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.