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Susan McLennan PR and Content Marketing Strategy
Susan: Adele Revella is the CEO of the Buyer Persona Institute. She founded the organization building on insights she gained as VP of sales, marketing, and product management for three B2B technology companies, and from her work at a PR firm that launched some of the most important tech companies in the world, including Apple.Over time, she came to understand how fundamental the buyer persona is to absolutely every piece of marketing, and she realized that most companies were including too much frivolous information that threatened their values and resulted in way too many buyer personas. Through buyer persona research, workshops, and consultation, Buyer Persona Institute helps marketers cut through the clutter and understand the real decisions that influence their buyers’ decisions.I have actually seen Adele in action at a workshop and taken her classes, and they’re wonderful. Adele, thank you very much for being here. It’s great to have you.
Adele: Well, thank you for asking me, Susan. As you know, this is my favorite topic. I’m thrilled to be here.
Susan: How important do you think content marketing as a whole is in the mix today?
Adele: Goodness. Content marketing is everything. Matter of fact, I had an experience just this weekend where I decided I needed to hire an administrative assistant. I went out on Google, googled “administrative assistant,” found a woman through a blog post that she had published at an organization she participated in, and I just hired her.
This is the kind of thing that happens every day. Your buyers are out looking for you. You don’t know how they’re looking for you, and if you can publish content that’s where they’re looking, they’re going to find you and you’re going to have their business. You can publish the kind of information she did that spoke so directly and perfectly to my needs that it was just a no-brainer that she was the one I was looking for.
Susan: I wonder if she’d created a buyer persona for you. [chuckles]
Adele: I don’t think so, and I think that that’s interesting. I think when companies are very narrowly focused and really small, as she is, she’s really just an individual contributor and sole practitioner, I think that they already intuitively know their buyers. I think what’s really different and I know what’s different about what happens once we get inside a company is we’ve got many products, we’ve got many different types of buyers. We’ve grown up, and now there are lots of different pieces and parts moving, getting aligned around who that buyer is is a much more complex task. We don’t, in the ordinary course of our business, have an opportunity to really understand our buyer at the level that Bonnie, this lady, understands her buyer.
That’s really what buyer personas are about. It’s about being able to get the kind of insight that an entrepreneur who starts their business just to solve this problem probably already had that buyer in mind, knew them well, and saw that problem. That’s why they started the company. But I’ll tell you what, that goes away really quickly as you grow.
Susan: So, tell me a bit about a buyer persona. Who needs them? What, specifically, are they? What problems do they solve?
Adele: What the buyer persona is, and a lot of people are confused about this, is people are building a profile of the person. They’re calling that a persona. It just describes the person they want to market to. This is what’s causing all the trouble. We need to know, as content marketers, as marketers in general, we need to actually model and profile more than the person. We need to profile the decision, the buying decision, that we want to influence. That’s the part that tells us for this person, for the person we’re targeting, what factors into their decision. How do they make that decision? What triggers that decision? How do they go about choosing us, or choosing a competitor, or choosing the status quo? Why do they make the decisions and choices that they do along the way?
So, a buyer persona isn’t just a persona. A persona would be the person, but a buyer persona should model the decision as well as the person making it.
Susan: It’s a great shift in thinking. I know, from personal experience, when you really start looking at that decision and focusing the conversation around that way, really your personas become much clearer and much more useful.
Adele: Yes, exactly. Yeah. The part that I’m working to change through the Buyer Persona Institute is to try to create a standard in the industry that if you’ve got a medium-to-high consideration product, service, or solution you want to market, it isn’t enough. It might be OK for very low-consideration products to know whether the buyer is married or not, whether they have children, and their hobbies. But honestly, when the buyer is spending weeks, months, or even years evaluating their options, finding out whether or not they are snow skiers or whether they’re married is really irrelevant to us. What is terribly relevant is everything that’s going on for them as they’re making that choice. That’s the big shift that we’re trying to make in understanding our buyer personas.
Susan: How important is it to actually talk to the buyers?
Adele: Well, it’s extremely important that someone conduct an unscripted interview with a buyer that goes into detail about how they actually make these decisions. This is another area that’s pretty troubling for me. There are a lot of people out there saying, “You can build your buyer personas off of internal data, or things that your salespeople tell you, or social media interactions.”
The fact is that the information we really need… we call this the five rings of buying insight around the buyer persona, how, why, and when they make a decision that we want to influence as marketers. Those insights have never been disclosed or discussed with anyone, and you can’t get that picture without actually having a conversation with the buyer. The funny thing is, it’s pretty simple to do that, and yet it’s just so new to marketers that a lot of people just haven’t developed the skill to do that, or it’s just sort of out of their range of reality that you could even get on the phone and talk to the buyer. They tell you precisely what you need to know in order to be a more effective marketer.
Susan: What are some of the ways you are able to reach the people that you need to talk to?
Adele: There’s a number of ways to do that. What we like to do with people that… we do a lot of research for our clients, and then we also do a lot of training for marketers that want to do this work themselves. So, if the marketer wants to do this themselves, then what we try to do is get them to interview the people that are the easiest to find and the easiest to recruit for these interviews, and also where it’s easiest to get these insights. That is to find a list of people who have recently been in the buying experience. They just made a decision either for you or for a competitor, or they’ve made a decision to stay with the status quo, and if you can get that list, about three out of ten of those people will usually talk to you, and they’ll be very forthcoming about how they just made this decision, why they made the decision, what triggered that decision.
People sometimes think, “Well, gosh. How could that be the right person to interview?” The fact is, there’s every reason to believe that the people who have just made this decision are very similar to the people who you want to make the decision next week or next month. So, we’re really capturing from a real buyer, and not having to have a hypothetical discussion, but rather have a real discussion about the very things that we expect to influence with the buyers that are coming into, or that we hope to persuade in the upcoming period of time.
The only exception to that is when we have new products that we’re bringing into market. That’s where we generally say, “You know, you’re probably going to need to hire someone to do that work for you,” because it takes a little bit more skill to do those interviews.
Susan: So, let’s say there’s a marketer who gets this, who’s really on [type], but they might be getting some pushback from the C-suite. What kind of pushback do you traditionally see from the C-suite on this kind of exploration, and what would you say that a marketer could tell the C-suite about why this is so important?
Adele: That’s a great question, Susan. I think a big part of my focus on this work comes from the fact that I was a sales executive as well as a marketing executive in my career, and I find it just fascinating that people take for granted the fact that a salesperson needs to listen to the buyer they have to persuade before they have to make a pitch. As a matter of fact, there’s all sorts of training curriculums, all of them that say to the sales reps that you should never go into your first meeting and just present your solution. First, you should listen to the buyer.
Yet, by contrast, marketing is expected to go out and pitch to buyers every day without ever listening to them. This is just illogical to me. If you really think about it from this perspective, the main difference between sales and marketing is that salespeople persuade one buyer at a time, while marketers persuade markets full of buyers, which is harder. I guarantee persuading markets full of buyers is harder than persuading one buyer at a time. Yet, salespeople have the permission, the training, and the opportunity to listen to their buyers before they have to speak, while marketing has none of that.
This is my primary message to the C-suite. Explain to me how that’s supposed to work. If you think that’s a good idea, let’s just have your salespeople do that for the next six months and see how good a job they do.
Susan: [laughter] That’s wonderful. [laughter] Let’s see how the company does.
Adele: [chuckles] Do you think I might be being too hard on this? I don’t know. But I really …
Susan: No, I don’t think so, because I think people really need to know. I think there’s a lot of energy all over the place expended on the wrong things, and you’re doing people a big favor if you can shine a light on that. It may be hard to hear, and it may not be what people want to hear, but they have to hear it if they’re going to grow, or even survive, in this day and age.
Adele: You know, one of my interviewers that’s working on a research project for us, this morning he got off a call with one of the buyers. I was debriefing him about the interview, and he said, “Adele, I feel like I’m cheating.” And I said, “Precisely.” Getting to interview the buyers before you have to market to them is like cheating. You already know what you need to say.
So, I’m promoting that. I think we should cheat. I think before we have to sit down and write the content, write those few words that are going to be the headline of the email, and figure out what our white paper topic should be. I think we should cheat. I think we should go out and find out… a very simple idea. Let’s talk to the buyers and find out what they want to hear first.
Susan: It’s such a simple idea, but it takes the friction away when you are in alignment, you can use their language, and you have a real understanding of the exact moment where things go right or go wrong. I know in your process you keep bringing people back to that moment so that you can really, really understand that critical point where they are making a decision for you or against you. Yet, we do. We just throw it aside as if it’s the sort of thing… it’s like handing car keys to somebody and saying, “You’re 16. Congratulations, there’s the car.” [laughter]
Adele: [laughter] Exactly. Yeah. The funny thing is, and I did put a short… I think there’s a four- or five-slide deck out on SlideShare.net/BuyerPersona that are the five slides on how to explain this to your C-suite, to explain to your executives why you wanted to interview your buyers. This is one of the key questions people have, and it is a key obstacle. Yet, I have never once had a C-level buyer argue with me about that exact reasoning, that marketing shouldn’t be asked to persuade buyers before we understand what’s relevant to them.Susan: I’ll make sure I put a link to those SlideShare presentations. That’s great to have. Thank you.Adele: Yeah.
Susan: [chuckles] I can imagine all the frantic people you’ve got saying, “How do I convince them?” [laughter]
Adele: Yes, exactly.
Susan: And maybe some of it is just that they’re not… maybe, too, marketers are limiting themselves. I’ve seen this as well where marketers make assumptions about the limitations that the C-suite will impose upon them, but they actually get this sort of thing more than, perhaps, they’re given credit for.
Adele: Yeah. I think the biggest barriers actually are not the C-suite. The biggest barriers are that marketers are so busy in a production mode, delivering content, and churning out all the work that we have to churn out. The idea of stopping to learn a new skill… because it is a new skill, by the way. You can’t… most people. There are probably a few people who can just jump on the phone and just figure out how to get to these insights, but most people are going to need some training to do that. It’s not lengthy. It’s just a couple of hours of training, but it’s something brand-new. I think a lot of us have been doing our job for a long time, and we’re really comfortable just doing the things we do all day, and it’s a little bit of a step outside of our comfort zone to say we’re going to start phoning people up and asking them questions, and then learning how to get to, really, the insight.
So, that’s why we built our framework, to make it really clear which insights you need. You only need five things that you need to know. Then, also we made our training available so readily, already pre-recorded and packaged up so that people can come and listen to it, they can listen to it again and again, and they can get really comfortable with that. Like anything else, it’s a new skill. I think that’s actually the bigger barrier than the C-suite.
Susan: You know, I think you’re right. I also think that there’s a trap that marketers fall into, which is, “I know my audience.” It’s very hard to challenge yourself sometimes to say, “Well, I may have known them when I first started this, or maybe there’s more I need to learn about them, or maybe I don’t know them as well as I think I do.” But there is that sense of, “No, I know these people, and I can speak for them,” without continually going back and getting that deeper understanding. I think that’s a barrier, too.
Adele: Yeah. I hear that occasionally, mostly from people who used to be the buyer. Maybe when they came into their role they were hired because they had the job that was similar to the people that they’re now marketing to. That’s where I usually hear that.
Things change, and unless you… I once hired somebody back when I ran product management and product marketing. We were doing networking solutions, and I hired a guy who ran the world’s largest enterprise network for State Farm. I thought this was such a grand hire, because he exactly understood the problems that our buyers faced, and in fact it didn’t work out and he ended up leaving us after a very short period of time. The real problem was that he did, literally, work for the world’s largest enterprise network. Well, that wasn’t our target market. That was one company. A whole bunch of our clients worked in companies that were much smaller than that, and his experience in that company actually stopped him from being curious about how other buyers thought.
So, that’s the other reason why we train marketers to do this. We literally say that we want you to conduct six to eight interviews before you build your buyer persona, but then we want you to conduct one interview a month for the rest of your life, because things change. Competitors come into the market, and the priorities change. There’s all sorts of change that’s going on out there in your buyers’ world. This is about, not just the demographics, because you probably know that, but really what’s going on in their minds while they’re making these decisions.
