Transcripts
1. Trailer: I'm Gary Vaynerchuk, author of 'Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook: How To Tell Your Story in a Noisy World' and I'm also CEO of Vayner Media and do social media agency here in New York City. I love social media because it sells shit. This class is to really take the IP that sits in this brain and transfer it to people, and give them the foundation and the framework to understand that we're living through a context world, not just a content world. The student project is to create your own piece of content, one that you think most represents the best story you can tell on specific platform. I'm excited to teach on Skillshare because Skillshare executes the pieces that I'm talking about. Bang.
2. Introduction: So welcome to the class. I'm really excited to have you here. Very honestly, I love live events, so like not having you directly in front of me kind of hurts my feelings. I wish we could be talking but that's a different story for a different day. We'll have to use the scalability of this technology. What we are going to be focusing on here is we're going to take a really deep dive into the five platforms that I think matter the most. Facebook, Twitter, Tumbler, Pinterest and Instagram. The ones that I think are quite relevant, the ones that I think we can really dig deeper on, and the ones I think all of you need to figure out how to story tell on, to actually drive business or any other kind of results in today's modern digital social mobile world. We're going to go into each platform, we'll talk about the nuances that make them special, different. We're going to really dissect, go a little bit deeper and we're going to focus on two pieces of content. One that I consider a good piece of content, one that I consider a bad piece of content. We'll focus on whether it's a jab or it's right hook and then we'll really go into every variable that made it successful and or not. We'll go through all those platforms, give you an overall vision on all of them and then the collective of that should give you this overall view of how to actually natively story tell in a modern world. Here's my overall philosophy of social media, let's start with this. I love social media because it sells shit. I'm I allowed to say shit? Sure. Bang. I love social media because it sells shit and let's start with that, because before I get any further you're going to hear a lot of jabbing, which is giving and Mother Teresa like feelings and it's going to feel very Zen. But I want everybody who's watching this to understand that I'm a capitalist. I may have been born in a communist country, I was born in Belarus in 1975, I was born in a communist country, but I'm the ultimate capitalist. I get enormous pleasure out of selling things. So, the reason I gravitated to social media is it's where I think we're going to be selling things in the future. I'm not there because I loved technology or the new iPad or I have a gold iPhone, I don't care about that crap. What I care about is where people spend their time. I want to figure out how can I penetrate their attention to tell them about the thing that I want to sell them. That's my game, that's what I'm focused on, that's why like social media. Over the last almost decade now, probably since 2006 when I started Wine Library TV, I've been focused on how to storytelling on these platforms. How does Facebook and Twitter in the early days help me bring awareness to my wine show and drive those results which ultimately led to selling wine to people? So, I've been playing around with a lot of things and I landed on this thesis called jab jab jab right hook. Which breaks down at its basic form to give give give ask. How do we play in a world where now we're storytelling all the time, it's not a day and age anymore, where you think all year and you do your television commercial and you push it out you get one at bat and you got a flow right hook because there is no jabbing, right? How do we live now in a world where everybody's putting out content every day? That if you have a Facebook fan page or a Twitter account, every day, multiple times a day, you're putting out stuff. Now, what people defaulted into is right hooking, because that's all we've had. Print ads and radio ads and television ads and direct mail and billboards. They were all right hooks because they were the only thing a brand or business had to do. It was the only abat they had. So, when you're whizzing on the highway at 65 miles an hour, right? That billboard, nothing really tried to romance that person. You're trying to close and so you're throwing right hooks. However, now in the digital world, when everybody's always on, always connected. Let me ask you this, in every 24 hours, how often is your phone not within arm's reach? That's what I thought. So, it's always with us, we're always there. I mean even when your showering like there's some weird like admit it, like tweet me by the way. Admit that you have in your shower and like doing this while you're showering. People do that. So, we need to focus on a very different variable, this is where the jabs came in. Now that you're talking all the time, it's tough to only talk about oneself or what you want for yourself. So, I believe and my social media strategy is to give as much value to the consumer, to the end-user, that very honestly this is where it gets kind of interesting, that you basically guilt people into buying what you're selling. That you've given them so much over such a long period of time, that when you actually ask for something in return, it works. I get it with this book. I've been giving so much for the last couple of years since the Thank You Economy my last book, answering questions, giving away free stuff randomly, replying to people, giving them access to me, giving them everything that I could for the last two years. Now, over the last three months, because my book comes out, their status updates on Facebook that says buy this book. If I've brought you any value, buy this book, link to Amazon and Barnes and Nobles. That's a right hook but I bought the equity through my actions to be in a place. I kind of think about it like this, think about the friend that calls you every time they have a headache, or a problem, or an issue, or break up with their boyfriend, that friend in your life. The one that calls you and needs your emotional equity. Now, think about the person that you call when you have a problem. That's what I want brands and businesses to figure out. You want to be number two, not number one and almost everybody is number one, right? Asking asking asking, rarely giving. Jab jab jab right hook, give give give, ask. Now, the reason we go deeper and that's not the end of this lecture, is that every one of these platforms requires a different jab and a different right hook. It's like being a boxer, you might be fighting at south pole and so there's a different style, the ring might be bigger than smaller, a different style. Somebody might be fast and you've got to react to that and so every one of these platforms have their own nuances, are consumed in different ways, subtleties to how they get shared and how they get passed on and really activating the true unbelievable aspect of social media. Which is that social media is the plumbing for word of mouth in our society today. That these platforms are actually allowing us to amplify our messages and that the people that follow us, the communities that we have, are actually now the engine that push out the information. They are the distribution, not what you pay for in banner ads or commercials, and that takes you respecting the user. Facebook has figured this out. It's why you don't see everything from everybody. They recognize that if they gave you all that crap, that you would leave Facebook and you as the user are the most important asset. That is the overall philosophy, how do we bring you so much value. By the way, there's a huge variable. How many jabs, I'll answer the question right away, how many jabs do you throw before right hook? It's not three, just because that's what's in the title. The amount of jabs you have to throw, the amount of value that you have to bring to somebody before you can ask for something in return, is completely predicated on the health of your brand and business and the value that you actually bring in that product. Apple, at its height in 2008, could have probably thrown right hooks every time. It was the best product, everybody loved it, an amazing run. BP after they dumped a crap load of oil into the Gulf, couldn't throw any. They had to jab for the next three years. So every business, every personality, every small business, every celebrity, everybody has to figure out their right genre, their right mix of jabbing and right hooks and they have to keep testing and learning. Everybody, whether you're sitting right now and you're a graphic designer or you're a brand manager for a Fortune 500 brand or you're the manager of an up and coming indie band or you're an accountant. Whatever you are, every person and every organization is now in the media business, everybody. In 2014, everybody in the world is in the media business. It's something that you have to understand, that now we are all public brands even as individuals, to why we have profiles. What we put out and what we share and what we put on these networks, represents who we are and in essence tells our story. It's no different than passion. We wear the clothes that we wear, we rock the glasses that we're wearing, for a very specific reason. It tells the world who we are. It's the haircut we rock, it's are growing facial hair or not. It is absolutely what we are doing on purpose subconsciously to tell the story of who we are. That is the challenge and the exciting thing of what everybody has to figure out. What is your story? If you can come from here, instead of here, it always has a better chance. I think most marketing people and business people come from here, if not from here and that's why we don't respect it or respond to it. So listen, I know a bunch of you are sitting down right now saying, crap what's my story? One of the great ways to figure out what your story is, is to actually ask people that know you or your product. Asking and listening, is a great way. Emailing 20 people right now by opening another tab and asking them, what do you think my story is like? Who do you think I am? Is a funny way to kind of figure it out because you've been doing it all along, you might not be aware of it. Not everybody's self-aware enough to know what their story is but the fact that matters it's out there. Everybody's got it, everybody's branding, it's high school over and over and over again. You are clicked, you are somewhere. Now you need to recognize what it is, do you want to be there? Do you want to double down or not or do you want to shift that story. That's what I think you need to be thinking about.
3. Context vs. Content: So, many of you who are watching this right now have heard the term "content is king", and I'm a big fan of content, I'm all in on content, this whole book is about content. So, clearly I'm a fan. However, context matters more than ever because we have a problem. The world is predicated on supply and demand. Supply and demand rules the most. People don't realize it, people overlook it. It's a very basic economic principle that a lot of people have taken for granted and it's not the sexy thing to talk about, but let me talk about it for a minute. Content used to be rare. Let me explain. Thirty years ago, we're in 2014. Thirty years ago pre-cable television at scale, there was 13 channels on television. There was 40 magazines that mattered. There was some radio stations that mattered and some books, right? There was a supply and demand issue. There was still 300 million people in America. There was still the numbers for the most part around the world, but there was far less content. So, and this is going to get me very unpopular with a lot of you, especially if you're in the older demo. Screw Walter Cronkite, he only beat out two other people. He was the great anchor man of his time, but he only had a beat out people that were on Channel four and seven and that was it. Two other people that were decided to be on their mind another human being, who ran the stations. So now, in a world of YouTube, in a world of Facebook and Pinterest and Vine and Tumblr, it's complete capitalism for content. I had an office in New Jersey and a camera like this with three bottles of wine for 20 minutes a day, became a force of nature in the wine business and I was in New Jersey. I didn't have to go to LA. I didn't have to go to Bordeaux or to Napa Valley and become it, I did it at the confines of my own home, my office [inaudible] and I became this brand. We have more content being produced now in one week's time than used to be produced in years at a time. So, when you start thinking about what that all means, we have a supply and demand issue. There's a lot comedians now, they're everywhere. They're on Vine, they're on YouTube, they're writing blog posts, they're on Tumblr. It's not just one HBO special and HBO decided who we're all going to love. Yes, Eddie Murphy still would have broken through in today's world, but now, you actually have to be the best. To me that capitalism is exciting and so content has a supply and demand issue. There is more supply of content than ever. The demand is equal and so now you have a problem. Now, you have to actually be great. Now, you actually have to break through. Now, you actually have to know what you're doing. To me that's quite exciting because the days of seven or eight king makers, because they ran the networks and the newspapers are over.
