Subtle Selling and Building a Community in Social Media with Gavin McGarry

In this Episode

• [01:26] – Gavin starts things off by talking about how to build a community on Facebook organically.
• [05:11] – We hear about the difference between Facebook pages and groups, and when it’s better to use one than the other.
• [07:07] – Stephan recently ran a 5-day challenge using a Facebook group, he explains.
• [07:42] – What is one of the most innovative ways in which Gavin has seen Facebook groups being used?
• [08:47] – Gavin explains the difference between secret groups and closed groups on Facebook. He and Stephan then talk about the potential different uses for the two types, and why secret groups may not be particularly useful.
• [12:42] – In response to Gavin’s mention of using Slack, Stephan reveals that he doesn’t use it much because he finds it to be a distraction. He and Gavin then talk about uninstalling social media apps.
• [15:18] – Stephan brings up the concept of willpower being a finite resource, and discusses how this relates to social media apps as well as the snacks that he keeps in the house.
• [18:13] – Gavin draws the conversation back to the addiction of social media, then debates with Stephan about the value of putting tempting things into people’s lives.
• [22:18] – Stephan takes a moment to encourage knowledge workers to cleanse their environments of the distractions that are designed to suck us in.
• [24:16] – A lot of people immediately assume that Gavin is always distracted because he works in social media, he explains. He then goes into depth in discussing social media across various generations and age groups.
• [30:40] – Gavin talks about how kids are using technology and tells a story about his one-year-old nephew, who was already addicted to iPhones.
• [32:22] – What does Gavin think about Snapchat, virtual reality, Snap Spectacles, and so on?
• [37:44] – A study showed that the brains of Millennials are wired completely differently, Gavin says, and explains how distractions are different across generations.
• [41:24] – Gavin relates what he has been saying about distractions to advertisements, specifically outdoor advertisements.
• [42:27] – Stephan talks about one of his favorite demonstrations of the power of augmented reality.
• [43:26] – Stephan shifts to discussing LinkedIn, which he admits can be boring if you’re using it in the traditional way. Gavin then explains what his problem with the site used to be, and why that has changed for him.
• [47:29] – Another secret about LinkedIn is that you can publish posts, which give you incredible visibility.
• [48:44] – What does Gavin think about LinkedIn groups now?
• [50:22] – Stephan talks about his experiences on Facebook, specifically that he’s impressed with closed groups that require an application to get in.
• [51:40] – We move into a lightning round of quick questions and answers. What are some best practice tips for videos?
• [53:13] – Should we care about WeChat, and be on it?
• [54:05] – What’s Gavin’s favorite relatively unknown Chrome extension?
• [55:59] – What does Gavin think is the biggest opportunity people miss when it comes to YouTube playlists?
• [57:16] – In terms of reach, does it matter whether you post from your phone, computer, Hootsuite, or others?
• [60:09] – How can people get in contact with Gavin to learn more or work with him?

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Transcript

It’s time to geek out on social media marketing. Hi, I’m your host, Stephan Spencer. This week’s guest is Gavin McGarry. He is the founder and president of Jumpwire Media, a social media agency that does community management for large entertainment brands and celebrities like Coca Cola, the BBC, Yahoo, and Katie Couric. His company was voted one of the top 10 most innovative companies in media by Fast Company magazine. Gavin, it’s great to have you on the show.

Thanks for having me. I’m excited to talk about what we’re going to talk about.

Let’s geek out. I want to talk about social media and how to make a big pile of money using it. Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and all that sort of stuff. Let’s start with Facebook. It seems like everybody is on Facebook. How do you build organic growth, because it’s easy to just shovel a bunch of money into the machine of Facebook advertising but what if you don’t have any advertising budget and you want to build a community? You want to build 1,000 true fans as Kevin Kelly calls it.

This is what a lot of people are trying to figure out. How to make money from social media? How can you do it? In… mile deep is really good if you have a niche that is really great. B2C plays are a little more difficult and more expensive on Facebook for example, but Facebook is probably the best tool out there in the social media world for just managing communities and being able to connect with people. Only about 8% to 9% of the people on it are fake, as we say, that they are not who they say are they are. They spend a lot of time cleaning that up both on Instagram and Facebook whereas you know, from the website side, you can have a lot of traffic come in there that bots and all sorts of things. For us, we really try and push a lot of our clients to social media just because the traffic is pretty real and the people are reaching through the glass and having to do things. When we look at Facebook, we look at engagement and that engagement, we can turn into the funnel, the sales funnel. The most important thing I think about Facebook is the not selling side. We call it subtle selling. You can call it all sorts of things that you want but this idea that as we move from traditional types of media: newspapers, radio, television, which are part of the interruption economy. I’m going to give you something but then I’m going to interrupt it and then I will tell you something that will pay for it and then I’m going to interrupt you again, whereas we move to the conversation economy where you still have ads but you have a little bit more control. As you’re going through your newsfeed, you’re actually able to scroll at different speeds. You’re not controlled by, for example, a commercial being inserted. These sorts of things are leading everyone who’s coming on Facebook to have a great experience, to having a good newsfeed experience which leads to that world of being able to monetize it. Facebook is only putting in, I think it’s two or three ads. They’ve got a serious problem with ad inventory being sold out and those sorts of things because they know that if they put too many ads in people’s newsfeeds, the get very upset, obviously, a lot of testing around it. The question is when you start to say how are you going to make a lot of money from this? There are the two key sides. There is the one side which is the paid ad model, which you go and put ads that say, “Hey, you don’t even really need a Facebook page.” You can put an ad on that says, “Hey, come to my website and buy my stuff.” You pay a certain amount. Apparently, Facebook ads can be more expensive than television. That I don’t think is true because you can buy Facebook ads for $20. But the idea that the amount is actually quite expensive, it can be very effective and you get lots of data back unlike television where you’re not really sure who’s seeing your ad. The other side of Facebook is the organic side, where we spend most of our time at Jumpwire building a brand page and then building that community. In America, we’re trying to get most of our clients to 1 million fans. Many of them are over 1 million fans but once you have 1 million fans, you’ve got something in which you can really start to leverage and if you don’t sell too hard, don’t use the key selling words like on sale, or coupon, or anything like that, Facebook will give you a lot of leeway. If you’re creating a lot of great content, original content, and posting at least three times a day and it’s good strong content or sharing things from around the web and you’re not pointing people off Facebook, those key things, you’ll have a lot of engagement. From there, you can direct people to all sorts of place.

