Social Pros Podcast – Justin Levy, Citrix Online
Posted on 16. Feb, 2012 by Jay Baer in Blog, Infusionsoft, Small Business Internet Marketing, Small Business Marketing, social media strategy

This is Episode 3 of the Social Pros Podcast : Real People Doing Real Work in Social Media. This episode features Justin Levy, the head of social media for Citrix Online. Read on for insights from Justin, our “Work It Out” advice segment, and Eric’s Social Media Stat of the Week (this week: are people comfortable giving their credit card information to social media sites?).
Next week’s guest is Lauren Fernandez from Landry’s Restaurants.
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Please Support Our Sponsors
Huge thanks to Argyle Social for their presenting sponsorship, as well as Infusionsoft and Jim Kukral at DigitalBookLaunch. We use Argyle Social for our social engagement; we use Infusionsoft for our email; and Jim is our guest host for the podcast and a smart guy)
Social Pros Transcript For Your Reading Enjoyment
Transcription services from our friends at Speechpad.com
Jay: Hey, it’s Jay. We’re here on Episode 3 of Social Pros with my trusty digital marketing and social media sidekick, Eric Boggs from Argyle Social. Eric, what is going on?
Eric: Hello, hello, Jay. I’m very happy to be here. It’s a nice, cool day in North Carolina.
Jay: It’s not a particularly warm day in Indiana, either. It’s nice to be back on Social Pros with you after last week’s live podcast in a sports bar in Tampa Bay with Scott Monty.
Eric: That was a good time.
Jay: It was a good time. We’re back to the regularly scheduled program. We’ve got a fantastic guest today, Justin Levy from Citrix Online, who’s going to talk to us about all things GoTo; GoToMyPC, GoToMeeting, GoToWebinar, GoToBathroom. There are all kinds of products they have that he’s going to fill us in on and how he whips them into shape in social media.
First and foremost, though, I want to thank our sponsors, including Argyle Social, the presenting sponsor of Social Pros, as well as our friends at Infusionsoft, who we use for all of our email stuff, and Jim Kukral from DigitalBookLaunch.com. Jim’s going to take the hosting chair here in a couple weeks. He’s going to jump in while I’m out of town. So make sure that you are kind to him, Eric.
Eric: I will be as nice as possible.
Jay’s Thought of the Week
Jay: I appreciate that very much. We’ll start off the show as we always do with my thought o’ the week. It’s funny, this one rings a little bit personal. I got into it on a blog last night and the comments with somebody who wrote a blog post about social media “experts” ruining the ethos of Pinterest by posting social media-related content and infographics and things like that.
I created a board about best social media books and some other things and put up some quotes, and apparently that rubbed some folks the wrong way. I feel like it’s one of those circumstances where the social network of choice of the day takes on the personality of its early users, but then when somebody comes in and says, “Oh, I want to use it differently,” there’s a hullabaloo about that.
Eric: Nobody can kill the goose that lays the golden egg faster than a marketer.
Jay: It happens every time, doesn’t it? We cannot help ourselves. If we see an opportunity, we must exploit the opportunity. You may have seen the cartoon, we’ll make sure we link it up in the blog post about this podcast. There’s the guy at the keyboard and he’s freaking out, and it says “Pin All The Things.”
Eric: Yeah, I think Shauna Causey gave that in her talk at Social Fresh.
Jay: Exactly.
Eric: That was a very funny picture.
Jay: In this blog comments that I got into yesterday, there’s one that says “Must Co-opt All The Things” with the same guy. It’s super-duper funny. I’m actually starting to use Pinterest as a bookmarking tool. In lieu of Delicious or something along those lines, I’m actually using Pinterest as a place where I log and store all the things I want to remember that I read in social media. It’s sort of a visual Evernote, but on that platform.
Eric: That’s an interesting use case. There are certainly many more, I’m sure. I’ve seen a few, in particular, B2B software companies, use Pinterest as a visual gallery for whitepapers and videos and things like. It actually looks really good. You’ve got to wonder if they’re getting traffic or traction. But it really is a beautiful way to present otherwise boring resources.
Jay: One of the things to think about is that when you’re creating a blog post, in particular, I think most people feel like you should try to have an image in your blog post. But with Pinterest and the whole notion of pinning, it becomes really critical to have a signature image large enough for Pinterest and the browser plug-in to grab and that will actually resonate when people see it in their Pinterest stream.
Eric: There’s the next cottage industry to pop up. You have email subject line testing, you have tweet timing and content testing. There’ll be Pinterest thumbnail image testing before we know it.
Jay: Sounds like a company we need to create on the side with today’s special guest.
Eric: I just patented that, by the way. First to invent.
Jay: Excellent. We will put up the registered trademark icon when we talk about this in the podcast.
Eric: Pinterest actually came up at Argyle today, so it’s funny that you brought this up, Jay. Jill and Tristan, I’m not exactly sure what they were talking about, but the quote from Tristan, I think, was, “This might sound ridiculous, but we should probably consider Pinterest for that.”
Jay: I always like when the marketing guy prefaces it with, “This might sound ridiculous.” Way to sell your ideas in there, Tristan.
Eric: What was funny, Tristan said that and Jill, basically, responded with a “Ha, ha, ha. I told you so. We should use Pinterest.”
Jay: You guys have so many interesting charts and graphs from the research that you do. It’s not infographic, though you have done some infographics, but part and parcel what you do is you’ve got a lot of interesting individual data points. I can certainly see a circumstance where Pinterest would be a play there.
Eric: That’s been one of the interesting things about the advent of Pinterest and this tidal wave of infographics that we’ve seen over the past 18 months. There’s been a re-focusing on the visual presentation of data. The underlying data may or may not be crap, but things that are presented beautifully and creatively and thoughtfully are always interesting, even if it’s NBA basketball scores or marketing data or sleep patterns or who cares?
Jay: I think it’s part of a larger trend towards Johnny can’t read or Johnny refuses to read. If you think about what’s gaining steam across the entire social community, it’s all visual. Pinterest, Instagram, Path, etc., it’s all visual instead of words, and certainly instead of podcasts. But it’s all that direction and I think there’s a larger trend at play there around communicating, not just data, visually, but communicating every aspect of your life visually as opposed to textually.
Eric: I don’t know if you saw the new homepage that Marketo launched. Marketo.com?
Jay: I did. Yep.
Eric: Their homepage is an interactive infographic.
Jay: Yep.
Eric: For lack of a better description. It’s really amazing, it’s striking, but you’ve got to wonder if it’s going to convert the same way that a good, old fashioned landing page will convert.
Jay: Well, if only they were a company that could figure that out.
Eric: If only someone would invent marketing software to track it.
Jay: I’m pretty sure that they have a conversion rate test running at Marketo. I did see that and it’s a really interesting homepage. We’ll make sure that we link it up in the show notes because it is, no question, a stake in the ground. That’s not an evolution, it’s a revolution in how they present their front door to the world. It may or it may not work but I give them for credit for rolling the dice.
Eric: Yeah, without a doubt, it’s a gutsy move.
