Generate New Streams of Revenue – Jon Goodman

By Rich Brooks 06/29/2014

Did you know personal training and self-motivational techniques can help you strengthen your small business? Do you know how to maximize Facebook comments to re-animate old blog posts and generate new streams of revenue?

If not, then you’re not alone. A lot of small businesses don’t know how to motivate themselves to tackle big projects let alone motivate their clients. By breaking out your big projects into smaller pieces and then creating a reward system when you complete each step, your tasks will be much more palatable. This week, we talk it up with long time personal trainer, owner of PTDC (Personal Trainer Development Center), author, and social media maketer, Jonathan Goodman, to learn more about how to push through tough goals and make the most out of what our core talents are.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: RSS

Big Ideas:

Jon, you started out as a personal trainer. How did you end up becoming the guy behind the Viralnomics blog and basically running your own small social media empire up there in Toronto?

It’s a very long winding tale. I was a personal trainer and I saw a need for how you get somebody to want to do a workout and adhere to a workout better which stems mostly from psychology than it actually does any kind of physiology or biomechanics.
So I started doing a lot more research into the psychology of adherence, even word of mouth and social contagion theory when I was in training for marketing purposes.
As I wrote my first book, Ignite the Fire, I decided I needed to promote the book using a website and that’s where the PTDC (Personal Training Development Center) came on and social media was, and I believe still is, to promote a blog through word of mouth.
I took a lot of the same theories that I was using to try to get clients to speak about me and just applied them to whatever social media networks I found to be the most effective at the time; Facebook being the biggest one.
The result was uncanny and I started doing nominal research and started getting in touch with John at University of Wharton School of Business as well. I started to really expand upon those theories and that’s how the Viralnomics blog came about.

In a lot of industries you sort of hit this glass ceiling. There’s only so many hours in the day you can make money, so you have to branch out. Was that part of what was going on as well?

That was 100% of what went on and that was a huge issue for me at 23 years old. I had kind of hit what was known to be the highest income level for a personal trainer working in downtown Toronto. I was making $100-$120 an hour and I had anywhere from 40-50 contact hours a week which for anybody that knows personal training means you work anywhere from 60-80 give or take.
I was also managing a group of trainers at that time and making a bit of a salary from that so really my only options were to own a gym which I felt and still believe for most people is a fool’s proposition. Or, to sell things like supplements and all of these multi-level marketing schemes which is something that I fundamentally don’t believe in.
I started to read up a whole bunch about multiple streams of income, passive income, income generation and all that fun stuff. Eventually I came across the term “infopreneur” and that’s how it all started.

How did you segue into doing multiple streams of income? What were the steps? Can you tell us a little bit about how you carved out time in your day and what research you did?

Carving out time in the day is a good point to hit on. I’m glad you spoke about it. Actually I had a number of very good mentors because of where I worked it was a very affluent neighborhood and one of my clients was the dean of medicine at University of Toronto. Another one was the head of psychiatry at one of the major hospitals in Toronto.
So I have some very high-level, very well educated, just incredible people who were mentors to me who were my clients. One of them gave me this principle that I later called the “freedom number” and it became the basis for one of the courses I put out.
It’s very basic. Pretty much it’s just this equation for establishing what amount of money I need to make to make sure all of my basic needs are looked after. That’s of course my food and rent, but it’s also if I have dependents. I call it “do something special for the girlfriend” fund. What is it you actually need each month?
At the time, all I needed was $2600 a month. I didn’t have dependents or anything like that, so it was quite low. So then I took a look at how much money I was making each month and I actually whittled down my clientele to eventually 15 hours a week (and this is from 40-50 previously).
I first went to 25 and kind of cut out all of the sort of wishy-washy clients that personal trainers have. Then I cut it down to 15 and very much condensed and organized and made my schedule much more efficient and I started to block off times for personal development and I started to block off times for writing throughout the day.
That, I will say, is by far the most important thing I ever did. Was take a really strong step back and say, “how much money do I really need to make? How can I make that in the most efficient way possible over the course of my day so that I can focus on building assets?”
The first asset that I focused on was this huge project was this book, Ignite the Fire, that took eventually three years to put out. The book was fortunately well received but if I were to do it again, and I spoke to a personal trainer the other day and this goes for pretty much any industry where there’s a service need (like plumbers for example), building up an asset for a business that is just a passive income stream is actually really easy to do.
In terms of just packaging what you know over the course of a day is as simple as walking around with a clipboard and writing down notes of all of the little tasks you do over the course of a day and putting it together in a 20 or 30 page guide or workbook.
You can put this thing out for $4.99 or $9.99 as an ebook. I put one out about three weeks ago that was about 125 pages. It was a compilation of a bunch of things. I put it out for literally zero dollars. I didn’t even create a cover for it and used PayPal so it doesn’t cost me anything unless people buy it.
So, I think anybody in any industry can do that and to get started and start seeing potential of producing these high-value but these short, information rich resources that act as an asset for that business.

As a personal trainer, what were some of the techniques you used to get your clients to behave in a way that helped you but more importantly helped them to succeed?

I think that there’s two separate things at play.
The first is kind of away from personal training specifically and more in this idea of creativity and the theory of creativity which is a fascinating area of study for me right now. There’s a psychiatrist who’s name is Rollo May and his book is absolutely fascinating and he’s one of the few academics who writes material that people like me can understand. One of the most interesting facets of his theory of creativity is understanding why it is that people who are inherently creative never actually see their projects through to fruition.
This is something that I’ve fallen prey to and it speaks to a lot of people as well. Where by you have this great idea and you take all the actions to do it, but the minute there’s that time to flick the switch and actually ship it, as Seth Godin says, people eventually run the other way.
His argument is saying, “what are the benefits and gains that somebody is getting from creating?” And often it’s not actually producing whatever the output is that they want to produce. Say it’s a book for example. Often it’s not that, there’s something much deeper. The example he gave in one of his books is that it’s his need to get acceptance from his mother. So, the minute that his mother says, “oh, that’s a really good idea,” all of a sudden his motivation wanes.
What I think is really interesting about that concept is saying, “well why is it that you’re actually creating?” Money is a good motivator to a certain extent, but money is ultimately a really poor motivator once that person becomes comfortable with their living and once all their bills are paid and the people they love are looked after.
So what is it that’s actually motivating you? Is it ego? Maybe. But again, where does that ego stem from? I think the first thing to understand is to be really honest and say, “why am I doing what I’m doing?” and, “who am I trying to please?” then you can kind of shift your work process into pleasing those aspects and being happy and fulfilled from that because fulfillment is really what’s important.
When it comes to working out though, and I think it’s important to discuss the nature of procrastination. There’s a quote that I really love that says, “procrastination is opportunity’s natural assassin.” What that really hits on is procrastinators are addicted to what’s called immediacy. Meaning that the reason why most people don’t accomplish this huge task in the future like getting in shape, is because a lot of the things that are really great to have, to own, to be in this life have almost a punishment to get there a lot of the time. But, once we get there there’s this goal in sight a long way away. But, there aren’t rewards built into the process.
I think that’s the most important thing. If you can build rewards into the process while achieving some major goal in the end, then those rewards become gratifying and they’ll help you accomplish that large task.
The simplest example is in my second book, I actually split it into 82 cue card. Each cue card was one hundred words. Each cue card was a sub heading. The cue cards all sat on the right side of my computer I’d pick one up and write out that section of 300-600 words – it’s not as daunt ing as 3,000-5,000 word chapter – and when I’d finish it I’d pick up the cue card and physically put it face down on the other side of my computer.
That tiny habit, that little reward and the gratification that I got of knowing that I completed a section and to pick it up and put if face down on the other side of the table allowed me to finish the book. And I knew that when the cue cards were done the book was finished and went off to editing and all the people who are good at that kind of stuff.
So, anything that I think is really worth achieving is a matter of breaking it down into its fundamental pieces into manageable chunks that are 20-30 minutes of time each and providing some sort of reward for achieving that little chunk – and it could be as small as flipping a cue card over.

So, this is great, introspective advice for an individual, but what about when we’re trying to motivate our clients? Are there ways that we can show them or motivate them when we’re the outside source? What do we do then?

I think you need to be a little bit more creative then. Going back to working out, there’s a fantastic program company called Fitocracy, and I’ve been good friends with the founders for years and they’re at like 1.5 million users now based out of New York, and they use gamification techniques.
You have a status bar and you can level up and get points for the exercises you do. Every workout that you do you put in your workout, you get points and you see your status bar go up and up and other people you’re connected to give you props. The like button is props, and the picture is two knuckles.
If you can build something into your business like that when a user updates a Facebook page, then they can go into the backend of your system and they say, “yes I updated my Facebook page,” and they put a little check in a box or something like that and then you could build out almost like a token system and that token system is a certificate, sort of like Weight Watchers. Where, if they do it ten times then you send them a gift in the mail.
I mean, it would be different for everybody but it would be helpful for people to go in and show off that they’ve done something.
It’s also important to consider tangible vs. non-tangible rewards. Something that somebody can physically hold in their hand and they say, “I have this because of this,” is generally for most people going to be a more powerful reward than something else.
Also, what also needs to be considered is this nature of “third drive,” illustrated by Daniel Pink in Drive, but the research goes back to the 1950s. From that you look at the difference between tangible and non-tangible rewards and extrinsic tangible rewards can be powerful but they can also be damaging to intrinsic motivation.
In the end you want people to become inherently intrinsically motivated and going forward the task becomes its own reward.

Jon, you and I had talked via Skype a few weeks ago and I couldn’t remember how we met. It’s actually an interesting story. Would you be willing to share how we met?

