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Amber: Roadmap Part 2

the fourth pillar of a good social framework is obviously audience now. The most important thing about audiences that we don't always, our audience isn't everyone. And one of the cardinal sins that we tend to make in business is when people say, Who is your customer, our customers? Adults? Yeah, and that, unfortunately, that's not gonna help you focus your efforts very much. So we all need to know kind of who our customers and what the profile is. An especially in social media we have to create for someone, even if it's a fictional kind of persona we build in our head. We have to be creating our world and our social media interactions specific to that person, because that's what makes us unique. If you go out on social right now, it is noisy, loud, fast and overrun, with all kinds of people shouting over each other to be heard. The only way to stand out in social media anymore is to be different, not louder, not faster, not mawr, but to be different. And the most important thing you ca...

n do, then, is if you're going to be different, you have to be specific about who you're talking Teoh and why you're talking to them. And I mean, it's a little bit kind of schizophrenic. But if you what? If you get in there and have a conversation with your imaginary customer and start talking to yourself as though you were that person, what do they need? What do they want? What did they expect from you? Is a company in social media because that sort of starts to drive? How did they use social media? One of the most important things to recognize about Social is that the usage of it is incredibly diverse. There. The way people use social is completely different from person to person. I identify with I'm obviously I'm a content creator. I'm a consumer. I'm really active, so I'm I'm a very small percentage of the universe because I do all those things. The consulting firm Forrester came out several years ago was something that they called a techno graphics ladder, and you can look it up online. There's a graphic, it looks like a ladder, and they profiled a bunch of people and how they use the Web and social networks. And there's everything from really active content creators like me to very passive consumers who do nothing but read. And they do nothing but consume content. They never comment. They never interact. They never share. They never do anything but there. Still valuable because they're still consuming the content that we're putting out into the world, so we can't forget them. But it's a mistake to think that the only measure of success in social is to put something out there and people interacted with it. It's like, Yeah, I get it. That's obvious evidence. But the truth is that if we're the kind of business where our customer is not geared towards sharing or participating or engaging with content, we're gonna miss an opportunity to be talking with them. They're still consuming in social ways. They're just not vocalizing their social participation. So it's really important to keep that in mind. And if you want, you can sit down and actually do that sort of techno graphics profile for your customers. So survey them, ask them questions, find out how they use social media if they use social media and when. I also tell you, if you hold my mom and you say to my mom, are you a social media user, she would say. Absolutely not. I'm not on Facebook. I'm not on Twitter. I don't do you, too. I don't use social media. However, if I could say to her, Well, did you search for anything this week? And she says Yes, and I'll say, Well, we're any of those search results block posts and she'll say, Well, yeah, I said, Well, did you read any of the comments? And she'll say, Yeah, and I'm like, You're a social media user But people don't identify that way because it our minds social media equals using Facebook, which is so bent. But it's really important for a business to remember that not everybody uses the Web the same way. So don't neglect the fact that some people may not be. You could put up a contest for some company to do a video blogged contest, and you will get crickets and the other company. You'll get thousands of entries because their audiences air so different, so you could do the exact same thing with the exact same tactic and get completely different results. It's really important to understand how your customers and community use social media The other thing about building an audience is that we tend to think about an audience. Is me standing up here and talking to all of you and as a business that makes sense, way want a market right? So we want all of you to be listening to us. The problem is that audience is not sustainable. But community is so audiences outward for me, to you, me talking to you be providing you with information, you all sitting here and listening. But a community, by definition, is participatory. People get to be part of something, and miraculously, when we build communities, they become self reinforcing. So what we're looking to do is get everybody in a room that's not just interfacing like this. But imagine if we all took these tears and turn them around and faced each other and got on the ground. And right now this feels very present, her audience. But afterwards we'll all hang out and mingle and talk and share a bit of about our lives and what we have in common. That's community, and that's what we want to build with social. It seems like our obvious goal should be to build audience because we want to build awareness. We want to build reach. We want to build a platform for people to hear us, and that's amazing. And it works, and it's a huge advantage. But the real power play as when we can turn that audience into a group of people who actually want to be with each other so that when we're not around talking to them, they're talking amongst themselves. They're helping create content there, answering each other's questions and problems. If there's nothing more gratifying in the world than building a social community, whether it's 10 people or 10,000 that's really active and self nurturing, it really is something. So I have a trick for you. Another exercise you can do to try to figure out who the people are, that you want to be