John Cecil on Video Spokespersons, Pickle Fights and Surfing in OC

This week’s DishyMix interview focuses on video with a twist. I like video spokespersons, especially for landing page conversion improvement when the product is complex, the offer is complex or the navigation is complex. There are some great places to use video spokesperson and I interviewed John Cecil, co-founder of Innovate Media after going down to Orange County for a video shoot for a new product we’ll be launching from Personal Life Media.

Click HERE to see the “Day in the Life of a Video Spokesperson” shoot on my Flickr page.

Alissa Kriteman, host of Just for Women shooting her Video Spokesperson.

Dr. Patti Taylor, host of Expanded Lovemaking shooting her Video Spokesperson.

John James Santangelo, host of Sales Magic shooting his Video Spokesperson.

Here’s an excerpt from the show that I found very informative.

Susan Bratton:  So a video spokesperson is essentially the overlay of either a character or a human being that comes onto the page after it has loaded and tells you a little bit about what you’re seeing there.  Is that right?

John Cecil:  Yes.  It’s basically the transfer of the web turning from a text-based medium to a video-based medium, and our core product is the video spokesperson that comes out on the screen and lets a company give a pitch, if you will, in real time video about kind of what they want you to do, either buy a product, click on a button or move to another page.

Susan Bratton:  Well a lot of times too, in addition to giving directions about how to work the page you’re on, I think there’s a really big opportunity in verbally explaining products that are fairly difficult or complex.  I had mentioned to you TrustedID.  That’s a product that I use for identity theft protection.  It’s a proactive service that monitors your credit card and your health insurance and your bank accounts.  They seemed like a perfect company for you because their product is kind of hard to understand and you can go onto their site and read all the stuff, but text has its limits and it strikes me that not just getting people to click on a button or make a buy, but explaining products through a video spokesperson could work well too.  Are you finding that?

John Cecil:  I think every landing page, every website in some amount of time will have video on their sites.  There’s only so much text you can put on a page

Susan Bratton:  Well you can put a lot of text on a page, but no one will read it.

John Cecil:  Absolutely.  Video allows the consumer to get a video message about the product or service.  If I walked into a retail store, someone doesn’t hand me a brochure of what they’re selling.  There’s a live person there that’s talking to me about products and the services that that person is trying to sell.  We’re able, with the use of online video and our products, to sort of match that same thing – a full motion video communicating a message is replacing text.

Susan Bratton:  So a lot of people say, “I don’t like those video people to pop up on my page.”  But in reality, I think many times the people that I hear that from are people who are pretty web-savvy, not necessarily our target customers but ourselves as marketers and experienced web users.

You gave me a piece of research from a professor at Stanford University, Byron Reeves, the Center for Study of Language and Information. He did this big piece of research on video spokespeople and what popped out for me in this were, number one, having a human on the page creates a level of trust that you can’t get in other ways.  Number two, it makes interfaces easier to use which you mentioned, and number three, that the characters are well liked.  And I think if you think about the general web that characters, if well done, can be very well liked.

John Cecil:  I am backing up everything that he says and the way I can back it up is conversion data that we have.  It’s very interesting.  I have really never seen a product that consistently increases conversions so much as far as the video spokesperson product.  So to back up with what he is saying, so I’m going to compare two units.  We have a non-user initiated and a user initiated page with the same video spokesperson.  The video spokesperson that comes out without a user having to touch a button converts better than the one that requires user initiation.  And so we get into talking about being in the web and being sort of not annoyed by video or things along those lines.  The conversion data is telling us over and over again that this person coming out on the screen converts better.  And as a marketer, we have to get out of our bubble of knowing so much about the web and really look at the conversion data and ask what tools are helping us to kind of convert the best on our sites.

Susan Bratton:  One of the things in this study struck me.  It said,

“Research shows that over 90% of people can find a character in an interactive session that they prefer over no character at all.  It only takes five choices to provide a character that is liked but even when a single character is presented, only 15% of users dislike that character and those people can usually be accommodated by allowing them to opt out of the character interactions in favor of other forms of navigation.”  It was also funny later on in that he said, “Some people just don’t like anything.” 

I thought that was funny.  Are a lot of your customers just using one character and just testing with that or do you have clients who come in and try four or five different actors? Most of the video spokespersons are done with professional actors but you can have people from the company. (I want to talk about celebrities too but I’ll come back to that.)  Are most brands using professional actors and are they testing multiples or do they just pick the one they want?

John Cecil:  What our clients do is A/B test talent against each other and find the best converting person their particular customers like.  So in one case, a client of ours shot five different actors with the exact same scripts, some male, some female, some old, some young, and those five actors were A/B tested off of the home page and pitted against each other.  They chose the best performing video spokesperson from a conversion standpoint and that person became the video that they used on an ongoing basis.  Our more savvy clients are testing different characters against each other.

Susan Bratton:  And what about celebrities?  What about William Shatner coming out on the home page of Priceline?  Have we gotten there and how well does that do or how well do you think it will do?

John Cecil:  As an organization, we have just started to kind of scratch the surface on it.  The early data that we’re seeing is that it increases the increases that we’re already seeing, so we think that a known actor or actress is going to help even more with the conversion data on a particular site or landing page.

In this interview, I particularly like Tara’s perspective on building community around a brand, in this case, Intuit.

Susan Bratton: This is Susan Bratton, and you’re listening to the Community Powered podcast series live at South By Southwest, and I’m with Tara Hunt, marketing lead for the partner platform at Intuit, a new roll for her. Welcome.

Podcast Here and Transcripts Below.

Susan Bratton & Tara Hunt

Tara Hunt: Thank you Susan. Great to be here.

Susan Bratton: Yes, I’m glad we were able to connect. And you’ve done a lot of work in the area of brand and community. Give us some of the background about some of the work that you’ve been doing there.

Tara Hunt: Well I, you know, I think my first brand in community project was with rhia.com, about four years ago now. And I joined the start-up, it was a little start-up, it hadn’t even launched in Silicon Valley, it came down from Canada. And they gave me the license actually to pursue the idea of building a brand through a community, through community outreach and inreach. And it was all experimental, but fantastically successful because we ended up, after six months of not being launched, of just being in private beta, at the end of the six months we opened our doors and had over a million photos uploaded and 20,000 registrants on the first day. It was a pretty good testament to how powerful online communities can be for companies.

Susan Bratton: So that was your early addiction to community?

Tara Hunt: Well I was already, I had been addicted to online communities personally for many years and started to think about them as a potentially really great way to spread word of mouth, especially if you are working or part of a brand that can give back to the community. And so this was my first real opportunity to apply that, that thought.

Susan Bratton: So now that you’re with Intuit, what are you focused on here at South By Southwest? Has it changed the filter of what you want to get done while you’re here?

Tara Hunt: Well I definitely have more meetings than my previous years at South By…

Susan Bratton: Are people trying to meet you and sell you things for Intuit and different products or what?

Tara Hunt: Not as, not as much that, but Intuit actually is more focused on being a more forward thinking innovated agile social company these days, because a lot of small businesses that have been using Nia QuickBooks and QuickIn for years, are starting to get interested in the online space, and starting to really be interested in connecting with other small businesses online. We have a really great community site at Intuit that’s very popular. And so Intuit in general is looking to reach out to a lot of the different software service applications that have come out through Web 2.0, and a lot of who are here featuring their products, whether in the trade show or they’re on panels or they’re just here enjoying themselves in Austin. So, I’d been talking to a lot of people through Twitter and email previous to being here and said, “Hey, we should meet up and talk a little bit about how we can work together.” So that’s more of what the meetings are about. So it’s a really positive fun thing, and nobody’s looking to sell, everybody’s looking to see how we can serve our customers better by working…

Susan Bratton: Has there been anything that you’ve seen that’s been particularly intriguing, some new product, technology, service, a new idea that you’ve heard about that’s got you going?

Tara Hunt: Well, I’m really enjoying Four Square, and I don’t know if you’re on Four Square…

Susan Bratton: I don’t know Four Square. Tell us what it is.

Tara Hunt: So it’s a replacement for dodge ball. Dodge ball was a location-based text messaging service that you could check into a location years ago that was bought by Google and just recently shut down by Google. So Twitter is awesome for, and has been really amazing for creating connections broadly, but the problem that occurs is when you come to a place like South By Southwest is that, you know, you’re following however many people, several hundreds of people, but they’re all around the world doing different things. So you’re wondering, “Where are people heading? What’s the part? What’s the part to not be at? What’s the panel to be at”, sort of thing, and Four Square has brought that back. So I can check into a panel and say I’m really enjoying this panel and all of my friends that follow me can know that they should come and check out that panel or, you know, there’s too long of a lineup at this party, so all my friends know not to come to that party and can tell me, “Come down to this place instead.” So it’s a really great service for that location-based.

Susan Bratton: So it’s a mobile app, it’s a mobile micro blog.

Tara Hunt: Yeah, it’s a mobile app. It’s also, so it’s on the iPhone, but I do believe they have a text messaging interface as well SMS interface.

Susan Bratton: And it’s called Four Square?

Tara Hunt: Four Square. And, play, I think it’s playfoursquare.com, is the name…

Susan Bratton: URL.

Tara Hunt: is the URL.

Susan Bratton: Okay, that’s great. Thank you. I would like to get some advice from you because you have done a number of communities for brands. If there’s someone who’s thinking about creating community as a brand, it’s a scary thing, you know, what if we build it and no one comes. Could you give us the one, maybe most dynamite piece of advice that you can for other brand people like yourself who are thinking about creating community? What should they know or be aware of.

Tara Hunt: Well it’s, it’s, when you, creating a community for a brand, it shouldn’t be about the brand at all. It should be about how you’re going to empower your community members to go further. This is what I, and I didn’t build the community for Intuit, it’s been around for a while, and I was really surprised to see that Intuit people actually don’t spend a lot of time in the community other than, you know, stepping in when they absolutely need to to help somebody out ‘cause another community member hasn’t come along, or if there’s a specific question about an Intuit product. Otherwise, they’re empowering and giving tools to the community members to help one another out. So, you know, if you have a question about, you know, what, should I be an LLC or a S Corp and what does that mean? There’re a lot of great conversations that are going on on that blog, or how to market my small local grocery store. There’s other small local grocery stores from other regions that are helping one another, and Intuit doesn’t step in and get in the way. Like, they create the platform and then get the heck out of the way so that their community members can really help one another out and go further. And I, you know, they talk about platform as a service and software as a service. I look at this as being community as a service, creating that platform for the community to really thrive.

Susan Bratton: Oh, I like that one. That’s one we have to Twitter; community as service, here we go. Well that’s great, Tara. Thank you so much. You’ve gotten to know Tara Hunt, marketing lead for the Partner Platform group at Intuit. I appreciate you being part of the Community Powered podcast.

Tara Hunt: Thank you Susan. It was great.

Susan Bratton: Yeah, it was a pleasure. Alright. Thank you so much for listening to this, and I hope you’ll join us for more of the Community Powered podcast series.

In this interview, listen for Cathy’s PR approach to Twitter and her thoughts on the concentric circles of opportunity with influencers.

Susan Bratton: This is Susan Bratton. I’m here live at South By Southwest doing the Community Powered series and I’m with Cathy Brooks who is a consultant, runs a company called Other Than That. Welcome Cathy.

Podcast Here and Transcript Below.

Susan Bratton & Cathy Brooks

 

 

Cathy Brooks: Thank you so much.

Susan Bratton: And you have a little bit of a lack of voice.

Cathy Brooks: If Brenda Vaccaro and Debra Winger had a love child, this is what she would sound like.

Susan Bratton: I love it. Well you obviously have been busy at South By Southwest.

Cathy Brooks: Yeah.

Susan Bratton: Tell me what you came to accomplish here.

Cathy Brooks: So social media to me is only as social as the people who are in it. And so, that means you actually need to see people in carbon-based life form.

Cathy Brooks: So the opportunity to get together with these people who I know so well, who I see everyday, air quotes, who I talk to everyday, to get to spend quality time with them, it’s very important. I’m also here with Nokia this week, helping them navigate the social media landscape. We had a couple of events, we had a couple of tweet ups, helping people better use their Nokia devices, and they’ve been having a great time as well, and I think that’s part of where the voice lost big drama.

