Summary: CJ Hudson and Melissa Noon are social media strategists with a large track record of success. Both CJ and Melissa are ex-Facebook employees, with CJ being Facebook Australia's first hire. CJ and Melissa are strong in all areas of social, with CJ focusing on strategic aspects and Melissa very strong in the tactical space. Having recently left Facebook, they now run Stencil, a social research, content, media, and strategy agency. It is with great pleasure that I say welcome to the call, CJ and Melissa. CJ: Hi, thank you. Melissa: Hi. CJ: We're excited to be here. Greg: Excellent, excellent. I first saw you speak at an event, and straight away sort of resonated with your message. It was obvious that you guys knew what you were talking about in the social space, and then we've met several times since then. Thanks for joining us. It's great. CJ: Yeah, absolutely. We're going to enjoy this next 45 minutes to an hour I hope. Greg: Well, let's dive straight in. So you're obviously both very strong marketers, especially in the social space as ex-Facebook team members, which is something that I think a lot of people would be interested in. Do you mind sharing sort of both what you did within the organization? CJ: Sure. I'll go first, if you don't mind, because I was the first guy that said. I was very fortunate, Greg, to be invited to be the first person working for Facebook in Australia and New Zealand. Previously, I was selling big, ugly adverts on top of the AFL website, which was a great job on its own, but I was making a fundamental shift from selling disruptive advertising for companies out there to a brand new way of thinking, that people coming to Facebook to discover information and how I could work with brands that help them leverage what people are really doing in the world versus what they've been forced to consume. So that was a really, really good experience for me. And I had to spend probably the first three to four months, quite honestly, learning what Facebook was about and all of the tools that sit behind it and why things change on a daily basis and understand the culture. Then once I was able to do that, then I was able to go and actually learn about businesses and help them strategize to leverage what we call the social graph and not necessarily a website called Facebook. Greg: Okay. Cool. What about yourself, Melissa? Melissa: My area at Facebook was definitely a lot more of the sort of product and implementation, so once sort of say a person in CJ's role had done that strategic work, sold the ideas into the client, that would sort of come over to the account management team and we'd really take that idea and implement it. Another really sort of interesting role that I had was in – I was a member of the product council. I was the APAC representative of the product council, which is basically the team at Facebook that implements and comes up with the ideas for any new product that is launched across Facebook, and really I guess sort of date dives into how that particular product will benefit advertisers. So it involved doing research on what brands actually want, what kind of product that would work for them, and a really great example of that is check-in deals. So that was sort of the original iteration of the office product. We sort of talked about that, what was good and bad about check-in deals, and sort of helped release the evolved version of that product. CJ: Greg, just in case you didn't know what a check-in deal was, because it's over a year old and people forget, a good scenario is so many people were checking in every day that you'd walk into a cafe that you absolutely love and you’d naturally go to check in there. So why would you not give an opportunity for the consumer to have a better experience by checking in and maybe get say a free muffin with a coffee? And so that was the actual thinking behind the launch for that product.
