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