6 Reasons to Make Your Big Idea Small
Posted on 12. May, 2012 by Jay Baer in Blog, content marketing, exacttarget, Small Business Internet Marketing, Small Business Marketing, social media research
Brad Van Orden is the most interesting man in the world. It’s not the Dos Equis guy, it’s Brad.
Sheena Navigates the Market in Nebaj, Guatemala
A former product engineer for WL Gore & Associates, Brad is an expert telemark skier, mountain biker, mechanic, cook, humorist, and explorer. I got to know Brad and his wife Sheena when I lived in Flagstaff, AZ (where they’re from). I met Brad and helped him with some Web strategy when he took an interest in sustainable energy (as a hobby) and taught himself C++ and a bunch of other programming languages to build a company called Sunwind Solutions that would automagically figure out the best solar or wind equipment for your home, based on a massive database that mapped wind and sunshine patterns against GPS data. Exactly the same way I spend my free time, if you swap “drinking tequila” for the “teaching yourself how to program” parts.
Not content with their baseline level of intrigue, Brad and Sheena decided to quit their jobs, buy a VW van, and spend three years driving across the world. This is no hippie quest, it’s a methodical embrace of a new life that simultaneously requires extensive planning, yet none whatsoever.
Their VW van is named “Nacho” and Brad is documenting their adventures with terrific blog posts and photos at Drive Nacho Drive. Brad is a gifted travel writer in the mold of Tim Cahill (my second favorite travel author, and founder of Outside Magazine). Instead of posting a couple times a week, Brad could have instead held off and released a killer, long-form tome when the trip ended.
But Brad Van Orden thinks small. And so should you.
Charles Dickens Was a Hell of a Content Marketer
Serializing your work used to be the standard practice. Dickens published every one of his novels in a serial form, experimenting with weekly and monthly episodic fiction. It made his work cheaper (in the short run) and thus more accessible. Publishers loved it too, because they could include ads in each part. In short, it worked.
Somewhere, we got away from this notion and started to embrace a “bigger is better” philosophy with regard to publishing (and now content marketing). We need to swing the pendulum back the other way, and start atomizing our content (hat tip to Todd Defren for coining that).
Deconstructing Your Big Idea
When I talk about atomizing your content, I’m not advocating more ideas, or even a tremendous amount of additional work. What I’m imploring you to do is take your big idea and turn it into several smaller ideas. You have to disavow yourself of the natural inclination to create the “mother of all” whatever, and instead embrace the propagation of a larger number of less massive (but still meaningful) content executions.
My friends (and clients) at ExactTarget have a fine example of thinking small in their Subscribers, Fans, and Followers content. This is a very large research project that uncovered many important behaviors and data points related to social media and email marketing. Instead of releasing it as an omnibus study, they deconstructed it into 14 separate parts and released a new piece every few weeks, increasing overall impact considerably. See the whole series here.
The 6 Benefits of Thinking Small
Atomizing your content in this way has six advantages over the “mother of all” approach:
1. Atomized Content is More Searchable
When you break your content into multiple pieces you get more bait in the water to attract your most important customer….Google. Producing disparate pieces of content gives you the opportunity to emphasize a wider number of search terms, cross-link your content, acquire more inbound links, and increase your total number of ranked pages.
2. Atomized Content is More Findable
This is especially valid when you repurpose and reimagine your content while also atomizing it. What will get more exposure for your company, a blog post or a blog post + a podcast? How about a Slideshare presentation or a Slideshare presentation + a blog post? Every presentation you make should be at least one blog post, and each blog post you write is the untapped nucleus for a presentation. This findability principle is the reason we have full written transcripts of every video interview and every Social Pros episode here on Convince & Convert.
3. Atomized Content Gets Consumed More
In a world where 140 characters equals a fully-formed thought, what will get consumed more – a 90-second video, or a 32-page eBook? Typically, it’s the former. Face it, Johnny Don’t Read. Every trend in social media and content marketing is toward brevity and showing rather than telling. YouTube. Pinterest. Socialcam. Viddy. Instagram. Tumblr. Infographics. Will I still write this blog in two years? Will anyone still read posts as long as this one?
This is why even though I’ve delayed my next book project, when I get ready to jump back in, I’ll be working on a short, small, easy to digest book. Seth Godin has this trend nailed with his Domino Project.
4. Atomized Content Gets Spread More
The potential virality of smaller content supersedes larger content in almost every case. This is partially related to consumption, as we are more likely to recommend via tweet, share, +1, buffer, email forward, etc. something we have actually read or watched. But it’s also just a factor of mathematics. If you have one terrific eBook it will definitely be shared. But if you take that same eBook and release it in 8 parts, the collective shares for those components will be higher – and given the inclusion of sharing behaviors in search results, this also impacts #1 above.
5. Atomized Content Gains More Mind Share
One of the big successes of the ExactTarget project is media coverage. Thousands of blog posts and media mentions have been made of the Subscribers, Fans, Followers research. It’s very good information, and packaged well. But the fact that there have been 14 possible bites of the media apple instead of one makes a big difference. Thinking small gives you more opportunities to create and sustain mindshare among media, prospective customers, and even current customers.
6. Atomized Content Generates More Leads
One of the often overlooked benefits of thinking small in content marketing is that each time you deconstruct or reimagine your content, you have another opportunity to include calls-to-action. Remember, you’re in the behavior business not the eyeballs business. An 8-piece series gives you 800% more calls-to-action than a “mother of all” program. Further, when your content is smaller, your call-to-action competes against fewer words, pictures, and other content elements, which could provide additional attention and conversion (your results may vary).
Be an Amoeba
Remember learning about cell division in school? A single-celled organism becomes two, then four, then eight? The next time you’re brainstorming a content marketing execution for your company, think like an amoeba. How can you take your big idea and make it two, or four, or eight? That’s Thinking Small. Go do it.
About the Jay Baer: Jay Baer is a hype-free social media strategist & speaker, tequila guy, and co-author of The NOW Revolution. Jay is the founder of http://convinceandconvert.com and host of the Social Pros podcast.
6 Reasons to Make Your Big Idea Small is a post from: Convince and Convert Blog: Social Media Strategy and Social Media Consulting
Social Pros 13 – Ryon Harms, Farmers Insurance
Posted on 27. Apr, 2012 by Jay Baer in Blog, edison research, Facebook fan pages, Small Business Internet Marketing, Small Business Marketing, social media research, tom webster
This is Episode 13 of the Social Pros Podcast : Real People Doing Real Work in Social Media. This episode features Ryon Harms, the head of social media for Farmers Insurance. Read on for insights from Ryon, and our Social Media Stat of the Week (this week: 44% of Americans see tweets mentioned nearly every day, but only 10% of Americans actually use Twitter).
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Huge thanks to data-driven social media management software company Argyle Social for their presenting sponsorship, as well as Infusionsoft and Jim Kukral at DigitalBookLaunch. We use Argyle Social for our social engagement; we use Infusionsoft for our email; and Jim is our guest host for the podcast and a smart guy).
Social Pros Transcript For Your Reading Enjoyment, Thanks to Speechpad for the Transcription
Jay: And here we are with episode number 13 of the Social Pros podcast. Lucky number 13. I am Jay Baer, joined today not by Eric Boggs, not by Eric Boggs, but by a different Tarheel. Our good friend, oft-mentioned on the podcast but never actually a participant, Mr. Tom Webster, the Vice President of Strategy for Edison Research.
Tom, thank you for pinch hitting for our man Eric. It is fantastic and an honor to have you on the podcast.
Tom: Hello today. Not lucky 13 for Mr. Boggs, I’m afraid.
Jay: Evidently not. It will all be fine we hope for Mr. Eric. Thanks for being here, Tom. You were in a crazy season. Some people know you, many people on the podcast of course know you for your work in the social media research area. But your company is perhaps best known as the proprietors of the exit polling in American politics.
Tom: Yeah, that’s right. Pretty much everything that you’ve seen on TV, anything that you’ve read in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, CNN, ABC, NBC about who voted and why in the recent primaries, and certainly who’s going to vote and why coming up in the national election this November. That all comes from my company. We see lots and lots of numbers.
Jay: I know you picked it for Dukakis, but forgive that one.
Tom: Well, yeah. Unfortunately Paul Simon dropped out before the primaries start.
Jay: Every time I’m in Illinois and I drive past the Paul Simon Memorial Expressway with the bow tie on the highway sign I always chuckle a little bit about that.
You have some exciting research that you have put out recently, which we’ll talk about in the social media stat of the week. You have some additional research on the way. Would you like to tease that research Mr. Webster?
Tom: I would tease it. I’m not sure it’s going to behave very well when I tease it. We’re going to be releasing a major update to our social habits series. This will be a presentation on how Americans are using social media and why, and a general look at various platforms and different behaviors on those platforms.
I’m going to be releasing that at BlogWorld, I think kicking off BlogWorld, the morning of June 5th with that. We’ve been teasing little bits of data from it. I know I teased a little bit this week, which perhaps we’ll get to. It’s from a major national random representative survey of Americans 12 plus. Super excited. This is our 20th such survey, and we’ve been tracking a lot of these things for six years now.
Jay: Nothing starts off a major conference better in the morning than a presentation on research. That’s been my experience.
Tom: Bucket full of numbers. That’s how I like to start the day.
Jay’s Thought of the Week
Jay: Fantastic. My thought of the week is this: I found an interesting blog post the other day on Social Media Today. I really enjoyed it, because it did some myth busting. It was from JD Rucker.
The headline was provocative. It said, “Why local businesses should stop focusing on their Facebook page.” JD’s premise was that lots of local companies have rushed into Facebook, created Facebook pages, because of course it’s low cost or no cost at least from an out of pocket perspective. Of course, it takes a lot of time to do it well as we all know.
But that many of those local businesses then don’t actually have any audience, so they’re putting up all kinds of photos of dining patrons and aren’t our donuts fantastic, and it’s crickets. There’s three people commenting or liking.
His premise is that geez, maybe what we need to do is turn this on its head and encourage the patrons of those businesses to create content in Facebook so that their friends will see chatter about the businesses that they support. As opposed to social media essentially just being a tiny little press release machine.
Tom: That is a super-interesting take on that to me, because I think a lot of what people forget, especially for local businesses, is that social media starts offline, goes online, and then goes back offline again. If you are a local business, encouraging people to tell their stories I think starts at the store. It starts at the retail location, it starts in the restaurant, it starts where you are, and giving people a reason to tell those stories.
The other thing I would point out too, and some of this research that we will release, some of this is research that we and others have released. There are a lot, especially younger demos have lots and lots of Facebook friends. If you’re 18 to 24 or 18 to 39 or so on, you’ve got 300 or 400 Facebook friends.
You’re checking your Facebook page several times a day, four or five times a day. Thanks to the Facebook algorithm EdgeRank, the content that you’re actually interacting with, largely from your actual friends is what’s getting prioritized. If you’re local business and you’re not bringing it on Facebook and actually interacting with people and getting them to engage with you, your content will just never be seen.
Jay: Yeah, I did a webinar earlier today with our friends at ExactTarget. We talked about how email has a linear deliverability mechanism. If you send somebody an email, they’re going to get it. They may not open it, they may not click on it, but they’re going to get it.
You put a status update on Facebook and a much, much small percentage of the people who theoretically have subscribed to interact with you will actually see anything that you publish. I think that’s a misconception in the industry. People say, “Well, I’ve got 16,000 fans, so 16,000 people will see that.” That’s just not true.
Tom: Well, I’ll give you a bigger misconception. Social media throws off a ton, a crap ton in fact, to use the technical term, of click stream data. We think we have all of this information that we can mine from Twitter, we think we have all this info that we can mine from Facebook.
If I run an ad on AMC or A&E or some cable network, I can give you a pretty good estimate how many people saw that ad. It’s an estimate, but an estimate works within some kind of parameters, right? But if I put out a tweet or I put out a Facebook post, you cannot tell me how many people read it. There’s no click stream path to that data.
You cannot tell me how many people actually read my message. That’s something that click stream data is just not going to give you.
Jay: Yeah, it’s interesting and I wonder if at some point that data will be revealed. It is theoretically possible to get at if the proprietors of that information, Facebook, Twitter, etc. wanted to do so. They could cookie set, they could do some other things to make that information available, but perhaps it’s not in their best interests to do so.
Tom: Yeah, maybe not. Even then, they could make available that I had the opportunity to see it, but not necessarily that I saw it.
