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How Dude Perfect Creates Perfect Brand Partnerships

Posted Under: Social Pros Podcast
Hosted By
10XMarketing

Daniel Lemin

Convince & Convert
10XMarketing

Hannah Tooker

LaneTerralever
10XMarketing

Leanna Pham

Convince & Convert
About Social Pros Podcast:

Social Pros is one of the longest-running marketing podcasts in existence (10 YEARS and counting), and was recently recognized as the #1 Audio/Podcast Series by the Content Marketing Awards.

Our purpose? Making sure that we speak to real people doing real work in social media.

Listeners get inside stories and behind-the-scenes secrets about how teams at companies like Google, Reddit, Glossier, Zillow, Lyft, Marvel, and dozens more, staff, operate, and measure their social media programs.  With 600+ episodes, the Social Pros Podcast brings the humanity of social media to the forefront, while providing incredibly useful marketing strategies that listeners can immediately implement.

Follow Social Pros on LinkedIn.

To inquire about becoming a guest or show sponsor, please email our Executive Producer, Leanna Pham, at leanna@convinceandconvert.com.

Apple Podcast Reviews:

The Social Pros podcast has quickly become a favorite in my feed! I'm consistently impressed by the engaging conversations, insightful content, and actionable ideas. I truly learn something every time I listen!

@Arlie K

This is absolutely an awesome listen for anyone in communications or social media!!

@Will31C

This podcast has become one of my staple weekly podcasts for learning about marketing! Love the conversations that they have and it's always enjoyable and educational!

@Simonstone95

Love the podcast - informative, in depth and spot on for any business size.

@MissTriathlon

Chad Colemen, the VP of Brand Partnerships & Digital Engagement at Dude Perfect, joins the Social Pros podcast to discuss the dynamics of brand partnerships and how to discover what works and what doesn’t.

Creating Partnerships that Maintain Brand IdentityHow Dude Perfect Creates Perfect Brand Partnerships

Chad Colemen, the VP of Brand Partnerships & Digital Engagement at Dude Perfect, is on the Social Pros podcast to share the ins and outs of forming and maintaining brand partnerships.
As a fan of golf and a proficient digital marketer, Chad admits that he’s landed his dream job. However, it’s every bit a job as the next role. It’s not all trick shots and hanging with the Dudes for him. He juggles a number of behind-the-scenes duties, including managing all the brand partnerships that come their way.
Chad offers a peek behind the curtains at how Dude Perfect picks brand partners and what goals need to align before the partnership is considered successful. He also paints a vivid picture of what the wrong partnership looks like and how partner expectations have evolved with the success of Dude Perfect.

In This Episode:

  • 7:04 – What the Dude Perfect’s creative process looks like
  • 13:31 – Chad’s description of a typical week at Dude Perfect
  • 15:31 – Chad’s elevator pitch for his job role at Dude Perfect
  • 17:21 – How Chad’s role has evolved with over the years
  • 23:24 – How Dude Perfect vets brand partnerships
  • 26:49 – How advertiser expectations have changed with the success of Dude Perfect
  • 30:49 – Why embedded marketing messages work better Dude Perfect
  • 39:14 – How Dude Perfect manages varying social media algorithms
  • 45:44 – Chad’s top tip for people looking to be social pros

Quotes From This Episode:

It’s important to value consumer experiences and future growth above a one-off paycheck for a sponsored video. Click To Tweet
“For us, finding creative ways to embed marketing messages in our content favored our retention rates a lot more than having a standalone ad in every video.” @HashtagChad
“It’s a priority for us to have unique content for each channel so that when people are consuming Dude Perfect content on YouTube shorts, Instagram or Tik-Tok, they’re receiving a new and different experience.” @HashtagChad

Resources:

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Episode Transcript

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Neil

Hoyne:

How

often are you making data driven decisions? And it was about six or seven out of every hundred, six out of six or seven with how much data we have less than 10 out of every hundred decisions, less than 10% of some decisions are made using data.

Jay

Baer:

I'll

tell you what, Adam, as you said so wisely in this episode, we have so much data that surrounds us constantly in business, perhaps, especially in marketing yet, as you just heard from our incredible guest this week on the show, only six out of every 100 business decisions are rooted in data 94 out of 100, like, yeah, this feels pretty good to me. We gotta fix that. And this new book from our guest this week, Neil Hoyne will help you do just that.

Adam

Brown:

This

was fascinating to me, Jay, as, as you just mentioned in the opening message from Salesforce, our state of marketing report talks about how the number of data silos, if you will, that marketers have to deal with is doubling and doubling. It’s like 18 data sets that we all have to deal with. But as Neil articulates here and makes throughout the book, we’re not using that data. And what Neil is able to dive into is why we’re not using that data and how to start using that data. Start be effective, just start somewhere, stop analysis, paralysis,

Jay

Baer:

Data

and measurement is certainly an increasingly important part of social media success. We talk about that here in this episode, and you might think Jesus social pro’s episode about data and a book about data. That’s not for me, trust me. It is for you. The book is really approachable. It is really an easy read. And, and as I said on the back cover of the book, I think it’s the best book about data in business that I’ve ever read. It is really something you’re gonna like this episode. It really is. Just wanna remind everybody as Adam alluded to about our sponsor for the show Salesforce and their state of marketing R port, they gathered data from more than 8,000 marketing leaders across 37 countries to learn about what’s going on with marketers today. What are the challenges? What are the opportunities?

