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How PostSecret Uses Social Media to Grow its Mission - The Frank Warren Interview
I used to think that Frank Warren had it easy. I didn’t think he had to do any work at all to grow his site: PostSecret. PostSecret is a collection of secrets that people write on postcards and mail to Frank’s house. It’s one of the top blogs and I thought that’s only because the idea is so extraordinary that people naturally have to talk about it.
In my interview with Frank, I learned that a lot of work went into developing his community. So I asked Frank to teach me some of what he did. Here are a few ideas that I learned (listen to the full interview to learn more, directly from Frank):
Know the tools - I foolishly tried using every single social media site for one thing: to get more people to pay attention to my company, Mixergy. Frank uses each site differently. He uses Facebook for his event invitations because the site’s news feed makes events go viral. He uses MySpace’s blog features to interact with his readers. And he uses YouTube to co-create viral videos with his audience, based on the secrets he gets.
Live - Frank takes his community offline by speaking at colleges. He meets his readers in person at book signings. And he displays the postcards he gets at art shows.
Mission - If you listen to my interview, you’ll hear me pound Frank with questions about how he uses different tools to grow his audience. He answered all my questions and gave me good advice that you can use to grow your your onlien business. But when I listened to the interview again while editing it, something hit me: all of these tools work for Frank because there’s a sense of mission behind what he does. He’s not just an audience or a business–though he readily says that PostSecret is NOT a non-profit and he IS a businessman. There’s a sense mission behind what he does. He wants to give voice to the people who mail in their secrets. He wants to touch his readers. And he wants to connect with everyone who sees him in person.
Right click to download the interview
(40 minutes)
Surprising Customers with Amazing Service - The Tony Hsieh, Zappos Interview
I interviewed Tony Hsieh, the CEO of Zappos, to find out how he took a little online shoe company and made it into a billion dollar a year online retail success story.
Here are some of the things I learned from our conversation. Download the full interview to learn more directly from Tony.
Shocking customers - Doesn’t every company say that they have great customer service? When Tony told me about the level of service that Zappos gives its customers, I tested it by conferencing in the phone number on his web site. When I asked for a pair of shoes that they didn’t have in stock, the woman I spoke to offered to find it for me somewhere else. I was shocked, but if you listen to Tony’s voice at the end of that test, you’ll hear that he didn’t find it extraordinary at all. That’s just how his company operates.
Surprise - Tony told me that Zappos tries to surprise its customers by giving them more than they expect. For example, they’ll routinely ship an order using a faster delivery method that the customer paid for. Can you imagine how excited customers get when they receive a package sooner than they expected?
Social Media - Zappos encourages its people to use tools like Twitter (see them). I tried to understand how many extra sales they got from it, but Tony taught me that’s not the way to look at it. He’s doing a billion dollars in sales, the few orders he gets from Twitter won’t impact his bottom line. But the connection with his customers is priceless. Social media, for Zappos, is about letting the world know that there are real people behind the online brand.
Right click here to download the interview
(Thank you Tara Hunt for making the introduction.)
How to Develop Intiutive User Experience - The Eric Stephens Interview
Don’t you love web sites that just seem to “get you”? Everything on them seems to be placed exactly where you want them. That’s not an easy experience to create, but Eric Stephens showed me how to do it using listening labs.
Eric learned how to do listening labs when he worked at Creative Good, a consulting company focused on good user experience. He uses them at Mahalo, where he’s the Director of User Experience and at BeerMenus.com, a site he co-founded.
You’ll have to listen to my full interview with Eric to hear step-by-step instructions for conducting a listening lab for your web site, but here are some of the basics:
Basically - In a listening lab, you interview people about how they use the web and watch as them use it.
Be a fly - The most important element of the process is to try to be a fly on the wall. You want to see how people use the web when no one’s there.
Find subjects - You want to study people who are in your target group. You can find them by posting an ad on Craig’s List. When you’re starting out, you can save some money by interviewing your friends.
Interview - First thing you do is ask your subjects how they use the web. Your goal is to create a list of tasks that you want to watch them do online. Don’t go fishing for information. Just listen. When they tell you that they use your competitors site make a note of it. If they tell you they have issues, make a note of it.
