 Okay, so good afternoon everybody. Welcome to WordCamp. My name is Jim Gilbert, and for the next half hour, I'm going to talk to you about the law of social media relationships. And by relationships, I mean R-E-A-L. We're gonna talk a little bit differently than we normally talk about social media. I tend to think differently about how social works. So let's just kinda jump in, and first of all, let me thank you guys for coming. I appreciate everybody who's here, and I really enjoy and appreciate that you guys are taking the time to spend in this half hour session and the entire weekend. So a couple of notes about who I am. I'm not a young guy. I have been around for over 30 years in the marketing business. I'm the CEO of a company called Gilbert Direct Marketing. This is not a sales pitch. I'm just getting this out of the way, okay? President of an organization called the Florida Direct Marketing Association, and I've been an author for a number of years. I do a lot of these lectures, and it's, to me, it's the best thing. It's the most fun I can have is actually getting out and talking to people about what I do. So if you guys, how many people are gonna be tweeting here today? Okay, everybody knows the WCMIA hashtag. So if you're gonna be tweeting anything out, please use that hashtag. Also, if you wanna use nine immutable laws, another hashtag, feel free. And if you wanna follow me on Twitter, it's at Gilbert Direct. So I do this before every presentation. This is kind of my orientation. This is also why I do what I do. And I'm gonna give you guys a quote that there was only one valid definition of business purpose to create a customer. Companies are not in business to make things. They're just in business to make customers. Anybody know whose quote that's from? Nobody? Okay. Everybody here, Peter Drucker? Peter Drucker is one of the smartest guys who ever lived in the business field. And I encourage you guys to Google him and find his stuff. Okay, so here we go. Ladies and gentlemen, this is the formula for social media success. Actually, this is the formula for social media success. It's all about engagement. Now, here's how I kind of got started in social media. I was the CMO for a company back in about 2009 and Facebook pages had just come out. The company was called The Fresh Diet. I don't know if anybody's ever heard of it. And we just opened up our Facebook page and things just really took off from there. We had no idea what we were doing, but we started doing a lot of fun stuff and we built this hugely engaged community. From that, I turned that into, as I was a writer, I needed to turn that into a way for people to really understand what I was thinking and somehow get it from my mind into other people's minds. So I created this talk called The Nine Immutable Laws of Social Media Marketing. And what that does is just gives people the background and the context for how I did the social media in the early days and how it turned this into some very successful communities for me. By the way, if I was to do The Nine Immutable Laws here, it's about a two hour presentation. If you guys drop me your business card at the very end, I'll send you a link to that presentation. It is chock full of how-tos and tips and stuff like that. So it's a very useful tool for you. Anybody who has a website, anybody who's marketing, anybody who's doing social media. So feel free to drop me that. So I'm just going to give you a very quick review of The Nine Immutable Laws and then I'll really get into the whole engagement relationship thing. So the first law I created was the deeper the level of engagement, the deeper the level of trust and bond is with your company. Obviously nothing happens anywhere without some sort of engagement and trust. I'm not really going to go deep into these because there's a lot of stuff I want to get through and I apologize for moving fast, but there's a lot I want to impart to you in the next 25 minutes. So as I'm saying this to you, as I'm talking today, please map this onto your current business and take some of the examples that I'm giving and just kind of turn them into what you do because I'll have some fun examples for you in a few minutes. So number two, brand plus channel equal engagement, meaning that the more channels somebody follows you in, engages with you in, the higher the level of engagement. And then the third immutable law, brand plus time plus channels equals advocates, meaning the more time, the more channels they spend with your brand, the more likely they are to become your customer advocates, which is, we all know, is the holy grail of social media marketing. Number four is the exponential search factor and we all know that social media increases your search ranking so I really don't need to speak very much about that. Number five, newfangled customer service factor. Basically that law states that customer service is not just a phone call away or an email away anymore. It's just that these days people pick their preferences and they are going to tweet to you, message you on Facebook, post nasty things if you don't respond quickly. So the one thing that I tell everybody that I speak to is in your social media channels, you always have to be constantly monitoring them and making sure that you respond to people in a timely manner. I do this all the