Patrick Schwerdtfeger is a motivational keynote speaker whose topics include using YouTube for business and social media marketing strategies. He’s a leading authority on self-employment and the author of Marketing Shortcuts for the Self-Employed (2011, Wiley). There are four chapters in his award-winning book (2012 Small Business Book Awards) that cover a variety of marketing strategies on YouTube (in Part 6 of the book: Leverage Social Media) and is included below for your review. The book has a total of 80 short chapters, each ending with an Implementation Checklist. Also, Patrick’s perspective on the business marketing opportunity on YouTube as well as the increasing shift to video-based content is summarized below.
YouTube is the second largest search engine on the internet today, just behind Google itself. Of course, Google owns YouTube also! In fact, when surveying people within different age brackets, those between 8 and 13 years old actually went to YouTube before going to Google! And the trend is accelerating every year. That means that the population will soon be getting their questions answered by watching videos rather than reading the answers in text format. Patrick has been following this trend since its inception and has four chapters in his book devoted to the exploding popularity of YouTube. He also has 500+ videos on his own YouTube channels, giving him an insiders view of the trends in action. If your attendees need to learn about the opportunities of marketing their businesses on YouTube, Patrick is the perfect person to convey the message. His presentations are well known to be actionable and inspiring, leaving attendees excited and empowered to use the same strategies themselves.
Chapter 75: YouTube Viral Videos
What’s the most effective type of content?
Before we answer that, we have to determine what the options are. There are basically just four types of content available: text, audio, photos (or images), and video (or animation). Which do you think is the most effective from a marketing perspective? You guessed it. Video! People love video. Period. It’s easy. It’s intuitive. It’s fun. Video requires the least amount of effort to watch, understand, and/or learn from. As a result, good video content tends to get shared more than other types of content.
Next up: where does your marketing content come from? Well, there are really just two places where relevant marketing content can come from: your business or your customers. Think about this for a minute. Peer reviews: that’s content about your company provided by your customers. What about photos? Yes, you could be sharing photos of your business online, but your customers might be posting photos about your business too. What about videos? Same thing.
What’s more effective, content provided by your business or content provided by your customers? Right again! Content provided by your customers is far more effective than content provided by your own business. It makes sense. People will always believe what someone else says about you more than what you say about yourself. It’s more credible. It’s a third-party endorsement, whether it’s a positive comment or a negative one. So what’s the most effective content available? Bingo! Video content about your business that is provided by your customers is the most effective content you can get.
Back in January 2009, the Australian Tourism Board advertised for “The Best Job in the World.” It got huge media coverage. Maybe you remember it. Anyway, the job paid $100,000 for six months—not bad. The successful candidate would live in a beautiful house on an island in Australia’s Great Barrier Reef area. He or she would be provided with all the snorkeling gear, scuba diving apparatus, and parasailing equipment he or she could handle. The responsibilities? Simple. He or she would have to write one blog post every day on the Australian Tourism Board’s blog.
In order to apply, candidates had to submit a video (one minute or less) demonstrating why they would be perfect for the job. Well, as you can imagine, the buzz exploded and the job opportunity was reported by media outlets around the world. The result? Almost 35,000 people submitted videos. Talk about spectacular content! We’re talking about almost 35,000 videos featuring beautiful young human beings (for the most part) talking about why they love the Great Barrier Reef. Brilliant. All those videos were posted on YouTube and collectively watched by millions of people around the world. Awesome, awesome, awesome!
But it gets better. People were allowed to vote on the videos they liked best—one vote per e-mail address. So they ended up with an opt-in list of more than 400,000 e-mail addresses. The brilliance of this campaign is insane. The interesting thing is that the eventual 6-month contract wasn’t nearly as successful as the campaign to hire the candidate in the first place. The hiring campaign delivered most of the benefit. That kind of video exposure is priceless.
I recently met with a company that makes accessories for wheelchairs. They make a great product that make it possible for wheelchair users to move forward by either pushing or pulling vertical levers instead of manually turning the wheels. We put together a brilliant strategy based on the same concept as the Australian Tourism Board. Unfortunately, the company never pulled the trigger, but I’m convinced it would’ve been a winner. The idea was to send e-mails to their past customers letting them know we’d be having a contest where owners of these accessories could submit videos of how they were using the product. The most creative and inspiring videos would win great prizes. The plan was to purchase 20 Flip digital video recorders and send them out to interested customers along with self-addressed postage-paid return envelopes. “Record your video and send it back,” the insert would say. I bet we would’ve gotten some fabulous videos.
I could imagine a video of someone (maybe a veteran) using the levers to propel himself up Lombard Street in San Francisco, the steepest street in the country. Or someone going up a hiking trail … in a wheelchair! It’s really too bad we never got a chance to test the strategy. How can you incentivize your own customers to create content about your business? Give them a good reason (like contest prizes) and you’ll be amazed at what you get back.
YouTube Viral Videos: Implementation Checklist
What do you do that’s remarkable?
How can your customers tell their story?
Imagine videos about your business.
Incentivize your customers to make them.
Have a contest and offer great prizes.
Support the process by providing cameras.
Post and promote those videos on YouTube.
YouTube is serving more than two billion video views per day right now. Are any of those videos yours? Are any of those videos about your business? Those two billion views are being watched whether you’re there or not. People with questions are searching on YouTube whether you’re providing answers or not. So how do we get your content in front of that traffic? How do we get your business in front of those eyeballs?
You may be familiar with the name Gary Vaynerchuk. If not, we’re talking about a super high-energy and fast-talking 31-year-old guy who inherited his parents’ retail wine store in New Jersey, just outside New York City. The store is called WineLibrary. So what did he do? He started his own video blog called WineLibrary TV and his frantic communication style make his videos extremely entertaining to watch. He literally eats dirt and chews leather to explain the flavors in wine. He’s not exactly your typical French sommelier! But the younger generation loves this guy.
To be clear, Gary Vaynerchuk posts a new video almost every single day, so this is no small undertaking. But he managed to explode his annual revenue from $4 million to more than $60 million per year in the process. Imagine: $4 million to more than $60 million!! And two thirds of the revenue came from online orders. His parents never once took an online order. He started it. Two thirds of $60 million is $40 million! This guy went from zero to $40 million in online orders! How? He demonstrated his expertise in a clever way in the middle of a raging river. You’ve heard this before. These stories are always the same.
Consider Blentec, a company that manufactures commercial and residential blenders. As the story goes, the newly hired marketing manager, George Wright, was walking through the factory one day and noticed the CEO, Tom Dickson, trying to destroy a 2×2 block of wood with an entry-level residential blender. He succeeded. The room was littered with sawdust and chips of wood. Apparently, he did that on a regular basis. It was his way of testing the durability of their products.
George saw the potential immediately. They needed to record it on video! So they started a series called “Will it blend?” to share the results on YouTube. The start-up costs for the campaign totaled just $85. They started blending all sorts of things. They blended marbles. They blended golf balls. They blended a full size rake! And they also blended an iPhone. Yes, it’s true. They blended an iPhone and it got completely destroyed. It literally turned to dust. On the video, they called it “iDust.”
What were the results? Sales didn’t double. Sales didn’t triple. Sales soared 500 percent! Why? They demonstrated the capabilities of their product in a clever way in the middle of a raging river. It’s always the same. Bottom line: it worked because it was remarkable! What do you do that’s remarkable? What do you do in your business that’s remarkable?
A woman recently attended a conference where I spoke and she e-mailed me a few days later, all excited. Her business sells premium foods like caviar, truffle mushrooms, and foie gras and she wanted to create a video about her business and put it on YouTube. “A video.” One video. Why stop at just one video when her company sold 85 products? I told her she should make 85 videos—one for each product! And then optimize each video for the relevant keywords for that particular product.
She never made all 85 videos but she did make 27 of them, and they were all optimized for highly specific keyword phrases like “black truffle oil.” People are searching for that stuff. They found her videos and each one pointed back to her website. She racked up more than 25,000 views in her first 12 months and her revenue doubled.
When I launched the first edition of this book, I recorded 57 videos, one for almost every chapter (the original book had only 60 chapters). I set up the camera in my office and recorded one chapter after another, and then chopped up the footage into separate videos later. A good friend of mine told me I should change my clothes in between each video. No! Nobody is going to watch all 57 videos. They’re only going to watch one. Each video is optimized for different keywords, based on what that particular chapter is about. So people searching for information on YouTube will find one of my videos and each one points back to my website. Mission accomplished.
Think about your business. What’s the area where your customers are most fascinated? Where do they give you the most animated response? That’s it! Get that on video. Share that on YouTube. Pick an angle or a gimmick to make your videos unique. There are basically three different strategies for creating videos: educate, entertain, or shock.
Educate: The fastest growing content on YouTube is educational how-to content. Every day, the demand for valuable how-to content increases. Teach your prospects how to use your products or services. Teach them how to avoid common mistakes. Teach them about the tips, tricks, and tools that will make their lives easier.
Entertain: People love to be entertained. Humor will always get a warm welcome from YouTube users. Show your prospects the humor in your industry. Show them the irony in your products or services. Find ways to make people laugh while engaging them about your value proposition. Gary Vaynerchuk basically chose a combination of education and entertainment and enjoyed enormous success in the process.
Shock: You want viral? Shock people. We’ve all seen examples of this approach. The “Will it blend?” campaign by Blentec essentially falls into this category. Their demonstrations were shocking, albeit with some great entertainment sprinkled in. What’s shocking about your product or service? How can you shock your prospects with the results you deliver?
Regardless of which direction you choose, YouTube offers a tremendous opportunity to those who share video content. Find a way to participate with your own business.
YouTube How-to Videos: Implementation Checklist
Demonstrate your expertise on YouTube.
Display the capabilities of your product.
Exhibit the benefits of your service.
Identify what you do that’s remarkable.
Upload new videos regularly.
Educate: provide how-to information.
Entertain: show the humor in your field.
Shock: surprise viewers with wild videos.
Everybody wants their videos to “go viral.” They want the video to catch on and spread like wildfire, accumulating hundreds of thousands of views along the way. Turns out, getting a video to “go viral” is hard work. Don’t get me wrong. There are definitely some videos that just hit it right. They strike a chord and get shared around the globe. But there are also countless great videos that get a few hundred views and then fade out. To give a video the best possible odds of becoming successful, you need to give it a good push at the beginning. There are lots of things you can do to promote YouTube videos and there are companies that specialize in doing just that. What are they doing?
First, make sure the video isn’t too long. These days, we live in an ADHD society. Nobody has any patience anymore. Most of the successful “viral” videos are between 30 and 45 seconds long. As a rule of thumb, your videos should be no longer than three or four minutes.
Second, ping your network. Once your video is uploaded with an effective title, description, and tags, send it out to your e-mail list. Post it on Facebook. Tweet about it. People enjoy videos and will often take a few minutes to watch yours, if invited. That will get you some initial views.
Third, encourage comments—right on the video itself! Near the end of your video, ask people to leave comments below. Ask them a question. Ask for their input. Also, invite controversy. Controversy leads to more comments and comments improve YouTube rankings.
Fourth, find a high-traffic forum that’s related to your video’s topic and embed your video in a new thread. Use an enticing title and encourage posts. The longer your thread (and video) are in the “fast water” (see Chapter 53 for full instructions) the more views it’ll rack up. In many cases, you can get a few hundred or a few thousand views by effectively managing your thread on the forum.
