Learn How To Build Relationships with your Customers by using Social Media to Connect, Network & Build Bridges, with the view of Building a Loyal Army of Followers – Chris Brogan Reveals All
[podcast]http://www.blogtrepreneur.com/recording/ChrisBrogan.mp3[/podcast]
Who is Chris Brogan?
Chris Brogan is a co-author to a bestselling book called ‘Trust Agents‘, a very successful professional public speaker, often speaking to many Fortune 100 and 500 companies, and a problogger who’s main area of expertise is Social Media and Human Business.
Chris is very much the ‘old school’ blogger and actually started his first blog way back in 1998 – when blogs were born from the pure passion that the creator had for a given topic or subject and before you could make such vast amounts of money from blogging. Fast forward just 13 years and Chris now runs an extremely popular blog in the internet marketing niche called simply, ChrisBrogan.com, which is a Top 5 in the Advertising Age Power150.
Alongside his blog, Chris’s main focus in 2011 is Human Business Works which is run by Chris himself and Rob Hatch, and focuses primarily on educating business to put relationships and people first.
Similar to the message of Human Business Works and his book ‘Trust Agents’, Chris also has a huge amount of knowledge when it comes to Social Media and using tools like Twitter and Facebook to build trust and relationships with your customers, with the overall goal of growing as a business. Within this interview Chris reveals how some of the worlds most successful entrepreneurs manage to reap the true benefits from social media by connecting with people, listening to what people have to say and acting upon the suggestions from the people who are buying your product.
He also uncovers why, in his opinion using Twitter as a marketing tool is far more beneficial to businesses than using Facebook (I think I caught Chris on a day of FB rants!), and some small facts about Facebook that may help you to see it’s inferiority. At the same time Chris is a huge believer of using all Social Media tools simultaneously in order to reap the full benefits of taking part and offers some truly helpful advise on promoting your business with LinkedIn.
Clearly Chris is the perfect guest for us as he is very much a veteran when it comes to blogging, and his advise under the subject certainly did not disappoint. When asked what he thought of people who think making money through blogging is an overnight success, he sums up the reality in this fantastically powerful response…
If you are looking for some effective tips on how to use Social Media to market your business and build solid relationships with your customers, by become a ‘Human Business’, then Chris really is your guy. The reason that I loved interviewing Chris so much was because his range of expertise is so wide that his advise and tips really were endless, and he manages to cover so many hot topics of modern-day online marketing.
Enjoy the interview, and don’t forget to tell us what you thought of Chris’s tips in the ‘comments’ section below this post.
Always a pleasure,
Luke Etheridge
“The Interview Guy” at Blogtrepreneur.com
______________________________________________
Chris Brogan Interview (Audio Transcription)
Luke Etheridge: Hi guys. My name is Luke Etheridge, and welcome along to yet another of our popular interviews here at blogtrepreneur.com. Our next guest is, amongst many things, co-author to a best selling book, a professional speaker, a consultant to many Fortune 500 companies, and CEO of Human Business Works.
It gives me great pleasure to introduce Mr. Chris Brogan from chrisbrogan.com. Welcome to Blogtrepreneur, Chris.
Chris Brogan: Thanks for having me on, Luke. I’m happy to be here.
Luke: Cool. Cool. First up, I know a lot about you personally, but I’m sure many of our readers have probably never heard of you. For those out there who haven’t, if you could just take the time to tell them a little bit about yourself from what you’re about.
Chris: Well, sure. I’ve been blogging in some form or another since 1998, back when they were calling it journaling. I like to tell people that it took me eight years to get my first 100 readers, because for a long time hardly anybody even paid attention to blogging. For a long time, I wasn’t exactly doing it right.
I now write a blog, chrisbrogan.com, that deals a lot with marketing in what I call human business, and it ranks in the top five of the Advertising Age Power 150. I’ve since gone on to work at a lot of different places and then started running my own company January 2009 when I started New Marketing Labs.
Then I stepped out of that role and into entrepreneur residence at the company that started New Marketing Labs so that I could help them incubate that at a couple other companies. Then I run Human Business Works, which is a company that does business systems for small businesses. That’s kind of where I’m doing a lot my focusing right now.
Luke: So, it sounds like you’ve got quite a lot of stuff on then.
Chris: Yeah. I’m not smart enough to just do one thing at a time so I tend to kind of do a lot of stuff and I hope that it starts to sync up and make a lot of sense. Human Business Works is starting to feel like that. It’s starting to feel like a lot of my things are all in one area.