4. Facebook (part 1): Let's start with the mothership. Let's talk about the number one platform in the world at this moment. I call it the everyday platform, I call the platform that people really actually spend their time on. Yes, it may not be as cool as it used to be, but Facebook took care of that by buying Instagram and we'll get into that in future. This is the mothership the one that kind really took what Friendster and MySpace started took it to that next level and kind of hit the entire platform. For the big businesses that are watching this if you're a brand manager or executive or CMO, the reason you've got Facebook is because that's scale right? It's got the scale, it's got everybody, you want 45 to 60 year-old females in middle America? No problem, we've got almost all of them. And so this is a platform that hits everybody and this is a tough statement to say, but I would be okay if you spend all your time trying to figure out a storyteller here because we're looking at at least another 2-3-4 years from date I'm filming this, of this platform being that relevant and that scale, after that it's tough for me to predict, but it's got the biggest opportunity to reach the most possible people more importantly they're adding so many layers of data and we're going to be able to create creative and post it for people that bought ice cream in a convenience store last week. That kind of targeting is so insane. One that by the way traditionalist when that TV, print, radio, direct mail, smoke signals could've never wanted. And so this is the one we need to really focus on just the sheer volume, the amazing transitioning made to becoming a mobile company with more than half of their consumption of their own mobile and so this one I really want you to take serious, I'm glad it's upfront because if you get the teeth along the way to brainstorm makes them fresh for the spot.
5. Facebook (part 2): There are a lot of things to think about with Facebook when you're creating content. Let's get into some of the important points. One of the biggest things that are very- now we're getting ready for a very unique aspect, no logo. Let me explain. Pictures really matter on Facebook. Think about how you, yourself, go through your screen right now. I myself noticed just yesterday, I noticed pictures really matter. I just scrolled by every single text post on my Facebook account but the pictures made me stop or at least I consume them. So first and foremost, massive consideration Facebook is picture platform. It's why Facebook bought Instagram, it's why Facebook tried to buy Snapchat, and when they couldn't, they copied it with poke, a bit of a gap. Pictures are the game in Facebook. We all know it, it matters. First and foremost, you want to often storytelling pictures. I don't mind the occasional text in a jab way. You get the right hook, fine. I tested it myself but pictures really over the next. When you get into the pictures, the number one thing that pisses me off from a storytelling simply is you put out a picture and you don't put your company's logo or your organization's logo in it. I mean, that's like literally running a magazine ad back in the day and not putting your company's logo or putting a billboard up on a highway and not putting your company's logo. It's insane. It's not attributing the photo to your organization and it makes no sense and tons of people still do it. When you think about the size, we've got to think mobile. I mean, I just want to make sure you get it. You've got to think mobile. When you think about when you're scrolling, how small the icon is of what the account is that puts out the picture, it's very small. I think people are being lazy in thinking that that's enough to attribute the photo, it's not because of the speed that we go through it and that's the context here. The speed of how fast we go through it, you may see a picture of a dog but, if it's not contributed in the photo to a pet brand you may think it's just your friend sharing it. You may not remember it. You may just laugh. It's a cute photo and your brand that put it out there might not get the value proposition for that impression or the emotional brand equity because they didn't put their logo in the bottom left corner. Another thing that give a lot of thought to, the text. So, you put your photo but then you're going to copy it with text. Now, I see so many brands and I have so many examples in the book and we'll go through those later but the amount of people that write novels as a Facebook post in an ADD fast-paced world is devastating. The thought to write 16 sentences to a company context is ludicrous. People don't have time for that. Time is the asset. The photo quality I think really matters. I'm blown away by how many people especially businesses nail it in, just it's not my brand. It's not attractive and all that stuff is subjective and we deal with that. And so, it's going to be subjective to you. Remember if you're going to try to win this access to me, I'm going to be the one deciding it. I may decide that's not a beautiful photo. You may. Art is subjective. However, making sure there are vibrant colors, are obvious or more importantly you could see how much I'm relentless on this. I'm pounding this. You got a small screen. Make sure they can consume it. Make sure the picture is obvious. The amount of photos that are busy or just not appealing are just overwhelming in the platform. The call to action.If you've decided to do a right hook, so a jab as we said might just be happy Monday. And you put a little calendar there and it's Monday and your business or your personal brand, that's fine. That's a jab. But, if you have a call to action, if you want somebody to buy the book, making sure that's clear. Sometimes people put the call to action in the picture and not in the copy. You want to send them to buy something but you can click the copy and be sent to that website and sometimes they put in the picture like, "Go to our website." It's insanity. It's not understanding the utility of the platform. Make sure you understand that if you're trying to drive somebody to a dot com or to a place that you put the hyperlink in the copy not say it in the picture. These are things I see over and over that people mess up and it pisses me off. Sorry. There's a million things going through our screen. So, before you put out that photo and before you put up the content, give it some real thought. Does anybody care? You may care and you want to shove it down somebody's throat because that's how marketing is usually done but that's not the way the world works anymore. So, you have to give it a lot of thought especially for throwing a jab. If you're throwing something that has no business interest in it, you've got to make sure it's so creative or interesting or worthwhile that somebody is getting engaged with it because you are just trying to build the equity. Now, let's take a step back. Actions on Facebook matter. The more people comment and share and like, the more likely other people will see it. When you have a hundred thousand fans or 10 fans, 10 not all 10 are going to see that when you push something out. The more that people engage with it, the more likely people will see it. There's a virality to it. So you want to put out compelling content so that people actually engage with your content and you can drive your results. Asking for that action isn't appropriately occasionally appropriate because you're training your audience to share, like and comment. But, the amount of you that do it every time and ask for a share or comment or like, every time, it becomes exhausting. Facebook itself is going to start penalizing in an SEO like way that action. And so I highly recommend that you don't exhaust your community with asking for things over and over and over again.
6. Jabs vs. Hooks: One thing I also want you to focus on because I didn't do in the setup, it's probably right to do here on Facebook because again how important this platform is. Let me give you little quick distinction between jabs and right hooks. Here's why we came up with the terminology. I truthfully believe that most people try to mix messages on Facebook, meaning they actually want you to buy something but they're disguising it in a nice little thing. It's half pregnant as I like to say in marketing, right? It's trying to make it seem like it's native and it's nice and they care, but somewhere in there suddenly it's really saying buy me or or sign up for me or help me. When you're doing a jab, which again, let's reiterate is bringing value to them, then just go all in, give them a tip, or a recipe, or make them sticker, or make them laugh, or curate some content that you think they'll be interested in. Go all in on that, that's it. Leave it at that. It's funny, 99 percent of people just write hooks on social networks all day long. So, it's funny for me to try to teach that I do hook right, but it's funny for that a lot of people are half pregnant. When you go for a right hook, just go and directly for the ask. Don't beat around the bush, download our app, link, here it is, five value proposition bullets and one picture and you're done. Buy my book or my wine from me. Don't be scared and a lot of people are, it's really interesting, the three percent of people that I truly believe understand social networks out there today, are scared to do the ask, because they got the emotional EQ and they're so zen and they're romantic and they're right that they actually struggle with the ask or they're clueless. That's the formula. Boxing is known as the sweet science and that's what I'm thinking about. What's the science of how many jabs and how many right hooks and when you do them, make them clear. I'm giving you value, I'm giving you value, but when it's time for the right hook, here's a very important do, don't hedge the right hook. If you're asking for business ask all in. Don't try to say, oh, oh, da da da, go for it.