Fifth, do the same thing on two or three other forums. These are all independent communities and you can double or triple your results by repeating the exact same steps on multiple communities. Post your video on Facebook Groups and LinkedIn Groups and Google Groups and Yahoo! Groups. Post it anywhere your target audience spends time.
The companies that specialize in this sort of thing generally maintain multiple accounts on all these various platforms, including YouTube itself. By doing so, they can start the initial dialog (via comments) and controversy all by themselves. They can also keep their forum threads active and popular within those communities. Understandably, YouTube tries to limit these types of artificial conversations and will automatically check to see if the various accounts are being managed from the same IP address. That means you’d have to have people in different locations using different Internet connections to do this safely.
My advice? Be careful. It’s important you understand what people are doing. That’s your competition. Whether you decide to employ similar techniques yourself (or hire a company that uses these strategies) is entirely up to you. My objective is to give you a clear picture of how these things happen and then leave the final decision up to you. Ideally, you want your video to make it onto the “Most Popular” pages on YouTube. They’re featured on the homepage and show the trending videos each day. There are a variety of factors that determine which videos make the cut, including the numbers of views and comments. The point is that once you get to the “Most Popular” pages, your views soar.
At the end of the day, you work like crazy to get the first few thousand views, and then you get the next 50,000 for free. Once you’re on the “Most Popular” pages, the exposure explodes. And that’s when you’ll find out if the video has true viral potential. Once you get to that point, the video is circulated widely enough to really take off . . . or not. Some will go to 100,000 views. Others will go to 1,500,000 views. It all depends on the video. Is it catchy? Is it educational? Is it funny? Is it shocking? If so, you could be in for an exciting ride. By the way, once your video gets a bunch of views, YouTube will offer to “monetize” it with advertisements, giving you a share of the revenue. If your channel does well in general, they’ll offer you an opportunity to become a “YouTube Partner.” Both will result in revenue and exposure.
Moral: promote your videos! It can change your business.
YouTube Video Promotion: Implementation Checklist
Make your videos short.
After uploading, tell all your friends.
Post it on Facebook and e-mail your list.
Ask for comments—right on the video!
Create a thread on a high-traffic forum.
Embed your video and invite interaction.
Post it to Facebook and LinkedIn groups
Post it to Yahoo! and Google groups.
Try to get it on the “Most Popular” pages.
If you succeed, sit back and enjoy the ride.
Patrick Schwerdtfeger is a motivational keynote speaker whose topics include Facebook for business, social media marketing and Facebook advertising. He’s a leading authority on self-employment and the author of Marketing Shortcuts for the Self-Employed (2011, Wiley). There are four chapters in his award-winning book (2012 Small Business Book Awards) that discuss Facebook in detail (in Part 6 of the book: Leverage Social Media) and is included below for your review. The book has a total of 80 short chapters, each ending with an Implementation Checklist. Also, Patrick’s perspective on Facebook marketing for businesses, including national marketing opportunities as well as local geo-targeted campaigns, is summarized below.
Facebook offers tremendous opportunities to local businesses. It allows you to target people by location as well as their demographic profile. Even better, you can target people who already “like” other Facebook Pages. Taken together, Facebook has one of the best target marketing platforms on the internet. Aside from Facebook advertising, businesses can also learn to engage their fans on Facebook by posting visual (photos or videos) content and providing incentives for interaction. Micro incentives for micro actions! Patrick has accumulated dozens of Facebook success stories involving PPC advertising, micro incentives, effective posts and tagging people in photos. If you’re looking for someone to present an informative and entertaining synopsis of the business opportunities on Facebook, Patrick Schwerdtfeger is the perfect choice!
Chapter 70: Facebook Profiles & Pages
Can you use Facebook for business?
Yes! Absolutely. But we need to begin with some of the basics. There are three different “facilities” you can use on Facebook: profiles, groups, and pages. Profiles are for individuals. You probably already have a profile. Profiles have “friends.” Groups are for multiple individuals with similar interests. Groups are built by profiles. A profile builds a group. Groups have “members.” Pages are specifically designed for public figures and businesses. Pages are built by profiles. A profile builds and becomes an “admin” for a page. Pages have “fans.”
In the past, engaging with a page involved clicking a button called “become a fan,” hence the term “fan.” In 2010, Facebook replaced that vernacular with the “like” button. The change has resulted in an increased willingness of Facebook users to engage with Facebook pages. Anyway, the term “fan” is still regularly used to refer to page membership. Facebook pages can have multiple admins. You can add admins or remove them as circumstances change in your business. Also, when you become an admin for a page, it will not link back to your personal profile so it’s a great way to keep your business and personal lives separate.
Now, let’s take a look at how the Facebook facilities are different from each other.
If you want to see my profile, you have to jump over two hurdles to get there. First, you have to be on Facebook yourself. You have to have your own profile and be logged in. Second, you and I need to be Facebook “friends” for you to see my profile. There are a few exceptions to this. Facebook recently introduced new privacy settings that allow you to make your profile more public. But for most people, there are two hurdles to viewing a profile.
If you want to see my group, there’s only one hurdle you have to jump over. You have to have your own profile and be logged in, but you and I do not have to be friends for you to see my group. You can search for groups, find mine, and check it out without being friends with me.
If you want to see my page, there are zero hurdles. What does that mean? It means you don’t even have to be logged in to Facebook to check out my page. It means there’s no firewall. It means that pages are fully indexed by Google and the other search engines! Do you think Facebook ranks high on Google? Yes, indeed! Facebook is a huge website and Facebook pages rank high on Google. In fact, there are companies who have a Facebook page and a website, and when they search for their own company name on Google, their Facebook page ranks higher than their own website!
So that means there’s an opportunity for businesses in creating Facebook pages for themselves. But wait! You need to keep one thing in mind: the title of your Facebook page is the only thing you can’t change once you’ve selected it. Everything else you can change, but not the title. So you want to get it right the first time.
The title of your Facebook page is the most valuable from a search engine optimization (SEO) perspective. For those familiar with the HTML website coding language, it’s effectively your H1 tag. That’s valuable real estate so you want to include some keywords if possible (and appropriate). If you work for a large company that people are already searching for, fine. Just use the company name for your page title. But if you’re a self-employed service practitioner, you might want to include a few keywords beyond just your name. Would you call your page “Jane Smith?” No. Nobody is searching for “Jane Smith.” Instead, call it “Jane Smith Financial Advisor Boston MA.” There will be people searching for a financial advisor in Boston, so include those words in your page title.
Your Facebook page title is one of the only things you can’t change. You can at the beginning but once you have more than 100 fans, the title will become permanent and will no longer be editable. If you already have more than 100 fans and are now wishing you could go back and change your page title, chill. It’s not that big of a deal. It’s just one of those little tricks that’s worth mentioning for those who are just getting started. So if you have less than 100 fans, consider adding a few keywords. If you have more than 100 fans, it’s probably not worth deleting it and building a new one. Stick with the one you have.
The important thing is to recognize the different facilities available on Facebook and how you can use them. Do not create a profile for your business. Profiles are for people, not businesses. Profiles that are created for businesses will eventually get deleted because they’re against the Facebook terms of service. Create a page for your business. All the new features such as Facebook Places and Facebook Deals (Chapter 74) are only accessible through pages, leaving businesses with profiles in the cold.
Create a Facebook profile for yourself.
Visit www.facebook.com/groups.
Search for your favorite keywords.
Visit www.facebook.com/pages.
Search for your favorite keywords.
Consider creating your own page.
Never create a profile for a business.
Add keywords to your page title.
How do you communicate with your friends and fans?
This is another interesting topic on Facebook. Turns out, every facility you use (profiles, groups, or pages) has its own communication advantages. If I (my profile) want to send you (your profile) a message on Facebook, it will go into your Facebook inbox but you will also get e-mail notification (with the default settings). You’ll get an e-mail telling you that Patrick (me) sent you a message on Facebook, and you can read the message in either location.
To be clear, you can read my message in your regular e-mail inbox or you can log into Facebook and read my message in your Facebook inbox. The message is in both locations. It gets interesting with groups and pages. If a group wants to send a message to its members, the delivery depends on the number of members in the group. If the group has 5,000 or fewer members, the message will go to each member’s Facebook inbox and the group members will also get e-mail notification. If the group’s membership grows to 5,001 members or more, the e-mail notification goes away. That means the message only goes to the Facebook inbox. That’s a major problem. Why? Without the e-mail, if your members don’t regularly check their Facebook inbox they might not even realize they received a group-related message.
This is a major drawback of Facebook groups. When your group has fewer than 5,000 members, you have an extremely effective way of communicating with them. But once you cross the 5,000-member threshold, you lose that functionality and never get it back—unless you remove members to stay under that 5,000 limit (which some people do, by the way). It gets even worse with pages. As a page admin, there is no way to send a “message” to your fans. You can only send “updates.” So what’s an update? In your Facebook inbox, there are “messages” and “updates.” The default tab is messages and very few people read the updates. That means an update sent to your fans will get read by almost nobody.
If you want to communicate with your Facebook page fans, the best way to do it is to post on your page’s wall. Wall posts go into the Facebook user’s news feed and end up getting seen way more than updates. So let’s take a minute and talk about wall posts. Whether you’re posting on your profile wall, your group wall, or your page wall, the primary objective is interaction. Interaction leads to trust, and trust is an essential precursor to the purchase decision. You need trust first, and the fastest way to get it is by encouraging interaction.
One of the simplest things you can do when posting on your wall is to end your post with a question. What do you think? Any suggestions? Are we missing anything? Other ideas? How can we help? Who’s your favorite? What went wrong? Ah, yes. The power of a question! Questions tug at people’s subconscious. They beg for a response. They tickle people’s minds and invite new ideas. Bottom line: they encourage interaction. Using this one simple strategy will dramatically increase the effectiveness of your Facebook activity. And on your Facebook page, interaction is absolutely essential for building a broader fan base. Keep in mind that any time Facebook users make a comment on your page wall, that activity is also noted on their wall. That means their network is notified. It means their interaction spurs a viral process that can attract new fans. The more interaction you have, the more people find out about your page.
If you’re just getting started, your first milestone should be getting 300 fans. Once you have 300 or more fans, you’ll notice that your number of fans will start to grow on its own, especially if you’re actively encouraging interaction on your posts. Also, when people comment on your post, they’re automatically subscribed to subsequent comments. That means they’re notified when other people comment after them. So you can post something, accumulate a bunch of comments from interested fans, and then comment again yourself, knowing everyone will see your follow-up comment. These strategies are simple. It just boils down to a series of simple little tricks to maximize your effectiveness. It’s all about understanding platforms like Facebook and how they work and then leveraging them to achieve your objectives. Once you’re comfortable with the process, it’s easy.
Facebook Messages and Wall Posts: Implementation Checklist
Log into Facebook and visit your inbox.
Notice the “messages” and “updates” tabs.
If you have a page, send an “update.”
Measure the response you get.
Next, post something on the page wall.
Measure the response you get.
Always end wall posts with a question.
Add follow-up comments on wall posts.
Tagging people on photos. Tagging people on photos has such huge potential and is so underutilized. Here’s how it works. Let’s say I take a photo of Susie, upload it to my Facebook page, and then tag her in the photo. What happens? Well, the photo shows up on my Facebook page. That’s where I uploaded it to. But it also shows up in Susie’s profile as “photos uploaded by others.” That means I can put a photo into Susie’s profile. Think about that! The photo also goes onto Susie’s wall. It says “Susie was tagged in a photo” and the photo will be there for her entire network to see.
