Ian Greenleigh: Well, I’m a nut about authenticity. I believe that authenticity is supreme in all things, and too often when I read a business book I don’t detect that, and it’s hard for me to connect with the author, and maybe this is just me, but I don’t often finish them.I wanted to write a book that I would read and a lot of that to me was I wanted to have a lot of myself shine through, in perfections and all, failures and all. I think, in business if you’re honest with yourself you’ve had more failures usually then you’ve had successes, but those successes outshine your failures because they are so tremendous. And that’s how I kind of think about social media in general–it moves so fast you need to experiment a lot, you need to do new things and try new things frequently, and a lot of those things will fall flat.But I also think that there is an element to social media that’s more forgiving, and that people can be so inundated by information and activity that the chances that they’ll really notice your mistake and hone in on it are very limited. So it’s a very forgiving atmosphere, and it’s great for people who like trying things and like experimentation and innovation. So for me to tell the accurate story, the authentic story of my journey through social media and the things I’ve learned I had to include those wrinkles that aren’t necessarily super flattering, but are part of the authentic story.
Interviewer: They make you very human and I think you’re right; you said something that we talk a lot about here and that is that people buy from people, and we need those points of human connection and we’ve spent the last few decades really trying to strip the human out of our business interactions and it doesn’t work.
Ian Greenleigh: Yes, exactly. I think that when we try to systematize everything and automate everything and perfect it and go towards four-hour work weeks and things like that we’re really trying to take some of the charm and the appeal out of business and it may work, but I don’t think we’re going to have a great time doing it necessarily. And my ideal is to live a life where my business is my passion, and passion is a very human thing; robots and machines don’t feel passion. So to take the humility out of your work and to take some of the kind of admitting to failure and things like that, and plus, that’s essentially taking the humanness out of it, and I think it’s less appealing for people who want to do business with you, because they are just seeing some kind of edifice that is not the real you, and so they’re not really going to want to do business with this kind of squeaky clean corporation.
If you think about the difference in marketing for instance between two of these big behemoths, Microsoft and Apple, Microsoft is very squeaky clean. Their marketing is all about the products and the superiority of their products and that may appeal to a certain segment of the population and certainly it’s a very successful company. But what resonates with me and I think others, and is responsible for a lot of the success of the products like the iPhone is Apple’s view that they should show how these products affect your everyday life. They are all about the interface between your life and their products; they focus on (inaudible 00:4:36) of these things, and that I think has been a very successful formula for them.
Interviewer: I think you’re absolutely right; and brands across the board have really been arrogant and they’ve been allowed to be arrogant because there was no mechanism for consumers to say, wait, over here, over here. And really, social media is forcing them to think in new ways. And I think to it’s core you’re right; Apple really, that’s been a part of its philosophy right from the beginning, as understanding and showing how these products live in your life, and I think we’re going to see more big brands have to kind of adopt that model in order to stay relevant in the age where the consumer is really taking more power.
Ian Greenleigh: Exactly.
Interviewer: One of the tactics you suggest in terms of connecting with influencers is commenting on thought leaders blogs, and I love this because I see over and over again people using a facet of something like barraging people on Twitter, trying to connect with somebody on Twitter and of course all the great influencers and you talk about this in your book. You’re just bombarded and you’re not really adding any value to them when you’re just tweeting them or coming up with the occasional quip. And you really offer a step-by-step process in your book on how to integrate the various tactics and personalize for each target, whether it’s how to get a new job, or how to engage a journalist. Can we talk a little bit about the engagement strategies that you have found successful when engaging thought leaders?
