MackCollier.com

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Jason Bourne on a Jetski is More Interesting Than Bruce Wayne in a Tuba

Think about ordering pizza and having it come to your house.  Not a big deal, right?  But what if that pizza was delivered in a Ferrari?  Suddenly it’s a memorable experience.

Recently someone on Twitter posed the question: What happens when you write what you think is an amazing blog post, and it falls flat. No one comments, no one shares, and it’s doubly frustrating because this was a post that you loved, and you thought others would love it as well.  This post was about a thing or a person or an idea that you are passionate about, and you wanted to share that passion with the world.

And it fell flat as a pancake.  The proverbial digital tree falling in the digital forest and no one heard it.

The question becomes, ok now what?

Whenever a piece of content doesn’t resonate as I thought it would, I ask myself “What is the core idea here that excited me, and why doesn’t it excite others as well?”  This forces me to re-evaluate the idea, question if it is really important, and also examine how I can frame the idea so that others can see its importance.

I’ve written before about the value of empathy in your marketing and really all your communications. In this context, empathy means seeing your content as your audience would see it. How will you frame your ideas so they are interesting and relevant for your audience?

When I was working on the book that would become Think Like a Rock Star, I had a core idea that was interesting and relevant that I wanted to share with the world. I saw how some brands had customers that literally LOVED that brand, and I wanted other brands to understand the power of creating and cultivating powerful advocates. But the reality is that most brands don’t have a core base of passionate customers, so it’s hard for those brands to relate to this idea and see the potential.

So I took my core idea and wrapped in the rock star analogy. While most brands couldn’t envision what it would be like to have passionate customers, they COULD relate to how a rock star has fans, They could understand how fans drive success for that rock star. So I started with the rock star frame of reference, that brands saw the value in, and worked backwards to relate the analogy to their brand.  The majority of the book is written to help brands understand how their customers can be converted into fans just like a rock star has fans. By presenting the idea in this way by using the rock star analogy, it immediately becomes more interesting and relevant to brands.

So when you are trying to frame or even reframe your idea for your audience, ask yourself these questions:

1 – Who is my audience for this idea?

2 – What impact or change will this idea make for my audience?

3 – How can I take my idea and make it relevant to my audience.

 

I think the third question is the hardest to answer as we’ve just discussed. The trap many of us fall into is believing that everyone else will love our idea for the same reasons we do. Nothing could be further from the truth. Understanding the point of view of your audience and having empathy for their reality are keys to creating an idea that connects with your audience,

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Fighting For Your Passion

One of the pieces of advice we are all given to having a happy life is to find your passion, The idea is, if you can find that one thing (or things) that you are truly passionate about, that moves your soul, especially in a work context, you can live a much happier life. If you are lucky, you can figure out what you are passionate about at an early age, and build a work history and even life around those passions.

But some people are different. Some people know what they are passionate about, and they let that passion be their fuel to be the best. They aren’t content with simply doing what they love, they want to be the best at what they love.

The late long-distance runner Steve Prefontaine once said “To give anything less than your best, is to sacrifice the gift”. This is one of my favorite quotes, as it is for many people. But there’s an underlying message in this quote that many people miss.

Consistently giving your best requires sacrifice.

If you look at people that are great at something, then you look at the people that are recognized as ‘the best’, the difference typically isn’t talent, but ”The best’ were willing to make sacrifices that others were not.

Being elite at anything comes at a cost. Not everyone is willing to pay that cost. But a few rare individuals value their gift enough to give it their all.

We lost one of those people on Sunday. Here’s who Kobe Bryant was:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y64OsZNYhp0

That was the final 3 mins of Kobe’s final game,. When this video starts, the Lakers were down by 10 points. Kobe scored 17 straight points, including the game-winner. Then he finished the game, and his career, with an assist.

And he is exhausted. He can’t catch his breath, he is wobbly as he comes off the court each time. If you’ve played basketball, you know that when you get tired, the first thing that happens is you start to miss jump shots, because your legs can’t give you the normal amount of lift that they do when you are rested.

Yet Kobe continued to hit long jump shot after long jump shot. He blocked the fatigue and even the pain, out of his mind, and dominated.

Because he owed it to his fans to give them a show in his final game. But he also knew he owed it to himself. He owed it to the gift that God gave him.

I’ve always admired the sacrifice that Kobe was willing to make to be the best. He could have given half the effort and he probably still would have been a Hall of Famer, he was that good.

