We recently sat down with JSA’s founder and CEO, Jaymie Scotto Cutaia. JSA had just joined the prestigious ranks of the 2021 Inc. 5000 List of America’s Fastest-Growing Private Companies.

About Jaymie and JSA

Jaymie was the Director of Marketing and Public Relations for Telx, a colocation operator acquired by Digital Realty Trust back in 2015. Originally, Telx had a PR firm that dealt with a variety of clients, but with no real specialization in networking, telecoms, or IT. They were underperforming and didn’t understand the mission, so Jaymie let them go. She built the entire capability internally, and soon the company was doing all of their own advertising, promotion, and media. When Telx went through their first sale, she started JSA as her own firm.

J. Todd Raymond, the head of Telx’s Legal and Acquisitions team at the time, was the one who helped Jaymie with filing the company formation documents. He suggested the name Jaymie Scotto and Associates. It felt strange to her at the time, because she had no associates! That’s why on the ten-year anniversary, they made sure to change the corporate logo to JSA, making it about the entire firm as a family.

The Value of Good PR

David asked who Jaymie and her team decided on what services and values that JSA would bring to the table in those early days?

She said that the company had to redefine the word 'agency'. She never liked dealing with ad agencies in the past, and so she worked hard on JSA’s image within the industry. Public relations, event planning, and marketing were just tactics used to create a core message for a company. The real deliverable was setting up clear calls to action for each campaign, and then using the best tools available, rather than taking a scattershot approach and seeing what stuck. ROI, data-driven approaches were central to their method. And it worked.

In 2008, JSA started their blog ‘Telecom News Now’, recently rebranded to The JSA Blog which now has 250,000 readers in the industry. Readers include data center operators, telecom carriers, and enterprise businesses across all sectors who were interested in the colocation (and more recently Cloud hosting) industry. Eventually, they moved into social media, videos, podcasts... pretty much adopting them as soon as those mediums emerged on the scene.

Planning and Executing a Media Strategy

David asked what advice Jaymie would give to people who are interested in starting blogs and podcasts?

She said that now is the time, as they're hotter than ever. As an example, JSA started Datamovers the year of the pandemic, and they already have 7,000 regular listeners. Because people are working differently, some remotely, others with a commute if they're essential workers, others with odd or flexible hours... you simply don't know what the best way will be for any given individual to consume your content. So providing different methods to digest information is critical. Multiple channel marketing plans are the key to success in 2021.

• Step 1: Start with strategy. Ask yourself: Why do this? How will it incorporate your brand? Who are the listeners, what are their interests and pain points? Will you be solving their issues with fresh content?
• Step 2: Get together the list of aspirational speakers to include, both as hosts and as guests. What's the host structure, one or multiple? What is each host bringing to the podcast... a baked-in audience? Credibility? Will they promote the show on their end? Finally, which guests will drive value to the exercise?
• Step 3: Build a content calendar. Given the selected speakers, the goal is to build a consistent schedule. The time frame needs to be achievable, reliable, and realistic. Build in two to four weeks between recording and release dates, so you can be proactive in production, rather than reactive and frantic.
• Step 4: Book guests, promote, record, optimize, repeat. Any issues? Contact JSA!

David agrees with the consistency theme. Investing recording time, editing time, creating the associated text and interactivity tools, and marketing the podcast all need to be considered as costs in both time and energy. But delivering the same high-quality show fifty or more times in a row brings massive value to the table. He gives Jaymie credit for being a leader in talking to people within the industry and putting faces to important names.

She credits her clients and the team for a lot of the innovation. One of her clients came up with the idea for the TV portion of the media packaging. JSA TV now has over 150k viewers, not bad for a data center services oriented YouTube channel!

Communication is Everything

David asked what the main issues are that clients are trying to solve when they first approach JSA?

Jaymie says that the answer is largely ‘communication’. The pandemic was something that forced innovation in that area. The unexpected growth in data centers, the increased stress, the lack of human contact... all of that combined into a primal urge to reach out.

Data centers are now sitting at a unique place in history, creating an infrastructure for industries and people to work from home, to communicate with loved ones in brand new ways, to focus on public safety. People have had to reach deep and find their heroic selves, both as individuals and as company leaders.

So marketing for colocation facilities and data center services companies during the pandemic has been about telling the human side of the story. JSA talks about the key workers who kept things running. About the businesses that allowed people to reach out and connect globally, to improve lives, health, education, and everything else that couldn't happen 'in person'.

David points out that healthcare relied heavily on their telecoms firms in order to function. And that companies had to adapt if they wanted to be around when things started to get back to normal. These were compelling stories, things to get excited about.

He asks what else Jaymie is excited about looking ahead?

She points out that communication is the fabric of what makes us human. Building the digital infrastructure is about creating the next evolution of education for our children. It's about creating digital ways to interact, no matter how isolated people are.

Conversely, modern social media has created echo chambers of misinformation, where real data and science haven't necessarily been able to win out. Regimes around the world continue to censor science and impose draconian restrictions. So there needs to be ways that people reach real information, even if it's in secret and anonymously. Education needs to transcend social restriction, and give each individual a sense of empowerment. Since education is online more and more these days, and cost barriers are coming down, people from all over the world can use the Internet to pursue fields of study that can change the environment, change political thought, and change the future of the planet. And that's what she looks forward to in the future of the industry: More access to knowledge.

On the theme of planet changing technology, she's also proud of the industry for embracing new cooling technologies, as well as solar and wind power. More companies are using scientifically sound data centers that make use of the natural terrain and resources around them to slash energy usage and reduce their carbon footprint. It's something that she and her team love to promote about their clients: Their dedication to a greener and more sustainable world.