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June 20, 2018 at 10:14 am #1212992Up::0karensaid, post: 259774, member: 110616 wrote:Gosh [USER=6375]@JohnW[/USER]And I am truly hoping, most on this forum have heard of Gary Vaynerchuk. This man is the man! Millions upon millions of organic subscribers.
The proof is in the audience numbers. They will tell you if you suck! or not…
Best selling author, his Social Media books are a must read. Below is a YouTube videos when he was in Brisbane. Key note speaker. Word was everyone was there to hear Gary speak. No surprise.
The kicker: He was a traditional business owner. His roots started there!
BRISBANE 2017 SOLD OUT AS USUAL
426,491 YT VIEWS
713 COMMENTS (incredible engagement)
You CANNOT FAKE THIS DATAT
hanks [USER=6375]@JohnW[/USER]
Hi Karen S,
My reply to your post is in four parts:A. Can followers and video views be faked?
B. What does GV tell us about social media marketing in the video?
C. How does GV market his products/services?
D. How many FS’s may find GV’s promotional tactics relevant to their businesses?A. Can followers and video views be faked?
Unfortunately, it is cheap & easy to fake social media followers & viewers. Worse, the practice seems to be rampant!
There are lots of services offering fake followers/viewers. You can buy Facebook “likes” and “followers” and/or you can buy a robot program to automate the process. You can buy fake traffic for the other social platforms, including YouTube views.
Google will show services offering to sell you 100,000 Fb followers in 2-7 days for $US492. Fake YouTube views are available for $7 per 1,000.
I’m not for a second suggesting Mr G.V. does this but as I calculate it, you could buy all of his 3 million Facebook followers and the 426.5k YouTube views of this video for $17,760. This happens to equate with 15 minutes worth of his average appearance fee ($US75k and above) if the Brisbane event is typical.
BTW. It seems the world’s major advertisers are starting to wage war on the endemic problem of “Influencers” who are buying fake followers and likes.
Here are 2 very recent articles:
Apr 2018 Adage: Study of Influencer spenders finds big names, lots of fake followersP&G brands “Pampers and Olay ranked No. 4 and 10, respectively, on the list of brands with the most fake followers among their paid influencers last month; Pampers with 32 percent and Olay with 19 percent. Topping the study’s list: Ritz-Carlton, with a whopping 78 percent of fake followers for its influencers.”
Jun 2018 Reuters: Unilever takes stand against digital media’s fake followers
“Consumer goods giant Unilever, the world’s second-biggest advertiser, is cutting ties with digital media “influencers” that buy followers”
“The announcement comes four months after Weed (Unilever CMO) made waves by threatening to pull investment from digital platforms such as Facebook and Google if they did not take steps to improve consumer trust and eradicate “toxic” online content.”
“It is hard to pinpoint how prevalent the practice of buying followers is, but Weed said he has heard estimates that as much as 40 percent of influencers have been involved at some point…”
Then there are the 583 million fake accounts Fb closed in the first 3 months of 2018. (Ref. The Guardian News)
To put that number into perspective Fb tells us it only has “80 million small businesses on Facebook“
What about the problem of video “views”?
- YouTube counts 30 seconds as a “view”
- Facebook, Instagram & Twitter count 3 seconds as a “view”
- These count a “view” when opening/scrolling the page or pressing play – Instagram Stories, Instagram Live & Periscope
The best of these equate with someone viewing 0.8% of the 1+ hour long GV video. What sort of viewership metrics are these? Surely it would be less misleading to report the number of people who landed on the page.
ISTM, these social media “views” are at best misleading or at worst, completely deceptive.
Is it any wonder that 2/3 of CMOs say they can’t measure their social media performance metrics?
B. What does GV tell us about social media marketing in the video?
I’ve watched the Brisbane video a couple of times and the Sydney event one once and these are the only points of relevance I noted:
- Buy online ads. When Google gets too expensive, switch to Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, pay Influencers to promote your/product/service
- If you don’t spend 2018 completely and obsessively around Facebook and Instagram, you will lose.
- For those selling products, spend 65% of budget on Facebook, Instagram ads & influencers.
- Test your ads before you commit your ad budget
- He predicts the future will be in podcasts
- Everyone should do what they are good at. Use print if you can write or video if you are better at that.
That’s about it. If I’ve missed something significant or relevant, please add it to the list.
I see some flaws and/or omissions with this advice…
1. Where is the advice for targeting repeat customers vs. new customer acquisition?
There are only two ways you can increase your business revenue:
- Find new customers to buy something
- Sell more to existing customers
Were we given any advice about this?
