The Inside Social Media PodcastEpisode 18:

Ted Rubin, Chief Social Marketing Officer at Collective Bias

Rick: All right. Today I'm chatting with Ted Rubin. Ted is the author of the book Return on Relationship. He’s one of Forbes top 50 social media power influencers and he’s been called one of the most interesting CMOs on Twitter. He’s also the chief social marketing officer of a company called Collective Bias, which we'll talk about here in a second. Ted, welcome to The Inside Social Media Podcast. Thanks for coming on the show today.

Ted Rubin: Well, thanks for having me. I'm really excited to be chatting with you and looking forward to a nice conversation.

Rick: Absolutely. So, Ted as I mentioned, you're heavily involved in a company called Collective Bias where your title is chief social marketing officer. Can you tell us about what that company is all about and a bit more about what your role is there?

Ted Rubin: Absolutely. Well, you know, just to try to keep it as simple as possible, Collective Bias is what we call a social shop or media company and what we do is through influencers and bloggers or micromedia publishers, we create content that we use, you know, organic, social content into engaging real life stories that is mostly connected to the product and their audience and it creates millions of impressions.

It leads to increased share voice, has a great effect on search engine optimization and ultimately reach the sales for brands and retailers. And as far as what I do there, my title is chief social marketing officer and you might say like wow, that’s kind of interesting. Where did that come from? Well, previous to this I was a chief marketing officer and you know we all basically know what that role means.

And that role has a lot to do with all different marketing aspects of the company and when I was at a company called Elf Cosmetics eyeslipsface.com, I built their social presence back in the early days in 2008, 2009 to the largest social presence for a cosmetic company on the web and it was the early days so I was lucky because the likes of Sephora and Estee Lauder and Lancome, you know, weren't being allowed by their legal departments to do a lot of that.

So, I kind of had a jump on then. But what I discovered was that for me personally, the search engine optimization, detailing and the banner and the media buying and all the things that go into a CMOs job just didn’t interest me as much as the relationship building and the engagement and the interaction that came on the social side. And what I

also discovered was that even when doing that stuff, it had incredibly more value when it was wrapped in a social shell meaning that if we were doing any other kind of advertising, if we help syndicate it through social channels, it became way more valuable than simply buying media in one place.

So, I thought that the title of chief social marketing officer more represented where the marketing world is going and it’s a place that I want it to be. So, as far as what I do at Collective Bias, what that means is that I am the brand’s voice to the world. I build awareness for what we do. I build relationships. I talk to companies about building engagement and interaction.

I interact with our blogging community and it's a way we create our contents. We have a private community called Social Fabric which is made up of about 2,000 bloggers at this time. It's an invitation only community, all application only. We have bloggers come in and they become part of the community and the most important metric that we look for in what they do and yet they do need to have a certain size audience, but what we're looking for is interaction and engagement.

We're looking for people that really engage with our audience because the way we create our media scale is by bringing thousands of media producers together, micromedia publishers or bloggers rather than being a Hearst or a Conde or a Meredith that has publications with lots of followers because these individual publishers we believe have direct relationships with our consumers and therefore have more influence on them.

Rick: Sure. So, you’ve built a bit of a network of these blogs. Now, when you talk about interaction with their audiences, are you talking within the blog or are you talking about within those blogs individual social media channels?

Ted Rubin: I mean both and there's just one little thing I want to back up on. You know, you called it a networking, as a marketer and as a person; I'm very particular about words. I think they're really important on where we use them.

Rick: That’s my internet advertising background.

Ted Rubin: And what I like to differentiate us is that we're not a network, we're a community. Then there's a very big difference between a network and a community. They're similar in certain ways, but a network is a series of nodes that are connected one to the other and very often very little connection from one node down here on the bottom to the node that might be in the bottom through various connections.

A community tends to be all connected together and there's also networks just spread out, communities support each other. So, the difference here being that there are a lot of blogger networks out there which just bring people in and have them do things and campaign and give them marching orders and they have 50 blogposts that are written of the same exact thing, you know, reviewing the same product. Ours is a community.

Everything is strategic. People support each other. There were many more blogposts usually written and are commissioned for because bloggers are supporting each other. If their friends are writing about something even if they're getting paid for it, they might jump in because they like the product. They respect the blogger. So there tend to be a huge amount of over-delivery on the media buys that come out of that.

So, to go back to – I lost track for a second. There was another part of that question… Oh, you asked about their social channels versus the blogs.

Rick: Yeah, yeah.

Ted Rubin: So, those relationships are built in different places. So, they're built via the blog itself and then most of these micromedia producers, bloggers, publishers which is what they are have presences on Facebook, on Twitter, on Pinterest, on Instagram, on YouTube, on Vine, I mean you name it and yes, they syndicate and build their relationships in all these places.