Jay

Baer:

What

are the circumstances? And that particular report has got nothing but gold nuggets in it got downloaded. If you haven’t, it won’t cost you anything go to Bitly slash state marketing report B I T dot Y slash state of marketing report. And also as we record this episode we are just, I think, a week away from the 10 year anniversary of the first episode ever of social pros, as you may know, we just passed the 500th episode milestone recently, and we have a commemorative ebook all about our 500 episodes, our favorite guests, our best lessons ever from the guests on the show. If you haven’t grabbed it, I really would like you to do that. Go to Bitly slash social pros, 500 B I T dot L Y slash social pros five zero. We put a lot of work into it. I hope you like it again. Won’t cost you anything also won’t cost you anything to listen to the brilliance of our guests this week, Neil ho. He is the head of analytics at Google and the author of a brand new book you’re gonna wanna buy. He run social pros,

Jay

Baer:

Friends

of social pros. Our guest this week is the chief measurement strategist of a company may have heard of it’s called Google. He’s also the author of a substantially terrific new book. What I want you to buy is called converted the data driven way to win customer hearts. Here’s what I wrote in this book about this book. I, Jay bear said that this is the most useful field guide ever written on how to drive desirable customer behavior online, highly recommended. It is highly recommended. We’re gonna talk about the book here to a day. Neil Hoy. Welcome to the show, Jay,

Neil

Hoyne:

Thank

you so much for having me and thank you for the, for the gracious comments on the book as well.

Jay

Baer:

I

love it. Like I genuinely love it. I have been in this business for a long, long time, almost 30 years now, since domain names were free and it really is the most useful field guide I’ve ever read about drive customer behavior. What’s fascinating about it and why I think you’re the right person to write this book is that it’s about data and how to make sense of data, but you’re not a data scientist by background. You are by vocation. But, but talk about that. I think it’s a real advantage.

Neil

Hoyne:

You

know what it’s, it’s surprising and it’s difficult to find people in business and marketing that wanna be become data. People. Generally, you just find data, people that end up in marketing, but you start to understand the importance of the language, right? When you’re looking online, you don’t get to directly observe those people. As you would in a store, in a store, you can see people interact with products. You can see how they feel. You can see how they respond, and then you get online and you have this layer of data in between, or it says I don’t get to directly observe. I just get all these numbers and these plots coming in, I have to make sense of it. So just early on, it was one of those things that I committed myself, almost forced myself to learn to say, I really need to get this. If any of this, if any of this world is going to make sense to me in a meaningful way,

Jay

Baer:

You

might be asking great, Jay, what’s the book about out? Well, it’s, it’s a book as I think you say, Neil, in the book at the very top, it’s a book about making better decisions and Adam Brown for our audience, the social media professionals, audience making better decisions is the coin of the realm. Now it’s harder and harder and harder and harder to succeed with social because competition continues to escalate. Customers expect more than ever social media platforms change their mind about every 20 minutes. It’s a, it’s a tough gig and this book will help you make better decisions and, and succeed with your social media. It’s out on February 22nd. You can pre-order it

Adam

Brown:

Right

now. Adam, I know you really liked it too. I did. And, and, and Neil, there were so many things about this book that, that truly fascinated me, captivated me and made me begin to think. You know, when I sit down in, in my day, job is strategist for Salesforce. I talk to a lot of our customers, a lot of the listeners of this show and they say our huge challenge right now, Neil is, is not a Darth of data, but too much of it, marketers are drowning in data today, from your perspective, how do we help them learn to swim? Oh

Neil

Hoyne:

Boy.

Now I I’ll tell you the, the data collection thing. This is one of the things that I, I spend a lot, lot of time on just because companies came away with this idea, that data is inherently valuable. Therefore, the more data that I collect, there’s going to be more value. So it’s almost like you’re, you’re just watching this number go up and you’re like, look at how much wealth I’m accumulating. And then somebody asks you all right, well, let’s cash it in, let’s turn it into real dollars. And then you pause. You’re like, well, how do I do that? And then you talk to your friends and your co how, how are we doing this? What are we doing with all this data? And that, that fuzzy, warm feeling they had simply from capturing the data doesn’t translate into anything real. This is discussed in the book, but there was a larger market research study that talked to marketers and said, how often are you using that data?

