Behind the Scenes at Springer Nature: Marketing

Author: Penny Freedman

What does it take to get your journal article from submission to publication? How does your book go from a manuscript to a title available at your university library? When your journal partners with Springer Nature for distribution, what steps are taking place to ensure all goes smoothly? We’re answering these questions and more in our new series “Behind the Scenes at Springer Nature.” Learn about the work being done across the company by our dedicated employees from around the world. Today we’re chatting with Deidre Hudson Reuss from our Springer marketing team.

What is your position at Springer?

I’m a Senior Marketing Manager for Springer based in Heidelberg, Germany.

What are the main duties of your job?

I am responsible for the marketing activities for the Earth Sciences and Geography program. My role is twofold: on the one hand to promote books and journals in these subject areas, ensuring high visibility and readership, and on the other to support content acquisition. That means reaching out to scientists – potential authors – to ensure that they know what author services Springer offers. New for example are SharedIt, which makes it easy for researchers to share journal articles, and Bookmetrix which measures the impact of books and lets authors see title and chapter level metrics for their titles.

A lot of what I do is social media marketing, maintaining and growing our various social media accounts. You can follow us at @SpringerGeo and like us on Facebook at Springer Climate. Another aspect is coordinating our presence at conferences, an opportunity we value to showcase titles, as well as to meet with authors to discuss publishing ideas.

What tools/programs do you utilize in your role?

We use quite a lot of different tools and programs on a day-to-day basis. There’s Hootsuite, which I use to feed information to our various social media accounts. In addition to editorial-driven posts, I keep our followers informed about author services, conferences we are exhibiting at, new books, and any special events or activities. Another tool I use frequently is our content management system, which keeps our webpages up-to-date, and creates the e-mails we send out.

What does your workday look like on a typical day? 

I usually start the day working on my bigger projects. At the moment that means ensuring that new journals get the promotion they deserve: setting up e-mail campaigns for them or tweeting and creating social media ads. The American Meteorological Society Meeting took place recently, so I was  promoting our “Meet the Author” sessions at our booth in Seattle. Of course, I also need to check my e-mail inbox to see what has been going on. With offices around the globe there is never a quiet moment! I usually end the day with a look at Twitter & other social media platforms to check out followers and to re-tweet or reply to any comments as needed.

What project(s)/campaign(s) have you most enjoyed working on?

I’ve really enjoyed working on our social media channels in the last few months. They launched at the end of 2015, so it has been fun to get them up and running with frequent tweets/posts to keep followers interested and reach goals in terms of the numbers of followers we set for ourselves. I think the growth indicates that we have been successful in providing relevant and interesting content.

Recently we had a film crew here, which was exciting. One of our Editors-in-Chief was here to be interviewed about the development of his journal (which got its first Impact Factor last year). Two of our in-house publishing editors created short videos for their profile pages to introduce themselves. We also filmed interviews for videos about a reviewer reward project we are trialing, which supports the non-profit humanitarian organisation Filter of Hope. A final video will highlight the Springer Nature “Change the World” campaign.

What do you most enjoy about your role/working at Springer?

I really enjoy my job! I have a scientific background, but have been in marketing in the publishing industry for many years now. I’m always interested in the new areas that your research takes us. It’s always nice to hear of an author or a journal’s Editor-in-Chief who is happy. Happy, because they have had a great experience publishing with Springer and can see that their work is available for people to read across the globe. I like being one of the many people here at Springer Nature who have contributed to that.