We recently had the opportunity to chat with Sara the Director of Marketing for Weddzilla and she shared with us all the fabulousness that Weddzilla has to offer. Please see the interview below that she shared with fellow bloggers:
1. What is your role within Weddzilla?
Weddzilla.com is the first website in the wedding industry to fully integrate the wedding planning process into popular social networks. Weddzilla.com leverages the power of community to simplifying 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.
Our focus is on bringing offline word-of-mouth to an online platform and the tools we give vendors access to will help connect them with Nearlyweds in a more efficient way.
2. How is Weddzilla changing the game for online wedding planning?
Planning a wedding is supposed to be fun! With a million sites out there focusing on selling brides something, Weddzilla aims to make their planning experience easier.
We created each feature with the thought that if it didn’t simplify something it didn’t make it on Weddzilla. Brides and vendors both appreciate how Weddzilla cuts out the guessing and wasted time.
3. What is the one feature you would highlight for Wedding Professionals to use?
The Weddifieds is hands down the game changer for Wedding Professionals. While sites like the Knot, Onewed, and Wedding Wire charge for leads, Weddzilla’s Weddifieds allows Vendors to get alerted for FREE when a brides is looking for them. When we were building the Weddifieds from the feedback of users of other sites – we got the same thing over and over again. “Find a way for me to cut out working with all the unqualified leads, and you will have my business”. Vendors can now do just that. Vendors can browse “Posts” on the Weddifieds or set filters to only receive leads within a certain budget range, or location and view qualified leads in their dashboard.
4. What is the one feature you would highlight for Nearlyweds to use?
Well there are two really. The Posts and the Weddmark. When we talk to brides one of the things they hated was having to call and e-mail so many vendors during their planning process. They would spend weeks and month going back and forth with vendors only to find out they were booked or out of their budget. That will never happen again when a Nearlywed creates posts on Weddzilla. They can now tell specific categories of vendors exactly what they need with budget range, wedding dates, and important details once and let the vendors come to them. These posts live on the Weddifieds I mentioned before…which vendors search and submit quotes to brides that are within their budgets. Vendors have to stay within your budget to quote and we don’t sell them your info like other sites. We organize any quotes you receive right there attached to the post so a Nearlywed can view and compare easily.
I can’t go without mentioning the Weddmark though because it’s my favorite tool on our site. We know Nearlyweds are looking everywhere for inspiration and wanted to give them a new way to collect and organize it. When you add this Weddmark to your browser toolbar and browse other websites and find an image you like – you can click it and we magically strip all the text off the page and leave you only images to select from. In a few clicks you can add something to your Weddzilla collection to look at later, share with your bridal party to get their opinions, or use for an inspiration board.
5. Do you do Webinars or educational series to help Nearlyweds or Vendors?
We want to be a resource for brides and vendors alike. Our current educational series focuses on social media. I can’t tell you how many times I have talked with wedding professionals and heard them say "I know that I need to be engaging brides via social media, but I feel overwhelmed and don’t know where to start."
That’s why we created our social media presentation called “Social or Die.” Making social media a part of your daily business routine is a lot simpler than you may think and our “Social or Die” presentation is takes a straight-shooting approach to help wedding professionals “get real” about how to grow their business through social media.
6. Tell us about your experience (an anecdote) about working with an up-and-coming internet company. What has the journey been like?
We have definitely had our share up ups, downs, and everything in between.
Every Friday we have a weekly roundup call to make sure we keep in touch with everyone on our team no matter where they are. My favorite part of the call is when one of our team members has to sit on the “Hot Seat” and everyone gets to fire one question at them. The question can be on any topic and needless to say, the calls always end up very interesting! The lucky “Hot Seat”-er also has to accept a work-related challenge with a funny wager attached if they don’t meet their goal by the following Friday. People have had to shave only half their beard for the day, go to work in a Mu Mu, and even reenact the “Dennis Quaid is Here!” skit from the Ellen Degeneres for You Tube. Just another day in the life at Weddzilla.
It’s hard not to imagine it now – we have a great team and have a ton of fun. We do a lot of crazy things, pull stunts, pranks, and probably have had an HR violation or two – but we all love working with each other and that’s what’s so cool about it. Being a startup means that its about passion – and it’s not about a job. We are all passionate about Weddzilla and I think it shows in everything we do.
7. Tell us about your gurus. How did you pick them? What will they be bringing to the Weddzilla community?
We love our gurus. And honestly, we don’t use them enough…but that is about to change! When we started creating the concept of Weddzilla we wanted to align ourselves with the best experts in the industry, but wanted more than faces. We wanted expertise with weddings, but also wanted them to believe in the power of social media. All of our Gurus definitely satisfy both of those qualifications. In addition, we wanted Gurus that were accessible…because in the near future we are going to connect them with our community in a way no other site does!
We have a lot up our sleeves, but one thing that is really exciting that I can tell you is that we are about to launch the first annual Weddzilla Guru Awards featuring our awesome Guru Panel. This year we will be naming 25 “Blog Gurus” and 6 of the top 25 will be handpicked by one of our Gurus do do an exclusive interview with. We believe in the power of social media and are awards are 100% community driven. That means anyone will be able to nominate and vote for their favorite blogs through October 5th. Weddzilla and the Gurus will be announcing the winners on Oct 6th – so make sure you nominate yourself and vote a million times!
8. 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.
9. I notice you have a Weddzilla You Tube channel…any good videos we should be looking out for?
We actually just started putting up some videos to our channel. We want to make it a hub for cool wedding videos from our brides, or anything else wedding related. We’d love to have our users suggest videos to us to add to our site or as a favorite. In addition to wedding related videos you can find tutorials on how to use Weddzilla better, highlights from our launch party, and will be adding more content soon.
10. 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! 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!
On the horizon are an iPhone app for Nearlyweds…if you thought the Weddmark was cool, wait till you see the iPhone app…It’s going to be addictive!
We have a whole bunch of new site features coming soon. The Ideabook, a new twist on the store, and we will be introducing “Wedding helpers” soon which allow our Nearlyweds to really get social and get their communities or, “wedding helpers” involved in the planning process.
Be sure to check out there site to stay in the KNOW of all things bridal.