Turning lurkers into leads webinar transcript contentzap by GenooMarketing

Turning Lurkers Into Leads – Webinar Transcript View Webinar Video & See Blog Post Kim Albee: Welcome everyone to "Turning Lurkers into Leads" webinar. I'm happy to be here with Nick Kellet. My name is Kim Albee. As way of introduction, I am the president and founder of Genoo and a professional services agency called ContentZAP. I was honored to be named one of the top 20 digital strategists in 2015 by the Online Marketing Institute. Genoo works with businesses of all sizes to supercharge their online marketing, and build, and augment their marketing teams. Our professional services site is ContentZAP.com. We offer online marketing tools and marketing automation to small and midsized businesses at Genoo.com. I am thrilled to be able to go to our second of three series of webinars with Nick Kellet, really looking at how can you better leverage content in social media. Our first webinar, for those of you who attended you have the link. For those of you who didn't, I highly recommend you go look at it. It was called, "No Such Thing as Social Media." This webinar is called "Turn Lurkers into Leads." I am thrilled to bring you Nick Kellet. Here we go. Nick Kellet: I'm back in control now. All right, [laughs] good work everybody. We're talking about lurking today. Lurking, for many people, is something that...it depends where you've been hanging out in recent times because the meaning of lurking has changed. Lurking used to have a stalking feel to it, but the way that the term has been adopted by Internet users is it's become Internet for "just looking." If you think about it, in real life if you had a retail outlet, or some physical presence, people would come through your store and you could actually see them. You knew things about them because you could actually determine they were male, female, tall, young, old, however they were. You could see your customers. On the Internet, we don't have that pleasure. We can project certain things from the statistics of who arrives at our website, but that's really the least of our problems, because on the Internet we can't actually engage with people actively, because we've given control to the consumer. We've actually shifted into a self-service economy. There's so much information on the Internet, before anyone buys a product they don't need to be in touch with your brand. They don't need to sign up with your email list. They can find and research everything they want before they engage with you. It's become really important to think about what it is you're doing or not doing to get the people who are coming to your website to engage with you. There's a whole philosophy around lurking that explains, and for me it's the biggest...one of the things that I'm going to explain about is 1-9-90, which is a well known percentage on the Internet called the © 2015 Genoo, LLC.

one percent rule, which many people have not heard of. For me, it explains and motivates me to spend time on the Internet. Basically, it's the reward for engaging with people online. Let me carry on and give you a bit more background and context to this. Firstly, about me, I'm co-founder of Listly, a social list platform. 30 percent of the content on the web is a list. 10 ways to do this, 27 tips on how to...You know and consume that content daily. We basically create lists as a social platform so that people can actually vote and collaborate on your lists. This is one of the reasons I've become such a focused, passionate person about this topic because Listly is all about getting people to engage socially. There's a lot of psychology to that, as much as there is technology. That's part of my connection. I also published a board game that was crowdsourced. The only way to do crowdsourcing is to get people to participate. That was another big experience for me about how to get people to engage, and how to draw people out of the shadows, which is very much the focus of our conversation today. I also have a tech ex that I took to some of the business objects, and I'm working on a book right now called, "Unlurk me," which is really explaining the concepts that we're going to dabble...we're going to drip into some of the concepts from the book today. One of the things that is very interesting is when we actually analyze things is we tend to not see things that have stopped happening, for example, customers not spending. We tend to analyze the revenues and we fail to notice someone's dropped off spending something. We also don't see the things that are coming. Our prospects haven't spent any money with us yet. Maybe they haven't even registered with us. We don't even know they exist. I can tell a story from my previous startup. A guy came up to me and said, "I put $30,000 into my budget for next year." I didn't even know who he was, but he'd been following my brand, following the company, and he'd allocated money and budget even before he'd even spoken to me. I didn't even know his name. At that point he just told me this. You realized that your marketing is actually creating value long before you can measure it. That's part of the problem. People start saying, "Where's our return on investment in marketing?" A lot of your marketing efforts and activities are about touching people in the future who will come to you. It takes something like 15 to 20 touches to convert someone into a full-blown customer. Often we're touching people many times before they actually become a customer. I've seen that with my board game. I know for a fact it happens a lot with Listly. I meet people all over the world who've talked and influenced, and interacted, or conceived interacting with Listly but haven't done anything yet. But it's on their list of things they're going to explore and evaluate. I know that my marketing activity is touching those people, but that's the stuff that's very hard to bank and to justify internally. Some of what today's talk is about is to give you a model to understand the way the Internet works and to embrace the fact that the majority of people © 2015 Genoo, LLC.