Susan: This is kind of off topic, but something that has stayed with me was working on a project with Earthquake Preparedness in Vancouver. All of these emergency planners had been working on… OK. So, here’s what we have to do. When the earthquake happens, we have to get everybody to this hospital, this hospital, and then that hospital. This is the order, and these are the routes. These are the routes that are likely to stay safe, and here are the challenges we’re going to face. Everybody was really happy with that, working on that for years and years and years. And somebody piped up their hand, who was kind of a last minute invite to this meeting. Somebody threw up their hand and said, “Just a quick point. The hospitals were actually built before code, so they’ll be the first things to collapse.” [laughter]
Adele: [laughter]
Susan: So, for years and years and years everybody had been working on certain assumptions, and then all of a sudden the world changed and everybody suddenly realized, “We have to reverse-engineer everything we ever thought about this.” [laughter]
Adele: Yeah.
Susan: But it was only because they decided to open up the field and start inviting people who they actually thought were rather peripheral to the conversation.
Adele: Yeah, the real insights come from the most amazing places. People often ask me about the attributes of a really good marketer, and sometimes there’s things on social media, “What’s the one thing that a good marketer needs to have as an attribute or a trait?” I always say curiosity.
Susan: Yeah. I think…
Adele: Curiosity.
Susan: Totally. It’s…
Adele: Yeah. Never stop being curious about how people think. There’s so much we have to learn. We should be lifelong learners.
Susan: That’s really it. Lots of marketers want to be lifelong talkers, and we really have to be lifelong listeners.
Adele: [laughter] Exactly. Yeah. It’s a basic thing. There’s all these silly jokes, you know? You were given two ears and one mouth for a reason, and we just don’t listen enough.
Susan: [laughter] I think you’re absolutely right. Is there one thing that you think everybody absolutely needs to know about a buyer persona before we sign off?
Adele: I think this is really a new way for most marketers to think. I think that the biggest problem people have with buyer personas is they take their existing ideas about their market, their demographics, “We sell to this guy with this title in this industry in this geography,” and then they layer on top of it, “OK. Now, we’re going to go profile this guy.”
Actually, good work on buyer personas starts somewhere else altogether. It starts with, “What decisions do we want to influence?” And it starts by interviewing somebody who’s been involved in making that kind of decision to find out, really and truly, who was involved in that decision, and what’s different about how different buyers make that decision.
What we find is when we take that approach, when we start with a decision rather than our ideas about segmentation strategies and demographics, we end up with far fewer buyer personas, and we end up with the insights we really need to be able to impact and affect those decisions. Just really critical.
Susan: That’s a good question. How many buyer personas do you think the average organization needs?
Adele: Half as many as you think you do.
Susan: Yeah.
Adele: There’s just no way to answer that. But it’s always fewer than you think you do, because you’re trying to model the buying decision and not the person. Just because I have a different job title or I’m in a different geography… we have one client that we are building buyer personas for all of their 2014 planning. This is one of the five largest software companies in the world. No one can tell me how many products they have. Probably thousands. They have 1600 people in marketing, and we’re only building ten buyer personas.
Susan: Wow.
Adele: They have marketers in every corner of the world, and we’re only building ten buyer personas.
Susan: That’s fascinating. You arrived at that number of ten by your preliminary research and said, “Gee. Just looking at how these decisions are being made, this is how they’re coming together.’
Adele: We looked at it by looking at what were the decisions that the company strategically most wanted to influence this year, and they said are big market opportunities. We actually got involved with their planning cycle and looked at it. And again, a ginormous company. This is, like I said, huge. We said, “Where are we going to get the most bang for the buck in terms of building buyer personas?” Well, it’s going to be finding parts of the market where we know it’s a big strategical for the year. We know we don’t have all the insight we could to be effective here, and there’s a lot of competitive activity. There’s a lot going on in this space. Now, let’s just go find out who’s involved in that buying decision, and that’s where our research comes in. Then, let’s build personas for those people.
Susan: And it’s critical, too, to get this phase of things right at the planning table. The earlier you have a seat at the table, the better.
Adele: Yeah. And this is, again… Now we’re kind of drifting off of content marketing into the use of buyer personas for real strategic work, and that’s good, Susan, because the fact is that buyer personas can be applied to solve so many problems in the company. Ideally, we’re at the very front end of the strip strategy work.
I just recently wrote an article, and it was republished on my blog recently at BuyerPersona.com, about my vision for marketing and what really drives the work we do is that marketing ROI, marketing’s value, is measured in part… not exclusively, because we’ve still got to deliver all that content, there’s still a lot of leads we’ve got to deliver. We’ve got to do all that. But in addition, I want this whole other dimension of the way we’re measured that’s around the strategic value we bring to the company.
We’re really buyer experts, and this is the real goal of buyer personas. It’s to become an expert, to know that buyer better than anyone else in the company, so that you can predict, with great clarity, where the company is going to be successful, and what it needs to do to be successful.
Susan: Adele Revella from the Buyer Institute. Thank you very much. That was great talking with you.
Adele: Yep. Thank you, Susan. Thank you again so much for having me today. It’s been my pleasure to be here and talk to your folks.
The post Adele Revella Podcast Transcript appeared first on ReimaginePr.com.
Adele Revella is the CEO of the Buyer Persona Institute and helps marketers understand the real decisions that influence buyer decisions.
Over time, she came to understand how fundamental the buyer persona is to absolutely every piece of marketing. She also came to realize that most companies were including too much frivolous information that threatens their value and results in too many buyer personas.
Through buyer persona research, workshops, and consultation, Buyer Persona Institute helps marketers cut through the clutter and understand the real decisions that influence their buyers’ decisions.
It’s worth checking out The Buyer Institute’s Slideshare channel as well, which is brimming with really useful information.
In this podcast, you’ll learn what makes a good persona and how that differs from a profile, what many people mistakenly build instead of a persona.
This podcast is particularly geared for businesses whose customers have a high level of consideration when making a buying decision, in other words, pricey enough such that days, weeks or even years go into deciding on a product, service or offering. She will give you insights into building a great persona that will help you market more effectively to your target audience.
Read the transcript here!
The post Podcast 001: Adele Revella appeared first on ReimaginePr.com.
Susan: So this week I’m here with Clif Dikens he’s a freelance graphic designer in Nashville, Tennessee with a BA in integrated strategic communications and he is also the wonderful mind behind Honestslogans.com. Welcome, Cliff.Clif: Thank you very much, I’m glad to be here.Susan: So, what was your reason for creating Honest Slogans?
Clif: Well, to go back to the very beginning as far as the catalyst that made me start doing it was I was at a restaurant with my friend and I ordered a Coke, as I say. I don’t know if it’s a North South thing, some people say soda, they say pop when you’re just saying something generally.
When I say Coke because I want a Coca-Cola, and the waitress already had it in her head to say “Oh, is Pepsi okay?” and I just realized that everyone seems to say that because when they don’t have it, they’re just kind of saying “Well, I’m sorry we don’t have what you want, and what is better, but is Pepsi okay, will you be okay to resort to this lower quality soda?” So he and I just kind of joked about that. Like wouldn’t it be funny if Pepsi actually just full transparency mode admitted, hey, we’re not as good as Coke, but is it okay for you to have at this restaurant, please?
With my creative knowing, Photoshop and InDesign and Illustrator, as far as having the tools and the outlet for creating it, I decided it would be funny to start a site of doing it. And I didn’t, honestslogans.com wasn’t taken, and the Tumblr wasn’t taken so I just started with that one. And from there on out it was just kind of an audience of one and a few people I would show that saw the ones I would put up, but I was still having fun with it. So it kind of just started as a joke, as it is anyway I guess.
But it started out as something that I didn’t expect would necessarily get any notice and any time I would think of one I would put it in. I would make little notes on my phone or in my journal, when I get free time I would make one, and yeah, that’s kind of how it started, and luckily like I said, just recently it’s been pretty highly recognized. So now it’s great to see whenever I post one it gets positive reception.
Susan: I think it, you know, you’re really tapped into something on a whole bunch of levels. They’re wonderfully clever.
Clif: Thank you.
Susan: But they’re absolutely what every one of us is thinking. I look at your slogans and go “Yeah, that’s pretty much it.”
Clif: And that’s what I love to hear. I love to hear that because I want it to be something that everybody can look at, at least the majority, and nod their head and say “Uh-huh, yup, that’s how Sears is or that’s what I do on iTunes. And that’s what I love about it is finding those idiosyncratic things about a brand because they exist and everyone knows they do. And unfortunately, or not unfortunately, it’s not always in the most tasteful way. Like Kmart, we still exist is a little bit cruel. I get it. But at the same time they would even agree that yeah, it is kind of crazy that we’re still a company. But, you know, I mainly mean it in a positive, in a very tasteful way.
Susan: I actually think, and I was thinking about this, I think you are, if brands were deeply honest with themselves, I think you’re doing them a great favor.
Clif: Oh.
Susan: I thought about this today. Because I think you are in some ways like the white hat hackers who go in and find where the weaknesses are and gone back to the companies and said, “Hey, have you thought about this? Because the rest of us are.”
Clif: Right, exactly, and that’s kind of what I like about it is if anything it’s just giving them exposure and confirming to them what people think about their brand, which is what they’re trying to advertise to anyway. So I hope that it’s helping them.
Susan: I think it does because I think what it probably does, I think the smarter marketers among them, and I think some of them have some very good marketers, I think many of them are probably going into the c-suite and saying you know what, it’s a whole new era out there, we actually don’t have the control of the brand that we used to, it doesn’t work that way. The world has changed and now they can point to your site and say okay, so this is how the world sees us, this is actually a pretty honest representation of how a lot of people see us, what do we need? It used to be as a brand you could say, well, you know, you would create your value statement and you’d say “this is what we are”, and you would have everybody memorize and put it in handbooks and everybody would parrot it back.
Clif: Right.
Susan: And I think those days have come and gone. And I don’t think a lot of brands, particularly those that are kind of sloping, a lot of the ones that you kind of parody, I don’t think that they have quite, they may say that they get it, they think social media is a tool not a way of being. And I think that what you’re doing is holding that mirror up, it’s like the emperor with no clothes.
Clif: Right.
Susan: We’re looking at them and saying gee, you’re kind of naked there, and you’re the first one I think who has said “Here’s the mirror, king, maybe you should put a fig leaf on.
Clif: Exactly, I agree and that’s something I’ve noticed and I think a lot of people have noticed, but fortunately at least for me, I’m the first to have put it out in some kind of outlet for people to agree with and for hopefully advertisers and their companies to see this is kind of the way it’s going now. And with the social media, everyone has a voice, everyone has their pedestal they can get on now and talk about anything. And companies have to be transparent anymore. Look on Facebook, or excuse me, Twitter, almost every company has a Twitter support or Twitter handle that they deal with customers, say someone’s unhappy, they want to publicly, and privately I guess, they want to help this person because everyone can hear anything anyone’s saying about anything anymore.
And like you said, it used to be completely different. I was born in ’86, but even when I was growing up, noticing advertising, it was a one way conversation, or not even conversation, it was the advertiser saying here’s what this brand is, here, like it, here, buy it, do this, and you didn’t really have a way of saying anything, the only way you could rebel sort of is just not to buy it, but now, yeah, it’s such a different conversation.
With social media exploding the way it has, what’s interesting is when I was going to school, social media wasn’t a thing we talked about. I graduated in ’09, but even then it wasn’t something that, it really didn’t have a handle, no one knew exactly what it was going to be like and I actually went back, I went back to UK earlier this year and spoke on a panel about my major and now that’s the thing is if you know social media, you’re in, you at least have an in to some degree. Because it’s all about talking to the people and being in the, you know, a spokesperson for this company to the people that are consuming or using that product.
Susan: Or even the listening, you know, that’s the thing that brands haven’t done well is listen. But we also find, it’s interesting that you would say in 2009, saying that schools weren’t up to date. We have found that a lot of the schools across the board wherever they are are way behind. They’re still being taught things that made a lot of sense ten years ago and are not reflective of the way the world is today.
Clif: Right. Yeah, it changes in such drastic ways it seems like. Like I said, in 2009 wasn’t that long ago at all. But things change by the month now it seems.
Susan: Have you ever had a response from any brands, anybody saying “Hey, how dare you?” or anybody saying “Hey, thanks, we needed to hear that”?
Clif: You know, every morning I wake up and before I check my inbox, I always wonder if I’m going to see one from Kmart or DiGiorno or something. But, luckily, or I guess luckily, I haven’t heard from any of them, at least not directly. I’ve heard from people who I worked for advertising for those companies, for that brand, that they were a client and they disagree with me. They just confirm to me that, yup, that’s what it is, you’re right. Which even more affirms as you said, that’s just the way it is now. Going on that full transparency. So I haven’t heard from any. We’ll see if I do in the future.
