Start With A Win - How Facebook Uses Community to Navigate Crisis with Nada Stirratt

Episode Date: May 13, 2020

We are honored to welcome to this episode of the Start with a Win podcast Nada Stirratt, VP Global Business Group for North America at Facebook. Nada has had a prolific and storied career in the technology and marketing industries, and her efforts continue as she leads her team at Facebook to accomplish the mission of building communities and bringing people closer together. Their unwavering commitment to that mission has led them to innovations that have changed the way people connect, which is especially important during times like the current pandemic. Facebook has specifically outlined its four key objectives for helping people navigate this crisis:Build communityProvide accurate informationUse data for goodHelp businesses and the economy recoverIntegral to these efforts is an understanding of the needs, wants, and behaviors of Facebook’s users, which trickles down to the advertisers that Facebooks works with to best serve those populations. This knowledge also informs the marketing efforts of individual businesses and organizations, who are increasingly using video to connect with their consumers. Nada recommends that all businesses look into free resources and course content if they have not yet engaged with their customers through video. In this challenging business environment, many businesses are quickly adjusting their operations and marketing efforts to “meet people where they are,” while others are unsure of how to move forward. Nada emphasizes the importance of being resourceful and in touch with the communities your business serves to know how best to continue to work with them. Connect with Nada:https://www.linkedin.com/in/nadastirratthttps://www.wsj.com/market-data/quotes/FB/company-people/executive-profile/81869227Connect with Adam:https://www.startwithawin.com/ https://www.facebook.com/REMAXAdamContoshttps://twitter.com/REMAXAdamContos https://www.instagram.com/REMAXadamcontos/ Leave us a voicemail:888-581-4430

Every day is filled with choices. You're here because you're choosing to start with a win. Get ready to be inspired, learn something new, and connect with the win nation. And welcome to Start With A Win. Adam Conto, CEO of Remax here. Another COVID broadcast coming to you from the bunker here in my basement. Got producer Mark on the line. How you doing, buddy? I am doing so good. in the global situation here. This is not one of these local situations that we just talk about around the neighborhood or the city or something like that, or even the US. This thing is all over the place. And as a result, we're actually talking to so many people

around the world and have global impact. So kind of exciting to have our guests on today, don't you think? Yes, extremely exciting. And I think our audience is going to really enjoy this episode. I love this. I love this. So as you know, Remax does a great deal of business globally.

We're in over 110 countries and territories with over 130,000 agents, over 8,300 offices. And one of the major platforms that everybody uses to communicate is, of course, Facebook and the other organizations that are associated with Facebook, like WhatsApp and Instagram. And we love them so much that we have a great relationship with the key leaders at Facebook, especially one of our great friends, VP of North America at Facebook, Nada Stirret. How are you doing, Nada? Welcome to the show. Thank you so much for having me. Really great to see you again. And I always love spending time with you. Yeah, likewise. So last time we saw each other, I think we were in New York hanging

out with your team in a restaurant talking about business, weren't we? Yeah, it feels like a lifetime ago. Now you're in your bunker and I'm in my business, weren't we? Yeah, it feels like a lifetime ago. Now you're in your bunker and I'm in my basement. There you go. Yeah, yeah. Sitting down here in the woodland reading room at Fort Contos. So lots of fun. So Nada, you have one of the most interesting

marketing and advertising and data careers that I've seen holding top roles at AOL, MTV, MySpace, Verve, Axiom. I mean, you were even named to Cableworld's Most Powerful Women in 2006, Business Insider's Most Powerful Women in Mobile 2015, and awarded the Ad Tech Industry Achievement Award in 2016. Congratulations on all these accolades. You've done so much. Thank you very much. I guess that's a nice way to say that I'm old. I was looking at this going, were you in high school when you got these things? What's going on here? It's cool to have you here. And you and I have had some amazing conversations

when it comes to the dynamic changes in marketing that are going on in the world, particularly in how we communicate with each other. Really, social media is kind of the foundation for all of that right now. And you work at the epicenter of that. So, can you tell us a little bit about working at Facebook? What's that like? Yeah, so sure. Let me just to context a little bit. I run the North America business. And so, I oversee the relationships with advertisers of all sizes from the small local companies that are looking to grow to the national level, and then to some of the largest marketers in the world, across Facebook, Instagram, Messenger. And what my team does every single day is we work with our clients. And we like to say we want to be

