The Transcript

How to Escape the Social Media Swindle

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Robert Bruce: Are you ready to log in?

Brian Clark: You talking to me?

Robert Bruce: Yeah. Are you ready to log in?

Brian Clark: Someone had an interesting weekend, I take it.

Robert Bruce: Yeah. Well, it’s Monday. I’m trying to get back in the game here.

Brian Clark: But it’s not Monday. It’s Thursday.

Robert Bruce: It’s Thursday. That’s right. Actually, it’s whatever day listeners of New Rainmaker are listening to this.

Brian Clark: What is it that you like to say? Wherever and whenever you are?

Robert Bruce: Out there on the Internet. Yes.

Brian Clark: That’s right. That’s your phrase.

The Proliferation of the Logged-In Experience

Robert Bruce: We’ve been talking about this ‘logged in’ experience. We’re doing a mini-series. This is number two in a mini-series of looking at membership sites. We also have a nice little surprise today, Mr. Clark, and that is somebody joining us from the well-known Mainframe podcast on the Rainmaker.FM Podcast Network. That’s Chris Garrett, our Chief Digital Officer. Chris, did you make it in?

Chris Garrett: I am the token geek today.

Robert Bruce: Token geek.

Brian Clark: You’re always the token geek.

Robert Bruce: That’s a good way to look at it.

Brian Clark: Actually, remember in Office Space when the one guy that they’re like, “Could you tell us what you do?” And he walks the plans to the engineers from the customers, and then it turns out he actually has his secretary do it and he doesn’t do anything.

Brian Clark: No, that’s not Garrett. Garrett wishes that were his job. It’s a little more complicated, though.

Chris Garrett: Yeah, right. That’s the dream.

Brian Clark: But he does translate for us quite well.

Robert Bruce: I don’t think there’s anything in this company that you don’t have your hands in, in some way. Right, Chris?

Chris Garrett: I just interfere in everybody else’s business.

Robert Bruce: Yeah, right. Hey real quick, how’s The Mainframe going over there? You and Tony Clark, our Chief Operating Officer, are co-hosting The Mainframe. How are things over there?

Chris Garrett: We’re having a lot of fun, and we’ve had some nice feedback. I’d like to unseat Mr. Damien, but we’re doing quite well.

Robert Bruce: Join the club.

Brian Clark: I know. That guy, he’s rogue.

Robert Bruce: You know, I was thinking, you do have direct access to the servers, or at least the folks that do, right?

Brian Clark: Wait a minute, Robert. Oh, you want to fix the stats. You don’t want to just kick him off. Actually, we could just kill his show, but I don’t think that would be in our best interest.

Robert Bruce: Delete. Well, for those of you who are fans of Chris, which are many, you should go over to Mainframe.FM. Check out what he and Tony are doing over there.

Chris, thanks for hanging out with us today. We’ve got some good questions for you, too. Like I said, we’re continuing this mini-series on the idea of membership sites.

Brian, you started last week with the general idea of this ‘logged in’ experience. One thing that struck me towards the end of that episode, you talked about the true nature of a site like Facebook. We think of it as a social media site, which it certainly is, social networking site. But you argue that the real nature of it is a membership site, which I’ve never really thought of before if I’m honest, but we opened up with this idea of the logged in experience. There are several aspects of that. Why don’t we do a quick little recap.

Brian Clark: So we talked about Facebook. Basically, you have to register to gain access. If you’re not logged in, your experience is not the same. So, in essence, it operates like a membership site even though it’s primarily a social network. I’ve actually got an even better example for you this week, which we’ll get to in a second, kind of tied into some recent news.

The basic premise, and this is something we acted on in 2013 when we shifted our email strategy, was that the advent and the mainstreaming of social media, the proliferation of apps, and certain sites that deliver premium content, whether paid or free, have transformed the way we think about the online experience. That really comes into this, whether you’re logged in or not. Whether you’re registered for access or you’re not. I think we did cover some of the psychological aspects of that. We can go fairly deep down that rabbit hole, but you get the idea that — what is it?

Fear of missing out is the dark side of social media. That you’re always worried something’s happening that’s cooler than what you’re doing. I think there is some aspect of that — this velvet rope syndrome — that when you interact with a site and you realize that there’s an experience waiting that requires registration, that is much more compelling than opt-in or, for most situations, just a newsletter.

There’s got to be more. We’ve known this for years with the whole ethical bribe, free e-book stuff that isn’t as effective anymore. I think things have shifted to a new level. Let me give you some examples about this that build on what we talked about last week. Membership sites have been around since the ’90s, started off on the seedier side of the Internet, and then slowly made themselves into a mainstream concept. I think that’s the important lesson here.

Why Big Companies Are Sick of Social Media

Brian Clark: I saw something really interesting from Forrester, who obviously reports on the enterprise level, that big companies have grown completely disenchanted with social media. Number one, I think it’s fair to say a lot of them took the wrong approach for about five to seven years there as far as trying to treat the outer fringes of the audience like they were in a ready-to-be-converted mode. As in, “Become our customer,” after you gave us a Facebook ‘like.’ Didn’t really work that way. That’s a very cold relationship. It still counts as part of the audience, but until you bring them in closer to you, you’re not going to get the kind of response you want.

Number two, of course, is that email is 40 times more effective for converting into sales than social media. That’s pretty huge right there, and we’ll talk a little bit more about that. We’ve got the Zuckerberg bait and switch. You’ve got to pay on Facebook to reach your audience. On Twitter, it’s not really that much better because not everyone’s paying attention at the right time. Unless you do a Guy Kawasaki and tweet out 15 times in repetition, which does work by the way, it’s still disenchanting.

