west elm's Neil Gazmen connects with local customers

According to his bio, “Neil Gazmen is a retail people manager with over 9 years experience in managing high volume, complex stores in the Toronto area. He is a strong supporter of relationship based selling and grassroots type marketing that targets building a community of loyal followers, one customer at a time.” The last sentence is quite telling.

I met Neil on Twitter several months ago and recently in real life. He’s always bright, friendly and busy making everyday conversation with his Twitter community. Although he’s always quick to answer customer questions, he makes a point of being himself and not overtly promoting west elm or its Toronto store – the first Canadian location – where he is Associate Store Manager.  A of couple weeks ago we had a chance to chat and in a few minutes shared each of our “how we got into social media” stories. I was fascinated by how he’s been helping west elm build relationships with customers one tweet at a time and asked if I could share some of his story with you.

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Photo credit: Eden Spodek

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A week of firsts... #digitaledu, Storify and Spin Sucks

This has been a week of firsts.

Last night, I gave my first lecture to our amazing students in U of T School of Continuing Studies Digital Strategy and Communications Management Certificate program or #digitaledu for short.

This morning, I used the Twitter backchannel discussion from last night’s class to create my first Storify. 

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