A little while back I thought I wanted to get more into the social media marketing space. I’ve decided now to kind of write about that stuff for fun as a way to explore my own thoughts and actually market it but I thought that I wanted to become more notable in that space and go on the speaking circuit and write books about it and all that fun stuff.
So, I identified five or six people that were in positions that I aspired to be in – social media marketers, people with popular blogs, people based on an idea, number of metrics, whatever – were in positions that I wanted to be in.
Then I went and searched, and I had an intern at the time, we both went and searched for articles that had been written about them in major websites and major magazines. Then my targets were not these influencers because they’re so busy and they generally don’t care that much and there’s what I realized later on was there’s a bit of a focus group and a monopoly that they formed trying to almost have a net and choose who they bring in and who they don’t. But anyway, I didn’t want to be a part of that.
But, Rich you were one of the people who were written in a number of articles written by these people that I aspired to be in their position. So I started to then try to figure out what social media or medium has the least amount of friction in Rich’s life. For Rich, it was Twitter, and for most people it’s Twitter.
Twitter is a very good networking medium. Facebook is either very personal or business-y. Instagram is kind of tough because people don’t pay much attention to it. Pinterest is Pinterest, again it’s not very good. And LinkedIn, I don’t really see the benefit of it for networking beyond looking for jobs and head hunting. Although a lot of people disagree with me.
Then it became a matter of finding all of these people’s Twitter accounts and just over a period of time building a relationship with them. I mean intelligently responding to their tweets. If they had an article, reading the article and maybe giving some sort of input. And looking for an opportunity to enhance that relationship.
For Rich, it was I think you had asked a question? And I had just written something about it and we kind of had a unique viewpoint with it (at PTDC, my other business) and I so I just shared that with him and immediately he got back and said, “hey let’s jump on a call and talk about this.”
So it’s not pitching, pitching, pitching it’s building a relationship slow enough and looking for an opportunity to actually increase the relationship with that person. With Jonah Berger it was that he had a book coming out and so after five months of tweeting back and forth with him I sent him a message and said, “hey, if I buy a copy of your book can you give me an early copy and I’ll write a review of it?” From that we were able to build a better relationship.

You love using Facebook comments for you blog. Can you share with us what exactly that makes Facebook comments a good solution for you?

Right. It can be very very interactive. You can have people watching in the audience and asking questions live and you on the inside can see those questions with the tools you’ve got. You can even bring those questions right onto the screen if you want which I think is very very engaging with the audience and it’s live!

Let’s say I’m a small business owner, I do my broadcast, it automatically goes to YouTube. What easy things can I do to get people to find and watch my Hangout on Air up on YouTube?

The question wasn’t about Facebook comments, I remember it now. The question was about how you get your old blog posts new life. I had sent you an example of a blog post that I’d written in November of 2011 that I had reshared. This is like three months ago, so like February or March of 2014. I had showed you an example of how I reshared that blog post on my Facebook page and got 12,000 views to it in a day and a half just by resharing it and using the system of Facebook commenting.
I’ll try to be as brief as possible about this. Pretty much my view on comments is that people on the most part on Facebook and blogs don’t really care about adding that much more to the conversation.
People read blogs to reaffirm what they already now. Fort the most part, people aren’t actually tribe or community members, your quality readers aren’t actually learning that much necessarily from your blog. They’re going there because it reaffirms what they already know and they’re going there because it gives them an opportunity to articulate their own thoughts better than they could perhaps do or have time to do it to their own audience.
In commenting, what they’re doing is they’re commenting to almost boast to the abyss or tell you that you’re stupid – which I get is a form of boasting by saying, “hey, I’m smarter than this guy,” – so I really don’t like comments. I find that for the most part on blogs they’re a waste of time now. Five years ago I think it was different.
So I decided to eliminate comments on the PTDC blog, but when I did it again I said, “maybe I can get an added benefit with these comments by using them not necessarily to stimulate discussion but using them to take advantage of Facebook’s story bumping feature to get new life out of old blog posts.
What we did is we took the embed feature for a status update. So, we create a status update promoting an old blog post, put it on our Facebook page and then we’d actually embed that status update right to the bottom of a blog post and say, “hey, join the discussion. Comment below on the Facebook status update.”
What this did was accomplish two things. First of all, it makes the entire conversation for the article take place on our Facebook page as opposed to the general Facebook comments you embed where the conversation takes place on your website but really on individual threads on everybody else’s Facebook page.
What it also did, most notably, and where we’re seeing the biggest benefit now, is Facebook came out with this story bumping feature whereby you could have a status update from a few years ago, if there’s new comments on it all of a sudden it will pop up in a feed to a whole bunch of people that are relevant to other people based on their edge rank (which is a conversation for another day).
What we’ve been doing is methodically sharing old blog posts, taking those status updates, embedding them to the bottom of these old articles, and then as people go through the archives and like a status update that’s embedded at the bottom of that blog post then all of a sudden now that status update on our Facebook page gets shown to all their friends.
It’s just this perpetual system of old blog posts getting seen by new people interested over the course of a day. I can’t log in to Facebook and see any less than 20 or 30 notifications on our Facebook page. It’s because there are so many notifications happening on old status updates.

Which Facebook page is this that we’re talking about now?

This is the Personal Trainer Development Center. Facebook.com/theptdc

I guess you could argue that any blog could benefit from Facebook comments.

Yeah, and I agree with you. I mean we’ve been using it and having extraordinary success both with the growth of our Facebook page, but more so the growth of our email list.
I still do believe that everything is about the email list. I don’t think Facebook is going anywhere. Facebook has kind of become that comfortable place and any reasonable competition they have they’re pretty much buying up. You could argue that Instagram is the young kids’ Facebook. Well, Facebook owns Instagram.
I don’t think that Facebook is going anywhere. Even if they do right now Facebook is the best place in the world, and I don’t think you’d argue with me here, to gather people who are interested in a subject in one place, create a community around them, and create enough value with them that they become interested in your more premium materials to opt in.
We share on our Facebook page a squeeze page from Facebook once a day or every other day and as a result our email list grows 200-500 people every single day. Just from our Facebook page.
It’s because we’ve built up so much relevancy with our Facebook page on a continual basis that on a Facebook page of 81,000 people a squeeze page will get seen by 30,000 every single time we post it.

Juicy Links:

Get in on the early bird discounts for Agents of Change!!
Check out the PTDC Facebook page.
Check out the PTDC website.
Check out the Viralnomics blog.
Connect with Jon Goodman on Twitter.
Get a copy of Jon Goodman’s book, Ignite the Fire.

Rich Brooks
Panning for gold in revenue streams

How to Build Your Audience with Google Hangouts – Ronnie Bincer

By Rich Brooks 06/22/2014

Did you know Google Hangouts and Hangouts on Air (HOA) can help you build an audience and increase your online visibility? Or help you build valuable relationships when you’re not face-to-face with someone?

If not, then you’re not alone. A lot of small businesses don’t know how to use Google Hangouts or even how they can connect their existing Google Plus page to YouTube. By setting up a Hangout in Air and sharing your broadcast of the video, you can boost engagement and find more ways to interact with your audience.

This week, we chat it up with Google+ Trusted Tester, Google Plus Hangout Helper, and consultant Ronnie Bincer, to learn more about how to use Google Hangouts for your small business and bring some face time back to interactions with clients and friends.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: RSS

Big Ideas:

Ronnie, how did you get so passionate about Google Hangouts?

I imagine I became most passionate because I didn’t even start with Hangouts, I started with Google Plus. When I did stuff in Google Plus I did stuff differently than when I started looking at it from an SEO perspective.
I was quite shocked and amazed at how well it performed for me. What happened is that I moved into the realm of video and specialized in video SEO before Google Plus existed. So it was a natural thing for me to poke around at this video tool so I could meet people, chat with them, and get to know them.
Then, they eventually came out with the broadcast version which is what we’re doing, which is the “Hangout on Air” thing. And then it was a no-brainer for me because I knew how to optimize videos that a lot of people never did after they did their shows. They’d just do their shows and they’re done.
As far as I’m concerned you’re creating content when you’re using this Hangout on Air broadcast thing and what you do with that content is a lot can happen afterwards.

Can you walk us through exactly what we’re doing today for the people who are listening or watching at home?

You bet. We are meeting inside what is technically called an “Unlisted Hangout on Air.” You and I are just chatting with each other and no one else is watching live but YouTube is actually doing the heavy lifting and making a recording of this live. When we’re done, in five minutes or less, there’s a video.
So the normal version that many people will use when they’re in this Hangout on Air environment is a show, like a broadcast and they’re watching and interacting with it live which is another thing and I just did another one less than an hour ago and I have another one later.
I’m really big into the broadcast part. I train people how to do this but then there’s another valuable component which is similar – because I want to give you an idea of all the breadth that you could have with this tool – which is the private video conversation which doesn’t have to be recorded at all.
It’s just me meeting you and talking about stuff or ten people in this video room where we can all communicate and share our information and collaborate. It does not need to be recorded or broadcast.

So it’s a networking and communication tool as well?

Yeah. I’ve seen companies in the same building actually open up a Hangout because it’s just quicker to ask a question real fast.
It’s like making a phone call but what you get are the visual cues you cannot get on a phone. Whether that made sense and clicked with that person right then, or no, you need to explain a little bit better. That visual cue is just massively important to me.

Okay, so we make this video of the show, we put it out there, and I assume this is going to a channel you’ve already created on YouTube that’s associated with your Google+ account

That’s correct. Every account on Google+ that’s a profile – meaning a person – is automatically connected to a YouTube channel in one way, shape, or form.

Is there a way I can create stuff for my business and have it automatically sync to a different YouTube channel because my business YouTube channel has not been able to connect with the Google+ account just because of the rules Google+ set up?

It’s a complicated world when you have multiple email addresses that you’re using and you’ve got multiple profiles, possibly by accident, and maybe you’ve made a business page which is connected to one of the emails but not the right one and you need to move stuff around. It’s a mess.
I deal with that mess daily. People navigate with that. I don’t have the mess but I know people that do, so I try to help people move things around.
Google and YouTube have made it more difficult and have made it much less “self-service.” You actually need to now request that YouTube tech support help you. They have a special form for it, but you actually have to ask them to move things around when you need to change things.
Many times when I work with a client I say, “are there any real videos or any real value to that particular YouTube channel that you accidentally got connected?” If they say no, then we just make a new one, we connect it, and we’re done.
But, if there’s stuff out there that you want to keep and you want to keep the engagement you’ve already got on that particular channel, you can move things around but you have to go through a process and it’s a little bit tricky.
So there is a help form. What I’ve done when I meet with my clients I help them write up the wording so that it only goes back and forth once or twice with the people. I promise you that if you don’t do it correctly you will be having an interesting conversation for many times.