So, the smart publishers are publishing their blog and then they're taking that blog and they're syndicating it via all of their other social channels and then the interaction takes place in different places. So, I'll give you myself as an example. I'm a blogger. I'm also very active in social channels. I will tell you that I get way more interaction about my blogposts on Facebook than I do on my blog.

Rick: Yeah.

Ted Rubin: So, I might get one or two comments in my blog, but when I take the same thing and post it on Facebook, I might get 50.

Rick: Sure.

Ted Rubin: And the reason is I think people are much more comfortable commenting on Facebook. There's also a much huger audience that it can spread out to.

Rick: Sure.

Ted Rubin: And it's just easier to do as the quickness of the interaction. So, I think it's happening in both of those areas and the good publishers are making sure it happens in multiple places because also people, as you’ve learned I'm sure, communicate differently on Twitter, on Facebook, on a blog.

Rick: Sure, sure, yeah, yeah. And we'll touch on that here. So, you're talking a lot about content and creating content and you know social media is such great platform for small businesses to tell their story within social – or tell the story about their business. Now, to create content though for a lot of small businesses, it can be overwhelming you know as far as resources go, as far as the amount of time it takes.

But I know that you're also a proponent of you know there are many different types of content out there. Can you talk a little bit about that and how – maybe some tips for small businesses that they might be able to take and sort of simplify that whole content creation process?

Ted Rubin: Well, you know, I think very often it's overcomplicated especially by small businesses because whether it's an expert that tells them oh my God, you’ve got to be on Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, Instagram and that’s just not true. I mean let's face it. If they're doing no social then one piece of social is better than none at all. And it's also important to not be in places where you're not going to interact, so very often small businesses they're told they have to be everywhere.

They open up a presence on every platform and then they have no time to interact. So, it's not only does it sit there and go stale, but even worse people go you know I went there. I tried to communicate with them and they didn’t care. Even some big companies make this mistake. You know you see a brand like Brookstone on Twitter and then you tweet about them and nobody answers you.

Rick: Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Ted Rubin: And you're like why are they – oh, and then you look and you see they're tweeting everyday, but it's very clear that they're using some kind of application that automatically tweets content for them and they're just not replying and that’s like – they should be – someone should knock them on the head and say you're just better off not being there because the negative you're getting.

But for small businesses, you know, there are so many ways to create content and repurpose content and to use content over and over. So, let's talk about some simple ways for a small business. First of all, you probably have collateral material for something that you're doing, a letter that can be repurposed into blogposts, into Facebook posts, into tweets.

So sometimes people ask me how do I create so much content? Well, I write tweets and very often if I write a tweet it's really picked up and people like it or something that I'm passionate about, I will take that idea and just go with it and turn it into a blogpost. But then I will take my blogposts and I will repurpose them into tweets or into Facebook posts.

So, I'll write a blogpost that has the six best ways to engage your audience and then I will take each of those six and on a different time of day or a different day post them to Facebook just number, you know and I won't even number it. I'll just say, you know, reach out everyday and call somebody you haven’t spoken to in 60 days and then I might write a little blurb after that.

I can turn most blogposts into 20, 30 tweets because every sentence can be a tweet if you write it properly. So, there's a lot – I also syndicate my content in all different places.

So, if I write a blogpost on my blog, it’ll also get put on Tumblr. It’ll also get put on Facebook. It’ll also get put on Google+. It’ll get tweeted out from Twitter and then there's another site called Listly, which the site where you post lists and other people can add to it. So, I'll take every blogpost and repurpose it into a list in some way.

Now, I don’t do all that myself. I use interns to do some of that stuff because they're not writing for me. They're just taking my content and repurposing it. And every small business has the opportunity to do that. You also can empower your employees to help. Empower them to build their own personal brands. Let them know it's okay that they are building a Twitter following. I mean I think every major company should do this.

Every employee should have a personal brand, build a following, not necessarily for the benefit of the brand but then when the brand does need it they will have it. But then also you can start repurposing your content. You can tell people that you'll share their content on your post. So when I was at Elf Cosmetics, we were a small company, I mean sure we did millions of dollars, but we didn’t have a large staff.

I didn’t have a lot of excess for – so I had a big audience that I had grown, so I let people write content for me and give them access to my audience. So, you can also repost other people’s content. Most bloggers who understand the world and understand blogging and understand SEO, there's a myth that goes around it that if you place the same content in more than one place, you get punished in an SEO basis by Google. It's an absolute myth. It's not correct.

And it should be told most of your content is being found by Google when you're a small publisher, a small business. It's being found because you're in many different places. So, there are a lot of bloggers that will – I mean you go to my blog, there's a button on it called repost and any one of my blogposts without asking my permission, you can repost to your site and it automatically gives me attribution. So, it automatically adds up–

Rick: Oh okay. Is that just the plugin?