Jay: Yeah, Maria’s smart like that. She’s got gumption. We’ll have her on the show at some point, too.
Eric: That sounds great.
Jay: Speaking of Pinterest, there’s been a ton of blog posts and research and quasi-research about it that has come out recently which is fueling the mania, a lot of data points. But that’s not today’s social media stat of the week from Eric Boggs.
Eric’s Social Media Stat of the Week: 55% of Adults are “Uncomfortable” Providing Credit Card Information to Social Media Sites
Eric: It is not, actually. The social media stat of the week, though, does have a tangential Pinterest connection. I’ve been hung up on social commerce for the past few weeks, in part because Argyle has done some research in the area. We’ll be unfurling a new infographic in a few weeks. We’re doing a webcast…
Jay: If you’re going to unfurl an infographic, are you actually printing it on a scroll? Is it like on papyrus?
Eric: It is. We’re going to unfurl it on the side of our building.
Jay: I like it, I like it. I appreciate that. I think it’s got the wooden dowels, at the top and bottom. It’s going to be nice.
Eric: Exactly. Social commerce has been of interest to me over the past few weeks for a variety of reasons. Interestingly, Pinterest was in the news because of some commerce-related issues in which they were, I think, injecting affiliate codes onto the end of some product URLs. I don’t want to go down that path, but it is related to a potential business opportunity for Pinterest, and that is really as a commerce engine or a commerce referral engine. Neither here nor there.
I wanted to talk a bit about some research that was published, I think, this week by Digitas, or sponsored by Digitas. It was actually conducted by Harris Interactive. They did a survey of over 2,600 U.S. adults that are 18 years and older, the vast majority of whom identified themselves as social media users. They asked quite a few questions about social commerce. 55% of that sample stated that they were uncomfortable – and I’m doing air quotes, “uncomfortable” – providing their credit card information to social media sites for the purposes of conducting transactions.
Jay: More people uncomfortable than comfortable?
Eric: Yeah.
Jay: Giving their credit card to a social media site. That sounds like a stat. If you replace “social media” with “website”, and published that data ten years ago, it would make perfect sense.
Eric: Exactly. The interesting context around this is the fact that everyone predicts that social commerce is the next gold rush on the Internet. Booz & Company estimates that it’s going to be a 30 billion dollar global industry over the next five years. That was a number that was thrown out a few weeks ago.
It’s interesting to see that social commerce is pretty much agreed upon as a rising tide that’s just beginning to pick up steam. But, when you look at the actual user data and the user behavior, people really aren’t that into it yet. You don’t even have to look at the user data, you just have to talk to your buddies that sit next to you. People just aren’t conducting a lot of significant transactions on Facebook.
Jay: I guess on one hand, I see it as I’m not so sure I want to give Facebook my credit card number either. But then I look at it conversely and say, “Well, they know everything else about me. What’s the big deal about giving them my credit card number?”
Eric: Exactly.
Jay: They can probably infer it, do some sort of algorithm, anyway.
Eric: Exactly.
Jay: They can probably guess it like a safecracker.
Eric: There was another nugget that was pretty interesting out of this same report. One in five, it was like 21% percent, something like that, but basically, one in five of these people, and I’m quoting from the report, agree that, where possible, they would purchase products or services from their favorite brands on a social media site. So one in five, where possible, would purchase. I found the phrasing of that really funny because it didn’t say one in five did make a purchase, it said one in five agreed that they would make a purchase.
Jay: Sure. But I wonder if the thought there is, “Well, then we’re giving the credit card to the brand, not to Facebook.”
Eric: I don’t know. That, along with a few other things, are some questions that this survey left me with in terms of, the people that are afraid to provide their credit card information, how frequently are they shopping online? Is this really going to take the same path as e-commerce, where people, over time, just more and more transact socially as it becomes more the norm? Or is there really some sort of hidden line out there that people are just afraid to cross because they’re nervous about interacting this blend of commerce and transactions and their social daily lives that are online.
Jay: That’s interesting, because I think the party line today around social commerce maybe not being a tremendous force yet is that it is a user experience cluegy problem, as well as a ‘social commerce ain’t that social’ problem. It’s not a better mousetrap today, it’s just sort of a mousetrap.
But maybe it’s something bigger. Maybe there is an important trust factor there that supersedes ease of use and some of these other factors. It will be interesting to see how this shakes out. If I were going to put a bet down, I would say that, like we did with regular web commerce, eventually people’s fears will be overcome. Since we’ll be spending so much more time on social networks than on websites of any stripe, eventually social commerce will become the default just because you’ll be spending all your time on social networks. But I’ve been wrong in the past.
Eric: I tend to agree with you. I think it is going to happen. It’s just fascinating to watch how it’s happening through fits and starts and very slowly.
Special Guest: Justin Levy, Citrix Online
Jay: Absolutely. Speaking of somebody who knows a little something, not about fits and starts necessarily, but about social media commerce and communication, it is today’s special guest on the Social Pros podcast, Mr. Justin Levy from Citrix Online. Justin, good sir, how are you?
Justin: I am well. How are you? Sorry I missed you guys down in Tampa last week.
Jay: I know. You were all scheduled to be part of that whole deal and now that you’re a big corporate poobah, you got called into a meeting and couldn’t make Social Fresh. You could have hung out on the podcast live in the sports bar.
Justin: I would have loved to, but you know how those meetings go. They fill up the schedule.
Jay: Actually, I don’t, because I don’t work for corporations, Justin.
Eric: Yeah, I don’t know how meetings go, either. Tell us about those meetings. Actually no, wait, don’t tell us about those meetings.
Jay: I’m not wearing shoes.
Justin: I’m not wearing shoes, either, but I still have to have five or six meetings today.
Jay: What did you use for those meetings, Justin? Did you use something like GoToMeeting?
Justin: Possibly, with HD faces.
Jay: With HD faces. Actually, we were just talking before we went on air, Convince & Convert has been a long-time GoToMeeting user and the new HD faces application within GoToMeeting, which allows you to do HD quality video calls, is really spectacular. I really, really like it. I try to do as many virtual meetings with customers as possible and it’s terrific. The quality is really excellent.
Justin: Thank you. We love it, too. All of our conference rooms use it. We use it on our laptops and what have you, and webcams. We’ve converted our conference rooms to having large displays built into the walls, like a 55-inch TV with just a simple $80 or $90 webcam bolted into the wall. That’s how we conduct all of our videoconferencing now.
Jay: And think about what a videoconferencing system, point to point like that, used to cost. Tens of thousands of dollars.
Justin: In a lot of ways it would only be available to the C-suite or to a very select group of folks because of how expensive it was.
Jay: It’s amazing. Now, I think, most of the GoTo products are available on tablets and mobile and things like that. I have the application on my iPad, I just haven’t done it much. I don’t know why that it, I just haven’t. What’s the penetration rate? Are you guys getting a lot of mobile and tablet usage?