Susan Bratton: And what are you doing with Nokia? Are you letting people use those fun phones?

Cathy Brooks: It’s a little bit of that. And so what Nokia does very well of course is get the product into the hands of the kind of traditional product reviewers, right? So we’re talking, I’m talking to them more about who are those people out in the world? Who aren’t the gizmotos and uber gizmos? Who aren’t the Gary Vanderchuk’s and (unintelligible) that, they have that down already. There are so many people in so many markets and so many industries face this; politics, food, family, technology, all of it, so how do we take these devices and put these tools into the hands of people who really need to use them everyday?

Susan Bratton: I’ve heard a lot about that now, this kind of second, third tier of bloggers and Twitterers and people who can be brand advocates, who are influential to their own group. It might not be to 85,000 people or 100,000 people, but, you know, they might have two or three hundred people that follow them and those people look to that particular person as someone who really does influence the decisions of many. And so you’re helping brands like Nokia get to that next tier of VIP’s in the social media space.

Cathy Brooks: That’s part of it. And I want to comment on something that you just said, which is about the numbers of people. It doesn’t matter how many. Yes, there’s volume, great to have thousands of people following you. But I’d rather have 2,000 of the right people or 400 of the right people following me for the right reasons. And so it’s, the beautiful thing about social media is that it’s, it’s customized for everybody, and so whatever it means to you, you can take from it. So how can you help big companies figure out how to navigate those waters ‘cause they’re very hard to quantify.

Susan Bratton: Absolutely. And that brings me perfectly, thank you for the segway to the next question, which is what advice could you give someone right now as a brand, a brand advocate, someone who works within an organization, who wants to get into the social media space, specifically in the community? And I know you’ve had, you’ve done some work at Seismic for example with community around video content. What would you tell some who, that wouldn’t be apparent about how to create a community around a brand that would be satisfying for the constituents and work for the company as well.

Cathy Brooks: So you’ll not I’m smiling right now as you’re, as you’re speaking because frankly I don’t think that any of what we do here is rocket science. Now people might not know what to do because they don’t understand the tools. But I would say to people, a brand looking to come into social media, know your voice. Well first have a voice.

Susan Bratton: Right. Yeah, good luck with that…

Cathy Brooks: Unlike me today.

Susan Bratton: Yeah like, yeah…

Cathy Brooks: Don’t be like me. Don’t be like Cathy. But know your voice. And what that means is what is the authentic voice of your company going to be in the social media realm? What does that mean?

Susan Bratton: Anyone who helps you figure out what that voice is if you’re not really sure?

Cathy Brooks: Well there are a lot of places you can go. I mean, theoretically somebody at a company should know their company better than anyone outside, but there is many consultants, there’s so many people, many of them here at South By Southwest, people like Chris Brogan, who I know that you talked to, people like Brian Sulleys, people like Steph Agresta. These very, very smart people, Tara Hunt, another great example… We could sit here for the next several minutes and just list them all. Each one of those people has a slightly different skill set. Each one of those people has a slightly different expertise, so, just as you need to know what the voice is of your company or what you’re trying to accomplish. It’s like dating. Find the person whose voice is right for you tell help you find your own voice. Does that make sense?

Susan Bratton: Absolutely.

Cathy Brooks: And if like, I am not for everyone. If someone comes to me and it’s not a fit, I’m going to be the last person who wants to do that kind of work anyway. But I can point them to someone who I know.

Susan Bratton: Has that style that can help…

Cathy Brooks: Correct.

Susan Bratton: that can help them, because a lot of social media really is an editorial approach. You have to have, you have to have good writing skills and you have to have a passion for it. You have to want to do it everyday, ‘cause once you get in ain’t no getting out.

Cathy Brooks: Once you create the beast…

Susan Bratton: Yes.

Cathy Brooks: you must feed it.

Susan Bratton: That’s right. Absolutely.

Cathy Brooks: And it’s very hungry.

Susan Bratton: It is. So last thing, and this more just a Cathy Brooks question; what about social media is very interesting to you right now? What’s turning you on? What would you like to have a spare day to dabble in? Is it a technology, an idea, an innovation?

Cathy Brooks: That’s a very good question. And I think that, I think that for me, there’s, there’re two things, two kind of ariants…

Susan Bratton: Two buckets that come up?

Cathy Brooks: Two big buckets. One is the technology bucket and tools like this, this Nokia device that I found, and people shoot video on that. All of the new devices that are coming out of the software platforms, I love how they’re evolving.

Susan Bratton: And the real time connection that comes from…

Cathy Brooks: I love that…

Susan Bratton: those mobile devices, right?

Cathy Brooks: I love that.

Susan Bratton: Yeah, me too.

Cathy Brooks: That I can share with anyone, at any point in time, exactly what I’m doing then, and if there’s somebody who will actually care about them on some level. The other bucket is the behavior. I am proud to be part of this community because I am proud of how this community is stepping up to be responsible stewards of that which we’ve created, helping large companies, helping newbies, helping each other, learn to use the tools better, to share, to play nicely in the sandbox. A lot of sessions here this week about making the money, getting the deal, this kind of almost a desperate bad economy, you know, how are you going to survive. But what I’m feeling in the hallway, it’s more muted than last year, no question. But there’s this sense of camaraderie. There’s this sense that none of us, not one of us is alone, and that together we can help bring this platform, these platforms to average people so that the world can be persistently connected. I mean look, the rose colored glasses were smacked off my head a long time ago. I hold no grand illusions that social media is going to change the world, peace…

Susan Bratton: Oh, but it can have some help. Yeah.

Cathy Brooks: But we will help the world change, because at the end of the day it’s about the people using the tools. And I just, it makes me proud to say what I do everyday.

Susan Bratton: That’s great. Well thank you so much for sharing your wisdom…

Cathy Brooks: Pleasure.

Susan Bratton: and what’s left of your sweet voice, your husky little voice.

Cathy Brooks: Taverse and tea, plenty. And a whiskey.

Susan Bratton: Oh there you go…

Cathy Brooks: Maybe I should go have a whiskey.

Susan Bratton: Irish coffee or something, there you go…

Cathy Brooks: Yeah, whiskey and some barbeque.

Susan Bratton: Oh yes.

Cathy Brooks: I am in Texas, after all.

Susan Bratton: You are, absolutely. Well you have gotten to meet Cathy Brooks. She runs a consulting company called Other Than That. She’s incredibly experienced in this space, both from a pubic relations perspective, kind of the intersection I think of technology and pubic relations and social media, which is exactly the right place to be right now. Thank you so much Cathy. I’m your host, Susan Bratton. Thanks for tuning in to the Community Powered podcast series from South By Southwest. Have a great day.

Susan Bratton: This is Susan Bratton, and you are here for another episode of Community Powered live at South By Southwest, and now I am with C.C. Chapman. C.C. is among many things, in addition to being a fabulous human being, the co-founder, one of the co-founders of a company called The Advanced Guard, and I will let C.C. describe it, but it’s a really neat new company working with amazing brands in the social media space. So welcome C.C.

Podcast Here and Transcript Below

Susan Bratton & C.C. Chapman

C.C. Chapman: Thank you. I’m psyched to be here.

Author’s Note: DishyMix Episode with CC Here.

C.C. Chapman, The Advance Guard – From Deep in New Media

Susan Bratton: We’re in a bit of a loud spot here.

C.C. Chapman: Yeah, and it’s weird all the people walking by and just going, “What are they doing over there?” That’s part of South By right?

Susan Bratton: It is.

C.C. Chapman: Yes.

Susan Bratton: Absolutely. And luckily you and I both are boomers. We have not problem making it loud.

C.C. Chapman: No, not at all. If we have to get louder we will, so…

Susan Bratton: Yeah.

C.C. Chapman: there’s no problem there.

Susan Bratton: That’s good. So, the first thing that I want to do is have you talk a little bit about The Advanced Guard…

C.C. Chapman: Sure.

Susan Bratton: and some of the work you’ve done with the American Eagle…

C.C. Chapman: Yeah.

Susan Bratton: and other great brands.

C.C. Chapman: Sure. Yeah so, The Advanced Guard launched in 2007, and our focus is on working with brands of all sizes to utilize what we like, we say disruptive technology and emerging technology to build buzz, awareness and community. And we’ve worked with everybody from small start-ups like M Dialog, all the way up to Verizon, American Eagle Outfitters, HBO, Warner Brothers, so it’s been a really exciting run, and what we like to talk about is the fact that, you know, we don’t focus on any one, not any, you know, latest shiny objects syndrome, you know, we don’t want to do that. We want to really focus on strategically using this stuff, ‘cause brands are spending a lot of money on it and they need to get their return and we, we don’t want to waste clients money ever. So it’s a very exciting time.

Susan Bratton: You mentioned the bright shiny object syndrome. I do have to ask, is there any particular thing that’s the bright shiny object for C.C.? Some new technology or some new particular social platform that you’re intrigued by or anything like that? And this doesn’t have to be something that you recommend to clients…

C.C. Chapman: Yeah.

Susan Bratton: but what do you like?

C.C. Chapman: I’m really excited by all the possibilities with RFID technology, you know. Seeing this thing Poken here at South By, I’m completely enamored by this. I learned about it this morning…

Susan Bratton: We’ll get a photo of Poken and we’ll put it up on the blog.

C.C. Chapman: And I’m really turned on by just the fact that, you know, I can interact and connect with people virtually, I don’t need a paper business card, and I think technology like this…

Susan Bratton: What does Poken do? It looks to me like a little green guy with some little hand and some little techy thing. It’s a little plastic object…

C.C. Chapman: So what happens, if you download one of these…

Susan Bratton: like a baby toy.

C.C. Chapman: and we walk up to each other…

Susan Bratton: Yeah…

C.C. Chapman: Just now I held it up to Chris Brogen and…

Susan Bratton: Yeah…

C.C. Chapman: it like lit up. And what it is is…

Susan Bratton: Uh huh.

C.C. Chapman: it got all his information. And when I go home and plug this into the computer, I’m going to have all of his information, and it’s sort of like Plackso on the go because, but the, what I’m also excited about, you know, this could be so South By could walk right in. You know, they could be tagging people or they could be send you data or Starbucks could or whatever brand. And I think RFID technology’s going to be rather interesting.

Susan Bratton: How do you spell that?

C.C. Chapman: P-o-k-e-n.

Susan Bratton: Okay, Poken.

C.C. Chapman: Yup, Poken.

Susan Bratton: Kind of like the shortened Pokemon. It looks like a little bit like a Pokemon, too.

C.C. Chapman: It is, yeah. So it’s a little, and there’s also a little…

Susan Bratton: Oh, and I see a little USB drive. So you collect some data and then you plug it into your computer and it slurps it up.

C.C. Chapman: Yeah, so…

Susan Bratton: Really cool.

C.C. Chapman: I haven’t plugged it in yet, so I’m curious about it, but I’m very…

Susan Bratton: It’s almost, we have to have an unboxed moment. We’re going to have to take a little video clip…

C.C. Chapman: It’s kind of neat.

Susan Bratton: and plug this thing in…

C.C. Chapman: Yeah.

Susan Bratton: and tech it out or something.

C.C. Chapman: Yeah it’s kind of, I’m excited by it. So, I mean, that’s the newest thing I’ve seen literally in the last four hours that got me excited that, I’m sure I’ll see something more before I leave this week.

Susan Bratton: Exactly. Well one of the things that I was excited about this week was your White Paper…

C.C. Chapman: Thank you.

Susan Bratton: I hate the word White Paper. White Paper’s like, it’s our stupid positioning statement disguised as something that’s not our positioning statement. But you actually did whatever is the real new term for White Paper on Face Book.

C.C. Chapman: Yeah we were, do we call it an e-book, do we call it a White Paper, we didn’t know what to call it…

Susan Bratton: Yeah.

C.C. Chapman: so we said lets call it a white paper, everybody knows what that is, so…

Susan Bratton: Yeah.

C.C. Chapman: Yeah, so Face Book changed the way fan pages work for brands, and whereas…

Susan Bratton: Thank God.

C.C. Chapman: Yeah…

Susan Bratton: And we were really bad. I have one and I was struggling with it.

