Episode 125 – Creating A Social Media Strategy That Works with Jeff Gibbard

Jeff: I guess if we really want to look at the humble origins of this, I grew up on a dairy farm, and it was at that time that I really thought that in some time in the future, we'd be communicating in a 140 characters or less. That part's all made-up, but what actually happened was is that I've been kind of an entrepreneur since birth, always wanted to be my own boss and try to launch a couple of different businesses over time. Around the time that I hit about 25, I decided it was time to stop being so right brain-heavy. Went back, got my MBA and when I came out, it was around the time where social media was really starting to hit its stride.

I thought nobody else knows more than anybody else about this. I think there's a huge potential here, so I just started working my ass off to know more about it than anybody else, because we were all at the start line together. So I went to a management consulting firm for about two years where I design their social strategy, I was talking about something that I call social business but really didn't have a name back then. I designed their social strategy, did some website work for them, brought in an SEO and did all these different little projects.

From there I went to a PR firm where I only lasted about 11 months. They brought me on to run the social practice group, but it was clear that we have very different ideas about what that meant. After 11 months, we parted ways, and I started this company True Voice Media. I've been doing that like I said since 2011, and the idea was there are too many people that were out there that said, “Hey, I've got a Twitter account so I'm a social media expert.” I said, “Nobody is an expert yet. We all are learning about this. It's constantly changing.” I don't want to make my clients good at social media. I want them to use social media as a way of being better at business and driving results.

Brian: I love that. That's one of my monickers, too, man. It's like there is no social media guru. You cannot get up on a mountain and talk to the guy and say, “What did the swami say to the hot dog vendor? Make me one with everything.” There's nobody in social media that does that because it is changing. It's evolving and one of the things we talked about on your show was the evolution of marketing and stuff like that. But I think the key thing that we need to talk today about is strategy.

So let's get down to brass tacks. Anybody can get into Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and all these other things, but they tend to be the ‘marketing tool de jure.' How do you look at a client and define, “These guys need a strategy, and this is the direction I want to take them.”

Jeff: I'd say the main thing the people get wrong is that they start out thinking about how they can be good at social media. They start thinking about, “How can I be really good at using Facebook? How can I really be good at using Twitter? How can I be really good at using LinkedIn?” And they start looking around and comparing themselves to their competitors, really just doing everything that they can think of – reading Social Media Examiner, and Mashable, and trying to get an idea of the best practices, and they never start at the beginning, which is, “What am I actually out to accomplish? What hurts?”

It's such an important question, and I always harp on it because there are organizations where their problem is not lead generation. It might not even be sales. It might be customer service and that the sentiment that's out there about them is negative, and they need to turn that around. Depending upon what an organization's goals are is going to change what they should be doing on social media. That's not a one-size-fits-all solution. So when we come into an organization, the first thing that we do is we start off with what an organization is trying to be in the future and where they're currently getting stopped. What the problem is.

Because the way that we look at social is that it's not just a marketing tool. It can be used for sales. It can be used for recruiting. It can be used for internal collaboration. It can be used for R&D. It can be used for product or service innovation. There are so many options for companies to just jump into it and say, “Okay. Now we have a Facebook page.” That might not actually be the right way to go.

Brian: See, and I love that. One of the things that I run into and we talked about this on your podcast, is you get people to come in with these preconceived notions that, “I want to do this. I need to reach this particular person, and I want to jump on LinkedIn, and I just want to follow them and connect with them, and then all of a sudden tell them, “I'm the best thing since buttered bread.” We all know what happens with that, they end up being toast in the long run, because nobody wants to listen to that stuff. We're totally bombarded with sales messages. How do you work with your clients to get them to understand that setting up a strategy and having some measurables is important?

Jeff: I think one of the things that I found as super-helpful is one, I obviously have to educate my client. That's the first thing that I think that they pay me for, is to really give them a greater understanding of it. What I have to do is really peel back the kimono, so to speak, show them what's behind the curtain and show them all of the things they don't see, or give them a perspective to look through that will allow them to see the bigger picture. For instance, I talk about all of the things that are plain to see on the web versus all of the things that are hidden, that you could never actually see how it works. For instance, the LinkedIn messages that you see people send. You can only see what's coming out on the public streams, you can actually see how they're privately messaging.