Jay: Right. Exactly. Speaking of data, what is the social media stat of the week?
Social Media Stat of the Week: 44% of Americans See Tweets Mentioned Nearly Every Day
Tom: Well, I’m going to give you one. An entirely self-serving one, but it’s one that just completely surprised me when we uncovered it. It’s a piece of data that I wrote about on my blog, BrandSavant.com. Plug. Slash plug.
It’s a piece of research that we did again based on this data set we’re going to reveal about a little bit about the disparity between the number of people who are aware of Twitter and the number of people who actually use Twitter. That’s been a significant disparity for several years now.
This year, the number of Americans 12 plus who use Twitter is about 10%. The number of Americans 12 plus who are aware of Twitter is actually 89%. It’s an enormous disparity there, and that’s been the case for the past three years.
We got at that with a number of questions. The one that really stuck I think was this. We asked people, “How often do you see tweets talked about or mentioned or shown on other media? On traditional media, such as television or radio or newspapers, or on other websites?”
The answer that came back actually shocked me, and I’m well nigh unshockable as you know, Jay. The answer that came back was that 44% of Americans 12 plus reported that they see tweets mentioned on other media nearly every day. Nearly every day.
80% of Americans 12 plus, again that’s all Americans, even offline Americans, which about 15% of Americans don’t have Internet access. 80% of Americans said that they have at least once seen tweets mentioned in other media. This, to me, up ends a little bit of how we think we use Twitter and what we think we’re doing when we use Twitter.
A lot of the people who use Twitter frequently may use it conversationally, but what this data suggests is that most Americans, and again, that’s the majority of Americans 12 plus, view Twitter as a broadcast network. They’re getting information broadcast from them. They’re not interacting with it, they don’t even belong to Twitter.
But tweets have reached, tweets have power. I think what that means is that if you’re famous, you’re a lot more famous thanks to Twitter. That’s another broadcast.
Jay: Especially in certain categories, right? In sports, how often does ESPN report on tweets? Hourly, by the minute. Entertainment business, same thing. Celebrity musings on Twitter are reported via television and in print every single day.
It is a symbiotic relationship, because the other group, celebrities, athletes, the other group that uses Twitter disproportionately are the media. So it all works together.
As a long ago journalism major, however, I have railed against this in the past. I don’t think on the podcast but in other places. To me it’s the epitome of lazy reporting, though. Instead of actually getting your notepad and getting on the phone or emailing somebody even, to actually get a quote for your story or get a real perspective, it’s, “Well, let’s just copy and paste their Twitter feed and we’ll call that a quote.”
Number one, you’re taking somebody out of context in some cases. Number two, you’re not actually doing any reporting. I have twitter.com myself. Why do I need your journalism organization to tell me what somebody else said when I could read it for myself on Twitter or in an RSS feed or any other number of places?
Tom: Well, but I’ll give you the flipside of that, Jay. You have a journalism background. I happen to be a celebrity athlete.
I absolutely appreciate the opportunity to have a platform like Twitter where I can get the word out about my new album, about my autobiography that’s coming out. I think it’s some of my best work. As a celebrity athlete, my opportunities have never been greater.
Jay: My problem is not with the celebrity athletes or the gin-soaked market researchers. It’s more that the media are taking Twitter reporting and calling it journalism. That I think is not only doing a disservice to the practice of journalism, but also bodes poorly for the nature of real investigation.
If we’re not going to actually ask any questions, we’re just going to copy and paste statements from people in 140 characters, we don’t really have that fourth estate anymore, do we?
Tom: No. That’s an excellent point.
Jay: But you know what? If that’s our biggest problem, that’s a high class problem. If journalism reporting tweets is our worst possible depth of despair, I’ll take it.
Tom: I think it hurts journalists to lose the curation aura and to cede it to other people, I think. I don’t think they’re all like that, but we’ve certainly seen enough indications of tweets being put uncurated, seemingly randomly selected tweets, on national news networks during significant events. I can do that myself, just as you say, and I’m merely a celebrity athlete.
Jay: Speaking of Twitter and the confluence of Twitter and politics, I wanted to ask you about your thoughts. I don’t think you and I have ever discussed this. Your thoughts about the seemingly faux accounts that Newt Gingrich and other members of the political establishment have run up, and they’re crowing about the number of Twitter followers that they have.
Some research suggested that a disproportionate share of those followers were robotic or fake. How do you feel about that?
Tom: I think it’s a useful case study for everyone listening to this podcast, to think about how easily those things are gained. To think about how influence can be gained, to think about how followers can be gained.
Because, and I’ve written about this in the past, the attempts so far to predict the results of some of the primaries that we’ve looked at, the caucuses and the primaries in the GOP selection process on social media, have ranged from awful to exponentially awful. There’s very little correlation between how a GOP candidate seems to perform in terms of mentions and sentiment with the number of people that actually walk to the polls and flip the switch or fill in the bubble.
That’s a fact. You can go back and look at that. If you are a brand manager and you’re watching this, and you’re seeing how easily these things are gained and you’re seeing how they potentially don’t have correlation with real world behaviors, replace politics with breakfast cereal.
Replace politics with whatever your brand is and consider that for a moment. That what you’re getting raw, what you’re getting unfiltered from social media, may not be what you think you’re getting. Doesn’t mean it’s useless, it means you’ve got to do some work to make it useful.
Jay: That is a really interesting point and I think a fantastic segue to bring in our special guest for this week, Mr. Ryon Harms, who’s the Director of Social Media for Farmers Insurance. Ryon, thanks very much for being on the show.
Special Guest: Ryon Harms of Farmers Insurance
Ryon Harms, Farmers Insurance @thesocialexec
Ryon: Thanks, Jay, for having me. Happy to be here.
Jay: Tom was just talking about this notion of big audience, and does big audience translate into big business results. Farmers in particular has really been well known for some pretty aggressive tactics, especially on Facebook and now recently on Twitter as well.
In particular, I think you still have the Guinness Book of World Records record for most likes on Facebook accumulated in a 24 hour period. Is that correct?
Ryon: Yeah, we got two million friends in 24 hours.
Jay: Two million likes in 24 hours. That is, and no offense, Ryon, intended, but when I think about what brand could I possibly rush to Facebook to click a button for, Farmers Insurance or any insurance company for that matter, is not high on that list.
Ryon: No, absolutely. It’s a really interesting.. part of what we do and what we try to do is to try to do things differently, try to differentiate ourselves, try to position ourselves in places where not only where our competitors are not but potentially even where other companies are not, other companies or brands haven’t really been.
The two million fans actually came from a campaign that we did within the game Farmville. If anybody’s ever done any sort of advertising or marketing inside of Farmville, they understand this firehose effect that can come from the participation, engagement that happens within that network.
The big goal wasn’t so much to get these two million people to come and like our Facebook page. In fact, we were a little surprised by how big a number that actually was. It was to be in a place where people are highly engaged, it was a great demographic for us, and it was an opportunity to be the first financial services company to do anything within Farmville, one of the first companies in general to do it. It was a great way for us to really try to make a big impact in a new space.
Tom: Much respect for that, for two million fans. I know hard it is to get a Guinness World Record. I have one in goulash eating. How much did you actually beat the old record by, or was it a brand new record?
Ryon: No, it was actually an existing record. I think the previous record was held by Frito Lay, and I believe it was for about 1.5 million fans. I believe that the majority of those fans actually came from a Farmville promotion they did as well.
Jay: We’re going to have them on the show and see how bitter they are about this whole development.
Ryon: Yeah. It’s a Guinness World Record and it’s two million fans. But I think what you’re trying to get to is really, we did this big thing and truly what is the business value out of doing something like this?
We saw a lot of value from a lot of different things. The exposure that we got, the millions and millions of people. I think at one point our Facebook page was getting about 16,000 hits a second or something like that. We had millions of people come in, great exposure. We were able to provide them with something within the game that was really useful for them.
I think as much as we put… I think sometimes social media gets a lot of slack for the ROI issue. We have seen very significant ROI in other things that we’ve done. When I think about what we did in Farmville, I think it’s much more akin to advertising, more like what the advertising team might be doing.
When we think about TV commercials, a small percentage of them are probably very successful in actually achieving what they want to do, but people continue to do it and spend hundreds of millions of dollars doing that. I think it’s interesting how social media gets put into this special place when people think about business value when a lot of marketing is approached this way.
Jay: Well said, and I really liked the way you framed that. The most recent campaign that you did was perhaps not a Guinness World Record, but another first. That was a Twitter hashtag on the back of a NASCAR Sprint Cup series race vehicle. Kasey Kahne’s Number Five Chevrolet.
You used the hashtag “#Farmers5″ during a race just last weekend or the week before.
Ryon: Yeah, we did it last weekend and we did it the weekend before. It was a really… they sent me down to Phoenix to check out the racetrack and see how it all works. It was really exciting.
One of the first things that I noticed was that we’re not NASCAR sponsors, we sponsor this driver. I started to look and try to figure out where is the canvass here. What can we use in this offline space to create an experience that’s online? How can we take our main asset, which is a race car, and make it into an interactive experience?
Furthermore, I didn’t want to go and put our Twitter handle to be the main thing that’s on the car. Essentially that’s one of those pet peeves of mine where I see a link to someone’s Facebook page or their Twitter account. Why? Why would you want to do that?
When I looked at the car, I also heard lots of great stories about how NASCAR fans are heavily engaged through Twitter itself. I thought why don’t we, as a company, try to create something that connects people with each other as opposed to trying to connect us as a company? Once we connect them with each other we can listen in and try and figure out ways to contribute to that conversation.
Putting the hashtag on the car was I think a great way to actually do that. One, is to let everybody know hey, this is the channel that you use if you’re a Kasey Kahne fan and you want to talk with each other and find each other online and trends connections, which a lot of those actually happen.
We put it on the car. A lot of the real engagement happened leading up to the actual race itself. Once the conversation got started, I was looking for ways to interject Farmers and figure out how we can maybe give away a couple things, just some random acts of kindness or whatever, and really start to listen in on conversation, participate in the conversation.
Though I’m fairly new to NASCAR, just in that experience of immersing myself with the fans, I actually became a huge NASCAR fan and Kasey Kahne fan. More than anything I really became a fan of the fans if you will. The passion that they had.
It’s truly amazing how in NASCAR, how the fans can be almost as passionate about the sponsor than as they are with the driver itself. It’s huge. Right?
Jay: Yeah, it’s amazing. That’s really impressive. You don’t really see it in any other sport like that. It’s a pretty unique situation. Did your team interact with fans in real time during the race and foster that conversation, put gas on that fire?
Ryon: Yeah. Like I said, a lot of the gas that we put on the fire came leading up to the race. A lot of the conversations that were happening. By the time we got to the race, it was actually interesting if you want me to tell the story here.
On Friday morning, I’d already been interacting with them, I’d already started building our relationship with some of the hardcore Kasey Kahne fans on Twitter. I realized that this #Farmers5 thing was really taking off, so that gave me the idea what if we could get this to actually trend on Twitter? That would exponentially grow the exposure for us.
I put out a tweet and I said, “Hey, what do you guys think about trying to make #Farmers5 a trend?” Someone was like, “Yeah, we should do that. Let’s all tweet at the same time.” I said, “When do you suggest that we do that?” and somebody else chimed in and said, “Why don’t we all tweet #Farmers5 on lap five, because it’s the five car and it’s #Farmers5.”
Jay: There you go, now you’re talking.
Ryon: Everybody started jumping in like yeah, that’s a great idea. Really, even though I sparked it the fans came up with the idea and that was fantastic. By the time that Saturday came around, everybody was talking on Twitter about we’ve got to make this thing trend. #Farmers5 on lap five.
Then it actually, as people were talking about it on Saturday, it started trending for people. In the act of trying to make it trend it actually started trending for some folks in certain places. It was really fun and people started tweeting out screenshots of it trending for them. We grabbed some of those screenshots.
By the time the race came there was this high intensity of what we’re going to do. I really felt like us as a company were a part of the team here, trying to make this happen. Jeff [Hammond] right before the race, he came in and he talked about, he’s like, “‘NASCAR’s all about Twitter and hashtags. You don’t believe me, here’s Kasey Kahne’s car.”
He showed the #Farmers5 on TV, and everybody on Twitter’s going crazy. They’re like, “Oh, they showed the #Farmers5.” Then came to lap five and everybody was tweeting and it was really taking off. We had several, I think it was like 4,000 or 5,000 people that were tweeting #Farmers5.
