No such thing as social media webinar transcript contentzap genoo by GenooMarketing

No Such Thing As Social Media Webinar Transcript View the Webinar Video & See a How To List to help you get started! Kim Albee: Hi. Welcome to our webinar, "No Such Thing as Social Media." To get started, I just want to tell you a little bit about Genoo and about myself. I'm the president and founder of Genoo and our professional services agency called ContentZAP. I was lucky enough and honored to be named one of the top 20 digital strategists in 2015 by the Online Marketing Institute. We work with businesses of all sizes to supercharge your online marketing, and particularly your content marketing strategies and implementations. We also offer online marketing tools and marketing automation to small and midsize businesses. Today one of the things that I'm really thrilled with is that we have an awesome guest, Nick Kellet, who is the co-founder of List.ly, which is the largest list app on the web. What's fun is to be able to bring people like Nick into a webinar for all of you so that you get these really fresh ideas about how to think about content. Because we know that content marketing is the new game. As you start to think about content marketing and what you need to do, people get overwhelmed with all the content you need to produce. Today we're starting what is a three-part series of webinars, each for 30 minutes, to give you some really good ways to think about your social media content strategy, and present ideas that will help you be more relevant with your content. Without further ado, I am going to turn this over to Nick and let him take over. Nick Kellet: Good morning, everybody. Today we're going to talk about social media and why it's actually two things and not one. The reason I came upon all of this analysis and thinking about social media. I discovered people weren't really mindful of what was actually happening on the Internet and how things were actually working. It's not surprising because social networks arrived first, and then media platforms arrived second. They were just bundled under this headline of social media. People haven't really realized these two things are distinct. I describe social networks as 4, or 3.5 if you count Google+ as a full player or not. Social networks are where the people are at the center stage. It makes it easier for people to manage and find, and engage and connect with other people. These different types of networks have different functions, but they're all people-centric. Conversely in comparison to that, you've got media platforms, the likes of YouTube, SlideShare, Instagram, List.ly, SoundCloud. All these platforms basically let you manage www.genoo.com www.contentzap.com ©2015 Genoo, LLC. All Rights Reserved

media separately, but they are much more focused on...Everything there revolves around the content. It's less to do with the people, it has to do with the content. These platforms actually behave differently and you should approach them differently. I think that the risk and the danger of bundling social media into one term is people fail to appreciate there are really two different beasts in play here. First of all, social media is really a sort of people catalog. It's a proxy for our identity. It's who we are, it's how we find out what other people are. If you want to find out about my profile, you can go to my LinkedIn page, or you can look up me on Facebook, on Twitter. There is an identity, an existence out there for anybody that you want to look up at. There's a parallel for media platforms is they're a content catalog. They're a proxy for knowledge. These are places we go to find things. If our TV's broken, we go to YouTube and find a video that's going to solve how to fix it. We don't tend to go to the company's website anymore. We've moved into a self-service economy. I know I often go to SlideShare to look for information, or I'll go to List.ly. These places are all destination search sites. I go to social networks to find people, and I go to content and media platforms to find content. There's some great parallels, because the two systems are, they're digital, they're online. They have lots of metrics. In a content network, your metrics are around views and shares and where the content's being viewed and who's engaging with it. On a social network, it's about how many connections you have and what likes do you have and what's your influence across different networks? At the social network level, these are definitely destination sites. People go to Facebook daily to check out what's going on, just to engage with their friends. They go to LinkedIn to check out what's going on, to research people, et cetera. These are terms that have slipped into our common-day vocabulary is the social graph, coined by Mark Zuckerberg, and that's basically who knows who. Also our connections. There are six degrees of separation is how do we reach somebody? No one is more than six connections away from us, and that number is falling over time. Our preference gap graph is the other part of the social network, is what we like. The things that we choose and express an interest in. Compare that to media platforms and we have...Basically, there are destination sites. People go to these sites to consume content. They are search sites, too. This is one of the things most people miss about the value of media platforms. For example, YouTube is the number two search engine on the planet, but it's actually a media platform. People go there to search for videos and look up and solve problems. They go there via Google and they find videos coming up. People actually go directly to YouTube to search for content. www.genoo.com www.contentzap.com ©2015 Genoo, LLC. All Rights Reserved