Then in terms of frame works, instead of talking about how often you should be posting on Facebook or Twitter, or what sort of content gets the best exposure in the Facebook, you see the algorithm. I like to instead focus on five different activities, and I think that what social media provides us are five different opportunities, and this is what I start to educate my clients on, is a new way of looking at things. Their social listening, which is really looking out to the web and identifying trends and conversation about you, your competitors, your brand, your industry, anything like that and from that, you can actually start to generate content and content is the second of the five.

The interplay between content and listening whether that's you heard something in a form and then you created a white paper, or it's somebody who posted a comment on your Yelp page, for instance, and you respond, that's an interplay between content and listening, and I call that engagement, which is the third component, and focusing on how engagement factors in. Which is funny enough, I wouldn't say it's the least important, but of the five components of social, I think it's the one that gets far too much attention when it's not the one that drives the most business results.

Then there's promotion. Promotion actually drives people to this network where you can listen to them, create content for them and engage them, and then there's measurement which is how you identify what's working across anything. It's a new lens I give them to look at and I actually have a graphic that I associate with it. Makes it all a lot more easy to understand. But to your original question, which is how do you get clients to see the value of strategy? I think it's through education, because I think there's too many people coming in as you said with a preconceived notion of what social media is or how it fits.

Brian: Now we get people coming in all the time that say, “I want a million followers. I want a million hits on my website. I want all these different metrics that they've been sold.” How do you deal with that? How do you get people to understand that a million people on your website may not be the top 10 people that you need who are actually going to buy your stuff? What kind of things do you do to get them to understand the metrics, and the measurement and the end results that you're trying to achieve for them?

Jeff: There are really three that I do. I'll tell you the first one, because it's more of – I guess it's just funny to me, but at one point I have started a Twitter account called Followers Mean Zero, and I started to just accumulate followers for it using the various different tactics, going on Fiverr.com and buying them. That's something I'll just show my clients. I'll say, “Look, you want followers? I can get you them. They're right here.” I'll show them that for $5, you can buy 1,000 followers. That's one thing. So I had this account that I was using to show them that. Now, I just show them Fiverr. So one, I showed them that it's easy to manipulate that, that's the first thing.

The second thing I do is I ask them this very basic question which was, “Would you rather have 100 people to follow you and buy something, or a million to follow you and never pay attention to you?” It's generally pretty easy for them to answer that, and I occasionally had some people answer they'd rather have a million people but don't pay attention.

The third question I ask them or the third approach I take I guess is, “Why? Why do you want that?” I use the Socratic method to really dig deeper and deeper and deeper until they wind up answering their own question that either they don't know or they're able to see the lack of value in going about that approach.

Brian: I love that. That's huge, man. It's hard to get people to that point, too, especially when they've been tainted and hell-bent on getting what they want.

Jeff: Yes, absolutely and one of my favorite things to do quite honestly is to tell my clients, “No.” The reason why is this, I have somebody who advises me on my finances and when they tell me to do something, I do it, because they are the expert in that, and I know that I'm not. What I need to do when I'm dealing with a client is help them to see that the reason they brought me out in the first place is because they're not the expert and not to claim that I'm all-knowing expert, but I know a hell of a lot more than 99% the people that they've encountered or that most people encounter as it relates to using social to drive business objective.

Therefore, I have no problem pushing back on them and saying, “You know what? If you want to go toe-to-toe and talk a little bit about how these things work, I'm glad to do it. But here is why I don't think your way is going to work.” I try not to be a jerk about it, but I do find that the more that I question them and take them down that path of examination of what they thought would work and I show them the fallacy in that thinking, the more likely they are to say, “Okay, this guy has obviously thought it out. He obviously knows what he's talking about.”

Brian: Jeff, man, you run into it, I run into it all the time. You get people who are willing to say, “Okay, yeah, I need help.” Then they want to basically hand it over to you and get that million-dollar bullet, that thing that they hit the button and all of a sudden they're just making millions. With that thought in mind, what are some of the biggest common mistakes that you see your clients or clients that haven't worked out making, that have stopped them from seeing the success that they need?

