Mike Michalowicz describes how Hampton Inn uses distinctive images in each room to help guests remember their room number, then applies that principle to business: use visual symbols to make information stick. Jason Goldberg adds that on social media, product images get ten times more engagement than text, and Fab.com grew by half a million users in two months through shareable images.
Hi there everyone. I'm JJ Ramberg and it is time now for better your business, a special segment just for our Open Forum viewers. Mike Michalowicz is the author of the best selling book the Toilet Paper Entrepreneur and he is the founder of Obsidian Launch, a company that provides online behavioral marketing services. And Jason Goldberg is the founder and CEO of Fab.com, a website that offers sales on items from leading designers and manufacturers. He is also a serial entrepreneur who has already sold two businesses. Different kinds of serial entrepreneur. Okay, Mike, I'm going to start with you as the veteran on this show here. What's the secret?
So I actually discovered this when I was on this trip to Asheville and it happened at the Hampton Inn. I was walking up to my room number, which I don't remember my room number, and under there I saw a little sign or picture of an old fashioned truck. It's like, hm, that's easy to remember. Then I looked at the other rooms. They all had unique pictures. This is a mnemonic memory trick. When people see pictures, it's very easy to remember, but numbers are hard. A lot of people forget their room number, have to go to the front desk. All I remember, I'm the old rusty truck and I found it. So look in your own business, where can you make things easier for your clients by using pictorial memory mnemonics.
Oh, that's interesting. Yeah, they should do that when you're in the parking lot, right? Yeah, because I'm always losing my car. Okay, Jason.
Well, I guess we hear it all the time. I'm just going to say it. Social, social, social. That if your business is not getting Facebook, not getting Twitter, not starting to figure out how to use things like Google, which is just evolving. It's now is the time more than especially in a down economy when people aren't searching for products every day. You need to find a way to get your products in front of them. And the way to get in front of them is by having their friends share them on our website. For instance, we have a half million people join our website in the last two months, all from social sharing. And when your friends are telling friends and telling friends, telling friends, your cost of acquiring customers comes down just dramatically.
So how do you encourage people to share it?
I think it's creating very simple ways to say not just that I like this, but I want to show this off to people. So there's an image on the site, enable them very easily to share that image with their friends. One thing we found a little trick on Facebook is that the number of people who like and comment images or photos on Facebook is almost 10 times the number of people who just do status updates. So take an image, take a product picture, take a kind of an image or, you know, a photo of something that's, you know, that's just on your. On your site and make it very simple for people to share it out to their friends and watch that virality happen. And then also measure and track. Everybody comes back in through it.
Right. All right, good advice. Thanks so much, you guys.
