Competitive Audit Positioning, Design and Social Media

Here we go. This is called. Officially, unofficially, number 71. I know I'm totally messed up on the numbering. But it's theoretically somewhere around 70 ish. I know it's more than this. The competitive audit and I'm structuring this conversation in three parts today. Feel free to stop me and we're going to talk about this. This one might make your brain melt. It might, because there's a lot of stuff in here just to let you guys know. I actually will look at it like this via the light table. OK there's a lot of stuff to go through. So if you need to get a coffee or something or do some push UPS to wake yourself up, this is a good time to do it. I'm letting you know I broke this into three parts positioning, design and social and you. You can question the labeling. I just try to figure out some way to organize this content, and the first one I'm going to get into is olise, which is something that we had done many years ago. And one thing I wanted to understand was how they fit into the marketplace relative to their competitors. It actually gave us some valuable insight into how to position them. So here's what we did. For those of you guys that don't know, olise is a remote fly in salmon fishing lodge, meaning you can't access it by any other way except for to really fly in on a float plane. And that means it's quite expensive because the price of the flight in is included, as well as the lodging, bait and tackle and all that kind of stuff. So what we wound up doing is we try to figure out where they fit in terms of the spectrum of fishing lodges in the general area. And believe it or not, they are more expensive ones on this chart and less expensive ones. But we just kind of found ones that were close to them. OK when you go to the left of the spectrum where it's really inexpensive, it means they rent you a boat. You pack your own sandwich, you bring your own tackle tackle and you can buy bait from them, something like that. And those are really inexpensive. They're going to be under $1,000 for sure, and there's ones where you get to, you get flown in on a helicopter. To very remote parts, and then there's a guy that fishes with you. And then when you're done fishing, there's a person to give you a massage that's even more expensive than what's here. So we find that they're kind of right in the middle in terms of their pricing, and that helped us to figure out how to position them. So it's kind of difficult. This is a place that most people don't want to be. You want to be on the ends of the spectrum. This is the inverse of the bell curve, right? A bell looks like this, which says everything in the middle works. The inverse bell says things at the low end like Walmart and things at the high end like Tiffany's works. Things in the middle get slaughtered like best buy, potentially. What you want to do is you want to be on the ends of the spectrum, preferably on the luxury end, the one where people feel there is no replacement for. So this is tricky. All right, so what we did was we started to do keyword search to see how these companies are found through organic search. And it told us lots of things in terms of how people are finding them. So for Joe salmon lodge, it might be Hawkeye lodge, which is very specific because you wouldn't know to search for that unless you were familiar with the area. So things like salmon fishing lodge, you can see here Hawkeye lodge has several websites. They kind of cheat the system a little bit. I'm not sure if they're being penalized for it now, but they created a bunch of different websites that all kind of point back to one site. So you can see here, so you're looking for salmon fishing lodge, they rank number two and number five. That's an enviable spot. And then we started to dig in where their traffic sources were coming from. So here's what we were able to discern. And we did this kind of prior to knowing exactly how to do this the correct way. Just digging around. Keyword search. And then we kind of had fun with this, I should have cut this out properly, but I was too lazy and we broke it out in chunk like this is information graphics design, right? So we're seeing that most of their traffic is organic and very little of it is coming from Facebook or anything else. So they have a big problem, and then we went to identify where their sources were linking to their site to see if we should be spending more attention and energy towards these things. So you can see here. The number 2 site linking to oldies is Campbell River tourism. But Campbell River tourism is only generating 2.9% of the website traffic. So even if we doubled that. It wouldn't be very much so we needed to really work on organic search. OK, so then what we would do is we put together a list of what. We thought that the client needed to do. I'm not going to go through this because this is very long. So I just want to take a moment here to pause, to see if you guys have any questions about any of this stuff because it's been some time since I put this stuff together. And so not all of it is like best practices, but just to share with you how you might go about doing a positioning competitive audit. Anybody hey, Chris, have a question. OK, cool, let me stop this. OK, hold on. Give me a second. All right. JD where are you? So go ahead, fire away, man. So when you do a competitive audit, there's a certain level of transparency that the company has to give you. Is that correct? Yes and you have to give us access to their stuff, right? Correct for companies, I guess, that are really seeking your attention to figure this stuff out, it's fairly easy. What do you do for the competitors to get that information as well? Obviously, you're not going to the competitors and asking for that information, but there's probably there's probably some. If you just go to Google, you could probably do some information auditing yourself. So how do you do? How do you compare all these to other companies when you don't have access to their information? Right? OK. That's a very good question, JD There are some websites ranging from free to thousands of dollars that you can pay for that are able to get relatively