Tag Archives: twitter

Friends of Friends: How I leveraged my way to massive growth and coverage

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Joe Avella is a long time comedy film maker from Chicago. He asked me if he could write a post on his marketing strategy and I agreed YES right away! I’m a huge fan of Joe and LOL’ed a ton when I saw his new 20 minute webisode of Delivery Dudes. This is a guest blog post by Joe Avella – the writer, director, and creator of Delivery Dudes.

Deliver Dudes Pilot

Leverage My Existing Network

My strategy was to market my new comedy show ‘Delivery Dudes’ only to people connected to the pilot and the show’s existing fans. The production includes 50+ people and had an existing email list of 100 fans. So, I targeted their existing social networks, making the marketing much more focused. Once I’d get those connections, I’d then target the new fan’s networks, and so on and so on.

Playing on friendly connections was a key way to cut through the noise, get a lot of people to connect with the pilot, triple my email list, and get written up on Mashable.com!

What do I want?

I needed a goal before implementing the strategy. I had to decide on one thing I wanted my marketing to do. I’ve found that having multiple goals results in far less impressive results. For me, I wanted email addresses! I feel this is the most important aspect to building a long term fan base.

Building a fanbase on a Facebook page is risky because Facebook can change how pages operate. Twitter is short and fast, so you risk a large percentage of your audience missing your message. With email you can send a message whenever you want and get it the most attention.

First things first

I set up a landing page. My site is hosted by Squarespace, so making a page with the video and an email sign up was super easy. First it had the trailer; later the pilot when it was available. I always included an email sign up form embedded under the video, the form was powered by MailChimp. The goal is to get people to this page with as few clicks as possible and make it easy to give me their email address.

Strategy 1: Facebook Ads

People involved in the production of Delivery Dudes were going to share it, at least I hope they would. Which is great, but to really get the word out I made Facebook Ads, and a few promoted posts. Delivery Dudes starred several actors known among the Chicago improv/comedy scene. A majority of them perform regularly at places like i.O. and Second City. So I targeted the ads to Facebook users who associate with those places.

 Example ads:

I created a few different ads featuring various performers only marketed to people who at least knew of the performer, and in some instances, were already friends.

Ad targeting:

note: picking just the 4 theaters still gave me a target of 340,000 people!

These institutions have several students and performers, and are very tight knit. Users associated with these theaters would recognize the performer in the ad, which greatly increased the click-through rates. The clicks would take them to the landing page which featured the pilot and a chance to join the email list.

Strategy 2: Email Promo Contests

I already had a list going into the release from years of other projects. If you don’t, that’s fine, you can try this once you build yours. I run exclusive content on the email list only and occasionally have giveaways. Leading up to the release I had two separate social media-related giveaways to help get the word out.

#1: Twitter

For one week any member who retweeted this tweet was entered in, with the chance to win a prize from Revolution Brewery.

#2: Instagram

For another week, I asked to share any one of these images on Instagram with the hashtag #DeliveryDudes and you could win a prize from seamless.com. (The giveaways gave fans a higher incentive to share Delivery Dudes with their fan base. A lot of those tweets got retweeted, and several images were liked and ‘regrammed’. (Note: I made the contest as easy as possible. Only one thing to do, and it was easy to do.)

Joe Avella marketing quote-v4

Why do any of this?

In short, it was up to me to get the ball rolling and the word out about the pilot. Sure, some would share it, but after all the work, and the fact that I really believe in this pilot, I wasn’t going to let it get sucked into the eternal nothingness that is the internet.

Running the strategies above forced me to think about how to get people’s attention, target an audience, and obtain something more than a passing glance: the permission for future connection.

Mashable.com coverage

But the biggest impact came from a Mashable writer who saw the pilot on a mutual friend’s FB page. From hustling to get friends of friends to share, one did who was connected to the writer.

Delivery Dudes on Mashable

If I had no game plan, and just threw it out there and ‘hoped for the best’, the incentive to share among those connected, and their potential connections, would be low. It’s safe to assume the pilot would not have gotten very far.