C.C. Chapman: Yeah, and a lot of, we thought a lot of brands would be scared by it because it forces them to become social. It forces them, you can’t just make a pre-designed web page now, you have to actually interact with your fans, a novel concept for people like you and me, but brands, you know, that’s a big shift. And we realize that there was going to be a lot of brands freaking out, and so we spent, you know, an entire weekend cranking through really testing it, really figuring it out, and we put it up, we put it up on the web and we told people about it, and what was really exciting was to see everybody Twittering it and writing about it and meeting people here at South By coming up and saying, “Hey, really liked the White Paper.” I mean, I had a woman who runs, she advises camp counselors, and she’s like, “That’s the best thing I’ve ever read because I’ve been trying to get camps on Face Book”, and people don’t think about summer camps on Face Book, and I think any brand can do it, and if anybody listening wants to get it, we’ve been doing revisions. We’ve already done three of them this week…

Susan Bratton: I sent you a typo or two

C.C. Chapman: I know you did…

Susan Bratton: Yeah, I was reading it.

C.C. Chapman: If you go to aboutface.theadvancedguard.com, you can get the latest one and I know we had to push one out yesterday because Face Book changed the rules again…

Susan Bratton: Oh really? What did they change yesterday?

C.C. Chapman: You used to have the stream in the wall…

Susan Bratton: Right.

C.C. Chapman: and they got rid of the stream.

Susan Bratton: So it’s just the one thing now.

C.C. Chapman: It’s just the wall now, so…

Susan Bratton: So it’s both things that you write as a brand…

C.C. Chapman: Yes, and your fans…

Susan Bratton: as well as what your fans think.

C.C. Chapman: Right, you can’t separate it. So it’s…

Susan Bratton: So your content gets pushed down, and the things you’re doing, if you have a lot of fans commenting…

C.C. Chapman: Yes.

Susan Bratton: you’ve got to kind of repost a lot.

C.C. Chapman: Exactly, it’s going to be an interesting thing. But the biggest thing is that now brands have status updates. Anything I post as a brand appears in the fans feeds right next to their friends, and that’s kind of, that’s a shift and brands are going to have to be very smart about it because they don’t want to become a spammer because someone will say, “Oh I don’t want to get that”, just like if that friend that we all have that status updates way too much, you know, it might push him down a little bit, and now it’s going to happen to brands, so… Gives you lots more options, but you got to be very smart about it. So, it’s going to, it’s an exciting time I think.

Susan Bratton: Question for you about that; now a fan page, which is now just called a page…

C.C. Chapman: A page, yeah.

Susan Bratton: just a page, now that a brand can have a fan club and it’s called a page in Face Book, one of the things that you can do as a, an individual on Face Book is expose yourself, not just to the people that are your friends, but to the friends of your friends, you can actually click a little button…

C.C. Chapman: Yup.

Susan Bratton: that exposes you to a wider audience. If you’re the person who’s trying to build, rather than confine your persona in the Face Book domain, can you do that on the page? Do you know if there’s a way that the fan itself, the page, the brand can open itself up to the friends of the fans?

C.C. Chapman: Well one of the interesting things that you can do that you can control, it’s sort of, it’s different but it’s sort of along that lines, you can control, so if I’m a fan of, and I go to a page, I automatically see the wall…

Susan Bratton: Yeah.

C.C. Chapman: But if I’m not a fan, the brand can control what page is shown to just a casual visitor.

Susan Bratton: Okay.

C.C. Chapman: So, you know, like if you go to our fan page, our portfolio is shown if you’re not a fan, ‘cause that’s, we’re the first thing you want to see. But it’s a perfect time to upsell people on why becoming a fan. But the other key piece is that now with these fan pages, if you’re a fan of a company and you see a piece of content, whether it’s a video, you know, a status update, anything, and you can do the, like the little thumbs-up thing, you can share it, and that appears in your news feeds, all your friends see it and that’s kind of the hope, and that’s why brands should be putting up pictures and video and stuff and tagging them…

Susan Bratton: And reviews.

C.C. Chapman: And reviews….

Susan Bratton: That’s a big one in the White Paper.

C.C. Chapman: Yeah, you’d think reviews would be, and so many people aren’t using that application and…

Susan Bratton: Mm hmm.

C.C. Chapman: and I’m hoping that more third party apps are going to come along that plug into pages because some of the greatest applications that you can plug into your profile or my profile, you can’t plug into pages yet, and I don’t quite get why, but I know, I hope they fix that.

Susan Bratton: Exactly. So then what you want to do if you have this page is spend a lot of time producing valuable content for your fans that they can react to…

C.C. Chapman: Yes.

Susan Bratton: so that it becomes in their news feed and then in the news feed of their friends, and if they have it turned on…

C.C. Chapman: Right.

Susan Bratton: the news feeds of their friends friends.

C.C. Chapman: And you’d think….

Susan Bratton: That’s the strategy.

C.C. Chapman: And what’s funny is it’s, one of our clients is American Eagle and they have a sub brand called Ares, which is, it’s a college girls line of clothes…

Susan Bratton: Sounds like it.

C.C. Chapman: And what’s, but the simple, you know, they have the ambassadors at different colleges, they took, they had Valentine’s Days parties, and all we did was post pictures from the Valentine’s Day party up on Face Book, and they, within minutes, had hundreds of people liking it and commenting on it, and these were just photos that were casually taken at an event. And so many brands seem to think, “Well why would I put that up? Who’s going to care about it?” Well the people who are fans are going to care about it, and those girls went in and tagged their friends so they saw it. And that’s content that any brand could create, you know, whether it’s your print ads, whether it’s your, you know, your circular flyer, I mean it could be anything. And people seem, it’s weird that brands seem to not realize that people like photos, they like video, they like to look at content and say, “Hey, that’s good. I want to show it off.” It’s such an amazingly powerful concept that brands are missing.

Susan Bratton: Well one of the things that I also like about the White Paper, and you’re right that we’ve got to give that thing a better name than that…

C.C. Chapman: Yeah.

Susan Bratton: I know. But it’s a fabulous piece of content to help anyone who wants to have a brand presence on Face Book, and one of the things that you do very well in that White Paper is give links to examples of work that you think is done well, both of your own and others, brands that you like on Face Book.

C.C. Chapman: And that was hard because the new fan pages were literally two days old as we’re writing it…

Susan Bratton: Yeah.

C.C. Chapman: and that’s one of the reasons why we viewed it as a living document because we want people to give us suggestions on, hey, you know, brand X is doing this really, really well, because there’s not search that says show me who’s doing it well, so we really wanted to showcase for people and be able to hyperlink so people could go out and see who’s doing it well, who we think is doing it well, and I hope, I hope those people get outdated ‘cause I hope more people do more cool stuff. You know, we’ll have to add your page in there.

Susan Bratton: Thank you.

C.C. Chapman: Yeah.

Susan Bratton: I would love that. It’s funny, I also created a domain for and I point to that page…

C.C. Chapman: Oh, smart…

Susan Bratton: ‘Cause those Face Book fan pages are, you know awful URL’s…

C.C. Chapman: Oh yeah, horrible URL’s, yes.

Susan Bratton: So I just use on my podcast, I just tell people to go to dishymixfan.com…

C.C. Chapman: There you go.

Susan Bratton: and it takes them right to my page…

C.C. Chapman: Very smart.

Susan Bratton: and so that works. I got that from Shana Hader, Shana Hyder, she gave me that idea. So everybody wants a piece of you here, and I, I am priding myself on actually getting a piece of you…

C.C. Chapman: You did, yeah…

Susan Bratton: Such a pleasure.

C.C. Chapman: The minute you said it, I said, “Oh, I’m there. No way I’m going to miss this.”

Susan Bratton: I really appreciate that.

C.C. Chapman: Well thank you for having me.

Susan Bratton: C.C., last thing. What are you trying to accomplish for yourself or your business here at South By Southwest?

C.C. Chapman: Two-fold. One, I want to meet, because when we do a lot in this space and, you know, a lot of outreach and a lot of programs to interact with, it’s these people. It’s everybody at South By that every brand wants to talk to whether they realize it or not. So it’s meeting the people on that side. It’s also, which I haven’t done yet, is gone to the expo floor and see what the new technology is, see what’s cool, because I want to, you know, I want to look at that, every piece of technology and put it in the back of my head so that down the road I talk to a client and I can, “Oh wait, I saw something that would fit that.” I mean those are the two really things, meeting the people and seeing the technology, and you get such a cross section. Like, I can’t wait to go down to the Screen Burn section for the gaming where, ‘cause we just did a, a program for a game, and it’s a whole new world and they think differently, and I want to see what they’re thinking about, see what they get excited about. So those are the, the people and the gadgets and the technology.

Susan Bratton: Absolutely.

C.C. Chapman: Yeah.

Susan Bratton: So a lot of, a lot of hallway conversations and connections…

C.C. Chapman: It’s the magic of the hallways…

Susan Bratton: It is.

C.C. Chapman: It’s, you don’t need to go to the, as bad as South, I don’t want to say this, you don’t have to go to the panels. You really don’t. I mean, you can sit in the hallway and just meet everybody you ever imagined. And then people, and you might be, and I met, I sat down at lunch yesterday next to a guy from UCLA and I’ve never met him before and we struck up a conversation and now we’re seeing each other in the hallways and I hope we get to do something together at some point, and that’s what’s, there’s something different about South By Southwest. I don’t know what it is…

Susan Bratton: It’s good.

C.C. Chapman: but there’s something different.

Susan Bratton: Well I’m glad we go to do this in the hallway too…

C.C. Chapman: Yeah.

Susan Bratton: We’re in the hallway right now.

C.C. Chapman: We’re in the hall now, people walking by, yup.

Susan Bratton: Exactly, like Lobbycon. Terrific. Well C.C. Chapman, thank you so much…

C.C. Chapman: Thank you.

Susan Bratton: You are the co-founder of Advanced Guard, and also you have Accident Hash and managing the Gray Podcasts…

C.C. Chapman: Yeah.

Susan Bratton: that you do, fairly frequently.

C.C. Chapman: Yeah, I need to do them more frequently, but yeah…

Susan Bratton: It’s alright. We love every one…

C.C. Chapman: Thank you.

Susan Bratton: We’ll take whatever you can give us.

C.C. Chapman: Thank you.

Susan Bratton: Anything else you want to tell us about? Cc-chapman.com.

C.C. Chapman: Yeah, you go to cc-chapman.com. It has links to everything. I mean and I’m going to, and by the time this goes live maybe I might have a new website called digitaldads.com that’s going to be live…

Susan Bratton: Oh really?

C.C. Chapman: Yeah, I need something else to keep me busy, so…

Susan Bratton: Right, you just don’t have enough, I know.

C.C. Chapman: I don’t have enough. I just, I got rid of that last hour of sleep, so…

Susan Bratton: Well it’s great to have you here…

C.C. Chapman: Thank you.

Susan Bratton: Thank you so much for being on the Community Powered podcast. I’m your host, Susan Bratton. Have a great day.

Susan Bratton: This is Susan Bratton, and you’re listening to Community Powered, a live series of podcasts from South By Southwest. And I’m here with Henry Jenkins, who’s lovely in purple today. Henry is the director of Comparative Media Studies at MIT, and of course a favorite person at South By Southwest of many, speaks here a lot. Welcome Henry.

Podcast Here and Transcript Below.

Susan Bratton & Henry Jenkins

Henry Jenkins: Happy to be here.

Susan Bratton: It’s great to meet you finally in person, and a fan of course. So we’re talking about the intersection of brand and community, and what I’d like to know is do you have any advice for brands that want or are considering creating community, what would you tell them?