accurate information about any website. How they do this, I do not know. And one of them, I think it's called Alexa. No relation to Amazon and it's an OK one. People that are in the know like Al Martinez, he told me that is OK if you got no other source, but you can use something like that. I'm not prepared today to talk to you about all the different tools, but there are tools and things that you can get access to somebody who is in the digital marketing space, especially social media marketing. They're probably going to have a subscription to one of these things, and if one of them, you could just borrow their account and poke around. It's surprising to what you can find out. Russell Brunson I don't have the book here in front of me, but if I find it before the end of the call, I'll share it with you. There's a website that also allows you to kind of figure out what ads they're running, what their landing pages will look like, what the conversion rate. There's a lot of information that's out there through these kind of digital spying networks that are out there, and this is how they make money. They sell other people's information. OK, so if I'm not going to remember it after this call, if you just prompt me in the discussion. Post it inside this event to say, hey, what are some of those resources? I'll dig them up. I'll find them for you, ok? That's a great question, does anybody else have another question? So just so I can be super clear. You're going to need your client to give over access to their Google analytics, to their YouTube, to their Twitter and their Facebook pages so that you can do what you need to do is understand how people are finding them. Somebody is going to say something. I heard that, yeah, that was me, Chris. Hey, Gary. Yeah another bootcamp. Yeah the boot camp I take. Oh man. Yeah so you know this. Yeah, this is something we do every day. And so because we're in the SEO area, we will use a tool like ACM rush and that really gives you a lot of data that even before you get Google analytics, I can tell you like what you're ranking for organically, and I can put in your competitors and do a domain comparison and just get an idea of some of the main keywords that you're ranking for somebody else. And ACM rush is pretty expensive. I think it starts at like 100 to 189 a month, but you can do like two or three free searches per day. I think that can just help give you an idea of what that is. Mm-hmm I think that's what Ben burns used to generate some of the information that I'm going to share with you guys a little bit. There's another one called buzz Sumo. Have you use by Sumo gary? Oh Yeah. Yep, and that's really to get an idea of what content is going viral. Yeah so you put it in the competitors and you just see, what are they sharing from a content marketing strategy? And just say, man, this one has got a lot of shares, likes and replicate some of that. Yeah We use buzz Sumo to figure out how my Instagram account was blown up. It was because of logo inspirations, his account mentioning us. And that's why my account was blown up. And we found that through Sumo. So there's some really good tools out there. Semrush, now that you mention it, it's like, yep, I should have remembered that, but there you are a good resource. Thank you very much, Gary. OK as always, if I say something that you guys have more knowledge about, please chime in, correct me because obviously I don't know everything. And I'd love to have you participate in part of the discussion. So let me go back to sharing this thing. And now this part might turn some of you guys on this next part because it's visual and it's designed. So we do a competitive audit also to look at what. People that are in their same vertical and people that are not within the same industry to inform what we should do for building the website. We do this for a number of different reasons. We do this because we want to make sure we're not stepping on a competitor's interface design or aesthetic accidentally. We want to do it on purpose. So it's like ignorance is not an excuse for doing design that then becomes a problem you don't want to get into the development stage and then later on, be told by your client to say, well, you know, our main competitor is the exact same thing and we need you to change it. It makes you look bad. It's kind of unprofessional. And now you waste a lot of time and money and the schedule is going to get pushed out. Or you're going to have to eat the cost and pay the developers overtime just to get the work done to deliver. When you said it was going to deliver. So what we like to do is whenever we're doing a project, a web base, this is a form that I like to think of as kind of like light UX sketching, where there's only so many conventions out there on the internet. We just need to kind of be aware of what's going on and what's working and then pick parts that we like and then reassemble them to resolving or solving some of the UX problems that our customers are having our users. OK so what we do is we have our designers go out and do a lot of screen captures and we give them a list of competing companies. And then we also encourage them to explore. Things have no relationship to this vertical at all and then to then put into a keynote document and pull out parts that they thought were interesting, different unique or things that we needed to be aware of. And this is a way for us to do. So this is like the style scape of UX sketching, because then what we'll do is we'll present this to our clients like, oh, we love that feature. No, we don't really care for that or we don't have the content to support that, Chris. We can't do something like that. So this is a very low committal way of talking about potential features and functions. OK, so here they're all called out, so I'm not going to go through and read all of them, but this is kind of what we do. And you guys just stop, chime, chime in and say whatever it is that you want to say. So we're just going through and pulling parts out. Calling out a customer story as a form of social proof. And some of this seems super obvious, but to non creative people, it's not obvious at all like this one, for example, email