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SOCIAL MEDIA
Social media continues to permeate - and confuse - just about every aspect of the entertainment business. Skilled analysts in the new communications tool are becoming ever more necessary to every company's overall success. To give readers an idea of what the brightest minds are doing in this area, we searched the TV industry far and wide for the most innovative and active social-media marketers. The list we ended up with is impressive, but by no means definitive. More than anything, it offers a window into successful campaigns and is a testament to the expertise the cable industry is increasingly counting on to connect and communicate with customers and viewers.
TRlClA MELTON
SENIOR VICE PRESIDENT, ENTERTAINMENT MARKETING
Turner Broadcasting System
Turner's stable of cable networks are some of the most "social" networks on the dial these days and that's no accident, Trisha Melton,'s senior vice president of entertainment marketing for TBS, TNT and Turner Classic Movies, said.
"In the past two years, Turner has embraced the 'social by design' theory in its overall marketing strategy," she said. "Social media is the connective tissue that brings every element of marketing together under one umbrella."
Since joining TBS in 2004, Melton has supervised a slew of high-profile marketing campaigns, including award-winning work for the launch of TBS's late-night series Conan. Now, the company is turning the dial up another notch with its campaign for Dallas, which includes several social-media components to introduce the rebooted series.
TNT created a Facebookpage spanning 34years of Ewing history, all in the first-person voice of the crusty, old patriarch himself, J.R. (played by Larry Hagman), drawing more than 663,000 fans. A string of tweets encapsulated 356 episodes of the original series, drawing 2,200 followers.
Job description in 140 characters or less: "Marketing leader, strategy specialist, creativity coaxer, cheerleader, catherder, plate-spinner, marketing whisperer."
ADAM NAIDE
EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR OF MARKETING, SOCIAL MEDIA
Cox Communications
In 2008, as the presidential election cycle was heating up and social media was exploding, Adam Naide was part of a new group at CNN called the Audience Experience. His group essentially became CNN's social-media department, scrambling to get its hands around this new phenomenon as consumers embraced Facebook, Twitter andYouTube. It was up to Naide and...