Guy Kawasaki interview Part 2
Here’s part two of three in Walter Schwabe’s interview with Guy Kawasaki.
Click on the MP3 above to hear the second part of Walter’s interview of Guy Kawasaki.
What are the top three ways you leverage social web for your business?
“I would make the very bold claim that I get more value out of Twitter than anybody in the world, because Alltop has largely been built upon the shoulders of Twitter in the sense that the Twitter community provides me with ideas for topics and not only that, they also provide me with the best feeds for those topics.”
Guy said his Twitter followers may suggest a topic like ADHD. They may have a child with the condition, are doctors familiar with it or family counselor and already know the best feeds for the topic.
“Not only do they suggest a topic then they send me the feeds and I’m in business. I don’t know how I would have done that without Twitter. I don’t know how I would have reached them. I don’t know how they would have reached me.”
The old way of building Alltop would have been to have created a community interested in dissemination of information and once the community is in place, tap them for more information and help.
“The new way is you just dive into the middle of Twitter and you form no community around yourself in particular to start. You dive in the middle and you get these sporadic sort of gems of and nuggets of information that come to you from the community as a whole; not your community.”
Several days before the interview, Guy mentioned he’d started a Facebook group for Alltop, which he did as an afterthought.
“Before, that would be the first thing you would try to do because you need to get this community to form this community to help you. I didn’t need to do that. I already had this very loosely held Twitter community that is very diverse, all over the world, but I could not have formed a community around Alltop of the magnitude of the overall Twitter community.”
At the time of the interview, Guy had 17,000 followers on Twitter, which has ballooned to more than 55,000 followers now.
“Odds are for every topic that I could possibly come up with, there are five people who are experts in that topic.”
How would a large organization (eg 5,000 people) follow your lead on Twitter?
“I think it would be impossible. (laughs) That’s being facetious but let me tell you why I think it would be very hard. Because in a 5,000 person organization that… with a legal department and a general counsel and outside counsel, they would want to read each Tweet before you send it.”
“They don’t want you divulging anything that’s confidential, that might affect the stock price, that should have been filed with the SEC before you said it. It’s the same reason why I can’t name an interesting blog of a publicly held CEO.”
“Twitter is not a company presence on a social media network. It is one person typing something in 140 characters.”
“Probably the best Twitterer at a 5,000 person organization is a summer intern. How palatable is it to tell a 5,000 person organization ‘rest your reputation on Twitter on a summer intern that you’re paying 15 bucks an hour to who is going to be gone in 60 days’?”
“The way to be successful on Twitter is to establish yourself as an interesting person.”
Guy suggested having a focus, for example baseball. If you’re an expert, you could eventually develop a following of baseball fanatics.
“You always have to ask yourself this question: in the infinite conversations going on in Twitter or any social medium, how do I stand out and be interesting? Some people choose to do this by being assholes and flame the most. So you may get a few followers for that, but I don’t think that’s optimal.”
“The best way is to be seen as a content expert in a niche, whatever that niche is.”
Do you think that large organizations or industry have managed to figure out social media in general?
“No, not at all. Now don’t get me wrong. I don’t think that most small start-up organizations have figured it out either. We’re at the stage where Alexander Graham Bell is calling the guy in the other room right now.”
“As a first step I think companies on their websites should open up forums and let people who are interested in the company communicate with the company and with each other. But how many companies even have the balls to do that?”
How would you help an organization to accept scrutiny online, react effectively to it and help the customer?
“First, it would take a lot of money. (laughs) It’s all about giving up control and stop being paranoid.”
Using a made-up example of a product with short battery life, Guy suggested that it would be better to be open about a product’s shortcomings and that the company is working on it rather than attempting to hide the problem.
Guy had some problems with his iPhone where it would drop calls. He gave up trying to solve the problem with AT&T and searched “3G iphone dropped calls.” He found in the Apple support forum that around 500 people were having that same problem. The solution was to go from 3G to Edge, or 2G.
“This in itself is rather amazing. I just bought a 3G phone and I’ve been told the way to really make it work for phone calls is go to 2G where 3G is spotty. Holy cow. That’s like you go to Toyota, you buy a Prius and they tell you ‘well, to fix that problem you should really disconnect the battery and run on gas.’”
“So there’s a forum and there’s this thread and it’s probably got 500 messages in it by now. Do you think most people in the world have heard this? Do you think it’s stopped the sale of iPhones? Do you think it’s hurt Apple really?”
“Do you think that Apple should fix this problem? Absolutely. You could make the case that Apple now knows the severity of the problem and they cannot deny it. They have to fix it.”
“It’s better that Apple has this open forum and they have seen that 500 people are already pissed off about this and they have to fix it.”
“Even in the worst case, at least I know now that if this occurs with me with my phone I know all I have to do is switch from 3G to 2G and the problem will go away. And then when I’m back in an area with good 3G I just turn 3G back on.”
“That’s a lot better than wondering is it me? Is it AT&T? Is it AT&T’s coverage? Is it something is wrong with my iPhone? What’s wrong here?”
“A great example of social media.”
I would have been astounded if the AT&T operator would have told me the same solution, Guy added.
“The first thing they would have said is ‘are you sure you have the current software installed?’ And the second thing they would have said is ‘we show no outages where you are.’ And the third thing is ‘it’s probably your phone is faulty. You should go back to the Apple store where you bought it.’”
What are some of the other barriers you see that organizations are bumping up against when they contemplate a social media strategy?
“Besides the legal, or the perceived legal risk, is that it’s very difficult to quantify the return. If you allocate a certain budget to social media. Let’s say you get past the legal department, which is a big if, but let’s just say you do.”
“So now you’re past the legal department and you’ve allocated this budget, how do you quote unquote prove that this was worthwhile doing, and I don’t know how you do it.”
“How do you quantify the impact of a social media strategy? Wow. It’s hard enough to quantify click throughs and click actions and TV buys and media buys. I don’t know how you would quantify social media. It’s something you just have to believe it to see it.”
Walter talked about some of the difficulties in being able to quantify the return on investment in social media strategy.
Walter: “Maybe then it’s something more vague. Maybe it’s something like just measuring the amount of sort of interest in a brand or a brand’s products or services after, for example, relationships and rapport have been built up. Because one of the things, I think, obviously somebody like yourself on Twitter who has thousands and thousands of followers is doing is essentially building rapport.”
Walter: “And that is having an effect on your business. By extension, these people who you have some level of rapport with are supplying you with, as you said earlier, ideas and feeds for Alltop. So, in a way you can measure some level of response in terms of success there.”
Guy: “Yes, but I am a unique situation, right? I can measure this because I have a real tangible result. People send me a feed or send me a topic idea. What if you’re Frigidaire refrigerators? What are they going to send you that’s tangible? I don’t know. What if you’re Proctor & Gamble and you’re selling a new kind of baking powder? I have no idea how you would quantify the fact that you have a big social media presence.”
Walter: “I think in the early adopter community online with respect to social media, that has got to be probably the single most, toughest, and probably biggest ongoing question that people are trying to put their own spin on right now.”
Guy: “On the other hand, it’s not very expensive what we’ve just advocated. It’s not like we’re saying spend $20 million to do a Super Bowl commercial.”
Walter: “That’s very true. The cost of implementation is considerably lower.”
Part 3 of the interview
We’ll publish the rest of Guy Kawasaki’s interview next week with the last portion of the audio as well. In this last part Guy will talk about who he thinks are some of the sharpest minds in social media today, how he uses Twitter and how organizations communicate.
Alain Saffel – any questions? alain@fusedlogic.com