time. Just as practice is fun, I'll literally I'll tweet to somebody or I'll send them a message on Facebook or I'll post something. And nine out of 10 times it takes at least 24 hours to get back to me. And that unfortunately is completely unacceptable in this real time world that we live in. So you need to be responding very quickly to any type of social, any question that arises on social media. Even if your answer is I don't have the answer, I'm gonna have to get back to you and then take it offline. Deliver or die and a litter or else. Those are my maxims about that. Everybody in the organization, I encourage everybody in the organization, if you work in a large organization, small organizations, everybody needs to get involved in customer service. From the CEO on down, everybody should be living on your Facebook page, monitoring your Twitter feeds and just seeing what's going on there because you don't wanna miss anything, whether it's good or negative. Then there's number six is the behind the scenes factor, meaning that people don't buy from companies, they buy from people and I'll have a couple of examples about that a little bit later on. We live in a very personality-driven world, especially with social media and you'll see some of that in a minute. Trust is the new black and if people aren't trusting you, then your brand's going nowhere. It's basically what that one's all about and I always encourage people to speak in a real voice. I do a lot of freebies and contests. It's a great way to build engagement and build it quickly and build trust quickly. It's kind of like the old days where your social media side has to be like the old days where you'd walk into the corner store and people knew you. They knew you when you were going to buy a pack of gum or something. They knew what kind of gum and they knew what kind of cigarettes. God forbid, I don't smoke anymore, but you know what I mean. The online reputation factor, your reputation is everything if you're not monitoring and actively engaging to make sure that your reputation stays intact, you risk the chance of getting negatively dinged because let me tell you something, everybody goes to your social media properties to check you out before they buy. If your product and your brand promise aren't in sync, you risk getting in trouble. To sum it up, the last one was that engagement plus time plus trust equals revenue, which is basically the fact that it brings everything together. I always knew though, as I created the Nine of Mutable Laws that there was something completely missing. There was something, some galvanizing factor that was missing in the way I was presenting it and I thought about it and I asked people about it and it was really relatively interesting, relatively simple. So you know, I pulled it all together and I created a new presentation which you're sort of watching here, the shortened half hour version. So now I present to you the 10th immutable law which is the law of real relationships, that it's time to get real again, it's time to get back to different types of levels where when we first started social media properties, we had a completely different feel to it. A lot of it has changed. Why get real? Obviously everybody out there knows, right, it's tougher to get engagement these days to get people to respond to you. Show of hands, how many people have a easy time of getting people to respond to you via social? Okay, how many people have a hard time? Big difference. You have to work harder to get her done, as they say. Everybody's doing it, there's so many more companies that are involved in it now and every day, more and more people are getting deeper involved, not necessarily doing it better, but getting involved in it. Lots of clutter out there, it's hard to separate the wheat from the chaff. Facebook obviously has been for a while, it's been paid for play, which means that two to 3% of your audience which you worked so hard to build is now actually receiving your information when you post it, you have to pay to reach your own audience which you paid to build to begin with. Believe me, I could go off on a major tear on that one. There's more relevant sites. Vine is a big site these days. Obviously Instagram, Pinterest, all of that stuff are huge opportunities for marketers as well. So if our goals are to build engagement and build relationships, how do we do it? We still have to draw people out in order to get them to respond. We still need to get them involved. We still need to do things like if you're on the B2B side become a social media thought leader. How many people are thought leaders out there? How many people want to be thought leaders? Hang on every word, retweet everything. Cool, me too. Generate authority, tug at their heartstrings. This is a great, great way to do social is build emotion into your content and your storytelling via social. Tell a story, as I said, create drama. I love to create drama. I love controversy. I love posting things that are gonna get people's attention in positive and or negative ways sometimes because that really tends to draw people out. Anybody want to know how that well that works? Just post something political on Facebook and see how well that works. These days we have to work a lot harder, faster, smarter to get people engaged, as I've been saying. So I broke