Last year, I worked with a small winery. It was a very small family-owned operation and we hosted a public wine tasting to try and get more exposure for the place. We only charged a $5 entrance fee and marketed the event using offline channels. Lots of people showed up. When they entered, we had a table set up where they had to register. At that same table, they received their wineglass (included) and also got their first pour. So when they left the registration table, they already had wine in a wineglass. A few feet away, we had an area where the winery name and logo was displayed on the wall, and a photographer greeted people there. “Welcome. We’re thrilled you’re here. We’d love to take your photo. Is that okay?” Almost everyone said yes.
Think about these photos. They all had people smiling with wine in their hands and the name and logo of the winery in the background. These were branded photographs. That’s very important. They were basically advertisements! Right? I mean, it’s subtle but those photos were ads. After the event, we uploaded all the photos to the winery’s newly introduced Facebook page and tagged everybody. You need to be friends with people before you can tag them in photos so we gave everyone a full explanation of the process at the tasting. We had to send friend requests first but that was a small price to pay for the end result! We had about 180 photos and ended up with more than 100 people tagged. So those photos ended up in the profiles of more than 100 people. We basically put an advertisement into all of their profiles! Not only that, but the photos also appeared on the walls of those same 100 people. The awareness shot up immediately and the foot traffic increased the very next weekend.
Where do you interact with your customers or prospects? At trade shows? At a retail storefront? At events you host? Think about the opportunities you might have to take photos and tag people on Facebook. If you’re a real estate agent and you sell a house, you need to take a picture of your customers in front of the house and that “SOLD” sign. If you’re a contractor and just did a major renovation of someone’s kitchen, you need to take a picture of your happy customers in front of those beautiful granite countertops!
I worked with a shop that does pedicures for women. They started taking photos of these women’s feet and tagging them. You couldn’t even see the women’s faces. You only saw their feet with little flowers painted on their toenails. Before they uploaded the photos to Facebook, they brought them into Photoshop and added in their company name and phone number, subtly in the top right-hand corner. Over time, they accumulated dozens of photos—or advertisements—in the profiles of their customers.
Think about this stuff. How can you leverage it?
As a speaker, I create images of the cities I speak in with my head shot superimposed at the top. I add text explaining which conference I’m speaking at and the date. I upload the images to my page and tag myself in each one, bringing them into my profile as well. Whether you want to admit it or not, people are looking at your photos on Facebook. That’s what people do. People love photos. So when they’re looking at my photos, they see these images of cities all around the world. Without ever speaking to me, they see where I have spoken. It builds my credibility.
Tag people in branded photos. Find ways to capture your customers and prospects in situations that involve your products or services. If you do it once or twice, it won’t change your business one bit. But if you accumulate dozens or even hundreds of these photos, it’ll change your business forever.
Facebook Tagging Photos: Implementation Checklist
Where do you interact with customers?
Where could you interact with prospects?
Take photos that involve your products.
Bring the photos into Photoshop.
Subtly add your contact information.
Upload the photos to your Facebook page.
Tag the people featured in each photo.
Do this regularly, accumulating photos.
Patrick Schwerdtfeger is a motivational keynote speaker whose topics include social media and business marketing on LinkedIn. He’s a leading authority on self-employment and the author of Marketing Shortcuts for the Self-Employed (2011, Wiley). There are four chapters in this award-winning book (2012 Small Business Book Awards) about LinkedIn and how to market your business on LinkedIn (in Part 6 of the book: Leverage Social Media) and is included below for your review. The book has a total of 80 short chapters, each ending with an Implementation Checklist. Also, Patrick’s perspective on the best use of LinkedIn for B2B business marketing and professional business networking is summarized below.
LinkedIn is the most professional social media platform and contains an enormous amount of information about its users. That allows for unparalleled functionality, like searching by Job Title. You can’t search by Job Title on Twitter. You can’t do it on Facebook either. That means LinkedIn offers massive opportunities to B2B businesses and salespeople who need to connect with prospects for their products or services. Aside from becoming a LinkedIn Open Networker (LION), there are a lot of other strategies people can use to market their businesses on LinkedIn. Patrick’s award-winning book includes four chapters about these topics and he has a wide variety of case histories where people and business have achieved huge results by using LinkedIn effectively. Patrick’s keynote programs are well known to be content-rich and extremely tactical, leaving attendees excited and empowered to leverage the strategies in their own businesses.
Chapter 67: LinkedIn Precision Emails
Do you get more than 50 e-mails each day?
For most, the answer is yes. You might get more than 100 each day. By contrast, how many LinkedIn e-mails do you get each day? Five? Ten? For savvy LinkedIn users, maybe more but it’s still a small number compared to your regular e-mail. Turns out, e-mails that come through LinkedIn get opened a lot more than regular e-mails. These are the types of statistics LinkedIn publicizes on their blog because they demonstrate the value of the LinkedIn platform.
Consider unsolicited e-mails, e-mails from people you don’t know. So we’re not talking about e-mails from your spouse, colleagues, or friends. If you get an unsolicited e-mail, you’re up to seven times as likely to open that e-mail if it came through LinkedIn rather than if it just showed up in your regular e-mail inbox. LinkedIn is a great way to deliver a proposal to an ideal prospect, especially for people in the B2B (business to business) space. You have a much better chance that the prospect will actually open your e-mail and see what you have to say.
If you’re a savvy LinkedIn user, you’ll know that you can only send LinkedIn e-mails—called “InMail”—to your direct network, people you’re directly connected to. As luck would have it, there’s a really easy way around that. Just visit the profile of the person you’re trying to contact—all LinkedIn profiles are public so you can visit anyone’s profile—and see which groups he or she is a member of. Join one of the same groups and once approved, you can send InMail to anyone in a mutual group. This is not always true. There are settings people can modify in their group membership preferences and it is possible for people to restrict the messages they get from other group members. But the default setting allows other group members to be able to send them InMail directly, and most people leave those default settings unchanged.
Here’s what most people do: they join groups full of their competitors. It makes perfect sense. So a photographer joins groups of photographers. And that’s fine. I’m not suggesting you stop doing that. Rather, I’m suggesting you go a step further. Take a moment and think about what groups your customers and prospects would be a part of. Visit the Groups tab on LinkedIn and do some searches to see what you find. Visit the LinkedIn profiles of your best customers. See what groups they’re a member of. Select a few groups—ideally, the big ones—and join. It’ll give you direct access to your ideal prospects.
For me, I’m always connecting with event planners. Those are the people who hire speakers. On LinkedIn, there are some huge groups of event planners, including Event Peeps and Meeting Professionals International (MPI). I joined both of those groups and it’s a tremendous marketing channel for me. The Meeting Professionals International (MPI) group has more than 18,000 members. It’s a raging river all on its own. It’s an online destination with tons of traffic, all of whom are ideal prospects for me. By being a member of that group, I have direct access to my target market.
How would you contact these prospects? This may seem obvious but you’d be surprised how few people do it correctly. If you’re about to send a message to someone you don’t know, take a few minutes and visit the person’s LinkedIn profile first. Look for commonalities you can mention in your message to make it less “cold” and more personal. Upon visiting the person’s profile, perhaps you’ll notice that you went to the same alma mater. You’ll see if you have any mutual contacts. And obviously, you’ll know the group you’re both a member of. Include those specifics in your message. “I’m contacting you to introduce myself. We’re both members of [group name] and I noticed we have two mutual contacts: Chris and Lisa. I also saw that you went to Cal. Me too! Anyway, I believe we might be able to help each other.” And so on.
The point is your message should be as personal and relevant as possible. If it’s not, the recipient might tag your message as spam and that can result in your account being frozen, suspended, or even deleted. I am absolutely not suggesting you send spammy e-mails to people you find on LinkedIn. Instead, take the time to research the person you’re about to contact and then introduce yourself in the most relevant way possible. It’s a discipline, just like going to the gym. I’ve used this analogy before but it’s true here too. Go in January and the place is packed. Go in March and it’s empty. That’s the reality. Similarly, we all know the right things to eat but rarely eat the right things! Most people don’t take the extra five or ten minutes to customize their e-mails, but that extra effort makes all the difference in the world. There are highly successful salespeople who use nothing but LinkedIn to facilitate their sales efforts. You could be doing that too.
Visit the Groups tab on LinkedIn.
Search for your keywords.
Look for groups full of prospects.
Avoid groups full of your competitors.
Visit some customer profiles on LinkedIn.
See what groups they’re a member of.
Join some of the same groups.
Visit profiles before sending messages.
Look for commonalities you can mention.
Contact prospects by providing value first.
Be as personal and relevant as possible.
For most, the answer is yes . . . but . . . You may have filled out your profile. You may have answered all the questions. You may have even included all the correct dates and locations and job descriptions. But chances are you’re missing a few important opportunities. Let’s look at a few.
Status Updates
Did you know you can update your status on LinkedIn? It’s true. You can update your status whenever you like, just like you can on Facebook. And of course, Twitter focuses exclusively on status updates. Anyway, you can update your status on LinkedIn too. The important thing is where that update goes. It gets displayed right at the top of your profile, immediately below your name and photo. That’s some valuable real estate! I’m willing to bet that anyone visiting your profile will see your status update. It’s a great place for an announcement. There’s an endless list of things you can mention in your status update but I recommend something pointing to an informative video or that juicy sexy PDF report we talked about in Chapter 65. The beauty is that you can include a live link, allowing people to click through.
“Here’s a 5-minute video with the seven biggest mistakes people make when renovating their kitchen: [link to YouTube video]”
“Here’s a free 14-page PDF report with the 25 most effective promotional products of 2010: [link to PDF report]”
Whatever you point to, take advantage of that real estate and get something up there. Also, keep in mind that your status update is included in the weekly e-mail LinkedIn users get with “updates from people you know.” That means it makes sense to update your status once each week but not necessarily more than that.
Recommendations
Do you have any recommendations on LinkedIn? You should: people read them! So whether you like LinkedIn recommendations or not, it makes sense to get a few. What’s the easiest way to get them? Well, you could simply request them, but I find that a bit tacky. Or you could sit back and pray that people you know will write them proactively. Good luck with that. Or . . . Think back to that great client you had 18 months ago. Boy, wouldn’t your life be easier right now if you had that client again! Have you written a recommendation for that person? Perhaps. But for most, the answer is no, even though you loved working with that person and have nothing but good things to say about him or her. What would happen if you wrote that recommendation today? Well, he or she (let’s say it’s a she) would get an e-mail saying that you just wrote a recommendation for her on LinkedIn. She would immediately be reminded of you and how nice it was to work with you—objective 1 accomplished. Next, she would read the recommendation and it would presumably include some complimentary comments. Pretty cool. I suspect she would sincerely appreciate the gesture—objective 2 accomplished. At the bottom of the e-mail, she would have the option to either accept the recommendation or ignore it. What would happen if she clicks “Accept”? LinkedIn would take her to precisely the spot on their platform where she can return the favor! It would literally say “The recommendation has been posted to your profile. Why not return the favor and recommend [your name] back.”
Take a Saturday afternoon and write a dozen recommendations for people you’re connected to on LinkedIn and for whom you have genuinely good things to say. Scroll through your LinkedIn contacts. If you have something nice to say, say it! By doing so, you’ll tickle all those people’s memories and more than likely get a bunch of recommendations back.