Susan: Because I think your site isn’t going anywhere. I think it’s such a wonderful commentary because it does strike a vein and I think we live in this era of kind of post-brand loyalty. Or, you know, the concept that we used to establish our brand loyalties and always buy them, well that’s out the window, we no longer do that.
Clif: Right.
Susan: We go by a whole bunch of motivating factors now that cause us to have a relationship with a brand and it’s just not because we had X number of touch points and people have pushed things at us, it’s a much more complicated relationship now. So I ultimately think that what you are doing will help brands really fully understand in a very “oh my goodness” immediate way.
Clif: Right.
Susan: How they’re being perceived. And you’re doing it through humor, it’s such a wonderful gift to be able to do that.
Clif: Well, thank you very much.
Susan: I mean, I guess it all came together in that moment. Oh, I’ll do this one and then it led to others. You didn’t sit down and you weren’t strategic about it, it was hey, this is fun.
Clif: It was pretty impulsive, my brain is with almost anything else. It wasn’t like as far as a grid laid out, but it was definitely something that I had in me. What’s real interesting about this too, to see the reception and remember, oh, I sat on my couch at 3:00 am designing and coming up with this because I just found it humorous. I know these products. A lot of it did come from my studying in college, but also my acknowledgment of what these brands really stood for. And a lot of them, as you’ll notice, they’re very dated. They have a time stamp or they’re incredibly esoteric that only a few people might seem to get it, or they might have gotten it a year ago when it was relevant.
For example, the Chik-Fil-A one, we didn’t invent the chicken, just a teenage girl on Facebook. Now, even a year and some months later that doesn’t make sense to some people, but in that week of news when that was going on was when that whole fiasco with gay marriage and Chik-Fil-A was going on and they did that thing where they just created some false profile on Facebook and started creating, it was exposed that that was fake. And of course with social media, that blew up, that was what everyone was talking about was that.
So that one makes sense for that specifically. But now if I was going to do one for Chik-Fil-A it would probably be about oh, I only want your chicken on Sunday when you’re not open. Because that seems to be something that everyone that I talk-
Susan: Humor is very topical, you know? Humor doesn’t always, sometimes what’s funny now, as you point out, not funny a year from now. And vice versa. What do you think brands need to know about how millennials relate to brands differently than say their parents or their grandparents did?
Clif: Well I think one thing that’s definitely different is their exposure to so many different brands and the overflow of different products in the same realm. It used to be you’d see an ad on television or in a magazine, but now as we’ve said, or as I said before, with social media, there’s so many things that they’re exposed to and there’s so much they can find out about said company. Just as I said before that the transparency of a brand anymore is just phenomenal. You can find out anything, nothing is sacred, so to speak, there’s nothing that can really be covered up. So I think the PR that companies and products have to deal with now makes it a lot different than for my parents and for children’s parents now.
Susan: And yet they seem to have rejected so much, they are, I think in many ways much more critical in their thinking. They don’t just accept a brand’s word. They are bombarded.
Clif: Right.
Susan: And maybe that’s why. When you are bombarded by that many messages, you simply can’t believe all of them, or even a portion of them. Or a big portion of them. You know, you have to reject most of them.
Clif: Exactly, yeah. Sprint.
Susan: It’s fascinating from that perspective. It’s certainly harder for advertisers; I think it’s better for people. It’s certainly harder for brands, you know?
Clif: It really is, it’s harder to find a niche.
Susan: You know, it is. What kind of trends do you think we might see in the advertising world? Around brands.
Clif: It’s an interesting point. I really, I don’t think as far as a physical advertising aspect, a lot of people thinking print’s going to die, which I guess in a sense it is. But I always feel that that traditional idea of advertising is going to stick around for a lot longer than people expect it will. Social media is very useful and it’s interesting, but I don’t think that it has a strong enough hold on the changing aspect of advertising that the roots of advertising has.
I don’t know if that makes any sense, but I just feel like in the near future, it’s going to be I think about the way it is now, but I think print advertising will stick around for a good deal longer. But I think the main struggle will be about staying relevant because right now and the truth is millennials would really rather be on their device, their computer, their smartphone, you know? As they, that’s where they want to be. But I don’t know if that’s enough, if that’s going to make a general change in advertising in the near future, but I could be totally wrong. I think that’s the thing too is it’s interesting actually, before this interview I was reading, I was looking over the Ogilvy on Ogilvy book, Ogilvy and Mather.
Susan: Yeah.
Clif: And at the back of it he had his predictions of how he thinks advertising is going to be in the future. And I wish I had it with me, sorry, but every single one of them is way off. And that doesn’t mean he wasn’t perceptive, it just means there’s no way to really know. That’s what the scary thing is. It’s scary to me also being a creative person, I think you just don’t know where that inspiration necessarily comes from or when it might stop, you just have to run with it. Which is hard to do in such a huge business as is advertising. And I think what’s scary for brands is that they want to be relevant, but they don’t want to just throw everything that they’ve done out the window.
Susan: Yeah. And you got a huge amount of talent and trying to shift old ways of thinking and it’s a fundamental shift where we as brands, the whole concept was to create your product as the hero in somebody’s life, and I think that the thing we’ve all come to realize is that in fact people are the heroes in their own lives. And brands fit into them when we want them to and it’s not the other way around. And that’s a fundamental shift.
Clif: Right.
Susan: Because all of advertising, whether it’s woman singing with a mop because it saved her, whatever it was, it was always about that hero brand.
Clif: Exactly.
Susan: And that’s out the window now. And that’s a really hard shift for people. And yet there’s some great, what you do is wonderful storytelling. It’s using the best in humor. It may not be exactly as brands would like it to be, but it’s extremely truthful and insightful, it resonates, it’s all the things that you want advertising to be, really what you’re doing is yours is a public service, that’s how I look at it.
Clif: Right. Well that’s exactly kind of you know, how I expected it to be and how I expect it to continue to be, it is a public service, but as you mentioned, it can be a positive tool for that company as well. If they’re maybe lost on that thing that was known by people that used their product, then this is the way for them to realize or to learn about what the people actually think and that’s one thing too. Of course one huge thing in advertising is marketing research and just researching and focus groups, but there’s only so much you can get from those kinds of things.
You’ve got to really dig in deeper or be that person, or know one of those people who use your product that find that little niche thing about it that everyone seems to be like “yes, oh my gosh, you’re right, of course, of course Capri Sun you’re going to poke the straw through the whole thing at least once when you’re a kid” and everyone remembers that.
I don’t know, so I just really like those little examples. And the great thing about this, and I hope it lasts and continues to go on and on, is the, you know, the material is endless. There’s always going to be products, new products, news about products that make people shift their opinion that week, that month. So, I hope and I have no intentions of stopping so I’m hoping there will be something that will continue.
Susan: I am sure it will continue and I hope I hope there’s some way for you to monetize this, it’s such a great, great thing. If I was actually one of those brands, I would be paying you.
Clif: Well thank you, that’s a very good compliment. I was thinking maybe it would be the opposite; someone would want to pay me not to make one for their company if they’re worried about anything that concerns you. Depending on the slogan. Sorry, go ahead.
Susan: Oh, I was going to say I think as marketers, PR people and marketers, we have to be in some ways fearless and unafraid and it’s hard because we want to protect our jobs and so much is tied to how much people immediately respond to something and nobody wants to be the bearer of bad news. But if we truly care about what it is we’re doing in this world, and we truly care about our customer and being the very best that we can be, then it is up to us to be the conscious of that organization. And speak truth to power and go into that C-suite and say “You know what, we’re not working for our people anymore” I think that’s really hard.
Clif: Right.
Susan: And I think that doesn’t happen very often, but I think as we move forward into this brave new era, the companies that will do the very best will have the marketers and the PR people who assume that roll as conscious as the advocate for the consumer both about the product and the services that they offer and how the brand lives its values out into the world and does this still fit who we are? Are we saying one thing and doing another? Are we one thing, are we actually not as good as we say we are?
Clif: Right. Exactly. I totally agree with all of that.
Susan: Clif, it’s just been an absolute joy to have you on and I would love to touch back with you because everything you do has got me in stitches.
Cliff: Thank you much, Susan, it’s been a pleasure talking to you.
The post Clif Dickens Podcast Transcript appeared first on ReimaginePr.com.
In a few short years, we’ve moved from a time when brands and big companies had all the power to the consumer being in the driver’s seat where she belongs.
Clif Dickens is a graphic designer who has captured a lot of attention recently for his website honestslogans which brilliantly and artistically highlights what some people secretly think about their experience with a brand.
Is it what brands want to hear? No, probably not. But we actually think what Clif Dickens and Honest Slogans are doing is a bit of a service to the very brands he lampoons.
I think or I like to hope that most PR people want their brands to serve their target audience as meaningfully as possible. Honest Slogans provides all brands the opportunity to ask themselves “what would our ‘honest slogan’ be and how can we fix the problem before we end up wearing it??
In this episode, we’ll talk about the rise of social media, marketing to Millennials and how a joke started between friends at lunch one day can turn into Honest Slogans, loved by some, feared by others but, regardless, on a lot of people’s radar screens. Speaking of being on people’s radar screens, his work has been getting lots and lots of media hits recently.
Read the transcript here!
The post Podcast 002: Clif Dickens appeared first on ReimaginePr.com.
Susan: In the 80s, Joe Roberts was living under a bridge in Vancouver’s notorious downtown east side. He turned his life around and within a few years, he had made his first million. Since then, he has gone on to help a number of clients, both in Canada and around the world, some of which are fortune 500’s and he joins me now. Welcome Joe.Joe: Welcome. Thanks for having me Susan.Susan: I’m really glad you’re here. Joe, you use storytelling and particularly you have a very personal storytelling, to help, well I would assume to help others identify and shift problems within their businesses. Is that true?
Joe: Yeah I think that one of the things that I learned, living on the streets and going through transformation and working with a number of different companies is that it’s really those human road blocks that create disengagement in the workplace. When I work with an organization, whether I’m doing a keynote or I’m doing a training session, it’s really about possibility mindset. Possibility and seeing more in yourself, but also possibility in seeing more in your people and your brand and when you tap into that possibility and that’s just the idea that anything is possible, then you create a space for creating that shift whether it’s a culture shift in an organization or it’s a mind shift in the way a company does business. That’s what I like to do is I like to facilitate the initial ideas or the genesis of transformation if you will.
Susan: Why storytelling? What does it do that nothing else can?
Joe: I think that it connects left and right brain. I think that when you get into using a metaphor over in your right brain and then you slide over to your left brain and do some statistics, you’ve got a higher retention and you’ve got a greater chance of shifting the consciousness. What I have found is that a story like mine resonates people. It’s the story of perseverance, of determination, of overcoming great odds and it’s not my story that resonates. That’s actually a misnomer. Someone in their first few years as a speaker might see it that way, but really what it is is each of us individually identifying with the struggle. That connects us. That is one of the things that universally connects us. Every single one of us goes through adversity, challenges and change through our lives. We’re walking down the road of life and life life’s us and it’s in that moment that we ultimately determine that there’s more in us than we thought we had.
When you tell the story, because I’ve shared this with hundreds of thousands of people. Different people hear different things and that’s proof that what’s happening is they’re seeing it in their context, but then what you’re able to do is you’re able to take that story which connects us universally and then drive a couple of key pieces of ideas. It’s those ideas that have the teeth that can create that change in an organization or in a leader. I just spoke to the credit union managers association in Manitoba. The context for telling my story and the story’s really simple. In 1989, I was pushing a shopping cart around the downtown east side. Ten years later I was on the cover of leading Canadian business magazines as an entrepreneur. What does that have to do with credit union managers? Everything and nothing.
What is has to do with is as leaders, they’re looking to engage their employees. They’re looking to create their legacy in leadership and mentorship by extracting the most out of their people and the most out of their branch. The first thing that they have to see is one, that it’s possible. My story does that. The second thing my story does is connects them to the idea that we all impact other people in the form of mentorship and the form of leadership. It’s really about storytelling, but I would say the key piece that makes it powerful is contextualizing it for the different audiences that you speak to.
When it comes to storytelling, storytelling has been around far longer than any of the modern technologies that we have today to tell stories. I’m talking about modern technology. I’m talking about print. I’m talking about television, radio, Facebook, Twitter, all of these different mediums that we use to communicate and they simply weren’t present as little as maybe a few hundred years ago.
