This week @Conz, Regional Director of Buzzfeed, spoke with us and gave us the best tips and advice about her job and the strategy of the company she is part of.
See here the questions that Postcron posed to the viral queen of social media.
Conz Preti (32) is the regional director of Buzzfeed for the Americas. She is in charge of the teams from Canada, Brazil, Mexico and Latin America.
She is Argentinean, based in New York for the past five years, the location where the company runs.
She studied communication at the University of San Andrés (Argentina) and moved to the USA to do a Masters in Digital Journalism at the University of Columbia.
Before joining Buzzfeed she worked in medias such as Mashable and Univisión News.
Q: What does a regional director do?
A: I do a little bit of everything.
- I’m in daily contact with the editors from Mexico, Canada, Brazil and in Spanish.
- I suggest notes from our site in English to translate into other languages and vice versa.
Buzzfeed has an overall concept that a news article in Brazil be translated into English by the UK team and be viral in both regions.
- I work close with the video crew to adapt videos made by the team in Los Angeles and produce new content.
- I spend more time in meetings than I would like to admit.
The TL;DR version is:
I’m in contact with all the parts of Buzzfeed whether it be adapting content to the region that I am in charge of or vice versa.
Q: What is a normal work day?
A: I get to the office about 9:30 which is late for New York but early for Buzzfeed. The first thing I do is send notes of the day for translating, since we have teams in the UK and Australia that already have a backlog of content that I’ve just got.
Then I spend the day in meetings, looking at analytics all day, I write notes when I have time and sometimes I go to videos that we produce in New York – being the only Argentinean in all of the company is good for giving another perspective on issues.
It’s highly probable that I have to interview a candidate for hiring. And so the day passes between emails, meetings and posts, with all the small breaks to take advantage of snacks and music breaks that we have in the office.
Q: Any inspirational phrase that inspires your work?
A: Not necessarily. I am not a fan of motivational phrases. 
Q: For us at Postcron, time is a key factor and we focus our efforts in helping our community save as much time as possible.
How do you manage your time in order to complete everything you have to do that day?
A: It’s difficult to have a really rigid structure at Buzzfeed because things change super fast.
We can have a really easy day where I can finish all my planned tasks on time and then there’s days (like when we publish the clothing note) where everything is running in chaos.
When I have a lot of things to do I block off some hours on the calendar where no one can call me to meetings, I go to a room to be alone with my music and finish everything.
For me it’s also key to have lists – since I work at Buzzfeed – and my life changed when I downloaded the app Clear.
Another thing that I try to do every end of the work week is leave my inbox empty. I have to have responded to all the pending mail and file them before I leave the office on Friday. I live for an empty inbox.
Q: Buzzfeed has demonstrated being unrelenting to return a viral content on social media.
What practices of Buzzfeed could intimidate a community manager to return a viral content on Social Media?
A:
I think the key to all viral content is that it makes you feel something.
It can be funny or sad, but awakens something inside of you. For me this is the desire to share it with the world.
There is no perfect recipe to make a content go viral on social media, if you don’t try new things all the time the effort is meaningless.
Another important thing is to always be listening to what your readers are saying. You’d be surprised with the quantity of ideas that have been taken note of from the comments of the most successful posts.
Q: What makes you take notice of an article?
A: Generally I look at an article for the title/topic.
Then I scroll through it rapidly to see how long it is, if its too long to read at the moment I send it to myself via email to read on the weekend. If I get to the end of the note – which happens rarely – I share with my social medias so that the rest of the world can read it.
I think many of us who are working on online trust in peer recommendations as those we respect. If I see two friends sharing the same thing on Facebook there are more probabilities that I click on this than any other thing, with more name, just tweeting.
Word-of-mouth is key these days.
Q: A tip for our readers?
A:
It’s difficult to find a job that you love, but when you finally find it you live for what gives you so much satisfaction.
It’s good and bad at the same time because you end up, like I have done more than a million times, working seven days a week and more than 12 hours a day.
I learned the hard way that the key is balance.
In conclusion, the capacity of a determined content to become viral on social media is very difficult to control.
A big percent of trial and error exists and a large part of the success is determined by your capacity to interpret it to your public. Like Conz expressed it, a good way to do it is to be attentive to the comments, even the bad ones.
I hope that these reflections are useful to you. I remain attentive to your comments about what you think is important for a content to become viral on social medias.
If you’ve arrived at the end of this article, share it.
Until next time!