Web Site Links
You can include up to three links on your LinkedIn profile but the labels are very generic and boring: my blog, my website, and my company. You can customize those labels and it only takes about two minutes. Click “Edit My Profile” to change them. I use:
“Book me for your next event”—points to my “speaking” website.
“Marketing Shortcuts: my book”—points to my “book” website.
“Read a Sample Chapter (PDF)”—points to a PDF sample chapter.
The idea is to entice the reader and offer more visibility to where these links point to. Customizing your LinkedIn profile links gives people a better reason to make that click to find out more about you.
LinkedIn Profile Basics: Implementation Checklist
Update your status on LinkedIn.
Include a link to something valuable.
Consider updating your status weekly.
Write recommendations for people.
If you have something nice to say, say it!
Customize the three links on your profile.
Again, point those links to things of value.
Tell the reader where the link points to.
Chances are, if you Google your own name, your LinkedIn profile will show up on the first page. Of course, if you have a very common name, that won’t be the case. You might have to include a few more keywords that identify what you do for business. But either way, LinkedIn profiles generally rank high on Google. Why is that? Is it because LinkedIn ranks well for people’s names? Or is it because LinkedIn ranks high in general? The answer is that LinkedIn ranks high in general. It ranks for your name but it also ranks for all the other keywords that are listed in your profile.
Your LinkedIn profile has a “Summary” section at the top, including a “Specialties” heading. You also have a section under each job where you can discuss the particulars of that employment situation. Those are all great places to add specific keywords. LinkedIn has much more profile information than most of the other social media platforms. Consider Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube. None of them have anywhere close to the detailed personal information available on LinkedIn. Because LinkedIn is basically an online resume, it contains an enormous amount of personal information about its users. By the way, one of the most powerful characteristics of LinkedIn is that you can search by job title. You can’t do that on Facebook or Twitter. You can’t do that on YouTube. Yes, there are ways of identifying your target market on those other platforms, but LinkedIn actually has a formal way of searching by job title. That’s one of the primary reasons why it’s such a great marketing tool.
The point is that you can put a lot of information into your LinkedIn profile and you should strive to include as many keywords as you can. Your profile includes a “Summary” section about your professional achievements and goals as well as a “Specialties” section. In addition, each job has an area where you can include a description. Each of these sections should be filled with specific keywords relevant to your occupation. The trick? Be specific! Obviously, the generic keywords like “real estate” or “mortgage” or “coach” or “consultant” are highly competitive on Google so there’s little sense in targeting them. But the specific and technical terms are a different story.
Recently, I spoke at an event held by the Bay Area Biomedical Consultants Network (BABCN). In preparation for that event, I did some general research about the biomedical field (to make my presentation more relevant to attendees) and found dozens of highly specialized terms specific to that industry. Including these types of specific keywords in your LinkedIn profile makes it distinctly possible you’ll rank high on Google when people search for those words, particularly if they include a location name in their search query. Regardless of what you do for a living, try to identify the most specific terms possible, not because everybody is searching for those technical terms but because they’re the easiest to rank for.
What we’re trying to do is get you “found” on Google when people are searching for the specific things you do. Resist the urge to use the common generic terms in your industry. You’ll never rank for those terms on a LinkedIn profile. They’re just too competitive. And keep in mind that those who search for super specific and technical terms on Google are much better qualified prospects. They’re demonstrating their knowledge of your industry by including those specific words. The more specific, the better.
If you are a service provider, it’s likely your prospects include your location name when searching for your services. If they didn’t, they might find a provider on the other side of the country or the other side of the world. So it makes sense to include the city, county, or state name in the search query. That means you should strive to include those words in your LinkedIn profile as well. Write down a list of location-based keywords including your city, neighboring cities, county, and state or province. If you’re in a big city, perhaps you should even include the neighborhood keywords. Refer back to Chapter 13 to research which of these keywords are searched for the most on Google and then include the most commonly used search terms in your LinkedIn profile. Never miss an opportunity to add some keywords into your profile. You never know what quirky keyword phrase someone might use. Every time you add another keyword, you increase the odds that someone will find you.
LinkedIn Google Ranking: Implementation Checklist
List specific keywords in your industry.
Include them in your “Summary” section.
Include them in your “Specialties” section.
Include them in your past job listings.
Be specific, including technical terms.
Make a list of location-based keywords.
Use those in your profile as well.
Consider what people might search for.
Turns out, there are tons of things you can do to spice up your profile. Here’s the thing: people are visiting your profile whether you realize it or not. They’re poking around, reading your stuff, and you almost never hear about their experience. So it makes sense to make your profile as impressive as you possibly can. The key to beefing up your profile lies in the “applications” available. On the top navigation bar, click “More” and then “Get more applications.” There are many options; let’s look at a few.
WordPress or Blog Link
These blog-related applications allow you to integrate your blog with your profile. By doing so, any blog posts you publish will automatically populate your LinkedIn profile at the same time. There are two applications relating to blogs: one for WordPress and one for all the others (Blog Link). So depending on which platform you’re using, select the appropriate application and get it installed.
Amazon Bookshelf
If you’ve written a book, it makes good sense to use the Amazon Bookshelf application to highlight that book on your profile. Not only will it add credibility by showing the title you’ve published but it’ll also include a link to Amazon where people can buy your book. Incidentally, you can easily write a 20- or 30-page PDF document and sell it on Amazon for a few dollars. In other words, it doesn’t need to be a full book. You can take a document you already have and set it up as a digital e-book for sale on Amazon. Once set up, you can then feature that product using the Amazon Bookshelf application—awesome credibility and it’s not that hard. (Refer to Chapter 61 for more information on building other credibility products like CDs and DVDs.)
SlideShare
SlideShare is a platform where you can share PowerPoint presentations, PDF files, and other digital resources. It’s becoming increasingly well known and attracts more and more users every day. LinkedIn offers a SlideShare application where you can include up to three files right on your LinkedIn profile. That means you can have a PowerPoint presentation or a detailed PDF proposal available right on LinkedIn. Take a moment to open a SlideShare account and upload a few files. Perhaps you have a PowerPoint presentation your prospects might benefit from. What about that juicy sexy PDF report we talked about in Chapter 65? Or maybe you have a proposal that’s worth sharing. Adding these things to your LinkedIn profile allows visitors to learn more about you and your business (and your value proposition) right from their Internet browser.
TripIt
If you travel a lot (like I do), the TripIt application can add a lot of fun to your LinkedIn interactions. TripIt is a platform that tracks your trips and shares them in a social setting. You can follow other people’s travels and they can follow yours. TripIt also integrates nicely with a variety of social media platforms including Facebook. Anyway, the TripIt application on LinkedIn will display your upcoming trips on your LinkedIn profile. Also, when you add a new trip, it will include it in the weekly e-mail all LinkedIn users receive with “updates from people you know.” Every time I post a new trip on my TripIt account, it goes out to my LinkedIn network and I invariably get an e-mail or two from contacts who live in the destination city. As a result, I regularly have lunch with people in my network in cities all around the world.
Google Presentations
I have used the Google Presentations application to embed a video on my LinkedIn profile. This is a fun one; it’s not as easy as some of the other ways you can dress up your profile, but it’s worth the extra effort. At the time of this writing, LinkedIn has not provided an easy way to embed videos. But with the Google Presentations application, you can jerry-rig it to create that result. Here’s what I did: I created a one-slide Google presentation and embedded a YouTube video on that slide. I then expanded the video window to encompass the entire slide and saved it with a privacy setting of “public.” I then “shared” that presentation using the Google Presentations application on my LinkedIn profile. The result: I now have a YouTube video right on my profile. Of course, you can use this same application to include other presentations with multiple slides and graphics. Get creative. This is a great opportunity to put some impressive content on your LinkedIn profile.
Company Buzz or Tweets
LinkedIn also provides a way for you to include tweets on your profile. There are two applications serving that purpose and they allow you to do slightly different things. Company Buzz allows you to select certain searches (like your company name, for example) and have the applicable tweets show up on your LinkedIn profile. On the other hand, the Tweets application allows you to display your own most recent tweets on your profile. Essentially, Company Buzz allows you to display what other people are saying on Twitter while Tweets allows you to display what you are saying on Twitter. Tweets also allows you to follow, reply to, and retweet posts by people you’re following, right from LinkedIn.
Other Applications
LinkedIn also provides an Events application. This one is great for finding events that people in your network are attending. If you’re a lawyer, the Lawyer Ratings application might work well. If you’re a real estate agent, Real Estate Pro will allow people in your network to follow your activities. And if you have certified SAP expertise, you can use SAP Community Bio to display those credentials on your LinkedIn profile.
Do you have to use all of these applications? Of course not. But they exist and you should play with each of them to see if you can use them. As we said at the beginning, people are already visiting your LinkedIn profile. Some probably visited while you were at home sleeping. You want those people to get the best impression possible, so take the time to beef up your LinkedIn profile. LinkedIn has ambitious plans to add new applications in the years ahead, so it makes sense to check back from time to time to see if anything new has been introduced. It’s fun and will make you look like a technology ninja to all your connections!
Visit LinkedIn and click “More” at the top.
Then click “Get more applications.”
Browse through the other applications.
Look at the blog integration applications.
Look at the Amazon Bookshelf.
If you travel a lot, look at TripIt.
Use Google Presentations to embed video.
Check out Company Buzz and Tweets.
Check back to see new options over time.
Patrick Schwerdtfeger is a motivational keynote speaker whose topics include negative comments on blogs or negative reviews on social media. He’s a leading authority on self-employment and the author of Marketing Shortcuts for the Self-Employed (2011, Wiley). The 28th chapter of this award-winning book (2012 Small Business Book Awards) is entitled Negative Comments (in Part 3 of the book: Build Your Website or Blog) and is included below for your review. The book has a total of 80 short chapters, each ending with an Implementation Checklist. Also, Patrick’s perspective on negative comments (what business owners are most afraid of) and the opportunity they represent for businesses is summarized below.
Keynote Speech about Negative Comments on Social Media
Most businesses are reluctant to engage on social media because they are afraid of negative comments. Customers control brands on today’s social internet. They can say good things. They can say bad things. And businesses need to learn how to deal with negative comments if they wish to thrive. Turns out, negative comments actually offer businesses a powerful opportunity. Not only do they inform the business of product or service shortfalls but they also give the business to respond in the public domain and building their brand in the process. Patrick has a number of case histories where businesses turned negative comments into significant branding opportunities, and he can convey that same opportunity to your audience!
Chapter 28: Negative Comments
Are you scared of negative comments?
One of the characteristic features of a blog is that readers can leave comments that remain on the site for future readers to see. In fact, today’s social Internet is full of opportunities for perfect strangers to rate your content and post comments. Many people (and businesses) are reluctant to post their content because they’re worried about negative comments. This is an area where the younger generation and the older generation have very different perceptions. Older people think this constant ability to comment is a bad thing. Younger people think it’s a good thing. Which is it? The answer depends on how you handle the situation.
Consider a restaurant that receives a negative comment on Yelp about their spaghetti. “The spaghetti sucks.” If the restaurant has verified their account on Yelp (see Chapter 48 for more details), they have the ability to respond to each comment. So what should they do? Get mad? Maybe, but there’s a better way. Consider the following response:
“Thank you for telling us what nobody else would. We’ve changed the recipe. Among other things, we’re now using ground turkey instead of beef and we’re also using organic whole wheat pasta. Please come back and try it again.”