Henry Jenkins: Well I think there are two pieces of advice. The first is that you probably want to think about courting communities rather than creating communities. That is, I think the idea, most brands are not able to create a community by their, on their own, but what they can do is really study the communities of use that are out there, connect with other communities that are already deeply invested in whatever the field is they’re involved with, understand those interests, and engage with them. So the idea of creating a community around toilet tissue brands or around insurance companies is probably not the way to think. You know certainly, I am a Crispy Cream enthusiast, and so certainly I could imagine a Crispy Cream community for me, but… But I think most products are just not that into you. The second is to get over this idea of going viral, which is sort of treated as a mystified process, a magical process. When people talk about going viral, simultaneously they’re acting as if they still were in control of the communication process, they made it go viral, and as if there was no agency on the side of the consumer. Reality is that we don’t, media doesn’t travel through infection. Media travels by people consciously spreading messages to likeminded people, taking back to their community, talking about the things that matter to them, embedding the brand in their everyday conversations. And that’s what we talk about now is a move to spread ability as a new way of thinking about what, how social media works in relation to brand.  So, so people often say spreadability sounds like peanut butter. Well, if you think about peanut butter, the properties of the peanut butter determine how well it spreads. So whether it’s crunchy or smooth, it travels differently. But so does the act of the person who picks up the knife and spreads it on the bread. So we want to recognize the property of the brand, the property of the communication channel, but also the properties of the communities, the agencies and interests of the people who are passing that content along. So I think as long as you treat it as a mystical process of going viral, you don’t actually look at the other side of the fence, why are consumers interested in taking your brand and spreading it through their social network? What’s in it for them? What are their stakes? What are their interests?

Susan Bratton: So a follow-on to that would be if someone’s just getting started in social media, a brand manager or someone involved in community at a brand, what advice would you give that person just starting out? It’s a really wide world, this whole social media world.

Henry Jenkins: Well you need to figure out what the core communities are that your brand is likely to be inserted into. And you have to figure…

Susan Bratton: How do you figure that out Henry?

Henry Jenkins: Well you’re, I mean, you have to figure out what your product is, what’s its use patterns, who are the people who are using it. The great thing about the web is there’s probably a active visible community around any activity interest that you can think of. And you have to immerse yourself in that community and really get to know how they’re, how they’re, what they’re doing. It’s a kind of layman’s ethnographic project, that is just as an anthropologist comes to understand a community, you’ve got to know who these people are and why they care about you. And until you know that, I don’t think you can actively effectively communicate with them.

Susan Bratton: Are there other things beside Googling, places that you can go to find your communities?

Henry Jenkins: I mean, I think, you know, that’s an interesting question. I mean, right now, the best way is to use a variety of search tools; so search Twitter, search the blogosphere, search Google, search every engine that brings you to sites where conversations are taking place. Listen to podcasts that are tied to the products that you’re involved with. Read the blogs, go to Live Journal, go to, you know, all of the other social network sites, and you will find activity and discussions spontaneously occurring. You don’t need to bring people into your studio and run a focus group now. What you need to do is recognize how this product is used and talked about in the field and engage with the people, engage with your consumers on that level. But you also are going to need to figure out what’s your value at it, why should they listen to you? What’s your point of entry into this conversation? So when I talk to companies they often are saying, “We’re worried about losing control over our brand message.” Well the reality is you lost control a long time ago. That your consumers can take your brand and do with it more or less what they want, and you might stop some of them with cease and desist letters, but you’re not going to stop all of them and you’d be an idiot to sue your consumers. But what you can do is get into the game, and by getting into the game I mean you create a value for that community, you give them something that’s a resource that allows them to talk to each other about the brand that matter, brands that matter to them. You give them things that they can take back to them, and wherever the communities they’re involved with and continue the conversation. And sometimes you can become an active part of that, but just as importantly you give the resources that communication takes place around…

Susan Bratton: Become the facilitator, the platform, if not the integrator.

Henry Jenkins: Exactly.

Susan Bratton: Mm hmm. You are a very, oh gosh, very big blogger, you spend a lot of time writing, you’ve authored nine books. What in social media has taken your fancy now? Is blogging still your main thing, or what are you watching? What are you in love with?

Henry Jenkins: I mean, I still love blogging…

Susan Bratton: Yeah.

Henry Jenkins: I think for me, I’m a marathon runner, not a sprinter. So for me the blog is a better medium than Twitter. I’m just starting to use Twitter. I’m trying it out, but I’m not sure I have the conciseness to be the ideal Twitterer…

Susan Bratton: Yeah, you said you like to write a lot ‘cause it’s too hard to write a little.

Henry Jenkins: Exactly. And so, but also as an academic, what I’m trying to do is bring a variety of communities together that I’ve found are interested in the questions I work on and to facilitate new kinds of conversations. So for me my blog is an experiment in how academic ideas can travel in the culture. But as an academic I need enough time to develop an argument. You know, something Nom Chaunski said was that if you’re trying to challenge established wisdom, it takes more words than if you’re trying to reaffirm it, that he says its hard to put revolutionary messages into sound bites. And I think at this point I’m trying to shake up the existing paradimes by which we’ve thought about them consumers and their relations to producers, and that requires a little more language than Twitter facilitates. Right now what I see with Twitter is Twitter is an attention mechanism. So people, like the bees doing their dance and saying, “Honey’s over here”, this is an interesting place to look. It’s not a great tool for analysis. And so I’m interested in, I get a lot of ideas every week that I can’t write about, so I expect to use Twitter to say, “Here’s an article you should pay attention to.” But to use the blog to have in depth conversations with key thinkers to lay out my analysis of current trends, to sort of develop my ideas in a more systematic way.

Susan Bratton: Well that makes a lot of sense to me. I like the combination of things. I’m interested in reading it, whether it’s 140 characters or 1400 characters, or 14,000 I suppose in your books. Last question for you Henry. I haven’t read your latest book. Can you tell me, tell us all about it just a bit.

Henry Jenkins: Well Convergence Culture is the most recent book. We just put it out on paperback. And Convergence Culture really is exploring, it’s sort of picking us out of a world where we think about convergence in technological terms, which magical black box will all the media flow through. And instead it’s describing a world where every story, every idea, every image travels across every available media channel shaped by decisions made in teenagers bedrooms as much as by decisions made in corporate boardrooms, shaped by the desire of consumers that have the media they want and where they want it, when they want it, how they want it, and they’re willing to take it there illegally if it’s not available legally. And the desires of companies to maximize touch points with consumers. Those two things work together to insure a world, which is profoundly transmedian, and a world where the orients is increasingly participating in shaping the flow and content of the media that touches their lives.

Susan Bratton: So is, is it more of a possible future projection or is it a look at what you really believe is actually happening now in a different context?

Henry Jenkins: A little of both. What I do is walk through of contemporary media franchises, Survivor, American Idol, Harry Potter, Star Wars, The Matrix, and now Barack Obama in the book, to try to lay out how they used media and what can we learn from studying these successes that points in future directions media changes take, and so I’m, I’m both looking very systematically at specific practices and experiences around media, but extracting from that to speculate about the directions our culture is moving.

Susan Bratton: Well I’ll be reading that to prepare for our interview on Dishy Mix. We’ll be doing that some time soon, right?

Henry Jenkins: Looking forward to it.

Susan Bratton: Me too. Henry Jenkins, director of Comparative Media Studies at MIT. Thank you so much for being with us today on Community Powered.

Henry Jenkins: Happy to do it.

Susan Bratton: Alright. I’m your host, Susan Bratton, and you can look forward to more great interviews like this one with Henry. Thank you so much.

Susan Bratton: This is Susan Bratton, and I am here at South By Southwest doing the Community Powered podcast series, and I’m with Rohit Bhargava. Rohit is the senior vice president of strategy and marketing at Ogilvy 360. He’s also the author of Personality Not Included. By no means does that mean that Rohit does not have a personality; he has more than enough for both of us. And we’re talking about community and brand and the intersection of those two things here at South By Southwest. Welcome Rohit.

Podcast Here and Transcipt Below.

Susan Bratton & Rohit Bhargava

Rohit Bhargava: Thank you. It’s nice to talk to you again. We’ve done another interview before, so…

Susan Bratton: We did. We did Dishy Mix together. You were excellent on that.

Rohit Bhargava, Author of “Personality Not Included” and 360 Degree Digital Influencer at Ogilvy PR

Rohit Bhargava: Thank you. You were excellent as well.

Susan Bratton: I had a really good time…

Rohit Bhargava: Yeah. It’s a very popular show, I know.

Susan Bratton: Thank you. Well it’s because I have great guests like you.

Rohit Bhargava: Alright, lets stop complimenting one another.

Susan Bratton: Oh, lets keep doing it. It feels so good. I love you so much right now. So one of the things that I wanted to do, you’ve done a lot of thinking about brands and how they present in the social media space. And I’d like to get one pearl of wisdom from the experience that you’ve had working with so many brands about someone who wants to get started in social media, but doesn’t know quite what to do, what advice would you give them?

Rohit Bhargava: Well I think the first thing that I’d like to say is, and I hope that people do think this, is that a lot of my experience hasn’t just been about talking, sort of theory based advice, but has been more actually doing things…

Susan Bratton: Hands-on man.

Rohit Bhargava: Yeah, hands-on totally. So…

Susan Bratton: You’re working with a lot of brands.

Rohit Bhargava: Yeah, I mean, you know, I’ve got a book and I’d consider myself in the same category as a lot of social media types, and I think we all know who those people are. But I have a day job. And I work for an agency and we work with lots of different brands, and so that really keeps me grounded because I deal with real people who aren’t on Twitter 24 hours a day and who are barely on Face Book sometimes, or who are just starting to learn some of the potential of this stuff. So I think the one biggest pearl of wisdom I’d offer is a lot of times I see companies look at social media and try and decide where it fits within their company first and then assign it to someone, and that’s the way they get started with it. So they say, “Okay, social media should be a PR thing, so lets get our PR person to work on it”, and the situation that that causes a lot of times is that you end up putting the person in charge of it who may not necessarily be the person who’s passionate about it or who cares or who’s most intuitively able to do it. And so the biggest piece of advice I’d give is see if there’s somebody’s who’s actually already passionate about it. See if there’s an employee within your company who is already blogging or who is already on Twitter, because what you find there might actually surprise you, and I think that a lot of times that would give any company, big or small, I mean that’s not just for huge enterprises, this is for any small business, might give you a place to start. And the other thing that you might find is that a lot of times it’s quite surprising because it’s not, it’s not the youngest person on your team, it’s not the college student that just graduated as you might think. A lot of times it’s just somebody who’s really passionate about something.

Susan Bratton: That makes a lot of sense. I think, someone earlier said that it’s a, it’s not a, it’s a marathon, not a sprint. And it takes a lot, whether you’re blogging or podcasting or participating in Face Book, you know, there’s so much work that comes with it, the interaction of being out in that world, that, it’s social. And if you don’t have a natural affinity toward wanting to connect with people, and you don’t have an opinion about things that you trust, then it can be quite onerous to assign it to someone who isn’t comfortable with it. I think that’s a brilliant piece of advice and actually not one that I’d heard before and very practical. So thank you. Any other things come to mind about that?

Rohit Bhargava: Well, I’m trying to hit for stuff that other people haven’t come out, ‘cause I know you’ve been doing this for a, some time now, so…

Susan Bratton: You’re doing a good job.

Rohit Bhargava: I think the other thing is that one of the big fear factors I think that goes into a lot of social media is people worry about what if somebody says something negative, right?

Susan Bratton: Right.

Rohit Bhargava: That’s one of the big barriers that people have.

Susan Bratton: From a corporate perspective I’m sure you see that all the time…

Rohit Bhargava: All the time, yeah…

Susan Bratton: You see a lot of panic rippling through organizations. You’re probably calming a lot of people, aren’t you?

Rohit Bhargava: Well I think the, in real life, I mean I think a lot of times our perceptions are from real life, so perception is negativity. Real life is indifference. Most of the time what happens is you’ll launch something and nobody will visit it because you haven’t promoted it and nobody will comment because nobody’s there. And so the bigger challenge is how do you create something that people actually go to, and how do you create something that actually has some eyeballs and has some audience and has people who are checking it out because usually what’ll happen is people just won’t care enough to even comment. And so that’s the biggest surprise that a lot of companies have that get into this. They could say they set up their whole system to manage risk of a negative comment and then nothing happens. Nobody comments, nobody goes there, and they realize that the bigger challenge is to create something that people actually want to go to.

Susan Bratton: Well isn’t that the whole premise of your book Personality Not Included…

Rohit Bhargava: Yeah, it’s…

Susan Bratton: that you have to take the risks to actually have, like get a personality as a brand and…

Rohit Bhargava: Well I think…

Susan Bratton: own that in the market, good and bad, not everyone’s going to love you?

