Lingo – Discover Your Ideal Customer’s Secret Language With Jeffrey Shaw
Posted by John Livesay in podcast | 0 comments
Understanding your audience is at the core of creating a successful business in today’s fast-paced world. It’s become easier and easier for audiences to move on if they feel that a brand doesn’t really try to understand what they need. Jeffrey Shaw, the author of LINGO: Discover Your Ideal Customer’s Secret Language and Make Your Business Irresistible, joins John Livesay about this essential element of catering to your audience. Businesses can’t grow if they don’t find ways to keep up with their audience. Let Jeffrey take you through how you can best work towards creating a full-fledged understanding of what your audience wants from you.
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Listen to the podcast here
Lingo – Discover Your Ideal Customer’s Secret Language With Jeffrey Shaw
Our guest is Jeffrey Shaw. One of the reasons I’m excited to have Jeffrey on the show is he’s going to help us figure out how to stop wasting time on customers that will never appreciate us. For more than three decades, Jeffrey’s been one of the most sought-after portrait photographers in the US. His portraits have appeared on The Oprah Show, People Magazine, and have been even seen at Harvard University. Jeffrey’s going to share with us about how to make your customers feel seen, heard and understood like a photographer sees their subject. When that happens, you’ll attract and retain your ideal customers by learning to speak their LINGO, which happens to be the name of his book. When he’s not hosting waffle Sundays at his home in Miami, then he is a Brand Consultant, the host of the Creative Warriors podcast and a TEDx speaker. His book is called LINGO: Discover Your Ideal Customer’s Secret Language and Make Your Business Irresistible. Welcome, Jeffrey.
John, I’m thrilled to be here with you.
You are a keynote speaker, photographer and author. There are many great things about you that the readers are going to love knowing about. Let’s start with your own story of origin. I’d like to know the story of how you became interested in becoming a photographer.
My original interest was it seemed like the ideal thing to do as a young kid that I’m afraid of the world. I was a shy child until my twenties. In my teen years, that seemed like the ideal hobby because there’s a thing. There’s this box between you and the world. Of course, back in the day, a lot of the activity involved a darkroom, which I loved because you could isolate yourself in the dark. The darkroom was my survival technique through high school. I was fortunate that my father enjoyed photography as a hobby. We had a darkroom in the house, so that introduced me initially to the chemistry. Up to this day, I’d love to bake and I love to landscape. A common denominator with all these things that I am passionate about is the chemical interaction between art and science. That’s the root of the passion. That’s something I picked up as a teen and have been doing ever since.
Understanding Your Audience: You have to believe there’s an audience of people out there who will value what you do. It’s your job to find them.
An interesting hook that I wasn’t anticipating as part of your answer is the chemistry, this whole combination of a catalyst that triggers the reaction. I vividly remember that in school and being fascinated by something being a catalyst. Of course, in the business world, whether you have chemistry or not with your team or with your customers, it’s that vibe of, “Does something click or not?” In the dating world, I remember reading that when you kiss somebody, you’re smelling them. The chemistry between two people in a romantic situation has to do with pheromones and there is actual science to it. Let’s talk about chemistry as far as what you’ve learned being a portrait photographer and how important it is to have chemistry with the people you’re photographing.
It’s such an intimate experience photographing. On my job, I did all portraits on location. I was going to their homes, beach or second homes. Most of my clients have multiple homes. It’s such an intimate experience, not just being photographed, but also gaining the trust of our customers in a way of having them open up their lives and their homes to prepare for a portrait session. It’s almost more intimate than the actual act of being photographed because people are going to ask you, “What do you think I look best in? How do you think I should dress?” People are opening themselves up in a vulnerable way asking for your input into what’s going to bring out the best in them. I always appreciated that. I loved being a photographer.
There were things that I loved about it, but at the end of the day, the camera was my vehicle to have amazing relationships with people. I have found that to be a common denominator for one amongst successful photographers, we used to call it the dirty little secret in the industry, which is those of us that were the most successful in the industry tended to see what we did as a vehicle for something bigger. It wasn’t that we were photography nuts. We weren’t the people that were going to conferences with cameras on our neck. We were the ones that were there to allow the people we are interacting with to help us grow and be bigger at what we were doing. At the end of the day, the camera was just a vehicle. I find that to be true of some of our most purpose-driven entrepreneurs.
[bctt tweet=”You need to speak the same lingo as your customers in order to be successful.” username=”John_Livesay”]
How did you go from having a special place in your home to develop photography, to becoming known for getting relatively successful, even sometimes famous people to agree to hire you? There are some lessons here in a landscape full of photographers and especially now, everyone thinks they’re a photographer because of the iPhones. What did you do to get yourself to stand out as a place where people can trust your taste level and take the best picture of them?
I grew up in a small country town. It’s a couple of hours in North of New York City in New York State. I grew up lower to the middle class. That’s the reality of it. I had no expectations. I would ultimately be a family photographer for the most affluent families in my country. What changed everything for me was going back to my hometown after I went to a photography school. Quite honestly, I went to photography school because I had no guidance from my parents. Some people have helicopter parents. I had parents that forgot that I lived at home from the age of fourteen and on. I was the youngest, which is okay. I was the youngest of three boys and I was easy. I was the kid that nobody ever had to worry about. I never got in trouble. I was quiet.
I was left on my own and I didn’t have any guidance. University College wasn’t something I thought about. I went off to photography school. It was during that one year, I gained the confidence that this is potentially a career, although I couldn’t imagine what it could be. I returned to my hometown and that was the pivotal moment. I went back to this hometown with big aspirations, not that I was going to be super successful, but big aspirations that I felt being a photographer was important. Therefore, I commanded what I felt was a high price, certainly for that area.
The problem was three years in, it was a complete failure. I go through all the things like, “Am I not good enough?” My biggest fear was this is all I knew. I’ve been into this business for years and the only education I have is being a photographer. The real reason it wasn’t working is why I wrote my book LINGO. The turning point moment when I realized that the reason my business wasn’t working is I was not speaking the same lingo of the people that I was trying to serve. It was such a big division. The reason photography is valuable and important is because it’s something we hand down from generation to generation.
Being the youngest of three boys to this day, I have found one photograph of my childhood. I know that it emotionally drove me to feel it was important to have the moments of our lives preserved. These are the ideas I was promoting to these potential clients in my hometown that they should invest in photographs to hand down from generation to generation. They should invest in preserving their children’s memories. The problem was this is a community that’s struggling to get by a month every month, so investing isn’t part of their lingo. Responsibility for their children’s future is not part of their lingo. That was when I realized why I was failing.
It sounds like you were a little too high up on the Maslow hierarchy about self-actualization and legacy for someone who was still at the bottom rung of getting basic needs met.
I don’t know if you feel this way, but sometimes I wonder, “How does that happen?” This is where I was born into the world in that place to this family. To your point, I came into the world at a higher level of that pyramid. I had a completely different value system than my family because they said it was a lower-middle-class economic scale. Why did I have such value? I don’t know and I find that compelling and interesting, but I find that to be true because I work with creatives. I’ve taken surveys and I’ve asked people, “How many amongst us feel like we were the black sheep of our family?” Every hand goes up.
Surely, these cannot be my parents. It must have been some mistake at the hospital.
We prayed to find out that we were adopted, but to me that is a universal truth. The world needs that because we need people born into those situations to take everyone to the next level.
In LINGO, you talked about that your understanding of the affluent market came from watching Bing Crosby’s Christmas specials, so you weren’t in-sync. Did you change your language to the people in your town? Did you move to a town that cared about legacy and investing?
At the moment that my business was failing, I realized that it was the big question. Do I change everything about who I am, what I value and believe in to adapt to the market or do I fundamentally believe? I almost had no reason to believe this except in my absolute soul of soul and my gut. There’s an audience of people out there that will value what I do. They’re already out there and it’s my job to find them. The most tweeted moment on any of my keynotes is when I put up a slide that says, “It is not your job to prove your value to anyone. It is your job to find the people who already value what you do.” That shifts everything from a world of selling and convincing to taking on the higher-level responsibility of marketing and branding so that we put ourselves out in the world.
Also, the way that the people that we’re meant to serve to see us. That’s what I chose to do. I chose to say, “Instead of changing who I was, there must be people whose values were aligned with mine.” Ultimately, I realized that in order for their values to be aligned with mine, they had to have discretionary income. That’s how I led my way into the affluent market. Believe me, I had no experience or knowledge of what it meant to be affluent at that point in my life, but their value system was more closely related to mine. If you have the money, you can plan for the future. You invest. It’s part of your lingo.
Let’s talk about one of the stories that you shared with me about one of your clients, Stephanie Seymour, and why she wanted to have you photograph her family.
