Science of Social Media Marketing - Masterclass w/ Brendan Kane

We're not talking about tricking people, we're not talking about clickbait here.

Joining to me today is Brendan Cain. He's the founder and managing director of Hook Point, a research and insights company about social and viral content. The author of two bestselling books, he's generated over $1 billion in revenue. If you're in the social media space, if you want to build personal brand or be more effective at marketing and getting that very coveted earned media, you're going to want to pay attention here for people who don't know who you are. Brendan, can you just briefly introduce yourself and tell us a little bit of your backstory?

Ye, yeah, My backstory is interesting in that I got into social media very early. So I started in like 2004, 2005, so I'm going to date myself a bit. But I started on like Friendster in MySpace and it was kind of by accident, you know, I was going to film school because I wanted to be a film producer. But when I showed up at film school, I realized they teach you nothing about business there. And I'm like, well, I probably should know something about business if I want to be on the business side of the film industry. So the most cost efficient way at the time, and it still holds true today, is to start Internet companies. So I was just creating Internet companies while I was going to college, really just to learn and experiment so that I had kind of a leg up when I was going to LA to pursue a career in film, because my second book is all about this. Hook Point is how do I go into a notoriously difficult industry to break into and have a leg up. So I showed up in LA after I graduated film school in about around 2005. And like everybody else, I was making coffee and copies and deliveries. You have to start at the bottom. And when people would ask me, what do I want to do? I would say that I wanted to be a film producer. And I could see everybody's eyes glaze, you know, because I was just one of a million kids with a pipe dream. So I had to take a step back and really analyze the environment that I was in. I was working for a movie studio and I could sense this tremendous anxiety that would come over the office every time we finished a film because we invested tens of millions of dollars into a single piece of content. And then we needed hundreds of millions of people around the world to know about this single piece of content in a matter of months. It's not like we had years or decades. So I Just started going to the president of the studio and I said, listen, I know how to tap into these online traffic sources for a fraction of the cost that we were paying for television or print, and in some cases, no cost at all. So that's how I really got my foot in the door. And I went from making coffee and copies to building digital divisions and tapping into these social networks to promote our films.

So you saw the need early on, the connection between social influence and building an audience to help launch properties, projects and ideas. Right. Where did you get that confidence that you could do this, that you're pitching this as a relatively new person in the industry?

It's interesting that I learn something, I get super excited about it, and I want to share it. It's just about like, hey, there's this cool thing that we can do. Like, for example, I did the first ever influencer campaign on YouTube. This is around, like, 2007 for a movie called Crank with Jason Statham. And I was just analyzing YouTube and there was no such thing as an influencer. But I was like, there's these kids out there that are generating millions and millions of views on their videos. Why don't we reach out to them? And I just made a list of the top 100 YouTubers at the time, and I said, do you want to interview a movie star? And I got like 10 responses. And we didn't have to pay anything for it, but the confidence just came from. There's this unique opportunity that will provide value to the movie, the directors, the studio executives, because they want nothing more than their film to succeed. And that's where just that confidence comes from. I kind of lose myself in that process of finding solutions to people's problems.

It's a theme that we talk about a lot, or I try to, in that from one. One point of view, you see opportunity and someone else sees an obstacle for you. It must be, like, natural, like breathing. You see something, you go for it. But for who are more stuck, who still are late to the social game, who are quick to dismiss it as being vapid and vacuous forms of entertainment, killing the intelligence of people. And they're looking at like, this is dumb, and I'm not going to get on social media. Social media are for people who cannot do things. Social media is about looking good and falling into social trappings. And it's emotionally very damaging for young people. There's a lot of people who are still in that camp. How do we shift the conversation around a little bit to have a different perspective? And then maybe we'll get into some real marketing tactics with you.

Well, I think the first question, because I do run into that quite a bit and I think the first question to ask yourself is what is really driving that belief? And this could be on a subconscious level. You know, this may not be conscious, but really sit with yourself and ask yourself, is it that you really just despise social media and what it stands for or does it overwhelm you because you don't know how it works? And thus those beliefs are coming up because we work with some of the largest creative agencies in the world, like traditional creative agencies, and we get that a lot. And what I find is it's, it's really not that they despise social media or the negativity around it. They just have a sense of self doubt or they don't know how to translate their expertise to that medium. And thus it's very easy for us when we don't understand something to kind of put it down. What I find working with top creatives is they can't. And I'm talking about creatives that have mastered creative for other forms. So television, print, radio, things of that nature. They don't know how to translate their zone of genius to social media. And thus because of that they put these negative thoughts or beliefs about social media. But from my experience is once you show them how to translate, I have to distill these things into its simplest forms so that I can understand it. And then once I understand it, then I can figure out how to scale it and do it better. So that's where I think I'm able to articulate what social media is in a more simplified way in terms of what you need to do, because I've had to do it for myself.

Your first book, one Million followers, which I'm holding here in front of me, I think what's really interesting for me is you actually implement the things that you recommend people to do. And so it's hard to walk by a book like this since 1 million followers, how I built a massive social following in 30 days. It seems outrageous. It seems incredible, like too good to be true. So can you tell us a little bit about why you wrote this book and what you're hoping that people get from it? Because it does seem like a clickbait title. But you've actually been able to do this multiple times.

I didn't want to just provide my perspective. I wanted to interview partners and friends and other ways of doing it so that I made sure that I was providing well rounded strategies and information and not just from myself. I had wanted to do a book for some time because I love teaching, I love sharing information, I love providing value. But I just didn't feel like I had a strong enough hook, something that was going to grab people's attention. And I had spent about three and a half years working with some athletes, journalists and celebrities to help them grow their audience. And I had probably at the time tested 70 to 100,000 variations of content. So I had a very good understanding of what it took to build a following. And then I thought to myself, because I would have these conversations with people like, oh, it's great you worked with a Taylor Swift or an MTV or Paramount Pictures, but I'm not that. And I could just see in the data that I was getting, it didn't really matter. As long as you had the right message, the right content, it would work. It wasn't a matter of if I could do it, it was a matter of why I could do it. And I'm a huge believer in testing hooks, testing stories to see if they have validity before you actually go and do it. So I called illiterate agent that represented $5 billion worth of book sales. Like he brought the Four Dummies books to life. And I said, hey, I'm thinking about doing this experiment and turning it into a book. If I do it, would you sign me as a client and get me a publishing deal? And he said yes. And then I didn't stop there. I wanted to ask like other marketing experts, hey, I'm thinking about doing this. If I did it, would that be a book that you want to read? And the answer was a resounding yes. So that's where the experiment came from and that's where the inspiration of the book came from.