Luke: Cool. Cool. As I mentioned earlier, you’re actually co-author to a best selling book, “Trust Agents.” The book is a best seller. I’ve read it. It’s a best seller in both New York Times where it was, and the Wall Street Journal. That must feel quite amazing. When you first set out to create the book with Julien Smith did you guys ever predict that it would be received so well?
Chris: No. It was a first book so we figured other people would hardly even notice it. I think we were just very lucky in getting the timing just right on this so that it would be… people wanted to talk about trust, they wanted to talk about how to be human on the web. It just kind of hit at exactly the right time in business. So we’re very fortunate that way.
That said, we were very lucky to hit when we did. It wasn’t very hard to beat the best seller list out. It wasn’t like we sold a gazillion books. In both cases, when we hit the Times and the Wall Street Journal we just had a very lucky run of that book.
Luke: So, you think that at the time there wasn’t so much competition around? Do you think that was the key to success for that book?
Chris: I think that being to market early was helpful. There were a couple other books out at the time. There was the Twitter Power with Joel Comm, Social Media Bible with Lon Safko. But, it wasn’t like today. Today, pretty much everybody I’ve ever met at South By Southwest has a book. It’s certainly a little trickier to stand out as a marketing book.
At the same time, trust being in the title was happening at the same time U.S. financial markets were collapsing. So, I think people bought it saying we think trust is good. I think we were just lucky with our naming, too.
Luke. Yeah. Yeah. I’m a massive person in a massive family is the underlying message of the book. That businesses should build trust and relationships with their consumers instead of sort of conveying this faceless and untrusting image that so many businesses do.
Could you tell us a little bit more about that? About that kind of, what businesses need to do, the actual message of the book. What businesses need to do in order to build that trust with their consumers?
Chris: In our mindset we told people that they had to make your own name, which was the idea of standing out and doing stuff in your own way as opposed to fitting into the existing systems. Be one of us, which is the idea that these social media tools allow us to connect to people in a way that never happened before. So, use those tools to really connect and sort of build relationship bridges between people.
Look for leverage because the web provides leverage in a way that no other system ever did. Also some other ideas such as building armies of people together, and things like that, and doing much more networking than ever before. All those different things combined together gave people an opportunity to really understand a different view of having to do business on the web.
It definitely shows you how to do it offline as well. The sort of thing we did at the very end was explain that everything that we talk about and how to do it online all applied to the offline world as well.
Luke: How do you think that social media has helped businesses to achieve this kind of trust and this kind of branding that you speak of?
Chris: I think that when we started writing about it, it was because there were a lot of companies that were doing that sort of a thing, and that we could point to our early predecessors doing this. In the States, for example, there was Frank Eliason who was running Comcast Cares. He’s moved on to City, but he was doing Comcast.
Tony Hsieh at Zappo’s. Jenny Cisney at Kodak. Ferg Devins at Molson up in Canada. There were lots and lots of people who were kind of playing this role of a person who was building relationships on the social web, that were then translating that into business all the way around.
Scott Monty at Ford is another great example; a very successful example. He hangs out with Alan Mulally who is the chair of Ford. You shouldn’t normally get that access in that kind of time, but Mulally knows that it’s really important so he keeps Scott real close by.
How did they do it? It’s a matter of actually listening to what people say. It’s responding and connecting with people. It’s publishing in these kinds of forums and making information and relationships that aren’t just ads. It’s going from sort of theater, which is advertising, to theater in the round where you actually integrate and work with people.
Luke: I’ve actually read on your site somewhere that it’s cool to share information, and the amount that you share with other peoples tweet and other people’s blogs, you will soon reap the benefits from your followers, and things like that. Can you tell us a little bit about that?
Chris: For a long time, I’ve been promoting that if you promote other people 12 times as much as you promote yourself, the rewards come right back in huge ways. I think that it’s very true. The more you show people that you are going to talk about other people, that you’re going to promote the good stuff when you find it, the more that they have a rapport with you.
They think of you as that person who shares good stuff. Then when you do have something of yours to share, they’re far more willing to look at it, open up, pay attention and give response to it because they know that you’re also sharing other people’s stuff and it’s not just the me, me, me show.
I think there’s a real huge opportunity to do such a simple thing and to build relationships that way, that why wouldn’t you take advantage of that?
