Scott Mon­ty. Glob­al dig­i­tal and mul­ti­me­dia com­mu­ni­ca­tions man­ag­er for one of the biggest com­pa­nies in the world and Sher­lock Holmes fanat­ic. He’s also par­tial to a spat or two in public.

If there’s one per­son any­one in media jobs should be pay­ing atten­tion to it’s Scott Mon­ty. He’s the guy in charge of social media mar­ket­ing for Ford Motor Com­pa­ny and has been described by Ford CEO Alan Mulal­ly as ‘a vision­ary’, while he’s also been referred to as ‘an unstop­pable force of nature’ and ‘the best cor­po­rate social media lead on the plan­et’. Praise indeed. But as you will dis­cov­er, Mon­ty is not a hum­ble man, and nor does he favour hid­ing his light under a bushel…

Face­book Fun

Towards the end of 2012, Gen­er­al Motors, Ford’s arch neme­sis announced it would be pulling the plug on its $10 mil­lion Face­book ad bud­get. Rather than keep­ing qui­et and main­tain­ing a dig­ni­fied silence, while beaver­ing away and mak­ing head­way as his fiercest rival slunk off the edge of the dig­i­tal land­scape, Mon­ty seemed more than hap­py to stick the knife in. And give it a twist.

He has near­ly 90,000 fol­low­ers on Twit­ter, and they all read this: “It’s all about the exe­cu­tion. Our Face­book ads are effec­tive when strate­gi­cal­ly com­bined with engag­ing con­tent & innovation.”

Ouch.

He’s also not afraid to have a bit of fun at the expense of his cor­po­rate bud­dies. One of his famous quips became ‘most tweet­able quote’ at last year’s Busi­nessIn­sid­er Social Media ROI Con­fer­ence. The quote went some­thing like this: “What’s the ROI of putting your pants on every day? It’s hard to mea­sure but there’s neg­a­tive con­se­quences for not doing it.” A neat anal­o­gy as I’m sure you’ll agree.

What Mon­ty says is inter­est­ing. His con­tent is engag­ing. And that’s why he’s so good at social media mar­ket­ing. He also adopts what he calls the ‘Woody Allen’ approach to social and states that 90% of it is sim­ply turn­ing up. Being where the cus­tomers expect you to be.

“You need to be where peo­ple expect you to be,” he said. “And a while back we would see peo­ple tag­ging us with that “@” sym­bol and “Ford” after it on Twit­ter whether or not they real­ized we had an account.

“It could be on pro­grams that we were spon­sor­ing or dur­ing sports events or com­mer­cials. They would tell us exact­ly what they thought. And then when Ford actu­al­ly replied it would blow them away that a glob­al com­pa­ny would be pay­ing atten­tion, and then tak­ing the time to actu­al­ly respond to them.”

What Else Is Mon­ty About?

Scott has a Master’s in Med­ical Sci­ence from Boston University’s School of Med­i­cine at the same time as he com­plet­ed an MBA from BU’s Grad­u­ate School of Man­age­ment and pri­or to join­ing Ford he worked for strate­gic mar­ket­ing firm Crayon.

As well as con­quer­ing social, Mon­ty is also obsessed with fic­tion­al, Lon­don-based detec­tive Sher­lock Holmes and has two blogs ded­i­cat­ed to the super sleuth ‘The Bak­er Street Blog’ and ‘I Hear of Sher­lock Everywhere’.

He pub­lish­es his mus­ings on PR, adver­tis­ing and mar­ket­ing in his own blog ‘The Social Media Blog’ which sits on his web­site www.scottmonty.com. He also writes reg­u­lar­ly for a num­ber of news and busi­ness pub­li­ca­tions and is in reg­u­lar demand as a pub­lic speak­er, although his­to­ry would dic­tate that any­one think­ing of engag­ing his ser­vices would be wise to agree what he’s going to talk about before he takes to the stage!