#H2HChat Why Mindfulness Should be in Your Marketing Mix with Janet Fouts, CEO, Tatu Digital Media

He's with us in spirit. Hi everyone. Happy Monday. It is time for H2H chat and I am so excited to see all of you here today or virtually see you all on the Twitter stream. I really appreciate everyone taking time from the hectic South by tweets that are all flooding our timelines, I'm sure, to take a moment. to talk for the next hour about marketing and mindfulness. This is seriously going to be awesome. Before I start, I want to go ahead and say hey to my very special guest host, Rachel Miller, my fellow Pure Matters social strategist, and find out how's it going in sunny LA. Is it sunny there?

It is not sunny, but I'm super stoked to be here. I love this community and I'm a huge fan of Janet, so it worked out really well for me with this guest spot. No, it's cloudy and overcast, but I'm bringing the sunshine.

There we go. I like that. It's cloudy and overcast as well here, kind of dark, so I'm hoping I don't look too much in the shadow. Awesome. Janet, hi to you. How's it going?

Hey, it's going really great. I wanted to take this opportunity to wish everybody happy Pi Day because today happens to be Pi Day. We like Pi Day.

How many digits can you recite of pi? Oh, 2. That's awesome.

Actually 3, 314.

There you go. Well, happy Pi Day everyone. We had Leap Day a few weeks back. Now we have Pi Day. Everything is aligned for us. Welcome, Janet. Before we get started, I want to just give a little shout out to Janet who is author of Mindful Social Marketing: How Authenticity and Generosity Are Transforming Marketing. That's published by Pure Matter. sister partner, Substantium. So thanks Substantium for sponsoring us today. Janet is also a speaker, a consultant, a trainer. She's authored several other books. I absolutely encourage you to check out her amazing website, JanetFeltz.com, an all-around fabulous person. So welcome Janet.

Golly, what an intro. Thrilled to be

here. Awesome. Oh, and fellow H2H Chat community member. We're very excited to welcome one of our own. I want to just get started. Tell me, what is mindful social marketing?

What's

this

concept? People think of mindfulness as maybe you're into meditation or maybe you're into yoga or something that maybe people think is kind of woo-woo. But it isn't really. It's something that is really about just being present. Right here, right now. When we're having a conversation right now in this Hangout, it's about being here. I'm not checking my email. I'm not watching the Twitter stream no matter how hard that pull is. I'm being here and I'm paying attention. That's really all there is to mindfulness. As it applies to marketing, I really believe that a lot of the people who are really excelling at social media are mindful at heart. They care about their communities. They want to connect. They really want to talk to people and engage with them rather than just spam them with marketing crap that nobody cares about.

I like that. I like that. That makes me feel very validated. So what prompted you to look into mindfulness as the topic of this book?

Well, you know, I've always been kind of mindful. I've meditated on and off for years, but I really started paying attention to how I was marketing and how other people were marketing and what really annoyed me about how some people were marketing. I don't like being inundated with messages that aren't relevant to me and things that don't matter to me. I don't like tweeting a brand and finding that they They don't care about me at all. I really love it when brands engage. I love it when people talk back to us on social and have actual conversations. And I started to realize how that intersects with a mindful approach. It's just paying attention and active listening. I think Ted Rubin, for an example, has a really great presence at active listening and paying attention. There are a lot of other people that are really fabulous at it, and they are good and successful because they are paying attention and they are here.

So talking about brands, what brands do you think are doing a good job at being mindful?

Well, you know, there are quite a few of them. I mean, you look at the big ones, Southwest Airlines and JetBlue, that actually engage their user base. Coca-Cola is somebody that a lot of people might think is doing a lot of spamming, and they kind of do sometimes, but they're also very mindful of who their market is and how to engage them and make a difference. Those brands, although they're huge, really do make an effort. That's kind of all we can really ask for is that they make an effort. It's much harder with a brand of that size. to really engage with everybody on a day-to-day basis. You know, but they do really seem to be making an effort.

So is there an offline culture that you think can contribute, or what's the role of an offline culture in mindfulness?

Well, I think, you know, if you look at brands like Eileen Fisher, for example, they have a very solid offline culture in their office. You know, you look at Facebook, they have places where you can meditate. They have a whole group of people that are working on compassion at Facebook, and the compassion team is very active. So they're setting the stage for really caring about their users and really caring about their employees as well, and that makes everybody happier. You know, I say in the book that if you If you practice mindfulness, you're going to be happier in your life because you're not going to let yourself be as distracted by all the minutiae, the stuff that makes us all crazy by just being inundated with noise. We can separate ourselves from that even if it's just our inbox.

So how do you practice mindfulness as a social marketer? You told me beforehand your phone is vibrating and buzzing and you're trying to stay focused. We live in this omnichannel world. How do you try to stay mindful?

