Influencer Illusions - Hype or Reality

Business Brain, episode 522 for Wednesday, February 7th. Wave all your fingers at your neighbor. Day 2024 Greetings, folks, and welcome to Business Brain, the show where you. You join us while we all dissect a couple of issues. We analyze them, we dig into them, we use them to tune our business brains every single time we get together. Sponsors for this episode include gosquaredaway.com contact squared away empowers highly educated military spouses to become your trusted royal remote executive assistance. We have more details about that that we'll share in a little bit. For now, here in Durham, New Hampshire, I'm Dave Hamilton.

And out in Lafayette, California, I'm Shannon Jean. Where we just went through this massive, I don't know, bomb cyclone, Pineapple Express atmospheric river party.

All right.

Yeah, that was good. And I mentioned the weather. Not because I'm old and want to talk about the weather all the time, although that sometimes happens. I want to start today to talk about responsiveness as it's related to something I just went through. So I have a few minutes before we get into the meat of the show.

Yeah.

So we recently bought a, a rural piece of property with a couple of houses on it on a river that we're, we love. And we're going to, you know, rent out to guests and we're going to hold events out there. And of course, after about, I don't know, four or five months, our furnace went out, of course, and of course it did. And this just, this was the first piece of property we bought in years ever. I think that we didn't get the home warranty on it, so we had to suck it up and fix the furnace.

Yeah, of course.

So that, that's a whole other story.

Home warranties can really, especially in the first year of homeownership, they, they like. I know it's an insurance policy and it's built for the insurance company to profit, but I have, great. I've, I've loved them. But anyway, yeah. You have something else to talk about.

Yeah. So we, you know, I, we've done shows about having a sense of urgency, being responsive. So I had a contractor go up, inspect the furnace, called back and said, yeah, it's, you know, you need a new one. It's not repairable.

Sure. It's done.

Yeah. So, okay, great. And he said, yep, I'll get a quote, follow up. I said, okay, wonderful. So about a week went by. I didn't hear anything. And so I had my real estate agent, I said, hey, is there somebody Else. She said, yeah, I'll send somebody else out. We can take a look at it. So I got this guy come back, literally called me while he was there and said, look, here's the deal. I can do it. It's $4,500. Do you want me to do it? I can get it done next Saturday. I said, yeah, that's awesome.

Let's go.

And so I approve it. He goes out. And so time goes by a little bit. A little bit. We got this new furnace. Everything's working great. A month later, I get a phone call from the first company that went out. And this says, hey, Shannon, I'm so and so from so and so Heating and Air. I've got your quote ready.

What?

And, and I want to send it to you. And I said, well, you know, is this pretty cold up there, right? You know, the temperatures have been in the 30s and so on. And I said, you know, I, I, I've contracted with somebody else and already had it fixed. And she's, and, and this is I an admin or, I don't know, maybe she was the owner. I had no idea. But she says, well, I wouldn't blame you. And I said, yeah, I had to get somebody. And so they send me the quote. And a quote is like $7,000, you know, and I paid 4,500 and the guy got it done. And within a week.

Yeah, within a week. Because you, like you with a furnace repair, certainly here in, in the Northeast, time is of the essence.

You can't use the house. I mean, I went up to try to fix it myself and, and it was 37 when I went in the house.

Yeah.

Turned, turned on all the fireplaces and everything.

We humans don't do well with that.

Yeah. My point is getting that sense of urgency in your business. You know, if you want the business, you have to have Systems and, and SOPs in place that get to people quickly. And I'm going to do a post later this afternoon up on on X on Twitter, if you follow me at Shannon Jean all about how you get that sense of urgency. And we've done it on our show. If you go to businessbrain show and just search for urgency, you'll find we've done a couple episodes on it before, but it's crucial for success. They have to do it. If you're going to grow your company, there's just no way around it.

There's no way around it. You have to be responsive because unless even if you are the only company on the planet that does the thing. Like, if you are, there's a whole other conversation to have. But even if that's true, customer service still is customer service. Like, you might not have to be as responsive because if you're the only one that can do it, well, you know, there you go. Yeah, but that's not a good way to treat customers. As soon as someone else comes in that can do something similar, people will go to them. Yeah, you're out. Yeah. Oh, yeah, man.

It was crazy. But anyway, that's my. That's my story for today.