She’s definitely one of my most treasured clients and experience. Stephanie Seymour was one of the original supermodels with Christie Brinkley and Cindy Crawford. There’s even a portrait of them altogether. They were the models that even coined the term supermodel when models became a household name. She was Victoria’s Secret’s first breakout model. Everybody back in the ‘80s knew who she was. She was a recognizable and absolutely beautiful woman and inside as well. What most people don’t realize, she went on to have four kids in her life. She would hire me annually for many years to photograph her family.
Understanding Your Audience: Businesses that take the time to get the audience they want to reach will achieve their goals.
She’s been photographed by the world’s most famous photographers in the world. To have someone like you instead of Bruce Weber, Richard Avedon or whoever she’d been photographed by, is a huge deal. It completely ties into, “You spoke her lingo.”
I would walk into her bedroom helping her choose what to wear and there’s a nude portrait of herself by Richard Avedon in the bedroom and she’s hiring me. I asked her once, “Why me?” She said, “You have a way of seeing my family.” I had a way of seeing herself as a mom that these other photographers didn’t. Think about your experience as a well-known model. You must’ve come to wonder if anybody sees you for who you are because everybody’s just seeing the exterior. That was the difference. She was used to having been a model from her teen years. She was used to being seen for what the world saw on the outside. I saw something more. I saw a mom of four kids. I saw the relationship between her and her kids. I saw the relationship between the siblings and her husband. I saw all the relationships and I captured them. That’s why she felt that I saw her in a way that no other photographer had. That’s what she wanted to be portrayed in her family, photographs that she would share with her family and friends.
[bctt tweet=”You need to stand out to the right people.” username=”John_Livesay”]
What makes you special? What makes you picked to be the portrait photographer when people at her level have a lot of other relationships and choices? The takeaway here is that you have a way of seeing her that others don’t. As an entrepreneur, people hire you to come in to help them be better at attracting their ideal customers or clients. How are those lessons from a portrait photographer of helping people feel seen transferable to the entrepreneurial world? How does that lead to people hiring you as a speaker?
I love this part of the conversation because honestly, I’ve been spending years trying to unpack that. Sometimes, we don’t see the through-line where we come from and how it serves us today. For me, there are many layers to it. One is as a photographer, I’m used to not only seeing people and making them feel seen, but I’m also helping them see something in themselves. When you see someone gained confidence, it’s usually that they’re finding something in themselves that they didn’t see before. If I could be the facilitator of that, that’s an amazing thing. That applies as a photographer, brand consultant and speaker. As a speaker, there’s hardly anything more satisfying than seeing attendees of an audience in front of you get something you’re saying. You can see the visceral change in their expression and it’s more than just a nod of the head. You know when you’ve helped them see something in themselves that they didn’t see before.
Tell us about one of your ideal audiences where they had that a-ha moment that you’re referring to.
My ideal audience is a combination. My heart will always be with entrepreneurs because I love the entrepreneurial journey and how much heart entrepreneurs put into their businesses. At this stage of my career in business development and branding, I’m excited about working with companies and leaders because I like to see them have that same reaction. I’m beginning to see these walls being broken down between the whole B2B and the B2C world. I don’t even get it anymore. I’m embedded as an entrepreneur and has been a B2C type of business. What I’m seeing is the B2B world opening up to learning the entrepreneurial spirit and mind. Somehow, B2B has thought they are different. With the leaders that I speak in front of and I do workshops with, I’m seeing their eyes opening up to realizing that they’re B2B customers are just like B2C because, at the end of the day, we’re all humans.
Instead of thinking it’s all artificial intelligence talking to artificial intelligence. Jeffery, you have this wonderful coffee creamer story as part of your keynotes. It ties into making someone feel seen. Can you share a little bit about that story with us?
I love that you relate so much of your work to dating because I’ve always found that to be a useful tool as well. I was on a date and I observed that he took cream in his coffee and I drink my coffee black. At a later date, we had a casual diner. The waitress brought over the metal creamer and set it down in the middle, but almost a little bit more towards me. I immediately slid the creamer across the table and it was much an expression of, “This is for you,” because I had already observed that he took the cream and I did not. It was such an interesting reaction as his eyes were watching the motion of the creamer, but then he looked up with this look in his eyes like, “You get me.” It was the smallest gesture, but those are the ones that are always the most meaningful.
That’s what happens. We take that behavior into the business world where if you are having trouble standing out against a sea of competitors, the one that people are going to use and more importantly, stay loyal to are people who feel like, “You get us. That brand gets me. Therefore, I’m staying loyal to that brand,” whether it’s a hotel, a particular department store or whatever product or service you might be using. You have so many choices of stories to go to, whether it’s the Venice water taxi or Bergdorf Goodman. Tell us one of those, if you would.
Making your customers feel like you get them is the differentiator today. It’s only going to become more so because, with today’s technology-driven way of doing business, we’re often going to feel more distant. With my own concerns about businesses and how they use technology, which can be an incredibly useful tool, but the question I like to pose businesses is, “Using technology, will you make your customers feel like one in a million or one of a million?” The choice is yours and it’s going to make a difference as to whether you succeed or not.
Hopefully, it’ll only be the businesses that make their customers feel like one in a million that succeed. To understand the lingo of your ideal customers is to understand not just their values, behavior, and lifestyle, but these intimate ways in which they function. At the end of the day, if I looked at all my affluent clients, my photography clients, there are certain traits. We don’t want to judge people, stereotype people or put people in big buckets. However, there are certain behaviors that one can attribute to certain places of how they see themselves in the world.
Most affluent people are particular and detailed. They’re surrounded by a lot of staff and supportive people that can help them live their lives in a certain way. What I realized is that at the end of the day, the thing that was most important to them was being responsible because if you have money, money’s not an excuse. They can’t put two of their kids to Ivy League schools and the third one to community college. They can’t answer that. They can’t address that. I realized that their main lingo was the lingo of responsibility. Everything I did in my business spoke to the lingo of responsibility.
For example, one thing we did is we would produce these beautiful high-end holiday greeting cards. We’re talking about cards that were $10 apiece, and these are clients that are sending out 600, 700 or 1,000 of these cards. Big investment in holiday cards and my photographs would be on the front. Back in the old days, there were photographs mounted on the front and then when digital printing came along, the photographs were printed on the outside and maybe multiple photographs on the inside, all custom done. The smallest detail like the creamer of coffee would include in the box of cards and a pen that was a soft calligraphy nib, which the ink of the pen was as close as we could get to the recolor of the return address ink on the back of the envelope.
What I know of their lingo is that perfection is a big part of it and there’s no way they’re going to address or have someone else address the envelopes in black ink if the return addresses red, blue or green, which doesn’t match. We would give them that pen, it was a $2.50 pen and their faces, especially the first time they experienced it, would light up because of the amount of attention to detail. What I knew I was doing is helpful. I was saving them time from having to run around town to find that pen that I know that would be important to them. More than anything, it was the saving of time that I gave them. It was way more valuable than the pen. It saved them time and that meant the world to them.
Let’s share the story about the Venice water taxi because when you speak to someone’s lingo, that causes you to stand out.
At the time, it was funny how it stood out to me as an event in my life, but I wasn’t doing what I do in branding. It didn’t have the correlation, but it was one of those life moments that stood out. I was in Venice with my three kids and my kids were young at the time. It was our first European trip as a single dad and it was a big undertaking. I’m alone with three kids going to Europe and I don’t speak Italian, but this was the country you wanted to go to. We’re in Venice and we’re cruising down the Grand Canal in a crowded water taxi. If you’ve ever been in that experience, they’re packed and not all Europeans believe in deodorant.
[bctt tweet=”It’s your job to find the people who already value what you do.” username=”John_Livesay”]
It’s an intense environment and everyone around us is speaking Italian, which to my American ears sounds like white noise, a buzz. All of a sudden, someone on the taxi spoke English and my head whipped around. We made eye contact with that person with a smile. John, to this day, I would swear that the person’s voice was louder than everyone else. It was crystal clear to my English-speaking ears and I realized this is often how I even demonstrate what it means to speak someone’s lingo in the world. Because that person spoke my lingo, my native language, they stood out crystal clear. In today’s business world, standing out is not enough. We’ve been hearing that as an objective because we can stand out as being louder.
We can stand out by being dramatically different, but what’s the point of standing out if you haven’t taken the time to make sure it’s standing out to the right people and your ideal customers? That person could have stood out by speaking Italian louder, but they spoke out to me because they spoke my lingo. That is what makes lingo the most important strategy today because it’s a big world full of a lot of noise and a lot of messaging. Businesses will experience exponential growth in their businesses if they know who their ideal customers are. Who they’re meant to serve, who will love what they have to offer and learn to speak their lingo. That’s what cuts through the noise and raises a louder volume.
You have a lot of different keynote topics and I want to touch on a little bit on two. One is Life is an Everything Bagel: How to stop choosing between things and choose to have everything. What does this concept of having it all versus failure mean? Give us a little snapshot of who would want to hear that and one of the takeaways.