their best partner, their best meeting, their best dollar spent. And we do that by being so completely laser focused on their business outcomes. And so we help with everything from launching products and brands to cool creative executions, driving sales. I mean, the list goes on and on and on. And it's with partners like you that we just get really excited about working together. And again, focus solely on your business outcomes. I love that. And it was interesting because during the conversation, you guys weren't talking about trying to sell product or services or anything. You were about

helping the community. It was so neat to see that perspective. You're a service organization that your intent is to give people great information, create relationships or tighten those relationships up, bring them closer together globally through different means of communication. And since the COVID-19 global breakout, the COVID period, as Mark Zuckerberg called it, can you give us a little insight? How has Facebook been supporting communities and business? And I know there was a lot of discussion last week where Mark put out a video, which was fantastic, by the way. I got on social media and talked about that and some of the amazing things that are going on from Facebook to the consumer based on my perspective of that

video. But can you give us a little bit deeper perspective on the COVID period from Facebook? Yeah, sure. I would say, I think you hit the nail right on the head when you use the word community. And I would say that we wake up every single morning focused on our two and a half billion people plus who come to our platform and use our platform across the world every single day. And our mission,

we are very much a mission-driven company and our mission has always been to give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together. And that unwavering focus on that mission of building community and building the community for good means that when something like this happens, and like, again, this is a global pandemic, the likes of which none of us have ever seen. When this is coming at you in all different levels by your focus on your mission, it allows you to do really good work for the benefit of your community. And there's a couple things that we do.

Number one is, again, in building this community and bringing people together, we are very mindful that there are communities, there's families, there's people that are living alone that maybe aren't, are truly isolated, maybe want to be with a community of shared interests. So we've made it even easier for you to communicate with your group. So things like we've doubled the capacity on video calls for WhatsApp. We've added video calls to our dating app. We've got live streaming features on both Instagram and Facebook. And I mean, IG Live wasn't really even a thing until just about a month ago.

And then last week, we announced Messenger Rooms. And that's a new group video format in Messenger. And I love hearing you talk about that last week after the announcement. And these are all ways to use our platforms to bring the community together. And then the next thing that's really important when you have this incredible, it's a privilege to have this kind of community that we have, it's making sure that we are providing the most accurate information that's available. Everything from Mark's interview with Dr. Fauci to a really robust COVID information center that is constantly updated. We are very, very focused on removing

fake news. And we also put $100 million grant towards small and local news sources to make sure that they stay in business and continue delivering news. And I would say the third piece that's, again, very much focused on this mission is what we call data for good. And that is using the platform and the data that the platform affords to virus map and symptom map, ultimately see where supplies are available or may not be available so we can help governments determine where to send resources and eventually which areas are safe to start perhaps opening again, which then leads us to our last piece, which is we have an obligation to help businesses get back on their feet and to help economies recover. We announced a $100

million grant of new programs for the small business groups for them to be able to pivot and adapt. And again, our relentless focus on business outcomes is enabling us to be able to do that and ultimately to help people grow sales. So that's how it all comes together. I was totally blown away when I watched the video. And then you did such an amazing recap of everything you guys have going on right now. So thank you. Thank you for going through that. I want to unpack just a couple of those things. Sure. Something that I've noticed about your organization is you're so dedicated to ensuring that you understand consumer psychology and what's going on in society. But you're also incredibly aware that people's personal information and security matters. And that was touched on several times by Mark during the announcement. He was careful to make sure that people that get into the video rooms

that you're talking about on Messenger, that those rooms are protected. There's a level of security as well as there's a level of encryption in WhatsApp and things of that nature. So you've taken in a lot of these concerns that society has and you've listened. What's the organization's perspective on this? Because you guys have to maintain a really great balancing act to serve appropriately, is what I call it. And that's what you're doing. You're serving so much, but you also have to know, okay, we just can't gather everything and then give everything. We have to be very careful how we do that. What's your perspective on that? Well, a couple of things. Number one is our business model rests on the fact that targeted

advertising is good for businesses and it's good for consumers. The only way that you're going to have a consumer respond to targeted advertising is if they trust the platform and they trust that you are using their data responsibly, that you are using their data transparently, and that every consumer on our platform, again, over two and a half billion, have an opportunity to go and see what data is being collected out of different sources from a data standpoint, and then also see what kind of data is collected off of Facebook and used to inform advertising decisions. And we feel that that responsibility of the consumer, which is first and foremost of everything, is so important because we need that relationship with them. And we need to be the

place where they can come and connect with their communities. I love that. So this is a relationship between Facebook and the consumer, Facebook and the user. It's not transactional. It's fascinating to watch this. And you mentioned some words here that just mean so much to me and my viewpoint of organizations that I love to do business with. Trust, responsibility, transparency. You're thinking about people's feelings before you're thinking about what is the result that's going to happen if there's an advertising buy or somebody ends up making a purchase through your platform or something like that. So that's really, really cool to hear.