7. Facebook Case Study: Kit Kat: So, let's get into the first case study, one that I called Kit Kat Timed Out. So, all you early viewers, you follow me here. If you got the book later in the year or next year or what have you, open up to that part of the book. This is a really interesting one, because there's a couple of things that I'm really excited about. When you look at the image, you'll see that they have their tag line which is their universal tagline everywhere, "Have a break, have a Kit Kat." I think it's extremely clever. I love the idea that this Super Bowl poster they put out, they're being timely. It's the Super Bowl. They're putting it out, I think it was the Friday before the Super Bowl. But it was right in that time. So, they're being timely. It's what everybody is talking about. It's back to the psychology of the user. People are talking about Super Bowl, the brand is now acting human, I love it. Kit Kat is doing a good job. Top of that, they really did understand the culture. If you look at the piece, it's the roman numerals of the Super Bowl out of Kit Kat bars. It's perfect. Right? They're incorporating themselves into the lexicon, into the nuance of the Super Bowl. You understand that Roman numeral cultural is a big deal in this world from football nerds. They get excited about that. Perfectly executed, "Super break." Perfect. Break it. You kind of get. It just great. Everything's really strong. Very short, easy copy, have a super break this Sunday. It makes sense. Everything's right. Everything is going perfect and Kit Kat could have been a perfect case study in this book. Maybe one of the best ones, believe it or not. I just thought it was excellent creatively and this is where it starts getting interesting. The reason this is a slight fail is when they posted it. So, one of the things to keep in mind is you can do the creative, you can have an agenda but there's other variables. Not only is creative a variable, but there's things like what time you post them. So, they posted this amazing piece of content at 6:00 o'clock in the morning Eastern. Well, first of all, it blows my mind altogether, how they schedule that. Like did somebody come in early and schedule it. Just very fascinating to me to begin with. Six Easter, fine, a little early but people are up and maybe they were going to do it again later in the day, fine. East Coast time, I can almost get away with it. I mean six o'clock in the morning, little early but fine. For the people that are Baltimore Ravens fans right. What's funny about this piece of content is this Super Bowl featured the 49ers of Francisco, California and the Baltimore Ravens. I think that, what really hurt my feelings here is even though the Super Bowl is universal and this works for everybody, you can't take away the emotional equity that 49ers fans feel towards this content versus let's say somebody who's not in the Super Bowl. Those 49ers fans, though a team that has popularity throughout the country, an enormous amount of them are on the West Coast. I don't know if you've been keeping track as I'm ranting here right now but six o'clock in the morning Eastern is 3:00 AM PST. 3:00 AM is probably like in this 24 hour culture right now, probably literally the one hour in the world where almost everybody is sleeping, right? Like 6:00 AM and 3:00 AM maybe five and two. But, that is literally you can see the graphs of the Internet, the shut down period in our 24 hour culture. This piece of content was phenomenal. It was well thought out. It understand the nuances that I cared about, reinforcing the brand with your quote. It didn't need a logo because it used the product in the picture and had their quote. Everything was right. Everything was perfect, except they posted this the wrong time. Posted five to six hours later, seven hours later, this post would have done dramatically better, got way more engagement and a dramatic more people would have seen it, thus giving the results of the agenda of this which is to build awareness around the Kit Kat. It's a huge mess on such a minor thing that ends up being a very major thing in today's world.
8. Facebook Case Study: Reggie Bush: So, let's go to next case study on Facebook. This one I have a lot of heart for. Obviously, if you're reading the book along, you'll see the little joke I'm making. This case study is around a football player running back in the NFL, his name is Reggie Bush. For some of you, fantasy players, you know him that way. For some of you, gossip peeps, you know him as a former boyfriend of Kim Kardashian. I know him as a former Miami Dolphin, and I make a little joke in the book if you're reading along, that I would never put this case study in here as a diehard Jets fan if he was still at Dolphin. But to my luck, he's a Detroit Lion now. Detroit Lion has been so bad for 30 years that I have heart for them, even though I hate every football team, somewhat, as a diehard Jet fan. Now, this man is a celebrity on many fronts because he got into that Kardashian world, and because he's a football player. What he's been doing on Facebook is really exciting me. When you look at this picture now, I'm just screening up here, because big NFL team is doing their thing. The thing that really stands out is that your sucks. If this photo was done by anybody or any organization or startup or business or anything other than a celebrity, I would hate it because the glare literally covers up an important part of the content within the picture. However, when you're a celebrity and you're always polished and airbrushed and perfect lighting and all that horse crap and fake, a little humanity and humility goes an extremely long way. The celebrities and I see you shaking your head and I'm sure a lot of you were shaking your head, this is a huge point, when you're a celebrity, maybe your celebrity watch right now, which thank you, hit me up. If you're a celebrity, it's massively important for you to show other characteristics other than perfection. So it's a little serendipity, but I'm going to give them the benefit of the doubt. What I love here is that he put a photo of his time in his stats and again, one of them is covered I don't know that means and since I don't work out as you can tell, I've no idea what this means, and he says, "If you know anything about rowing, this is my time is this good?" This is interesting to me in so many ways. What he's doing for his audience is letting them be in authority over him. This is a professional athlete, but inevitably, there are a hundreds of people that follow him and I'll keep it on hundreds because maybe it is more rowing going on than I think. But hundreds of people that are following him, they actually know more about how well his time is or how good is he, and now listen, he's a beast. So I'm sure he's probably pretty damn good, but I love this, I love it in so many ways. It's everything that is perfect for a celebrity to follow, what Reggie was able to do here is humanize himself, make it for the first time an occasional time, make it feel like he's one of us. Maybe even you're really good at rowing and you're actually beating his time because it's the first time he's doing it and he has a lot of amazing athletics, be able to amplify the time. So, perfect raw clean real, it's a lot of reasons why people love Instagram and following celebrities on Twitter because it's not a perfect picture, it's from their perspective, that's what's happening here, but I love that it's being done on Facebook, he's asking a question which induces engagement. This is extremely well done and really one of my favorite case studies in entire book and then I'm glad to show it in this class and I would tell you that it doesn't just have to work for celebrities, let me explain. A lot of you work for or are major CEOs of organizations that are always buttoned up and always perfect and humility, humanity, empathy, just human aspects other than humor, work on social networks, and I think a lot of people need to learn that. We'll get to Twitter later where everybody thinks humors and wittiness is the only way to break through, there's a lot of characteristics that make people like other people. Caringness, embattleness, empathy, and some weariness, and so, where Reggie is showing here is a humility that you don't real often see from a celebrity athlete, and that's why this over indexes, not the fiction execution, not a lot of text, a question mark which is going to induce more action. I love it.
9. Lesson 2 Prompt: So, at this point, we've gone through a good and a bad piece of content on Facebook. I've set up the principles and read the plenty about Facebook. You're going to need a Photoshop, or onOver, or something about nature to create this content, to put out on the platform. So, I'll also give you some other reference points where Ammo, as I like to call it. To help you create the best piece of content, you can put. Remember, if you want to do a job that just bring you value, then, you're going to use it as a gateway to build up equity, to eventually go a right hook. Though I'd like to challenge a lot of you to throw a right hook as well, or maybe if you want to really be an all star, be a pet of the teacher, make one of each, make a job and a right hook on Facebook. Now, remember, we're going to go through other platforms at the end. So, you have an ability to go out and do many 10 pieces of content. If you only want to do one for this, you've got to decide. If you want to do it now for Facebook or later, if you become more passionate about a different platform, maybe you can choose that. You pause me now and get to work, or we can continue. Success on Facebook is something that I want to round up really quick for you as well. To me, it's about the engagement numbers. When you start looking at the analytics via Facebook fan page, which you can look in the background, you should be able to see that on your dashboard. When you look at the engagement number, how many likes, common shares, actions you get against the base of how many people follow you, or how many people saw that piece of content, is very important. It is a complete and clear indication of how well that piece of content did. Now, if you really want to think about success, if you are a direct consumer play, where you're literally linking to a product reach, like we do on YWeber.com, or other e-commerce sites or bad sites, that's a very easy way. This post drove this many sign-ups, this many sales, but you need to look at it holistically. To look at just one post on Facebook and its results would be the wrong way to look at overall. What it did at the end of the year or per quarter, is the way you want to really look at it. Especially, when you're doing a bunch of jobs to that right hook. So, all truly, net net, whether you throw one right hook a year or one a week, let's called 52 right hooks a year, right? Or 26, which feels in the range of the request, how those 26 or 52 do? Directly quantifying really matter from a results-based business, but the overall impressions, the awareness, the brand equity that you're getting day in and day out from the jobs, and the right hooks as a collective. When you start measuring that against what you're paying for in print, or better at, or email marketing, or television, or billboard, or radio impressions, starts becoming quite sexy and very much worth your time.