I forget, there were 14,000 tweets that actually mentioned it. In any case, we couldn’t get it to actually trend on lap five, but everybody was doing it, everybody was super-excited about it. A lot of it is just Twitter has its own algorithm of when the tweets come in and when it was earlier. It was difficult to do anyway. And we didn’t have a plan to do it.
It went off. In the middle of the race, Kasey was doing great so I put out a tweet to really rally the fanbase, like, “Hey everybody, this is a rally tweet, everybody tweet this, let’s go.” It started taking off and Kasey started doing better. It was a really exciting thing to be one of the fans.
We built a lot of, I would think, a lot of credibility with the fans. We’re just there to try to give them the best possible experience.
Jay: Yeah, it wasn’t a sales pitch, right? It wasn’t like, “Hey, two for one flood insurance on lap seven.” It wasn’t that kind of come on. Make sure you send us a good photo of the car, we’ll put it in the podcast notes. That’ll be awesome.
Ryon: All right, sounds good.
What did happen was there were a lot of spontaneous tweets started coming out. I was with State Farm for a long time, or I’m sorry, with a competitor for a long time, and I’m going to switch over to you guys now, you guys are so engaged and this is awesome.
Somebody’s like, “I just bought three policies” and did this and did that. That was without us asking them, it was just because I think that they saw that we were really just about the fans.
Jay: Nice. You know what’s really interesting, and last question for you before we get into the shout outs. That you have a lot of these big brand programs where you’re reaching a lot of people at once, Twitter, Facebook, etc. But yet operationally, you have this network of 15,000 local agents who are all doing their own social media program as well.
It’s really fascinating. You’re hitting on both of those. How do those tie together, and how do you keep 15,000 local agents in line when most of them have Facebook pages as I understand it?
Ryon: A good percentage of them have Facebook pages. I wouldn’t say that most of them do. Actually at the agent level is the most exciting part of what we do. I think we really see our agents as these 15,000 points of light in these local communities.
When I was brought on, it was because I totally supported the fact that what we should be doing is leading with our agents. For the simple fact that people on Facebook want to connect with faces, not with logos.
Jay: That’s where they buy, right? They buy from the agents. You don’t buy from Farmers Insurance.
Ryon: Exactly, that’s where they buy, the majority of our policies come from being sold by the agents in local communities. These are real people. I spent the last year or so traveling around the country, speaking to the agents, basically teaching them how to be themselves. How to be authentic, how to come across, how to find their voice on Facebook.
You read that blog article today that said that small businesses shouldn’t be trying to build up their Facebook pages or whatever, but in fact that’s where we see many thousands of policies actually be sold through Facebook is through our local agents. That’s actually where we actually are able to track direct ROI with policies written and revenues coming in from agents assigning those leads within their CRM tool.
I would have to disagree with that blog post. I haven’t read it, but just from what you said about it, which is that absolutely, the small business owners I think have a huge advantage over big companies like ours. We’ve got to take advantage because we’ve got all these small business owners.
Jay: You use Hearsay to manage all those folks?
Ryon: Yeah, exactly. We use Hearsay. It’s a way for us to… I wouldn’t say manage. It’s really more about supporting and suggesting content out to them, and providing them with tools they can use if they want to. We don’t force anything out to their Facebook pages, because then it would completely take away from our message that this really needs to be about them.
Jay: But you allow them to syndicate things locally. You put content out there that they can pull down to their local page if they want to?
Ryon: Yes, exactly.
Jay: Then Hearsay’s built in so that individual agents maintain FINRA compliance and things along those lines?
Ryon: Yeah, exactly. There’s a whole compliance layer that’s behind it that archives things, that does the best that it can to keep track of all the compliance issues and things that we do. In that sense, it’s an indispensable tool, because we get both the marketing part of it which is the part that gets me excited, that gets me interested in it and gets the agents excited, and then the compliance part which is the base…
Jay: Which gets compliance excited. Yeah, I understand.
Ryon: Yeah, which gets the compliance excited, precisely.
Jay: Send us a couple links to agents that you think are representative of that initiative. We’d love to drop in a couple of screenshots of the things that they’re doing.
Ryon: Absolutely. I’ve got a couple agents, I think their Facebook pages are more sophisticated than the vast majority of Fortune 500 companies, including ours.
Jay: Hey, we’re always hiring here at Convince & Convert. If those guys want to get out of the insurance racket, you just let me know.
Ryon: I think I might have a couple for you.
Jay: Fantastic.
Tom: Hey Ryon, really quick, when I think of Farmers I think of JK Simmons. I think of that great TV campaign that you guys continue to run. Is he part of your social efforts at all? I think he’s a pretty compelling spokesperson for you.
Ryon: JK, not directly. We have used the Professor in different places, like for instance in the Farmville campaign. He was a part of that campaign as far as, we had a Farmville-ized version of the Professor that was in it. We did some crossing there.
I think that you’re right. I think that’s a huge opportunity and something that we’re looking to do. We don’t want to just rush into it, we’re looking for that great idea, that great opportunity to actually be able to do it. I think that’s absolutely on the horizon for us.
Jay: Ryon, do you have a Social Pros shout out for us?
Ryon: Yeah, I’ve got a few actually. I think there’s always the great social media bloggers like yourself and Jeremiah, which I read fairly religiously. To be honest, I think the biggest inspirations to me have become, over this last year, agents for one.
There are agents out there that are just killing it out there. They allow me to see their insights and things in the back end, and their virality and things like that are just killer. Ten times the amount that I think most corporate pages have. Every day, the agents help each other. We’ve got an internal social network where the agents are sharing ideas.
From there, I get some of the best practices. They inspire me to continue to get better, and they challenge me to come up with better content, better things for them. They’re a big inspiration.
I think the other inspiration that I have is a lot of the people that I work with are co-workers. Over the last year we’ve built a lot of trust with each other. Because of that, they give me a canvass that’s so much bigger to work with. The fact that I could put a hashtag on the back of a race car is so amazing. I think three or four years ago when I started using hashtags on Twitter, it was a little bit of a geek thing to do. It made me smile to see a hashtag on the back of a race car.
Things like that can only happen when you’ve got the whole support of the people around you. The agents and my co-workers I think are definitely probably the biggest inspirations that I have right now.
Jay: I completely agree. It’s like we said in the book, and I know Tom agrees as well. Without corporate culture, without everybody believing in being in social, none of this actually works.
Ryon: I couldn’t agree more.
Jay: Thanks very much for being here. Fantastic story, you were a great guest. We appreciate your time and all the exciting things you’re doing. Please keep us posted on other exciting stuff that you have rolling out.
Great show today. Thank you very much to my man Tom Webster for stepping into the breach. Also thanks as always to our sponsors, Eric’s company, Argyle Social who we use for all of our social media stuff. Our friends at Infusionsoft who we use for all of our email stuff. And our buddy Jim Kukral at DigitalBookLaunch.com.
We’ll be back next week with more exciting stuff on Social Pros. Real people, talking about real work in social media.
Remembering the Dangers of Social Media Research
Posted on 15. Apr, 2012 by Jay Baer in Blog, exacttarget, Small Business Internet Marketing, Small Business Marketing, social media research
This one is true. I just know it.
Numbers don’t lie. But sometimes we lie to ourselves about what numbers represent.
Last week, I wrote a post about new research from ExactTarget that studied Americans’ digital channel preferences. It was a lengthy report, but what stood out for me was the finding that only 5% of us prefer promotional offers from brands to show up in social media – even brands we have given permission to contact us. I accompanied the post with the somewhat inflammatory headline - New Research: Americans Hate Social Promotions. This is not factually correct, as the survey did not ask about love vs. hate, but rather about “preference.” I should have been more careful about that.
What I found even more interesting than the research was the negative reaction to it by readers at Convince & Convert, on Twitter, on Google + and elsewhere. While it had several somewhat strident tentacles, the gist of the complaint was “this research cannot be true, because I clearly remember a study saying more than half of all people WANT promotions and offers in social media.” Not a single aggrieved reader cited the research numerically or with a link, but several were convinced that consumers’ desire for special offers and coupons in social media was as insatiable as Ozzie Guillen’s lust to say stupid things.
They remembered the research in general. It stuck with them. But they couldn’t remember the company who published it, what the exact numbers were, or how they were divined. I remembered it too, and looked it up. It was the Lithium and CMO Council study on the Social Brand Experience from December, 2011.
Upon review, however, these reports are not contradictory. If you ask two different questions, you’re likely to get two different answers. Here’s how:
ExactTarget 2012 Channel Preference Survey
Survey Sample: 1,481 Americans, using MarketTools database, randomly sampled and weighted to be representative by age and gender
Response Methodology: Written survey, with permission granted by parents for participation for minors
Question Asked:
“What is your preferred channel for promotional messages from companies whom you have granted permission to send you ongoing information?”
Lithium/CMO Council Social Brand Experience Survey
Survey Sample: 1,300 consumers. Unclear whether they were all Americans, or whether they were existing social media users. Lithium published age and gender demographics, which were not weighted to match national patterns. Uncertain if this was random sample, or self-selected participation
Response Methodology: Online survey
Question Asked:
When I like a brand on Facebook, I expect:
Multiple answers were permissible, and 67% of respondents selected “To be eligible for exclusive offers”.
Well yeah. I’m surprised it wasn’t higher, actually. If I Like a page, I do suspect that they will give me a special offer at some point. That doesn’t mean I prefer those offers to be in social media versus other places.
The Danger of Data
There are at least 4 ways these research reports are different, and consequently why the findings of each are not in conflict.
1. One survey asked about preference. The other asked about expectations
2. One survey allowed for one answer. The other allowed for multiple answers.
3. One survey asked about Facebook in comparison to other channels. The other asked about Facebook “like” outcomes
4. One survey asked about how consumers behave. The other asked about how consumers anticipate brands will behave.
5. There are also significant differences in sample and response methodology.
Given that in the same Lithium results set, 50% of respondents said that they like a brand on Facebook to find service and support, and 41% like a brand on Facebook to share their ideas for new products, do you believe that companies are massively under-executing in the areas of Facebook CRM and crowd-sourcing? Both of those are interesting findings, and just as valid as the “67% of fans want special offers” data point. But the latter was the headline on dozens of blog posts, and maybe we vaguely recall the headline and the Mashable article, and maybe we start to make business decisions based on that piece of information. And then maybe we reject out of hand another data point that we assume is incorrect because it contradicts what we’ve convinced ourselves to be true.
This isn’t about which research is better, or “true”. They are both good studies using different approaches, and there’s no such thing as “true” research, just accurate interpretations of it.
New Research: Americans Hate Social Media Promotions
Posted on 08. Apr, 2012 by Jay Baer in Blog, Email Marketing, exacttarget, facebook, Small Business Internet Marketing, Small Business Marketing, social media research, Twitter
Among other disruptive characteristics that have altered the nature of business forever (real-time interaction, every customer is a reporter, customer service is a spectator sport, etc.) a major way that social media changes the game is the Democratization of Voices.
Your Company Needs to Be Human Because You’re Competing with Humans
Social media is the first time in history that companies communicate alongside real people, and with no inherent advantage. Go to your Facebook Wall and scroll down for a while. Mine looks something like this:
Friend
Friend
Friend
Brand
Mom
Wife
Brand
Acquaintance
Acquaintance
I’ll bet yours is approximately the same. Now look at Twitter (public feed of the people you follow, not lists). Basically the same, right? A mixture of people you know, people you love, people you want to know, and companies. All of them using precisely the same tools and formats to jostle for your attention. This is simply unprecedented.
Your Mom does not buy full-page magazine ads adjacent to car companies. Your friends do not make 60-second radio spots. Your high school ex-girlfriend doesn’t put up freeway billboards (unless she’s even more deranged than most). Those are brand tactics, not people tactics. Yet in social media, brands and people are using the same toolbox.
Because social media strips away the corporate communication advantages (money, personnel, expertise) they have enjoyed forever, brands often try to fight through the clutter of social media and curry your favor by giving you the BEST OFFER EVER. The paradox is that’s exactly what we don’t want.
We Don’t Want Promotions in Social Media
We the people don’t want promotions in social media. It’s not as if we signed up for social media sites so that we could hang out with software companies and hotel chains and T-shirt purveyors and ham merchants. We signed up to connect with each other, not with commerce.
