NBAA Social Media Panel Discussion Transcript

And really that’s what we’re talking about with technology. It can be very disruptive. And it can really mess up your day. But it also can be very, very useful. So today we’re going to talk to some real people. I could stand here as a marketing person and tell you about social media.

And what to do, what not to do, and so on. But what’s really more interesting I think, is talking to real aviation professionals about what they do with social media. So we have eight fantastic panelists who are here. And we’re going to actually let them introduce themselves, in the interest of time, and also go through their stories of how they view social media.

So if you guys can come up? And you guys are in alphabetical order, so you have a name on your chair. We’re really happy these guys are here. One thing I’d like for you to notice. If you guys have the flyer that introduces the speakers, they all have very different job titles.

These are not all social media professionals. In fact very few of them are. These are people with regular jobs doing regular things in the aviation industry that use it as a tool to do what they do. So you’ve got a couple more things here. Social media is a tool or a set of tools, these are what you would find in anybody’s garage, but if social media is just a tool they you can think about it as what is the best tool for the job.

People ask us that all the time in our practice. We do a marketing practice in the aviation industry and they ask us, what is the most important media tool to use? And the answer to that is what are you trying to do? If you have a job that requires a hammer, than a screwdriver is not going to help you.

So you really do need to just consider just what is the best tool for the job and that’s what a lot of these guys are going to be doing, discuss what their favorite tool is, what tasks they accomplish using social media, and how that works. Another thing is you want to make sure that the people who are using the tools are using them responsibly, right.

So this young man who’s drilling a hole in his coffee table may be using that tool very, very well for a very inappropriate thing. So that’s one thing that you really want to make sure that you have in your organization is some way of making sure that social media and all other media are being used appropriately.

All right, so let’s get started. We are going to start with Jerry, Jerry Buccola. He is one of our clients as well.

Jerry Buccola: Hi, this looks more fun actually, this big microphone. [LAUGH] I am Jerry, Jerry Buccola. I’m senior account executive with V-Log. V- Log stands for Virtual Logbooks.

We are a fairly recent startup, we have the daunting task of connecting with a large market in the near future. My favorite tool is LinkedIn as it is with most folks I’m sure here.

I plan to connect with the prospective customers from here on LinkedIn and I’m going to send them a couple recent articles that our marketing consultant, ABCI, has recently published. These two articles are amazing success stories for V-LOG. I will connect with the perspective customers with substance, with content.

Instead of just saying hi it’s me again, remember me? I’m going to give them something of value to help their own endeavors in their own business and a tip I’d like to pass on actually has to do with Facebook, and I learned that in another industry prior to aviation.

I would highly recommend using Facebook to connect to your customer base or your prospect base and do so using testimonials to post onto Facebook a customer testimonial and if you can, a customer picture. And if you can a customer picture of you and the customer, with the testimonial.

I think it’s powerful and that’s my tip for you this morning. Thanks, I’m Jerry. Jerry Buccola, V-Log. Thank you.

Paula Williams: Thanks, fantastic idea. Any questions for Jerry before we let him go? Okay, any sales people out there? [NOISE] Actually every one of you is a salesperson right? Okay great.

Thank you Jerry that was great. Good job. Okay and then we have Larry Hinebaugh. Another one of ABCI’s favorite clients. They’re all our favorite clients . . .

Larry Hinebaugh:  I’m Larry Hinebaugh, I’m the founder of V-Log. And I think you know a lot about it already because of Jerry but it is a digital log book company, and we are tasked with the challenge of changing the paradigm and the aviation world, and that’s not only using paper to record maintenance on airplanes but backing up that paper electronically and then using all the tools that we have when we do that, search engines and all the things available to us.

It is the way to go in maintenance and we’re looking forward to getting there, but right now, we’re trying to drive that forward. And we’re using social media to do that. And so I will admit I’m not a big social media user.

But Paula, who’s our marketing person. convinced us that social media was the way to reach people through of our message in trying to change this paradigm. And it’s successful. I first went on social media, learned about it just simply to see what she was saying about V-Log and I found out there’s a lot of good information on LinkedIn and Google Plus.

Those are my two favorites but I use it, and I’m one of those people that use it everyday.

Paula Williams: Fantastic. Do we have any other CEO’s or founders today in the audience? Gene, I know you are. Yup absolutely anybody else? Founder of a company or CEO of a company.

All right. So, you know, it was interesting in our survey. A lot of people who are CEO’s are actually using social media. That’s a change over the last couple of years. It used to be just the sales folks, just the marketing folks. But, a lot of the upper level executives are directly connecting with people.