Luke: How about Facebook? Where do you stand on that? In one of your videos I watched, you briefly mentioned that Facebook is quite different from Twitter as a business tool. It sort of felt as though you were saying that it’s sort of inferior as a marketing tool. Is this the case, and if so what’s different about it?
Chris: Oh, Luke. You’re catching me on a strange day to answer that question. I don’t like Facebook. What I don’t like about it is that…
Luke: You’ve already got a rant to that about Facebook, don’t you?
Chris: [inaudible 0:08:24] many times today, and if you’re just putting fuel on my little blogpreneur fire…
Luke: Good. Keep going.
Chris: Here’s why. You can only have 5000 friends. You have to do everything on a fan page. It feels dorky to make yourself a fan page.
Luke: Yeah.
Chris: So, that’s already negative. It’s not serendipitous. So, Twitter, which is not a better tool, it’s just more serendipitous, I can type something and anybody searching on that keyword is going to find it. And Facebook, you have to know someone. It’s like the old days. It’s like I know a guy who knows a guy.
Luke: [laughs]
Chris: It’s just a lot of work. And Facebook ads, the CPM doesn’t cost a lot, so you can spend a real little money on it, but unless you’re advertising something inside Facebook you are probably not going to get a great response. It’s just this whole to-do. It’s a matter of I want to believe, I want to like it, I’m actually investing some money into it this week to see if I can use it to convert some things, but I’ve yet to make it convert in any way that makes it a business value to me.
Luke: So, you’re saying that Twitter is certainly the better route to go now?
Chris: No. I can’t say that either. I love Twitter [inaudible 0:09:43] . I get so much better value out of it. But, there’s like 600 million people on Facebook. There’s like 100 million on Twitter. So, how am I going to tell you that that’s a better tool?
College kids don’t use it as much, et cetera, et cetera. It’s a really different demographic. It sure isn’t LinkedIn. To me it’s combo. It’s sort of like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and YouTube. You have to give a shot at all of them.
Luke: What about LinkedIn. You just mentioned that. How can people use LinkedIn to really boost their success and promote their business?
Chris: LinkedIn has a lot of ways. One is their groups are a lot better than they ever used to be. Two is they have sort of a Twitter-like stream kind of a thing. But, if you’re just using it to promote yourself, you’re going to fail. No one cares. LinkedIn questions and answers is really useful still. People can do a lot there.
The other thing is make sure your profile is set up to talk about what kind of business you’re looking to do, and not a resume or a CV. Make sure your profile is set up for something super important.
Luke: I’ve personally never had much experience with LinkedIn, but that’s certainly something that I’m going to try down the line.
We did touch on briefly earlier in the introduction that you actually run a blog, Chris Brogan, and you were saying about how it actually took you, what was it, eight years to get 100 readers.
That’s completely tied into this question, where blogging isn’t an overnight success. A lot of people, I think, think that you can just build a blog and straight away you’re going to build a following, build a brand, and it’s all going to happen overnight. What advice can you give to those people who think that blogging is the quick way to get rich online?
Chris: Oh dear Lordy. You [inaudible 0:11:28] .
Luke: It’s certainly not that way, is it? [laughs]
Chris: It’s really not. You know what it is? If you [inaudible 0:11:34] and blogging as a media property, you need to do the same things you would do with any media property. You have to build an audience. You have to turn them into a community.
You have to get that community really focused and interested on what you want to talk about. Then once they believe in you, once they think that you’re out for their own good, you can make offers to them and you can put things in front of them that might be of use to them. But, you really sure can’t go in and say, “OK, here’s my website where I talk all about how great iPads are, and I’m going to sell iPad accessories all day and I’m going to quit my day job. Here it is.”
Now, we all hear somebody telling us this story. It’s not that we haven’t heard that story. It’s not that we haven’t heard someone say, “Yeah, I just set up a page and I put a bunch of links to how you can get such and such a loan, and I made 30 grand a month.” But, that’s one out of a gazillion, and oftentimes if they’ve made a lot of money, then also what they’ve done is they’ve got some kind of a scam that’s not exactly Google legal.
I really think that the real goal is you’ve got to build up audience, you’ve got to build a relationship, you’ve got to show them that you know what you’re doing and that you care about them and then you can actually make them some money.
Luke: Yeah, and I think what you just said there about these guys that are getting into that whole scamming kind of industry where it’s not even legal in the eyes of Google. I think these guys, they’re not going to stand the test of time either. And I think a blog, just look at people like yourself and ProBlogger and Copyblogger and people like that, they’ve all stood the test of time and they’re going to continue to. I think that’s probably one of the most important parts, I feel.