Justin: We absolutely are. We’re seeing a lot of downloads and usage of GoToMeeting and GoToMyPC, especially on the iPad and on the iPhone. As we continue to update the products and add more features, we expect those downloads and usage to go up. But it’s great because you’re not tied to your laptop anymore. You could be at a meeting or in a hotel room with just your iPad and be able to jump on a meeting and see the slides and everything. Whereas before, if you had to be away from your desk and a meeting was scheduled, you’d just have to call in and ask people to advance the slides or to describe something to you on the slides so you could respond to it. But now you can do that right from your phone or from your tablet.
Jay: Amazing. You mentioned GoToMeeting and GoToWebinar and GoToMyPC. There are a lot of GoTo products, as I talked about when the show opened. How do you, as the social media lead, coordinate all of those things? I think a lot of people don’t even know Citrix, necessarily, as the parent company of all these products and maybe that’s by design. But how do you balance the different needs of all the different product sets?
Justin: One of the things that we look at is scale on this. You see a lot of conversations on the web about social media moving into social business. When I take that back internally, the way that I look at that is in order for us to become a social business, we have to scale it and empower our teams.
I work on ways that I can partner, that we can empower product teams. We can have our product teams and our demand generation teams and those responsible for creating content and externally facing teams to actually help us build that content and get out there and manage those properties, and be at events and share, say, tweets from an event or where we might be sponsoring something.
Over the past few weeks, we did three spots on Jimmy Kimmel Live. We had some of our team down there and they were taking pictures and feeding them back to my team so that we could get them up on Facebook and Flickr in real-time as opposed to waiting for a delay or having to send one of our team members there to simply take a picture.
For the online division of Citrix, or Citrix Online, I just did a count and we have 50 active or soon-to-be active social media accounts to manage, including WorkShifting.com and the surrounding properties around WorkShifting. That doesn’t take into account all of the other Citrix properties. We have a corporate social media team that manages those.
Fifty properties in some form of active or inactive state is a lot to manager. But it also depends on the priority. Not all of them need the same level of attention. Twitter is definitely different than Facebook and YouTube. Different teams interact with it. We use Twitter and Facebook mainly as the customer support channel. 65% of all our engagement on Twitter and Facebook is of support nature. We have someone that sits in global customer support whose full-time job is to provide social support as part of the customer support team.
Eric: That’s fascinating, Justin. Are those problems getting resolved through social interactions or is that person routing the social interactions through existing processes and platforms internally?
Justin: Both. His name is Glen and you’ll see him on Facebook. Either star his name and put Glen or the caret symbol on G.D. on Twitter. Glen sits in customer support. He grew up in customer support, a career customer support rep, and showed an interest towards technology. He’s into all this technology and the web outside of work. When we were bringing together our social accounts, he showed an interest in providing support through there. He also had this base of knowledge around our products. Obviously, customer support deals with a variety of different things on a daily basis, whether it’s problems with an account, whether it’s an issue with a meeting drop in our technical issue, it might be feature-set request, it might be workarounds on the products or things like that.
All that information flows into the global customer support team. Glen, being on that team, is able to respond more quickly than if that flowed into, say, a centralized social media manager, who’d then have to go check with global customer support and wait for this delay in response. He’s able to respond very quickly and he generally responds within one to two minutes.
We take that information and flow it into normal business processes that the business has, whether it’s creating customer support cases or adding it to product workflows for feature and enhancements requests or bugs, whether it’s feeding it into a customer insight scene that does research into our customers and might put together surveys and things of that nature. So that information gets captured and then flows back into the business.
Jay: It’s interesting that you tapped him to do social, partially because of his deep knowledge of the company and its products. I think that’s a point that gets overlooked quite often. Instead, what companies do is say, “Let’s find somebody who is inherently social and teach them the business,” instead of finding somebody who inherently knows the business and teaching them social.
Justin: It should be a mix of that. You have to have someone in a strategic role that hopefully understands both, that really deeply understands social and understands the strategy behind social, but also gets the business. Then you can have people on both sides that either really know the business and learn social, or know social really well and then learn the business over a period of time. I think there’s a benefit to both.
Jay: I’m glad you mentioned Glen using the caret and initials. One of the things I noticed when looking at some of your existing 50 channels is that the company is really strong at humanization of social interaction. There’s almost always a name and a face and a real person associated with it. You’re not hearing from GoToMeeting, you’re hearing from Glen or yourself or other people on the team. I really believe that’s the best practice. I think, Eric, you’d echo that as well.
Eric: Without a doubt.
Justin: We see brand humanization as a big deal to the company. For social business or social media over 2012, it’s one of my six key objectives, to use brand humanization. We see it as a competitive advantage to us and also as a way to show the faces behind a company and to show the culture that we have.
It helps with recruitment and retention of employees, but it also helps us to be human to our customers and to our prospects, to show that we’re out there and we’ll have fun through our social channels while we’re helping people, and there’s always someone that you can identify. That’s why it’s important for even something as simple as a caret symbol on your initials; they know who they’re talking to.
Jay: At the end of the day, there’s no such thing as a relationship with software.
Justin: Exactly.
Jay: It doesn’t actually exist. You can have thoughts about that software and you can have perceptions about how that software works and how it fits into your life, but relationships are inherently personal and I think it’s really, really smart to do that. It’s amazing to me how many B2B companies, in particular, are resistant to allowing real employees to step out from behind the curtain.
Justin: And there are so many other opportunities to that, which I don’t see people taking advantage of as companies that we’re even trying to do a better job of. I think the first step is to initial your tweets and your Facebook status updates when you’re replying to someone so they know who they’re working with, especially in a customer support manner.
I know that, at least for our company, there are so many things that we do in the community and events that we sponsor and events that we speak at, and things that we do at our company, whether it’s a cookout or it’s a bocce ball tournament that happens at our campus, or just a variety of activities. All it takes is someone with a camera and some best practices and some alignment in partnerships with your legal and HR teams to make sure that you’re covered and that the employees are okay with, if it’s of employees, of sharing the pictures. You have to make sure that your legal and HR bases are covered.
There are so many opportunities to capture content that don’t take additional bandwidth at all. I think a lot of times in social it becomes this big, heavy lift in bandwidth, it’s going to take forever to launch and you have to have all these designs and all that. You can set up a Pinterest account really quickly to test, or you can take a couple pictures at your company barbecue to show the human side, like you said, of a product. Otherwise, it’s just there and it’s supposed to work when you want it to work and if it doesn’t, you call a number. If you identify with the product team that built HD faces during the bocce ball tournament, people feel more beholden to the brand.
Eric: You know, that’s something we did recently at Argyle. We launched a new feature and we took a page out of the Google playbook and had the primary developer behind the feature do the 90-second demo. It’s Stacy on our team and we spent a few hours shooting it, cutting it and producing it. She just looked right at the camera, saying, “Hi, I’m Stacy. I’m a software developer at Argyle and I developed The Hopper.” It was great. Our customers loved it and we loved it because it shows someone from our team who is actually building the guts behind Argyle. We’re huge proponents of that kind of thing.
Jay: Justin, do you have an internal social network that you use to communicate those things within the enterprise?