Watch & listen - At this point, you get them online and ask them to do the tasks you wrote down. Get them to put their brains on “speaker phone” so you can understand what they’re doing.
Suggest - Suggest they use your site. If possible, don’t tell them that it’s your site. You don’t want to bias their reaction.
At this point, you’ll notice problems with your site that need to be fixed ASAP. Eric says they’ll be so obvious you’ll feel the pain. You’ll also know more about your users’ overall internet experience, including how they interact with your competitors.
Right Click to download the interview
(about 40 minutes)
Quickly Building and Selling Sites - The Matt Mickiewicz Interview
There was an article in the NY Times recently about people who are buying web sites and flipping them for a quick profit.I called up Matt Mickiewicz, founder of SitePoint.com. The Times article said his site is where the entrepreneurs are going to buy and sell web businesses.
If you download my conversation with Matt, you’ll hear step-by-step how to take a web site from idea to profits. Matt should know. Not only is SitePoint.com a hub for online entrepreneurs, but the site is profitable in its own right.
Like me, Matt believes in building companies for the long-term, so we discussed what we could learn from flippers about building long-lasting value.
Here are somethings he told me about:
Niche - The Times article talked about flippers who turned a profit by buying and selling a bird cage business. That’s the kind of super-targeted niche that Matt says is most successful.
Content - Don’t write it yourself. Just buy it from guru.com.
Community - In my interview with Andy Oliver about PR, I learned the same thing that Matt taught me. You don’t have to build a community on your own site to be part of the conversation. Andy told me about Twiistup using sites like Facebook. Matt talked to me about the value of participating in relevant message boardsand including a link back to your site.
Right-click to download my podcast interview (45 minutes)
Launch in Phases - The Roger Ehrenberg Interview
When Roger Ehrenberg’s company, Monitor110, closed down, he wrote a post mortem for it. After reading his reflections, I called him up to for an interview to get more insight.
My biggest takeaway from the conversation is the importance of releasing a site in phases. Roger told me that people’s expectations for Monitor110 were so high that the company didn’t want to launch until they had a finished product that could live up to those expectations.
By doing that, they robbed themselves of real-world user feedback. “It created an enormous distance” between the company and its clients, he told me.
Writing the post mortem and having this conversation with me couldn’t have been easy. But Roger has invested in some of the web’s most successful companies. I know his CEOs will benefit from reading and hearing about his entrepreneurial experiences–just as I did. Thank you Roger!
Right click to download the podcast. (32 minutes)
Do-It-Yourself Public Relations - The Andy Oliver Interview
I noticed when Andy Oliver of LewisPR takes on a new client they seem to appear everywhere.
If you see stickam shooting live video at a conference, it’s because they’re Andy’s client and he keeps emailing organizers like me to ask them to include stickam at our events. If you noticed Robert Scoble shooting video at twiistup, it’s because they’re a client of LewisPR. When Andy heard that I was meeting with Scoble the day of twiistup, he kept emailing me to find a way to get Scoble at the event.
I love watching what he does, but I wanted to learn more. So I did a 1 hour interview with him and peppered him with questions about how you and I could use some of his techniques.
Here are some of my notes from our interview:
Do-It-Yourself - You can generate a lot publicity for your brand by yourself because so much of new media is accessible. New media tools like blogs, twitter, and Facebook are available to anyone. You don’t need a PR team to start using them and seeing results.
Influencers, influencers, influencers - You need to identify influencers in your industry and start going after them. Andy likes tech conferences because attendees are early adapters who influence others’ decisions.
Get others to talk - It’s nice to talk up your own brand, but it’s much more effective to have others talk about you. Get quotes from venture capitalist investors, analysts, bloggers and other trusted sources. I used this idea right away and asked Andy for a quote about my interviews. Here it is:
“I think it’s clear that entrepreneurs can learn a lot by these short interviews.” –Andy Oliver
Right click here to download the interview. (1 hour)
Andy Oliver is a Vice President at Lewis PR. You can see his profile here.
