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004: Peter Shankman of Help A Reporter Out (HARO) | How Businesses Can Get Started Using Social Media
this is a smart business revolution podcast with john corcoran episode number four in this episode we talk with peter shankman creator of the incredibly successful helper reporter out website and one of the most widely quoted experts on social media he's going to explain to us how more businesses can leverage social media to increase customer loyalty and engagement and most importantly bring more revenue in the door let's get started welcome to the small business revolution revolution revolution say you want a revolution the revolution it's going on right now welcome to the revolution the smart business revolution podcast your source for how to grow your small business without working 24/7 now now you're host with a revolution john corcoran all right hello everyone this is john corcoran and today on the line we're really thrilled to have with us uh... peter shankman hey peter hey how are you good good thanks so much for joining us i'm going to give a little bit of background i'm sure i'm going to miss something that peter's the kind of person that makes i think the rest of us feel like um we really don't know what we're doing with our lives because he could probably accomplish this more by 10 in the morning than we all do all day um it wears a lot of hats you you are an author an entrepreneur a keynote speaker uh an unbelievable networker um and peter knows a lot of things about a lot about a lot of things but today we're going to try and focus on social media and PR strategy and how businesses can can use the new the new social media landscape uh world to their advantage so just a little bit about his background he's the founder and CEO of the geek factory which is a social media marketing and PR strategy firm located in new york city and his client list is impressive to say the least you got american express sprint u.s. department of defense and nasa uh you name it Walt Disney World some of the biggest brands you you know you can hurt you have ever heard of um and he's also authored a couple of books on social media and um one called customer service new rules for a social enabled world which is interesting and but he's probably most well known for creating the website helper reporter out which um i was hoping peter you could tell us a little bit about that and how it originated and what it does for people who who aren't familiar with it sure yeah helper reporter is really a site that connects journalists with sources worldwide and lets them uh lets the journalist find the source they're looking for on a on a you know a moment deadline um in a in a very simple uh organized way using social media so the the reporter finds the source they want the journalist gets or the the source gets the uh the potential hit in the newspaper and everyone everyone wins and it's really changed the landscape for reporters who before were scrambling or or calling uh PR reps like yourself uh in order to find sources and quotes on a daily basis right well that was sort of key it was uh a lot harder in the past to find the people you needed you know um especially now with reporters being asked to do so much more with so much less and so this is really a way for um reporters to uh to come up with a new a new sort of way to to find the ones they wanted it's also a great win for the small business you know it's a free service so yeah a great win for the small business who can now get quoted uh has the opportunity of about 225 times a day to get quoted in the media um you know what i think so fascinating about your you creating this business is that on the one hand you were very you had a successful PR firm and you had you know hundreds or thousands of reporters who called you on a monthly or a weekly basis um to you and used your access in order to get other experts and that was really valuable to you i'm sure and so it seems kind of counterintuitive create a website which kind of uh deflected that it gave people another source uh did you have people who who thought you're crazy and in creating this idea or you know said said that it wasn't a good idea well you know what i would think believe we're in good karma and uh i had a feeling that you know if you do something great the universe really tends to reward you and um my logic was you know it's a very simple process um it was currently it was a company that was doing it that was charging like five grand a year well it should be free there's no reason it shouldn't be free and sure enough within six months of starting it um the companies wanted to advertise on what i built and so that you know within six months of starting this free service as a favorite friend it really sort of generating a lot of revenue and uh so like i said the universe does tend to unfold uh the way it should yeah uh now i want to see a bit about the social media landscape now we've got you know you name it twitter facebook linkedin tinterist all kinds of other copycats out there but i think those are kind of the big ones at least twitter facebook linkedin uh and each of these different social media mediums have their own style what advice do you have for businesses maybe if you have a new client who comes to you and they don't have a social media presence or they don't have a social media strategy what advice do you give them um when they're looking to jump into that area and the person they have to understand is really twofold but you know a social media strategy is only beneficial if it generates revenue for you there are way too many uh consultants running around the world um who are trying to you know oh yeah we'll get you facebook followers and facebook fans and the end result is that really doesn't mean jack unless you um unless you know how to to monetize that and so one of the first things i'd say is you know don't don't rush out and listen to all of the uh social media so-called experts right away. Secondly i think it's take the first month if you're just starting in and start listening you know uh jump on twitter don't tweet anything just listen to what other people are saying about your company about you about your business about your competitors go on facebook listen what they're saying you know the owner restaurant is the owner restaurant have they been have they been talking about your restaurant are they are they posting about it online are they are they showing food photos of the food they saying it's greater bad are they checking it on force where are they commenting chances are they are and just by listening you can learn so much about what your customers doing so you don't even have to start you know you don't even have to start reacting right