So that’s great. Thank you very much.
Paula Williams Genaro Sanchez. We’re really happy to have him from Cutter Aviation

Genaro Sanchez: Hello. My name is Genaro Sanchez, the marketing director for Cutter Aviation. We use a variety of different media, social media channels. We use Facebook, we use LinkedIn, we use Twitter, we use Google Plus, some Pinterest.

I think that it all depends what you want to accomplish with your social media strategy. If you’re looking for leads, we have found out that LinkedIn is a great tool to connect with new leads. If you’re looking to promote new services, if you want to brag about your staff.

If you’ve done a new installation, a new modification, we have different lines of services so each line of service works different with different social media strategies. So we have found out that Facebook and Twitter is really good if you just need, let’s say a retrofit on an airplane.

So this is what we do, one of the things that I will encourage you to do is to connect your communication throughout the company. If you have a blog on your website, make sure that blog is posted also to the social media channels. I would also encourage you to use hashtags but please, please, please for whatever you do, do not over use hashtag.

That’s not cool. Don’t talk with hashtags. Be conservative with it, and make them make sense. The use of video on social media it also huge, it gives a very good results. So we have found that social media is not our only channel of communication but it’s most definitely a very important one.

Paula Williams: All right. Excellent, thank you. Thank you so much. Anybody else from FBO’s or other businesses that are local? Local businesses? All right. Most of us could get better results from using that targeting and things like that. And Matt Steward, we’re glad to have you.

Matt Steward:  Thank you. My name’s Matt Steward, I’m the vice president of marketing and sales for Applied Composites Engineering.

I just started in this role four months ago so I’m coming into this industry as a newbie if you will. And my years of experience go back to a lot of political advisory and consulting, also the tech sector. And one of the things I realize probably the most, is the fact that we have to be reminded that social media is not just for the younger group of users.

As you saw there with the statistics that were result of the surveys taken, and I’m 40 years old. I’m the first group of students who would’ve gone through college with the internet. So when we think about that, everyone 40 and under has grown up of course with the internet then therefore are following social media.

So, understanding that that’s a part of our daily lives, you also saw the fact that people admit to using the social media more than twice a day or multiple times a day, it’s probably ten or 12 times a day if we were to be honest about it.

Matt Steward: So, just understanding that this is a legitimate marketing tool, it’s not an extra. And so then investing the time and effort and the expense into actually doing a good job of it. So, my tips are simply this. My favorite. Right now is Twitter and not Facebook but Twitter and LinkedIn.

But understanding to not take the social out of social media. So don’t just be throwing up all your press releases, telling everyone about your business. Because quite frankly no one cares. And social media’s for entertainment with a mix of that business story. So, make sure that you’re sprinkling that in.

You remain a professional, but at the same time find ways to actually keep the social in social media. And then, lastly, research your customers or the people you’re trying to reach out to. You’ll learn so much about them through their social media feeds. And that will give you a lot of insight before meetings and as you’re reaching out to them so you can customize your message as you’re looking to make new contacts.

More than happy to chat with all of you afterwards but thank you for having me today. Yes sir.

Bert Botta: Now, you say you make it personal. Do you find it challenging to findthe line between personal and professional and how do you determine how personal to make it?

Matt Steward: Sure, that’s a great question. What’s your name? Paula Williams: Bert Botta.

Matt Steward Bert?, so Bert from a personal standpoint what I mean by that is if we were connected on LinkedIn, I wouldn’t just choose my mode of communication with you being a blast announcement or my post daily. I would learn about you, Bert, by seeing what you talk about, what you like, what you do on social media and then therefore we could have a little bit better understanding of each other as we start a relationship, or build upon our relationship.

And, so that’s what I’m kind of meaning by that. But also, when I talk about the social, don’t take the social out of social media. I don’t always make it about business. You know, your a person, I’m a person, people make business decisions, not nameless, faceless corporations and that’s extremely important and I think that’s the advantage of using social media for business.

Paula Williams: Right, very true, thank you so much. We would actually like to do questions at the end and then you can ask all the panelist and I think a great way to make this interactive. So thank you. And John Kosak, NBAA.

John Kosak: Hey, how’s everybody doing? Paula Williams: Great, how are you, John?

John Kosak: I am fantastic. I woke up breathing. That’s always a good start to the day. Yeah. So I actually work two accounts. I do the one for the air traffic services desk at the command center. You’ve heard some people talk about focusing things and we try and focus that Twitter account on just TFR’s, presidential TFR’s they’re going to have an impact on business aviation.