I'm really struggling with not multitasking as much as I used to. It's one of the things that I've really found makes a huge difference. Just paying attention to the one thing I'm doing right now actually allows me to be a lot more efficient at it. A lot of us think that multitasking and having Twitter and Facebook and email and all the alerts popping up, and then especially with the phones, if every time your phone buzzes you pick it up and look at it to see what it is, Then you've interrupted what you're doing, you've interrupted your flow, and you've made it harder to get your job done. But if you just let it go and make a practice of picking it up every 15 minutes, every half an hour if you can stand it, you know, and look at it then, that's one way to be really mindful. You know, I, I really try not to get too carried away with Spending all day staring at my phone. I actually have conversations. Trying to put it down at the dinner table.

Yeah.

Those kind of things really matter. I also— this is maybe not about social media so much, but when I go into a meeting, I don't bring a laptop anymore and open it up in front of the customer because you're actually putting a wall up between you and the person you're talking to. I actually take paper and I find that I focus better that way. If I'm typing on my phone or my iPad or that laptop, I can be really putting up a barrier between us without really knowing it and paying more attention to the machine than the person in the room.

Wow. I like that a lot. I'm just like processing.

I'm trying.

I respect that. I respect that greatly. Talk to me more about doing social in a mindful way. In the application, you've talked a little bit about spam. You've talked a little bit about broadcasting. What's the balance there?

I think there are a lot of things that we can do that are really more about how we use social media mindfully. For example, listening. You know, I have an image that I'm just creating now that's going out with another post that's really about listening isn't just gathering data. We tend to think of social media listening as finding out as much as we can about the market and creating all that big data. But if we don't drill that big data down to the little data and actually talk to people, and have conversations and actually listen to what they have to say rather than thinking of them as data points, then, you know, we can be so much more effective at actually reaching our market. Not thinking of them so much as targets or data points, but actually individual people. That's getting down to the small data instead of thinking about it as big data.

So how would you How would you then create, say, a mindful marketing strategy that puts the customer first?

Well, it's always going to start about listening, and then it's going to go to, okay, here's kind of the customer personas that we've encountered and that we've designed to talk to. You know, we kind of know who these people are. What kind of tangential things are they interested in too? If you sell ski boots, you can't just talk about ski boots. What are you going to talk about in the summer? You can talk about training. You can talk about travel. You can talk about snow conditions. You can talk about taking the family and raising a family, bringing the whole family and maybe the kids want to ski. How can you think about the bigger issues that relate to that person and talk about those too? Think about what their problems are. Right. Really, they don't care about you and your product. They only care about their problems. So find out what their problems are and help them with them. Be generous with information so that they can learn more and it helps them. You want to be kind of a thought leader, but you also want to be somebody that they feel they can approach and talk to, whether you're a big brand or a small brand.

What are, as you work with different clients, What are some of the big challenges that you find that they're facing as they try to get into this mindful mindset?

Well, it's difficult for clients not to think me, me, me, me, me, my product is really great, why would I want to talk about anything else. And it's really interesting to watch marketers who are successful at creating real engagement with their user base and getting that Earned media. Because, you know, you don't get earned media if all you ever talk about is yourself. You're going to end up having to pay for every mention you get because nobody really cares about you. But if you engage them, you can get a lot more earned media because people care about you. You give them information. It's like the Burger King story with their secret sauce. You know, they talked about the secret sauce forever and made it such a big deal, and then they shared the recipe. Because Burger King knows that you can't make their secret sauce and their burgers exactly the same as they do. Maybe in this case it's not such a great idea anyway, but that's beside the point. The point is that they shared what was really deeply secret to them and it actually engendered more trust because now we know what's in there.

So that gets— That gets us to a question that's been very much on my mind. You mentioned earned media. Then we know on the other side of that, I want to know, can we do mindful paid media?

Wow, that's a good one. I think you can do mindfully paid media, but it really has to be something that is valuable. Let's say that you're reaching out to bloggers, for example. It's considered paid media if I give you product to try, if I give you endorsements, or if I give you cash. I think that people distrust sponsored posts a lot more than they used to. I like to combine paid media. For example, you might do a series of ads that's going to draw business to your Facebook page, and then you can get conversations going there that are going to get you earned media. I have a client right now that we spent $100 on video views on Facebook. We got a lot of video views, but we also got a lot of engagement. We got a huge amount of shares. That's earned media. We didn't pay for the shares or the comments that happened on those other pages. When you can get to that point that you've really engaged people and they want to share your stuff, The paid part comes to remind them, oh yeah, I wanted to share their stuff and I'm too busy or I forgot. Just making those reminders.

So would you then say— what would you say is a good metric of mindfulness?

100%. I think it's really hard to be— you can't be mindful all the time. I don't think the Dalai Lama is mindful all the time, but it really needs to be part of your mindset and the way you live your life, not just the way you do business, but the way you live your life. And as much as you can make it part of your life, you find things are easier and you find things bug you less. I think the biggest thing that I found from meditation, and I'm kind of spotty with the meditation, is that I really get bugged less about things and I've learned to let things go and not be quite so frantic about things. I still get a lot of stuff done, but I'm not so freaked out about it all the time. And that is a huge load off any businesswoman's head.

