Jay Baer, president at Convince & Convert, is a New York Times bestselling author (Youtility), marketing consultant, and keynote speaker. He also co-hosts the Social Pros Podcast, interviewing social media professionals about their day-to-day work.

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I invited Jay to Marketing Smarts to talk about his first batch of Social Pros All-Stars, what they have in common, and what their personality traits and technology preferences might mean for the marketing business as a whole.

Here are just a few highlights from our conversation:

More than half of the Social Pro All-Stars studied writing, English, or journalism, as opposed to marketing or business. (17:52): "Historically—and it's ironic to use that term—but historically social media has been mostly written. And you think about two years ago when we'd have corporate clients in our consulting business, and they'd say 'what kind of person do we need to be in social media,' We would say 'you need somebody with good judgment who understands the organization who's a really good writer, who can get their point across in a sentence or two. I'm not sure that would be our advice today, because the nature of the medium has changed."

Social entrepreneurs tend to have a different skill set than their corporate counterparts (22:42): "I don't know that it's a different personality necessarily, but it's definitely a different skill set.... I've had this conversation with a number of people who have decided to do their own thing...and being good at social media and running a small business that happens to provide help with social media is not necessarily the same thing. I could run a successful business selling anything, and it just happens to be this. And this is the fifth marketing services company that I've owned. I know how to do this...but we could make this work probably if we were selling pitchforks or something."

Google+ has recaptured what used to make Twitter great, and Instagram is the modern-day postcard (23:57): "I'm starting to use Google+ more and more because you get into the kind of back and forth questions and interactions that remind me of what Twitter was a few years ago, before it got so popular, and I really like that.... I think, in general, Instagram tends to be a lot of travel log kinds of things. 'Look where I am, look what I'm doing.' It's the post-modern postcard for a lot of people."

Although 27 Social Pros Podcast interviewees do not constitute a statistically significant sample size, there were some intriguing commonalities that emerged among this initial group of All-Stars, as well as some unexpected surprises, so be sure to check out the Social Pros All-Star cards on SlideShare for some fun facts about your favorite social media professionals.

For more information, visit SocialPros.com or follow Jay on Twitter: @JayBaer.

Jay and I covered a lot more ground, including why Facebook didn't even place for "favorite social network" among the Social Pros All-Stars, and how Jay is creating a series of e-books on Youtility for specific industries, so be sure to listen to the entire show, which you can do above, or download the mp3 and listen at your convenience. Of course, you can also subscribe to the Marketing Smarts podcast in iTunes or via RSS and never miss an episode!

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Music credit: Noam Weinstein.

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Published on April 23, 2014