In episode 16 of the Crowd, we connect with Guy Kawasaki to talk all things social media. Guy is the chief evangelist of Canva, an online, graphics-design service, trustee of the Wikimedia Foundation, and executive fellow at the Haas School of Business at U.C. Berkeley. Formerly, he was an advisor to the Motorola business unit of Google and chief evangelist of Apple. He is the author ofThe Art of the Start 2.0, The Art of Social Media, Enchantment, and ten other books. Guy has a BA from Stanford University and an MBA from UCLA as well as an honorary doctorate from Babson College.

For more information on Guy Kawasaki: http://guykawasaki.com/

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Transcript:

Alyssa:           Hi, I’m Melissa and this episode of The Crowd is brought to you by Near Me. Near Me helps brands and entrepreneurs create peer-to-peer marketplaces. If you want to learn more, shoot me an e-mail at alyssa@near-me.com. Thanks.

 

Kevin:            Hi. Welcome to The Crowd, a podcast by Near Me. We’re talking about peer-to-peer marketplaces. We’re talking about collaborative economy and we’re talking about thought leadership. We’re talking about all these things, any and all of them with some of the best minds in the field. And of course, I’m your host, Kevin Cohen.

 

                        Hello, I’m your host, Kevin Cohen. I’m super excited about today’s interview. I’ll be joined by Guy Kawaski. We are going to explore how to use social media to drive traffic, engagement and sales. Guy Kawasaki is the chief evangelist at Canva, an online graphic design tool. Prior to that, he was an adviser at Google and chief evangelist at Apple. He is also the author of numerous books, his latest being The Art of Social Media: Power Tips for Power Users.

 

Guy, welcome to the show.

 

Guy:               Thank you. Thank you for having me on your show.

 

Kevin:            We are super excited to have you.

 

Guy:               I’m super excited to be here.

 

Kevin:            Thank you, thank you. Before we jump into our discussion on social media and online relationships, I’ve got some rapid fire questions for you.

 

Guy:               Sure.

 

Kevin:            What book do you recommend most often to your friends and family?

 

Guy:               It’s a book called If You Want to Write by Brenda Ueland. It is a book ostensibly about writing but really it’s about pursuing your passions.

 

Kevin:            Very good. What social media channel is your home base? Do you spend time on one of them or all of them?

 

Guy:               Not all but not one either. My primary effort is Google+, Facebook and Twitter.

 

Kevin:            Guy, how often do you post on social media per day?

 

Guy:               If you count all the posts on all the platforms, 50 or 60 times.

 

Kevin:            Wow. So do you oftentimes post the same items on various channels simultaneously?

 

Guy:               On Twitter, I post the same story roughly three times in a 24-hour period, roughly.

 

Kevin:            Very cool. So who are some of your favorite people to follow online?

 

Guy:               True confession, I don’t follow many people. I don’t really read stuff. I’m mostly posting stuff. So I follow blogs about, blogs in websites for news to find, to curate, to post but I’m not the follower in the sense that you just asked that question. Rare exception, one site called Design Taxi, I’ve noticed has always good posts on Google+. But generally speaking, I am writing as opposed to reading.

 

Kevin:            Okay. Give us one of your most viral social media campaigns that you’ve done today. What are some of your winners?

 

Guy:               It’s not so much about I have these winners that I made a video about United Breaking Guitars or something like that. I believe social media is a slow burn, day after day, long enduring process. So any given post of mine gets read thousands of times and dozens to hundreds of comments, dozens to hundreds of re-shares. So I don’t have the – I’m not doing the $5 million let’s make a viral video with all these fantastic special effects. You know, large brands do that. I don’t do that. I believe in the long haul incremental improvement every day.

 

Kevin:            Okay. So let’s jump in to the social media world and let’s go back in time. When did you start your journey into the social media world?

 

Guy:               I started roughly when Twitter started. So I believe Twitter is about eight years old. So look up when Twitter started, I started right after.