Rohit Bhargava: Yeah, I think that the biggest thing is, I mean, it’s really about humanity, right? And if you think about humanity in our, our own humanity, like we all have humanity, we just forget it or we hide it or we keep it away because we don’t think that that’s part of our job or we don’t think that’s part of what we should be doing, especially at work. And so, really the premise of the book is that how do you rediscover that as a company? And if you are able to rediscover it, really the premise is not you should start a blog, because sometimes a blog is the wrong thing to do and not very many blog experts, and I might put myself in that category, would tell you that. And so, my first thing is well do you need a blog? Should you even start one? And if you should then maybe it’s the way of demonstrating that humanity, but maybe there’s other ways, there’s real life ways. I mean, go to an event, meet your customers. These are not social media ideas. These are just real life ideas to demonstrate that you’re actually out there and that people who work for your brand care and they are part of the community.

Susan Bratton: What do you see the companies that you can sell for, ‘cause you’re really applied across a lot of the Ogilvy companies, right? I mean, you don’t have just a specific account list. You are kind of Rohit does everybody, right?

Rohit Bhargava: Well, I don’t know if I’d go with that in my tag…

Susan Bratton: As many as you can. Oh, come on. Aaron’s Twittering that right now, isn’t he?

Rohit Bhargava: Yeah, I know.

Susan Bratton: He’s Twittering it right now; “Rohit, overheard Rohit does everybody.”

Rohit Bhargava: I’m going to get a tee shirt with that tagline on there. Well I think the first thing I’d like to say is it’s not a one man show. I mean we really do have an awesome team

Susan Bratton: Right, you have a group, you’re a team, 360…

Rohit Bhargava: Yeah, we have an awesome team…

Susan Bratton: is a group, yup.

Rohit Bhargava: And the thing that I think differentiates our team quite a lot is that we don’t just have one or two super stars who are out at conferences talking and who are, who have well read blogs. I mean we have a pretty deep team. Everybody from the more experienced people to the lesser experienced people, we pretty much all have our own blogs. We have, what I would argue is probably the most often updated large agency team blog. Because a lot of, I mean every one of our competitors has a team blog, but if their last post is from four weeks ago, you know, how current is that. And, you know, I haven’t even looked at our blog in a couple days, but I guarantee you the last post is from, you know, at least a day or two old and that’s it.

Susan Bratton: What’s the blog URL, so we can go look at it?

Rohit Bhargava: It is blog.ogilvypr.com.

Susan Bratton: Got it.

Rohit Bhargava: So, and it’s from the digital influence team. I’m a contributor. There’s probably ten or fifteen other contributors. And it really has started a landslide within our group of using blogs to communicate our point of view. And so we have a blog about, you know, our health practice, we have one that focus, we have the Ogilvy branded entertainment guys who are doing a blog now, we have our government political affairs guys and the lobbying things that go on out of DC, they have a blog. So there’s a lot of niche blogs as well, but the main team blog is the blog at Ogilvy, and we pull in headlines from that our homepage of Ogilvy PR.

Susan Bratton: Oh, that’s good.

Rohit Bhargava: So, it’s really front and center…

Susan Bratton: Beautiful RSS.

Rohit Bhargava: We love RSS.

Susan Bratton: Yeah man.

Rohit Bhargava: And the idea is that we’re really kind of trying to demonstrate that we’re thinking about the issues facing our clients, not just from a here’s what one project should do or another one, but from a larger how do you actually use these tools and how do you be effective with them. So part of it’s that. The other part is that we have real stories to point to, so we have real case studies. So if you go on that website, you’ll see that there are actually a lot of examples of real brands that we’ve done work for. We did a great campaign with Lenova around the Olympics where we got a hundred Olympic athletes to all blog and share their experience…

Susan Bratton: You went to Beijing, didn’t you?

Rohit Bhargava: I did.

Susan  Bratton: I was tracking you there.

Rohit Bhargava: It was very, very cool, and it was an interesting…

Susan Bratton: Love Beijing.

Rohit Bhargava: Yeah, I love Beijing, too.

Susan Bratton: You got to take your kids there.

Rohit Bhargava: Yeah, I will, when they get a little older.

Susan Bratton: You didn’t take them this time, right? They’re still too little, yeah.

Rohit Bhargava: No, they’re a little young. Yeah, they’re a little young, but, but I love, I love Beijing as well, and especially the Olympics. I mean, I’m a big Olympics junkie. I lived in Atlanta, I lived in Sydney, so Beijing was my third, so… I’m a huge fan of the Olympics. I’m already planning my London trip, so…

Susan Bratton: Nice. Yeah, you got to get that going. You got to save up your money.

Rohit Bhargava: Yeah, I know.

Susan Bratton: So, let me ask you something. I want you to, well you are such a, if I had a big corporation I would want you to work for me because you are so professional, so intelligent, so well spoken, so handsome, you know. You’re just like the guy that should represent you.

Rohit Bhargava: I have a face for radio.

Susan Bratton: No, actually you have a face, Aaron’s taken some pictures,  he’s going to Twit pick you, I know he is.

Rohit Bhargava: Aaron’s often told me I’m a handsome guy, so I’m getting a little worried.

Susan Bratton: There, he does. He’s flirty. He’s a flirty little guy. He’s flirty little guy. So take that hat off, just the Rohit that is the dude that loves tech stuff and social media. I’m giving you a day where you have no kids, no wife, no anything, an extra free day to just play with something that you’re interested in, and if I could clear your slate and sit you down in front of your computer and you would go play with or experiment or check out a new technology or do something online that didn’t have to matter, what would you like to play with?

Rohit Bhargava: You know, this is why I like doing interviews with you, ‘cause you have great questions like this.

Susan Bratton: More flattery.

Rohit Bhargava: It’s interesting that you said in front of a computer because as you were leading up to that question, my first thoughts were just about having a…

Susan Bratton: Matai on a beach.

Rohit Bhargava: Well no, it was actually, honestly, I was actually thinking about having a really great soccer game at a field that I used to play on in Australia that was literally by the ocean…

Susan Bratton: Oh, that’s nice.

Rohit Bhargava: And it was just an amazingly beautiful field…

Susan Bratton: Didn’t you to school in Sydney?

Rohit Bhargava: No, I lived there for five years after college

Susan Bratton: You lived there though, I knew you did, yeah. After college you lived there, yeah.

Rohit Bhargava: So my first thought was well what would I do if I didn’t have any of that stuff to worry about, I’d just play soccer all day…

Susan Bratton: Soccer by…

Rohit Bhargava: if I had the stamina.

Susan Bratton: Right, yeah that’s the problem, is it? Computer…

Rohit Bhargava: But going online, computer, well I think one thing I would do is people often ask me, because I do a lot of content creation, I spend a lot of my time online and I have a family with little kids, and they say, “How do you find time for it all and how do you fit things in?”, and I say, “Well, something always gets left behind”, and for me what gets left behind sometimes is reading and actually learning. And I don’t consider, I mean seeing what sites are out there and being knowledgeable about what’s happening today I think is a little bit different from what I would consider learning, as in like truly internalizing like a new life lesson or something that kind of makes you a better person. So I do a lot of learning when it comes to like, oh, that’s a new site that launched and that’s a beta thing and that’s a new trend, and I mean, I do a lot of that. But when it comes to like really learning a new lesson for like living my life better, being a better father or being better at my job, like, that’s what I would spend the time to do because I don’t feel like I have or take enough time to do that.

Susan Bratton: Got it. That’s neat. Well I have a good podcast recommendation for you.

Rohit Bhargava: Oh, okay.

Susan Bratton: There’s a podcast called The New Man by Tripp Linear, and it’s all about the men’s movement and being more fully into your, who you are as a human being and the masculine man that you are, you know. It’s not all about rrrr, it’s not six pack abs, it’s not that.

Rohit Bhargava: You know, the interesting thing is I’m about to be in the market for listening to a lot more podcasts because I’m work…

Susan Bratton: Oh really, you got some travel?

Rohit Bhargava: Well no, I’m looking for, ‘cause I work on, I take the train right now to work, and so the train time, my commute time is blogging time.

Susan Bratton: You’re in DC. Mm hmm.

Rohit Bhargava: I’m on the computer and I’m blogging. But I’m looking for a new place where I’ll probably have to drive, and so I’ll have audio time, and I’ve never had that before.

Susan Bratton: Yeah.

Rohit Bhargava: And when I have audio time, that’s what I’m going to do, I’m going to be listening to podcasts, so I welcome anyone to send me any recommendations, ‘cause I’m working on my slate of podcasts. Obviously yours will be on there…

Susan Bratton: Thank you.

Rohit Bhargava: But, you know, any other ones, I’ll be, I’ll be looking for them.

Susan Bratton: Excellent. Well maybe we’ll get some good blog posts for you, when Aaron posts this to the Powered blog, maybe we’ll get some good recommendations for you.

Rohit Bhargava: That’d be great.

Susan Bratton: Rohit, it’s been great as always to talk to you. Thank you so much for being on Community Powered Podcast today.

Rohit Bhargava: Thank you. Thanks for having me.

Susan Bratton: Alright. This is your host, Susan Bratton. Thank you so much for listening in today. I hope you enjoyed it as much as I did.

Susan Bratton: This is Susan Bratton, and you are at another episode of Community Powered live at South By Southwest, and I am with Chris Brogan. Chris is the president of New Media Marketing Labs, an avid blogger, apparently number two, he’s trying harder on the Ad Age top 50 bloggers. Welcome Chris.

Podcast Here and Transcript Below.

Susan Bratton & Chris Brogan

Chris Brogan: So happy to be here Susan. How are you?

Susan Bratton: I am great. So we’re right in the middle of a shift change at South By Southwest panels. You’re going to have to give us some golden gems while the crowds flow by. It’s a busy South By Southwest.

Chris Brogan: It is busy, but that actually really points to the trend right now. There’s a lot of people interested in how they’re going to move community for business, how they’re going to use the right kinds of tools and really grow their business.

Susan Bratton: And you’re going to help them with that. Tell us about New Marketing Labs and chrisbrogan.com.

Chris Brogan: So New Marketing Labs is a small start-up that deals with two things: content and community management, which deals with either marketing from the side of creating good content marketing, like good blogs, good video, whatever. On the other side we’re doing community marketing, which deals with either helping people with community platforms, either growing their own or helping them participate and make presence elsewhere. I also write a bunch of events called The Inbound Marketing Summit, and those are to help equip people, both brands and agencies, with the kinds of new tools and new strategies that are working in ’09.

Susan Bratton: You’re also a founder of PodCamp, aren’t you?

Chris Brogan: I am. I’m a co-founder of PodCamp with Christopher S. Penn. It’s a on-conference model based on the BarCamp model, and the basic idea was that a jury of your peers would be able to educate everybody because we’re all learning at the same time, why have people on a stage, why have it be a sort of dias. We’ve had 77 events all over the world; Cape Town, South Africa, Perth, Australia, wherever you want to be. And it’s sort of the ultimate democracy model.

Susan Bratton: Now is New Marketing Labs more of a strategic consultancy or are you more of an agency model where you’re actually doing both consultancy and implementation?

Chris Brogan: Well I’ll tell you what, I’ve been acting more under the agency model where I’m actually doing the work, but Charlene Lee said I’m working too hard…

Susan Bratton: Mm hmm.

Chris Brogan: so, you know, I’m going to listen to Charlene. So maybe I’ll just stop doing all that and I’ll just tell people what they should do. Forrester did it for a lot of years.

Susan Bratton: Well tell me, if you’re going to tell people what to do, I want to know what are, you cover all areas of social media and community, what are you really excited about right now? What’s getting you going?

Chris Brogan: A couple things. One is sort of the location-based platforms of the world. I like the idea of sort of the annotated world where we can start floating data in space, in physical space, that our mobile devices will allow us to pick up and do something with. We’ve talked about this in the ‘90’s, we talked about it in the early part of 2000’s, but marketers always talked about giving you a Starbucks coupon when you were walking by a Starbucks. There’s so much more that can be done with it. There’s so much more community opportunity, non-profit opportunity. There’s a lot of ways to use the new abundance of GPS data, at least in the states, and the new mobile devices that are taking good advantage of it. The other thing is café shaped conversations. A lot of businesses are getting back into the idea of how do we have much more meaningful smaller conversations, even though we’re a big company, and how we can add a little bit more meaning back into our marketing and our business communications.

