Vine
Launched: January 2013
As of June 2013, Vine gained 13 million users.
In the week following its launch, almost half the videos posted on Twitter originated from Vine.
Five Vine videos are shared every six seconds on Twitter.
Restrictions are a powerful thing. Although we often chafe at the limitations imposed by our marketing platforms, those limitations often bring out our storytelling creativity. That’s why we should all be paying close attention to Vine, the six-second looping-video platform Twitter recently bought and launched to a whole lot of hoopla. By the time this book comes out, we’re going to see how its restrictions have inspired some incredibly powerful storytelling. Currently, a lot of potential viewers pass over the opportunity to watch videos because they can’t be sure if they’re about to get sucked in for ten seconds or ten minutes, and that’s not counting the preroll. The promise of a six-second limit is going to encourage a lot of people to watch Vine videos, representing a great opportunity for the marketer with the right skill set.
Truth be told, I’m infatuated with Vine. I think that six-second promise is going to turn it into one of the major platforms in the marketplace. It’s the perfect product for our world—offering enough variety to satisfy the cravings of consumers constantly looking for their next dopamine hit, short enough for those time-pressed consumers to come back for more over and over again. One father I know told me that Vine was causing problems for his fifteen-year-old daughter, because she was staying up until three in the morning watching Vine videos. When asked why, she said it wasn’t intentional. She’d decide to shut down, but then she’d spot a new video, and think, “Well, just one more—it’s only six seconds.”
Brands and businesses need to make it a priority to figure out Vine. Much like Instagram and Facebook before it, it is skewing young in its early months, appealing to eight- to twenty-one-year-olds. In twenty-four to thirty-six months, however, that demo will increase substantially, and businesses will need to be there. This platform could do to YouTube what Twitter did to Facebook. There will always be longer-form stories that will be better suited for YouTube, but Vine will become the video-watching platform of choice, especially because of its integration with Twitter. For further incentive, consider this: as of March 2013, consumers share branded Vine videos four times as often as branded Internet videos.
My only regret is that the platform just isn’t mature enough for me to be able to tell you more about how best to use it. The best I can do is urge you to pay attention to how you edit your videos. A lot of people make the mistake of shooting an image for six straight seconds. That’s boring. Just as edits and cuts are what build rhythm and suspense into a full-length movie, edits and cuts are critical to storytelling on Vine. There will probably be one or two major changes to the platform in the near future, but I, along with the rest of you, will be working my ass off to figure out how to best use this amazing tool as it evolves. I’m currently trying to create a new agency to represent the best Viners in the world. Check back with me to see if I pulled it off by the time this book goes into print.
Snapchat
Launched: September 2011
60 million “snaps” are sent per day as of February 2013.
My Snapchat name is GaryVayner.
Launched in 2011, Snapchat, the service that allows users to send photos and videos that self-destruct in a matter of seconds, was immediately labeled a sexting platform. Many people would be surprised to discover that it’s actually used much more for circulating visual gags and jokes than dirty pictures. Snapchat was made for a world that can’t stand one minute of boredom, and that is fast becoming addicted to putting out content. I share, therefore I am. Whereas before, the Internet operated under the 90-9-1 rule—the principle that generally, 90 percent of Internet users consume content, 9 percent edit it, and merely 1 percent create it—apps like Snapchat are going to shift those ratios to reflect something more along the lines of a 75-20-5 rule. Snapchat is not for profound content, nor to produce anything that’s going to be treasured for eternity, or even analyzed as a case study one day. It’s where people will go for a quick laugh before moving on. Imagine the power of a brand or business that can jab well enough to become the source of choice for those little moments that get us through our day. It’s also a place where your content is likely to get more focused attention than on any other platform, because knowing that your content will disappear in seconds is incentive enough for consumers to make sure they don’t miss it.
As usual, this new platform has been derided for its low value. It’s not useful. No one will use it for anything important. It has no value. We’ve heard it all before. The debate swirling around the actual value of Snapchat is the same debate that was swirling around Facebook and Twitter not so long ago. Yet someone is clearly finding value in the platform when more than 60 million images are being sent around on a daily basis. And that value is only going to grow as the platform matures.
For now these platforms offer limited opportunities for right hooks. But for now isn’t forever. Someone is going to figure out how to do it. It could be me. It might be someone else. Why not make it you?
ROUND 9:
EFFORT
Content is king, context is God, and then there’s effort. Together, they are the holy trinity for winning on Facebook, Twitter, and any other platform, and even for winning in any business. Without effort—intense, consistent, committed, 24-7 effort—the best social media micro-content placed within the most appropriate context will go down as gracelessly as James “Buster” Douglas when he crashed to the mat at the end of his November 1990 fight with Evander “the Real Deal” Holyfield.
It’s a sad story, though it should have been the next Rocky. At the time of the fight, Douglas had been enjoying fame as the world heavyweight champion after unexpectedly trouncing the then-undefeated heavyweight champion, “Iron” Mike Tyson, nine months earlier—an upset that put my fifteen-year-old self in such a state of shock, I hid in my bed and missed a day of school. Dead serious.