I wrote some notes from the book itself and I'd like to do a little deeper dive on some of these concepts. I think when we take away the word social media and we just talk about influence, it maybe sounds a little bit different. Like if you have an idea, if you have a concept, a process, a framework, if you write a book, you want to get people to read it. That's the whole point. The best, most shareable ideas win after all. And these can be things around marketing, sales, or it could just be around ideas about how we should live, sustainability and dealing with issues that are potentially life threatening to our planet and to ourselves. So you talk about shareable content and there's a couple things you write about. Serving others, finding I Think in the other book, and you reference this a lot like a hook point, a headline that's going to grab people's attention, because if you don't have that, you don't have anything. You talk about keeping your intros short, having twists. And something that I would like to ask you more about is this PCM model, the process communication model. And you point out a couple of really interesting things. The content that's shareable, has some element of logic, humor, and really tugs at our emotional kind of heartstrings. Can you expand on that?

Yeah, absolutely. I think the first place to start is really explaining what drives success on social media today. It comes down to one thing, and that's the algorithms. The algorithms control reach and distribution of content. And there's a lot of myths about the algorithms. One of them is they suppress your reach to get you to pay for reach. So to boost your post, run paid ads. But if that were the case, nobody would ever go viral. So what do the algorithms really care about? They care about user retention. The longer people spend on a platform, the more ads they can serve, thus the more revenue they generate. And now we live in a world. I remember when I first started in social media. I remember the press release of MySpace hitting its first million users. You fast forward. Today, there's 4 billion people on social media and they're pushing 200 billion messages into the world every day. So the algorithms have an abundance of content to choose from. And what they are really favoring is content that can hold attention for as long as possible with the widest audience. When we talk about social media and gaining influence, growing audience, getting views, engagement clicks, whatever that may be, you have two things that you need to do. You need to grab attention. You need to stop people in those first few seconds. For TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, it's stopping the scroll, YouTube, it's really getting people to click on the suggested video thumbnail because that's where most of that traffic comes from. So that's the first part, because if you can't stop people's attention, you're never going to be able to hold their attention, which is the second part. And clickbait isn't really relevant anymore because again, if you're clicking people into viewing something or stopping and the substance isn't there, if you're not meeting the expectation that you set in those first three seconds, then that retention graph is going to completely fall off a cliff. So our job as content creators of mastering social media is how do we grab that attention? But then how do we tell an effective story that holds that attention long enough, longer than the billions of other pieces of content, longer than in our competition. And if you do that, the algorithms will become your best friends. Because we have to remember these social media platforms don't exist without our content. It's not that they want to suppress it on purpose. They want content that holds attention, that provides value, that entertains, so that they can really keep people on these platforms longer. And as you mentioned, one of the tools that we use, pcm, and we've kind of evolved it to what we call a communication algorithm, is one of those storytelling mechanisms. And this is backed by 1.5 million communication assessments worldwide. So it's validated and it's updated every year. Pixar doesn't talk about it, but all of their screenwriting are trained in this model. Bill Clinton used it to become president. NASA uses it to train all of their training program. And what it does is it breaks down the six different ways that people perceive content, that perceive the world, and we break it down into a mathematical formula. So the largest subset of the population, 30%, is feeling based. So they're going to connect with your content, they're going to buy for your products or services based upon how it makes them feel. So they want to feel really connected. They want that emotional response to the messages you're putting out there. The second largest 25%, is fact based, so it needs to make sense for them. It's not about feeling, it's about time frames, data, information, who, what, when, where, why. The third largest, 20%, is fun base. These people react. They want excitement, they want fun, they want to just know that if I watch this piece of content, it's going to be entertaining, or if I buy this product or service, it's just going to make my life more exciting, more fun. 10% is values and opinions. So can I trust this brand? Do I feel like this creator is committed and dedicated to me? Another 10% is imagination based. So these people are very reflective. They don't say a lot. If you hear the stories about Albert Einstein and how he came up with his best ideas, he would sit by the window and just stare out the window for hours on end, reflecting, reflecting on all the things that he was working on. And the smallest subset is action based, it's 5%. So they don't think, they don't feel, they don't believe, they don't have fun, they just run. If you've ever seen Tom Cruise in Mission Impossible, what is he doing? He's running the entire movie. He's hanging off the side of planes. So when we work with clients or we look at content, we want to make sure that we are contextualizing our message to incorporate those as many as possible. For example, my base is thoughts and logic. If I just talk data, information, time frames, things like that, that I'm disconnecting and potentially alienating 75% of the population. Us as individuals, we have communication strengths and we have communication weaknesses. So we have access to all six different ways. But we tend to communicate from our strengths. So when we're creating content, oftentimes from a subconscious level, we don't have that awareness. So we're going to speak through the way that we perceive the world, we perceive the content, but that really kills retention off of content because it's not really looking at. At the larger population. So again, look at Pixar like, you know, a great homework assignment is watch inside out, not for the content, but for the different characters in the little girl's head. That represents these different ways that people perceive content. And that's where we see a lot of brands struggling with marketing or creative content, as their creative directors are designing content based on how they perceive the world instead of looking at the holistic view.

I want to ask you just one question about you because you just revealed something. You're a very analytical person. Data, fact, logical, kind of. This is how you operate in the world. That's your normal mode, right?

Yeah.

And. And I think a lot of us operate in our headspace and so we forget to connect from the heart and get people to feel something. Knowing this, I've looked at your content. I've been kind of looking at what. What's popping on your Instagram feed. I've recognized some patterns, but I want to just throw the question to you. How does someone who's like you, either a personal brand or a company who's very fact data driven, maybe a little cold in how they present stuff, how do they bring in some of these other concepts to reach a broader audience and increase their retention?