is killing productivity, just saying that simply that was something I was able to use in my conversation with the client to say, you know, when we look at the site, your site, I can't understand anything. And this company ServiceNow may be complicated, but what they're saying is super clear. We need to have that level of clarity and simplicity. Hey, Chris. Yes, sorry, a quick question, do they did they give you a list of competitors websites that they like? Or do you guys just kind of dive in and do your own? We ask them, we just ask them straight up. Who are some of your biggest competitors? Who's killing it in your space right now? And they tell us, because there's no way we would know right away. It would take us too long to figure that out. Yeah and we move really fast on this kind of stuff, right? And this is another way to start to prime your clients towards something that you want to do. Most of the time, if the client is calling you to ask you for design help, their site is a mess. Maybe it's not. Maybe it's unclear, and oftentimes it's cluttered with stuff. So when you start to say, look, we want to be like them, we want to have their kind of traction, we want to be positioned like them. Well, look, how much white space there is. Look, how they're not trying to just jam every single thing in there, I mean, I'm saying in this example in particular, but so we're doing the same thing here, we're just going through. Here's the clear list of features. We know that people are information heavy and short on time, so we want to respect that. We want to make everything as simple as possible. That's what we're doing. This is a visual audit to crawl around the internet and pull things apart. Very simple. I learned some of this from Josie and then I've just added my part to it to make it even clearer. You can see that there's a big circle here just to call out stuff and these giant dialog boxes that to things. And some of it's repetitive. And you can see themes emerge really fast, like this three column grid that you're seeing the way that they're comparing prices and laying out options. You can see the use of icons to help attract and draw your eye to something and then some very simple explanations underneath. Now the Oracle site is super boring. Look at it. It's really boring, but it's fairly easy to figure out. So they could probably use a visual update, but maybe they don't need to because of who they're working with, oracle, I think, is more of a B2B company. OK, so there's a bunch of this is what we do, and I do want to say this because I forgot to say this at the beginning. I cannot give you this deck, you guys. I know that everybody asks me like, hey, can I have the deck after this? I can't. This is stuff that we do for our clients that we probably would not service them. Well, this were floating around the internet. And the dangerous thing is, as soon as I put it out on the internet, somebody is going to share it with somebody and then that's the end of it for us. I don't think there's anything proprietary in this, otherwise I wouldn't be sharing it, but there may be some sensitivity to like, hey, we don't want other people to see what we're doing. Now, TurboTax and quicken weren't in the space of this particular company, it's for a company called Tango. They do it expense management, but there's something that's really beautiful about the quick insight that I love. Just a very simple value proposition. Organize your money, simplify your life. It's not fancy tricky headline writing, but it's just very effective to me. And you can also see this is the best practice here. Something that we try to do. And sometimes fail ourselves is they have one color that's reserved for your action button like the thing that you want people to click on. So it's that blue one. So every time you see that blue color, that specific shade it should be to draw your eye and to teach you the end user. Just click on those things. That's really what you should be doing. And then the gray ones, the secondary option, the bridge, if you will. So for you guys, if you have a button on your site, the blue one might be say, book a session with me now and the gray one might be watch a video on the process. So it's a softer sell, right? So it's a lower commitment. Again, you can see the three column thing, so those of you guys that are pricing your creative services start to think about the three option price anchoring price decoy concept because people need to see the context to know that the price that you're offering them, the service that you're offering them is a good fit for them. You can see it being practiced everywhere. So I think I want to just take a moment here to talk about Salesforce. You see these three videos on the right. We wanted them to start thinking about telling their stories using a dynamic rich, medium like video. And that's why we call attention to this and say, hey, instead of just having a picture and a really long article, why not shoot high quality video to support the story that we're trying to sell? And this site, Zora was one of their competitors. They had a lot of stuff going on, but they were able to organize in a way with the dropdown tabs to reveal more. So we wound up using something very similar to this for their site. Because their site had so many parts and pieces to it. OK should we skip onto the next part here, or do you guys want to see more of this kind of visual audit? Anybody? OK, super exciting topic, competitive audit, right? OK, I will skip the Anime Expo one because there's a lot of stuff that's in there, so I'll just go straight to the social and then you guys can see what we do. And Gary, I'd love to hear your input on this because Ben burns let this part, so I can't even speak to it like I'm an expert or anything. But I know you guys wanted to see this, so I'm going to share it. Then we'll work through it together. OK, so Anime Expo is one of our clients. We did a bunch of work for them. Part of it was to help them with their social media strategy. So what Ben and the team did was to crawl through all things, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube figured out what they're doing. Figure it out what