Jay Baer and why customers demand social media

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Updated on July 8th, 2013

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Jay Baer is a social media speaker, author and coach. His blog is ranked as the #1 content marketing blog in the world, and he’s the co-author of, “The Now Revolution: 7 Shifts to Make Your Business Faster, Smarter and More Social.”

I caught up with him at the Business Growth Summit in Sydney, where Jay Baer was the social media keynote speaker and addressed the summit about the future and importance of social media in business.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G5Dsxk2Swxw&rel=0&w=560&h=315]

Here is the transcript:

Adam Franklin: Hi there it’s Adam Franklin, and I’m here with Jay Baer, the author of “The Now Revolution“.

Jay Baer: Yes sir.

Adam Franklin: And I would normally hold up the book, but I’ve got it as an audio book on my phone.

Jay Baer: That’s fantastic. The guy who read that book kind of sucked, I’m just going to tell you right now. My new book, I’m reading it, because I didn’t like that guy. I apologise in advance.

Adam Franklin: Awesome. There were some great points you made today. One of them was like this Wayne Gretzky quote, “Don’t skate to where the puck is now. Skate to where the puck is going.” Can you elaborate on that analogy with social media?

Jay Baer: I can. I would say though that one of the problems with social media – and I literally get this question from companies: “Tell me what’s the next hot thing?” The next hot thing is doing today’s hot thing well. Let’s not get seduced by ‘new’, because new isn’t necessarily more effective. It’s just new. So I think there’s a lot of room for optimisation and improvement in today’s social technologies.

That said, I think the next wave, the next iteration is in social is twofold. One is video, like we’re doing here. We have crossed the chasm from a technology perspective. And smart phone adoption in Australia and the States in North America, in Asia, even in Europe and South America is now crossing 50%.

So when more than half the people who have a phone have a phone capable of getting high speed Internet access at all times, then there’s literally no barrier anymore to communicating video. The reality is people don’t want to read anymore. As an author, it scares me to death, but video is the future of social communication on behalf of companies.

Adam Franklin: As you said today in your keynote at the Growth Summit, every customer now is a reporter with a TV studio in their pocket, right?

Jay Baer: Yeah, I mean the things I can do on an iPhone now literally would have cost – and I’m not making this up – $US10,000 eight or ten years ago. To think that I can just pull out a phone and shoot it. I can edit it on the phone. I can change the lighting. I can annotate it. I can upload it to YouTube in 30 seconds. We lose sight of the fact about how mind boggling that is, because we’ve lived that evolution.

But if you look back, not that long ago, it’s crazy. I remember the days when people would never want to put video on their website because no one had enough bandwidth to download it. It wasn’t that long ago really.

Adam Franklin: It wasn’t that long ago at all. Another really great point you made in your keynote was the fact that a lot of companies don’t necessarily need to outsource their social media to companies like yours or mine: they’ve got a hidden army of people. Can you shed some light on that for us?

Jay Baer: Yes. We’re seeing a lot of this trend developing in the States, especially among bigger companies who are saying, “Look we have had a lot of third parties helping us with social media. Now we’re going to bring that back into our own fold and use third parties to help us with strategy, but not necessarily with execution.”

The reality is your own team, your own employees, can always react faster and always understand the culture of the company better than any third party. Like I feel like I’m good at understanding my clients. I’m sure you’re good at understanding your clients. But the reality is the client understands the client better than we ever will. So we’re starting to see companies understanding that their best social resources are the employees that they already have.

The key to that is understanding that social media is a skill, not necessarily a job. So yes, you’ll have people in the company who are managers of social media or directors of social media, but the key trend is that everybody who works for you – everybody in operations, in sales, customer service and marketing – can use social media to communicate on behalf of the company.

So everybody spends 15 minutes a day doing social. That’s what this is all about. It’s the same way we use email. It’s not like we have a Director of Email who’s only allowed to send email on behalf of the company. Everybody in the company has an email address. So everybody in the company will be active in social media. That’s the next step.

Adam Franklin: That’s great. One of the things I really enjoyed at the Growth Summit today is Jay’s point that social will continue if these customers demand it, just like they demand a website, they demand a fax machine, a telephone, email address. Social is just next. So that was a really powerful point. Thank you for sharing that.

Jay Baer: My pleasure.

Adam Franklin: Thank you Jay. The book is “The Now Revolution,” and we’re here at the Growth Summit in Sydney. Thank you.

Connect with Jay

Connect with Jay Baer on Twitter @jaybaer. Check out his website, jaybaer.com and his blog site, Convince & Convert.

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About Adam Franklin

Adam Franklin is the bestselling author of Web Marketing That Works. He is an international social media speaker and CEO of Bluewire Media. His blog was Australia's #1 Business Blog and his podcast was #9 on the top marketing podcasts in Entrepreneur magazine. His work has featured in Forbes, Entrepreneur, The Australian, Sydney Morning Herald, Huffington Post and iTunes. Download the popular Web Strategy Planning Template which has been used by hundreds of thousands of businesses worldwide. His weekly 'Bluewire News' email goes out to over 32,000 readers.