Ian Greenleigh: Yes, I think that your goal should be to three dimensionalized yourself. And what I mean is, when I was in sales I learned very quickly that if you just called someone up and tried to sell them something, and that’s all you did, the odds that you’d get hung up on were very high. If you engage with them first beforehand through any other medium you would become not just the person that called, but the person that had also reached out in this other way. So you start essentially as a sketch; that’s the first way that you appear in this person’s mind. And every channel through which you build a relationship becomes your image in their mind becomes closer to the real thing, it becomes closer to three dimensional. So in my mind it doesn’t matter where you start as long as you’re building value and being useful and approachable through each channel. So yes, blog comments are often overlooked because they’re not instantaneous and people prefer that direct connection through Twitter. But I think blog comments have some secret advantages and one of them is your record is kind of permanent on their blog.
Interviewer: Yeah.
Ian Greenleigh: They’ll also be notified through email and sometimes other surfaces of that blog comment. I think they probably get far less blog comments than they do tweets, which means that your message is going to have less competition with other messages, which just sets it apart if the social media landscaping in general, vying for that attention through that competition. And it’s longer form; you can leave a full thought there and not just kind of a series of messages.
Interviewer: Yes, it’s more meaningful, too, in many ways. The value you’re adding to somebody because as you say, the thought, the opportunity to leave a more thoughtful response, and also the links back both to your site, but just the credibility it gives the person who’s written the article; because so many people who visit a blog don’t leave a message–even great thought leaders don’t get a lot of comments, and you point that out in your book, too. So when somebody actually does take the time to add value to other readers or just spark a dialogue, it really does get more notice.
Ian Greenleigh: Yes. There’s a story in my book; I’m a big comic book geek, and one of my favorites is called The Surrogate, and this guy Robert [Venditty] has his blog and I was so amazed that this author of this series of books that was turned into a Bruce Willis movie, and by no means is it some kind of Indy comic. The fact that he had this blog and very few people were commenting and trying to connect with him was very strange to me.
So I commented on his blog, just told him how much I liked the book and instead of just commenting back he actually reached out to me with an email and it was great. It was such a (inaudible 9:44) because the other day we hadn’t spoken since then and this was back in like 2009 maybe. I emailed him and said, you know, what happened there, that dynamic actually is a big part of why I wrote my book. I started to realize that you can reach people through social media that otherwise you couldn’t reach. I would have had to go through his publisher or some other gatekeeper, and instead, we formed a real connection there. And I sent him a signed copy of my book as thanks, and we’re staying in touch, and I think that’s such a cool early instance in my life of this bigger idea. I think gatekeepers don’t really exist anymore, if you know where to look.
Interviewer: And also you talk about more and more gatekeepers are starting to encroach on social media, so the time really is now to get in there before they really get in there and shut things down.
Ian Greenleigh: Yes, I think there will always be open side doors, and you just need to find them. And as the number of inbound inquires and inbound activities go up as we see with all communications of technology over time the technological and human gatekeepers inevitably arrive. And one interesting way that’s happening is with celebrity. Now a lot of people assume that okay, it must not have really been (inaudible 00:11:17) at the helm of their social media account, but I did a lot of research for the book and really it is frequently the person you think it is. So you do have an opportunity to reach out and talk with celebrities if that’s useful to you. For me it’s not the best thing in the world, but whatever. But someone like Ashton Kucher who is definitely an early adopter, even on a larger scale, not just among celebrities, but an early adopter of technology like Twitter. I think he was tweeting before I was, and I do this stuff for a living. And if he’s an investor in a lot of companies, he came up with an interesting system that I think you’ll see a lot more celebrities actually adopt at this point, where he’ll have kind of a queue of tweets that he almost proposes, so like 50 tweets that he wants to tweet out, and the ultimate decision makers as to whether those tweets go out is his agency–people at his agency. So they can kind of pull the trigger on them and he just proposes them. And this is because–and I don’t even remember what it is, but I wrote about it in the book–he had some kind of scandal. He wrote something that was objectionable.
Interviewer: Yeah, it was very insensitive. It was the Penn State thing I think, where the sexual assaults at Penn State, yeah.
Ian Greenleigh: Jerry Sandusky, exactly.
Interviewer: Yeah.