10. Instagram: So, now let's get into Instagram. Probably the hardest of all social networks in the last three years has completely exploded an enormously big platform at this point. They just announced last week, I think it's 150 million active users now, which is half of America, to put into context for you. So, big numbers at scale, natively mobile. It started as a mobile app and so, it's moved on to desktop. It's here, but it's really a mobile play. A lot of the same principles about the image and all that, but there's a lot of different things going on with Instagram. Number one, Instagram doesn't have virality, yet. So, I'm putting a big yet there because I'm really not sure where Facebook's going with this because I'd have to think that eventually, that virality has a lot of value. What I mean by that is, on Facebook, if you put out a great post and a lot of people share and comment, people that follow that brand or don't, start seeing it in their feed. On Instagram, you follow somebody and you see everything and only from those people, kind of the way Twitter works, and we'll get into that a little bit later. The other thing is, there's really two actions, two core actions on Instagram. You can leave a comment or you can double tap. You can share it a different way, but the double-tap gives you that heart that Instagram has, and it shows that you like it. You got love for it. Or you leave a comment, that doesn't do anything else really but stay within the confines and it doesn't add to the virality. If you get thousands of hearts, the only thing it can do is populate to the popular pages or explore, but that's limited to just 12, I think, or 15 photos. So, it's quite limited. You can really be crushing it and never show up there and so, it's limiting the virality. Another thing a lot of people don't like about it is you can't link out in the post. You can link out from your profile, but if I put a post, a photo to something that I want to sell, it's hard to throw right hooks, if at all, in Instagram other than if you use the mentality of a flyer or poster, it's different. It acts actually traditional instead of digital because of its lack of clicking out. When you put a photo and you're going through it on Instagram, you can't double-click it and gets sent to that website, which is what makes Pinterest and Facebook and other things very interesting to marketers and business people and organizations, and actually limits the upside of Instagram. Now, I've given you all the cons. The pro is, for all those limitations, it becomes a more authentic place. People like following brands, because they can't push them to those things, can't do those things. So, it's a yin and yang, chicken and egg kind of scenario, where the reason people like Instagram so much is for that reason that you can't maybe make it as spammy as some of the other platforms. So, you really need to go in with the philosophy of treating Instagram in my opinion, very similar to high and we're very strategic thinking around what you would do and print. So, for the people that have been in magazine advertising for a long time, this might come very naturally. On the flipside, there are native things you can do. For example, when you know that you double-click on a heart, that heart image shows up. So, we've tested and I've tested organizationally like putting pictures that has an empty slot there of the heart, that if you doubled tip it makes the action, which induces people to double tip it, which in some psychological way, if you're giving it another extra second, you're deepening the brand message and that brand into your heart or business message or celebrity, or once again, organization. So, Instagram is quite hot, very important. At a youth marketing level, if you're trying to market to 15 to 22 year old's, whether you're a fashion brand, an amusement park, a video game company, you have to be on Instagram. You have to figure out how to story tell, you have to be great at the visuals, you have to realize how to make it authentic, not everything has to be polished, some depends on the voice your brand is trying to do. But it is a platform we cannot deny, it is a platform that you can not just live without anymore, and really, I think as this video in this course in this class matures, people watching this, let's say a year or two from today of this filming, Instagram is going to be only be bigger, stronger, more important, and we're going to continue to challenge ourselves on trying to storytell. At the time of this taping, a couple of weeks ago when they announced 150 million users, they also started innuendo in advertising. So now, we're talking about the idea of, will brands be able to build up bigger audiences? Because up to this point, without being able to buy ads, it's been very difficult to build the size of your audience on Instagram without the serendipity of getting into popular or explore and then being found. So, with Facebook, who's the owner of Instagram showing ads, I do believe over the next 24 months, there will be some shareable more explore/viral opportunities within the app, maybe not, but the paid thing, the ad thing, definitely caught my attention. Right now, all of a sudden, in your Instagram feed, if there's a promoted gram, that might be a way to actually be able to be discovered and I do believe that's a variable we'll be seeing and I'm sure a lot of people are like "I get it," but this is business. So, when I think about Instagrammers, the first thing that pops to mind is hashtag culture. I told you that it's tough to be discovered. One of the great ways to be discovered is understanding what a hashtags are. We'll talk more about hashtags in Twitter as well. If you're watching this, for the most part, I think you know what a hashtag is. If you don't know what that means, open up another browser, Google hashtag, and understand that we don't need to describe it. It's a function, it's the number sign and a word. It's how people really explorer on Instagram and on Twitter, for that matter. So, a photo comes in your screen, you may see it says hashtag Valentine's Day, you may hit that hashtag, and now you're seeing a bunch of photos that use the hashtag Valentine's Day. So, if you know something's trending or popular, like the Amy's were the other night. I could have put a photo and put the Amy's around my brand, hashtag the Amy's, and then somebody else who is following a celebrity at the Amy's, they click the hashtag. Now, they're seeing everything, if my timing's right, they may see my brand in there. Oh, I didn't know XYZ brand or XYZ business was on that platform. Cool, I will follow them on Instagram. So, hashtag culture community stands out in a very big way as the true function, as a tactic. Make sure when you put a photo, that you're accompanying a lot of hashtags with that or find your right balance. To me, I like over hashtagging, some people find that spammy and annoying. You got to find your right tone. To me though, at least two, three, four hashtags need to accompany your photo, and figuring out how to hashtag takes a little time. You've got to understand how to be specific, theoretical, aspirational, trendy. There's a lot of hashtags, if I took a picture right now of this, I might say, hashtag Skillshare. I might say hashtag class, I may put hashtag professor, I may hashtag learning. You could go with camera, camera on camera, camera on camera on camera. You can go a lot of places and be creative, but be specific. It's like two lanes, utilitarian and creative. The other thing to really think about is, it's still at this point, if you're watching in late 2013 or early 2014, it's still pretty young. So, I would come with a little flavor, and when I say flavor I mean slang for just a little more youthfulness. If you followed Facebook for the last seven years, you've watched the transformation of it being like, beer pong photos to baby photos. You've like literally seen it mature, and so, Instagram still has a youthful energy to it and I would really, really recommend that. I'd also take into consideration that it's a pretty artsy, it's started off as a place where filters made your photos better, and I would still give a lot of thought, are you making the photos Instagramy? Meaning giving that extra effort, you can get away with many more lame photos on Facebook that you can't necessarily on Instagram, and so, finding that artistic flare or that vibe or that nuance that makes it Instagramy, will take you downloading the app, if you're not on it, following brands and celebrities and popular people, and starting to get that taste. I love how people talk about all these social networks or what works and doesn't, and they don't actually even use the products. It makes me laugh.
11. Instagram Case Studies: So, let's go to the first case study on Instagram and this is the Gansevoort Hotel, storytelling for love. Full disclosure, this photo was taken in Turks and Caicos, which is one of my favorite places in the world. So, I'm sure that's how it probably got in here. This is actually ridiculously brilliant for a lot of reasons. I referenced in the set-up about the culture of Instagram and being native. That the double tap, the heart, and how we've done things, the organization and I have, but this one is extremely well done. Clearly, and again, this could be altered by Photoshop. It's amazing the world we live in now. Everything has to have a cynical life. Did they alter this? But if they caught this picture natively, the sun beating down on the shoreline and creating this heart, and then cropping it to be in the feed right where you would double tap, then using very simple, Turks and Caicos is betting that you are a beach lover, #beach which is something that a lot of people use. Maybe for my liking they maybe left one or two hashtags on the table. Though not necessarily because again, you do it a lot so you can test and learn. I think this is extremely well done. This is exactly and I mean the exactly the kind of photo that stops somebody dead in their tracks. The exact kind of photo that people want to tell their friends about. Share. This is just clever, perfect storytelling, brilliant execution. This will work three years from now as brilliant execution. That gives me the double extra kudos to the Gansevoort Hotel, whoever is managing this, nailed this and I promise you that beach, there's plenty of bikini shots going on Instagram so I'm sure a lot of people are using that hashtag which leads to a lot of discovery. This is a brilliant piece of content. All right. Let's go to the next example here and let me start by saying I feel pretty bad picking on SeaWorld,. I titled this sloppy, sloppy, sloppy mainly because when I was going through case studies for this book, SeaWorld actually did a good job and fully putting it out there for anybody who's watching loves SeaWorld or works there. I was actually going to give them one of the pieces of the content that was a good Instagram photo. So, I feel a little bit bad because I'm pretty positive, half glass full guy. However, this is just what happens when you do the wrong thing, I guess at some level, as I was looking for the good one. This was so bad that we really couldn't let it go. So, I apologize and I feel bad and let me explain. This piece of content is a red hook. SeaWorld is an amusement park, I guess, or entertainment location. I don't know what the proper politically correct word is to use these days, but it says, "Who's coming out for Bands, Brew and BBQ." So, they have an event and they're trying to promote it and I guess they were lazy, didn't have the time or resources to make an original piece of content and this is a great time for me to tell you guys something. One of my biggest pet peeves is that people use social networks, and I talked about it earlier, as distribution. They want to use Facebook, Instagram, Twitter to drive awareness to something else, your website over here, or go here instead of natively taught storytelling within it. So, instead of neatly figuring out how to storytell on Instagram with the double heart, or this time the other thing, or hashtags, they just probably took this image from some other poster, some other website from their Facebook status and just plopped it in here for distribution, for awareness. Lazy and now they get caught. Sorry. You could see, I'm rarely speechless. This is how upset I am. The date is cut off, actually somewhat weirdly can make it out because day is on the left and sun is on the right. I guess that means Sundays that I guess it's February 9th and 16th because I can make the feber down on the right. But this is a piece of crap. Let's call it what it is. This is a really poorly executed piece of content. It's quite busy. It's that classic cliche wording of, "Who's coming out?" I mean, think about the times in your life when you've heard, "Who's coming out this Sunday for the barbeque?" It's literally that live radio read you heard when you were a kid as the radio commercial, "Who's coming out of the county fair this Sunday to meet the pig?" It's shit. This is where I get into, you shouldn't even put it out there. If anything, it's noisy. It didn't bring any value. I have no engagement when I rewind it in my mind, in comparison to the other content. At some level, when you're playing in a cool place like I referenced early, doing something not cool is a quick way to be not cool. That's what really bothers me here.