away your first bet can really be just focused just to listen and and understand what the uh what the landscape is like you know learn what the audience is saying uh just to start you know listen to what they're saying listen to how they're uh you know are they are they talking about what you're doing is it good or bad are you getting positive or negative results just right there i mean everyone has the ability to talk every every uh customer now has a camera phone and has the ability to post the web almost instantaneously so you know are they having a bad experience kindly they're probably posting that online if you could fix that in a real time when you're a hero but the only way you're going to know that is if you start listening it you know first and foremost right and and how how is the shift towards the shorter and shorter messaging with the you know twitter has 140 characters how's that changed writing in general communications in general and the ways that companies achieve their message to communicating i think that the best thing that i've learned is that reporters tend to um or rather companies tend to go way overboard when they first start you know they they create a great facebook page the great twitter page the great this and the great that and then they they get so excited about it and they don't see any measurement in the first couple of days or weeks or minutes so they immediately bail you know and they never come back and the only thing worse than a company not having a a website where they're talking or they're doing things it's having one where they started and they let it go to nothing that's the worst possible way then i just see it there's just nothing there and there's no excitement there whatsoever so that there's no joy there at all and do you recommend uh you know is twitter for a certain kind of business and facebook for a certain kind of business and linked in is that is a for a certain kind of business or is it really business specific well i think you know the best way to find that out is to find out where your audience is you know where's your audience what are they doing where are they listening to what are they what are they uh focusing on you know where where are they going where are they hanging out um knowing that will help you tremendously because then you get to know um sort of where to where to where to go after them you know if you have an audience that's only using twitter and you're only using facebook you need a problem you know or vice vice versa you know if you have um if you have uh the opposite effect same thing you have to know where your audience is the best thing you could do go out there and listen find out where they are first before anything else to go after them that's a great lesson because i actually i talked to a guy who recently who worked in-house for a large very well-known restaurant chain that is about every every town and um they didn't have any social media strategy and they found out that that someone had actually started a page for them on facebook which had someone like 20 or 50 000 followers without anything having been done to it it is basically just you know a created page and they were able to take that over and then start leveraging it and using that following and then just you know quadrupled the number of people by actually uh engaging it do you find that with some of your clients where there there is a following already or there's a page maybe even a page set up by someone who's a passionate customer already yeah she did a lot you know and then you get in and we saw it all the way back in the 90s when when the web started getting really popular people started creating up Simpsons fan pages and Fox threatened to sue them and say what was wrong with you what you know these are people that love your show they're doing this out of the goodness of your heart they're promoting you and you're you're telling them not to do anything what's wrong with you not so amazing not smart not smart yeah um you know you've got your your blog which is at shankman.com and you've been writing on it since 1995 I believe which is probably before they even use the term blogging um what role do you think that blogs play today and going forward with facebook and twitter and whatnot I think blogs spectacular in respect they really allow um they allow people to really express their views of it to me you know they were really what they were how people talked before facebook and twitter and things like that now they're really more they're more long-form so I can write a blog post but then I can go out and tweet it or mention it or let people tweet it right from the blog and and and it can really promote my you know promote the amount of users that I have and things like that so you know if I'm saying look it all comes down at the end of the day it all comes down to content you know I don't care how many followers or fans whatever you think you have if you don't have good content that keeps people coming back they're just gonna go away it always has to be about having great great great content and uh it kind of leads to a discussion that I wanted to ask you about because you've talked a lot about transparency and how there is little division these days between public and in private life and I wanted to ask about that in in light of businesses how businesses can leverage transparency to their advantage um given given that that's the the current state and society today I think the end result is if you're not transparent you don't have a choice um you know you basically have you have two choices you're it's not a question of whether you're going to do something stupid or you know it's a question of when you're going to be shown stupid it's a question of when and so you want to be able to um be you want to be able to be transparent knowing that you're going to screw up when you do being able to admit it own it fix it and move on you know we'll turn all the people who hate you for your mistakes into fans if they if you can fix the problem you had and take tell them that here's what we did wrong here's what we learned for it here's how i'm making it better you're actually doing a great job and no one no one will no one will love your company more than the person who you offended and is now a fan it is funny i i um this really speaks to me because just a couple of weeks ago i had an experience like this with a a pizza restaurant a new pizza restaurant i went to had a really negative experience and when i called and and told them about it even though it's their mistake um the reaction was so bad that i ended up i ended up going and you know telling all my friends about it and then i wrote a blog post about the experience and uh i said the same thing you did that if they had had