So you’ve got these big brands who are going back old school — everything old is new again — with branded communities. ‘Community’ has been a buzzword on the Internet since the BBS days. It’s always been over-hyped, but these branded communities are essentially what we’re talking about here in the sense that they’re driving people back to their own sites. They’re getting them to register to participate. Usually there’s a form involved. There’s a Q&A function. There’s content. Actually, when you combine all three of them together, as this Forrester excerpt of the report reveals — we’ll link to that in the show notes — it goes beyond evangelism and advocacy into you can actually convert prospects into customers.

We certainly know that. When you bring them in at that level, they’ve come on the other side of the rope. You’re now able to communicate with them directly by email. It’s interesting to me, just as we’re starting to really hit on this change in the way a great website should work, that the enterprise level, which is usually forever behind the rest of us, they’re actually moving in this direction and having legitimate success. There’s more to this than just the scrappy small companies.

Robert Bruce: What does this mean to let’s not even mention the idea of ownership of the community itself. We all know you mentioned the Zuckerberg bait and switch.

Brian Clark: That’s the point.

Robert Bruce: Right.

Brian Clark: They’re completely frustrated, and I don’t blame them. We, of course, have been preaching this ad nauseam, but I think this is a good sign. Remember when Gary Vaynerchuk’s book came out and he really emphasized interaction at the social level. Really that’s kind of falling apart. I think there were some very smart people with some ideas that turned out not to be right. We have always been strong on home base. Own your property. Bring the audience to you. All of that. We stayed the course, but I’m feeling better that there’s some sanity returning to the world. Facebook’s going to take you for all you’re worth.

Robert Bruce: Garrett, what do you think of the enterprise waking up to this idea of owing their own and developing their own branded communities?

Chris Garrett: It’s like Brian just said about owning the real estate, owning the asset. When you own the real estate, then you control what that member sees. You can put nudges into taking actions. They might upgrade their account, or they might buy something from you, which you can’t do in Facebook as well. You could do some targeted ads, but you’re not in control of the experience as much as if you owned it. If you do that well, then the social proof and the other members will actually sell for you. You don’t even have to step in explicitly.

Brian Clark: Yeah, that’s a great point because Facebook benefits from the logged in experience, not you. They’re there. They have the user relationship. They’re logged in. They get to follow them all over the place, serve them targeted ads, and determine what they see in their news feed. You guys remember the psychological experiments they were basically performing on Facebook users without their knowledge. That was interesting.

Chris Garrett: Yep.

Brian Clark: Facebook owns that relationship. They’ve made that abundantly clear by saying, “You now get to pay us to reach that audience you built over here on our land.” Again, Chris is right because, when you own the property, there are all sorts of ways to heighten the experience that you can’t do otherwise.

A Major Content Acquisition, and What It Means for You

Robert Bruce: A very interesting purchase took place recently and that was LinkedIn acquiring Lynda.com, a massive education site. Let’s talk about that for a little bit, and also what it might mean for smaller organizations.

Brian Clark: Lynda.com has been a site that we have followed and admired since the beginning of Copyblogger. I’m pretty sure the early version of Teaching Sells pointed to Lynda as a great learning community. They just got so big. It’s amazing. Then, of course, what was the acquisition price? $1.5 billion? That’s a lot of money for a membership site, but that’s exactly what happened there.

This is going to become my new example of an overall logged in experience type play. Because think about it this way, LinkedIn has the Pulse service, which is freely available content. It started out in their Influencer program, and then they opened it up to others. So you have all this freely available content that’s being shared on LinkedIn, but also across the web. Then you have the original logged in experience, which is a business networking function combined with the 21st century resume, if you will. Again, you don’t get to do all that stuff until you register for access and log in.

Now there’s another component. Now, with the edition of Lynda, they have a paid business training and lifelong learning environment that complements. Something we’ve been talking about since 2007 is, as technology increases, as business models change, as the pace of everything intensifies, you’ve got to be constantly learning. So the reasoning given behind the acquisition of Lynda from LinkedIn was “always be learning,” which again, another play that we did in Teaching Sells a long time ago. This is a good thing because it legitimizes this type of non-university-backed online training because I don’t see any of the universities at the cutting edge.

It’s always been the practitioners, and that’s what Lynda latched onto. In a way, it continues to validate the people who want to make their own online courses, their own membership sites, because this is the way education happens. Therefore, building up your own authority as a subject matter expert or being able to produce sites that rely on the expertise of others, like Lynda does, that’s going to become a crucial opportunity. Lynda’s not going to extinguish all the training programs out there. We already know that today. I think it just legitimizes it.

The structure is what interests me. Freely available content, an initial free logged in experience leading to a paid logged in experience. That’s Copyblogger, MyCopyblogger, and Authority. It’s the exact model we’ve had in place for over two years now. Now, I’m not saying LinkedIn ripped us off. No. I doubt that very much. This is what’s happening. It’s not a Copyblogger thing. It’s a web thing. It’s an Internet thing, and it’s incredibly important. Chris, you’ve been around with us forever, both before you joined the company and then after, how do you see this all playing out?

Chris Garrett: I look at it as your career is the ultimate fear of missing out. If you see other people progressing in their careers past you, you’ve got to look at why they’re getting ahead. You’re going to look at the certifications, the training, the skills on their LinkedIn profile, and you’re going to want to upgrade. But you’re not going to go back to university. You’re going to tactically add those skills and that experience. I think it’s a really smart move, but it validates