Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 33:57 — 31.1MB)
Do you ever look at your followers on social media and think, it’s just not enough? Claire Diaz-Ortiz says, it’s not about follower count, it’s about follower engagement. She’s a social media master, early employee of Twitter, and bestselling author of Social Media Success for Every Brand. Discover what it means to climb the engagement ladder, why you should NOT be trying to go viral, and how the SHARE model can help you leverage your social media presence.
About
Website: Clairediazortiz.com
Book: Social Media Success For Every Brand
Bio: Claire Diaz-Ortiz (@claire) is an author, speaker and innovation advisor who was an early employee at Twitter. Named one of the 100 Most Creative People in Business by Fast Company and called “The Woman Who Got the Pope on Twitter” by Wired, she holds an MBA and other degrees from Stanford and Oxford and has been featured widely in print and broadcast media. She is the award-winning author of eight books that have been published in more than a dozen countries.
Transcript
This transcript is unedited.
Peter: With us today is Claire Diaz Ortiz. She is the bestselling author, speaker and advisor. She’s been named the one of the 100 most creative people in business by fast company. She was a very early employee of Twitter. She has been called everything from the woman who got Pope on Twitter to a force for good to one of the most generous people on social media. That is my experience of her. Clara and I know each other from some work that we’ve done together. We know each other from the a 100 coaches group that we’re both a part of and she’s awesome and she has just written a book called social media success for every brand, the five pillars that turn posts into profits. And we’re here to talk with her about that book. Claire, welcome to the Bregman leadership podcast.
Claire: Thank you so much for having me. Super pumped to be here. I I say that, that’s actually a bad phrase. Now I’m reading the overbook and you’re not supposed to use the phrase super pumped anyway.
Peter: Super. That’s good to know like what you can say and what you can say. So this is, I was very excited to read the book first of all because I know first hand about your success and, and your methodology. And second, because I don’t really like social media so much and I don’t think I use it particularly well even though you’ve taught me how to use it. And, and so I think it’s like a good, I’m excited to have this conversation because I think I represent at least some percentage of people who, you know, I’m in a role and in a position and, and, and with a brand that has some recognition and brand out in the world and that should be on social media. And yet I don’t think I do very well with it and I don’t really like it. So I want, you know, like I read this book and it makes me like it a lot more. Usually I talk about why people wrote a book, but I actually want to start with what does everyone get wrong about social media?
Claire: Sure. So let me tell you a story. I had a client a few years ago it, you know, I was doing digital media advising work for clients and the client had recently launched their new widget, right? Great new widget, great product, great idea. Total marketing flaw, right? So they hired me to try to figure out what went wrong, but, but less what went wrong and more what we can do differently next time. Right? So how can we relaunch this widget to make it really take over the world and make everyone buy it? Right? So I spent a couple months on this big plan, you know, many, many pages of strategy about all the things we were going to do and all the reasons it would work, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And we sit down for the big meeting to go through the plan. Right, right. And clear to me kind of early on that, that some of the folks in the room had not really read much of their plan.
Claire: Right. I would say things like, well, let’s look at, you know, point number four, Oh, we can do that next quarter. You know, what about point number six? Oh, maybe next year we’ve got a little more budget. Things like that. Right? Right. And then it became clear that one of the cofounders kind of sat up straight in his chair and he said he was going to make his big points, right? And so, you know, I listened up and he said, you know what Claire? I think that if you can just make Mark Cuban tweet about us, we’ll go viral and then everything will be fine. Right? And Peter, this to me was the epitome of the problem with social media marketing today, right? We all think of social media as this thing that is only there to kind of make you go viral and blow your brand up completely in a good way. And if it doesn’t, then it’s completely useless. And so the point of this book is to kind of make people understand once and for all that that’s totally not actually what social media is for. That social media is a really useful marketing tool, but it’s a useful marketing tool for not going viral and instead building a longterm sustainable brand. So, so the plan in this book is all about kind of getting you there and convincing you that you don’t even want to try going viral anyway.