12. Lesson Three Prompt: Wrapping up, I'm thinking about Instagram. There are thousands of apps that you can use that can make you better. I'm a big fan of Over. Obviously, if you want to do in Photoshop, but obviously since it's readily mobile, and you could be on the run, it's great to have your tools as an app on your phone and Over's killing it. I'm sure there's others that are great. Very honestly and transparently, I haven't played a whole lot with all of them just of yet. So, those are tools to think about. In summing up victory here, I will tell you that, I do believe that Instagram much like Twitter is a heavily predicating jabbing platform. But because you don't have the ability to link people out, that throwing right hooks here are limited, and almost become a really smart debate of how many you want to throw here. I would tell you that me, I guess I wrote the book, I would not throw that many right hooks on Instagram. Occasionally, again, in poster thinking, I mean, back to the Sea World content, if it was done better, why not? But less. I think that's a great place to jab, it's a great place to build up equity. As the product evolve, this advice could change, if we can link out from Instagram in the future, becomes a much more interesting place. I think this is a heavy job place to think success here looks like building your top line audience organically. I think what success here is, to me, if I'm thinking about it, success here is to a certain demo that has some coolness factor, maybe not as much cool as Tumblr and and we'll get to that in a minute, but to a very certain demo. I don't care if I have 50,000 fans or 100,000. But the 1,000 or 2,000 that I do have, it's that depth of "I get it," and what that equity is for my business and sometimes you only need three or four people to really care. So here, it's about thinking about going really deep whereas Twitter, and Facebook offer enormous width, here, I think is a depth plain. Success here to me would be, building an audience that actually thinks you get it on this platform for now. Remember, over the next 24 to 36 months it will scale, get more mature and start thinking about it in a different way. Success to me is getting the foundation down, seeing that your metrics are going up. It's a vein step but these hearts will give you a sense if you're building an audiences that's engaging. I think these double taps, these likes and hearts and comments, over time will pay dividends and maybe bring you bigger results as I think Instagram of all is just a pry. Also, one fun note on Instagram is, it's one of the few, if only platform that we are looking at here that doesn't offer native analytics and stats, other than what you publicly see with likes and comments. First, I fully think that will change, obviously owned by Facebook who's the most mature. But Statigram, is that it? But Statigram is something you can use as a free tool that can give you a deeper understanding of the analytics behind Instagram. Breaks are now if you feel compelled, I'd love you to really think about doing a jab in the right hook orb because of the way you set it up I'm fine with you just doing one jab here on Instagram around this brand. What I'd love is to challenge you to keep it consistent here because you learn a lot more by doing one brand, and one voice, and one kind of story across all these platforms, because then you'll get taught the nuances. So, whatever you've done for Facebook, I highly recommend you see this whole thing all the way through. So now, throw your jab or your right hook, though I think it's your inner jab, on Instagram. Don't forget the hashtag. Cool.
13. Pinterest: So, let's talk about Pinterest. I think Pinterest is a very, very clever, extremely timely, and quite important website and app into this culture. To me, what I love about Pinterest is, first and foremost, the psychology of why somebody's on Pinterest. In the US, it's a heavy female demo. Outside the US, it's actually become more male and female-oriented, right? I do believe that we're seeing signs of becoming a little more male oriented in US as well. But let's really talk about the psychology. Somebody's on Facebook because that's the world. It's the people. It's mapped their social graph. It's your friends, it's your friends from highschool, it's former friends, it's even former boyfriends of your friends. You're following a lot of people you've known, once known, things of that nature. Pinterest has a really interesting psychology. Number one, to me it's aspirational. When you start looking at why somebody's on Pinterest, a lot of times they're pinning things that they either, A, want to buy, so it's intent to buy, which all by the way from a business standpoint is very interesting, where too it's aspirational. This is the kitchen I hope to have. This is the vacation I'd love to visit. So it's giving you insight to the psychology of this person of what they want to aspire towards or want, just very, very interesting interest data, the interest graph. So Pinterest to me has been something I've always gravitated towards, something I believe in quite a bit. It's a very challenging platform but you need to know something about them and the reason I say it's challenging is it's a social network that is grounded in search DNA. Let me explain what I mean. The leadership team at Pinterest is much more influenced by Google than they are on Facebook. So what you need to understand is that Pinterest has a lot of interest in becoming something that's a referral play, that they want to drive traffic to websites, that when talking to them about their perfect partners, it's often media sites or e-commerce sites because they want to drive and show that they're effective and for a lot of people that are watching here, going deeper into the nerd culture or analytical culture or business culture of the Internet, you're starting to hear things where you know for yourself that Pinterest is the biggest referring site to my X, or Pinterest sold more Y than Z. So we're seeing Pinterest grow up. It's a big platform. It's huge platform. There's enormously interesting psychology. It's a challenging platform because you do need very good photo jobs. This is a place that if you're aspirational, you need high-quality photos. So you not only need to have high-quality photos, you have to have utilitarian photos. One thing that I've been paying a lot of attention to is that infographics tend to get shared and re-pinned and now you see me refer to share and re-pin much like Facebook and Twitter with the retweet and the share command. Unlike Instagram, there is enormous virality opportunities on Pinterest. Pinterest is set up to be a visual pin board, your virtual pin board back to people that used a pin board back in the day. I've always thought of it as like the locker from middle school that like if you think back to, especially in the female demo, when they opened up their locker, if you're a little bit older like me, you had new kids on the block in there in front of fifth-grade girls. A little bit more contemporary, I'm sure if you open up some fifth-grade girls locker right now, there's plenty of One Direction or something that has more relevant as of the second in there. Then dresses and shoes and this and that and Ryan Gosling and all that crap. So I think that what we need to think about is that we need to recognize that that's what it's replicating, the real life locker and all those photos. I think about the absolute ad campaign, the absolutely everything that everybody when I was growing up had in their locker, it would have dominated Pinterest as a brand, no doubt, and me still even be dominating Pinterest as well. So it's set up on boards. It's quite interesting people set up their own boards around interest things I want to buy, places I want to visit, good-looking dudes, good-looking chicks, sports play. I have my athletes that I like, wines that I drink. You set up boards and you start pinning things to them. There's just a lot of functionalities. It's a very, very interesting platform, not to mention that the core piece of content, unlike every other platform, actually links out to a URL and somewhere else on the Internet, and that's where it gets interesting, and that's why it's driving a lot of traffic. When somebody sees a picture on Pinterest, they're clicking and they're getting sent somewhere many percentages of the time. So a platform that everybody should be paying attention to clearly one of the reasons that in this book and in this course I'm giving you Pinterest content and I'm not talking about Google Plus and other things that nature or Linkedin so you can understand how much and how serious I take it and it's something that you think you need to think about, so let's get to the case study so we can dig a little bit deeper.
14. Pinterest Case Study: Arby's: Before we get into case studies, I just want to add little other point, the functionality of Pinterest is a little bit different in this one, note. Yes, you can put a like button and share button and a retweet button on your website as an overall digital play, but where the pin button really matters is it puts the content deep. Think about the search, back to that Google reference, deep. When you put a retweet button on a product under e-commerce site, somebody could retweet it and then it goes zipping through the feed one time and a couple of people might see it. Whereas Pinterest, when you pin it and somebody puts it to the board, it's now in that lexicon and has the ability to be repinned and shared over and over and forever and ever, and so there's a functionality of that pin button I'm putting in your website that gives it longer form, longer tail content in the Ethos of Pinterest that you need to take very seriously. It's less of a feed play and speed of the fire, as we called the fire hose all this information, and more of it's now think of it as the visual search engine and it's there. Like, three years from now, a celebrity could repin that or an influencer could repin that because they stumbled on it and then it becomes hot, and that's quite interesting. So let's go into the first case study. Let's start on the negative end of this. I've said it before so I don't want to be that cliche thing, but this may be the worst example in the entire book. Arby's, I'm not sure what they'd, I mean, it's almost like they blew or so, they've done nothing right with this. As you're looking at this visual, I've got the book and are looking at on screen, you can see the disaster this is. Personal photo is clearly pinned from a website or their website or their internal catalogue, I have no idea, and it's cropped and the most insane way that I've ever seen. It looks like a Tetris 4 piece. I don't know if Tetris 4 exists, but it's completely miscropped. It seems like a digital image from literally like if you said, "Oh, this is a picture of a strudel from the Internet in 1981." I'd be like, "That's right, that's what they probably did back then. They didn't know how to crop." They did this now. I mean, it's a terrible, terrible, terrible piece of content. The picture, you're dead on impact. Here's where you need your best pictures, Arby's probably put their worst picture. So it's over before it starts, but let's keep going. The copy where you need to support the image, where you can do a great classic kind of capture. Think of something clever, do something aspirational, maybe think of weekend retreat. You can be clever to people and the demo that's there that maybe wants to eat a stack once a week, and something clever. Now they put Arby's apple turnover. Straight descriptive, literally out of the catalogue, disaster, no value, not interesting. The other thing is the link doesn't even go back to the Arby's website. So the functionality, all that power that they just set up about Pinterest, they're not even linking this to the right place. I mean, I'm pretty aggressive, competitive dude and I like to call out crap but this is as bad as it gets. This is complete misunderstanding. I say it in the book, I'll say it to you, this feels as though they're just checking the boxes. Like, "Hey, look, boss, we're on Pinterest." No thought, no knowledge, no strategy, no execution, everything that you can possibly do wrong, Arby's did wrong with this piece of content. The big thing that bothers me is when you stereotype the female demo, there's a great movement towards health and wellness and living a better life and eating healthier, things of that nature. In general, Arby's has so much to overcome to win over that demo on this platform. It's not the natural move of the average 25-year-old girl now to go to Arby's, and I'm stereotyping. But when you've got that hurdle of trends in society around eating and habits and fitness and exercise, this is where you need to position yourself as an occasional indulgence as a product like this or like an escape or like you deserve it, or all these things that can find some sort of crack to get somebody to actually eat it. Instead, they massively reinforce what's crappy about this and how it's not healthy by reinforcing its imagery that just dismantle system. I mean, this is garbage effort, effort that pisses me off. Garbage effort.
