Kyle Hoedl is the Senior Social Media Manager at Viacom International Media Networks (VIMN). In this global role, Kyle manages all things social media-related for MTV and Nickelodeon outside of the United States. Hired in 2011, he created and oversees the global social media strategy for VIMN as well as the day-to-day work of dozens of social media managers around the world that are managing more than 200 communities across Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Tumblr, Instagram, and YouTube. In addition to the daily oversight of all things community-related for the TV networks, Kyle works with cross-functional teams across all lines of business to create social marketing campaigns for priority programming, tentpole events like the European Music Awards (EMA), and revenue-important ad sales deals and vertical communities, like Movies.MTV and the District MTV fashion site. Upon joining VIMN in the newly-created role of Social Media Manager in mid-2011, Kyle dove headfirst into transforming the way the company viewed social media. In today’s ever-social TV environment, it’s extremely important for social media to be in the forefront for how VIMN communicates with its target demo: teens and young adults. That’s why Kyle quickly worked with marketing and digital teams to reposition how VIMN views social media and creates marketing campaigns, putting social media and content creation as the focus of show promotion and big events and training teams around the world on social media best practices. In 18 short months, Kyle has transformed the way everyone from local social teams to senior management views and understands social media marketing. In 2012, Kyle led the launch of ten global social marketing campaigns for major shows like Awkward, the EMA, Beavis & Butthead, and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. What makes this most impressive is that all campaigns must take into account that Viacom programming is shown across 600 million homes in 160 territories. That means dozens of different languages, cultures, and social media habits. The scale alone of VIMN’s reach makes anything we do exponentially more complex, but Kyle ensured that campaigns took language, culture, and varied on-air timings into consideration. He did this by working with regional teams to plan and implement local iterations of each campaign by market, which led to a record-breaking year for many shows, especially the EMA and Awkward. In addition to supporting programming, Kyle works closely with VIMN’s ad sales unit to insert social media into major client partnerships, regularly trains more than 50 local social media managers around the world, advises on major social vendor partnerships, and works with research to stay up-to-date on social media trends around the world. In many teams at TV networks, these jobs are divided among multiple people focused on each area. At VIMN, Kyle handles them all smoothly and effectively as the social media team of one. Since joining VIMN, a few of Kyle’s many accomplishments are: - More than 200% increase in fans/followers within international social communities - An increase of social refers to local MTV sites (in particular: a YoY increase of 75% to the MTV EMA site). - A record-breaking EMA, generating 5.4m tweets and 39 worldwide trending topics during the show (104% increase YoY)