2. Variable costs of targeting different customer demographicsThen there are the different demographics for all the media platforms.
You can’t begin to calculate which platform’s ads are cheapest without answers to:
- What is the ad cost for your product category/service ?
- Are they used by existing clients or potential ones?
- What is the sex, age, location, interests of your target audiences?
These variables can make a huge difference in the cost-effectiveness of ads on any chosen platform. You can’t ignore these variables when they are this pronounced…
Mar 2018 Pew Research Center: Social Media Use in 2018“A majority of Americans use Facebook and YouTube, but young adults (up to 24 yo) are especially heavy users of Snapchat and Instagram”
This USA Pew research should also cause reflection on GV’s advice to spend 65% of your ad budget on Instagram. Pew research indicates Instagram is a female user skewed platform. If you have a product/service where the decision maker is predominantly male, the survey suggests don’t spend it on Instagram.
Jun 2018 Wordstream: Facebook Ad Benchmarks for YOUR Industry (USA)
This USA study reports average Facebook costs per click across a range of industries/services. The CPC range was from $US0.45 for Apparel to $US3.77 for Finance and Insurance.
But, this USA study is only of general indicative value when you see a recent Australian study…
Mar 2018 Adnews: Australia has the most expensive Facebook ads in the world, study finds
“Facebook costs Australian advertisers nearly four times the global average CPM,”
“Studies show up to a 50% drop in organic engagement and reach for some brands on Facebook, meaning marketers will move more towards a pay-to-play model.”
Then there is video ad fraud, also not new:
Dec 2016: Forbes: ‘Biggest Ad Fraud Ever’: Hackers Make $5M A Day By Faking 300M Video Views“It’s the biggest digital ad fraud ever uncovered and perpetrated by faking clicks on video ads”
My question is, how accurate, up-to-date and relevant is the seemingly all-encompassing, USA-centric advice given by GV to Australian small businesses in the Nov 2017 video?
3. The incidence of “Influencer” and ad fraud
There are some 2018 references to the incidence of Influencer fraud above.
It’s not a new problem. Eg.
Why is GV seemingly recommending paid Influencer advertising unconditionally?
Sorry for the excessively long post, folk.
If anyone is interested in more of this detail I will post on these additional topics:
C. How does GV market his products/services?
D. How many FS’s may find GV’s promotional tactics relevant to their businesses?PS: We are up to 7,962 views of this thread before I added the above post. It will be interesting to see if FS forum participants are interested in long edu pieces like this.
(Hey Bert, …and you thought SEOs needed supervision. It seems we are babes in the wood when compared with the high jinks some “influencers” and incompetent social media marketers can get up to. )
June 21, 2018 at 1:30 am #1212993Up::0Hi John,
We clean for some social media darlings and they have amazing businesses. Their influence enables them to release new products and services that have been instant sellouts.
Interestingly, both are associated with the Kardashians – one as an adviser and the other company paid for an endorsement. The one with the endorsement is quoted as being worth $46M.
Both are where they are today because of their associations with the Kardashians.
Gary V’s first and foremost argument is that pretty much all of the Fortune 500 companies “waste” a lot of money on broad based advertising such as on TV ads. The money is wasted, he argues because the ads are not targeted.
On the flip side, Social Media advertising is a better spend because it is way more targeted.
Gary V is an investor too and he “pushes” products that he invests in eg Snapchat – I am personally wary about what he says about any of the platforms he is invested in.
As much as the articles you point to indicate there are hurdles to jump, if using influencers means that you can access their audience, which will have a natural interest in what you do, it will be a positive for you.
You only need to look at how influencers help each other to see the effect.
For example, as Brian Dean how much being featured by Pat Flynn helped him.
June 21, 2018 at 6:22 am #1212994Up::0Paul – FS Concierge, post: 260363, member: 78928 wrote:Hi John,We clean for some social media darlings and they have amazing businesses. Their influence enables them to release new products and services that have been instant sellouts.
Interestingly, both are associated with the Kardashians – one as an adviser and the other company paid for an endorsement. The one with the endorsement is quoted as being worth $46M.
Both are where they are today because of their associations with the Kardashians.
Gary V’s first and foremost argument is that pretty much all of the Fortune 500 companies “waste” a lot of money on broad based advertising such as on TV ads. The money is wasted, he argues because the ads are not targeted.
On the flip side, Social Media advertising is a better spend because it is way more targeted.
Gary V is an investor too and he “pushes” products that he invests in eg Snapchat – I am personally wary about what he says about any of the platforms he is invested in.