they were doing relative to the competitors and put together a report. And it's nice for some clients to see this kind of stuff. Now we're not telling them anything new. We're just organizing in a way so that they can see it. So in terms of social engagement, we discovered that Twitter was where their best action was. And you can see here that in terms of engagement, 30% was going to Twitter, while only 20% was going to Instagram and then other whatever that means and then Facebook. That meant that they were doing something right on Twitter, and maybe we can learn something from that. And then what we did was do a lot of social listening. So we're pulling things apart here. Of course, there's some strong language in there, but we're trying to get the general sentiment about what people are saying about them and their organization. So most of it's positive, some of it's horrible, but this is a snapshot so that whoever is driving the ship can see, well, this is really what people are feeling right now. We're we're pulling out some of the emotional stuff there. OK, so here's what we see here that it's. Mostly positive. You can see they're neutral to positive, and the things that they were sharing were mostly informational. And the negative stuff thankfully wasn't about them, per se. It's just that they were not able to attend. So we can deal with that kind of negativity. That's not to say that Anime Expo doesn't have its share of issues with Lions and heat and those kinds of things. OK we're also looking at who was. Talking about. Anime expo and being the most influential in the social space, and that was a potential to see if we want to build a deeper relationship with these people because they're doing it kind of out of their own fandom, their own enthusiasm. Maybe we want to tap into this. So here Ben is highlighted five people who account for over 50% of the voice share over the last 90 days. So his recommendation was, should we consider empowering these people and making them officially unofficial ambassadors or evangelists of anime expo? Gary, did you do something like this for your clients? Something very similar. You know, when it comes to social. It really comes down to specifically when you're doing audits, you want to know, does that does that niche really meet those different social sites? So we do audits, do them around social media, and then we have to determine which ones have the greatest Roi potentials for our clients. And then, yeah, like in this case, doing influencer outreach, looking for people that maybe have that audience already and just trying to hack that to get to that audience quicker. maybe on a different day, we can have you come on and present what you do so that people can learn from you. Sure yeah, I love it. I just want to confirm that your part, right? Yeah, OK. Yeah, I was like, it's not good. Yeah, whatever happened to that guy? Yeah, he died on a. That would be bad for us. That would be bad. Yeah, OK. So then he was also kind of finding topic association keywords because play was one of the biggest things. And so if we have it's true, the largest cosplay gathering in North America, what more do we want to do with this? How do we capitalize on this? Is this going to lead somewhere? So this is purely research. This isn't about, hey, we have this amazing, actionable insight, but what we do need to do is to find out what's going on. Now I do want to take a moment here. I'm going to stop sharing here for a second. I do want to take a moment here. I was listening to the radio last night on the Ted Radio hour, and there was this woman who was talking about data and how they're using data to help with suicide prevention. So they're using machine learning to figure out all kinds of things. So she said, if hopefully I can remember this, that people with eating disorders tend to have the hardest day was Monday. And then people who have a substance abuse problem that 5:00 AM is the time in which that's the biggest problem. And then they also found out that more people consider suicide, have suicidal thoughts in Montana than anywhere else. And so with that data, she said, let's figure out something. So they share this information, so this is just information, then the insight is they share this information with schools so that they can have the most number of counselors and they can maybe adjust their menu from Monday so that people who have eating disorders or issues around eating can be addressed. And I think that's wonderful. So the data needs a counterpart to it. The thing that you connect because data by itself is kind of worthless. It's your job as a strategist to be able to say, well, here's what we see. Here's a potential opportunity, and we're going to connect it to something. And she also said something like five AM she wanted to let parents know that that's when they should be on the lookout for their kids. If they have a substance abuse problem, that's when you need to be most vigilant, so they're going out and partying and there's no curfew. You want to check in on them at around that time. And lastly, she said that for the people who commit suicide, I think there's a lot of people who live on Native American reservations. Perhaps that's the thing because she was saying Montana is a great place to visit, but perhaps it's not a place to live forever. And so they needed to do some outreach into community programs to help support people who are committing or thinking about committing suicide. So that's where the data can be very empowering. Sorry for that segue. I hope that helps. Let me jump in with that. Actually, I have a great example yesterday. I'm sorry. Two days ago we were at a large franchise. This is a franchisee of a large sign shop and there's 500 locations worldwide. They happen to be the largest franchise in the world and involve the franchises, and I'm sitting down with the business owner. We're doing two web design projects, and moving into the SEO contract. And he said, well, the good thing is we rank really well locally for our area. And, you know, just doing some of the Socratic approaches and just asking, well, OK, well, what do you mean? What does that look like? And then him giving me his