Ted Rubin: It's a plugin, yeah.

Rick: Okay, okay.

Ted Rubin: It's awesome. I mean and then there's Triberr which is a blog distribution network that you do in tribes and then people will share your content and they’ve also into it the ability to repost anybody who’s in your tribe’s content.

Rick: Cool, cool. I'm going to call these up by the by the way – just – if you're listening, I'll be linking up all. These are such great resources. I'll link these all up in the show notes.

Ted Rubin: So, if you're a small business, there's absolutely no excuse not to have enough content and there's plenty of content out there that’s Evergreen. It's not content

that’s sending someone do a competitive business or selling them things you don’t want to sell them and you get to read the whole blog before you repost it and anytime you want – and you can do anything you want with it so.

And then there's people that will write original content for you just to be seen on your blog. I mean there's a lot of them who want to get paid, but a lot of them don’t care about getting paid.

Rick: Yeah, yeah.

Ted Rubin: And even if they do want to get paid, I mean sure there are people like me that is going to cost you a whole lot of money for me to write a post for you, but there's plenty of – I mean plenty of moms out there and bloggers that for 50 bucks will write a post for your son.

Rick: Yeah.

Ted Rubin: And if you're a small business, you know, you start – you test it like any other type of advertising and one of the things I talk about is right now the content is the ad. Like content marketing is so much more valuable than straight advertisers that on Google right now – now obviously most small businesses can't create enough content at scale to tremendously effect their Google rank.

It's hard to compete with the major companies, but there is – it's a fabulous way because people when they go to Google tend to click on organic content much more frequently than they do on advertisements.

Rick: Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Ted Rubin: And people were finding – people want to buy what their friends is buying, so reviews are important and if you give people the tools to do this – and then there can also be small incentives. You know give people coupons. Let them get things for helping you share things. You're just a proponent of incentivized sharing, but it works. But it's also your individual business, test something. Your audience might like that stuff. They might not. And in this day and age you can put it up and take it down in a heartbeat.

Rick: Yeah, sure, sure. Ted, where in your estimation do small business owners get social media wrong?

Ted Rubin: I think they get it wrong and then they think of it as advertising. I think they get it wrong and some of it is not their fault because they’ve got people calling them on the phone selling them ads via the social space and calling it social marketing. That’s advertising. That’s not social marketing. When you buy an ad on Facebook, that’s an advertisement and that’s okay. Ads are great.

And if you test them and they work and with Facebook and Google it's so easy to test them for small amounts of money. You know, why not? But what happens is that’s what they consider social marketing. The other thing that they get wrong is it's the old field of dreams thing. You know, build it and they will come. You think they learned this lesson when they first opened their store and thought they would just open a store on Main Street and they’d make lots of money and they found out that it didn’t work that way.

And then they open their website and they thought they’d get all kinds of traffic and people didn’t come there. Well, social is no different. You know you start a Facebook page, people don’t just come. You know you have to have a strategy in place of how you're going to drive people there. So one of my favorite things is when people say what's the value Twitter and oh my God, I could go on and on.

We could do a whole show about that, but let's not waste all that time. One of the great values of Twitter is that it's probably the only social platform, and if someone jumps in and corrects me that there's another right now, you can do it on. I'd love to hear about it, but that you can aggressively grow your following without any fear of retribution. So, nobody will say to you oh my God, you're following people to get them to follow you. Yup, that’s what I'm doing. I do it everyday, you know.

Now, if you do that and don’t deliver any value in return, then that following is not worth a lot. Now, don’t get me wrong. I'm not telling you to buy followers. That does not work. That’s fake followers, that doesn’t mean anything. What I'm saying is find people in your area. So, if you are a clothing store, go to the Gap, go to their Twitter handle where there's thousands of followers and follow the people that are following the Gap.

Why? The odds are that there's a decent percentage of them that are people interested in buying clothes and there's a customary thing in Twitter, if you follow, they follow you back. I also tell everybody follow back everybody that follows you. Don’t play the ego game. That’s okay for celebrities. But any company doesn’t follow back the people that are following them, I think they're being given bad advice.

Now, look I'm not expert. I'm not a guru. I'm just a guy with opinions who’s not afraid to voice them, but actually use what I preach, practice it, do it for brands, see what works and what I'm telling you is that works.

Rick: Yeah.

Ted Rubin: So, to help you and I know you're making a list for your audience, there's a post on my blog, so it's tedrubin.com. There's a post called Twitter basics. Just go into the search box and search it and it’ll give you some of these basics on how to build your Twitter following, some of the tools to use and how valuable it can be in spreading your message onto other platforms.