Prior to that, going back in the history of mankind, in every culture, there were those soothsayers. Those people that delivered the story and in the story is the ethics, is the way that we ought to live are the moral messages is the inspiration, is the teaching, whether we’re storytelling to children or we’re storytelling to corporate leadership. The story and the metaphor is incredible powerful.
I’ve had people come up to me 15 years after seeing speak at a mini conference and say, you know? I just loved your story and I would say what is it that you remember and almost every single time Susan, they say that story you told about the booth or that story about this or that story about that. It’s the stories they remember and it’s in the story that there’s something very powerful and that is to shift emotion.
Susan: You’ve said so many wonderful rich things in there and I want to highlight a few of them because I think they’re absolutely bang on and one of them is that it’s really not about you or your story but it is always about the audience and finding those points of connection for the audience and it’s about the specificity. You can tell a very general story and you’ll get a very general result and oh, that’s interesting, but it’s those moments of specificity where you bring somebody into the context of something that may seem unrelated but they will find their tooth there.
Joe: Absolutely. Honestly, as a professional speaker was the greatest. I began bringing value to clients when I learned that, that one, it’s not about me. It’s about the message and the message has to be properly contextualized for people to get it. At the end of the day, if you’re able to do that effectively, then you’re speaking into the heart, minds and soul of the audience member you have. I just did an event in Halifax where I was the key not speaker for the Brunswick Street Mission. This is an organization that serves the homeless community in both Halifax and Dartmouth. They’re a great organization. Really lean and mean. They’re doing some really great work and they brought me out to tell my story.
The context is, I’ve got 550 people in the room who are community stakeholders and this is a fundraising breakfast. In this particular environment, what I did was I shared my story, but then at the end I was able to say thank you to this group, so the context was the money that you guys are investing in Brunswick street mission impacts individual lives and I’m one of those lives that was impacted because of the heart of charity that’s in this room today. By doing that, you cleanly knock it out of the park because this is a group of people who have taken time out of their morning to come and buy a 100 dollar breakfast to support this organization. Contextually, they see that it’s worth investing in transformation and they get inspired by that.
I think the other thing that I look for, me personally when I’m storytelling is to inspire people and what I know is that people forget what you say, forget what you do but they never forget how you make them feel. Whether in my role as a father, in my role as a community leader, in my role as a husband, in my role as a speaker, I’m looking for those opportunities to share a story with someone to inspire them because it’s a bit of a misnomer to say I’m a motivational speaker.
Motivation comes after action. You don’t leave something motivated. You leave an event inspired and that inspiration one would hope then translates into action. I’m going to tackle that weight loss goal of mine. I’m going to write that book. I’m going to leave this crappy job and go follow my dream. I’m going to get out of this relationship that hasn’t worked for five years. Whatever it is, whatever you feel inspired by to change as a result of that storytelling.
When you actually get into the repetitive action, that’s when you become motivated. You don’t get motivation until you do something. You take inspiration, it fires you up, you do something, it has a positive changing result. You get some good feelings out of that and now you are motivated to continue.
Susan: You keep saying so many wonderful things. One thing I wanted to pick up on is as a storyteller or as a brand storyteller, whatever your storytelling role is, it takes patience and trust and that’s a very hard thing to convey sometimes to communicators because they feel it’s their job to get certain bits of information about the company out. They’ll push these things out and they want to give the conclusions to the audience immediately. You see in young speakers as well, but you definitely see it in communications professionals. And the problem that they have is when you take the audience out of the thought equation, they lose their engagement, so instead of telling them it’s four, and this is a Pixar thing as well, you have to give them the problem of what’s two plus two and let them conclude that it’s four, as opposed to it’s four. It’s having that patience too and the trust that they will do the work and that they will want to do the work as opposed to you doing it for them.
Joe: I think that you’re right. One of the things that we’ve noticed with technology and Gen X and Gen Y is a higher level of skepticism when it comes to messaging, whether it’s a corporate messaging or just anything. There used to be a time when you had a microphone and you said something into that microphone, it was considered as gospel and nobody would fact check you. Today people are fact checking you on their smartphones in the audience and then challenging you in a Twitter conversation. It’s just a really brave new world out there. I think it’s important for organizations to understand that it has to be authentic. It really has to be authentic and so the authenticity comes in the “show me”, not the “tell me.”
Susan: To that point, ten percent of people believe what a company tells them about it. They need to experience it in some way. They do not believe what you tell them anymore.
Joe: I agree with you 100 percent and that’s why smart organizations are rolling their sleeves up. One of the organizations I love dearly because they’re a sponsor, but they’re also someone who puts their money where their mouth is is Telus. It’s an organization who really lives and breathes this idea that we give where we live. It’s that message isn’t just something they’re saying to drive an idea across the country. From their CEO Darren all the way down through the organization, they really live and breathe that message and they want to have a positive impact in the country.
What they do is they do all kinds of great things and they’re out in the community saying this is who we are as an organization and we’re doing it. Their storytelling and their messaging is in their actions. That level of authenticity from their involvement in We Day to having their staff volunteer at a homeless shelter, people start to get that. I think that one of the things that I’ve seen is sometimes those CSR projects are done in the shadows and they really need to be broadcast more. Instead of saying you’re a great company, show the world you’re a great company and that’s where I get excited as a consultant speaker is when organizations do roll their sleeves up and go out and they do cool things.
Susan: Talk about the benefits of CSR, of corporate social responsibility, because I agree with you on the nature and in some ways you have to I think celebrate others in order to tell your own story or sometimes infinitely more effective telling your own story when you’re telling somebody else’s because again it goes back to that nobody really cares about what you say about your brand, it’s how they experience it and it’s how they live it and it’s how they hear about it through other people and certainly corporate social responsibility is a great way to do that and one of the things I want to talk about is your Push for Change.
Joe: It’s interesting, because, we’ll unpack and talk about the push change, but the opus work that I’m working on right now is called a change maker program. This is something that I’ve been playing with and working in different corners of for over ten years. It’s the idea that we as people and as organizations become incredibly laser focused when one, we’re living on purpose. The things that fire us up and the things that ultimately help us leave legacy. The second piece is, when we push through the road blocks and deal with the personal development stuff that we may not have known has set us back. And the third, connect purpose, push through road blocks and get into action and find projects that we’re passionate about that have community impact. This is when you start to see an organization really help because when is the last time your boss came up and said to you, “What are you really passionate about Joe?”
If we could create a program within this organization and I may say something like I’m really passionate about the environment or I really like music or I would really like to see something put together in our city that has to do with helping single moms or something. When you connect into these specific pieces, what you start to find is two things and it’s just absolute genius. Your brand begins to grow in the good will. You’re viewed as an organization who’s doing good things.
Two, you’re actually doing good things. You’re actually impacting the community and three, you’re now able to squeeze more out of the people around you because they’re fired up and living in purpose and with passion and these are people coming to work now going I love this company. We’re out there making a difference. That may be something as simple as a carwash or a bake sale or joining the local walk a thon or whatever is going on in that city. When they bind together and do things as a company, and bring people and engage them, that’s when the magic happens. That’s what we learn with the Push for Change.
Two years ago I worked for an organization called Aeroplan rewards program. Most Canadians would recognize that brand. They’re an extraordinary company with an extraordinary vision and they do tons in the community to give back. They’ve got a program where you can donate your air miles to a multitude of different charities. Anyways, they’re a very community minded company and they do tons to give back.
They had an event in Montreal, where they needed an impact motivational speaker to talk about what living on the street was like. I get the call and went and did this project and over the course of the next day and a half, we went through three core exercises. I shared my story of what it was like to be a kid on the streets. We made sandwiches which were distributed to youth in the streets in Montreal. Then they did something really cool. They actually pan handled in the subway system of Montreal. 35 teens hit the subway system and they came back with I believe it was over 12,000 dollars in change. It was absolutely phenomenal. I’m looking at these 350 people absolutely fired up, absolutely inspired, absolutely passionate about what they’re doing and they’re having this huge impact in the local community.
The next thing that we did was we slept outside on October 10th in front of the bell center parking lot in downtown Montreal. October’s not a really warm month in Montreal. The next day there was a transformation that had taken place with those people. The senior leadership commended me on the project, told me they couldn’t have got to that place without the impact of my talk. On the back end of that Susan, I was actually saying to myself I’ve given 100 keynote presentations. I’ve gone to all these different conferences, but that piece of work was probably the most impactful piece of work I’d ever done in my life because people were fully engaged.
I went home and said what can we do to leverage that idea and inspire millions of Canadians to get behind the cause that’s important to me which is helping youth at risk in Canada. My business partner at the time, Dr. Sean Richardson, he said, “You know, nobody’s ever pushed a shopping cart across Canada and shopping carts represent homelessness, the thing that we’re trying to avoid for youth at risk.” He said, “Joe why don’t you push a shopping cart across Canada?” He said that on a plane when we were flying into Calgary to do some consulting work and I remember feeling the hair on the back of my neck stand up.
Susan: You know it’s a good idea.
Joe: It was one of those aha moments. At the time I was 45 years old, not an elite athlete. I was 60 pounds overweight, but I’m a possibility mind set guy and I said, you know what Sean? We’re going to do it. Over the next several months, we began working on purpose. Remember the model purpose? Personal development and passion. We began checking out what was my purpose? What was my legacy going to be? I began looking at all of the things we were going to prevent from being able to achieve this goal. The money, the time to do it, the resources, physical. It’s a wide country. Here’s the thing. When you connect into passion, things that fire you up, things that get your feet hitting the floor on Monday morning, it’s amazing what you can learn about yourself.
We decided we were going to do this thing but we needed to do a trial project before we did the national walk across the country. It was decided that I would walk from Calgary to Vancouver with the shopping cart that we now had. It was a custom shopping cart made out of aluminum. It’s really cool. You can learn all about it at thepushforchange.com. Anyways, we started a walk from Calgary to Vancouver, a distance of 1,071 kilometers and in less than 56 days, I had pushed the shopping cart through the rocky mountains from Calgary to Revelstoke to Kelowna all the way into the downtown east side. We gained national media attention.
But here’s what was cool. By telling that story to school kids, to community leaders, to mayors and to people along the side of the road, we got them inspired. Not by what we were saying and to people along the side of the road. We got them inspired not by what we were saying but by what we were doing and because it was a big enough aggressive goal, they supported it. We said, we want to be involved in this too.
You’ll be amazed at how many other people are passionate about the things that you’re passionate about. We believe that there should be no children in this country that sleep outside, that don’t have a safe place to go, that are able to get help for some of the things that may put them at risk of becoming homeless or worse.That was what the Push for Change was all about and now we’re preparing for the national walk, which will take us across ten provinces over 9,000 km and one Canadian winter. That’s probably going to be northern Ontario. We actually did some winter training. I went up to Edmonton last January and I pushed the shopping cart in minus 27 degree weather from Edmonton to Red Deer, Alberta, which is a distance of about 140 k. We did that just so that we could get a feel of what it would be like being on the road in the dead of winter through the prairies.All of that, what we learned is that one, people are inspired by what you do. Two, people want to help and get involved and if you lead with passion and inspiration, people will follow and they’ll join you on that. But three, what we’ve been learning from this experience is the model to teach other people how to make change with their programs. When we’re done with Push for Change, yes we’ll have made some money and we’ll have supported youth at risk in this country, but we’ll have a wire frame to show anybody that they can take their most passionate projects or life’s ambition and go out and make it happen. That will be the legacy and ultimately, that’s the change that we’re pushing for. Inside each and every one of us, there’s more in us than we can see. It’s unlocking that.
Susan: It is. It’s very much about unlocking that and in the business context, I think we’ve spent decades squashing our humanity and creating these silos and separating us from each other and we’ve really proven that doesn’t work and the amazing time that we live in now, we can all reach out to each other and I think we’re all starting to say, he that doesn’t work and it’s about engagement. That’s the magic piece that everybody’s looking for and really what we’re looking for a gain is to reconnect to our humanity. Even in business, we’re looking to reconnect that thing that connects us to each other and gives us purpose and that whole aspect of trying to turn people into robots has just been a disaster.
Joe: I absolutely agree and I’m optimistic. I’ve seen both. I remember being in Seattle listening to a keynote from a former, I don’t know if it’s president or vice president of Starbucks talking about how as we in North America continue to see erosion in social services, in budgets and different things that are being dropped by our government, it’s more and more important that corporate picks up the slack. What’s really cool is it’s this juxtaposition or oxymoron that as the organizations that give actually get more. That error of greed in the 1980’s, you remember the movie with Michael Douglas?