It’s a fun keynote for me. I was originally hired to give that keynote by an organization that wanted me to do to be the closing keynote. What they were looking for was how to inspire an audience to take action on what they had learned. I’d love it as both an opening and closing keynote because it’s one of the humorous because life is an everything bagel. The reason I use everything bagel as the metaphor is I envisioned what it must have been like when someone was in a kitchen and decided they didn’t want to choose between poppy seed, sesame seeds, raisins, garlic, and onion instead of saying, “I’m going to put everything in me in the batter.”
The creation of this talk came from when I was moving from New York to Miami because I was going through such trauma about not being a New Yorker and I realized, “Why do I feel like I’m being forced to choose? Why can’t I have everything? Why can’t I still be in New York or living in Miami? Why can’t I consider New York home and visit it often?” I don’t love how I tested this theory. I went to a burger joint once, a casual burger place like a lot of burger places, they had an endless number of different kinds of fries.
The waitress came over and I ordered my cheeseburger and she said, “What fries would you like with that?” I said, “What kinds do you have?” She said, “We have waffle fries, steak fries, curly fries, spicy fries, regular fries and sweet potato fries.” I said to her, “I’d like a little bit of all of them.” She goes, “You can’t do that.” I said, “I’m not asking for more fries. I just want a sampling of each of them.” She nervously responds like, “No, you can’t do that.” I was like, “Ask the chef. Maybe it’s possible. I bet you can do it.”
I wanted to pump her up a little bit. I wanted her to get this philosophy in life like, “Why am I being forced to choose? Why can’t I have everything?” Sure enough, a little while later, she came back and she was grinning from ear to ear giving me this burger with a little bit of a sample of all the fries. Let’s face it. They’re all premade. That is what this talk is about. It’s about learning to realize that in this black and white world, constantly forcing us to make a choice between things, when we stopped choosing between things is when we choose everything.
That’s important in business because many entrepreneurs have this experience as a roller coaster that we’re on. Often, the root of that roller coaster is because they’re unknowingly deciding, “Right now, I’m choosing to put all my attention and money towards my business. I’m neglecting my personal life and then I’m going to put all my attention towards my personal life, but my business is taking a slide. I’m putting all my attention towards the volume and not the price of services. I’m going to put all my attention to the price of services.” This is the route of why we experience this roller coaster and my philosophy is, “Why not choose to have everything instead of limiting your own thoughts?”
We understand now that speaking the right lingo is going to attract the right people and to help us stand out, but you have another keynote about how to attract and retain dream employees, not just customers and clients. That’s such a challenge for a lot of companies, especially the Millennials and younger. What is it that someone can do to speak the lingo of a Millennial versus someone else?
One of the key lessons in businesses today is about pivoting, but there’s a deeper level to pivoting. It’s paying attention to what needs you. When I wrote LINGO as a branding strategy, I joke about it in my HR keynotes that I have never had a job and I’ve never received a paycheck. Here I am speaking to HR, but I’m bringing this branding perspective into HR, which they desperately need. Every generation has had its differences and has misunderstood the generation following them. Honestly, I don’t know that there’s ever been such a dissonance between the generation that is typically doing the hiring and the generation of today’s workforce, which are the Millennials.
There are such huge misperceptions of Millennials and I have to have three of them as well. I’m a little more sensitive to this. It’s a key problem in HR because they’re not speaking of lingo. I’ll give you one example and it’s the recruiting process. Many companies recruit in such an old-fashioned way. It’s a lack of communication and this formal interview process. Even if a candidate gets in front of HR, there’s a lack of communication. There’s this old style of doing it. I go into companies and I refer to it as creating a frictionless recruiting process because the generation you’re speaking to, their lingo is frictionless.
LINGO: Discover Your Ideal Customer’s Secret Language and Make Your Business Irresistible
We turn to Uber and Lyft, and the whole business model of technology is to create a frictionless experience. HR is like the fax machines of business practices and it’s a big problem in HR. If they want to get their dream employees, they need to develop the process itself to be more frictionless or more technology-driven. If they want the dream employees of today’s workforce, they need to think like them. They need to speak their lingo.
The takeaway I have is if you’re trying to target a tech Millennial and your application process, your whole interaction with them is a pleasant user experience as they call it in the tech world. It’s seamless and there’s not a lot of bumps. It’s easy to use and it’s intuitive. They think, “They’re speaking my language. They want me to do this, but they already arrived. I’m going to come here. These people already understand the importance of what is important and therefore, I’m intrigued to possibly pick them versus another company trying to woo me.”
You will stand out competitively. If you were that candidate or potential employee, wouldn’t that also mean to you what the experience of working for that company was likely to be like?
I was speaking at a Coca-Cola Summit for CMOs who carry Coke instead of the other brand. One of them was the CMO of Domino’s Pizza and I said to him, “What’s your biggest marketing challenge?” He said, “Attracting tech people.” I said, “Really?” He said, “Yes. We’re competing against a lot of other tech companies because we’re promoting this app that tracks your pizza from the time you ordered it online, how fast it’s getting there and who’s doing it. We used to say we’re a pizza company that uses tech to try to attract this top tech talent. Now we say we’re an eCommerce company that happens to sell pizza.” I thought, “You’re speaking their language because eCommerce company happens to sell insert books. It sounds a lot like Amazon, but you’re just inserting pizza.” That’s another example of what you’re talking about speaking the right lingo to recruit the right people.
I’m working with a company that layout offices. They get the furniture and they design it. It’s an integrated system that they offer and they’re big on what they refer to as resimercial design, which is this blend between residential and commercial design. In redoing their branding where you’re leveraging that as one of the key distinguishable properties that they want to promote to potential customers as to how they can attract their ideal employees. Many companies are having a problem attracting a good workforce. Designing their offices in resimercial styles are attractive to today’s workforce because it’s a cooler atmosphere. I even dig deeper and I was like, “There’s also an added psychological benefit here. In all our lives, the lines are blurred between work and in our personal lives. There are almost no lines.” Therefore, in the workplace when you soften those lines, it’ll feel like that. You increased productivity because it’s not like you’re going to take the hour and go down to the cafeteria. You’re going to sit in a café and keep working while you’re having your sandwich.
At least have a casual conversation with people you work with and collaborate on brainstorming ideas in a new space. I’m a big believer in that as well. Any last thoughts or a quote you want to leave us with?
Philosophically, I believe that businesses, whether they’re businesses seeking their ideal customers or their dream employees, those that take the time to get the audience, get them. They get the audience they want to reach and achieve their goals. Companies that are willing to get their customers will get better customers and companies that are willing to get today’s workforce will get their dream employees. It starts with having a willingness to understand the lingo of the people that you want to attract. I look at lingo as the evolution beyond buyer personas and avatars, which at best scratches the surface. It’s an attempt. Buyer personas and avatars is an attempt to understand that you have to go further than that today because all the companies that are producing buyer personas and avatars are all going to compete with one another. If you want to stand out, go beyond the buyer persona and avatar and find out what emotionally moves the audience that you’re trying to attract.
People can find you if they want to hire you and have a conversation about having you as a speaker at JeffreyShaw.com. Jeffrey, thanks for being such a great guest and sharing your secrets on lingo.
John, thank you for having me. I appreciate it.
Important Links
- LINGO: Discover Your Ideal Customer’s Secret Language and Make Your Business Irresistible
- Creative Warriors
- JeffreyShaw.com
- Better Selling Through Storytelling Method Online Course
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Fanocracy: How To Build Your Fandom With David Meerman Scott
Posted by John Livesay in podcast | 0 comments
When you’re a stage performer, there’s nothing like connecting with people who bring vibe and excitement to your show. Is it possible to build your fandom and create the same energizing feeling in your business? In this episode, John Livesay, aka The Pitch Whisperer, chats with marketing strategist, entrepreneur, advisor, and best-selling author David Meerman Scott about fanocracy, strategies that help you build fans for your business, and the usual marketing tactics that scare them off. David touches on his relationship with his daughter and how they teamed up to write their book, which is not just a prescription for a business to grow fans but also a formula to live a more passionate and fulfilled life for every one of us.
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Listen to the podcast here
Fanocracy: How To Build Your Fandom With David Meerman Scott
Our guest is David Meerman Scott who is an internationally acclaimed business strategist, entrepreneur, advisor to emerging companies and a keynote public speaker. He’s The Wall Street Journal’s Bestselling Author of ten previous books, including The New Rules of Marketing & PR, Marketing Lessons from the Grateful Dead and The New Rules of Sales and Service. He’s got a new book called Fanocracy and in his spare time, he serves and travels around the world for great live music. David, welcome to the show.
Thank you, John. It’s great to be here. I love what you’re doing.
