The next video in our Delightful Conversations series sees me catch up with Scott Monty shortly after his keynote speech at Pubcon last month.
Scott is now CEO and Co-Managing Partner of Brain+Trust Partners and made his name in digital as Global Head of Social Media at The Ford Motor Company.
His stunning talk at Pubcon was entitled: The Broken Promise of Digital: Making the Customer the Center of What We Do and you can see the Live Blog from Lisa Barone here.
When we chatted at the Majestic booth, I asked him about trust and how well brands were doing with consumers in an increasingly fragmented digital space.
Given there’s such a lot of “noise” out there created by marketing teams who have taken social media using traditional advertising techniques and simply blasted “at” people, Scott says we’d see a change in the “trust curve” if we would only start having conversations with customers.
On influencer marketing, Scott has an interesting pivot on how brands should be thinking about that growing area of marketing. When he was at Ford, he was on the communications team and they engaged in “influencer relations” which was very much (as the moniker suggests) about building relationships with influencers who might write about a new product or service a company has in the pipeline. Influencer marketing is a better term to describe transactional relationships where influential people are paid to promote that product or service in Scott’s opinion.
Although I call out that Scott is a snappy dresser, there’s way more to his personal brand than the bow-tie given his experience and success. He just puts it down to being himself, a sentiment shared by Scott Stratten too.
When it comes to CEOs and their personal brand, he suggests because 50% of their job should be in communicating with people – employees, investors, customers etc. – social media is just another chance to say they same thing you may be saying to others in person as “it’s never a wasted opportunity to talk to a customer…[CEOs] just have more tools at their disposal to do that.”
Thanks to Scott for taking the time to chat. I hope we got more time to chinwag somewhere else in the world soon!
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Cheers,
@MelCarson – Founder & Principal Strategist at Delightful Communications