The first place to start is just awareness, is having awareness of how you communicate and how you need to def. Diversify that communication. And then it comes down to practice. I've been integrating this process for over eight years. I'm not perfect at it, but I've gotten a lot better over the years. And the thing to understand is you don't have to go over the top with it. So I'll give you an example. I was brought in by a Guy named Gary Keller that founded Keller Williams, one of the largest residential real estate companies in the world. And he asked us to really help him revamp the social media strategy. And our process is deeply rooted in research. So we did a lot of research on the content that they were producing and their competitors were producing. And it's a very formula model in real estate. They say, hey, this house has five bedrooms, four bathrooms and an acre of land. Do you want to schedule a tour that's fact based, you know, that's 25% of population. So how would I sell this house using this model? I would start by, with facts, by saying, this house has five bedrooms, four bathrooms and an acre of land. And imagine your family sitting around this fireplace on Christmas Eve. How is that going to feel when your family's all together, all cozy, excited to open up, present, and as you check out that pool in the backyard, you are going to have the craziest and funnest parties and all of your neighbors are going to be super jealous. And I really believe that this is the best house on the market because of the school district that it's in. Would you like to schedule a tour? So the big thing is the content of the house never changed. It was the way that I represented the context. And I did it in about 30 seconds. So I didn't go over the top with each one. I started with the facts about what the house was. I tuned into the imagination by just saying imagine, then went quickly into feelings by saying, how is this going to feel when your family's sitting around this fireplace place on Christmas Eve? Then I went into fun saying, check out this pool. You're going to have the craziest and funnest parties. And I went quickly into action because they want the best, they want the bottom line and said, all of your neighbors are going to be jealous. And then I said, I believe, tapping into the values and opinions, sharing my beliefs that this is the best house in the market because of the school district that was in. It's not that you go over the top in any direction. You just hit on it so that you make sure that people are getting their psychological needs met so they, they can, can resonate with the entire message that you're putting out there.

Is there one that you want to lead more with and then tap into others or does it not matter as much?

Well, we typically say focus on the big three. Feelings, facts and fun. And if you want to play it from a math perspective, you would go feelings, facts and fun. Because it's you know, that's 75% of the population, but that goes 30%. 25%, 20%. However, what you can do is fun. Doesn't need to be words. It could be a background. Like, I don't know if you ever saw that dollar Shave Club video that went super VI they created. But, you know, he does an amazing job of doing facts in the first, like, five to 10 seconds. But in the background, there's like all these crazy, like, posters and colors and things like that. So just even the environment can do that. And then he starts layering in feelings and just goes back and forth between all of them. It doesn't necessarily have to be words. It can be environment, it can be facial expressions, body cues, how you use your arms and things of that nature to layer it in.

I really like those two examples because one was linear and it progressed in a sequence. And you could totally understand that. It was kind of very logical. Logical for my mind to understand the other one that was happening simultaneously because there's the background, the juxtaposition between what's happening behind him. I think there's a. I don't know if it was a dwarf or someone who's in the background and just crazy things happening. And then him being in a suit, he's very dry in his delivery, but what he's saying is not in alignment with the way he looks. So there's a lot of stuff that's going on. So you can sandwich and develop layers. I really like that. Is there a third example that you can share with us?

It's kind of. And I'm not political at all. But let's talk about how Bill Clinton uses to become president, because I think it's very interesting. So he is in debate, I believe it was against George Bush. And a woman got up and said, our family's really struggling. How would you support us? Because we just. We just don't know what it's going to feel like if we choose you or you win, or we're just really concerned. So George Bush gets up and he just talks about data and facts. These are the things that I'm going to do to change things to make your life better. Bill Clinton realized that this woman perceived the world through feelings and emotions. And 30% of the population is that. So the first thing he did is he stepped around the podium and he said, I feel your pain. And with that, he won the female vote. So it just absolutely, you know, killed it with that. Also, you can look at the Harmon Brothers, who produce videos for, like, Squatty Potty Poo Pourri and things like that. They layer in a lot of the feelings, facts and fun with their characters. You know, they're very satirical, but they provide facts and information about the product. They emotionally connect the audience with the main character. So I worked with a company called Chad Chat Books and they, they worked with Harmon Brothers and they have this amazing story about a mother and how stressful it is to be a mother. And it's very funny. The kids are like shooting off crossbows in the background. The mother is just like, have you ever experienced this? Like, if that's you, I really connect, I really hear you. And then it dives into the facts about the product.

You've been able to do something that very few people do. You were able to grow your Facebook account really fast and your Instagram account really fast. I'm curious if the observations that you've had in devising different ways of understanding how algorithms work and how humans perceive the world, if you've been able to translate this across every social platform that you touch, are you able to have the same amount of success everywhere?

We've been able to translate this across every platform and every, basically every industry. And the reason is we have a viral content engineering creative process that's backed by 60 billion views, 100 million followers, and a billion in revenue for the projects we worked on. The reason that we are successful cross platform and no matter what change or new feature comes to social media, is that our first step of our creative process is research. So what does that actually mean? Some people think research is, let me just look at my competition and I'll try and emulate that. Now, typically your competition is going to tell you what not to do because they're probably not succeeding at the highest levels, which is important. But what we do is when we work on projects, we extend that research to other content creators, other brands, other people that are really excelling at social media. Even if they're talking about something that's nothing relevant to the piece of content that we're going to work on. And the reason is that we're not looking at the content, we're looking at the context of how they're delivering their message. There's over like 50 nuances that we pay attention to. So it's down to like, pacing, tonality, the personality types that we just talked about, how many edits, what are their first three seconds? Look at thumbnail images, captions, meme cards, if there is one. And what we'll do is we'll take a Viral content creator or a viral content format. And we have a research process that's called Gold, Silver, Bronze. So gold is the highest performers, silver is like the middle performers, and bronze is the lowest performers. Because if you just look at the highest performers, you'll never really understand what are those performance drivers that are pushing that. So we'll look at these high performers, the gold standard, and we'll start creating hypotheses of, oh, we think it's the way that they're editing it this way, or we think it's the way that they're delivering their message. But then we have to go to the silver and bronze to make sure that same performance driver is not showing up. Because if that performance driver is showing up, then we need to knock it out and go buy back to the gold and find a new one. So because we're deeply rooted in research and we do research every single day, it doesn't matter what platform, it doesn't matter when things get to the metaverse, because we're always going to use research to inform our creative decisions about how we need to contextualize it for success.