will be the silent ones, the ones that aren't telling you anything, the ones that you don't even know exist yet. Measuring future action is pretty hard, but when you understand the model that exists on the Internet, that's definitely what motivates me to think about this kind of activity. Oops, [indecipherable 6:41] There is a rule on the Internet called the one percent rule. There's a magic set of numbers that go with the one percent rule. This was a rule that was conceived in 2006 based on a whole bunch of research from multiple different communities. What it cited was that basically in any given community 1 percent of people create, 9 percent of people contribute, and 90 percent of people are what we call passive consumers. They don't do anything. They just read your content. The name for those consumers is really...as things have evolved. In 2006 it wasn't really a self-service economy. There wasn't enough content on the Internet for people to serve themselves. But very much as self-service has come along, and by self-service I mean I go and find out the things I'm interested in. I research the projects, and the products, and the services I'm going to buy, and I do that without participating or involving any salespeople in the process. I serve myself. That process, the 90 percent I affectionately call lurkers. One of the reasons I call them lurkers is because they call themselves that. On the Internet if someone says, "I'm just lurking," it's become a self-adopted term that people who spend time on the Internet know. They're just looking. They're window shopping on the Internet. Sometimes if they're on the cusp of wanting to engage with you, that's actually the expression that people use. "I'm just lurking." It's basically a gentle touch, a symbol. It's actually a cry out for help to say, "Please invite me in. I'm interested in your stuff. I'm just lurking today. Not quite fully committed, but I'm interested enough to let you know that I'm looking." This one percent rule has these three layers, these three concentric rings of creators, contributors, and consumers. One of the things that's really worth driving home is people get false expectations about what they can get from the Internet. You're never going to get everybody in a community to contribute. Don't expect it. Only expect 1 out of 100 people to actually create original content. Expect 9 out of 100 to maybe comment, or contribute, or add, or refine what's already there. Then 90 percent of people are going to consume. That rule is, within reason, pretty hard, set, and fast. If you think about it in your life personally, we can't always be creating, so we dip in and out. Once I'm a creator I'm not always a creator. I can't always create all day long just as a survival mechanism. I create sometimes. I contribute others. Plenty of time I consume even when I'm massively interested.

It's worth noting that people who are consuming your content are interested because there's plenty of other content on the Internet that they could consume. The fact they're consuming your content is a very positive sign. The interesting thing to me, though, is the one percent rule makes it sounds like it's everybody. It's actually one percent of the people in your current community. There are two larger groups beyond your community. They are people who are looking, who are trying to solve a problem that you solved today. They currently haven't discovered you, but they're in the process. They're in the market for something that you offer, and they're looking. I call those affectionately the lookers. They're still in the shadows. They're an extension of the lurkers. Knowing that they're there gives you a much bigger motivation to spend time online, create content online. How those people look for content, and that's something we'll cover in next week's webinar. But how people look for content is very important. If you're not in the right places, and creating the content that they're looking for, you're basically keeping yourself out of this process and this model. Beyond the lookers there's the future people. These are the people who one day will have a need for what you have. That audience is even bigger than the people who are looking. You're just following out this 1-9-90 rule. I'm extending it here to say 1-9-90-900-9000. It keeps growing by a factor of 10. Whether these numbers are right or wrong, you can approximate these numbers for your space, but this model gives you a way of explaining why you invest time and effort creating content on the Internet. It's about being discovered by prospective customers and people who are suffering pain for which you offer solutions. There's a huge opportunity cost by not looking at lurkers in the biggest possible way. These are not just your silent consumers who already like you, but they're also the people who are looking, and the people who will one day be looking. By investing in creating engaging content online, you are improving your chances. The interesting thing is you're always being judged. We're going to shift on a little bit here. Pulling this whole model together, these six rings, if you like, explain that the silent majority is very large. They exist, and if you're not speaking to them, if you're not addressing that audience, you are definitely missing out. As part of having done a lot of work around sourcing my game, about working with Listly, and how to get people to engage, I've been working on this book called "Unlurk Me," which brings together...there's 24 laws in the book, but 11 of them are around the idea of why people and how to bring people into a conversation. It's often what you don't do, or things that you do that you don't think are related, that are causing people not to engage with you. I'm going to just quickly skim through these 11 © 2015 Genoo, LLC.

