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Business & Tech

Gourmet Food to Hashtags and Search Engines

From electronic engineering to gourmet food and social media, Melanie Yunk has written a unique success story with husband Kent.

Melanie Yunk was sitting in the middle of the living room, in her pajamas, sending out tweet after tweet after tweet.

When she discovered Twitter four years ago, she realized she could connect with the customers of Melanie's Fine Foods better. Tweeting began to consume all of her time until, finally, her husband Kent Yunk walked in one day and suggested that if she was going to tweet all day, she should find a way to make money at it.

That was the beginning of Roaring Pajamas, a company based in San Carlos. Yunk, who sold her gourmet business a year ago, began providing social media tools for companies designed to maximize exposure on a wide variety of platforms.

Keeping up with developments in social media proved time-consuming and difficult. A generation of change can happen in 24 hours. Yunk stays on top of it by attending seminars, always monitoring things and "living it."

Kent Yunk, a business management major at Eckerd College, helped design effective marketing strategies.

"What's the new technology? How does it work and what platform do you use? How do you juggle the things you care about?" Kent Yunk said. "Part of the challenge is figuring out the application for the software and how to use it. There's so much misinformation about everything. It's a challenge for anybody."

It was an industry that did not exist when Yunk came of Arizona State with a major in electrical engineering. She worked as an electronics engineer for Honeywell and Intel, and as an independent consultant in the semiconductor industry for 13 years before entering the gourmet food industry, which she also operated in San Carlos.

"The business came to us," Melanie Yunk said. "I started using social media for our gourmet business. I was talking to people on twitter and the next thing I know people are asking for me to help.  I eventually had to ask people to pay me."

Roaring Pajamas became a full service social media, search engine optimization and digital strategy consulting agency.

Melanie Yunk maintains an active involvement in the San Carlos Chamber of Commerce and recently sponsored a Social Media Day Treasure Hunt designed around Hot Harvest Nights. Clues were handled through twitter and answers were collected via photos taken by contestants with their phones.

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