Rick: Awesome. I love it. I love it. Now Ted you have a quote that I also love, it's called – or it's a brand is what a business does, a reputation is what people remember. Talk about that for a second in relation to small business if you would.

Ted Rubin: You know I think so many businesses get caught up – and small businesses alike, in what their brand is. So, they hire a branding guy. They hire a marketing guy. They put together collateral material, the sign’s throughout their store. Even a law firm, you know, this is what we do. And what they failed to realize is that you can tell people all day long what you do, but people build up their own impressions and one of the most important places that comes from is your customer service and I think it's criminal that – criminal is a bad because it's not crime, but it's criminal to the investors in a brand or a company that brands don’t keep customer service as a separate silo and consider it a call center rather than an investment center.

Rick: Yeah.

Ted Rubin: And to me any company that doesn’t have the customer service team either working in conjunction with the marketing team or reporting to the CMO are making a grave mistake because I think the most important on to talk to a consumer is during customer service. Now, first of all, they're your customers. It cost you four times as much to get a new customer than to keep one, so why wouldn’t I want to make them happy.

Second of all, I call it like moments with my teenager. One of the best times to communicate with my daughters is when they want money. Now, but I don’t leverage that. I don’t say I will only give you money if you do this. But what I do tell them is you’ve got to look me in the eye and have a conversation with me. And they desperately want that money, so they're going to have like – and they're going to respect when I'm going to say what is the money for. You know, where are you going?

Now, for a customer, I likened that to the customer service point. They are coming to you with a problem. Guess what? You got their undivided attention.

Rick: Right, right.

Ted Rubin: So now that’s what I think reputation comes in. So, what happens is you have this branding company that talks about we're the best dry cleaning service in town. We love you. We take care of your clothes like they're our own. We will make sure everything goes right. And that’s the advertising. And then a person comes in the store when the manager is in the store and they complain about something.

He says sorry, I can't help you. You didn’t bring it back the next day or where’s your ticket or how do I know that happened here. That becomes your reputation. So, no matter how good your branding is it's really what people say about you, think about you, feel about you and that’s your reputation and that’s where the real value comes in.

Rick: Okay. Now, I want to talk about your book here Return on Relationship and in it you write about skipping. Can you share with us what's that all about?

Ted Rubin: Absolutely. Again, I'm a divorced dad and as any dad would know, your kids are delighted when they skip and in fact many kids, if you open your eyes and pay attention, they skip when they're happy. It's almost like they don’t even know they're doing it. It's like when someone – you call it having like a hop in your step or a skip in your step.

Like oh my God, you must be having a good day and so of course, I always knew that my daughters love skipping. And then I'm a divorced dad and I have got two good daughters, 23 months apart and of course, what happens is they start fighting and bickering and here I am alone with my daughters, not knowing what to do and all of a sudden I would just like start skipping with them and I saw all this fighting stopped. And–

Rick: Yeah. You can’t be unhappy skipping.

Ted Rubin: You cannot be on – nobody. I tell people. In the middle of your day, you’re having a bad day, get up and skip down the hall. It will make you feel better. So, the way I take this is it's about a personal thing, but let's metaphorically try to make every interaction with your company to leave your customer skipping away. So, it's about making every interaction remarkable.

Now, that doesn’t mean that you make – that you give them everything they want. JetBlue does a remarkable job of making people skip after interacting with them socially. I can guarantee you they're taking that plane off because you're on Twitter bitching about it. You know, if the tower is saying you can't take off, it's sitting there, but the fact that they answer the tweet, that they have a conversation, that they engage makes that person feel good.

Rick: Yeah and I know – Ted, I know you have a story and Morgan has been on the show here before from JetBlue. Morgan Johnson and I know you have – so give us – I know you have a story about JetBlue and I'd love to – give us the Reader’s Digest version of that story because I think it's such a great story.

Ted Rubin: I'll make it as quick as I can. It's 2009. I'm an advocate. I like JetBlue. I'm flying to South by Southwest, the largest interactive conference in the world. It was right around the tail time when JetBlue was having trouble with those flights getting stuck on the runway and they were trying to resolve all those things and there were lots of issues and I was sitting on a plane, stuck on the runway for two and half hours getting no answers from anybody. I finally got fed up. I took out my laptop.

I fired up my hotspot and I tweeted out hey there JetBlue, love you guys, but what's the deal. We've been stuck on the runway for two and a half hours. And I quickly get back, you know, a canned tweet which okay as an initial interaction. Sorry, you're having a

problem. We're doing everything we can. We hope to have you in the air as soon as we can, you know.