I've coined the term content graph. It's basically we would go to...What's there to know, and what is the best practice? How do we solve problems? One of the things that you think about in your domain is if you're not putting out content that solves people's problems, you're not part of the content graph and people are not going to discover you. Then there's the knowledge graph of who knows what. Who are the people to go to for a particular set of knowledge? Again, if you're not creating content and contributing to the knowledge graph in your niche, then you're going to be missing out. People hang out on media platforms to find content and find expertise, and that's the question here. Are you there? Are you involved in these platforms, to be part of it? It's going to be lists, slides, video, podcasts. We all have to choose what media we want to make our own, where our expertise lies, where our preferences lie. You can jump between multiple platforms, but I suggest you pick one or two to benchmark rather than trying to be a master of everything. But that depends on your team and your budget size. One of the things that's really a huge difference to me is that the lifetime value on a social network from a content perspective, the content is so fleeting because the feed is algorithmic. It's also throttled. I don't know if you are aware now, but basically Facebook has shifted to a pay-to-play model. The feeds that people are seeing are [inaudible 07:21] managed and throttled. They change fast over time, so you can't go back to Facebook and find something very easily. Because your feed is changed, and you scroll back in time and it's somehow disappeared. Twitter's the same. They're constantly trying to curate that experience to keep more people on Twitter, more people on Facebook. That has the impact that your content can get lost. You're not in control. Whereas on a media platform, your content persists. So if you drive people to consume content or to get your content to get consumed on these platforms, you know people can find you. Over time, you accrue social proof by the views, the embeds, the likes. You also accrue proof by creating a rich body of work. People say, "Oh, he didn't just make one slide deck or one list or one, you posted one photo on Instagram. You actually built a body of work." One of the things I always find is some people say to me, "Oh, I knew Twitter wasn't going to work for me, or I knew Instagram wasn't for me." These things are pretty much self-fulfilling prophecies. If you don't think a media platform or a content network's going to work for you, you're absolutely going to prove that hypothesis to be true, because you won't be committing to it.

The difference is in the people you see that excel on any of these platforms or all of these platforms are people who commit. They have to find mastery. They have to dig deep and try stuff. Because not everything works. I honestly know and I can tell you that I put out a lot of content, and I can't tell you which piece of content's going to work. I can have a good idea. I get better at it. But the best way to figure it out is to expose your content. You learn by more exposure, the more risk you take, the more you put yourself out there, the more you'll discover what's right and what's wrong and what works for your audience. It's interesting to think about this, too. But I think people on a social network, they think about something. When you put out a tweet, the half-life of a tweet is measured in minutes, if not, it used to be hours. It's going down all the time because our attention span is very short. But also the content is churning. The content volumes are so fast. For me, I certainly see more value. It was more easier to create an impact on a media platform. Part of that possibly is because people are so focused on social. They haven't fully understood or exploited the value of a media platform as point. I always think of the book by Keith Ferrazzi, "Never Eat Alone." He talks a lot about connecting ahead. That's very much the case with a social network. You should reach out to people you want to meet and engage with ahead of time. But with content, you're creating ahead. If you want people to find you, you have to create content that they're going to be looking for in the moment. We don't want to learn anything complicated, we don't want to learn anything more than we need to know. We want to solve our immediate problem. If your content isn't there to answer that problem in the moment, it's somebody else's content. When someone jumps on Google and tries to solve something or jumps to YouTube to find a video, if your content isn't there, that's when you're going to be missing out on it. You need a strategy for both. You need to have a social strategy for the social networks and you need to have a media strategy for the media platforms. If you do that and you're conscious of how you're investing and where you're investing and how you feel your time should be invested between the two, then you're going to be in a lot better shape than if you just casually assume that social media is one big bucket and any or all effort is good. Because I think there comes a point of limiting returns. You don't want to focus on too many things, but if you focus on just one or you don't have a strategy, you will get slightly sideswiped and overwhelmed by the platforms.

This is an interesting angle here that basically you can be two things. Social-centric, and I think most of us are, mainly because social networks came first and because we don't necessarily understand the power of media. But we can also be media-centric. What this means is if you build a following on Twitter, or on Facebook, on Google, on LinkedIn, that's the size of your social centricity. But conversely what you're following on SoundCloud, on Instagram, Flickr, Vine, List.ly, SlideShare, whatever, if you have more followers on those platforms, you can be media-centric, and there's a real competitive advantage to being media-centric. Just to analyze this, here's an example. I don't know if you've heard of Gary Vaynerchuk, but he's a very vocal guy. He runs a creative agency in New York now, but he was very famous for Wine Library TV. He's a very social guy. He has 3.6 million followers the last time I...when I produced these numbers, across four different networks. Conversely, his following on all of the content networks only amounts to...I say only, and that's a pretty large following. But it's only 830,000 followers. He's socially centric. That's his bias is he's more about engaging in conversation, which totally fits with his persona. If I compare that to somebody you've probably never heard of, a guy called Nash Grier, this guy is called the king of Vine. I don't know how many of you have used Vine. Probably very few. Maybe we're on the wrong demographic. But you and I maybe scratched our head when we saw Vine, and Nash Grier saw an opportunity. He made these very specialist Vine videos that got him a massive following. Last time I checked, he was at 9.5 million followers on Vine. That's great. What he managed to do then was he created extra YouTube content specific to YouTube. He didn't just move the content from Vine to...He created different content for YouTube. The point and the value of that is each of these platforms has their own culture. Twitter's very about short, Facebook's more about social exchange with friends. Vine is very, very short-form videos. He's mastered that. But then he did a really awesome job of translating that into YouTube videos. Now his YouTube videos get millions of views and he's monetized his YouTube channel and he's fully sponsored because of that. He's got a massive following on Instagram. He's really playing the media game, and he is like a, to me, bit of a shining star and a leading light in how to utilize media. He still has a significant following on Twitter and Facebook. But he is content-centric and that's where his investment and his strategies lie. It's obviously worked for him. He's doing very well. www.genoo.com www.contentzap.com ©2015 Genoo, LLC. All Rights Reserved