So let's talk a little bit then about, you know, this concept comes up a lot, lots of different thoughts in terms of work-life balance, right? So are you working all the time? Are you always on? We have then social media. Are you setting boundaries? How does that translate? What would you advise?

I try really hard not to be always on and it's the worst problem that I have is to put the phone down for 10 minutes, particularly because I'm monitoring accounts for my clients as well. That's important. Some of that comes from having a great team and being able to delegate so that you don't have to be there all the time. I will say that I do use automation as a tool as well. I will go through my RSS feeds in the morning and I'll schedule a whole bunch of stuff to go out through CoSchedule. Then if I get responses, I'll respond to it. I won't spend all day trying to come up with really great content. I do a lot of content sharing, a lot of curation like that. I do try to delegate time away from the computer. For me, that's really easy. I have a horse and I go off in the mountains and I ride where I don't have any Wi-Fi at all. Awesome. The world won't end if I'm off for an hour. It's really important to understand that. If you have a good team, then the world isn't going to end if you take a break. You don't have to be on all the time. Sometimes we're using it as an excuse to not pay attention. And that's a very different thing. That we're just, you know, kind of going, oh, nope, I got to do this, I got to do that. Maybe you don't. Maybe you really don't.

Yep. Yep.

So I know myself, I'm very conscious of my time throughout the day and how I spend it. I'm curious, what, what role does being deliberate play in being a mindful social business person?

Being deliberate, setting your intentions for how you're going to do the day. Is really important. And you know, you see all of these posts about, you know, what successful people do. What they do is in the beginning of the morning they say, okay, this is what I'm going to get done today. If I don't get anything else done, cool. This is what I'm going to get done today. And at the end of the day they take stock and say, did I get what I wanted to get done done? And if they did, the day's a success. So, you know, delegating that time and saying, okay, I'm going to spend this much time, not having all your social media networks open all the time, especially Facebook, because they're distracting. You wander off because you see something somebody posted. All those alerts distract you from getting your job done, even if your job is social media marketing.

It's one reason I can't trust myself to get an Apple Watch. I just made the decision it would just be a very, very bad idea because I'd constantly be doing this. All the time. So I know you've been blogging since the '90s, since there basically were blogs.

'94.

Wow. Wow. That is awesome. I'm old. No. So how have you— you've seen a lot, a big shift. Have you seen Have you really— we talk a lot about how things have been speeding up, right? Everything, there's this demand, etc. Do you think the demand, the need for mindfulness is greater now than before, or is this pretty much constant in our experience?

Well, I think it isn't that mindfulness is more necessary than it was before. I think that it's that we're realizing that it has something to offer. That maybe we ignored before because we thought it was woo-woo and it was, you know, hippie, whatever.

Right.

In the '70s and the '80s, you know, but it really— people are feeling inundated and tired and overwhelmed and needing a break, and mindfulness is a way for them to do that and to get into actually having time for their lives. It doesn't mean that they have to not work. It doesn't mean they're not going to get as much done. Actually, they're going to get more done, and it's really a very effective way to focus. And I think that's why, you know, corporations like Google and Facebook and Aetna are actually teaching this to their employees. It makes them healthier, it makes them more efficient, and it makes them happier. How can we not love that?

So what specifically are they teaching?

A lot of them are teaching meditation. They're offering different classes in mindfulness. Google has a guru that they have come in regularly in-house and teach mindfulness to the employees. They have meditation rooms, and they have a policy that it's okay to take a break, that going out and taking a walk in the middle of your workday can actually make it more efficient. And so, you know, those policies. Make people healthier and get their jobs done more. I mean, one of the things that I teach in my classes is to just quit, just quit, go take a walk for 5 minutes and come back. And the thing that you're struggling with right now that's making you crazy will maybe be a lot easier to understand when you're not so focused and so clenched over it. It might just work. And make it easier for you to get it done.

So it sounds like there's a role for leadership in creating, in fostering mindfulness. Can you speak to that a little bit?

Sure. I mean, if your boss is like, no, no, get out there, don't take a walk, get to work, get to work, and pushing you and forcing you with numbers and isn't mindful of how the staff and the culture that exists in the business, they're not doing their job right. Mm-hmm. Leaders have to lead by being part of the staff. They need to, you know, be part of the culture. And if the culture in the organization is pushing and driving and people dropping like flies, well, then you need to look at that corporate culture and see if you want to be a part of it. And, you know, if that's what the leadership is, Then that's probably what the culture in the company is, and then you need to take stock of that. Not all leaders can be mindful. Some of them are running so frantically away from failure that they can't even stop to think about it.

Do you think that we're going to see— do you see us having a shift away from those leaders though towards mindfulness?

