Guest Speaker Gino De Blasio

Reflections of this year…

At the Juice Academy, we are often fortunate enough to have some of the finest industry professionals come and talk to us about certain aspects of the social media and digital industry.

And one that has stood out in particular was the turn of former Tangerine and Head of content and social at Click Consult, Gino De Blasio.

After introducing himself and discussing his Italian heritage with us, Gino quickly moved onto what we were going to be discussing in the session - Search Engine Optimisation (SEO).

Gino talked us through the differences between SEO and Pay Per Click (PPC). SEO is known as the organic form of getting viewers to a specific webpage, whereas PPC is a form of Page Search Advertising (PSA).

This is something that I found really interesting, as Tangerine, the company I work for, are very big on SEO and SEO management, so I learnt a lot from that specific part of the session.

Gino then moved onto discussing how vital audience engagement is in social media.

He talked us through keeping up to date with audience attitudes towards a brand or product through conversation. This was something my cohort certainly found interesting, due to the fact that many of us work with clients who deal with customer engagement, so learning new ways to do this was something we found really helpful and constructive.

Gino then went on to tell us the story about Gary Vaynerchuck, who rose to prominence on a normal August afternoon, when he begged his dad to let him create content for his family winery.

That August ended up being the biggest selling month in the family’s history, and in no time, Gary had transformed his dad’s New Jersey liquor store into one of the biggest retail wine stores in the United States.

To finish off the session, Gino left us with a quote to think about: “If you think something is challenging, assess the situation and see if you can combat the challenge.”

Everyone took a moment to think about this and it made us realise that in reality, nothing is impossible.

It was a great talk from Gino and on behalf of everyone in Cohort 4 I’d just like to thank him for him time and passing on a fraction of his know-how to us.