Posted By: Michal
We love wedding planning site
Weddzilla for brides and wedding vendors alike - it is so easy to collect inspiration, plan your wedding, and shop for vendors you need. In fact, that's their tag line! We're helping to spread the word because we simply love the way they are changing the way brides can simplify their planning process. Last week we got to chat with Sara Morgan, Director of Marketing for Weddzilla, to find out more about this trailblazing site!
1. What is Weddzilla.com and what is your role within Weddzilla?
Weddzilla.com is the first website in the wedding industry to really integrate the wedding planning process into popular social networks like Facebook and Twitter. Weddzilla uses the power of community to simplify the wedding planning process for our Nearlyweds. It’s all about connecting them with their perfect vendors and making their wedding planning easy, social, and fun.
2. What is the one feature you would highlight for Wedding Professionals to use?
Our Weddfieds are the game changer for vendors. They allow wedding professionals to be proactive in connecting to the Nearlyweds that need their services anytime they want, without paying for leads. You can set your search parameters by zip code, budget, and wedding date. We notify vendors every time a Nearlywed creates a post that matches their search criteria and they’ll be able to start connecting with the brides they want to work with directly through Weddzilla.com.
3. What is the one feature you would highlight for Nearlyweds to use?
Our Nearlyweds are loving how easy Weddmark (a visual bookmarking tool) makes collecting and organizing inspiration from all over the web.
And of course they love the fact that each new item they Weddmark between now and September 30, 2010 gives them one entry in the “Weddmark Challenge” and a chance to win a $1,000 gift registry from Macy’s!
4. Tell us how the Weddmark came about.
After comparing when Nearlyweds created posts to when they got engaged we noticed that the majority didn’t start posting until 3 months after they got engaged. We started surveying and found that almost all of them were in mostly “collecting” mode for those first few months. So we put our heads together and came up with a few ideas and tested a handful of versions of what now is the Weddmark. Our testers almost unanimously hated two things about their life before the Weddmark:
1. They hated bookmarking because it always led to millions of unorganized links that they never looked at again.
2. They hated that they couldn’t share the stuff they liked easily.
So, we built the Weddmark. The current version is just the start. There will be new ways to Weddmark and more enhancements that will make it more social.
5. Tell us about your gurus. How did you pick them? What will they be bringing to the Weddzilla community?
The Weddzilla Gurus are our team of celebrity wedding professionals that will be sharing their awesome expertise and experience with the Weddzilla Community. The Gurus are not only trendsetters in their fields, they’re also trusted names in the wedding industry.
Plus, they all have HUGE personalities and that comes through in their blog posts and interaction with our Weddzilla community. They are all seriously passionate about what they do...it’s inspiring! And it’s why they have all gotten where they are today.
6. Why have you made social media such an integral part of Weddzilla.com?
Social media isn’t a trend, it isn’t going anywhere. It’s changing the way people interact and the way companies do business. The wedding industry is built around a very social community of brides and vendors. We wanted to create a site that took offline word-of-mouth and social networking and put it into an online format to create that same sense of community through our site. It’s all about engagement, continuous conversation, and instant feedback.
7. What’s on the horizon for Weddzilla? Tell us what we should be looking out for from you guys.
Up first is the Guru Awards …this is going to be really cool. We are all about social media and blogs play a huge role in the wedding community and we can’t wait to award 25 great blogs our Blog Guru 2010 title!
Also on the horizon is an iPhone app for Nearlyweds...if you thought the Weddmark was cool..wait till you see the iPhone app...Its going to be addicitive!
We have a whole bunch of new site features coming soon like the Ideabook, a new twist on the store, and we will also be introducing our “Wedding Helpers” soon which allow our Nearlweds to really get social and get their family, friends, and bridal party involved in the planning process.
8. Tell us the biggest challenge about working for an internet start-up company.
The biggest challenge of working for an internet start-up company is wanting everything to happen right away. I’m a big “ideas” person. I dream big. And this tends to mean that I love a little something called instant gratification;) My challenge working at an internet start-up company has been to learn patience, to let things evolve organically, and to realize that Rome wasn’t built in a day. It takes a lot of hard work and dedication and yes, time.
9. Why are visuals so important for brides?
Brides love to be inspired visually. Even if they have been dreaming about their wedding day from the time they could walk, it can be difficult to express to a wedding planner, florist, designer, exactly what they have in mind. Visuals give brides a great reference point. Photographs are also allow brides to conceptualize and imagine what the “big picture” will look like once they bring all the different elements together.
10. Tell us three things we don't know about you!
1) I was born on 11/11 in 1983 (8+3=11), was born at 9:11 AM and weighed 7lbs. 11 oz. So naturally, my lucky number is 2... just kidding. It’s 11.
2) I want to try living on the West Coast for one year in my life.
3) I have an unhealthy obsession with John Mayer. I have an entire playlist on my ipod dedicated to him and play it all the way through at least once a day. It gets me in the zone!
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