Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook Read online

  Social media is like crack—immediately gratifying and hugely addictive. With their mobile devices in hand, people may as well be getting intravenous drips of the stuff, a constant and incredibly noisy stream of information, imagery, and interaction. And as with any drug (so I’m told—dead serious, I’ve never tried anything), the more they get, the more they want. That’s why it matters that more than half the total U.S. mobile population are using their mobile devices to engage on social media sites—they’re there so much that it’s starting to alter the way they want to interact with brands, services, and businesses, even when they’re not on social media sites.

  Very Important News? You bet your ass it is.

  HOW SOCIAL BLENDED INTO DIGITAL

  This statistic alters current fundamental marketing principles. Over the last half decade, marketers have learned to divide their campaigns into three categories—traditional, digital, and social. We knew that traditional marketing had begun to lose much of its relevance and reach with the advent of the Internet and digital media options pulling the audience away from television commercials and print. Still, when properly aligned, these three platforms could often complement each other effectively. But now that people are addicted to their social networks, they get itchy when their media experience doesn’t have a social element, and they move on. Social media is no longer just pulling the audience away from traditional marketing; it’s cannibalizing digital media, too.

  The evidence is clear. Emails, banner ads, search engine optimization (SEO)—the power of all these stalwart digital marketing tactics of the Internet era is diminishing, with one exception: when the digital platform has a social media component. In fact, adding a social layer to any platform immediately increases its effectiveness.

  Anyone who pays attention to media trends and history shouldn’t be surprised. It’s natural that every new marketing platform would usurp the one that came before. Radio leached away the audience for print, TV poached the audience for radio, the Internet stole audience from every one of these old platforms, and now social media (which is really just the evolution of the Internet) is well on its way to overtaking them all. What’s astounding, however, even to me, is the speed at which this progression is happening. It took thirty-eight years before 50 million people gained access to radios. It took television thirteen years to earn an audience that size. It took Instagram a year and a half.

  With the instant access to social media made possible by mobile devices, there’s no such thing as undivided attention anymore.* It’s not just that people are scrolling Facebook on their laptops while hanging out on the couch half watching The Voice. They’re sharing on Pinterest while crossing the street. They’re loading on Instagram while driving. And while they’re tweeting at the supermarket, they’re starting to ignore the expensive endcaps brands paid for at the end of the aisles, as well as the displays of candy and magazines in front of the registers.* From a personal safety point of view, mobile social networks are a disaster—no one is looking where they’re going. But from a marketing perspective, the writing is on the wall: The fastest-growing marketing sector getting people’s attention is social media. The strict dividing lines between marketing categories can no longer exist—they must all be blanketed with a layer of social.

  The problem is, most companies, marketers, and entrepreneurs haven’t gotten the message, and so they persist in overpaying for diminishing returns.

  It’s not that businesses aren’t trying. Many were dragged kicking and screaming to social media, but by now most understand that having a Facebook page and a Twitter account is critical for brand visibility and credibility. So they’re there. They’re just still not doing it right. While companies were getting comfy cozy with the idea of being on social media platforms, social media transcended those platforms, and few businesses have followed.

  Marketers and business leaders have got to catch up. People want to be social wherever they consume their media. This means that you need to fold a social element into all of your creative, including for traditional media, and into every interaction with your customers, whether by commenting on Tumblr, gamifying a banner ad, engaging on a news aggregator, or sending people to Facebook at the end of your thirty-second radio spot. From now on, every platform should be treated as a social networking platform.

  And now that your consumer is mobile, you’d better be, too.

  A quick look at many companies’ marketing efforts reveals that many have caught on that mobile networks and apps present the biggest opportunity for brand growth. They are disseminating content all across the mobile social media board, making their presence known on all of the most popular networks, like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, and Tumblr. For the most part, their content looks like this:

  With the exception of the Twitter feed, can you tell which platform is which? Though some platforms may eventually implement changes that might alter this scenario by the time this book goes to press, as of this writing, you can’t.

  I write this with the utmost respect: Marketers, small businesses, celebrities, I know you’re trying, but with a few exceptions, the content you’re putting out there sucks. You know why? Because even though consumers are now spending 10 percent of their time with mobile (a number that is soon going to be much higher), you’re investing only 1 percent of your ad budget there. You can’t just repurpose old material created for one platform, throw it up on another one, and then be surprised when everyone yawns in your face. No one would ever think it was a good idea to use a print ad for a television commercial, or confuse a banner ad for a radio spot. Like their traditional media platform cousins, every social media platform has its own language. Yet most of you haven’t bothered to learn it. Most big companies haven’t put in the financial resources, and most small businesses and celebrities aren’t putting in the time. You’re like tourists in Oslo who haven’t bothered to study a word of Norwegian. How can you expect anyone to care what you have to say?