But he didn’t want to be good, he was driven to be the best. I think that’s the lesson I will take from Kobe, and maybe that is his lasting gift to us all: It’s not enough to simply find your passion, you owe it to yourself to let that passion consume you and make you be the best you can be.

Rest in Peace, Kobe. Thank you for the sacrifices you made, and the example that you left us with.

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Pinterest Passes Snapchat to Become Third Biggest Social Media Platform in the US

According to eMarketer, Pinterest passed Snapchat in number of US users in 2019, and will grow its lead through at least 2023.

I’m far from a Pinterest ‘expert’. In fact, I’ve probably only spent a few hours combined on the site since joining several years ago. But I’ve always thought it was interesting how that Pinterest continued to have its fans and devoted users, even though it maybe hasn’t gotten the level of hype of a Snapchat or even Tik Tok. The growth has been more ‘organic’ in that sense, fueled not by hype or a marketers land-rush, but by users loving the site and telling others.

I think you can learn so much about a social media platform’s users by asking and answering two simple questions:

1 – Who is using the site?

2 – Why are they using it?

 

Lets Compare the Ages of the People Using Snapchat and Pinterest

Referencing the eMarketer article again, let’s look at age penetration among US users for Snapchat:

12-17 years old – 66.5%

18-24 – 81.3%

25-34 – 49.2%

 

As you can see, Snapchat is very popular among the 12-34 age group. But the study listed 5 other age groups, and Snapchat didn’t see over 21% penetration in any of these groups. In fact, it only saw double digit penetration in the two groups of the five not listed.

So that tells you that Snapchat is popular among millennials (and whatever group is coming after them) and doesn’t see as much usage among Gen Xers and Baby Boomers.

Keep that in mind, now let’s look at the age penetration among different age groups for Pinterest users:

12-17 years old – 28.1%

18-24 – 35.6%

25-34 – 40%

35-44 – 39.6%

45-54 – 33.9%

55-64 – 26.1%

 

See the difference? While Snapchat enjoys roughly 50% and higher penetration in three age groups from 12-34 years old, Pinterest enjoys 25-40% penetration in every age group from 12-64 years old. So while Snapchat appeals to a mostly younger audience, Pinterest appeals to a wide age range. This means Snapchat’s userbase is more fragile and susceptible to loss if a competing app or platform emerges that appeals to a younger audience as well. Such as TikTok. Since Pinterest appeals to a much wide age range, it is in a better position to fend off any current or future competition.

 

So Why Do People Use Pinterest? 

I started blogging in 2005, started using MySpace that same year, Facebook and Twitter in 2007. I’ve typically been one of the early adopters of emerging social media platforms. For the last 15 years that I’ve used social media, it’s always been amusing (and a bit depressing) to see what happens when the MARKETERS discover a particular social media site. First the social media/marketing bloggers discover the site, then the marketers that follow them try it out, and we are off to the races. In each case, the marketers come in and try to alter the basic site functionality to fit within the marketing processes that they are used to.  With often mixed results because these social media platforms were primarily built as personal communication tools, not marketing communication channels.

But Pinterest was one social media site that the marketers never really spent much time on, and that’s always intrigued me. I think the main reason why marketers never spent much time on Pinterest is because it takes a lot of time and energy to create, curate and maintain boards. If you aren’t passionate about the process, you probably won’t stick with it. If you talk to Pinners or google why people love Pinterest, you will frequently hear users talk about how they love how the boards give them inspiration. The inspiration can fuel ideas, or future plans, or just give them something to dream about. But the Pinners who invest the time and energy in creating and maintaining their boards do so out of love. And they interact with other Pinners, they share their findings and likewise find other interesting boards to follow as well.

If you look at Pinterest usage from the angle of planning and inspiration, you can begin to understand how the site appeals to a wide age range. All of us have something we are planning. If you are young, it could be going to college, or getting married. If you are married, it could be travel, or relocating to a new city because of a job promotion. If you are older, you may be planning for retirement and that could involve a possible move as well. No matter what stage of your life you are in, there are major future events that you are planning for.

And besides that, there are things you need help and advice with every day. Maybe you need help landscaping for the Spring, or working on your car, or becoming a better painter, or growing your collection of old comic books. Whatever your interests and whatever your age, Pinterest users have no doubt already created boards that you can find inspiration from.