How does that fit with the strategy of setting up a Facebook group? I know there are different types of groups, there’s secret groups, closed groups, etc. Differentiate those two worlds, your Facebook page and your Facebook group. When is one more appropriate than the other?

It’s actually been tested for about six months and about a month ago they have now allowed groups outside of your personal profile. Generally, on your personal profile, you could set up a group and you could have people come and be a part of that group. Pages can actually create their own groups. Groups are an interesting area right now. They’re developing very quickly. I think it’s mostly to combat a lot of these private social networks that are setting up. A lot of people are setting up private groups and that’s where they’re spending a lot of their time. WhatsApp is a perfect example of that. Many, many people have WhatsApp groups over in Europe. These groups are essentially people in a small community. Facebook Messenger, the same sort of thing where you can have these small contained areas. The whole idea around groups is that for the most part, there’s a little bit more control. With a Facebook page, anyone can like your page for the most part. A group is a much more controlled Facebook page, in our opinion. You can do many of the things that you can do on a page and you can do a few more. The great thing about groups is you can have polls, which you don’t have on a Facebook page. It just allows you to have a little bit more control over how people are communicating in an environment. The tools that come with the Facebook page are actually quite strong so we say to people, “Don’t shy away from using a page.” But generally, what we do is we’ll create a page. We get 25,000 people on that page and then we will take a portion of those people from the page, the most highly engaged people and we’ll move them to a group of maybe 1,200 that we can use to ask questions, the key VIP users. That’s how we’re sort of using groups now. There are lots of ways in which people are using them. I’ve heard all sorts of things but for the most part, we just find it as a private area in which you can have a controlled environment that you can regulate a little bit more. People don’t feel they’re putting everything out into the real world.

I just ran a five-day SEO challenge and used the Facebook group as the platform for people to check in and share their progress, their questions, post the evidence that they did the challenge each day. It was very active. We just did this last week. I had a community go through and do five days of challenges. One day after the next. That was a very good use of a Facebook group. What would be one of the most innovative ways that you’ve seen Facebook groups being used?

Great question. I have to admit that when we use groups, we use them in a way as a sort of a focus group area in which people can feel comfortable to share things with people that they know and they know most of the people in it or they know of it. I find it when groups get bigger then people aren’t sure who’s on it, that’s when groups start to collapse and that’s when you need to move to a page. But the most innovative way, I don’t actually have one other than just using them as a focus group, focus testing area. It sounds like what you were doing was pretty innovative. That’s what groups are for, is to have a community of people so yeah, I’m sorry I don’t have a good answer on that one.

It’s okay. We’ll just use my example of the five-day challenge. There are multiple types of groups. There are secret groups. There are closed groups. Do you mind to differentiate the difference?

On the secret group side, not searchable. You have to be invited to it. Closed groups, you have to apply for them. I guess a lot of it has to do with search: where you can find the group, how you can find the group. The whole idea around the private networks when you look at secret on the secret side of it. I, to tell you the truth, never really understood the idea of the super top secret groups, why you would need it. I don’t think many people are searching for particular groups. If you were to make a group that people were to find for example, they wouldn’t be able to get into it because most people are making closed groups. I think the different levels of groups, the only one I don’t understand, maybe you have some more insight into it, is the super secret group. But because Facebook still tracks it. If it was a secret group for me, is that everything inside that group would be completely anonymous and no one would know what’s going on but that apparently is not the case.

Kind of like the dark web or something, right?

Yeah. It’s there, people know it but I’m like, “It’s okay.” Why do they have to be super secret? We use groups but we’re not sophisticated group users. It’s not our key area. We spend a lot of time on the pages and making sure they’re optimized in an organic area. I don’t have a great answer but there are a few things that I question about groups. I will say that we are using groups more and more. I think that every business should absolutely have a group. The other side of groups is that they have tools that they don’t have on pages. That is the polls. The polls are really great. I’m sure you use them on the weekend with everyone being able to throw a quick poll in there and say, “Hey, what do you guys think about this?” People respond. In really active groups, it’s a great way to do that.

For sure. I know a number of podcast shows have closed groups. I don’t really know if any of them have secret groups. I guess a secret group would be more appropriate for maybe masterminds where you’re spending a lot of money to be in this mastermind group and they don’t want anybody to even see that there’s a group in the search results, perhaps. I don’t know. I agree with you that the point of a secret group doesn’t really make a whole lot of sense. If you can’t see the content inside the group anyways but it shows up in the search results, so what?

I think it’s the other way around. I think that it doesn’t show up in the search results but you can see the content inside. But you have to be invited to the secret group. The thing that I don’t really understand is from the secret standpoint is that it’s still searchable by Facebook. Facebook is still getting the data inside the group. I think that mostly, people are using secret groups or my friends that are using them, it’s just that they’re completely hidden. You’ll never be able to find them and there’s no way to search for them at all. Facebook, most of it, for us, it’s an oxymoron because Facebook search is still so bad that it doesn’t matter even if I’ve been searching for groups that I know I can’t find them. Someone has to actually send me the group. But I have noticed a real increase in group use across the board. We use Slack as our group. We have a private social network in which people can pay to be a part of. That, sort of our Jumpwire Academy, you have to pay to get into that group, a monthly fee. That’s all done on Slack and completely removed from anywhere. We have just more control and more data. I don’t find Facebook groups has enough data for us but they are going to be offering a subscription portion of that. I think that’s where they’re taking it. That’s where they wanted to take it, to the Slack side. But we just find Slack is more versatile and allows us to be a little bit more nimble.

I don’t even use Slack. I have it but I don’t turn it on because it’s just so noisy. My team uses it. I don’t use it because it’s just a huge distraction and time suck. There are some groups that I’m a part of like Podcaster Society where they mostly communicate through Slack. I guess I’m going to miss out. Maybe I’m…but I value my time way too much and anything that’s going to distract me, I even uninstalled Facebook from my phone. I only install it when I need to do a Facebook Live and then I immediately uninstall it again so I don’t get the temptation to when I’m standing in line just veg out and scroll through the newsfeed.