idea of why he thinks that he ranks really well? And then I was able to pull up the actual data and show, like he's had the biggest hit over the past two months organically than he's had in the life that his domain and the life of his business. And I showed all the competitors and the search terms their ranking for the largest company in the state and their ranking like page two, 3 and for their main key terms. And there was a disconnect of the data, and it's often just this gut feeling that they have, you know, we're getting leads. And so just being able to pull that data and paint the picture for the business owner, you shared a quote in one of somewhere and it was daily. I think it was. That said, you know, just being able to rightly know the problem is half the answer. My hacking that to pieces. That's that's better than what I can recall at this point. So, you know, it's at that point he's going, wow, you know what you're doing? And all it was just showing data that's already there and painting the picture. Yeah, I think what we realize is that people make decisions based on emotion and then they find the data, the logic to back up that decision. So for them, they had a lot of emotion about, oh, this is what we feel like. It's working without any data. So when you brought in the data, there were some cognitive dissonance there. It's like this does not line up with what you just said. So let's sit down and talk about it. Let's figure out a plan so that the data does actually back up what you're saying. OK, thank you for sharing. back to the deck, where are you, deck? OK, so now we're kind of digging into what their current situation looks like, and it's a mess, it is a mess. And we're not doing this to be mean spirited. We're just saying kind of. Yeah, and it's easy for anybody to be super critical. As critical as I am, I'm sure if I were to look at our site with the same eye, I would tear it apart, too. So that's the one benefit of this job. It's like, I don't have to look at myself. I can look at other people and point out their problems versus look at myself, ok? Anyway, so this is the Anime Expo site, and they are the Facebook page, and they have a lot of followers here. So we're kind of looking at things and seeing the quality of the post. What kind of engagement, they're getting. And we're looking at the parent company, which is sp, a society for the promotion of Japanese animation. And then we can see that there's a big trail or fall off here in terms of activity and interest. So most people know the Anime Expo brand. They really don't know. That's PJ brand. So I think this is Twitter now, and we're looking at here. They have 110,000 followers. This is years ago, so I'm sure it's much bigger than that now. And then you look at Instagram and you can easily spot now some problems, right? First of all, they're posting video congratulations, Bravo. But the videos don't have thumbnails and they look like that. So if you're scrolling through a feed and you're looking for somebody to follow, that would not put you, that would not get you off on the right foot. That's not going to make somebody compelled to follow you instantly. There's a problem there, and these are just really low hanging fruit things that they can change, which we help them to change and to organize this. Another thing that we wound up doing is saying we need to be more intentional with when we post how we post, et cetera and we need to be thoughtful and look at the grid so that it's not just a bunch of random images of varying quality. Right, so there's a Christmas tree, and then there's these low quality snapshots. Perhaps this is where there's a lot of room for improvement. So you can see here for an organization of their size, and they have something like over 120,000 attendees. They should have at least 120,000 followers on Instagram, at least. We looked at their YouTube page and look at the number of followers, it's 3,852 on YouTube, which is pretty pathetic. It's much more than that now, but back then this is what it looked like. Again, not a lot of content curation, not a lot of production or design or consideration, and a lot of poorly titled videos. So we went through worked with a YouTube specialist who went through and changed all the tags, the headlines, all the thumbnails to clean this whole thing up. Ultimately, I look at them on Pinterest now. Bonnie would probably be falling out of her chair right now. This is what we have for Anime Expo for Pinterest. One follower. Nothing no activity. OK, so here they are compared to people in their space, so we're going to compare them to South by Southwest events, essentially, even though they're not necessarily in the subculture space. Momo Kahn comic-con is probably one of the biggest, most relevant competitors Coachella and wondercon. So we looked at it like that. Guys, I don't know this is boring you or killing you right now. So should I continue down this path is what I thought you asked for. So that's what I put together. It's not my favorite topic to talk about, but I didn't want to make you guys feel like you were being ignored. Anybody I think it's awesome. This is super dry stuff. Oh my gosh. Oh, but it's so incredibly timely for me. Is it really? Yeah, I I'm waiting on my first strategy bid right now. I'm waiting for them to come back with price objections. But this is what I want to do for them if they agree. Yo, you like a super nerdy stuff digging through the data. All they need it. They need it. And so this is what I want to deliver. This would be valuable. So, so here we can see that in terms of Facebook. SBA sucks, and that's the parent company, so we know that there's almost no brand awareness. Most people don't even know that it exists. And then we're seeing how we compare to some of the other ones. So compared to mobile and wondercon, we're killing it because they're over a quarter million page likes, which is awesome. But South by Southwest almost has double, and then comic-con is blowing it out of the water, as is Coachella. And then you're looking at post frequency and you can see how you compare and then engagement rate. And you can see there that overall, excuse me, we have more people who