I hope so. I think there will always be some that are going to be that kind of a leader, and that's what they think think leadership is, but I think that at least as far as social media goes, the ones that are successful are going to be paying more attention. And more and more, that's what clients demand. That's what customers demand. Right. When we look at customer service on social media, people demand that you pay attention. They demand a response on Twitter or Facebook or Instagram or LinkedIn. They want to hear from you, and if you don't listen and you're not mindful in your response, You're going to get burned for that. So in some ways, the culture of social media is training us to be more mindful.

That's very interesting to me because I would have definitely pegged it as the opposite with everything speeding up and all the angry conversations going on. What do you think about it? You've talked about it a bit, but what exactly about social media is triggering us? Is it just that we have to be focused in on these conversations? What are you seeing?

I think it's part of the culture that people are actually asking us to pay attention to them individually as human beings. That changes the way that we respond to them if we respond successfully. If we respond in this kind of authoritarian way, Not only does the person that we're talking to feel put off by that, but all of their friends do too. So that's how it's kind of training us to be different. I know what you mean about the inundation of all of the noise with social, but I'm here to tell you no brand needs to be on every single social media network ever invented. Yeah. You need to pick the ones that are relevant to your market and relevant to the way you want to do business. And focus on that and not get distracted by every bright shiny object. Leave that to us consultants to figure out. Right. Is that going to be a good fit for you or not? It might not be and that's okay. You don't have to be there. You don't have to buy into that. You cannot and it's okay. If you're not on one social network and there are 6 people on it that are relevant to your business but they're not really Your market, they'll find you where you are too. I like to say go where the clients or the customers are, but not every single one of them. It may not be a good fit for you.

There are some, and I've seen this pop up a little bit in the Twitter stream, who are pushing back and saying marketers are talking. about mindfulness, but are they really practicing? Are you seeing a trend where you think this is really sinking in? I would even worry with some of these brands. Yes, they create meditation chains, all these different things, but is that really what's going on there? What are you seeing?

I think there are a lot of people out there who are putting the words out there, but they're not actually showing it in their actions. And, you know, that's more important to me. Are they showing it in their actions that they actually care, or is it a marketing ploy? Is that something they're doing just because, ooh, mindfulness, all of a sudden it's relevant? Well, as people become more mindful and the market becomes more mindful, they're going to see through that and they're going to understand the difference. And so, you know, sure, you can talk the talk all you want to now. But at some point, somebody's going to call you on it. And so sure, there are a lot of people out there that are pseudo-mindful. But I think that, you know, they don't necessarily get as much of a response, they may not be as effective. And so, you know, eventually, they'll either learn or, you know, they won't.

It almost sounds to me like you're talking about a Darwinian mindfulness Survival of the fittest.

I think that's the key. You need to audit yourself. I know we were talking before we started the show, you really do need to step back and look at yourself on social as somebody else. How am I being perceived? I think that's the key to being mindful successfully. You might think you're being mindful, but if someone is looking at your profiles and like, no, you're just pushing out content, it's not about me at all.

Yeah, and in the end, we all want the content to be about us. We don't want the content to be about the marketer. We don't want the content to be about the brand. We want it to solve our problem. If it doesn't solve our problem or show that you care about us, then maybe we're not going to pay as much attention to you. If you step back, like you said, and look at your content, is my content saying what I think it's saying? What are people responding to? When you look at what people are responding to, I think most of the time you'll find out that it is a mindful approach. It is something that is relevant to the market. It's more personal. It's more human. That's what makes a difference, just being human instead of feeling like some big strategy for them. It may not be the best place for them.

I know that's something I use Buffer for actually because I can see the real-time analytics. I push out content, that's my automation, and then I'm able to look back through. I love being able to see all the analytics there. I am seeing so many awesome questions here in the Twitter stream. I'm going to go ahead, Rachel, if you are ready. I'm going to go ahead and hand the baton over. You are in excellent hands.

There are so many questions. I hope I scooped them all into this document that I've been curating. Before we jump into the Q&A part, I just wanted to say, Jenna, I read a bunch of your content over the weekend. One of my favorite lines, I actually scribbled it down on a sticky, I can see it on the wall right by my monitor, is the hero of your story is the reader. I think that for me was an excellent mindful quote to put you in the right mindset when you're sharing on social, to make sure that everything you push out is for others. It's not for you. I think that's a really great one-liner.

Cool.

Okay, so let's jump into Q&A. We have so many amazing questions. First question is from Christy at Chris Ella Loans, and she's asking, what are some tips and tricks to mindfully and thoughtfully meld your online and offline presence? How do you stay authentic?

Well, I think that should be easy because if you're working in an office and you're seeing clients there every day, Then take the conversations that you have with them to social. What kind of problems are you encountering in the office that people are telling you they have? Solve them. Put it on social. Share those answers with people and talk to them on social as though you were talking to a friend rather than talking to a market. I hate it when I feel like I'm being talked to like a market. Don't put a target on our back.

So yeah, social listening, you'd say social listening is key for being a mindful marketer?

