DOMANTAY: TOP-NOTCH SOCIAL MEDIA STRATEGIST

Jason M. Domantay has gone a long way from his early beginning as a TV director to a four-year stint with Yahoo where he honed his skills as a social media strategist and is now enjoying a reputation as top-notch in his field where his counsel is much sought.

He has transformed a celebrity as a thought leader who is relatable, pushed a product’s attributes to resonate with target moms, consulted by entrepreneurs, CEOs and even government officials in helping with their campaigns in social media platforms and conducted lectures with Ateneo on social media marketing.

In an interview with The Financial District, Jason said that it is important for one to have authenticity in connecting with the target audience and create compelling narratives for the marketing campaign. However, he warns not to spam your followers.

As an evangelist on social media marketing, his lectures are packed to the rafters and in fact TFD’s Ardee Urbina, a marketing whiz, confided that he attended a three-day lecture twice three years back where he said that his key takeaway on Jason’s sessions was the need for “story-telling” and authenticity in pushing brand objectives.

Only 39, Jason has run the gamut of the social media marketing milieu in his four-year stint with Yahoo where he wrote blogs for Yahoo! Newsroom, shared contents on social media channels and also selected news and feature stories that will be shown on the front page of Yahoo!

He said he was also part of a team that “initiated a lot of engagement with our audience through online voting of OMG! Awards, listed the top trending Yahoo! Search results and created multimedia content like infographics and photo albums.” He credits the Yahoo! Southeast Asia experience to what he has become.

“The skills and insights that I got then still holds today as I navigate the social media world as a strategist,” Jason said, adding that what he usually tells his clients is to first establish a connection with the target audience and for this he emphasizes the value of research for one to succeed in social media platforms.

For him, to leverage the power of social media, one has to be attuned to the noise in the community. Social listening is important, Jason said, who admits to being a “storyteller all my life” a key ingredient in a storied career in Yahoo! Southeast Asia where he produced infographics and other social media marketing tools for the company that were watched by millions of people on a weekly basis.

He said his Yahoo! Southeast Asia stint was the biggest break of his life for he was able to know the byways of social media marketing which is still a misunderstood concept in the country and this is why he is trying his best to evangelize on this aspect by being a lecturer at the Ateneo on the subject and in the webinars that he now holds because of the pandemic.

Before getting the Yahoo offer, he had worked as a TV Director and Executive Producer for then Studio 23 for twenty years where he produced and directed shows such as the Breakfast, News Central, Digital Tour, Yamaha Yey! And Bella on Lifestyle Network. 

Jason, who has an AB Communication Arts degree from the University of Santo Tomas plus an Entrepreneurship Development Program with the Asian Institute of Management, believes in the power of storytelling in connecting with a target audience.

He believes that, contrary to other marketers’ perception, there is no single formula or “magic arrow” that will make a brand or a company known in Social media. He said that in his consultations with clients, he found out that “what worked for one of my clients may not work for a similar client. There are just way too many variables to consider to declare a campaign a success or a failure.” 

“My training in social media really started when I was working in Yahoo! We had this company mantra: Art + Scale and that is the essence of social media marketing. Art is expressed in written text, videos, photos and other multimedia formats while scale is achieved by the number of people reached, converted or led into a specific action,” he said.

According to him, what he does early on is to first set the parameters of the engagement by doing research to determine what campaign could resonate with the target audience. Before he makes the first post or video in a social media channel, he first does research.

He has come up with a four-step formula, which he expounded on in a TV interview. These are first, set a goal, then strategize which could include the appropriate platform to be utilized, create compelling content such as texts, vlogs, videos, photos etc. And the fourth is “don’t hard sell.”

Jason said that “on a marketing perspective, businesses who cannot transition to Social Media Marketing, e-commerce and Digital Marketing are having a hard time surviving this pandemic. “

“This situation forces corporations to shake things up and use digital tools to nurture their relationships with their markets or risk being out of touch with everyone. Now more than ever, companies have to be creative in telling their stories and sending out their messages online to jump out of the clutter” Jason emphasized.

He stressed that with the “COVID-19 pandemic, Social media now plays a bigger role in people’s lives more than ever. “

“Mobility is mostly confined to our homes so people spend more time on social media and they rely on these platforms to talk to their community and socialize. People currently do not have access to public places and gatherings where they can have a discussion on a face to face basis hence, they bring those discussions online on Twitter or Facebook threads.”

For Jason, there are many aspects to a social media marketing campaign that one has to guard on. Having had the luxury of getting a taste of what strategy to implement, he knows now when to pivot a messaging campaign and when to wait out the algorithms to do their thing.

But most important of all, he knows how to provide authenticity to a narrative to make it resonate with the target audience. He has earned his spurs and one gets the impression that he is really tops at what he does. [Lito U. Gagni]