Neil

Hoyne:

How

often are you making data driven decisions? And it was about six or seven out of every hundred, six out of six or seven with how much data we have less than 10 out of every hundred decisions, less than 10% of decisions are made using data. Now that’s just the reality of it. The reason I bring it up, some audiences are discouraged. They said, wow, I guess we’re really not as data driven as we thought, but it also shows where the bar is and the bar is not to become a perfect company and to use data in a hundred of your decisions. It’s not to do 50% of your decisions. It’s just to be better than the competition you’re against, especially when it comes to social media. So if you’re slightly better than the other people that are attract, trying to attract the attention of the audience, you’re in great shape and the bar is considerably low, but the starting point is first saying, all right, well, this is the reality.

Neil

Hoyne:

I

don’t need to be perfect. I don’t need to convince myself that everything I build needs to be a hundred percent data driven. I just need to take small steps forward. I need to go from making six decisions to seven to eight, to nine, to become slightly more data driven. And what we find that companies do are a few things. One is they tend to move away from large enterprise level strategies saying we’re going to spend the entire year, simply preparing ourselves to use data. And instead they move and say, what are short, simple things we can do? What is that next decision we can do with data that will improve the exp and the relationships that we have with our customers? Just

Adam

Brown:

It's

agile marketing, it’s agile development for marketers.

Neil

Hoyne:

There

you go. There you go. It’s just telling ’em to move forward and I’m giving them permission to do it because they’re like, they’re looking at companies and they’re like, how can we compete against data driven companies and all the stuff we have to buy and all the people we have to hire. And somehow they convince themselves that they need to collect more data, which is really bizarre. It’s always like, well, we’re gonna need to collect even more data to do this. And I’m saying, no, I’m saying take a small piece of data and act on it with purpose. And today, not not six months from now today, go would do something with your data that otherwise you wouldn’t have done.

Jay

Baer:

The

book is called converted. The data driven way to win customers, hearts the author, Neil Hoy with us here on social pros in this episode, Neil, do you believe that it is more important than ever to create good decisions, hopefully rooted in data wherever possible because of fun, the mental shifts in customer behavior. What, what I see in my work as a, as a digital strategist is partially by because of the pandemic and partially just the insane digital transformation we’ve seen over the last two or three years that that customers think and behave and desire different things than they did even a short time ago. And what we say to our clients is if you don’t have real customer data that you’re acting on now, then you’re flying blind, right? That, that if you’ve got this 1999 or 2019 customer attitude study, that’s not worth anything, right. You’ve gotta, you’ve gotta know what customers want today. Do you see that in your work as well?

Neil

Hoyne:

Absolutely.

A and in fact, from the Google side, one of the things that the company admitted was that once a pandemic started a lot of the large scale testing, the big studies of customer behavior stopped because behaviors were changing so quickly. And so unpredictably that it didn’t make sense to study C companies, customers needed a response, right? And they didn’t have one. And you notice how quickly things changed when we went from March of 2020, and then getting into April of 2020, nobody knew what to say to their customers. It was frightening. They didn’t have a playbook. And so what did they all do? They gravitated towards it. And you can look at your inbox. We’re all in this together. Next line, buy my product. Like that’s what it was. And I love Toyota as a brand, but it was we’re all in this together.

Neil

Hoyne:

Nice

soft messages, people holding hands. And then at the bottom, well call to action, buy a Toyota. And it was terrible, but they really had no option. And so you’re right. The game has changed where now it’s, how quickly can you figure out what your customers are thinking and doing? And the most surprising thing that we’ve seen now. And you’re, we were to think retrospectively, what would we have done differently? A lot of companies, when March of 2020 happened, they continued to look at their dashboards and they continued to say, well, okay, how are things changing? Where’s the curve moving towards? But what we saw was in around March, an entirely new population of customers with distinct attributes started popping up and engaging with bro. Now people needed different things based on their new work, from home, taking care of homeschooling kids, everything changed, but that audience was almost lost in the average, because they were waiting for these preferences to overrule what they were seeing in their previously acquired customers.

Neil

Hoyne:

And

it took ’em about six months until somebody started raising their hand and say, wait a minute, should we just segment out? We have our pre pandemic customers. And then we have our current, hopefully post pandemic customers. And they want entirely different things in entirely different relationships. And now we find ourselves almost two year years later, where companies are looking and saying, what do we do to keep these post pandemic customers around? And what do we do to bring all those pre pandemic customers back? And they require two distinct strategies, two different types of messaging, two different types of content,

Adam

Brown:

Neil,

to that point. One of the things that, that you say in the book converted the data driven way to when customers, how hearts is that we don’t ask customers enough questions. And I think that’s genius. And, and no, when I say questions, I’m not talking about what is your zip code? What is your email pin or accepting a first party cookie? Why is that? Why is marketers and even social pros? Do we not ask the right question? Switch to your point about the pandemic would be a very simple question. Understanding kind of what nuances are important to that particular customer. Is it because we don’t have the capability to use the insights that are being shared much, like you mentioned before, we’re only using a very small portion or is it as marketers? We think we’re too smart for our own good. We know what you want. We’re the marketer.