I want to talk about something a little bit deeper. And I know you and I have discussed this before with your team, and that's video. We are a visually driven being. Genetically, we function off of that. In fact, you go way back to when the iPhone 4 was announced and the first FaceTime that occurred on there. And then when you guys started releasing video over the past couple of years, and it's just increasing, increasing, increasing. There were a lot of video announcements. In fact, it was so important that Mark Zuckerberg actually did his announcement on Facebook Live. And I thought that was, it showed so much vulnerability on his part that he was telling everybody, it's okay. I'm doing it. You can do it. Can you give us a little bit of an idea,

why is Facebook so heavily involved in video and what gets you excited about the new changes in video? Yeah. And so Facebook is heavily involved in video because the consumer is heavily involved in video. And so I feel like we reflect and some parts we reflect and other places we guide. And on the consumer side, I mean, you all see it in when you have some time, what do you do? You'd like to maybe go look at slightly longer form content. So we have something like a watch for those kinds of things. You love to look at clips and soundbites when you have time and you like to share them with everybody and whether you share them by a messenger or your own posts. We are very much a very visual society garnering creativity and new ideas that we can share

both with marketers and with consumers. And the format that tends to be able to tug at the heartstrings the most is video. The ways that I look at that is your customer is on mobile, and when they're on mobile, they're consuming video a great part of their day. And so we need to make sure that we have everything from really good quality scripted things, like we do on watch, things like Jada Pinkett Smith and her red table talk or Mike Rowe and we just have a whole roster of really great original production and then we also have some great partnerships as well with many many content producers obviously a lot of

those are challenged right now with COVID-19 and so like everybody else who's affected, we're getting slowly back on the content production side of it, but that's not stopping people from sharing and building the community around shared videos. We see so many human to human, one-to-one, people picking up their mobile device and shooting a video or opening their laptop or whatever, because in the past, call it six weeks, videos become mainstream. Before it was so much FOPO, fear of other people's opinions, people getting on video, that you look at it and go, all right, it's almost a minimum necessity to entry now for business to be on video. Because people are doing it personally now so much more.

I know I've been on video a lot with just family members directly. And I use video all the time on Facebook Messenger. I love that feature as well as the video calling on Facebook Messenger. In fact, I think I do more video calls on Facebook Messenger than I do normal phone calls now practically. So many businesses, are lagging in video. We see business leaders are like, I have a marketing team. I have an advertising team that does this. But I think we know that this digital transparency that has to occur in business overall is the next, call it, hill to climb for business. What is your professional perspective? Because you're an expert in how people market their businesses. And you look at the accolades that

you've received over the past decade or so, it's always been about how do you get yourself out there ultimately for the visual experience? What expert advice do you have and does Facebook have on what businesses should be considering here? Yeah. And so I think it starts at the very core is knowing that your customer is on mobile. Your customer is on mobile and you need to reach them where they're spending the majority of their media consumption time. I also would urge any small businesses or franchises to take advantage of a ton of free courses that we have to help businesses. We have Facebook for Business.

And the curriculum is really sophisticated and helps on new formats like video, helps on being able to best communicate in something like video on Messenger. And what does that look like? I think it's really important that with social media, especially people know that business is personal. So for especially for your field, it's knowing that how to use social media to build their brands to build the Remax brand. I mean, I think you've done an extraordinary job building your brand and understanding with like, how do you start with a win? And so those are really, really important. And then I would say to what you were getting at with the video, creative matters. I mean, we refer to it as thumb stopping creative. You want, when you're looking at your phone, that you're going through your feed and chances are you are on Facebook or Instagram, oftentimes during the day. And the creative has to be so compelling that you stop your thumb and you want to get engaged in a different way. And then I would say the last piece is then be really intentional on then furthering those connections, using Messenger, using WhatsApp, using ways that you can have that more personal

one-to-one interaction. And so I think people who do that really well and use the power of all the platforms for what they're designed to do and make sure that their organic presence mirrors the messaging and the tone of their advertising, you suddenly have a very robust way to surround the consumer. Wow. Some great tips. I think if somebody didn't write those down, you need to rewind right now and take a listen to those again. I will email you. I'll go back and listen to it and type it up. It's like a mini business masterclass there from Nada. So thank you for those. I love that.