Justin: We have a few, so we’re testing. We’ve spent probably the past six months or so, maybe more, testing a SharePoint Intranet because our company is a Microsoft company, so we have SharePoint as an Intranet. Our internal Comms Lead updates that regularly and we have a social media section of it. But then we’re also testing with different teams, Chatter, Yammer, and other internal collaboration tools, to see what resonates with employees beyond email and email newsletters and things of that nature.
Jay: Just so people will have a sense of scope, how big is Citrix, how many employees?
Justin: Citrix Systems is about 6000 employees. The online services division, or Citrix Online, as a lot of people know it, the makers of the GoTo products, or the division that makes the GoTo products, is about 1400 employees.
Jay: It’s a pretty going concern over there, no question about that. You mentioned that humanization is one of your six big directives this year. What are some of the other things that you’re trying to tackle in 2012?
Justin: Some of the things are internal focus, the operationalization and governance of social. There’s the need to have enterprise-level toolsets, and we have some of them now and are looking to bring on others or how we manage these tools. As you set up these new accounts on different social networks and start to engage in it, as you look to scale the business, you don’t want to be giving out the corporate social media password to the entire company.
Jay: Right.
Justin: There’s a need to manage that with administrative tools, whether it’s access to Twitter, Facebook or something new like Pinterest, with the contributor function that Pinterest has now and who knows what they may roll out for brands for the future, if they do roll out features. There’s a focus on that, especially, as we expand social globally, which is another one of my objectives.
How do we expand this globally into markets that we are either already in or that we’re looking to enter over the course of 2012, and how do we make that a repeatable framework? There are a lot of considerations that go into entering a global market or entering a new region socially. How can we make that a repeatable framework where we will always have this decision tree to go to when we look to a new market and then actually launch them within those markets over the course of 2012?
Jay: It certainly sounds like you’ve got your work cut out for you. That is a lot to tackle this year. I’m very impressed with what you guys are doing so far in stitching together a lot of different products under the umbrella. WorkShifting is one of my favorite social media and content programs ever. In fact, we talked about it in The Now Revolution. It’s fantastic and I know you had a lot of hand in that program before you even came to work for Citrix, so it continues to be awesome.
Justin: Well, thank you. We have some big plans for that site. We have a new site design coming really soon with a bunch of new content and new features.
Jay: Fantastic. Please let us know, maybe we’ll talk about it again on the podcast or write a guest post or if you want to write something like that. WorkShifting.com, we’ll make sure we link it up. Justin, thank you as always for the time and your expertise. It was fantastic to have you here on Social Pros.
Justin: Thanks for having me, guys.
Jay: Next week on the podcast we have Lauren Fernandez, who is the head of social media for Landry’s Restaurants. They just made a big move and bought out all the Morton’s restaurants in addition to the existing hundreds and hundreds of restaurants that they own. We’re going to talk a little bit about social media in the restaurant business. Hopefully, we’ll be able to be eating steaks during the podcast. Eric, what do you think about that?
Eric: Jay’s guests are nothing more than a selfish quest to get free good stuff.
Jay: I’m waiting for the social media manager at Don Julio to join us for the podcast.
Eric: HD faces, steak, Ford . . .
Jay: I’m working on it. Justin actually used to own a restaurant. Do you still own the restaurant, Justin?
Justin: I still am a partner in the restaurant, yeah. One of my best friends owns it so I still stay tied into it, obviously, through that.
Jay: Speaking of steaks, Justin originally came to fame in the social media community for his adept usage of social for a Brazilian steakhouse.
Justin: Argentinean steakhouse.
Jay: Argentinean steakhouse, sorry.
Justin: Close enough.
Jay: Well, you know what? If it was a soccer game, that would be a serious transgression.
Eric: Yeah, I think you would have just gotten beaten up, Jay.
Jay: Yeah, that’s OK. That’s all right. That’s why I live in the Midwest. So that’s on the docket for next week. Thanks, everybody, for joining us. Thanks again to our presenting sponsor, Argyle Social, also Infusionsoft and Jim Kukral at DigitalBookLaunch.com. Until next week, thanks very much.
Social Pros Podcast – Scott Monty, Ford Motor Company
Posted on 09. Feb, 2012 by Jay Baer in Blog, Infusionsoft, Small Business Internet Marketing, Small Business Marketing
This is Episode 2 of the Social Pros Podcast : Real People Doing Real Work in Social Media. This episode features Scott Monty, the global head of social media for Ford Motor Company. Read on for insights from Scott, our “Work It Out” advice segment, and Eric’s Social Media Stat of the Week (this week: do brands use free or paid social media tools?).
Next week’s guest is Justin Levy from Citrix Online.
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Huge thanks to Argyle Social for their presenting sponsorship, as well as Infusionsoft and Jim Kukral at DigitalBookLaunch. We use Argyle Social for our social engagement; we use Infusionsoft for our email; and Jim is our guest host for the podcast and a smart guy)
Social Pros Transcript For Your Reading Enjoyment
Transcription services from our friends at Speechpad.com
Jay: Welcome to Social Pros. I am Jay Baer accompanied by the man, the myth, the legend, Eric Boggs. A very special guest on the show today, Mr. Scott Monty, Global Poobah of social media for a little startup in Detroit called Ford Motor Company. It’s actually amazing we’re here live. This is only the second episode of Social Pros, and we’re already breaking out of the format to do a live show in some crazy sports bar in Tampa. We’re here for Social Fresh.
Eric: Episode three, clip show and show the greatest hits.
Jay: Episode three, we go to Disneyland, and then there’s a rodeo. We introduce the young cousin. It’s actually interesting to have Scott here as the guest on the second show, because some people who have read Convince & Convert for a long time may remember I used to do an interview program called Twitter 20, where I interviewed people live on Twitter. Mr. Scott Monty was actually the second guest on that program, and we did it live at the MarketingProfs Digital Marketing Mixer in Scottsdale. There’s massive synergy here.
Eric: What was the fate of the Twitter 20?
Jay: You know what happened? I started that three and a half years ago. We actually have an eBook of all the greatest hits of that program. But as Twitter got so big and so cacophonous, then it became really mechanically difficult to do one-on-one interviews. The stream got too messy.
Eric: Well, if it made it to a greatest hits, that’s pretty good.
Jay: We did. We did like 22 of them or 24 of them or something like that.
Scott: And I’m honored, once again, to be number two.
Jay’s Thought of the Week
Jay: Exactly. In everything but guest hosting. So, we’ll start off the show as we always do with a thought of the week. My thought of the week is this, Eric. It wasn’t so long ago that it would have been unthinkable, unconscionable to show your Super Bowl commercial before it actually aired. It would have been crazy talk.
Eric: Definitely.
Jay: Now, the pendulum has swung almost all the way to the other side where almost every commercial was seen before the game. Is that a good idea, or is that just insanity?
Eric: My wife is like many wives in the sense that she recorded the Super Bowl so she could watch halftime and the commercials multiple times. I didn’t really watch the game. That’s what happens when you run a startup and you have a baby and you’ve just got other things to do. But there were multiple times where my wife shouted for me to come into the living room and say, “Ooh, Eric, this is the one with Ferris Bueller.” So they were so hyped before the show that she knew it was coming before it was coming, and there was just this sense of anticipation and eagerness. I think it’s brilliant. All of those commercials are going to live on YouTube forever anyway. Why not just go ahead and get it out there?