Neil

Hoyne:

It,

it, it’s a combination of those things. I’ll give you my, my top top list that that drives us. One is in many companies, the checkout process, the information that’s collected on the website is disjointed from marketing. Marketing is a user of the data that’s collected. They are not necessarily driving the engineering or product roadmap for what they collect. Some of that is also driven by the second problem, which is there’s this concern that asking questions will interrupt people from what you’re trying to drive them towards. We want people to sign up. We want people to buy our product. And if we ask them more questions, they’re gonna drop off the funnel. Right? Well, most of the research says that the best time you ask questions is actually after the checkout process is completed on, on that, thank you page. That’s where trust is at its highest.

Neil

Hoyne:

They

just gave you their money, but nobody asks anything. And then the third part, I think is if there’s a part of curiosity in companies that I’m actually disappointed has been dampened because everyone thinks that their question needs to be so monumental and so interesting in order to make it into the product. And then they start pondering. Well, what is the right question to ask? And invariably, they end up with net promoter score, or they end up with some large once in a year survey that they send to everybody. And they don’t get that curiosity to say, well, couldn’t we just ask our customers share of wallet. Couldn’t we just ask our customers how they feel about our products at this moment. And then they, then they work way out. Well, we don’t know how we’re gonna use it. We don’t know what we’re gonna find.

Neil

Hoyne:

It's

a really big lift for our company and they don’t do it. And that just really that interrupts the process because now what you’re stuck with is the same questions, the same fields that you’ve been asking five years ago, you’re asking today, you bottleneck everything, tying large initiatives, as opposed to the more agile marketing you could be doing and all those questions that are rattling around in her head go unexplored. And that’s just a poor way to do things. So the, the best practices are actually to use that. Thank you page to use those right moments to engage customers and just admit to yourself, you may not know the right questions and that’s okay. As long as you dedicate the time and the effort to explore them. Nonetheless,

Jay

Baer:

One

of the things I find really interesting about this book, Neil, is you spend a lot of time and energy and rightfully so. Beeching the reader to pay attention to customer lifetime value or, or C V, which certainly stands to reason as a very important principle. Like what, how much is this customer worth to us forever. Yet, even today in 2022, a lot of businesses don’t put a lot of time and effort into that calculation. Therefore they don’t know which are their most valuable customers. And they’re sort of going on off making decisions that might make sense in the short term, but not in the long term. Why do we have this problem? What, what are the, what are the blinders that, that prevent companies from embracing the notion of lifetime value, as opposed to short term value?

Neil

Hoyne:

I,

I would say that it started with marketing accountability. This has been the perennial problem. And fact, I think the earliest quote I could find was actually from the late 18 hundreds, where some marketers are complaining that other people in their business didn’t know what they were doing. didn’t know what they were driving. And we still see this today. We see the sales people saying, look how much we drove. And even I think Larry Larry Page was on on record of saying like the sales people at Google at one point are just there to collect the check, right? The product drives the people and that’s where we make the money. And so there’s always been this question about marketing accountability until digital marketing came out. And then it was simple. Somebody clicks on an ad, they buy a product that was the best story to tell, Hey, if we didn’t have this ad, they couldn’t have clicked on it.

Neil

Hoyne:

They

wouldn’t have found our website. They wouldn’t have bought our product. And we love this immediate click, immediate response. But as the web becomes more complicated, as digital becomes more integrated into our lives, we know that not only is there more happening beyond the story, but we need to embrace that. And that’s kind of a, a, that’s kind of a challenge for the marketers is to figure out, well, how exactly do we do this? Where we know consumers going to take their time. But we know our CFO is going to demand, accountability to say, where did my check go today? And so that is why we’re stuck in that short term view. Now what some companies do is they sit and they think about this problem. Again, this is the, this is a cerebral part of marketing. We sit there and we’re like, well, we know, we know customers are worth more or less.

Neil

Hoyne:

We

should figure this out. It, well, how do we sort through this? Now it’s too dramatic. But some companies do go there and say, ah, starting today, we’re going to measure on lifetime value, not transactions. And it actually fails. And it fails not because lifetime value isn’t accurate, but because a company feels like they’re giving up everything that they learned and mastered over the past decade to transition to this new metric. And so the success that I’ve seen with companies actually making this transition is relatively simple. Instead of trying to take it all on, they just start surfacing lifetime value, a alongside all of their existing metrics. They don’t act on it, right? They’re not saying we’re gonna start giving people bonuses or turning on or off campaigns or customizing content. We just want the metric there where it’s non-threatening. And what they see is the organization starts to pick up on that language.

Neil

Hoyne:

So

when they’re looking at their campaign performance, everyone sitting there and saying, wow, these these campaigns are really successful. And then somebody looks and says, but wait a minute, those customers aren’t coming back where they see a campaign where these customers are worth a lot of money and say, well, what did we do right here? And eventually the business adapts to it because they have that deeper insight. And so it’s a soft transition where all you’re doing is you’re saying, look, we know lifetime value is important. Know we can calculate it. We just wanna bring it alongside. So everybody has it, but nobody’s threatened by it. We’re not transforming the business. We’re not telling people we’re moving budgets. And then the organization generally becomes familiar and brings everyone along with it.