 

If you are a regular Pinterest user, how do you use the site? What do you love about it? Pinterest is the one social media site that I rarely visit, but every time I do, I think to myself “I need to spend more time here!’

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Twitter Will Soon Give Users the Ability to Control Who Can Reply to Tweets

I’ve been pretty critical of Twitter’s recent attempts to ‘manage the health of the conversations‘ on its platform. Too often, these efforts seem to set in place mechanisms that could automatically enhance or suppress content based on whether or not this content contains certain topics. It could lead to giving an artificial impression that some content is actually more popular than it is, or that other content isn’t gaining in popularity, when in fact it is being shared widely.

But I tend to agree with Twitter’s signaling that it will add more user controls into who can and cannot reply to a user’s tweets. In general, I think its better to let the individual user have more control over how it views and creates content, versus having more content consumption decisions made at the platform level where everyone is subject to the same guidelines.

The new settings will let users specify which group they want to be able to reply to their tweets, and they can select for each tweet.  The four groups include:

Global – Any Twitter user can reply

Group – Any Twitter user you follow or mention in your tweet

Panel – Any Twitter user you mention in your tweet

Statement – No Twitter user can reply

 

Oddly, there’s not a planned setting to allow only Twitter users who follow you reply to your tweets. This seems like a no-brainer as it would be an easy way for Twitter users to gain followers; Want to talk to me? Gotta follow me first.

 

At any rate, since it appears these changes are coming, now is a good time to decide how you or your company might utilize these new settings to better connect with others. Each of these settings give you the ability to improve or restrict engagement, based on who can reply. I also think it gives you a chance to revisit your content strategy, at least for Twitter. Each setting gives you the chance to reach a different audience, and as such, gives you the opportunity to accomplish different things.

Global – Any Twitter user can reply. For most companies or individuals using Twitter, this will continued to be the preferred setting.

Group – Any Twitter user you follow or mention in your tweet can reply to you. This is where it begins to get interesting. For instance, let’s say you or your company sells training via a subscription model. You could follow all your members, and then change the settings so only those members can reply to your tweets. Or if you were a popular Twitch streamer or YouTuber, you could tell your subscribers that you will follow all subscribers back on Twitter, so if they want to be able to reply to your tweets, they need to subscribe to your content.

Panel – Any Twitter user you mention in your tweet can reply to that tweet. I could possibly see a use for this with Twitter chats, where the organizer questions the guest, that way you could follow the organizers tweets during the chat if you only want to hear what the guest has to say, and the larger hashtag for the chat if you want to interact with everyone else.

Statement – No Twitter user can reply to your tweets. I think this setting holds a lot of potential for experimenting with driving engagement OFF Twitter. Think about it, if you say something on Twitter and I want to reply, but can’t, then what are my options? I either forget about it and move on, or I find another way to reply to you, likely through email. When I reply via email, the interaction changes to ONE TO ONE. On Twitter, I can reply then others can chime in and it can quickly become a one to MANY interaction, which for a company can present a LOT of problems, especially in regards to customer complaints. Additionally, it can be much easier to convert a follower into a customer via an email interaction, so I think there’s a lot of potential for companies in regards to the Statement setting.

 

As I said earlier, now would be a good time to revisit your Twitter content strategy with an eye toward these coming changes. Start thinking now about how you could incorporate these changes into how you use Twitter, and to your advantage. Hopefully we will also get a Followers setting so only the people following us can reply to our tweets. That could be the most useful setting of all.

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Don’t Sweat the Technique: The Rock Star’s Guide to Content Creation, Content Marketing and Promotion

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For most of us, we write a new blog post, then maybe we share it on Twitter and Facebook, and hope for the best.  We tell ourselves that ‘good content will find an audience.’

But is that really true?  Can we realistically expect to spend 30 mins writing a blog post that becomes a masterpiece just because we publish it?  Or do we need a more robust strategy to give our content a fighting chance to be seen among all the other millions of pieces of digital content that are being created right now?

I would say that we do, and I think we can take a lot of inspiration from how rock stars create and market their new music.  Let’s look at the creation process and then the promotional process:

Step One: Writing the songs

This is where the rock star gets the basic idea for the song down on paper.  The lyrics, the chorus, the title.  None of this is finalized, it’s sort of a rough draft of what the song could be.  The songwriter is telling a story and while the fine details may need to be ironed out, the basic idea is there. This is very similar to you writing a draft for your blog post.  You might want to revisit that draft and refine it, but you have the general idea down for your post and the point you want to make.  If you need advice on how to write an awesome blog post, here’s my 2,000 word guide on how to do so.