No one had expected Douglas to win that earlier fight. Tyson was the best boxer in the world; some thought he was the best boxer ever. This was the tenth time he was defending his title. Douglas had proved to be an unreliable fighter at best, and often carried more weight than he should. The odds were so high in Tyson’s favor that only one casino would even take bets on the fight. Most people were watching just to see how fast Tyson could knock Douglas out.
But Douglas had done something no one expected of him—he trained like a man possessed. He was partly motivated by the unexpected death of his mother: “I knew that, somewhere, she was saying, ‘That’s my boy. He’s gonna do it.’ If I didn’t do my best, if I didn’t do what I was capable of, I thought my mama’s ride to heaven would be a little harder. I didn’t want that.” But he had also met Mike Tyson in person and walked away unimpressed. Tyson couldn’t be the undefeatable monster everyone said he was, and Douglas was going to prove it. By the time he stepped into the ring with Tyson, he had more than doubled his bench-press capability from 180 to 400 pounds, lost more than thirty pounds of weight, and watched countless tapes of Tyson fights. He studied Iron Mike’s techniques, identified his flaws, and with the help of his managers and trainers, put together a strategy to take him down.
The effort paid off. Despite having been laid up with the flu just twenty-four hours earlier, Douglas pummeled Tyson with a series of strong, confident jabs, until at one point Tyson, his eye almost completely swollen shut, was literally using the ropes to keep himself standing upright. Douglas handed Tyson the first defeat of his career.
Effort is the great equalizer. It doesn’t matter if your competitor is three times bigger than you and built like a Mack truck, or if it has a marketing budget that matches the GDP of a medium-size country, or if it has a staff of hundreds and you are alone in your broom closet with two laptops, an iPad, and a cell phone. What matters is the effo
rt you put into your work. And never has effort counted more than it does today. Social media gave access to the market and even an edge over corporate behemoths to creative, determined, nimble upstarts. But now that big business has finally started investing in social media platforms like Facebook, albeit hesitantly, entrepreneurs no longer have as strong an advantage as they once did. One or two people just can’t be in as many places at once building community as a staff of twenty. What they can still do, however, is win through effort. Budgets should have no effect on the amount of effort, heart, and sincerity that can go into your conversations with your customers. You can’t be everywhere at once, but when the quality of your communication and community-building efforts is better than anyone else’s, it doesn’t really matter.
If you throw a great jab or right hook on Facebook, people will start to comment. Marketers that creatively and sincerely engage in as many of those resulting conversations as possible will be able to scale their relationships higher than their opponent. You should make sure to tag the person you want to talk to, to guarantee they see you have replied, and to bring them back to your page to continue the dialogue. Maybe you see that some people are unclear about the hours of your Black Friday sale, or they’re not sure that the sale is happening in all your store locations. By going back and clearing up the confusion, you’re amplifying your right hook and solidifying your relationship with your customers. And while you’re there, be charming. Be funny. Show you care. People love to be entertained and informed, but they’ll take that from anyone. The real connection, and the loyalty, happens when they believe that you care about them both as a customer and as an individual. People are usually astonished when a brand puts in extra effort to make them happy. That’s how rarely it happens, and that’s where you, whether you’re an entrepreneur or a big business, can separate yourself from the rest of the pack. Bigger businesses will be able to jump in on more conversations than others, but volume alone won’t raise a brand’s engagement levels—the quality of the conversation will.
The thing to remember, however, is that you’re fighting a never-ending boxing match. It’s true that brands that throw out consistently skillful storytelling jabs and right hooks can eventually build up so much brand equity that they don’t need to engage with quite the same frenzy as a newcomer, or a brand working to repair its reputation, but it’s all relative. Twenty percent less of massive amounts of engagements is usually still more than most marketers’ average engagement levels. But you cannot get lazy and rest on your laurels. You’ve got to keep putting in the effort, or you’ll get knocked out in ten minutes. In Buster Douglas’s case, it took seven minutes and forty-five seconds, to be exact.
Douglas’s story, which started out as an underdog triumph, took a disappointing turn about nine months after his historic win over Mike Tyson. When he left the ring in February, he was in the best shape of his life and the new heavyweight champion of the world. He spent the next months doing the media circuit, appearing on the David Letterman show, posing for the cover of Sports Illustrated, signing autographs, and enjoying his fame. At the same time, however, he was still grieving for his mother. He also admitted to suffering from stress and depression due to a dispute with Don King, the boxing promoter with the electric shock of hair, who did his best to have the results of the Douglas-Tyson fight overturned. What he did not do was return to the training ring with the same intensity that he had when preparing for the Tyson fight. By the time he weighed in for his fight with Evander Holyfield, he looked like he’d eaten every cheeseburger in the world.