Jay

Baer:

I

like this idea of non-threatening metrics. That’s gonna be my new band name, non-threatening metrics sold out show in social media. I feel like this problem is even more acute Neil because your social media managers, practitioners, listeners to this show already have a bit of an attribution conundrum because it’s pretty rare other than in the burgeoning world of social commerce for social to be the last touch driver of, of a sale. It’s almost always a contributor as everybody. Who’s looking at their Google analytics dashboard every day. Can attest you any advice for, for that audience who are trying to, to demonstrate lifetime value of social media inside the organization using techniques, social media, that that sometimes can be a little bit amorphous on the math side.

Neil

Hoyne:

Well,

I mean, there’s, there’s a few things that I would recommend the first is simply looking at it from a high level. You will know the lifetime value of your customers. The second part of that exercise is to figure out why, what makes people more valuable and understanding just as they would download a mobile app, if they are connected on social media, does that change that relationship? Do they stick around longer? Do they spend more? Now we’re not saying it’s causal, but we simply wanna know if that relationship is there. And I think that we also learn how to optimize. If you find that whether or not someone follows you in social media, doesn’t change their behavior. Then that leads to a questions about tactics. But that’s where companies start is they look in the, and to simply say, do customers that engage with us over this channel behave differently than those that don’t.

Neil

Hoyne:

And

that’s usually enough to say there are these separations and you can start to test that to say, does the lifetime value, does their retention change? They connect with us on social media. You can change your tactics to say, are we able to use social media for the people connected to spend more time with us? And that usually brings out the differentiation and this sounds complicated, but it’s not. It actually happens for a vast majority of companies in a spreadsheet where you have all your customers in one column, they’re lifetime value in a second column in their third column, are they connected on social media, through which channel? And you just break that apart and you say, how does that lifetime value change based on how these customers are connecting? And now it starts to give you that ROI. How is that changing? And also what channels are more or less valuable?

Adam

Brown:

It's

that connection piece, Neil, that I wanna ask you a question about as your role of sure. Chief measurement, strategist, and senior fellow at the Horton school, you have this opportunity to go into large organizations and sit down with the chief marketing officers, chief executive officers, chief digital officers. And I think one of the things we’re seeing is the complexity of marketing today in 22, 22, as social pros and digital marketers, we are as, as Jay kind of alluded to one small cog in this enormous, enormous gear train with our colleagues in customer service, marketing coms, customer experience, SEO front of house. If you actually have retail brick and mortar stores, commerce teams, everybody is involved and everybody is intersecting this data. And everybody is in that same correlation versus causation conundrum. How do we, as social pros do a better job of going after the same north star, we’re all trying to head towards the same thing, a north star that we can actually measure a, and even if, if the way we get there is very different for a social pro and the very versus, you know, one of these other groups that we’ve just noted.

Neil

Hoyne:

So

I I’d say amongst all the other practitioners and I mean, that’s why I love lifetime values. The fact that it does it is that true equalizer where we’re saying, look, a customer is a customer. I’m not talking about channel performance. I’m not talking about campaign performance. I’m saying, did we change the customer’s behavior? And it sorts out a lot of questions. Now there is that larger organizational question to say, how do we get everybody on board? And I’ll tell you a story. This is actually one of the first project I projects I worked on with lifetime value. The pitch I gave was so compelling that it ended up breaking the entire project. So I wanted everybody on board. So we got everybody in a room and we said, look, this is the possibility of lifetime value. If only we’re all aligned, right? That Nirvana of marketing, we’re all going to follow the same north star.

Neil

Hoyne:

And

then everybody said, yes. I was like, well, that, that should be great. The first meeting, 83 people all with their own idea as to how lifetime value can take off in their organization, what they could do to implement it and to use it. And all of a sudden, then you realize the problem. You’re like, how do we coordinate this? This company’s gonna be in all different directions. And that’s what happened. Everybody made it their own side project. Everyone went in different ways and you ended up with more confusion than less. So I actually prefer starting with individual teams and saying, look, we don’t need to solve this entire problem, but we wanna do two things. One is we wanna know how lifetime value impacted by the domain we control. How does lifetime value change across social media? What can we do with social media to improve lifetime value, to acquire better customers, to develop our customers and retain our customers.

Neil

Hoyne:

And

then once we have that, then it falls to really, what’s the core skill of all marketers telling a great story, but we’re not telling a story externally. We’re not telling it to our customers. We’re to internal stakeholders. Why should you pay attention to this metric? What should you look at? And then helping those teams integrate what you’ve learned into their own processes. Now, it sounds like it sounds like a tough deal because effectively you have to become not only a master of social media, but also master of customers, but you’ll have that knowledge and it picks up fairly quick, but it also puts you at the center of this activity. You are guiding that direction. You will know how the customers behave. You will be their central voice and arguably a better voice than trying to go through static webpages for information. But now you have that connection and now you just teach it to the other teams to say, how do you use lifetime value for paid search for display advertising for video, what’s the most effective in reaching high value customers. You already have a head start. And so I actually like starting small within those silos and trying to get everyone coordinated, just because it’s too hard. It’s too messy. Otherwise

Jay

Baer:

Friends.