Step Two: Recording and producing the song

Now at this point many bloggers feel their post is finished, and they will publish it.  But rock stars take their song, and give it to a producer.  That producer will then consult with the rock star on the song’s arrangement and musical elements and how they can compliment the lyrics of the song.  This would be very similar to a blogger handing her post over to an editor to review it before publishing.  If the rock star works with a stellar producer, the end result will be a much better song, just as when you let an excellent editor review your post, it will be improved.

But again, most bloggers skip this step and never let their posts be edited or reviewed.  This might not be as big of a deal for a seasoned blogger that can self-edit, but for the new blogger especially, it helps to have a trained set of eyes reviewing your content.  One of the key areas where bloggers short-change themselves is on the post’s headline.  Headlines are an art for bloggers and songwriters.  John Denver’s iconic song Leavin’ on a Jet Plane was originally released as ‘Babe I Hate to Go’.  His new manager listened to the song and recommended the change based on what the song was actually about. Many bloggers have the same issue, they summarize the post with the headline instead of actually telling readers what its about.  Here’s some tips on improving your headline writing.  Headlines are insanely important, so are the visual elements of your post; the picture you use to accompany the post, any videos you choose.  Sweat the details.

Step Three: Promoting the song and helping it find an audience

Now for the average blogger, this means sending out a tweet on Twitter, an update on Facebook, and hoping for the best  Rock stars do this as well, but they also actively court radio stations to play their songs.  Rock stars know that radio play is wonderful exposure for their music.  You can do the same thing by actively courting friends and fellow bloggers to promote your content.  You can also greatly improve your chance of having other bloggers promote your content if you do two things:  First is actively promote their content.  If you are already promoting my content and you ask me to promote yours, odds are I will unless your content is a complete mis-match for my brand.  Second, selectively ask bloggers to promote content that they would be interested in.  Don’t ask me to promote your new blog post on how to grow an organic garden.  But do ask me to promote your new post on launching a brand advocacy effort at your company.

BONUS: Social media isn’t just Twitter and Facebook anymore.  Social media savvy artists are leveraging multiple tools online, a blog, Twitter Facebook but also Instagram (big hit with artists and fans) and YouTube.  The point is to hustle.

Step Four: Promotion leads to hit songs and that leads to concerts and appearances

As a rock stars’ new music is promoted, some of those songs will find a large audience and become popular.  One hit song can take a band playing local clubs and turn them into an international star.  As rock stars start to create hit songs, their fanbases grow and spread.  So connecting directly with them via concerts and appearances makes good sense.

You can do the same thing with your blog posts that become popular.  Let’s say you write a blog post “5 Tips For Marketers That Want to Crush It On YouTube Today”, that ends up being incredibly popular.  The popularity of that post makes you more marketable.  You can reach out to twitter chats and ask to co-host, I bet the #YouTubeMarketing twitter chat (if such a thing exists) would love to have you co-host to discuss the tips from your post.  Also, reach out to bloggers and ask to write a guest post on YouTube marketing tips.  Remind them of how popular your post was and they will probably be interested as you have already proven that your topic resonates with readers. All of this means more exposure for you and your content.

Step Five: Rock stars take their biggest hits and create a Greatest Hits album

There’s a lot of talk about ‘re-imaging’ content these days, but rock stars have always done this.  They take their most popular music and use it in as many ways as possible.  One example is how rock stars that have had a successful career will sell a Greatest Hits album.  This gives fans new and old a way to get most of the rock star’s biggest hits and most popular songs, all on one album.

Now at this point, it’s time to take a step back for a second.  A week or so ago I was watching a PBS documentary on John Denver.  Denver had a pretty long musical career, from about 1969 to 1984 or so.  About 15 years, and for the majority of the 1970s, he was one of the biggest musical stars on the planet.

But as I was watching this documentary, I realized that I could only really recall 2-3 hit songs of Denver’s.  Rocky Mountain High, Take Me Home Country Roads, and maybe Leavin’ on a Jet Plane.  Sure, there were a few others and diehard John Denver fans are already rattling off several other songs, but for the casual John Denver fan, that 15 year career resulted in maybe 3-5 songs that were memorable.