You’re the second person who I would say arguably is an intelligent person. You’re the second relatively intelligent person that I met that does that. I’ve got a friend that installs his Instagram when he goes to work because he has a job in which he has a little bit of down time and stuff like that and he wants to look at Instagram. But as soon as he gets in the car to go home, he deletes it, every night. There’s no temptation for him to look at it and be distracted by it at home because he doesn’t want to be sitting there vegging out on it. Both of you are men. I would say that it’s a very interesting behaviour because it says a few things. The first question I ask is you don’t have enough self will to stop yourself from opening an app?

It’s not like that at all.

But that’s the question I would ask. I’m like, “Really? You can’t stop yourself from opening an app.” Maybe this is a good discussion to have because I’m extremely curious because I asked him the same question. I’m like, “What? You can’t not open the Instagram app? Why would you need to delete it? It just sits on your phone. It doesn’t tell you anything if you turn off all the notifications.” If Slack is really distracting you, it maybe from my standpoint to give a little bit of feedback, is that you’re not using the notifications properly. Slack has a very, very sophisticated notification system. I can only see things in a channel that I put in certain parameters around. That’s the only time I’ll ever get an alert. Otherwise, I never see anything.  Actually, my Slack is quite quiet most of the time. Why delete it if you’re worried about opening it? I’m very curious.

Okay. There is this concept of willpower being a finite resource and when you optimize your environment, you remove the distractions and you remove the temptations and thus, you don’t waste any of that very important resource of willpower on really stupid things. I don’t have cookies in the house. I don’t have candy or anything like that. I’m very strict on sugar. But even before that, a couple of years ago, when I went off of sugar and I’ve been off of it, I would still, even before that, not have a lot of junk food in the house because it wastes your willpower.

How much willpower do you have then? If it’s a finite resource, how do you find out the amount of willpower, because I’m assuming it’s different for each person, that you have? Is it based on like a 24 hour period? What do they measure it in terms of?

The research says that willpower is at its maximum when you wake up in the morning and it’s depleted the most by the end of the day. That’s why if you let’s say have some Oreos in the house, by the end of the day, you’re probably going to succumb to having some Oreos. If you’ve been really good about staying away from the Oreos all day but you know they’re in the cupboard, you’re just eating away at your willpower and then you’re not using that willpower for really important stuff like starting that project that you keep procrastinating that’s going to make a big difference in your career.

Oh, okay, okay. It’s not willpower staying away from the Oreos or, “Okay, I’m going to stay away from the Oreos.” Or “I’m staying away from the cocaine that I don’t have in my house but I could go out and find a dealer to get.” What you’re saying is it also works the other way around, is that willpower is a plus minus. Either you use up your willpower to stay away from the Oreos and finally you break it down so each time you think about the Oreos, that depletes a little bit of your willpower. But what you’re saying is that if you don’t have the Oreos in the house, you can’t get them. You have to go down the street to get those things. Then that kicks it away from being willpower you’re using up. That willpower can go the go the plus way, which is like the willpower to start on a new project. If you deplete on the Oreos, you won’t have to start on the new project.

Exactly.

Interesting. Do they have any idea like how do you measure? They say at the end of the day, you have less of it but where is the benchmark?

That is a great question. I haven’t really dug deep into this. I know there’s a book all about willpower and I just heard all about this in a talk at a mastermind. I’m like, “Wow. That makes a whole ton of sense.” This was years ago, ironically, in a secret society that I’m in, that isn’t so secret because I actually have a website.

Because I think what’s interesting about bringing it back to the Facebook app, is that you’re so worried. It’s so addictive. Let’s talk about the addiction of social media because it’s so addictive that you will delete the app so that there’s no way you could actually sit down with your phone and open an app. You actually delete the app. To me, that is such an interesting behaviour, is that there’s still something that you want to use it for and you will download and install it. If I, in my little world, have two people that are doing the same thing, this must be rampant. I wonder what Facebook thinks because they see all these download, upload, download, upload. Sometimes, people are doing it a couple of times a day. I know lots of people are deleting apps all the time just to keep them off it like deleting Tinder or deleting some other type of dating app. It’s interesting from a social behaviour perspective because you’ve got this information that’s available that you’re saying, “Well no, I didn’t see that.” Yet the algorithms are spending so much time, the AI is trying to make your Facebook so specific to you so that when you open the app, you see things that you want to engage with. That it’s actually working. It’s actually backfiring as Facebook because you’re deleting the app. You’re finding so much stuff you want to engage with. That is amazing to me.

It’s not that I can’t say no or whatever. It’s simplifying the environment. If you have kids and you have a candy jar in the house and they can see that candy jar, why? Why would you subject yourself to that suffering, that abuse? They are going to be hammering you nonstop. Can I have a candy? Can I have a candy? Can I have a candy?

I totally get it but the issue is that then you’re never going to teach your kids that they can’t. Because same thing with TVs, and iPads, and iPhones. It’s relentless. You just end up cleaning your house of everything but books because you want them to read books. That to me, does not say that, to be the devil’s advocate, is that I want to put more things that tempt people.

You definitely are the devil’s advocate. Let’s pass out the cocaine.

No. Listen. If you know something about your personality, if you have an addictive personality, which I have some friends who have addictive personality, their scenario is saying, “No, no, I got to stay away from all those sorts of things. I don’t want to be a part of all this.” But if you got a candy jar in your house, yeah, just don’t bring the Oreo cookies into the house, don’t bring the candy into the house and the kids won’t have access to it, then they never have it. That’s what happened to me. My parents were very hippy dippy. We never had anything around the world but you know what? Kids are smarter than you. I figured it out. I would go to my friend’s house and have way more junk food and way more access to candy that my parents couldn’t control. The other way around, it’s like parents who have their kids when they’re 16, they’re saying, “Yeah, buy them beer because I want them to drink at home. I don’t want them to be out somewhere where I can’t control the environment.” It’s interesting to bring it back to apps, is that the apps at this point where they’re so addictive that people are deleting them and that they are such a time suck and I would agree. It sort of bags the question like what’s next? I have talked to so many people in their 30’s and 40’s, who are doing less social media. Even myself personally, I do a lot less social media. The way that I look at social media and the way I engage with it, it’s just interesting how it’s morphing at such an incredibly fast rate. The human behaviours of how we interact with things and how people are making changes in their world and how social media is fitting into it is absolutely fascinating.