like the page, but less people that are engaging compared to mobile kind. And we can also see the rate in which people are liking the page. I hear a little sound in the back. Somebody want to say something. Um, I was going to say that the engagement rate for Coachella is probably the best looking at the numbers of likes. Well, not as good as mom Alcon. Mobile counts like 1.6. Right, you see. Yeah, but in terms of these kinds of organizations at that size, that's pretty good. At that 0.33 percent, right, Coachella. Coachella is a music festival, right? So there's going to be a lot of fan engagement there because there's cool bands and things like that. And that's what they're tapping into, I think. So here you can see how they compare on Twitter. So let's ignore a.j., because we should just throw that out, because that's not even worth looking at. So here, you know, they're doing pretty good compared to Muammar Khan and wondercon. But comic-con is again destroying it. And what we're finding here is that we post a lot. Look, how many times we post per day, 13 point eight, four times a day. Compared to comic-con. Even though they post less and this might be an indicator of quality versus quantity, their retweets, their engagement is much higher. It's almost three times. Or maybe double. I'm sorry, 67.8 versus 28.9. So certain patterns will emerge. And this is kind of like reading the tea leaves, if you will. Different fortune tellers are going to look at these tea leaves and prescribe very different solutions. And this is what I think is really fun about what it is that we do. Right, so, so Rachel might have the same set of data, and she's going to say, let's keep doing more tweets and let's tweak a couple of things about it, whereas we might come in and say, let's post less but higher quality. And this is what we want to do. So again, Instagram, we're doing the same thing, and this is just somebody scraping this is just, excuse me, manual labor and kind of studying it, right? I don't think there's anything fancy about it. So here we are kind of looking at it compared to Pinterest and Snapchat. And YouTube, the others, if you will. So it looks like in this space. In the comic book space there, there isn't a lot of activity on Pinterest. So that might be an opportunity, or it might be, according to Gary, maybe something we ignore because it's not in alignment with our goals for social media. OK, trends. So we're kind of looking at trends on Facebook, the engagement rate, the video, the family and the unveiling here. OK, so I can't speak to this because I didn't build this and I didn't present it, so I'm going to do my best to try and figure out what the heck Ben was doing, but I grabbed this document in preparation for today. OK, so this is how people are making announcements and sharing news. And we're just comparing mobile comic-con and anime expo, so you can see here that in terms of anime expo, they're doing pretty good because look at the amount of engagement, they're 5.6 1,000. So we're doing much better than comic-con, which has 365. But Momo is doing pretty good, too at 2K. And then what happens, how does the. Events or organization respond to news that affects their community. So comic-con responded to the passing of Carrie Fisher. And are we doing similar things? Are we helping to keep the community together by sharing news and things that bond us? How are they using video? Look at this video from Coachella has over a million views. Oh, and I'm just not doing that, either. It's 2 and 1/2 million, but this is really, I think, us just sharing other people's content versus posting our own content. And that's what was happening a lot with Anime Expo. They weren't really producing their own content. They're just sharing other people's videos. So this is, I think, during the event, I think when they're pushing out information to help people or no, I'm sorry if you don't have plans for New Year's day, consider. OK, so this is just bits of information that's not self-promotional. The trends on Twitter. So he's looking at post frequency, the retweet, retweet rate, helpful info and contest. Now a lot of people who were in the social media space that we're trying to help us out for a period of time and think everybody wanted to run contests. And I hated the idea, I wanted to see what it was like, so there's even us recommending them running contests to get engagement. But I just don't like the idea of stoking engagement for. A free giveaway. I think it's better to provide real value to people and give them a genuine reason to follow you and engage with you. But I know giveaways are like the easy thing to do. Gary, do you have data or an opinion on giveaways and contests? Yeah you know, I think it depends on what the goal of the giveaway is. If it's just for engagement or brand exposure, I agree. Like you want, you want that to be around value. But if it's to award the audience that you already acquired and just as a way to like, give back. It's fine. But we've had clients that have tried it and it's worked well in terms of giving them more exposure. I just it's not really value based audiences, you know, so they're coming on to their social sites, but they're not going to engage well. So that's going to drive engagement down. They're only there for the giveaway. Yeah, I think that's the case, like, for example, I was on the Adobe live stream and they were giving away prizes and the only thing that you had to do, you have to be watching in real time, but to make any kind of comment and they would pick some random person from whoever made a comment. So people were just mashing the keyboard. It didn't even matter so that I don't know what the purpose of that is to wake up people or something. So they're just slamming the keyboard like a monkey hitting Command B and just doing that. And then eventually somebody would pick them. And that seemed like a really waste of engagement. Yeah now, I don't know of anybody studied Gary Vaynerchuk when he launches a book. He does some pretty interesting things in terms of how he's able to launch books and how he's able to get into the best time. What is it best Sellers list? Does anybody has anybody studied Gary