The details of these two strategies can be changed around depending on the project or your goal, but I highly recommend trying something like it. It’s cheap and you never know who’s 1-2 degrees away. Also, please check out my web series delivery dudes and sign up for my mailing list 🙂

Learn from Google+. Copy First, Innovate Second

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Instead of reinventing social networking from the ground up, Google+ just copied the best qualities of all the other popular social networks, which is why it’s so amazing and gaining traction so quickly.

Here are some things that I’ve noticed they copied:

Facebook’s Layout

Everyone is used to Facebook’s layout. So why not lower the learning barrier by making the user interface the same?

Facebook’s Likes

Google noticed that users really loved Facebook’s “Like” feature. Leaving a comment is a lot of work but allowing people to easily give you feedback with a click of a button incentivizes more status updates. Google copied the “Like” with a “+1” which functions identically.

Twitter’s Retweeting and Tumblr’s Reblogging 

Who doesn’t love a reblog or a retweet? Google made it super simple to share your friends status messages with your followers.

Twitter Followers 

It’s pretty cool when you can get an inside look at what your favorite American Idol is having for breakfast. Google makes following a possibility (something you can’t do on Faceb00k). This allows a one-to-many relationship and opens up the amount of connections you can have.

Quora’s Notifications

All top social networks (Quora, LinkedIn, Facebook) do whatever it takes to show you notifications. Google went to the extreme on this. You get updates at the top bar of all Google properties (Google.com, Google Reader, Gmail, etc) if you are signed in, and they also email you updates.

Color’s Nearby Tab

Google knew that early on peoples newsfeed would be pretty empty since most people would have less than 10 connections when starting out. So they adopted Color’s idea, which is to show you what people near you are posting. This allows you to feel an instant sense of community and engages you right away.

I’m not bashing Google here by any means. I love Google+ and I think they made a smart move by just going with what already works. Once they reach their 25M+ users next week, like PC Magazine predicts, then they can innovate like crazy and change the world.

Update: Awesome comment on Hacker News to this post:

I want to point out that so many companies get the “copy first” part right, but never get around to the “innovate later” part. Copy first is becomming a mantra. Facebook was a copy of The Face Book, in fact. The reason facebook is what it is is that they did get around to innovating later. The reason there’s no competition for the iPod is that the competition never got around to innovating (or in MSFT’s case, got around to it way too late.) – econgeeker

3 Simple Steps to Increase Customer Retention

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Comic that shows keeping old customers is way easier

Comic by Ted Goff

The awesome guys at Blogtrepreneur let me do a guest blog post on their site about simple ways to increase customer retention.

I go into examples of things that have worked for me as well as examples of what other companies are doing really well. Here is a quick summary of what I talk about:

* How Walmart pays someone to say hello to you right when you walk in
* How PhotoJojo sends really great emails on fun things to do with your camera
* An email template you can use to make a customer feel special right when they sign up.
* And many more examples (DailyBooth, AirBnB, Reddit, Meetup.com, Twitter, SaaS Businesses). See the full post here.

Public Stats: Twitter and YouTube make me care

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Graph showing Rishi's # of followers

I have no idea why but for the past few days I have been obsessed with the number of followers I have.

It probably has to do with the fact that it is public and everyone can see it. Or maybe it has something with the fact that if someone has a ton of followers we think they are more important than others. I often find myself looking at how many followers other people have to determine if they are worthy of my follow.

Public stats has worked on me over and over again.

First it was YouTube. Since people could see how many views a particular video has, I wanted to promote the crap out of it. I also would email all my friends so I could get 1 more view. If a video is over 5 minutes long and it has less than a 1,000 views I will most likely turn it off before the 1 minute mark (unless it completely engages me).

Next it was LinkedIn. Since the number of connections was public I really wanted to hit the 500+ connections landmark. I quickly lost interest in connecting with more people after I hit the 500+ goal because you can’t publicly see how many connections someone has past 500.

Now it is Twitter. I find myself checking Twitter Counter on a daily basis to see if my # of followers has grown. Do I think it is pathetic?… yes, I do. Will I still check my twitter numbers tomorrow… yes, I will.

Conclusion: If you want your users to care. Show them stats and make it public for everyone to see.

Side Note: I wonder if I would have done better in school if my grades were displayed publicly.

Am I the only one that is like this? Do public stats make you care? Let me know in the comments please.