ideas to give you a sense of how to engage people. These are basically how you turn lurkers into leads. Firstly, by acknowledging that there are these people out there. There is a law, I call it the law of a million thirds, that says in every conversation on the Internet there are people who are listening in to what you're saying. If you know that you're being listened in to, that gives you an opportunity to speak in a more curious, more intriguing, more interesting way, so that people will say, "Hey, Nick. What are you talking about? What's that you're mentioning? Can you tell me more?" This is a notion that's called social selling. On the Internet you are being visible. If I'm just having a conversation on Twitter, for example, where I'm producing content, and there's a comment stream, that is a social conversation that people can pick up on. They can see the way I communicate with other people. They can judge my culture based on the way I communicate. If I'm speaking openly, in a way that's inclusive, people will begin to listen and listen in. You know that if you're following the 1-9-90 rule that if one percent of the people are actually driving the conversation, nine percent of people are commenting, there are a factor of nine times the number of people who are actively listening into your conversation. By being intriguing, by being helpful, curious, by projecting a really solid human face to your organization, you are making yourself accessible to those people who are lurking, because they are making a decision. "Will I, should I, step out of the shadows and join this conversation?" If you know that these people exist, but if you speak in a way that allows these people to join in, you are doing yourself a massive favor by creating a bigger pipeline of people that are preparing themselves to engage with your organization. One of the things that's very interesting is that we focus sometimes in marketing on [indecipherable 15:02] perfect. We want to be seen to be beautiful and wonderful and perfect. One of the things that does, from a human perspective, is we can be too perfect to be approachable. If we project that idea of being perfect, nobody wants to step into the conversation because they don't feel worthy or able to contribute. Imperfection is sexy. Which one's more fun? The completed jigsaw, or the one that's, "Oh, no. Just shuffle those around and make it." The idea is anything that you create that is intriguing can bring people into the conversation. Don't be too perfect. Leave gaps and let people suggest corrections, extensions, fixes to what you're putting out there. That will draw them in. If you become too intellectual, if you project yourself too high up the food chain people think, "Oh, this isn't for me. I need someone who's more basic." You can push people away. You actually think you're being very helpful, but you can be too helpful. You can be intimidatingly helpful. © 2015 Genoo, LLC.

This comes to the idea of the law of adding value. One of the things that we've found is I run a thing called lurker chat on Tuesdays at 10:00 Pacific time. This is one of the things that really came out. People don't want to participate in a conversation if they don't feel they can add value. If you, as the brand, are constantly producing value, and you're thinking you're being more and more helpful, and you try and create more and more value, you're trying to be more and more perfect. What you're doing is pushing people away because they don't feel they can contribute. They don't feel they can step up. People talk a lot about utility, but there's a duality to utility. We can bring people into our world, invite them in, in a much more welcoming, human way if we leave room for them to contribute. As an example of this, with Listly a lot of people create lists that are far too perfect. If they create a list of soccer players and miss off Pele, and they miss of David Beckham, and they miss off any other favorite, famous soccer player, then people who are soccer fans, "Oh, you're missing this. I can add that to it." People will want to step in because they can demonstrate knowledge and expertise. Conversely, if you put out a list of the 13 top marketing books, it's going to take a real expert in marketing books to add the 14th and 15th book. The hard thing is getting those first few people to participate. You don't necessarily realize this, but you are often pushing people away. You're denying yourself the opportunity to have social participation by being too perfect. We often think of, and I call this the law of culture. We think of culture as something very big. Someone else looks after culture. The culture of Canada, the culture of America, the culture of boomers, or millennials, right? We talk about these things as if we don't own it, and yet your brand has a culture. Your brand is accessible in a way based on the conversations that you have with your audience. People see your content and see the way you engage. What they're doing is they're assessing your culture. From that culture they're deciding, "Hmm, these guys are nice. These guys are my kind of people. I relate and connect to what these guys are talking about. I can join in." When they join your community, what they do is they tend to mirror the behavior that's already there. If you have a snarky, trolling kind of behavior, or if you tolerate that, or if you're not supportive or welcoming, whatever behaviors you exhibit, those are the behaviors your audience is going to mirror. If you're welcoming, and friendly, and helpful, and not too intellectual, not too superior, then you're drawing people into your conversations, and you're going to trigger people to participate. One of the values of getting people to participate is other people see that participation. What you're doing is you're selling it up, so you'll actually get more participation. © 2015 Genoo, LLC.