Chris: Agreed, agreed. I think that for the most part what you’ll find is that the people who are going to go somewhere are the people who are looking for sales down the line and not just today. Sure, we all need to pay our bills and sure, we have to gather nuts and berries where we can. But, if we’re not farming, if we’re not really building for the future, and really building up value, I mean, that’s the thing that people keep forgetting when they try to rush to the profit is the companies that actually make money are the companies that give people something of value on the way to that profit.
Luke: Yeah, I think in that sense content certainly is king when it comes to blogging as well.
Chris: And I almost think their content is a prince because I think that the king would be the relationship. And the reason I say that is I could switch out the content. I can say to you, “You know, I’m also interested in writing about entrepreneurialism so I’m going to start my escapevelocity.com” and a whole bunch of people rushed over. I suddenly had 2000 subs in the first day.
You can’t do that starting out, not at all.
Luke: No.
Chris: So, my content on ChrisBrogan is different than Escape Velocity and so I need to sort of work it out.
Luke: Yeah, yeah. We spoke earlier about building a brand with Twitter, but how do you build a brand with your blog? I mean, obviously that is your brand. So, people like ProBlogger, Darren Rowse isn’t just known to the world as ProBlogger, and Mike Michalowicz is known as the Toilet Paper Entrepreneur. These guys are building this brand around themself. How have you managed to build a brand around yourself and really spread the word about yourself with your blog?
Chris: You know, I’m almost terrified to imagine what the brand of me is these days. I don’t know what people would see I was if they didn’t know me. But, I would say that probably if they think about me, they would say he’s that guy who’s been everywhere in social media because I’ve just been at it for 11 years or so.
I think that the way I did it, the way I’ve kind of put my life together out there is that I have one thing about blogs which is be helpful, and I’m always trying to connect people together. I’m always saying yes to as many things as I can manage in a day. And I’m always just trying to come up with ways that I could add value to other people because I find that it comes right back.
Luke: Yeah, yeah. I really like what you just said there, be helpful. And the bit about cramming things into one day, that’s something that I personally think that everybody should be doing. Just sort of have this mindset that nothing is too hard to accomplish and just cram it all into one day and set out little tasks and cross them off as you go through the day and all that kind of thing, and make sure that you use every single minute wisely. Would you say that?
Chris: That’s a great point to make. The biggest problem you run into as you start doing more and more entrepreneurial stuff is you run into saying yes too much and you run into not managing your time very well. For example, I asked Brian Clark about that, Copyblogger. I said, “What are you doing to keep yourself focused?” And he says, “I only work on projects that I know will help my community.”
I’m trying to steal that from him and do the same thing and I’m trying to just keep myself focused on things that only help my community. So, that’s the goal.
Luke: Yeah, yeah. It’s a great goal to have. When branding comes into play with a blog, do you think that design plays an important part at all? Do you invest a lot into design or do you think that that’s secondary to content? Things like logo, color schemes and the whole neatness of your blog, do you think that actually plays quite a big part in the success of your blog?
Chris: Yes, I think the design does matter, and I think it’s for a reason that maybe you don’t immediately think of which is it deals a lot with proof points, social proofs. So, if you are looking at a site like mine, you realize that it doesn’t look off the shelf. It looks reasonably well put together. It’s not slathered with ads. There’s a few in the bar, but it’s not like John Chow where you trip over an ad every few inches.
[laughter]
Chris: And I tease him about that all the time.
Luke: I think everyone does. [laughs]
Chris: I told him, I said, “Your site is like Nascar. I’m afraid to hover my mouse because I might have bought something by mistake.”
Luke: Yeah, look in your bank account, there’s lots of money gone.
Chris: That’s right. So, I don’t shoot for that, but I do believe that affiliate marketing is OK on your site. I believe it’s OK to try to make revenue on your site. What I try to do with my buyers and why my design matters is I want you to see how much stuff you get out of me for free before I ever think of asking you for money because I think that works out.
Luke: So, how do you actually monetize your blog? I think that’s quite a question that everybody wants to know because when you go to ChrisBrogan.com, like you just said, you’re not tripping over ads. You don’t realize you’re even being sold to. But, obviously, there are affiliates in there and you even say it on your About Me page. You’re very, very frank and it’s very, very trustworthy that you even display this kind of information that you are affiliated to all these products.
