness, site traffic, and positive mentions of our product.
We entertained the idea of hiring or contracting a freelance social media person, but the training and overhead would have been too expensive. PeopleBrowsr was able to deliver what we needed with little to no ramp-up time. Plus, we get to learn from what’s working with their other clients.
Because we are such a young company, it is important for us to stay close to our customers and be able to listen and learn from them. Other web 
outreach firms often take over the relationship and pride themselves on being your outreach engine, but for us that wasn’t going to work. We want to grow our reach online, but we never want to give up our social media outreach. PeopleBrowsr has allowed us to ramp up quickly without completely detaching ourselves from our community.
The whole process has been remarkably painless. We basically met with them to discuss our product and our goals, they came up with a plan and schedule, and we reconvene every 2 weeks to measure and adjust the plan.
Since we started working with PeopleBrowsr, we have seen a 10% increase in Twitter followers each month and a considerable uptick in the response rate to our online promotional campaigns. We’ve also seen a huge increase in people who identify the name “Creative Edge” with online training—an increase in brand awareness that is critically important for a young company like ours.
More info:
Creative Edge web site: http://www.creativeedge.com/
Creative Edge blog: http://blog.creativeedge.com/
Creative Edge on Twitter: http://twitter.com/creativeedge
PeopleBrowsr web site: http://www.peoplebrowsr.com/
PeopleBrowsr profile on CrunchBase: http://www.crunchbase.com/company/peoplebrowsr
PeopleBrowsr blog: http://www.peoplebrowsr.com/Blog
PeopleBrowsr on Twitter: http://twitter.com/PeopleBrowsr