Hurricanes, and or major weather events. Things that are going to have an impact on our folks. My personal account, and like Mr. Steward, I like to keep the fun in it, so I try and share my four passions. Which are aviation weather, hockey and more aviation usually.

Paula Williams: I thought that was a typo when you gave that to us.John Kosak Nope I put that up there on purpose. And like Mr. Sanchez, I also encourage the responsible use of hashtags in whatever form that you’re using them. This week I’ve been using just two hashtags really which are #bizav and #NBAA15 to try and let everybody know where ,I am and what I’m doing.

From a business standpoint, trying to use the. Twitter to get information out there about some of things that I’m doing on the weather subcommittee but also, again, keeping it fun. My tip would be kind of along the same lines. Figure out who you are. Don’t take the fun out of it but figure out who you are, what message you want to deliver.

I don’t talk about politics or religion on any of my feeds, but other people do. So, I just wanna keep my message kinda centered, and I’ve made a choice to do it that way. And I think that’s it, yeah.

Paula Williams: Great, yeah, so you did show your tips and that’s great to promote the event and things so great thank you. John Kosak Yeah, the space weather that we did yesterday was fantastic, thank you.
Paula Williams: Fantastic, all right, and we’ll take questions for all these guys at the end and thank you, Bill Johnston?

Bill Johnston Hi, my name’s Bill Johnston, President of V-Log. I basically oversee the operation of the company in regard to sales, production, operations, finance, quality assurance of the product that we provide to our customers. I think my most favorite social media tool is LinkedIn. I have well over 500 to 700 contacts my past life as a DOM for a major corporation and president of the professional aviation maintenance association for years.

I have a lot of contacts and, I use that to help develop new contacts for my sales department but don’t necessarily come from the aviation background. And so, I’m helping them learn this trade that they’re in right now. And so, I use this to reach out to past friends acquaintances ,I had probably twelve meetings here that I set up today over the last three days with those past people that I’ve known over the years.

In regards to issues. I do research before coming to a meeting using LinkedIn and other social media, making appointments like I mentioned. Assist the sales department in making contacts, and just keeping in contact on a day to day basis. With people is a real help for us from a company standpoint.

Because, they understand what they’re all about. I don’t know, there’s probably been 30 or 40 people that walked up to me and I said, you know what I’m doing now? They go oh yeah, your the log book guy.

You know, so they know what it is that I’m all about because I’m linking with New people, old people on an ongoing basis and one of the big things that I like to just as a closing remark and I get this from wife as family’s first.

Remember don’t get lost in this social media world because you may be finding yourself on the end of a set of divorce papers if you can’t keep it straight. So, anyway, remember families first.

Paula Williams Put it down for date night, right?

Bill Johnston: Right.

Paula Williams: Absolutely. Thank you, Bill. That’s wonderful. And Beth, our own Beth of NBAA, right?

Beth Sanders Hi again, everyone. So like I said, I am the social media manager for NBAA. NBAA is on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Google Plus, LinkedIn, and YouTube, so I am hoping you follow us on all of those platforms.

Our objective with social media is pretty simple. It is just to inform everybody what is going on in the business aviation industry, what is going on in the association. We use it to advocate on behalf of the association, and we use it to present ourselves as the thought leader in the business aviation industry.

So, I have said that Instagram is my favorite one. It’s our newest social media platform. We started it about a year and a half ago, and it’s just been fun to watch it grow and seeing what kind of pictures really resonate with people and what people want to see.

But I think that every social media platform has its own value and its own use. Things you would do on Twitter, you would never do on Facebook. We at the show, we use Twitter to send out very regular updates. This session’s started, registration’s open, the opening general session’s starting, those kind of things.

So it comes out very regularly. You would never do something like that on Facebook, because it would just be very annoying on Facebook, whereas people expect that on Twitter. So in terms of the show, specifically, we use social media to tell a story about the convention. We push out articles and videos and pictures and everything about the show, and the main thing is creating a hashtag about the show, so it’s #NBA15, which hopefully you’re all using in all of your social media posts.

We use the hashtag to basically create a virtual community around the show. If you’re on Twitter, on Instagram, and even to a lesser extent on Facebook, you can search for that hashtag, and you can see what everyone else is saying about the show, what’s going on at the show.

You can get ideas about what you want to see at the show, so it really creates a community around a specific idea. Just to give you a good example of how it worked, yesterday I was walking around the show floor, and I was just doing just quick Twitter interviews with people, taking pictures, posting their comments on Twitter, are you having a good show, that kind of thing.

