RIESTER

I met Professor Hester on Twitter. We spoke recently about some of the new tools of our trade.

Advertising Professor JB Hester.

Breitinger: Can you to define the term social media?

Hester: I don’t like the term. I think that’s from being in advertising, when I think of media I think of things very differently. The term “media,” a real strict definition of it that we learned way back in school is: a carrier or deliverer of information, entertainment, and advertising. These tools that we’re talking about, like Facebook and Twitter and LinkedIn, they’re more than that. They’re not just a channel and what people do with them is more than just one-way communication. And so, the term media just doesn’t seem to capture the essence of what is going on here. I like “social networking,” that’s kind of my favorite term for all this.

What are some of your favorite advertising and marketing blogs?

I was reading RIESTER’s earlier and I will give you guys credit, your blog is very nice. The thing that I like, is getting a good idea of who the people are at your agency. I told somebody earlier that I was going to do this phone call and that I probably know more about you than I do a lot of the people in the advertising industry in this area. Just because I’ve seen so much stuff on Twitter and I’ve read your blog.

I like that you’re creative. I get the impression that the people who work there are very much into their clients. Let me see if I can express that a little more clearly: When I was first getting started in advertising I was a big David Ogilvy fan. And one of the things that Ogilvy stressed was use your client’s products. And he wanted people who were passionate about those clients and I get that feeling from your agency.

Can you talk about organizations or brands tweeting?

This is one of those real interesting areas because Twitter wasn’t designed so that brands could use it. That wasn’t the purpose when it was developed. So it’s interesting to look at how brands have used it and some of them do better than others obviously and they do it in different ways.

The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill is one of America's finest universities. This is the Old Well.

We have a former student named Alexa Robinson and she handles the Twitter account for Pizza Hut and she’s really fun to talk to because she tells stories about how she first started. The lawyers for Pizza Hut wanted to look at every single tweet before it went out. You’re thinking ‘okay, this doesn’t work that way.’

You’ve got a lot of different things going on here. Some brands are really flying by the seat of their pants. Actually I should re-phrase that—I think almost all of them are. Because this kind of stuff is so new, that we don’t necessarily know exactly the best way to do everything.

There are some brands that treat social networking tools as though they were just another broadcast channel. That’s probably not the best use,  but it is a way to use them. I hate when I read those articles by self-proclaimed experts that you have to do this or you cannot do this in these various platforms because you know if a company gets information out by using Twitter purely as a broadcast channel and it gets to who they want it to get to, good for them! That’s fine. That’s one way to use it.

There are interesting things that happen because social networking platforms are so very different from the traditional things we’ve been using.

What are some advantages for you for in using Twitter?

The most obvious advantage for me is that it’s a great way for me to connect to the industry. You can get isolated in the university if you’re not careful especially if you’re in a professional program where you’re teaching advertising, you have to be careful that you don’t do that. It does help me there. It helps with a lot with my students. I’ve got a class of 92 people this semester and I bet you that 80 of them were already on Twitter when they came to class yesterday. Students in that young demographic have discovered Twitter.

We met JB Hester on Twitter.

Traditional broadcast media channels aren’t getting the market share that they once did. What trends do you talk about with your students regarding broadcast media advertising and also how important is that as part of the mix these days?

It’s still really important if you’re looking for a big audience. Joseph Jaffe wrote that book a few years ago about the death of the 30-second spot. Well I’m sorry Joseph but the 30-second spot is not dead yet. It still works and it actually can work really well. It’s not that social media is replacing traditional media, it’s just yet another tool and we spend actually in our curriculum we spend a lot of time talking about all of the various options that you have. TV is still a big part of it. The thing that happens now of course is you do TV, and then you’ve got a version of that that goes on YouTube and you hope you go viral.

Do you talk about the characteristics of something going viral in the classroom?

We do. You have to actually be careful because getting something to go viral is very hard. You don’t want to have a bunch of students working on a project and have every one of them saying “And we’re going to do this thing and it’s going to go viral.” Because that’s not the way it works necessarily. So we talk a lot about how difficult it is. It’s like everything else in advertising—to do it really well is really difficult.