Jay: Yeah, but if everybody’s doing it, is it brilliant? The problem with marketing is that we insist on killing the golden goose. We can’t help it. Now the pace of change is so quick, as soon as somebody has a good idea, it’s beat to death in 20 minutes.
Scott: Don’t be a lemming. Zig while others zag.
Jay: If you’re doing the same thing that everybody else is doing, you by definition have no competitive advantage.
Eric: Which is an excellent segue to Mr. Scott Monty, who just gave a talk at Social Fresh in Tampa, which is great by the way, Social Fresh. Scott made a point to call out that Ford does not do Super Bowl commercials anymore, which is mind-boggling considering that car companies and beer companies have bankrolled for the years.
Scott: They’ve pretty much made the Super Bowl what it is, right?
Eric: Yeah. Talk to us a little bit about that.
Scott: For one, our product cadence this year does not align with the timing of the Super Bowl. We’ve got major vehicles coming out in May and in September, and that really doesn’t make sense for us to buy advertising now, primarily because, from a legal perspective, we’re restricted in advertising only within 60 days of the launch of a vehicle. So one, we can’t from a legal perspective.
Jay: You can’t advertise earlier than 60 days?
Scott: Exactly. We can’t run advertising any farther out than 60 days.
Jay: Is that in case, not in your case, but in case a car company goes out of business before the model exists?
Scott: It’s probably more to do with production delay and different expectations . . .
Jay: That’s why you don’t see any Saab commercials 90 days out or anything like that, because you never know.
Scott: It’s also a strategic decision. Everybody else is there spending exorbitant sums of money. We are not. We’re not there, and we’re not spending exorbitant sums of money. We have a limited marketing budget that we have to work with. It’s large, but it’s limited, and we want to spend it in the most effective way possible, not being part of the rest of the crowd.
Jay: You saw also the number of tweets during the game broke the record for the number of tweets per second, 10 million or something crazy thing.
Scott: 10,000 per second I think was the number. (actually, 12,233)
Jay: Yeah, which stands to reason.
Scott: And only half of them were about Madonna’s age.
Jay: Yeah, and the rest were her hamstring.
Eric: That’s what my wife was talking about, by the way.
Jay: Yeah. Women of a certain age were glued to that Madonna performance and probably rightly so.
Scott: Yeah, she looked a little slow to me.
Jay: Yeah, the hamstring. She had a pulled hammy in practice.
Scott: That’s what I’m going with.
Eric: Regardless, Madonna gets a retweet, plus one, and a like from me for her halftime performance.
Jay: A for effort. Exactly. Do you think this whole social TV, whether it’s American Idol or Super Bowl or what have you, this back channel, we’re watching it with one eye, we’re tweeting it with the other eye, is that ultimately a good thing? Because clearly you’re taking attention away from the core medium, which is television. I watch TV with an iPad religiously, and there’s no way you’re watching TV with the same amount of attention as you were before you had an iPad in your lap.
Scott: Well, I agree, but think about it this way. I actually wrote about this last year. The notion of live television having gone away seemingly, we’re all on DVDs or TiVo or whatever. To me, creating a social experience around a television show, whether it’s a premiere, a season finale, a special episode, whatever, you’re basically creating a digital living room of 100 million people. We used to sit around television sets with families, or farther back sit around the radio and watch the radio back in the ’40s and ’50s before there was television, and it was a shared experience. People would have that experience within their families. Now, it’s just a larger digital family. I think that connection that people are seeking, that back channel commentary, whether it’s snarkiness or sharing a love of a good joke or commercial or whatever it happens to be, that unites people together. So I think we’re actually seeing a return, in some ways, to live television and live events rather than a flee from them.
Jay: Interesting.
Eric: Conferences are the same thing. You saw, too. When you’re on the stage at a conference, you have to . . . I know when I think about building my presentations, I build them for the Twitter audience just as much as I build them for the live audience.
Scott: You’ve got to have those sound bites in there. I’m looking through here now (note: social fresh tweets). One thing I knew would end up here and I didn’t intend for it to be was that I said, “How frigging lazy to find us on Facebook.”
Jay: You saw what Kip from HubSpot did. He actually had his tweets in a quote bubble with a Twitter icon.
Scott: Yeah. That’s like he knew it was coming. Right?
Jay: Let me bludgeon you to death.
Eric: All the act was like, “Please tweet this.”
Scott: “Just take a photo of this screen.”
Jay: Instagram it and then share that. It’s fantastic! Speaking of today’s presentations, both Scott and Eric gave great presentations here at Social Fresh today. Eric, one of the stats that you had in your presentation was very interesting and got a real rise out of the audience. We’re going to use that as this week’s social media stat of the week. Cue stat of the week intro music.
Eric’s Social Media Stat of the Week: 91% of Big Online Retailers are Using Free/Cheap Social Media Tools
Eric: So, Argyle has done some research in the social media marketing practices of online retailers, which is a core segment for us and just an interesting segment in general. We took the Internet Retailer 500 as our sample, and we took 38 data points, publicly available information. One of the things that stood out was their usage of social media management tools. We found that 91% of the Internet Retailer 500 are using free or cheap – when I saw cheap, I mean $50 a month or less – social media management tools.
That’s interesting for a couple reasons. One, it indicates that there’s not a lot of investment in the space yet. Two, when you compare that to the technology spin that retailers are making in shopping cart platforms, email marketing platforms, social is a blip. It got a rise out of the audience. It got a rise out of the Twitter back channel. For me, as a CEO in the Internet space, I’m encouraged by that. I think the market is going to continue to evolve. Someone asked a question about how many of those are actually free versus cheap. How many people are actually using native Facebook, native Twitter versus TweetDeck or HootSuite, something like that? My hunch is that of that 91%, the majority of those are actually using the native tools on the platforms.
Jay: Do you think some people have moved to native because of the imbroglio with Facebook, where they were condensing third party tools and posts through apps and that whole thing, and that the word has not gotten out that that’s not as much of an issue anymore? Is that a possibility, or is that too inside baseball?
Eric: I think it’s a little too inside baseball. At Argyle, the deals that we win, typically we’re not displacing another competitor. We’re displacing logging into Facebook and logging into Twitter. So I don’t necessarily think it’s that. I think it’s more reflective of a maturing market. At Ford, do you guys use social tools, or are you guys logging right into Facebook? Or is it a mixed bag?
Scott: Both. When there’s free stuff to go around, who’s going to say no to that? You said cheap technology. It’s cheap in terms of cost, not in terms of actual output. The results we get are still okay. Now, Facebook doesn’t have the most robust analytics in and of itself, but it’s okay for what it is right now. We’re not going to waste money on a third-party solution that can basically extract the same stuff that we’re going to get out of Facebook anyway.
Jay: It’s an X and Y axis, right? So you have labor in your organization to actually do these things, and then you have software which theoretically makes these things easier or better. It would be really interesting to redo this study and say, “What tools are you using, and how many people do you have on your social media team?” Because I actually bet that at some point, the more people you have, the more likely you are to use free tools, because you don’t need the software to help you.