I agree on that. I think I would encourage anybody who’s a knowledge worker, who works in social media, works in internet marketing to cleanse their environment of the distractions that are designed to suck us in. The best engineers of casinos and so forth are working at Facebook, are working at Snapchat, and at Twitter and so forth so that they can suck you in. That just destroys your ability to do deep work. Are you familiar with the book Deep Work by Cal Newport?

Yes, I am.

In fact, listeners, you got to check out episode number 46 of my other show, Get Yourself Optimized because I interviewed Cal Newport on his book Deep Work. It is an amazing, transformational episode. If you employ Deep Work into your work environment, your business, your life, you will get so much more done and it will be profound work. It’s amazing. Just simplifying the environment and removing distractions and so forth is just the tiniest little sliver of the big picture of creating a Deep Work environment. There’s this thing called attention residue that happens when you get distracted, your work gets disrupted by a text message or an email or whatever it is, a Facebook message, you have lost about 20 to 25 minutes. This is research. This is science. You have lost about 20 to 25 minutes of productivity because part of your brain is still occupied on that thing that you checked for 10 seconds because it’s an unresolved loop that you are not able to complete and now, you’re halfway gone out of the flow from working on whatever article you are writing or whatever so Deep Work is the difference maker.

What’s interesting is a lot of people immediately, because I work in social media and I run a social media company, they immediately think that I’m always distracted. I look at them and I’m like, “Are you kidding me? I work in social media. I know how to regulate it. I know how to spend the time on it but I also know how to use the technology to make sure that it’s actually doing what I want it to do.” I will sit in meetings all the time and there will be no distractions. While people are checking their phones and looking at text messages and they’ve got their watch going off and all that sort of stuff. That never works for me because the thing is that I think a lot of people are not understanding how to make the technology for them. That is the big chasm right now. There are people who understand the tech enough to make it work for them and then there are the people who don’t understand it. You’re right. Distractions at Jumpwire, we spend a lot of time working with our teams to make sure they’re not distracted. It’s actually the top thing on my big to-do list right now, which is this whole idea of how do I eliminate as much distraction as possible? How do I get rid of as many meetings as possible? How do we make sure that people can snooze their Slack and have enough time to do that really, really deep focus work? I agree with you. I think that in today’s world, I think a lot of people, especially older people who knew a world before the phones that we currently have, realize that these kids are growing up in a world where they’re so distracted all the time. They’re actually never thinking very deeply and that the little pathways in their brain are never getting to that point where they can actually do something really deeply.

The dopamine hits that you get constantly just by flipping through things on your phone and checking stuff on your computer and everything, it really is a poor substitute for the serotonin hit that you would get from completing something really meaningful or having a powerful human connection. Who knows where we’re heading in terms of virtual reality and augmented reality and how that’s going to change the way our brains work, and not for the better probably.

People are going to listen to this podcast and like two old guys, “Get off my lawn, kids. How did you enter? What’s going on?” A lot of the people who work for me are in their 20’s and I watch them. It’s very interesting to see because, my brain is an older person, for me, I’m in my 40’s so it’s over. Generally, men, we didn’t last past 48. Those were the good old days. 48 was old back 10,000, 100,000 years ago. For us, everyday, I get past 48 or 49, I’m probably, “Yay! I’m winning.” What’s interesting is that you see how kids are working with things. I think it’s really important that the new nimble brains, the way that they’re absorbing information, I have to change the way I do things all the time. Like for the longest time, I remember, I couldn’t understand how kids were typing because, this is like maybe five years ago when the first Apple phone came out, I remember I always used to turn my phone on the side because I could see better. You never typed with your phone straight up and down. You would put it on a horizontal and use the wider keyboard so that you could type away and then I always notice these kids just tapping away and then I realized that I wasn’t using my predictive text board enough. This was a big change for me and my brain. Because I was older, I was thinking about every letter that I typed and because I’ve done some research on the predictive text, I realized I’ve been doing it all wrong, is that you don’t think about the letter that you’re typing, you think about the word and just type and your brain figures it out. It took me about a week to do this but I started not thinking about what I was typing anymore. I just typed what the words were and I said, “Okay, I’m not going to type a, b, c, d. I just type the words.” I was able to do it on the vertical and at double the rate that I’d already been doing because I’d move from a BlackBerry to an iPhone. Remember all those people that got trapped in BlackBerry? “I’m still using my BlackBerry because I love the keyboard.” I remember going from Blackberry to iPhone and I’m like, “God, this is really hard.” But I was watching all these kids who never had BlackBerry and they crushing it because they’d never known a world before BlackBerry. What’s the difference? I think that is a very interesting discussion. I’m really watching how these kids interact with Instagram and what they do on Instagram and what they say back to each other in the conversations they’re having because it’s how their brains are dealing with this world in which they’re rated constantly. I know some of my nieces and nephews. If they don’t get 250 likes, hearts, or favourites on a particular Instagram post, they delete it immediately like, “That wasn’t a very good post. I guess no one liked it.”

That’s so weird.