it down. Another part of this presentation is called The Eight Stages of Engagement and I broke it down to eight different stages. Some people have two, some people have six, some people have 16, but I'm gonna go over very quickly the eight stages with you. Stage number one, well, let me just pull these all up so everybody sees them so we can go through them better. Stage number one is a brand impression. Somebody is a casual, they may see something that somebody else retweeted. They may see something that one of your friends or fans liked or some comment that shows up in their news feed or something like that. So you don't really have anything going on with that brand yet, but every time you get an impression it's an opportunity. So the goal here is to move somebody who is in the number one position over to the number six position, which is a super brand advocate, and you have somebody who's a casual listener who maybe likes your page. You have a super like, somebody who engages often. Then you have your minor brand advocate who will go ahead and make good comments and they'll recommend things and they'll recommend your product and the holy grail again is the super brand advocate. Basically that's the guy who's out there actively selling your products for you and you don't have to do anything but just keep them happy, right? How many people wanna keep your social media people in the number six position? Okay, only two? Come on, the rest of you guys, wake up. Number seven is a dislike. That's a disgruntled fan that goes away. You did something to them, you piss them off and they're gone. Then I have the really bad one, but it's really a good one and I'll tell you about that in a second. The super dislike, which is what I call an engaged dislike. This is the guy who's constantly blasting you. They used to be a fan, now they're not and they're gonna tell you and everybody around you why. But I gotta tell you, these guys are an opportunity. If you solve their problem, you can turn them around because if they're that vocal about being negative and their problem gets solved, it's very easy to make them positive and turn them into a number six into a super brand advocate again. So that's just a couple of little things on that. So how do you find and create brand advocates? First of all, I'm a big fan of listening and spending time on sites and I'm gonna tell you some heretical thoughts in about two seconds. You wanna look for and identify who the people are who are retweeting your stuff, sharing your stuff, liking your stuff and then do something about that. Not just say, oh, okay, well, these people are just retweeting it. Make contact. How many people actually make contact with people who retweet your stuff and build a relationship? Good, should be more. It's a great way, especially on Twitter, to build those relationships and just start speaking to people. I do it all the time. I get clients from it all the time. It's a great opportunity. So another thing is, if you don't know who your brand advocates are, I encourage you to find them and meet them. For instance, when I was at FreshDiet as CMO, we had Carol who was a brand advocate, Donna, Josh, Trevor, Tina, Angel, just to name a few. Those people got so engaged in our community and got so engaged with me as a leader of that community that they're now friends of mine. Literally, not just necessarily Facebook friends or Twitter followers, they're actually friends. So I really encourage you guys to go out there and find those advocates and make friends with them because they will build your business for you and you'll also meet some nice people along the way. So the law of relationships, back then when we first started in social media, we had this thing called the Nameless Faceless Corporate Entity. And our goal was to turn around and put a face to the Nameless Faceless, right? Now what we have, and here we're gonna shift gears, we have the Nameless Faceless Social Media Pusher. Okay, I'll tell you about that in a second. Don't be an info pusher. Info pushing in social media is the worst thing you can do. Now everybody talks about content, finding content, curating content, blah, blah, blah, right? The bottom line is when you put out content, you gotta put your spin on it. You gotta provoke with that content. You gotta look for a way to get response from people. Otherwise, the content is just content. I get stuff all the time, tweeted to me. I see stuff on news feeds that literally makes me wanna puke because there's no real engagement factor. It's just what I call info pushing. So, here's the thing. How many of you guys schedule your posts? That's a key, he said some of them. You guys using Buffer, Hootsuite, all of those tools that you have which are designed to make life easy for us are actually getting in the way of building relationships and building engagement. Because the more time you spend up in the sky as opposed to down on the ground in the infantry which is kind of a bad analogy, the less likely you are to build that relationship with somebody who's gonna become your super brand advocate. These days in social media, relationships are dying. I watch it all the time, I see it with clients and I study this not all the time. Kind of a, as you probably guess, a social media junkie, I'm always on social, my wife's like, why are you on