owned up to the mistake and turned around and uh you know um just been honest about it and and been apologetic i it definitely would have turned around the other way and i would have been really you know pleased with their service but do you have a tough time convincing clients of this that they need to um when there is a mistake that they need to be very transparent about it i think once you tell once you show them some case studies of why it works it makes it a lot easier for them um you know i've shown them some studies on uh on things that have happened to um to airlines to hotels it's amazing you know and and it really it really teaches you um but if you don't get in front of the problem you know there's no doubt you're going to lose it and i've just seen it happen you know so it's really about showing the client hey here's what happens when you don't do it here's what happens when you do here's how it'll work and they get it they see they see the difference you know and again it goes back to that being transparent because you win more friends but that way than others it's interesting that some social media platforms i guess you would call like yelp and trip advisor i guess those are kind of those are review sites i guess but they enable um businesses to actually respond in kind of a threaded way to reviews so sometimes you go on a hotel and there might be some negative reviews but then you see the manager has responded and and kind of explained how they tried to address the concern with the person um and it's interesting how how these sites have adopted to allow people to do that it's no question but i mean look look around and find someone find someone you know who doesn't have a um a camera in their phone you know you're not going to be able to and so the fast manner is is that uh once you are able to wonder once you sort of expect that and understand that and understand that everyone in the world becomes a customer service um uh fortune teller either for good or for bad they're going to tell you a sword whether you're doing a good job or a bad job because everyone is a reporter now everyone and so your choice is very simply um uh tell people and you know get in front of the problem be transparent and fix it or don't but either way they're going to cover it and they're going to report it and they're going to tell their friends it you know google uh go on to twitter and look up various airline names you'll see the ones being transparent and the ones not it's the easiest thing in the world to notice yeah um i want to ask about your your new book um customer service and you said that the new public relationship is is customer service what do you mean by that? customer service basically comes out of this we all like to treat well and because we have the ability to to get great customer service and tell everyone about it when it happens we also have the ability to tell them about it when it's bad remember the last thing you landed on a bad flight a delayed flight and everyone picked up the phone sort of bitching and everyone else on the phone you know uh travel flight i hate this never fly this airline again you know we're a society that when we're treated like crap we're only we're not truly miserable until we've made everyone else around us truly miserable right yeah flip side is true as well flip side is true as well we have great customer service excuse me we love telling the world love telling the world about how look at how awesome they treated us we're so good look at how awesome we are we're amazing they upgraded me and must be so cool you know and so it's it's that level of you know everyone's reporting on everything so it if you start your if you start your uh concept of social media by looking at your customer service and realizing that your job is no longer do your PR your job is to get other people to do your PR for you people that you've treated really well you start that you're going to have a great great trip and everyone's going to love you and you mean recently bells do your PR for me don't tell you how great you are not hard it's really not hard it's interesting because that advice is is not really i'd almost argue it's not even uh it's PR consulting as much as it's management consulting i mean it's really talking about uh you know not not shaping the news but but shaping the business shaping the quality of the product through delivering good customer service and then using that to get the message out would you agree not it's not a rocket science it really isn't you know it's amazing yeah it's amazing i mean i'm seeing so funny you know i i'm looking at you know i i feel i i feel like um i feel united airlines constantly and i'm looking at just the number of tweets from united bad and good uh the ones that are coming at you know everyone just merge the emerged with cotton else everyone's uh you're talking about it now and depending on what happens who's good or bad we're seeing what people are saying but then we all sort of get amazing you know united responds almost immediately it's here's the problem and here's what's happening above and and as long as they're answering it that's all it is do you have any um clients or potential clients that come to you and um you just won't work with them or you refuse to work with them because you know that they can't embrace or won't embrace this philosophy i've worked with some companies that have had problems before but you know i think there are a couple of why no longer use um but i'm very you know i think that my goal is to work with companies and teach them how to do a better job you know and if they're willing to listen you almost always can but they have to be willing to listen um i want to just a little bit and ask a little bit about something that i saw you speaking about which was top of mind presence the concept of top of mind presence right which i think relates to um the new social media landscape and you gave an example of berry diller how he um he had used that philosophy or used that approach you want to tell us about that a little bit yeah i mean top number is very simple berry diller when he started his career used to at uh and started his career at um i was in camera pictures and he's going to use to call 10 random people in his world x every day just to say hi you never asked for anything you never put anything you would just say hi and what went up happened was that you wound up when people wanted to um to uh you know book a movie or or or hire an actor or whatever you know they could have gone to any of the other uh movie production has something they went they went back to paramount because they remembered talking to berry just a couple of weeks ago he was top of mind he was the first person to say hi whatever the case to me and that