Ian Greenleigh: So, Ashton Kucher tweeted something insensitive about the Penn State child sexual abuse scandal. For good reason after that there was a lot of fall out and he decided to kind of re-evaluate how he approaches Twitter. The system he came up with is really interesting. He kind of proposes a queue of tweets and then his agency will decide which of those tweets are appropriate. I think that it’s the vast majority of them that get out of there, but it’s just the failsafe in case his head is not in the same place as his agency’s; and they have ultimate authority over what to pull the trigger on. So I think that was an early indicator that we’ll see more of these systems come out that are meant to kind of mediate between influencers, celebrities, brands, and their audiences to avoid these kinds of unexpected or tone deaf [crisisees].
Interviewer: And you can’t be on top of every issue at every moment, and the temptation of course is to wade into something without, and I think that was the case in the Ashton Kucher case where he didn’t really understand the complexity of the whole thing when he tweeted that tweet, and before something would have gone out by, and I have certainly been that gatekeeper for a celebrity, part of the job is to make sure that you understand the whole of the situation before something goes out. So I do think that there’s something lost, but there’s also something gained in the long term for that celebrity brand.
Ian Greenleigh: Yes, and I think it’s a pretty cool model, because people kind of assume that it’s this binary thing, that’s it’s either someone highly influenced like a Fortune 500 CEO, or a celebrity, it’s either all of them or it’s just fake, right? It’s like ghost written by their PR manager. And I think that sometimes it is one of the two there. I think that there’s also this middle ground and I think Ashton Kucher is an innovator in this regard because it’s not either or; it really is his voice, his word-for-word tweets except maybe once or twice a month, or I have no idea how frequent it is, or infrequent, one of those tweets just doesn’t reach his audience because for whatever reason it’s not going to be appropriate. But still, it’s his stuff; he’s writing it. And that’s great, and so that’s not this binary situation where it’s everything a celebrity wants you to hear or just completely contrived by their publicist.
Interviewer: Yeah, I think that’s true. I love your concept of using Facebook and LinkedIn ads to target a particular person with a pitch. So okay let’s say for example I’m doing PR for one of the many, many tech products and in an increasingly crowded space and heading off to CES, you know, what used to be called Consumer Electronics Show. How can I use social media ad targeting to get noticed by influencers and top journalists?
Ian Greenleigh: If you establish which ones are going to be covering that show, you can actually decide on a news peg. So before the show starts you start hearing rumors of what’s going to happen at the show, what are the big products that are going to unveiled, and what’s the story going to be at the show? Is it about tablets this year, is it about whatever. One of the best ways to get someone’s attention is to challenge a commonly-held perception like that. So if you start saying that there’s this ground swell; a CES this year is going to be about, I don’t know, about . . .
Interviewer: Medical I’m hearing.
Ian Greenleigh: Okay, so there you go. I have no idea, and I’m not going this year, so if it’s about medical this year, how can you peg your product to that trend? Or how can you challenge that and say essentially it’s about this category that my product belongs, and that would be just one way to peg it to something. Or you can do a direct approach by just making sure that your product is showing up in someone’s news feed and on the sidebar of their Facebook feed, and that there’s something about it that attracts them to it, and that they know that you’re going to be at the CES.
So one way to do that is to take out a Facebook ad and you can actually do things like anyone that is working at CNN; that could be a targeting category, although it’s not going to 100% accurate, because the people that are with CNN and the people that are working at CNN are going to be at CES are few and far between. There might be, I don’t know, ten people with CNN who are actually going to make it there, but this is a network effect that works, right, because if you can actually show your ads to someone that will see it but not necessarily be relevant to them they might share it with someone that they know is going to be at CES, but you don’t know about them, so you can anticipate it. So they have more knowledge than you in the situation.
