A Very Special Social Pros: Announcing Your New Co-Host!

Passing the Social Pros Baton

Mr. Jeffrey K. Rohrs is departing from our long-time Social Pros patron Salesforce Marketing Cloud. His next adventure is as the Chief Marketing Officer of Yext in New York City. Yext is a leader in digital presence management software, and has developed a solution for companies to be able to manage their digital presence at scale.
Jeff is leaving us in excellent hands with our new co-host, Mr. Adam Brown, the Executive Strategist at Salesforce. His title is deliberately vague, which he loves, so that he can nimbly shift focus when the company needs it. One of the many things he does is sit down with Salesforce customers and talk to them about social media to help them make the right decisions.
Before joining Salesforce, Adam led social at Dell for about three years, which brought him to Austin, TX. Prior to that, he spent 15 years in Atlanta, where he led social media at the Coca-Cola company for about four of those years. “I like to joke that I started in sodas with the servers, and now I’m at Salesforce. So if anything does happen after this—and obviously one of the reasons I chose to help with the podcast here–is because it also starts with the letter S.”
After graduating from the University of Tennessee in 1994 when “there really was no internet yet,” Adam began his career at an advertising agency. When a client wanted to get on that little thing called America Online, the task of setting it up fell to Adam as the youngest guy in the shop. From there, he went to a web startup where he got his sea legs in coding. At that point he would have said that PR was smoke and mirrors and would prefer a 30-second ad with a call to action any day. But then he crossed over from advertising to PR, and after eight years at Ketchum, “I had a completely different respect and understand of not just PR but how both advertising and PR were coming together.”
Now, having a pedigree on the ad and PR side of things informs Adam’s decisions as Executive Strategist and will no doubt be an asset to his insights on the Social Pros Podcast.

The Whole Picture

Adam is a firm believe in “the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.” When it comes to social media, it applies in several ways.

1. B2B & B2C

There’s a fair amount of convergence between B2B and B2C on social media today, as opposed to three or four years ago when you’d find consumers on certain platforms and organizations and professionals on others. “We recognize now that our consumer is really kind of platform-agnostic. They’re everywhere, which means even if you’re a B2B, you’ve got to make sure that you’re getting your message across.”

2. Customer Engagement & CRM

The Holy Grail is the be able to access a CRM record when you’re engaging with a customer on any platform to inform that interaction and prioritize responses. That’s not to say you wouldn’t pay attention to someone if they have under 1,000 Twitter followers, for example. But when you’re dealing with tens of thousands of conversations a day and only have the resources to respond to maybe 1,000 or 2,000, you need to be able to figure out how to filter it down.

3. Content Marketing & Social Media Marketing

Content marketing and social marketing are coming together; instead of separate teams and separate strategies, companies are starting to see the value in merging the two to create great storytelling. But even more than the convergence of content and social, Adam advocates for all marketing to be “surround sound” and tie together.

“We need to ensure that the conversation and the stories that we’re telling in traditional and digital and content marketing are consistent with social so that we can ‘surround sound’ our customer platform agnostically with that same message.”