Eric: That’s a good point.
Jay: Thank you, Eric Boggs.
Eric: This is sort of off the top of my head when I think about Argyle’s customer base. B2B teams tend to be more spread out. There tends to be more people using the tools. Online retailer teams, the use case is typically somebody in marketing or the person in email marketing, and it’s a person or maybe a team of two or three. I think as your team federates and there’s more organizational machinery, without a doubt, the workflow that these tools enables becomes enormously valuable. For us at Argyle, we think about it more from a measurement perspective, and that’s the part that’s kind of befuddling a little bit.
Jay: It’s not so much the posting in advance. It’s the stats on the backend. And partially, as the presenting sponsor of the podcast – commercial insertion now by Jay Baer, host – is that because Eric and his team come from an email marketing background, as I do, they think about social from a very defined, measured standpoint, which is why I use Argyle. End of commercial
Eric: End of social media stat of the week.
Special Guest: Scott Monty, Ford Motor Company
Jay: Perfect. Let’s talk about Ford Motor Company and our friend Scott Monty. So, I saw in one of the trades today that your company is now allowing dealers to insert, I believe, real-time inventory into their Facebook pages. That seems like an enormously complicated program, fraught with all kinds of peccadilloes.
Scott: One would think. We have a great partner in Ford Direct, which is a joint venture that we own, that integrates with tier two and tier three dealers, which is really the bulk of where our . . .
Jay: Is that by actual revenue? Is that how you tier those?
Scott: By size. So not the big conglomerates, but some of the mom-and- pop shops, some of the collectives, like Southeastern Florida Ford dealers, for example, they kind of come together as a collective, and they get, obviously, better rates on software, lots of different things. It’s long been my personal contention that you shouldn’t be on Twitter and Facebook just throwing your inventory up. The way they’ve approach this is obviously through the customized tab experience, where it’s not the wall and the communication you’re actually getting from the dealer, but you can actually go on a separate part of their Facebook page and look through the inventory.
Why this is so important is, as you said Jay, it’s real-time. So many times, people see, God forbid, a newspaper ad. Bring them something advertised on the Internet, and they get to the store, and the dealer is like, “No, sorry, we sold that yesterday,” or “I don’t know what that was. We never had it.” So this actually ties with our backend system, so it is tied directly to what we see back at corporate in terms of what’s moving and what’s next up and whatnot, what the pricing is, all the options. That’s going to feed directly through Buddy Media and through Ford Direct into the backend of the dealer’s Facebook page. It’s a really, really powerful tool.
Jay: Not to mention the fact that, you guys both acknowledged it today, Facebook has 850 million members and an accompanying traffic stream that any dealer website, even Ford.com, doesn’t. People spend way more time on Facebook than they do on any other website. So ultimately, the future of communication digitally is in taking the best of what you have and sprinkling it in all the places where the audiences are as opposed to what used to be, back when we all got involved in this business, which was “Come to my website.”
Scott: Right. And people are still going to come to our website to do things. We do this on Facebook too, it’s not just the website – to do a build and price, to spec out what their vehicle is going to look like.
Jay: Configure.
Scott: You configure that vehicle, and then you want to see if it’s available, right? So if you’ve got a button on Ford.com that takes you to your local dealer’s website or Facebook page – either way now, it doesn’t really matter – to see what the actual inventory is, that’s where we’re going to get that stickiness.
Eric: I think that’s the big leap forward for retailers.
Scott: Absolutely.
Eric: Not just taking your inventory and splatting it on Facebook, but taking your inventory, splatting it on Facebook, and building a social experience around it that’s deeply integrated into the Facebook platform, has all the social gesturing associated with it. Building a Mustang, sharing it with my brother who might say, “Oh no, the black one is cooler,” or “You should get a white one.” That’s pretty cool. That’s social commerce.
Scott: It is cool. Have you tried the Mustang customizer app or the Mustang customizer page?
Eric: No.
Scott: You can actually build your ideal Mustang and then battle with your brother and see who comes to supremacy on the best Mustang built.
Eric: That’s cool. My brother would come to supremacy. My brother is a car guy, not so much me.
Jay: It’s funny that you talked about Mustang. It’s fascinating to me Ford’s strategic plan as it relates to social, because more so than many, many companies that are active and recognized for their social media prowess, you have such a broad array of buyer personas and buyer circumstances. As you’ve referenced in your talk today, the Mustang customer and the F-150 customer and the Flex customer, as I am, is a different audience. Yet, it’s all still Ford. How do you balance that? How do you bake consistent attributes into all the things you do social, but yet still do things that are brand specific so that they’re highly relevant?
Scott: Well, we just market to people who drive. That’s pretty much it.
Eric: Keep it simple.
Scott: We have to. We absolutely have to. When you’re doing something like the Mustang customizer . . .
Eric: By the way, Scott’s got the Mustang customizer flowing on his iPad, and it’s pretty awesome.
Jay: It is pretty awesome. I’ll take a picture of it for the podcast.
Scott: And see you’ve got the name of who did each one there. So, I think the important part is understanding your buyer persona. We came up with an ad for Mustang that was even too racy for Mustang owners. We wanted to see if we could build a little bit of attention around the Woodward Dream Cruise, which is a big auto thing in Detroit. A whole Saturday afternoon, people take their vintage cars, and they drive them up and down Woodward Avenue in Detroit. It’s so much part of the car culture. People love it, and they come from miles and miles around to show off their cars. So we had a billboard ad that we were getting ready to promote for the Mustang. I don’t think I have a photo of it here. If I can get it, I’ll share it with you guys to give to your listeners. It was on the wall of our agency, and I took a picture of it. It was a Mustang peeling out, just smoke coming out of the rear tires, and you had this white box above it that looked like the Surgeon General’s warning. It said, “Warning: May cause pregnant women.” Now that’s very different from . . .
Jay: I like it.
Scott: That’s Mustang. That’s very different.
Jay: That’s more like that crazy Kia ad from yesterday which was just . . .
Scott: Boy, that was something, wasn’t it? They’ve gone a long way. But even for Mustang, our brand team determined that was a little too racy.
Jay: A little too much.
Scott: We would never do that for something like the Focus or the Flex or, God forbid, an electric vehicle.
Eric: I’m thinking of two songs in particular by this band I like called the Drive-By Truckers.
Jay: I love those guys. DBTs, nice.
Eric: They make a reference to “I used to go out in a Mustang. Me and your mama made you in the back.”
Jay: You should be sponsoring their tour.
Eric: Yeah, so I know of one band that would stand behind that advertisement for sure.
Scott: There you go.
Eric: I was going to ask you about Google+. We’ve kind of talked around that a little bit. Ford is working very closely with Google on the development of Google+. Give us some context around that. Scott just gave about an hour long talk, super detailed, super fascinating about Ford and Google +.
Jay: Send us your slides and we’ll link them up from the podcast notes.
Scott: All right.
Eric: Ford’s evolution on Google+. What’s worked well for your guys, and what do you see as the next thing that you’re going to be working on, on the platform?
