The Best Job in Social Media

Charlie Kautz, Content Marketer at TaylorMade Golf, joins the Social Pros Podcast this week to discuss delivering fresh story-telling content across several platforms every week, following the PGA Tour around the country, and what it’s like having the best job in social media.
Read on for some of the highlights and tweetable moments, or listen to the full podcast.

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Tweetable Moments

“My role at @TaylorMadeGolf brings golf into the realm of 24/7 for the first time.” (tweet this)

24/7 Golf

Charlie Kautz has the best job in social media. He manages the voice, content, and brand of TaylorMade on social media channels. For 45 weeks of the year, his team follows PGA Tour events around the country in a 42-foot trailer. With Charlie’s help, social has taken golf from a Thursday-through-Sunday sport to a 24/7 sport.

Golf lends itself well to social media interaction; its regular schedule allows professionals like Charlie to give people a behind-the-scenes look on a regular basis. Charlie’s team delivers content across 6 to 8 platforms every week: from players’ birthdays, to what events are happening and where, to the original content site Tour Diaries that they launched this year.
Social wasn’t a part of TaylorMade even just 7 years ago, but now it relates to everything they do, including marketing executions and new product launches. “The company’s willingness to embrace social as a means to this very fast news cycle has helped, but also just being able to plan. Then I look at this year versus last year, the experience that we gained in this tour role has really helped us.”
Facebook and Twitter are their “keynote” channels, with Tour Diaries a close third. Charlie’s background is in journalism, so he tries hard to tell rich, pure stories in just 140 characters.

Social Media Stat of the Week: 24 billion minutes a month spent on Tumblr

Yahoo bought Tumblr last week, triggering a lot of talk about the blogging content site. In an interview, Tumblr founder David Karp mentioned to Charlie Rose that people spend 24 billion minutes every month perusing Tumblr’s content.
Yahoo may have a history of ruining companies they acquired, but perhaps they will have learned something from Facebook’s acquisition of Instagram: buy the company, then let it run itself.
Tumblr will continue to be successful if Yahoo allows it to because it is so photo-driven. People don’t want to read anymore, and Tumblr provides a nearly endless outlet for visual content. Jeff sees visual more as the “bait” for written content; on Facebook, posts barely get any engagement unless there is a photo alongside them. But that doesn’t have to mean that the written word is dead.

Four Your Information

How did you get involved in social media?
Charlie’s involvement in social media was very natural. He started with an internship at TaylorMade in 2006 and again in 2008. He was lucky enough to land a position after he graduated doing press releases and copywriting. His curiosity led to taking on the responsibility of running the Facebook page, and it snowballed from there.
What do you like best about social media?
“The beauty of social is just that it’s an environment and a category of marketing, or even society now.” It’s an inspiring place to be: fast-paced and with a strong focus on story-telling.
What do you like least about social media?
He’s tired of social being lumped, of the assumption that everyone uses it all the time. It can be all-consuming. “You start to think in tweets.” And people don’t appreciate how difficult it is, thinking of it as the little-sibling of traditional media.
If you could do a Skype call with any living person, who might that be and why?
Charlie gave us the best answer we’ve gotten so far, saying his grandfather in Illinois. “I think an aspect for me with moving out here and the road life, it’s easy for me to be connected, but also the challenge with social is that you’ve got to remember what matters at the end of the day.”
See you next week!