I want you to go to converted book.com, converted book.com. You can download a free chapter of Neil’s book converted. Also all proceeds from the book will go to local food banks in Northern California, Yale. It’s very kind of you to do that as well. The book again is called converted, the data driven way to win customers. Hearts. You quick question for you. Do you think that social media practitioners, so the people who making content, distributing content, deciding where to share messages should also be the people who do measurement in analytics, or is that sort of a Fox watch in the hen house scenario that allows you to statistically gerrymander results to prove yourself, right?

Neil

Hoyne:

I,

I I’ve seen enough manipulation of metrics where I believe that anybody that touches metrics is going to be, be guilty of this. A and to be honest, people challenged me that said, if somebody produces a report that says your team should be half the size, and you know, some of your friends are going to have to find new jobs. Do you just accept the data as is? And you start to find out with any piece of data, there’s always going to be gray area. Every test you run, there’s going to be some question, some interpretation on it. And so generally I’ve become comfortable with teams interpreting their own data. But I do have, I, I do have an exception to it. Whenever those discussions are held about data, there needs to be enough organizational understanding about the data for other people to comment on it.

Neil

Hoyne:

The

big distinction I make is between data driven, decision making and data driven selling. If I’m a product manager and I spent 12 months building a new tool and I need that tool to launch, and I’m going to decision makers, am I trusted to present an impartial case about the data that I have given what’s on the line? Or am I gonna present the most glowing thing? Here’s all my friends that tested the product and love it. Here’s all the glowing customer reviews. Here’s all the revenue in front of me. What we generally need is somebody to be able to challenge that data in some organizations, they insist that this fluency of data be consistent so that everyone around the table can do it. One technique that I love was actually you borrowed out of the CIA which they call red teaming.

Neil

Hoyne:

You

may have heard of it. It’s where effectively you have somebody in the room or their job is to write counter proposals, to any, be anything being sold with the data. Now their goal is entirely to present an opposite point of view. And what we see are two really interesting things happen. One is we find that decision makers actually end up with more information because they get the presentation, whether it’s from the social media team or the product managers about the data they see, and then they get a presentation from somebody else about what they think is missing from that proposal. And you might think it leads to gridlock, but we actually see that it leads to more comfortable decisions. Be cuz leaders feel like they have all the data and that it’s their job to take that risk and say what direction we’re going.

Neil

Hoyne:

But

what we also find is that people start becoming more honest and comfortable sharing everything they know or don’t know about the data, because they know if they don’t do it, there’s somebody else in the room. That’s gonna look at that analysis and say, ah, you miss, ah, your sample size is four people who are all your friends. So it’s easier for us to raise a hand and be like, so we only had a couple people that tried the product and they’re all friends of mine because they don’t wanna seem like they’re hiding anything. And organizationally, that company goes from those six decisions to seven to eight to nine, and everyone feels comfortable with it because they feel like they were sharing in impartial data, regardless of where it started.

Jay

Baer:

It's

like the, keep your friends close and your enemies closer principle. But, but with data, which I, I really like. I like this idea of being a professional devil’s advocate. That seems like a fun job.

Neil

Hoyne:

it? It is just the big caveat. Make sure that these, this is not their full-time job. Okay. It is a, if you have a team that, or they argue about it, they become politically the most savvy people in there and be like, so these are the people that are gonna argue against their stuff. Make sure they get the nice corner office when we move. Maybe they’ll be lighter. If you move people every three to six months, you get a diversity of experiences. And you also prevent that entrenchment that where people start having their own, you know, horse in the race. So to speak.

Jay

Baer:

Here's

a social media strategy question for Neil Hoy, who runs analytics for Google. As a marketer, you say in the book, this is a quote from the book. As a marketer, there are three ways to build your business. You can meet new people, acquisition, you can improve the relationships you have development, or you can work to save relationships that may be on the way out retention. Do you believe that one of those three is best suited for social media or said the other way? Which of those three, do you think social media is best at

Neil

Hoyne:

What

should I think it’s best? I would say that arguably, I would say on acquisition simply because of the reach and how the percentage of customers that arguably, let’s say prospective customers, that you could then introduce to the brand and to the company. That’s what I love. But I would also say that it’s powerful really for all three. And it’s unique. Whereas when you look at, at something like search search is intentional. You need to go into search because you’re looking for a pro product where social media being more passive. But if you think about the opportunities development as you build new products and services, as you have new features, which can drive lifetime value, you have that direct channel to the customer to reach them on retention. If a customer has a complaint, they don’t need to weave through a phone center menu. They don’t need to go, go to a webpage and kind of drill three or four categories down where you’re bombarding them with ridiculous chatbots.