Based on your research and your clients and what you do, is it possible for any person in any industry, any vertical, to have consistently high performing viral content?

Yes. And I can give you some examples. Like There is a YouTube account called Clear Tax Value, It's All About Taxes, has over a million subscribers. They average like 3 to 400,000 views a video and have several videos over millions of views. You may know Graham Stephan. He teaches finance to millennials. Graham Stephan, for example, is a perfect thing, is like if he did a video that says, hey, I want to teach you about finance for millennials, nobody's going to care. But again, what we talked about, the algorithms you have to make the widest audience possible, care for the algorithms to care, and push it to as many people as possible. So you need to contextualize your message so that anybody would be interested in one. Graham's top videos is How I Bought a Tesla for $78. Anybody would be interested in seeing that. And he's teaching people the principles of finance, but he's contextualizing it in an interesting way. There's another guy, Ryan Serhant, who's a luxury real estate agent. He sells properties that are 10, 20, 30, $50 million. So his audience is very small, but he gets this, that I need to expand and make the average person care about what I'm saying so that I can generate millions and millions of years on my videos. So what does he do is like, I'm going to take you on a tour of a $7 million closet. I'm going to take you on a tour of a $250 million ranch. And what he knows is he's playing to the general audience, so he'll generate millions of views. But even in those millions of views, if only 1% is his core target, he's out beating every other luxury real estate agent. And he said that he's sold 10, 20, $30 million properties off of YouTube because he's contextualizing his message so the average person cares. And that's the big challenge, but that's the big opportunity. That's really how you consistently go.

I just want to tell everybody this conversation is not scripted. It's not premeditated. It's a testament to your thing about reaching a broad coalition and audience. My son yesterday told me about a guy who produced a video about how you can get a Tesla for $78. I've seen the same video. My son is 18. I'm 50 years old. Proof is in the pudding here. And with your confidence in saying that we can help anyone in any vertical in any industry produce consistent viral content, what does an engagement look like with Hook Point, your agency? Can you give us the, like, the broad outline of, like, what an engagement looks like if somebody wanted to work with you?

Yeah. It's interesting because we're making a big transition with our business because we've been training organizations in our viral content engineering process for the past year and a half. And what I realized is research is the core element for the reasons that we talked about. But even when we train people in the model, they don't do the research either because they don't have the time, they don't want to do it, or it takes them a while to identify those nuances. So we created a new community where. Where every week we do new research and insights and deliver it to the people in our community. That's kind of like at the base level, is that every week we're delivering, and obviously you get access to our past research, but we're delivering these nuances. We'll break down a top TikTok creator, we'll break down a top brand, or a viral video or several viral videos and explain these nuances to them. And then we give them access to the research sheets and activation guides and how to do it for other people that want to take that next level. We'll actually do custom research for them. So they'll say, hey, this is Our product or this is the brand that we have. We're just looking to scale. So we'll do the custom research and the custom social media strategy and then train their entire team in our process. Our job is because we don't produce a creative for people. We want to empower people to learn as much of this as possible so that they're not reliant on us or anybody else for the long, the long term.

So the agency doesn't do any production content creation, it's research and insights.

My goal is to help as many people as possible and it's not infinitely scalable to have a creative agency. I know people that and we actually service creative agencies as well. I just know that there's nobody out in the market that's doing this granular level research and insight. So I'd rather double down and super focus on just being best and world class at that. And I think through that will help so many more people that could take those research and insights and create their own content effectively.

You talked about this a little bit because it was one of the questions they're going to ask you but you kind of already started to answer answer it. Which is. So some people are like well what's the whole point of getting an audience and having viral content? I need sales man, I have to move product, I have to close business. Do you also share insights on how we can create content that actually helps with conversion and sales? You, you talked about the real estate person who is able to get millions of people to care about the content. That's tremendous social proof. So if his 1% of the people watching that is is a natural client, then that totally works. Are there other smaller examples of somebody who's not selling a hundred million dollar property and with millions of views what they can do?

Yeah, absolutely. And the way that I like to position it is let's just say your average video right now is generating a thousand views a video and of that maybe it's 50% is your core target audience. So it's like with every video producers, 500 potential people that can buy your product or service. Now let's say you learn how to consistently go viral and you take your video performance from a thousand to a hundred thousand views a video and your core target audience is going to drop because we're taking that generalist approach, but maybe it drops down to 20%. We just went from 500 potential customers that we could reach with each piece of content to 20,000. That's the power of it. Now in terms of how you actually monetize that. There's many different ways you go about it. And one of the research that we do is how do you subtly integrate calls to action into content? The other way you can do it is you're building an audience that you can retarget with ads. So sometimes we'll do with clients is you're using organic to earn the right to make the sale. And you may not make the sale in the video itself, but you can retarget that audience with the sale. But there's many examples of companies out there, like we mentioned, the Dollar Shave Club video like that launched that business. Now obviously they eventually started running paid against it, but they generated tens of millions of views organically because that content was so good. Same thing with the Harmon Brothers with their videos. Yes, they put paid behind it, but there's so much organic lift there that there's a lot of free earned media. Then you look at some of the extreme cases like Kylie Jenner and Kylie cosmetics. She built $1 billion empire off of her ability to foster this audience, this connection with them. So when she launched KY Cosmetics or any product, she can authentically connect with them to do that. It was similar to the initial work that I did with Taylor Swift. She was really on kind of like that inflection point of taking off. And she had built so much trust and credibility with her audience that once we really started to get into E commerce, it was just so natural because people are bought into this person. Or you look at Mr. Beast, for example, one of the most successful influencers of all time. He, he launches Beast Burger, he launches his chocolate bars, he launches all of those things or the campaign he did to raise $20 million to plant 20 million trees for him. He authentically can deliver that message A because he's an expert in communicating with his audience, but he's provided so much value through his content that the audience just really wants to support him in anything that he does.