And I was looking through our Twitter feed, and I happened to see that the governor of Kansas was at the show. And we didn’t know he was coming. He just happened to be in Las Vegas, I guess, and he came by. So I immediately went over to the booth, introduced myself, said, hey, I’d love to get a quick picture and a quick Twitter comment from the governor of Kansas.

Sure, no problem, he told me. Aviation is great. It’s important to his state. It’s the future of Kansas. Got it on Twitter, and we got that message out that the highest executive in a key aviation state thinks aviation is important, and it’s the future. And within 20 minutes, we got that message out there.

So I guess my basic tip for social media is consistency. You have to keep up with it. You can’t post you know once a month and expect anyone to follow you. If you want to be the thought leader of your followers and you want people to keep coming back to see what your saying, you need to post regularly.

I guess going into that are two other things is that not every social media platform will work for every company or every organization. I’ve had people ask me within NBA, oh, why we aren’t we on Pinterest or why aren’t we on Snapchat? And those platforms, just they’re great and I personally love Pinterest, but they don’t make sense for NBAA, at least at this time.

So, if I can’t keep up with them and I can’t provide a constant flow of information, there’s no reason for me to be on there. And then, the other thing going into that, is content is really key also. You have to have good content or else you’re not giving anyone anything worthwhile to look at.

And retweeting things is great and sharing things is great, but you also wanna have your own original content. And you want people to see what you have to say, because you want to be the thought leader, and you want people to go to you for the information they need.

So, those are my tips.

Paula Williams: Fantastic! Yeah, I’ve noticed a lot of NBAA stuff, and it’s all really good, that’s cool. How many people found out about this event from a social media platform of some kind?

Speaker from audience: I did!
Paula Williams: Anybody else? Okay, fantastic. All right, John. I have no idea what John’s going to say, and I am actually married to him.

John Williams: Yeah, well maybe I won’t get fired after this.
Paula Williams: Here we go.

John Williams: Personally I do not use anything but LinkedIn. Corporately speaking, you better be on everything, all these folks said were good, assertive marketing stuff, but remember two things.

One, it’s all public. You’re on CNN and NBC, everything. When you talk, it’s out there. And the reason you need to be on everything is because you never know what somebody else is saying about your company. You need to know. And there are some really good stories like the American Airlines and the guitar situation and others, and that waited almost too late to figure out.

LinkedIn? Great. I had a CEO of a company call me, and he was in the area and wanted to meet me at Park City. And I said, sure. I’d never met him before. Looked him up on LinkedIn, got his picture, he did the same for me as I found out later, and we met at the very nice restaurant he chose.

And just like we knew each other, walked in, shook hands, the first time we’d ever met. It’s great stuff. So research, that’s it. That’s about all I have to say.

Paula Williams: That’s it? All right, prevents those awkward blind date moments when you’re meeting someone for a business meeting and you don’t know what they look like, they don’t know what you look like.

If you look them up on social media ahead of time, you can find out their kids like soccer. Or you can find out a lot about a person, and there is never any reason to do a cold call or anything else these days because everybody has something out there.

So, thank you John. All right, we want to leave a lot of time for questions because I know you have them, but before we get there, we do have a door prize. And this, this is our social media guide. It includes the survey that we talked about earlier, and it also has a hashtag guide for hashtags relevant to the aviation industry with statistics of how often they’re used, a lot of good stuff like that.

So, we’re going to do a social media experiment. How many of you have a cellphone today? Let me try that again. Does anybody not have a cellphone?

Okay, how many of you have one of these little bookmarks?

Does anybody not have a little bookmark? Okay, let me pass those over.

Speaker from audience: Thank you.

Paula Williams: Okay, what I want you to do is take your cell phone in your right hand and this bookmark in your left hand, turn it over to the white side and there’s a QR code there. If you zap that with your cellphone, you should have a little form pop up.

Put in your postal address, and we will send you this book. If you don’t know how to do that, ask a younger person sitting close to you. Anybody? Okay, all right. So that’s our book, and we would like to make sure that works for you.

You do need a QR reader, if you have the NBAA app, there is a QR reader inside the app, which is really handy. Thank you Beth for being so considerate to put the QR reader in there. So it’s very likely that you do have some sort of a QR reader on your phone.

Okay so carrying on while you work on that. Okay another thing that we would like you to do after the session is to give us a grade. And the way that you do that is if you have the NBAA app on your phone you can, you’ll get this little icon, since you put this on your agenda of course, and then you can go ahead and give us a rating.