What I would do in either case is to create a custom landing page for journalists that kind of pitches your product in relation to a larger story that you think is going to be hot at CES. And then target these news organizations by employer so you can choose, I want to sell this ad to the people that work at this company. Or you can do one-to-one advertising which is much more complex. I probably can’t do it all in the podcast interview, but basically if you get someone’s Facebook ID you can add them to a list, and show your ad to only members of that list; so taking it to its logical stream that means that you can show your ads to single people; specific ads to single people on the list.
Interviewer: And I have to say Ian you do a great job of walking people through that process in your book I’ve actually done what you suggest and it’s really well laid out and you also say to people, “Hey, target me.” and I’ll respond and let you know if this works. And I love that, that’s a great way. Your book not only shows people but it adds value by saying, hey, I’ll validate that for you.
Ian Greenleigh: Yeah, it’s pretty cool. I did a webinar for [Vokus], which is a Swedish this public relations and marketing tool, where I walked the webinar attendees through this process and did the same kind of thing. I challenged them to try to target me, and about a day after the webinar I started to see all sorts of goofy ads that were using my picture and all sorts of ways in trying to get my attention, because I felt they knew that they’d be up against other ads that were targeting me, so they had to stand out, and discolor it, or ad photo shop effects and all sorts of weird stuff. But it was cool, because yes, it was validation in not only that they were able to do it, but validation that the things in my book are still accurate.
Interviewer: Indeed. And it builds on that concept of newsjacking, which you also talk about in the book, the concept of inserting yourself into breaking news or in an existing story by offering something fresh, or unexpected, or extremely timely and positioning yourself as an expert in that; it’s so valuable.
Ian Greenleigh: Yes, one of the newsjacking techniques that I talk about in that webinar was actually–I don’t know if you’re a Breaking Bad viewer, but there was an episode where they said, as a euphemism for taking someone out, they said, we’re going to send them to the Belize.
Well, the country of Belize, the tiny country Caribbean nation between Mexico and Guatemala is one of my favorite places in the world, and they actually newsjacked that story and took out a full page ad and a few quotation things, “Hey, we’d love to have Brian Cranston (inaudible 00:21:48) at Belize.” And it got a lot of cool media coverage for it. It was just the traveling tourism bureau there.
So, I started doing this spot experiment, where okay, how could they actually newsjack this social media. And one of the ways was to target travel journalists on Facebook with this ad technique that we already talked about. And that actually is doing custom created ads for encouraging travel journalists to kind of experience this hidden gem of the Caribbean or whatever it was. But also just kind of playing on the whole like, let’s send them to Belize mien, that Breaking Bad. It inadvertently started without even the country’s participation. But that was an opportunity to use all the resources available, traditional PR, advertising, social advertising, Twitter; I’m sure their Twitter account went up by quite a bit as well, so if you watch for these opportunities, they happen seldomly, but when they do it’s a great way to kind of surround sound people with your message.
Interviewer: And you need to move quickly, too.
Ian Greenleigh: Yes, definitely. Some of this is because ad approvals take from a few hours to a few days sometimes. So you need to realize the news cycle being 24 hours you must move quickly. But there are certain things you can do to be prepared for things to happen, and that’s just kind of know, like have an account set up with a domain provider so that you can buy newsjacking relevant domains really quickly. You can make sure that you’ve got kind of all of the tools that you’ll need in order photo shopped, you’re handy with Word Press, and you know how to create a quick landing page. You’ve got a Facebook ad account set up already, then when the story hits you’ll have far less preparation work to do.
Interviewer: Yeah, you’re not having to figure it out, and the concept of the time to dig a well and you used this in your book, “Before you’re thirsty.”
Ian Greenleigh: Yeah, exactly.
Interviewer: There was a recent report that social media jobs are going to be gone ten years from now; that the skills that specialists now will just be assumed in any given job. Do you think that’s true?
Ian Greenleigh: Yes, I think it’ll happen probably sooner than ten years, and I hope it does. You know, there’s no one out there that has a fax machine specialist; it’s a communication channel.
Interviewer: Yes.