Peter: Great. I think that’s great. And I, and I, and, and the goal is really to peak people’s interests and to move them up the engagement ladder. And we’re going to talk about that. And I think the engagement ladder to me is the most exciting part of like, you know, you, you talk about it upfront and everything else is driven by it. And I really want to make sure we get to it. As you’re speaking, I’m realizing, here’s why I think people want things to go viral on social media. It’s not just because of course if they think something’s going to go viral, it’s, you know, going to suddenly, you know, they’re, they, they, they’ve gotten on Oprah’s book club and they go from selling five books to selling a million and wow, isn’t that awesome? Or whatever it is that to try and sell. But that’s the idea of something going viral.
Peter: And, and we also, and we can talk about this later, but we also know it’s short-lived. Like you could be a huge, you know, you talk about this in the book, which is, you know, you can be a huge hit one day and you’re like, wow, I went viral. And the next day they’re talking about, and I can’t remember the example you use, but it’s like the color of someone’s skirt or something. I can’t remember what it was. But yeah. So, but here’s why I think there’s something else about why people want social media, why you got that response. And that’s because for someone who really loves being on social media, like, like my, my son who’s on Instagram a lot too much in my view, you know, he’s doing park Corp, he’s doing all these acrobatics. He loves putting it up there. He loves when people start following them.
Peter: He loves having conversations with them if he can. Like he loves that whole, so for him, yeah, maybe you want something to go viral, but it’s not the most important piece of the whole thing. And it’s not just because there’s not, he’s not selling something or it’s because he actually really likes the incremental engagement. But I think for someone else who doesn’t like social media, it’s like, can we just like get this thing to do what it’s supposed to do and not waste any more time on it? And, and, and my underlying, my big underlying question is, there are so many ways to get the word out. Would you say to people use social media if you really like using social media because otherwise you’ll never really engage people and develop relationships with them and work up the engagement ladder because you’re just not into it enough.
Peter: It’s like with writing, I love writing. So yeah, I, I’ve written or contributed to 16 books. Right? But that’s not because I think the books are going to do something for me and there’s no way I could have done that if I’m only doing it because I think the books are going to do something to me. I’m doing it because I liked the process. I really liked doing it. And that can take me through the hard times. And I wonder whether social media is the same kind of thing and whether you would suggest to people, if you love it, here’s a way to do it really well. And if you don’t love it, maybe there’s some other ways of marketing yourself. That’s my question.
Claire: So my answer would be if you are a brand who is trying to sell something online, I believe you have to be on social media. And so then what the answer is is to figure out which platform you like the most and are the most suited for. And then either you get on that or have someone on your team get on that. But the reality is that social media is the most ubiquitous and free way to get your message out there. And you know, as we’ll talk about, it’s the bottom of this engagement ladder, right? So it’s really hard to get people more and more engaged, right? So the way the engagement ladder works, let’s jump into that a little. That is, you’ve got this ladder right? At the bottom is people who don’t know you. And at the top is people who are buying your stuff and or recommending your services. These are your big fans,
Peter: Right? And the joy. And the problem with the viral piece, which you described at the beginning is I think if I have people following me on social media, the next thing they’re going to do is buy my product. And what you’re saying is it doesn’t work that way,
Claire: Right? Well, it’s not gonna work going viral if you don’t have an engagement ladder set up. So the best way, this is why it’s not useful to try and go viral all the time, is because companies don’t do it well and they spend millions of dollars doing it and it’s a total crap shoot. So you know, some of my favorite examples of, you know, the millions that have been spent into bad viral marketing campaigns, all of garden, right? Good pasta. They spent millions on something called the random act of pasta, which was like you were supposed to tweet out some generosity thing you did involving pasta, right? Gusher gusher, and these are little like little snack fruits. And they came up with a really creative thing for Halloween where it was like an eyeball looking gusher and then it’s flat open. And so all these mommy bloggers were supposed to blog about it, but instead, you know, a mommy bloggers started vomiting and started writing about that, right? So these are examples of brands that are trying to do things by going viral, and ultimately they’re just wasting a ton of money. Instead, if they had gone after sustainable marketing that tried to bring people slowly up and engagement ladder and put that same money into that, they would have actually gotten customers.