New research from my friends ExactTarget (I am proud to have them as a client) puts a mathematical fine point on our collective abhorrence for social promotions. In their 2012 Channel Preferences Study (download it here for free) 1,500 Americans ages 15 and older were asked about their usage of email, social media, and text messaging. The results are astounding.
Even for companies that we have given permission to send us offers (not Spam), only 4% of us prefer those messages to be delivered via Facebook, and just 1% via Twitter.
Only 4% of us would look at Facebook first to find a deal from a company. Another 10% would look at Facebook second.
Where do we prefer to receive and look for promotional messages? Email. That old, neglected war horse of digital marketing still delivers the dollars, as 77% of survey participants want promotional email from companies, and 44% would look to email first to find a deal.
Be Social Don’t Do Social
I’ve been critical about Facebook’s Timeline and how the company is forcing companies to act like people on the platform. But they’re right. If we so clearly don’t want special offers and promotions clogging our social streams, companies must focus on being social, and worry less about doing social media in ways that approximate direct marketing.
I’m not saying never run a contest or a promotion or a special offer or a threshold deal in social media. But if your company doesn’t have a social media editorial program that emphasizes spontaneous, personal, human, light-hearted, interesting, funny, timely, and photo-driven content, you are swimming against a powerful tide of customer desire.
Smart companies use social to turn customers into fans, and fans into volunteer marketers. They worry less about squeezing every nickel and click out of each tweet and status update.
The more you sell, the less you sell.
I’d like to hear what you think in the comments. Are companies headed down a blind alley by relying too much on social media promotions? Get the Channel Preferences study for free here.
New Research: Americans Hate Social Media Promotions
Posted on 08. Apr, 2012 by Jay Baer in Blog, Email Marketing, exacttarget, facebook, Small Business Internet Marketing, Small Business Marketing, social media research, Twitter
Among other disruptive characteristics that have altered the nature of business forever (real-time interaction, every customer is a reporter, customer service is a spectator sport, etc.) a major way that social media changes the game is the Democratization of Voices.
Your Company Needs to Be Human Because You’re Competing with Humans
Social media is the first time in history that companies communicate alongside real people, and with no inherent advantage. Go to your Facebook Wall and scroll down for a while. Mine looks something like this:
Friend
Friend
Friend
Brand
Mom
Wife
Brand
Acquaintance
Acquaintance
I’ll bet yours is approximately the same. Now look at Twitter (public feed of the people you follow, not lists). Basically the same, right? A mixture of people you know, people you love, people you want to know, and companies. All of them using precisely the same tools and formats to jostle for your attention. This is simply unprecedented.
Your Mom does not buy full-page magazine ads adjacent to car companies. Your friends do not make 60-second radio spots. Your high school ex-girlfriend doesn’t put up freeway billboards (unless she’s even more deranged than most). Those are brand tactics, not people tactics. Yet in social media, brands and people are using the same toolbox.
Because social media strips away the corporate communication advantages (money, personnel, expertise) they have enjoyed forever, brands often try to fight through the clutter of social media and curry your favor by giving you the BEST OFFER EVER. The paradox is that’s exactly what we don’t want.
We Don’t Want Promotions in Social Media
We the people don’t want promotions in social media. It’s not as if we signed up for social media sites so that we could hang out with software companies and hotel chains and T-shirt purveyors and ham merchants. We signed up to connect with each other, not with commerce.
New research from my friends ExactTarget (I am proud to have them as a client) puts a mathematical fine point on our collective abhorrence for social promotions. In their 2012 Channel Preferences Study (download it here for free) 1,500 Americans ages 15 and older were asked about their usage of email, social media, and text messaging. The results are astounding.
Preferred Channel for Promotional Messages From Companies Whom I Have Granted Permission to Send Me Ongoing Information
Even for companies that we have given permission to send us offers (not Spam), only 4% of us prefer those messages to be delivered via Facebook, and just 1% via Twitter. 77% of us prefer offer to be delivered via email.
Only 4% of us would look at Facebook first to find a deal from a company. Another 10% would look at Facebook second.
Where do we prefer to receive and look for promotional messages? Email. That old, neglected war horse of digital marketing still delivers the dollars, as 77% of survey participants want promotional email from companies, and 44% would look to email first to find a deal.
Be Social Don’t Do Social
I’ve been critical about Facebook’s Timeline and how the company is forcing companies to act like people on the platform. But they’re right. If we so clearly don’t want special offers and promotions clogging our social streams, companies must focus on being social, and worry less about doing social media in ways that approximate direct marketing.
I’m not saying never run a contest or a promotion or a special offer or a threshold deal in social media. But if your company doesn’t have a social media editorial program that emphasizes spontaneous, personal, human, light-hearted, interesting, funny, timely, and photo-driven content, you are swimming against a powerful tide of customer desire.
Smart companies use social to turn customers into fans, and fans into volunteer marketers. They worry less about squeezing every nickel and click out of each tweet and status update.
The more you sell, the less you sell.
I’d like to hear what you think in the comments. Are companies headed down a blind alley by relying too much on social media promotions? Get the Channel Preferences study for free here.
2012 Social Media Marketing Industry Report
Posted on 03. Apr, 2012 by Lee Odden in Blog, Book Reviews, report, Small Business Internet Marketing, Small Business Marketing, Social Media, social media marketing, social media research
Click the image above to download your copy of the report.
While the speculation, pontification and monetization of social media is reaching momentum of tsunami proportions, many businesses looking for practical advice are asking, “Exactly how are marketers using social media to grow their businesses?”
Michael Stelzner from Social Media Examiner has posed that same question and others like it to a sample of marketers on the front lines of the social web to help bring some clarity to what works, what doesn’t and where to focus.
When asked about the bearing of the report on the intersection of search and social, Mike said, “With Google integrating results from its Google+ network into search, we’ll begin to see an Amazon type social proofing of search results based on the activity of friends. This will make search even more important.” We agree!
The 2012 Social Media Marketing Industry Report is out today and offers 42 pages of insights, tables, graphs and examples of tactics. Over 3,800 respondents provided their advice on the who, what, when, and where of social media marketing. They also shared where they plan on investing in the future.
Key subject matter covered in the report includes:
- The top 10 social media questions marketers want answered:
- The time commitment
- The benefits of social media marketing
- Commonly used social media services:
- Social media sites people want to learn more about
- Social media outsourcing
- B2B vs B2C
- Changes since the 2011 report
How much time should you spend on social media marketing tasks each week? It’s a reasonable question and the responses broke down as:
- 59% – 6 hours / week or more
- 33% – 11 hours / week or more
- 15% - 20+ hours / week
Other key findings from the 2012 Social Media Marketing Industry Report include:
- 83% of marketers indicate that social media is important for their business.
- Top benefits of social media marketing:
85% Generating more business exposure
69% increasing traffic
65% providing marketplace insight - 76% of marketers plan on increasing their use of YouTube and video marketing
- While only 40% of marketers are using Google+, 70% of marketers want to learn more about it and 67% plan on increasing Google+ activities
This report is a perfect compliment to the upcoming Social Media Success Summit online conference coming up on May 1st. You can get your basic questions answered and some alignment with what others are doing from the report and then get practical advice, tips and training from consultants and practitioners from the online conference. It’s a great example of content marketing to promote an event actually.
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Social Pros Podcast 5 – Chad Pollitt, Kuno Creative
Posted on 01. Mar, 2012 by Jay Baer in Blog, Small Business Internet Marketing, Small Business Marketing, social media research, social networks
This is Episode 5 of the Social Pros Podcast : Real People Doing Real Work in Social Media. This episode features Chad Pollitt, the Director of Inbound Marketing for Kuno Creative. Read on for insights from Chad, our “Work It Out” advice segment, and Eric’s Social Media Stat of the Week (this week: are we unfriending each other more than ever?).
Listen Now
Click the play button to listen here:
Download the audio file: http://socialpros.podbean.com/mf/play/746hib/SocialProsEpisode5.mp3
The RSS feed is: http://feeds.feedburner.com/socialprospodcast
Find us on iTunes: http://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/convince-convert-blog-social/id499844469
Please Support Our Sponsors
Huge thanks to Argyle Social for their presenting sponsorship, as well as Infusionsoft and Jim Kukral at DigitalBookLaunch. We use Argyle Social for our social engagement; we use Infusionsoft for our email; and Jim is our guest host for the podcast and a smart guy).
Social Pros Transcript For Your Reading Enjoyment
Transcription services from our friends at Speechpad.com
Jim: Hey everybody. My name is Jim Kukral, and I am guest hosting today for Jay Baer on the Social Pros Podcast, and I am joined by co- host extraordinaire, Eric Boggs. Eric, how are you doing?
Eric: I’m doing just fine, Jim. I’m glad that you’re guest hosting. I was getting kind of tired of Jay.
Jim: Well, you know Jay. You can only take so much of Jay.
Eric: Small doses. Small doses.
Jim: Exactly. So I’m glad to be here today. This is something that Jay had approached me about a couple of months back, putting together this podcast, and I thought it was really interesting. I’m obviously very involved with the world of social media, as we all are, and I thought it would be really interesting to come on and talk about this. Then I got to meet you and it sounds like a really fun show to do.
Eric: It has been a pretty fun show. Jay, as you know, is a really smart guy, and he’s brought on some great guests and the conversations have always been timely and relevant. So I have a lot of confidence in your ability to fill Jay’s shoes.
Jim: Well, that’s a lot of shoes to fill in there. So I will try my best. So, where do we start off here? Kind of guide me around here because this is my first time. I will just maybe just tell people out there quickly who I am, if you don’t know who I am, probably don’t because I’m a Z lister. My name is Jim Kukral and I write books and I speak and mostly books in the non-fiction world of business and marketing, very similar to what Jay does. I do a lot of consulting, but I also own some businesses. Most currently I own a business called Digital Book Launch where I help people figure out how to do book marketing. That’s really about me. That’s really the short version of what I do.
Eric: That sounds great. So we like to start with a thought of the week, which is kind of a rant on whatever is on your mind. So I’ll let you start us off.
Jim’s Thought of the Week
Jim: The thought of the week. I thought long and hard about this, and I thought, should it be something really poignant and important? And I thought, you know what? Let’s do something fun. I said, “What would happen if you were deserted on an island? Would you rather have Twitter, or would you rather have Facebook? If you could have one thing that you had to deal with, would you rather have Twitter or would you rather have Facebook?” It sounds like a completely silly question, and it is, but I’d be curious to hear your answer, Eric.
Eric: So I am immediately reminded of one thing, and I guess it’s like the quote from somewhere on the Internet, or it may have been the interwebs. Facebook is the people you used to be friends with, Twitter are the people that you are friends with, and LinkedIn, I think that’s people you want to be friends with. I’m not really sure, but it’s some blend of that, and when I run it through that filter, I would have to say that Facebook is most important to me. Not because I think it’s more useful, but that’s where my mom hangs out and my wife hangs out, and the people that I love the most are active on Facebook. So I would hate to give up Twitter, but it would probably have to be Facebook for me.
Jim: Yeah. I’ve got to agree with you there. Twitter is, as early adopters, I’m assuming you’ve been on social media since the beginning, right? I’m assuming you’ve done that, right?
Eric: I suppose. Yes, you can say that.
Jim: At this point, who isn’t really kind of like an expert? We’ve all been doing this a long time. There are really no experts in this industry. We’re all just experienced. Some more than others. Twitter for me has really evolved. When I first started, I didn’t get it. Then I got it. Then I didn’t get it again, and then I got it again. I’ve kind of come to this place where I just think Twitter is this kind of weird acquaintances of people that I know. I think you actually described it best. I guess what I’m trying to say is I agree with you. Facebook is that one thing that you can just do so much more with the photos and the ongoing threads. I think having discussions with people on Facebook is so much easier than it is on Twitter. Since the discussions are limited to just the people who are watching them, for example, if you try to have a discussion with somebody on Twitter, it becomes really annoying to everyone else following you. Doesn’t it?
Eric: Oh, yeah. For me it always ends with email me at eric@argylesocial.com.
Jim: Exactly. The big difference to me is that one, right there – the ability to continue discussions and build meaningful relationships and engage with people on a level that you can just do it, not privately, but just between those people. On Twitter, it’s like this one to many, no matter what. Right?
Eric: Yeah. Well, so when you run that through the filter of a business, I’ll turn this question back to you. Instead of Jim the author and super cool guy, pretend you’re Jim the Social Media Manager at a software company or a brand. Which would you rather take with you to a deserted island, Twitter or Facebook?