Absolutely, and social listening meaning, like I said before, not just gathering a bunch of data points and then sticking them all in an Excel spreadsheet, but actually drilling down to that small data and finding out what those issues are, how you can help people, answering questions, just being there for them. Giving somebody a high five because it's their birthday. That kind of stuff from a marketer and from a brand can be really huge. I have to tell you a little story that I did with— I put a picture up of my little dog, she's a little Chihuahua, on Instagram and I said it was her birthday. Purina drew a doodle around her and then sent me an email. They put it up on Twitter with the doodle wishing Minnie a happy birthday. Then they sent me a direct message and said, we'd like to send her a gift. And they sent me a little box full of toys for Minnie. And they customized it. It was so cool. I always remember that. I will never forget that. And it was all about my dog. It's that easy to be really mindful.

That's a really great example. So social listening and personalization for the win.

Ta-da!

Ta-da! I know, it's not rocket science, right? Okay, next question is from a first-time H2H chatter, and I'm going to totally— if I don't pronounce your name correctly, I super apologize— from Mehul. And he is asking, with so much work being done on our desktops and mobiles simultaneously, it can have a real drain on you mentally. How do you cope with it? I know you mentioned meditation, but are there any other techniques you use to kind of recharge and stay on task?

Some of it is literally turning alerts off for everything that isn't essential. You can go look at your email on a 15-minute, 30-minute, hourly schedule. You do not have to see every time your email pings. Those kind of things, just even if it distracts you for a second or 30 seconds, That takes away from what you're trying to get done. Having dogs also helps. Those kind of things really, just that split second that I'm distracted by the dogs, that takes me away from what I'm doing now. So turn off the alerts. You can go look it up. They'll all still be there when you get back. That's the biggest thing that people can do. My phone's buzzing off my desk right now. So I don't do it all the time. I try. It's not— it's practice. They call it practice for a reason.

So it's fighting the FOMO.

Yeah.

Which is true. I think what you said is true. You're not missing out because it is going to be there in another 5 minutes, another half an hour, another hour. Those notifications aren't going anywhere. So— And unless you're in a sense of urgency.

Yeah, it is. It's a self-imposed sense of urgency and it's a little bit of ego too. Oh, I'm getting notifications. But the thing is unless you're a doctor, nobody's going to die if you don't get those notifications. If you want to leave notifications on for messages from your loved ones, cool. That's not going to happen a lot. So turn off the social notifications when you're doing something. Turn off your phone, but that's kind of hard.

Or customize them. I know that's been a huge game changer for me is changing the notifications on each device. So if I'm on my laptop, I get a certain set of notifications which do tend to be of the more urgent type. If I'm on my phone or my iPad, I get different notifications. So that's a big tip.

I've turned off Twitter notifications, horror of all horrors. On my iPhone. When it really gets bad for other stuff, I actually turn it face down on the table.

I think once your network reaches a certain size, you have to do that on your phone. Otherwise, it's just like ding, ding, ding.

You

know

what happens too then is if you have notifications like that, like right now, it's buzzing, it's buzzing, it's buzzing. If there was something that really was important in there, I wouldn't even see it. Right. Because there's so many notifications. Then you have to go back through it, but it takes you a lot less time to go through it than it does to respond to every single one. Just be where you are doing what you're doing and stick to that. Even if I use the Pomodoro method, which I don't know if you guys know what that is. Basically, you take 20 minutes to work on a task. At the end of that 20 minutes, you stop for 5 minutes and you do something else. And then you go back to the 20-minute cycle. And I have a timer on my desktop that I use for that. And every hour I get up and I go for a walk. If it's 2 minutes, I go for a walk. And it makes a huge difference in your mindset and how much you get done.

I'm going to have to try that because I know, I think there's some articles that I've read where actually the human brain can only concentrate on a certain task for so long. So I think stepping out and then stepping back in is probably increase your productivity because you're hyper-focused.

And walking is another one. You know, taking a walk actually activates different parts of your brain. And so taking a walk, even if you're thinking or walking meditating about a particular subject, can totally change your mindset. Sometimes, you know, you'll sit down at the computer, maybe you're writing a blog post or writing a marketing piece, and you get so focused on what it is that you want to write about, and then you get locked up and you're like, oh no, and you get all freaked out about it. Get up and go for a walk and come back, and your mindset will be a lot better, theoretically.

So we have a couple great questions from one of my favorite people on social, Mr. JS Gilbert. Hey

JS!

Love him. One of my first— his first questions are, aren't we seeing that people want to engage with the personalities behind behind the brand and not the brand itself. So how does that play into successful mindful marketing from a brand perspective?

That's a really great question, JS, because I really do think that people want to connect with a human at the brand. It's hard when the brand is really huge, and there have been a lot of cases where individuals that are sharing on social for the brand have actually become bigger social media personalities than the brand itself. That can be a problem for a lot of brands. On the other hand, that's why it worked, because those personalities were so amazing and so generous and so attentive that we really wanted to like them and we followed them wherever they went.