Jeff: That's a really interesting question, because I'd say that the clients that haven't worked out, or that the work that they're doing hasn't worked out has been a result of one of two things. The first I would say is impatience, and I'd say the second is, I would say – I don't want to call it bureaucracy, but more like internal structures because I have this theory that essentially, social media success really relies on three pillars. Without those three pillars, you cannot have success. The three pillars are culture, process and technology. Without all three of those working in harmony, it's never going to work.

The two reasons why I've seen clients fail are impatience and internal red tape in bureaucracy. The first one is that again to your initial point, they sign up, they start and they want results tomorrow. This is even clients that I have explained that this is not a light switch. You cannot just turn on social results. You need to build trust over time and you need to commit to it. But after a month and a half, they say, “Well, we've tried these two things and it's just not working. I think that it's an unwillingness to one, it's a risk in tolerance; but two, it's an unwillingness to buy into a vision where something will develop over a long term. It's an impatience, really. That's the first thing.

The second thing being this internal bureaucracy is that I have made recommendations to organizations, and I've developed – as one particular organization I'm thinking of – I've designed this gorgeous strategy for them. It had graphics, it had everything spelled out in very intricate detail about how all these pieces were going to work together – from landing pages, to social campaigns, social ad campaigns paid search, everything worked together. And we spent the next four months basically having meetings every month, every two weeks, where I would come in, they would say, “Yes. We're still having some internal discussions.”

It's just internal discussion after internal discussion. They couldn't pull the trigger on anything and that was really where I've seen some of the other struggles is that you just can't get alignment inside the organization, which is why it's so important, especially if you're working in a regulated space to get all of the readership that wants to say yes and the legal and risk that wants to say no. You need to get them in the same room at the same time so that they can get on the same page and you can move fast. It comes down to a matter of alignment internally inside the company where everybody is on the same page so you can move forward.

Brian: All right, two big problems I want to discuss with small business and that is you've got the guy who's on the mom and pop store for 45 years and they all of a sudden realize that there's no newspaper to advertise in anymore and they decide that, “Now we're going to turn to social media to replace our advertising.” How do you deal with that?

Jeff: I think it's a great idea. The problem is this, it's that you just can't take bad advertising offline and put it online and think it's going to be good. The truth of the matter is that the principles of good marketing whether you do it online, offline, in a virtual space, in a gaming environment, it doesn't matter. The point is you need to have the right message for the right person at the right time when they're willing to hear it and in a way that is going to engage them and not turn them off. So it's got to be entertaining. It's got to be emotive. It's got to be interesting or informative. It's got to be something that captures the attention and provides some value.

I think for the mom and pop store, it's a great idea because the cost per impression and the cost per engagement of these channels is going to be a lot better and more measurable than what they'll find offline. You put in a print ad, or a television ad, or a radio ad, unless you've built in some measurable mechanism that brings them online, or when they call up you can say, “Well, how did you hear about us?” which is still imperfect, but unless you have that, you're going to have a much more measurable marketing channel online. But I think the issue is you still have to have good messaging, good creative and the right kind of targeting.

Now that being said for the several thousand dollars that it might cost you to post in a trade publication for three or four issues, I'd imagine it would be a lot more cost-effective for you to come up with three or four variations of a Facebook ad and target it to the exact right audience, whether it be a remarketing campaign for people that visited your webpage, people that are on your email list with a custom audience and look-a-like audiences for both of them. The problem I think that they run into is that they just don't have the sophistication to keep up with all of the changes taking place on these ad platforms.

Brian: Now, part two of that question; mom and pop want nothing to do with Facebook. I've had this all the time, “I'm not on Facebook. I don't want to look at Facebook. I don't care about Facebook.” And I hear the same thing about Twitter, and LinkedIn, and Pinterest, and Google+ and all these other things. So what do they do? They go hire a 20-year-old. She can text, so she gets it. How do you deal with that?

Jeff: You mean if I'm trying to convince them not to or?

Brian: Or how do you deal with their…

Jeff: [inaudible] your question on that?

Brian: Well, the bottom line is they don't want to deal with it. They've got somebody else in their organization who clearly doesn't know what they're doing, and they think they've got an answer. How do you get them into the mix? You said it, and I said it. The bottom line is is you have to control your own messages. You have to be engaged. You can't just pass this stuff off to somebody. But they want to do that. They want to hand it to the 20-year-old they hired in accounting who happens to know how to text, so they think they're social media-made. What do you do?