Vaynerchuk in terms of how he launches a book and his giveaways? I watched it a bit when she was doing, and she was like said, if you're going to buy like three or five books, something like that and then give to other people to make it happen, like they helped me to become like best seller. Like, what's an amazon? Something like that? Something I remember somebody telling me that there was I think it was Ben burns who told me this. There was a promotion to push book sales, pre orders, and he had one of those printers. So every time somebody would order, the receipt would come out and then he'd tear it and put it into a bag. And then he would randomly pick somebody who ordered a book from that bag of receipts to do something even cooler, like maybe send them autographed stuff or exclusive merchandise, things like that. So he was stoking sales of the books by doing another giveaway as kind of a random raffle. There may be rules about how you may or may not be able to do that, like you can't make people buy something in order to give them something for free. Right, I think there's laws about that, and we've probably broken those laws ourselves. But there's something like that. I know that there's another thing that he did and I'm going to share this with you because we'll probably wind up doing the same thing. It's a little underhanded, but should I ever finish a book and release it? When he goes to speak instead of getting a speaking fee, and I think he charges anywhere between 30 to 100,000 to speak at an event, he wants those in book purchases instead of money. So you can imagine if you get 100,000 for a speaking fee, you appear, you speak for an hour and then you go home and they buy $100,000 worth of books as a pre-order or on day one. Well, you're pretty much guaranteed. To get on the bestsellers list, I think maybe not number one. In case like a new Harry Potter is coming out, but you're going to be high up on that list. So that's a kind of a sneaky strategy. But hey, if the rules aren't explicitly written to say you can't do that, then hey, why wouldn't you do it? There's another person, Johnny cupcakes, who's been on our show, and he talks about how he uses social media to do some interesting PR stunts, so he has an interesting thing that he does. So if he's going to do a limited edition shirt, he'll use different social media platforms to announce, and he has a whole strategy behind it, whereas he'll tell somebody something on Instagram, somebody else on Twitter. There are different things that he's promoting. So there's a secret location where they're going to drop a coveted t-shirt design or special limited edition packaging. He'll announce it on there and then make you find him. So I think he's dead on St Patrick's Day. He dressed up like a leprechaun, and he says, if you find me. I'll give you this shirt. So he had a bag or he would hide things in the bushes and all around wherever he was, whether it's l.a., San Francisco, New York or New Jersey. He would hide stuff and kind of tell people the general area and then people would find it sweet. He was gamifying that whole thing. So he, yeah, I actually have something to add to that. Yeah, please. I was working on a magazine for a while and I was coming up with a strategy to do just that. How could we kind of put something interesting in place that will get people interested. And engaged? And it was through placing hidden Easter eggs in the magazine that would eventually, when people find them all, it would lead to some sort of prize. Yeah, that's it. Pretty much. Yeah, I really like these really fun ideas. We're not particularly good at coming up with these ideas, but this is where some of you guys who have that inner child, you could utilize that person and have wonderful ideas that engage the community in different ways. So that you're crossing over from a digital interaction to real life physical one. And that's pretty cool. And it loops back because the person who finds it in the Bush or finds the leprechaun and gets the shirt, they're going to take a picture and they're going to share it back on social. So it feeds itself. It's generative. So anything that's generative is good. If you think about what generative is, if you think about Facebook. Facebook is basically a platform where you make all the content. With no props from them. So Facebook does not exist, Facebook isn't much of anything unless people make up. Same thing goes with Instagram, Pinterest and Twitter and all these other platforms like media. So if you come up with an idea that gets your community to create stuff like, for example, we did the future pop art. So that's a generative thing. Here are some parameters you guys go out and use this hashtag. So that is something we wanted to promote. We could. So we wind up having was over 1,000 posts related to that hashtag. Many of which came from you guys. Hey, Chris. Yes hey, I had another thought about this just because I tend to not be. I get a lot of promotion things to try to get me to take part in something, to maybe win something or just to engage. And the first time I actually did any one of those was for a company called imperfect produce. If anybody's heard of it, but they're basically taking surplus produce and you can buy it online and they'll send it to you and it's discounted. But it's also stuff that would have gotten thrown away. So there's kind of a feel-good aspect to it. And so when they try to get you to engage, they'll say, like, you know, the idea is that you might get produce that looks a little weird that the grocery store didn't want, but it's perfectly good. And so they get you to take a picture of like, what's the weirdest thing in your box? But if you post it, then they donate something like they give them, you know, they give a meal to a homeless shelter or they do. I think the only reason I engaged in it, because it wasn't really about, I thought, oh, I'll do this thing, it'll promote them, but it's actually helping somebody else. Yeah and I didn't feel as weird about promoting the company. I normally just get the I just don't usually feel comfortable doing that. So it's just maybe another why? I'm curious. Yeah, I want to talk to you about