So you and I are having this conversation, what process might we do to bring more people into this live conversation we’re having now?

The process is relatively simple if you are the host, meaning the person that started the conversation. This is a broadcast and because of that it’s a Hangout on Air. When you’re in a Hangout on Air in general – and here’s the simplest answer – if the host invites somebody else in they can come on in.
If you, as an additional guest, want to bring someone else in you basically need to tell the host who to invite or send your friend a special link that the host can give you that you can then use as an invitation.
In general, with these broadcast things you don’t just want people dropping in in the middle of nowhere because that would be bad. So you get to control who gets to come in by sending an invitation and the host is the easiest one who’s able to send that but others can do it as well.

So, you can also set it up to allow people to watch live and can even submit questions?

Right. It can be very very interactive. You can have people watching in the audience and asking questions live and you on the inside can see those questions with the tools you’ve got. You can even bring those questions right onto the screen if you want which I think is very very engaging with the audience and it’s live!

Let’s say I’m a small business owner, I do my broadcast, it automatically goes to YouTube. What easy things can I do to get people to find and watch my Hangout on Air up on YouTube?

I’m going to treat this as if people don’t know much about SEO and then accelerate fast into the nerdy stuff.
With any video, whether it’s a Hangout on Air video or a recorded video that you’re putting on YouTube, some of the key comments are your title, the description area, and the tags. Those are the three main areas you get to edit.
In the title you want to have the primary keyword phrase or the words you think people are interested in that will give you the results of your video.
That’s your goal. It’s to figure out what they’re searching for and use that text in the title. Here’s the nerdy nerdy part – Don’t use it at the end of the title, use it at the beginning. The first few words in a title of a video will give you more “Google juice” than the last few words.
Also, I’d like to tell people to repeat that title somewhere appropriately, the keywords, inside the description text. You should be saying it multiple times because hopefully the title ties to what you’re actually talking about in the video.
It’s easy for you in the description to say, “in this video we’re talking about blah blah blah,” and you’re using your keyword phrases.
The hidden part that people don’t see is what’s called the “tags.” This is the equivalent in the old days to what were called “keywords” in the meta for your keywords. Those are still built in and are still part of YouTube and they still work really well. So, what I encourage people to do especially if you’re doing multiple videos, whether they’re Hangout on Air or regular videos, is to put in some unique keywords (maybe your business or personal name) in every single video you do as a tag.
It’s not bothersome or get in the way, but what it does is help group all your videos together on the right sidebar when you’re watching a video inside YouTube. There’s suggested follow-up videos or related videos that are all going to start to populate with your own stuff if you have a consistent keyword tag from video to video to video.

One thing I’ve heard about video is that YouTube actually listens to your video (and that’s part of the algorithm) and so I’m assuming we should be using and saying the keywords from our description in our video out loud as we talk as well. Correct?

Exactly. If you can do it naturally, hopefully, there’s a reason why you’ve named the video what you’ve named it and you’re going to be talking about it using those words.
It’s a natural occurrence if you plan it. If you don’t know what you’re doing and then add the keywords later, you’re going to have more of a difficult time.
So, it’s best to think in your mind ahead of time, “what are the primary keyword phrases I want to make sure we talk about?” and then do your best to talk about them when you’re doing your show.
Then the text that is actually crawlable – because they transcribe it into words they can read – it does a pretty good job, not always, but then you can fix that and tweak it but as long as it matches the title and the things you’re talking about then there’s going to be a better match from Google’s perspective.
As a result it’s going to help match the search that people are looking for and therefore you’ve got all your cylinders playing together, they’re all working together, and it helps make it work out.

So consistency with those keywords is going to be critically important?

Yeah. This is an old SEO trick and I don’t know if it’s still valid or not but I still do it.
I will use those keywords at the beginning of the video, and somewhere near the middle, and then I’ll definitely repeat them at the end.

How do we bring in people into Google Hangout if they’re not necessarily using Google Plus?

That’s a question that I’m asked a lot.
One of the best meeting grounds is a common area called YouTube. A lot of people watch videos on YouTube. You can point people to your Hangout on Air as it’s being broadcast live. You can point them to the video link of the show.
That can be done by sending a link to their email if their on an email list. If you work with them in another social environment you can send them that link right there.
You don’t have to necessarily draw them in to the Google Plus world unless you need them inside the video part and they actually need to be a player in that world. Otherwise it’s just a video. That video can be posted on your website. You can stick up a video embed.
Just because it’s an embed doesn’t mean you can’t work with a Hangout in Air. It’s a live show that shows up in that embed. When you’re done with the live show it just automatically turns into a video that’s still in that same embed holder. There’s nothing you need to change from the live to the recorded side of things.
Not only on your website, but you can show it on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, or anywhere you can send a link of a video you can send out the broadcast link. While it’s live or even before it’s live.

So, if I know that someone has a Gmail address, can I invite them to a Google Hangout and they can be a part of that as my guest?

Yes, that is correct. It’s technically called a “Google account” and not even a Google Plus account. As long as they have a Google account and you still need one to add any comments.
As long as they have a Google account then that will allow them into Hangout filmstrip (is what I call it), inside the video room. So yeah, it works.

You said that “Google Hangouts build relationships.” Can you elaborate on that?

You bet. That’s the biggest thing about it besides the broadcasts and the show, it’s allowed me to reach out to people literally all over the world and build a relationship.
The only way to say is that I’ve seen somebody interacting online somewhere and I decide that I like what they’re talking about and I just want to get to know them a little bit. I will send them either a private message or in a public environment and say, “hey, I’d love to hangout with you sometime. Would you be interested?” They say, “yes,” and a click a couple buttons and now we’re in a video room.
What that means is that I can now meet them literally no matter where they are in the world. Then from then on I am now growing a relationship with them so from that point on if I see text that they’ve done it has a different feel for me because I’ve met them.
It’s strange, but I have some really good friends that I’ve never met in real life but I hangout with them almost every single day.

It’s not the same as meeting face-to-face, but we live in a time where that’s not always possible, but this is the closest the internet can sometimes give us.

Now with the communication with the verbal and the visual here’s what happens sometimes – I’ll be typing text with someone, they’ll be typing, it would go back and forth and back and forth – it’s like, “look, let’s just hangout. I can get this done faster.”
That is literally what I’ll do nowadays. We’ll do a little chat and I’ll say, “are you ready to join me? Yes? No? Yes? Okay, boom. You’re in the video call.” Just get through the process because It’s easier to work out the misunderstandings and get to the resolution and then you both move on. Really really helpful. I find it to be almost indispensable now. I can’t just do a webinar without doing the visuals.

Can you tell me one tip or tactic for small businesses about reaching more of your ideal customers in regards to Google Hangouts?

It’s gonna be an odd one, but here we go.
Don’t try to jump into the Hangout right away. Try to jump into the conversations around the Hangout that others are having. This allows you to identify other commenters that are active in another video where someone else is running.
You get to see what they’re talking about. You get to easily identify who they are based on their level of interest. Then you build this relationship in the comments before you ever get into the video with them. And now you all of a sudden have an audience because you’ve created almost a following because you’ve had some good interactions with your commenters.

So just to clarify. You’re saying to go to other people’s broadcast and Hangouts on Air, and engage in chats to build up relationships similar to leaving comments on blogs. Then from there I build up an audience and then I take the next step and have my own Hangout?

I would think so. It’s worked out really well for me and other people. It’s a way for you to get known in a less threatening environment because people don’t have to respond to you right away. They can just read it whenever they want.

Juicy Links:

Get in on the early bird discounts for Agents of Change!!
Grab your seat for the free List Building webinar by Rich Brooks
Checkout Ronnie Bincer’s Hangout Mastery Membership site.
Ronnie Bincer’s Hangout Helper website.
Request Help Form from YouTube multiple account issues, etc.
The Jetsons Morning Mask Video. 😉

Rich Brooks
Let’s Hangout on Air

Getting Started with Facebook Advertising – John Haydon

By Rich Brooks 06/08/2014

Do you use Facebook advertising? Do you know how to target your most relevant audience? Do you know to create and market to lookalike audiences from your existing email lists?

If not, then you’re not alone. A lot of small businesses don’t know why exactly they’re running Facebook ads. By taking your most liked, commented, and shared content and then advertising it, you multiply your success.

This week, we chat it up with author, digital marketing consultant, and Huffington Post contributor John Haydon, to learn more about how to use Facebook as an secondary strategy to compliment our existing content.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: RSS

Big Ideas:

How did you get involved with Facebook?

I guess it’s the place where everybody is. Working with non-profits, a lot of them eventually are asking, “what do I do with Facebook?”
I’ve been involved in Facebook and MySpace when it first came out; Twitter when it first came out. So I tend to be what you might call an early adopter.
With Facebook I saw a lot of non-profits having a lot of success, so that’s how I got into that, but my background is really marketing and sales.
For for-profit, I work for software companies, health care companies, traditional media companies. I feel like that experience is what I’m bringing to non-profits because they generally don’t have a marketing headset.

What do you say to small businesses and non-profits that say, “Facebook should be free. I can’t believe we have to pay for this?”

I say that it’s a non-issue. That’s not a discussion because it’s not free.what a
Some people say, “why, why isn’t it free? Why is our reach declining?” It’s good to understand why, but in the end it’s happening.
Facebook is a public company, and knowing this is important because they actually have to make money every three months. They have to make not just money, but MORE money every three months so they’re always tweaking things and tweaking how they’re doing ads and any way they can even get an extra penny they’re gonna go after it.
That’s the model of most public companies and they do it pretty well. They’re very successful.

Once you do convince somebody they have to spend money on Facebook, how do you get started?

