Founded in 1992, K’NEX Brands, the world’s most innovative construction toy company, was established to make and sell what has become one of the world’s leading integrated construction systems for children and is America’s STEM building solution. Winner of over 250 international awards and recognitions, K’NEX, America’s building toy company, is focused on Building Worlds Kids Love and encourages youngsters to “imagine, build and play.” From the living room to the classroom, K’NEX has building toys specially designed for every age group and skill level. The K’NEX family of brands includes K’NEX Building Sets, K’NEX Thrill Rides, K’NEX Education, Lincoln Logs®, Tinkertoy®, NASCAR®, Angry Birds™, Mario Kart Wii™, Mario Kart 7™, Super Mario™, PacMan™ and more. Since 1992, The Rodon Group, a subsidiary of K'NEX Brands, L.P., has manufactured over 31 billion parts for the K'NEX building toy system. Join us as we help build the leaders of tomorrow. For more information, please visit www.knex.com or www.rodongroup.com.

Rake Narang: Is your company’s social media a part time activity, or is it a core function that requires dedicated people and resources?

Barb Rentschler: For K’NEX, social media is a core function that is integrated with our marketing efforts. In addition to social media activities designed to maintain and develop relationships with our fans, we add social media efforts to traditional marketing programs. For example, when we ran the Golden Mario promotion in 2011, we used social media to generate awareness of the promotion and to share the actions we took when overwhelming interest crashed our server. Social media is another tool in the marketing toolbox.

About Barb Rentschler

Barbara Rentschler is CMO and Senior Vice President of Global Marketing for K’NEX Brands. She has a broad and varied background, with over 20 years of progressive experience, ranging from classic consumer package goods marketing to business-to-business marketing to strategic alliances.

Barbara brings her strengths in brand management, strategy development and execution, and creating market-focused high performance teams to help create increased market awareness of and demand for the K’NEX brand and licensed product lines.

Barbara currently oversees domestic, educational and international marketing initiatives including brand management, public relations, social marketing, consumer promotion, advertising, and ecommerce.

Barbara holds a BA in American Studies from Penn State University and an MBA from Cornell University’s Johnson Graduate School of Management.

Rake Narang: Having implemented a successful social media strategy have you partially or fully abandoned traditional PR?

Barb Rentschler: Gosh, no. Social media is another tool in the marketing toolbox. We seldom use a single tool when reaching out to our fans and look for ways combine traditional and digital tools to super charge our communication efforts. For example, we have a four prong approach when introducing new products:

1. Issue the traditional press release
2. Participate in toy tests
3. Create engaging Facebook posts
4. Send samples to our bloggers to encourage them to write about our products.

Adding social media to traditional efforts simply means we have more ways to reach fans and soon-to-be fans.