Think about that for a minute.  Even truly successful rock stars only have a handful of big hits over their entire careers.  Now think about your favorite blogger.  Name your favorite 3-5 posts from your favorite blogger.  Hard to do, isn’t it?  The point is that you are NOT going to have many posts go ‘viral’ and it is often hard to predict which ones will.  You can improve your changes through simple trial and error, but for most of us, even if you blog for years you will be lucky to have even 2-3 posts that truly spread like wildfire.

So as a blogger, you want to make it as easy as possible for other people to find your best content.  Look at the top right of this blog.  Notice I have created a Most Popular Posts section.  These are hand-picked posts that I want you to check out.  These are some of my ‘greatest hits’.  Also, when I share posts on social media sites, I focus on about 10 posts that cover topics I want to be known for.  Community-building, brand advocacy, content marketing.  It helps brand me, plus it gives more exposure to posts that cover topics that I want to see be more popular.

The Secret Bonus Tip: 

JessicaTweet

Hopefully you’ve picked up on something while reading this post.  There is a LOT of work involved in creating successful content.  It’s not just about writing a masterpiece in 15 mins and then waiting for fame and fortune.  You have to work hard on writing great content, and even harder promoting the content after its done.  Now all of this process becomes easier as you become more experienced, but there’s no shortcuts.  You need to have a robust strategy in place for creating your content, for polishing it, and then for promoting it.

I’m guilty of this too.  Too often I whip out a post in 30 mins, then tweet it on Twitter and that’s it.  Professional bloggers don’t do this.  They invest hours in each post.  They research, they agonize over the perfect headline, the perfect accompanying picture.  They sweat every detail.  Which is exactly why their content has an audience that hungrily devours everything they write.

I love the tweet from Jessica above.  She’s killed it with #CMChat as she’s turned it from being a Twitter chat to a literal online empire.  But it took hard work and harder sacrifices.  Following your dreams and creating something amazing usually does.

So change the focus of your content creation.  Stop thinking of each post and throw-away, but instead view every piece of content you create as a potential mega-hit that you are releasing to the public.  Focus on the creation, the post-writing editing, and the publishing and promotion.  And if you need help, I’ve created this graph to keep you straight rockin’ your content from now on:

$300 BILLION (4)

PS: It took about 10 hours to write this post, including research, visual elements and creating a custom graphical checklist.  And now the real work begins..and all I’ve done is increase the chances that the content will be more popular.

Pic via the amazing Kmeron

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Over the Hills and Far Away: The Rock Star’s Guide to Building an Online Community

Jessica Northey-Shaw is kind of a big deal in the country music scene. She’s worked with many of the industry’s top artists, and her #CMChat is probably the largest chat on Twitter, she’s had artists such as The Oak Ridge Boys, Charlie Daniels, Clint Black and Alabama as guests. She told me once that one of the first pieces of advice that Taylor Swift got when she started her career was “Shake half a million hands to get a Gold record”.  The message was that Taylor was going to have to connect individually with her fans if she wanted to be successful.

Taylor took that advice to heart and has always embraced her fans. In 2010 Taylor Swift agreed to have a free autograph signing for her fans as part of a CMA event in Nashville. Taylor was scheduled to start signing at 8am, and she agreed to sign for a staggering 13 hours.

Instead, she signed for 15 hours. The only breaks she took during the marathon signing session was to stop signing long enough to perform music for the over 2,000 fans who stood in line for her autograph.

Content creators of all stripes, whether it be a blogger, a Twitch streamer, a YouTuber or a budding Instagram star, want to grow their followings. Most of them are in a race to grow as quickly as possible. Growth is equal to success in their minds, and fast growth equals fast success.

Yet when you look at how most rock stars become successful, the ‘growth’ process typically takes years. There are rarely overnight success stories.

A big part of the reason why is rooted in how rock stars create and cultivate fans versus how the rest of us do.

Growing Slow Trumps Growing Fast

Consider how the average rock star gets their start. Maybe they perform for a local coffeeshop every Thursday, or maybe a local bar every Saturday night. In either case, the rock star performs for a very small crowd. The crowds are typically small enough that afterward, the singers have a chance to talk individually to the people that took the time to listen to their music. They can connect with these people individually. They can get their feedback, and apply it to the next performance.

Connecting individually with these people greatly increases the chance that they will become fans. Which means they will come back next week and when they do, they will likely bring some friends. Those friends will connect with the band after their performance and they will likely become fans as well. As a result, the crowds that the artist performs for each week become a bit larger. Soon, they are too large for the small bar or coffeehouse, and they have to move to a larger club, maybe a local arena.