Susan Bratton: Lets go back to the mobile application space again. What did you call it? You had a word or a phrase for it.

Chris Brogan: Oh, I don’t know. I have a thing where I call it the secret of the annotated world, the idea that in the middle of space right around us, something as simple as Twitter is telling us what’s going on even when we’re not there, but something more like Bright Kite is telling us what’s going on in this space. So someone might say there’s 8 power outlets along this wall, but on the 6th power outlet don’t use it, it’ll blow up your Mac Book. And there’s that kind of data being passed around now in a way that you can’t see it unless you’re knowing to look for it with a certain mobile app. I think there’ll be more of that as time goes on. Some people are thinking, you know, it’ll be these QR codes, which are 3D barcodes. Other people are saying that it’s just GPS data tied to a certain place as well a person, a certain time.

Susan Bratton: What are some of the applications that excite you in that space particularly?

Chris Brogan: Bright Kite is doing really well with it. I think Bright Kite on the iPhone…

Susan Bratton: What are people doing with Bright Kite? Bring it into the real world for us. How would we use it?

Chris Brogan: So we could be at the South By Southwest conference and looking for the party that doesn’t have the line 700 people long, and I could push a button and say, “I am here”, and give you my GPS coordinates and show you a picture and type, “No lines here. Come and visit”, and within 20 minutes we’d have margaritas. The extension of that though could be that you and I are standing next to a statue in the middle of the square down here and I was standing, and it’s a guy on a horse like every other of these statues, and who is it and what do we know about them? Well if it isn’t just put on a metal placard, what if when you turn on your phone you can look at Bright Kite to see who else left a note there, and someone’s left us a URL, so we can now go to a website and read more about the person on the statue.

Susan Bratton: So it’s, it’s like a threaded conversation that’s place based.

Chris Brogan: Yes. So it’s an opportunity to do something either threaded or just to, just to pile notes on a wall. Imagine a, you know, invisible sticky board where people have come and put pictures and notes, and now we have the opportunity to build a business relationship around it. We can, we can, it can be marketing for a location, it could be community organization kind of a project. The whole goal of it is that with the advent of mobile technology meets community and mobile technology meets location, there’s a whole new opening up, a whole new space opening up for us to do this sorts of work.

Susan Bratton: I just saw Mary Hodder here in the hallways and she’s working on a new company called Appishere, which is API’s for the mobile sphere, and so it goes along the line. I always think about Mary as being one of those people who’s always on the leading edge of what’s happening, and to hear you talk about it as well being the same kind of a person that we look to for the direction of the world tells me that we’ve just come across something that’s going to be very big and very hot. How does it apply to brands? If it’s not the Starbucks coupon, what is the perfect fabulous first application that we might want to do?

Chris Brogan: Lets imagine that what brands really want, I mean what most any company really wants is they want a conversation with the right person, and it might be a conversation with a person who’s going to buy, it might be a conversation with a person who needs to accept. If we’re Ford, Ford’s business motto is anybody who buys cars. Seems like a pretty big market. So if we are using something like Appisphere, if it’s making up certain kinds of apps, Ford might have a “Lets have a Ford flex car club” kind of a motto. And so, we could set a space and time kind of location, so as the Ford flex car club gets together here every Friday, show up, and everybody can come there every Friday. Well next thing you know, there’s open PR, there’s a lot of people making their own media from that experience and it’s going out onto the web, and you’re seeing more and more pictures of the Ford flex drivers in this one locale. If you’re a film producer, you could go around and if your set, you’ve shot your whole think in Vancouver and it was supposed to actually be, you know, Prague in the movie, you can go there and do a walk through, you can do a walk through of where the different movie sets were and you could say, “Here’s where Daniel Craig was being James Bond and, you know, grabbing the bad guy”, and you could actually do a lot more interesting promotions based on location based applications. So there’s, there’s really a lot of ways to get brand messaging across. I mean there’s lots of ways to add sort of liner notes to this, and it gives you a participatory feel, a sort of community sort of feel, which are the sort of power, a better opportunity going forward, and you can power a back and forth experience instead of just being advertise or marketed to.

Susan Bratton: The café conversation, the second thing that you think is particularly hot, what is that? Is that an online conversation with a small group of people?

Chris Brogan: It could be both. So one thing to talk about is, in the book that I’m writing with Julian Smith, Trust Agents, we talk about this idea of being one of us. So when I think of Google, I don’t really think of Eric, Sergei or Larry, I think of Matt Cutts because…

Susan Bratton: Right.

Chris Brogan: Matt would actually respond to me if I need him.

Susan Bratton: That’s right.

Chris Brogan: If I think of Dell I have Morgan Johnston, Dell, sorry, Jet Blue, Morgan Johnston. If I’m looking for people out in the space now, in the social space, there are big brands who I now know a human being at; Monetem Bow at Pepsi, Scott Monty at Ford. There’s a lot of people, Christopher Barter at GM evidently. There’s a lot of people that we, we know now as human brands. Well café shaped conversations is this idea of, you know, lets look at Pepsi downstairs, disclosure, they’re sponsoring part of my efforts here…

Susan Bratton: Good for them.

Chris Brogan: Pepsi is downstairs trying to make media. And really what their goal was how do we play. So they and Blog Talk Radio said, “Lets get together and lets make some media downstairs”, and we extended it. And we have Pepsi employees, all of the Flip video cameras going out and meeting people, how do we shoot and make more media? And you think about that, you go, why would a food and beverage company want to do that? And the reason is they’re looking for more authentic back and forth. It’s just…

Susan Bratton: Well they’re a lifestyle brand too.

Chris Brogan: Not going to happen in marketing materials, it’s going to happen with talking to the people who use their products.

Susan Bratton: Got it. What advice would you give to someone, and I’m sure your clients ask you this all the time, for a brand that’s just starting out in social media? They want to have some kind of connection to a community. They want to have some kind of an initiative. What’s the advice you’d give to a brand, a newbie, a newb as they’re called in the social media space?

Chris Brogan: Well there’s a few things I’d want to operate. I’d say start with listening. So pay attention to all the different place where people are talking and see if you can find that. Search for where people are talking about you. Search for where there might be the starting point of a conversation. Second is by listening, sort of sign on, get an account for any of these kinds of online spaces, and then pay attention for a while, see how people are going to use it. Third though, within that be helpful. People don’t want to hear about your dumb product, people want to use your product to better their lives or do something different in their lives. It could be anything. It could be a Sig Water Bottle. You could say why, you know, this is going to be better for you or why it’s not such a big problem at the airport or whatever, instead of “We make awesome bottles.” The, I guess the third and final thing I would say about it is be willing to make mistakes, but understand that you’ve got to tie this thing back to real life business at some point. It’s not an island on its own, it’s a bridge to a whole new marketing strategy.

Susan Bratton: It’s funny that you said Sig Water Bottles, it’s sitting right here, and that’s why you thought of it. I always carry one around, and I’ve been pursuing them for over a year to sponsor a series of our podcasts.

Chris Brogan: And wouldn’t you be the best because now we’ve just had an interaction about it.

Susan Bratton: Right, I mean I’m like a walking billboard for Sig, but they’re still buying page four color ads in Yoga Journal…

Chris Brogan: So there you go.

Susan Bratton: instead of in the influential media space of podcasting, vidcasting, blogging, it’s interesting. And not to down them, I mean, they’ve exploded as a brand and they don’t have the staff yet to really deal with all this, which I think a lot of people go through, you know, we don’t have the staff to figure it out. But luckily they can come to you. Here’s my last question: what’s the single most important thing that if a company wants to actually create a community around their brand, they’ve decided to do that, what’s the most important thing they need to know?

Chris Brogan: If you build it, they won’t come.

Susan Bratton: That doesn’t sound good Chris.

Chris Brogan: You know, I’m just sorry, but it’s just not, you don’t put up software and everybody show up. The idea is that what you need to do is it starts with building and facilitating a way to have a conversation with a community, but then you actually have to facilitate the community, you have to make them feel wanted, you have to make them feel loved, heard, heeded. You have to water those plants, because otherwise, you know, you’ve just, it’s like buying a gym membership, but you don’t actually go to the gym.

Susan Bratton: Oh, that sounds familiar. How many people are thinking that right now?

Chris Brogan: I have two gym memberships and it’s working great.

Susan Bratton: That’s great. It makes a lot of sense. So you have listened to the great wisdom of Chris Brogan, president of New Marketing Labs. You can find him at chrisbrogan.com. Amazing blogger, amazing human being. Apparently if you make it to number one on the Ad Age top 50 blog, you’re shaving your head.

Chris Brogan: Soon to be bald.

Susan Bratton: That’s going to be a very unfortunate day, Chris.

Chris Brogan: Thank you Susan.

Susan Bratton: Thank you so much for listening to Community Powered live at South By Southwest. I’m your host Susan Bratton. Have a great day.

Susan Bratton: This is Susan Bratton. I’m here live at South By Southwest, and you’re listening to Community Powered podcast. On this show you’re going to get to meet Dave Evans. Dave is the co-founder of a company called Digital Voodoo. He’s a social media expert, and he’s also just recently launched a fantastic book called Social Media: An Hour a Day. Welcome Dave.

Podcast Here and Transcript Below.

Susan Bratton & Dave Evans

 

Dave Evans: Thank you Susan.

Susan Bratton: It’s great to have you here.

Dave Evans: It is super to be here.

Susan Bratton: Well I want to talk to you of course a lot about social media and community and brand, but first I really want to give the listeners a minute to talk about the book with you because it’s an outstanding tome at, how many, four hundred and…

Dave Evans: 432.

Susan Bratton: 432 pages. Not only is it really an overview of every aspect of social media marketing, but you have a unique twist to the book. It’s not just something you sit down and read. Tell us about it.

Author’s Note: DISHYMIX INTERVIEW WITH SPECIAL “COMMUNITY” BONUS MATERIAL

Dave Evans, Digital VooDoo on Interruptus Vulgaris, Trusting “The Cloud” and Social Media: An Hour A Day

 

Dave Evans: Correct. The book has exercises, each week split into five days, each day has a one hour exercise that goes with it. So as you work, for example, through blogging, right, a topic like blogging, I actually take you out to the Ted Blog where you get to read some really interesting things, so that you get an idea of what people talk about. I take you to the IBM blogging policies so that you see, you know, sort of the gold standard or certainly one of the high regarded standards in how to establish an internal blogging policy so when your employees are blogging, they’re doing it correctly, they’re, you know, disclosing themselves, they’re being transparent, they’re not revealing company secrets, they know what to do, right. As your workforce moves into this, it’s important that they understand what to do. In Twitter we set up a profile, I talk about the completeness of a profile. In Linked In we do the same thing. I talk about recommendations and the power of recommendations and the power of soliciting recommendations from people that you know who can credibly recommend you, who themselves are recommended. Because remember, when people are looking at all of this, when they’re looking at you and what you’re doing and working on on the social web, they’re forming their opinion about you and about your brand, your product, service, all that kind of thing. So we sort of roll all that together through this series of one hour exercises. One quick note on the exercises themselves, I get this from a lot of people who have purchased the book, I’ll get a comment like, “Hey Dave, I was really excited. I bought your book, it showed up, I dove into it and all of a sudden I realized I’m not going to get through this in an hour.” So I want to again point out, it’s social media marketing an hour a day for three and a half months, right. It’s, there are 55 one hour exercises in the book. How fast you want to work on them is up to you, but the real point, the metaphor is a little bit each day and you will go from whatever comfort level you have with social media at this point, to being able to confidently stand in front of your peers, your colleagues and so on and present a cohesive social media marketing plan.