My thinking about Facebook ads, and this might apply to Google ads and other kinds of ads, is that they are salt and pepper, so seasoning. You can’t just eat salt and pepper. You have to have a meal. You have to have steak, potatoes, salad, french fries, whatever you’re going to have. That has to be the meal.
The meal in a sense, is the content – understanding your people and what gets them going. Facebook is a pretty powerful platform for learning this. You can post an update on your Facebook page and you can actually compare that content with other content that you’ve posted on your Facebook page. And you begin to learn, “wow, our Facebook fans really like it when we talk about this. Or they like it when we post pictures of new dogs that are up for adoption. Or new shoes we have in our shoe store. Or they really respond when we post pictures of pizza.”
The first step is to really understand the community and the people. Then supplement what you’re doing with Facebook ads. So, if you do post that picture of a pizza that people are going crazy about, then you can give that more exposure with Facebook ads.
That’s the general rule that I have. Don’t think that Facebook ads is a primary strategy. It’s more like a secondary strategy that’s going to supplement and enhance what you’re already doing.
It’s interesting because I’ve seen more than a few examples where the cost of a Facebook ad will actually be lower if you’re promoting a post that has a lot of likes, comments, and shares.

So, should we first create this content and then if it starts to get traction, then spend money on it?

Yes. That’s the short answer.
The reason why is that if you say, “well, we have an event that’s really important and we think it’s important and people need to see it.” Whenever I hear that I say to myself, “geez, that’s a backwards way of looking at things. ‘What WE think. What WE want people to see…’ Well, let’s see what your people say first. Let’s get proof that that is an awesome piece of content and then go from there.”
When you take out a Facebook ad the only thing you’re paying for is reach. In the long run, reach doesn’t necessarily matter as much as engagement.
So the way that Facebook’s newsfeed works is that the more a user, and let’s say you, Rich, like my Facebook page, the more that you like, comment, and share my content from my Facebook page the more likely you’re going to continue to see that content in my newsfeed.
If I decide, “well, this post is really important and I’m gonna promote it even though it’s a dog,” and it’s really just a waste of everybody’s time, but I promote it anyhow and you see it in your newsfeed, you’re not going to like, comment, or share it because it’s just not interesting.
So what does that do? That enables you to see it, but in the long run what you really want is likes, comments, and shares. You want people that engage with the content so that their friends see that content and are exposed to the organization or business.
You can even think of Facebook as a massive word-of-mouth monster. It’s like Godzilla word-of-mouth. The key from a strategic and marketing standpoint is to see it that way and to leverage your current community – the people who are already customers and who are already consistent donors and supporters, event registrants, and event attendees – to get those people telling their friends about you through your content.
A lot of people view Facebook as a place to just push something out there and hope somebody likes it. There’s really no thinking.
Let’s say there’s an event coming up like Agents of Change, I’m sure you’ve thought about this, but you could post a couple of different updates about that. What do people really care about? Like you said, you’re basically testing the market in a very inexpensive way. You see how people are reacting, what topics they like, what content they like, and then taking the best of the best and then promoting that.

So, with our Agents of Change conference, we think we have some great speakers coming, one thing we might try is to create posts about each speaker and the ones that really start to take off are the ones we want to throw money behind and turn those into Facebook ads.

Exactly. What’s really great are the targeting selections in Facebook are so incredible. There are so many different targeting options.
Let’s say you publish a post about Pat Flynn. People really start talking about it and it really starts to excel and becomes one of your best updates compared to the other updates about other speakers. You can actually target that update to fans of Pat Flynn’s Facebook page that happen to be located near Agents of Change. People may not come from Arizona, I don’t know, maybe they might?
Anyhow, I call it poaching. You can basically poach the fans of another Facebook page like Pat Flynn’s page. You can put that ad right in front of those people. Of course, what are they going to do? They’ve already liked the page and they’re gonna see that post about Pat and of course they’re going to be interested in that.
You also mentioned retargeting which is a such a brilliant approach with Facebook ads. I think that’s an underutilized feature. Someone goes and visits an Agents of Change landing page or the information page and then they leave. They say, “ah, I’m not ready now.” Then they go to Facebook and what do they see? They see the ads in the sidebar. They see that ad in the newsfeed about Agents of Change.
So marketing 101 says to expose people from multiple angles. The more angles you have – email, SEO, blogs, Facebook, Twitter, Facebook ads – the more exposure you create for people the more likely they’re going to take whatever action you want them to take.

What kinds of things should I be looking to accomplish with my advertising? Am I trying to get people to like my page? Or am I trying to drive them to take a certain action like buying something, or sending them to my web page? Where do you recommend people spend their money here?

It depends upon the goal. In your case, you want people to go to a page and register for the event. So you want to drive traffic to a web page. You may pay a little bit more money because Facebook generally charges a little bit more of a premium if you’re directing traffic off of Facebook.
Facebook wants people to stick around, because when people stick around they increase the page views and that’s a direct effect on their revenue. The more page views they have the happier the shareholders are. Shareholders’ happiness is the name of the game.
The first thing is to clarify the goal. What is the goal?
Second thing is to understand the people which we talked about before – posting and testing different updates to see which ones people like and what topics they like. Do they like a photo? Do they like closed questions? Trying different things like that is always a constant thing that people should be doing on Facebook.
And finally, targeting; so the more you understand your people the better you’re going to be able to target that ad. It does depend upon the goal.
So if the goal is to like a Facebook page you’re going to take out a Facebook page like ad to get fans. But even those you have to really target. If you just go based on what Facebook says. Facebook will say, “hey, click here. Two mouse clicks to get more fans.” Of course they’re gonna target very broadly. That’s not going to be effective because then you’re going to have very low quality fans. You might get a fan but they’re not going to see your updates. It’s almost meaningless and you’ve wasted money.
But, if you target really specifically by understanding your people, you’re gonna get fans of your page that are more likely to engage and stick around.
Another goal you could have is to increase engagement on posts. Again, in that case you’re still going to pick the posts that are performing the best and Facebook pages, as you know, has a tool called Facebook Insights. You can quickly go in there and see your top ten updates over the past week. Then based on what your business goals are, you can decide that of these ten posts, these two are really really relevant for the event that’s coming up or really relevant for this product.
So it does depend upon the goal.

Sometimes you can advertise to get into the newsfeed or advertise to get into the side. Is there one that beats the other? Or does it depend?

I would say newsfeed is going to beat the sidebar ads every time. They’re much more effective. They’re much more engaging. Sidebar ads are good because they have more of a permanent fixture, but the downside is that they look like ads. You look at them and know it’s a Facebook ad. Everybody kind of knows what they are.
With the newsfeed with a sponsored story, it is literally a piece of content that hopefully is useful and relevant that’s just simply being pushed out a little bit further to the Facebook users.

Do you have any recommendations for setting a budget or what people should spend to see some results?

Yeah. The first thing is Facebook by default is going to have a setting that says, “let my ad run from today onward.” Like literally, let my ad run forever. Maybe somebody’s hoping that you’re gonna have a heart attack and die and then making money off that. So that’s the default setting, so you always want to select a specific date range.
For the run date, I’d recommend around 3-5 days for any Facebook ad. Because Facebook ads are kind of like relatives and fish – they last just a few days. People see the ad and then they reach this point of diminished returns and then you have to switch up the ad and do something else. You have to keep things fresh.
The other benefit of doing a short run like 3-5 days is that you can get a test. You can test something out and see how it performs. Facebook ads does have an analytics tool so you can see how many clicks, how much exposure, what money you’re spending, and even the click-through rate (which is kind of the magic number or value of the ROI of the ad).

Do you know anything about “unpublished post” and then advertising off of that instead?

Yeah, so unpublished posts are basically a Facebook update, a regular old Facebook update, that’s not published but is pushed out using an ad to very specific, targeted audiences. It is published on the page, but only the people you target are going to see that. It’s an unpublished post.
The example where you might want to use that is for the people who attended Agents of Change last year and you want to offer them a discount. You want to say, “hey, this is just an early bird discount for previous registrants who came last year,” so you want to create a Facebook post about that and you want people to engage with that. But of course we don’t want everyone to see it. We just want the people who attended last year.
That’s where you could take that unpublished post and then publish it to only the people who attended the event last year.
How would you present that ad to only people who attended Agents of Change last year? You would do that through a custom audience. Facebook ads allow you to take an email list, upload it into Facebook ads and create an email list. In this example, you would simply have an email list of everyone who registered and attended last year. So then you’re only presenting that ad to those people that have a Facebook profile associated with each email address on that list.

So you could target any of your other email lists as well?

Exactly. I’ve actually used this approach with a number of non-profit clients, but it applies in the for-profit world too. A typical non-profit problem I encounter is that someone donated once a year ago and we haven’t heard from them. They’re not opening our email list. They haven’t come to events. Where are they? We’ve lost touch.
Well, they’re on Facebook. This is a way for you to get in front of them. Are you suddenly going to reignite their interest and passion? No. But you might remind them and a subset of those people you’ve lost touch with can be pulled back into the fray.
Because guess what? You have their email. I feel like email is still the most important marketing tool. A lot of people feel like email’s dead, but I think that’s idiotic.
So social media does it all the time. When you join Facebook you give them your email and they want the emails of all your friends too. That’s what happens when you sign up.
Targeting to people who you’ve lost touch with, there are so many ways to use those custom audiences. You can even create lookalike audiences. So let’s say that you have an email list of customers and you really want to attract those people who are very similar to your customers. You can upload that list of a thousand people or so and create a lookalike audience which might be 10 -15,000, but they all have similar characteristics.
Let’s say most of your email subscribers are in Maine and they like certain things like the State of Maine, fishing, biking, these different things and so Facebook will assemble a lookalike audience that will basically match the prevalent likes an interests of your email list.

What are some of the biggest mistakes you see some non-profits and small businesses doing when it comes to these Facebook ads? What should we avoid?

Targeting too widely. If you say, “oh, I want to get more fans of my Facebook page and I’m just gonna spend as much money as possible.” There is a mindset and tendency to think that if you throw money at it it’s going to solve the problem.
Money is just money. It’s not going to solve a problem if we don’t go about it wisely. Sometimes they’ll say, “well, I’ve got a thousand dollars, let’s just get a whole bunch of fans.” Whoa, hang on. Let’s not waste your money. Let’s find quality fans.
So targeting is a big issue. Not targeting wisely is a huge huge mistake.
The second biggest mistake is promoting content with an ad that’s just a dog. Like it’s just not good stuff. Why would you want to do that? Your fans aren’t going to like it. No one’s going to like that because no one has liked that in the past because it doesn’t have any likes, comments, and shares. Also, you’re going to pay a higher rate for that ad because Facebook, as a business, don’t want that junk in the newsfeed either.
If they have that junk in the news feed, guess what? The users start disappearing and without the users they’re in big big trouble. They really are truly trying to put the most interesting and relevant content in the newsfeed even if it’s an ad.
So targeting wisely and only promoting the posts on your page that are performing above and beyond the average performance on your page.

