Tessa Horehled | Strategic Marketer, Community Manager, Brand Strategist, Digital Communications Specialist | ATL / NYC

Social Fresh Charlotte – Culture and Talent

This week I attended my fourth Social Fresh conference, back in it’s home market of Charlotte, North Carolina.

Many of the usual suspects were present including Amber Naslund of Radian 6, Bert DuMars of Newell-Rubbermaid, and Zena Weist of H&R Block.

This was my first Social Fresh not speaking or moderating and I have to say it was a pleasure to be able to focus solely on absorbing everything around me including meeting some smart people such as Shawn McPike of AT&T and David Thomas of SAS (now New Marketing Labs).

Amber, far and away, had not only the most aesthetically pleasing presentation (with Jay Baer who wasn’t able to attend in person) but some killer takeaways for the entire audience.

Below are two key discussions I felt deserved specific attention and I’ve embedded the full presentation beneath them, if you’d like to view it in greater depth.

TODAY’S CULTURE
It is now pivotal to integrate into company culture:

• Solidarity of purpose
• Demonstrated trust
• Laboratories & feedback loops
• Diversity of people & ideas
• Reward systems

TODAY’S TALENT
We need to be taking an attribute trait approach to hiring and looking for talent with:

• Curiosity
• Enthusiasm
• Innovation
• Motivation
• Collaboration
• Translation (speak both the language of the C-Suite and those you hope to be getting on-board internally)
• Humility (drop the ego)
• Awareness

Think To Engauge

Working aggressively within your career at a young age provides some unique challenges, being young in general offers it’s own healthy chunk, and a hard to satiate drive poses a number of decisions.

In my late teenage years and early twenties, I wanted to love my job. I was working in the music industry on everything I could get my hands on. Eager to explore and learn. Big eyed, though not blind, to how “business works.” I have very clear memories of going to the Cotton Club (RIP) and attending every show they hosted for months, regardless of whether I was familiar or even interested in the artist or band. I would stand in different areas of the crowd and venue to observe how the audience interacted, looked, smelled, spoke. Are they alone or with a friend? Are they here with their mother? Are they pretending they know the words and singing along? How long has it been since they washed that shirt? How much of the artists’ catalog were they familiar with? I engrossed myself in consuming this database in my mind. To this day, I can predict the audience — who the bulk and one-off’s will be — for pretty much any concert. Working within the music industry directly with artists’ fans allowed me to tap into this database and both market and communicate with them, in accordance with the unique characteristics of each group.

I hit a point in my mid-twenties where I was looking for something a little different but wasn’t quite prepared to make a drastic change (like the move to New York I am still planning). After much thought and discussion, I have chosen to leave THINK and join the Digital Innovation Group at Engauge. THINK has been quite the ride and I’m happy to know I have had real impact on the agency as a whole and it’s social offerings. I will miss (and be calling) many faces from here. My decision to join Engauge was spurred around a need I’ve identified, to work on a team of smart people who live and breathe social and other new technologies, dedicated to innovation in raw form. I miss the ability to really dig in and engross myself in that knowledge acquisition and sharing. Since social has taken a more mainstream role in marketing, I have felt a bit stagnant in the learning process and feel there is much left to learn. I’m quite excited to see what they have in store for me!