Personally, I’d be curious to try the spaghetti. You may feel different, but the point stands. There are productive and unproductive ways to reply to negative comments. The first rule: always reply. Explain how you’re fixing the problem. Make sure your response is right beside the comment so that anyone who reads the comment will also read your response. I remember when I got my first negative comment on my “Beyond the Rate” podcast series. That was an educational series about the mortgage business that I recorded in 2006. Anyway, the comment was on the fourth episode. Actually, it was quite vicious. The guy really called me out. He totally disagreed with my thesis and gave a litany of reasons why he was right and I was wrong.
I was mad. Oh boy, was I mad. At first, I started thinking of all the things I wanted to say to that guy—stormrider718, whoever he was. I wanted to tear him down! I strategized all the different things I could do to make his life difficult. But I waited. Thank God. I slept on it. When I woke up the next morning, I realized he was basically right. I hadn’t supported my argument. I just spewed out my opinion without any supporting evidence (even though I had plenty). Bottom line: my podcast was practically begging people to post counterarguments.
If you listen to my whole podcast series (it’s still available online), you will notice that, starting in the fifth episode, my statements include a lot more supporting evidence. In other words, those later episodes are better than the first four. That guy—stormrider718, the guy I was so angry with at first—ended up helping me improve my podcasts. Negative comments are a blessing in disguise, but you need a lot of self-discipline to see that. You need to hold yourself back at first. Force yourself to wait 24 hours before reacting. It’s difficult, I know. But it’s so important. If you wait out your initial reaction, you’ll soon see the opportunity.
Ironically, negative comments are the best thing you can hope for. They tell you how to improve your business. The faster you find those negative comments, the faster you can improve your business. The truth is that you should almost encourage negative comments! If people absolutely hate you, they’re usually pretty quick to say so. But if they have three good things to say and one bad thing to say, they’ll usually say the three good things and skip over the bad. How do you uncover that one bad thing? It’s way more important to you and your business than the good things. If you had to improve three things about my product or service, what would they be? Get creative.
What about that one guy (or gal) who’s seems to be on a mission to destroy your business by posting a negative rant on your blog? What do you do about him or her? Well, you can’t do much. But it’s okay. If you have 15 four and five-star reviews and then one absolutely awful review, it sticks out like a sore thumb. Trust that the average person will recognize that as quickly as you do. Once again, I recommend responding to a negative comment as best you can; there will be some individuals you’ll never be able to appease, but that’s okay. The important thing to remember is that your response is only 5 percent intended for the person who wrote it; the other 95 percent is intended for all the other people who will read the original comment followed by your response thereafter. I recently stayed at the Fontainebleau Hotel in Miami Beach, Florida. Upon checkout, I got my receipt in an envelope along with a business card suggesting I post comments on TripAdvisor. Brilliant. Don’t hide in a cave, fearing negative comments. Instead, get as many comments as you can and trust that they will average out to accurately reflect the quality of service you provide.
Negative Comments: Implementation Checklist
Don’t fear negative comments.
See negative comments as opportunities.
Expect bad comments from time to time.
Trust that the average will reflect reality.
Always reply to comments, good or bad.
Wait 24 hours before replying to bad comments.
Compare notes and ideas with a colleague.
Here is an unabridged video of Patrick Schwerdtfeger’s most popular keynote program. It’s called “Social Media Victories: Real Businesses, Real Campaigns, Real Results” and it covers 21 case histories where businesses used Twitter, Facebook and YouTube to build awareness and dramatically expand revenue.
This video was recorded at the New York Institute of Technology (NYIT) in October, 2011. The event was co-sponsored by Comcast Cable Business Class and Bloomberg TV. The video is 61 minutes long and the entire transcript (over 8,000 words) is included below.
Copyright, 2012, Patrick Schwerdtfeger. All Rights reserved.
I suspect most of you are familiar with the saying, “What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas.” Well, these days, what happens in Vegas, stays on YouTube and Facebook and Twitter, and that’s really what we are going to be speaking about today: social media and what’s going on out there. Social media has become so common it has become almost ubiquitous in our lives. Every time we turn on the news, every time we open a magazine or see a television commercial or talk to our friends, Facebook seems to come up in the conversation, Twitter or YouTube or whatever else, but let’s jump right in.
There are over a hundred million people on Twitter today. Do you think most of those people are just wasting time? Absolutely, and you don’t need a guy like me to tell you that, do you? You know that already. We all do. There are a lot of people singing the praises of social media these days. Is most of it just a bunch of hype? Sure it is. Look, there is a lot of people on these platforms, and they might be having fun, and they might be “being social”, but they are not getting new clients for their businesses. They are not actually building revenue!
But there are a few. There are a few. People and businesses that are using simple but powerful strategies, and in some cases, they are exploding their businesses virtually overnight. Those stories are real. Those things are happening. So that’s what we’re going to try and do this morning. In the next 45 minutes to an hour, I’ve got a whole bunch of case histories. You’re going to be amazed. There are so many little things that people have done that have actually delivered results. They’ve actually gotten the phone to ring, and we’re going to look at some of those case histories and see if we can find the trends. Wait until we get started. You will see this for yourself. These stories are all the same. Once we get into it, then you’ll start to see the rhythm of how all these people are following a pretty simple formula and getting really remarkable results.
All right, let’s jump right in. There are some remarkable examples. Universal Studios opened their Harry Potter theme park. Universal Studios had a virtually infinite budget. I mean, these people are not short on cash. They could have spent tens of millions of dollars to introduce their Harry Potter theme park, but they chose not to. Instead, they reached out to ten bloggers. The top bloggers in the Harry Potter niche, and what do they do? They put something together that they thought that those bloggers would love. They’ve reached out to the people who owned the audience they were looking for.
Who owns your audience? Start thinking. We are here for an hour so open up your mind. Who owns your audience? Universal Studios reached out to these ten bloggers, and they put together a one and a half hour webinar for these people, invite only, and they actually invited the designers and all the creators of the actual Harry Potter movie series. These are Academy Award-winning professionals. Think about the people within this niche. The people on this webinar are their heroes. It’s something that they really look up to, and they did this webinar. And by the way, the webinar started at midnight. They really did it to cater to that audience. These bloggers, that’s how they function, and if any of you know blogging, you already know that they might be the most egocentric audience on the planet. They are the masters of their own domain.
The ten bloggers didn’t even show up, only seven did, which is incredible to me. So anyways, seven bloggers show up and they do this webinar, an hour and a half. It starts at midnight talking about the entire theme park, how they are going to design it, how the whole thing is going to be set up with all the details that are going to go into the preparation of this thing. At 1:30 in the morning, the webinar is over. What happens? Well, these seven bloggers started blogging about what they just heard. They’re fired up. They’re excited, and all their followers, they’re all up at 1:30 in the morning as well so they all start sharing it on Facebook and Twitter. Everyone starts blogging about it and 24 hours later, one day later, 350 million people had heard about the Harry Potter launch.
This country has 300 million people in it. They got the word out because this is where the conversation is taking place. This is where the eyeballs are. What did they understand? They understood social media. They understood that conversations are markets. Conversations are markets. If you want to access a market on today’s social web, you’ve got to participate in the conversation, which by the way, there are two steps. You have to find the conversation first, and then you have to participate in the conversation. There are two steps. But by participating in the conversation, that’s what builds awareness. Awareness leads to interest. Interest leads to demand, but it starts with awareness. If they don’t know you exist, then where it ends. Now, by participating in the conversation, that’s how you know they exist and they are trying to contribute like, “Hey, that person is intelligent. That person is smart. That person has value. Maybe I should follow that person.” And all of a sudden a network is created.
Now, by the way, obviously, a number of you got a copy of my book when you registered in the first 50, and for those of you, if you’d like one, I’m sure they have extra copies. The book has 80 chapters in it, so they are very short. They are like three pages long. But it’s basically in the instruction manual with instructions on how to do a lot of this stuff we are going to talk about this morning. So if we are speaking about something in the presentation that’s in the book, then that number up there, 44, will tell you what chapter it’s in. So just if something captures your ear and you’re like, “That’s interesting,” you just write the number down and you can come back to it later.
Okay, so what’s at the center? What’s at the center of your online identity? I would say it’s your blog. Just out of curiosity, how many people here are just like hate the word “blog?” Yeah, it’s probably more than that. What’s the difference? What’s the difference between a blog and a website? Okay, this is important. It seems so simple, but it’s important. I can subscribe to a blog. It has what’s called an RSS feed. If you don’t know what that is, don’t worry about it. But it means I can subscribe to it. I can’t subscribe to a website, it’s static.
Now, what does it mean? It means if Bloomberg has a blog, which they do, and I subscribe to their blog and if they update their blog, I don’t have to go to their blog to see what they posted. It can get pushed to me electronically. Does that make sense? Now, I’m not so naive just to think you’re going to start a blog and get a 100,000 subscribers. I know that’s not going to happen for most people. But again, think one step past kind of the obvious. Your Facebook profile can subscribe to your blog. Your LinkedIn profile can subscribe to your blog. Your Twitter profile can subscribe to your blog.
What does that mean? That means that if you put something on your blog and click publish, it just goes out automatically to all those other platforms. Now, what’s Facebook? Facebook is what I call a “raging river.” It’s an online destination with tons of traffic. There are lots of traffic. Is your blog a raging river? For most people, no. Hey, some blogs become very popular, but most blogs are not raging rivers. Where are the eyeballs? The eyeballs are on Facebook. The eyeballs are on Twitter. So how do you get your content and put them in the middle of those raging rivers? So what you end up with is something that looks more like this. Because anyone of you who has ever been in charge of marketing a website or whatever, you’ll know that getting traffic to your website is difficult. It’s very frustrating. It can cost a lot of money. Meanwhile there is a hundred million people on Twitter. Introduce yourself here first and then bring them back. Introduce yourself on Facebook, then bring them back to your blog. Introduce yourself on YouTube, and then bring them back. It’s just easier. It’s easier and it’s faster. It’s way more effective.
So just as an example, because we are all busy, everyone is busy, what if you just wrote one blog post? And then because you’ve got all these websites integrated together like we were talking about, Facebook and Twitter and so on, the blog post automatically goes out to LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter. That just happens automatically through that integration. You can take the blog post and you can publish it as an article on literally thousands of article directories on the internet. Some of those are raging rivers. You can take the blog post and literally read it off of your screen into a microphone, now you’ve got a podcast. You can put that on iTunes. What’s iTunes? iTunes is a raging river, yes? Right. And of course, you wrote the blog post, you can put on a video camera and talk about it for 45 seconds or a minute. Now, you can take video and put it on YouTube.
You can repurpose your content, and these are just three or four examples. You can repurpose your content in a dozen different ways. But how many people are doing this? Not many. You might think there is a lot of people doing this stuff, but the number of people truly leveraging their content on today’s social web is not many. If you actually did this, but statistically most people don’t. If you actually did this, you would have a huge online identity and be working less than most of your competitors trying to do the same thing. Does it makes sense?
Everyone uses the internet differently. Some people always go to iTunes and they are looking for their information on podcasts. The 8 to 13 year olds, they might not be your target market. But there was a study on this, 8 to 13, they go to YouTube for their answers before they go to Google. They get their answers, and if you have children in that age bracket, they go to YouTube first on average. It’s amazing. Some people go to Google. Some people go to Bing, whatever. You want to have your content in front of all that.