Juicy Links:

Get in on the early bird discounts for Agents of Change!!
Grab your seat for the free List Building webinar by Rich Brooks
Check out John Haydon’s website.
Get John Haydon’s book Facebook Marketing For Dummies.
Connect with John Haydon on Twitter.
And be sure to leave a review for The Marketing Agents on iTunes

Rich Brooks
Seasoning Content with Facebook Sauce

Google Plus Your Business with Martin Shervington

By Rich Brooks 05/05/2014

Have you been using Google+? Do you know why you should be using it and what it means for your small business? Do you know what Google Authorship is and how to create opt-in circles within Google+ to maximize your presence in Google search?

If not, then you’re not alone. A lot of small businesses don’t know the benefits of using Google+ as a springboard for more relevant leads while building stronger relationships with their audience. By setting up a Google+ page, using blog posts, targeted content, and making it search optimized you can make stronger “ripples” in the social media pond.

This week, we bring in Google Plus master Martin Shervington, business development author and digital marketing strategist, to talk about setting up your Google+ page and getting amplified engagement by using the myriad layers of Google’s ecosystem.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: RSS

Big Ideas:

Google+ has been in the news lately, and it’s rumored Google may be getting out of the Google+ business. What do you think?

I think that, Vic Gundotra who I met a while ago and he was very kind to me – he gave me a great endorsement when he shared some of my content – I think he’s taken Google+ to a place now that it’s really robust and stable.
I think it’s a surprise for a lot of us that he’s left, but I think so many of us in the community have appreciated what he’s done.
Now what happened was one article got written by somebody who isn’t really on Google+ and hasn’t posted anything since January 2012. They wrote an article on Tech Crunch and that had claims in it that were very vague and unsubstantiated and then Time magazine picked it up online and then Business Insider did, and you almost sort of watch these dominoes fall of peoples’ perception, “Google+ is going to end because Vic’s left,” and so on.
I say that having seen what they’ve done, Google have managed to create something that brings all of their products and services together using this principal of Google+. I would say that there’s always changes. There’s additions to the platform, there’s things that get removed, but I would say Google+ is not going to go anywhere.
I also think the community gets stronger and stronger every time these sort of things happen. We smile, sometimes even laugh, because we know what is really going on. I feel that we do with Google+ because the power for search, which I’m sure we’ll come on to, is phenomenal. The networking you can do on Google+, the access to people, the ability to build relationships using lots of different parts of their products – this is really what Google+ is about. It’s about relationships.
Relationships are going to disappear, and it’s been important to people, traffic to websites, engagement on content, and let’s face it, it’s not gonna happen. They’ve got social media in the bag, and when you add search to it, Google have done very well with not making it too difficult as an entry point with Google+ considering that the scope of what they’ve done, and I’m sure we’re going to come on to that, Rich.
Google+ isn’t like Twitter, it isn’t like Facebook for certain reasons.

Google+ is relatively new as social media platforms go, so what drew you first to this platform?

Well, I did what a lot of people did. When it just came out of beta which was in July 2011, I put a couple of posts out and just went, “well, no one’s here. It doesn’t seem very active,” and I left.
It took me until March 2012 where I thought, “I ought to give this thing another go.” I then spent three days – and I went to promote some books that I had that came out around that time – and was looking at markets and getting some consultancy and I had just moved back from the States, so I spent three days granularly going down the rabbit hole that I’ve now gone down to understand everything that I can and could about Google+ and I made notes.
So, that was really how I fell in love with the platform. It was just by understanding how it worked. It led me to go from this social destination aspect of Google+ to then understanding Google.
I was on YouTube and then Google Drive, then starting to look at local search, and lots of other products and services as well. I started to see that Google+ was one aspect of the social destination, but there’s this layer – it’s called the social layer – that goes throughout so many of Google’s products and services.
The aim is that it kind of binds them on certain principles, so that’s what got me started. It became a fascinating research project in a way, and a very experiential one, where I said, “how does this thing work?” And when we got to search, that’s become a journey of understanding social search engine optimization and the role that Google+ plays in that.

I know a lot of small businesses that say, “I don’t want to jump on yet another social media platform.” They’re not sure if it’s worth their time and effort. What do you say to people like that?

I think that sometimes that might be the right decision.
My position is that if you do any social media network badly, then what’s the point in doing it?
It’s not about having the account. It’s about who you’re building relationships with, what content you have to share, and what intent you have behind it.
I think one of the big differences with Google+ is that content shared on Google+ is indexed by Google search.
So, if we jump back to what’s important to a business and you say, “is relevant traffic going to your website important?” – then what you with them is up to you, whether it’s an email newsletter or conversions to leads or purchasing something.
Then you say, “can you get more of that?” using, for instance, content on Google+ – and the figures for me, my blog went from a thousand visitors to 35,000 uniques a month by using Google+. About 29,000 of that is from search.
So, there’s a relationship between the content which is shared on Google+ and Google search.
Also, plusyourbusiness.com, which is very much just the business site, it has 20,000 uniques, so I use content marketing to build relationships within social so that then people are able to connect and able to engage on that content and visit directly from within the Google+ environment.
But, also that sends signals to Google search and the signals that it sends to search is that, “hey, this content could well be important for people to find in the future.” You find more and more that the people who are engaging on it that have authority in subjects tends to give those messages to Google search and the algorithm.
The relationship is between the site, your content, social – the connections that you have and people are engaging on it, and then that turning into Google search.
So think – search, site, social – that flow is really what a lot of us have been using on Google+ for a long time and it’s happening.
But, people either have to have a content marketing strategy to understand and to run tests on their own content, their own blog pages, their own images they share which then have links which go to the site. Everything needs to be run and tested to make sure it’s worthwhile.

So you create a blog post, and then what are your next steps once the blog post goes live? Are there things you’re doing before the blog post even goes live?

Well, that set me up nicely, Rich. It’s as if we prepared, which we haven’t!
Look at it this way. If you search for, “what is Google?” right now, and you do an incognito search, most of the time I’m coming up #1 as that search result. Now, it may be number two or three, it depends on the settings, but it’s pretty high up.
That blog post, if you look at it, they’ll see that there are at least six, eight or ten videos that are 10-20 minutes in length and they’re really detailed and I do them step by step. So that blog post, not only does it have text on it as well, it has images, it has these videos and it’s like a video course.
That has around 7.3k “plus ones” on that particular page and it’s a social proof site. I know it’s been shared an enormous amount of times on Google+.
So, what have we got there? We’ve got a blog post and we’ve got videos. Those videos are from YouTube and they’re all independent. They’re all individual videos that are shared publicly that can be shared in their own right, by myself or by other people.
What I’m doing here is I’m starting to build a picture – that blog post holds a lot of content that elsewhere as well.
When it comes to an important search term, and I was going for, “what is Google Plus?” I’m getting around 8,000 uniques a month from that blog post. In order to get it to that place out of 4.5 billion results, it has to be the best answer to the question according to Google’s algorithm at that time.
The first thing to do is to think, “what problem am I solving? What questions am I answering? What key phrases am I trying to rank for?” Not so much thinking keywords but more thinking about problem solving and question answering. When you do that you then go, “what assets – like YouTube videos, text, downloadable PDFs – what else can I be doing that gives added value to people?”
When you give away that content that a lot of people think you pretty should be charging for, that then gives something for people to engage around, but that’s only part of the story.
The bit of the story that’s missing is that you need a distribution network. That’s how I use Google+. So, the relationships that I’ve built are with people who value what I do and I value what they do, we’re part of a large team, that love the stuff that we’re producing. So, when they engage on it and it shares across their networks and we’re getting hundreds and hundreds of shares, or even thousands of shares on certain things, and lots of comments, and lots of +1s, all of that starts to signal to Google search that this content is important and should then appear for people in the future.

When you share that blog post, how are you taking the step from publishing it to sharing it on Google+?

First thing, everybody that’s interested in this needs to have the +1 button and the +1 share button on their blog post. What that means is that when stuff gets shared that is linked back to that website page, that blog post, the +1s can be attributed to that page.
We take the URL and we put it into the link bar as a Google+ post. Now the reality is if you click the +1 button on the blog post you can do it straight from the blog. That’s the great thing about Google+ is that it brings up the share post.
What I do is put a nice heading on it, a nice subtitle, and I put a small amount of text. Sometimes I put a lot more, but I certainly put some context, some added value, but this isn’t the main thing that I do. What I do more than anything else, before I get to the press and the send, I build up circles of people who have opted in to receive that content by that email.
That’s one of the biggest things I recommend to people is to build opt-in lists on Google+. This is permission marketing 101.
Now when I read that in 2001 from Seth Godin it blew me away. I told him, like you did, Rich, that his book changed my life, but it did!
What I’ve done is applied the principles of this to Google+ so I’ve built many opt-in circles and I have many different methods of doing that.
This means that when I hit that send button having embedded the link and making it pretty, people receive it as a notification. Most of the time they’re going to receive it by email, other things being equal.
That means that they get it in their inbox. They’re ready to engage on it and they’ve asked. The key thing is you’ve got to ask permission. That tends to give an extremely big lift off to content when it lands.
I’ll tell you something I don’t tell people very often – what I will very often do, if I’ve got videos for instance that are embedded on the site – I’ll often give people prior access to that content so they know what’s coming. So essentially I give them a bit of a gift – a bit of a bonus for opting into the circle.
That way people feel that they’re being valued and there’s an increased level of reciprocation and deepening of the relationship.

Can you walk us through the process of what you do when you build opt-in lists for Google+?