Just to wrap this whole thing up, we've seen so many changes in business. And as somebody who helps people institute their marketing, we've seen a lot of brands step away from marketing during this timeframe, which I think is a bad move. I talk to my marketing team all the time. There's a great opportunity on Facebook, on Instagram to get out there and market your business right now. What final words of insight do you have for us on that? And what should people be thinking about as they log into the advertising platforms on Facebook to get something going as they emerge from the COVID period to really kickstart what's going on in the community? Any advice you have on that? Yeah. And I would say, remember anchoring

everything to knowing how informed the consumer is and taking your guide from the community. Any advice you have on that? Yeah. And I would say, remember anchoring everything to knowing how informed the consumer is and taking your guide from the consumer. And there are some places and there are some areas where maybe they are starting going back to work a little earlier than other areas. And so really, there is no black and white. I take it from knowing consumer insights and knowing the appetite that consumers have for products or messages. And I'll say there's a couple places where it just may not be appropriate for some really high entertainment kind of messaging right now. And so many of those types of companies have either gone dark or they've tweaked their messages.

I love so much when you see companies who have taken their entire production line and maybe away from automotive and into producing respirators or away from alcohol and producing hand sanitizer. And those are important messages that consumers need to know because they will feel incredibly proud that they are part of your brand. And so I urge everyone to make sure that we're being really, really mindful on what the consumer feels ready to do and to be patient on one hand. But then to your point, it's really under, and you know your consumer better than anybody does, and really knowing when they are eager to then get back into the market. And obviously, everybody wants to make sure that they are safe and that they are healthy. And then they also want to do their part to get the economy going.

I love that. The old saying, people don't care how much you know until they know how much you care. It's so fantastic to hear from you, another business leader who really has such an impact in this transference of knowledge that's going on, as well as emotion, because we've got so much emotion going on in society right now. Nada, we always wrap up the Start With A Win program by talking about how business leaders do something to start their day with a win. It might be a habit. It might be meditation. It might be a book or a quote or time with loved ones or something like that. The question I have for you, Nada, how do you start with a win? I would say, first of all, I love this question. I'm going to ask you when I'm done too,

so be prepared. My start with a win always starts the night before. I am the type of person that has to be incredibly prepared before I go to bed. That way, then I can start my day with priorities, my own, as opposed to the email frenzy the email frenzy. And the second part, which again, has also become habit to the point that it's really more a ritual. And this is putting on my big nerd hat. Every single day, I have to do the New York Times crossword puzzle. And I have to complete it before I can do anything in my day. And I've been doing that now for over 25 years. And I think this is one of those things that just gets me mentally pumped to start my day. But those are my two wins that I have to do every single day. What about you? How do you start your

day with a win? I'm a routine junkie so I always start my day the alarm goes off the same time every day and it's actually not necessarily an alarm it's just the light goes on on my phone and then I get a German Shepherd nose in the face and that's Seymour going, dad, wake up. So I get up and I go to the kitchen. I make some coffee, let the dogs out. I have my bulletproof coffee with the coconut oil and collagen and different things in it to kind of get my brain going. And then I go work out. Once I'm done working out, it's time to hit the business. I get into doing a podcast or a Facebook Live. I love doing a Facebook Live in the morning, by the way. Kudos again to you guys.

Thanks for giving us these amazing platforms to broadcast our ideas with. But ultimately, I think you have to build these successes. And you have your successes you build in the day. When you start with a win, I have my successes. Everybody else has some successes. And you have your successes you build in the day. When you start with a win, I have my successes. Everybody else have some successes because we are a functioning organism that functions on successes and momentum creates momentum. So keep building that. Nada, it's so nice to have you with us here today. It's so nice to see that you're well. Huge kudos to your organization. You guys are doing so much in the community globally, as well as helping all the different health and government entities and helping people

understand supply chain, helping people understand small business assistance, as well as moving us into this next level of video creation and just the relationships that we have with different people in our business. So Nada, thank you so much for being with us. You're on Start With A Win. Thank you so much for having me. I'm so flattered. I really enjoyed this.

Be safe and I can't wait to see you in person, hopefully soon. Yes, thank you. And my best to all the leaders in your organization and everybody helping so many around the world. Take care. Thank you. Thank you so much for listening to Start With A Win.

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