Susan: Yeah. Wall Street.
Joe: He said greed is a good thing. Maybe. I’m a die hard capitalist. I’m an entrepreneur from way back, so fly the flag for capitalism. I love it, but I think that if you’re going to look at that and you’re going to look at it pragmatically, we can only get more by giving what we have away. That’s the oxymoron, it’s like when we as organizations go out and attach ourselves to causes, it brings up the moral in an organization. People love working for that company. The community loves it and we’re going to need to do more and more of this as we hurl forward because we’re seeing holes within the social net and the fabric that used to be there aren’t there anymore. If it isn’t companies like the Westin Group or Tim Horton’s or Telus saying hey guys, there’s thousands of us. There’s tens of thousands of us in this organization. Who here put up their hands would like to do something cool that has an impact on the community? When they do that, it only serves to shore up their brand as a company that makes a difference. They get more out of their own companies and ultimately their bottom line stock price looks better.
Susan: I think lots of companies forget that their [inaudible 00:28:37] culture. In this day in age, every single employee is your PR department and they’re talking about you and what they’re saying either is they’re bringing out into the world what a wonderful experience it is working for you and how much you give to the community and how empowered they are to be a brand representative or they’re telling you how much they hate their job. You can invest in helping to grow that culture that is exciting and stimulating and working towards something or you don’t invest at your peril.
Joe: When we say at peril, the costs for non-engagement is staggering when we look at it in North America. We’re talking billions are lost when you consider everything from social claims to not being present at work to the maximization of sick days to conflict in the workplace, union grievances, all of these things have to do with culture and people. A recent statistic, I know I was on Ken Blanchard’s website and Ken’s someone I know in the US. He’s a famous author and real great stuff on leadership and the quote on there was, “less than 20 percent of people in the workplace today are playing into their strengths.” Less than 20 percent. That’s one in five people in the workplace are actually firing on all cylinders.
I think about how much more is in the tank if we begin to understand the human stuff, the behavioral science behind what’s going on and invest and I know that sometimes when I’ve worked with organizations, they may not see the value in investing in the soft skills but ultimately, it is that investment in soft skills and in people development that really determine whether you’re an upbeat culture or a beat up culture. I think you’re right, at their peril. Sometimes too what I’ve found is that sometimes it’s when a company is doing really, really well that people are stretched.
Susan: One of the things that you said really struck me, I think brand complacency is one of the biggest threats to business right now and brands I think tend to rot from the inside out and they don’t really notice until the external signs are there and then they’re running around putting Band-Aids on things. Quite often, even a company that might have gone through a major restructure and yet when they come out of it, the first thing they want to do is more of what they were doing before. I sometimes think how do you get a brand to hit their bottom? The same way that it takes a person to hit their bottom. How do you get that brand to hit their bottom and understand that doing the same thing is just going to result in disaster?
Joe: That’s a million dollar question. I think that what I go to is sometimes the brand maybe isn’t supposed to survive. I get asked all the time, how do you help somebody, whether it’s a brand or whether it’s somebody on the street, it’s the same thing. It’s like, well if they’re not going to help themselves and do the things that are necessary in order to make that, maybe it needs to suffer. Maybe it needs to hit rock bottom. I think sometimes a change in leadership is often the order of the day. It depends. If it’s just more of the same. The reality is that I don’t think there’s one thing. I think there’s a process and if the process is followed, then transformation can take place whether it’s a brand or a human being. I think the misnomer is looking for the one answer. If we do this or if we do that. I think there has to be a deep commitment and this is going to sound cliché but a deep commitment to wanting to change.
If there isn’t that deep commitment at a senior level, is it really going to shift and change? I’m skeptical. You often see people at a VP or a director level trying to implement change or strategy, but if it’s not brought in from the top down, will it change. I’m not too sure. I’ve worked with organizations where the senior leadership jumps in the deep end with you and the change is incredible and I’ve watched others where they’ll look at it from the sidelines and there’s change but regression to the mean can be measure by weeks. You know that going in as a consultant. You go okay. Maybe we call that job security. I don’t know. It’s lead me to now in my mid to late 40’s to want to work with organizations, you’re working with senior leaders who say we want and we’ll do whatever it takes to get from here to here. Ironically, Susan it’s the same thing with working investing time and people who are wanting to personally make a transformation in their life. I want to work with those individuals who are hungry for wanting to make that change and transformation. Hungry to do it and willing to go to whatever lengths.
I’ve been asked a million times by media like the papers and the TV what was it for you and I think the one driving thing was the passion. I wanted something different in my life so bad, I was willing to do whatever it took to make it happen. That’s something you can’t teach a brand. They’ve got to have that. If they don’t, it may just be resources after resources. It’s hard to say.
Susan: They have to be willing to embrace a radical honesty and transparency as well. I think whether it’s personal recovery or brand recovery, those two pieces are absolutely key.
Joe: Absolutely and to facilitate that takes someone with some special skills because someone can come in to arbitrate against your own thinking and get you to turn around and face yourself in the mirror. You get into all kinds of funny stuff around human behavior and egos and yeah, it’s a funny dance. I kind of like being the guy on the outside when you’re doing that work because it’s tough. At the same time too, if you’ve got your arm bent around your back to the point where you’re saying uncle, all right good. The problem with human beings is sometimes we’ve got to get beat up before we become teachable.
Adversity challenge and change whether it’s in a brand or a company is losing money or your own life feels like it’s going down the tubes, that is the catalyst of change. We don’t change when things are going well. It’s when things start to really suck that we say all right, what do we got to do to turn this around gang? That’s the great thing I love about human suffering and pain. What appears to be adversity.
I could look at my life and say that day and that week in my life is the worst thing that could have ever happened to me but just fast forward ten years and go that day and that day in my life was the best thing that could have ever happened to me because it was in that moment that I gained that tool that I’m able to share with youth at risk or in that moment, I was able to learn that key thing about being a professional sales person or a speaker or a consultant or a father. We don’t learn a whole lot with success. If we’re paying attention we can learn a snot load from failure. It’s in those challenges that we see time after time those great articles in Forbes of someone who faced peril managed to turn it around and turn it into the company’s greatest success because they had a vision for it.
Susan: That is almost where all great success comes from is standing on the brink of abject failure.
Joe: It’s our mistakes that makes us gurus. It absolutely is our mistake that makes us gurus and there isn’t a person out there walking that hasn’t been through some special life experience that couldn’t assist a human being with that. You just have to look for that genius because it’s there. Most times for us, it’s on the end of our noses.
I was just putting some program material together for the health and safety conference which I’m going to do a proposal for and I was thinking health and safety, what do they need? They need somebody to speak to some of the mental health issues in the workplace. Stuff on bullying, stuff on substance abuse and depression. These are topics that I can speak to in a real deep and profound and personal way and yet for many years now, I haven’t really saw that as my topic matter. The event planner for that conference said, “Could you cover this or could you cover that?” I thought, well yeah, all day long. That’s my backyard.
It’s amazing how you don’t see it. There it is. There’s your genius. Going to share with health and safety managers about bullying in the workplace or about addiction and substance abuse. They’re facing this every single day and they’re in the trenches, working with unions, working with employees that are battling and dealing with substance abuse. If we treat them like a human being through an EEAP program, there’s hope for that transformation. Anyways, I digress.
Susan: Digressions are fun. Any trends you see emerging in business? You get to see a lot of them from the outside. Anything that you think is remarkable coming along?
Joe: I’m really excited about the age of CSR right now. I’m excited about where it’s going. More and more organizations are putting back into the community and they’re doing so in a way that is getting people involved and creating relationships and strategic alliances within the community and more so than five years ago or ten years ago. Forget about 25 years ago. Tackling a myriad of different issues. It’s not just the things that are near and dear to my heart. There’s all kinds of really great projects around environmental change. Culturally, we’re seeing some different shifts and some different thinking around soft skills developments. I’m kind of a cockeyed optimist. I love when I see that kind of stuff. I think there’s a coming back to humanity and we’re seeing more and more of that at a corporate level.
Susan: I would totally agree. The one thing that I would urge and the embrace of CSR is I sometimes see big organizations, particularly and sometimes smaller organizations too embrace a program of CSR and yet the thing that they are embracing is not actually resonating throughout the whole of who they are. And so you’ll see an organization talking about this great work that they’re doing out in the community and yet that piece is missing in their fundamental business relationship with their customer.
It’s about not just getting out there and using it as a communication piece. It’s about learning from it and folding that knowledge back in to the fundamentals of how you treat your customers and your other stakeholders, your employees so that it’s not kind of a oh, we’re making up for all the bad we’re doing. It’s actually a moment of reflection and folding that back in. You’ll see big organizations go out with messaging that talks about how they do this and how they are this and yet in their business practice, not so much. What we’re hoping to see is a closer relationship where what they are learning there is folded back really deeply, authentically and honestly into the culture of who they are.
Joe: I agree with you. You can measure on a scale of one to ten and I would call it the authenticity scale. One of the things that I’m also really aware of is CSR as a concept is still in its infancy. There’s some organizations that are leading the way. There are others who are saying we need to be there too and CSR strategy is created and a bunch of action items are put on and they check the boxes and they go through the motions. I think as this evolves more and more, I think the leaders will teach all of us because it is still an emerging thing on how to do it with the authenticity. A few stubs of the toe I think will wake up those that are simply doing it to do it.
It’s kind of like I did really well in graphic design and website development in the late ’90s. It’s one of the places where I ran a little company and we did really well really quickly and what we learned was, a lot of people ran to the website and said, well we’ve got to have a website. What our strategy inside mind ware was to go and fix websites because everybody had run to it, but nobody knew what the hell they were doing. They just, we got to have this. What we said was our value proposition to a CEO or a company was like, “Okay well you’ve got a website that’s not working, would you like to do it right the second time?” Because everybody needed to be there, so they ran out and they got a presence, but they weren’t asking the right questions and I think that’s what you’re talking about. You really want to ask those right questions about what it is that we’re doing. Why it is that we’re doing this. Make sure that all those things do line up.
Susan: I think that’s exactly so and I also think it has to do with the listening. You can ask those internal questions and they’re critical but I also think that sometimes leadership will not come from the leaders. I think it will come from more of a ground swell up and I think that’s where the learning has to happen. I think we’re seeing the rise of the consumer and I think that’s a very good thing ultimately for business and for our society, because I think people have gotten into what can we say and get away with and they’ve learned to believe that. I think the fact that we have now so many wonderful consumer oriented groups, they’re saying hey, no big industry here. You really need to be thinking about what you no longer believe what you’re telling us. I think it’s a painful transition, but I think it’s ultimately going to be better for humanity, for the planet and for business.
Joe: I agree with you absolutely.
Susan: Joe Roberts, Skid Row CEO, you’ve just been an extraordinary guest. Thank you so much. I loved having you on talking about stories and just the infinite wisdom and perspective you’ve brought to all of this, it’s just been an absolute joy talking to you.
Joe: Thank you, Susan. It’s been a pleasure being on the show.
The post Joe Roberts Podcast Transcript appeared first on ReimaginePr.com.
Most don’t come back from addiction, not when it’s gripped you so tightly it has separated you from everything you hold dear, including a place to live.
As a young man, Joe Roberts’ addiction took everything from him, leaving him homeless and alone, living under a bridge.
He battled back. Now he is a sought after business speaker and advisor who helps others. And it’s all through the power of story.
In this episode we’ll touch on how to use your personal story to affect change, the future of corporate social responsibility and much, much more.
Read the transcript here.
The post Podcast 003: Joe Roberts appeared first on ReimaginePr.com.