I talked a lot about social networks today and talked about media platforms. But really, there's also blogging. One of the things is these three things play very nicely together. Social network is where your people live. If you follow the advice that I'm taking is media platforms is where you should build your content. Then you create blog posts assembling, reassembling that media. You might put some slides from a slideshow. You might build a List.ly list and embed that and create a listicle. Top 10 ways tech insider blog post. You might embed a video. You might embed some Instagrams. But your blog is about gathering your media and telling a story inside a blog post. Equally, your media can be shared inside a social network. So your slides, your videos, your lists can be shared inside a social network. But your media platform is standing, your media is standing as its own, searchable entity that can...People can find you not just from your blog. The danger is if you don't have a media-centric strategy, your blog is working alone and you're not leveraging the power and the traffic and the audience that are hitting all these different media platforms. We're very focused on social networks, because we've all heard of those and we've used those and we think that's social media. But as I was saying, there's really two parts to that. If you just create a blog and that's your media strategy, then you're creating something called owned media. You absolutely have to have owned media. I am a massive fan of having your own blog, but what I would...The way I've learned to be more effective is to create your own blog and embed into that market blog different media, so slides, videos, and lists. Then you get all these incremental, these four extra blocks of traffic and attention and traction. Different ways that your content can get exposed. Media sharing. These media elements are much easier to share than a blog post. They're actually more contextual. Short, snappier. If you play to the short attention span, you actually deliver people a short snippet of content. They will consume it. It's more likely to share, because it hit. It hit a particular point with that audience. Because it's shorter and more precise and more contextual, it's easier to share and has a better impact. The other big thing is if you create great media, then it's embeddable. People can embed your lists, your slides, your videos on their blog and talk about you. That's what's called earned media. Earned media also gets you search traffic to earned media. People discover you by organic search to other people's blogs. That's a big hit. Because you want organic search on your blog. But if you get covered on someone's blog that's bigger than you, you're basically borrowing their audience. They're reading and discovering and consuming your content and becoming aware of you through a blog post. www.genoo.com www.contentzap.com ©2015 Genoo, LLC. All Rights Reserved

Maybe that was just search traffic. They weren't looking for you directly, but they found you in an article. Then media search, and I mentioned YouTube is the number two search engine on the planet. If your content isn't on these search engines, people are only going to find you by your blog and your blog's Google ranking, which is a challenge. Whereas people are always...Google will keep changing all their engines and algorithms. There's an element to saying if you spread your risks between investing in your owned media, your blog, and investing in media, you're getting, you're bypassing, you're insulating yourself some exposure to Google algorithms which is a very important part. Possibly something that everyone's realized is media platforms began with Flickr in 2004, with YouTube following on its heels pretty quickly. You'll see then it progressed out slowly over time. That's why, maybe some of you haven't realized this, because it took eight years or more for all these platforms to emerge. They're still really emerging now. This is a solid trend and this group of platforms really, they all behave in similar ways. They have different cultures. But if you embrace the concept of embeddability, it explains to you in a way, some of these I'm trying to explain today is how the Internet works and how the machine works. That gives you a lot of value and a lot of power. I've talked liberally today, you have video, audio, slides, lists, graphics. These are all the types of media you can have in these different media platforms. You have to decide what's our use case? What are we trying to solve? What's our own preference? Is our team suited to video? Do we enjoy audio? Can we create slides? Can we create lists, et cetera? What's the media for us? There's no right answer. It's totally personal to you. Just to close off here with a few examples, just to show you that the point being is every one of these examples, don't get put off by the content or the volume. I'm looking at a...I could find examples that are in your space with appropriate numbers for you. This is an example of a slide deck that I produced that got 16,000 views, and that's awesome. What if I had not made a slide deck, I'd just made a blog post? 34 percent of those views came from embedded media. A smaller percentage of that came from my own blog. But what's important is 66 percent of those views came from a media platform. I got exposure through SlideShare. I got exposure through these lists of blogs that were writing and talking about my content. Therefore the brand exposure was being generated. That's really a lot of the value.