Thank you. I love your passion for music, but I always like to ask my guests to take us on their own story of origin. You can go back to childhood, high school or wherever you want to go and tell us where you had the idea that you wanted to become who you are now.
I started my professional career on a bond trading desk. I was absolutely terrible at bond trading and I hated it. I disliked the idea of being in a windowless room and screaming into telephones, but I loved the information behind bond trading, real-time data and real-time news. I moved into that world and for about a decade, I was in sales and marketing for companies like Dow Jones, Reuters and other organizations that are delivering real-time content around the world. The company I was working for at the time in 2002 was acquired by Thomson Reuters. I was in a jam because they let me go. They fired me and I was like, “What in the world am I going to do now?”
Fanocracy: When creating a new company, idea, book, or speech title, think of things like trademarks, unique names, and how people are going to search for you from the internet.
Fortunately, I had a head start on the web because I had been working in real-time information prior to the web. I came up with this new concept of what marketing on the web is that nobody else was talking about at the time back in the late ‘90s and early 2000. Marketing on the web, in my mind, wasn’t about advertising but instead was about content. I started to write and speak about that. The New Rules of Marketing & PR, the book I’m best known to hit the international bestseller list. It’s on a business week list for six months. It sold 400,000 copies in English. It’s now in the sixth edition and it’s in 29 languages. That got me on the rocket ship of speaking and I’ve been thinking about, “What’s next?” It seems to me that the pendulum has swung too far in the direction of superficial online communications when we’re all hungry for a true human connection. I’ve been trying to figure out what that is and it is the topic of my newest book.
Where did you come up with the name? One of the things you say is the need for fans is not just for actors and athletes anymore.
I’m a massive fan of live music. I’ve been to 790 live shows. I saw David Byrne three times, which is incredibly geeky. I’ve seen the offshoots of the Grateful Dead 75 times. I was thinking to myself, “I’m such a massive fan of live music.” I’m also a massive fan of the Apollo Lunar program. I wrote a book on the Apollo program. I was a producer on the PBS American experience mini-series called Chasing the Moon. I have probably one of the world’s best private collections of artifacts from the Apollo Lunar program. When I dig into something, I dig deep.
It’s not just a double click on the mouse.
I dig freaking deep. I was saying to my daughter, Reiko, “It is crazy that I’m geeky about live music and 75 Grateful Dead concerts.” She said, “Daddy, me too. I am such a Harry Potter nerd.” Not only has she read all the Harry Potter books multiple times, but seen the movies multiple times, been to the Wizarding World of Harry Potter at Universal Orlando Resorts in Florida. Also, she went to London to go to the Harry Potter Studios. She wrote a 90,000-word alternative ending to the Harry Potter story where Draco Malfoy is a spy for the Order of the Phoenix. She put it on our fanfiction site. It was downloaded thousands of times and had hundreds of comments. She’s like, “Daddy, I dig in deep, too.” We realized that there’s something there around fandom.
We’ve decided several years ago that we should collaborate on researching and potentially writing something about fandom. We didn’t have a title for a book and we didn’t even know it was a book yet. We dug in deep and she’s interesting. Not only is she a fan of different things, not only is she a different generation and different gender, but she’s mixed race and she graduated with a neuroscience degree from Columbia University. She is in her final year of medical school. She’s going to be an emergency room physician. We came at it from utterly different perspectives.
With different generations, too.
[bctt tweet=”Focus on community, generosity, and fun! What makes a superfan?” username=”John_Livesay”]
I’m a middle-aged white guy who loves the Grateful Dead and she’s the Millennial who’s digging into things like Harry Potter and Comic-Con. We wrote this thing together and we had to come up with a title. I’m a big fan of a lot of things, but I’m also a big fan of names that are memorable and names that you can own.
That is such valuable information because you want to get into people’s heads with something that takes up the rent. If you don’t have something memorable, compelling, easy to remember or combining phrases or words that people haven’t heard and put together, that’s what our brain craves something, “That’s clever. Democracy. Fanocracy. I get it.” For me, I came up with the pitch whisperer. People go, “I know what a horse whisper is. What’s a pitch whisperer?” It gets people intrigued enough to want to know more, which is the beginning of a conversation. It’s the whole premise of your book of this word of mouth.
It is. The other thing that’s important is that if you think of something in that way and come up with something new, the pitch whisperer and fanocracy, then you can also presumably own the URL and own the search results. A lot of people, when they’re creating a new company, a new idea, a new book or a new speech title, they think of things like trademarks. They think of things like, “Can we legally do this?” They forget that you need to think about, “What’s going to happen when people want to search on it.” When you introduced me, you said that my name is David Meerman Scott and some people think, “Why does he use his middle name? Is he pretentious?” I’m maybe a little pretentious, but the reason I use my middle name is that there’s a David Scott who walked on the moon. There’s a David Scott who’s a member of Congress from Georgia. There’s a David Scott who’s an IRONMAN triathlon champion.
I was never going to own the real estate for David Scott certified. If I went with my middle name, I’m unique on the web, David Meerman Scott. I pioneered something called newsjacking and I pushed that word out into the marketplace. This is an important aspect of this idea of creating something. I believe rather than trademark it, you should let it go and let other people use that. When I went out with newsjacking, I could have put a trademark against it and said, “This is my concept. You can’t use it,” but I didn’t. Instead, I put a Creative Commons license on it and let anyone use the term and my ideas who wanted to. It spread like crazy. I still own the search results because I own Fanocracy.com and I wrote the book.
There have been thousands of other people who have talked about newsjacking and the Oxford English Dictionary included newsjacking in the dictionary and they put my name against it. How crazy is that to invent something that’s in the dictionary? When I was talking with my daughter about the title for our book about the idea of fandom and growing fans, the word fan, fans and fandom were all great words, but all had been used many times. We came up with fanocracy and I don’t say we just came up with fanocracy like it took a minute or two. It took a year because we were playing around with many different names and then we realized that fanocracy was the way to go.
Let’s double click on the nine steps to building your fanocracy. We’re going to touch on each one to get people intrigued enough to want to go buy the book, hopefully. This concept of focusing on intangibles, you talk about community, generosity and fun as opposed to what a lot of companies are focusing on, which is all this internal data about how long we’ve been in business. That’s the first step of how am I going to get closer than normal to someone?
The fundamental principle of fandom is that it’s about a true human connection. I’m a huge live music fan, but what’s an important aspect of that is that I experience live music with my best friends. I have become close on a strong emotional level with other people who love to go to live music with me. It’s the same thing with my daughter. She gets dressed up to go to Comic-Con every year and she’s doing that with her best friend.
When you say dressed up, I’m assuming in costume as opposed to fancy.
Yes. It’s called cosplay, getting dressed up in costumes like the characters that they’re fans of the books.
We used to do that back in the day with The Rocky Horror Picture Show movie.
Fanocracy: If you’re trying to build a company and there’s transformative fandom going on, celebrate it.
It’s the same idea. The whole idea of The Rocky Horror Picture Show is a fabulous example of a fanocracy. The people who are there love the movie, but they love being with like-minded people who are also throwing the toast and doing the other things that you do at The Rocky Horror Picture Show film when you’re there together. You can watch it on your DVD or on Netflix, but going to the theater and being with like-minded people is what’s important. That’s a critical idea and we dug in deep on this particular one and there’s a big aspect of neuroscience involved because it turns out that our brains as humans are hardwired. The closer we get to someone, the more powerful the shared emotions are.
This is something that’s hardwired for our survival because we need to know when we encounter another human. Is that human a friend, foe or a potential mate? We have zones when people enter them of what our brain is unconsciously doing to make sure that we are prepared for what’s happening further than twenty feet away. We’re conscious of people, but we don’t get too concerned quite yet. Within twenty feet, it’s called social space. That’s when you walk into a room and you subconsciously scan the room to see, “Do I know anyone? Is there any threat here? Is our friend here?”
From 4 feet to about 20 feet is called social space and when we begin to track people within 1.5 feet to 4 feet is personal space. In the personal space, if we get that close to someone and we’re comfortable with people, like in a cocktail party situation, it’s a strong and positive human connection. If we get that close to someone and it’s a crowded elevator, a train or sitting next to someone you don’t know on an airplane, it can be a potentially negative emotional response. To develop fans, the more you can bring people in close proximity with like-minded people and with your employees or bringing your employees together with your customers and your partners or customers together with other customers, the more powerful the fandom grows. That was the first idea that we hit on and it comes from neuroscience and it’s a fascinating concept.