Jeff: I'm going to answer this as if this is a friend of mine, and I want to advise them because I care about them, not because they're a potential client because ultimately, if somebody told me that that's what they're doing, it would be like, “Good luck to you” and I'd let them fail, because I kind of look at it as my job to save every small business that wants to make silly decisions in the same way they might want to hire a giraffe to do their accounting. It's not my problem.

But pretending, of course, that it's somebody that I care about and I want to advise them, I would say that's important to get some training for this person who is going to be managing the account. I think if somebody is willing to learn the technology, I don't think it's particularly difficult to run someone through an exercise of creating personas of their ideal client, showing them the technology especially if you're talking about a millennial. It shouldn't be difficult to teach them how the technology works, but I do think that they need some guidance and mentorship, because they're not going to be a schooled in the principles of business, or in understanding the essentials of marketing, or even understanding the essentials of new marketing and how these new channels differ from previous channels.

I would say that if you're going to do that, there's nothing wrong with that, but I would say you do need to dedicate some amount of budget for an investment in that person's success, because if you just throw them into the fire, it could cause more harm than good, or it could do no good at all and then you're just throwing money down the toilet because you haven't really given them a chance to really succeed.

Brian: And one of the things I'm going to add to that, which is my monicker is if you invest in that person, you need to have some kind of system set up so that you can replicate it when the next person comes in because millennials, the average life expectancy of a job is three to five years. So you don't want to throw out the baby with the bathwater when that person leaves. What do you think about that?

Jeff: Yeah, absolutely. It all is going to come down to budget as well. If you're not paying that person very much, you obviously can't expect them to stay on board. But if they're doing a great job for you and they're continuing to drive new customers, it's not that millennials are incapable of holding a job for longer than that, but I think it's good advice for anybody to have a backup plan, to limit your downside and to try and create systems that can be replicated and scaled.

Brian: Absolutely.

Okay, here is kind of the meat-and-potatoes question: give me some examples – you don't have to get really deep down – but some clients where you took them from a place where they weren't being successful to where they really saw over the top results – one or two.

Jeff: Sure. One of our first and earliest clients, we still work with them to this day and they're probably one of my favorite clients and that's nothing against any of my other clients. It's just that they have a little special something. We work with a summer camp. And when we first came in, there were a couple of things that we did that I thought really were just major shifts for them and it has made such a huge difference over the past couple of years.

So we've been working with the summer camp since 2011. When we came in, they had a very scattered and fragmented social media and web presence. They had a couple different Facebook profiles that were businesses so we made them pages, they have hundreds of different groups, so we condensed that and reduced the number of them, and they were ultimately just kind of like trying to do it as many of these organizations do where they just jump in and try and figure it out.

Well, what we did was that we reduced that down and gave them precise number of channels to focus on. But I'll tell you the two big things we did: one, they were running all these contests and different things for the students that they were trying to attract to their programs, and they were offering things like iPads, watches and all these different contest giveaways. When we looked at their audience and who they were, there are pricey camp, there are premium camp, so we're talking about a fairly affluent user-base, and what we found was that it wasn't much of a motivator to offer a kid that already has an iPad, a Macbook Air, an iPhone of their own, an iPod of their own. So they offered them an iPad. It wasn't a particularly big draw for them. But what we did find is that amidst this group, if you look at the age demographic and everything, status was one of the most important things for them.

So we made a shift in what drew these students to actually play along, and we started focusing more on giving them a platform and a pedestal and acknowledging them amidst their friends. So we made a lot of changes like that, and we saw a huge success in the amount of engagement they were getting across all of their post and different things that they were doing. But the second thing that we did that I think to this day, and they would probably agree that this is the most successful thing we've ever done with them strangely, is we actually encouraged them to focus on – the parents are the ones footing the bill for this camp, and what we encouraged them to do is to create four different Facebook groups – one for the students, one for the alumni, people who have attended the camp before, one for staff and one for parents.