Susan Bratton: Well one of the great things also about the book is that you can skip around. So if you want to start with, you know, your need to know about Face Book or your need to know about Twitter or your need to know about blogging, you can do that and focus, but what’s great about it is that  by the time you’re done going through the whole book, which I did, I didn’t do all the exercises ‘cause I’ve done a lot of them before, but I read the whole book and I really enjoyed how you had the exercise created. It’s helpful because you can skip around as well. So, 432 pages, 55 exercises later, and what do I want? I want one pearl, one little gem. What’s kind of the thing that has resonated more than anything else with your readers and with your clients, because you work one on one at a strategic level with big brands for social media strategy, as well as with individuals who’ve purchased your book, so net it out.

Dave Evans: So I think the one pearl of wisdom and the thing that comes across in the book is developing within your organization a culture of operations rather than a culture of marketing. And let me explain what I mean by that. When we think about what we see on TV for example, this is driven by brand, by positioning, by marketing and so on, when we think about conversations or we use a social media monitoring platform and we look at what people are talking about, this is driven by operations, and so developing this operations culture toward marketing, creating the experiences that we want people to talk about or understanding what people are talking about, and therefore how our operations are impacting that, you know, whether it’s the customer service department, whatever, warranty service, what the store looks like when somebody walks into it, whatever it happens to be positive or negative, we’re shaping that conversation in operations. And I think people truly get that by the time they’ve completed the book. Part two really dives into that, and then part three takes that onto the social web through all the various channels, through blogging and podcasting, through the various networks, through micro blogging and so on, and really puts that in a practice. But the pearl of wisdom in the book is that, you know, number one, this is a marketers book, right. This is absolutely a marketing textbook. This is not a, you know, social, social media book. This is a marketing textbook. And then the second thing is from an operations perspective, understanding as a marketer the importance of your relationship with your chief operating officer, with the heads of customer service, with HR where they’re hiring the people that are answering the phones and so on, as a marketer you need to build those bridges because that’s where your conversations are formed and that’s how you manage those conversations on the social web.

Susan Bratton: That makes a lot of sense. It reminds me of a book that I read that was called something like Operationalizing Your Brand, which was about making sure that every touch point with your customer reflected the personality of your brand and the message of your brand and the promise of your brand. And now you’re saying that social media is another touch point in that, and that the way you communicate using the social web has to reflect all of the rest of your organization and everyone needs to be informed, so it’s really a big company perspective.

Dave Evans: Yes, absolutely, and the idea that social media is a touch point, social media is, to me is one of the sort of terminal expressions of your touch points and so on, and let me talk about that for a second. There’s a coffee bar here in Austin called Progress Coffee, one of my favorite places, and they have a French press and so for those of you that know what a French press is, it’s that little glass container, it’s got the plunger on it and so on. So, makes great coffee, but if you’ve never seen one before they can be a little bit intimidating. Somebody sets this thing down in front of you and walks away and it’s like, “Okay, now what do I do?” So what they’ve done is they have a little plastic timer that they snap onto it, they set it down in front of you and they sort of make a pushing motion and they say, “When that beeps, push.” And so they’ve sort of queued you as to how to push, right, and the beeper will tell you when to push. Now the reason that they do that is because it creates a consistent experience for the customer. They know how long that coffee should sit there so that it’s hot when you actually press it, it’s not cold and oily, and it’s sat for long enough that it’s not going to be weak. In other words, they’ve looked at their brand and said, “We know the people want to try this”, and, you know, here’s this way of enjoying coffee, and it’s really nice to order the big French press and split it with a couple people, it’s great. And then they’ve got this little process that they’ve injected into this that makes it very simple for them to insure that every single time they serve one of these things, because the experience is actually being turned over to the customer, when the customer does it the way that they suggested that they do it, the thing beeps, they’re going to get exactly the right experience and then that’s what they talk about. So it’s like these little things that we do, these touch points that create, that themselves drive the conversations.

Susan Bratton: I want to switch gears a little bit here, and thank you for that. I actually had Dunkin’ Donuts coffee this morning. I drove by a Dunkin’ Donuts. Now I grew up in Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, and that’s Dunkin’ Donuts, I even say Dunkin’ Donuts backward. It’s Donut Niknud, that’s how much I love Dunkin’ Donuts. And I drove by a Dunkin’ Donuts and I bought a cup of their delicious coffee today and I was so happy. But the French press is good, but I….

Dave Evans: We spend, a little side note, we spend summers in Wingersheek, near cluster, and absolutely rabid Dunkin’ Donuts fans. We have Dunkin’ Donuts coffee every morning…

Susan Bratton: Yeah.

Dave Evans: Not made in a machine. Somebody actually gets up and goes and buys it and brings it back to the house and, you know, we’ve got six or eight cups and, yeah, it’s wonderful, wonderful stuff.

Susan Bratton: It’s funny, isn’t it? They do a good job with that.

Dave Evans: Yeah, they do a great job.

Susan Bratton: What, you’ve written a book on the panoply of social media. Now there are always new things coming to the fore or things that you fall in love with all over again about social media. I know that recently when C.C. Chapman just put out a White Paper on the latest updates on Face Book fan pages, and, you know, he’s with the Advanced Guard, and I downloaded that and I thought, “Oh, just, I need a day, just to go update my Dishy Mix fan page and do all this great stuff that he gave me.” You know, there’s always something that you want to do. I’ve been experimenting for good and bad with Tweet Later, most recently where people are complaining, “You’re tweeting too much. You’re repeating your tweets” or, you know, I’m just like playing with it to see what it can do and boy you get feedback fast in the social media world, you know, and there’s no hesitation about people who want to give you, you know, like what their expectations are about how you should be doing your social media. So I’m always finding these new things that I absolutely love. What are you excited about right now or what are you playing with in the social world?

Dave Evans: The thing that I’m most excited about, it’s not a piece of technology, and this’ll give you again, an insight into the book. It’s the number of people who are declaring themselves social media experts.

Susan Bratton: Which is awesome that people feel like they can embrace it so quickly.

Dave Evans: Exactly. My vision, and I spell this out in the book, is for my son and his peers to grow up in a world with less interruption, where the information they need to make smart choices is available, right. That is the social web, and so when I see a large number of people taking an interest in this, taking a personal risk and saying, “Hey, I’m going to declare myself and expert in this”, I just love that. And one of the tips for using the book, if you are a social media expert, right, if you’re, you know, half way up the ladder or all the way up the ladder,  however you’ve come to arrive at this label for yourself, share this book with your clients, right. There will be things in there that you’ll recognize and you’ll be nodding your head as your going through it and you’ll go do some of the exercises, and some of the things that I point to might even be your own site, right. There are, I picked up a lot of things from friends and colleagues on Twitter, from other professionals that I work with. Susan, you know, you’re in the book, obviously Personal Life Media’s in the book, you know, and so on. Share this with your clients because they will then understand the importance of what you do as a professional of how you can help them and why you’re telling them things like you can’t just flood a blog or flood comments into something to push a negative post down. You can’t do this without transparency. You can’t fail to disclose your stuff, ‘cause you’ll get into trouble. You know, we talk about our, we talk about this stuff with our clients, and sometimes they’re so used to traditional marketing where we don’t really have to disclose because it’s obvious that it’s a commercial, I’m watching the program, gets interrupted, I know that this is a commercial. On the social web, unless you have disclosed your relationship or your interest in whatever it is that you’re talking about, the only think that I have to go on as a consumer of that content is I’ve got your name and I have, you know, some other basic information about you, but if you fail to point out that you’re the product manager for the kayak company that you’re posting about, I’m going to figure it out and when I do all of a sudden the great information that you provided, because of your expertise in kayaking is now suspect. So share this book with clients and they will then appreciate both the difficulty, the challenge and the value that you as an expert are bringing to this. That’s the thing that I’m most excited about. The bar camps, social media clubs, all of those things that are popping up, just wonderful, wonderful organizations to help people up this ladder, so as people get involved in this I love to see this. What it means to me at the end of the day is my vision for my son may be realized in my life time after all, it’d be great.

Susan Bratton: Well thank you so much for that. And what are we doing right now? We’re going to have lunch. Where are we going?

Dave Evans: We are going to Iron Works, and if you come to Austin, and particularly if you’re at South By Southwest, Iron Works is right next door, it’s one of my favorite places, I’ve been eating there for 20 years. If you remember the Flintstones and the brontosaurus ribs, that’s where we’re going to eat. They are literally that big. Two hands to pick them up, and they are, they’re great, so…

Susan Bratton: It’s such a great old place. It’s kind of this broke down shacky looking thing. It’s an old iron works, an old iron works building, and it’s called Iron Work Barbeque. It’s painted red, it’s got all kinds of iron, metal stuff stuck to the front of it. It’s right on a little river, and so there’s like a back patio.

Dave Evans: Exactly. And actually the historical note is actually the foundery where they made all of the iron and door hinges and so on, for the Texas state capital, which is, you know, half a mile away.

Susan Bratton: It’s absolutely beautiful, that Capital Building. Austin is a gorgeous little town, absolutely. Well I’m looking forward, lets go get some barbeque.

Dave Evans: Lets go get some barbeque. Thank you Susan.

Susan Bratton: Alright. It was my pleasure Dave. This is Susan Bratton. You just got to meet Dave Evans. He’s the co-founder of Digital Video and the author of my favorite social media book, Social Media: An Hour a Day. I hope you’ll pick up a copy. Keep him in that top one hundred Amazon books and enjoy it for yourself. You don’t have to do all 55 exercises, but maybe a couple. Alright, here we go. We’re going to go have some brontosaurus barbeque. Have a great day.

Susan Bratton: This is Susan Bratton. I’m here live at South By Southwest and this is Community Powered, the podcast series, and I’m here with Angela Benton. Angela is the founder and publisher of Black Web 2.0. Welcome.

Podcast Here and Transcript Below

Angela Benton: Thanks for having me.

Susan Bratton: It is my pleasure. So you are the brave one who’s willing to answer one of the questions that I was very interested in getting some opinions on. When you think of brands and companies who have a well-executed social media strategy, who comes to mind and why Angela?

Angela Benton: A couple of companies come to mind, and these are just might personal opinions. H&R Block comes to mind mainly because of their work on Twitter. They’re actually using Twitter to help people with real life situations like tax questions. And it is consumer focused, but it can easily be focused to a small business as well. So, so I guess that’s H&R Block. Another one, oh, Kodak. So I really like how Kodak is outreaching to bloggers and just other people who they may be determined influencers who use their products, and they’re actually moving them over to their site, so… The only thing that I don’t really, that I don’t really like is they’re only, they’re only soliciting feedback that’s positive. I mean obviously, you know, consumer products do that, but I think like in an effort to be transparent and authentic, I mean, clearly not everyone is always satisfied with all Kodak products. But, I mean, I still think they’re doing a good job. There was one other, I forgot, oh well in terms of I guess a personal brand, someone who I think that I’ve been following, I’ve been kind of addicted to following lately is Diddy, Sean Combs. So he’s on Twitter under I Am Diddy, and I think he’s really using his YouTube channel and his personal brand on Twitter to I guess get a much larger following. I think he goes up like at least 10,000 followers like everyday…

Susan Bratton: Wow!

Angela Benton: Yeah. Initially when I first started following him and noticed that he was on Twitter, he had about 45,000 followers, and now, I mean, I haven’t checked in the past couple of days, but last time I checked it was like 100,000. I mean, and I just started following him like literally a week ago. So he’s someone that understands transparency, and I think that’s why he’s been so successful. If you see any of the stuff that he does from a personal branding perspective, he’s totally himself, even though he does go on record to say that he edits his video, but even with him saying that he’s still being totally transparent and still being totally himself, so…

Susan Bratton: Those are three really great examples. And I liked that you talked also about the pros and cons of what brands can do like Kodak, and being willing to embrace your imperfection. I think that imperfection can be a really good way to get people to bond to your brand these days. No one expects anything or any one or any product, in light of Enron and the banking melt down…

Angela Benton: Right.

Susan Bratton: and, you know, the world coming to the end, we realize that imperfection is a part of having and being in business, so that’s great. So based on that, if a company wants to create a solid social networking community around their brand, you know, it’s a lot of work to do that, what are some of the most important things that you think a company should know about creating a community and their brand?