15. Pinterest Case Study: Lauren Conrad: Growing up as an early Hills enthusiast, it makes me happy that I can focus on LC. Oh, you know, huh? Be careful. What Lauren does here great which makes me super happy, is that she, and her team, publicist, digital person, or her, I'm assuming not, really know how to speak Pinterest. To me the thing that stops here is that it's a great image, it's very clear and concise what they're trying to do. They are not scared to go in for the ask, right? They tell you to pin this and do it at the gym. The amount of engagement this post had was incredible. It links, and this is where I get excited, this piece of content links not to some cheesy DVD that they want you to buy, it goes to a blog post that gives you even more content, so they're using it as a gateway to more information. Simple and concise copy, and the image is exactly what you'll see from- it's exactly the kind of photo that a high-end women's magazine would use of Lauren, a celebrity, and so it's speaking to that high quality that I think you need on Pinterest. It uses her fonts top left corner. I think this is just extremely well played. To me, when you calibrate success on Pinterest this might be, in reverse to Instagram, the perfect place to throw right hooks. This is a place where the pictures often link directly to places of call to action, and so I would highly recommend understanding a couple things. One, how to become part of the community, go out there and re-pin things, get yourself out there, understand the lexicon, the language, how to use it, get in there. But two, really start looking at is this a place where when you're putting out pins that it's driving business results. This is a place that can really drive us results for commerce driven, sign-up driven. This is a place to do business and as long as you respect and bring some value, and more importantly try to maybe share some love and pin other people's things, get involved in a community in your sector, in your business, this is a really great place to go. I highly recommend you take it very seriously, it's not some cool girl place to hang out, this is a real business driver in the new economy. I'm excited for you now to go and try to make your own pin, give it a lot thought. We didn't cover an infographic here, but if you don't don't know what an infographic is, Google that, learn what it is. A great place to do that as well, they get spread a lot in this place and so something to really think about.
16. Lesson Four Prompt: So, one more time. What I want to do now, is you've seen those two examples. You looked at them visually on the screen. Now, give some thoughts of, you know what, I'm going to push you towards throwing the right hook. I believe in it so much, I'm probably being even more empahtic about right hooks here than I even wrote about in the book. I highly recommend you now, we've gotten the story in the beginning, we've done some Facebook stuff, we've done some [inaudible] stuff, or you're deciding to just to one, you're going to do one right hook, and actually you play try to do a Pinterest and think about, and I want you to incorporate where you're sending it to because to me it's not just the visual, but what's the accompany and where you're sending to. We saw a lot of people trying to throw right hooks some Pinterest, and they're setting it to an information page, when they really saying buy, and why do they need somebody click another step to get the product page, makes no sense. So, give a lot of strategy towards where you're sending them to and how you're doing it.
17. Tumblr: To me, David Karp, the founder of Tumblr is really the pioneer of the interest graph. When everybody was really focusing on you, he was focusing on what do you like. So, when you look at what's happened with Instagram and Vine and other things of that nature, the precursor to all that, in a lot of ways, was Tumblr. I think over time in the historical nature of the social network revolution, Tumblr will continue to gain more and more respect for what they did, which was they created a platform for people to share their interest and be creative, and it wasn't about how many followers you had. It was really about what were you putting out there. If there's any place that I consider massively important to be cool, it's Tumblr. It's a very creative place, the stakes are high and it was very young. So by nature, you basically had amazing creatives and 13 to 16-year olds, the highest level of scrutiny for being cool from both angles. So, a very important platform that really gained it success as a desktop, and I really do believe left an opening for Instagram to come in on the mobile device and should have moved a little bit quicker towards mobile revolution and might have led to why it sold to Yahoo. To me, though this doesn't take away from the fact that it is one of the more important platforms of our time and a very important platform for specific brands, specifically if you are now trying to do this from a fashion perspective, on apparel perspective, entertainment perspective, Tumblr matters so much. Now, what gets about interesting to me about Tumblr is, back to the native language, where if you're trying to really think about high quality pictures on Pinterest, or artistic pictures on Instagram, or general memes and pictures and copy or thoughts on Facebook. When you get to Tumblr is, yes, the black and white high class fashion photos, cool, artistic, fine, high quality, fine. But what overate index is on tumbler is animated GIFs or gifs, as my good friend Stan were here, and I guess the person that created it claims the way you actually say it. Though that person claimed it ten years after it was completely burned into the lexicon of how we say GIFs, but that's another story for another day. Animated GIFs. These moving pictures that you've seen all over the internet now and are pretty well established at this point. Between Tumblr and I Can Has Cheezburger, a really fun website, they really brought it back. It was kind of been around for a while, but Tumblr definitely is the place where it regurgitated. So, I always say, if you're going to story tell on Tumblr, you need to have a very strategic, very heavy dose, and very smart playing with animated gifs. Can you tell your story? How do you tell your story? What are you doing with your story in animated GIF form? So, when you start looking now of this as a complete book, as a complete thesis, as a complete strategy, now you're saying to yourself, Okay, I get it. Picture here. Picture here. Different kind of picture here. Animated GIF here. Maybe small videos, I didn't really refer to this on Facebook, but under 10 second videos over here on Facebook, maybe also on Tumblr, but not too long. Staying within the GIF thought." We'll get to Twitter, which is a lot of copy. So this is animated GIF land. If you don't know where it is, if you don't understand it, then you're not playing in the space. It's, if you don't understand how to dress at a trendy restaurant in a top five city, you're probably better off not walking in there. That's exactly the analogy I would tell you about Tumblr. Unless you're looking to roll deep with some animated GIFs, I'd highly recommend you reconsidering creating a page.
18. Tumblr Case Study: Jimmy Fallon: So, let's start with a great example of a piece of micro content from Tumblr and it's the Late Night With Jimmy Fallon Show. To me I love to refer to social media sites and micro content as a gateway drug. Give somebody a nickel bag of weed, we got them buying tons of coke a couple years later. So, what I see here excites me and this analogy is this. You've got Jimmy Fallon who's done this long form interview and they put that content on YouTube. On YouTube, they can gain more viewership and this and that and that nature. Taking a little piece of that interview, the best part, the funniest part, the coolest part, the Tumblr part and turning into an animated gif and then putting it on that Tumblr account gives the ammo to that show because here's where it gets interesting. They put out that animated gif but there's also a link to the longer form version of YouTube. So, they're teasing you, they're giving you a taste. That's funny. That whole interview must have been great. Now, you click it, you go to Youtube and you're in a longer form content. Pretty scary for some of you that think a four minute video is long form content but that's where we're at. It's ADD culture. Welcome. So, you get a little piece, then you go to the four minute piece and then all of the sudden, you're finding yourself DVRing Fallon and getting into the world that they want you to get into. I think that one thing you need to understand about Tumblr is, people have Tumblr blogs and for people that know and think of it as a blog and you can go to a URL that says jimmyfallon.tumblr.com. I know that's probably not the URL for them. But the one thing you should understand is the way people consume Tumblr content, is in their dashboard, a backend version were all the things that you follow come to you and get curated. Much like a Twitter feed. What is great about Tumblr and really when they started the virality, they were doing this before retweeting became a real thing. Around the same time as the reblog where if you like a piece of content and you hit a button, you take that piece of content and you make it your own on your blog. That's where the virality spread. So, your big goal is to put out something so compelling that somebody wants to reblog it and anoint it by putting it on their blog and endorsing that piece of content, and then that link travels onto yours and now it goes over and over, rinse and repeat, and now you've got a ton of people going to that YouTube video because it went viral, or was shared, or reblogged, or reTumblred, however you want to call it within a Tumblr world. This is perfect execution. They got a two piece animated gif things going when you look at it so, it's got both scenes, it's got the wording there to give you more of the stories since the audio is not accompanying it. It's really sucked people in, they drag. It's just dragging people into the rabbit hole when you do it right, and that's what's going on here. You like that, it's funny, you click, you're in Youtube. Now, you're on Youtube, moving on to the Fallon page. Just on and on and on, virality. Just so brilliant. This makes a ton of sense to me. A great demo for this show. But don't forget the demo plays in this world. A lot of them don't watch TV and you'd be stunned how many youngsters don't know TV stars. So, this kind of stuff creates relevancy and it's quite important.
