By Tim Sweeney
Q & A with Scott Stratten
With his wife, Alison, Scott Stratten has authored four best-selling business books and owns UnMarketing. He travels the world nonstop, delivering 60 keynote addresses per year, urging companies to “stop selling and start engaging.” We interrupted his travel schedule and picked his brain on social media marketing, the importance of authenticity, and how millennials are actual people, too.
Q: You use social media, especially Twitter, all the time. Why do some companies still refuse to accept that social media has a customer service responsibility?
Scott Stratten: Marketing people aren’t used to this type of service, because marketing has been classically outbound. The strategy was to never let the customer be part of things. From the customer’s point of view, they don’t see silos. If I see your Twitter account, you’re the company. So whatever I need it for, that’s you. Our cable company here in Canada, Cogeco, has a customer service Twitter account, @cogecohelps. But if you tweet @cogeco, they don’t tell you that you’re in the wrong place; the customer service Twitter account jumps in. You never want to tell a customer they are in the wrong line, and that’s what often happens on social media. You might be an air traffic controller, telling people who goes where on social based on their needs, but you still have to be that voice.
Q: You mentioned an amazing stat in a recent blog post: 85 percent of Facebook videos get watched with the sound off. What does this mean for marketers?
SS: Facebook actually counts a “view” as anytime someone watches a video for more than three seconds. On YouTube, a “view” is anything over 30 seconds. If you are watching a video for 30 seconds, you are watching it, but three seconds can just be you scrolling through your News Feed. That’s not a view, so it’s not the right metric. I had a two-minute rant about millennials that got 14 million views, but that is a vanity metric, because only 2.8 million watched it with the sound on and for longer than 10 seconds. With the sound off, there is no value to me of that video being played.
Q: So what can brands do to combat this?
SS: One good example is Tastemade’s videos, which you can watch with no sound because they are visual and closed-captioned, so words are being shown on-screen. In the case of my millennials video, I had shared it previously with closed-captioning and got 250,000 views. Then I reshared it without closed-captioning and added title bars across it that stayed there the entire time. It was called, “What Old People Mean When They Say Millennials.” That same video clip got 14 million views with the title bars. You have to do things in this Facebook News Feed way that is enticing to make people click. That is not relevant to a YouTube video. We aren’t scrolling past videos on YouTube, because that’s what I’m there to do. So matching the content to the platform is hugely important. Contextual content is also hugely important. Facebook content needs to stand out on people’s News Feed, but YouTube is the second-biggest search engine in the world, so that content needs to be searchable.
Q: Based on your own blog posts, you seem to have a gift for attention-grabbing titles. Any advice for brands that want to do this better?
SS: I believe we’ve all forgotten some of the main things about marketing and advertising—that we have to create and compel people to take action. That means a good headline, title, or subject line. We are caught up on what is the best time to send your newsletter. The best time to send your newsletter is when you have something compelling to say. The biggest problem right now isn’t that they are sending it on the wrong day; it’s that their subject line is “November Chiropractic Update.” We look at so many factors after things don’t succeed, but the issue is usually very fundamental: Is the content compelling and conceptual to the platform, and is it easily shareable? The problem is not the color background on your Instagram photo. The value of the headline, the subject line, and the message has never changed in marketing. That’s why I find value in a marketer who can make it compelling and then link that title accurately to the content. Even at conferences such as SXSW, this is a problem, where the title might say one thing and you get there and the person’s talk is not about anything like that.
Q: You wrote about four steps to creating endearment. The first one—listening—seems like an oft-missed opportunity, because brands are so focused on what they want to say that they miss what customers are saying. Who is really good at listening and then creating dialogue?