Why does a particular ad catch the imagination of people and become part of popular culture? It’s very hard to sit down and quantify and say it’s x, y and z and that’s how we can reproduce and do it again. I think that if you have really good creative people who are really tuned into the world you’ve got a good shot.

What are some common misconceptions you see regarding social networking platforms?

Especially since I deal with students primarily and I have to be careful here because I’m not trying to say that students don’t know as much but they haven’t thought through things from a business standpoint. Having a Twitter account and having a Facebook page, great. But what are you going to with it? It’s the strategy behind it and I think that’s the biggest misconception that people have. The other misconception is that it’s free. It’s not going to cost anything to do this. Sure it doesn’t cost anything to open up an account but somebody’s got to do all the tweeting. But back to the strategy point, if you’re a business anything you do should be strategic. You should have a goal in mind. You’re trying to increase sales or increase foot-traffic or whatever it is. You set out a way to do that and all these tools are things that you can use that relate to various strategic goals that the company has. I think the biggest misconception is “Well we have a Facebook page, so why aren’t people coming in the door?”

Please expand on that a little bit? Say you’re speaking at a conference to business people, how would you describe for them the characteristics they should look for in who they hire to do their social networking?

You just get an intern, didn’t you know? Sorry that’s kind of the joke these days. I think a lot of it’s going to depend on what you’re trying to do. If I’m going to use Twitter to pump out discount codes where today only if they come in and mention this they’ll get 20% off that’s a totally different thing than if you’re trying to build a relationship with key customers versus if you’re trying to get foot-traffic versus if you’re trying to build followers. There’s all these things. If I were giving a speech to business people, my question is not what you can do on Twitter or Facebook or insert social media here, but why should you use it to begin with?

Professor Hester likes Doritos. He discusses one way this brand is using its social networking tools to interact with customers.

A lot of businesses probably could do a lot more with it but you’ve got to figure out what the heck you’re trying to do with it and go from there. In terms of hiring people, obviously you need people who understand the various tools. But it’s like hiring someone to make ads, if you’re hiring an art director to do magazine ads obviously they need to know a lot about typography and color and all those wonderful things about production but they also need to understand advertising. They need to understand what gets a reaction from people. How you can combine a headline and a visual to sell a product. So it’s the same issue now. It’s really not that different. It’s just different sets of skills.

What about Facebook? How do you see that fitting into the world of marketing?

Facebook is fascinating because there’s so much information that can be used to target in Facebook. If you want only men, only in a specific age group, only in a specific part of the country, who only have expressed an interest in underwater skydiving or whatever. Facebook has got all of that information and can do that for you. And so you can get incredibly targeted things.

When I go on my Facebook account which I do at least a couple times a day, it’s real fascinating to look at what ads I’m being served and to see if they relate to what Facebook knows about me and most of the time they really do. Probably the two big Internet success stories advertising-wise are Facebook and Google ads because in both instances you’ve got a situation where it’s highly, highly targeted.

What about a Facebook page?

A Facebook page is a little different story. And I actually picked Doritos because of some interaction I had with them on Twitter. Because I’m a big fan of the Habanero Doritos and they were taken off the market and I learned through their Twitter feed that the flavor was coming back. So that made me go to the Facebook Doritos page and become a fan there and sure enough they brought back that flavor even though I still can’t get it. But in terms of an ad on Facebook for a lot of companies that’s not really going got drive sales or anything. But for others it may be very, very good.

That’s a good example of interacting with a brand. You don’t usually have that opportunity, at least not very easily.

Right. It’s also a good example because I think most people would say “Why on Earth would you want to interact with Doritos?” That’s a lot different than other types of brands. But that’s my favorite flavor.

Returning to the more common and broader term, there’s a lot of hype about “social media.” What’s on-mark, what’s off-mark, what’s the potential?

I think you can probably just look at history. Every new channel or medium to come along that can be used for advertising has been hyped as the best and going to totally get rid of what came before, etc. etc. And that never really happens. Other channels and other media adapt. TV did not kill radio. Even reports of the death of newspapers are greatly exaggerated. I think there is a lot of promise in social media.

Thanks professor! You can follow Joe Bob Hester on Twitter @joebobhester.

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