And you can rate all of the sessions that you’ve been in that gives NBAA some great information about who to have back next year and who not to have back next year. And that’s really good information. That’s another thing you can do in you business, is get immediate feedback from people.

You know did they like what happened? Did they not like what happened? You know, can we do better?

So Ed Bolen at the very beginning of this session talked about the Wright brothers book, has anybody read that? Let’s see if I can get it to show up on the screen.

We’re having fun today. There we go. The David McCullough book, The Wright Brothers, anybody read that? Well I’ll have to tell you the whole story then since none of you read it. It’s actually, the Wright brothers were using innovative, disruptive technology at the time. You know, they were using bicycle parts and bicycle technology, and they did not just put something together and go jump off a cliff, right?

They didn’t just take this new technology and say, well, theoretically, this is going to fly, so let’s go put something together and commit fully to this. What they did is they put things together, they tested them, they tweaked them, they tested them, they tweaked them. They did short little test flights, they found out what they did wrong, they took it all apart, they put it back together.

Tested, tweaked, tested, tweaked. So whenever you are using a disruptive technology you do not want to bet the farm on something that you don’t know anything about. You want to do a couple of things. One is to get hold of somebody who knows what they’re doing. You may have some people in you organization, most of us have what we call digital citizens.

People who have grown up online, whether they’re younger or older doesn’t matter, the fact is that they’re comfortable with technology. So that might be one of the things you want to hire for, when you are looking for people to include in your organization and on your team. Is to have someone who is comfortable with technology.

Another thing that you may want to do, is to do small tests. We like to do 90 day tests. One example is, if you are thinking about should I be using this particular platform, look at your top ten most desired customers, and your top ten most wanted or your, yeah your top ten most wanted customers and your top ten most feared competitors.

If they are on that platform then you should be too. If they are not on that platform it may not be worth your time. That’s a really good rule of thumb.

People in aviation are really great innovators, that’s how we got where we are, and that’s how we stay where we are, and to stay on top of things as things are changing.

So what I’d like to do is just if anybody has questions for the panel or questions for me, if you could raise your hand and I’ll bring you the microphone. We’re recording this and we’re going to transcribe it, so we want to make sure we get the questions recorded as well.

So, questions for the panel? All right, let’s get James first.

James: As they read in the future, video is going to be so much more prevalent with social media. Maybe this is for Paula, or John, or Beth to answer, do you agree with that and if so what are ways we can capitalize on video in our businesses.

John Williams: I think T-mobile pretty much answered that. T-Mobile’s got free video and television going to all their cell phones right now regardless of what the FCC says or anybody else. They just did it and it’s open to anybody that wants to supply content. All you have to do is conform to their network requirements and you’re good.

Paula Williams: Oh. That is a good answer, all right so lets get Gene.
Gene: Jerry when you were talking about your Facebook account are you there on your personal name or did you put that as a company name or do you do both?

Jerry Buccola: Thank you excellent question cause I was just thinking about that I’m on both and Paula helped me, what’s the word, bifurcate my presence on Facebook. I do both, yes, I’m not sure what else to say about it but.

Gene Clow: Well can I make the assumption that if you do Facebook under a company name it’s pretty much the same guidelines that you would use on LinkedIn?

Jerry Buccola : Not sure.
Paula Williams: I would say no. Facebook is a more personal platform. So even though you may be using a company account on Facebook it’s going to be a lot more visual. You also have more room for text and you can use video on Facebook and you cannot on LinkedIn, so I would suggest having a slightly different strategy for Facebook as opposed to LinkedIn.

For most of our clients we produce the same content for all three of their media and then we do a slight variation, with more words, less words, video, not video, bigger picture, smaller picture, things like that so.

Gene Clow: Thank you.

Paula Williams: Excellent. Other questions? First time attendee? Glad you’re here. Go right ahead.

Speaker from audience: Thank you. Two questions for the panel. First question is correct spelling and grammar, how important is that?

John Williams: Very.

Paula Williams: John’s our editor-

John Williams: Maybe not so much for the millennials, because college isn’t that great anymore. And try to find somebody now that can spell. Is not easy. The 55, the 40 plus crowd knows grammar how to spell.

They’re really picky. So in addition to that, it was mentioned that, ease up on the hashtags. Is that more of a trend that’s starting to happen? Hashtag less within your posting.

Beth Sanders: It depends on really which platform you’re using. If you’re on Twitter, you only have 140 characters, so you don’t wanna take it up with all hashtags because then it’s kind of unreadable.