We never want to walk into an empty coffee shop or an empty bar. We're always looking for signals of where it's appropriate for us to contribute, where it's safe for us to join in. We're always looking and assessing this information. This is what I call the law of thriving. If we involve people in our projects, the more people who contribute, we're actually building intrigue. When we see an active community, it's more intriguing. The more people that are there the less time we have to take to create all of the content and do all of the work. It's about letting go. For many people this is very counterintuitive. They think as a brand they should be in control and they should be dominant and they should be intelligent and leading the way. Really what they want to be is accessible and human and simple and basic. If you follow that route, then you end up creating this environment that's like a social party that people want to join in with. I think it's worth noting that the first 5 or 10 people are the hardest to bring. Sometimes you want to seed that effort and seed it in the expectation. It's worth knowing, just going back to the 1-9-90 rule that we began with, that you don't expect everybody to be a creator, and don't expect everyone to participate. Expect the majority will consume, but judge the fact that the people who consume are tomorrow's contributors and they're tomorrow's creators. If they don't see a welcoming social activity, an engagement within your audience, and a feeling around your brand...People can go to go to Google and search your brand. They can pick up a sense. They can see how you respond to people on Twitter. They can see what conversations people are having about you. They're judging. If they feel there is a thriving community there, they're willing to jump in. Building a thriving community takes work, effort. It's persistence. It's a commitment. It's a long haul. It's not simple, but once you have that, once you have the 1-9-90 in place, you have an active community, it's easy to use your community. People discover your community and then judge your community based on what they find. From there they're deciding when to step in and out of the conversation, and when to join in, and when to show their colors, show their passion for what you're doing. One of the things that's worth noting is the way conversations happen online. It's what I call the law of soft signals. Basically we live in a world where it's a game of noticing others and getting noticed. How many touches does it take to convert? It's many touches. It just depends on the space you're in, but 15 to 20 touches is not uncommon. This is a marathon, not a sprint. Also, bear in mind that the longer your touches take place over, they leak. We're like a balloon. We remember stuff for a certain amount of time, and then that touch becomes less and less valuable. Our balloon is leaking, so we need to touch people more regularly. © 2015 Genoo, LLC.

Don't try and dominate a conversation. Create these soft signals. Expect to kind of keep touching people gently. This is why you need to put out regular content, so there's always something new, a new signal that people can join in with and discover that you're still alive, and that you're talking about what you're doing, and your space is evolving, and they feel curious, and intrigued, and want to become a part of that. That's very much a culture that you're creating. Moving onto the law of learning, one of the things that's changed today is nobody wants to learn everything about anything. We learn on a need to know basis. We learn to solve our immediate pain, the problem that's facing us right now. When our TV breaks, or when our computer breaks, or a car, something happens, the first thing we do is we Google that. We don't want a whole answer. I don't want to become a car expert, or a mechanic, or a computer maintenance guy. I just want to fix my TV right now. We look for the immediate answer to that. The question is, "Are you there with the answer to that question? Is it your brand that they're finding in that moment?" I think one of the things that's worth realizing is we want to progress from novice to expert, but we don't want to do it, and we won't do it, in any serious way. We'll step there on a need-by-need basis. If we ignore that we tend to over educate, and we tend to provide too much content. We drown people, and they feel overwhelmed and they leave. You need to give people a little bit each time you talk to them. You're then building on the law of soft signals. You're building up those impressions. This is a similar thing. I've done this many times on Twitter, is to have a conversation with people and try to be too smart, try and share everything I know. If I do, all I do is kill the conversation because I become that annoyingly smart guy that is trying to be smart. Don't try and be smart even if you are. Be accessible. It's way more valuable to be accessible than be too smart. Don't rush. Think of this. If I pick up the foreplay metaphor, just keep this thing alive. Just touch it gently, move forward. No one likes someone who runs into a party, and I'm doing it right now. I've been talking for 20 minutes straight. That's the format of a webinar, but that's a webinar, and not a social conversation. When you're having a conversation say something short and brief, pass it over to the other person, have them come back. By creating and building more of a conversation, what you're actually doing is creating a dialog. Other people are observing that dialog. They are seeing that you are conversational, welcoming, appreciative. That's going to trigger other people to join. All of these rules that I'm talking about, these laws, combine together. They do overlap. It's just a mental model. If you understand the mental model, and you understand that 1-9-90 exists and 1-9-90-900-9,000, the reason you're engaging socially is because there is a significantly larger number of people out there who are capable of listening in and discovering you. © 2015 Genoo, LLC.