I’ve actually just brought out a Google Circles course because there’s a lot to it, but I will give you the short version so everyone doesn’t feel like I’m selling to them.
The first thing is when people are engaging on your content and you’re starting to build the relationship – if they’ve shared your content, or you meet them in a Google Hangout, or you meet them in real life – you can ask, “would you like to receive notifications from me?” I usually say something like, “it will be 2 or 3 notifications of unique content a week.”
If you get a “yes” you put them in a circle. If the circle’s no more than 100 people, then very often when you’ve added public and the name of that circle when you’re sending out a post and you click the check box, or rather, it will have a checkbox available to be clicked if the circle’s not too large and it will say, “also send email,” to that circle. You can do it from multiple circles actually.
There are limits of course, but now you have really small targeted audiences in your lists.
The next thing that I recommend is to look at your lists and create a blog post – and this is once you’ve already got engagement – when you’ve got people who are seeing your content – one of the methods is to have full comments underneath your blog post and say, “who wants to be in this list or that list? Just +1 whichever ones you want to be in,” and then close comments off.
What you’ll find is that you can accumulate a differentiated list just by the +1s. It’s a bit like in Facebook when you hover and you see who has liked. On Google+ you can hover over and add those people to circles.
So straight away you’ve got this really refined specific niche, specific circles, built on whatever criteria you’re setting in those comments.

If a small business has no Google+ presence where do you recommend they get started?

The first thing is, do they have a physical location?
If they do then they want to make sure they’re on the map.
So the system is to start by going to google.com/places and to get themselves on the map. That’s one of the ways that we recommend.
There is something else we need to look at. Google your business name and see if Google+ have generated a business page for you automatically because this may have already been set up. What happens then is it says, “would you like to claim this page?” and if they want to claim the page they click and then they can register as the owner of that page.
Now, let’s say that you don’t have a physical location or address and that doesn’t work for you, the first thing to do is to look at whether it’s worthwhile having a Google+ page which is like a brand page which may not have a physical address.
What I would say is, take the 10 minutes and set it up and link it to your website using the Google+ badge. This is a developer’s badge. I’ll give this to you as well, Rich, so we can add this in the show notes so people can have access to it.
When they do that, activity that occurs on the page starts to build up in relation to that website. There’s a +1 number which doesn’t appear on the page anymore but does appear still on the website which is called the social number. Even though Google haven’t said exactly what it is we know it has some sort of relevancy metric potential in the future.
Let’s go another step in terms of the business page. If people have content that they are sharing on social networks and they value social engagement then look at using the business page for exactly the same purpose.
The difference is, look at nurturing engagements. That’s the biggest thing on this. If people are +1ing and sharing, say “thank you” and add them to circles. +1 their stuff if you like it. Go and comment on content.
Build the relationship because you can find your influencers on Google+ very easily and the system “ripples” on any shared post that’s public on Google+. If you go in the upper right you can click and a drop-down says “view ripples.” you can see who the influencers are that have shared that content.
For a business it really gives you insight into finding the right people that could be the evangelists for your content.
For an individual, an entrepreneur, I recommend a Google+ profile as a person because people relate to people easier than brands they don’t know.
The first month, if people are feeling inspired to get started on Google+ I would recommend beginning as your profile understand the system and understand the relationship between profiles and pages because you can share content between them – that can help you get more reach.
Then you will begin to see whether it’s worthwhile setting up a brand page as well or whether it’s worthwhile keeping it going for yourself.
One of the things as a profile is that (and you’ve seen this when you go to Google search and a picture comes up alongside the content they’ve authored) this is called Google Authorship.
Google Authorship is the process by which a person’s profile on Google+ and their picture gets attached to content they create around the web. It could be their website it could be other websites, other people’s blogs. You need a two-way link. You need that website to say, “yes, you are also an author.” As long as you’ve got a profile picture and it’s a clear headshot and it’s been tagged with your name which you just hover over and tag it, then that process can happen, it can appear. It doesn’t mean it’s going to, but for most of us, the reason we get excited is that it can show the number of people that you have in circles, shows this picture, that picture may well increase click-through rate because people want people.
It’s a really useful thing to make sure you’ve got all the steps set up even though you may not be active on Google+ but you are active as a blogger or if you’re producing content.
It’s all about trust. This is where you get into the semantic web which my buddy David Almerland is the expert on. What we’re doing is building relationships and every step, every piece of content we create it helps people to get a better picture of where we’re and if they can trust it. If lots of people are sharing it it means you start to get a reputation within that particular niche.
Once you’ve got this trust and reputation going it then turns into, outside of your circles, people just get to know that you’re the authority in that particular subject and that’s when it appears in search. So even though the original people who shared it may have nothing to do with it in the future in terms of the propagation of it into search, they’ve given the message to Google that they’ve backed it.
If you’ve shared something and you’re already perceived authoritative or have a reputation and you share somebody else’s you kind of give some of that authority to somebody else. This is why the whole trust transparent thread that we’re apart of on Google+ is starting to make a big difference in Google search. What Google wants is the best answer to the questions and search inquiries that people are giving when they put into the search box.

So, I understand that for people, I can add them to my circles, but if I’m a business I have to wait for them to add me in. Is that correct?

No longer correct! That has changed. Pages now have pretty much exactly the same now except for a few little differences now and again just because of the nature of the settings they come across.
Let’s just say that Pages have the same abilities as profiles.

What are some tactics we can use to get more people to pay attention to us on Google+?

Let’s look at the reasons why you want that as opposed to just the numbers which is important as well and they’re not – that “social proof” matters AND it doesn’t.
Leaving that bit aside, let’s look at the mechanics. When somebody adds you into their circles when you post content, that content can appear in their stream – which means it’s got more chance of it being engaged upon.

Wait, why “may” it appear and not “always” appear in their stream?

You’ve got the ability to control the volume of the stream as either “appear in stream,” which is a checkbox, whichever circle or circles they’ve added in you can adjust it to suit.
There’s four different ones: does it appear at all which are a checkbox, the next one is “higher,” and then you have “standard,” and then you have “fewer.” You can change the setting. So it’s really an adjustable flow.
If the person has unchecked the box for that circle then your content isn’t going to appear. Which is why it’s very much under the user’s control or user’s decision as to what appears.
With the circles I have a video, I’ve just brought it out, which gives people my flow system and shows them how I’ve got my circles set up. It’s on YouTube and it gives you an idea then. When you understand the system you can understand how people are gonna receive the information. It just becomes a transparent system.
You want people to add you in but you also want them to ideally want you on the highest levels. So you want to be producing quality content that encourages that behavior.
That’s just the mechanics bit because I know that you want to know how to find those people, so I’m gonna give a tip there. You go and you search for the things that you know matter to your target audience.
Let’s say you’re writing on social media marketing. Then, you go and you search for that and you go and find the people who are influential in that. Let’s say you’re writing on financial services and again, go into the Google+ search box and start looking for those people.
Now, when you seem them appear, because it pulls up a stream of content posted by those people and potentially individuals as well, what you can do is you can add them into circles into differentiated lists. You don’t contact them – it’s a different process. You can add them in and start following them and engaging with them and start interacting with them so they know who you are.
Once that happens you start to build a relationship. Once you deepen that relationship with them you can start to up the level.
So, you may say, “hey, do you want to get involved in this event I’m running? I’d love to have an expert on the panel and you’re clearly an influencer in this particular area.” And the metrics are how many +1s, how many comments, how many shares go to the profile, how much engagement in total are they getting on the content.
If they’re just dumping a link and nobody cares then they may not be the best people for you to be really deepening the rela

Is Google Hangouts a part of your world view and if so, how might a small business use hangouts as part of their Google+ strategy?

Yeah, so one of the things we didn’t touch on early but essentially Google+ is Google.
Google+ is not only the social destination which is really what we’ve been focused on, but it also goes across all of Google’s products and services.
So the principles of Google+, and we’re talking about circles, that’s applies to hangouts. So, a hangout is a text-based chat and you can add images in and also a video call. The text-based side you can add a circle in of up to 100 people. You can be interacting and chatting with people in that. It’s like Skype but a much bigger circle of people. Then, you can click the button and you can start a video call.
If you’ve got a non-paid account you can have up to ten devices, ten people, but you can have one room with a hundred people in it, which is just one device as a feed. That enables you to then have face-to-face real-time conversations.
If you have a paid account then you can have up to 15 devices.
You can then choose from your Google circles, other people can who you invite. So, Google+ has this entire contact list and if you go to Gmail, because remember Gmail is like Google+ in this way, you’ll often find the “add to circles” button for pages you’ve been interacting with and for people who’ve gmail addresses. You never contact them on Google+, but it’s your contact list, so you can add them in.
Then, you go to the hangout, and you can often initiate a hangout straight from their profile.
So yes, absolutely, it’s integral but you can also see it as semi-standalone to some extent. I have an Android device and it’s an app on the Android device that even brings in my SMS messages as well.
Hangouts are going to be the place where all communication is based that is around voice, text, image sharing. They’re certainly trying to centralize it.

Is there a best practice for how frequent we should be updating our Google+? How many times a day should we be updating our Google+ accounts and how should we best be spending our time if we’re getting into using Google+?

Okay, so let’s look at it this way. You’re walking down the street in real life and all you said to somebody was, “hello,” and you went up to them 20 times a day and said, “hello.” You go, “well, that’s just a waste of time.” Where as you went up and deepen the conversation each time and you engage with them and you help them do things and you work collaboratively on projects and you gave them good content and people love that content.
That’s a very different relationship. I think the thing with Google+ is to focus on the people. Focus on the people who love what you do. That’s what you want is for people to fall in love with your personal brand and your business.
You put out as much content as people want to have and you test it.
Now, if somebody said, “I’m gonna force you to give a number of how many times,” I can say, “4 times to 8 times a day,” but the reality is the first month that you spend on Google+ you need to make it about other people anyway.
Go and +1 comments and share other people’s stuff. Then, once you’ve done that, that’s a bit like stocking your shop with their products and saying, “hey, I’m just going to stock your stuff because I value you. I want to build a relationship.”
Then, after a little while, and this is a good tip for starting off, you change some of those products and you put some of yours on the shelf. So you start sharing some of your blog content and start showing people who you are.
Once you’ve done that a while then you can start looking at the relationships and reciprocation and sharing some of theirs and sharing yours and finding out what gets a response.
If you’re posting rubbish and nobody cares then that isn’t any use. So, if it doesn’t get any engagement and continues to not get any engagement even if you’ve got a network then it may not be the right content for the network that you built.