On Instagram, hashtags are everything on Instagram. You don’t wanna use too many. You don’t wanna have a whole list of 25. Hashtags on it, but the whole point of getting people to look at what your posting is you post hashtags that are relevant. So, when we post a picture of static display, its NBA 15, biz app, business aviation, business flying.

Plane pics, airplanes, planes those are the regular hashtags that we use and on instragram it’s acceptable to do that, that would look ridiculous on Twitter.

Speaker from audience: Now it was mentioned that spelling and grammar are very important. Speaking as a professional photographer, are good images important or is that a trend that’s going to finally happen?

Paula Williams: I think good images are important, images they’re what draw you to something no matter what platform you’re looking at. So I think they’re important, I think that there can be, does it have to be a professional?

Speaker from audience: Well, in my opinion it should, but I’m speaking as a photographer, but I’m wondering where’s this going? In terms of bad photos are getting constantly posted, are we going to finally become educated that this is a bad photo? Because we are identifying bad spelling and grammar, aren’t we?

John Williams: Do you mean bad photo content or bad photo quality?
Speaker from audience: Both, you need to be accurate in your imagery, but also the quality is being questioned. But, is that a trend that is going to eventually come along?

John Williams: Well, technologically speaking, the higher res quality pictures you get, the system, the networks, everything is going to handle it very easily.

Paula Williams: There used to be a resolution speed problem. Do we have a question in the back?

Speaker from audience: Yeah this one’s on Twitter. I use Android phones and I’ve been bit a number of times by spell check and I was just curious using Twitter, you guys are professional here, using Twitter to do fast updates on status and so on. Have you ever been bit by the android spell checker?

Speaker from audience: I’m sorry, I didn’t hear the end of the question.
Paula Williams: Have you ever been bit by the spell checker on android, auto correcting your words and making them different than what you had typed. Is that right? Okay.
Speaker from audience: Yes the auto correct.
Speaker from audience: Yes I have and I try and delete it as quickly as possible.

Paula Williams: And John Kosak you have something to say is that right? Go ahead.

John Kosak: Yeah I’ve got an Android phone too and I have slowed down in my texting just to make sure that what I put out there is accurate, professional and readable. I you know i just don’t want to make that mistake, but I have learned from it. And just so you know two fingers means I text slow already.

Paula Williams: Great! More questions? Excellent if you want to go next please?
Speaker from audience: I want to know what tips you might have about increasing engagement specifically in the aviation industry. John Kosak: So I’ve got the mike, I’ll go first.

I’d just, I’m following accounts like our own account, the NBAA and i’m trying to see who else interacts with the NBAA using hashtags that have a similar interest to what I’m looking at. So I’m a weather geek, I’m looking at all the national weather service stuff and I’m looking at who interacts with that.

I’m into aviation photography so I follow professional photographers so I know the difference between a good photograph and a bad photograph. That’s how I do it. The same thing on Facebook. I’m looking for people with similar interests in order to increase that because I don’t just want spam on my feed.

I want to be on LinkedIn with people who have similar interests. Same thing with Facebook, Instagram, those places so.

Paula Williams: That’s another trend I think that we’ve been seeing is quality over quantity. You know anybody can get 5,000 Twitter fans but what good does that really do you? You know I mean, if you tried to pay your rent with or your payroll with the number of Twitter fans. Your bank is going to laugh at you. So the quality really matters a lot more than quantity and if you can move those people from lower engagement to higher engagement and they have to people who are really relevant to you. So, that’s a great one.

Other questions? Thank you. Thank you for saving me steps.
Speaker from audience: For the gentleman with the photography question, I’m an aviation copywriter. If you need any help spelling let me know. Paula Williams: Social networking. In the wild. Right here.
Speaker from audience: And I’d love to trade services with you because I could use some good photos.
Paula Williams: Fantastic.
Speaker from audience: Another question, LinkedIn Premium, how important is that to getting your message out?
Matt Steward: I’ll answer that. You almost have to have that. I think probably most of us in the room do not. The statistics show that. It’s very inexpensive relatively speaking, when you think about what you’re using it for, which is a business development tool, a communications tool.

There is a reason why you pay for that. Some of the best features on LinkedIn are behind that subscription fee. So, you can really dissect your connections, but then also be able to reach out to a lot of people you can’t with the free application, so I’d encourage you to purchase that.

Paula Williams: Anybody else? Jerry or Larry do you have that? Okay. Anybody else have the premium subscription? I don’t, actually. But we haven’t really been using all those features, so that’s interesting.

Bert Botta: The reason I asked that. I have a work around that works pretty well, without having to cough up the money for premium. So if anybody’s interested they can talk to me.