Jim: It depends on the company. I’ll put it to you this way. If it’s a company that really does a lot of customer service, then I’ll take Twitter every day of the week. I think Twitter absolutely excels for customer service and just hands down beats Facebook out with that regard. If I’m doing a ton of customer service, I have Twitter all day long. If I’m engaging with people and want to drive promotion and awareness and actually have conversations with people, it’s Facebook all day long.
Eric: Yeah. I would have to confirm with Jill, who helps run marketing at Argyle, but I’m pretty sure we’d take Twitter, seven days a week. Maybe even eight days a week.’
Jim: Really? Wow.
Eric: We’re a B2B software company. We use Twitter for lead gen and awareness, and our audience on Twitter, it might be actually an order of magnitude bigger than our audience on Facebook. It might be two orders of magnitude bigger. I’m not exactly sure. Twitter’s been much more valuable for us as a company.
Jim: Well, we’ll have to ask our guest coming up, Chad, about that as well. I think that there are comments on the page. If you’re listening to this on the Social Pros page, you can leave your comment below and give us your opinion as well, because we’d love to hear it.
Eric’s Social Media Stat of the Week: 63% of Social Media Users Have Unfriended Someone
Eric: Yeah. So let’s move on and we can talk about the stat of the week. This is sort of my pet piece of the podcast. At Argyle, we’re very much a data driven marketing company in terms of the way we do our business and also the way we think about our customers and our product. So the stat of the week is something that aligns with my own personal interests.
The stat of the week for Episode Number Five, I believe we’re on here, is from the recent survey from Pew. The Pew Internet & American Life Project did a survey. I think it was published February 24th or 25th, so it’s pretty recent stuff. There’s a big pile of information, and there was one bit that jumped out to me as most interesting. It’s basically about unfriending. Again, this was buried down deep inside of the study. There’s a lot of fascinating macro data about adoption and usage, especially around privacy. But this data on pruning really jumped out at me. Essentially, pruning or unfriending or deleting friends or deleting comments and photo tags is way more popular than it was just a couple years ago. So from the survey, let me make sure I’m telling you correctly, two-thirds of the profile owners that were surveyed, actually a little less than two-thirds, have deleted people from their networks or friends lists which is up from a little over half. So that’s basically a 20 percent increase in just a couple years. Forty-four percent have deleted comments that people have made on their profile, which is up from a third two years ago. Same thing, a rise in people removing their names from photo tags. Again, just up from a couple years ago. Digging into this by age demographic, it gets even more interesting because the older and actually the more educated you are, according to this data, the more privacy centric you tend to be.
Jim: Right. This reminds me of a cartoon I saw on Facebook, appropriately. It was a cartoon and it was something like, remember in 2000 when getting emails, you were like, “Wow. I’ve got email.”
Eric: You got mail.
Jim: Right. And then it was like today, “Oh, crap. I’ve got a thousand emails.” This just seems very right on target with what we’re talking about. Social media has gotten past the hump. We’ve gotten to the teenage years, or whatever years you want to call it, and now it’s kind of like, “Oh my gosh. This is too much.” And I think that’s probably why a lot of these people are like, “Well, it was really fun in the beginning to have all my photos tagged and to be part of all this stuff, and now it’s like, ‘Well, wait a minute.’”
Eric: It’s work. It’s becoming work.
Jim: It’s work. You’re right. It’s annoying when people tag you with things that you don’t want to be tagged on. Also, people are worrying about what their boss is going to see or what a recruiter’s going to see, or things like that. I tell you right now, I’m 40 years old. I’m thankful that we did not have Facebook and video cameras when we were teenagers in high school and college. Can you imagine?
Eric: You are not the first person to say that to me.
Jim: Can you imagine all of the stuff that your idiot buddy from 1989 drags out, scans, and starts putting pictures of you up. It would be horrible.
Eric: I shudder to think what would be on Google if it were so easy to publish photos online when I was in college.
Jim: Exactly.
Eric: Heck, even just three or four years ago.
Jim: Right. So this makes total sense to me. Sixty-three percent of people have deleted people from their networks or friends list.
Eric: Are you a defriender?
Jim: I’m a little bit unique to my Facebook, to most people, because I use Facebook and I use social media as a business tool for me. My business is me. So the more connections I have, the more opportunities I have to get people to read my books and hire me to speak and consult and things like that. It’s a total business tool for me. So I don’t defriend. I only defriend people who want to spam me or want to send me naked pictures or ridiculous stuff that is just a waste of my time. But I don’t defriend, but I totally get it. Absolutely.
Eric: That’s interesting. So from the perspective of you, the business, you’re not a defriender. What do you think about the people that are subscribed to you? I guess I’m just trying to flip this. People are defriending from their friends. Most certainly they’re defriending and blocking and unfollowing businesses and brands. I think that’s a pretty reasonable jump. Don’t you think?
Jim: Absolutely. People are getting tired of it. Here’s the thing. As more businesses learn how to do this stuff, and any social professional will tell you this, this is the Social Pros Podcast, any professional in the business will tell you, the more and more businesses who try to inject their marketing into the social sphere, the more people start to get weary of it. Social media at its core is a social thing. I always tell this example. I teach classes for the University of San Francisco Internet Marketing Program. I always tell people when I teach the Social Media class, I say this. I go, “Look. If you walked into somebody’s Super Bowl party and just walked up to every single person you know and said, ‘Buy my book,’ and ‘Download my white paper,’ and all this stuff, you’d never get invited back to that party.” It’s a social environment. Facebook, Twitter, it’s the same exact thing. You can’t just go out and put that stuff in front of people and expect that they’re not just going to unfollow you.
Eric: Yeah. Let’s hold on to that thought. The Work It Out segment of the podcast that we’ll do at the very end, kind of gets back to this idea. I think you’re on a good path there talking about the crowdedness of mainstream networks. So we’re going to talk a little bit about niche social networks when we get to the Work It Out portion, but this is good stuff. Good stat of the week.
Jim: Yeah, it was fun. Don’t defriend me.
Eric: I don’t know that I’ve friended you yet, but I’ll track you down. I must admit I’m a defriender. But I’ll give everybody a shot, Jim.
Jim: Okay. Well, I will try to stay in your good graces on that. So you don’t have to defriend me.
Special Guest: Chad Pollitt, Kuno Creative
Eric: All right. You want to introduce Chad? Chad are you there?
Chad: Yeah. I’m here, Eric.
Eric: Right on.
Eric: Jim, can you introduce Chad?
Jim: Chad Pollitt is somebody that I’ve known for a couple years now. He works for a company called Kuno Creative out of Northeast Ohio here, which is one way of saying in the Cleveland area. Chad and I have become friends over the last couple of years, and I’ve really gotten to know him because he’s really good at what he does, which is he works for a company that does a lot of inbound marketing. If anyone’s ever heard of a company called HubSpot, a little small company called HubSpot, Chad is one of the partners, one of the biggest partners for HubSpot, and his company takes those solutions and helps people do search and social and leads and all that stuff. Chad, it’s great to have you on the show.
Chad: Well thanks, Jim. That was a great introduction. Makes me sound better than what I possibly could have anticipated. Thank you.
Eric: Nice to meet you, Chad.
Chad: Definitely, Eric. Definitely.
Jim: Chad recently spoke at an event that I was at and really brought down the house with some amazing statistics and numbers about the whole world of inbound marketing, and look, it’s all connected. We’ve got search, we’ve got an affiliate, we’ve got social, we’ve got the whole thing in internet marketing, it’s all connected. So that’s why I want to have Chad on, because I know he’s going to have some good insight on what’s going on in social media. First though, Chad, the audience needs to know, the desert island question, Twitter or Facebook?
Chad: Well, Jim, I’m going to have to go against both of you and say Twitter.
Jim: Oh, really? Why?
Chad: Twitter is the most fun for me. I find Facebook work, and one of the great things about what we do is most of it doesn’t feel like work. It’s fun stuff. But Facebook tends to . . . I have to be a little more cautious with the content that I distribute on Facebook simply because I have personal and professional connections in Facebook. So I’d say Twitter. It’s more fun for me. It’s more real time. Plus I’m a little bit of a news junkie, and I find that I’m informed more on Twitter than on Facebook.
Jim: Ooh. That’s a really good . . . you know what? You’re right, because I get the majority of my news from Twitter, man. I forgot about that. Ooh. I might have to think about my answer. So Chad, it’s great to have you here. Let’s talk a little bit about social media and what’s going on in your world with it. You do inbound marketing. What parts of social media come into place when you do inbound marketing?
Chad: Well, Jim, that’s a great question. I have, I like to think, a unique approach to social media, but there are some others that have the same approach that I take. I look at social media as really two things. The first, and some people who are listening to this are going to disagree, but the first, I like to look at it as a content distribution channel, because at its core, that’s what we do. We distribute content. Now whether that’s a blog post, or whether that’s a meaningful conversation, whatever that is, it’s a content distribution channel. And then on the other side of things, you have the relationship aspect. So what I want to do is work with companies out there and develop the distribution channel and develop content for that distribution channel, which drives traffic to their website, and then I try to coach them or we will provide services that allow people to, excuse me, that allow people to do the more personal type conversations. So that’s the approach I take. I start with the business side, and that’s the content distribution, and then we coach and provide services to listen and to have conversations, so on and so froth.
Eric: Chad, what are the usual business objectives that you and your clients are trying to nail down, when you begin an engagement and you start . . . I don’t disagree with the framework, at all. I think that social is an amplifier, and if Jay were here, he would say the same thing. He’d say that content is the fire and that social is the gasoline or the fuel. I’ve actually heard him say that a few times.
Chad: Yeah. Absolutely. Absolutely. The business objectives that we go after is the companies that hire us, they want leads. They want good actionable leads. So we approach content two ways. One, we try what we call a generation two or generation three website. We try to deploy content creation engines, machines that are somewhat like magazines. They’re constantly publishing content. Then on the other side of things, we want to create what we call advanced content. So this is content that would be considered highly valuable, that solves people’s problems, and that people want to download. So they go into this quid pro quo transaction where they provide us with their contact information and their email address, and we give them what they came for, and that’s advanced content, whatever the business is.
Eric: What type of clients do you typically work with?
Chad: It’s really a mix, from B2B to B2C. There’s a fairly large brand in the United States and Canada that we work with on a regular basis that is primarily B2C. They’re our biggest B2C. With them, we do a lot more multimedia type advanced content, from videos and text message reminders and things like that. Then on the B2B side, we work with software as a service type companies, consulting companies, tech companies. It really runs the gamut.
Jim: I have a question. Maybe other people probably have the same question. I kind of have my own answer, but I want to hear what you guys think. How do you get somebody to friend a software company? I know that you use it as a distribution channel. I get that and I totally agree with it. But it’s easier for me because I’m the company. But if I was . . . why would anyone want to be friends with XYZ Software?
Chad: Well, that’s a great question, Jim, and I’m going to steal a quote I learned from you, years ago, where you said, “People only go to the Web for two reasons – to solve a problem or to be entertained.” If you take it to that and you really believe that, which I do, I know that people have problems that that business can solve. They’re out there. If they weren’t, the business wouldn’t be in business. So you have to be able to communicate solutions to problems as a B2B company, for example, or a B2C even, and do it in a valuable way. So, your content, if it’s not valuable content, if it’s not a video that’s real good or a podcast like this, that’s real good, nobody’s going to want to consume that content. So it starts with the content. You have to create valuable, problem solving, and/or entertaining content.
Eric: Yeah, I’ll echo that. I don’t follow very many brands or companies online. The handful that I do tend to be very either funny or helpful in terms of the content that they share. That said, I do follow the CEOs and visit high visibility employees from quite a few companies in our industry, and I think that gets down to a second question. In your experience, Chad, do your customers tend to invest in the brand presence or the presence of the people around the brand, when they’re launching social campaigns?
Chad: It’s mostly the brand that, in the client’s that we work with, although I’ve seen lots of examples of what you just described. But in the clients that we work with, a lot of them the senior executives don’t want to put that foot forward. And that’s fine. That’s their choice. I think here in the years to come, you’re going to see less and less of that.
Eric: Less and less of the apprehension?
Chad: Apprehension.