Peter: So, so walk us through the engagement ladder so that people have a sense as to what we’re talking about. Sorry.
Claire: So the bottom of the engagement ladder is where you’re trying to get people interested in you. So think about it like a cocktail party. If you are at a cocktail party, the, the goal, so to speak, of a cocktail party is more or less to be kind of the most interesting person in the room, right? It’s not to to go in and try to convince your ex wife’s boss’s husband’s roommate to buy your latest, you know, healing essential oil. It’s instead to try to make a connection, get someone interested in maybe your story, what you have to say, your life. Yeah. Maybe your work as well. And then it creates some sort of connections so that you can follow up later. Right? Right. So think of social media as the same sort of thing. Social media is like this cocktail party where you’re just trying to pique someone’s interest and that’s really the bottom of this engagement ladder, right? So you’re sending out content on social media. A lot of it is actually not about you at all. Most of it is, is about things that you think your potential customers might be interested in learning about or, or reading or watching
Peter: You. You, you say in the book you talk about 80, 20, like 80% of the stuff they’re interested in, 20% stuff that’s in your interest.
Claire: Totally, totally. 80% stuff. They’re interested in 20% stuff that calls them to act. So maybe calls them to follow you on social media or engage with you on social media or respond. And so this is all that bottom of the ladder. So what you’re trying to do is you’re trying to get someone from not knowing you to go up the rungs of the ladder to follow you on social media, to start engaging with you on social media, to just start talking about you to a friend on social media. Then maybe it’s a click over to your website. Then maybe you know, we’re going up the ladder, then may be to sign up for your email newsletter. Then maybe to open your email newsletter, then potentially to buy something, click on something and buy it in your newsletter. And then, you know, the Holy grail is then to share what a great experience they had with a friend to get another customer to go up that same ladder.
Claire: Right? So that’s why social media, you know, a lot of people say, well, I got on social media and I sent out some, some tweets or some Facebook posts about my, my new book and nobody bought it. So social media didn’t work right, and you hear this kind of thing all the time. People have this idea that social media is just kind of like a teeny tiny little billboard that you see in a highway and they don’t understand why people aren’t responding. And the reason is because you know, in order to, to get people to really respond, you need to bring them up the ladder. And the reality is the vast of the time, social media is just about getting people on a ladder in the first place. And it’s all these other digital marketing tools like your website, your newsletter that are getting people to actually buy.
Peter: Right? So I want to go into each of these steps in a second. Before that. I just want to now that we know what the engagement ladder is and, and your point, which I really take and I think is really powerful, which is this is free marketing. And we were talking about social media, but LinkedIn is very different than Facebook, which is very different than Instagram. And so you may not like being on one platform or another, but, but understanding some of those differences might say, Hey actually it would be really fun to be on Instagram or LinkedIn. And some of that I guess isn’t just made by what your passion is. Some of the decisions shouldn’t just be made by what you’re interested in, but probably more importantly is where are the customers that you want hanging out, right.
Claire: Absolutely. So one of the big things in this book is there’s an evaluation you can take that basically tells you which your priority social media platform should be. Right? And you only need one. And that’s what I say, you know, go all in on that one. And then as you have more bandwidth, you can go to your second priority platform as well and start sending out content there. But I think it’s really important to understand that, you know, these platforms are super different and it doesn’t even matter what you like. Honestly, it’s more about where your customers are, as you say. Right, right. And I think that’s typically correlated with the type of thing you like also. But the most important thing is where your customers are. So I wouldn’t tell you to go crazy on LinkedIn, Peter, because I think your audience is, I, excuse me, I wouldn’t tell you to go crazy on Instagram because I think your audience is on LinkedIn. Right? Right. And by the same token, you know, I wouldn’t tell a mommy blogger to necessarily go crazy on LinkedIn because her audience probably is on Instagram and these types of things are really important to understand. So gotten evaluation in the book and makes it really straightforward and you can figure out immediately which your birdie platform is and then just worry about that platform.
