Gary Bauer is the face of Bauer’s Intelligent Transportation, a transportation company based in San Francisco. He’s also my friend, and someone I’ve helped both as a consultant and just as a friend in Social Media many times. I’ve told Gary and also anyone regardless of whether they listened to me, that the CEO who speaks for the company must lead the charge and the effort into Social Media.
Why? Because most of the time the CEO is the person who has (or should have) passion for the company. If it’s Gary, or George Zimmerman Of The Men’s Warehouse, that person is the one who should implement the Social Media effort.
The video below proves it. Watch Gary in action, talking about what he loves other than his family: his business.
You can’t hire a Social Media specialist to replicate the passion that comes naturally from Gary Bauer. Gary’s feel for what he’s doing can’t be replicated or faked. Yet, business after business passes off its Social Media effort to one person, and leaves everything to that one person. That’s a huge error, yet it’s done every day.
Then we have someone telling us that Social Media doesn’t work for business.
The Social Media specialist should not be that, but a person who writes a plan that the entire company, including the CEO, follows. Every employee that has a blog Twitter, website, and Facebook account, or ideally all four, and more, should be enlisted to help communicate the company’s message about its product or event, or general news.
The CEO must craft and deliver his or her message via Social Media, and for an important reason that’s especially true for entrepreneurs: the person who creates the business wants his or her message communicated via Social Media, and is the best person to do it because they made the dang company.
I told Gary a long time ago that he’s the best person to do this. While I think he gets that now, that video, created in 2009, is the best example of what I’ve said over and over again.
Oh, and if you’re reading this, do Social Media Consulting, and yet only do what the client, who doesn’t know Social Media, asks for, you’re not doing a good job for your client – even if the client thinks you are. Eventually, that good feeling will go away when they realize that sales aren’t really connected to anything you did, and are just the product of a good quarter.
Stay tuned.
Bill Carroll