Facebook again? But it's true. So, here's a rule for you, okay? Every time you use an app to post rather than going directly on a site, a kitten will die. I want you guys to remember that always, okay? That's the groaner. I'll make it, wait, wait, I'll make it better for you. Every time you post directly, a kitten gets their wings. Is that better? Okay. What? Good pivot, right? I got in trouble the first time I did that without the second slide. People were like, how can you do that about kittens? You can't mess with kittens. So here's the new social media law, okay? Ready? Social media success in only eight hours a day. Because if you're gonna get back in the trenches, right, it takes time, we don't have time, do we? I'm sorry, I have to say this. It takes time. There's no way around it. You're not gonna build those lifelong relationships and that deep engaged community unless you get, obviously not eight hours a day, okay? But, you know, the point is, is that you gotta put the time in, you can't just do it, you know, and schedule the post, set it and forget it anymore. We're losing people. Those are the people who set it and forget it. Too many people are posting stuff without engaging. People are actually creating what I call anti-social social media. It's that set it and forget it mentality, unfortunately doesn't work. It's not. How many people wanna get more engagement and wanna get more out of their social relationships? You gotta talk to people. So how to get real, okay? Another pivot. The gift to get is a huge opportunity. How many people give away their product? Okay, that's good. Like for free. I like that. It's about maybe 10% of the people here. I absolutely 100%, 1000% encourage you to give your product away every day. When I went to work for Fresh Diet, we had no idea how powerful this was gonna be and I've recreated this success in half a dozen other companies since then. We gave away free food every single day for over a year. Literally, sometimes twice a day, we gave away. A full week costs us like 80 bucks. Customers bought it for 190 bucks or something like that. Give it away. How fast are you gonna build trust and build engagement when you're giving your stuff away? And number two, the other reason for that is these people are all gonna come back and tell you what they think about your product. Now if your product is really good, they're literally gonna come back and sing your praises, right? So the exponential growth factor from that is amazing. So I encourage you guys to give it away. I like a lot of contests. I got a couple of really good contest examples. I'm gonna give you a minute. Freebies, giveaways. Behind the scenes, everybody loves behind the scenes. Again, people don't like to buy from companies they like to buy from people. Videos, how many of you guys are using videos actively? Okay, great opportunity video, not only for SEO purposes, et cetera. Share other people's content. Again, don't just share other people's content, share and put your spin on it. I'll talk about that more in a minute. Connect and build. Now your advocates are everywhere. People who retweet, people who share, people who like, people who comment. Those are the people you wanna seek out. Like for instance, I've had this whole, this clicker here the whole time that I haven't used it, but now I'm gonna use it. Cause if you look here, where are we? You know, John and Justin on this post, those are opportunities. They're an opportunity to connect, draw them out, give them a freebie or something and get them going. Get people involved. This is for another client of mine called Glasses Shop. We encourage people to take pictures of their new glasses when they, once they bought their new glasses and got them, and people love posting pictures and they loved it. Got people very, very involved. They got them involved. We did a contest around that. And people, you know, really liked it. Here's another interesting content piece. Everybody see that spinning? It's not the room. It's really that. Provocative content. It's kind of fun. I just posted that with nothing. There was no comments, no nothing. And people were like, oh, and they responded. You know, a lot of this is kind of trial and error. Sometimes you never know what's gonna resonate, but you try it. And some things will work. Some things won't work. Don't want things that don't work. Don't do it again. Here's your brand advocates. These are people who are commenting and sending you messages. If somebody's gonna send you a message, like I said earlier, respond quickly, solve their problem, answer their question, do whatever they can, and then draw them out, get them involved. Here's some great contest examples. It's Fresh Diet, which was a meal delivery diet company, like Nutri Systems, only the stuff was fresh. We did a contest where we asked people to take their food, put it on a plate, take a picture and send it to us. Now, what better way for us to get people to see how good our food looked, right? Than having somebody else take the picture. And nine out of 10 times, they created better pictures of the product than, you know, the guys on my marketing team did. So this was great and people loved it and it got trust and engagement built very quickly. We were creating a new delivery bag, so what do we do? I said, hey, wait, why don't we