19. Tumblr Case Study: Smirnoff: Now, let's talk about something that sucks. As a good Russian boy, it hurts my feeling to pick on a vodka, especially with all my uncles who used to drink liters of vodka directly to the face on our holiday parties. It's another story for another day. Smirnoff Vodka here, as you're looking at this image, whether in the book or on the screen, is doing a terrible job. First and foremost, I've set this up for you. Remember when I said, "Don't go into a room if you're not acting cool?" Let me tell you exactly not how to act cool in Tumblr, by using a stock photo. This is as big of a no-no across the board, but then again, with the added concern of Tumblr being a cool place, this makes no sense. Then, the function. Honestly, I shouldn't have started with a stock photo, because I don't know if you just noticed, you might want to rewind. I literally just blacked out for a second at the notion that Smirnoff would use a stock photo on Tumblr. Then, even more scary, is the copy they accompany this photo with unlike Jimmy Fallon, that we talked to as a pro where they had great copy, and it linked to YouTube, and it understood, these guys said, "Neat drink ideas? Check out @smirnoffus on Twitter." Without linking to the Twitter account of Smirnoff. Let me say it again. They want you, I guess, when you see this, to open another browser, type in twitter.com. Type it. We are lazy. My friends, we are lazy. We all know this. The number one thing we are is lazy, so to not lead people to the well and by making this link out to Twitter is as amateurish as it gets. This is awful. This is a complete lack of knowledge of how the Internet works. How did that feel? That's the statement. This is a complete lack of knowledge of how the Internet works. To not put a link, that's 1994 Smirnoff. That's 1994. I'm sorry, I'm getting pissed because this is stupid. Stock photo, crappy text, they tagged it with food and yum. Yum. They tagged this with yum. I'm sure all the peeps that are clicking the yum tag in the Tumblr world that didn't see this Smirnoff stock photo pop up were like, "Yeah, fuckin yum." No, its ludicrous. This is a complete tone deaf to culture as you get a complete no, a complete mess, a disaster and I'm telling you, I'm going to say something. Being wrong is worse than not being at all. Smirnoff coming into Tumblr and you could say anything you want. Let's be authentic here. Even though alcohol brands are not allowed to market to youth, what the hell do you think Spuds MacKenzie was, from Budweiser back in the day? A little dog with a pack, do you think that was marketing to 40-year-olds? There's always anyone knowing it at some level that aspirations of teenager to become a gateway or their current consumers. And I'm not going to say that they're targeting to teens, or anything of that nature, but, being not cool is a very quick way of going out of business in the alcohol beverage world. And to go into the coolest place, where the coolest of 21 to 25-year-olds are, and to throw a fuckin stock photo and then show that you have no knowledge of Twitter. I promise you, this piece of content, instead of getting people to do something, I promise you, definitively, with no support analytically, but my gut feel hundreds of people stopped buying Smirnoff because of this effort instead of the alternative. It's just true. I've got a crowd full of cool peeps here that know, that when people do something or brands do something wrong, it checks you out, instead of checks you in. I just have a feeling Smirnoff would have been better off not being here at all. Crap, super crap. Hashtag supercrap.
20. Lesson Five Prompt: To me, success in Tumblr looks like everything else at some level. It's the same old game, right? Are you getting your story cross correctly? Are you getting it distributed? I would love to give you another nuance, so I'm going to give you one. There's a cool circle in Tumblr, the influencers, the people that share a lot, have big audiences, successes penetrating the ones that are the most interesting, and I don't mean the celebrities. I mean the people that are influencers, native to the platform and have the ability to share, to bring distribution. Your goal should be to penetrate everybody and that demo and to be cool in that world, but also have the ability to arm the people that are taste makers within that world with great content that makes it shareable, that makes them want to share, and so winning that game. This is a tastemaker platform. So, you want to be distributed and shared and viewed by the right people. This is kind of like the one percent of coolness that if you can penetrate, you can trickle outside of the confines of Tumblr and really impact your business, your brand, your personal brand, or your organization. So, if you're sitting here and you're thinking about now you want to make a right hook or jab in this space. Remember, jabs are easier because there's link outs again. Not as easy as on Pinterest where you click a photo and you go there. With Tumblr, it's the picture of the none underneath, there's a little collection. It was a little less than that. There's more jabbing and right hook thing going on here. If you're going through this exercise, if you're watching this class, Photoshop 101, if you're going to listen, I'm not good at Photoshop. So, you could have somebody creating. But if you're sitting here as the creator, as the designer, you want to have that Photoshop 101 skills, and the PDF will have some other GIF makers for the less advanced like me, has apps and we'll get to that, and you'll see that in there, but I highly recommend it. It's probably a good time to make the overall statement that if you are the mason, not if you're the architect, if you're following me here. If you're the mason, you need to have real Photoshop skills. Also, on the analytics part from the real heavy business people, ROI justification, union metrics. You want to write down that name, it sort's of popping up somewhere in here, it's in the PDF, is by far the most advanced Tumblr metrics platform out there. So, let's get into the project part here. I highly recommend again, I feel if you're really feeling this course and you're going to go coast to coast, five pieces of content across these platforms, I'm challenging you here even if you've never done it. As a matter of fact, I'm not even going to accept any content from this challenge, this part this piece without it being an animated GIF. Please only submit the animated GIFs as a jab or a right hook and the copy supporting it and the link out if it's going in a jab, in a right hook world that goes along with it. Animated GIFs only, that's your challenge. Go. Don't sneer often.
21. Twitter: Twitter is the single platform that changed my personal life the most and I still believe is the most fertile ground to change others. With all of Facebook's distribution scale, Twitter is the one true cocktail party we are in at. The one true social network. A place where you can jump in to anybody else's conversation and engage in it. Like literally, they like to say the town square, I like to say the cocktail party because to me at a cocktail party there's the context that you can actually talk to other people there and it's accepted, you can roll up on somebody and say, "Hey, nice chicken", and you can do that. To me that's what makes Twitter so special. Twitter is the one place where you can both push and pull. It's the one place that you actually get more credit for listening than talking. You'll notice we just went through all the other platforms and we didn't talk a whole lot about the listening aspect. We're going to hear with a bunch of Twitter stuff. So, this book is very focused on content and the push, and the case studies will be focused on this. But my last book was the entire book basically the Thank You Economy on Listening and Providing Value and I'd be remiss not to mention those nuances that make this platform so special. That if you sell doughnuts, your ability to go to Twitter's advanced search tool and type in doughnuts and coffee and early morning breakfast and policemen and all the things that are around doughnuts and engage those conversations is incredibly interesting, massively fruitful and it's the one place in the entire social network landscape that you can jump in to something that somebody is talking about and you don't come across as a creeper. It's the one place that you can jump into somebody or two people having a conversation, you insert yourself and if you're a brand in a business and you're actually trying to sell them something, and you're just adding to the conversation, not only are you not a creeper, they actually give you points for listening and giving a crap. By saying thank you to somebody that said your product's awesome, you get credit. That's insane. By being somewhat borderline, occasionally polite, you get massive credit and that will last forever and that's why Twitter is so special. It's the one place where you can create enormous context and I have enormous passion for it. You look at my Twitter timeline @AgaryB, 90% of it is @replies, answering people's question. Bringing value and 10% is the push and that's what we focus on in this instance because this book is following my last book which is all by listening. But in this context we should focus on some tweets that matter. Understand that this is the place where you build the most equity so that when you actually push something out people will retweet it or favorite it or share it or pass it along or act on it. That links and sound soundbites and you need to be ready and improper acting skills probably helps a whole lot here and many other variables that really matter. But you can Curie and be a deejay. You can share content. It's got very heavy implications and a lot of opportunities in storytelling both as a deejay by sharing things or as a songwriter by putting out original things. But I'm telling you, with all due respect, if you're not doing your fair share of listening and engaging, you're not buying yourself enough permission to push yourself because the one thing that Twitter has is what people call a firehose problem. Remember early on, that supply and demand of content, there's a whole lot of people talking about eating a snickers bar on Twitter. There's a whole lot of people talking about writing on beautiful day with their top down. There's a whole lot of people who lost their sneakers. It was a whole lot, a Mundin tons and tons of content that means nothing and to break through all that noise, you need to set yourself up with the context not only the content that we're to talk about. So, keep that in mind if you're going to attack the Twitter world.