How do you actually manage to monetize the blog?
Chris: There are two things I want to talk about there. One is that the way I approach the disclosure and all that partly is the Federal Trade Commission has requirements. The second part of it would be that with regards to how do I make the money, I have a few different things that make me more money than not on there. Genesis WordPress theme probably makes most of my money, and I make somewhere between two and three times the price of my mortgage just with that one thing.
Luke: Wow.
Chris: And remember though, that’s on volume of 200,000 unique views and that’s on 11 years of writing with tons and tons of free content. So, no one out there should think oh, I’ll just get a WordPress affiliate program and I will quit my day job. But over time, it has.
So, in my sidebar right now, there’s six total ads and one, two, three of them are from my companies. So, over time, I’ve taken away other people’s affiliate programs and put in some of my stuff. Blue Sky Factory provides me my email services so I have a square for them because it’s like a trade. And then Rack Space is my hosting service and that’s a trade. But, I make money on the other four.
But, the way I make most of my money has nothing to do with little bitty ads on a site. I do it through professional speaking, I do it through consulting and through running my companies, and I do it through content projects. So, for example, I’m a co-founder at Third Tribe Marketing, I’m an owner of Kitchen Table Companies and 501 Mission Place.
So, I try to sell a lot of products where people will get some extra added value by connecting to them as opposed to just passing through. I think affiliate stuff is great. I just try to do a mix of that and my own stuff.
Luke: Yeah, yeah. So, you try to steer away from this whole ad heavy blog that people want to just quit. And I think that’s probably quite a good point to make that in order to be successful with a blog you shouldn’t be in your face with ads and focus more on content than ads. Have ads and advertise affiliate products, but put more of your focus on the content.
Chris: Yeah, I think so for sure because if somebody clicks and buys the Genesis theme from me, I would be so thrilled I’ll make $47. If someone reads my post about how the real estate market could do a lot better if they did this and that, I have the chance to make $22,000. So, I’d sooner make $22k than 47 bucks.
Luke: Yeah, yeah, agreed. [laughs] So would I. Finally, just wrapping it up now, I do like to ask all my guests this question and it’s sort of a chance for us to really pick at your brains on how you might have done things differently if you could start out again. But, if you lost everything today and your products, your companies, your contacts, your following, your brand, everything was wiped out, what would you do tomorrow to get you back on the path to success?
Chris: I have a huge bookshelf full of liquor. I think I would start there.
Luke: Yeah, that would be the first thing. That’s today, that’s this evening. How about tomorrow?
Chris: Oh, OK.
Luke: [laughs] After you get over the hangover.
Chris: I would start with an email list. I would start absolutely with an email list because I think you live or die by your database. I think that it should definitely be part of it. And I think that email marketing is still alive and well, just good email marketing is alive and well, and I would probably push for that.
Luke: Cool, cool. So, building a list is probably one of the most important parts of insight marketing, you’d say?
Chris: Indeed. I would say that having a real sense of your buyer and a real sense of the community that you can sell into is probably more important than anything because once you understand your community, once you know who you’re spending your time with, you can understand their needs and you can understand how you can fill those needs. It’s always community first, product second.
You could be the most amazing person in the world who paints with tomatoes, but if you’re the one person who paints with tomatoes who loves it and no one else wants to buy it then who cares.
Luke: Yeah, yeah, agreed, agreed. Well, thanks for those tips, Chris. And once again, thanks for being our guest today.
Chris: Very much a pleasure, Luke. Thanks for having me on.
Luke: I’m certain our readers will have taken away quite a few valuable lessons there. I personally have as well. And to our readers, please leave your comments below. Let us know what you’ve learned from Chris. Have a pop over to his website, ChrisBrogan.com, and even buy his book, “Trust Agents.” Let us know what you think.
And it would be cool, Chris, if you could pop back there sometime. I’ll let you know the link just to see what people are saying.
Chris: Sure, absolutely.
Luke: I know with all these projects going on, you probably haven’t got much time on your hands. [laughs]
Chris: Not a lot, but I’d definitely love to stay in touch and I really appreciate you giving me the opportunity to hang out with your crowd and I’m excited to be on the show.
Luke: Thanks, buddy. So lastly, from all of us at Blogtrepreneur, we wish you great success in 2011 and have a great day, buddy.
Chris: Thanks so much. Cheers.
Luke: Cheers.