take those to resample, those three samples, and put them up on Facebook and see who, I mean, these are the people who are gonna be using it bad. Why don't they choose which one they wanna use? We did that, got a lot of great engagement. We did a Halloween costume contest. This is, oh boy, Amy, that's right. Amy is the one who won that. Talking five years ago, I still remember her name, by the way. Amy won this contest, she wasn't on the diet yet, but she wanted to be on the diet so bad, she wanted to play this contest and everybody was playing and so she built herself a fresh diet bag. Here's another great contest that I love. We asked people to go out and use those memes that you put the motivational poster on the wall thing and we asked people to create their meme poster and this is what they came back with now. I have to tell you that we did wash this bag when it came back. More contest examples, and these are simple ones. John Lennon's birthday, we created a fresh dietize, a Beatles lyric. We did that in honor, and how many people came back and rewrote Imagine to Imagine There's No Diet and the guy who won the contest did the entire song so well that we went out, we asked him to video himself and then that went viral when he sent that in because it was just amazing. These things kind of, they snowball, they turn into giant opportunities and one thing turns into another thing and another contest turns into another contest. Fresh diet, haiku, create a haiku around the diet. You guys can use that one all day long. Video contest, we asked people to create a video testimony and I wish I had time to run some of these videos for you because they were really, really fun but you'd be surprised when your advocates get a hold of a contest like this and they can win a month of diet or a week of diet or whatever of your product, how well they respond. And so this guy did, he literally pulled up to the drive-in and said to the drive-in, yeah, hi, do you have fresh food? And the lady went, fresh food, what kind of fresh food? They had no idea. Do you have cheesecake? Cheesecake, what? Anyway, we did a recipe contest. This is Donna, the winner with our head chef. And not only did she win with her recipe but we brought her into the kitchen, we made the food, we invited some of her friends in to eat. Just a great opportunity, really built engagement and trust pretty quickly. We wanted to show how spotless our kitchens were. So we literally just walked around with a flip phone and had our chef video and he walked around the spotless kitchen and boom, we just saw just how clean our kitchens were and proved the point, bless you. We wanted to give something back so we created a spoof of undercover boss. Now, if you guys Google undercover boss, the fresh diet, you'll see a video, I think it's probably one of my favorite videos I've ever done. It's super funny and we created it in one day. Cost us less than $1,000 to do between editing and filming. By the way, everybody say hello to Benjamin. Benjamin's my executive filmer over there and videographer, he's also my kid. So, talking, we hear it in WordPress land, if you will. And the first time I came to WordPress and spoke, I created a presentation called the blog is the center of your universe. And that's kind of what it still is, is that when you create content, the goal of the content is to put it somewhere and maybe it's your blog or maybe it's YouTube or whatever, but from that main point, then turn around and, sorry, my apologies, cross pollinate that back throughout all of the social media properties and get it out there. Now, some of it has to be changed. Obviously, a tweet is gonna be different from a Facebook post, which is gonna be different from a YouTube video, but once you create that content and it starts to resonate, you really wanna amplify that content all across all social media properties. I call this the hub and spoke method. And another one of my favorite maxims is forget your ABCs, always use ABP, where ABP is always be promoting. A couple of years ago, a company I was working with had this deluge of orders around the holiday time and I walked into the call center all my exhausted reps were like dying and as I walk in, I see four of them over in the corner doing the electric slide because we happen to have a lull. So what do I do? I grab my camera, which by the way, I walk around all the time with my phone ready to video or I'll have a regular camera with me that takes really high definition video. Always be promoting means go out there and always look for those opportunities to turn something into a great connecting device on social. So to do an electric slide, so I grab my phone, I videotape about 20, 30 seconds of it. Five minutes later, it's up on Facebook being tweeted out, it's up on our blog, blah, blah, blah. And people are commenting and just having a blast with it. Like they don't know who these people are, but now they're kinda getting a sense of who they are and their personalities and fun and we work so hard and now it kinda turns into a great, great connection device. So, usual real voice. One of the things that I love to do is take news and turn it into my own particular content. Like for instance, a couple of years ago when Mark Zuckerberg turned 30, I wrote a nice little blast about him from my column in Target Marketing