Juicy Links:

Get in on the early bird discounts for Agents of Change!!
Check out Martin Shervington’s website for Google+ tips.
Looking at Google+ for business content? Check out Plus Your Business.
Connect with Martin Shervington on Twitter.
Watch how Martin Shervington sets up his Google+ circles.
Free stuff: www.plusyourbusiness.com/quickstarter-signup
Paid stuff: http://www.plusyourbusiness.com/circle-plus-system/
And be sure to leave a review for The Marketing Agents on iTunes

Rich Brooks
Google Plus Model

Return on Relationships with Ted Rubin

By Rich Brooks 04/26/2014

Are you getting a return on your relationships? Do you know how to give your small business authenticity on social platforms? Do you know how to connect, interact, and engage with your audience on a personal level?

If not, then you’re not alone. A lot of small businesses don’t know how to develop and nurture relationships with customers and clients that are mutually satisfying. By focusing more on ROR than ROI and talking about what matters to your audience, you can build an authentic social presence.

This week, we bring in marketing superstar Ted Rubin, co-author of Return on Relationships, to talk about being human in the digital age, and how to use social media to scale authenticity and engagement.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: RSS

Big Ideas:

You were CMO of e.l.f. Cosmetics. You basically tripled their revenue in 2 years. What was like that and how did it all come about?

It was really an interesting opportunity. They had started the company originally intending it to be a retail brand but they really didn’t have a lot of experience with the cosmetic industry. They were in the garment industry for many years. What they did have amazing experience with was manufacturing products in China.
They decided to bring out a line of products at a very inexpensive price point, but to compete (more in their minds and then hopefully in the consumers’ minds) with the prestige brands and basically with a perspective of you can get something very similar for a much less expensive price.
They quickly found out how incredibly hard it was to become in an inline brand at most retailers and it became, overnight, basically an e-commerce company.
They did have product in stores but it was mostly in retailers you wouldn’t expect to find them in like supermarkets, off-price goods chains, your dollar stores.
When I joined them they had built their company strictly on word of mouth – they never had a marketing budget – because they didn’t intend to be that kind of brand. They just didn’t have the money to dedicate to it but they had grown to have a very nice following of people that loved them.
They were looking to bring in somebody that wasn’t necessarily a cosmetics marketer, but someone that was more of a business development person, a digital marketer, who could make a lot of creative ideas on how to spread the word about them.
They had kind of hit a wall with traditional word of mouth and when I joined them in 2008 the social platforms like Facebook, Twitter, were really just starting to scale. YouTube was already a very big site but it wasn’t really being used as a place to promote a lot of consumer goods.
Things were starting to change and I saw a real opportunity to jump into that space in addition to doing a lot of the business development, creative ideas we did by leveraging about half a million people in their email marketing database (back then) – all women – I decided to approach a lot of major brands who wanted to speak to women and convince them that we have a database of women in a very aspirational state of mind.
When women are buying cosmetics they’re happy. Women love cosmetics. Whether they’re 17 or 70, you send a woman a box of cosmetics – even dollar cosmetics – they become little girls again.
I’m telling you. You can say this to a room full of corporate executives who might not ever admit this in a board room, but in an audience they’ll be shaking their heads.
Invariably, when I started sending out boxes of cosmetics to better understand the product the reply I would get the next day after they received the product was, “oh my god, thank you so much. I was up all night playing with my new stuff.”
Women play with cosmetics, so I saw a real opportunity in social here because I believe there is no social media without women and I had an aspirational product, a product women liked to play with, liked to share, liked to take photos, and I leveraged that.
I built them the largest social media presence for a cosmetics company back in the early days of social, back in late 2008 and 2009, before the likes of Sephora and L’oréal and Estée Lauder, were really allowed to do it, while they’re legal departments were still holding them up.
I had the good fortune to be involved in a couple of groups like the CMO club, and a few others where I spent time with guys like Jeffrey Hayzlett, who at the time was at Kodak, and Barry Judge, who was at Best Buy, who both were very early big believers of the power of social marketing and social media.
We’d brainstorm ideas and they’d kind of look at me and say, “you try it,” because I didn’t have a legal team to deal with and I could really do anything I wanted.
For me it was a tremendous opportunity to grow a brand and learn, experiment, and figure out this new medium. It’s really where I got my “social legs.” It was a fun, exciting time, and it really took hold.
One of the advantages were that we were one of the early companies that were really willing to engage in real time about real things, about things other than cosmetics, and the blogging world really appreciated it and jumped in with both feet.
We were able to leverage that and now, truth be told, e.l.f. is probably doing in excess of $100 million a year. I say “probably” because they’re still a family owned business and actually privately held. They recently sold the majority of the business to a large acquirer.
The company grew dramatically. People were sharing our products. I grew 100,000 Twitter followers back in 2009 when your average company was lucky to have a few thousand. AND we were actually communicating with these people, sharing with these people, saying things that most companies would never say.
I think we had 50,000 fans on Facebook back in 2009 or 2010 when I left.
We were sharing YouTube videos. I built the first aggregated content site for a major brand that automatically sucked in any content created about the brand in a site called Ask e.l.f. to the point where people were making videos of the cosmetics being used, how to do applications. Every single day there were videos being uploaded to YouTube and all they had to do was upload it, not even tell us about it, and we’d suck it in.
We had one of the early blogs in the consumer goods business. We had 250,000 followers of that blog and what we did was we just leveraged our social presence to grow our email database and in return we leveraged our email database to grow our social presence.
By the time I left, we had 2.5 million women in our email database and one of the largest social presences and when the company finally got a trial with Target, at the end of 2009, we sold through every single product brought in for that holiday promotion four weeks before Christmas. Bloggers from all of the country were taking pictures of the empty shelves and sending them to us.

What kind of things were you sharing online in social with your audience that wouldn’t necessarily be about, like “we’ve got a great new product, come check it out?”

We basically got into the whole lifestyle thing.
Here’s what we really did and this is so simple and anybody can do it. We listened.
We didn’t just push out information. We started not only listening to the conversations our followers were having with us, we listened to the conversations they were having with each other.
We watched what they were talking about on their Facebook pages.
We saw what was interesting to them. We found out very quickly and then we tested and we started putting up photos of New York City. We had a creative director who was young, loved New York, had moved here from Sacramento, she would write on the blog about her weekend adventures, about going and finding the best deals on clothes down in SoHo or all over Manhattan.
We got so much play from that. It wasn’t easy, but I had to convince management that THIS is valuable. People are coming back to our blog in droves versus how they were when all we were doing was writing about our cosmetics.

At my day job at flyte new media we don’t get the most engagement on our Facebook page, but the posts that tend to do well are when I take a photo of Casco bay first thing in the morning and say, “Good morning, Maine.” Those posts are the most liked, commented on, and shared more than anything else we do like, “3 Ways to Build Your Email List.”

Because you’re talking to people about things that matter to them.
The simple thing is I get a huge amount of engagement around taking a picture of a cocktail I’m drinking that night.
I don’t do it when I’m out. I don’t it when I’m home, it’s been a long day, “join me for a cocktail” and I post a picture of my martini.
I start getting emails. I start getting things on different platforms saying, “hey, I’ll join you. Here’s what I’m doing.”
People start sending me a picture of theirs or what they’re drinking. What does that do? That’s a door opener.
That doesn’t mean I only continue talking about cocktails – it’s like a cocktail party.
Most people, if you’re a business and throw a cocktail party, you’re not going there so people can throw back shots and not speak in between. You’re doing it because it creates an environment where people are comfortable engaging, building relationships, and talking about themselves and their businesses.
You’ve found a connector there. And guess what, our blog is part of our website. So when people are coming to our blog to read about what Michelle was doing downtown on a Saturday last weekend, they’re also one click away from looking at and buying product.

So, it sounded like you were using social to build your email database, and then using your email database to drive people back to social. Did I get that correct?

You did, except I want to correct one thing because of the order I said it in. We actually had our email database originally at that time because with the company social was kind of a new thing.
We got the jump start by using our email database but then it became a back and forth kind of thing.
We would promote our email signups, our subscription, and our newsletter via social and then we also got a lot of email when people just came for our products and joined our newsletter or just signed up to be a part of the site and then we would use that to drive people to Facebook – people asked how we did that – well, we talked about it in our newsletter. Like, “hey, come visit us on Facebook! Great interaction, special offers, etc.”
I mean we mixed it up. We did all different kinds of things and what we did was we supported each medium using the other medium.

Talk to us a little bit more about your blogger outreach program. How did all that come about? What exactly were you doing to get these bloggers? Did you ask them to talk about you or was it kind of implied? How did that all work?