Interviewer: Ian Greenleigh is a content and social media strategist. He is also the author of a great book called The Social Media Side Door, how to skip the line and gain greater access and influence. It’s published by McGraw Hill. To my mind this book is an absolute must read for any PR or marketing professional and I think you’ll see why in this interview. Ian; welcome, you show a tremendous amount of vulnerability in your work and book and I find it so refreshing. Do you think that vulnerability is necessary in today’s world, and do you think it can give somebody a competitive edge?Ian Greenleigh: Well, I’m a nut about authenticity. I believe that authenticity is supreme in all things, and too often when I read a business book I don’t detect that, and it’s hard for me to connect with the author, and maybe this is just me, but I don’t often finish them.I wanted to write a book that I would read and a lot of that to me was I wanted to have a lot of myself shine through, in perfections and all, failures and all. I think, in business if you’re honest with yourself you’ve had more failures usually then you’ve had successes, but those successes outshine your failures because they are so tremendous. And that’s how I kind of think about social media in general–it moves so fast you need to experiment a lot, you need to do new things and try new things frequently, and a lot of those things will fall flat.But I also think that there is an element to social media that’s more forgiving, and that people can be so inundated by information and activity that the chances that they’ll really notice your mistake and hone in on it are very limited. So it’s a very forgiving atmosphere, and it’s great for people who like trying things and like experimentation and innovation. So for me to tell the accurate story, the authentic story of my journey through social media and the things I’ve learned I had to include those wrinkles that aren’t necessarily super flattering, but are part of the authentic story.
Interviewer: They make you very human and I think you’re right; you said something that we talk a lot about here and that is that people buy from people, and we need those points of human connection and we’ve spent the last few decades really trying to strip the human out of our business interactions and it doesn’t work.
Ian Greenleigh: Yes, exactly. I think that when we try to systematize everything and automate everything and perfect it and go towards four-hour work weeks and things like that we’re really trying to take some of the charm and the appeal out of business and it may work, but I don’t think we’re going to have a great time doing it necessarily. And my ideal is to live a life where my business is my passion, and passion is a very human thing; robots and machines don’t feel passion. So to take the humility out of your work and to take some of the kind of admitting to failure and things like that, and plus, that’s essentially taking the humanness out of it, and I think it’s less appealing for people who want to do business with you, because they are just seeing some kind of edifice that is not the real you, and so they’re not really going to want to do business with this kind of squeaky clean corporation.
If you think about the difference in marketing for instance between two of these big behemoths, Microsoft and Apple, Microsoft is very squeaky clean. Their marketing is all about the products and the superiority of their products and that may appeal to a certain segment of the population and certainly it’s a very successful company. But what resonates with me and I think others, and is responsible for a lot of the success of the products like the iPhone is Apple’s view that they should show how these products affect your everyday life. They are all about the interface between your life and their products; they focus on (inaudible 00:4:36) of these things, and that I think has been a very successful formula for them.
Interviewer: I think you’re absolutely right; and brands across the board have really been arrogant and they’ve been allowed to be arrogant because there was no mechanism for consumers to say, wait, over here, over here. And really, social media is forcing them to think in new ways. And I think to it’s core you’re right; Apple really, that’s been a part of its philosophy right from the beginning, as understanding and showing how these products live in your life, and I think we’re going to see more big brands have to kind of adopt that model in order to stay relevant in the age where the consumer is really taking more power.
Ian Greenleigh: Exactly.
Interviewer: One of the tactics you suggest in terms of connecting with influencers is commenting on thought leaders blogs, and I love this because I see over and over again people using a facet of something like barraging people on Twitter, trying to connect with somebody on Twitter and of course all the great influencers and you talk about this in your book. You’re just bombarded and you’re not really adding any value to them when you’re just tweeting them or coming up with the occasional quip. And you really offer a step-by-step process in your book on how to integrate the various tactics and personalize for each target, whether it’s how to get a new job, or how to engage a journalist. Can we talk a little bit about the engagement strategies that you have found successful when engaging thought leaders?
Ian Greenleigh: Yes, I think that your goal should be to three dimensionalized yourself. And what I mean is, when I was in sales I learned very quickly that if you just called someone up and tried to sell them something, and that’s all you did, the odds that you’d get hung up on were very high. If you engage with them first beforehand through any other medium you would become not just the person that called, but the person that had also reached out in this other way. So you start essentially as a sketch; that’s the first way that you appear in this person’s mind. And every channel through which you build a relationship becomes your image in their mind becomes closer to the real thing, it becomes closer to three dimensional. So in my mind it doesn’t matter where you start as long as you’re building value and being useful and approachable through each channel. So yes, blog comments are often overlooked because they’re not instantaneous and people prefer that direct connection through Twitter. But I think blog comments have some secret advantages and one of them is your record is kind of permanent on their blog.
Interviewer: Yeah.
Ian Greenleigh: They’ll also be notified through email and sometimes other surfaces of that blog comment. I think they probably get far less blog comments than they do tweets, which means that your message is going to have less competition with other messages, which just sets it apart if the social media landscaping in general, vying for that attention through that competition. And it’s longer form; you can leave a full thought there and not just kind of a series of messages.
Interviewer: Yes, it’s more meaningful, too, in many ways. The value you’re adding to somebody because as you say, the thought, the opportunity to leave a more thoughtful response, and also the links back both to your site, but just the credibility it gives the person who’s written the article; because so many people who visit a blog don’t leave a message–even great thought leaders don’t get a lot of comments, and you point that out in your book, too. So when somebody actually does take the time to add value to other readers or just spark a dialogue, it really does get more notice.
Ian Greenleigh: Yes. There’s a story in my book; I’m a big comic book geek, and one of my favorites is called The Surrogate, and this guy Robert [Venditty] has his blog and I was so amazed that this author of this series of books that was turned into a Bruce Willis movie, and by no means is it some kind of Indy comic. The fact that he had this blog and very few people were commenting and trying to connect with him was very strange to me.
So I commented on his blog, just told him how much I liked the book and instead of just commenting back he actually reached out to me with an email and it was great. It was such a (inaudible 9:44) because the other day we hadn’t spoken since then and this was back in like 2009 maybe. I emailed him and said, you know, what happened there, that dynamic actually is a big part of why I wrote my book. I started to realize that you can reach people through social media that otherwise you couldn’t reach. I would have had to go through his publisher or some other gatekeeper, and instead, we formed a real connection there. And I sent him a signed copy of my book as thanks, and we’re staying in touch, and I think that’s such a cool early instance in my life of this bigger idea. I think gatekeepers don’t really exist anymore, if you know where to look.
Interviewer: And also you talk about more and more gatekeepers are starting to encroach on social media, so the time really is now to get in there before they really get in there and shut things down.
Ian Greenleigh: Yes, I think there will always be open side doors, and you just need to find them. And as the number of inbound inquires and inbound activities go up as we see with all communications of technology over time the technological and human gatekeepers inevitably arrive. And one interesting way that’s happening is with celebrity. Now a lot of people assume that okay, it must not have really been (inaudible 00:11:17) at the helm of their social media account, but I did a lot of research for the book and really it is frequently the person you think it is. So you do have an opportunity to reach out and talk with celebrities if that’s useful to you. For me it’s not the best thing in the world, but whatever. But someone like Ashton Kucher who is definitely an early adopter, even on a larger scale, not just among celebrities, but an early adopter of technology like Twitter. I think he was tweeting before I was, and I do this stuff for a living. And if he’s an investor in a lot of companies, he came up with an interesting system that I think you’ll see a lot more celebrities actually adopt at this point, where he’ll have kind of a queue of tweets that he almost proposes, so like 50 tweets that he wants to tweet out, and the ultimate decision makers as to whether those tweets go out is his agency–people at his agency. So they can kind of pull the trigger on them and he just proposes them. And this is because–and I don’t even remember what it is, but I wrote about it in the book–he had some kind of scandal. He wrote something that was objectionable.
Interviewer: Yeah, it was very insensitive. It was the Penn State thing I think, where the sexual assaults at Penn State, yeah.
Ian Greenleigh: Jerry Sandusky, exactly.
Interviewer: Yeah.
Ian Greenleigh: So, Ashton Kucher tweeted something insensitive about the Penn State child sexual abuse scandal. For good reason after that there was a lot of fall out and he decided to kind of re-evaluate how he approaches Twitter. The system he came up with is really interesting. He kind of proposes a queue of tweets and then his agency will decide which of those tweets are appropriate. I think that it’s the vast majority of them that get out of there, but it’s just the failsafe in case his head is not in the same place as his agency’s; and they have ultimate authority over what to pull the trigger on. So I think that was an early indicator that we’ll see more of these systems come out that are meant to kind of mediate between influencers, celebrities, brands, and their audiences to avoid these kinds of unexpected or tone deaf [crisisees].
Interviewer: And you can’t be on top of every issue at every moment, and the temptation of course is to wade into something without, and I think that was the case in the Ashton Kucher case where he didn’t really understand the complexity of the whole thing when he tweeted that tweet, and before something would have gone out by, and I have certainly been that gatekeeper for a celebrity, part of the job is to make sure that you understand the whole of the situation before something goes out. So I do think that there’s something lost, but there’s also something gained in the long term for that celebrity brand.
Ian Greenleigh: Yes, and I think it’s a pretty cool model, because people kind of assume that it’s this binary thing, that’s it’s either someone highly influenced like a Fortune 500 CEO, or a celebrity, it’s either all of them or it’s just fake, right? It’s like ghost written by their PR manager. And I think that sometimes it is one of the two there. I think that there’s also this middle ground and I think Ashton Kucher is an innovator in this regard because it’s not either or; it really is his voice, his word-for-word tweets except maybe once or twice a month, or I have no idea how frequent it is, or infrequent, one of those tweets just doesn’t reach his audience because for whatever reason it’s not going to be appropriate. But still, it’s his stuff; he’s writing it. And that’s great, and so that’s not this binary situation where it’s everything a celebrity wants you to hear or just completely contrived by their publicist.
Interviewer: Yeah, I think that’s true. I love your concept of using Facebook and LinkedIn ads to target a particular person with a pitch. So okay let’s say for example I’m doing PR for one of the many, many tech products and in an increasingly crowded space and heading off to CES, you know, what used to be called Consumer Electronics Show. How can I use social media ad targeting to get noticed by influencers and top journalists?
Ian Greenleigh: If you establish which ones are going to be covering that show, you can actually decide on a news peg. So before the show starts you start hearing rumors of what’s going to happen at the show, what are the big products that are going to unveiled, and what’s the story going to be at the show? Is it about tablets this year, is it about whatever. One of the best ways to get someone’s attention is to challenge a commonly-held perception like that. So if you start saying that there’s this ground swell; a CES this year is going to be about, I don’t know, about . . .
Interviewer: Medical I’m hearing.
Ian Greenleigh: Okay, so there you go. I have no idea, and I’m not going this year, so if it’s about medical this year, how can you peg your product to that trend? Or how can you challenge that and say essentially it’s about this category that my product belongs, and that would be just one way to peg it to something. Or you can do a direct approach by just making sure that your product is showing up in someone’s news feed and on the sidebar of their Facebook feed, and that there’s something about it that attracts them to it, and that they know that you’re going to be at the CES.
So one way to do that is to take out a Facebook ad and you can actually do things like anyone that is working at CNN; that could be a targeting category, although it’s not going to 100% accurate, because the people that are with CNN and the people that are working at CNN are going to be at CES are few and far between. There might be, I don’t know, ten people with CNN who are actually going to make it there, but this is a network effect that works, right, because if you can actually show your ads to someone that will see it but not necessarily be relevant to them they might share it with someone that they know is going to be at CES, but you don’t know about them, so you can anticipate it. So they have more knowledge than you in the situation.
What I would do in either case is to create a custom landing page for journalists that kind of pitches your product in relation to a larger story that you think is going to be hot at CES. And then target these news organizations by employer so you can choose, I want to sell this ad to the people that work at this company. Or you can do one-to-one advertising which is much more complex. I probably can’t do it all in the podcast interview, but basically if you get someone’s Facebook ID you can add them to a list, and show your ad to only members of that list; so taking it to its logical stream that means that you can show your ads to single people; specific ads to single people on the list.
Interviewer: And I have to say Ian you do a great job of walking people through that process in your book I’ve actually done what you suggest and it’s really well laid out and you also say to people, “Hey, target me.” and I’ll respond and let you know if this works. And I love that, that’s a great way. Your book not only shows people but it adds value by saying, hey, I’ll validate that for you.
Ian Greenleigh: Yeah, it’s pretty cool. I did a webinar for [Vokus], which is a Swedish this public relations and marketing tool, where I walked the webinar attendees through this process and did the same kind of thing. I challenged them to try to target me, and about a day after the webinar I started to see all sorts of goofy ads that were using my picture and all sorts of ways in trying to get my attention, because I felt they knew that they’d be up against other ads that were targeting me, so they had to stand out, and discolor it, or ad photo shop effects and all sorts of weird stuff. But it was cool, because yes, it was validation in not only that they were able to do it, but validation that the things in my book are still accurate.
