Aaron Strout:   
I'd like to introduce today's guest, Jason Falls.  Jason is a social media explorer and strategist at Doe-Anderson, which if I understand this correctly is the fifth oldest agency in the United States.  Is that correct, Jason?

Jason Falls:

That is correct.

Aaron Strout:                             

Thank you for joining us today.  I'd like to start out by having you tell us a little bit about yourself.  How did you end up becoming a social media explorer and strategist for Doe-Anderson?  What did your life look like before that?

Jason Falls:

Well, I spent 11 years as a public relations person in college athletics, and that doesn’t really have a whole lot to do with social media, but I also sort of on the side had a blog.  I started blogging in 1998, so I've been blogging for a while, and I've been playing in the online space and sort of exploring the social media, the social networks and the social media tools as they come along.  I was an early adopter for instant messaging and things of that nature.

Then my son was born three years ago.  He actually turns three on Friday, and I was traveling three or four days a week nine months out of the year and knew that I needed a lifestyle change if I wanted to be present, not even really just a good father, just present.  So, went through a career change and decided to move home to Louisville, Kentucky.  I was in Birmingham, Alabama at the time and went into mainstream PR and got a nice little job at Doe-Anderson, which is, as you said, the fifth oldest advertising agency in the country, working in their PR department.  Worked with some real good clients.  We have some national clients.

Louisville Slugger being – was one of my primary arenas to oversee with Doe-Anderson for about a year and a half.  But from the time I walked in the door I was jumping up and down saying, "We need to be advising client about blogging, talking about social networks.  We need to be looking into podcasting and web TV.  And if we want to remain on the cutting edge of connecting our clients with their consumers we need to be talking about the online space a lot more than we are."  Fortunately my CEO was sort of taking notes and listening to me even though there weren't any immediate opportunities to do that. 

So, a year and a half go by, and one day our client, namely Maker's Mark, which we've been the agency of record for Maker's Mark for 40 years, had a long relationship with them.  They came to us and said, "We want someone to start thinking about the online space for us," and my CEO immediately kind of pointed at me and said, "Okay, get off the conference table.  Stop jumping up and down.  We got somebody for you."  I started working on some social media and online strategies for Maker's Mark, and that's blossomed into a nice relationship there and we've had an opportunity to meet clients who're interested in social media programming that I sort of advise on the side.

But I'm primarily a Beam Global resource.  Beam Global owns Maker's mark, and so I advice a variety of brands in the spirits industry on social media.

Aaron Strout:                             

So, I'd like to talk more about that, but go back to the blogging thing.  So, you've been blogging since 1998.  I think you're probably a handful – you've got to be one of the first folks to try it out.  What got you thinking about it, and how have you seen blogging changed over the last ten years?

Jason Falls:

Well, I was writing a newspaper column for a very small paper in my hometown, but I was living in New York City at the time, and I decided I want my college friends to be able to read this.  I want family who don’t live in my hometown to be able to read my column.  So, I started looking for self-publishing techniques, and I think originally I was actually – I was using one of the earlier HTML editing softwares.  It wasn't Microsoft FrontPage.  That wasn't out at the time, but I was using an old archaic system of self-publishing, and so I would just put my weekly newspaper column on the internet.  Then eventually that evolved to if I could publish on the internet I'll publish more than just my newspaper column and start publishing my own thoughts about different things that maybe wouldn’t make it into the newspaper.

Again, this was kind of an opinion column, so it was more of a personal effort.  It wasn't really a blog like Social Media Explorer is, which is where I blog now, but it was just sort of my little effort to try to be Dave Barry, try to be funny on the internet, and it was really just kind of an online journal or the original interpretation of a blog at the time.  It was a diary for me, and it helped me publish my thoughts and helped my friends and family keep up with what I was doing up in New York City, which was a far cry from Pikeville, Kentucky, which was a town of about 7,000 people in the mountains of Appalachia.  So, it was a good opportunity to just sort of help people keep up with what I was doing. 

Over the years that evolved, and as blogging started to take hold – I think I might have even been blogging before the term "blog" was even sort of coined, which is kind of amusing, but once blogging sort of took shape and people started using it for business purposes I was still sort of stuck in this self-publishing routine.  I didn't care about using blogging for making money or commerce or advising clients or anything like that.  I just wanted a place to put my stupid opinion out there on the internet for my friends and family to see.