Peter: Right? And it’s so, you know, it’s, it’s in some ways it’s obvious when you say it, but it’s really easy to get distracted and not obvious because all my kids talk about are LinkedIn. So I’m, I’m sorry. All my kids talk about [inaudible] kid did Instagram. And so I hear about Instagram a ton and it begins to make me nervous. Oh, maybe I should be on Instagram. That’s where everyone is. In fact, there was a this was maybe five years ago, maybe more than five years ago. Let’s see, Sophia now is 14. She was nine, so it was five years ago and I was at her soccer, a soccer tournament, and she was joking around and she was like, you know, kind of being goofy. And I took a video of her being goofy and I’m like, sweetie, you gotta be careful. I’m gonna put that up on Facebook. And at that moment, one of her ninth, nine year old friends walked by me. I didn’t know this girl at all, but nine year old friend just walked by me, literally looked at me, rolled her eyes, and goes Instagram.
Claire: That’s amazing. That’s perfect. Right? You were already late.
Peter: It’s already late. I’m, Oh my God.
Claire: The buck at that point had already graduated onto kind of middle age seniors. That’s who loved it then.
Peter: That’s right. That is so interesting. I was like, Oh my God. But that might make me be like, Oh my God, I gotta be on Instagram. And where you’re saying is, no, you don’t because your customers are on LinkedIn. And now what about with like my business for example, where I and a lot of people are in the same boat where I’m selling different things to different people, so when I write a book, that book could be popular, you know, across the board to a lot of different people. Whereas when I’m providing executive coaching services and working with people, they’re more likely to be LinkedIn. But I guess the point that you’re making is if I’m moving people up a ladder, then my book has to continue to move them up the ladder. Like anything else I do is supposed to move them up the ladder. I have to be really clear about what that one single ladder is. Is that right?
Claire: Right, right, exactly. And you know what I would would, I would offer as well is, is that pretty much most people when you look at kind of the different types of things they sell, they’re still going to have everything kind of circulate around one type of platform. You know, for example, I love food bloggers. I’m super into food blogging. I’m a terrible cook and I love reading recipe books and whatever, just everything. And no matter what food bloggers or just all over Instagram, it doesn’t matter what product they’re selling me, it could be a course that could be a book, it could be some sort of live conference, but it’s always on Instagram just because so many of their readers aren’t there. And a lot of times you see that in different niches, right? So executive coaching is a perfect example of that. You see some content on Twitter for sure, but you really see the vast majority on LinkedIn and you see very, very little on Instagram, certainly. And then some on Facebook, right? But it’s really, a lot of times industry-based is what you kind of see. Right? So I would think of it more in terms of that than necessarily the product you’re selling. Because of course the idea is the customer you might have might have different price points for different needs they have, but it’s going to be the same individual and that individual is probably more on one platform.
Peter: Right. God, there’s so many questions I want to ask you. I’m going to just ask you one, which is going to take us off of this and then we’re going to go right back on it. I’m curious about Cal Newport.
Claire: Oh, it’s so funny. I had, I just wrote down Cal Newport. I totally wanted to talk [inaudible]
Peter: Okay, let’s talk about it to explain why we’re both thinking of Cal.
Claire: Sure. So Cal Newport, big bestselling author, most recently of deep work that his latest book. Correct. And he is,
Peter: Yeah, he actually wrote digital erode digital minimalism digital, which came after deep work. But yes, but deep work is, but you know, super cool
Claire: Big thought leader, thinker guy who completely issues social media and is not on it. And I think what’s interesting about cow is that it works for him, but he is one of very, very, very few people at works for. And furthermore, you must remember that his last book was digital minimalism. So if he wasn’t at least not on Twitter, most of the time we wouldn’t really believe his book was right. Credible.