I can take it even farther, John, because there’s another aspect of neuroscience, which is called the concept of mirror neurons. We spoke to a bunch of neuroscientists about this. Mirror neurons are the part of the brain that fires when you see or hear somebody do something and it fires as if you are doing that action yourself. For example, if I take a bite of a lemon. That lemon is tart and it makes my eyes scrunch up. My mouth begins to water. I can’t help it but my cheeks pucker up a little bit and it’s a strong reaction. I would guess you might have had a little bit of saliva release now as well, just by me mentioning that. What this means interestingly for building fans is that you can virtually show people together, for example a selfie. A simple selfie is a powerful reaffirming tool that you have great relationships with like-minded people. The people who view that selfie together with another person are seeing that as if they’re in the photo with you.
I haven’t heard that before. I’m fascinated by that. Seeing a selfie is I’m imagining myself in that photo with you and those people are feeling comfortable enough for you to be in that personal space, then I could feel safe enough as well.
You nailed it and the same thing is through a video. Video is popular and people think, “You have videos that are popular,” but what’s popular is a video that’s framed as if you’re in the personal space with the viewer. That means looking at the camera directly, a head and shoulders shot. It’s one of the reasons why we think we personally know movie stars or television presenters because of those close-ups. It also means that in a scary movie, we get scared and when somebody’s sad, we get sad and happy and so on. There’s a lot of interesting ramifications when it comes to video down to the concept of proximity and mirror neurons.
I was watching A Star Is Born. They did such a great job with the camera angles that I felt like I was on stage and what it must feel like to be a rock star having all of that adoration come at you. This concept of, “Is it safe?” I talk about that a lot, too, that the handshake came about to show we didn’t have a weapon in our hands. Most people go, “That’s what’s going on at that fight or flight response.” The other thing I want to talk about what you mentioned in this concept is the shared emotions. That’s what I love about storytelling and that’s what you do and I do as speakers. We tell these stories that give people a sense of shared emotions. They go on a journey with us. When you can do that as a speaker with your audience, in your messaging or you’re talking to somebody one-on-one, that shared emotion is what makes someone become your fan and that’s valuable.
[bctt tweet=”We’re all hungry for a true human connection. ” username=”John_Livesay”]
That’s only one of these great nine things. Let’s move onto the second one, which is letting go of your creation. Many people talk about, “I’ve created this proposal. It’s my masterpiece. I’m not going to touch it. I’m done.” I remember talking to Françoise Gilot who is Paloma Picasso’s mother and she said that in the ‘40s, there was a shortage of canvases and they had to paint over them. The concept of having to paint over your masterpiece is valuable for people. Tell us what that means to you as far as how can we let go of our creations that you touched on about not letting anyone else use your URL, but I’m guessing there’s something more to it.
That’s a good manifestation of it around how I recommend that anybody build fans, which is don’t try to control that thing which you just created. For example, I mentioned that my daughter, Reiko, loves Harry Potter and she transforms Harry Potter into something else by writing alternative books for Harry Potter. Other people get dressed up as Harry Potter characters and still, other people draw fan art about Harry Potter. JK Rowling, the author has embraced this concept of fan-created Harry Potter works. There’s a website called MuggleNet that celebrates this. She has a good relationship with the person who created MuggleNet. That’s the idea of celebrating people who create something new.
To give the readers a contrast, Disney with somebody who does not like people doing anything with Mickey Mouse. I think that’s valuable to give them the contrast that not everyone embraces this concept. Those that do are a little more modern and newer.
We also looked at it from the perspective of, “Can we define and articulate that?” What we did was we came up with what we call curative fandom and transformative fandom. Curative fandom is the idea of the official fandom, the statistics, the official website, and the official social media. Disney has the official places that you can go to. Transformative fandom is the idea of transforming that into something else. I mentioned the idea with Harry Potter, but there are certain fandoms that have both. The best organizations at developing fans are those that understand that neither is right or wrong and that you should be celebrating both.
A perfect example is Major League Baseball. There are a lot of people who are under the curative fandom aspects of Major League Baseball. That would be curating the statistics, how many RBI is, how many home runs, which team is up and which team is down and all of the data that goes in with Major League Baseball. Whereas transformative fandom would be the people who do fantasy baseball. They’re transforming baseball into something completely different and they’re both fans of baseball but in different ways and Major League Baseball celebrates both of them.
I love the example of Hamilton. You’ve got the book Hamilton, which is the facts. “Here was Alexander Hamilton’s life,” and that’s curative fandom. You’ve got a transformative fandom of Hamilton, which is the play. A race bent retelling of Hamilton’s life in rap. It’s completely transformative. Neither one is better than another. They’re both great but they’re different. Celebrating both as ways of looking at Hamilton is great. There were some professors of history that said, “No, you can’t do the play. That’s wrong.” That’s not how you build fans. You should celebrate both of them.
I’m going to speak at the Coca-Cola CMO Summit and the whole theme is storytelling. They’re having one of the co-authors of Hamilton speak to the audience before we all go see the musical. Talk about an experience of that. What you’re talking about that’s valuable that I love is the transformative fandom of turning Hamilton the story into a rap musical. It is an entryway that causes a lot of students who aren’t into history to then want to know and go back to the curative fandom part of, “Let me read the book now and learn more about these characters through the entry of the transformative fandom.”
You can tune your brain to curative fandom versus transformative fandom. You think of different ways that perhaps if you’re trying to pitch something and if you’re trying to build a company, if there’s transformative fandom going on, celebrate it. One of my favorite examples is Roomba, the robot vacuum cleaner. If you take a look at YouTube and search for cats on Roomba or dogs on Roomba, there are all these wonderful videos of animals hitching rides on Roombas around the house. It’s unbelievable transformative fandom of what the Roomba is. It’s not a device for carrying your cat around the room, but that showcase fandom for a vacuum cleaner. Any time that there’s something like that going on, celebrate it. That is the coolest thing in the world to growing fans and smart investors, smart potential customers, partners and VC firms love that.
Fanocracy: Putting out white papers or eBooks requiring an email address to download it set up an adversarial relationship with a potential fan before you’ve even met them.
In marketing, there’s something called paid impressions and earned impressions. The paid impressions are how many people watch this TV show, see this ad and listen to this commercial. The earned impressions are when the fans start sharing it. Of course, that has more impact because word of mouth has more credibility than a paid ad. You’re right on the market money with the need in the marketplace for people to figure out, “How do I create fans?” One of the things you talk about is giving more than you have to. The concept of don’t have strings attached to your content. In other words, you can watch the first two minutes of this video and then you got to watch commercials. That’s strings attached and you say, “Don’t do that.”
There’s another one that always makes me wonder why people do it. I know why now having done the research, but that is people who put out white papers or eBooks and require an email address in order to download it. The problem with that is it sets up an adversarial relationship with a potential fan before you’ve even met them. If you dangle something in front of them and say, “Here’s my wonderful white paper. Download it.” They go to download it and you say, “I need to have something from you before I give you my stuff.” That’s an adversarial relationship. Better to make it completely and utterly free. I learned this from the Grateful Dead because they were the first band to allow fans to record their concerts and nobody else was doing that. If you went to The Rolling Stones or Pink Floyd, there are no photos and no recording devices allowed. Nothing is allowed. The Grateful Dead said, “Sure, why not?”
Many people started to record the shows that it became disruptive to the fans who weren’t recording. They created a taper section that was right behind the soundboard. You could buy a taper seat. It was this specific seat, which wasn’t a great place to watch the show, but it was a fabulous spot to record the show. In the early days, it was the cassette tape and it became MP3s, but the band allowed you to give away the cassette tapes or trade them. The only thing they asked is, “Please don’t sell them.” As long as you trade them or give them the way, you can record the shows.
That goes back to your first concept of it’s the fear of missing out. They weren’t at the concert, but they see the video of the concert. That’s like the selfie. They feel like they’re at the concert, makes them want to go to the concert and buy the music even more.
Even more so for Grateful Dead because they made the majority of their revenue from touring, people would say, “This is a great cassette. I’m playing it in my car and playing in my dorm room. I want to go to a live show, too.” You have people like me who have been to 75 Grateful Dead concerts. I wrote a book called Marketing Lessons from the Grateful Dead. The foreword was by Bill Walton who’s an NBA Basketball Hall of Famer. He’s been to 850 Grateful Dead shows. Imagine the revenue the band gets from people like us.
If someone can’t imagine going to something that often like, “I’m a fan, but I’m not a super fan.” Is it that you’re going with different people to these concerts? Would you go by yourself? What is it? They’re typically real professionals. You think, “That amazing,” and then you go the next time and they say exactly the same thing at the exact same time. Whether it’s a Broadway musical or a Grateful Dead concert, it’s precision. What is it about seeing something multiple times, the time when people’s attention span is short that makes you a super fan?
In the case of the Grateful Dead, it’s simply because they never repeated a show. The setlist was always different. At any one time, they had about 100 songs they could play at the drop of a hat and if they rehearsed a little bit, probably as many as 200 songs that they could play. The way they put the setlist together is that they try hard. If they do three shows in a night in the same city, they won’t repeat a song and they’ll try not to repeat a song from when they’re in the city last time.