Magazine. Not a promo. Called Facebook Marketing's Greedy Petulant Child. A lot of people commented, responded on that, got a lot of views, put it up other places too, LinkedIn got a lot of comments there on LinkedIn. So take stuff and put your own spin on it instead of just pushing the content out there. Don't just share people, make it your own. Other ways to become a thought leader? How many people are using LinkedIn publishing platform? Amazing opportunity to get your thoughts heard. Okay, you can like write all of these great blog posts, you can take stuff, repurpose it, you can write summaries on LinkedIn and then draw them back to your Facebook, to your blog and then promote it all over the place. It's a giant opportunity. At one point it was like, okay, I'm getting a lot of success here with my blog and then I'm getting a lot of success here with LinkedIn publishing. But I know one thing that I've got 3,000 followers on LinkedIn and whoever comments and everything it gets amplified through their own media sphere on LinkedIn. So I can reach potentially thousands more people. So I had this great debate where I put it. So then I started doing a little bit here, a little bit there, custom stuff for here, custom stuff for there. And it really kind of worked very nicely because LinkedIn is just an amazing opportunity if you guys aren't doing long form blog posts on LinkedIn. I encourage you to do that. How many people use social groups on LinkedIn or Facebook as a way to get their stuff amplified? Another fantastic opportunity. I have my own group on LinkedIn called Direct Marketing Questions and Answers. Great way to make a name for yourself. Same thing, I have one for social media called Social Media Marketing Questions and Answers. Have the same thing on Facebook. Blog, video log, write, do video, videos, huge. This is just my LinkedIn publishing platform page. Same thing on, that's the group. That's it on Facebook. More ideas for you. We already talked about that actually. We talked about becoming a thought leader. We talked about always being promoting, amplifying and sharing, just to recap. Create share worthy content. Here's some good examples. I'm gonna wrap up real quick after this because I'm running out of time and I'll take some questions. I like funny stuff too. One of my former clients called Mega Motor Madness. They sold motorcycles, scooters, ATVs, stuff like that. We put some fun stuff up on there for people to like and comment on. Humor definitely works. So some more tips. You guys using hashtags when you post stuff, even on Facebook, right? Okay, good. You guys tagging other people in businesses where appropriate when you publish, when you post stuff. Yes, yes, okay. I'll take your word for it. Pictures and graphics, you know they're a must, right? Okay. Video we already talked about. How many people create events on Facebook, even use Google Plus to create events? That had great opportunity. I do webinars all the time where I use events, you know on Google Plus and Facebook and stuff like that to turn them into, you know, into people who are interested and get people involved. It's a great opportunity. Again, here's a great example for one of my clients called Upfront Foods. They sell granola and just granola, great granola. You know, I like to use this because they're tagging, you know, the appropriate people, they're using the right hashtags. It's just a great, great way to, you know, make sure that that message gets amplified as much as it can. And lastly, you know, the days of that big and honest, anonymous corporation are over. You know, these days it's all about real people doing real things. So I'll leave you with Debbie. Debbie was the customer service manager at the Fresh Dye, sorry, at the Fresh Dye. And you know, not only did people know her picture, they knew who she was when she called in because we put her out there, you know, they knew who her sons were, they knew what sports her kids played. We basically, we built the personalities, the personas of our internal staff, we did it from our president, and this is just not just this company, it's all the companies, but I just have so many great examples from that company because it was the first one. Everybody in the company, from the chefs to the drivers who delivered our food, we built personas around them. And it was just a great opportunity. It really helps seal the deal, if you will, with, you know, people who are potentially you're gonna buy or are currently buying your products. Anyway, I will put a copy of this presentation up on SlideShare, I'll also put it up, I'll give it to the WordCamp guys and they'll put it up as well wherever they do that. I'll take some questions now, but if you give me your card, I will email you a link to the full two hour version of the nine immutable laws. And I thank you very much for your time. Thanks for coming and spending time here with me. Thank you. Thank you. Any questions? Any answers? Don't be shy. I don't bite. You, white shirt, white hat. It is, if you have the little, if you look at your, see where it says when you go to LinkedIn, thank you. When you go to LinkedIn it says, you know, publish something, a status update, a picture, whatever. There's a little pencil. You click on the pencil and you can publish a long form blog post with that. Thank you.