I'm going to acknowledge the fact because I'm. I'm just noticing it everywhere, and we're months past this transition. I think Elon Musk really screwed things up by changing the name. Talk about ruining a brand. Because every time you say on the show or I say on the show, we talk about X, Twitter or, you know, Twitter, slash X. And it's true of everyone who talks. No one just says, oh, yeah, I did this on X. No one.

But eventually, maybe when. Remember when there was a car company called Datsun if you're older?

I do. I remember Dotson and Nissan. Yeah.

They changed to Nissan, and for several years, they put both names on the cars. I can remember looking at the back and it said Datsun, Nissan. And eventually, you know, we became. But it will be interesting to see.

I don't think that's gonna happen here.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Like in Internet time.

Hard to. Yeah, yeah. It's even hard to just say it. Oh, I'm up on X. You know, you say, well, you're on the X platform or whatever. And, you know, I. I agree with you that that was just a silly.

It was an ego stroke.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I've had this for my whole life and I wanted to build this massive thing called X. Whatever.

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Yeah.

Business, you know, at this level, influencer, not in this other world. So fine. But I know the value of influencer marketing. I've been doing it 25 years. So it's like, fine, find the company that's essentially the backbeat media of that world. And we, you know, told them what we wanted to do. We Great, okay. We set a budget. All good. They and we and they even said they're like, great, we're going to treat this as a prove it campaign. And I'm like, ah, I like that term. I'm going to, I'm going to use that term. Right? Yeah, exactly. And so great. We're all on the same page. They know. I told them, I said, you know, we're spending five grand with you. Right. If this proves out, I'll spend 50 grand next month.

Of course. Why wouldn't you?

Why wouldn't I? Right. So we're all in the same. And I made it clear to them like, there is more budget here. There is effectively unlimited budget, you know, because of the way this, this business works. Okay, great. Not unlimited budget.

Forever.

But, you know, if you can bring me users that earn me money, well, I'll keep paying for those users. That's how this works. Yeah. So, okay, great. So they come up with these things. They run a bunch of these influencers past us. There's some YouTubers, there's some Twitter, slash X things, you know, whatever. Yes, all that. All that. And some, like blog posts. And we're like, okay, that's. If this is the stuff that you think is going to work, that's great. Okay, great. So we start doing this. And this is.

Let me interrupt. This is not like a branding campaign. This is a direct. They're going to respond. Something's going to happen. You're going to track what happens.

Yeah, we, we run a web. The website is essentially a website where you come and you can like earn essentially money for yourself by doing, like, little things. Take a survey, you know, do a. Install an app or something. Like, do a thing. Earn money. Right. So this is it. Like, nobody pays to join our site. You just do it. It's great. And so they did all this stuff and we put like little coupon codes along with each of the influencers, like, you know, so that their followers would actually get like free money on the site. You know, so like. Okay, right. Like all the things that I know you're supposed to do. Just like on the show, you know, we use like custom URL codes sometimes so that you get a discount and that's that sort of thing. So then we were post morteming this campaign and one of the tweets had, this person's got, you know, I don't know, 500,000 followers or something. There were 166 comments on the tweet, 544 retweets, 330 likes. I think they said there were 46,000 views on the tweet and there were two signups. And then there was another tweet that was very similar in terms of the metrics that I just said zero signups. And so I went to them and I'm like, we need to talk.

Yeah.

Because what happened here, that does not prove it. It doesn't prove it. Right? Not even close yet.

Opposite.

It's the opposite. And then I started digging into these tweets and I'm looking and it's like, you know, the comments are amazing. There's probably a dozen or more comments from all different users with different accounts that all say, amazing, Amazing Project. Smile emoji. Smile emoji. Looking forward to this one Muscle Flex emoji, like, literally copy paste all the way through. And it's like, these are bots.

Those are bots.

So I told the people. I'm like, we need to talk. Because it looks like these are, like, rife with fraud, these people you brought to us. And we get on a call, and I told them ahead of time. Like, I gave them a day's notice. I didn't want to blindside them. You know, I wanted to let them do their research. I didn't want to. I didn't need to see whether they felt, like, surprised you had the data. I don't care. I want to talk about it. So do your research. Figure it out. Come to the meeting informed.

Great.

So show up at the meeting. And they're like, I don't. The term fraud is really, like, not, you know, essentially saying, we don't like to use that word. And, like, okay, well, but it is.