The parents' group to this day has been their number one source of information about what kind of content they should be creating. It's been their number one source of being able to get in to and address the concerns of different parents when things are happening and going on. It's their direct line to the parents and it's also a way that they can generate a lot of referrals and build loyalty among the audience that they already have. It was just a matter of looking at it and saying, “How can we use this to build a community rather than consistently building a new community every year?” We thought, “How can we hold on to these people and keep a connection with them?” That has been one of the biggest things that we've done with that particular client.

Brian: See, that's awesome.

Jeff: And I can give you another good example. This is one of my favorite case studies actually. I can give you two more. They're both small ones.

Brian: Go ahead.

Jeff: So I ‘ll give you two small ones. We had a women's clothing company that came in to us, and they were looking to do social media and all this different stuff. They came in and sat down with us and told us what their goals were and they said, “We're moving online probably somewhere around 5 to 10 coats per month. We're doing all of these shows where we're selling our clothing in person, and we'd really like to get a lot more in the way of our online sales. For now we just like to sell 5 or 10 more coats.” I said, “Okay.”

So I started looking at their analytics, and I started looking at what they were doing on social media and I looked at their emails and when I looked at their analytics, I noticed that if you looked at it month by month, it was kind of a flat line and then a spike, then a flat line and a spike. Each month they had a flat line and a spike. So I asked them, “What happened on this particular date?” And they were like, “Oh, that's when we sent out our last email.” I said, “Is that good for sales? How many do you sell?” They said, “Well, we probably sold at five to 10 quotes per month.” I was like, “Why don't you send more?” They're like, “We don't want to bombard our clients with too much email.” I was like, “Send three emails a month.” They did that, and they actually were so successful with that, they didn't really implement anything else and they have since been just working off of that and putting their content in the emails, and they're actually signing so many they produced their schedule going to these shows instead of just sending more emails.

It was one of those, like sometimes the answer is right in front of you and something simple, it's something obvious, but you just got to look for it.

Brian: And you had another one you said?

Jeff: Yes, I'll give you the last one. The last one is we were working with a company. I can't say much more about them, but they're related to the pharmaceutical industry. They were running these display ads on Facebook, and they were getting a particularly low click-through rate. We looked at what they were doing, I said, “I think we can fix this. I think we can make this better.” Early on, this was on our prospecting stage, we're talking to them about it and, they're saying, “We don't know. Budgets are kind of tight. This and that and the other thing.” I looked at their numbers, and I said, “I'll guarantee you that I can beat your numbers. I guarantee it.” They were like, “That's kind of a bold statement.” I was like, “Just go with me. I guarantee I'll beat it.”

So they said, “Okay.” They decided to run with us and give us a shot. We took a small piece of one of their projects, and we compared our results against theirs. This is purely Facebook ads, mind you. We really do too, too much else. But what we did was we went from a straight display ad format into a content-based format where instead of targeting the individuals they were targeting and just saying, “Hey, click here for this thing.” We said, “Click here to learn about this thing.” We tried to pull them in through that. Then on top of that we suggested a couple of changes to their ad formats. But just taking basically one suggestion which was to change from a display format to a content-based format, we beat their click-through rate by 1400%.

Brian: Wow!

Jeff: I think small things sometimes go a long way, and this is a company that was spending – we're talking serious dollars on this campaigns and if you think about the difference of converting at less than 1% versus almost 3% and, you're spending that much money and each conversion can be worth a pretty sizable amount of money to you, little things can sometimes go a long way, which is why small companies have such a hard time. They don't have the resources to necessarily AB test things, or try different graphics, or headlines and things like that. But that's really where the money is, is in testing things and trying out to see what works.

Brian: Absolutely and I know exactly how you made that campaign better. What you did is you took out the side effect of sudden oily discharge. Right? Is that what you did?

Jeff: Yes, that's exactly what it was! What, you saw that campaign?

Brian: I did. That's awesome, dewd. I love your examples, and the first one that you talked about with the camp, the one thing I want to kind of stand out in that area, or make stand out in that area is the fact that what you did is most people will try to find the perfect avatar and what you did is you help them segment into four perfect avatars. Each one of them, you decided that there were success in each of them, but you found the real success in one. That's one of the mistakes that I think that people make a lot, is they try to hard to focus on one person that sometimes they're missing the opportunity with some sub sets.