Yeah, but the thing is This American Life did a really great piece about how millennials or even younger, the plurals, or generation Z are dealing with social media and what it means. They will have these groups. Especially, women, like girls who are using the social media, they’ll put something up. How long a person takes to respond, what they say, what they don’t say, what emojis, it’s so subtle and deep and rich. It blew my mind because for me, it’s just like, “We’re texting back and forth.” But now, when you start looking at that level, especially when you look at people who are dating, they’re like, “Why didn’t this guy respond to me? What the heck?” I’ve talked with friends, my friends who are girls, who are on the dating scene, very interesting to see about how they’re using social media in dating. Because there are only a few things that I’m tracking all the time: dating, obviously music, and then anything that’s going on in the kids environment, anything with Kids TV or kids apps. Because how kids are using the technology and social media for example, is extremely exciting. How they do things, even though they probably shouldn’t be using it but you can see with the one year old, my one year old nephew, they had to literally remove all the iPhones from the house, as you talk about sugar, he was so addicted. When you pulled one out, he could not focus on anything else but the iPhone because he’d seen it only two or three times and he was already addicted to it. The fact that the moving things are on it. This is what we’re dealing with. I guess you’re right. This idea of the iPhone, our phones are the cigarettes of the 21st century. Are we going to have a situation where we should be limiting and shutting off phones? But then, you start getting to this world of communication. If cigarettes were something that someone could communicate through, would we still be smoking? Probably.

[bctt tweet=”If cigarettes were something that someone could communicate through, would we still be smoking? Probably.” username=”mktg_speak”]

Crazy, crazy world. Okay. Let’s go back to this idea of AR, augmented reality and VR, virtual reality and Snapchat. You know, you got those glasses and who knows what they’re going to come up with. The glass is right now is pretty dumb. They just take photos, looked kind of silly with them on as well, I think but just my opinion. What do you think about Snapchat and just Snap as a company? Are they dead in the water? Is Facebook/Instagram destroying them? Do those glasses have a real value that they’re providing? Are they doing anything in the virtual reality or the augmented reality space that looks interesting?

I am going to go with everyone else on this and I think VR, virtual reality is really great. Numbers like 30% of the people who have put on the glasses are nauseous or get sick is a serious problem. I’ve been to a couple of VR conferences and stood up and asked a question and been basically shouted down, “You don’t understand them.” I’m like, “Why are my friends who have put them on nauseous?” Once they figure that out, which they will, they’ve got a bunch of different glasses that are coming out that apparently have higher refresh rates and have better technology that you won’t get sick. It looks the same to the real world so your body doesn’t get nauseous, etc. That’s a problem they got to fix. I think VR is great for gaming. I’ve used it for gaming and it’s phenomenal. I don’t think it’s great for much else. Television, I’ve seen some TV shows on it, they’ve been really compelling being in areas you wouldn’t be actually a part of, be able to be in. I think there is uses for VR. I think it’s going to be a bit 3D TV. I think it’s going to be awhile before there’s going to be very specific ideas, very specific uses. Augmented Reality, I’m very bullish on and I think a lot of people are as well too. Being able to use a phone, to open your phone, and be able to decide where and how long the couch that you want to buy and I guess, online there’s this specific company that you can order couches by the inch. You measure the area and then they build the couch exactly to the inch. What you do now is you take this AR app and you put it over the space and it measures the space and you send that to them and then they send you something to look at. AR is definitely going to change the way we do things in everyday life and I think people will be using it more and more and more. When we talk about Snapchat, I think Snapchat, I’m on the fence always because I’m never sure what they’re going to release. I think they’re done and I think it’s over for Snapchat mostly because we deal with a lot of influencers who are Snapchat influencers and are now, uh-oh, Instagram influencers. Snapchat has become a messaging platform. Once you become a messaging platform, you are done. It is over for you. Microsoft tried to monetize email for many years. No one has ever been able to monetize messaging, no, that may change. Arguably, Messenger by Facebook could possibly be something they’re going to monetize. They’re trying to do that with the chat bots but right now I think the Snapchat has moved away from being the destructor of television and has moved very much into the space of just playing messaging. If I wanted to get a hold of my nieces and nephews, I message them on Snapchat. I know they’re going to be there but I don’t watch their stories. I noticed they’re not posting nearly as many stories on it. All my friends, everyone I know, is on Instagram. From my nieces right the way up to my grandmother, they are all on Instagram and they don’t spend any time on Snapchat. The interesting thing about Snapchat that everyone out there in podcast land should really try is open up Snapchat, go to the main screen because the camera comes up immediately and pinch your fingers together. When you pinch your fingers together, you will see the Snapchat map popup and they’ll ask if they want you to show your location. You’ll say yes or no. I would say yes. Say that you just want your friends to see it, not the public, and then look at the maps around the world and you can see where all your friends are in real time right down to the exact point. This is something that is very interesting. Location based social media has always been a big deal but to know where your friends are, and you can actually decide that you only want to let you bffs, your top three friends know exactly where you are all the time. For 13 or 14 year old girls and boys, this will be a huge deal. This is the same as I would argue as having your first kiss. If you got a boy in your life and you’re a girl and you’re on Snapchat and they say, not that they’re messaging you because they already got to be doing that, but if they say hey, can I see your location? That is huge deal because they’re going to know where you are all the time and they can follow you around and they can see what you’re doing. If you block them, that’s a serious deal. Right now, blocking is a big deal. If someone doesn’t like me, I have a locked Instagram account because I have my nieces and nephews and stuff like that. But if someone asks to be a part of my Instagram and I let them in, but then for some reason I maybe letting the wrong person or I didn’t think it was the right thing and I want to block them. Blocking is a big deal and you don’t know that the other person has blocked you unless you use a third party app to determine who’s blocked you and unsubscribed to you. I know there are women in my office who live on this app. They want to know who’s liked them, who’s blocked them. They are obsessed with it all the time. I think what’s interesting about what Snapchat is doing, and when you look at AR and VR and you look at how this is all coming together, I think we’ve got a lot more things that we need to work out in terms of the behavior of how we extend the conversation to these moments in time. What you’re saying around the fact that you delete your Facebook app, I think it’s good and it’s a way you’re dealing with distractions and it’s clear your time is very, very valuable. What’s interesting is that they did the Oxford study where they showed that the millennial or this kids that are five years ago were in their teens, their brains are wired completely differently. We have to take into account that they may not get distracted at the level that we get distracted and they may be able to handle more things. There’s a lot of people out there that say, you can’t multi task and arguably for me, because I am a deep thinker and I grew up with a world without these devices in it, I never really learned, my brain is still old, I never really learned how to deal with multiple inputs coming at me from hundreds of miles an hour. I just never had to deal with that. I could usually see everything around me but it wasn’t like there were 300 dogs coming at me every 2 minutes and I had to decide to make a decision to push them out of the way. That’s what a phone is. When you open your phone, you are making hundreds of decision in seconds. You’re like, “Okay, I’m going to open my email app. It looks like I got three new Facebook messages. Oh, looks like my daily mail or my BBC app has got a few things, I should probably check the news. Oh there’s Snapchat, there’s something there. Oh, I noticed over there, oh there’s an alert there. What should I open first?” And yet, as you do it more, you get better at it. For me, I don’t have the same problem that you do around Facebook. For me, my Facebook sits there until I open it. I turned off all the notification. I can’t even tell if someone’s pinged me or not. However, I do turn on my lock screen notifications around Messenger because if someone messaged me, I want to actually see it. I want to know that someone messaged me because there maybe someone I can respond back quickly to. Is it a distraction? Yes. But if I turn my phone face down, I don’t see it because I don’t have any alerts on my phone. I have no buzzing. I turn that off from my Apple watch, same sort of thing. It’s only screen alerts. If I’m in a meeting and my phone is face up, that’s me, I’m an idiot. I just turn it over and it does distract me that does take me out of my thoughts but the issue is again, I’m using the technology to integrate more with my world, to understand. What I’m trying to learn or what I’m trying to get better at is I’m trying to get better at taking the very martial arts. You know how when you’re doing martial arts, they say use their own power against them.