Peter: Right. So to me, the Cal Newport question is also like, I sometimes sit here and I think instead of spending any time on social media, I just have to keep honing my writing skill. So, and keep writing books so that I write a book that becomes so big that that people just, you know, like cow, first of all, Cal had cows, a professor, right? And, and, and he has, he’s had a blog very, very early, but it’s like if we’re putting too much energy on the marketing piece and not enough energy on the product piece in a sense, or in the writing or in the, in the who you are and what you’re accomplishing, then the social media becomes a little hollow in. You’re like doing your best to, to engage an audience that you probably will have a hard time engaging. Is that, is that right? And how do you find that balance?
Claire: Yes. I mean, I would say you kind of varied a little bit of the lead there. Cal had a blog really early on, right? And we didn’t have social media when he started his blog in 2004 2005 all kind of thing. When I started my blog in 2006 we didn’t have social media either. So it’s a completely different world now than it was then. And he honestly is able to get away with it because he started it then. And his online platform, so to speak, was kind of already created. So one thing that I would say is, you know, to his detriment, and this is, you know, one of the things we talk about in the book is people are talking about your brand on social media, whether you like it or not. So you know, I think it’s your benefit to go in there and shape the narrative. So the thing that is to his detriment is that people are talking about him and he’s not able to shape it in any way. But you know, he’s decided that that’s not a priority.
Peter: Right. And I think also what I’m hearing you say is, and I don’t know that Cal would agree with this or not, but you, you have a very specific outcome you’re going for in social media. So it’s not like, Oh yeah, I’ll find out what your friends are doing on Facebook. It’s like, no, there’s a brand, there’s a focus, there’s a goal and we’re going to work it like we would any other marketing. So social Modio media becomes a, a pathway to marketing, not like something to hang out and see who’s on vacation.
Claire: Well, absolutely and I mean, you know, success is achieved through different means. You know, one of my favorite writers and Lamont, she’s hysterical on Twitter, but that’s not the reason she’s selling books. She’s selling books because she’s been writing incredible books for three decades. Right, right. So this book, social media success for every brand is about brands who are trying to really sell things and trying to get their message out and amplify their message online. And a lot of these people just aren’t doing that.
Peter: So Claire, take us up the engagement ladder. We, I mean you’ve done that already in, in, in big picture, but I’m curious if we can get the little tips like 32nd tips on, you know, what are some things that we can do at each stage of that ladder to move people up to the next stage of the ladder? [inaudible]
Claire: So the whole book is really structured around something I called the share model, which is basically based on this acronym share, which stands for story, how audience reach and excellence. And each step of this model is basically helping you figure out how to get people on the engagement ladder, move up it and then ultimately buy your product or service and recommend you to others. So the first step in this is story and the thing you really got to remember what story is that content is queen. And the story is the most important thing you have to offer on social media. And what’s really important about this is that we want to stick to this story brand concept, story brand as this large marketing company that I partnered with to write this book on. And the story brand idea, which to me is pretty revolutionary in marketing is that your story should be about your customer.
Claire: It should not be about your brand. The idea is that we all like things that that really relate to us and make us feel a certain way. And so if your brand and your service and your product can, can solve the problems that I have, then I will like it. So you want your story to be about that customer. So when you’re coming up with content to help people get on that engagement ladder, whether it’s, you know, curated content or original content or articles or you know, calls to action or images or video, all that, you want it to really be 80% of the time about the customer and not about the brand. So that step one, telling a story that really is about the customer
Peter: And you talk about the customer really being the hero. You’re not the hero, you’re not, your brand isn’t the hero, it’s the customer who is the hero and you’re helping the brand and the customer be that hero.
Claire: Absolutely. And I think this is kind of revolutionary when you, when you think about social media as you know, a world of selfies. But when you’re thinking about social media for brands and for businesses, you really want to turn that on its head and you want to say, how can I really help the people who are following me? How can I give them something they want when, when they’re coming to look at my account? So step two is really how, so this is the practical logistics of how to post your content. And I think the most important thing to remember about this step is that you need to take the social media evaluation in the book to figure out which platform is most important for you. Because I really just don’t want you to be focusing on too many platforms because you’re never going to be able to succeed.