talking. Teoh and we used this technique a lot in larger corporate situations when we're trying to figure out how to understand what's going on inside a company, but you can use it to figure out what's going on in the hearts and minds of your community. Draw head on the wall. I'm not kidding. Yes, seeing those like big posted pad things. Those things air gold. So get a big sticky pad and stick it to the wall and get a marker and draw ahead and doesn't have to look good. You could just be a head round ball. What you want to do is sit there and think about okay, this is my customer in the middle and in the context of my social strategy, what does my customer see when they see me out in social? What, What are they observing and when they What kinds of things are they going to find if they look for me, or if I happen to find them and when that happens, what are they going to be thinking about? Gee, I'd really like to see this. What sorts of things, What sorts of expectations do they have? What sort of misunderstandings might they have about your company or your business? What are they thinking about your category as a whole? What are they thinking about their lives or their professional cells? So what's going on in the head of that person all across the board? And then, of course, what are they saying out loud? Because what we thinking, what we say are often two different things. So it's important that they're separate. I may be thinking, Wow, that guy's really a jerk. But I'm certainly not gonna be like Wow here, is it? Well, I might, but But usually we don't just come right out and say those sorts of things. So what we want to think about is the difference between what our customers actually were thinking in their hands. But what's actually coming out of their bows? So when they talk about the needs that they have is a company, what are they saying? Or as a person? What are they saying about that? And, of course, intrinsically. What do we think they're feeling now? This, of course, takes a little bit of speculation. You have to sort of guess at some of these things and you can ask. So take a good sampling of your customers and talk to them about this, and you don't have to ask them literally. What are you seeing? What are you thinking? What do you feel? Because they're not going to tell you, but start interviewing them about how did you find us? What do you love about doing business with us. What do you not love about doing business with us? What kinds of other companies are you loyal to? Why do you love them? So getting that gives you an idea off that profile of a person. Here's what starts to happen. You will start to see conflicts between what people think and what they say. You will start to see that they you believe your customer feels and has certain expectations. But they're not seeing those things from you. So all of a sudden you have some dots to connect and things to Dio. This is a beautiful way to start informing the next thing we'll talk about which is content. But can you see how When you pull this together, it gives you a really focused idea of who you're talking to, because now, when you revisit this coupled with your goals and your vision, suddenly you've got this beautiful picture of like Now I know I'm talking Teoh, and suddenly you get inspired to create and we get all kinds of ideas for content. Yes, ma'am, I guess I'm kind of doing that backwards because I don't have any customers yet, but I'm creating content That's okay. So is there a way that I can ask people questions? Still, if they're not yet my customers? Absolutely. So what you can do is go out and ask your potential customers or people who you'd like to be your customers and see what they have to say about that kind of thing. And that can also be a persona that you envision. So what is my ideal customers thinking and saying and all those kinds of things. So if you don't have customers yet, that's who you aspire to. Okay? Yes, sure. Okay. So content the key to content useful always wins. Frankly, nobody cares about your stuff, Really, Like the people who care about our marketing are us. We care about we think were the coolest, sexiest, most important business on the planet. And we love our marketing, and we become used. Navel gazing like marketing is awesome, and for the most part, people don't care. What they want is problems solved. And how many times have you encountered a business that you found because they gave you something useful? And now it is content. Online is a huge port portion of that. So your best silver bullet in terms of content is to answer the questions and solve the problems that your customers currently have. So if they if if you're a photographer, you're not answering people's questions about your pricing and your packages, you're answering people's questions about how can I take better pictures of my kid with my own camera? You know, how can I take pictures of my kids at the pool without drowning my camera? What happens if I get sand in my IPhone? You know those kinds of things are really helpful, useful content, and they they surround your business. But they're not directly related to your marketing. Useful always wins. Always. The second thing is, it's really important to remember that storytelling still has a place in business. If you can find a through line to tell stories about why you do what you dio, that's amazing. At Sierra Works, we took our nerdy kind of Galileo space analogy and turned it into a story about why we're in social business. Because back in 16 10 Galileo actually discovered the four moons of Jupiter, and it totally turned on its head the idea that every planet in the universe revolved around Earth and instead proved that everything revolved around the sun, which was a heretical and revolutionary at the time. But it completely changed the way people saw the universe. And we believe that that's what's happening in social business today. Is that the way people see the universe is changing? Once again, that's our story. And when people hear that story there like that makes so much sense. And so we have an anchor point to draw all kinds of content in our logo is part of Jupiter and, you know, stories have a place in business, and they're still there's something about us as kids that loves