SS: This is the most surprising answer I’ve ever given for something: airlines. They have done a complete 180. Some of them are really responsive, especially on places such as Twitter. During what can be one of the highest-stress points in a person’s life—when they are stranded or struggling to get somewhere—airlines are really fast on social. Delta has been focused on it, and WestJet in Canada has always done a great job. I was on a WestJet flight, and an executive from WestJet got on the plane, sat in a regular seat, and told the flight attendant he would be helping with the beverage service. When we got in the air, he stood up, rolled up his sleeves, and started serving. The flight attendant told me, “They all do this.” Listening is a top-down driven event. There are companies who want to hear from customers and companies who do not. Most fall into the latter. They want you to buy the product, use the service, and not say anything. Social media is often just this apologizing mouthpiece, but it should be about listening, taking information, and saying, “This is what we have and what we know.” The worst customer complaint is one you don’t hear, because you can’t do anything about it. Fifteen years ago, if I went onstage to speak to Fortune 500 brands and said I have a tool that will listen in real time to your customers, they would have paid me a million dollars per month for it. Now it’s here and it’s free, and companies say, “I don’t know . . . I’m not sure I want that.”
Q: So many companies are trying desperately to connect with millennials, but you downplay the notion that they are some new species of humans.
SS: We love labels. As marketers, we love putting people in boxes. We have customer profiles where we make up pretend people, such as, “Jane, the 43-year-old wife and mother of three.” We do it with generations, too. But we’ve all shifted how we buy and how we consume content as a whole, not just millennials. My mom texts me, and she is 71. If you want to make a millennial mad, treat them like they are different. It’s just called being human. Look at people who are 15 and people who are 40. We have different needs and wants. “Millennial” is a great tag and a profitable industry, because people create fear and then revenue from that. But we have five kids in our house between ages 10 and 20, and their entire frame of reference for things is different . . . and they live in the same place! We’ve now started saying things such as, “Young people use Snapchat, older people are on Facebook, and everyone who wears a tie is on LinkedIn.”
Q: So it’s all about finding the right audience for your tactic?
SS: No marketing tactic is ever dead. Bad marketing is dead for sure, but even direct mail still works, and door-to-door can probably still work. It all depends on the context. If someone comes up and offers paving services for our driveway because my neighbor had his done and they can offer me a discount, I’ll probably listen. If the Girl Scouts come up to sell me Thin Mints, I will probably buy a skid of them. It’s all about finding people at the right moment and in the right context.
Q: You said in one of your speeches that hiring great people is more important than logos or branding. Why did you say you’d hire people with passion over people with experience?
SS: I think if we want to market better, we need to hire better. For some reason, marketing and human resources are treated as separate silos. They go to war over head count, budget, or relevance. I think they should work in tandem. If we hire better, it becomes easier to market our company. I don’t think experience is irrelevant, but I think it’s overrated. I don’t know the difference between having 10 years of agency experience versus having five. We hire with so much less focus on passion and drive, because those things are hard to read before you make the hire. If I were opening a coffee shop somewhere, I would go to all the coffee shops in town and find the best personalities and train them. Nowadays, companies post entry-level jobs that need five years of experience. What? The best time to get a great person is at the entry level. I can teach procedure, but I can’t teach giving a (bleep!).
Q: Your newest book, UnMarketing: Everything Has Changed and Nothing Is Different, shows how to unlearn the old ways. With things changing so quickly in the marketing world, what would you define as “old ways” in this day and age?
SS: The reason we came out with a new version is because we’ve all got bright-and-shiny-object syndrome, so focus and strategy have gone out the window. It falls out the window because we are running around chasing, and that is so confusing to the marketplace. It’s also frustrating for marketers trying to jump on the latest thing. But if someone asks what your Snapchat strategy is and your website doesn’t load well on mobile, you don’t need a new Snapchat strategy—you need a website that is responsive. Stop worrying about the next thing. “Usability” is a forgotten word, but there are brands whose sites aren’t rendering properly on tablets and phones. There are basic functions you need to be good at. For instance, does your site come up in search, or how many clicks does it take to buy on your site? Rather than trying to get more sales, look at where you are losing sales now. What’s the sense in being mediocre on eight platforms? Be great on two. If you open up on all these places and platforms, you have to monitor them, and that takes all your time.
Q: What is the best takeaway from your new book?
SS: The best takeaway is just what the title says. We realized that people were still buying the original version, which was written seven years earlier, but the landscape had shifted. The core concepts are still there, but we deleted five chapters and added five new ones. We also added commentary to the others, including how we bought this house that I’m sitting in because of donuts.