And I didn’t accept that and I wrote back and said, “That’s all well and good. That’s the same thing we're hearing here on the plane. Thank you very much, but I want to know what's going on.” And we have a very quick back and forth and eventually the person who tweeted with me starts explaining to me that our bags are on the New Orleans flight and the New Orleans bags are on our flight.

And Morgan if you're listening, I apologize if I got the exact city wrong, but I believe it was New Orleans. And he always threatens me when we go back into the history of the tweets and figure out exactly what city that was. And at the time I did not know Morgan. And they start answering me. They realized that here’s a guy. He’s got a lot of Twitter followers. He’s not giving us a break, so instead of just shutting down, they start saying well it's a lot more complicated than you think.

You're certainly don’t want to take off with your bags on the wrong plane and I'm like of course, I don’t. So, I'm actually well, what's the big deal? Let's just move the bags. I'll get off the plane and help you. I'm sure I can get 10 other people to do it. Well, it's a lot more complicated than that. You're out on the tarmac. We can't do it out there. There's no gates available.

You have to get a union crew, on and on. But in the middle of the conversation, all of a sudden they tweet me and they say hey, listen, good news. We've got a crew. We've got a gate. We're going to have you in the air in half an hour. And they thought it was over. And they said, “Thank you very much.” By the way, they made me a hero.

So the whole time I'm filling in the plane. The flight attendants are coming to me for information, so JetBlue not only engaged me and my whole Twitter audience, but they made everybody on the plane think that I'm a hero. So, they thought it was over. It wasn’t over. So, I tweeted back and go, that’s well and good, but now it's 11:00 o'clock at night. We're not going to land in Austin until 2:00 in the morning. You know, we were all going – if you know about South by Southwest, it's all about the parties.

We're going to miss our parties. How about free drinks for everybody on the plane? So now I get again the boilerplate, you know, tweet back saying FAA regulations say blah, blah, blah and I literally tweet back blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, we want a party. So, I won't bore you with all the tweets in between, but there's a quick conversation and they go how about free movies for everybody when you take off?

And now they do that automatically, but they weren't then. I said, “Deal,” because I was not trying to be a hard ass. I was just trying to see what they would do, have a little fun. I announced to the plane we're getting free movies. Everybody claps for me. We take off. JetBlue still and Morgan again, if you're listening, what is going on with no Wi-Fi? It's 2013. Okay.

But we land and I couldn’t tweet this out while we're flying and like a good social media guy, I tweet out kudos to @JetBlue. They couldn’t solve my problem, but they engaged me and that made me happy. So, a month later, a month a half later, I'm on a panel at the Chief Marketing – CMO Club Summit, Chief Marketing Office Club Summit. There's a 150 CMOs in the audience from Fortune 500 companies down to startups.

Who’s on the panel? Morgan Johnson, the head of the communications from JetBlue, Jaime Punishill who before Frank Elias was running social for Citibank and Jeff Lewis from Target and I was at Elf eyeslipsface.com Cosmetics and idea was here I am tweeting, you know with aspirational product and a fun thing and all these guys get are complaints, how do you do it?

And a couple of minutes into the thing, I didn’t walk until Morgan introduced me hey, I'm the guy, you know. We were talking about something. He talks about engaging and I looked at him I go, I've got to give you guys kudos and the minute that word came out of my mouth he starts pointing at me, shaking his finger, and he goes oh my God and he looks back up at the screen and go sure, Ted Rubin. You're the guy. You're the drinks guy.

And I – and this is totally authentic, neither of us knew each other. I looked at him and go I'm looking at him just as incredulously like how do you know? He says because I was the guy tweeting with you. Because JetBlue even back in 2009 had an escalation policy, that if somebody was complaining and they were socially active and whatever it was and it was – this flight was flagged anyway because it was South by Southwest that they got somebody on the Twitter conversation who can really answer questions.

And to this day and you have – Morgan is out there, go into it, you know how extensive – they’ve rebuilt their entire brand using social and they do it not by fixing things for people, but by engaging and interacting.

Rick: Yeah, yeah. So that aligns with – I love that story, by the way and I'm so glad to hear you share it again. You know, a study came out recently from the Internet Advertising Bureau where they said that 90% of consumers would recommend a brand to other people after interacting with them on social media and that’s exactly what you're talking about here.

Now, I want to take that a step further and this is sort of the million-dollar question that comes up here on the show all the time and it revolves around measurement and I know you do talk a lot about measurement and I realize that, you know, measurement is going to differ from campaign to campaign of course, but on the whole how do you think small business should – how small businesses should be looking at measuring their social media efforts?

Ted Rubin: Well, you know, it should be told I think it's easier for small business because it's a much more controllable format. I think that small business can – as the opportunity of every customer, how did you find your way here? I mean there's not that

many customers. They're having a one to one relationship with them. Most small businesses and I'm gathering and I could be wrong that we're talking about small businesses that tend to be face to face businesses, that tend to be real world businesses and I don’t think we're talking about small e-commerce businesses, but we might be.