That's just languaging.

That's just language. But fine, potato, potato. And then they said, but, you know, like, influencer marketing is like, you know, the audiences of these things are like, you know, 70, 80% bots. And I stopped him, and I said, no, that's not true. I've been an influencer for 25 years. Certainly, I know that there are bots following me. But I also know that when I recommend products, people buy the products, and when they comment on them, there might not be as many comments as these, but the comments are related to the products I'm talking about. People are reading the things that I tweet. They're listening to the things that I say, and they're either reacting or not, you know, depending on whether it's a good fit or whatever. But the reactions aren't fake. Like, they're. They're legitimate.

What did they. Yeah, and what was their response to that?

They were. And then they said, well, then why did you pick these influencers? And I'm like, we said, we didn't pick these influencers. Yeah, you did.

We hired you to pick.

Like, I'm like, if I did this with one of my clients and just said, well, why did you pick that podcast to be on if. If you knew it was fraud? Because you told me to, Dave. Like, yeah, I was just blown away. And so we. We. You know, we. We chatted after this. I have an assistant that works with me on. On this kind of stuff, and she was actually running this campaign, kind of managing it. But, you know, we work together on it, and we talked about it, and of course, she hears me talk about the two tokens of customer service. And I wasn't even thinking of it this way. At the two tokens. That's right.

Yes.

And she said, I can't believe she's like, you laid down both tokens for them and gave them the opportunity and they still picked the wrong one. Like, you fed them this and they could have been like, oh, we are so sorry. This is terrible. And. And, you know, like, all they have to do is tell me it's more terrible than I said it was. And now we're on the same page. It gets you on the same side of the desk.

So, yeah, a quick primer on the two tokens. If you've not listened to that episode or we've mentioned it over and over, but in customer service, there's a theory that there's only two responses. And the one response is, oh, it's no big deal. Yeah. What. Whatever. And the other response is, it's the end of the world. It's the worst experience of my life. And as when you. There's two people in the conversation, each party gets to only pick one. And if you lay those out there and if you pick the wrong one, which, like your. The people selling you this influencer marketing did, they're telling you it's no big deal. It's just the way it is. It's 80%. Dave's only choice is to pick. Yes, it's a big deal. It's terrible fraud, and it's terrible. And so, you know, it's a. It's a really good example of why your service provider should have said, dave, we're so sorry. This is incredible. Let's. Let's do something. Let's try something else.

Do something. Let us deal with another for you.

Yeah, you give us another shot.

Yep.

Yeah. You're saying it's fraud. We're. That really, you know, wow, that's the most concerning thing out there. And then Dave would have gone, hey, that's great. Okay, let's. Let's keep working together and get this right.

Yeah, this isn't that terrible. Like, we're going to be able to fix this. And, and, you know, we have a they. Which. They did a thing. Which, Which I liked they. When we started this project, they linked their Slack group with ours. So we have like a kind of a dedicated channel in our Slack workspace that. That's with them. Right. They don't see the rest of our Slack workspace. We don't see the rest of theirs. But, you know, there they were. And they're a relatively small company too. And their CEO is one of the four members of their company that's in our Slack workspace. We had an account rep and I, when I posted about this and I said, you know, this is fraud. We need to talk. I tagged their CEO like, I think he needs to be here too, because this is a big deal. Like, I, I couldn't possibly have communicated to them how any more, how, you know, to any greater degree how important this conversation was going to be to me.

Yeah, right, to you.

And, and that the CEO not only didn't show up, but he, like, still hasn't said anything to me and we haven't heard anything from them yet. So.

Yeah, great example.

Crazy.

It's crazy. And the influencer thing is fascinating. I'd love to talk more about it on our Friday episode. This whole concept of, you know, do you need millions of followers or hundreds and hundreds of thousands, or do you really just need a thousand, one thousand true fans to make your business work?

I am looking forward to talking about that. I have, I have, I have thoughts. I have opinions. Yes.

Awesome. Yes. Yes.

It's good. Thanks for hanging out with us, everybody. Make sure to visit our sponsor course, gosquaredaway.com contact. You can find all those links at BusinessBrain Show. You can send in feedback to us at feedbackusinessbrain show. Keep living that charmed life and we'll see you on Friday. Thanks.