Scott: Give us some time to perfect this one first. As I mentioned in the Q&A there, we always have to be ready for what’s next, but I think we have to master the major ones that are here. I really feel like we’ve just gotten to the point where we’re getting more out of Facebook than we ever have before. We’ve reached a critical mass with a number of our pages. The Mustang page has over 2.7 million fans right now. The Ford page has 1.6 million. Once you hit that 1 million mark, there’s a natural momentum that takes place. You kind of can take a hands-off approach in terms of the build of the base. You still have to put content in there, but it takes on a very, very different flavor at that point.
Similarly, I think there’s a lot more potential, as I alluded to, with Google+ than we’ve even given it credit for. The notion of having a single Google+ page for the entirety of Ford Motor Company globally is really, really significant. If we can create a circle for Germany, and it’s only German language updates and it’s tied to Ford.de, think of the potential there where we can really have a unique and intimate relationship with those fans and give them exactly what they want.
Jay: People then opt in for the communication modality and topic that they want. They basically select their own relevance. As you mentioned earlier today, it’s much more similar to what we see in email.
Scott: Absolutely.
Jay: This is the topic of my conversation tomorrow, 10:30 at Social Fresh.
Scott: You could think of Google+ potentially as a sophisticated email platform. It just happens to take place in a more real-time environment. It has search implications there to a much greater degree than an email newsletter. You’re giving people the exact content that they want in the mode they want it delivered.
Jay: It becomes Facebook but upside down. Or instead of you shooting in the dark hoping that you’re relevant, people tell you what’s relevant.
Scott: Well, that’s one way of looking at it. When I did an analysis of this, I said, “Think about the evolution of Facebook versus the evolution of Google+.” Facebook was an inside out approach. It was started by Mark Zuckerberg within Harvard, and it eventually branched out to other universities and then to the rest of the world as we know it today. Now, it’s integrating itself into lots of different web products. Google, on the other hand, has basically bought, acquired, or built sections of the Web that you can’t do without, and everybody has a piece of, whether it’s search or video or blogging or 28 other things, and they’re bringing it all together with Google+, which I think is a much more powerful connection, because again, it’s about weaving social into everything we do rather than making you go to a single platform.
Jay: Absolutely. Google has so many more advantages. The only thing that Facebook really has going for them, and it shouldn’t be dismissed, is single sign on. They have become the passport of the Web the way that Microsoft wanted to be with Passport years ago and failed. That’s not an insignificant advantage.
Scott: I’ll take it one step further. Thinking of it from a retailer’s perspective, if we’re able to create a customer experience on our own websites with a single sign on, whether it’s Google or whether it’s Facebook, we’re suddenly going to have access to a whole bunch of social data about somebody and their behaviors that will help tailor customer service, our next email campaign to them, etc., to be able to know what really makes them tick. Now, if we come to this split in the road where it’s either Facebook or Google+ and we’re only getting a certain portion of their life and their actions in one versus the other, we’re going to have to make that decision.
Jay: That’s why I’m so bullish on Janrain as a platform and their social sign in capabilities. I’ll be talking about that a little bit tomorrow. I just really think they’ve got it figured out. Those guys are going to get bought for a bunch of money, because it’s just really, really effective.
Scott: Sign me on.
Jay: Exactly. Let’s talk about our famous segment, famous here on the second episode, called . . . what did we call it? Making it Work.
Eric: I think it was called Working Out.
Jay: Working It Out.
Eric: Work It Out.
Jay: Work It Out.
Eric: Cue Work It Out theme music.
Scott: Making it Work Out.
Work It Out
Jay: Making it Work Out. Cue Work It Out theme song. This is the section of the show where we actually try and help a podcast listener who has a social media question or concern, and we turn to Eric Boggs and our special guest to try and solve that problem. This week, we actually have a question from a relative of mine. My uncle, Lloyd Meyer, is the COO of Leo A Daly and Associates, which is one of the top five architecture firms in the world. I don’t know why he couldn’t just ask me this question. It actually makes me feel a little bit uncertain that he has to go through the podcast process. He couldn’t just call me.
Scott: What’s his name?
Jay: Lloyd Meyer. Clearly I don’t know anything.
Scott: Uncle Lloyd. Hello.
Eric: Hey Jay, could you please ask a social media expert this question?
Jay: Exactly. Ask Scott Monty, because your book doesn’t mean anything. So, the question is, obviously, Ford Motor Company is a household name and has 1.6 million Facebook fans, etc. and has a lot of social chatter just day to day. In his case, it’s an architecture firm, albeit a large one. Their customers are very distinct. They’re municipalities. They’re Native American tribes, things like that. Very classic B2B. What should their play be in social media, and what is the role for something like Google+ or Facebook in their world?
Eric: I’ll defer to our special guest, Scott Monty, on this one.
Scott: Excellent question, Uncle Lloyd. I’ll see you at the family barbecue to follow up on this one.
Jay: Next time you’re in Omaha. Four Jacks and a Jill.
Scott: Get some good steaks. So, you’ve got to ask yourself this first, Uncle Lloyd and everyone else listening. Where are your customers? What are they doing? Are they on this stuff? Are they on Google+? Are they on search for that matter? Are they on Facebook? Determine where your customers are and weave that into it. It’s not like you need to avoid it simply because it’s B2B. Last time I checked, people are behind these businesses. It’s not institutions talking to each other on Twitter. It’s people. So get that notion out of our head that it doesn’t matter because it’s B2B. But then ask yourself, “Where are they spending their time? Where are they making their decisions? Who are they talking to, and where do they get their information?”
Jay: I always feel like in a B2B circumstance, the social media playbook always tilts toward content. It becomes more of a content marketing play. These guys have massive expertise, especially in certain types of architecture. They do a lot in healthcare, a lot of hospital design, a lot of casino design. You could go deep in those verticals. SlideShare would be a great opportunity, infographics, podcasts like this one. You could do a lot of things.
Eric: Think about the things that they know about designing a hotel or designing a casino, whatever the inner workings behind these massive services machines. There’s got to be some remarkable content to be shared.
Jay: Helpful information well merchandised always works, always.
Scott: Helpful information well merchandised always works.
Eric: Everyone can tweet that.
Jay: Thank you. I just made that up. I should do this for a living.
Eric: You do.
Jay: There you go, Uncle Lloyd. You can call me next time. Or Scott Monty, whichever you want.
That’s going to do it for this episode of Social Pros. Next week, a man we know, Justin Levy from Citrix Online will be joining us on Social Pros. I want to thank Eric Boggs, the presenting sponsor of Social Pros from Argyle Social. Also InfusionSoft, we use for all of our email marketing, and then Jim Kukral from DigitalBookLaunch.com. Thank you to Mr. Scott Monty.
Scott: My pleasure. One final question, if I may ask you two, Eric, where do you get your pants?
Eric: The question is in regards to the argyle pants I have on. It’s my game day uniform when I give a talk. I like to get my pants at LoudmouthGolf.com.
Scott: Nice.
Eric: And I prefer the blue argyle pattern.