As much as the articles you point to indicate there are hurdles to jump, if using influencers means that you can access their audience, which will have a natural interest in what you do, it will be a positive for you.
You only need to look at how influencers help each other to see the effect.
For example, as Brian Dean how much being featured by Pat Flynn helped him.
Hi Paul,
“Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don’t know which half.” This old Wanamaker saying goes back to the 19th century.Now, according to the CMO Survey (linked in post above), online media has increased this offline ad “half” to around two-thirds that may be wasted online. There are lots of reasons for this.
Eg. On Facebook you can be billed at different rates for ad impressions, likes, clicks or video views. There is a higher fee for rare event ads. What do these different metrics actually mean to the advertiser?
You have different ad fee charging methods and metrics being reported on the different search engines and social media platforms. Eg. Video “views” are sometimes counted when someome scrolls past them, on others a view can be as long as 30 seconds of playtime.
At least in the offline world, for all their limitations, there are consistent performance metrics for TV, radio and press. You don’t have each TV channel, radio station newspaper and magazine running its own unique performance statistics.
GV makes no mention of all these major types of problem that confound the world of online advertising. Does he know they exist? Why doesn’t he warn folk about them?
I found the Brisbane video very short on useful social media info that small businesses of the type on FS can really use.
It seems GV is on much the same pathway as the Kardashians. He promoted his name to become a celebrity then developed products to monetize his fame.
He is very good at tying his name to others more famous than himself and getting lots of publicity on TV, radio, major newspaper and national magazines coverage.
Google this list of TV presenters, film stars, celebrities and even an ex US President…
- Gary Vaynerchuk Mike Rowe
- Gary Vaynerchuk Ellen Degeneres
- Gary Vaynerchuk Jimmy Fallon
- Gary Vaynerchuk Gwyneth Paltrow
- Gary Vaynerchuk Kevin O’Leary
- Gary Vaynerchuk Robert Herjavec
- Gary Vaynerchuk Joe Rogan
- Gary Vaynerchuk Al Roker
- Gary Vaynerchuk George W. Bush
He did not become a celebrity buying online advertising.
Now he has a world-wide network of affiliates who invest an unknown quantity of their time and money promoting his speaking events.
He also has a team of 500 people at VaynerMedia who I imagine are involved in preparing and making the thousands of videos and other content he publishes each year.
I gather he has a net worth of $US160MM – not the sort of financial buffer your average FS business is likely to have.
I’m not anti the guy at all. He works harder on promoting his services than anyone I can recall. I certainly could not nor would I want to dedicate myself to the huge work load and life-style he has set for himself.
To me the real issues are the relevance, accuracy, currency and completeness of his advice to the types of small businesses on FS.
BTW, It is not all success stories for his small business clients either…
PS Google Trends is an interesting resource. Enter a search term and Google will show you the term’s search usage back as far as 2004. If you search for Kardashian it peaks in Nov 2014 with the release of her infamous “back-side” pic. I don’t think I have the resources for that sort of online impact. It wasn’t achieved with online advertising either.
June 21, 2018 at 7:29 am #1212995Up::0I read a story about a booking agent that forgot to book an ad in a major newspaper for a year – the company’s earnings in that market was on-trend with all other markets for that year!
The dilemma became if and what to reveal to the company…
Sometimes super-niched influencers <1000 on a mailing list can be an effective and cost effective way of reaching an audience for a Soloer...like always, research, due diligence and measure results is the order of the day.
The broader questions are the important ones.
What are my goals and what is the most cost effective ways of reaching them.
Using influencers is one way of reaching an audience but there are many more.
June 21, 2018 at 8:51 am #1212996Up::0Paul – FS Concierge, post: 260363, member: 78928 wrote:Gary V’s first and foremost argument is that pretty much all of the Fortune 500 companies “waste” a lot of money on broad based advertising such as on TV ads. The money is wasted, he argues because the ads are not targeted.
.But like everything else he says, there is no substance behind the argument.
Do you think the fortune 500 business’s would be using TV, etc, if they weren’t making money from them. Thats why they are fortune 500 business’s, they spend their money where it is working.
To many people get sucked in by the arguments of the ”influencers” and unfortunately end up getting ripped off
June 21, 2018 at 8:53 am #1212997Up::0JohnW, post: 260353, member: 6375 wrote:(Hey Bert, …and you thought SEOs needed supervision. It seems we are babes in the wood when compared with the high jinks some “influencers” and incompetent social media marketers can get up to. )And [USER=6375]@JohnW[/USER] the sad thing is they suck in many more people who should know better.