to be told a story and in content there is no exception. Tell lots of stories. Tell stories about your customers, how your business came to be, why you're in business, who you hope to do business with stories about the people you've worked with, the people you wish you worked with. All of those things become really great content fodder when you can't figure out anything else to talk about. Don't forget. Your audience has lots of dimensions to, so we again, we talked to people as though they are our customers. So if I have, um, if I have a health and wellness company, I'm talking to people in terms of their health and wellness. But I'm concerned with health and wellness, too, because I'd like to lose a few pounds. But I'm a mom. I'm a dog parent. I'm a business owner. So understanding all of those things about me is actually really important to you delivering content that I want to read. Because if you can show me that you empathize with the whole person that I am not just how I fit your customer profile, I'm much more inclined to spend time engaging with your content because I think you get me. You know, I know you get me. So knowing that your audience has dimensions is huge. I love pet plan insurance. If you guys don't know them, they're a small business, and they provide insurance for pets. But their best asset is telling stories about the dogs in the kiddies and stuff that they save. And their content is all focused around the stories in the back stories of these animals. And what happened to Fido, who got hit by the car and how you know all these crazy stories, and that is this. That's the backbone of their content, and it's amazingly engaging because sure, they sell pet insurance. But I'm an animal person, so I'm in love with the whole animal person thing. If I'm gonna buy pet insurance, who am I gonna think of first? Not because they pitched me pet insurance, but because they identified with me as a pet lover, and that's something that they do really well. The next thing, of course, is to go through and figure out what your resource is. Our for most of us in this room, it's not much, but it's not a whole lot. We don't have a lot of money. We don't have a lot of people. So what you want to sit down and do is actually do an audit? Sit down and figure out what you have to work with at your disposal. Do you have two hours a week? Do you have five hours a week? Do you have 500 bucks a month to spend on your website or zero? And also auditing the process of auditing your social and all that kind of stuff is also about understanding what you're currently doing, that you either need to keep doing that. You're not doing that. You should be so something that you need to build and create. And what are you doing that is totally wasting your time that you need to stop doing, which is usually the hardest thing for us to give up in business. We started doing it for a reason, so it's hard for us to admit that's not working so well anymore. So it's important to go through the process of understanding what you need to keep, create and destroy, and one way to look at all of your research sources and exercise we call impact versus ease. So make a list of all of the thing is in your social strategy that you want to do. You think you want to dio all the different pieces and components, and you want to rate them on a scale of 1 to 10 in both of these categories. Impact meaning? How much do I think this convene of the needle in my business? And two, how easy is it to get done? So if it's high impact but really difficult, it's probably worth spending time on low impact, high level of difficulty. Maybe not so much, you know, to get the get the idea. So this is a great way when you're trying to get when you're getting overwhelmed by all of the things you want to do in social, put them all out on paper and start rating them to figure out what's actually worth your time and investment. I find that because I get fixated on a particular project that is my baby for the moment. And I tend to not think of it in context of other things I'm doing. So you can get lost in the woods a little bit thinking, Well, this I have to build the website because that's really important. But then when I stack it up against a bunch of other stuff, it's got low impact, high level of difficulty, high cost. Maybe it shouldn't be my priority right now. So social is a really good thing to look at through that lens because what you're getting overwhelmed. This will help you filter out what's actually important to Dio. Yes, ma'am, I just want to say something about having you know the resource is you haven't stuff. I didn't know that I was coming on to Creativelive until, like, two days before I didn't have my website up. And in 36 hours or something like that, I turned around a really quick wordpress seem. And I got somebody on the lance to build it for me, and nothing happened in 30 hours for like, 100 $50 or something. That's often so. It can be really quick, and it doesn't have to be expensive, and it looks fine. And it's, you know, it could be done. Cooking easy sometimes is I'm a perfectionist, so I suffer from that all the time, like it's got to be just right, and sometimes it's more important to get it out there, and you can always tweak it and generate on it later on. But of course, the irony is that I work with a lot of companies on innovation programs, and we always talk about build quick, fail fast learn, and I'm not really good at that myself. But when it comes to content, that's absolutely a cardinal rule, and we'll talk about that a little bit more. But I'm so glad you brought that point out because it's so true, it doesn't always have to be big and fancy. Did you have a question? Yeah, kind off. Kind of good when you were talking about impact and ease. Yeah. Say building a block, Which might not be easy. Yep. But it the foot is only the first time. And you're selecting the team are putting everything together once everything is put together. Yeah, the follow will not be that difficult. Exact. So how do we That's a gut check as faras like as faras ranking it in terms of ease. I would say if it were me, I would rank a blawg, probably somewhere on, um if one is really easy in 10 is really difficult. I'd put the initial phases of a blogger up by 78 