MEMBER SPOTLIGHT - LISA SPARKS

Contributed By: Naomi M. Massave, Attorney at Carlton Fields and WCC Communications Committee member

Lisa Sparks is so enthusiastic about her career as Regional Development Director for Constant Contact that you almost can’t get her to talk about herself.  Constant Contact is an e-mail marketing, online survey and event marketing tool for small organizations.  Lisa describes her role as to advocate on behalf of best practices in e-mail marketing and marketing in general, and teaching businesses how to leverage the power of social media for their brands.  

One of the cornerstones of her position is presenting no-cost, educational seminars to the business and non-profit community, where she shares strategies on what works and doesn’t work, what new things are happening, and how small businesses can make sense of it all.  This works as a business strategy because people tend to come back to the organization that has educated them the most to purchase their products, Lisa explained.

Lisa was recruited by Constant Contact while she was working as a certified business analyst for the Small Business Development Center at Florida Gulf Coast University in Fort Myers.  Lisa is a long-time fan of Constant Contact, and when she first started working at the Small Business Development Center, Lisa started using Constant Contact to keep in touch with clients they were counseling, and she described it as “wildly successful.”  Lisa herself was also wildly successful at that position, winning a state-wide award for 2006-07 because she provided more funding opportunities and spent more time with clients than anyone else.  Lisa credits Constant Contact for enabling her to spread the word about the assistance she could provide for businesses.  Lisa described this as the “perfect object lesson – someone working with a statewide organization in a tiny part of the state can out-hustle the rest of the state because of leveraging the power of e-mails.  People forwarded e-mails to their friends about our seminars or free counseling on starting a business and it snowballed.”

When the Senior Vice President of Constant Contact came to Southwest Florida to give a seminar, Lisa told him about the success she had using Constant Contact.  He later called her up and recruited her for her current position as the face of the company in South Florida.  

When asked about the latest trends in marketing, Lisa said “the big hot thing right now is really putting social media in its place … We are dispelling the myth that social media is this mysterious offshoot that small businesses have to conquer and learn.”  Constant Contact has developed partnerships with several social media tools, such as Nutshell Mail which is like a DVR for social media networks. This free system pulls together posts that people have made on an organization’s Facebook page, posts the latest responses or re-tweets, lists new people who are following the twitter feed or have left the twitter network, and posts updates from LinkedIn, all in one e-mail, which Lisa described as “very elegant.” This makes it very easy for an organization to see what is going on in its market, and respond immediately without spending hours monitoring each social networking site.  

Lisa added that using social media effectively is not all about self-promotion – it enables a company to identify trends and problems its target audience is facing so that it can stay relevant and figure out how to solve its audience’s problems.  Constant Contact’s goal as an organization is to help small businesses to expand and grow, to achieve their dreams.  Lisa said the key ways to achieve this goal are through education and through powerful and dependable products that people can use and trust.  

Constant Contact has helped the Women’s Chamber of Commerce keep in touch with its members and fill its events, and the Chamber in turn has helped Lisa find new clients.  Lisa said at Women’s Chamber of Commerce events, “you always meet the most interesting people and the most engaged and dynamic women in the city of Miami.  The caliber of women the Chamber attracts is unparalleled.”   Lisa presented at one of the WCC’s Lunch and Learn events last year.  You can learn more about Constant Contact at www.constantcontact.com. 

– Back to Winter 2011 Newsletter Index