22. Twitter Case Studies: Going to the first case study, probably my single biggest pet peeve. As you look at this Holiday Inn piece of content, they are basically through, as I set this up, through April 21st to April 23rd of 2013, Holiday Inn and this one piece of content sums it all up is retweeting all day long nice things said about them. So, at it's lowest form, one retweet or two retweets about somebody saying something nice about you is bragging. I know you may not think so, I know that you have not realized the humanity of social networks yet. When I say this, by the way, I'm talking to the collective advertising world, not talking to you my wonderful class. I know that people haven't realized what it is, but it's bragging and when you're doing it for two straight days, it's obnoxious behavior at the very least. It's really quite outrageous, and so that's all that Holiday Inn is doing here. It's a tactic I see all the time. I've pretty much tracked it down to PR, public relations thinking. A lot of PR firms have consulted clients and do it on their behalf of doing this all day long because they're in the business of press clippings and B2B, and they don't realize that when I say B2B, I mean business-to-business. They don't realize how to a consumer are this, it's just not attractive. It's not. I mean, why in the world would you follow Holiday Inn for them to brag about other people saying how awesome the Holiday Inn is? It's bringing absolutely no value to you. Instead of taking the extra effort and replying to somebody and saying thank you, they're doing this to try to show the following how great they are by endorsement by somebody else. It's what you call bad form, and it comes down to not understanding the nuances. So, from a copy sample, it is terrible. Like, just to retweet somebody else's tweet and say, "Awesome, hope you have fun." Then, broadcasting that to everybody, it would've been one thing if you look at this. If they replied to msdaisy66 individually and said, "Awesome, have fun." That's not what they're doing here. By putting the "Awesome, have fun." in front of retweet and saying that we're saying retweet with RT, they're basically publicizing to everybody that this is what somebody said about us. So, it's back to that push thinking. It's back to like it's almost like a movie trailer. When you're watching a movie and then like, "Cisco and Eobard said and your time said." I get it, but it's low form. Then the context of how they did it, they did it over and over and over for a two-day period. It's bad. Before I'd move on to a great example, I just want to talk about functionality. A really bad job by Twitter and teaching everybody. When you're looking at this piece of crap and I hope it pops up, maybe we can do something here, team. If you take out the "Awesome! Have fun! RT" and you started the tweet with the @ symbol and msdaisy66 only. So when you start to tweet with that @ symbol, the first character, not a space, not a dash, the singular first character, one is that @ reply symbol and says msdaisy66, "Awesome! Have fun!" only the people in the world that follow both msdaisy and the Holiday Inn would actually see that in their stream. By not doing that, everybody that follows Holiday Inn then sees it. So, just a little nuance thing that I want to make sure from an education sampling digging deeper you're world. When you look at these three pieces of content, these three tweets as a collective, it makes you understand how much Shakespeare's Pizza understands what to do on Twitter. Twitter, much like we referred to earlier in Instagram, has a huge hashtag culture. So, when you look at what they did on the third post around the #PizzaIsRound, #TheEarthIsRound on the day of Earth Day, you start understanding they're putting all the pieces together. It's great about all three of these tweets is their talking Twitter. So, earlier in the lesson, we talk about how much Smirnoff was not talking Tumblr, this is a small local pizzeria understanding how to talk Twitter. That's what makes me so passionate about all this. You would think this big global vodka brand should know how to market hell a lot better than, and I'm not aware of Shakespeare's Pizza is big or small, but I think it might be a one-storey unit, maybe a couple, I mean, it's really incredible. So, all across the board here, all three of these just really speak the language. Great use of hashtag, timely tweets. The middle one really understands that around graduation day, that's going to work. It's like textbook 101. I mean, as a collective, it really, really understands how to get the pieces across and knows the nuances and the variables. It knows, for example, the first one talks a lot of numbers. I've been testing a lot of my own, it's not even something I've been playing with being on media, but how numbers work really well in Twitter? Because in a very equipped world, a lot of copy, numbers actually somewhat stand out, and now when used a lot of numbers in Twitter. So, just a really strong knowledge from a local business that makes a ton of sense. I think the one that really stand on here and when you do your lesson, when I have you write a tweet right now, I really want you to think about the clever aspect of what story in your brain are you trying to tell around a hashtag culture. More importantly, one thing I should mention is writing a hashtag on Twitter hashtags thread. So, let's say you have an agenda as a sneaker company to talk about your new running shoe. As they might say, "Announcing our new shoe or new running shoe." I might put a hashtag #marathon, #running, the brand/marathon. Let me play. What they aren't realizing what I want all of you to realize, and maybe you can even do this in real time as you're writing the copy for your brand that you designed and unvoiced, to go to Twitter right now, go on to Twitter.com page, sign-in to your account, and see what's trending right now, and challenge yourself from a creative writing standpoint for you to ride the trend and get into the lexicon because I'll tell you one thing, people are searching those tags, those hashtags in a big way. You might get someone I love to call by "Accident business", which means some people might become aware of your brand because they're searching the trending hashtag. So, we've seen analytically, it's without this organization when we did this work that jumping on hashtags results in dramatically more engagement, awareness, and impressions all the branding things that we care about.
23. Lesson Six Prompt: So, here's the challenge for you. In lieu of, Shakespeare's pizza doing such a great job of hashtags. If you're going to decide to make a piece of content right now in class, go to twitter.com, and look at the trending topics, and use one of the trending topics in your piece of content, and the rationale behind it. That's where you get challenged. It's easy for you to come up in your hashtag. But, here's a news alert, nobody cares about your hashtag. Nobody cares at all about your hashtag. What they care about is where people are actually talking about and your ability to reverse engineer into that lexicon of conversation, that's where the magic is, that's playing Twitter for the sake of Twitter. Success to me on Twitter is very easy to follow. There's metrics of retweets, and favorites, and engagement on your posts. You can put links in a tweet that drive to e-commerce sites, commercial-based stuff. You can gain followers, all those metrics, but what I'd like to see success from you is you actually understanding the platform. You understanding that this is the one place that is the heartbeat of society right now. Meaning, putting out content, when it's relevant to the conversation and what's going on in the world is huge. Riding the hashtags is huge, being nimble. It's kind of like Floyd Mayweather, I kind of talked about this in other places and the theme of the book, it's about counter punching. I know, you want to say something. I know, you want to sell pizzas. I know, you want to sell wine. I know, you want to sell books. But, the best way to do that is to actually listen and then bring value to what everybody's talking about, than instead of forcing your agenda down one's throat.
24. Summary: Whether it's Twitter or Tumbler or Pinterest or Instagram or Facebook, it's bottom line, results right? If you're an NGO, getting donations, if you're an author, selling books, if you're an artist, selling concerts, and music. It's all the same game. But how you tactically do it and how you reach the most people you can, and how you reach people that actually care and make them convert, that's the full game, and it starts by respecting the nuances on the platform, the context, that's what we're talking about here. So, in the total world, how do you produce enough compelling content that actually forces people to retweet your product, so they're telling people about you, and this infrastructure of word of mouth that Twitter is, and brings awareness and opportunity in business results. One last time for the project, the jabs follow the lexicon, the hashtags, right hooks, same thing. Don't forget to put a call to action, be smart and strategic about your call to action, make sure you're linking it to the right piece. So, I want to thank you so much for taking my course, my class. It was a lot of fun to have you, I hope you enjoyed it, and I hope you learned something. Very honestly, I hope you watch it a couple times because I know I speak fast. Really, I want to wrap this up in a nice bow. Here's the bottom line: if you are unable to understand the nuances in the platforms we covered, what makes them different? What animated gif is? What time to post on Facebook? What a hashtag means on Instagram versus a hashtag on Twitter? How to follow the lexicon? How to engage on Twitter? How to make something that links directly to a product or service? How not to be smeared off? If you don't understand those things, you're not cool to be successful in the new world, if you do not know how to story tell, you will not win, if you didn't know how to tell a good story back in the day when we sat around campfires and you stay mute, you didn't win the respect, you didn't get to tell that story. That is now happening in the digital world, on social networks, in mobile devices, and across all sorts of digital platforms. I highly recommend you figure that out, and I highly recommend you understand the nuances as they change and evolve from the moment I made this video, and as new ones like Snapchat, like Vine, Google Plus, ever gets its act together, like Linkedin and whenever else some smart kid, some guy right now, some 14 girl living in Columbus, Ohio has an idea right now and she's going make it. In five years, all of us are going to try to figure out how to story tell there, because 300 million Americans are going to be on it. We have to know how to tell a story that's not intrusive, that isn't cropped like crap, that isn't not cool, that isn't bringing value, and that is the challenge my friends we live in a very different society, where we have to really become native and bring value, and storytelling a different way, not one that's predicated on stopping somebody, like who's listening to radio show and they stop it, and then we cram our message for three minutes. We're watching a TV show when we cram our 30 second span on them or reading the paper and it also has a full-page ad, disruptive storytelling is coming to an end, and native, integrated, smart, and culturally relevant content storytelling on these platforms is emerging. Marketers will ruin this one day too, and we'll story tell in glasses, and we'll story tell on the moon, will do all sorts of things, but for now, and for at least the next half decade, this stuff really matters. I implore you to take this course very seriously if you want to have anything result in the things that matter to businesses and organizations. Thanks for having me. Hit me up facebook.com/gary and say thanks, twitter.com/garybee. Don't ask something else, ridiculously terrible branding, and I wish you well.
Gary Vaynerchuk, Wine Guru and CEO, Vaynermedia