So for myself, I used to be in the real estate business which mostly I’m embarrassed to admit that these days, but I got out before the disaster. But I started a podcast. I just want to figure out, anyone here like seriously, put your hand up so I’ll explain it if you do, but is anyone not familiar with podcasting? Okay, so there is a few of you. So podcasting is a way for me literally to record my voice on a microphone. It’s audio podcast. You can also do video podcasting, but let’s just talk audio. Literally, a recording of my voice or a talk show or an interview or whatever and I can put that audio file on iTunes that people can download it. iTunes is where you can download music for 99 cents a song. You can also download podcasts, and by the way, most of them are free so I didn’t make any money doing this.
But the bottom line is, it’s a raging river. I did this podcast series that’s all about the mortgage business, and the thing took off. It was amazing how it just grew. Now, it didn’t happen right away. Here is what happened, the bloggers today, or it’s not the bloggers, my audience is almost always self-employed baby boomers for the most part, people in their 40s, 50s and 60s. By the way, I’m 40. I turned 40 in January so I got my first cellphone when I was 27. I wrote my first email when I was 24 which was after I graduated university. So I didn’t grow up with this stuff either.
But the bottom line is the older folks, for the most part, they are reluctant to try blogging. They don’t necessarily understand many of them, and so you kind of beg and plead with them to give this a try, and finally some of them, they said, “Okay, fine. I’ll try it.” And they write blog post and they click publish, and then they stare at their telephone, and they are like, “Why isn’t it ringing? I blogged.” It’s not going to work that way. People want to know the seven things you need to do to be a millionaire by Thursday. It doesn’t work that way. It takes time.
So I put this up, and the first week it got downloaded 17 times in the first week, I think, and I was like, “Who are these people?” I never told anyone I did it. I just put the audio file on iTunes, but it turns out that there are people searching for that information, and so it started to get downloaded, and then it got written up on this site, MortgageDaily.com, down in Texas. They wrote this thing about my pod, so all of a sudden I got a surge in downloads, and then three months later, I got another write-up somewhere else, and in June of that year, I got written up on About.com, at About.com. My downloads just took off, and at that point it was like the third most popular mortgage-related podcast on iTunes. It just exploded.
Why did they get written about? But let me ask you a question, is everything on the internet true? Is it all well written? No. Is that good or bad? It’s both. I’m a human being just like you. It’s both. There is a natural human instinct that I have as well that says it’s not good, that there is stuff in the internet that’s not good. We’ve been on a website and read things and you’re like, “That’s not true. How can they post this? It’s not true.” It’s frustrating. But there is an opportunity amidst that chaos. Because when everything else is garbage and a lot of the stuff in the internet is not that great. When everything else, the quality level is low, the good quality content does get found.
Here is the reality, the people with the least to say are the first to blog. In many cases, that’s true. What are the people with good quality content do like some of you, no doubt? They are like, “Oh gosh, I don’t know. It’s not perfect. I’m not going to post it.” Just post it. Just post it, and be confident that it’s going to get found and it’s going to start to rise to the top. That’s the way these things happen, and you’d be amazed, the curve looks like this. It start off slow, but then people start to find it and they start to see it and they say, “Hey, that’s good.”
Because here is the thing, all these platforms have one thing in common, they always have a way for people to endorse the content of their peers. You can like the page, or you can follow that person on Twitter, or you can stumble the content, or dig it, embed the video, or every website, they all call it something different but it’s all the same thing. It’s a way for one person to look at their peer’s content and say that’s good quality content.
I mean, think to yourselves, for those of you who own businesses. I know not all of you as some of you are students and so forth, but for those of you who own businesses, or even in any case, how many of your friends know what you do? Probably most of them. Probably most of them. How many of your friend’s friends know what you do? Maybe half. How many of your friend’s friend’s friends know? Now, we are down to single digits. That’s what social media addresses is that if it’s good quality content, people start sharing it with their peers. It infiltrates those circles and the whole thing can go much faster than you expect. Starts off slow, but then the acceleration is incredible. I’ve gone through this like three times. It’s incredible when it starts to go. It’s fascinating and it’s exciting, and that’s why social media is so much fun.
So it does affect who owns your brand as well, because people can say things about your company, about your brand, about you as an individual that’s either positive or a negative, and this is a great story. Some of you might be familiar with this. It’s about a Canadian music band. By the way, I’m Canadian, so it’s a pretty good reason why it’s here, but it’s a great story. They were traveling through Chicago O’Hare to get to their gig, and this is all online, by the way, so you can check it out. It turns out that their baggage handlers were being really rough with their bags. Surprise, surprise. And the lead singer has a very expensive guitar, a Taylor guitar, and so for those of you who are into guitars, you’ll know that that’s like a $3,500 guitar. Anyway, they busted it.
So you can imagine kind of how this starts to unfold, and again this is all described online. So he called the number and he said, “No, you’ve got to call this person or that person, and we need a letter and we need receipts.” And this went back and forth for almost a full year. It was 11 months that it was going back and forth, and at the end of the whole thing, United said, “Look, we are not liable. You are on your own.” So Buddy writes a song about it called United Breaks Guitars, and this thing took off. This was a public relations disaster for United, yes? It’s a public relations disaster. By the way, they bought him a new guitar in less than a day. It was like 19 hours, and they were like, “We will get you the guitar.” But it was too late. It was too late because this thing took off.
Now, this is where it gets fascinating. The fact that this was a public relations disaster for United is not the point. That’s not the point. The point is it was the best thing in this guy’s career. I mean, he’s like a celebrity now, and everywhere he goes, they want him to play the United Breaks Guitar song. Now, think about how these tables have turned. What did this guy do? He basically demonstrated his expertise in the middle of a raging river. He had a clever angle.
My podcast series is about the mortgage business. What did I do? I demonstrated my expertise in the middle of a raging river, yes? It’s the same thing that happened here. Now, I’m not saying that everyone who writes a song is going to become a celebrity. He had a good angle. It was funny. Anyone who hasn’t seen this video, you’ve got to go to YouTube and look for it and you’ll find it. It’s got millions of views because he did it in a really clever way. It has to be good quality content. This guy has good quality content. He is a really talented guy, but the bottom line is he demonstrated his expertise in the middle of a raging river and it got found. It’s a predictable pattern.
So let’s jump in here and talk about Twitter first. How many of you just think Twitter is a total waste of time? Oh, come on, there are more than that! So for those of you who put your hand up will love this study actually, because there is a lot of studies being done on Twitter because it’s a new phenomena so they do these, but this is fascinating. They looked at a half a million tweets. Forty percent of the tweets were categorized as pointless babble. So the people on Twitter, or people who hate Twitter, those of you who may hate Twitter will look at this study and say, “This is precisely why I don’t want to be on Twitter.”
But this is just like blogging to me. I look at the same study and think, “That’s exactly why I do want to be on Twitter.” Because most people are talking about this stupid garbage like, “I’m going to go get a taco.” Right? Are you kidding? Like that’s what you’re going to share? I mean, look at this bottom one, 8.7% of the tweets had what they referred to as pass-along value. Less 10% of the tweets were good enough that people shared it with their friends. It’s not hard to shine in this audience. It’s a pretty low bar.
So when I first published my book, I summarized my book into 300 marketing tips, 300 marketing tips, and I released those tips as tweets on Twitter. Here are a few examples. I hope you can read this in the back. We talked about this, it’s the top one, “Conversations are markets. Participation plus facilitation equals opportunity. More tips at…” What am I doing? I’m trying to introduce myself on Twitter, and if they don’t care, that’s okay. Because the culture on Twitter, it’s okay. They say, “If there is a tweet that comes through that doesn’t appeal to me, it’s no big deal. I’ll let it pass by.” But if they do care, now they can learn more about what I’m doing.
What tips can you write? What tips can you write with all the knowledge you already have? You could all write 300 tips, I’m convinced if you sat down over a weekend. I uploaded these to an automated platform. They go out automatically once a day for 300 days and then they repeat. This is a weekend project. You start thinking about this stuff. I’m not saying that’s the only thing you have to do on Twitter, but it’s a way to get start adding some value and it doesn’t have to completely change your schedule. It changes a weekend and then you’ve got something in place that you can build on.
There are some great case histories on Twitter. This is one of my favorite case histories here. So JetBlue who I love. JetBlue is a great airline, although Virgin might be a step above, but anyway, it’s the neon lights, the pink neon lights. If any of you have flown Virgin, that makes it so special. Anyway, so get this, JetBlue has a staff of people, paid people on their payroll that are on Twitter every day searching for people who are tweeting the word “Southwest.” It’s their competitor, and in particular, they are looking for people who are saying not so nice things about their competitor. Now, you think about the opportunity that that leaves them with. They can reply to these folks in real time. These are people who need what they are selling at the precise moment that they are pissed off with the competition. That’s like borderline evil, but it’s brilliant. So I mean, I basically make my living by stealing people’s ideas.
So this is a lady, but actually, this is not her. It is funny, people never want you to use their photo, so this is a canned photo. But I worked with a lady who owns a very small flower store. It’s really tiny. I mean, it’s very small in Northern California where nobody wants to live. So I’m sorry. We set up a local Twitter audience for her, which is easy to do, and we have an alert system set up, so she gets an email every morning of people in her audience, a daily digest of people in her audience who tweeted the word “congratulations,” “baby,” “wedding,” and a half a dozen other words, and where appropriate, she can reply with something like, “Hey, I saw your tweet. Congratulations from us as well. Come on in and get a free flower.” Now, most people don’t do it. Most people do not do it. But some do, some do, and more than half buy something when they are there. Does it make sense? She’s using the “waste of time” Twitter to find new customers every day.
What words can you search for? What words can you search? You go to search.twitter.com. Search replaces the www. This is what it looks like, search.twitter.com, and start looking for words. Now, here is a tip, don’t just search for your primary keywords. Last year, I did 68 events so I really do a lot of these sorts of things, and about a third of those events were in the insurance business so I do a lot in insurance. So I did an example for them just to give them an idea of how you could use this. If you search for the word insurance, you just find all your competitors. So you want to search for a phrase. Twitter is a conversational platform. People are having conversations with each other. They are making conversational statements to their followers.
So I searched for the phrase “I need new insurance.” It’s just the most basic example. In insurance, there are so many little specialties and so forth, but the most basic is “I need new insurance.” So check this out, this is what came up. I was shocked. I didn’t even have to look at this. There were literally four different tweets that talked about basically saying, “Hey, I need new insurance. Any suggestions?” I was like, “Oh my God, it’s incredible.” Obviously, they are not all going to be perfect, but the ones that are relevant, those insurance folks can reply with something like, “Hey, I saw your tweet about insurance. That’s what we do. Here is a free PDF report with some answers.”
Seriously, number one tip, internet marketing 101 right here, write yourself an awesome, juicy, value-packed PDF report you can give away for free, seriously. In any business you’re in, just create an awesome PDF report. Not a sales pitch. Not a sales pitch. Something that truly attempts to help people and be willing to give it away for free. You can use this in a million different ways. This is just one example. And I’ve been looking for it a long time, and there is a lot of like boring examples for this sort of stuff, so I’ve been looking for an example that’s a bit more fun, and I just found one like three months ago. This lady, this is brilliant. She’s in Boston, a dentist in Boston. So what does she do? In March 2008, she writes a 20-page e-book to give away for free in her blog. What’s the e-book called? This is so brilliant. I just think this is so awesome. So the e-book is called Healthy Mouth Healthy Sex. By the way, it’s like double spacing with two inch margins. I mean, the thing is like four pages, but she stretched it 20, and you can imagine what’s in there. There are pictures and cards. You can all download this, by the way. Just go to Google and search for it and you will find it right away. That’s how I got the screen capture.