But even small e-commerce businesses, they don’t have thousands of employees. Their ratio – I mean the customers, their ratio of employees to customers tend to be higher and they have the ability to ask that question. They have the ability to watch their page and see the interactions that are happening because there's not – they don’t need expensive software to do it.

So that’s number one important way. Another way is classic AB testing that any business can do. You know, start using something more and see what the difference is. Now, this company is not a terribly small business. They are small in the sense of Fortune 500 companies or larger corporate companies, Bigelow Tea, you’ve probably heard of them, very big tea company.

I might get the exact numbers wrong, but they're about an 85-year-old family business. Collective Bias has been working with them since the beginning of the year. We only create a huge amount of organic blogger/conversational storytelling contents for them. And what they’ve done, they’ve come back to us and said that because of us they’ve had their first ever back to back double duty increases in sales at retail and a lot of that was not tracked via point of purchase.

It was tracked because they’ve been doing the same kind of marketing for many many years and we're the only thing that changed. Therefore, in their lives, that has to be the differentiator that caused the jump in sales. So, small business can do that very easily because they're really controlling their marketing. So, if they try something for a two to three months period and then they watch what happens to their sales, they can attribute certain things directly to what they're doing differently.

So that’s another way they can do it. And then they can also look at different metrics like a lot of small businesses know the more support people they speak to, the more sales they make. Okay. It's a very basic part of their business. The more people that walk through the door, they know how many people they can convert. They can watch their average order value. Are they getting people to buy more? Are people – more frequency of purchase? Are people coming back more? These are things that are measurable and they can be directly attributed to certain different efforts that they do.

Rick: Yeah, yeah. So, let's stay on that theme there Ted. So, let's say you're a small business owner with very little budget for online marketing and you want to start leveraging social media to market your business, what are – let's bullet it out here. What are three things that you would do to start out in social media?

Ted Rubin: The first thing I would do is start listening and following social media. I would start interacting with other brands. I mean the very first thing I would do would be

I would get into social and start interacting as an individual, very very important. Don’t just hire a social media consultant. Don’t just bring an intern. Don’t just assign somebody in your company. If you're a small business, the odds are as the owner you have your hands in everything, so why wouldn’t you have your hands into the social side of things.

So, I think that most important thing is to open – you know, is to start using – if you don’t want it to be your regular personal page and I think it should especially if you're a small business person. I think people should know who you are. They should know you're a family person. They should know something about you. Everyone has their different levels of how comfortable they can be with that and start another page that has to do with your business. And it doesn’t have to be a business page.

Through your personal page, you start posting things there. Start interacting with people so you can start understanding the media. I mean you wouldn’t buy a TV ad without watching TV, you know and I think that’s a big mistake people make. They think of it as this thing that they have to get someone else to use and look there are some things they can't do themselves.

They can't necessarily learn how to code because not everybody has the time to learn how to code and build their own website. So, what do you do? You hire someone to build your website. And very often small businesses have lots of problems with that. They get a shitty website built. They hired the wrong guy. Well, at social you shouldn’t be doing that. You can go out and do it yourself.

Most important above everything is – and you can do it off hours. You can do it at midnight. I've got to tell you, some of the most active time on social is 11:00 o'clock to 2:00 in the morning. You know, it's early morning. So, get on those channels. There's no excuses. Don’t tell me you don’t have time. Get up earlier. Go to bed later. Sleep less, you know and get to understand the medium. Go out and buy a few books.

If you're first starting, one of the best books on the market is Gary Vaynerchuk’s original book. I think it's called Crush It! You know people in the business, social media “experts” like to put it down and it's very simplified and basic. Well, guess what? That’s what most people need.

Rick: Right, exactly.

Ted Rubin: So, it's great for that and yes it was written a few years ago, but it still talks about Twitter, Facebook, YouTube. It's all still relevant. Go buy that book. Okay, really really important. And when you're buying that book, buy one other book, the best social media book ever written, I'll give you a clue. It was written in 1936. It's called How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie.

It blows away every single book that’s been written in the last 15 years. Make sure you read it. Learn to look people in the eye. Learn to call them by name. I call it online.

The term I use is looking people in the eye digitally and most business don’t do this. Small businesses especially they have no excuse not to look at every Twitter follower, not to know before they respond to them. Look at their name. Answer them by name. Thanks for sharing George. Oh my God, you live in Park City. I love to skate.