Jim: I’ve seen some really cool ways people have been doing this. I share space in this loft with a photographer, and he realizes that people really don’t want to hear about what he’s doing. So he tweets and he does Facebook updates from his dog’s perspective, because his dog’s always with him. So he’s like, the dog is always talking about what Hal’s doing. It’s kind of funny. So you follow the dog, and you learn about what’s going on about the owner. I’m doing a lot of publishing now, self-publishing, and I’m learning a lot of fiction authors, this is really interesting, they are creating the characters from their books and turning them into Facebook accounts and Twitter accounts. Imagine Indiana Jones tweeting. Your favorite characters from your . . . I’m a big fan of the James CLavell books, so imagine if I had an engine from the Shogun tweeting, I could follow them. So, it’s interesting how other people are taking content and adding personas to it.
Chad: Yeah, very cool.
Jim: So what else you got for us, Chad? I know that you got a lot going on with your business. Anything else that’s on your mind these days about social media that you can share with the audience?
Chad: One thing that I’ve been thinking a lot about, writing a lot about is the convergence of social media into search, and I’m pretty excited to where this is going. If I knew exactly where it was going, I’d be a millionaire here shortly. But it’s exciting to watch the world of SEO, because that’s where I came up from, evolve into what it is today and what it will be tomorrow. That’s really search engines like Google and Bing scouring social media and building social media platforms in order to have access to what I’ll call votes of real people and real content. That’s what I’ve been working on.
Jim: I got to tell you, I agree and it’s mind blowing. As a matter of fact, Google has come out and said, I don’t know how long ago, it’s like six months ago or something. Matt Cutts, or somebody, came out and said that social is a huge part of how Google is going to work in the future.
Eric: Well, that was pretty much a directive from Larry Page.
Jim: There you go. Even better.
Eric: The CEO, he kind of refocused the entire company, cut a ton of products and said, “We’re going to do social come hell or high water.” If that’s a substantiation of what you just said, Chad, then I don’t know what is.
Chad: Yeah, exactly.
Jim: It really does make sense. If you go search things on Google now and you’re logged in, you’re starting to see . . . I did a search the other day for something, and I started to see results come in that probably wouldn’t have been there before, but they showed up because somebody I was connected with on Google+ tweeted about or posted them on Google+ or something like that. So they’re actually injecting results directly in. So I think you’re right on, Chad. I think that they realize, smartly so, that people would rather have recommendations from people that they trust. I always put it to my students this way. The logic is, if you are connected with somebody, so you have 5,000 people you can connect with on Google+, if you’re connected with somebody, then most likely you like that person. Isn’t that a fair argument to make? Why would you connect with somebody who you dislike or don’t trust, right? Therefore, if they are recommending things and liking things or + 1′ing things, you probably will be happy when you see their recommendations show up in your Google search. I think that’s their logic, and it makes a lot of sense to me. What about you guys?
Eric: I don’t disagree.
Chad: Yeah, Jim. The way I see it, over the whole search landscape, is that you’ve got a PageRank algorithm, where it looks at backlinks. Now I’m not saying that’s going to go away tomorrow, but I think this is something that Google would favor over their PageRank algorithm over time. Google got pie in their face when The Wall Street Journal wrote that article about JC Penney cheating their algorithm. (Note: New York Times did that piece) I think that black eye definitely set this . . . if it didn’t set the wheel in motion, it accelerated it.
Jim: Yeah. It’s really interesting where we’re going with this whole social thing. When I teach that, when I talk about that to students who don’t really know about everything, they don’t have any search background, they don’t know anything, they’re just learning and they’re just . . . the immediate thought is, “Well, Jim, why don’t I just, if I’m a business, why don’t I just go out and get as many people in my Google+ network as I possibly can and then tweet all my own stuff?” When you really look at it, there are a lot of businesses that are doing that.
Chad: Yeah. Absolutely.
Eric: Guys, we’re running up on our . . . so we try to target these to be under 30 minutes, and we’re going to be cutting it pretty close. I want to dive in with our last segment, and we’re going to let you answer this, Chad, if that’s okay with you.
Chad: Yeah, sure.
Work It Out
Eric: I didn’t prep him with the questions. So here goes. This actually comes from Jill, who is an Argyle Social customer, actually. She works for a small software company and she asks, “My company is already active on Twitter and Facebook. There are lots of new niche social networks popping up, like Pinterest and Instagram, for example.” She wants to know what she should consider before putting in the effort to build a community on one of these new sites.
Chad: Boy, Eric, that’s a great question. I tend to be pretty, I guess you could say, time averse when it comes to these new social platforms. I let other people get out there and kick the tires a little bit before I dive in head first. So I take my time. I read a lot about them. Well, first off, let me take a step back. Pinterest, for example, obviously, it’s going to depend on your niche and your customers, so who your target market is. If Pinterest represents, there’s lots of demographic data you can find online. If your target demographic represents that particular niche that’s represented on that platform, then, by all means, set up your account. That’s something I always do out of the gate, I go ahead and set up an account, and I toy around with it a little bit. But I take my time in developing a strategy. It’s not necessarily a gold rush. Although every once in a while, maybe every five years, there might be a gold rush type platform, but I’m always cautious about that. That’s the approach I take. I get on there, I identify the demographics, and if it makes sense, I slowly roll out my strategy over time.
Jim: Yeah, I’m with Chad there. Look, I’ve been doing internet marketing for over 15 years, and one thing I can tell you for sure is that if you want to get results, you go where the eyeballs are and you go with what moves the needle. There’s a reason why everyone just talks about Google as the search engine. Nobody ever mentions Altavista and Yahoo and maybe Bing. Everyone always just refers to search as Google, because Google has the most eyeballs.
So every time one of these new networks come up and everything, I like to let them vet out a little bit. I do believe that there is a handful of people who turn them into immediate success stories overnight, and they get written about in every blog. But at the end of the day, not every social network is right for every single business. Every social media professional knows this, who’s worth their salt. You can’t go into a business and just say, “You’ve got to be here, here and here.” You need to be where it makes sense and which ones are actually going to get you the eyeballs and move the needle for you. Otherwise, you are literally just wasting your time.
So it’s smart to start building a presence there, but to invest any significant amount of time into something that you know you’re not sure is just a bad business decision. And that’s what we’re doing. We’re social professionals. We’re in business to help our clients figure out how to generate more sales, more leads, and more publicity, and that’s the advice I always give.
The last thing I always tell people is, “Look. You don’t have to be everywhere. You can be in just some places. We’re going to figure out which one works for you the best, and then we’re going to hit that one hard and then we’re going to work the other ones in as we can.” What about you, Eric?
Eric: I think you guys have answered that question about as well as it can be answered.
Jim: Wow. Okay.
Eric: Yeah. I agree with both of you. I think, Chad, you basically said start slow, and Jim, you basically said go where the audience is. I agree wholeheartedly. To Jill, I would say, pick one, test it for a few months, see if you gain traction, and go from there. Obviously, you need to make your biggest investments on Facebook and/or Twitter because that’s where most people are. Maybe other platforms, but you definitely, it would be unwise, I think, to abandon the mainstream platforms in search of new opportunities on the niche platforms just because they’re not there yet.
Jim: Yeah. That’s really good advice. You know what? This has been a lot of fun. I do a lot of podcasts, and this is one of the more fun ones I’ve done in a long time. But man, every single time, they go so fast, don’t they?
Eric: This one’s fun because Jay’s not here.
Jim: Well, I didn’t want to mention that. Eric, I wasn’t actually going to say that on the recording. When we got off the recording, I was going to tell you that.
Eric: That’s the new theme, “When Jay’s not hosting, it’s make fun of Jay.” I’m sure I’m going to miss an episode either, I think, next week or the week after, and I hope that Jay returns the favor by saying mean things about me.
Jim: It’s been a lot of fun, and Chad, I want to thank you for coming on and talking about this, because I think you’ve got a really unique perspective from a company that does really big stuff in terms of inbound marketing and integrates search and socials. So I appreciate you coming on. I know Eric does, as well.
Chad: Well, thanks Jim. I appreciate you having me.
Eric: Yeah, thanks Chad.
Chad: Yeah, Eric. It was great meeting you, and I will be following you on Twitter, if I’m not already here, shortly.
Jim: Chad, real quick. How do people reach you and what’s the company?
Chad: Certainly. I work for Kuno Creative, an inbound marketing agency, just type in Kuno Creative on Google and you can find our blog, is where I write most of my stuff. And you can also reach me on Twitter @cpollittiu. That is my Twitter handle, cpollitiu.
Eric: All right, folks. That’s it for Episode Number Five of the Social Pros Podcast. Special thanks, as always, to our sponsors, Argyle Social, makers of data driven social media marketing software and Infusionsoft, email marketing automation for small business. Tune in next week for Episode Number Six. We’re hosting Jonathan Wichmann of Maersk. Thanks everybody. See you soon.
Will You Abandon Your Friends to Seek Real Relevance
Posted on 01. Nov, 2011 by Jay Baer in Blog, book review, brian solis, Connected Consumer, jay baer, Small Business Internet Marketing, Small Business Marketing, Social Media Book, social media books, social media research
(video production by my friends at Candidio. Fast, inexpensive video editing and production. Check em out!)
Excerpted from the video:
I was happy to interview Brian Solis, a futurist, new media raconteur, and principal at Altimeter Group. Brian recently published his 5th book, The End of Business As Usual
which I believe to be his finest work to-date.
Jay: Hey everybody. It’s Jay Baer from Convince & Convert. Hope you are having a fantastic day. I’m joined this afternoon by a man who needs no introduction, but I’ll provide one anyway. Futurist, big thinker, gadabout, raconteur, and author of “The End of Business as Usual”, Mr. Brian Solis. Also a champagne lover, as I recall.
Brian: This is true.
Jay: So that is a lot of things. Congratulations on the new book. We just can’t stop you from writing books!
Brian: There’s just a lot to say right now.
Jay: You won’t be held back. I appreciate that. It’s great. I really actually read it, on a long plane flight out to the west coast. In fact, I was in your town for about five minutes earlier this week, but didn’t get a chance to say hi to you or the folks at Altimeter, but really, really enjoyed it. And what I like about this book in particular is that it’s got a lot of chapter breaks in it, it’s really the kind of book that you could read for half an hour and then set aside and then come back and not feel like you’re all confused. It’s really well packaged in that regard.
Brian: Thanks for noticing that, actually. And for everybody watching this, I did not seed that question. I appreciate that, because this time I wanted to write a book that could be, I don’t want to say easy to read, but could be thoughtful in how the reader would sit down, considering all of the things that they have to do, and still provide value knowing that they’re busy. I also wanted to write at the executive level, because one thing I heard about The End of Business As Usual
was that Engage was more of a reference guide than a book. People would read certain chunks as needed . . .
Jay: And refer back.
Brian: . . . and refer back. This one, even though I’d like to think it’s also a reference guide, it tells a story.
Jay: Yeah, but it’s a story that I find you don’t necessarily have to read in sequence, which I think is really interesting. It reminds me a little bit of UnMarketing
, although obviously at a much more executive level and detail than that. You probably could read it in somewhat random chapter order and still get a lot out of it. I think that’s really commendable.
Brian: Thank you.
Jay: One of the things I loved about the book is you talked about how we’re all wired for distraction now. We’re always like, “Squirrel! Tweet!” And it’s so true. It’s so true. I really notice it now, how hard it is to pay attention for any length of time. I don’t think it’s probably a net positive as a people or as a society, but I’ve thought a lot about, “gee, is a book too much sandwich to ask people to eat?” Should we be publishing sequential chapters in eBook format or things of that nature? Obviously the publishing business is disintermediated, and we understand that. But is long form publishing counter-cyclical?
Brian: Wow. So much to think about here. The answer is you can’t stop creating the content in the way that people you’re trying to reach consume it. That was the most challenging part of writing this book. You’re an author. You know what I’m talking about. You’ve got to write a book. You have to keep up your blog. You have to keep up your Twitter stream. You have to keep up your Facebook. Now your Google+, your Foursquare. You have these seminated audience or groups of people that are connecting with you because they find value in those channels. But yeah, there’s a fantastic audience for books and the need to have information at their fingertips. But I did design this book a little bit differently, considering that we are wired for distraction. Every chapter has almost tweetable summaries of what the insights were in each chapter. So if you have to go back and just kind of remember what the value was, or just read those, you could still walk away with the value your way.