It wasn't until I made that career transition a couple of years ago and got into public relations that I started looking at social media and blogging very, very differently.  So, I think in the last couple of years, since the advent of the news aggregators like Digg and Mix and StumbleUpon and reddit blogs have morphed.  They've taken a different shape.  Prior to those news aggregators blogs really were your aggregators.  People would have entire entries that were just links to other articles that they were sharing.  Some bloggers still do that, but I think the more successful bloggers since 2005 when Digg really hit the scene blogging has evolved into content-based instead of just, "Here's neat stuff I found on the internet," and that's why you've seen such an explosion, not only in blogs, but in good blogs out there these days.

Aaron Strout:                             

Very cool.  So, going back to the Maker's Mark thing, and maybe you helped them with blogs, talk a little bit about some of the things that you work with them on to get a very old, well-respected brand – it's amazing that you've been their agency of record for 40 years.  How do you teach an old dog new tricks, and what are the things you talked to them about in some of the campaigns you work with them on?

Jason Falls:

What's really interesting about Maker's Mark, in my personal opinion, it's probably one of the more perfect brands for social media because it's very – it's a very social brand.  When you enjoy a Maker's Mark you normally are enjoying it with your friends.  And whether that be at home or whether that be at a bar or a restaurant it's a topic started, but it's also a conversation facilitator.  So, it's the perfect brand, really, to be stepping in to the social media space.  However, for a variety of different reasons, the least of which is the legal concerns of making sure we are not talking to anyone under the age and that we're encouraging people to drink responsibly, it's also one of the most difficult brands to take into the social media space.

There's the legal issue, but then there's also the issue that Maker's Mark has always had a close relationship with its consumer, especially its most close consumers, the Maker's Mark ambassadors who are members – it's not really a customer relationship program.  If you want to quantify it as that it is, but it's really much more vast and wide, far-reaching than a customer relationship management program.  But Maker's Mark has always held its consumers very close to it.  It's always been about sharing things with friends, which is a lot of the same speak that you'll hear in social media, but it makes it very, very difficult to take it into the social media space because there's no room for error.  You really don’t want to make mistakes with a brand that has for 50 years been about sharing things with friends, whether it be stories or whether it be good bourbon. 

So, basically, what we started to do – Bill Samuels Jr. is the president and CEO of Maker's Mark, and he really got interesting in blogs, really got interested in the internet, and he's not the most computer savvy guy in the world, but he's fascinated by the conversations.  He loves – I set him up – one of the first things I did with him was I set him up with a simple Google alerts to see what was being said about Maker's Mark out there on the internet.  This is the CEO of a large company that literally one of the first thing he does every day is he opens up his email and goes through his Google alerts to see what people are saying about Maker's Mark out there on the internet.

We've seen the opportunity and we've taken the opportunity as he's seen things that he really wants to reach out to people and talk to them.  We've either gone and commented on blogs, which we've done in a limited fashion, but we've also reached out to people directly via email and whatnot and engaged them in conversations about our brand.  So, from that sort of genesis we began to talk about blogging from a brand perspective and would he want to platform with people who are interested in Maker's Mark, and we ultimately decided that we wanted to do that, but we wanted to do that with the Maker's Mark ambassadors. 

So, we are currently blogging, but it's within the ambassador's program.  So, it's behind – you have to have a username and password to get in.  I've had a lot of people raise an eyebrow and say, "That's not smart.  You want blogs to be available to the public," but what I don't think people consider is that's very strategic.  For the last eight years since its inception the first people that we talk to about Maker's Mark is our ambassadors.  Then our ambassadors go out and talk about the brand to other people, and when we have the opportunity certainly to talk about ourselves publicly we do that as well.

But if we were to circumvent the ambassadors, that line of communication and go public with a blog without their blessing or without their knowledge and approval we would have basically cut them out of the communications loop, which would have alienated them.  So, we had to be smart about it.  So, right now we're talking to the ambassadors on a blog.  It's just called Bill's Blog, and it's within the Maker's Mark ambassadors program.  We've been doing it for a couple of months now and gotten some great feedback from them and are excited they're coming and reading sort of the weekly thoughts of Bill Samuels, and some of the other folks, Dave Pickrell, our master distiller went to London recently to pick up an award that Whiskey Magazine had given the brand.  So, he has written a blog post. 

Then Emily Reed, who is sort of the voice, face and the voice on the other line of the phone and the person who responds to your emails when you contact the brand through the ambassador's program.  She is pretty active in publishing posts as well.  So, we're having a lot of fun with it, and hopefully we're going to sort of let the ambassadors kind of own that and see where it takes us.