Aikido them essentially.

Yup. Aikido them. You grab their fist and you take that and you use that against them. The same thing could be said about mobile phones and all the information that’s coming out there. I look at this in the real world as if it was things flying out of my phone. When I started thinking about it like that I’m like, “Okay, there are certain things I’m going to let dodge and go by and there are certain things I’m going to catch and there are things where I’m going to be pushing up or down.” All that sort of stuff. But at the same time, I’m controlling the environment. I control it, not the media, not the technology. I think that once people make that shift in their head, that they’re like I’m in control, things settle down. But most people, I would argue, don’t understand how to control the technology. The notifications are still extremely cumbersome on iPhone. For me to set up my notifications the way I wanted them, took a long time. Now, it’s a little bit easier but it did take a long time. What did I want on, what did I want off, which do I want to alert me, what I do I want on my lock screen blah, blah, blah. But once you get that figured out and it works out, you start to take control of the environment. What I would say to people out in podcast land is that you can take control of your environment if you want to but you have to step forward and do it. Because that’s what’s going to happen with AR and VR, this stuff is not stopping. We’re going to have constant distractions. Same issue we have also around advertising. There are some places, I mean I’m Canadian, you can hear my accent, but there are places in Canada where they’ve taken down all of the outdoor advertising. There are four cities in Europe that have removed outdoor advertising and it is changing the environment. That is a massive distraction. A giant billboard sitting in the thing, people are distracted by it. I’m not sure on this one, but I believe there was research around billboard, the accident levels around billboards on major highway areas where there was a billboard were much higher than stretches without billboards. Does that make sense? I think this idea around distractions is important but I think at the same time, we need to have a deeper conversation about how the human brain can do anything. How you deal with distraction and you get used to tuning it out and how you control that environment.

One of my favorite demonstrations of the power of Augmented Reality is a video called Hyper-Reality on Vimeo. Have you seen that one?

No, I haven’t.

Oh, it’s powerful. It’s so, so cool. It’s got this whole storyline to it. This lady is in the grocery store interacting with the virtual characters that are sitting on her shopping cart. She’s pushing it through the grocery store. I won’t spoil the surprise on what happens. Let’s just say that there’s a hacking incident. It’s like, “Whoa, that’s a scary, scary world.” Definitely have a watch of that video. It’s really, really cool.

What was it called again?

Hyper-Reality. I’ll share the link for our listeners and I’ll share it with you too, Gavin, after we finish the recording. Onto other types of social platforms, let’s move into LinkedIn and what that could be used for. That’s a pretty boring social network if you’re using it in the traditional way, it’s essentially a big database of people’s CVs or resumes and that’s a terrible misuse and misunderstanding of the platform. LinkedIn has LinkedIn polls, it has groups. It has a newsfeed and people who get LinkedIn can really make a lot of money off of it. You can even do outreach to the people that are your connections on LinkedIn and really build your business through using the equivalent of nine word emails but it’s social media outreach through LinkedIn, messages, there are whole training programs on how to do that, how to make money off of your LinkedIn connections, getting new clients and so forth. Let’s talk about LinkedIn. What are you most bullish about there and where do you think people are not getting it?

LinkedIn always had a lot of problems for me because nothing ever worked on the platform. It was basically a giant resume service. That has changed considerably. I think that if you are in the business community, you need to have a strong LinkedIn profile, you need to be Googling what is a good LinkedIn profile, you need to fill out your profile well, you need to be using keywords to do that, you need to be updating it on a regular basis, you need to, if you are a male, have a photo that does not look into the camera, if you are a female, you need to have a photo that looks into the camera. They’ve noticed on LinkedIn and on other networks that when men look into the cameras, it’s too alpha. So look off, it’ll help you. That’s my pro tip for today. But LinkedIn overall is becoming an extremely powerful social network especially for getting jobs, or securing jobs, or building your network. I would say that if you can, do not accept every request. I don’t accept every request. I have to have met the person in person. I have to have shaken their hand. It was always what I did and I probably have, I would imagine like 4,000 contacts. Over the 10 years that I have been on LinkedIn, I’ve only ever done that and I would imagine there is probably a few months before I let in a few people. My LinkedIn is very robust and rich. Generally, I know all the persons or I feel like I met them and at some point I can find them. I would say that LinkedIn is a really important social network to spend time especially if you’re in the B2B business. You need to be cultivating it. You should have a company page for sure, a lot people don’t have them set up. You can a company page, very easy to do. You should make sure that each person that comes and joins your organization as an employee adds you to their LinkedIn and connects with your company page. People use LinkedIn to trust you. I was recently hiring someone and they did not have a LinkedIn profile. They almost didn’t get the job. I gave them benefit of the doubt and I called her and I said, “Listen, I don’t know how to say this but you don’t have a LinkedIn profile. I don’t know what to do.” She said she’s been stalked recently and she’s taken it down which I totally understand. I said, “Well, it’s doing you a significant disservice because no one can find you and I was comparing you against someone else and I almost gave the job to someone else because I didn’t trust you.” This whole level of trust online, it’s very interesting how it’s morphing and we spend most of our time at Jumpwire building communities and communities are built on trust. We want to trust that the people in there are real people, we want to trust that the people are going to abide by certain law, certain rules. LinkedIn is a very important place to build trust for your business. If you’re independently wealthy and never need to work, don’t worry about LinkedIn, just have a nice photo and do what you need to do. If not, and you’re building a business, the other little secret is that inside LinkedIn, you have a couple of different things you can do and one of them is to publish a post. It’s not a post like a little status update, it’s actually published almost like a blog post to LinkedIn’s publishing network. It’s incredible how much visibility those things get. There’s a lot of people coming to LinkedIn right now. There’s a stampede because people are realizing, “Wow, a lot of people are seeing my stuff on LinkedIn now.” Because you’re used to post things on LinkedIn and it would hit crickets. No one would respond, no one would like it. Now I post things and status updates on LinkedIn and I am shocked at how many people respond, how many people like it, where it gets shared to. I think that LinkedIn is an extremely important part of any business owner or anyone who is in the business community to have that. There’s lots of best practices out there so definitely Google that.