Interviewer: Indeed. And it builds on that concept of newsjacking, which you also talk about in the book, the concept of inserting yourself into breaking news or in an existing story by offering something fresh, or unexpected, or extremely timely and positioning yourself as an expert in that; it’s so valuable.
Ian Greenleigh: Yes, one of the newsjacking techniques that I talk about in that webinar was actually–I don’t know if you’re a Breaking Bad viewer, but there was an episode where they said, as a euphemism for taking someone out, they said, we’re going to send them to the Belize.
Well, the country of Belize, the tiny country Caribbean nation between Mexico and Guatemala is one of my favorite places in the world, and they actually newsjacked that story and took out a full page ad and a few quotation things, “Hey, we’d love to have Brian Cranston (inaudible 00:21:48) at Belize.” And it got a lot of cool media coverage for it. It was just the traveling tourism bureau there.
So, I started doing this spot experiment, where okay, how could they actually newsjack this social media. And one of the ways was to target travel journalists on Facebook with this ad technique that we already talked about. And that actually is doing custom created ads for encouraging travel journalists to kind of experience this hidden gem of the Caribbean or whatever it was. But also just kind of playing on the whole like, let’s send them to Belize mien, that Breaking Bad. It inadvertently started without even the country’s participation. But that was an opportunity to use all the resources available, traditional PR, advertising, social advertising, Twitter; I’m sure their Twitter account went up by quite a bit as well, so if you watch for these opportunities, they happen seldomly, but when they do it’s a great way to kind of surround sound people with your message.
Interviewer: And you need to move quickly, too.
Ian Greenleigh: Yes, definitely. Some of this is because ad approvals take from a few hours to a few days sometimes. So you need to realize the news cycle being 24 hours you must move quickly. But there are certain things you can do to be prepared for things to happen, and that’s just kind of know, like have an account set up with a domain provider so that you can buy newsjacking relevant domains really quickly. You can make sure that you’ve got kind of all of the tools that you’ll need in order photo shopped, you’re handy with Word Press, and you know how to create a quick landing page. You’ve got a Facebook ad account set up already, then when the story hits you’ll have far less preparation work to do.
Interviewer: Yeah, you’re not having to figure it out, and the concept of the time to dig a well and you used this in your book, “Before you’re thirsty.”
Ian Greenleigh: Yeah, exactly.
Interviewer: There was a recent report that social media jobs are going to be gone ten years from now; that the skills that specialists now will just be assumed in any given job. Do you think that’s true?
Ian Greenleigh: Yes, I think it’ll happen probably sooner than ten years, and I hope it does. You know, there’s no one out there that has a fax machine specialist; it’s a communication channel.
Interviewer: Yes.
Ian Greenleigh: And these are skills that everyone should have. And on the other end of it unfortunately they are not being taught, you know. One of the things in the book is saying, all right, right now is trying to get my book into the different markets because when I talk to recently graduated marketing and business students they are not learning about social media. There are so many exceptions to the rule, and they are great progressive professors that are helping them, but it’s not very often that you’ll see people come out of marketing programs with a really well rounded social media education. There is also a trend of starting with social media programs with these schools, and that’s fine, but it’s the same kind of thing where if you only know (inaudible 00:25:18) social media and you don’t know about the other channels you might be just as disadvantaged when that does come about and social media just doesn’t exist anymore; then it’s someone who has a well rounded marketing degree but doesn’t know anything about social media.
Interviewer: I think you’re absolutely right, and this has come up for us over and over again. And the thing is that it’s in communication schools and classes and business schools, this stuff is being taught as if it is a channel that you should learn and you can pick it up along the way. And what they don’t understand is that fundamentally underneath the strategy of communications is actually changing, and that these tools are a reflection of that change. And it’s the way we’ve always wanted to be communicated to and with, and it’s a way we do in our personal lives and that’s coming more into play in our business worlds, but they are missing the point. And we’re watching people come through and graduate and not have an understanding of social media and what’s more, not have an understanding of how you effectively communicate with people.
And I know this because I get spammed with resumes by people who have given absolutely no thought to what it is that we do with the clients we serve. And I actually have a piece on my website about how you can communicate with me if you are interested in a job. And one out of every forty, maybe, reaches out the way that we tell them to. We actually lay out on our blog how to do that, and one in every forty do it. But instead they’ll give a full kind of, hey, as if they’ve known me or met me and it’s personalized but not really, that faux kind of personal thing. And it’s infuriating because the schools are pumping these people out.
Ian Greenleigh: Yes, that’s right, so that’s kind of two pronged in the other direction, teaching them that social media is no different, when it really is. And you touched on something that really is important. I don’t think that people’s underlying motivations or expectations really change much over time, but I do think that the way we communicate does, and the opportunities to communicate in the way we’ve always wanted, that’s what’s changing with social media. It’s allowing us to really communicate in a way we’ve always wanted to communicate, and to be spoken to in the way we’ve always wanted, to have the kind of participation in a brand that we’ve always wanted to have, the power. And it’s not that we didn’t want that before, it’s now we’re finally able to have that. So if you’re teaching students that it’s still this one way, bullhorn communication, scatter shot style, and then you’re failing them. You might as well not be teaching them about social media, because just look at the data. Look at your blog posts that are all about how great you are, and that you’re speaking at this next event. No one looks at those, no one reads those. Blog posts are about ideas, we Twitter about ideas, we try to help people, useful information, emotion, these are things that sell that work. And I wish it was easier than that, but if it was great to just blog about how great your company was then I’d suggest that to my clients, but I don’t because it doesn’t work, the data shows.
Interviewer: And you talk about becoming indispensible and Jay [Baer] talks about utility and I do think that is the fundamental. It’s as Jay says, “Its help, not hype.”
Ian Greenleigh: Yes, Jay is onto something there. Utility is at the core of everything that I do. I’m glad he’s turned that into kind of a book-like manifesto, because it’s a really important message. That utility is never ignored, it’s never failed. You always can get someone’s attention by being helpful, by being useful to them. It’s always been like this, but it makes it so much easier to be useful because you can reach people with social media that you couldn’t have reached people before, which is the premise of my book. So when you combine new landscape of access with this ease of being useful, you get opportunities that just did not exist before, and that’s amazing.
Interviewer: So, fundamentally it’s still all about building relationships and really thinking beyond one story or connection; it’s not taught in business schools or communications classes, and yet it absolutely fundamental to business success. And I think Ian that your book should be required reading for anybody who is in communications or marketing. And thank you so much for taking the time to talk to me today.
Ian Greenleigh: It was a lot of fun, and I appreciate it.
The post Ian Greenleigh Podcast Transcript appeared first on ReimaginePr.com.
“You don’t know how many emails I get in a day,” said Roy Furchgott from the New York Times when we met up at CES.
He’s not alone. Most influencers are over-run with more emails than they can possibly digest in any given day.
But what if there was a way to jump the queue? A kind of side door that got you access to the very people you need when you need them.
And that’s where Ian Greenleigh and his book The Social Media Side Door come in.
Ian’s book is all about how to use little known functions within social media to capture attention and stand. This podcast will cover some of them and I’m pretty sure you’ll want to run out and buy the book right after you listen to it.
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Susan: So Scott, thank you very much for joining me today and tell me a little bit about Postmodern Jukebox.Scott: Sure, well, thank you for having me Susan. This is really fun to be on this. Postmodern Jukebox, really the best way to describe it is taking current pop songs and putting them in a time-machine so that they come out in the 40s or in the 50s or the 20s. It’s kind of the idea of the songs that we hear today, what would they sound like if they were recorded 50 years ago. And that’s pretty much what we do. We take music and we kind of transform it.Susan: What gave you the impetus? What made you do this?
Scott: When I was growing up, I was really into ragtime. That was actually the first type of music that really caught my attention. Which is kind of strange because most kids aren’t into ragtime. It’s not something you listen to when you’re in fourth grade or fifth grade. But I realized early on that since not too many people knew about ragtime or enjoyed the same kind of music that I did, the best way to reach them was to introduce them to this genre by taking songs that they all knew and turning them into ragtime.
So I would perform things like, “Stairway to Heaven,” as ragtime, or I’d play gangster rap songs as ragtime, piano, or jazz and eventually this went on the backburner when I was in college and I went to school for jazz and supported myself as a jazz pianist for a while.
But then once I discovered YouTube, I found out there was this really awesome community of people, musicians in particular, that were doing really creative things music. I realized that that was kind of the place that was a good home for this type of project.
Since then, let’s see, we put up our first, most recent Postmodern Jukebox incarnation in February and since then we’ve gotten about 25 million views on YouTube. We have managed to get on the billboard charts for jazz. We’ve been on Good Morning America, it’s just really exciting for us and we realized that there’s a big demand for covers that are done in creative ways.
Susan: How have you marketed? Is it simply a great idea and beautifully executed with authenticity? I have to say, I know you want to get out of your apartment but there’s something about it that works for now, but have you done anything special on the marketing?
Scott: Well, we have kind of a different business model than I think most people in the music industry execute. The traditional model is built on record sales. Basically, the record industry started when they started mass producing records and found a way to market them. Artists would go into the studio, they’d release an album, and then they’d go tour promote sales of that album. That model doesn’t really work anymore in the digital age because now there’s streaming music sites. You can duplicate mp3s very easily.
So there’s kind of a new model that we’ve been fortunate enough to come up through, which is based on crowdfunding. The idea is instead of selling music, you’re selling an experience. You’re selling access and it allows you to connect directly with your fans. Your fans really want to support you. They want to help you do more of what they love, so this kind of cuts out the middle man. It’s almost like you’re bringing them along for the ride essentially.
Susan: I’ve watched people struggle with how to determine gift levels in their crowdsourcing campaigns. How did you decide what levels would probably work best for you and how have they worked?
Scott: Well it’s all trial and error. The good thing, the beautiful thing about crowdfunding is people will tell you what they want. So I’d say my best advice is to, if you’re running a crowdfunding campaign, I would come up with some cursory ideas but then expect to refine them later on. You might find that certain gifts just really aren’t that enticing to donors and other ones are.
If you keep an open ear, I think that they’ll tell you what they want to get. I can totally empathize with that though, because it is very difficult. The first time I did a crowdfunding campaign, I used Kickstarter to fund a pretty wacky project. It was a Motown tribute to Nickleback. So we took all Nickelback’s music and made it into Motown. If you can imagine, that’s kind of a goofy thing to come up with
Susan: Very niche market.
Scott: Very niche market. Exactly. Exactly. The other side of it is that people are usually so happy to be part of those campaigns that it’s not necessarily about the gifts that incentivize it. There are people that are just actually very generous and they really want to help artists succeed.
Susan: You’ve obviously figured out key pieces of engagement. Tell me how it is that you have managed to connect with your audience so meaningfully that they do want to support you.
Scott: Well I think part of it is the fact that we do film in our living room. There’s nothing slick about us. It’s pretty much what you see is what you get. We’ve all known each other, our band is very close. The singer is my girlfriend. The bassist and drummer, I’ve known them for years. So it’s just us sharing what we do with the world and we determined that the best way to do putting out these videos, these YouTube videos because there’s something that comes through in video, video of a live performance especially, that doesn’t come through with a slick music video or a very slickly produced studio album.
So we keep things rough, we keep things very real and I think that initially that was something that made people kind of gravitate towards us. The idea that these are just musicians doing what they do and essentially inviting the viewer into our living room to watch what we do.
From there we’ve expanded upon that. I’ve been introducing a lot of educational material on my website, postmodernjukebox.com. I decided the best way to help the next generation of musicians was not just giving them advice on how to play certain things or giving them sheet music, but also telling them how I’m going about building a career.
Susan: That’s really helpful because you get a lot of people who speak about it theoretically, but you’re actually sending down bread crumbs as you’re going, saying you know what this is working. Come along.
Scott: Yeah, it’s a laboratory. That’s kind of the fun part about it, too. There’s no rules. You try what works and you try something out and if it works you keep it. If not, you find another way to make it work. That’s what we’ve been really doing.
Susan: Your business model, obviously it’s just begun, your crowdsourcing. Well actually, I don’t know. How far along are you? Are you posting your updates and where you’re getting to, or are you not posting?
Scott: We just launched a Patreon campaign. Patreon is this really great website developed by Jack Conte, who is a very successful internet musician as well. The idea is it’s kind of like a Kickstarter, but instead of trying to raise a lump sum for one big project, it’s for reoccurring projects. It’s for our YouTube videos or people that release weekly content. We just started it and it’s been incredibly successful with us right out the gate. We’ve been able to raise over $1,000 per video. The number keeps going up.
