Interview with Maz Nadjm, Head of Social Media at Ogilvy Group UK

Maz Nadjm is the head of Social Media at Ogilvy Group UK. Before that he was Online Community Product Manager at BSkyB. In 2009 he founded Cozytweetup.com which allowed people to connect on Twitter and meet-up to follow their shared interests. Maz was born in Iran, raised in Sweden and studied in the USA and UK. He blogs at www.cozymazi.com.

Maz Nadjm: An advocate of social media

How do you use social media in your daily work, and socially? Professionally I use social media to network with other people in my field and get feedback or recognition for what I’m doing. When I want to reach out to someone, 95% of the time it’s on social. Some of my contacts have become close friends through using social. I’d say I use Twitter to contact everybody, LinkedIn for business and Facebook for my friends and family who are spread all over the world. I use Quora all the time. For me it’s the best Q & A site out there. It’s well monitored and much more efficient than searching for an answer using Google. It’s all about UGC and crowd-sourcing. Quora has kept a high standard of material and that’s all in the tone of the site. That’s an important lesson for many social media sites; it’s like when you go to a club, you might stage dive, but if you’re in a restaurant wearing a suit you won’t do that. It’s all in the culture of the place.

Which sites do you use most? On a day-to-day basis I use Twitter, Quora, LinkedIn and Facebook and all for different purposes. I like YouTube as well. It’s great to see how people are reacting to certain videos and how the latest news is broadcast.

Could you live without social media tools? No. Those days are gone. The kind of technology we see in social media has become part of people’s life. I have my iPhone close to me all the time. It’s there by my bed when I sleep and when I wake up I check the news and my emails etc.