that made him a lot of friends and and how how can people use that approach today using uh social media that's incredibly simple it's as simple as reaching out to people and saying you know what are you what are you working on what are you doing today what's going on what's the latest mhm simple simple people are saying hi you know telling people what are you working on what are you doing uh what's the latest that you know what's the latest thing it's incredible and it's it's we don't expect that because we expect to be treated like crap yeah it's unfortunate um treat them well and they'll do their PR do do their PR for you yeah um i also want to ask you i know you're an angel investor in a number of social media and internet companies you want to tell us about some of the ones that you're working with and and also maybe a little bit about your philosophy of what you look for um from a buyer or from an investor's uh perspective what what is what's an interesting uh company to you today oh yeah no question i mean i always look for the um i always look for the uh the companies that the same amount of the same amount of um passion and drive that i give when i sort of my companies i look people who you know you either have done this before or just understand the concept um i look people who are about you know not the cool but oh well well we'll get users in life and then worry about revenue you better be if i'm giving you my money you damn well better be worrying about revenue since day one you know that better be keeping you up at night um i mean twitter look at twitter it hasn't made a freaking penny it hasn't made a penny you know so i really want to know about you know what you're thinking and what your what your plans are and where you're going from those kind of things so yeah no question about it i really want to i want to know that the kind of companies you're working with are very very um that you you understand how the game is played you might have the greatest concept for accompanying the world but if you're not savvy in terms of how the stuff works it's just gonna be that a concept i mean you can't invest in concepts do you also look for companies that are kind of like um help a reporter out in that they take an age old problem something that really has been unsolved for you can even say centuries as long as there's been media and as long as there's been reporters and there's been experts there hasn't really been a great way of of having the two meet do you look for a company like that that solved an age old problem i've seen a number of one you look how is a great example of that but you know there are tons of companies out there that have solved something or another i mean if you imagine just a simple concept of um google let's google had back when they had labs and back when they let every employee take 20% of the time to focus on amazing things that's where google mail came from gmail that's everyone uses now and all these companies started as little basic ideas so understand the idea and ask yourself would you use this every day don't invest in it because it sounds cool ask yourself are you investing in exactly solving a problem right um i want to ask you about a blog post that you wrote where you said that you were talking about a fate worse than death and you said everyone has a different definition of what that is and i want to quote you here because you said i can't stand feeling like i'm spinning my wheels i deplore feeling like the good stuff is happening the big deals are going down the major clients are hiring and i'm no one no one has thought of enough of me to include me um i think that perhaps explains how you get as much accomplished as you do but how does that fear shape you today uh you know what what you're working on today i think that you know everyone wants to be afraid of i mean if you're not afraid of something if you're not trying hard if you're not afraid of failure then you get to be afraid of everything it be a fear keeps you nimble fear is you know fear is good for you eat your fears it has tremendous amounts of nutrients you know if you're not willing to try something new because you're afraid of it that's not necessarily living that's just sort of surviving um but on the flip side you're always there is always going to be things that freak you out oh well what am i doing well am i not doing enough people who tend to be successful and to their work their butts off always tend to feel like they're not doing enough that's why it's very hard people like us take vacations but you know the concept of being able to blog about it and talk about it is great because it really is a cathartic cathartic moment where you can actually share what you're feeling and you find you're not alone you're never alone on the internet you know share the feelings you have you know i'm scared about this well turns out a million other people are too it's great to know yeah yeah what was the reaction like uh from people when you wrote that blog post uh well the blog post uh the comments that came out were great and uh it was spectacular to see how many people were um really talking about it was cool stuff hmm cool um that kind of relates uh it was interesting that one of your hobbies is something that other people would probably consider a fate worse than death on that skydiving and uh i'm sure you've thought about your passion for skydiving and how it can serve as kind of a metaphor to your approach to life um is there a way do you want to comment on that a little bit out of you know how does jumping out of an airplane as a hobby somehow also serve as a you know related to your life philosophy or your life approach not two ways i mean you know you jump in an airplane and you land safely you're gonna be highly kind on dopamine adrenaline for someone like me who's massively um uh massively um ADHD to begin with that's great it makes me normal but i'd say even better it's it's very much like entrepreneurship except uh entrepreneurship is jumping into a plane without a parachute and then hoping that you're able to knit one on the ground on the way down before you hit the ground that's a great way to describe it well uh peter i think we're um we're about out of time so i really appreciate you taking the time to talk to me and we'll be uh keeping an eye out for other stuff you're involved in the future my pleasure i'm a shankman.com and on twitter i'm at peter shanker feel free to follow great thank you for listening to the smart business revolution podcast with john corkman find out more at smartbusinessrevolution.com and while you're there sign up for our email list and join the revolution revolution revolution and be listening for the next episode of the smart business revolution podcast you [BLANK_AUDIO]