The Only ROI You Need To Measure - with Connor Blakley - I Love Marketing Episode #331

That got millions upon millions of impressions and coverage all over the world. Now, if they would have went with the normal term for ROI and not return on interaction, that would have never been possible. I'm Dean Jackson, he's Joe Polish and.

This is the I Love Marketing podcast.

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Think back many years ago when you were in high school, you still weren't able to drink, vote, and in some states even drive a car. What were you thinking about back then? The opposite sex? Beer, sports, or what college you might go to. Our Next speaker was 14 when he started his first marketing company. He discovered that a relationship online with a customer was more important than just taking their money. Why in the world would I bring a kid into Genius Network and take even one second of your time to hear what he has to say? Because Connor Blakely is unique. Connor is a Fortune 500 Gen Z, a marketing and branding consultant. Connor's been named the number one high school entrepreneur to watch in 2016. He's been called by Inc. Magazine and I'm quoting, a business phenomena and tycoon. I can hardly wait for us to hear what he has to say. His title is the only ROI you need to measure. Please welcome Connor Blakely.

Thank you sir.

Markers are right here.

Hello. When I was seven years old, I started stealing people's rocks from their houses. Igneous, sedimentary. They were different colors. I just thought they all looked really cool. I decided to steal them from their own houses and take them back to their front door and try to get them to buy their own rocks. Back at 7 years old when I was 10, instead of me just running one lemonade stand, I was like no. Why would I ever do that? Because I can have all my friends work for me. So instead I gave them all the materials, all the supplies, all the resources they would need to start my own lemonade franchise at age 10. Age 11, I don't really remember. My favorite baseball player, Pete Rose dealed baseball cards and collectibles when I was 12 each week. I don't even know how much I was raking in at that point, but I was traveling all over, going to collection shows and all of that. And what I learned from all these non legitimate things was interactions. When I was in the eighth grade, I started a homework selling network that spanned citywide that I almost got expelled for. And the quote says I Like a teacher who gives you something to take home to to think about besides homework. Safe to say I wasn't really thinking about homework. All right, roi Now I'm going to go through each letter on each one of these slides, and if everyone could give me. ROI stands for I just. All right, ready? No Interaction. Return on investment. Monetary Return on interaction. Authenticity. Human Engagement. Adding value. This is my buddy, Peter Shankman, business advisor, founder of hara. Peter also just happens to be a huge Twitter nerd. Peter is also an international traveler for speaking events and all that kind of stuff. So Peter, like I said, being a Twitter nerd, tweeted mortons, can you meet me up at Newark Airport with Porterhouse when I land in two hours? K. Thanks. Well, if you know Peter, he's a jokester. There's no way this was serious. The closest Morton's was an hour and 15 minutes away from Newark Airport at the time. Now this tweet goes up. Oh, my God, I don't believe it. Morton showed up with a porterhouse. That is Peter with the dude who drove an hour and 15 minutes from Morton's to bring him his food from a tweet. Now, normal. What's a. Can everyone just say the normal term for ROI one more time? Yes. Now, if they were looking at this at face value, some random dude tweeted that he wanted Porterhouse at the airport an hour and 15 minutes away. Now, if you're looking at the normal ROI, they're losing time, they're losing human sweat, effort, they're losing money, they're losing assets, and honestly, in some places, credibility. And because they just spent almost two hours in this entire plan, they drove. Well, put it in this perspective. Ready? Someone at corporate had to see the tweet go through Morton's. Then they had to make the food drive an hour and 15 minutes to get it to Peter on time for his landing and. And then in time to take that picture. That left them a time frame of only 10 minutes from when they saw a tweet to get it ready, to be able to provide that to Peter. Now, return on interaction. Little did they know, Peter Shankman had 15,000 followers on Twitter, and he also had a very popular blog at the time. Peter wrote a blog about the greatest customer service story ever told that got millions upon millions of impressions and coverage all over the world. Now, if they would have went with the normal term for ROI and not return on interaction, that would have never been possible. My first time in New York, big city, of course. One thing I'm going to do is I'm going to try New York style Pizza, right? Ray's Pizza is the place that tweeted me after I went to. I'm not going to name the place because I don't want to throw them under the bus. Put it this way. I went to a place that started with a J in Times Square and the pizza sucked. I went in there and like, Peter, I'm a huge Twitter nerd too. So the first thing I did was I tweeted, this place blows. Anyone give me a good place. Ray's Pizza tweeted me back in less than 10 minutes and said, hey, Connor, hope you have a great rest of the time in New York City. I'm like, we gotta go to Ray's Pizza now, right? See if they're any better. Went down with my dad. Ray's Pizza, amazing. Anytime I refer someone to a pizza place, it's Ray's Pizza in Times Square. Anytime someone asks me what my favorite New York style pizza is, Ray's Pizza, not return on investment because they were losing money. Return on interaction. That made me happy. They care. They care, right? I mean, return on interaction. They were being authentic, they were being genuine. They weren't trying to sell me anything. They didn't even want me. They didn't even offer me a free slice because they didn't want me to go all the way down there and not waste my time, but spend my time walking down there doing other things that could have made my experience in the city better. Now there's an ocean of all kinds of different metrics that you can measure from monetary to HR to all that kind of stuff. But that's why I want you to meet Jim. You guys are probably thinking, wait, who's this dude? Am I supposed to know who he is? No, I have no idea who this dude is. I looked up Google. I literally put in businessman, and he's the one that came up. What Jim is, is let's just paint the picture in your head that he's a typical marketer. Okay? When you think typical marketer, what do you think? You think money, you think sales, you think storytelling. But if you want to get a return on interaction rather than a return on investment, you can't think like Jim the marketer, because what's his main goal? How's he gonna make money? How's he gonna establish credibility? Selling. You gotta think like you put yourselves in the shoes of these companies. If you want a return on interaction, putting yourselves in the shoes of your consumer or target demographic. Will allow you to not only get more out of the effort you're putting in, will allow you to get a return on interaction. And if you focus on the returns on interaction, that trumps money every single time. As I've been showing, return on interactions is why you need to be like Kobe Bryant. For those of you who don't know who Kobe Bryant is, Kobe Bryant is one of the greatest NBA basketball players of all time. Holds a ton of records. He didn't get there without being focused. He didn't get there without caring. When you want to be focused and caring, you won't be able to get an ROI of anything unless you try to be anything like Kobe Bryant. Because you can only be, as they say, fake it till you make it. But that's bs, especially when you're doing this kind of stuff. Because especially I talk a lot about Gen Z and the younger generations, how we're coming up. Well, let me tell you guys something. Our BS meters are through the roof because of the barrier to technology and the barrier to information listening. You can't get an ROI of anything unless you listen. Like I was talking about Jim the marketer. Does Jim the Marketer all the time put himself in the consumer's shoes because he's worried about selling a lot? Go take a step back and put yourself as how you would want to feel and then take the information that you're getting from listening in order to reverse engineer it to then get a further return on interaction. Jay Z, one of my favorite rappers. Famous quote, men lie, women lie, numbers don't. Now bringing it back into perspective. Yes, a lot of business marketing, all that stuff does have to do with money and that's what fuels economies. That's what drives business. That's what creates lives that we all would like to live. You cannot have return on interactions without having some monetary value because in a lot of ways that really does matter and that allows you to do a lot more things that you want to do to further benefit your customer. So when you're going and trying to get returns on interactions in the back of your head, just make sure you do have that end game where you do get to cash in. Thank you guys so much for your time.

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Sam.