It used to be that LinkedIn groups was a junkyard of garbage and things seemed to be a bit better now. Do you think LinkedIn groups are legit now or still stay away from it and just focus on Facebook groups?

I think groups in general are difficult. I think that people were using old techniques inside LinkedIn groups, inside Facebook groups. You’d invite someone in a group and they immediately spam the whole group like, “Oh, buy this from me. Get this from me.” I think people are becoming more sophisticated and more importantly, the tools are better so you can ban people who start selling right away. That’s important. The main thing that I would say is that if you’re going into groups, I tell all of our clients, it’s like you’re walking into a room of a real people. Think of it that way, don’t think of it as a like digital screen, think of it as a real group. If you walked in there with a giant billboard over your head with blinking lights that said, “Buy my service.” You didn’t know anyone. How many you think are going to come up and say hi? Zero. Add something to the group. Do something that’s going to help people out. I think that that’s why LinkedIn groups is getting a bit better. I think they’re policing it a bit more. A lot of people with the whole Reddit issue, people learn a lot from how Reddit polices their groups, they have moderators and I think you need to make sure you’re going to group with the good moderator. If the moderator isn’t a good group moderator, you’ll have a bad group. People will just do whatever they want. I think from my experience from the groups I’m in to LinkedIn, I think they’re marginally better. I don’t think that they’re a lot better but I think that groups over all across the entire social media space are becoming a good place to spend time. If you get into the right groups, you get invited to the right groups, you can be somewhere where you can get some really valuable information.

Yup. I agree and I’m a member of a bunch of different groups on Facebook, not so many on LinkedIn. But on Facebook, and I’m really impressed by those groups. The close groups where there’s an application process where there’s a form, you have to fill out and say here is how I heard about this group and here are my biggest challenges, whatever the questions were that they asked, I have to answer in order to apply to get in the group. Very smart. I think that’s a very effective thing that you could do. Once you identify the biggest challenge that the person is having in their business, in the particular niche or industry that you’re serving, then you can stretch the gap between where they are now and where they would like to be and how are you going to find out where that gap is unless you ask, what’s your biggest challenge and where do you want to be? If I could wave the magic wand. Very, very smart use of Facebook groups to just ask those powerful questions. Let’s wrap up here with a lightning round because I know we’re getting close to time here and I want to just cram in a bunch of stuff. Really, really fast, can you give me best practices on videos? On Facebook, YouTube, what are your best practice tips for video?

Video on Facebook under 10 seconds, under 15 seconds, that first 3 seconds must be clear and have a face in it. Nothing on the bottom, no cut, no text, no anything. It’s got to be very, very clean three seconds. More than 15 seconds for ads, for Facebook video ads, is probably a waste of money and time. Generally, things on Facebook are people, if it’s good content, they will watch long content. Don’t be afraid to put up half hour shows or half hour things like that. It doesn’t all have to be under three minute content. For YouTube, that is a very sophisticated area, there is a lot of tools but what I would say is that it’s essentially based on creators. For Facebook, you can have basically brand messages. It’s better for traditional television advertising tech things. But on YouTube, the best results you will get if there is a personality who’s in the front of the camera. If you have a brand, I would get someone to host your particular brand page. YouTube is extremely difficult to get any traction on if you just put something up, you actually have to work it. PewDiePie, who’s the number one YouTuber, he responded. Most people forget this, that when he first started out, he absolutely responded to every single comment, over 5,000.

Yeah. And he’s made a fortune, fortune off of YouTube. Crazy. Next, WeChat. Should we care? What should we do with that if it’s important?

Absolutely need to be on it. If you have friends over in Asia, you will find, as I do, is that that’s where is spend most of the time chatting with them. There seems to be something interesting happening around the world in terms of messaging services. Snapchat being for people under 15. WhatsApp being for people in Europe. WeChat being basically very Asian based. Line for Japan. In North America, we have a couple but it’s generally Messenger and then we have texting and group texting. That seems to be what’s flashing out. I would get on WeChat, trying to find a friend, a pen pal over in Asia and spend some time on it. Extremely powerful, it’s where Mark Zuckerberg is stealing everything for Facebook Messenger.

Awesome. What’s your favourite chrome extension for something that is not well known? Like some sort of capability that most people aren’t aware of.

The best chrome extension out there is called The Great Suspender. It suspends all your tabs so they no longer pool on your CPU. Your computer will jump in speed about 100% as soon as you put this in. Once a tab has been opened for over a minute and you haven’t been on that tab, it suspends it, keeps everything exactly the same. All you have to do is click back and it turns back on and then it’s pooling from the CPU or it’s pooling in the background. This is probably the number one thing you’re first asked to download when you come to Jumpwire. We run on chrome because it increases efficiency and speed for the people who work for us.

Awesome. I know that you told me before that there’s another great chrome extension called Email Hunter. Do you want to mention that one too?

