Executive profile: Jennifer Maggiore of Maggiore Consulting & Marketing

(Original article is available here) Plenty of folks in the business world try to hide their real personalities or create a persona they think fits their chosen professions and will help them attain career advancements. Doctors, lawyers, politicians and architects all are expected to act a certain way, and many oblige whether it’s their true soul or not.

Social media consultant Jennifer Maggiore isn’t one of those people. She wears her true personality on her sleeve. Ask most business executives and owners about themselves and you’ll get stock answers to questions such as who they like spending time with (their families), how they like to travel, and how their businesses are “about the people.”

Ask Maggiore, CEO of Scottsdale-based Maggiore Consulting & Marketing, and you get: “My son survived a life-threatening brain tumor when he was only a year old. He is in perfect condition now … I am a Buddhist … I was diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis in 2009 … My husband was my high school sweetheart.”

Those aren’t your boilerplate answers, especially among the business crowd.

Maggiore started her social media-oriented consulting firm in 2005 and, in 2008, brought on partner Heather Long.

“There wasn’t an established business model for integrated or social media firms, so there was a lot of intentional trial and error. We did research, we tried new things and kept what worked and tossed what didn’t,” said Maggiore.

“Since 2009 our sales have grown roughly 200 percent per year, and we are now a team of six people. We just recently built out and moved into a 3,000-square-foot suite at Via de Ventura and the 101,” she said.

Personal

Family: Husband, Joe;

Children: Matteo, 4, and Joey, 6 months

Residence: Scottsdale

Education: Bachelor of Science in business marketing, University of Phoenix

Pets: Belgian Malinois, Bea; cat, T.C. (“The Cat”)

You drive: Silver Nissan Murano

Music: I stream Pandora from my iPhone.

Zodiac sign: Aquarius — I’m so Aquarius.

Opinions

Favorite movies: “Goodfellas” and “The Princess Bride”

Hobbies: Cooking, reading and watching TV. I’m on a “Mad Men” kick at the moment, and “Medium,” too. We also love taking the boys to Disneyland, and we try to make it to Seattle once a year.

Pet peeves: Fake people, missed deadlines and leaving socks lying around. May God help you if you leave your socks lying around.

Best traits in people: Authenticity, a great sense of humor and being grounded. Friends, employees and clients overlap in this business. I love people who can be fun, genuine and at the same time be serious about results. Spirituality is important to me, too.

Rock stars need not apply

Three things clients should know before hiring a social media expert: 1) Good social media isn’t cheap, and cheap social media isn’t good. 2) True social media professionals will never refer to themselves as gurus or rock stars. They will demonstrate the results they’ve achieved for past clients. 3) Social media is really a people business. You should feel great about who you’re working with, because good chemistry gets great results.

Who should be hiring a social media firm but isn’t? There are small companies that grab the youngest person in the room, throw them on Twitter and then wonder why they aren’t successful. There are large companies who hire a team of social media professionals and wonder why they aren’t successful. A good digital firm will come in and evaluate what you’re doing, define realistic and measurable goals and then develop a sound strategy to meet those goals, as well as reporting mechanisms to make performance more transparent.

Who is hiring social media experts but maybe shouldn’t? If you are unclear about your goals or if you are unclear about your expectations of social media, do some research before you spend money. It’s not always as cut and dried as “we want to generate leads.” We spend a lot of time assisting clients in determining what it is that they truly desire. Most companies don’t really just want “more followers” or “more engagement,” they want to influence public opinion or educate consumers. You need to figure out what those goals are before spending money on putting a strategy in place.