Title: VP-marketing and communications

Company: Molex

Years in current job 6

Brian Krause, who oversees marketing at connectors manufacturer Molex Inc., has embraced digital and social media, but he takes an old-school, integrated marketing communications approach to these new media.

“The philosophy is integration,” he said. “We integrate everything we do. It's all connected, so to speak.”

Molex's Connector blog is a case in point. The blog, which runs the tagline “The place to connect with the connector experts,” offers detailed content on connectors for product designers and specifiers. The site also directs visitors to Molex's efforts on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube as well as the company's RSS feed.

“If you're not using [social media] and generating search-engine results, driving people to the website and creating conversations about you and your products, you're just not doing it right,” Krause said.

One of Krause's first priorities when he took over his current job six years ago was to improve product search on Molex.com. He wanted potential customers to be able to search easily on the website using product numbers and attributes.

Next came improvements in driving prospects to the site. Molex's YouTube initiative appears to be achieving this goal despite initial internal skepticism when the effort started three years ago. “My boss told me, 'Brian, no one is going to watch a video on a connector,' ” Krause said.

But Molex's YouTube page has garnered more than 200,000 views, Krause said. The company also has more than 2,000 Twitter followers. To take advantage of product design being done overseas, Krause said, Molex is also using video-sharing and microblogging sites in China.