Ian Greenleigh: And these are skills that everyone should have. And on the other end of it unfortunately they are not being taught, you know. One of the things in the book is saying, all right, right now is trying to get my book into the different markets because when I talk to recently graduated marketing and business students they are not learning about social media. There are so many exceptions to the rule, and they are great progressive professors that are helping them, but it’s not very often that you’ll see people come out of marketing programs with a really well rounded social media education. There is also a trend of starting with social media programs with these schools, and that’s fine, but it’s the same kind of thing where if you only know (inaudible 00:25:18) social media and you don’t know about the other channels you might be just as disadvantaged when that does come about and social media just doesn’t exist anymore; then it’s someone who has a well rounded marketing degree but doesn’t know anything about social media.
Interviewer: I think you’re absolutely right, and this has come up for us over and over again. And the thing is that it’s in communication schools and classes and business schools, this stuff is being taught as if it is a channel that you should learn and you can pick it up along the way. And what they don’t understand is that fundamentally underneath the strategy of communications is actually changing, and that these tools are a reflection of that change. And it’s the way we’ve always wanted to be communicated to and with, and it’s a way we do in our personal lives and that’s coming more into play in our business worlds, but they are missing the point. And we’re watching people come through and graduate and not have an understanding of social media and what’s more, not have an understanding of how you effectively communicate with people.
And I know this because I get spammed with resumes by people who have given absolutely no thought to what it is that we do with the clients we serve. And I actually have a piece on my website about how you can communicate with me if you are interested in a job. And one out of every forty, maybe, reaches out the way that we tell them to. We actually lay out on our blog how to do that, and one in every forty do it. But instead they’ll give a full kind of, hey, as if they’ve known me or met me and it’s personalized but not really, that faux kind of personal thing. And it’s infuriating because the schools are pumping these people out.
Ian Greenleigh: Yes, that’s right, so that’s kind of two pronged in the other direction, teaching them that social media is no different, when it really is. And you touched on something that really is important. I don’t think that people’s underlying motivations or expectations really change much over time, but I do think that the way we communicate does, and the opportunities to communicate in the way we’ve always wanted, that’s what’s changing with social media. It’s allowing us to really communicate in a way we’ve always wanted to communicate, and to be spoken to in the way we’ve always wanted, to have the kind of participation in a brand that we’ve always wanted to have, the power. And it’s not that we didn’t want that before, it’s now we’re finally able to have that. So if you’re teaching students that it’s still this one way, bullhorn communication, scatter shot style, and then you’re failing them. You might as well not be teaching them about social media, because just look at the data. Look at your blog posts that are all about how great you are, and that you’re speaking at this next event. No one looks at those, no one reads those. Blog posts are about ideas, we Twitter about ideas, we try to help people, useful information, emotion, these are things that sell that work. And I wish it was easier than that, but if it was great to just blog about how great your company was then I’d suggest that to my clients, but I don’t because it doesn’t work, the data shows.
Interviewer: And you talk about becoming indispensible and Jay [Baer] talks about utility and I do think that is the fundamental. It’s as Jay says, “Its help, not hype.”
Ian Greenleigh: Yes, Jay is onto something there. Utility is at the core of everything that I do. I’m glad he’s turned that into kind of a book-like manifesto, because it’s a really important message. That utility is never ignored, it’s never failed. You always can get someone’s attention by being helpful, by being useful to them. It’s always been like this, but it makes it so much easier to be useful because you can reach people with social media that you couldn’t have reached people before, which is the premise of my book. So when you combine new landscape of access with this ease of being useful, you get opportunities that just did not exist before, and that’s amazing.
Interviewer: So, fundamentally it’s still all about building relationships and really thinking beyond one story or connection; it’s not taught in business schools or communications classes, and yet it absolutely fundamental to business success. And I think Ian that your book should be required reading for anybody who is in communications or marketing. And thank you so much for taking the time to talk to me today.
Ian Greenleigh: It was a lot of fun, and I appreciate it.
Susan McLennan
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