Is part of the idea, the discipline to not think as transactions like do this today for this sale, but to to think more long term and to build an audience so that Mr. Beast didn't do Beast burgers on day one. It's many years into his content creation journey and Kylie Jenner is able to translate her audience, the Rabbit fans that she has, into launching a line. Is that the discipline or is it, or is it something totally different? Am I missing it like we were.

Talking about earlier, there's not one way to be successful. There is the long term game and the long Term game is very effective in building brand loyalty, building an audience that will purchase your things. But then there's also the direct response marketing game where you can, if you are a really effective storyteller and copywriter, you can sell somebody that knows nothing about you from a single ad. So I think about my friend Craig Clemons, who's probably one of the world's leading copywriters in the world, that created company called Golden Hippo and They've done about 2 billion in sales off of social media ads. And most of those sales are somebody just watching one video and purchasing the product. So again, there's different ways that you can go about it. A lot of times the people they want to work with us is, they're, they're in it for the long game and they really want to build a meaningful brand, build that connection. Because the other approach can be very costly and resource intensive to make work.

You've been sharing a lot of things around best practices, things that we should do, we could do. When you're studying these accounts that do really, really well and understanding their content, what are some of the worst things that you see people do? Maybe we get to worse practices.

I would say that most people that I run into who are typically batch producing content, they'll plan out content for a week, a month, a quarter. And there is, I don't wanna say a myth because at one point in time it did work. But people are really convinced that frequency is the key to scale. And the challenge with that, I'm not saying frequency never worked, you know, seven, eight, nine years ago when the platforms, there's less competition and I'm not saying it can't work, but people get caught in this thing that they, they haven't made anything go viral, or maybe they made one thing go viral, but they don't understand how it goes viral. So they think, hey, I'm just gonna just keep prod producing a ton of content and the algorithms just because I'm producing a ton of content are going to grow. We focus on and working with clients. It's really quality over quantity. We want to do the research, we want to identify, identify the performance drivers so that we can get our format dialed in. And once we have our format dialed in, then you can go to frequency and grow. If you're just constantly batch producing content, you never really learn what it takes to be consistent over the long run. And maybe you hit it because you got an Instagram reels early or TikTok early. As soon as the algorithm shifts or there's more competition on the platform and your performance nose dives, then you have no solid foundation to understand what do I need to do next. That I think is the biggest mistake that I see. And again, I'm not saying that frequency can't play a role. Like, I know content creators like a friend of mine, Alex STEMP, just hit 20 million followers on TikTok and he talks about frequency. And I said, alex, it works for you because your content is so dialed in. You spent so much time, you spent years dialing this in, that's why it works for you. But for everybody else out there, just to get in the process of just creating content every day, it's not going to lead to the results because they're just playing the lottery. They're hoping for luck. And if they get something to go viral, they don't understand why, so that they, they can't produce it. And then there's a lot of people that are still stuck on time of day, hashtags, things like that, where again, at a certain point in time when there's less competition on a platform, it could yield results. But what I always say to people is focus on content, don't focus on these, all these other variables because it's just having the right hashtag posting, the right time of day, posting every day is not going to make a crappy piece of content amazing. You have to be a student of the game. You have to learn how to really contextualize your message for what audiences are looking for and what the algorithms are looking for.

I really like what you're saying there, Brendan, because there's a lot of content that's out there that tries to teach you little tweaks and hacks around hashtags, time of day, or these little things that might get you a short term gain. But what I'm hearing you saying right now is there are foundational skills that you can build that are evergreen, that are universal, that you can take with you once you understand how to create content that people care about, that touch on the facts, the fun and feelings. And if you master that, you can write a book, you can make a movie, you can make a commercial, you can do a 3 second piece of content or 30 minute piece of content and people will care. And I really like that because now we're moving away from, from jumping on a trend or something and we're really looking at building real skill that is translatable. You mentioned something about research, and as a person who deals with research, there's a gap and it's creative and then execution, I think something like that, right? Research, creative and execution. So you're the supplier of really beautiful, insightful research. And if somebody doesn't get the creative part, they can't translate that to something good. Otherwise we'd all be geniuses making viral videos. So if somebody's stuck in the creative part, do you have any advice or thoughts on how. Here's the research, but this is how you connect it.

One of the things that we do with clients that we find highly effective is in our research, we identify a reference that we want to emulate. Again, not from a content perspective, but from the nuanced storytelling mechanisms. We never tell people to copy content. And also a big distinction, I want to say, is we never, when we work with somebody, it's not changing who somebody is, not changing their message, not changing their values, their brand, or changing the way it's expressed. So when we do the research, we identify a reference, we identify those performance drivers, and then we have the client create a piece of content based upon that. And then what we do do is one side of the screen, we put the reference on the other side of the screen. We put the piece of content they produced and we have them play it side by side. And by doing that, you will learn so much about what you're missing in terms of how you're delivering your content. You know, and still it takes time to get good at this. It's not going to happen overnight. But when you start doing those practices, you have that level awareness, you're comparing your content with the reference, you understand why the reference works, then you will see a light years of improvement in your content and your process.

When people put their work side by side against the reference, is it self evident to them or do you have to like point out certain things so that they can understand that?

It depends on the client, it depends on the performance drivers. I would say it's about 70% they get it and the other 30% we need to point out to them. What we have just found is the more you do it, the more you catch on to it. And that's really why I wanted to turn our company into a research and insights company is I want to be delivering new breakdowns, new research every week so content creators can look at it from different perspectives. You know, we can look at a clinical psychologist that's going viral on TikTok one week, a lawyer that's going viral on Instagram reels another week, an insurance company that's, you know, using the communication Algorithm to diversify. Because, and I would love to hear from your perspective, I find that the more you entrench yourself in this, the more you, you learn, the more that you look at, the more that you study from a creative perspective, then you start picking up those nuances. But it takes time. You need to really immerse yourself deeply in it.