I agree. That kind of plays into JS's next question, which is, what role do you think influencer marketing will play into brands' marketing on social media? Softball from your last answer.

Well, I do think that influencer marketing is huge, but I think we need to do it differently. Paying 100 bloggers to pitch your product and giving them all the content is something that everybody sees through. Everybody goes, yeah, I don't believe this. It's an infomercial. But actually reaching out to influencers and, oh my gosh, creating a relationship with the influencer before you need them. That's really being mindful. If you find somebody who's really influential in the market area that you want to influence, then you need to kind of talk to them. You need to support them. You need to tell them that they're doing a great job and you think they're really smart. Ask them questions. All of those things make it a lot easier to create influencer relationships that stick, and you get a lot more of that earned media later. Because it's something that they can relate to and they kind of like you now. So maybe they're willing to look at your product or your services.

So we have 2 follow-up questions from your writing, bringing in paper versus a laptop into your in-person meetings, from Mark Babbitt, who is asking, when someone isn't focused during a meeting with you, how do you Respectfully ask them to be mindful in the moment?

Hey, Mark, thanks. You know, it really is difficult when somebody's not paying attention. And, you know, one of the things that I've used really successfully, no matter how big the meeting, is I just stop talking. I'll just stop and be quiet. And if I really have to, I'll just look at the person who's not paying attention until they put their phone down. And that's really pushy, but everybody notices it. And, you know, there are a lot of people that now are saying, when we start a meeting, everybody put their phone down. That's the first thing we do in the meeting. We're going to put our phones down and, you know, take a moment. I love hearing that people actually take a moment at the beginning of a meeting to just go, okay. I also like really short meetings. That helps too.

I concur. Right, Suzie?

Yes, short meetings for the win. It's so true though. There are so many meetings that you can run through in 15 minutes or even 10 minutes.

Stand-up is good.

I do think that we're conditioned to these 30-minute blocks. Drives me nuts. I blame Outlook.

I was going to say, versus email threads, I would rather have a 30-minute meeting versus a 50-message email thread. I will always jump on a call.

If things get to the point in your email thread that you're just going on and on and on and back and forth and back and forth, Geez, jump on Skype. Jump on the phone. Get it over with. But I also hate conference calls where I've been— I have like 2 minutes worth of information for the meeting and it's an hour and a half. Those make me nuts. Stop that. Just stop it. Just focus.

Stop. So we have a great question from Laura. Hi, Laura. She is saying mindfulness seems kind of trendy right now. Do the people talking about it in marketing really understand it? I know you are clearly a fantastic example of mindful marketing. Who else would you name as a resource? Is there anybody in the industry that you turn to as well for additional inspiration?

Well, I'm glad you asked that, Laura, because actually Mark Babbitt is a really good example. And pitch for myself, I'm doing a Blab with him tomorrow on mindful leadership. But I think there are a lot of people that really do get it. Look at C.C. Chapman. He's a wonderful example of being mindful. You know, Chris Brogan is a really good example. If you get any of his newsletters, you really feel like he's talking to you personally, even though you know that it's a multi-user email. You still really— get the feeling that he actually gets you. That's a wonderful way to market to people.

How do you think someone such as Chris has achieved that appropriate tone? You're right, he has a fantastic way of grabbing your attention in a mass email, which I think is quite a skill. Is it trial and error? Do you recommend that businesses and individuals just try and see what works and be able to pivot? Or is there— what's the secret sauce there?

I think there's 2 things. I think what Chris really got as his secret sauce is that he really writes as though he's sitting down, he's talking to his best friend. He starts the email out, hey Janet, how are you? It's Friday. I'm having a great day, and I want to support a bunch of people that I really think are great too. How can you not love this guy? He's a really great guy too. But really putting that out there and making us feel like he actually cares about us is something that has come naturally to him over many years of working really hard. I think the other thing too though is asking. I am really bad at putting my newsletter out. I blog and I figure people read my blog and I don't get the newsletter out as often as I should. A few months ago, I sent out an email saying, look, I really suck at email newsletters. Before I start writing a whole bunch more content and shoving it down your throat, I want to know what you want to hear. I got some really wonderful responses back from people. I'm trying to customize what I'm writing to what people actually want to get from me instead of what I think they should want to get from me.

Agreed. The next question is from Haley. She is asking, what are some brands that are doing mindfulness marketing well? I know you had your super cute example with your dog. Are there other brands that you have made a note of that are doing mindful marketing well?

Well, you know, there really are quite a lot of them. You know, I can go back to the The airlines are really starting to get it. People that work in travel are really starting to get it. If you look at a lot of the food companies, Chobani is really good. There's a really great Instagram account called Camping with Dogs. They really get it too. That's really fun.

I love it.

Yeah, they make it entertaining. And it's still about them, but it's about the dogs, so it's okay. They don't sell product, really. It's about creating their community. If you start thinking about your market as a community instead of a market, then you have a very different approach.