Jeff: Yeah, absolutely. I'm a huge fan of understanding who you're going after and making sure that whenever possible, you're splitting those into groups that you can target your message accordingly. We worked with a mobile app company, and we found tremendous results from splitting our audience into males and females because the value of the application was so much different to both males and females. Again, it's always about looking at, “Can we segment this further and divide up our budget into smaller categories and see what works and then reallocate the budget towards what's working best?”

Brian: Love it. Absolutely love it.

So you've got a system that's going to help people to better understand or you've got some tools that are going to help people to better understand what you're talking about, and how to find their perfect client or to work with social media better. Can you tell us about that?

Jeff: Sure. You're referring to the epic white paper that we just put out?

Brian: Mm hmm.

Jeff: Okay, cool. So we just put out after many years of coming up with frame works and strategies and having worked with more than 60 different clients at this point across every industry. We've got our strategy development pretty much down pat. So we created something that we're calling the complete and essential social strategy frame work. What it is is it's our approach. It's literally our secret sauce of how we go about building a social strategy that drives results. It's got everything in there from the 5 opportunities of social, the 3 pillars of success, how to audit your social, your competitors, your customers and your employees. It's the full gamut, and we put it together as a white paper.

It's short and to the point. We tried not to put too much extraneous information in there. We really just want to get to the point of how you develop a strategy, and we're giving that away for free right now. I don't know how long we'll leave it up on the web, but we figured the more we can get that into people's hands, the better off the world is going to be, and we'll see less crap on social media.

Brian: Awesome, and I'll have a link to that in the show notes.

And then you have another white paper that I'd like you to describe. Can you tell us about that?

Jeff: Yes. The other white paper that we released around the same time was we sat down and we were like, “Okay, what can we make that's valuable? We put together this white paper that's the complete and essential strategy frame work, and I was like, “All right. Cool. I need to do something that's just for fun.” So we created the Ultimate Guide to Selling Social Media Woo-Woo. What that is, is it's sort of the Deepak Chopra of social media consultants. It's those social media douchebags that get up on stage, and they say the word “engagement” over and over and over until your head spins, and then they tell you that you need to focus on relationships and conversations.

I just got so sick of going head-to-head against people that really didn't know what the hell they were talking about, or how to tie it back to business results, that I thought it was time for me to put together just a humorous take on how to spot the so-called social media douchebags. So I put together basically what I would assume would be the handbook to become one of those people so that as businesses are trying to figure out who they should work with, at the very least they can look at what the handbook is that those social media douchebags would use.

Brian: I am so downloading that to make sure I am not fitting into that category.

Jeff: I can assure you that you are not. You've been on my podcast. I wouldn't have posted the episode if you were, and we talked plenty before and after the episode and before and after this episode, and I can assure you that you're not. I would encourage you to download it, not because you should be checking yourself against it, but because I think you've encountered enough of those people that you will get a major kick out of it.

Brian: I will love it.

Jeff, this has been awesome. You're like a brother from another mother because we both think the same way, we talk the same way and your concepts are so spot on, and that's why I think we complement each other so well on our podcasts. You've really kind of reinforced what I talk about. I think I've reinforced what you talk about, and it was such a pleasure to have you on.

Now, if people wanted to get a hold of you, what's the best way for them to do that?

Jeff: As a social media enthusiast myself and someone who advises and coaches, I'm obviously everywhere, but I will say that if people look for me on Snapchat and send me a message there, I'm just not as present. I would say the best places to get a hold of me are one, if you were to type “Jeff Gibbard” into Google, you would find me everywhere. But my favorite place to converse and be social with people is on Twitter. It has always been my favorite social network. It probably always will be until such point where hopefully it never shuts down. For as long as it is up, it will probably be my favorite social network. @Jgibbard is where to find me. I respond to direct messages, @messages and always looking to engage out in the public eye.

Brian: Outstanding and for my podcast-only people on iTunes, it is Gibbard. It's G-i-b-b-a-r-d, just so you get the spelling right, Jgibbard@Twitter.com.

Jeff, man, this has been fabulous. It's been a blast. I love your insight. I love your concepts. It's been a fun podcast, and I really appreciate you joining us.

Jeff: Brian, you're a good dude, and we will certainly talk more. Brother from another mother, peace out.

Brian: Just so you know, I spell dewd, dewd. Rock on.

Jeff: Nice!

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