Angela Benton: I think a lot of people are focused on just contacting influencers right now, and I personally think that’s a mistake. One of, the panel that I have here tomorrow is called Digital Urbanites: How to Become Part of the New Social Capital, and the theory around it is everyone who’s not an influencer, so who doesn’t have, you know, 10,000 followers and who’s not a social media celebrity or web celebrity, they are just as influential as those people, but for some reason their kind of being left out and…

Susan Bratton: Marginalized in some way…

Angela Benton: Yeah, marginalized.

Susan Bratton: You don’t have 100,000 followers, you don’t count…

Angela Benton: Exactly.

Susan Bratton: And you don’t think so. You think they’re important still.

Angela Benton: Yeah, I actually think they’re more important than the actual influencers, so… In the aggregate they actually have more social capital than those, like what, 10 to 15 individuals that we seem to hear and talk about all the time.

Susan Bratton: Got it. That’s a good point. So you’re saying that if a brand wants to create a community, they should be embracing a much larger constituent than just the top level influencers…

Angela Benton: Absolutely.

Susan Bratton: How would you recommend they do that? How do you still find the people who might be influencers for your brand?

Angela Benton: It’s really about outreach and what channels you use. And I feel like it’s easy to find people if you’re actually looking for people. So as a part of their strategy, if they make their strategy trying to find people outside of the standard influencers, then they should have not problem because in essence that’s anybody and everybody.

Susan Bratton: Mm hmm. Anybody who cares about their brand.

Angela Benton: Absolutely.

Susan Bratton: So tell us about Black Web 2.0.

Angela Benton: Black Web 2.0, essentially, I mean, it’s a technology blog that focuses on African Americans. So we do a lot of stuff for, I guess, African American entrepreneurs and start-ups that, you know, it may be harder for them to get coverage on other larger blogs, so we try to cover them there, but in the African American space we also focus on media companies. So we’ll focus on larger media companies who has, who have a presence online, so it may be, you know, Radio One, who has a division, Interactive One who, you know, last year bought Community Connect, which owns blackplanet.com which was really the first social network before Face Book and before MySpace.  But no one covers that at all, and I actually, I guess a few years ago, we’re coming up on our two-year anniversary, realize that…

Susan Bratton: Congratulations.

Angela Benton: Thanks. We realize that, you know, if you go to, you know, most tech blogs you kind of see the same kind of stuff, and I’m like, I know there has to be other people out there that kind of look like me, that are still passionate about me, passionate about what I’m passionate about, but they’re not really getting coverage. And actually once I started to, I guess, really look for people like that, I was able to find them. So I guess that kind of goes back to being a digital urbanite and how companies and brands, if they actively look for people, you can find them.

Susan Bratton: Who do you think are some of the biggest unsung heroes of the African American tech community. You want to give us some shout-outs so we can get some awareness?

Angela Benton: Ohhh, wow! Sure.

Susan Bratton: We got a lot of people who’re going to listen to this, so….

Angela Benton: Right.

Susan Bratton: So who comes to mind for you that we should be paying attention to? Besides you, Angela Benton, Black Web 2.0, who else?

Angela Benton: Besides me, there are a lot of really cool applications, there’s a lot of really cool individuals. One person who I guess is kind of like a mentor and on our advisory board is Lynn D. Johnson who’s at Fast Company….

Susan Bratton: Love Lynn.

Angela Benton: Yeah.

Susan Bratton:  Love you Lynn, love you Lynn.

Angela Benton: Actually, he introduced us actually, yeah, so…

Susan Bratton: Yeah.

Angela Benton: Another person who has I guess a social network for groups is Collective X. The founder, Clarence Wooten, he actually had a company in the first dot com boom called Image Café who he sold to Network Solutions for like about $20 million dollars and…

Susan Bratton: Good.

Angela Benton: these are people that I was able to find. I had no idea, you know, they existed. Another, another person is Michael Sibel, I think his name is. He’s the CEO of JustIn TV. I mean not, people don’t know…

Susan Bratton: That’s great.

Angela Benton: you know, really that he’s black, so…

Susan Bratton: That’s right.

Angela Benton: and, I mean there’s tons, tons and tons of people like that. There’s a lot of smaller, smaller sites; Appfrica, which is, it’s a blog that really does pretty much what we do, but they focus on applications in Africa, in, I mean the guy John who runs it, he’s here too and I actually just met him for the first time even though we’ve been communicating, so…

Susan Bratton: Plenty of people.

Angela Benton: Wow!

Susan Bratton: Lot of people.

Angela Benton: It’s so many, it’s so many people. But, I mean, if anyone is actively looking, there’s a start-up section on Black Web 2.0…

Susan Bratton: Right.

Angela Benton: right in the top navigation, you just click on that and there’s a whole list of different people with a variety of different kinds of start-ups.

Susan Bratton: Absolutely. Lets keep the conversations integrated and the connections happening.

Angela Benton: Absolutely.

Susan Bratton: Yeah, that’s great. Well thank you so much for the work that you’re doing in the world to surface all of the great people in the African American community who are, who are making a difference.

Angela Benton: Thank you.

Susan Bratton: That is awesome. It’s so nice to meet you, and I wish you all the success in the world and thanks for the great advice.

Angela Benton: Thank you.

Susan Bratton: Yeah. Alright. I’m Susan Bratton. And you are listening to Powered Community, Community Powered… I keep saying it backward, I don’t know. I think it should just be Powered Community, Community Powered, whichever one comes out…

Angela Benton: They’re interchangeable.

Susan Bratton: They are, exactly. It’s all the same. And you got to meet Angela Benton from Black Web 2.0. I will be talking to you soon with another luminary, and thanks for tuning in. I’m Susan Bratton. Take care.

Susan Bratton: This is Susan Bratton, and I’m here live at South By Southwest with Guy Kawasaki. This is part of the Community Powered series of interviews. And Guy, welcome.

Podcast Here and Transcript Below

Susan Bratton & Guy Kawasaki

Guy Kawasaki: Thank you.

Susan Bratton: Guy, if you don’t know him, who, is there anyone on the earth who doesn’t know who you are?

Guy Kawasaki: Jackie Chan.

Susan Bratton: Jackie Chan. Now he does. I’m going to email this interview to Jackie Chan. Guy is the co-founder of Alltop, and he’s going to let you in on an early secret during this interview. So the first thing I want to ask you Guy is tell me, when you think of brands or companies who have a well executed social media strategy, who comes to mind and why?

Guy Kawasaki: Well probably the starting point is someone like Zappos, and I think that’s primarily because of Tony’s efforts on Twitter, where he is at Zappos and people know it and they know they’re interacting with the CEO, which is rare. It’s rare that the CEO is that accessible, and it’s rare that the CEO can tweet effectively. You may have an accessible CEO who is clueless, which doesn’t help you in social networking. Or you only have an inaccessible CEO who’s not clueless, or in most cases you have an inaccessible CEO who is clueless, which is…

Susan Bratton: The worst of all cases.

Guy Kawasaki: a double whammy. Right, right. Another company that I think does it well is Com Cast with, at the Com Cast Cares, and… You know, sometimes I go out to Twitter and just say, “Oh my Com Cast, service sucks”, and just to see if he’ll answer. And clearly he’s using Tweet Deck or something and he’s searching for the string Com Cast. Although, I’ll tell you a funny story. I once went up and I said that I am removing all traces of Direct TV from my house. And within a couple days the vice president of customer service of Direct TV called me at home to ask me why I was doing this. Now, one could make the case that, you know, anybody who puts something up like that isn’t going to get the call, it may have had something to do with it, it was me. But still, the guy called, and still I didn’t put it back.

Susan Bratton: Well at least he tried…

Guy Kawasaki: He did try.

Susan Bratton: and that’s half the battle is knowing what’s happening with your reputation online.

Guy Kawasaki: Yup, yup.

Susan Bratton: So let me ask you another question…

Guy Kawasaki: Mm hmm.

Susan Bratton: Give me a pearl of wisdom. You’re here. We have you at…

Guy Kawasaki: Mm hmm.

Susan Bratton: South By Southwest. What can you, what advice can you share for a brand just getting started in social media marketing?

Guy Kawasaki: Well, I’ll give you a real power tip that perhaps many people won’t agree with, is that I think when a brand goes online and it’s social media, they think that any handful of negative comments reflects what everybody else thinks. And so if you’re a brand and you go up there and get two or three tweets that are pissed off at you or, you know, criticizing you, you think, oh my God, everybody on Twitter hates you. And I’ll tell you that that is just not true and that at any given moment in any social media ten or fifteen people in the world are pissed off at you. I mean, you could be, you could be Mother Teresa and there’ll be ten people saying you’re not Catholic enough. So I think a power tip for brands is, I’m not saying you should ignore the negativity, but you should certainly not believe that just because ten angry 45 year old men living at home with their parents are angry at you, that doesn’t mean the whole world is angry at you, and sometimes you just have to keep pushing. I get ten or fifteen angry tweets to me every day, every day. But I have 85,000 followers, so I did the math. You know, if you get ten pissed off people at you every day and you have 85,000 followers, it’s going to take a long time before you piss them all off. So, no you can’t worry about that.

Susan Bratton: 85,000 followers is impressive. I think brands we’re probably thinking about the older adage, which was if you have one angry customer, there’s probably another ten or hundred or a thousand who aren’t going to say anything to you.

Guy Kawasaki: Yeah, well…

Susan Bratton: But I think that rule has changed in the connected user generated content media world of today, so that’s your power tip, and it makes a lot of sense to rethink our perspective on that.

Guy Kawasaki: Well, my theory is if you’ve pissed off ten, ten people, you’ve probably made ten thousand happy. So, if you’re not pissing somebody off on a social network, you’re probably not doing anything, you should just go home, I mean…

Susan Bratton: What’s your little thing about ten thousand flowers growing or something? What was that?

Guy Kawasaki: Let a thousand flowers bloom, that’s a… He actually said let a hundred flowers blossom Sherman Mowel, although it’s not clear to me he followed through on that, but, you know…

Susan Bratton: Right.

Guy Kawasaki: That’s a whole other story.

Susan Bratton: Yeah, he was picking the daisies. So…

Guy Kawasaki: Yeah, he let them bloom and cut them off, but…

Susan Bratton: Unfortunately. Luckily China’s recovering from that. So, last question, what are the two things you personally are most focused on accomplishing here at South By Southwest?

Guy Kawasaki: You mean besides this interview?

Susan Bratton: Well that was one, of course. It was your number one, right Guy? Number one…

Guy Kawasaki: Really that’s the only reason why, I said, “Well, since I’m going to get an interview with Susan, I might as well introduce something at the while I’m there, nothing else to do after the interview.”

Susan Bratton: I like your priorities Guy.

Guy Kawasaki: You know, what can I say. We are, you know, I’m the co-founder of All Top, and All Top is an online magazine rack where we aggregate news by topics, and we have about 550 topics. So here on Tuesday we’re introducing My Alltop, which means that now you can go to the 550 topics of All Top that contain 31,000 feeds and you can pick your favorite feeds and create a custom page with just the feeds from any topic that you want, and then you can tell your friends that, “My collection of feeds is displayed at myalltop/susanbratton, and that way you can share,  you know, exactly your selection and… So it’s, we’re taking it up a level in terms of personalization. Before we had one massive magazine rack. Now you can customize that magazine rack for yourself and your friends and family.

Susan Bratton: So it’s kind of a deliciousy version of Alltop.

Guy Kawasaki: Yes, except I think it’s much easier to spell Alltop than delicious. Personally I don’t know where to put the dot all the time.

Susan Bratton: I think now they’ve bought all the domains…

Guy Kawasaki: You think?

Susan Bratton: You can put the dot anywhere, but that’s alright. Alltop is infinitely easier to spell. We go there.

Guy Kawasaki: I was really wondering, you know, when they sat down and said, “How can we confuse people the most? We’ll make a d-e dot l-i- slash, hyphen c-i, space, yes.” I mean, what got in their brain there?

Susan Bratton: Well it was the strategy that if you could figure it out you could be part of the club probably.

Guy Kawasaki: I guess I’m not in the club, I mean, what can I say.

Susan Bratton: You’re in the Alltop club and so are we. You have gotten to meet Guy Kawasaki. He is the co-founder of Alltop. I hope you’ll go check out My Alltop. Thank you. This is your host, Susan Bratton, and you’re here live at South By Southwest with Community Powered.