Paula Williams: Good idea all right, any other questions? Sorry, other questions? You get to talk to the smartest people in the industry and ask them what they really do. .

Speaker from audience: It seems to me that you can, somebody mentioned earlier about kind of getting sucked into it and spending a lot of time at the peril of your relationships and everything.

So where’s the sweet spot on this because I’m married to someone that’s self-employed and does their own marketing via social media. When what she should be doing is writing a book, that’s what she’s paid to do. Instead she spends about 2 1/2 to 3 hours a day on various social media, trying to promote her business.

So I would say, what’s the effective time management on this as far as, how do you get the most bang for your buck? Get your message out there, but still have time To do what it is you’re suppose to be doing, as a career.

Paula Williams: I can tell you what we recommend.

And then I’d love for everybody on the panel to answer this, because I think this is a different answer for everyone depending on what tasks their trying to accomplish with social media. We recommend that everyone start with three hours a week. Okay. Monday, Wednesday, Friday. Marketing Monday, webinar Wednesday, follow Friday.

You know we’ve got some fairly specific recommendations to start with, if you have the handout that was on this seat. So three hours a week is what we recommend in our class and then everyone kind of adapts from there and I’m sure everybody here is going to have a different answer.

So if we could go down the line I think it would be great.
John Williams: That was a good question thank you I don’t remember who said it but you’re supposed to do email in the morning.

So I just do it in the morning. I suggest you pick a time during the day and do your social media the same way. If you do all three channels or all four then make it ten minutes each. Pick a time, stick to it. Its self discipline. You need to be working on your business not in it.

Beth Sanders: So, for me, I’m on social media all day, every day. That’s my job. I want to monitor what other people are saying, so I’m not sure I would subscribe to that. I get Twitter updates at night telling me if someone’s talking about us on Twitter, so I can retweet it or make a comment.

I want to know all the time what people are saying about NBAA, so I can keep up with it.
Bill Johnston: When I’m working at the desk, I use the Twitter list function to follow a number of different things.

John Kosak: Primarily weather, cuz I’m concerned about that, but also some of the aviation feeds that are out there, so that sometimes you can actually find out, through Twitter, what’s going on before we know about it in the command center. So, it’s a useful tool. At home, it’s one of those things where if you’re not careful, yeah, it can swallow your whole day before you know it.

So, I try and make sure that I get out and do my other stuff and have fun outside of that. But like Beth, I have a number of accounts that come straight to my phone, so that no matter what’s going on, I get that. The National Hurricane Center is one of them, so that I know that Rick out there in the Pacific right now is not going to have any impact on business aviation.
And I can just make sure that I’m following that. So it depends on the day and the time and what I’m doing.

Matt Steward: Yeah, real quick. Real fast, I’ll tell you a very fast family story, some people brought up family. My father-in-law is 74. A few years ago, we were sitting at a family dinner, all the nephews and nieces, well grandchildren for him, were sitting around their phones not looking up talking to anyone.

He got really mad. And, well, that was about five years ago. Now when you sit down at the table, you gotta tell Jeff, the 74-year-old, hey, put down your phone. So the point is, as we looked at these statistics, more and more people are using social media. And I think if you say, I’m only going to tweet, only going to post during business hours, you’re really missing out.

There’s so many applications that are out there where you can schedule ahead your content. So, we sometimes will schedule ahead a week, and sometimes you’ll need to amend that cuz something will happen with your messaging that needs to be different. But that way, you’re not constantly up at 9 o’clock at night or 6 AM in the morning trying to be the first or the last one to get someone’s feed.

But how many of you have laid in bed and sorted through your social media? I bet every one of you have. And so, therefore if you stop your content at 4 o’clock, it’s simply going to be only seen during that time. And guess what? Everyone’s working during 8 to 5.

So, when we talk about social media, oftentimes you’re trying to reach people not just during work hours.

Genaro Sanchez: Going back to the beginning of your question, what is the sweet spot? I think that the answer is, it depends. There are recommendations, but they’re going to vary from one industry, from one company to the other.

We have people here, their whole job is to be on social media. You might not have that luxury, you might. What I do recommend, as Matt said, is to utilize those tools that are out there to schedule our content. One of the beauty about social media is that you can share somebody else’s content, so that it’s not only the content that you are generating yourself, original content, but you can also share other people’s content that are relevant to your industry.

And those you can post in advance. So you can set periods of time where you’re going to be working on that, scheduling that content for it to be posted in the future, and that’ll give you some free time when something comes up to go and post it on the fly, just like here.