June 21, 2018 at 9:50 am #1212998Up::0Paul – FS Concierge, post: 260367, member: 78928 wrote:I read a story about a booking agent that forgot to book an ad in a major newspaper for a year – the company’s earnings in that market was on-trend with all other markets for that year!The dilemma became if and what to reveal to the company…
Sometimes super-niched influencers <1000 on a mailing list can be an effective and cost effective way of reaching an audience for a Soloer...like always, research, due diligence and measure results is the order of the day.
The broader questions are the important ones.
What are my goals and what is the most cost effective ways of reaching them.
Using influencers is one way of reaching an audience but there are many more.
Hi Paul,
I’m not anti any specific online or offline promotional channel.I just can’t imagine a situation where any small business should limit itself to one of the many available to it.
I also can’t imagine a situation where any two small businesses are likely to find the same optimal promotional answers that are appropriate to their objectives and resources.
My “pet peeve” is any online marketing (meaning “promotional”) services that offers universal, simplistic solutions to those with limited marketing and/or technical knowledge in online promotion.
I encourage FS to listen to the people asking the questions in the Q&A session at the end of GV’s Brisbane video. Would you consider these folk to be informed about marketing or online promotional activities?
This illustrates the futility of using online “reviews” to indicate any sort of performance “quality” when complex assessments are involved..
Now watch this video that includes part of another GV video Q&A.
Sep 2017: Mark Ritson on charlatans like Gary VeeSo, FS small business owners, do you go with simple answers that are emotion based and which have not been quantified or do you go with researched answers that are more complex and evidence based?
June 21, 2018 at 2:41 pm #1212999Up::0bb1, post: 260370, member: 53375 wrote:But like everything else he says, there is no substance behind the argument.Do you think the fortune 500 business’s would be using TV, etc, if they weren’t making money from them. Thats why they are fortune 500 business’s, they spend their money where it is working.
To many people get sucked in by the arguments of the ”influencers” and unfortunately end up getting ripped off
Strangely Bert, it is hard to find instances where people are calling for curbing the influence of traditional advertising channels.Google and Facebook on the other hand…
Traditional media is obviously still very powerful for those that can afford it but very few soloists are in that category.
That the trend is away from advertising on traditional media and towards online media speaks for itself.
Using an influencer to promote a product or service was actually borne out of traditional media – you might have heard of the “Oprah Effect”.
The concept is not new and carries over to the digital space because it works.
To dismiss it universally as a potential strategy is counter intuitive to anybody who wants to be successful in business.
An example of how a soloer could use the strategy.
My cousin-in-law has launched a new service where he provides locally based personal training services for disabled kids.
He could reach out to moms groups, local diet and local personal training influencers and ask them if he could provide guests posts and videos and leave a link to his site.
What he does is social worthy – I am pretty sure a lot of influencers have a big heart and would get behind what his program can achieve for disabled kids.
And the influencer in return will be seen as somebody who cares about kids with disabilities.
Win/Win
There is no one marketing strategy that works – it is all about getting granular.
As I said before..”The broader questions are the important ones.
What are my goals and what is the most cost effective ways of reaching them.
Using influencers is one way of reaching an audience but there are many more.”
June 22, 2018 at 12:39 am #1213000Up::0Just weighing in on this one, agree totally with Paul regarding What are my goals and what is the most cost effective ways of reaching them.
Looking at your objectives and REALLY knowing your target audience and where they “are” (whether that be on Facebook, Googling or reading the paper) are the two most important aspects to any marketing strategy.
I’m working with one client in particular that said to me in the beginning “Facebook doesn’t do anything for me, I’ve wasted money”, when they should have actually been funnelling their marketing budget into Google AdWords and website SEO! Their audience is going to search for a business like theirs, they’re not going to be actively looking on FB for it.
Digital marketing allows you to be extremely targeted, you can almost pinpoint your ideal customer if you’re doing it right. Traditional advertising is more like a big fishing net that collects anything in it’s path in the hope of getting tuna, while digital marketing is like finding only the tuna!
June 23, 2018 at 2:22 am #1213001Up::0RE: Influencers. I couldn’t give a stuff about people who are famous for being famous and my guess is there are a lot of people in my age group like me.
If your product/service is geared toward youngsters an “influencer” may help however, if you are pulling resources from other areas and your target market isn’t swayed by endorsements for hire it could hurt rather than help.
[USER=78928]@Paul – FS Concierge[/USER] I would argue that your cousin is an influencer in his own right because of his expertise and networking and ability to share information.
June 23, 2018 at 3:28 am #1213002Up::0What are my goals and what is the most cost effective ways of reaching them.