Jay: Absolutely. Great summaries. It was a fantastic illustration that you have in the book that shows your own personal media usage habits and the channels across the social Web that you used a few years ago versus the ones that you use now. I counted them up, and it was something like 47 different outposts that you were present in. Flickr, going back to FriendFeed and Plurk and things that we don’t necessarily use now. Then I counted the ones that you use today, or at least refer to in the book, and I think out of that 47, there’s only 10 that you still use. So I think to some degree, the industry is wiring itself for distraction, because we keep creating new stuff and new stuff and new stuff. You and I have the rare luxury of doing this for a living, but take an average marketing director or average CEO. They’ve got to be like, “What the hell is going on?”
Brian: Right. I was talking to John Battelle on the video show that I run, and he’s got a book called “What Hath We Wrought?” that’s coming out in a year or so. It really looks at how it’s not the technology that wired us for distraction. We embraced this technology and wired ourselves for distraction. There’s sort of a subliminal message in the first half of my book where, even though it’s written for executives and professionals to help them understand how to embrace this type of consumer, there is this underlying theme there where I hope that people pick up on it, that if you are that “connected consumer”, that you’re understanding that, number one, you’re not alone. But number two, part of the onus of improving your own online experience, your own digital experience, is becoming a very critical curator of those experiences through relationships, through information that you share and consume.
So what you saw in those two graphs, my point was that I shrunk it and that I found the channels that had the greatest value to me. Not just for me to promote what it is I’m working on, for me to learn. Also what’s really important is that I change who I follow in each of those networks as it pertains to what I find fascinating or interesting or where I think I can add value. So I’m constantly expanding and contracting these networks so that there’s value on both sides. That’s part of the theme of that first half of the book. If you are the people that you’re trying to reach, you have a responsibility to improve your own online experiences, which I call the egosystem.
Jay: Yeah. I’m glad you mentioned changing who you connect with in different outposts. As you know, there’s been somewhat of a micro trend recently of people just sort of saying, “You know what? I’m throwing up my hands. I’m going to, especially on Twitter, unfollow everybody and then start from ground zero.” I know Chris Brogan has done it and other people have done it. What do you make of that? Is that a sign of the times? Is that a sign that we did it wrong the first time? To me, that is a symptom of a bigger issue.
Brian: I’ve studied this actually, the idea of social network fatigue. And there’s parts of this in the book where we talk about the effects that this is having on society. I use examples of students who are feeling like, even though they’ve wired themselves for this, they can’t keep up with what it is that they’ve created. There’s this sense that not only are they always on, but there’s this psychological need to be always on. Otherwise they feel like they’re missing out, they’re disconnected, their relationships are going away from them. So part of this is self-created. But also, it’s perpetuated through the “social media experts”.
I can tell you that year after year, I would have to get in debates that would justify my friend to follow ratio on Twitter, for example. And that the idea of following somebody back is of reciprocal value to show as a thank you to someone who’s followed you.
Jay: An interesting stat that I saw in the book was that people on Facebook, I think it was, created 90 pieces of content a month. I think that was the stat that was in there, which is a lot, right? It’s three pieces of content a day. Do you think that can continue to grow? I think we take it as gospel that people’s usage of Facebook has no cap, but I can’t imagine that that’s true. Eventually, enough will be enough, but they seem to try and find other reasons for us to participate on that particular platform. Now with f-Commerce and other things that perhaps you used to have to leave Facebook to do, now they want you to do within their platform.
Brian: I really like that question. They call it Zuckerberg’s Law – that you will double the amount of content that you share every year. And to counter that law, this was a few years ago, I had come up with my own theory, and that theory was something that I called Social Graph Theory. That every year, you would double the size of your social graph, depending on what you were sharing.
Jay: Stands to reason.
Brian: In many ways, that’s proven true over the years. You probably read in the book that I switched. I didn’t want to perpetuate that theory anymore. I wanted to believe that we were going to follow what I call the Interest Graph Theory, and that was that we were going to shrink our networks and rebuild them based on value and interests. We see that with Chris Brogan, for example. We see that with other individuals really starting over again. But the content creation side continues to double, and that is because people find value. This is why I spend part of my time as an aspiring social scientist.
The need for people to share isn’t just because I want to push something out into my network. It’s because I enjoy the reactions that I get in sharing, and that fosters engagement. That fosters community. But I think what we have to be mindful of is we can’t just do it for the reaction. We actually have to do it for the value in that. I know that I’m saying the word value, but it’s true. I want to have more meaningful engagement with the people that I’m connected to, so I’m going to be more thoughtful about what it is that I curate and put into the stream.
Jay: Absolutely. There’s a lot of conversation these days about influence or outreach and Klout, with Klout’s new algorithm change recently. A lot of people wringing their hands and things like that. Whether you use Klout or any number of other software programs out there that can give you some sort of number, do you find that influence or outreach is scalable for brands, that it really has the ability to be a core part of your social program, your communication program?
Brian: This has been another area of study actually going back to the 90s before there were influence scores. I used to call it the IF, the influence factor, and its importance in business engagement. And I started a company in 1999 developed around simply influencer identification and engagement. By “influencer,” I meant people who had the capacity to cause effect, not a score. And by cause effect, that means that I recognize that you, Jay, are a master in the world of new business models and new engagement and media, and I have this particular solution or service or product. You’re going to be influential for me, but I can’t go to a service and find all of the people who have a score above 55 and expect them to take interest in what I do.
I have a report coming out on this very soon with Altimeter. That is the difference between social capital and influence, because they’re very different. To answer your question specifically, yes, an influencer engagement program will help businesses cut through the clutter instead of doing this en mass, one to many broadcast technique that they’re very used to doing. I’m focusing on the very select group of people who are incredibly connected within these sites – incredibly influential. I call it the one to one to many approach. Yes, there is value in that, whether it’s through an advocacy, through an influencer program or an engagement program, all of the above, an expert program, an advisory program. All of those things should run simultaneously.
But I do not know that I could find value in social capital relations, finding people who are influential. That said, we are seeing examples of sales, loyalty, and service aspects of the organization embracing all forms of people with social capital, because then they’re excited to share their experiences, and that’s a different value. I guess what I’m saying is it comes down to intent and the ability to know what it is that you want out of those relationships and then design the programs and find the right people that will help you execute, at least according to plan.
Jay: My favorite is the one to one campaign that is actually a broadcast campaign, where you send out 5,000 press releases to theoretical influencers at the click of a button. I’m like, ”
Wow, the irony of this is unbelievable.”
Brian: I have an inbox full of them.
Brian: Yeah. This is an important part of the book. It’s probably also, I wouldn’t say the easiest, but it’s the one where you can have the most impact. Really what the book is talking about in that section is change management, and this is the quickest part to getting on a new road to change. I talk about earlier in the book the idea that your brand is sort of this collection of shared experiences, and I show examples. If you search a particular brand on Twitter or Facebook and you feed that into a word cloud, all of these words are the words that people feel about your brand. There’s nothing you can do or say about that. You just recognize it. This is where a lot of business say, “This is exactly why we don’t want to be in new media, because we lose control.”
Jay: But you actually never had control, but that’s another point.
Brian: That’s right. You never had control, because those are the experiences, real experiences of people right now. You actually now have an opportunity to take control, because you can steer those experiences. There’s a lot of stories and formulas and frameworks that I’ve shared on how you can steer experiences. What’s your vision? What’s your mission? You’re talking about aligning with people, and what people are saying, especially in social media, is they want to be able to align with your values.
Jay: You have to know what those values are.
Brian: Yeah. What are those values? What is our vision? So a lot of companies that I work with today, we reexamine those. It’s quite a political conversation, as you can imagine, but when they see what the output can do, where people can align with it. And then more importantly, that it drives your online and your digital strategy and management programs, because you’re operating around a new vision that people can stand behind. Actually, it takes on meaning, and it’s not just a temporary thing, it’s actually a mantra.
Jay: Absolutely. I’m glad you documented the pieces of change management and the processes you go through, and you actually talk about identifying the “change team” within the organization – having people tasked with making this work. What sort of attributes do you look for in somebody who would be a good member of a change team?
Brian: I’ve got to make the point here that in “Engage” I talk about building a new media task force, where you bring cross-functional representatives together around the table so that each one of those stakeholders, quite honestly, getting their hands dirty and have stake in how social media is going to transform their particular function in the organization overall. But with a change management team, what we’re looking at is sort of taking that idea of a task force, decision makers across the organization who recognize that it’s much bigger than social media, that the business has to mean something to a different customer.
And quite honestly, it’s a healthy exercise to go through, but what we’re looking at is people who can speak on behalf of the employees. For example, HR becomes a big role in this. Legal becomes a big role in this. Leaders of lines of business, leaders of the executive team. In fact, it does talk about having an executive sponsor who can oversee this and has reports that bring it back to the top level. It also shows that the size and shape of that change management team is going to depend on sort of this internal audit that you do that talks to leaders and change agents within the organization to recognize the gaps, so that becomes your mission on how to bridge those. But it really is a powerful team to bring together, because really at the heart of what it is that their tasked to do is change the organization to matter for a new era of business.
Jay: I always find it to be the great paradox of modern business that everything in communications happens so much faster now. It’s Twitter in real-time and all these things. But yet, the type of change that you are recommending in “The End of Business as Usual” is absolutely slow. This is not “we’re going to make this happen in two weeks.” So here we are in this real-time world, but we are predicting change that happens over a period of years?
Brian: Yeah, absolutely. Many companies that I’ve worked with on these particular tasks, the stories I tell have been underway for two, three, four years already, and we’re still a long way to go. But understanding that it’s slow is why you have to begin sooner than later.
Jay: It’s a great book. I really, really enjoyed it. Thanks so much for being here, Brian. It’s The End of Business As Usual
Brian: Thank you, Jay.
Will You Abandon Your Friends to Seek Real Relevance
Posted on 01. Nov, 2011 by Jay Baer in Blog, book review, brian solis, Connected Consumer, jay baer, Small Business Internet Marketing, Small Business Marketing, Social Media Book, social media books, social media research
(video production by my friends at Candidio. Fast, inexpensive video editing and production. Check em out!)
Excerpted from the video:
I was happy to interview Brian Solis, a futurist, new media raconteur, and principal at Altimeter Group. Brian recently published his 5th book, The End of Business As Usual
which I believe to be his finest work to-date.
Jay: Hey everybody. It’s Jay Baer from Convince & Convert. Hope you are having a fantastic day. I’m joined this afternoon by a man who needs no introduction, but I’ll provide one anyway. Futurist, big thinker, gadabout, raconteur, and author of “The End of Business as Usual”, Mr. Brian Solis. Also a champagne lover, as I recall.
Brian: This is true.
Jay: So that is a lot of things. Congratulations on the new book. We just can’t stop you from writing books!
Brian: There’s just a lot to say right now.
Jay: You won’t be held back. I appreciate that. It’s great. I really actually read it, on a long plane flight out to the west coast. In fact, I was in your town for about five minutes earlier this week, but didn’t get a chance to say hi to you or the folks at Altimeter, but really, really enjoyed it. And what I like about this book in particular is that it’s got a lot of chapter breaks in it, it’s really the kind of book that you could read for half an hour and then set aside and then come back and not feel like you’re all confused. It’s really well packaged in that regard.
Brian: Thanks for noticing that, actually. And for everybody watching this, I did not seed that question. I appreciate that, because this time I wanted to write a book that could be, I don’t want to say easy to read, but could be thoughtful in how the reader would sit down, considering all of the things that they have to do, and still provide value knowing that they’re busy. I also wanted to write at the executive level, because one thing I heard about The End of Business As Usual
was that Engage was more of a reference guide than a book. People would read certain chunks as needed . . .
Jay: And refer back.
Brian: . . . and refer back. This one, even though I’d like to think it’s also a reference guide, it tells a story.
Jay: Yeah, but it’s a story that I find you don’t necessarily have to read in sequence, which I think is really interesting. It reminds me a little bit of UnMarketing
, although obviously at a much more executive level and detail than that. You probably could read it in somewhat random chapter order and still get a lot out of it. I think that’s really commendable.
Brian: Thank you.
Jay: One of the things I loved about the book is you talked about how we’re all wired for distraction now. We’re always like, “Squirrel! Tweet!” And it’s so true. It’s so true. I really notice it now, how hard it is to pay attention for any length of time. I don’t think it’s probably a net positive as a people or as a society, but I’ve thought a lot about, “gee, is a book too much sandwich to ask people to eat?” Should we be publishing sequential chapters in eBook format or things of that nature? Obviously the publishing business is disintermediated, and we understand that. But is long form publishing counter-cyclical?
