by Tim Staples
So we decided to take the opposite tack. Instead of simply filming the sharp and polished superstar the way everyone else always had, we turned him into a vagabond. We pasted an ill-groomed beard on him, gave him a bit of bulk under some droopy clothes, and put him in the streets of Madrid, where he tried to make people notice him by doing tricks with a soccer ball. Without a disguise, he wouldn’t have lasted five seconds before being mauled by a mob of fans, but because he looked like a down-on-his-luck everyman, nobody cared or paid attention to him.
For over an hour he performed trick after trick, growing more and more desperate to attract people’s attention. He kicked the ball to a passerby, who merely tapped it back to him and then scurried away. He playfully asked a woman for her phone number, but was rebuffed. He then dribbled the soccer ball in and around people, upping the ante on his tricks. Midway through his soccer hijinks, he flopped down on the ground in mock exhaustion.
Despite all of his best efforts, Ronaldo in disguise was pretty much ignored. Until finally, a curious little kid showed some interest in his sleight-of-foot act. He returned the ball, and a bit of an interplay between the two unfolded. The bum asked the kid to show him what he could do, and the kid lobbed the ball up and down a few times before returning it. He had some skill! The disheveled man started dribbling, asking him to try and take the ball off him. The kid did it! The man picked the ball up and gave him a high-five, then he asked him to hold on for a second. He started pulling at his beard, pulled it all the way off, and revealed his true self: international superstar Cristiano Ronaldo.
Within a matter of seconds the square was packed. People stopped and flocked around him. Ronaldo barely had time to sign the ball and to give it to the kid before he was rushed off to safety by his security detail, surrounded by a mob of screaming fans who now recognized their hero.
This was a very shareable video because it showed Ronaldo in a way he had never been seen before. It was also counterprogramming to the hero worship of celebrities, allowing one of them to become invisible as an ordinary citizen for a moment. It didn’t offer any specific commentary or point of view on the cult of personality. But the mere fact that people were ignoring such a huge star, even though he was in an open public square displaying his immense skills with a ball—the exact thing that is the cause of his fame in the first place—was commentary enough. People were intrigued and drawn in.
Of course, before the video launched and we were showing the rough cut to viewers, everyone told us it was great, but it was just way too long. The video was over 4 minutes. That’s an eternity in traditional advertising. It’s like eight Super Bowl spots. For much of it, nothing really happens. Ronaldo even looks like he wants to take a nap at one point!
We were unilaterally told by experts in the field that we had to simply edit and cut the video in half. Even 2 minutes was more than the fickle internet could really handle.
Good thing we didn’t listen. These 4 minutes launched the global brand ROC. In addition to over 100 million views, more than 2,500 articles were written about the video in 22 languages around the world. The brand became a pop-culture sensation, and we had spent a tiny fraction of the cost of traditional advertising.
For any major brand, this is a virtual template for launching a new product line. And it was done by merely flipping the script.
When the Internet Flips the Script on You
The internet has a mob mentality and loves to disrupt and upset anything that feels like it’s from the ruling establishment, especially self-aggrandizing corporate promotion. Flipping the script on a brand’s best-laid promotional plans is a constant and favorite activity on social media.
When this happens, brands need to be fast-footed in their response and open to adapt and to change their initial strategy. Their response determines whether they will dig themselves a deeper hole or build a mountain of goodwill. Defensive posturing and pushback are typically met with internet mobs turning the volume up on their negative comments. In other words, the best way for a brand to respond when the internet flips its script is to instantly accept the new reality.
This is a lot like the dictum in improvisational comedy, the “Yes, and” rule that stipulates that you cannot deny, you can only accept and move on. If you are engaging in improv repartee with someone, you must go with the flow of whatever they do or say to keep upping the ante. You cannot deny the reality they’ve created. Say someone makes the shape of a gun with their hand and says, “Stick ’em up.” You can’t say, “That’s not a gun, that’s your finger.” That would be tantamount to saying “No,” which is not allowed. You must say “Yes” and accept that the hand is now a gun, and then respond to that reality. Brands that have the script flipped on them need to have that same sense of humor—whether they like it or not.
Walmart was put in this position when it launched an online promotion for hip-hop artist Pitbull to perform a free concert in the parking lot of a hometown’s Walmart. The contest was sponsored by Sheets Energy Strips, which are Listerine-like breath strips, and the rules were straightforward: Whichever town received the most votes online during the designated time period would win the concert.
The idea was to promote community pride. Everyone was supposed to vote for their town and to tell all their friends on social media to vote, so they would end up with Pitbull jamming at their local Walmart. Did the internet comply? Not a chance! The mob mentality of the internet decided instead to make a joke at Walmart’s expense, rallying around some obscure town to drive the show into the middle of nowhere. Mobs love it when you give them an opportunity for power, even over the silliest things.