The bottom line is she had this cool, spicy, sexy and fun PDF that she gave away for free. She put it on her blog and promoted it, and her revenue, her total revenue as a dentist went from a 150,000 – and this two years, two years – 150,000 to over a million dollars. How many dentists are in Boston? Hundreds. How many are you aware of? Does this make sense? What can you do that’s really cool for your customers? Something that’s truly fun, cool and useful? Something that they would want to pass along, and it’s the awareness. Awareness leads to interest, and interest leads to demand. Take that cool and fun thing and put it into the middle of a raging river and start getting that awareness.
Here is one more example on Twitter, and then we will go on to Facebook. Obviously, I mean, Naked Pizza is a great name. It’s a pizza place in New Orleans. They embrace Twitter. I mean, this is the sign here before they put it up, and that’s the sign in front of their spot. So here is their Twitter profile. So check it out. They gave an incentive, 10% discount if you tweet your order in, if you tweet your order in, and 68% of their orders are tweeted in. Now, why would they do that? This is brilliant. Just think this through.
Now, obviously, the customers, they save 10%. Why would the company do that? I have about 25,000 followers on Twitter. If I tweet my order in, my entire network just got notified that I ordered pizza from Naked Pizza. Yes? The viral element is guaranteed here. It’s baked in. The viral element is baked in. How can you incentivize your existing customers to communicate with you over the social channel? Right now they call you, but that’s private. Nobody finds out about it. They email you. That’s private. Nobody finds out about it. If they communicate with you over Twitter, their network is notified. If they communicate with you on Facebook, their network is notified. It’s fascinating.
Micro incentives for micro actions. It’s remarkable what people will do for a cup of coffee. Start thinking, micro incentives. We are going to come back to this with Facebook in just two seconds, but the opportunity on Twitter, 85% of their new customers come from Twitter. So they give a 10% discount, who cares? They built their entire company this way. The opportunity on Twitter is to participate in the conversation. Twitter is just one huge conversation. How can you get your two cents in?
All right, Facebook, we are going to do Facebook and then YouTube, and then I’ve got a couple of slides to finish it off just so you know where you are at. But Facebook, I mean, there are 800 million people on Facebook so it’s hard to argue with that kind of an audience. By the way, there are 7 billion people on this planet, so we are talking about roughly eleven people out of every hundred, 11% of the entire globe is on Facebook which is astonishing.
So let’s take a look. This is another great example. Sprinkles is a company, and this is perfect for you as well because the whole thing is about New York, but they make cupcakes obviously. They’ve been very successful on Facebook, and this is literally the post that I found when I went there. The first time I looked at this page, this is literally the first part. So read this with me, “Start spreading the news, Sprinkles opens in New York City this spring. The first people to wish for Big Apple at any Sprinkles store get a free Manhattan mocha.” That’s incentive number one. Now, keep reading, this is one post. “Do you want to be invited to our sneak peak event? Email so and so.” That’s incentive number two, this is along one post. Then at the bottom, check it out, this is brilliant, “Five random people who comment on today’s post will receive a coupon for a free cupcake.” There are three incentives in one post.
At the time I found this, it had been up for two hours, and it had 328 comments at that point. Now, what happens when I comment on a Sprinkles’ post? It goes on my wall. It says, “Patrick just commented on Sprinkles…” And do all of my followers see that? No, but some of them do and the word starts to spread. Micro incentives for micro actions. Think about giving away tiny little things to get people to do tiny little things. What’s the cost of a cupcake? I know they charged like $4. But what’s the cost? Is it 50 cents? Not much and it spreads the word, and by the way, they only gave out five cupcakes. There were 300 posts. It’s one in sixty. It’s incredible.
So let’s talk about Facebook just in terms of the basic structure. You can have a profile, most of you have profiles. Profiles are for individuals. Profiles have friends. You can have groups. Groups are for multiple individuals with similar interest. Groups are built by profiles, profile builds a group. Groups have numbers. Or you can have a page. Pages are specifically designed for public figures and businesses. Pages are built by profiles. A profile builds and becomes an admin of a page, and pages have likes or fans. Just the vernacular. Just to get the vernacular straight.
Now, how are they different? This is where it gets more interesting. If you want to see my profile, you have to jump over two hurdles to see my profile. You have to have a profile yourself as you have to be logged in, and you and I need to be friends for you to see my profile, for the most part. I mean, there are some exceptions, but for most people, there are two hurdles. With groups, there is one hurdle. You need to be logged in, but you and I do not need to be friends for you to see my group. Does that make sense? You can go to groups, search for groups, and find mine and check it out without being friends with me. With pages, there are no hurdles. What does that mean? I means you don’t have to be logged in to see a page. What does that mean? It means there is no firewall. It means it’s fully indexed by Google.
Do you think Facebook ranks high on Google? Yes, it does. In fact, in fact, there are companies out there that have a website and a Facebook page, and when you google the company’s name, the Facebook page comes up higher. Not always, but many times because Facebook is a huge platform so it tends to rank very high. All right, what does that mean? That means by having a Facebook page, you can get exposure on the raging river called Facebook and the raging river called YouTube at the same time. Yes, it makes sense.
Now, in the small business category, if you’re going to build a page, and now, if you already have a Facebook page, don’t worry about this little tiny tip, but if you haven’t built a page yet and you want to, I think it’s important to get some keywords into the title of the page. The title of the page is what’s most important from a search engine optimization standpoint so you having some keywords in there makes a lot of sense.
If you’re Bloomberg Television, it doesn’t matter because everybody already knows about Bloomberg and so they search for it. If you’re Time Warner Cable, people already know about those companies because they are so large. But if you’re a small company like let’s say you’re an insurance again, and again I have a lot of exposures with insurance agents, would you create a page and call it James Smith? Nobody is searching for James Smith. Instead you can name it something like James Smith Insurance Agent in Boston or whatever. People are looking for an insurance agent in Boston. They are not looking for James Smith. So if you haven’t created a page yet, and if you’re in an unknown kind of a business, you might want to think about trying to load a few keywords into that title because it’s valuable real estate in the online space.
So let’s talk about probably the biggest opportunity on Facebook. I mean, people have different opinions. My opinion is that this is the biggest opportunity in Facebook is tagging people in photos, and this is a great example. Again, this is a canned photo because people didn’t want their photo used which is fine. So we did a public wine tasting and it was a really small winery in Northern California in Calistoga area for those of you who are familiar with the area.
Anyway, we had people came in. It was a $5 public wine tasting, and by the way, we marketed it offline like newspapers and radio, but it was $5 so a lot of people came. So they came in and they walked in and we had a table here where they registered and they immediately got a glass with the logo engraved on it and their first pour. So they had a wine glass with wine in it, and they walked kind of over to their left and then we had this area set up with like this pillar and these flowers and then in the background we had the logo of the winery. We brought in a photographer and we’d say, “Hey, we would love to take a picture, is that okay?”
Now, think about these pictures. These are happy people with red wine, yes? And the logo is right here. This is a branded photograph. This is an advertisement. It’s an ad. I mean, it’s subtle but it’s an advertisement. Now, what happens if I take a photo and tag someone and put it up on Facebook. If I take a photo and so I want to put it up. Let’s say John, I take the photo of John, I put it up on my Facebook page. It’s going to be there on my Facebook page because that’s where I uploaded it to, but it’s also going to show up on John’s profile as photos uploaded by others. I can put a photo in John’s profile.
I can put an advertisement in John’s profile. I mean, the idea is not to piss people off here. You’ve got to be subtle, but these photos that we took were beautiful. No one had a problem. They had a good time. They were happy. When we put these things, we tagged them, and now what else happens? It goes on their wall. It goes on John’s wall. It says, “Hey, John was just tagged in a photo,” and there is John smiling holding a glass of wine with the logo of the winery that I’ve never heard of until just now. Does that make sense?
Where do you interact with your customers or your prospects? Is it in trade show? Is it in special event like this? A retail store front? Special events? Where do you interact with your customers? How can you use these sorts of strategies? Some of you might be familiar with the name Tim Ferriss. He wrote the book, The 4-Hour Work Week. Some of you might be familiar with it. The guy is brilliant. So he had a contest where to be eligible to win in the contest, you were to take a picture of yourself holding his book. I’ve got some great screenshots of that.
Let me show you this one first. I actually thought the slides were the other way. This is a company that’s run by a friend of mine actually out of Northern California where they do these urban scavenger hunts where people, they go from restaurant to restaurant getting clues. It’s a big race, one city in one day. Look how much fun these girls are having. They tagged these people in photos. It’s their primary marketing and people are like, “Hey, what are you in a marathon?” They are like, “Oh no, we were drinking and we are running around getting these clues and stuff. It was a big…” It’s their primary marketing. Every time they do a race, they get at least a hundred of these photos, and it goes out on Facebook and the awareness level goes up.
Here is the slide that I was thinking about before with Tim Ferriss. Look at this, this is an ad. He’s got hundreds of these on Facebook of people holding his book and tagging themselves on the photos. It’s just fascinating. This is a company in Walnut Creek which is where I live that does pedicures and they pictures of the women’s feet. You can’t even see the woman’s face. But before they take the photo and put it on Facebook, they brand it with their logo on the bottom right hand corner or wherever they put it and they tag these people in their advertisements, and the women love it because their feet look beautiful.
If you are a real estate agent and you just sold a house, and there is a big sold sign out in front, you’ve got to get that on film. If you did this once, it’s not going to change anything. It’s not going to change anything, but if you incorporate this into your business and you start doing this on a regular basis and getting those photos out there, these are surrogate salespeople for you. These pictures are surrogate salespeople. What do people do on Facebook? They look at photos. The number one thing people do on Facebook is look in photos, and so they are looking at your photos and they see these, they are like, “Wow, look at that.” And it jogs the mind and the familiar or the awareness goes up with simple things.
The opportunity on Facebook is to engage your community. In Facebook, they literally have meetings in board rooms where they talk about how to get people to communicate with each other more. That’s what they do. That’s what Facebook does. So if you want to engage your community and get that conversation started, Facebook is a great place to do it.
YouTube, yeah, YouTube and then like a half a dozen slides at the end. So if you have to go to the bathroom, just hold it for a while. Now, YouTube is the most fun. In YouTube, I have like 500 videos on YouTube. It is a very real part of my marketing apparatus. A significant contributor to my business is YouTube. So with some of you, especially in this area because he’s local, you might be familiar with the name Gary Vaynerchuk. Gary Vaynerchuk, 1-2-3-4. Okay, actually, there is a few. Cool.
Well, for those of you who aren’t, we are talking about a completely crazy, like ADHD crazy, like he’s frenetic. I mean, he talks like 300 words a minute. He’s really, really crazy. He’s a 31-year-old guy who inherits his parent’s retail line store called Wine Library, and it’s not actually in Manhattan but it’s in Jersey right on the other side of the river so it is local, and what has do? By the way, his parents didn’t die or anything. They just passed it on to him, which if I was his parent, there is no way I would do that. But they did, they gave it to him.
What does he do? He starts a video blog called Wine Library TV, and I’m telling you, the guy is crazy. I mean, he literally like eats dirt and chews leather to talk about the flavors in wine. I mean, he’s not exactly your French sommelier, but the young people love him. By the way, he uploads a new video almost every day so this is no small undertaking. But he increased his family business from $4 million to over $60 million. He did it in 18 months, $60 million a year. Two-thirds of the orders were online orders. His parents never once took an online order. He introduced that. It’s two-thirds. Two-thirds of $60 million is $40 million. This guy went from zero to $40 million in online orders in 18 months. How? Because he demonstrated his expertise in a clever way in the middle of a raging river.