 

Kevin:            When Twitter started, how would you compare what you did back when it started, let’s say eight years ago, with what you do now? Obviously, it’s a much different beast than it was back then.

 

Guy:               Yes, much different. Fewer platforms, less activity, not as graphically oriented. There are huge changes but the gist back then and the gist today for me is still the same which is I always try to provide value, something informative, something that assists people and somehow makes their world a better place.

 

Kevin:            Very good.

 

Guy:               That has not changed and I don’t anticipate it changing because that is what I do.

 

Kevin:            What are some of the big social media trends that you’re following right now?

 

Guy:               What do you mean by social media trend?

 

Kevin:            Well, like for example on Facebook, one of the big complaints that a lot of brands have is that when they do a post to their Facebook fanpage, only three to five percent of their viewers get to see those. So another complaint is or another challenge is that the Twitter feed moves so fast that a lot of times it’s hard for people to keep up so things like that. What are some of the big kind of top of mind issues that you see out there right now in terms of trends or challenges out there?

 

Guy:               Well, a trend is different from a challenge, right? So those two are challenges and one solution is if you’re a brand is throw money at the problem. Ironic that may be, the brands – the brands have agencies, right? So now, the agencies can say, well, it’s not our fault you’re not getting traction. It’s because of Facebook’s algorithm. So why don’t you give us $1 million and we’ll buy promoted posts? And that will be the solution. So maybe they like it that way because you could argue that it makes it easier and they get paid. Imagine a world where it’s only organic and all you could do is produce the best content you could and hope for the best. You could spend $1 million promoting posts. Hard to imagine, you could spend $1 million writing good posts.

 

Kevin:            For sure.

 

Guy:               So you know, I don’t see this mega-trend. I offer it in a very short term sort of framework maybe. So I’m not looking at what’s going to happen in two or three years. If Facebook says, from now on, we want you to upload video natively to get the most views, that’s what I’ll do. I live in a very tactical level. I’m not defining trends or predicting trends. This is for me a day-to-day, hand-to-hand combat.

 

Kevin:            In your book The Art of Social Media, you talked about repeating tweets. Walk us through that a little bit.

 

Guy:               Repeating tweets is because all your potential readers are not looking at the same time. They may be in different time zones so they’re awake at different times. Even if they are in the same time zone, some people will check the internet in the morning, some people at lunch, some people in the evening. So you cannot just post once at 8 a.m. and figure that everybody is going to see it, who you want to see it. So now if you do post that often, some people will complain that you post too much and I say tough luck. I mean that’s just the way it is that you can’t just have it both ways.

 

Kevin:            Right. One of the things that you talked about was curating content and creating your spin on that curated content. Do you use any tools to curate content? Or do you use Google Alerts? What do you use to gather all your content and put it in front of you in one place?

 

Guy:               Well I co-founded a website called Alltop and Alltop aggregates websites and blog feeds by topic. So I have created a bunch of topics that I look at every day because I can scan hundreds of stories very quickly. So that’s what I use. I do use – I don’t really use Google Alerts. I use Alltop and I look at what’s hot. I mean that as a noun. That’s a  thing on Google+.

 

Kevin:            Right.

 

Guy:               So I look at what’s hot on Google+ because I use sort of the crowd filtering for that. Then I have people who are helping me with social media who are also looking. We have to feed the content monster. We are constantly looking.

 

Kevin:            Right. Well, that leads right into our next question. If you were a marketplace like Airbnb for example, how would you leverage user generated content to promote your brand, drive traffic and promote relationships?

 

Guy:               If I were Airbnb, I would be all over Pinterest and Instagram.

 

Kevin:            Okay.

 

Guy:               This is a fantasy house. You can stay at Sydney. This is a fantasy house. You can stay in Vail or Saint Moritz or whatever it is. Airbnb’s use, I think should be primarily of graphic oriented sites and that’s Pinterest and Instagram.