When Douglas and Holyfield faced off in the ring on November 9, 1990, they didn’t seem overwhelmingly mismatched. Even the announcer commented, maybe with a little surprise, that there wasn’t much difference in size between the two. What he didn’t comment on, yet what was obvious the second each fighter took off his robe, was the difference in their shape. Holyfield’s trapezii were so built up, his head appeared to be sitting on a perfectly sharp, muscular triangle. His massive shoulders and chest seemed cut from granite, beautifully defined as a statue’s. As Douglas strutted into his corner, however, the tire around his waist jiggled slightly above his shiny white shorts; as he bobbed on his toes, his pecs shimmied, and his breasts drooped like soft little sponges. As the fight began, it was like watching a bull face off against a bulldog. Douglas was knocked out in the fourth round.
Effort. It matters more than most people want to admit.
ROUND 10:
ALL COMPANIES ARE MEDIA COMPANIES
I’ve just spent nine chapters emphasizing that the key to social marketing is micro-content. In fact, the shorter your content and storytelling, the better. But as I look to the future, I see a yin to the micro-content yang. After all, long-form content isn’t dead. It still lives on in the form of YouTube videos, magazine articles, TV shows, movies, and books, for instance, where it continues to find a sizable audience. But as brands continue to push the traditional boundaries via which they used to disseminate their content, and as companies recognize that they less and less often have to rent their media, but can own it and remarket it whenever they want, they’re going to start wondering why they have to deal with separate media companies at all? Why couldn’t they simply become their own media company? It’s not a crazy idea. There is no logical reason to think that a tire company should be a food critic, but a hundred years ago, Michelin tires started reviewing rural restaurants to encourage people living in the cities to drive farther and wear their tires out more quickly. Guinness created the Guinness Book of World Records to reinforce its brand and give people something to talk about in the pubs. Similarly, I predict that one day a brand like Nike could put out its own sports programming and compete successfully against ESPN, or Amtrak could launch a publication that could stand up to Travel + Leisure. The start-up costs would be extremely low for a luxury brand like Burberry to publish an alternative to the Robb Report, or for Williams-Sonoma to publish its own version of Eater or Thrillist. So long as brands remain transparent, so that their consumers aren’t duped into thinking these sites and publications are strictly objective content providers, this could be a fruitful way to expand their brand and their content reach. In a way, it would be no different from what I was doing through Wine Library TV. Everyone knew that I sold wine, but they trusted my product reviews because I made a huge effort to be honest, fair, and authentic. Any other brand could do the same for the product or service they sell.
Some people will be skeptical. That’s to be expected, especially in the older set. But the young, the under-thirty demo that puts a ton of stock in its bullshit detector? They know this is the future, and it doesn’t scare them. They have come of age in the era of transparency, and they know they have no choice but to treat their consumers with honesty and respect. No consumer will put up with anything less.
In the marketing world, there will soon be no more separation between church and state. It’s going to be exciting to witness the innovation that comes about as brands become major players in the media world.
ROUND 11:
CONCLUSION
It takes a ton of effort to figure out how to use any social media platform to its full potential, and today we’ve got seven major ones to contend with. I hoped that if I wrote a short, useful book—one as visually enticing as a Tumblr or Pinterest post—that broke today’s most popular and exciting platforms down to their essential building blocks of text, image, tone, and link capabilities, it would make the exploding social media scene seem a little less daunting to any marketer or business owner trying to keep up with it. I promise, the investment you make in familiarizing yourself with the ins and outs of these platforms will pay off, now and in the future. The rate at which they change is volatile, but the truth is that most companies and consumers are slower to adapt than they should be. This fact works in your favor. It means that you will have a significant business advantage if you choose to be part of the fraction of marketers who take the time to fully ex
cavate these platforms’ secrets. And it will be just a fraction. It always is. A member of the Google Analytics team recently informed me that almost no one uses the tracking system properly. Google Analytics has been around for eight years already, more than long enough for marketing departments to know it inside and out. But people’s perception is that it’s overwhelmingly complicated and vast, so even the best e-commerce companies have not put in the time and effort they should have to figure out how to take advantage of all the available features. There are a few marketers out there who have, though, and the data they access helps them beat their competition every day. They understood that whatever time they invested in learning Google Analytics would not be much compared with the huge returns the knowledge they gained could deliver. Marketers who put in the effort to really understand the nuances and subtleties of the platforms explored in this book can and will dominate. Yes, it will be frustrating when Facebook once again makes changes to its algorithm and newsfeeds, and Twitter and Pinterest will probably make tweaks and redesign. But if you don’t give in to the frustration, and do persist in staying alert and figuring out how to use these changes to your advantage, you’ll instantly be leagues ahead of most of the marketing pack. Others might huff and puff and eventually catch up, flattening your advantage, but you can make a lot of headway and be extremely effective during the two or three years that you’re zooming ahead of the curve. Besides, if you’ve made staying ahead of the curve your standard procedure, what difference will it make if they catch up? To paraphrase Jay Z, you’ll be on to the next one, probably to figuring out how to storytell on a Google Glass eye screen instead of a mobile phone. And about that time, I’ll probably write a new book called Four-Eyed Storytelling or something like that.
Jab, Jab, Jab, Right Hook Page 16
