TJ WALKER - THE HABIT INFLUENCER - Personal Development | LIVE STREAM

Welcome to Inside Communications. I'm your host, Mike Baco. And today we take the show on the road. We're at Quinn and Company, and we're going to take an inside look at this. This is the purple couch, the creative purple couch. Today on Inside Communications. Our guest is Florence Quinn. Coming up. Florence, thanks for joining us today and thanks for having Inside Communications at your firm.

It's my pleasure to have you here, Mike.

So we're here on the purple couch. It instantly brings a smile to your face. You're known for the purple couch. Tell us a little bit about it.

We decided when we moved at one point that we didn't want to have a conference room. It was too boring and too corporate for our culture. So we went shopping for an interesting couch to make the room feel a little bit more homey, a little bit more relaxed. And we ended up with this great purple couch. And then someone wrote an article about Quinn & Co. And talked about the bohemian purple couch in the dream room. So we ended up naming our conference room the Dream Room. So we had a purple couch in the dream.

Room.

And. And then it caught on, and clients started saying to us, can you go into your dream room, sit on your purple couch, and come up with some great ideas for us? So it just became a symbol of our creative thinking and an icon for the firm.

Really. And how important is that to foster that idea of what your firm is really about, even though it's tied to this couch, but it's a whole attitude and mindset that the firm.

Has. Yes, being creative is a thing that makes me passionate about pr. It's a thing that drives me. Personally. As a kid growing up, I was always interested in business and art. I actually used to do art. So when I made a beeline for New York from New England, where I grew up, my goal was to find something that was artistic and business oriented. And at first I thought it would be advertising, but it was too pigeonholed. You were either a creative person in advertising or you were in trafficking. And then I landed in pr. And PR is a wonderful combination of business and creativity. So that being my passion, became the signature of Quinn and Company. And honestly, we didn't sit around and say, what is the signature of Quinn and Company? It happened organically and authentically. And I think that's important for all brands to realize or for anybody who's birthing a brand or growing a brand, whatever your brand positioning is, it really needs to be something authentic to who you are. So the goal of the firm, you're working with, whether it's a PR firm, a branding firm, or an ad agency, their job is to help you realize what your authenticity is. And sometimes it's right under your nose and you just don't realize.

It. What advice can you give to some of these brands that are trying to come up with this idea? Should they be doing market research? Should they be doing internal research, talking to their creative team, the real pulse of the organization? How can someone find that rhythm to that idea of who their company, their brand is going to.

Be? The first thing, when I do trainings on the topic of creativity, the first thing I say to people is, forget whatever industry. Forget that you're in the industry you're in. So for us, since we work in travel, real estate, and food, wine and spirits, I say the first thing to do is to forget that you're in travel, forget you're in real estate, forget you're in food, wine and spirits, and think about what's important to you. Think about what's important to your friends, think about what's in the headlines, in the newspaper, think about what people love on YouTube, what they're talking about on Facebook. And that's where you're going to find the essence of what people care about and what people want and look outside of your industry. I think when people think, oh, my word, I'm in the travel industry, I'm representing a hotel. As soon as they put themselves in a box, you can almost feel it, right? As soon as I said the word hotel, oh, my God, I'm representing a hotel. It's got a bed, it's got a room. You know, I need to come up with a package, because that's what hoteliers do. They come up with packages. So we try to think contrary to what everybody else is doing as well, especially if we're trying to get the media's attention and the buzz, because as we all know, the media loves what's new and different. So a small example of that is for here in New York, a lot of hotels will do packages with Broadway shows. But we looked around and we said, oh, my God, there are a lot of talk shows here. So we were the first firm to partner hotel with a talk show and getting guest tickets to the talk shows. So the New York Times wrote about it because nobody else was doing it. Another great example is everybody comes to New York to shop. So hotels will create shopping packages, go out and shop, and we'll wrap your presents for you when you come back. And we said, wait a minute, it's so crowded out there in the stores, let's allow people to shop from their hotel room or their hotel lobby. So, and this is before social media. So we just put racks of all the catalogs of Bloomingdale's, Tiffany's in the hotel so people could shop without leaving the hotel. The New York Times wrote it.

