In this segment, we talk about ‘The Journey’ mini-series by Social Media Examiner, a unique behind the scenes look at failures that have helped their business succeed.
You’re listening to The Being Found Show. We are your guide to being found by more customers. If your company isn’t being found, who’s is? This is literally the best hour for business on radio and we’re here to help you be found by more buying customers. I’m Cloud Wise Joe with my co-host Chauncey.
There’s a lot I want to go over. One of them is Google Maps. Google My Business virtual tours. So we will talk about that in a minute. Right now I want to talk about a video that we shared on our Being Found Facebook page. The video is by Michael Steltzner the guy behind Social Media Examiner. So he’s doing a mini-series called ‘The Journey’ and he’s taking users behind the scenes of some of the most trusted social websites and advice sites in the industry right now. He shows us how he sells tickets for the conferences he puts on. What does it take to manage this stuff? What does it take to put on a show?
What really caught me when I was listening to this episode “Refining the Message: The Journey, Episode 8” was even though he’s been in this business since 2009 and literally everyone who’s an expert in this industry is featured on Social Media Examiner at some point, he still gets it wrong. You know he still tries to do things and finds out his ideas don’t work. Sometimes he has to find somebody to help him with a dilemma. I think the really neat thing is you get to see this kind of normal general nice guy smashing through block walls.
Some of the ways he deals with problems are, he finds someone who knows what they’re doing and he hires them, or he tries again, or he goes “OK I screwed up”.
So this is a really neat video. I’m following the series on YouTube. Let me tell you a little bit about him to just give you some context. I’ve actually been following him since 2009. So around 2009 Michael Steltzner decided that there’s this whole thing about social media going on but nobody really knows how it works or what it can do for you. Which I don’t know if anybody’s noticed and I don’t think things have changed.
Chauncey: Well I think social media is extra touchy. You know, with a lot of the marketing stuff that we deal with it’s kind of a combination of the changing internet and changing people. Changing internet can somewhat be tracked. We can say OK this is a logical next step but when it comes to changing people the logical next step is not always the next step. When it comes to social media and social media marketing you’ve got a much larger influence on society and people. So that next step is sometimes the last thing you thought was coming.
Joe: Is social media changing how we behave and buy? Or is how we behave and buy changing social media? I don’t know. What’s interesting is you get to see this guy struggle with the same issues in the video. He’s trying to sell tickets to his conference and apparently, he had this concept of a special kind of ticket that everyone would want to buy. You see him in this conference room with his team and he basically has to admit to the team that his idea wasn’t going to work and he was pretty sure it wasn’t working because he had sold seventeen out of a thousand that he had planned on. I don’t know if you’ve been there but I’ve been there. I’ve done marketing events, I’ve spent weeks and maybe even months preparing to market it and pull the trigger and no one buys it.
Chauncey: If you’re in this industry and you haven’t been there more often than you have been there, it’s okay. We’re reverse engineering technology and trying to figure out society, meaning frankly, and this might disappoint some people but, in order to get here there are more failures than there were successes. You know it was just a matter of hopping on there and saying OK failure happened let’s find that success. Just like everything else in life a failure is worth one point. And success is worth the hundreds so even if you have 25 failures and one success it pays off in the end.
Joe: It’s why there’s a statement that I use all the time especially when I’m talking to a client. I tell them that the goal is to fail as fast as possible and get up as quick as we can after failure. Maybe there’s a better way to say it that doesn’t catch people off guard because a client instantly wants to know that I want to succeed as fast as we possibly can, but to do that, we will need to fail a lot and fail quickly.
Chauncey: You know for years I played in bands and we’d go to play a big show and we always had a practice the night before and the practice was terrible. We’d always say to ourselves thank God we got the suck out before the big show. That’s the way it always went. It’s like we play horribly and then the big show happened and not only was all of the suck out of the situation but we wanted to redeem ourselves from the practice the night before.
Joe: You’re listening to the Being Found Show and please check out the Social Media Examiner and subscribe to ‘The Journey’ series on YouTube. Honestly, this show and our website were inspired by their site. There wasn’t a lot known about social media and because he didn’t know a lot about social media, he wanted to find great advice from really smart people, and share that into the Social Media Examiner website. Because of that, the rest of us have expert advice to work from and its free.
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Refining the Message: The Journey, Episode 8