I think I remember it on an interview. I don't know if it was on a stage or a podcast that you did with Vishen. About six things or something, six categories, six variables that you look at at a piece of content to see how it's doing. Is this what we're talking about when you look at content to break it down or is it a different model that you're using?

Yeah, so we look at what we call again, performance drivers. And initially when we started this, we, we just looked at those five or six things, but we've now expanded it to over 50 things. It's looking at your, your title or your caption, if you have a thumbnail. What are you doing in those first three seconds? What is your pacing? What is your delivery? What is what is happening in the background? How are you creating, you know, intimacy in your framing? Initially, when I wrote 1 million followers, it was at 6. But now with my team, we've really brought it out to almost 50 of these things that we look at.

I'd be interested in comparing notes with you for YouTube. When I talk about YouTube and growing on YouTube, it comes down to, I think, two things. Click through rate and then engagement. That's like YouTube terminology, but basically how many people who see your content actually watch it? And then what's the percentage of completion? And those two things, I mean, it could get more complicated and more nuanced than that. But those two things seem to drive whether or not your content's gonna be seen by a lot of people. Are those your same observations or do you have different ways of looking at it?

It's the same because again, going back to what we were talking about earlier, the click through rate is your ability to grab attention. And then your watch through rate or your retention graph is your ability to hold that attention. And again, that's all YouTube cares about. Like, I'm sure engagement factors in, but like, if you had a high click through rate and everybody clicked the like button in the first minute, but then everybody jumped off, I don't think that video would go viral because YouTube's too smart for that and it's not allowing you to serve more ads. So we really look at when we talk about YouTube, is that effectiveness of in suggested videos to click that thumbnail and headline and then your ability to hold that attention for as long as possible so that they can serve more ads and keep people on the platform longer.

I want to dive deeper into the title as we transition to concepts from Hook Point. But before I go there, I just. As a designer who makes thumbnails, what are you seeing is really effective for thumbnail designs for YouTube specifically?

Yeah, it's a great question. And it really depends on the subject. We often find is the thumbnail and the headline have to play off of each other. And oftentimes what we see is the thumbnail and headline basically say the same thing. So it's not adding layers in addition. And it's not just for thumbnails, but for even like the first three seconds of a video on like a TikTok Instagram. We talk a lot about and you'll know this term, Chris. Visual hierarchical is what do we want the attention to be? And oftentimes what we do is we overwhelm the viewer. Because even with a thumbnail headline or scrolling through a TikTok or Instagram, if you overwhelm them with too much information, like they're just gonna. Just gonna scroll past because they have so much content. So looking at the thumbnail and headline from a visual hierarchy, most people are gonna focus on the thumbnail first and then the headline second. So what is it that we can capture the attention with the visual nature of it and then back up the justification of why they should CL with that headline?

Attention grabbing visual. I'm intrigued. I've stopped the scroll for half a second title, then explains why I might want to dig deeper into it. Is that about right?

Yeah. And I think a great masterclass for this is looking at Mr. Beast thumbnails. Again, it's not about the content because most people's brands are not going to be relevant to the content that he produces. But he has tested it extensively and you could just see the thought process in there. And again, what we talked about earlier, our job with the thumbnail and headline is how do we make it intriguing to the the widest audience possible? And it breaks the old paradigms of what marketing was built on, which is create a very niche piece of content for a very niche audience and then the action will happen. Well, when we're talking about organic, social, it's. It's the reverse. It's how do we make it interesting to the widest possible audience on the subtextual level? Want to talk about what your genius is, expertise, or the value your brand offers. But with thumbnails and headlines, I think people often make that mistake is they are essentially niching down too far to try and attract a large audience. And the algorithms just don't really care about that at this point, unfortunately.

One last question on the thumbnail design, the visual component of it. Are you noticing specific patterns? Just broad strokes here in terms of like what seems to work? Faces? No faces. An image from the actual video? Or can it be just like a wild expression that you come up with after the fact that communicates it, but isn't actually in the video itself any patterns you notice?

Yeah, it's interesting you, you ask that question because we, we constantly do research every week and it's changing. So, you know, you talk about faces, it's not just about the face, what is the facial expression, you know, what's happening in, in the background. So I hesitate to always give blanket answers because I think it gets people into a lot of trouble to say, hey, if you use faces, your click through is going to grow exponentially because it's like, well, what is your facial expression? What's happening in the background? And things like that, like faces can definitely, definitely work. I've seen examples of it not working. So it's again getting down to that nuanced level. But I think that the best exercise I could give people to help with this is take a screenshot of a video with a suggested video, thumbnails on the right hand side. If you're on desktop, create your thumbnail and headline and then photoshop it into it and see if it stacks up against the rest. Because that's what you're going for. You're competing against these other thumbnails and headlines and what is going to break that pattern? What is going to cause it to stand out? That's the best exercise I could give you. In addition, go to a YouTube account and you know, again, do the research and find the highest performing videos in your niche or from other content creators and put the titles in a Google Doc and then start taking them and start tweaking the language for your content, for your video. When you get into that practice, it forces you to get out of your own head of how you would represent it and you start matching it up against the best content creators in the world and you're kind of learning from their genius to contextual textualize it for what you want to say.

That's a very practical exercise that you can use to gauge whether or not Your, your thumbnail design and and title are going to hold up to look at the what YouTube thinks is the competition to your video. And if your video disappears against that column of thumbnails, then you have a real problem. I, I really like that. Thank you. I want to shift over to your second book. I've been talking to, to Brendan Cain. He's the author of two bestselling books, one million followers, which, which we've been talking for are about for a period of time here. And the second book I'm holding in my hands and thank you for sending this to me is Hook how to Stand out in a Three Second World. That is an alarming title, a three second world. And I know where this is going, but we'll talk about this in the book. You write about five steps to creating an effective hook point. What is a hook point? And then can you tell us what the five steps are?