and sustaining a blogger is probably down by three. But the impact for me for a block is off the charts, so it's almost like, no matter what the difficulty, I'm absolutely going to do it because it's a really good investment for me to make. So that's the and it's all gonna be relative to your business. But, you know, in general, I would say that's the scale I would go on. The workflow element is really important because this is how you know how to manage your time. So can you figure out if this, then that And then I do the next thing. So if you write a block post, what you gonna do with that information? Are you going to then see that to Facebook or you're gonna share it on Twitter? And then if people start commenting, what's your workflow, then? Are you going to respond to comments how much time where you're going to take to do that work flowing all this stuff into your day to day is the most important thing toe actually making time to do it. So by every task I have in social, I start by asking, What am I going to dio? So what? In other words, why am I doing this? And is it important enough for me to spend time on it? What now is what do I do after it's done, which is super simple, But it's something that most of us don't actually spend the time to dio. So build yourself a playbook that actually match those things after you Even if you're a one person shop, your playbook can be one or two pages long. But it's the These are the things I'm going to do to further my social media strategy today. These are my strategies. These air my tasks. This is how much time it's going to take, and that way that becomes kind of your. If you get hit by a bus document, somebody could come into your business and do it all for you. The goal is to have that stuff completely systemized in a way that makes it easy for you to follow. And it's a no brainer, like you don't have to think about it so you can go in and build that so it's part of your everyday, not an ancillary thing that you have to add on. Second to last thing. Obviously, you need participation. You need people to interact with your content. You need people to come to your communities and participate. It's really important, but you have to share the stage. That means that for me, this would not be any fun at all if we weren't talking interacting. You guys were answer asking questions. I mean, how isolated would you feel if you didn't get to ask questions? So part of this is involving your customers and community and what you dio and showcasing them and their work and their lives, especially in social. It's like the quid pro quo is giving to get a lot more giving than getting so sharing other people's content. Putting other people in the spotlight is really important, and we talked about being helpful before. But being helpful is really important to people in your community. They want to feel like you care about their problems and that you care about solving them. They also want you to be part of that community. So we talked a little earlier about the whole idea of being one of us. Don't just be my health and wellness coach. Be somebody who can share with me your own experiences and doing that and participate with me as appear not as a business to customer relationship all the time. That's the thing that social does really well is breaks down that wall between customer company to we're all just kind of all part of the same big fish bowl here, and we share common interests purposes and goals, and we can talk amongst those things if you don't. If you're an outdoorsy person, you probably know moose Jaw, but they do a lot of outdoorsy where, and they have this down to a science, the idea of becoming being one of us. They live and breathe the whole outdoor community thing, and they behave like somebody who loves the outdoors. So all of their communications air really casual and laid back and they're funny. They don't take themselves too seriously, and they really feel with their customers, like we're just one of you. We just happen to be working over here, but we get you because we are you. And that engenders deep loyalty amongst their customer base because people feel like they're understood. And they also feel like they're part of something bigger than themselves, which is a huge motivating factor in social building, a platform that is scalable, sustainable and fun. You want something that you're actually going to enjoy doing so unsurprisingly with the first thing we have to do is care about the people that are part of it. They're not audience segments. They're not customer profiles, their people, and the first thing we need to care about is how we activate them, reach them, communicate with them and connect with them. Tool Agnostic. Your strategy should never rely on anyone. Tool Ever. If you're If you look at your social strategy as a whole and find that it's really resting on the back of Facebook, I encourage you to take a step back and look at if we removed Facebook and put another tool in its place, would that still be a viable strategy? Because that's what she wanted aimed for. So all of your goals and objectives and strategies and tactics need to be built around things that will come and go because they will. So you want the best example of this? You guys knew Brian Clark. Copy blogger. Okay, if you want to do content marketing, you guys need to go spend three days with a cup of coffee, a blanket and copy border, because they're they've built this amazing Brian started a block in 2006 and they become a multi $1,000,000 software product company because they learned the power off content and they learned the power of building a platform that doesn't they do very little on Facebook. You know, he's on Twitter and kind of irreverent, funny, but their core strategy is completely tool agnostic. They produce amazing content on a sustainable platform, and they do it all the time. So if Facebook blows up tomorrow, if Twitter goes away, guess who's gonna keep ticket Bryant and he'll never must be so He's a great example to follow, and I love their whole team. They've grown from Brian Clark and Sonia Simone to a team of I think they have 40 some odd people now, so they're an amazing small business success story that is one of my favorites, and they know social better than anyone.