Claire: And Ben, furthermore, different industries are suited for specific platforms. So figure out what your priority platform is and focus on that platform. So number three in the share model is audience. And we talked a little bit about this, right? If the idea that your brand is not your hero, your customer is, but one of the things I really want to remind you in in this step is to make sure that you think about generating empathy and engagement on social media. And there are a couple of key ways to do that. One of my favorite simple ways to do that is to ask questions. As soon as you ask questions of people, they feel that they’re being connected with and they immediately engage. And the thing I like to say, we never know how many different times the social media companies are going to change their algorithm and mess up everything, but it honestly doesn’t matter because I can tell you for sure that one thing will always remain true and that is that accounts with greater engagement are always going to get a greater reach, right? So you’re always just want to get more engagement and great way to that. Last question,
Peter: The question about that, because I think like when I think about asking questions, I think Twitter might be better for asking questions in LinkedIn for example, like there’s certain, you know, Facebook might even be better than like is it, can it, does it work as well on every platform and is asking questions the right way to engage in every platform?
Claire: Well, so there are different ways to engage, you know, questions is one of my number one tips to do that. But actually I would say it does work almost equally well on every platform because on any platform, someone asking a question has to engage with your post to do it. And so your post, no matter what the particular algorithm of that platform is, gets boosted essentially. So it is really effective. Getting people to respond in any way is one of the most important things you can do on any social media platform. And so a question encourages them to do that.
Peter: And that’s actually moving from follow on social media to engage on social media. That’s how you’re getting.
Claire: Absolutely. Which is part of that engagement ladder. Right? So initially we’re just getting people on the ladder. Then we’re trying to move them up by getting them to follow us, to like us to answer a question and you know, to maybe even forward that question onto someone else.
Peter: And to get people on the ladder to begin with. The the is the sense that if you’re posting a bunch of things that they care about, that they’ll share that with other people and then other people will want to follow you. Is that the general idea?
Claire: Absolutely. So the general idea of getting people on the ladder in the first place is all about the first step, which is story, which is creating great content and the, and yet the idea is that if you’re creating content that’s about the type of customer that you think will like your product, it will reach them, right? You get people to start engaging and maybe that person is a friend of theirs and then that person sees their friend engaging on your post, right? It’s all this incredible kind of cycle of engagement as we see. This is, you know, we’re, we’re both fans of Marshall Goldsmith, but I use a case study of, of his in the book about how he sort of accidentally hacked the LinkedIn algorithm by launch this application or you know, this a hundred coaches program that you and I are both in and in the actual blog post on LinkedIn.
Claire: He did not include the link to the application. Right. And so when someone pointed it out to him in the comments, instead of going in and just updating the blog posts, he actually went in and had someone on his team respond to every single comment with a link and a thank you. Right. So what it did was it just started, you know, the machine as he calls it, of just tons and tons of comments, which pushed up the engagement, which puts the post higher, which meant that any time any of those individuals was, was responding, their friends were that and it was incredible. And it turned that post into, you know, one of the most popular in the whole year on LinkedIn or something.
Peter: Wow, that’s amazing. It’s sort of like the social media equivalent of discovering penicillin, use it on Marshall. That here would be very, very proud. [inaudible] Exactly. I just happened to, you know, forget that. I left that there. Okay, so story how audience reach we’re at the are.
Claire: Okay. Yes. So this is the fourth step and reach is all about amplifying your brand on social media by expanding your reach. And there are two basic ways to expand your reach on social media. And one of those ways is to use influencer marketing. And one of my favorite things about influencer marketing is that people think that sounds creepy and weird and networky. But the reality is that social media is the best place to meet people you don’t know yet. And different platforms can, can thrive and you know, particularly different ways at doing this. But in general, if you can find influencers in your niche who care about the themes, same things you care about, and try to connect with them on a personal level, not immediately jumping to an ask, then over time you will probably see some great stuff happen. And you know, when I, I spent a number of years working at Twitter and over and over and over again, the stories of many of the nonprofits I worked with while at Twitter were always about some type of celebrities, some type of influence or some type of someone that they had over time cultivated a connection with on Twitter that then led to an offline connection that then led to some sort of support.