Neil

Hoyne:

My

internet access was down earlier today. So I had to do that. It’s like, I wanna talk to an agent, well, first click on what problem you’re having internet are you really let’s trouble? No it. Agent. Instead you can just reach out directly to people. And as long as the companies are respons, they have that. So what I’m saying on it is that these are three things you can do with your customers. But when you think about the power of social media to directly engage and reach those customers, then you can really, you’re talking about, you can use it to navigate all three layers of the relationship. Now that said, do I think that company should spend that amount of time equally on all three activities? Probably not. I do see more power overall of spending about 90% of your time on bringing in really great customers than trying to develop customers and turn them into something better and retention. It’s only proactive when you think you might lose them. So you can do all three, but I’m not sure you really should. I don’t think that would be a and even split all three might not be the best use of resources,

Adam

Brown:

Neil,

this, this power of two-way data is, is incredible. And I think as marketers, we oftentimes see the value of inhaling data from other parts of the organization, from sales and from customer service to inform marketing. But in the large large organizations, they have a chief strategy officer. Like you, they may have a chief digital officer that is inhaling and exhaling data across the organization, including taking marketing data and sharing that with other parts of the organization, maybe it’s research and development, maybe it’s the other way around, in medium to small organizations. They may not have a chief digital officer or a chief strategy officer. What is the home room for that? Who in a medium to small organization should try to share that marketing insight with the rest of the organization,

Neil

Hoyne:

Depending

on the, the exact size of the organization? Well, actually, you know what you call small and medium versus large, it could differ, but I would still almost argue for the same strategy, the role of a, of a, of a chief digital officer, a chief strategy officer in the case of data is to make sure that everyone has an equal voice and to make sure that those insights are sufficiently disseminated across the organization. Now this can be done in different ways. So for instance, some companies will invest in education to make sure that everybody understands data and the resources available. Some companies will default to say, look, even though we have a Google analytics account, we’re gonna make sure everybody knows how to access that Google analytics account and how it’s relevant to their role instead of waiting for one person to give us access to that data set.

Neil

Hoyne:

I

think Amazon has a fascinating technique where even at their size, they say that if you’re building a new data set, it needs to be open and accessible to all employees. So that way we need to default to open that way. If somebody wants to build, they can connect and understand that data. And that I think is where the, the, the chiefs really play is that connection of really joining all that data together. So people have transparency into what’s in it, where companies slow down is if they go and they say, look, I have a question, but I can’t get a hold of this one person. I don’t know if we even capture this as a company. If we do, I don’t know who pulls that data. And what they start seeing is it’s really complicated to get to the answer I want. They don’t have full visibility. And so they pull back and they say, I have to make a decision in this meeting. What do I do? And it’s really up to those chiefs, not to say, I’m gonna give you the data, but to say, I’ve created the processes in place. So you can get the data. You can ask those questions and your voice is heard when you come to hypothesis about it.

Adam

Brown:

That's

great insights. Thank you. The book converted the data driven way to win customers, hearts, Neil. So much of your book really leverages the idea of relationships and psychology as much, or in some cases, even more than data science. My question for you is if you were advising an aspiring marketing students still in college, would you tell ’em to take more psychology classes or more computer science classes?

Neil

Hoyne:

I

would say more, I would say more psychology classes, but I’d be even broader than that. The, the way that I typically look at education is that you’re going to receive a core curriculum of math and finance and accounting and marketing, which everybody else in your class is also going to have. And everybody else at every other major university is also going to have. And so what I look at is I look at how can you supplement that with different skills, consumer psychology, behavioral economics, even in some cases, computer science that helped to make your perspective more robust. Now I’ll tell you when I was at Purdue I was in their management program, but I also spent a lot of time with their computer scientists. I’ve learned over the years, that by their definition I can’t code. I can try, I can, I can scribble some stuff together.

Neil

Hoyne:

It'll

compile, but they, I look at them and they’re like, really? That’s what you built. But I learned through it that I can have that conversation. I understand what’s important. I understand what their position is and how they approach problems. And that’s really the large takeaway by working across other disciplines. You understand how those people see the world, how they structure and organize their problems. What’s possible. What’s not possible. And so the more of those you can gain, whether they’re coming from consumer psychology, whether they’re coming from even work some time with actors who position and they’re wonderful storytellers, but they don’t have a marketing background. I work with computer scientists and engineers. In fact, I’ll even tell you now, even outside of university, one of the things that I’m insistent on is that teams don’t spend in normal times, their time at their death.

Neil

Hoyne:

I

said, what I want you to do is I want you to leave. And I want you to go and sit by other people because you will talk to them. Eventually you’ll get to know them and you’ll share in how they see their job in their world. And they may challenge some of the assumptions that you have. So that advice to all those aspiring marketers out there is to learn and engage with people in other disciplines, understand how they look at the same problem in different ways and learn how you can tell the story and explain your value of what you are learning to them. Tom Peters would be proud management by walking around.