A hook point is designed to rise above the noise, to break the pattern, to stand out at the highest levels. So going back to the beginning, beginning of my story, my hook point when I moved to the film industry was, hey, I can tap into these traffic sources to help you promote these movies cost efficiently. So a hook point can be something like that. A hook point can be like 1 million followers. How I built a massive social audience in 30 days. A hook point can be a video. How I bought a Tesla for $78. A hook point has many different applications. It can be in the offline world, the online world, but it's designed to break the pattern of what everybody else is saying so that you can stand out at the highest level and get people to pay ATT attention to what you have to say. But as we've talked about, in addition, it's just not about grabbing attention. How are we effectively holding that attention? Because we're not talking about tricking people, we're not talking about clickbait here because that would ultimately not lead to monetization. And monetization is critical to keep everything going because otherwise you're going to get crater fatigue and burning out. So that is what it looks like from a high level perspective. And when I talk about living in a three second world, yes, we live in a micro attention to world, but it's micro attention for grabbing attention. Because once you have that attention, you can get somebody to listen to a two hour podcast. In the case of Joe Rogan, you can get Netflix can get you to watch Squid games and binge watch 10 hours of content over the weekend. This world, as I mentioned, we went from a million people on social media to 4 billion people. It's an extremely noisy world. So we really have to master the art of grabbing that attention so that we can share our difference, our value, our zoning of genius.

Okay, you talked about the hook point rising above the noise we're over communicated to every single day. We're bombarded with ads and messaging everywhere. Everything's fighting for attention and it's really fractured. So if you want your idea to be seen, for you to pull people in and to be able to hold them, you have to learn the art of creating things that people care about in ways that connect with them. What are the five steps to creating the hook point?

Again, hook points can be studied in many different ways. You can look at YouTube thumbnails and headlines, you can look at captions and TikTok videos. Sometimes we do this for landing pages. What are, what is the title of a landing page? What's the title of a book? The most effective way that we have found to do that is what I mentioned before, is take the most successful hook points you can find, put them into a Google Doc, modify them to your product or service, but then take it a step further, then create original ones after you've done that exercise and then put them in like the top 10, into a spreadsheet or Google Doc and then you rank them. And then if you want to take it a step further, then send them to your friends and send them to your colleagues and have them rank them. And I would even throw in some of the ones that you did the research on to see how far off you are. And what I also recommend, if you want to do it further, is pay attention to the billboards, the books, the ads, the thumbnails and headlines that don't grab your attention. And obviously that takes a lot of awareness to go into that thing so you can see the things that aren't working. But the whole goal is pattern recognition is identifying the patterns that are working, the patterns that are not working. And then try and learn from the ones that are working and apply them to the hook points that you develop. Like again, going back to the first story I told you is when I started making coffee and copies for a movie studio and I would tell people that I wanted to be a film producer. I realized I was falling into a pattern and that pattern wasn't going to get me to where I wanted to be. So then I had to take a step back and say, how can I break that pattern? How can I say something that is Unique and different than anybody else that's trying to reach people at the highest levels in order to grab that. That attention.

For the years in which I was teaching at a traditional art school, we struggled with trying to understand what conceptual design is. And after working at it for some time, I would tell my students, conceptual design as it relates to advertising or main title or anything that they want, they might make, is about disrupting an expectation. And you use very similar language, I think you use subverting expectations. And they're. They're basically the same meaning. And the way I describe it to my students is, first, we must create an expectation. And this is what magicians do, is like, we think a tiger is going to here, over there, and then instead something different. So there's patterns that we see that we set people up for through the art of misdirection, creative lighting, composing the frame a little differently. We shift their perspective. And as soon as we shift that, there's this really kind of, I don't know what happens inside the brain, but then all of a sudden it makes a smile inside, like, oh, I get it. I'm in on the joke and the trick with you. And I was delighted. I pay attention and I light up inside. So I've noticed on your account, I was checking out yesterday on your Instagram account, there are three things that you had done. Two of them are following a very specific pattern. I wanted to ask you about one video in particular because I couldn't understand the hook point on this one. Sort of, so you walking with an umbrella. I think it's raining outside. And then money falls from the sky, and you kind of look at it, and I think you just kind of walk away. I was like, I didn't understand that video, but it has a lot of views.

What is.

Is going on there?

One of the things that we've realized in terms of what we talked about with retention is setting an expectation that something's going to happen, but you're not sure what's going to happen. So that's kind of why that video worked, is you're like, some guy's walking on the screen with umbrella. You think something's going to happen, otherwise they wouldn't be posting it. You're not sure what's going to happen. Another viral video that we did where I break this down is there is a very talented musician called Laney Garner, and she had a cover from Fleetwood Mac that generated like 80 million views. The reason that video works so well is if you watch it, it's on my Instagram and Facebook account. What happens is you hear the song playing. She takes a sip of cranberry juice, and she, like, says, you know, hold on, like, playfully, and she smiles at the camera. She doesn't start singing until, I think, 15 or 16 seconds in. So you're like, you hear this really popular song. You know, a cover's coming. She's kind of playfully holding that tension. So you're like, it's, is she going to be good? Is she going to be horrible? And then her voice is just astounding. And that's why it worked. Now, if her voice was horrible, the video wouldn't have gone viral. But because her voice is good and she built that tension, it took off. Now, if she would have started singing the first second or two, it nearly wouldn't have that level of virality. So when we set these. These expectations for the viewer, sometimes that expectation is, something's going to happen, but we don't know what's going to happen. Or, like, going back to Graham Stephan buying a Tesla for $78, if you really watch that video, he doesn't reveal the numbers until like, eight or nine minutes in. And it's not like he's filling it with fluff. What we call, and the YouTubers call it, the Jenga effect. If you've ever played Jenga, there's a stack of blocks in the tower, and you pull out each one at a time. You know what the end outcome is. But with each block that you pull out, there's tension. And then once the block successfully comes out and you know the tower is going to stand, there's a release. So if you. If you look at any of these successful videos and you look at movies, there's ebbs and flows in the tension, setting expectations, releasing the tension, and back and forth. And that's what is really solid storytelling. That's how things go viral. That's how content creators go viral.