Yes, I think a community mindset is key to future marketing. H2H chat is a fantastic example of that. It's a resource for your community versus just pushing a product or service.

Having the engagement that we have with H2H Chat where you're really getting people engaging on Twitter, you're getting lots of comments, you get lots of feedback, that is what makes a really effective community. Then you take that information, find out what people are talking about, and use that to plan your next guests. That kind of information really is useful to everybody, and it starts to evolve. So that when Suzy sends us a tweet and says, hey, make sure you come to H2H chat next week, we're going to do that because A, we like Suzy, and B, we know that we're building a relationship and that we've gotten good value from the content.

I love you guys.

We have so many communication channels available to us now, especially with the live streaming platforms, virtual Virtual reality. So the next question is from the super cool Mitch Jackson. So hey Mitch, thank you for joining us. He's asking, do you think a new mindset is needed by businesses using live streaming and virtual reality marketing to build relationships? If so, how?

I do, I do. And I think live streaming in particular, you know, some of the platforms are all about the person who's live streaming. Other platforms like Blab are really great at integration and involving the community and growing the community. With VR communities, look at Second Life. That's one of the first VR communities. A lot of people still overlook it, but it's really deep. It has a lot of depth. There's a huge amount of nonprofit there as well that are really getting engaged. If you look to them as an example and see what people are doing in there, it can be really interesting. Just keep thinking about how can I engage with people here rather than how can I broadcast and just put out content. There's so much that we can do to really engage and talk to people instead of having it all be about me, me, me, me, me.

I think that engaging is a step that needs to be moved higher up in the first steps when you start a new marketing strategy. I think brands start with Shouting and promoting versus jumping into conversations that people are already having about their area of expertise, which would make when they start to be a little bit more promotional, it's much more well received versus— it's much like your comment about influencer marketing. If you engage with me first, I'm likely to agree to your proposal versus just being, you know, just the ask always.

At least buy me a drink first.

Coffee or something.

Yeah, it's really true and I think that marketers forget that. But it's also hard, especially for small marketers when they go into social media and they set up a Facebook page and it's crickets. Nothing's happening, nobody's talking back to them. Then they start asking questions because some consultant somewhere told them to ask questions. Well, if you don't have an engaged market asking questions and running contests isn't going to get you what you want. You need to figure out what kind of content your market wants, and then you may have to use a lot of paid media to get people interested in you. Once they get to your social media network, there needs to be enough content there. When you deliver the paid media, there needs to be enough content there to interest them, to keep them and start conversations. Then you can market. But if you're just going to spam us with stuff, just buy a billboard.

Or banner ads. Are people still doing banner ads?

People are still doing banner ads, but I don't know who clicks on them. It sure isn't me.

So the next question comes from the lovely Zala. She is asking, how can a company make mindfulness a core part of their business, not just marketing, and leverage it well?

Well, again, you know, I think it needs to be top-down. The leadership needs to demonstrate that. You look at Eileen Fisher, for example, they started practicing mindfulness within the company before they started using it in the way that they marketed. But it kind of has always been, you know, a natural way for them to market because they do actually care about their customer. So, you know, finding ways that you can bring mindfulness into meetings and saying, okay, we're going to do stand-ups. We're not going to do sit-down hour-and-a-half conference meetings where half the meeting is answering their emails. We're not going to do that. You know, you can say we're going to set times that we're going to sit down as a group and talk about how the company is going and where it's going. And how people are enjoying their jobs. Actually engaging with your employees and caring how they enjoy their jobs is another way to really get them engaged and caring more. I really think that an engaged employee group actually gives the company a lot more power. Mm-hmm. And if people are happy at their jobs, whether they're in marketing or they're line workers on the assembly line, You can do a huge amount. Green Mountain Coffee is a good example of this. They do meditation in the morning in the office, and they reach out to the community, and now they're offering meditation classes to the— not the university, sorry, the schools that are around them, the elementary schools. So they brought meditation into the schools to kind of lift up their community as well as within the organization. That's really cool.

It is really cool. Yeah, I think one of my favorite quotes is, you need to be interested to be interesting. And I think a lot of businesses forget that with their employees. It's like really taking that time to ask an employee how they're doing, ask about their children or their pets. It goes such a long way versus always coming at them with more things to do and telling them to promote things on social. But if you give them a reason to care or, you know, feel that they're a part of the process versus just like, you know, a little robot goes a long way.

Yeah, I totally agree.

Let's see, next question is from Dana. How can we ensure being mindful is something that all speakers relate to?

Hmm, not clear on that question, but I think where you're going, Dana, is that When you are speaking to your market, for example, your market has a lot of different personas, and everything you say isn't going to necessarily apply to everyone. And if it did, it would come off very vanilla and kind of canned. So you really want to be thinking about individual personas and mixing up your marketing message to talk to each of those personas as individual people instead of trying to Kind of get everybody all in one shot, not so effective because we're not all the same. We don't all have the same interests. We don't all like to hear things in the same voice. Focusing on personas can help with that a lot.