Jay

Baer:

We're

not walking around. We’re just sitting here recording a podcast as usual. This is social pros. And as usual, we’re gonna ask Neil, the questions that we’ve asked everybody here on the podcast, going back 500 and something episodes. Now, Neil, first one for you. What one tip would you give somebody looking to become a social pro?

Neil

Hoyne:

I

would say the, the best tip I can offer at anybody is to get started. Don’t overthink these problems. Even things like calculating customer, lifetime value, people even joke now with how popular learning is they think they need to study. Well, I’m gonna study machine learning for years, get into the data, start exploring the data and becoming comfortable with that data. That’s the easiest way. Don’t try to overthink the problems, just start playing around with it, knowing, and you have my full permission. If you need it to do it, to make mistakes and screw up. That’s fine. That’s part of the process. You know, I’ll tell you a quick story about the, this Jay is that, you know, I often work with students who are doing some of these larger projects where they’re working with companies for the very first time. And I work with these data scientists and they often come back to me.

Neil

Hoyne:

It

happens usually in the second week of the project. I’m like this project is a complete mess. Like the client doesn’t know what they want. There’s no organization. The data’s a mess. Like I joined on, on to do data science, where is my data science project. I join on to do marketing. When are we gonna get to the marketing part? And I kind of laugh. And I say, well, that this is part of the learning objectives. You don’t have alignment in businesses. You don’t have clean data to work with. You don’t always have clear objectives. The more experience you have there in just starting, the more you’re able to build up that memory. And I can promise you that gap between where you are and where you become to become an expert is a lot shorter than you think it’s just getting started. That matters.

Jay

Baer:

Terrific

advice, Neil, I love that. Just get started. Even if you’re wrong, everybody’s gonna survive. Presumably not always most likely though. Last question for Neil, if you could do a video call with any living person, who would it be? We should have asked you, what is your favorite metric, but no, we’re gonna go with, we’re gonna go with what’s your favorite integer? Nope. We’re gonna go with, if you could do a video call with any living person, who would it be?

Neil

Hoyne:

I

I’m, I’m gonna, I’m gonna throw this out there. And I know we, we talked about, you know, political leanings. I’m gonna bring it up and I’m gonna say Barack Obama and people are gonna say, well, why is it you, you agree with this political philosophy? No, that has nothing to do with that. When I was growing up, I grew up in the city of Chicago and a good friend of mine actually invited me to breakfast with up a politician gentleman named Barack Obama, who I had no idea who he was and I had better things to do that morning. So I was like, now I just, politics are not my thing. I’m not going. In fact, most people didn’t know when when Obama was a state Senator, he actually held breakfast. I think it was donuts in orange juice in his office in downtown Chicago.

Neil

Hoyne:

I

think it was like the, the third, Tuesday or Thursday of every month. And, and I heard people didn’t show up because they didn’t know who he was. And that always resonated to me. And then as soon he did did his convention speech and then he was in the national spotlight. And, and the reason why, I just always think back to that story is not because I think that we would have a great conversation. I’m not sure if my marketing interests him at all, but I’m just constantly reminded as to the, the importance and the opportunity of understanding where people might go and the potential of those people and of those relationships. And it is difficult to predict when we look at anybody, especially students is a student going to be the next CEO or CMO. And we use very simple heuristics on, did they go to Harvard?

Neil

Hoyne:

Well,

yes, they’re going to be a CEO, but it’s deeper than that. More complex in that because people are more complex. So even a more simplest, I, if the politicians are unavailable, I generally say this. I would love to have a video conference with someone in the world that at least with some reasonable certainty, I know I wouldn’t come across. Otherwise that’s the entire purpose of the book is to be able to share ideas with people and to say, look without this book, without this medium , without social media, I would never have met you. And now that I have, I want to hear your story. So there’s so many people out there. I don’t think I would focus on one. I would just say, how many of those conversations can I have and how many of those stories can I learn from

Jay

Baer:

You'll

absolutely learn from the book converted. Don’t forget. Go to converted book.com. You can get a free chapter you’ll figure, figure out how to buy the book and all proceeds from the book. Go to local food banks in Northern California. The author, Neil Hoy has been our guest this week on social pros. Neil love, love, love the book. Congratulations really excited for you. It launches officially on February 22nd, 2022, which is some kind of publishing voodoo 2 2, 2, 2, 2, 2. I don’t know what that means, but it’s probably good. It is about metrics and measurement after all. Thanks a lot for being here. We really appreciate it. Terrific job in the book,

Neil

Hoyne:

Jay,

Adam, thank you for having me. It was

Jay

Baer:

An

absolute pleasure friends. We will be back next week with another episode of what’s. Hopefully your favorite podcast in the whole world we’ve even measured. It it’s social pros and don’t forget transcripts links, special stuff from this episode. And every other episode going all the way back to 10 years ago, next week you can find ’em all@socialpros.com until next time I am J from Vincent convert. He is Adam Brown from sales force. Thanks for listening. See you soon.

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EP 507 – Edited (Completed 02/02/22)

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