I actually disagree with that. A better way would be:-
“What are my goals, and what is the best way of reaching them”. And even then, “best” is subjective.
The problem with “most cost effective” is that it is a compromise, plus, most interpret it as “cheapest”. You always hear more horror stories from those who sought the “most cost effective option”, than from anyone else.
There are two fundamental problems with using price as a primary indicator of the value of a service:-
1. Most overestimate the potential of what they will get by paying as little as possible, often because they don’t understand what it is they want, and
2. Most think that paying more gives you something better, which is much harder to define with services than it is with physical goods.Sadly, we have lost the ability to quantify value as anything more meaningful than number of likes.
Case in point is influencers. Apart from high profile exceptions, there isn’t a great deal of info around that influencers boost actual performance, certainly as much as influencers suggest.
There is always a way to get a bigger bang for your buck, it is an ongoing search to get the right content, right platform, right assistance etc.
June 23, 2018 at 8:09 am #1213003Up::0Hi Folk,
You might want to think of “influencers” in two categories:- Those that are paid to promote 3rd party products/services
- Those that influence a lot of followers to buy their own products/services
When you get the 2nd largest advertiser in the world (Unilever) threatening Google and Facebook to clean up 3rd party influencer’s false follower claims, you know there are $billions involved. Eg.
Then there are the “influencers” who are selling their own services. This is where “popularity” and “reviews” rules. It seems most web users are influenced by “reviews” even though they are so easily and frequently scammed.
In the minute market segment of SEO experts I can run the names of SEO experts who really know their stuff through Google Trends and compare their search frequency with the most popular but least accurate, least informed, most illogical and SEO inexperienced names and the knowledgeable folk won’t even rank beside them.
Guys, “Influencers” may not impact on you but they have a huge impact on the web. Why do you think social media wants us to measure success by “likes” and “followers”? It is all about dumbing us down to accept meaningless and often inaccurate metrics.
June 23, 2018 at 11:01 am #1213004Up::0JohnW, post: 260406, member: 6375 wrote:Then there are the “influencers” who are selling their own services. This is where “popularity” and “reviews” rules. It seems most web users are influenced by “reviews” even though they are so easily and frequently scammed.Accept for marketers who make there whole business on reviews, does anyone really believe reviews are factual, as I have often said when people put some bad reviews on their website I may actually believe their positive reviews.
JohnW, post: 260406, member: 6375 wrote:Why do you think social media wants us to measure success by “likes” and “followers”? It is all about dumbing us down to accept meaningless and often inaccurate metrics.And we are dumbing down rapidly.
Why did FB and many others like forums resist implementing the Dislike. Because a lot of the ”influencers” who there business is built on would be dead in the water.
June 23, 2018 at 6:40 pm #1213005Up::0Conceptually, “The Oprah Effect” is the best way to explain why using an influencer can be a good way to market a product or service.
It is (often but not always) an endorsement by a person that can influence their existing audience to buy your product or service.
It is often free although not always.@Jonny, I absolutely agree with your sentiment but with all of the metrics available on the internet, we really can make informed choices about “cost effective” if we do the research.
The concept is to leverage off somebody else’s audience (that you do not have yourself).
Getting on Shark Tank or Dr Oz are good examples of businesses that can “take off” as a result of being broadcast to somebody else’s audience.
The reason I am using these examples is because everybody knows about them already.
[USER=6734]@El Arish Tropical Exotics[/USER] – I love the studying the human condition and what makes us buy one product or service over another has always fascinated me.
You may not be influenced by a celebrity endorsement. Me on the other hand, if I have a problem I want to solve, I would be.
For example, I remember [USER=6375]@JohnW[/USER] saying that [USER=2298]@Aidan[/USER] is an expert Adwords practitioner – this is enough for me to look Aidan up if I have an Adwords need.
The reasons can be complicated but can include factors such as:
1. I don’t know who to trust in the Adwords space.
2. I trust John’s judgement
3. I trust that John’s does know who to trust.
4. I trust John wouldn’t recommend somebody he did not believe in
5. None of my friends are Adwords specialists (not true now but was previously).
6. Trusting an influencer in this way is a proxy for having a recommendation from a friend.My cousin is not an influencer because he does not have an audience. I feel strongly that if he could be featured on a site like kidspot or popsugar or in a newsletter distributed by local special schools, he could help more disabled kids be healthier.
July 10, 2018 at 12:29 am #1213006Up::0We have all social media coverage. However, we do admit that the enquiries coming from social media platform have been very low. They are good for your SEO on Google tho.
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