  Whether you’re an entrepreneur, a small business, or a Fortune 500 company, great marketing is all about telling your story in such a way that it compels people to buy what you are selling. That’s a constant. What’s always in flux, especially in this noisy, mobile world, is how, when, and where the story gets told, and even who gets to tell all of it.

  This book will show you how to create the kind of shareable, relevant, value-driven content that ensures consumers always pay attention to your story, no matter where they go, and then that they pass on your content, creating the word of mouth critical to actually making the sale. Ultimately, that’s the real reason to do any of this—because social media sells shit.

  HOW STORYTELLING IS LIKE BOXING

  Until recently, traditional marketing was nothing but a one-sided boxing match, with businesses slamming right hooks onto the same three or four platforms—radio, television, print, outdoor, and then later, the Internet—as fast and as often as possible.

  “Two for one, today only!” Punch.

  “Grab your keys and come on in!” Punch.

  “Don’t miss this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity!” Punch.

  It was an unfair fight, but it worked. Customers had to take the hit since they had nowhere else to go to consume their media. Social media, however, finally gave them an advantage. Now the match was taking place on a platform that allowed them to demand a change in how the game was played. They were going to demand more time. They wanted their brands and companies to spar with them a little, pay attention to them, let them voice their opinions and concerns, and make the brand their own before giving them a shot at the hard sell. From now on, marketers were going to have to spend a lot more time jabbing at their consumer before landing their right hook.

  That’s why I spent the majority of my last two books explaining how to jab properly, even though I knew that managers and marketers cared mostly about right hooks. Jabs are the lightweight pieces of content that benefit your customers by making them laugh, snicker, ponder,
play a game, feel appreciated, or escape; right hooks are calls to action that benefit your businesses. It’s just like when you’re telling a good story—the punch line or climax has no power without the exposition and action that come before it. There is no sale without the story; no knockout without the setup.

  Ironically, over the past few years, the same technology that made it possible for marketers to successfully jab—to use social media to tell their story by engaging directly with their customers—has also made it ten times harder to actually reach those customers and convert the sale. Even the businesses that got in on social media early are now seeing diminishing returns on some of their efforts. While they’re working to get those jabs just right (and there is still room for a lot of improvement), companies also need to update and improve their right hook techniques. They need to pay attention to context. They need to think about timing. They need to start respecting the platforms and understand the nuances that make them interesting.

  At the heart of the content quality crisis is the fact that many marketers and small businesses still don’t believe in social media or even really understand it. They have a presence on social media platforms, but only because they realized they had to in order to be taken seriously. Though the interaction required by social media is like oxygen and sunshine to people like me, and others who have built successful businesses through these platforms, many marketers remain skeptical. Publicly, they claim to be thrilled to have the opportunity to engage directly with their customers; privately, they suspect, maybe even fervently hope, that Facebook and its spawn are fads. Because things were a heck of a lot easier before social media. If you were a big business you created a campaign, like the Geico cavemen, plastered it as far and as wide as possible, and sat back to see what happened. You used the same images and ideas for television, print, and outdoor. If the reports showed the campaign didn’t work, you blamed the data collection technique or some other random element. After six months, regardless of whether the campaign worked or not, you scrapped it and started over with a brand-new one. If you were a small business, you sent some fliers in the mail, created a cute little Yellow Pages ad, ran a local radio ad, and waited for people to come in. If you were really forward-thinking in the late first decade of the 2000s, you did some SEO! Wow!

  Now, if you truly understand how marketing works today, you know there is no individual six-month campaign; there’s only the 365-day campaign, during which you produce new content daily. Maybe you come up with three big campaign ideas—if you’re Geico, it might be the gecko, Maxwell the Pig, and Dikembe Mutombo happily blocking the shot—but you run them simultaneously, selecting a different platform for each, and only using the one that gets the strongest response as the seed for a television ad. Now, if you know what you’re doing, you scour the Internet daily, searching for references to your product or service so you can jump in on the conversation, or scrambling at a moment’s notice to respond to a 2:47 P.M. complaint via Twitter. To do social media right is harder and requires more time and effort than most people realize. And though the analytics get more accurate and sophisticated by the day, even the best right hooks can sometimes take a while to offer quantifiable, data-driven proof that they worked (like when you post call-to-action driven content asking people to buy airline tickets or a bottle of wine). So though the majority of marketers and businesspeople are working with social media, a lot of them are still questioning the value of the platforms, and few respect them enough to fully invest, either financially or philosophically. It shows. It shows in the low frequency of their posts, the inferior quality of their content, the lack of ingenuity with which they approach each new medium even as it gains in popularity, and worst of all, in the shocking lack of effort put toward showing care and respect for any community that has formed around their business despite all the previously listed failings.