Up. How can you do that? Now with the ever changing world of social media, people are so tuned into things. How does your firm use Facebook, Twitter, YouTube? How do you utilize all these social media.

Channels? I would say the three basic ways to do it. One is, and then we're all doing it, and none of us know if we're doing it very well, if it's.

Successful. And that's a real key point, that there are so many people that say, I'll make you a viral video. I'll get you X number of Twitter followers. And yes, they could point to one or two instances, but there's really no real formula for a viral video or for a campaign that you could specifically point to. So that really speaks to what you're.

Saying. Yes, yes. So one of the things is we all. And we're all doing it. We all put our packages out there, our promotions, our recipes. Honestly, how many people care about that? We don't really know. But it's a communications channel and it's there, so we're doing it. That's one way we use it. Another way we use it, which I think is interesting, a very interesting area is we use it as a customer service tool, which is if somebody posts a comment, we respond to it, whether it's positive or negative. So then it becomes a customer relations tool, becomes an ability to see what customers like and what they don't like, because you get the negative as well as the positive feedback through social.

Media. Have you found that brands that you work with, with are a little bit apprehensive about allowing negative comments to be posted to a Facebook or to a Twitter? How does that.

Work? Oh, that's such a great question, Mike. I mean, it's something that I'm thinking a lot about now, because you're absolutely right. Especially the hotel industry, the travel industry, they are so deathly afraid of it. So I start to talk to some of our hotel brands and say, look, why would you want to send people off your website and force us all. Now, I'm speaking of myself as a consumer to go over to TripAdvisor to learn not only about you and all the negative and positive comments that are there about you, but Your competitors. And while I'm over there, P.S. i might find out that one of your competitors is actually voted number one on TripAdvisor. So I might decide to book there instead. So let's come back, bring key people on your website and see if there is a way to post comments without, you know, in a way that works. And there's gotta be a way because I don't know about you, but I am a huge online shopper. I'm on Pottery Barn, I'm on J. Crew, I'm on Garnet Hill, I'm on Amazon, I'm at Toys R Us, I'm at Best Buy. And I always read the reviews, the customer reviews. Do you do.

That? Yeah, absolutely. That really gives me the nuts and bolts of, of what people are thinking. They're actually road testing the product. That's really what I want to hear. I want to hear about someone who stayed in an all inclusive resort. How was the food, how were the drinks, how were people being treated.

There? So actually there are two hotel brands that are experimenting with this now, posting customer reviews, Starwood and Marriott. So I'm sure all eyes will be on Starwood and Marriott to see how it works. One of them, I think it's Marriott, has actually set up a separate site for the customer reviews. They're sort of just dipping their toe or their toenail in the water where Starwood is actually allowing people to post right on the site. But there's got to be. When you think about it, like I go to Amazon, I've never seen an inappropriate review. I've seen some negative comments, but they're very appropriate. So I'm wondering, I'd love to know how they control that process. Do they actually edit the.

Reviews? There are a lot of things that are going on now with Yelp is in the news now with paid advertisements, paid review type of systems, things like that, where a better review will get pushed to the top and less ones will go down to the bottom. But how do you deal with that when you're pitching this to a client? Is there a give and take in terms of bringing them into this new world where they may be used to just doing print or tv, radio, but do you have to convince them to do this social media outreach to have comments posted? What's their attitude on all this? Are they seeing the.

Light? Well, they're seeing the light in varying degrees because social media is a big area, so it's hard to talk about social media as an area. Almost everybody now is familiar with it and feels that they should have a presence in it. And almost everybody does. But there's different ways of doing it. I think honestly, most people, when they think of social media, it means I have to be on Facebook and I have to be on Twitter. In the travel industry, I have to be monitoring TripAdvisor and probably in the food, wine spirits industry, I have to be monitoring Yelp and some of the other social media media sites. And in real estate, I have to be monitoring Curb. But that's just such a small piece of it. That's not going to get you a viral video. That's not going to get you a campaign like Best Job in the World for Queensland in Australia that we were involved in. It's just a small piece of it. And honestly, if I owned a hotel, I would probably be more. I would put my focus on Trip Advisor and I would really, really think about allowing comments on my own website. Because in the end, that's what you want. You want people on your website, you want them to stay on your website. So I'm a big believer in expanding the content of the website. Some people call it branded content. You might have heard that word. So wouldn't it be cool if travel websites were not just about booking, but they also provided you with all the travel content that's going to help you make your decision. So instead of having to go to this travel magazine and then this booking engine for this hotel, you sort of get it all in one.