That’s unusual. We have to say for people who are used to going to concerts. That is not the norm, correct?
It’s not the norm. Usually, if you go to a Rolling Stone show, let’s say, for example, most of the show will be the same, although they’ll do a few songs that are different, but the Dead, you never know what you’re going to get. They have good nights and they have bad nights. The solos are different and the way they play the songs is different. You never know where it’s going to go. For super fans like me and others, it’s about every time is different and you start to dig in, you become a bit of an expert in what’s going on. It’s like, “They haven’t played this song in four years. We’re lucky to be here when they’re playing this.”
[bctt tweet=”The more you bring people in close proximity with like-minded people, the more powerful your fandom grows. ” username=”John_Livesay”]
I’m hearing an element of surprise is what keeps you coming back. In addition to realizing that someone at their peak performances still has good days and bad days. You see this with athletes. Tiger Woods is great, but not every time. Baseball players, but not every time. As entrepreneurs and business people, and even as you and I are as keynote speakers, our goal is to nail it. We want that home run every time. Even the best performers aren’t nailing it. Their bad night to someone who’s never seen them before still might be great, but to a superfan, you’ve seen them better. Is there any life lessons takeaway that you can give your own self talk about when you aren’t at your best, but nobody else knows it?
It’s an astute observation that you delivered because the Grateful Dead concert is like a sporting event. Somebody can go to see the New York Yankees play twenty times in the season because they know that every game is going to be different. Grateful Dead is similar. At least in my own work, when I’m speaking from a stage, I always try to celebrate and use as much as I can the nuances of the room and the organization I’m speaking to. How can I draw them in somehow? Is it a company that’s hiring me? If so, what can I learn about the company that I can work into my talk? Is it an association? If so, what is the association? How can I work that into my talk?
I’m going to be speaking to a group of insurance company executives in the country of Colombia. I’m going to Cartagena, Colombia to give a talk and I’m excited to be able to have a couple of rifts and talk about the insurance business. Interestingly, there is a company called Hagerty Insurance that we uncovered. There is a story of it in our book Fanocracy and they have built a fanocracy. They have 650,000 fans and they’re an insurance company. It’s a product everybody hates. Nobody likes insurance. It’s crazy.
They think of it as a commodity. How in the world are they using some of the elements that we talked about?
They are, that’s why they ended up becoming a story in the book. They do classic car insurance. What they’ve done is they’ve dug in deep to provide as much information as possible for people who are fans of classic cars. They’ve become a part of their classic car fandoms. They go to the classic car events and they run seminars. I love this one. They’ll teach your kid how to drive a stick shift. Teaching your child how to drive a stick shift is stressful for both the parent and the kid.
A phone company could teach Millennials how to use a rotary phone because I’ve seen videos about that where they can’t figure out how it works.
They’ve got a YouTube channel and they have some valuation reports on their websites. They’ve done a fabulous job at building fans. The CEO is McKeel Hagerty. I interviewed him and he goes, “David, I’m in a commodity business and more than that, I’m in a business that everyone hates. Nobody likes insurance. Everyone hates writing a check to an insurance company. It’s terrible, but I’ve been able to develop fans. I have 650,000 people who are members of my driver’s club. I have tens of thousands of people who subscribed to my YouTube channel. I have fans in a product category that everybody hates.
Also, it seems to me that there’s a strategy life lesson for us to take away, which is if you’re in an industry that doesn’t necessarily seem like an obvious place for fans, figure out an adjacent fandom and be part of that. In their particular case, they said, “There’s a whole group of people that are fans of classic cars. We can piggyback on that passion with our fandom.” Is that what they did?
That’s exactly right. This is true throughout this idea of growing fans. Saying to someone, “I want you to be a fan of my company.” That is not going to work. Trying to make them a fan of your company is not going to work, but being a part of the fandom that already exists, that’s easier. That’s something that’s entirely possible and people see you as part of that fandom that already exists. For example, these classic car enthusiasts see Hagerty as an integral part of the fanocracy that they’re a part of, that rubs off. When they say, “I’ve got to insure my classic car. Who do I go with? The other guy or the people I know and the people who I interact with on a regular basis at car insurance?”
Fanocracy: Understanding your customer’s story and relating to it is a much more likely way to build fans than just talking about your product and service.
It creates a little bit of loyalty so they aren’t always going for the cheapest price. You said something that I want to underline because I’m constantly talking about this in terms of storytelling. When you describe a case study through a story and people see themselves in that story of you’re the Sherpa helping somebody up the mountain, they want to work with you. What you’re saying is when someone sees themselves in your fandom or the adjacent fandom, you have that rub off effect.
We aren’t going to have time to cover all nine but people need to get Fanocracy. The one I want to jump on is listening to rehumanize. I talk about the importance of listening before you start telling your story, that you have to realize that people have many unspoken thoughts going on there in their heads when you’re speaking. You have to come from a place of curiosity every time when you’re giving a keynote talk or whether you’re the Grateful Dead or whatever it is. Speak a little bit about how do we rehumanize people, so that we become better listeners?
I’m glad you picked up on this particular chapter. My daughter wrote this chapter. The way that we put the book together is that we thought about making it one voice and having it be a third party. We realized that we both have different viewpoints, voices and writing styles. We’ve swapped back and forth with chapters and Reiko, my daughter, wrote this particular chapter. She’s in her final year of medical school and she is a huge fan of something called narrative medicine. It was developed at Columbia University where she did her undergraduate degree. She took some courses in narrative medicine. It’s the basic idea that to be a truly good doctor, you have to understand the whole patient and not just the symptoms. It’s simple, but the idea of narrative comes in because when you interview a patient, you want to ask them about their life story. It’s exactly what you asked me at the top of the show. The first question you said, “Tell me your life journey,” and a good doctor does that.
My daughter got into this idea because she writes fiction. She wants to know, “Who is this person that I’m about to see?” They’re coming in because they have complaints where in one case, she tells the story. This made it into the book about a patient who has cancer. When trying to decide what treatment for this particular patient, it wasn’t just about the symptoms and the likely course the disease is going to take. What this particular patient said to her was, “I’m an artist and as long as I can do my art, I want to continue living. You need to figure out how you can help me to continue to do my art, not just how you can keep me alive.” That stuck with her because it was powerful. That’s an emotional hook on the story, but she recognizes that understanding that story is important. It became fascinating as we dug into this.
We’ve interviewed Siri Lindley. She was the number one world triathlon champion for several years and now she’s a coach. What she told us exactly on this theme around storytelling was when she coaches triathletes, it’s not about the power meter, the data, what the watch says and shaving a second off of the time. That’s what all the other coaches do. For her, it’s, “What is the story of the athlete. What is it that motivates this athlete? Why are they doing a triathlon?” She says when she’s able to enhance or in some cases, she has to rekindle love in triathlon among her elite athletes, they win. She has had a number of a champion triathletes that she’s coached, not because of the way everyone else coaches around data, but around their story.
This is why it’s such an important chapter in Fanocracy, we believe that understanding your customer’s story and relating it back, that is a more likely way to build fans than just talking about your product and service. We’re coming at something that you talk about a lot, but doing it in a way around the rubric of fandom. It’s a fascinating look at how you can become a better doctor, triathlon coach, entrepreneur and professional. You can live a better life, which is the ultimate aspect of this book that I found to be fun. It’s not just a prescription for a business to grow fans, it’s a prescription to live a more passionate and fulfilled life for every one of us.
[bctt tweet=”Over the last few years, the pendulum has swung too far into superficial communications, but what really feels good is being around people. ” username=”John_Livesay”]
The book again is Fanocracy. If anybody wants to hire you as a keynote speaker, you’ve spoken to big brands like Microsoft and spoken many times at the Tony Robbins’ Mastery Events. There are two websites, DavidMeermanScott.com, as well as Fanocracy.com. David, is there any last thought, word or phrase you want to leave us with?
What I recognized over the years is that the pendulum has swung too far into superficial communications. The digital has got some great stuff around it, but we live in a polarizing worldwide now. What makes us feel good is being around people we love and being around people who enjoy the same things that we do. You can tap that and you can use that to grow a business, to grow a career and live a better life. It’s incredibly reaffirming and I’ve been having fun with this concept of fanocracy and engaging people around it. I appreciate you having me on, so I could talk about it a little bit with you.
I’m thrilled to support your messaging and this wonderful new book. I want everyone to be encouraged to start thinking of themselves and make sure that you’re your own fan and then figuring out who you want to be a fan of after that.
What a lovely way to end. Thank you, John.