Eventually, as the singers become more popular, they can tour the state, then the region.  Then the nation. But the growth, the growth started small by connecting with each of those few fans that showed up the first time to hear them sing.  From that point, the growth of the rock stars was fueled by their fans.

Which person are you more likely to listen to:

A – Me when I tell you that my blog is awesome and you should read it every day

B – Your best friend when she tells you that my blog is awesome and you should read it every day

 

Of course, you’re going to listen to your best friend. When I say it, it’s advertising, when your best friend says it, it’s a recommendation from a source you trust.

Rock stars have always understood this.

This is the Loyalty Graph, and it’s one of the most popular features of my book, Think Like a Rock Star: How to Create Social Media and Marketing Strategies That Turn Customers Into Fans. The Loyalty Graph is designed to give you a visual representation of the difference between how most rock stars market themselves, and how most companies do. For the purposes of our discussion, you could consider most companies to be most content creators, and most customers to be readers or followers or viewers.

Most rock stars spend almost all of their time interacting and marketing directly with their CURRENT customers, or fans. They do this because they know that their fans will grow their base for them. On the other hand, most companies try to acquire new customers, and all but ignore their current ones. Many bloggers or streamers do the same thing, they create content in a way that will grow their following, but they don’t focus on developing deeper connections with the people that are already consuming their content.

“But Mack, if my following grows, what difference does it make how it happens?”

Here’s the difference: Go to Twitter right now and tweet a link to your latest blog post and ask your followers to RT it for you.

Now email your 5 closest friends and ask them to do the same thing.

I suspect you will get more RTs from your 5 closest friends than you ever would from ALL of your followers on Twitter. Why?  Because the people following you on Twitter aren’t your friends. They aren’t connected to you and don’t have a relationship with you. Sure, some of your friends are also following you on Twitter, but if you’re like most people, you follow an awful lot of people on Twitter that you NEVER interact with.

Case in point: I have about 43,000 followers currently on Twitter. I could grow my Twitter following to 75,000 by the end of the month.  How? By simply following 2,000 people every day.  About half the people I follow would follow me back, and by the end of the month I’d have 75,000 followers. But how many of those additional 30,000 or so followers would answer my call for a RT?  Few, if any. So if I just gained 30,000 followers who I will never interact with and who will never interact with me, what is the point?

If you want to grow your online community, do it slow. Connect deeply with every individual person. Let them drive growth for you. The more you do to drive your growth directly, the less influence you will ultimately have over the people that follow you.

If you are a blogger and you have 5 readers, you have an incredible power. You have the ability to connect directly with EVERY reader of your blog. That’s going to convert them into fans who will grow your readership FOR you.

That’s precisely how rock stars grow their fanbases. One fan at a time.

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Instagram is Testing a New Feature That Might Save Social Media

So let’s do a social experiment, please leave a comment telling me if you have had this same thing happen to you: Often when I am either scanning my feed on Twitter/Facebook/Instagram or reading a blog, I will come across a piece of content that seems pretty ‘meh’ to me. But just as I am about to move on, I notice it has a huge number of social shares. I often stop, and think “wait, am I missing something here?”, and I will go back and review the content a second time.

Have you done this? I do it all the time, and studies have shown that most of us do as well. We often let number of social shares and popularity metrics such as Likes influence if we will consume and share content.

Well with that in mind, consider that Instagram is experimenting with a pretty revolutionary feature; Hiding the number of Likes its posts get. If this feature rolls out to all users, then Instagram users would have no idea how many (or how few) Likes any content posted on the site receives.  The content creators would still have access to this information, but not the content consumers or users.

I’ve long speculated that behavior by both content creators and content consumers would change drastically if the number of social shares content received wasn’t public. Too many of us consume and share content simply based on number of social shares or Likes.  If this was taken out of the equation, we would likely share less content, but it would be content we were more likely to have personally vetted. So it would, in theory, be of more value to our networks.

If Instagram rolls out the hiding of Likes to everyone, I suspect that will actually lead to MORE comments. I believe users will feel more compelled to explain why the DID share the content, what they liked about it.  If so, this would be invaluable information for the content creator.

What do you think about this idea of Instagram hiding Likes on its posts? Do you like it? Hate it?  Would you like to see more social media sites adopt a position of hiding social shares?