Jay: Why aren’t they a sponsor? Why isn’t LoudmouthGolf.com a sponsor? Let’s make it happen.
Eric: I don’t know. With the amount of Twitter feedback I generated with my pants today, they should maybe ship me the matching blazer. Hint hint, wink wink, nudge nudge.
Scott: And the knickerbocker version, too. Right?
Eric: Yeah.
Jay: Thanks everybody. We’ll see you next week.
Do The Work – Introducing the Social Pros Podcast
Posted on 30. Jan, 2012 by Jay Baer in Blog, Infusionsoft, Small Business Internet Marketing, Small Business Marketing, super-bowl
My new podcast debuts this week. It’s called Social Pros – Real People Doing Real Work in Social Media.
I’ve done a little podcasting in the past, and quite a few interviews here on Convince & Convert, and I’m thrilled to be adding Social Pros to the array of high quality content we create every week.
Tell Me More. What is Social Pros?
With your help via the reader survey I published a few weeks ago, we’ve designed a podcast that will be worth your time each and every week.
Social Pros shines the spotlight on social media practitioners, people doing the real work for real companies.
Each episode includes:
- Interview with a leading social media strategist, manager, director of community, or similar working for a corporation or organization.
- Social Media Stat of the Week, discussed and ratified or debunked by me and Eric Boggs of Argyle Social.
- Work It Out, where our weekly guest, Eric, and myself attempt to solve a listener’s social media issue in five minutes or less
You don’t have time to waste, and neither do we, so every episode of Social Pros will clock in under 25 minutes (ish), so you can listen on your commute, during a reasonable jog, or while your spouse is watching some crappy half-hour reality show that you can’t stand.
Also, every episode will be posted at Convince & Convert with a full transcript, because we know first-hand that sometimes you subscribe to podcasts, but then let them pile up in your iTunes.
Awesomeness! When Does It Start?
Now! Our first recording is tonight, featuring Taulbee Jackson, CEO of Raidious. His firm built and is managing the Super Bowl Social Media Command Center in Indianapolis (about an hour from Convince & Convert headquarters).
Barring any technical issues (fingers crossed), you’ll be able to listen via iTunes late Tuesday, and the first transcribed episode will appear on Thursday. We’re shooting for a Monday record, Thursday transcript schedule, and we’ll stick to it best we can, given travel schedules and guest coordination.
Who Should I Thank For This?
Argyle Social is the presenting sponsor of Social Pros, and in addition to the Social Media Stat of the Week segment, is handling much of the production work. Thanks guys! (for more on Argyle – the social media management tool I use personally – see this blog post about them).
Social Pros is also sponsored by our friends at Infusionsoft, who have an all-in-one email and CRM system that’s purpose built for small business. (for more on Infusionsoft – the email tool we use – see this blog post about them).
Digital marketing genius Jim Kukral whose new company Digital Book Launch helps authors market their books, is also assisting with Social Pros, and will be your guest host when I’m unavailable.
Can You Help Me? Can I Be On The Show?
If you have a social media issue you’d like me and a guest to tackle, or if you’d like to be a guest yourself, please fill out this form to send a quick note to our managing editor, Jess Ostroff, and we’ll do our best to make it happen.
How Can I Spread The Word?
Thanks for asking! It would be delightful if you’d consider tweeting, sharing, +1′ing, or buffering this post. Also, please subscribe to Social Pros- Real People Doing Real Work in Social Media in iTunes (soon), and check out (and share) the transcribed post on Thursday.
Let’s get this party started with a bang, shall we?
Thanks as always for your support of me and Convince & Convert. We have some other new surprises coming soon!
No B.S. Social Media Virtual Book Tour and Giveaway
Posted on 12. Oct, 2011 by Jay Baer in Blog, Book Reviews, Infusionsoft, Jason Falls, Small Business Internet Marketing, Small Business Marketing, Social Media Book, social media books, social media marketing
Video transcipt:
Hey everybody, it’s Jay Baer from Convince & Convert. Hope you are doing great. Today we’re going to talk about things that are no bullshit.
First thing that’s no bullshit is it is a Saturday here in beautiful Bloomington, Indiana. Going to go to the IU game with the kids. Go Hoosiers. However, it is also no bullshit that we are terrible. Playing Illinois today. Illinois 5 and 0, undefeated. IU, 1 and 4, with a victory over mighty South Carolina State. We’ve been soundly beaten by everybody else, so it could get ugly. But the weather’s beautiful. We’re going to tailgate and it’s going to be fantastic. (note: we lost 41-20)
A Great New Social Media Book
The other thing that I want to talk to you about today is this book, No Bullshit Social Media” (affiliate) written by my friends Erik Deckers and Jason Falls. They both live within a couple of hours of me here, so great book for the region.
I tell you what. There are a lot of social media books out there, as you know. In fact, I co-wrote one, but I really believe that this book is the best book out there for the small business owner and/or the company owner or manager who is still on the sidelines about social media, the doubting Thomases, the people who still say things like, “I don’t want to know what you’re having for lunch.” For those folks, and there are a lot of them out there as you know, this book is tremendous.
It really is an easy to read, easy to understand, compelling case about why social media and social media marketing make sense for business. How you make money, how you save money, or both. Great sections in the book about social media policy, social media resources, social media metrics, and ROI, all of it written in a way that’s very approachable for the small business owner who probably doesn’t have a ton of extra time to be reading blogs like Convince and Convert, etc.
If you’ve been doing social media professionally for several years, you probably won’t learn a whole bunch of new stuff, but that’s okay. That’s not who this book is for. It’s for those people who really do not believe in social media yet or just really haven’t experienced it. Give them a copy of it. They will thank you for it, absolutely.
Virtual Book Tour
The other thing that’s no bullshit is I’m really excited to announce that in conjunction with the book, we are going to have the first ever virtual book tour here at Convince & Convert. It’s going to be 11/1/11, so November 1st at 1:00. It’s a virtual book tour and giveaway sponsored by Convince & Convert and our friends at Infusionsoft. They’re a new sponsor here at Convince & Convert, really fantastic email and CRM software for the small business owner. So a great marriage between the book and Infusionsoft. We’re delighted to have them on board.
Free Book Giveaway
Jason Falls is going to present via GoToMeeting the highlights of the book and a giveaway. First 250 people who register for the webinar and show up, you can’t just register and blow it off, you have to register and show up for the webinar. The first 250 are going to get a virtual copy of the book for free. A PDF version of the book. You can read it on your iPad. You can read it on your Nook, on your Kindle, on your laptop, on your iPhone, on your Droid. It’s going to be great.
So check this out. Free webinar from the amazing Jason Falls and you get a free copy of the book. So how about that? Thanks again to Infusionsoft for making that happen.
I really do recommend the book, check it out. It’s on store shelves everywhere, or hang out for a couple weeks and get a free copy from us. But you ought to buy one anyway to give to your friends and cousins and bosses, things like that. You ought to support these guys. It’s a good book.
(Reserve your spot for virtual book tour and free book giveaway here. It will sell out, so don’t delay)