this. Aha I don't. Well, usually because they're trying to. They want the contact info of your people sometimes, you know, they want you to submit emails or they want something from you. And I don't know, I feel like it gets sticky in weird ways like I still see people liked Facebook pages of companies and then maybe their media companies and they post kind of a funky article or something and then it's like, oh, and you know, these three friends like this media company that just posted this thing that I know they wouldn't want to be associated with. And it kind of lives on, right? Right and I guess I'm just really leery of. I don't know, it's just this, it's just not something I tend to do. Yeah but let's talk about this in a way you're kind of like my wife. She's very careful about what she's doing online because she's doesn't want something revealed that wasn't intentional. And you're right, a lot of these platforms will utilize who likes their page and try to make it seem like a greater endorsement than it really is. And that's how they grow their channel. So here's how I do it and some observations I've had. First of all, I think social interaction and asking people to share should come from a place where the person feels compelled to do it themselves. I have a bad reaction to people who forced me to share in order to get something to get into an event. example, if you take a picture and share this, then we will allow you to win a prize or something like that. So what do I ultimately do? I put it on an account I don't care about or one that I care about. I get through it. And I delete it. All right afterwards. Like, what's the point of that? They're getting really low quality engagement, right? Whereas if there was an activation that was really cool and they do this at comic-con really well, for example, based on the Infinity War films that came, the film that came out, they had a giant Thanos gauntlet and a banner around it so that you could put your hand in it and pose. And of course, the hashtag and all the graphics were there, so everybody was getting in line to take a picture to share organically because that's what they wanted to do, because it was kind of cool. As opposed to when I was in Taiwan, I wanted to ride down this slide and they're like, well, it's $6 for ride down the slide one time, or if you share this, then we'll give it to you for $2. But you have to do it now. And you have to do it. I was going to share it because I love the idea, but the fact that they forced me to do it made me really angry about it. I was so upset. I'm like, I'm just going to pay the full price because you guys are just pissing me off right now. Whereas I would have just done it organically. Same thing happened at the razor booth when they wanted us to take so many pictures and do all these kinds of things. So my son can have a stupid keyboard key that had a laser on it. You wanted it so bad, but I did it for him, then I deleted everything. And that's a way to alienate potential fans as opposed to enroll them in your thing now. There are lots of things I sign up for that. I give my email address pretty readily because if they disrespect that, I just bounce them off, unsubscribe and I'm done with them, right? But here's the thing like, I give my email to lots of companies and brands that I like and they. Handle it in a respectful manner. They don't bomb my emails, my email inbox, and they offer me promotional codes or announcements when things are on sale, so I don't have to track them anymore. Now there's a fine line between somebody who's paying a lot of attention to you using robots and somebody who's just giving you stuff all the time. So this is where I think. Sometimes I do enjoy this, and sometimes they abuse it where if I'm looking at something. A company will send me a coupon code for that very specific item to say, look, we saw that you're looking at this, here's a 40% coupon off that very specific backpack or shoe you were looking at. I don't mind stuff like that because that's what I was trying to check it out was like, should I buy it now? I don't know. Then they follow up with this robot, this AI thing, and it's like, whoa. sometimes I'm compelled to buy, and sometimes I'm not. But I'm the ultimate decision maker. This is a long way. don't really know what the heck we're talking about, which is kind of veering off the path here. But I think if you build genuine relationships with people, they're going to want to share. You have to just give them a little prompt. But if you force them to interact, I think you might get the exact opposite reaction you were hoping for. I think that's some of the things you were talking about, too. Mm-hmm Yeah OK. All right. Back to the crazy Dick. I only have a few more slides here to share with you guys. I lost my way. I think we're talking about Twitter. So here's how coachella's sharing helpful information. I don't really know what Ben was trying to do with this, but there it is. He's just looking at how we share announcements and news on Twitter as opposed to others. And looking at numbers. So here, relatively speaking, we're doing pretty good, not as well as South by Southwest. But not bad. And then I want to talk to you a little bit later, if you guys are interested about Twitter and how to grow your social following on Twitter. So again, this is how they share information, news. Announcements same thing, we're doing this all through Instagram, checking it out. So seeing how Anime Expo is the largest cosplay gathering in North America, perhaps the world, I'm not sure about that. Like, why aren't we doing more with cosplay wise mobile getting the scoop on it with this cool Deadpool Deadpool thing? Right this should be us. OK the conclusion also for YouTube is we're not doing anything, so this is low hanging fruit. There's a lot of things that we can do to crush it. And we're just telling them that they should utilize video more. OK, now this was done a long time ago, I think this was done like over two years ago, a year and a half at least. So we've learned a lot of things since then. So I don't want to tell you that this is the way you do it, but this is a snapshot and how we did it at that time.