So that video where you're walking in the street, I now just glance at, it wasn't raining. You're just looking up, like, what is going on? So you create the intrigue. You're building tension. And then you open an umbrella, okay. And then money starts raining down on top of you, and so you're releasing that tension. So this goes to a lot of the things that we've been talking about today. That first you have to be able to grab attention, and then you have to be able to keep it, retain it. And by delaying the outcome of it deep into the video, you've got at least a high percentage of completion in terms of somebody watching it. And that, that video that you mentioned about just waiting to sing and then belting out the notes and then delivering on that is helping. So if you, if you give too much away at the beginning, there could be a satisfaction and then they're gone. And I've noticed this about when I write, right. Carousels. So this could even be applied to static things. If you tell everybody what they need to know on frame one, there's really no reason to complete it to frame 10. And that's what you're talking about.

Absolutely. So I love the breakdown.

And in storytelling it's the same thing. It's the creation and the release of tension that keeps us watching. Too much tension and we're fatigued. And then if you release it all this, this, I'm. I'm really bored out of my mind at this point. In hindsight, I, I think I would have done this conversation with you totally differently. I should have just picked up 10 random videos or viral content and ask you to break each one down and then tell us, because then we can unpack the lessons with you as we're referencing something. Now. There's two other things that you've done that have over 700,000 views on your Instagram account and they follow the exact same formula. And so I can see the pattern right away. One is titled why successful people know Nothing. That's not possible. So that's very attention grabbing. And then you go into the video talking about how not successful people think they know everything. They assume they know this and that. So successful people do the opposite. They pretend like they don't know so they can continue to learn. So that was a great way of showing potentially attention grabbing clickbait title. But you actually deliver on it by doing a little bit of like inversion thinking. The one that's like two videos before that says never ask for help, same thing. Give us the breakdown. What are your thoughts creating that? And then if you can just tell us why did these two videos work.

Really well, as you mentioned? And I don't suggest doing this all the time because your audience can get fatigued, but it goes back to pattern recognition if you're saying the same thing in the same way as everybody else or the audience perceives that they're going to scroll past it. So with those two titles, we're subverting expectations. So we are stopping the scroll because there's like what? That's not the case. You should always ask for help. But again, you have to deliver on it in the content as well. It's not just about tricking people. It's actually delivering on the storytelling mechanisms that we've talked about throughout this conversation. So subverting expectations. The very power, powerful tool. You've got to be careful how you use it and when you use it, it just goes back to what we were talking about with pattern recognition. You don't want to fall into the same pattern as everybody else. So people think, I know what this video is going to talk about. Even if you have a completely different perspective that will ultimately lead to people scrolling past or not clicking.

I have one more question for you before we get you out of here, which is this. I'm curious with the amount of research and experience that you've had. You're an early kind of pioneer in the social media space and you've been doing this for some time. The question I have for you is this, what current social platform platform excites you the most? And why and what are you seeing?

Yeah, it's a great question and I appreciate you not asking what recommendation of a platform that. That you would have people do because that. I get that question all the time and it's so dependent on the brand, the resources, the expertise and all of that. But I think that YouTube is a little bit overlooked. You know, the of you and a subscriber on YouTube is probably 10x the value of a TikTok or an Instagram or a Facebook because. Because of the length of time that they're consuming content. I just heard a story that VidCon just happened. The TikTok influencers, no fans really showed up for versus like the YouTubers, like they had tons of fans. And I'm not saying that there's no value in TikTok or any of these platforms. You can make every platform immensely successful and valuable for your brand. YouTube is super, I think, exciting because of that. That loyalty, loyalty that, that deeper connection that you can foster with the audience.

Because that's where our largest following is. So I'm glad you said that. Okay. I mean, I have friends who consult for people creators on TikTok. And the number one thing he says your TikTok audience is very fickle. They're usually really young people and they're into you one day, they're just, they forgot about you the next day. So it could be really nice that that hit of like reward of like, oh my gosh, my video went viral. But the relationship that you have with them is very different. I genuinely apprec our audience on YouTube because they seem to be there for the long haul and they're not just watching one and done. They feel like they've invested their time and I want to continue to invest in them. And is, is this where your focus is, is to. To work on YouTube for your own personal channel or it's just an observation for you?

Well, it's just an observation. I mean, we're at a point in our business where all of our energy and resources is doing research for other people and building that up. Once we get that to a certain level, then I probably will be investing more in YouTube because, you know, from it, building a YouTube channel is a ton of time and work and energy and like, if I'm going to go into it, we're going to go into it, you know, full force.

So right now, for the time being, it's about the research, the insights and helping other people achieve their goals. And I think you mentioned earlier that the reason why you did the whole thing on Instagram was just so that you can get the litter agent to. So you can do the book deal. And once you hit that, you achieve your goal and that's okay for it just to live like that?

For me, yes, it was an experiment. Both Facebook and Instagram were experiments. You know, do I want to be a influencer? No, I want to be a content creator? No. I like to teach, I like to provide that value. And I've just found that the best way that we can do that for the time being is really building out this research and insights, team and community so that we can just help as many people as possible. We will get back to the content creation, but as you know from running a business, you've got to be hyper focused on where you spend time.

What a great way to end this conversation with you, Brendan. It's been a real pleasure. I really liked how you're connecting the different books and ideas and sometimes challenging popular thought on what you should and shouldn't be doing. I really also just to reinforce this, I like that you're talking about this in a way that it's. There's systems in place, there's research, there's thinking, there's data, there's analysis and there's creativity. And these things, I believe can be a skill that people learn and acquire not only for themselves, but in terms of helping their business grow and to translate these same concepts into different applications. Because what you're talking about is pretty universal. And if you master this, there's not a lot that you can't do.

Absolutely.

Thank you, Brendan. Now, if people want to find out more about you, where is the best place that they should go?

Well, if they're interested in the research and insights community, they can go to goviral.hookpoint.com and if they want to connect with us, they can go to hookpoint.com or I do respond to DMs on Instagram, messages on LinkedIn and things of that nature. So those are probably the best resources to to start with.

And for our audience that are listening to this podcast, we'll include that in the show notes. And if you're watching this on YouTube, just check out the description below and you get all the information. We'll include that right there. Thank you very much, Brendan.

Thank you. Hi, my name is Brendan Kane, and you are listening to the Future.