You know make a comment that shows that you looked at their bio. If you want to make a real impression on them, a lot of people think in Twitter they're protecting their privacy by not putting their name incredibly stupid in my opinion and yes, I just did use the word stupid. But you know what, when you go to the extra effort of knowing their name, clicking on the link that might lead to their blog and then their blog didn’t have their name, but you go to the about internet log and they finally have their name and you say I do this with every time I answer people.

I find out – even with my 145,000 followers and – and I get hundreds of retweets a day. I answer people by name. Dale Carnegie has this thing, if you read How to Win Friends, one of the things is that the sweetest word in any language to any person is their own name, so do that. Get that book. I'm going to consider that both number two. Get Gary’s book. Get How to Win Friends and Influence People. If you can only buy one, buy Dale Carnegie’s book because that’s going to help you in every part of your business.

Rick: Okay.

Ted Rubin: Number three is – actually I'm going to give you four things.

Rick: Sure.

Ted Rubin: Jump in – and this goes back to number one. Don’t just jump in for yourself, but jump in for your company. Don’t worry about having a whole, full blown out strategy because if you make a whole full blown out strategy, if you're doing it right, it's going to change within the first 30 days because it needs – it's going to change. It's going to evolve. I evolve what I do for my personal brand and for any company I work for, everyday.

I get people and even at Collective Bias where I've been there two and a half years. I'll have someone in the leadership this thing go, why did you tweet that tweet? That’s not really – I'm like it isn't. Did you notice I got 20 retweets? Or, they might say, you know, that wasn’t really right. And I'll go you're right, it's didn’t work. Nobody cares or somebody wrote back a negative thing, but guess what? It's there and it's gone.

I didn’t buy TV time based on that. So, jump in, start evolving your strategy and by doing is part of the evolution and will help you build that strategy for your company. And pick a couple of platforms that you have time for so maybe just start with Twitter and Facebook or Pinterest might be important to you. I think Twitter should be a part of every plan just because of its ability to help you drive followers everywhere.

Rick: Sure.

Ted Rubin: And then part of that number three or maybe you can number it number four is make a decision on whether or not you need outside help. And if you do, be very careful, but you know go out and look for it and make sure – this is the most important thing. I told this to CMOs of Fortune 500 companies who say how would I know who to hire? There's a million people out there. Well, guess what? If they don’t have a strong social presence themselves, don’t hire them.

Rick: Yeah, yeah.

Ted Rubin: Because there's a million experts out there that tell you that know how to do it and then you look and they're not even doing it.

Rick: Right, right, yeah.

Ted Rubin: And that’s the beauty of guys like Gary – I mean Gary Vaynerchuk and a Chris Brogan. Those guys are out there everyday doing it. You know, you might agree or disagree with things they do. That’s okay. But they're out there doing it.

Rick: But they're doing it, yeah, yeah.

Ted Rubin: And that’s important.

Rick: Ted, two more quick questions here for you: What are the trends in social media that you're seeing over the next year or so and how do you see these trends affecting small business?

Ted Rubin: Okay. Well, you know, when people ask me that, sometimes the question comes in a little different format like it's what's next. You know, I think trend is a better word because it implies a gradual change. What I think is most important is in that respect is that I think – I'm not going to say exactly what the trend is. I'm going to say what I hope it is.

I'm hoping that people are going to start recognizing they’ve got to execute what's working now and not worry as much about what's next. That doesn’t mean not pay attention and not evolve. It means get in there and do it and stop worrying about being ahead of the curve because you will be a part of that curve if you're executing as you go. And what I really think is a big part of what the trend is going to is that people are finally – now, this is a little self-serving. People they talk about, but people are finally recognizing the real value of relationships and that clicking of button is not making a friend that we've got to take that the word friend from Facebook.

They they’ve co-opted it. God bless them. They’ve done an amazing marketing job when you say the word friend anywhere today. People don’t think of friends, they think of Facebook. We've got to give that word friend meaning again and the way you do that is by looking people in the eye generally. It's by building relationships. It's by

understanding that if we commoditize everything, it's only about price. If you want to be profitable, if you want to build a business that has sustainability then you have to add value and I think relationships are a good part of that.

Rick: Love it. Love it. Last question for you here Ted: Now, this is a little bit of a fun one here and I'm curious to hear what you have to say. You're very open about putting your telephone number out there. You have it on your website. You announce it at conferences and so forth, give us a story about a time when someone shall we say abused your phone number and made you question whether you should keep publicizing and you know maybe change your phone number?

Ted Rubin: Truth be told, it never happened.

Rick: Really.

Ted Rubin: My phone number is 516-270-5511. My personal email is tedrubin@gmail. Text me, write me, call me, what I will tell you is they don’t.

Rick: Really.

Ted Rubin: But this goes to a brand is what you do, a reputation is what people will remember.

Rick: Yeah.

