About

It all started when…

About Ernie & EMJ Social Media

When I created EMJ Social Media, I kept in mind that I wanted to provide something different to the small business community. I worked for major Fortune 500 companies as the ‘client’ hiring large marketing agencies and saw first-hand the disconnect between the service being provided, the fees we were paying, and the service we received. My goal was to create a boutique agency that CARES & feels like an in-house extension of your team. Always striving to go ‘above & beyond’ to provide exceptional service.

Disney hired me right out of school. I remember the interviews vividly, the excitement and butterflies in my stomach that my childhood dream of working at Disneyland would come true.  Three divisions wanted to hire me – Parades, Finance & Marketing – for my expertise in Apple & PC software products and my interest in marketing. I easily chose the Marketing Division. 

Learning so much about Guest Service, Customer Service & ‘The Disney Way’ has led me to a very successful career in Marketing.  It’s all about how to find & retain customers, or ‘Guests’ as we would say at Disney. I learned first-hand how to launch print, TV, outdoor, radio & online marketing campaigns. My personal interest in programming grew at Disneyland and I worked on the creation of several websites for Disneyland. Over the course of 8-years, I learned so much about consumer marketing – especially online marketing.

The Walt Disney Studios was calling my name.  The ‘‘Dot Com’ bubble was growing in 2000. I was young, energetic, interested in growing further and learning more. I transferred to an internal marketing/communications department that reported directly to Michael Eisner, the CEO of The Walt Disney Company. This was a bootcamp on how to communicate with every division in the organization on marketing efforts that drove the success of the company.  In a nutshell, when a film is released, we provide all the consumer marketing strategies & guidelines for how & what to market across Theme Parks, Home Video, Consumer Products, etc in support of the feature films. This was called Synergy and it was the secret sauce behind marketing at Disney.

What does spending a dozen years at Disney mean for me today in digital marketing?  All along the way I earned my ‘Disney Ears’  on how to market to consumers. The many strategies I learned apply across marketing channels - print, TV, outdoor, radio & digital. The tactics are different for digital marketing, but the strategies are pretty much the same.

Over the course of the next 15 years after Disney, I led many marketing & IT teams for many dot-coms. I helped to shape social media marketing strategies, website development, PPC advertising, SEO, blogging/content marketing & public relations. 

EMJ Social Media is a full-service Digital Marketing agency. I like to spend the time learning about new clients. One of the first services we provide, for free, is a full audit of your digital footprint. Do you have the right SEO in place? Are you maximizing all Social Media marketing channels & opportunities? What kind of content strategy is in place? Further, are there offline marketing opportunities that your company should consider?