Brian: Wow. So much to think about here. The answer is you can’t stop creating the content in the way that people you’re trying to reach consume it. That was the most challenging part of writing this book. You’re an author. You know what I’m talking about. You’ve got to write a book. You have to keep up your blog. You have to keep up your Twitter stream. You have to keep up your Facebook. Now your Google+, your Foursquare. You have these seminated audience or groups of people that are connecting with you because they find value in those channels. But yeah, there’s a fantastic audience for books and the need to have information at their fingertips. But I did design this book a little bit differently, considering that we are wired for distraction. Every chapter has almost tweetable summaries of what the insights were in each chapter. So if you have to go back and just kind of remember what the value was, or just read those, you could still walk away with the value your way.
Jay: Absolutely. Great summaries. It was a fantastic illustration that you have in the book that shows your own personal media usage habits and the channels across the social Web that you used a few years ago versus the ones that you use now. I counted them up, and it was something like 47 different outposts that you were present in. Flickr, going back to FriendFeed and Plurk and things that we don’t necessarily use now. Then I counted the ones that you use today, or at least refer to in the book, and I think out of that 47, there’s only 10 that you still use. So I think to some degree, the industry is wiring itself for distraction, because we keep creating new stuff and new stuff and new stuff. You and I have the rare luxury of doing this for a living, but take an average marketing director or average CEO. They’ve got to be like, “What the hell is going on?”
Brian: Right. I was talking to John Battelle on the video show that I run, and he’s got a book called “What Hath We Wrought?” that’s coming out in a year or so. It really looks at how it’s not the technology that wired us for distraction. We embraced this technology and wired ourselves for distraction. There’s sort of a subliminal message in the first half of my book where, even though it’s written for executives and professionals to help them understand how to embrace this type of consumer, there is this underlying theme there where I hope that people pick up on it, that if you are that “connected consumer”, that you’re understanding that, number one, you’re not alone. But number two, part of the onus of improving your own online experience, your own digital experience, is becoming a very critical curator of those experiences through relationships, through information that you share and consume.
So what you saw in those two graphs, my point was that I shrunk it and that I found the channels that had the greatest value to me. Not just for me to promote what it is I’m working on, for me to learn. Also what’s really important is that I change who I follow in each of those networks as it pertains to what I find fascinating or interesting or where I think I can add value. So I’m constantly expanding and contracting these networks so that there’s value on both sides. That’s part of the theme of that first half of the book. If you are the people that you’re trying to reach, you have a responsibility to improve your own online experiences, which I call the egosystem.
Jay: Yeah. I’m glad you mentioned changing who you connect with in different outposts. As you know, there’s been somewhat of a micro trend recently of people just sort of saying, “You know what? I’m throwing up my hands. I’m going to, especially on Twitter, unfollow everybody and then start from ground zero.” I know Chris Brogan has done it and other people have done it. What do you make of that? Is that a sign of the times? Is that a sign that we did it wrong the first time? To me, that is a symptom of a bigger issue.
Brian: I’ve studied this actually, the idea of social network fatigue. And there’s parts of this in the book where we talk about the effects that this is having on society. I use examples of students who are feeling like, even though they’ve wired themselves for this, they can’t keep up with what it is that they’ve created. There’s this sense that not only are they always on, but there’s this psychological need to be always on. Otherwise they feel like they’re missing out, they’re disconnected, their relationships are going away from them. So part of this is self-created. But also, it’s perpetuated through the “social media experts”.
I can tell you that year after year, I would have to get in debates that would justify my friend to follow ratio on Twitter, for example. And that the idea of following somebody back is of reciprocal value to show as a thank you to someone who’s followed you.
Jay: An interesting stat that I saw in the book was that people on Facebook, I think it was, created 90 pieces of content a month. I think that was the stat that was in there, which is a lot, right? It’s three pieces of content a day. Do you think that can continue to grow? I think we take it as gospel that people’s usage of Facebook has no cap, but I can’t imagine that that’s true. Eventually, enough will be enough, but they seem to try and find other reasons for us to participate on that particular platform. Now with f-Commerce and other things that perhaps you used to have to leave Facebook to do, now they want you to do within their platform.
Brian: I really like that question. They call it Zuckerberg’s Law – that you will double the amount of content that you share every year. And to counter that law, this was a few years ago, I had come up with my own theory, and that theory was something that I called Social Graph Theory. That every year, you would double the size of your social graph, depending on what you were sharing.
Jay: Stands to reason.
Brian: In many ways, that’s proven true over the years. You probably read in the book that I switched. I didn’t want to perpetuate that theory anymore. I wanted to believe that we were going to follow what I call the Interest Graph Theory, and that was that we were going to shrink our networks and rebuild them based on value and interests. We see that with Chris Brogan, for example. We see that with other individuals really starting over again. But the content creation side continues to double, and that is because people find value. This is why I spend part of my time as an aspiring social scientist.
The need for people to share isn’t just because I want to push something out into my network. It’s because I enjoy the reactions that I get in sharing, and that fosters engagement. That fosters community. But I think what we have to be mindful of is we can’t just do it for the reaction. We actually have to do it for the value in that. I know that I’m saying the word value, but it’s true. I want to have more meaningful engagement with the people that I’m connected to, so I’m going to be more thoughtful about what it is that I curate and put into the stream.
Jay: Absolutely. There’s a lot of conversation these days about influence or outreach and Klout, with Klout’s new algorithm change recently. A lot of people wringing their hands and things like that. Whether you use Klout or any number of other software programs out there that can give you some sort of number, do you find that influence or outreach is scalable for brands, that it really has the ability to be a core part of your social program, your communication program?
Brian: This has been another area of study actually going back to the 90s before there were influence scores. I used to call it the IF, the influence factor, and its importance in business engagement. And I started a company in 1999 developed around simply influencer identification and engagement. By “influencer,” I meant people who had the capacity to cause effect, not a score. And by cause effect, that means that I recognize that you, Jay, are a master in the world of new business models and new engagement and media, and I have this particular solution or service or product. You’re going to be influential for me, but I can’t go to a service and find all of the people who have a score above 55 and expect them to take interest in what I do.
I have a report coming out on this very soon with Altimeter. That is the difference between social capital and influence, because they’re very different. To answer your question specifically, yes, an influencer engagement program will help businesses cut through the clutter instead of doing this en mass, one to many broadcast technique that they’re very used to doing. I’m focusing on the very select group of people who are incredibly connected within these sites – incredibly influential. I call it the one to one to many approach. Yes, there is value in that, whether it’s through an advocacy, through an influencer program or an engagement program, all of the above, an expert program, an advisory program. All of those things should run simultaneously.
But I do not know that I could find value in social capital relations, finding people who are influential. That said, we are seeing examples of sales, loyalty, and service aspects of the organization embracing all forms of people with social capital, because then they’re excited to share their experiences, and that’s a different value. I guess what I’m saying is it comes down to intent and the ability to know what it is that you want out of those relationships and then design the programs and find the right people that will help you execute, at least according to plan.
Jay: My favorite is the one to one campaign that is actually a broadcast campaign, where you send out 5,000 press releases to theoretical influencers at the click of a button. I’m like, ”
Wow, the irony of this is unbelievable.”
Brian: I have an inbox full of them.
Brian: Yeah. This is an important part of the book. It’s probably also, I wouldn’t say the easiest, but it’s the one where you can have the most impact. Really what the book is talking about in that section is change management, and this is the quickest part to getting on a new road to change. I talk about earlier in the book the idea that your brand is sort of this collection of shared experiences, and I show examples. If you search a particular brand on Twitter or Facebook and you feed that into a word cloud, all of these words are the words that people feel about your brand. There’s nothing you can do or say about that. You just recognize it. This is where a lot of business say, “This is exactly why we don’t want to be in new media, because we lose control.”
Jay: But you actually never had control, but that’s another point.
Brian: That’s right. You never had control, because those are the experiences, real experiences of people right now. You actually now have an opportunity to take control, because you can steer those experiences. There’s a lot of stories and formulas and frameworks that I’ve shared on how you can steer experiences. What’s your vision? What’s your mission? You’re talking about aligning with people, and what people are saying, especially in social media, is they want to be able to align with your values.
Jay: You have to know what those values are.
Brian: Yeah. What are those values? What is our vision? So a lot of companies that I work with today, we reexamine those. It’s quite a political conversation, as you can imagine, but when they see what the output can do, where people can align with it. And then more importantly, that it drives your online and your digital strategy and management programs, because you’re operating around a new vision that people can stand behind. Actually, it takes on meaning, and it’s not just a temporary thing, it’s actually a mantra.
Jay: Absolutely. I’m glad you documented the pieces of change management and the processes you go through, and you actually talk about identifying the “change team” within the organization – having people tasked with making this work. What sort of attributes do you look for in somebody who would be a good member of a change team?
Brian: I’ve got to make the point here that in “Engage” I talk about building a new media task force, where you bring cross-functional representatives together around the table so that each one of those stakeholders, quite honestly, getting their hands dirty and have stake in how social media is going to transform their particular function in the organization overall. But with a change management team, what we’re looking at is sort of taking that idea of a task force, decision makers across the organization who recognize that it’s much bigger than social media, that the business has to mean something to a different customer.
And quite honestly, it’s a healthy exercise to go through, but what we’re looking at is people who can speak on behalf of the employees. For example, HR becomes a big role in this. Legal becomes a big role in this. Leaders of lines of business, leaders of the executive team. In fact, it does talk about having an executive sponsor who can oversee this and has reports that bring it back to the top level. It also shows that the size and shape of that change management team is going to depend on sort of this internal audit that you do that talks to leaders and change agents within the organization to recognize the gaps, so that becomes your mission on how to bridge those. But it really is a powerful team to bring together, because really at the heart of what it is that their tasked to do is change the organization to matter for a new era of business.
Jay: I always find it to be the great paradox of modern business that everything in communications happens so much faster now. It’s Twitter in real-time and all these things. But yet, the type of change that you are recommending in “The End of Business as Usual” is absolutely slow. This is not “we’re going to make this happen in two weeks.” So here we are in this real-time world, but we are predicting change that happens over a period of years?
Brian: Yeah, absolutely. Many companies that I’ve worked with on these particular tasks, the stories I tell have been underway for two, three, four years already, and we’re still a long way to go. But understanding that it’s slow is why you have to begin sooner than later.
Jay: It’s a great book. I really, really enjoyed it. Thanks so much for being here, Brian. It’s The End of Business As Usual
Brian: Thank you, Jay.
B2C Facebook Results Are 30% Above Average on Sundays
Posted on 30. Oct, 2011 by Jay Baer in Blog, facebook, jay baer, Small Business Internet Marketing, Small Business Marketing, social media research, Twitter
Last week I did a Webinar with my friends (and Convince & Convert sponsors) Argyle Social about social media timing. I use Argyle Social to send most of my tweets, Facebook and Linkedin updates et al, and the guys at Argyle (which specializes in advanced metrics and social reporting) agreed to put some of my crazy theories to the test.
We uncovered a great many interesting factoids, and even some “non-advice’ including the finding that if you’re a B2B company what day you tweet (within the work week) is irrelevant.
The big take-away (I hope) from our Webinar is that AVERAGE PEOPLE CARE ABOUT AVERAGES. Listening to some huge survey that says “on average, the best time to tweet is 2pm Wednesdays” is a mockery in stereo. First, that data is totally bogus, and whomever propagates that crap should know better. Secondarily, YOU should know better. The reality is that YOU need to determine what’s right for YOUR COMPANY.
As we talked about in the Webinar you need to create a defined hypothesis, and test that hypothesis with enough data to be significant statistically, while ensuring that you are not changing more than one variable at a time. Easy? Nope. Important? Yep.
Social media success is exiting the era of sympathy, and entering the era of science. Are you ready?
The reality is that your results may vary. However, one finding that we uncovered in the research is that there may be a large opportunity for B2C marketers on Facebook on Sundays. We found that few companies publish status updates on Sunday, yet engagement (clicks divided by audience) is 30% higher that Saturday, and even higher that than versus weekdays.
I know your community management team may be at church and/or gorged on buckwheat pancakes and apple-smoked bacon, but this data from Argyle Social suggests that you need to try Sunday Facebook posts, even if they are staged in advance. (recording of the Webinar available at: this link.
Which of our findings did you find most interesting?
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