 

Kevin:            Perfect. So you already mentioned the website that you use. Do you use any social media tools or software like Hootsuite to organize your tweets?

 

Guy:               Yeah. I at any given point am using Buffer, Hootsuite or Sprout Social and every one of them does the job but none of them does it perfectly. So I bounce around sometimes daily between which tools I will use. I wish someone would just get it all right. But in my humble opinion, none of them have got it right.

 

Kevin:            Right. There are pieces of it done well but none of them are comprehensive tools that work all the time. So it’s 2015, you know, what’s on your radar for 2015? What are some of the big things that you have going on? I know you’re obviously the chief evangelist of Canva but what else is –

 

Guy:               Yes. So I’m chief evangelist of Canva and I can give you some social media secrets which is number one, if you put a graphic or a video on every one of your posts, you will double engagement for those posts. So that’s number one. And one of the best ways to create graphics, easiest, fastest and cheap is through Canva. So that’s why I went to work for that company because I think it’s democratizing design. So number one is to add graphics.

 

Number two, particularly for Twitter, you should repeat your tweets. I think you can repeat a tweet that is valuable and informative, you know, not a promotion but something that helps people find stuff three times in 24 hours. So that will triple your engagement. I promise that you will triple – well, I can’t promise that you’ll triple but the number of, the amount of engagement you get for one compared to the amount of engagement you get for three, you will be amazed. You will say to yourself, why did I ever not repeat before? So I’ll call it triple, okay.

 

So right there, I have made your social media six times more engaging because you double it by adding a picture, then you triple it by repeating your tweets. Those of you who listen to this podcast, there you go. The most valuable podcast in the history of social media, you know, 6x increasing engagements.

 

Kevin:            That’s great.

 

Guy:               Now, maybe you believe me and buy the book.

 

Kevin:            So tell us some of the other things that our listeners can learn in the Art of Social Media.

 

Guy:               They can learn first of all how to optimize your avatar, your profile, how to curate content, how to post, how to spread out your post, you know, which tools, how to use those tools, how to socialize a meeting, how to run social media at a meeting to increase the impact of a meeting, how to run Google Hangout on Air. It’s got more than 120 or so tips. All very tactical. None of them are duh-isms. None of them are like, oh, you need to be engaging, you need to be transparent and honest, you know. Duh. Of course, you need to do those things.

 

                        So it’s all about tactic. What makes a great avatar? It should be only your face and asymmetrical and front lit and don’t make your avatar a tiny little crop out of a group photo. It should be so when people click on it, it zooms up and it’s big and it’s not pixelated. So it’s just all those kinds of tactics. This is a very tactical book. If you want to read a theoretical book, don’t buy this book.

 

Kevin:            Wonderful. Well, Guy, thank you for your time today. We really appreciate it. If our listeners want to learn more about your book and more about you as a person, where can they go?

 

Guy:               Obviously, one place is to follow me on social media that’s to learn about me as a person. But for my book, I have a website called artof.social. And there, the first thing you’ll encounter is the artof.social quiz. So you can take a quiz to see how you score. If you score really well, you don’t need to buy the book. If you score really poorly, you really need to buy the book. So, you know, we’ll let you qualify yourself.

 

Kevin:            Wonderful. Well, Guy, thank you so much for your time today. We really appreciate it and best of luck on your book.

 

Guy:               All right. Thanks.

 

Kevin:            So that’s it for today’s show everybody. I’d like to thank Guy Kawasaki for joining us. He’s doing great stuff at Canva and also you should check out his book. Details will be on the show notes. If you want to learn more about Guy Kawasaki and all the things he’s working on, go to the show notes at www.near-me.com. Click on the blog and then go to the podcast listing. Also, if you like today’s show, we’d really appreciate it if you could go to iTunes and leave us a five-star review. It really helps us out.