  Here’s how most marketers react to new platform: Someone emails them an article that says something like Snapchat is exploding, so they head over to the site to see what it’s about. They spend a few minutes there and see a bunch of drunken twenty-five-year-olds posting bikini shots and text saying, “Walking the dog!” “Anchovies . . . FTW!” They write the site off as a waste of time and don’t come back until twelve months later, when everyone and their aunt is using it, at which point they make a big announcement praising themselves, as though being last in line is something to be proud of: “Look what we did! Isn’t it exciting? See how responsive we are?” It’s embarrassing. It pisses me off. (It also makes me perversely happy because their cluelessness has a definite upside for my clients, my friends, and for me.)

  A smart entrepreneur or open-minded brand manager, however, will head over to a new platform, see the bikini shots, and think, “How can I do better?” He or she will spend twelve months securing a solid dominance over the platform in their category, all the while reaping tons of earned media as bloggers and reporters chronicle their progress and analyze their strategy, and attracting the best young talent because the students coming out of business school want to work at progressive businesses. You’d think, given the advantages, that brands and small businesses would be scrambling to be first to market on these platforms, but most of the time their fear of failure, their legal department’s fear of lawsuits, or their perceived lack of time outweighs their sense of possibility. They are playing defense instead of offense.

  Here’s my dirty secret: Though I get to things early and can often see the future, I’m not Nostradamus. I’m not even Yoda. I’m just the kind of person who shows new platforms the respect they deserve. I won’t predict what platform will see 20 million users in a year, but once it feels to me like it will, I put my money and my time there, testing the waters, trying new formulas, until I figure out how to best tell my story in a way the audience for that platform wants to hear.

  I can’t believe how many marketers will dismiss the media habits of five million people. Just because your teenage daughter and her friends are excited about a new platform does not mean that that platform is irrelevant to you or your brand. You may not see any value in sharing your thoughts on nail polish, or posting a picture every time you get a new tattoo, or telling the world every time you set foot in a Wendy’s, but when 20 million other people do, you need to do something with that information. Ignoring platforms that have gained critical mass is a great way to look slow and out-of-touch. Do not cling to nostalgia. Do not put your principles above the reality of the market. Do not be a snob.

  You cannot win big in social media if you’re going to be afraid of emerging technology. Those of us who spent time on YouTube in 2006 watched more than our fair share of dumbasses putting Mentos in cola or dressing their cats in silly outfits. But like a parent who knows that the infant currently squeezing handfuls of peas into mush will grow up to use a fork and knife, we had faith that this platform hadn’t yet reached its full maturity or potential. Some people saw an amateur video distribution site; we saw the future of television. For my part, I experimented and tested ideas to see what worked; I created an opening hook like an old-time radio program to make myself more meme-orable. I approached it as a major platform, and so did a lot of other people who are now big-name brands. (And they didn’t make the huge misstep to leave YouTube for Viddler in 2007, leaving millions of free views on the table, like I did. Even I screw up sometimes!) We didn’t do anything more than take the platform seriously and put in a massive amount of effort to figure out how to make them work for us, committing to the same intense process of testing and observation as any champion boxer before a fight.

  A boxer spends a lot of time analyzing his own technique, but spends an equal amount of time analyzing his competitor’s technique, too. Even when two fighters meet in the ring for the very first time, they already know each other well. For months before the match, in addition to their regular predawn training in the gym and practice ring, the competitors spend hundreds of hours studying each other on film. Like insanely fit behavior
al scientists, they analyze every move and swing their opponent has made in previous fights, repeatedly rewinding and rewatching footage in an attempt to memorize their opponent’s technique, and particularly, the tics and habits that can warn a fighter of the swing that’s about to come. Does the opponent blink before he throws with his right hand? Does he hesitate to come back after getting hit with a cross? Does he drop his hands when he gets tired? Finally, on the day of the fight, a boxer will take all of this information into the ring with him, armed with a strategy precisely calibrated to take advantage of his opponent’s weaknesses and protect himself from the other’s strengths, so he can use his best moves to maneuver himself into a winning position.

  If, whenever they approached a platform, more marketers prepared their stories with the same intensity as boxers, they’d create much better content. Like great boxers, great storytellers are observant and self-aware. A great storyteller is keenly attuned to his audience; he knows when to slow down for maximum suspense and when to speed up for comic effect. He can sense when he’s losing people’s interest and can make adjustments to his tone or even to the story itself to recapture their attention. Online marketing requires the same kind of audience awareness, which we can achieve thanks to the tremendous data mining opportunities at our fingertips. The real-time feedback that social media makes possible allows brands and businesses to test and retest, with scientific precision, what content connects with their audience, and what leaves them cold. Ignoring the deep analytics available for your fan page through Facebook (and through other platforms soon) is the equivalent of stepping into the ring without even having watched a video of your opponent during a fight.