Aaron Strout:                             

So, what have you learned from them that you could apply to some of your other clients, or if a business is just getting started with community or social media what kind of advice would you give them that you've learned from this experience?

Jason Falls:

Well, I think probably the biggest advice – this is obviously something that anyone should do when you're starting the process of building a blog or building a social media program is really your audience.  We know the Maker's mark ambassadors very, very well, but the one thing we didn’t know about them that we've had to learn because we didn’t take the time – and this may have been a little bit of a learning curve mistake for us, but I don't think it – it certainly hasn't hurt us, is we didn’t take the time to do a technographic profile of them.  You can do demographics, and you can do psychographics and all that kind of stuff if you want.

We have a real nice sort of one-to-one relationship with the ambassadors, so we don’t normally have to do that, but I don't think we were aware of how computer savvy the majority of the ambassadors were from the get-go.  So, things like RSS feeds and whatnot might have been lost on them. 

So, we've begun to see how that when we reach out to them via email we have a monthly email there's a significant pop in traffic to the blog.  There's a nice, consistent flow of traffic otherwise, so we do know there's a group of folks out there who are using the RSS feed and/or coming to the blog everyday or every week, but when we send out that monthly email that has, by the way, in the last few weeks here the posts we've had on the Maker's Mark blog we see a significant spike in traffic.  So, that email outreach is getting some of those folks that aren't necessarily technically savvy.  We're certainly covering all our bases, but we sort of guessed from the get go. 

So, I would say that first rule of communication is know your audience.  You probably ought to know them a little bit more thoroughly than you think you do before you start.  That will help you avoid some mistakes.  Like I said, we have that monthly email, so we've been able to accommodate that lack of consistent traffic or consistent large traffic.  We've had consistent traffic.  So, that's probably one thing that I would say.  The other thing is you really have to be able to adjust and adapt.  If the ambassadors were to come back after the first blog post that we put out there and said, "Hey, we really don’t like this," then we probably would have killed it.  They are very much owners of the brand, and if what we do and you've got to be able to adjust and accommodate your clients and your consumer base because they are the ones that are ultimately more important.  So, listen to them and react to what they have to say.  Maker's Mark has been doing that for a long time, and hopefully we will continue to do it.

Aaron Strout:                             

Great.  I like that message.  So, my last question for you that I ask everyone that I podcast with is if you could only read one blog for the rest of your life, whose would it be and why?  The goal here really is just to sort of give people a good sense of what's important to people and who's doing a good job out there blogging.  So, give us your thoughts.

Jason Falls:

Wow.  That is just tough.

Aaron Strout:                             

Yeah.

Jason Falls:

I think if I had to read one I would probably have to say Jeremiah Owyang's Web Strategist, and I say that because if I suddenly were not blogging, were not reading other bloggers, Jeremiah has a consistent flow of very valuable information for the Web Strategist and/or Social Media Strategist and/or Community Manager out there, and that's what I do.

So, from a professional standpoint, if I had to read one and only one it would probably be his.  Plus, he has a very large audience, so there's some great conversations and connections that can be made just even on the comments section of the blog.  I've had the pleasure of meeting Jeremiah and getting to know him very peripherally, not very, very well.  But he genuinely does a good job of pumping out valuable information and content, and I think I actually heard him say at a conference session at South By Southwest that the people at Forrester Research where he works he makes them very nervous because he gives away a lot of knowledge for free. We are sort of entering this economy of free – as Chris Anderson wrote in Wired recently, and he is certainly someone I think who gives a lot of his knowledge and expertise, and it's a valuable place to go to read things.

Aaron Strout:                             

Well, I think you are now the fourth or fifth person that has actually said Jeremiah, which is good for him, and I think I would be hard pressed not to say Jeremiah myself because he definitely takes a good pulse.  A few of my other favorites are obviously Robert Scoble and Chris Brogan.  But Jeremiah, definitely he's got an engaged audience and is constantly delivering the value.

Jason Falls:

Of course, I would also say that if you wanted to read one blog the rest of your life as opposed to my life, SocialMediaExplorer.com's not bad.  So –

Aaron Strout:                             

Well, we'll definitely include the link to Social media Explorer on our little write-up.  Jason, it's been a pleasure talking to you today.  For those of you listening in, we have Jason Falls, who is a social media explorer and strategist at Doe-Anderson.  Thanks for being here, Jason.

Jason Falls:

Aaron, thanks so much for having me.  It's a pleasure.