Claire: And that was why they love Twitter then. And this is the same for a lot of different social media platforms. So using social media to actually find influencers is a really great strategy and that will help you expand your reach. Okay. Number five is excellence. And this is really all about just fine tuning your social media marketing. And one of the, I think most important things to remember about this stage is that social media is all about rolling with the punches. And if your social media, if your brand makes us social media mistake, own up to it fast and do so transparently. And you know, in the book I tell some of my favorite sort of social media nightmare stories and large brands, terrible things.
Peter: There’s some positive stories in there too. But there there’s a positive story that I really like, but there’s some real nightmare stories. The red cross, the red cross story was a good story. But after that man, it was painful to read.
Claire: Yeah. So most all the bad stories of the same thing in common, which is someone tweets something terrible and then the, the, the company either pretends it doesn’t happen or just immediately delete the post and doesn’t apologize. Right. And, and the good stories are the ones where the brands come in and they’re transparent, they apologize, and they somehow try to engage with followers sometimes in a humorous way about what happens. Right. And that’s what you’re referencing in terms of this red cross story. When one of the employees sends out essentially the equivalent of a drunken tweet and then sort of has to, it has to walk that back and does it in a smart way such that they actually end up raising a bunch of money for the red cross.
Peter: You know? And, and one of the lessons of that story and the ones that didn’t work so well were where people just got themselves in trouble, is that social media ultimately is a very human engagement process. And so when you do something stupid, own up to it, laugh, don’t try to hide it, you know, don’t, don’t also don’t let it destroy you. Like you made a mistake. This is what happens. You make a joke about it and you relate to people. But if you make a mistake and you’re so embarrassed that you try to hide it or deny it or avoid blame or et cetera, that’s not gonna work. And so the more you really are a human being connecting with other human beings using this as a medium, you’ll probably be more successful. And as soon as you start to think of it as, you know, a faceless corporate process you’re leveraging in order to increase your brand, you’ll probably be a little less successful.
Claire: Absolutely. And that also just gets back to, I feel like the point I keep driving home throughout the book, which is just that social media is actually not about the followers you have. It’s about the engagement you have. And so getting engagement is all about being human, about actually responding to people, talking to people, making your customers as, as human as possible, your customers and your followers.
Peter: Right. That’s a, that’s great. That’s great. And I, I, we have to wrap up, but I do want to ask one question, which is why did you tweet about your birth right when you gave birth? Like you, you put that out there right away. It did very well. It didn’t go viral. What were you thinking at the time? Like why did you do that?
Claire: I w I was, I was not thinking quite honestly when I had my first daughter, I went into labor a few weeks early and it was the middle of the night and I went and Googled is my water breaking because I thought it was. And then after I saw the answer on Google, I just sort of instinctively went to Twitter and typed that out. And then it started off this kind of viral thing that I couldn’t control. And I think it’s a great example of why going viral is, you know, 99% of the time, perfectly useless because you know, as I say in the book, the day after I went viral was like the day some Christian girl went viral for saying she’d never wear leggings again for religious reasons. So you know, there’s always someone new going viral somewhere and you know, there’s always some brand trying to achieve it and failing and wasting tons of money in the process. Don’t do it. Don’t do it. Yeah,
Peter: This is great. You’ve used both humanize social media and you’ve clarified it for me and I hope for our listeners and and this idea of it not being some big mystery and there are choices and strategies for how to do this in a way that is very human and that can engage people that is in line with, you know, your relationship with your audience, which is what we’re going for. So I really appreciate that. We’ve been looking at the book, social media success for every brand, the five pillars, the turn posts into profits. Claire Diaz Ortiz. Thank you so much. Ah, it’s so fun talking to you as always and thank you so much for being on the Bregman podcast.