These stories are all the same. There are so many people who still think that YouTube is full of videos of like kids falling off of their bikes, crickets fighting or whatever, the Bug Wars. I mean, all these stupid stuffs. I’m a geek, I’m a nerd, I watch that stuff. But the biggest category of new content on YouTube today is educational content, the how-to. Now, here are some examples, look at this. WordPress tutorial, WordPress is a platform where you can built a blog for those of you who don’t know, and by the way, it’s open source which means it’s free. If you want to know how to do it, go to YouTube. There are 4,000 videos telling you how to do that.
Do you want to learn how to play guitar? You can learn that on YouTube. Do you want to learn to speak Spanish? YouTube. Do you want to solve a Rubik’s cube or tie a bow tie? All that stuff is on YouTube. Hey, look at this, business marketing was the keyword phrase I looked for. Look at this number one video, Small Business Marketing Coach. What’s this guy doing? This is marketing. Look at this, Stock Marketing Investing, Tips For The Complete Beginner. This guy is demonstrating his expertise in the middle of a raging river. I mean, these examples are incredible.
Look at some of these, How To Change an Alternator. It’s been watched 90,000 times. It’s branded with the garage. How To Read a Good Faith Estimate, this must be the most boring topic on Earth, but there is a video about it. And this one here, this is actually a lady that came to one of my programs. It was almost two years ago now, Miraply USA, they sell premium foods like caviar and foie gras and truffle mushrooms and stuff. She came up to me at the end of the program. She’s all jazzed. She’s like, “Oh, this is great. I’m going to make a video to promote my business.” And I was like, “That’s awesome. One video? You’re going to make one video? How many products do you sell?” She said, “We sell 85 products.” “Make 85 videos, one for every product, and optimize every video for the keywords associated with that particular product.
Like look at this video, the title, it says, “Black truffle oil, white truffle oil and truffle juice.” Well, it turns out that that keyword phrase is not very competitive, but there are people who are searching for it. By the way, she did not make 85 videos. I wanted her to and she never did, but she made 27 and no joke, her revenue doubled and it was like instant. Because now, people are searching for white truffle oil which she sells on YouTube, and by the way, YouTube videos rank very high on Google as well, and they find her and these 27 videos all come back to her website.
It’s like when I first came out with this book. I told you before this book has 80 chapters in it, and so I made 80 videos, one video for every chapter. Literally, I actually did it in my bedroom. I mean, I had a tripod with a camera and lights and everything, and I was like, “Hi, my name is Patrick and I wrote this book and today we are going to talk about chapter whatever, chapter 31.” And I’d say a few words about it, and then when I was done, I’d catch my breath and the video camera is still rolling and I’d get to the next, “Hi, my name is Patrick and I wrote this book and today we are going to talk about chapter 32.” And I just did one after another after another all day long. Over the course of two days, I recorded 80 videos and then I chopped them up afterwards and uploaded them as individual videos.
A friend of mine told me that she thought I should change my clothes in between every take. I’m like, “No one is going to watch 80 videos. They are going to watch one.” Every chapter is about something different about negative comments or effective blogging or SEO or some of the social media. So every video is optimized for something. If you’re going to make a video about your business, don’t make one. Make a hundred of them. It’s like a huge fishing net that you throw out into the ocean, the bigger the better, and it captures leads. It’s exactly what happened in my own business.
I got one more case history here for YouTube. I mean, this is three years old, but it’s so classic on how these things work. This is a company called Blendtec. They make blenders, commercial and residential blenders. Some of you are familiar with this story. By the way, this is the CEO. This guy is like comedian funny. I’ve spoken at conferences with this guy. He’s a very, very guy. Anyway, so he was walking through the factory in Utah. It’s actually in Park City, Utah where they manufacture these things, and they have a room where they test these blenders, and he walked into that room one day and the whole room was covered in like sawdust and chips of wood all over the floor.
The way he tells this story is so funny. But he’s like, “So what are you doing?” The guy was like, “We are just testing the blenders.” He’s like, “How are you testing it?” He said, and this is a true story, “We blended a 2 x 4, and the blender lived and the 2 x 4 died.” The blender lived. This is entry level residential blender. It destroyed a 2 x 4, and they got it right away. They are like, “We’ve got to get that on video.” And their marketing guy, this guy George, he’s the one who started this campaign. He started this campaign with $85.
Eighty-five dollars is what they started the campaign. It says, “Will it blend?” That’s the name of their campaign, and they started blending all kinds of stuff like marbles and golf balls and they blended a full-sized rake into it. Yeah, and a cellphone. This is an iPhone. They blended an iPhone, and the thing completely gets destroyed. Actually, on the video, they called it iDust. The thing completely gets destroyed.
Their sales didn’t double, it didn’t triple. The sales were up sevenfold as a result of this. Why? Because they demonstrated the capabilities of their product in a clever way in the middle of a raging river. It worked because it was remarkable. What do you do that’s remarkable? What do you do that’s remarkable? That’s where it all starts. The opportunities, the stories are all the same. It’s a question of sharing remarkable content. The opportunity on YouTube is to leverage rich media.
So let’s talk about what those trends are. We’ve gone through a lot of these case histories. What are the commonalities? It turns out there is a winning formula, and to me, this is the important stuff. It’s right here. The first part is like basically three questions, and we just said the first one, what do you do that’s remarkable? What do you do that’s remarkable? Think about the definition of the word “remarkable.” It’s worth remarking about. What we are trying to do is get people to talk about your business, so what’s worth talking about. What do you do that’s remarkable? That’s question number one.
Question number two is, how can you show that thing, whatever it is that you do that’s remarkable? How can you show that thing in a visual way, in a visual way? There are different types of content. There is text. There is audio, photos, and video. What’s the most viral? It’s video. What’s in second place? It’s photos. The propensity of someone to pass along the information is higher if it’s a video, if the photos. It turns out people like interacting with visual content. So how can you demonstrate what you do that’s remarkable in a visual way?
Now, the third part to me is the most fun. The content can come from one or two places. You can create the content yourself about your own company and share it in the public domain, or your customers can create content about your company and share it in the public domain. Which is more viral? The customers, that’s a third-party endorsement. Here it is, how can you incentivize your customers to demonstrate what you do that’s remarkable in a visual way? That’s the winning formula. That’s a winning formula to get things moving, and there are some great examples in here. I just got a couple of examples before we close off here.
There is a company, Australia Tours in Borden in 2009 advertised the best job in the world. Some of you might remember this. The job was a 6-month contract, 150,000 Australian dollars for a 6-month contract. That’s a pretty good start, live in a gorgeous two-story home on an island in Australia’s Great Barrier Reef and you’ve got all the scuba diving, parasailing, kite surfing equipment you can handle. All you have to do is write one blog post every day for the Australia Tours in Borden’s website. It’s a pretty awesome job. To apply, you had to submit a video, one minute or less, talking about why you would be the perfect candidate.
So this spread like wildfire, and everyone saw it. Now, what they ended up, by the way, this is the guy who won. That’s the guy who won. But in the process, they got almost 35,000 videos submitted, mostly created by beautiful, young human beings talking about how awesome the Great Barrier Reef is. Like the brilliance behind this campaign was incredible. These videos didn’t all go on to Australia Tours in Borden’s website. They went on 35,000 different YouTube channels and were shared within 35,000 different networks all talking about how great the Great Barrier Reef is. It’s really fascinating.
So there is a medical place, a hospital, that did a campaign saying, “What motivates you, and they encouraged their employees, nurses, techs and PAs to submit videos, one minute or less, talking about it. Well, it turns out that the people who work in the medical field have incredible stories to tell. The people who choose that field, something happened when they were young, or maybe their mother was sick, or something happened to it. These people have a reason that they chose to be a nurse, that they chose to be a tech or a PA, and some of those stories are incredibly powerful, and they got amazing footage that they didn’t have to create because their employees created it, and guess what, they didn’t have any liability either because they didn’t create the content, the employees did. So there is a liability benefit as well, and it was a very powerful content that they could leverage in social media.
I spoke at a conference. I speak in so many different places. Get this, I spoke in the Association of Premier Nanny Agencies. So last year I spoke at the National Flea Market Association. It’s really diverse audiences, but they had a contest to these premier nanny agencies to create videos of how crazy it is to be a nanny, and I’ll tell you what, they had all these sessions, and in most sessions, maybe a half to two-thirds of the delegates who were in the room, when they did the video of the top five winners, when they played these videos, the room was packed because everybody wanted to see those creative videos that the agency has created, but the association didn’t. It’s fascinating.
So when you look out there and you say, “What’s changing?” That’s the beef right there, what’s changing, and here is the change, and you can look back a thousand years. People have always looked at the source first. Listen to this, the source first and the content second. This is important. Who are you came first. What did you say came second. “Oh, it’s in the New York Times. Okay, I’ll read it. Oh, it’s in the evening news. Okay, I’ll watch it. Oh, it’s someone who is successful. Okay, I’ll listen.” Does that make sense?
That what’s changed. Today they look at the content first. Do you know how huge that change is? That’s a huge change. So all that stuff we’ve heard our whole lives. “Oh, I’ve got 28 years of experience.” Who cares? “Oh, I went to Harvard.” Who cares? I’m not saying it doesn’t matter. It does matter, but not as much. Not as much as it used to. By the way, maybe having 28 years of experience and going to Harvard left you with outstanding content. It’s a great content. That’s cool. I respect that. That will work, but they are not listening to you because you went to Harvard. They are listening to you because you have a great quality content.
Next year it’s going to be a circus in this country with the election coming up, and believe me, I’m sure both sides are represented in this room. Forget the politics for one moment. That’s how this guy won. That’s how he won. This guy was nobody ten years ago, and now he’s the President. How does that happened? How does that happened? It wouldn’t happen 40 years ago. It happened today in 2008 or whatever. Why? Because things have changed. People didn’t ask who he was first, whether you agree with it, and by the way, if you hate him, it’s even more important to understand what’s going on. Either way, it’s important to see it because whoever goes against him is going to have to play on this game too.
But the bottom line is he had a message that people embraced, and they embraced the message before they asked who he was, and that’s how he won. So my whole presentation this morning, the whole thing, it just boils down to one thing, what’s your content? What do you do that’s remarkable? Once you get that figure out and you can share it in a visual way and you help your customers to tell your story on your behalf or whatever you choose to do to get that story out there, that’s the kind of stuff you can share on these social media platforms.
I’m someone who loves quotes. I literally like to collect and go and buy books full of quotes so I really love famous quotes. This one is one of my favorites, “The future is already here, it just isn’t evenly distributed yet.” Most people are wasting time. Most people on Twitter and Facebook, most of these people are wasting time. But some aren’t, some are seeing incredible results.
I really hope that maybe you’ve got some ideas today or perspective or way of looking at things that maybe you didn’t have an hour ago, and as I said, I’m thrilled to be here. This is a great opportunity for me as well. I am in no rush, so I’m staying here as long as this event or as long as anyone is in the room, I will be here as well. If any of you have a smart phone, you’re welcome to scan the QR code and it will give you all of my contact information, so all my Twitter handle and everything else. I know there are some books available at the back. Thank you again very much for coming this morning. I appreciate you being here.