Is Goal-Setting Outdated? –The Rosalind Resnick Interview
My business mind was shaped by reading books like Napoleon Hill’s Think and Grow Rich as a kid. Most of those business philosophy books talked about setting clear goals and refusing to stop until you achieved them.
As you’ll hear in my conversation with Rosalind Resnick, that’s not how she built NetCreations. She didn’t set out to build an opt-in email business and take it public. As far as I can tell, she didn’t start out with a burning desire to get into the email business in any way. She and her partner tried a bunch of different ideas. Most of them either failed or just did okay. One of the ideas they tried was an email list management business. It hit. She loved growing it. And that’s the business that changed her life.
Have you read Founders at Work yet? Most of the entrepreneurs in that book started out chasing one dream and ended up realizing another. Evan Williams tried building a project management tool and ended up with Blogger. Max Levchin was focused on the Palm Pilot before steering PayPal towards what it is today. And Steve Wozniak was just trying to build cool stuff.
So here’s the question: Is goal-setting an outmoded idea?
Right click here to download the interview!
(1 hour long)
If you’re an entrepreneur, you can hire Rosalind’s company to help guide you and you can read her book about what really goes into building a great success.
Everyone is Accessible - The Gregory Galant Interview
I interviewed Gregory Galant of Venture Voice because he’s talking to and learning from some of the most successful people on the internet.
Gregory has talked to the founders of Blogger, PayPal, LinkedIn, Feedburner, Kleiner Perkins and dozens of others.
I’m a big fan of his interviews and wanted to learn from him, so I gave him a ring. Here are 4 things he taught me:
Everyone’s accessible - Gregory doesn’t have any special connection to these business people. He says he often simply cold calls and asks for an interview.
10 hours - People ask him why he doesn’t do a new interview every day. He says they don’t realize that it takes him about 10 hours to do each show, because he has to setup, record and edit each show.
Shut up - One of the reasons I love his show is that I get to hear people’s full stories. He says they can do because he simply stays quiet and lets people talk.
No Bond - My big disappointment was learning that he didn’t get to build friendships with everyone he interviewed. Maybe I’m being naive, but I’m hoping to learn from and build relationships with the people I interview.
Right click here to download the interview (35 minutes)
What Sways people - The Ori Brafman Interview
I recorded a phone interview with Ori Brafman this week about his new book Sway, which helps explain the seemingly-irrational decisions that people make. I have a full audio interview for you to download below, and a short video for people who don’t have time to listen to the 40+ minute conversation.
One of the things that Ori taught me is the power of endorsements. He told me that he put a collection of endorsements on the back cover of his book (instead of a summary or list of topics or a big picture of him and his brother) because people are more swayed by the opinions of people who are prominent, powerful or authoritative.
Like every other good idea that I learn from my interviews, I plan to use that technique. I’ve interviewed some prominent people because of my events on Mixergy. I’m going to start asking them for quotes about me so I could sway others. I started with Ori. Here’s what he said:
“Andrew does a well-researched interview that’s focused on helping his audience use the ideas they learn. A very interesting illuminating conversation.”
Right click to save this podcast interview (40+ minutes)
And here’s a quick video with one idea I learned from Ori:
How to Market on the Social Web - Jackie Peters Interview
When I worked on the Mixergy Traffic Forum, I posted to Twitter and Facebook that tickets were available. Within minutes a few people bought tickets. That’s when I really started really caring about social media.
I’m a businessman, I don’t care that Twitter lets me tell you what I ate for breakfast. But if you show me how to use it grow my company, I’ll pay attention and take notes.
That’s why I called Jackie Peters. She’s the Founding Partner of Heavybag Media, an interactive marketing firm that helps companies like Sun connect with communities. We talked about her 5 pillars of marketing on the social web.
One of those pillars is to use online tools to listen to what people say about your brand. So I did that for “Mixergy” and “Andrew Warner” on Technorati, Google News, Summize, and FriendFeed.
Do you know of any other free services that will help me and others hear what people have to say? Add them to the comments.
Right click here to download my conversation with Jackie (36 minutes)