Stop. You get a one stop shopping situation. Let's go inside the Queensland tourism campaign that you just mentioned. Super successful for them. They wanted to have a campaign centered around the best job in the.

World.

Right? 200 different countries sent in over 35,000 applicants for this job. A huge success for them. For you, you utilize social media, you utilize traditional media. Let's go inside that campaign just for a little bit. Tell us a little bit about.

It. Okay. We did not. Queensland came to us and said, we're looking for a PR firm in the US to do the PR for this campaign that our ad agency came up with. So when they described the campaign to us for Best Job in the World, we said, oh my, that sounds a lot like the search for the chief beer Officer that we had created for stock Starwood Hotels a while ago, before social media even existed. They said, oh my God, we can't believe you're the ones who did that. That was sort of the genesis. That was the idea for Best Job in the World. Best Job in the World was created by an ad agency in Australia. So they came to us to do the pr and we knew it was huge and wonderful, especially in this age of social media. So we came on board and we understood that we needed this to go worldwide. So we actually did not give it to a social media outlet first. We gave it to Roy. I almost don't want to tell you this because it's so cute. Industry secret.

Insights. Let's talk about it in broad terms. It came to you. You had this idea. The genesis was already there. Walk us through just the nuts and bolts of when it was actually going on to the very end where you got millions of dollars worth of.

Media. Oh, yeah. Over 11.

Million. Over 11 million. A success by any measure. Just talk a little bit about their reaction.

To. No one ever dreamed it would be as big as it became. So they came to us with the idea anybody could apply, send in a video to a channel on YouTube that was set up and apply to be an island caretaker for six months that paid $100,000. And it happened. Now, this is very important, and it happened at a time in our economy when people were losing their jobs. Remember in 2008, 2009, some people called it a recession. So it became viral and of great interest to people because people were losing their jobs or they had a family member or friend who was losing their job, and if they weren't losing their job, they were unhappy in their job. So it really hit a chord in.

Everybody. And this somewhat goes back to what you were saying before, monitoring things that were in the news, trying to find the pulse of what people are interested in. And it certainly seems like you.

Did. Well, we did, but this was actually by accident, this one. It just so happened that when Queensland finally got the program put together and was ready to launch it, they launched it during a recession. So it worked and it was great. So people sent in the videos and then people were. Then Queensland chose the finalists, a certain number of finalists, and then posted them and allowed people to vote. As you can imagine, the voting concept is key, key, key, key to making anything go viral. Because then. Because all the applicants, in order to win, asked all their friends and family to.

Vote. And that's really driving traffic to people that might not be aware of it. Like the idea, even if they don't know the person, they may send it along to someone else. So there's really this interactive component.

Right? And you want to help this person. You know, it's not just a brand reaching out to you and saying, go to my Facebook site. It's somebody you want to.

Help. So there's a real interactive component to it. It's not just a matter of pushing out this idea. It's about engaging.

People. It's key. And it's being done on TV now. I don't know if you watch the X Factor or American Idol. The voting piece of that is key to the success of that program as well. Really interactive. It gets people involved and excited. So that was a big part of it. And then people set up their own social media sites to get people to vote for them. We did set up Twitter. We set up Facebook. We got over $3,000, 3,000 Twitter followers. Their goal, Queensland's goal was to get 400,000 visitors to their website in one year. We had over 1 million in two days crash all their.

Servers. This is the first time that or one of the first times that you would want technical difficulties on your website because it's such a successful campaign. Florence, thanks for having us in your office. The purple couch. So much creativity and inspiration that you were able to give our viewers. Thanks for having.

Us. Oh, it's my pleasure. Mike. Thank you for.

Coming. Thank.