First of all, let’s put a little bit of perspective around this. This was early days – 2008, 2009. Bloggers were not being as bombarded as they are now by brands asking them to do things.
What happened with me was I was fortunate enough to be in a very early Jeff Pulver event (Jeff runs the 140 conferences based around Twitter). His original name was Social Media Jungle. I was at an early event in 2008. I was there with Gary Vanderchuck, Chris Brogan, and I got to meet a lot of these guys a little bit early on and he had a VIP party and there were these five mom bloggers.
The real big push in the mom blogger movement started in about 2007 when my ex-partner from Collective Buys, John Andrew, started Wal-mart Moms and started recruiting mom bloggers to be a part of that.
So, four or five of these moms had also known John and I hadn’t met John yet but they were a part of this and they did a panel at Jeff’s event about bloggers and mom bloggers and I was fortunate enough to sit next to them at this dinner and we began talking and they heard I was from e.l.f. Cosmetics and they said, “that’s really cool. We’ve seen your product and wow, it certainly isn’t Trish McEvoy or Chanel but then again it’s a dollar a piece. That’s amazing! We’d love to get any product,” and I said, “Sure.” They said, “hey, we’ll be happy to write a post about it,” and I said, “terrific!”
Very quickly I realized the power of this and I didn’t ask them for anything and they were a little bit amazed, like, “wow, Ted sent us this whole box of cosmetics and didn’t even ask us to write a post!”
Because to me it was like, if they like it they’re gonna do that. I started learning very quickly that if I did it for them without asking they tended to deliver even more.
Beyond that, I was just myself I said, “hey, you know, you should be doing something like this on your site and you might want to change this,” and I started reaching out to them with help and they were like, “thanks. What can we do in return?” I said, “you don’t have to do anything in return. I want to be your friend. That’s what I do for my friends.”
So little by little this relationship started to develop with these bloggers and they started introducing me to their friends and and their friends and to more bloggers and then shortly thereafter I came up with this idea for “make-up at home parties.”
Unlike the companies that do these parties so they can sell product at the parties, I had no desire to sell product at the parties. I didn’t even want to go through that effort. I wanted to give product to women at home to have friends over just to introduce them to the product – just to give it away for free.
One of the bloggers, Audrey Maclellan, who was called Mom Generations, she’s a publishing business, she’s one of the lifetime moms, she’s very well known, Audrey called me up and she said, “you know I love this idea. How are you going to introduce it?” and I said, “well, you know I was thinking Blog Her is coming up, maybe I’d do a party there.” She goes, “You know what? Let me do the party with you and I’ll invite all the bloggers that should be there. Instead of the invite coming from you – where you’re just a brand and you’re asking them to come – it’ll be coming from me, their friend. Look, you’ve been so good to me I just want to help you out.”
It was a major thing, we had to turn away bloggers at the door. Blog Her got upset that I did this party that was unsanctioned. I reached out to them first and tried to partner with them but they were like, “$50,000 for this or $30,000 for that,” and I was like, hell, I’ll just rent a suite in a hotel and do this myself I had offered them tons of product. I offered them what I could offer them – product in exchange for something – and they had no interest which hey, it’s their business and they run it the way they want, and I didn’t get upset at all, I just pivoted and came up with a different idea.
Then a lot of these bloggers who were invited to the party had other parties that were involved with Blog Her and they asked me if I’d give them product for the parties and I ended up making a bigger splash at Blog Her than the premiere sponsor, McDonalds.
Again, my eyes just grew wider – look at the power of this community and take this and layer it on top of social platforms – you’ve got marketing on steroids.
When I say you don’t have to pay for it, there’s always a cost. It can be in time, in can be in product, it can be in friendship, it can be in delivering information, but to me the cost was obviously was exponentially less than buying media to accomplish the same thing.

Your book is called Return on Relationships and I know that there are people out there that don’t feel that relationships impact the bottom line. What do you say to these people?

I say, open your minds and use common sense.
Everybody prefers to do business with somebody they like versus somebody they don’t like. Everybody wants to have a good experience.
The way I define “return on relationships” is simply put, “the value accrued by a person or a brand due to nurturing a relationship.” Whereas ROI is simple dollars and cents, ROR is the value perceived in real, that you’ll accrue over time through loyalty, recommendations, sharing, and I use it to define and educate companies, brands, and people about the importance of creating authentic connection, interaction, and engagement.
I’ve never really sat across the table from somebody that’s said (unless they were looking to make a name for themselves or write something that gets them noticed), “relationships don’t add value.” What they say is, “how do you quantify it?” “What’s the ROI?” “How do I dig down right into their return on investment?”
First of all, what I like to correct, some people think it’s ROR vs. ROI. That is not even CLOSE to what I’m saying. What I’m saying is return on relationships will enhance ROI. We always need ROI. Even if it’s in your personal life, there needs to be some kind of value for things that you do.
Very few people will continually go on and on doing something unless they get something in return. When I say something indirect, I mean Rich doesn’t have to do something for me. I might do something for Rich because I know that other people will do for me because they know I did for Rich. They know that I was there. They know that you’re a good person and they want to help you.
What I try to make brands understand is that social media itself is very much like traditional branding. There’s not a company out there that hasn’t grown their brand, except for strictly direct marketing companies, by building their name and enhancing their reputation.
Tell me what the ROI is of a billboard in Times Square? Tell what me the ROI is of a TV commercial? You can’t track that directly through a click.
Social is now the most advanced way to build that ROR at scale. We can all do it in the store or over the phone, but to do it at scale, to let other people view how you’re doing it and participate vicariously, so many more people in addition to the ones you engage with become a part of that relationship because they see you having that relationship with others.
It then becomes a part of anything else that happens with your company. You share a voice, that brand perception, your net promoter score. These are all things that say how quickly and easily will someone recommend you. How many people know about you and think of you in a good light?
Those are very important things and the problem is a lot of people think when I say, “relationship,” that it’s the same relationship Rich Brooks and Ted Rubin will have. We’re two individuals. We met each other. We’re going to meet each other personally. We can actually hug each other face-to-face. We can shake each others’ hands.
Whereas, a relationship with a brand isn’t the same thing. Experts will say, “people don’t want relationships with brands,” – of course they do! What they want is a relationship with a person at the brand. They want to know that that customer service person, that vice president, that general manager, that store clerk, says, “oh, Rich is here.” Or, even if they don’t know Rich, treats him as if he’s a friend. He is somebody they care about. There’s some value to what they’re giving him.
Those relationships enhance business across the board especially (and I think you’re market and the listeners to your podcast) small to mid-sized businesses. That value to a small to mid-sized business is even way more than a large multi-national company.
Those relationships make a difference. The way someone feels about your company makes it much more likely for them to come back.
Let’s break it down to something really simple – trust and loyalty. If somebody trusts you, they’re going to be loyal to you. If they’re loyal to you you’re going to make more money off that relationship as a business. You’re going to have a longer lifetime value from your customer and these are things that every corporate executive understands – lifetime value of a customer, average order value, and frequency of purchase.

How can we as entrepreneurs and small business people as non profiteers make our help and our relationships more authentic in this space when so many other people seem to be jumping into the space screaming, “no, I’m all about relationships and I’m all about people!”

Listen, every person will one day see through a poseur.
If it’s not authentic and it’s not really who you are, if you’re not true about it, if you’re not willing to do for others without any expectation of something directly in return, people are going to figure that out very quickly.
What I like to say is in someways it’s a better opportunity than it was before because there’s all these fakers out there and if you’re authentic and if you’re real and you’re actually trying to help people.
I love the movie Miracle on 34th Street. One of the scenes I love best is when Santa starts sending the customers to Gimbels from Macy’s because Macy’s doesn’t have the product. The general manager freaks out and is like, “oh my god, I don’t care if they have better product they’re here to buy.” My Macy says, “oh my god, what a fabulous marketing idea. Of course we should send them there then we’re the good guy. We’re the one that’s looking out for our customers and not just trying to sell them something.” So in the long run, that will make you more money. It’s not just about the extra buck.
I really believe that. There’s a lot of people that say that’s crap and nobody really cares, they only care about what they can get cheapest today. But I think there’s a big change going on. I think that we went through this dramatic change from small business, local businesses to mass marketers where people wanted to be anonymous. They just wanted to buy at the cheapest price and they didn’t care.
I think the world is making a major shift. I think things are coming back mainly because of the ability to share because of how much information is available. Because a change in generation. Millennials care about companies that care about people. They care about more than just the cheapest price. They’re different people. It’s not just them. All of us are coming that way.
First of all, we’re following our children. Second, we’re following their lead. Third, we’re recognizing the same things. We want our world to be a better place. We want cleaner air. We want better food products. Look at Chipotle that makes a series of TV shows called Farmed and Dangerous making light of but giving education about the dangers of corporate food manufacturing. They put a lot of their marketing budget into these films that made fun of an industry and did it through storytelling and content and were able to tell the story of why their product is better without saying, “our product is better,” but by explaining what happens in most food processing.
That was remarkable and now there’s a lot of other companies saying how can we be doing the same, but the only way you can be doing the same is that you’re authentic because if you’re a company that is using those processes you can’t do the same story. Again, if you’re legitimate and you try to help people and I buy your product and I call up and I say, “hey, you’re gonna have customer service whenever you need it,” and then I can’t get it over the weekend or I call up and I told, “we’ll only give you answers as to why your product isn’t working for the first 90 days, now you have to pay us $39/year.” I’m sure you’ve experienced that.
I’ve bought wireless devices and I call up and I’m told, “oh yeah, it can be reprogrammed but you’re not on our new programming,” and I’m like, “goodbye. I’m gonna go buy somebody else’s wireless router. I’m not gonna buy from Linksys anymore,” because Linksys is now charging me to fix a product that’s not working and it’s as simple as an upgrade in the software they do over the phone. Meanwhile, when they’re marketing their products they’re saying, “we’re here to serve you and to help you.” Now granted, initially they’re probably going to up their profit margins, but over the course of time I go into homes and I don’t even see Linksys routers anymore.
- Because things are so public these days and they’re shared so quickly, that when a company is not being authentic that they’re outed a lot sooner and social media has accelerated the pace that we discover what brands aren’t being authentic.
They’ve accelerated that process. Here’s the problem. Because so many things have accelerated, what brands and companies assume is that building a social presence and making it pay and seeing the ROI can happen overnight.
They want to see the ROI the same way they do when they buy a Google ad or even put up a banner. What they have to understand is that because social media, social marketing, and social relationships live so much on digital platforms, companies make the mistake of believing that they’re digital marketing and they’re not.
You can’t measure them like search, like banners, like email. You have to measure them more the way you’d measure your branding efforts, your experiences with people on the street, your billboards, your radio, your TV.
There are things that take time to show up in the numbers and you have to be looking at them quarter to quarter, year to year, and not minute to minute. That’s not where you’re going to see the results. Now, if you buy a Facebook ad or a Twitter promoted tweet, that’s an advertisement, that’s not social marketing. That’s advertising on social platforms.
Don’t mix that up with building shareable content, engaging, interacting, and building relationships.

Juicy Links:

Get in on the early bird discounts for Agents of Change!!
Google Ted Rubin!
Check out Ted Rubin’s website.
Connect with Ted Rubin on Twitter.
Connect with Ted Rubin on Facebook.
And be sure to leave a review for The Marketing Agents on iTunes

Rich Brooks
Relationship carpenter.