I'm very excited about this next question because I know you are a fellow tool junkie. It's a 2-part question. First part is, how much time should you devote to communicate with your audience? The second part is, any hints or good tools on how to support this task?

That is a good one. I'm a big fan of social listening, but I tend to listen more on hashtags and topics than I do for focused personas. I'm a huge fan of BuzzSumo. It's one of my favorite latest tools, because what BuzzSumo does is help me drill down. Marketing and find out what people are talking about marketing. Then I can go and read those posts and then I put them into CoSchedule, which is really huge for me. Because then I can schedule out over time really great content and not spam my followers with things that just, you know, it's too much noise. It's too much information. You don't want to inundate people with every single thing you read this morning. So spread that out during the day and then sit back and wait and see what kind of responses you get and go in and check periodically. Did anybody care about that post? Another cool thing about CoSchedule is I get data. I'm using Buffer, but I also get data from CoSchedule and it will show me who engaged with what posts, how often those posts were engaged with, and I can give them more of that.

Mm-hmm.

I also segment. I'll pick off the top of my head leadership and marketing and mindfulness as 3 different channels. Then I'll schedule those at different times during the day so that I can target those personas and what people are interested in and spread that out. This is with the understanding that I'm doing this for a lot of clients as well as myself. Scheduling is huge. I don't think automation is necessarily evil. As long as it's done in a thoughtful way. We'll use thoughtful instead of mindful just to change things up a little, but it's the same thing.

I'm a huge advocate for social media automation, if for no other reason is that it frees up your time to be more mindful, more human. Without it, we would be spending all of our time trying to write the tweets and not have time for engagement. I like where you were going there. Also love the reference to analytics. How frequently do you audit your tweets in Buffer and BuzzSumo? Is it weekly, monthly? What would you recommend? How often should someone check on their performance?

I like to look at it weekly, just briefly, and then monthly go in and kind of do reporting. If something is hot, I'll go look at it every 10 minutes to find out if it's working Is this direction doing what I need it to do? If you're in a crisis communications situation, then you're going to want to be on it. Then I will have the analytics open in a window the whole time. Fortunately, that doesn't happen very often. If you start getting things like trolling or there's some kind of bad situation with the brand, then obviously you need to do it more. Most of the time, once a week looking at your analytics and going, okay, this is working. Once a week stepping back and looking at your social stream and saying, okay, is my messaging on or have I been talking about this too much or that too much? Or am I totally off base and wandered off into the desert alone? That happens. Looking at what you're saying. Sometimes it can be really surprising to people because they don't realize that they've wandered off. Once a week minimum.

We only have a few minutes left in this awesome discussion. For someone out there who is feeling a little overwhelmed on social, they're starting to get a little robotic because they're a little time crunched, what is your top tip for how to start down the path for being a more mindful marketer?

Well, I really think it is stepping back and taking a look at what your messaging is and then looking at your social networks and deciding which ones do I really need to be on? Which ones are working for me? If they're not working, why aren't they working? Can I ditch them? You really don't need to be everywhere. You can't be everywhere. If you spread yourself too thin, you don't get enough done.

I agree. I actually recently did that and I have removed profiles on on a couple networks, and I'm going 200% in the ones that I have retained. I'm super excited about it too. I was starting to feel pressured to post on certain networks, and I think that really sucked the fun out of it. Now I've just got rid of them. We're full bore on my new top 5.

I just did that with my blogs. I have several blogs. Lot of blogs. I've been doing it for a long time so I've developed all these blogs and different channels and I realized that they were all kind of neglected because I can't create that much content that's valuable. I can create a lot of crap but I can't create a lot of valuable content that often. So I'm consolidating now and some of them I'm just making websites because I really feel very strongly that if I can't add value to that then I shouldn't be doing it at all. So I'm trying to consolidate too. It's a good thing to do.

I love that. Again, it comes back to being deliberate with your time. This has been awesome.

I'm feeling very inspired. I don't know about you guys.

Mindful

Monday.

Oh man. Thank you guys so much. Rachel, thank you for joining me. co-host and Janet, you are fabulous, more fabulous. Thank you so much. You've been amazing guests.

It's been really great and I'm so glad that we got to do this. And Susie and Rachel, Bryan missed out. Too bad.

I know. You know what, he's off partying at South by. Actually, no, he's actually speaking right now. This happens to clash directly. He has a really cool Biz Summit Yeah. But thank you so much for joining us. And everyone, we will be back next Monday for another awesome H2H chat. Stay tuned to the hashtag for our very special announcement. And once again, I really encourage you to check out Janet's book. It's available on Amazon as well as substantium.com. We've been tweeting out the link. It's in the stream. And thanks once again to Substantium for sponsoring today's chat. Have a fantastic week. We will see you same time, same place.

Bye everybody. Thank you.

Bye.