Important Links
- Fanocracy
- The New Rules of Marketing & PR
- Marketing Lessons from the Grateful Dead
- The New Rules of Sales and Service
- MuggleNet
- Hamilton
- YouTube channel – Hagerty Insurance
- Siri Lindley
- DavidMeermanScott.com
- Better Selling Through Storytelling Method Online Course
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Talk Triggers: Word Of Mouth Marketing with Daniel Lemin
Posted by John Livesay in podcast | 0 comments
Episode Summary:
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Talk Triggers: Word Of Mouth Marketing with Daniel Lemin
I am thrilled and honored to have Daniel Lemin. He is a startup co-founder, trusted advisor and the bestselling author on reputation management, digital marketing and social media customer service. He was an early member of Google’s global communications team. Daniel led the launch of products in North America and around the world. He is the CMO and Co-Founder of Selectivor, a food intelligence startup that helps people stay healthy through personalized eating. His book with co-author Jay Baer, Talk Triggers, is going to be a New York Times bestseller. It explores word of mouth marketing and lays out a framework so you can build that in your own organization. You want to have something that’s memorable and Talk Triggers gives you those ways to do it. He’s an expert commentary on television. He has got that anchorman smile. He’s smart and handsome. Daniel, welcome to the show.
Thanks for having me.
Take us back to when you were growing up in Ohio. You can go back to your childhood, high school, college, wherever you want, when you said, “I’m going to get into high tech.” Obviously, Google when you were younger that didn’t even exist. I’d love to hear what your background was of how you got into what you’re doing.
To some degree, I don’t know is the answer. That’s true for many people. You look back and think, “I’m not sure how I got into doing the things I’ve done, but I’m grateful I did.” Part of it though, I’ve always been a curious kid and also a kid that had a curious mind. I always wondered how things worked, why things worked and I tried tinkering with things to make them work better. I was always drawn to technology for that reason. I enjoy the challenges of it and also the gold rush. There’s always something new and bigger. There’s always a moon shot happening somewhere in the tech world, including several happening right now. There’s always been that curiosity for me. I always assumed that I would work in marketing as a kid. That was the only thing I was ever good at. I tried doing other endeavors, but none of them anywhere near with success.
[bctt tweet=”If you are assuming that your best chance to captivate a customer is to be the best in your category, then you’re going to struggle for a long time.” username=”John_Livesay”]
Tell us what it was like to be one of the early members of Google. What was that atmosphere like? What can you say looking back, how the culture has evolved?
I was employee number 400 at the company. I worked on this scrappy little marketing communications team. There were about eight of us in total at the time. The fun part about that was seeing the company explode around us in all different areas, from employee size to new markets, launching internationally new products, and new product space. They’ve launched so many innovations when I was there in the first couple of years.
[bctt tweet=”Nobody ever talks about average so you need to be remarkable.” username=”John_Livesay”]
It solidified for me, in my mind, the value of never resting on your laurels. You never assume that everything is done. The work is never done. You always continue to change things. You continue to think about ways you can do something better. That’s in part how I’ve approached my career after Google in marketing. It’s always looking for better ways to do things. It was a good training ground for me from that perspective. It was also an amazing place to work.
That has led you to your own startup, Selectivor. You’re applying AI intelligence to helping us all get healthier.
The broad mission is to help people stay healthy and well through whatever diets they may be following, both health and personal guidance. We’re building a whole host of AI tools to do that. We’ll help you find recipes that work for you. We’ll help you find restaurants and things that work for you. That’s the mission and the broad story behind that are personal struggles that both I and my co-founder had trying to stay on our diets. In the context of eating with other people, sometimes that conversation’s uncomfortable. You don’t want to tell them about your dietary needs. This has been the biggest buzzkill in the world, “I’d love to go on a date with you. I can’t eat this and I can’t eat that. I don’t eat this and I won’t eat that. Aren’t you looking forward to meeting me?” It’s extracting some of that social friction out of the equation in the process of doing that.
I’ve read some research that if you tend to have overweight friends, you are more likely to be overweight and vice versa. If you tend to have fit, healthy friends, you’re more likely to be fit. Since you’re an expert in data and software, does that ring true? Are you incorporating that into your company?
It completely rings true. There’s a famous landmark study from the ‘60s, the Framingham Heart Study. They wrote about it in that book, Connected. It’s a landmark study looking at how communities impact the health of its members. Obese communities tended to remain obese and lose weight together when they started. It is truly that connected. In fact, one of the things we’re building into our product is the ability to challenge yourself and others to do something, stay on a diet, drink more water, and eat more watermelon, whatever it might be. That notion of challenging each other is a much more playful way to do things together. It impacts how we think about the product.
Talk Triggers: The Complete Guide to Creating Customers with Word of Mouth
Let’s dive into Talk Triggers: The Complete Guide to Creating Customers With Word Of Mouth. If there’s anything I’ve learned from my advertising background is word of mouth is much more powerful than any paid ad and commercial. Getting these brand ambassadors to talk about you and spread the word, the trust factor is huge. How did you and Jay Baer decide to work together?
I’ve known and worked with Jay for a decade, even more than that. I hired Jay at an agency I worked at in Downtown Los Angeles. I hired Jay there to help us on the agency side with innovation and bring some outside thinking. I liked working with him so much that I decided to leave that agency and work with him. I’ve worked with him on the consulting side since 2010.
This is a big collaboration with a lot of insights together. The cover of the book looks like two llamas nestling each other. What animals are those?
They’re alpacas nestling. They’re from Peru.
What is the significance of that picture?
It’s a simple story. The first version of the cover from our publisher was less than remarkable. It wasn’t terribly exciting. Widely panned might be a phrase I would use to describe that. We were looking for something that people would remember and talk about. Have you seen another business book with alpacas whispering to each other on the cover? It’s unique. It’s also hot pink. It’s connected to one of the case studies inside. That’s the story behind the cover. We’ve taken it to a ludicrous extreme. We’re all over now alpaca GIFs and memes. We’ve even been to an alpaca farm together, Baer and me.
The premise is you want to say something that triggers a conversation, which is what a good pitch does. The second part for me, from what I can tell that you’re offering people, does not only do it trigger a conversation but it triggers a memorable conversation. Can you give us an example?
The hero insight that led us to write this book was that the economic impact of word of mouth. The things we say amongst ourselves as buyers, investors and consumers of things, the economic impact of that is much more massive than we might assume. 20% of every purchase decision that’s made is directly driven by word of mouth discussion or recommendation. The challenge is few companies have an actual strategy to make word of mouth happen. They assume that it happens. You probably know from a gut feel as well as we did, that doesn’t happen. It’s a gamble you take that someone’s going to talk about your brand. We started looking at examples of companies that do something a little bit different in the delivery of their surface.
[bctt tweet=”Listen to customers to find the gap where a talk trigger can happen.” username=”John_Livesay”]
For example, the UberConference. What’s great about UberConference is if you’ve ever been on a conference call from UberConference, you may be familiar with their country, Twain-y hold music. It’s a hilarious song. It’s all about being on hold. You can go check it out, Google UberConference hold song. You’ll quickly find it. The impact of that when you’re on hold and then end up on the call nearly every single time someone says, “Did everybody else here that hold music? That was amazing.” In fact, if you go on Twitter, even on Google and search for UberConference hold music, people go crazy for that song. What they have done is nothing magical. They built in a slightly different way of filling a customer experience gap, in this case with hold music. That was the spark. That is an actual idea. That’s a Talk Trigger. It generates some material for a consumer to work with. It gives them a story to tell. That’s the hero insight behind it.
It’s an interesting thing that something could be so engaging that people would go listen to hold music while they’re not on hold.
UberConference hired Postmodern Jukebox to do a remix of it in multiple different genres.
You give keynote talks on this topic as well. Who is your ideal audience that needs to know how to have Talk Triggers?
The interesting thing is it spans all industries, even as individuals. We can all benefit from having a personal Talk Trigger. Jay Baer, if you’ve seen him speak, he wears crazy plaid suits. He’s always dressed impeccably. As individuals, we can benefit from it. I do a lot of work with associations, small business owners and corporate workshops to companies looking to try to figure out the best type of Talk Trigger basically to deploy. It’s a wide range but a lot of work with small business owners who frankly can probably benefit from it the most.
To me, it seems with the problem you’re solving here is many of the people that I work with, whether I’m giving a keynote talk on how to be a better storyteller and therefore increase sales is this concept of objection around price. You’re a commodity. We don’t see the value in paying your premium price. I don’t care if it’s food you’re selling or a design of an architecture firm. People have a lot of trouble justifying a premium price. How does your keynote and Talk Trigger help people with that particular challenge?
Word Of Mouth: The economic impact is more massive than how we assumed it to be in terms of the things we say amongst ourselves and buyers, investors, and consumers of our products.
Part of that is if you are assuming that your best chance to captivate a customer is to be the best in your category, you’re going to struggle for a long time. Even the best restaurants in the world, from a technical perspective, still struggle to get butts in seats. What is the reason for that? Is it the price? Maybe, but is lowering the price going to get them across that chasm? It might even hurt you in the end. Robert Cialdini always talks about this, the Pre-Suasion. If by the time someone calls you, comes into your restaurant or opens the door to your store, they’ve already decided they like you. They’ve already decided that they’re willing and able to do business with you. That is a massive benefit to the business.
