Mark Lyn­der­say

Farhana Can­non is a 28-year-old en­tre­pre­neur spe­cial­is­ing in so­cial me­dia coach­ing. She's a grad­u­ate of the Fash­ion In­sti­tute of Tech­nol­o­gy in New York City with a ma­jor in Mer­chan­dis­ing. Her moth­er is Trinida­di­an, but she lives and works out of Boston. Straight out of school she be­gan work­ing in mar­ket­ing and brand­ing for nat­ur­al health and lux­u­ry brands, man­ag­ing events, sales PR, prod­uct place­ment and so­cial me­dia for sev­er­al com­pa­nies. It soon be­came clear that so­cial me­dia was the way to go for Can­non, and she de­cid­ed to nar­row her fo­cus, open­ing her so­cial me­dia mar­ket­ing con­sult­ing firm iMe­dia Ex­po­sure in De­cem­ber 2011. "There are two kinds of peo­ple, the eaters and the bak­ers," Can­non ex­plained in an e-mail in­ter­view. "Some peo­ple want to eat as much as they can and some peo­ple want to bake a big­ger pie so that there is enough for every­one to eat. I am a bak­er. I tru­ly want to cre­ate jobs, wealth, and hap­pi­ness."

Can­non put some of her goods on the ta­ble for free at an event held at Co­co Lounge where she of­fered an overview of so­cial me­dia ser­vices and tips on their use. The con­sul­tant used her own tech­niques to pro­mote the event, re­ly­ing on her Face­book page to pro­mote an event that filled the small room. So­cial me­dia neo­phytes might have been a bit con­fused at the flood of in­for­ma­tion that the so­cial me­dia con­sul­tant of­fered at a brisk clip. Of the lo­cal pop­u­la­tion ac­tive on the In­ter­net, 95.4 per cent of users are on Face­book, rep­re­sent­ing 37.6 per cent of the over­all pop­u­la­tion. Can­non sug­gest­ed that busi­ness users should be putting their lo­go in the new ban­ner on Face­book pages and mak­ing more cre­ative use of the time­line for­mat as well as videos and pho­tographs. Busi­ness strate­gies should be so­cial by de­sign, fea­ture an au­then­tic voice speak­ing for the brand, en­cour­age re­la­tion­ships with cus­tomers as well as in­ter­ac­tiv­i­ty with the page's con­tent. Can­non, an at­trac­tive young woman with a keen, en­thu­si­as­tic speak­ing style, is de­ter­mined to get the busi­ness­es she speaks with to see the po­ten­tial of so­cial me­dia.

"I train com­pa­nies how to mar­ket their brand to their tar­get de­mo­graph­ic," Can­non said. "I do of­fer full ser­vice so­cial me­dia mar­ket­ing pack­ages but I do stress the need for com­pa­nies to be self-re­liant. Some­one that is in the busi­ness dai­ly will be able to re­al­ly feel the heart­beat of the brand and will be able to share this essence." If it were that sim­ple, of course, every­body would be do­ing it. Farhana Can­non's key in­ter­ven­tion is in keep­ing com­pa­nies ac­count­able to their mar­ket­ing ef­forts. Can­non fo­cus­es projects on a mar­ket­ing plan that she re­views week­ly, the re­sults of which are tracked us­ing an­a­lyt­ics. "I guar­an­tee clients a sig­nif­i­cant in­crease in sales with­in six months." Trav­el­ling reg­u­lar­ly she keeps in con­tact with her clients via sched­uled Skype chats while she's on the move. Apart from live train­ing and con­sult­ing and on­go­ing mar­ket­ing projects, Can­non al­so of­fers a se­ries of fo­cused we­bi­na­rs on max­imis­ing a mar­ket­ing pres­ence us­ing Pin­ter­est, Google+ and Foursquare along with the big three, Face­book, Twit­ter and LinkedIn.

Farhana Can­non de­cid­ed on a so­cial me­dia con­sul­tan­cy two years ago af­ter an­swer­ing two ques­tions about her var­ied ca­reer goals. She liked mar­ket­ing and she thought so­cial me­dia had the biggest im­pact. Now she wants to help her cus­tomers come to the same con­clu­sion. In­ter­est­ed in Farhana Can­non's ser­vices? The con­sul­tant is of­fer­ing a 60 per cent dis­count on we­bi­na­rs and 20 per cent off on her ser­vices un­til Ju­ly 31 to Bit­Depth read­ers. e-mail her at farhana@iMe­di­a­Ex­po­sure.com with Bit­Depth831 in the sub­ject line to make con­tact.

Read my full in­ter­view with Farhana Can­non here: http://ow.ly/al­Rzy