When the campaign was launched, David Thorpe and Jon Hendren of the website Something Awful mischievously asked people to vote for Kodiak, Alaska, an island town with a population of 6,191. It was the smallest town in America to carry a Walmart. As the prank built steam and Kodiak gained votes in far greater numbers than its population, Walmart was faced with two options: Deny what was happening and scrap the promotion as rigged, or just play along.
Smartly, Walmart rolled with the punches and didn’t try to stop the movement. Almost more important, neither did Pitbull. He posted a video with clips of his current world tour, saying he would go anywhere for his fans, and invited the people who came up with the joke to “follow me to Kodiak.”
And so, because the internet flipped the script on Walmart, Pitbull flew to Kodiak. After being received in local fashion and gifted with bear repellent, he rocked the Walmart parking lot as advertised. In the end, both Walmart and Pitbull received far more and far better attention than they would have if the promotion had simply played out as originally envisioned.
Flipping the script, whether it’s by going small when everyone is going big, putting the shoe on the other foot, casting against type, or playing along if the script is flipped on your brand, is the yin to riding the wave’s yang. They are two sides of the same coin when it comes to attaching your message to the vox populi, or bucking it altogether. This can be applied to any message you want to put out, even on topics that are not obviously exciting, from community issues, to social good or dentistry. It’s a way to take the tedious and make it into the exciting.
Rule 8
Know Your Platforms
Shawn Mendes is a global superstar. He is the first pop artist to have four number-one hits before the age of 20. He headlines tours around the globe and has a whopping 100 million–plus followers on social media. But it wasn’t always this way. Mendes didn’t go to pop-star university or get discovered after ten years of touring in clubs. He made it by simply creating his own fan base on the internet.
Growing up in Pickering, Ontario, a smallish town outside Toronto, Mendes always knew that he wanted something bigger. So, at the age of 14, he learned to play the guitar and started posting videos on Vine, in which he played 6-second covers of songs by Justin Bieber, Ed Sheeran, and Adele. What Mendes lacked in formal music training he made up tenfold with raw talent, m
agnetic charm, and an innate understanding of how to connect with people online. He posted new videos religiously and quickly accrued a loyal following, running up 1 million followers on Vine and 400,000 on Twitter—all from his parents’ house in Pickering.
This all came naturally to Mendes, who told Rolling Stone, “I was one of those kids who was just always on the Internet, always on YouTube, so it was easy for me to do it. It’s not work. It’s just fun.”*
That “fun” led Mendes to being discovered on YouTube by talent manager Andrew Gertler, who immediately flew Mendes and his family to New York and put him in the studio. Gertler soon landed Mendes a recording deal with Island Records. Mendes’s first single followed shortly thereafter. It rocketed to number one on iTunes and put him on tour with global pop star Taylor Swift and eventually on his own headlining tour.
Mendes’s story shows the incredible power of social platforms like YouTube, Twitter, and Instagram to connect with audiences and build a large and passionate fan base outside the traditional Hollywood power structure. These platforms give everybody the chance to share their stories and talents with the world.
In this chapter, we’re going to dig deep into the actual platforms to gain a thorough understanding of all of the intricacies and technical details that you need to know to be successful. I want to arm you with the know-how to look at all of the platform options and understand where your type of content might be a good fit, and how it can be specifically tailored to break through.
The stakes are high. There are myriad platforms, and they are changing and evolving every day. What worked yesterday might be a death knell tomorrow, and no matter how sharp your content is, if you don’t understand all the different options, your efforts will fail.
Having said that, in the words of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy’s author Douglas Adams, which legendary sci-fi author Arthur C. Clarke called the best advice that can be given to humanity: “Don’t panic.”
Several times a year we see real anxiety set in across the brand community as a report comes out that some platform is changing its algorithm to reposition all their content. “Facebook now limiting status updates, feed reaches fewer followers. Is this going to lead to the death of online video?”
No, it isn’t.
People bang their heads against their keyboards in frustration, write angry posts about how Mark Zuckerberg is killing their business, and cry foul about the ever-changing nature of the bourgeoning industry they’ve chosen to work in. They spend hours and hours and hard-earned money to rejigger their messages—only to receive news a month later that the algorithm is changing yet again.
If you believe the tech news, you will constantly feel like you need a team of MIT data scientists to keep up with all the latest platform changes. But I am here to tell you not to panic. Sure, the algorithms will change, and yes, that may affect how your content is viewed or shared in some way. But the fact of the matter is that if you focus on the big-picture concepts that are outlined in this book, you can consistently outperform your competition, no matter what algorithm changes come your way.
This is why I will spend a lot of time, in this chapter and the next, explaining all the different ways in which these platforms affect you and how you can adapt to them in order to maximize your results. The key is to conceptually understand the motivations and incentives that drive these platforms, to fundamentally realize what they are built to do, and how they all fit together to form our social ecosystem, so that you can make that system work for you.
A Big-Picture View
Before we dive into the specific platforms, let’s take a step back and look at the idea of social networks as a whole. For us, there are three big-picture concepts around the philosophy of social media that are essential to understand.