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Baltimore Orioles Write Handwritten ‘Thank You’ Notes to Season Ticket Holders

Coming off an atrocious 108-loss season, the Baltimore Orioles decided to double-down on thanking the season ticket holders that stood by the team.

The players recently wrote handwritten thank you letters to season ticket holders. Orioles Director of PR Kirsten Hudak talks about pitching the idea to the players:

“I wasn’t sure what the reaction would be. The guys that I spoke to about it were immediately supportive. I saw many of them sit down and start writing right away. It felt like they had something on their minds or something they wanted to say and that was an opportunity for them to do it in a heartfelt way.”

Rewarding season ticket holders for their support is something many sports teams do at all levels. I’ve written before about how the Alabama Crimson Tide’s softball team (one of the top programs in the country), has its players and coaches hand-deliver season tickets to its fans.

As you can see, these two examples cover both ends of the spectrum from a fan support angle. The Orioles are no doubt scrambling for ideas to revitalize interest in a struggling team, and smartly thought of a way to reward their biggest fans with handwritten notes. On the other end, Alabama has been winning big for a while, and no doubt view the personal delivery of season tickets as a way to keep the momentum going with its fan support.

I think the word ‘fan’ has an interesting stigma around it. It seems like a special person who loves a sports team or rock star.

The reality is, a ‘fan’ is simply a customer. A passionate, loyal customer, but a customer nonetheless.

If you look at your customers in this context and overlap the above examples, you can easily see how ‘fans’ would be present in many businesses:

  • Frequent customers to your store that you recognize as soon as they walk in.
  • Loyalty club members
  • Subscribers to your company newsletter

All of these customers have signaled to you that they enjoy interacting with your company.  If you think of fans as being ‘people that love their favorite sports team or rock star’, why can’t you think of the above customers as being ‘fans’ or customers that love you?

In the previous post I talked about how rock stars have fans and companies have customers. Rock stars don’t have fans because they are rock stars, they have fans because they love their fans. They understand that having fans is a mindset, if you love and appreciate your fans, you deepen their love for you, and you act in ways that will encourage other people to become fans as well.

I shop a lot at WalMart and Publix. So much so that many of the employees at both stores will recognize me as soon as I walk in. Yet when I shop at Publix, the employees will always greet me with “It’s good to see you AGAIN’. They are communicating to me that they notice and appreciate my frequent visits. That’s one reason why I prefer to shop at Publix, because WalMart’s employees don’t bother to notice me, except for one cashier who always says “It’s good to see you AGAIN”. Guess whose line I prefer to go through at WalMart?

Creating and cultivating fans is about creating and cultivating a mindset that recognizes your fans and that communicates your appreciation to those fans.

Every business has loyal customers who are ‘fans’. The smart companies are the ones that reach out to their fans and let them know that they love them right back.

 

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Why Do Rock Stars Have Fans, While Companies Have Customers?

Gene Autry was a rock star decades before there was such a term. From the 1930s to the 1950s, “The Singing Cowboy” was one of the nation’s brightest film, radio and television stars. He died in 1998 as one of the richest 400 Americans, and the only entertainer in that group.

I was recently watching Ken Burns’ documentary series Country Music when they told a fascinating Gene Autry anecdote. Gene Autry often toured the country and at the same time he was receiving hundreds, sometimes thousands of fan letters every week. His wife would take the fan letters and cross-reference them against his touring schedule, and give him a list of every fan that had written him who lived in the next town that Autry was to perform in.  Autry would then take the list upon arriving in that city, and find the nearest phone book and look up the name of each fan who had written him, and he would call that fan and thank them for writing him.

Another story shared involved Garth Brooks. Every year Nashville has a country music Fan Fest, where artists sign autographs for their fans. One year, during the height of his popularity, Garth Brooks showed up, unannounced, at Fan Fest.  He picked an unmarked tent, and started signing. He pledged to sign for everyone there.  Organizers repeatedly attempted to stop the line so Garth could leave, but he was determined to stay until everyone had an autograph.

He signed for over 20 hours.

When I started writing Think Like a Rock Star and I began to research how rock stars create and cultivate fans, the key question I wanted to answer was “Why do rock stars have fans, while companies have customers?” I wanted to figure out what the secret formula was that rock stars used to cultivate fans, and find out if it was possible for companies to replicate that success.

The answer was surprisingly simple: Rock stars have fans because they WANT fans. Gene Autry didn’t have to go to the time and trouble of calling up every fan who wrote him a letter, he wanted to. Garth Brooks didn’t have to show up unscheduled at Fan Fest and sign for over 20 hours, he wanted to.

