Jason Falls is one of the leading educators and thinkers in the social media, public relations and communications industries. He has the unique perspective of having lead a national advertising agency’s Interactive and social media efforts, worked with Fortune 100 brands as a social media strategist and served as an independent consultant in the social media industry. He has advised major, regional and niche brands including Humana, General Motors, The Envelope Manufacturers of America, Jim Beam and Maker’s Mark bourbons, Louisville Slugger, and The National Center for Family Literacy. His work has resulted in acclaim and recognition in publication and honors, including a 2009 SAMMY Award for Best Integrated Social/Cross Media Campaign.

One of the most in-demand speakers in the social media space, Falls has spoken internationally and nationally and is known for his engaging style, wit, humor and for adding value to each audience’s experience. Falls is the president and co-founder of the Social Media Club Louisville. He is an educator, consultant and professional speaker and can be found online here consistently rated at or near the top of the prestigious Advertising Age Power 150 Blogs, or http://exploringsocialmedia.com, an online learning community focused on teaching technology and social media tools, tactics and strategy.

You obviously love what you do but what one thing do you most dislike about the social media industry?

By far the biggest dislike I have is the defensiveness social media practitioners have about the “social media gurus.” When people complain that this consultant or that practitioner isn’t qualified to sell themselves as such they’re really showing their ignorance. A) No one has a ton of experience in social media. It hasn’t been around that long. B) We all faked it until we made it at some point. Why criticize those who are doing it now? and C) People who are bad at this will weed themselves out eventually. Funny, but the one group of people you never see bitching about the social media guru are the clients. They’re smart enough not to hire them.

Where do you see social media going, what brands are doing amazing things right now?

Social media is another channel of communications. It’s not some magic carpet ride to sales success or consumer group love. It has its role along side advertising, direct mail, email communications, CRM programs, point of sale and more in communicating to and with consumers. The more businesses understand that being “social” simply means opening up more effective lines of communications with their customers and being open and honest with them, the only place social media is going is an environment of being how we communicate. There’s no such thing as the director of telephone in most businesses. We just use it naturally. Social media will be that way one day. Yes, compelling social media marketing will empower customers and make some companies stand out, but it’s just a channel of communications.

Brands that are doing amazing things right now? Pepsi, Dell, Canadian Tire, Kodak, Southwest Airlines … sometimes “amazing” is just being consistently present and aware.

You have worked with some amazing brands, how do you measure influence?

Well, “influence” is different than “success.” I would measure influence by the number of people you can motivate to act. If you’re an influential brand, you have a large number of ambassadors, people, hand-raisers, etc., who will go buy, try and even recommend your product. Same as if you’re an influential blogger. The more people you can move, the more influential you are.

Success (in case that was more along the lines of your question) is measured in a number of ways, all dependent upon your goals. If your goal is tied to branding and awareness, you measure your success in how many people are aware of your brand or its benefits before, then after a campaign or effort occurs. If your goal is focused on R&D, it’s measured in how many new product features or ideas you received, implemented and the subsequent sales from them. If your goal is to sell more stuff, your success is measured in how much stuff you sold using those channels as the conduit for the purchase. In other words, the “ROI” of social media is only relevant if your goal is to make money. ROI is a business metric, not a media metric.

With so many start-ups out there, some will succeed but most will fail, which one excites you most and why?

I like start-ups that create new opportunities. One I’ve recently become aware of (and to date is not a client, though we’ve had some conversations) is Tangelo Images. They are a photo tagging platform that allows you to tag photos with anchor points that include lots of information — text, more images, videos and even purchase mechanisms. By making photos more rich and dynamic, brands can better leverage photography on their websites, users can better leverage photos for educational purposes and more. Will it be a game-changer? If the level of adoption is high enough. But it’s at least unique enough to create almost a new category of technology.

Backupify is an excellent product which I use myself, what does the future hold for Backupify?

Backupify, which is a client of mine, is online insurance for your data. Because almost all of our data, including contacts, schedules, documents, videos, images and more are gravitating to “cloud” or online hosting, we will all need to ensure that data is protected and backed up. Backupify’s future is about giving users the peace of mind that if a service goes down, someone has their back. And I would anticipate Backupify’s future to be ever-expanding. From adding new social media services (like Foursquare) to enterprise-level backup solutions (Sharepoint, etc.), I could see Backupify becoming the go-to solution to insure your data is safe in the event of a system failure somewhere else.

We are seeing so many mergers and acuisquitions lately, is there one that you think would make perfect sense? (I think Google will purchase Yelp! eventually)

Facebook adding a location-based service (Gowalla or Foursquare) makes a lot of sense. I’d throw Whrrl into that possibility as well because it offers more story-telling functionality with its check-in capabilities. That sense of creating event-related “scrapbooks” is compelling and would fit into Facebook’s existing photo/video album functionality.

I could see Google purchasing Yelp! or even Twitter. I even predicted Google would purchase Twitter sometime this year (2010). Time is slowly running out there, but the fact Twitter has real-time search nailed and Google doesn’t makes me think it might still happen.

Overall, I think you’ll see a lot of consolidation in the coming years as start-ups get integrated into larger services. In the end, Facebook, Google, Microsoft and Yahoo will still be the major players. Which one will emerge as the best in 2-3 years is only dependent upon how compelling the offerings can be made with the right acquisitions.

I can’t find enough hours in the day, how do you find the time and more importantly manage it?

The biggest thing is understanding you don’t have to be everywhere all the time and setting your priorities. I only post 2-3 blog posts per week, yet people think I’m Brogan-like prolific. I just focus on quality posts, not quantity. This cuts down on time I need to spend blogging. I also schedule most of my share-centric Tweets in the morning as I go through my feed reader. In 30-45 minutes, I’ve set 6, 8 or even 10 Tweets to fire throughout the day so I’m sharing consistently without having to be locked into Twitter all day. If I have a few minutes to chat there, I do. If I don’t, I don’t. And I don’t worry about what I miss. If it’s important enough, someone will bring my attention to it.

And managing it all just comes with the tools and technology you get comfortable with. I pump LinkedIn Answer topics into my feed reader. I filter out important users in Facebook and Twitter using lists. When I go check the important stuff, that’s all I see. The noise is somewhere else because I’ve filtered out the signal.

Thanks for taking the time to talk, hope to see you in Ireland sometime soon – have you ever been?

I’ve not been to Ireland yet, but would love to come. My family is originally Scotish and Irish and finding those areas of my lineage would be awesome. Maybe some day.

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