I think that one of your questions, Paula, was how do we use it in the event? And I think that we fail, all of us fail, to really answer that question. We utilize social media before the event, during the event, and we’re going to be using it after the event.

We invited people to our booth, we told them what promotions we were having, we were having a give-away, come and visit us at our booth at 2 PM on Wednesday, etc. We posted the winner for our contest. Today, we also posted on all the social media outlets. I photograph all the team for people to come and see and meet the team.

And after the event, we’re going to be posting also some echos of the event. So, going back to your question, what is a sweet spot? I think that it all depends on your company.

Larry Hinebaugh:, I guess I would be considered a passive user of social media.

I did not have a computer in college. As a matter of fact, when I started engineering, I was using a slide rule. So, I’m a lot like most aviation maintenance people. I embrace new technology every day. It’s in the airplanes. And so to do it in social media, it’s more work and very time consuming, and I definitely understand, even as a passive user, how you can get caught up in using it and time can fly by.

So, I think it’s like everything in our life, life’s a balance, and you have to discipline yourself. But as far as your life goes, I have Jerry that does social media, Paula does social media for me, Bill does social media. Those guys are all inputting, I’m just receiving.

So, my advice to your wife is find a Jerry and a Paula and a Bill, because that’s the best way to save the time.

Speaker from audience: Hi. So, I have a quick question for the V log guys. Obviously, if you’re just trying to raise awareness about what you’re doing, that’s one sort of campaign that you do in social media, but then there’s the other element where you’re trying to generate business leads out of it and turn those into conversions which were paying customers, right?

So, I’m just kind of curious what’s your take on that and how you guys measure that sort of conversion rate, things of that nature. Jerry Buccola Maybe explain a little bit more your question. How do we use it to convert to sales?
Speaker from audience: Right, exactly. So you meet these people on a social media channel, LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, whatever. And then at some point you want them to actually give you money, right? So how do you move them through that funnel?

Paula Williams: Let me answer that, if you don’t mind?
Jerry Buccola Yes, go ahead. Please answer.
Paula Williams: Okay, I’ll start and Jerry can finish up because that’s what we do – we tag team them.

We tag them and Jerry bags them. Basically, what we do is we use social media as an outreach platform offering content. We have a piece of gated content, if you want to use the geeky term. If you want to use the non-geeky term, we require people to enter their contact information in exchange for an eBook, which is 12 Common Logbook Mistakes.

We know that people who are going to be downloading that eBook are people that typically use aircraft logbooks and would be interested in that information. And then we can also ask them qualifying questions, like how large is your fleet? What kind of airplanes do you have? Do you have a 135 certificate?

Things like that. Then, when they download that eBook, we have a form, but Jerry gets notified and I get notified that we have a new lead that is potentially qualified. And then Jerry can make the decision, and I’ll let you take it from there.

Jerry Buccola Right, exactly. In fact, you took the words right out of my mouth.

So, taking it from where Paula left off, I go to our CRM, and they invariably don’t fill out all the information, so I go to LinkedIn to get more information, fill that in to the CRM, and then I’m bagging them with phone calls. My input on balance is, this is still a person, sales is still a person centered activity, so I’m using social media as a tool, and I’m bagging them with phone calls and online meetings.

Speaker from audience: Perfect, thank you.
Paula Williams: We also use lead scoring within the CRM to see how often people refer to our social media and our website, and then those are people that are more likely to be worthy of Jerry’s time because it’s limited.

Speaker from audience: Having just completed a website and working with my web designer and the future being mobile, if you don’t have a website that’s mobile friendly, that’s really important right now.

So I just thought I’d throw that out. Kind of like going along with the LinkedIn thing, having the premium, being able to attract more attention that way. It’s very cool when your website comes up, and it’s actually readable on your cell phone. So, just a tip.

Paula Williams: Excellent – thank you! Last question.
Thank you very much. I think that is the end of the hour, but I know you guys probably want to with these guys. If you guys are available, if you want to hang out and talk with the folks in the audience. I’d love to have you guys give a hand to our panel. These guys are not social media experts.

Audience : [APPLAUSE] Paula Williams: Except for the ones that are [LAUGH]. Audience: [APPLAUSE] Paula Williams: And yeah, thank you very much for coming and-

John Williams: Well, we have to end with one more thing. Paula Williams: Yes. What did we miss?
John Williams: Birthday girl today. I think she’s 29.
Paula Williams: Isn’t that nice of you.
John Williams: Happy Birthday.
Audience: [APPLAUSE]