The way to break in and get someone to see you, to get invited to the pitch, is to have some memorable Talk Trigger. You say there’s a 4-5-6 learning system in the book. Can you walk us through what that is and use the MailChimp example?
We put this learning system together. Many authors have written about word of mouth over the years. Certainly, it’s not a topic that’s new. We wanted to bring a little bit more structure to it to give business owners, companies and even individuals an actual framework for how you can make these Talk Triggers. Generally speaking, sometimes it just happened by accident in companies. We thought there’s got to be a better way for this, it’s so important. The 4-5-6 system wraps itself around a few elements. The 4 is the four mandates for a Talk Trigger, four things that must be true for something to be Talk Trigger worthy. There are five general types of Talk Triggers, which are not necessarily mutually exclusive. The 6 is the six-step system that you can use to build them, create them and deploy them.
[bctt tweet=”There’s always a moon shot happening somewhere in the tech world.” username=”John_Livesay”]
I’ll briefly go over the four. They’re a good place to start exploring Talk Triggers. The four mandates or musts for a Talk Trigger, number one, it must be remarkable by definition. It must be something worthy of talking about. No one talks about average. You don’t say, “Let me tell you about this perfectly adequate salad I had for lunch yesterday.” It’s not remarkable. It has to be a remarkable element in the customer experience or the sales experience. The second is it has to be relevant to the customer experience. Relevance is vital to the delivery and reception of the Talk Trigger by the consumer. If it’s out of left field, it feels almost like a gimmick or a stunt, and that’s not the best way to get people talking about us.
The third is it needs to be reasonable. By reasonable, we mean not over the top. If you go to any DoubleTree Hotel anywhere in the world and check-in, they give you a warm chocolate chip cookie that they baked in the hotel. 75,000 times every single day people get this cookie. It’s a reasonable gesture. People talk about that cookie. It’s a remarkable Talk Trigger for the simple thing that it is. It’s a cookie. It’s not a baby alpaca in your room that you can use while you’re at the hotel. It’s a cookie, but it’s relevant to the product experience. The fourth of the mandates is that it has to be repeatable. This is where we often get trapped. Sometimes we think about Talk Triggers being available to our VIP customers, our top customers and top 10%. If it’s something that isn’t available to every single customer every single time they interact with your product, it can cause dissonance. It can cause frustration and disappointment, which is the negative of word of mouth.
Imagine if I went to a DoubleTree and they’d run out of homemade warm chocolate chip cookies and I’ve been looking forward to that. I might be even angry as opposed to if I had no expectation of it, then that’s fine. If I’ve heard word of mouth and they’re out, it’s not good.
Just say, “I’m sorry, your room rate doesn’t include the cookie because it’s too cheap and you’re a bad person.” It creates this letdown, “Terms and conditions. While supplies last,” and all of that stuff is the enemy of word of mouth.
Don’t you see some of the airlines starting to do that? “That seat doesn’t let you have a free snack,” or whatever they’re doing now. Not only is it crowded but you do have to pay to put a bag in the overhead.
It’s almost like they’re paying someone to tell them how to make this experience worse. That’s what they’re hiring in consultants to do at this point, “Can you help us make this the worst experience for at least a small part of our customers?” We’ll talk briefly about MailChimp. I like this example because I’m a software guy myself. It’s often a little bit harder for us to imagine what you can do in a software environment that’s a Talk Trigger. If you’ve used MailChimp, you know their little chimp. It’s everywhere in the product. He is their mascot, he is their voice. He has a name. His name is Freddie, which a lot of people don’t know.
Freddie has a place in the product. When you submit an email to be sent through MailChimp, you get this big high five from Freddie. He says, “Good job.” He’s everywhere in the experience of the product. People talk about Freddie all the time. The reason it’s interesting is email software is the pits. It’s basically the airline of software. They’ve found a way with Freddie to make the experience better for you and because of that people talk about Freddie. I’m sure it has downstream benefits for them from a loyalty perspective and a lifetime value perspective, but most certainly from that Pre-Suasion perspective. If you’re looking for email software, HubSpot, Emma or MailChimp, some people may have an affinity right away for MailChimp.
[bctt tweet=”Never assume that everything is done. The work is never done.” username=”John_Livesay”]
We have an emotional connection almost like Colonel Sanders. There’s a person with the brand. Let’s go through those four Rs and how MailChimp is doing something remarkable. The fact that there’s a playful tone to the culture with this Freddie, you could say that makes them more remarkable than other email companies that don’t do it. Would that be fair?
That’s fair. SurveyMonkey also has a monkey as its mascot. It’s not used to the extent MailChimp uses Freddie. Freddie is in the product, as part of the product experience. From that perspective, it’s remarkable that they’ve done that.
It’s not a one-off, it’s integrated. It’s relevant because the concept of having a bunch of monkeys working for you in the background, it’s fun and it creates a visual image for me anyway.
Often, small business software is painful to use. Not only is it a relevant brand vision, but it’s also slightly better to use, which feels relevant to you at the moment.
It’s easy a monkey could do it maybe. It’s reasonable, it’s not over the top. It’s not this huge gorilla or something intimidating. Finally, it’s repeatable. That monkey’s there come rain or shine.
He gives you a little pellet award every single time you send an email.
That is remarkable to me because we know how our brains are wired. That’s why people keep playing Words With Friends or keep the addiction to the phone or gambling. It’s the, “I’ve got a little ding. I’ve got a little award.” To incorporate that into the software, to me, triggers the same addictive behavior in a good way.
On the Selectivor side, we are building a cute little dinosaur named Oliver. He’s going to have a lot of that same presence like Freddie does because it’s a little bit more fun to use.
Word Of Mouth: If it’s something that is not available to every single customer every single time they interact with your product, then it can cause dissonance, frustration, disappointment, and negative word of mouth.
Are there any tips besides buying the book that if someone’s saying, “I know I need a Talk Trigger and I understand the four steps of these Rs. What could I do? What’s my next step besides reading this book and seeing how other people are doing it?”
I may be biased but reading the book is helpful. Start looking for them in your everyday life. Think about your own experience in places and look for Talk Triggers because you start to see them in different ways and in different places. It’s fun to spot them that way. It’s educational for yourself because for the most part, almost all of them is in the category of, “Why didn’t I think of that first? That’s crazy. It’s so simple, it’s stupid.”
One of the things that you have in the book Talk Triggers is the six-step process for creating them. We’re not going to go into all six, but give us a little teaser. What’s the first step?
The first one is one almost no company does enough of, which is listening to your customers. We go into a meeting room, a conference room, we sit down and we say, “We need to build a viral campaign to launch our new water flavor.” What few people take time to do is to talk to customers, to get their opinion, to see how they use the product, and to talk to your customer service people about what are they hearing from customers. The first step in that six-step process is a listening tour. You go deep on the listening exercise. What you start to see are these little tiny gaps that you aren’t seeing in formal surveys, you’re not seeing in email feedback, but they are actual gaps where a Talk Trigger can fill.
[bctt tweet=”Word of mouth is much more powerful than any paid ad, commercial, and brand ambassadors. ” username=”John_Livesay”]
I tell people all the time, “If you listen to what your customers are saying and put it in your marketing messages, then your potential customers feel like you’re inside their head.” The example of that is I was working with an architecture firm. They were trying to decide whether they wanted to hire me to come and give a talk and a workshop to them. They said, “The problem is we’re tired of coming in second. We’re not winning enough pitches.” I said, “I can help you with that.” Now, part of my whole pitch is, “Are you tired of coming in second?” and then people go, “We are.” That’s a great example.
It totally changed the entire conversation. If you’ve given people a reason to trust you, like you and want to do business with you, I know they understand where I’m coming from and that makes me feel good.
How can people follow you on social media?
It’s Daniel Lemin there on social media and TalkTriggers.com is where all of the other stuff is. We have a special little bonus for our audience. If you go to TalkTriggers.com/SuccessfulPitch, we’ve got a little download there. You can get the six-step process for free.
Thank you so much for being on. It’s exciting to watch you and Jay launch this book. It’s got a great alliteration, a great cover and great colors. How can it not be a hit? It’s going to be fantastic and entertaining at the same time.
I appreciate it. Thanks for having me on.
Links Mentioned:
- Daniel Lemin
- Selectivor
- Connected
- Talk Triggers: The Complete Guide to Creating Customers With Word Of Mouth
- Jay Baer
- UberConference
- Postmodern Jukebox
- Daniel Lemin – Facebook
- TalkTriggers.com
- TalkTriggers.com/SuccessfulPitch
- Quantmre.com
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