Susan: So I see you’re 13.98 and that’s, I see, per music video. I was wondering about that. So you’ve decided how many videos are in your series and you’re allocating each amount of money that comes in gets split up among videos. Is that right?
Scott: It basically means that we get that money every time that we come out with a new video, essentially.
Susan: Wow, that’s great. So…
Scott: Instead of…Right, right. What that does is that provides us a little bit of stability. Before that, we really just sold mp3s and that was what would raise money to do these videos. But now, this kind of new model…mp3 sales, I don’t know where they’re going to be in five years.
Susan: Yeah, for sure.
Scott: Nowadays you can stream music anytime of the day. So it’s good that there’s this new model that’s coming up. Patreon is a great website for that. I recommend it for anybody that’s creating regular content on YouTube. For other musicians, I also recommend another site called Stageit, which is kind of an online performance space. Basically it’s a concert venue but it all takes place online. You play directly for your fanbase and they’ll tip you. It’s another brilliant, just brilliant model. It’s like busking but it’s on the internet for potentially tens of thousands of people.
Susan: That’s extraordinary. I’ve never heard of that. It’s called Stages, S-T-A-G-E-S?
Scott: Stageit. It’s S-T-A-G-E-I-T.
Susan: I-T. Stageit.
Scott: Yeah.
Susan: That’s great. That’s wonderful. So then, the business model really is you’re moving away from mp3s and into this crowdfunding, crowdsourcing model. Does everything that you’ve been doing, have you been selling sheet music as well? I was trying to figure out you’re business model beforehand, thinking, well I guess he’s driving them to website and selling sheet music, so…
Scott: Well I’ll give you kind of the simple description of the business model. Really the crowdfunding stuff like Patreon, that’s the budget to create the work, essentially. T hen from there we will publicize the work by sending it to blogs or active media sites and also posting to social media, obviously. Then selling the music on a site like iTunes or Bandcamp, which is probably my favorite place to sell. In addition to that, I’ll write blog post about it, about the video that has a little bit of extras. Maybe I’ll include a chord chart for people that want to play it at home, I’ll give behind-the-scenes kind of stuff too.
On my site, I sell instructional piano chords of how to turn songs, I call it ragtime-ify. Again, it’s another niche, you know, turning pop songs into ragtime, but it’s been great. I’ve been getting lots of e-mails of that have been using and it and just enjoying. It’s kind of the way that I learned to play the piano and it’s a little bit different from the traditional approach and I think there’s a lot of people that the traditional approach doesn’t really work for them. They want to play the music that’s interesting to them, so it’s a way to make it more fun.
Basically, that’s the cycle. Then we’ll play a live show on Stageit and basically do our live performances that we do. We do a lot of events, obviously, in real life, not just on the internet. Then we just start the cycle again. We’ll have a crowdfunding campaign to do a new work. Then just repeat everything. That’s the model going forward. That’s the most efficient way to create new work and market it and distribute it.
Susan: Do you put any thought into having an SEO or keyword strategy at all, or is it most, primarily, and so successfully YouTube driven?Scott: I do. A little bit of SEO is involved in the titling of videos, basically. I’ll make sure to have certain keywords in the YouTube video description. Since most of my traffic is coming from YouTube, SEO is important on there. But for everything else, since what I’m doing is very, very specialized, people won’t find my website by accident. They usually find it because they saw one of the videos or something like that. So then I really just focus on quality, rather than quantity. I don’t write a ton of posts but I when I do, I try to make sure that they’re given a lot of value. Ultimately I think that quality wins outSusan: I totally agree and I love the fact, too, that you even, in your about you section, talk about your reluctant love affair with modern music, how it…
Scott: Yeah.
Susan: And that’s good that you’re [inaudible 00:13:38]. I think it’s your authenticity and your honesty that really works for you.
Scott: Totally. I think that that’s really crucial and in the music business, you see that there’s a shift away from the old rockstar paradigm that dominated music where artists were supposed to be seen as on a pedestal or unapproachable or something like that. The new move that this new crowdfunding model dictates is being completely open and transparent with your fans. Basically giving them access to the behind the scenes, your though process, to your ideas. I think that they really appreciate that. I think that for a while, the music industry wasn’t very genuine and I think that now there’s a return to those kinds of roots.
Susan: It was very, lots of handlers involved in imposing things and making things look like other things and I think you’re right. It’s a very hard time but at least the power is being returned to the musicians because for so long it’s been in the hands of, I mean, everybody made money but the musicians, except for a very few.
Scott: Right.
Susan: So it’s harder and it requires the musicians to be more things and to think more strategically, but if they can do that, they have much greater control over their careers.
Scott: Sure. I think that musicians that want to be able to branch out as much as they want artistically, I think the best way to do that is to have a really solid footing on business, essentially. Right now, this internet kind of stuff, YouTube, Stageit, Patreon, everything, that’s the crux of it now. So I’m a little bit disappointed that, I guess there are some college programs that are starting to focus on those things, but I’m always surprised when I meet musicians in the real world that aren’t really familiar with how these things work. A lot of them are just amazing, incredible musicians and I just want to show them what to do so they can have all this success because they definitely could. It’s all how you present yourself.
Susan: It’s not taught in schools and it’s certainly something we’ve seen across the board, even in our own industry. We are shocked at how the branding strategies that are being put forward in colleges and universities are from 40 years ago and they don’t…
Scott: Yeah.
Susan: …really take into account how the world has shifted and how we think now and the expectations of the relationship that customers expect to have with the brand. I mean, you get that.
Scott: Sure.
Susan: You completely understand that you are in a relationship with the brand and anybody who plans to do any crowdsourcing at all has to understand that this is a participatory; we are in the age of participation.
Scott: Yes. Definitely. The artist-fan relationship, and I believe you can extend that to the brand-customer relationship, that’s crucial. You have to have that. Without that, you have no business model. You have to have a good relationship with your customer base or your fan base.
Susan: And it has to be on, you know, I look at older models and they just want to keep doing what they’ve always done because the customers would always just show up. If you have a store, for example, they would simply wander in because they need something. Well, now, in that set of circumstances, your customer has made up their mind. 70 percent of their mind is already made up before they ever pick up the phone or walk into your store.
Scott: Right, yeah.
Susan: So if you’re not helping them, and in your case you’re being very helpful on your blog. You give people real insight. You give other artists real insight into the process you’re going through and how to make a living. I mean that builds up a lot of trust with the people who can buy from you.
Scott: Yeah. I hope so, definitely. I think it’s great. I think I love being on the forefront of these things, too. I like being involved in the creation of the rule book for this new model. There’s not really any rules to it yet. YouTube is still kind of in its infancy. Nobody knows what will happen but right now, there’s so many promising things on crowdsourcing front and crowdfunding front. I’m really happy to be able to share that knowledge with other musicians who might not have access to that. I know so many people that have gone to college for music or gone to college for business and they’re not really familiar with these new, game-changing technologies that are coming out.
Susan: Yeah. You also do just, I think, a beautiful job of storytelling. Even when I’m not a fan necessarily of the song, I find your videos deeply compelling.
Scott: Thank you.
Susan: I really do. The musicianship is so, so good. You have such an amazing collective. You can call me a puddlehead. I just think Puddles is amazing.
Scott: Puddles is amazing. Yeah, yeah.
Susan: For those who don’t know, there’s a great video on postmodernjukebox.com that you have to watch it’s Puddles, the seven foot sad clown singing “Royals”, the Lorde song and it’s just wonderful. All of the music is wonderful. Your whole team is so talented. There’s some real thought into the story that you’re trying, I know that’s the basis of any musicianship, but even as a collective, the dynamic is very minimalist and understated. But you’ve got real story going on, even with the little bit of props that you bring and the….
Scott: Yeah.
Susan: …little bit of staging. It’s very thoughtful, not overdone. But it’s very real
Scott: Right. Well, we base it on, we think of entertainment in the past. You know, you would see variety shows where there’d be a musical performance. It’s not all these laser lights. It’s not pyrotechnics or anything like that. They’re usually pretty simple things, but everything means something and we realized that just by subtle things we can get all kinds of people talking about it.
It’s funny, we have one video where our bassist is wearing a cut-off t-shirt and he’s wearing a newsboy cap and he looks a little bit like Sylvester Stallone in that, just from a certain angle. He’s playing an upright bass, but everybody things it’s a cello on the internet, so every comment, like, “Look at Sylvester Stallone playing the cello.” Something like the tiniest detail and you’ll have thousands of people commenting on something like that. We realized that just those little things that does create a story, brings something of interest to people. Because it’s not all fast camera shots and just one big wide shot. It gives people time to use their imagination and come up with stories.
Susan: That’s really true. It’s funny how we have all of this technology at our disposal and the thing that it has proven to us is that we still want to use it to get back to basics
Scott: Yeah. I know. It’s very ironic, but I definitely believe that to be true.
Susan: Is there anything else you wanted to add, Scott?
Scott: I’m trying to think. I don’t think I have anything. These are all great questions and I think you definitely get it. You understand how this works. I guess, let me think. I guess I would just reiterate that all these strategies that I use that are tailor-made for musicians and artists that want to connect with their fans, they can be used for any brand really. Your customer base will appreciate you for it.
Susan: You’re so on the money.
Scott: Yeah. There are just so many ways that you can engage your customer base and it doesn’t have to be giveaways or things like that. It can just be more personal things, having great customer service, checking in with people and things, it only takes a couple seconds to make sure that people are happy. You’ll have a customer for life that way.
Susan: And asking people what they want.
Scott: Yeah. Definitely, yeah. And they will tell you, which is great.
Susan: They will tell you. And giving them opportunity to participate however they can, certainly, you know people value what they help create and the more opportunities you give them to participate, the stronger they will become your advocates. You won’t have to control things to get the word out. They’ll unleash themselves and do wonders for you.
Scott: Definitely, definitely. I always think about it with the fans that contribute to what I’m doing. I think crowdfunding, it’s a little bit like artistic equity. They’re not getting a share in your profits or anything like that, but they’re getting the share in what you’re creating. They’re contributing ideas; they’re contributing more than just the dollars. It’s more about the kind of involvement that they’re having in the finished product that you create.
Susan: They know they’re making it possible. That gives them a total buy-in.
Scott: Definitely.
Susan: That’s amazing. Well you do amazing work, Scott. I really appreciate you taking the time. It’s just, I can’t wait to see your next video. I will watch everything you do. I think you’re really smart and really, really just ahead of the curve and destined for great things.
Scott: Well thank you so much, Susan. I really appreciate that. And I guess I’ll see you on YouTube then.
Susan: You sure will. It’s been fun, thanks so much.
The post Scott Bradlee Podcast Transcript appeared first on ReimaginePr.com.
I’ve kind of become obsessed with Puddles the Seven Foot Clown which is a really crummy way to introduce someone else all together but stay with me.
Scott Bradlee is the talented musician behind Post Modern Jukebox, which every few weeks reimagines a current hit in an older musical style, often racking up millions of viewers per video.
Scott is not a client and he is not particularly representative of our audience. But he has figured out something a number of our listeners have either been curious about or struggled with: Crowd-funding.
He raises funds for each of his videos on a site called Patreon.
Created by Jack Conte, another musician, Patreon lets Bradless raise money from his supporters for each video, approximately $3200 each video.
He and his team aren’t getting rich but what they understand is that the same people who won’t buy music will happily support a dream that comes with a side of music.
In this podcast you’ll get insight into the mindset needed to successfully crowdfund something.
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Jonah Sachs has helped hundreds of social brands connect with audiences through campaigns built on sound storytelling strategies.
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Jonah Sachs has been honored with 'Best Of' awards three times at the standard-setting South By Southwest interactive festival. With good reason.
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Tod Maffin is one of North America’s leading digital and social marketing experts.
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Tod and I discuss personas, best practices for stakeholders, and Scrivner, among other things...
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Everett Martin helps organizations understand the world as it is and not as it was.
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Everett Martin has his finger on the pulse of Corporate Social Responsibility and reputation management.
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Dave Kaminski is a professional videographer and the founder of Web Video University.
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We love Dave’s program video courses because he breaks things down to be easily understandable and he’s there when you need him.
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Our technology has exceeded our humanity. Oh and spin sucks.
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Spin sucks. But some people didn't get the memo.
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