1. Social networks were built for their users.
This may sound obvious, but it’s surprisingly counterintuitive. Most people, even experts in our field, don’t understand this.
Look back at traditional networks, both TV and radio. They were built from the ground up to serve one master only: the advertisers. They exist only to offer an audience to brands that want to pay to promote their products on the airwaves they control.
But isn’t that also true for all the social media platforms as well? What is Facebook if not a massive audience-gathering mechanism with billions of eyeballs available for a price? The difference is that social platforms weren’t necessarily built for that purpose. They were created to allow people to connect and share information about their lives. That is their (original) sole reason for being.
I can’t tell you how many brand boardrooms I’ve been in where the executives treat social media platforms as some kind of postmodern advertising delivery system for brands. They talk in terms of “impressions,” “paid distribution,” and “conversion rate.” As if Instagram was created just so that they could sell their candy bar to some kid in Indianapolis.
But social networks are a different beast. There, the exploitation of the audience for profit is an add-on, not the essence, as it is in traditional broadcasting. True, it may be crucial, and the source of billions of dollars in revenue, but it’s not a core functionality—and this makes all the difference.
Whether you are a brand or a personality, to succeed on these platforms you need to always understand the mindset of the users, as well as the unwritten rules that define the ecosystem. You are effectively an uninvited guest on these platforms—no one is checking their Facebook account to see the latest deal from a wireless carrier—so you had better act accordingly.
This comes back to Rule 3: Focus on value. As a guest on these platforms, you want to be focusing on providing value to the viewers instead of taking it. You’ll make a lot more friends that way.
My partner, Nick Reed, often tells an anecdote of being at a cocktail party and how to apply social etiquette. If you were talking to friends and a new person stormed up to your group and immediately asked to borrow $20 for cab fare, what would you say? How fast would you run away? Conversely, if that same person approached you and introduced themselves with a handshake and a smile, and you spent the next 30 minutes having a pleasant and lively conversation about life, your kids, and how much you both hate commuting, how much better would that feel? And if after that conversation, that person told you, with a hint of embarrassment, that they had misplaced their wallet and asked if they could borrow $20 for a cab home, would you loan it to them? I bet you would.
That is the same mindset that you should take to social media.
2. Each platform is unique.
While there is a common core to all social platforms, they are also deeply unique, each with its own purpose and modus operandi—a deep focus on a specific problem that it is trying to solve for its users.
They all do it in their own unique language, which is a combination of specifically formatted text, photos, videos, and emojis that guide how people communicate with their friends, family, and followers. Each has its own rhythm and cadence in terms of how often people post, how deep or shallow the content is, and how active or passive the user experience is.
For years, people have been talking about how different YouTube is from traditional television. This is certainly true, but in terms of user experience, Instagram is as different from YouTube as YouTube is from TV, Twitter is as different from Snapchat as WhatsApp is from Facebook. They are all totally and completely different universes, each with its own rules and guidelines. Always keep this in mind as we set out to understand and conquer the various social platforms.
Later in this chapter I will delve into all the major platforms in detail. We’ll talk through the ones that we view as being the most valuable for brands, including YouTube, Facebook, and Instagram, as well as a bucket of what we refer to as Direct Messaging Platforms, including Twitter, Snapchat, and Reddit. In my opinion, you can’t even begin to succeed on social media until you understand the differences that make each platform unique.
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p; 3. One size does not fit all.
This should be obvious by now, but because of the differences among the platforms, you must vary your strategy and execution for each one. That is, you can’t throw a YouTube video on Facebook and hope it works because, well, it won’t.
In the brand world, a philosophy of “content everywhere” has emerged over the past few years. This usually means that most corporate brands take their commercially heavy-handed videos and spread them across all their social media channels. Of course, since Instagram won’t allow a video over 60 seconds, the brand will simply make a shorter version for that platform, but it’s still the same video.
This is extremely misguided. Imagine Fox TV partnering with theater chain AMC to launch each episode of Dancing with the Stars as a feature film cut-down on 2,000 screens across the United States and making it a podcast at the same time. It doesn’t make sense. Who wants to go to a movie theater to watch a talent show? Who wants to listen to a dance program? That’s not how we consume our entertainment.
In the same way, you can’t take a video that was custom-made for Facebook and jam it onto Snapchat, or take an image-heavy strategy for Instagram and think it is going to have any success on YouTube. They’re completely different worlds, and they require different tools, styles, and cadences to be effective. And yes, doing this right takes a lot of work, but it’s the only way to ensure success.
Looking at these three guiding principles, you’ll find it becomes obvious that the overhyped concept of “content everywhere” basically translates to “effective nowhere.” My recommendation is to always take the complete opposite route: Instead of spreading yourself too thin and trying to master every platform, which will only make you feel overwhelmed with the complexity and exhausted by the constant failure, you should start by diving deep into one platform. Focus on the platform that suits your needs best and create a test-and-learn methodology (which I will outline in the next chapter) that allows you to experiment your way to success and eventually a mastery of your platform of choice.