What you'll see here is an example with videos. Again, here's a video that I uploaded to YouTube. It's a clip out of "Seinfeld" about the origins of regifting. This video got picked up and embedded and got 50,000 views. But 66 percent of those views were from embedding. This reach works really well. Here's another example from List.ly. 50 percent of this list, 166,000 views, came from embeds on multiple platforms. You're combining both the platform, the views on the platform, the views from search, the views from earned media and embeddability. You're basically moving friction. This is a fun example to close on is really, here's an example of the White House using media. This photo got 2.4 million views on Flickr. You can embed this content. This is how you enable reach and traffic and traction. You don't need to think about 2.4 million views for your brand. I was blown away. I discovered I posted a photo and it went up to Flickr and it got 200 views about a webinar I was producing. I was like, "Oh, great. If I hadn't done that, if I hadn't used that platform, that's 200 people that wouldn't have seen my brand or my message." Just making people aware, because we need to always have these little drip feed messages into people's psyche. Because it takes 15 to 20 exposures to tip people onto your brand. A few questions to end with. Maybe we can open up to some questions right now. These are the questions I've been tipping and asking throughout this webinar. I think really that it's for me. Maybe we can tie up with some questions. Kim: Nick, thank you so much. I do have a couple of things about what you said. One of the things that we talk about with our customers a lot is expanding your content footprint. Really focusing, because most of the people we work with, it's where can I put my energy to get the best return? Do you have recommendations for which are better to B2B, as opposed to B2C, businesses? Business-to-business businesses, and where they could focus for a starting place, to really start to explore your ideas here? Nick: It just depends on you, your brand, your team, your passions. Maybe you've got something of your age profile of your product and your audience. Also, one of the things I try to do is I try to author once and then publish to multiple places. If I've created content, I can output it to different platforms. I tend to mix it up a little bit. If I've made a slide deck, I'll always share an image from that slide deck on Instagram. Not the whole slide, just the headline page. Then I'll publish the same content as a list. I'm getting...I've gone through the emotional heartache and the effort of creating content, which is the hard thing. Then using these platforms to put the content out there, you just never know when it's going to get found.

Kim: I love that example from a reuse perspective, because if you're going to put all the energy into creating it in the first place, that's a really good thing to think about. Nick: One final point there is when I say: avoid personal bias like the plague. We tend to say stuff like, "Well, our audience doesn't watch video," or something. Don't let your own personal bias speak to this. Just say, "Look, these things exist. Everyone consumes differently." Some people love to read. Some people love to listen. Some people love to watch. If you turn off that whole audience by not providing that content, you're just cutting off your nose to spite your face because of your own personal biases. Kim: What people could do to get started, just really quickly. For example, you're the founder of List.ly. People love lists. They could go out, create an account out at List.ly, it's free to do. You could start to create some lists and then embed those in your blog. Start to see, not only expand and start to create some things out at List.ly, but also have things to put on your blog. Then just see how that goes. Would that be a good place for people to start? Nick: Yeah. I would start by creating content. But the other thing that most people tend to do is they do one or the other. They spend more time promoting other people's content sometimes, or they create their own content and don't promote it. Don't make content and then sit and watch and wait for it to be successful. Content gets to be successful because you work it and because you share it, because it's relevant, you're adding value, you're not getting in the way. It's not all about you. Kim: Now I want to end really quickly with, let's just give a little sneak, a little preview, a little sentence about the next one we're doing, "Turn Lurkers Into Leads," which is coming up in a week or so. Just give me a little snippet on that one, a little teaser? Nick: Most people have not heard of something called the one percent rule, that 1-9-90 is the magical number. 1-9-90 explains that 1 percent of people create in any community, 9 percent of people will contribute and add to the original content that the 1 percent have made, and 90 percent of people consume. If you don't understand what that means and you don't have a strategy to deal with the 90 percent, you're actually got a marketing strategy that's catering to the minority, not the majority. That in my mind is a big mistake. That's what we're going to talk about in that session is why the 90 percent are the big opportunity that we're all ignoring. Kim: There are some questions. We're going to go ahead and get them answered offline because we're at our stopping point at 10:30. We're going to go ahead and get those questions answered offline, and I see a couple of questions there that we weren't able to get to. www.genoo.com www.contentzap.com ©2015 Genoo, LLC. All Rights Reserved

Thank you very much, Nick. We will see you on the next one. I look forward to it. If you haven't registered for it yet, I strongly suggest you go register for it. We'll pick it up then. Nick: Thank you, everybody. Kim: Thank you. Be sure and join us next week for our second webinar in the series with Nick: Turn Lurkers Into Leads.

Check out our Next Webinar in the Series: Turn Lurkers Into Leads.