Ted Rubin: So, I get up on stage and I give people my phone number and people tweet it out and they talk – oh my God, Ted Rubin gave out his number. Oh my God, Ted Rubin tweeted it and guess what? I get one phone call, but you know what I do get? I get that virus of people going out there saying oh my God and then people spread it and it spread and I get the value of all these people saying oh my God, I can pick up the phone and call Ted and he’s okay with it.

Rick: Yeah.

Ted Rubin: And then some people do and they write I called him and we had a conversation or I also tell people if you're in the same town I'm in, you want to have a cup of coffee to reach out to me. That’s part of my personal brand. Seth Godin’s personal brand is he meets with nobody for anything. No lunches, no coffee, why? Because when people say how does he produce all those content? That’s how he does it.

He takes all his time and puts them there, but part of what I do is about building relationships and letting people know that I'll be there for them, so they're welcome to reach out to me. I've never had an issue with it. People don’t abuse it. I think people don’t use the phone enough. You know, I give people a challenge. You know, when I speak, I hold up my iPhone and I ask people in the audience what's this called?

And people, you know, scream out it's an iPhone. And I go what's the biggest word in iPhones? What's the biggest word in iPhone? And every single time, the majority of the people just go “I”. I go “NO”. It's phone.

Rick: Right.

Ted Rubin: You know, and there's an amazing app on this phone. You know what, you guys all have apps right here. I'm sure you have apps on your phone, right.

Rick: Sure, sure.

Ted Rubin: And you know what they are. Well, every iPhone or every phone itself comes with this amazing app pre-installed. You press a button it says keypad and it's got numbers and when you press a certain amount of those numbers, you can actually hear somebody’s voice.

Rick: Imagine that.

Ted Rubin: It's remarkable. Imagine it. And you don’t have to use emoticons to express emotions. You can laugh. You can cry. You can scream. You can express emotion. You can convey a thought very very quickly as a matter of fact. It doesn’t take 50 emails or 40 texts and what I challenge everybody to do is over the next 30 days, just the next 30 days pick up the phone once a day and call someone you haven’t spoken to in a while and just say hello.

Rick: Love it.

Ted Rubin: And make it easy for them, if they want to talk, great. If they don’t, just say just called to see if I can do anything for you, you say hello and get off the phone because the reason most people don’t pick up the phone and the reason us as men love text and don’t answer the phone when our girlfriends or wives call is because they can't get off the damn phone.

Rick: Right.

Ted Rubin: You know. Well, how was your day and what are you doing, you know. You know, I've got to go. I just called to say hi. I really care about you. You mean a lot to me. Get on the phone. You'll be amazed at what it will do for your relationships and how it will help your business grow.

Rick: Love it. Love it. We've listed out a lot of links here, a lot of sites, your phone number, tedrubin@gmail.com. We'll make sure to link all those links up in the show notes. What kind of projects – we'll also link up your book. People can get that anywhere books are sold, but what – you know, any projects that you're working on right now that you’d like to just mention here that I'll link up in the show notes?

Ted Rubin: You know, I wouldn’t say that there are any real projects. For me, it's about again continuing people to get this message about how important relationships are. What I'm talking about is not rocket science. People have to understand that digital is no different than personal. When you look people in the eye, they’d know you're paying attention to them or when you shake their hand and listen to their name and repeat it, they know that you care about them.

I want people – I mean what I want people to do is take back this word friend and make it valuable. Let our kids know that friends aren't just a button they press. That it’s someone that they get to know, that they reach out to and that you can scale this brand – here’s the other thing, brands say to me all the time well, how can we do that? We can't answer everybody and we have no answer to followers and that doesn’t scale, but it does scale because like I said with the phone, most people don’t want to engage with you.

Don’t let these experts tell you that your Facebook page has to have 500 comments for it to mean something or that the same people keep commenting. Guess what? Those same people that keep commenting, those people, dozens and hundreds and thousands of them that are reading those comments and getting something out of it. Most people are lurkers.

So understand that they're out there and they're paying attention and that you can connect with them. Just by connecting with the few, you can connect with many because when you connect, when a brand has a direct conversation with Rick or with Ted the other people watching go oh, it's like the lottery. They go that could have been me.

Rick: Yeah, yeah. It's such a great feeling.

Ted Rubin: And they feel like if and when that time comes, I will have that opportunity.

Rick: Yeah, yeah. That’s great. Ted, thank you so much for being on the show today. It's such great information. We could chat all afternoon, but thank you so much for your time today. I really really appreciate you're being on the show.

Ted Rubin: My pleasure. I really enjoyed it. Have an amazing weekend–

Rick: You too.

Ted Rubin: – and make the rest of the day great.

Rick: Awesome. Awesome. Thanks Ted. All right.