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SMM: If you could go back to the beginning and give marketing advice to yourself, what would it be and why? JH: To trust my gut more often. You make these mistakes at the highest levels of your career. When I was the CMO of a Fortune 100 company, there were times I let those little voices hold me back from what I thought was the right thing to do. When you think it’s the right thing to do, that’s when you should be doubling down. What I learned from that experience is I should have been bigger, I should have been badder, I should have been bolder. When I started a little fire, I should have thrown gasoline on it and made a bigger fire. I thought that was the conventions of the role and the conventions of being in that C-suite so I let myself be a smaller version of what I should have been. SMM: Are there a few social media tips that you would like to share? JH: Engage, so if content is king, activation is queen, engagement is the kingdom. It’s fantastic to have great content. The key for winning in the long run is around engagement. If you are engaging with your fans and they are engaging with you, you’ll learn together and you create great brand ambassadors as a result of that engagement. Because organically, you’re developing these devout followers who become fantastic cheerleaders for you and your company. SMM: What happens when you have a raving fan turn into a raving hater? JH: If you’re going to be a leader, you’re going to have haters, it comes with the territory. You can’t push the envelope without tearing it a little bit, you need to get comfortable with that. You need to be direct with distractors, deal with them, but not necessarily placate them, and good companies understand that. Typically, people want to throw them free things to shut them up in order to placate them and I think that’s the worst thing you could do because you’re setting a bad example for rewarding bad behavior. 5 Strictly Marketing Magazine September/October 2014 8 SMM: Can you share some marketing lessons that you learned the hard way? JH: Moving with greater speed and taking more risk. We are constantly pulling ourselves back because we’re afraid of the worst thing that might happen which is always great to keep in mind, but when it comes to marketing, you need to ask yourself this one key question: is anyone going to die? The answer is, probably not. In fact, for Marketers, the biggest thing that we can probably get is a paper cut. If that’s our biggest risk, quite frankly, why aren’t we taking more risks and why aren’t we doing it with greater speed? Will we make mistakes? Absolutely! We’re doing more marketing digitally with tools that allow us to make adjustments as we go. We spend too much time listening to the little voices in our heads rather than the voices in our hearts or in our gut. We should follow our intuition. When we started entering into social media, into the broadcast mentality, we focus more on eyeballs and ears. We focused more on clicks than we did on the bottom line and I think we’re in a new era for marketing, we should be more focused around customer satisfaction, our environment and relationship with our customers. So I think if we move from eyeballs and ears to hearts and minds, the numbers might not be as high, but the rewards will be much greater. Jeffrey Hayzlett is a primetime television host of C-Suite with Jeffrey Hayzlett and Executive Perspectives on C-Suite TV, and business radio host of All Business with Jeffrey Hayzlett on CBS on-demand radio network Play.It. He is a global business celebrity, speaker, best-selling author, and Chairman of C-Suite Network, home of the world’s most powerful network of C-Suite leaders. Hayzlett is a well-traveled public speaker, the author of two bestselling business books, The Mirror Test and Running the Gauntlet. His third book, Think Big, Act Bigger, was released in September 2015. Visit his website at www.hayzlett.com