Please introduce yourself and your website.
My name is Kent Lewis, and I’m president of Anvil Media (www.anvilmediainc.com) and Formic Media (www.formicmedia.com), two search engine and social media marketing agencies.  Formic specializes in providing SEM & social marketing services to small, local and emerging businesses, while Anvil focuses on enterprise-level clients like Real Networks and Borders Books.

Why did you start it, what was the biggest success so far?
I started Anvil Media in fall of 2000 as an Internet Marketing consultancy. I hired my first full-time employees in 2004 and our team is currently at 12, with 40+ clients. I believe Anvil’s biggest success thus far has been achieving a Fastest Growing Company in Portland the past two years, despite having no dedicated sales team or marketing budget.

I launched Formic Media in the fall of 2008 (I seem to like starting businesses during recessions) as there was a significant demand for Anvil’s services from smaller businesses that I could not profitably support. I created an entirely new business model, team and structure with Formic. Formic’s greatest success has been the exclusive status as Microsoft’s SEM vendor for the Ready to Go Marketing program, which supports over 150,000 Microsoft resellers.

Where do you get the new links and content?
While Anvil & Formic primarily support client initiatives, we do manage our own blogs. Anvil has two active blogs, Reputation Watch (http://www.reputation-watch.com) and SocialSearchMarketer (http://www.socialsearchmarketer.com).

The Anvil team is 100% responsible for developing content for our blogs and social media presence (Twitter & Facebook).

We primarily rely on internal marketing efforts (newsletter, PR & social media) to promote our site as well as limited SEO activities to generate awareness and traffic.

You are a Twitter expert, which tools can you recommend?
These are the best tools we can recommend when using Twitter:

-Market Research: utilize TweetBeep, TweetDeck, Twitalyzer, Search.Twitter.com, SM2 and HootSuite to identify prospective partners & clients, new trends and tools

-Sales & Marketing: utilize Ping.FM, HootSuite to manage multiple profiles, send marketing messages, schedule tweets and measure click-throughs

-Community Engagement: utilize TweetBeep, TweetDeck and HootSuite to identify conversations of interest and participate

-Online Reputation Management: optimize profile with keywords to show up in searches both on Twitter and Google

In retro-spec, what would you do differently?
No major regrets with our social media presence, other than the most common agency pitfall: not being able to dedicate the time required to do everything we want in terms of content & marketing. Clients always come first.

Please tell our readers your favorite blogs.
My favorite blogs are Seth Godin (http://sethgodin.typepad.com), Mashable (http://mashable.com/) and John Battelle (http://battellemedia.com/)

Please see a few resources from our site, as I believe they’re relevant and helpful to all readers:

http://www.imediaconnection.com/content/24165.asp

http://www.imediaconnection.com/content/25116.asp

http://www.anvilmediainc.com/linkedin-twitter-profile-optimization-article.htm

http://www.anvilmediainc.com/social-media-marketing-whitepaper.html

Thanks for the interview!