Jason Will talks about building a brand online: use influential people to validate it, create a community hashtag, study your competitors to understand your audience, ride relevant trends, and post consistently. He also answers questions about Facebook's marketplace and how platforms like Snapchat and Facebook Live are changing.
Chapters
Like an average individual because Scott almost looks like somebody who doesn't sleep more than an hour a day because he's interacting with people faster than anybody I've ever seen in my life. And it doesn't even make sense how quick he can actually respond to people because it's completely insane the number of posts and things that he does on a daily basis. And I was just so fascinated by this guy and I reached out and we jumped on a Skype call within a few hours because during that time of the day. It was middle of the afternoon, I think, in Thailand. And we get on this Skype call, and I see this guy with an insatiable amount of energy that I've never witnessed before. I mean, it was like if you took somebody— and he openly talks about this— ADHD, right? Somebody who has that sort of energy through the roof that you're just like, whoa, slow down. I can't take this at 3:00 AM in the morning. But the fact of the matter is that he channeled all of that into his social media and the relationships he made with people. around the world. But what's even more critical, and the reason why I bring this example up, is because we're all in a position where it's extremely difficult to market what we're doing. And people right away are like, I don't know if I want to be a part of this yet, because guess what? At the early stages, all you attract are the early adopters, right? You don't attract the people that potentially could be your second or third or fourth category of consumer yet. So by bringing somebody like this in to represent your brand, you immediately get a network of people that now trust and validate what you're doing has substance. And on top of this, this could be your marketing vehicle to be able to get people to care what it is that you're doing. So think about all these benefits. When you think about how to market your company, you have to think outside of the box because if you go on Facebook, you just start dropping ads. If you go on Twitter, you just start sponsoring all this kind of stuff. You're in a mix of millions of people who are doing the same thing. So think outside of the box and try to do something different, right? If you see something like this, reach out. The answer is no if you don't send the message, and the answer could be potentially no or yes if you do. So why would you not? So think about that. On top of that, creating an identity online. We created a unique URL— or excuse me, hashtag— Zipkick Bloggers, and that now became the identifying factor for our community. And a lot of the content that goes out is based on that. So people now are coming to us and saying, why do I keep seeing your hashtag online? What is this about? And that's when you know that you've actually started to do something that's picking up traction, because if people are noticing based on, you know, some sort of information that continues to go out, it creates interest, especially if they see it over and over and over again. Okay, some actionable steps to take right now. So we're all trying to build some sort of identity, whether it's for ourselves or for our company or whatever you have, whatever you're trying to market. You have to understand who your audience actually is and who are they engaging with. Go to your competitors' accounts. Take a look. Are they engaging with your competitor today? What are they saying? What is the content that they're interested in? What's the stuff that they're engaging? What are the type of questions that they're asking? You have to understand that. That's part of knowing your customer. Not only that, but what I really love is jumping on trends that are relevant. Instead of you trying to create your own traction online, why would you not just take a place where millions of eyeballs already are? You know, for example, Tic Tac, right? You know, they said something kind of funny the other day. They took a bad situation that happened in the media and they said, you know, they came out and they said a statement. A brand like Tic Tac, right, served to benefit from something that was a political disaster that was going on in the news. Things like this, you have to be aware of these things when they're happening, and if they're relevant to your brand or the audience that you're gravitating towards, then you gotta hop on those trends. Does that make sense? Yes. Okay, fantastic. And not only that, but at the end of the day, good content— and I say is king and queen because content doesn't know gender— the fact of the matter is, is that, you know, content is is extremely important. You know, if all of a sudden you completely change the tone of your voice online, people start to wonder like, what is going on here, right? So people get acclimated based on the information that you feed, and that's part of that give. If you keep on giving good content, stay consistent, make sure you post often and do it well, and make sure that it's actually good content, right? It's not just, hey, here's me eating my breakfast. Right? Okay, maybe that's cool if you're doing Snapchat, but most people really don't care about you eating your breakfast. Okay? Okay, so that takes us to the end of what I had prepared, but I want to answer the question back there. Remind me one more time? Buy and sell. About the Facebook buy and sell feature. I've used it a couple of times to actually rent an apartment. I think Facebook's trying to do a bunch of different things simultaneously. Obviously what happened with when there was a bid at one time to buy Periscope, that turned out to be a Twitter buy. And then they went ahead and they created their Facebook Live. Mm-hmm. So I think with this introduction of how fast Snapchat has really taken off, I think you're gonna see a lot more stuff being built within Facebook. I don't see that as, you know, that is never going to replace, you know, kind of the eBay sort of live auctioning sort of stuff, right? That's always going to be in existence, so you're going to always have that. But at the end of the day, you know, when you look at Facebook, what is Facebook actually used for? Facebook is used to communicate with people around the world, and it's not just limited to conversation. Yeah. It's really everything, and now you're starting to see the evolution of that. So I wouldn't be surprised if you see other things that are kind of spinoffs of concepts that already exist, but just on one consolidated platform. Great.