We use Email Hunter and ContactMonkey. Email Hunter is really great for LinkedIn. It basically gets you an email address for someone LinkedIn if you’re not friends with them. It gives you a percentage of how close they think that email is to. It’s quite accurate. Sometimes, not so much. I think people are onto it so it’s not working as much as it used to but worthwhile if you need to find someone’s email address and you want to email them directly. Generally, it gets you the right one.

Great. If you know their email address, you don’t have to waste an InMail on LinkedIn to contact them.

Absolutely. I think that’s why LinkedIn started to shut it down.

Yeah, very cool. By the way, listeners, there’s a great LinkedIn episode, episode number 67 on Marketing Speak, with Angela Lynn. It’s amazing, all about LinkedIn tips and tricks. Definitely, if you care about LinkedIn, you should listen to that episode. Okay, next lightning round question for you, Gavin. YouTube playlist, what do you think is the biggest opportunity there that people miss? Because a lot of people don’t even have playlist in their YouTube channel.

We use a specialist company when we deal with YouTube because it’s so sophisticated now. This is starting to happen across all the platforms and that’s why we focused down at Jumpwire here. We generally focus on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and Pinterest, Snapchat if we need it. YouTube, we usually outsource because yes, playlists are important but the algorithm is changing so much that I would say you probably would get better information from googling it. All I would say is that you need a playlist because people can search by playlists but more importantly, if they find something in your playlist and you want to keep them on your channel because it’s all about minutes feud now, that is a great way to do it because once they finished playing one, if they like it and you have a good, it’s sort of like albums of the yesteryear, if you like one song, you might like others and it will directly. It’s a great way to have a good list of information and content moving through YouTube in a really deep way rather than just them trying to find more stuff that they like about what you’ve done.

Awesome. Last question, Does it matter where you post from as far as your reach? Like posting from your phone for Facebook versus posting from your computer versus posting from Hootsuite or Buffer? Does it matter?

Yes. Absolutely! It’s a great question, a question I get a lot. You want to act like a real person. If you’re a brand, you want to act like a real person. Therefore, we  have seen 5% to 6% organic reach increase by making our clients post from a mobile phone. Not an iPad, iPads are not a mobile phone. It has to be a mobile phone with an IMEI number. Facebook scans that and knows this comes from a mobile phone and says, “This must be from a real person.” If you’re posting from a desktop, you want to post natively. Sometimes, if you can take photos from your mobile phone, they will already have embedded in them all the data that it was taken on a mobile phone. Uploading from desktop will be fine. Make sure you post natively. We do not believe, I’m not saying you shouldn’t use them, but we do not believe in using any of the third party apps to post. You go through an API. Once Facebook realizes that you’re coming in through an API, they know that it’s either a brand or an agency. Very few regular people do this so therefore, we tell everyone to upload natively if you can, from a phone, great. If not, the next best thing is your desktop, to post natively too.

Wow. That’s a game changer for people who are used to using something like Hootsuite. It saves them time but then it’s reducing their reach and then they have to make up the difference with and increased ad spend.

Yes, which is what they want you to do, which is not surprising. But there are a lot of tips and tricks. Visit jumpwiremedia.com, we’ve got lots on our blog. We put lots of stuff out there. if there are things that you want to learn about, we also have the Jumpwire Academy. It’s expensive but that’s where you get the top stuff, where we teach people our system and our system is something we’ve been doing for eight years and it really works. It’s social media that really works on an organic sense and builds community. That, I think is the future and that’s what we’ve been talking about. I really appreciate you having me on. It’s been a great discussion. I know we veered all over the place but I’m like, “Wow, I’ve learned so much. I thought I was supposed to be telling people things. What?”

That’s a conversation. It just happens to be we have a whole lot of voyeurs on the line listening. Thank you, Gavin. Thank you, listeners. I encourage all of you folks to check out Gavin and Jumpwire Media and see what they’re doing. They’ve got a really interesting community and academy. They’re doing some pretty cool stuff. I got to meet Gavin through a group I’m in called Metal and heard him speak multiple times. He’s always on the cutting edge. Thank you so much, Gavin, for sharing your wisdom and your experience with us. If somebody wanted to work with you, like work with your agency, what would be the best way to reach you or to reach the right person at your firm?

Just come in through info@jumpwiremedia.com. That goes to a whole group of us and we can check that out. If not, you can reach us through all of the social media platforms. There are people manning them and monitoring them all the time. If you want to test us, ping us through there. If someone doesn’t respond, let me know and I will fire them.

Uh oh.

I’m kidding. I’m kidding. I’m joking.

Okay, okay. I think you missed your calling as a comedian.

I don’t think I said anything funny, did I?

You’re pretty funny. Alright, we’ll catch you on the next episode of Marketing Speak. This is your host, Stephan Spencer, signing off.

Important Links:

Your Checklist of Actions to Take

☑ Use Facebook as a means of a more organic connection to my followers. Start with a specific niche and reach out to people through Facebook Groups and Pages.

☑ Post good, strong content that is subtle and not hard-sell on Facebook at least 3 times a day to increase engagement within the social media platform.

☑ Use my Facebook Group as a focus group where people can be comfortable asking questions and I have more control in my environment without having to bother people who are not interested in my niche.

☑ Use my time on social media wisely by making sure that what I’m doing on the platform is productive or beneficial for myself and others.

☑ Adjust the notification settings on social channels such as Slack and Facebook to prevent being interrupted without having to uninstall the app.

☑ Focus on building a reputation on platforms that are the most prominent i.e. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and YouTube.

☑ Have a strong LinkedIn profile, use keywords, and update it regularly so that I look credible and appealing to like minded people in my industry.

☑ Publish a post to LinkedIn Pulse for incredible visibility.

☑ Install The Great Suspender Chrome extension to free up memory and resources to make things run faster.

☑ Post social media statuses/posts from my mobile phone. Content coming in from an API or third party app such as Hootsuite can reduce my reach.

About Gavin Mcgarry

Gavin Mcgarry is the Founder and President of Jumpwire Media, a social media agency that does community management for clients including Coca Cola, the BBC, and Katie Couric.