This idea of social discovery is certainly part of organic social discovery and organic search, but it's bigger than that. It's how people find you because they discover the active conversations that you're having. One element here that stops all of us from acting is self-doubt. Often we don't think of other people's self-doubt because we're too busy focused on ourselves. One reasons that an audience member doesn't join in, doesn't contribute, is because they don't feel they are worthy of it. They don't feel they have anything smart enough to say because you're being too smart. If you realize and appreciate how vulnerable we all are, how self-doubt plays a role in all of our lives, we can leave room for those people. Just the last couple of laws here, the law of info snacking. We like short sound bites. Short snippy, snappy, lists work for this reason, so do short videos, short podcasts. We like the tapas idea. We can pick bits and pieces rather than the whole, full blown, four course meal, the table [indecipherable 26:52] . Leave people wanting more and allow for multiple entry points into your story. Those are the 11 laws that I really think explain how to bring all of this stuff together. In terms of what next, this is really where you're entering the question section here. One way is to explore some of this and try some crowdsourcing activity on List.ly. Try to involve people. You can explore. There are some Unlurk Me slides available that explain more about this stuff. The key thing to ask is, "Who are our lurkers?" We all have lurkers. Brands spend as much time lurking as consumers. Do you have a lurker strategy? Most people don't, because they're too engrossed and consumed by facing with the people they're engaging with. The reason that you're engaging with the people today is because they found you. Everyone you're talking to today was, at some point, a lurker. That really concludes my content for the day. We can pass over to any questions. Kim: Thank you so much, Nick. We're kind of right at our 10:30 mark. If people need to go, I totally understand it. We'll take a few more minutes to handle some questions. Get your questions entered. One of the things that I love about this is we don't have to be perfect. How do we actually be curious and ask questions rather than having to be the expert all the time? I like that you actually said that. I think it's more of a challenge for content marketers and things to figure out how to do that because I think we're so used to being experts at things. How do you come about that? Nick: Yeah, I always think of it as being, you know what? We think of brands as these things, but brands are really just a bunch of people. There's still just people behind every brand. They're not any different. They're no different than you. If you're concerned about these things, just being humble, and accessible, and approachable, and forgetting that © 2015 Genoo, LLC.

you're an expert. The problems you need to solve are way simpler than the ones you're trying to solve. I'm guilty of this on many occasions. You write to feed your own ego. You write to explore stuff that interests you. That, to me, is a big mistake. You need to write stuff that's interesting to your audience. Your audience are beginners. Your brand is not going to be their savior. Your brand solves one problem that they're facing right now. If you overstay your welcome, they'll go with the person who seems to solve just the problem they have right now because they're not trying to solve tomorrow's problem. Kim: Let me ask you this. We're going to get all the questions answered fully. Not on this, because we're out of time, but give people a sense for next week's webinar. It tails onto this one, so we have the three series. Give us a little snapshot. Nick: We talked today about getting people to engage and how people are looking, but we didn't really go into the psychology of that. Next week we're going to look at how it is we actually search for information, and it's way different than you think. People tend to think that Google is so dominant, and the way that we use Google is so dependent on what Google shows us. I think as a coping mechanism we the consumer use these technologies in a very different way. We'll be talking about, it's not really so much the buyer's journey, but how does the buyer solve their pains? They don't think they're on a buyer's journey at that point. They're just pain solving. If you play along and play into that, then you become their ally and collaborator on their journey. At some point they need to buy, consume, acquire services and products to solve their problems. That's some of the magic of understanding how people search, and what people search for, that allows you to create content so you can insert yourself neatly into that conversation. Kim: Excellent, excellent. If people haven't registered yet for next week's webinar, I invite you to go to ContentZAP/events and sign up for the Info Snack webinar. That will be the third one. It will be next week. I want to thank everybody for your questions. We will get answers to you. This concludes our second webinar, Turning Lurkers into Leads. Next week we have our third and final webinar in the series, and I look forward to seeing you all there. Thank you very much.

Check out the other webinars in the series: No Such Thing As Social Media? How The Info-Snack Habit Leaves Your Brand Forgotten

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