The reality is, you have earned the relationship you have with the people that buy your products and services. If you have fans, then you have earned them. If you just have customers, well you’ve earned them as well. If you want to have passionate customers who consider themselves to be ‘fans’ of your company, then you have to put forward the effort to make that happen.

“But Mack, you’re talking about actual rock stars, we’re just a boring company making boring products!”

Why can’t your company have the CEO personally reply to a positive comment from a customer left on Twitter? Why can’t you send a small ‘thank you’ gift box to a customer who emails you and thanks you for great customer service? When you have a culture that appreciates and values your customers, you create and cultivate fans.

A few years ago I was working with Dell on a customer advocacy event. We had a group of about 20 customers that had been flown in to Austin and we were meeting with them all day, having roundtable discussions, product demos, etc. We had just finished lunch and we were about to go onto another event when one of Dell’s PR team pulled me aside and told me to have everyone go into the conference room, that Dell had a surprise for them. The group filed in and quietly chatted, after a few minutes they began to wonder what was happening next.

In walked CEO Michael Dell. For this group of passionate Dell customers, it was as if a rock star had entered the room. Cameras immediately started flashing and everyone suddenly sat at attention, smiling and on the edges of their seats. Dell already had a full day planned for the group, this was obviously a ‘bonus’ they had wanted to add in at the last minute, since I had been involved in the prior planning and didn’t know about it until 5 mins before he arrived. Dell wanted to communicate to these passionate customers that they appreciated them so much that one of the busiest CEOs in the world was going to make time to come talk with them.

Introducing CEO Michael Dell to the DellCAP group

Former Maker’s Mark CEO Bill Samuels Jr often said that the brand viewed its customers as ‘friends’, and as such, that shaped all its communications with the people that buy its bourbon. You don’t pitch your friends, you don’t market to your friends, so Maker’s Mark changed how it communicated with its customers, to shape the type of relationships it wanted to cultivate.

Every company has passionate customers who consider themselves to be fans. The most successful companies are the ones that go out of their way to create, appreciate and reward their fans.

 

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Selling Your Passion vs Selling Your Product

The vast majority of companies I work with are using social and digital media to build awareness for their brands. Typically, they contact me because their efforts aren’t getting the results they need. One of the first mistakes I often find is that these companies are selling before the buyer is ready to make a purchase. You can’t sell to someone that isn’t ready to buy, and if you are trying to build awareness with customers, obviously these customers are unaware of who you are and why they should buy from you.

So instead of selling your product or service directly to these customers, you talk about the customers. Think about it, if you see or hear a marketing message, but it’s about something that you can relate to, that interests you, then you pay attention! If you want to grab the attention of unaware customers, then you talk about the customers.

In this post, Tom Martin talks about how he networks at events. He makes a point to talk to the person he’s just met and hone in on any common interests. Why does Tom do this? Because by talking about something that BOTH Tom and the person are passionate about, it helps the person more easily connect with Tom. The other person will let their guard down and be more willing to listen to Tom. On the flipside, if Tom had introduced himself and immediately started talking about him, about his business, the person would have likely lost interest very quickly. So Tom smartly puts the focus on the other person, let’s talk about you, let’s find a common ground, and let’s talk about that something that we are both passionate about. Also note that Tom adds that one of the people at the event later remarked that someone had told her that they appreciated that Tom didn’t sell them immediately, but now that they’ve talked to him for a bit, they want to hear ‘the pitch’.

Your marketing should follow the same path that Tom does when trying to connect with new customers. First, focus completely on the customer. Then, once you have their attention, focus on that common passion point that relates to both the customer, as well as your brand. After doing this, the customer will be more open to ‘the sell’, so then you start to promote and market your products and services directly.

A key element, perhaps the most important element, of connecting with a customer is establishing trust. Once the customer trusts you, they will lower their guard and give you their full attention. Think about how you interact with your friends. How much of your conversations revolve around common interests? We can relate to our friends, and we trust our friends.

So shouldn’t you talk to your customers as if they were your friends? Remember in the previous post we talked about how Bill Samuels Jr at Maker’s Mark said the brand strove to view his customers as friends, and he called this ‘marketing without fingerprints’.

What’s the common interest or passion point that runs through your brand and your customer? If you’re looking to build awareness with your customers, start there.