Carlos Gil - Komfo Summit

Hey, what's going on guys? Carlos Gil here. I am a award-winning Snapchat storyteller, keynote speaker and social media strategist. And I am passionate about meeting other people and traveling the world. I'm at the TwentyThree Studio here in Copenhagen, Denmark. I really wish that you could be here. We're talking all about social media storytelling, Instagram stories, Snapchat and why your brand should be much more like DJ Khaled and less like a brand. I have. Did you capture that? So social media, as we know, is not new. However, you have newer platforms and technologies like Snapchat and Instagram, as well as chat bots, which are greatly disrupting how marketing is being done and also how relationships are being formed and cultivated. So the purpose of my talk was really to break down from a historical standpoint how social media has evolved over the last one to two decades, starting with AOL and MySpace to where we're at today, which is Facebook and Twitter, as well as Snapchat and Instagram and where things are moving forward, which is with automation and chat bots. And more importantly, why it's important that as marketers and business leaders, we really take the time to use these mediums not to sell, not to advertise and not to market, but really to tell stories around our products, goods and services and to take it one step further to really build relationships. So the heart of any business is centered on relationships and centered on people. And if you really want to be successful using these mediums, you really have to evangelize the keyword in social media, which is social. You have to socialize. You have to meet people and really build your community one person at a time. The first thing is you have to use social media. Really listen to what is being said, not just about your company, but also about your industry and really just jump in headfirst. I look at a platform like Twitter, which is fantastic for having conversations with strangers. I look at Twitter as a platform that you can use as a search engine. So if you, for example, are a fitness and lifestyle brand, you can actually run searches and see what's being said specifically about the industry that you serve. Not necessarily what's being said about your company, because if you're a newer brand that's just starting, let's say that you're more of a mom and pop lifestyle fitness brand, you're not Nike. You want to know what people are saying about your industry so you can just jump right in and start forming that dialogue and building that relationship one person at a time. If you are a larger enterprise brand, like let's say Nike, you can actually see what's being said about you. You can have conversations. I think there's much more value in having conversations through social media, whether it's in tweets or whether it's in direct messages or whether it's responding to people on your own feed on Facebook, then there isn't marketing content itself. Let's face it, marketing content goes away and a lot of people have been conditioned to really tune out marketing content. They don't want to be sold to. They want to be engaged. The majority of people are using social media to engage with their friends and as I like to call their homies. They're not looking to see what brands are posting. They look at social media as almost like the alternative to TV and what happened with television. People started turning off the TV and they started turning social as an alternative. What we're seeing now in this era of marketing and new media is platforms like Facebook and Twitter and even YouTube. Brands are starting to penetrate and using it very similar to TV and they're doing more of advertising, more marketing and less of talking. I think we need to get back to the basics. First of all, who is your customer? That's question number one anytime that you're developing a social media strategy on any social network is who's your customer? So who are you trying to reach? What platforms are they engaging on? I often will hear from marketing executives that will say to me at conferences, well, we're trying to reach a much older audience that's on Snapchat. Well, that's great. Snapchat probably is not going to be the medium for you. Facebook is probably going to be the medium that better suits your needs. So who are you trying to reach? Where are they engaging? And once you identify that, what content are you going to put in front of them? Content is the name of the game here. That's going to be really what keeps people hooked and really wanting to follow your brand. Is your content fun? Is it creative? Is it educational? If there's anything that you can do really well on social media and you should look to do well is teach people. Teach people the value that your goods, products and services bring to them in their lives. If you can do that successfully, you can have a winning social media strategy. I think brands that you should really look at that are doing social media well is first of all, Warby Parker. They're an example that I like to use a lot. They're a male at home optical brand. So you can go online, you can order glasses, you can have them sent to your house as opposed to going to a brick and mortar location to buy eyeglasses. They use Snapchat as once again a storytelling medium to take you into the inside of their company. Oftentimes they'll have their employees do takeovers to their Snapchat account and then they'll go on Twitter and they'll say go to our Snapchat today to see what one of our employees is posting. Or you can see like five desk hacks. You can see things that normally you wouldn't see on Facebook or even on Twitter or on YouTube. The content that you tend to see with whether it's Snapchat stories or Instagram stories is much more organic. It's much more real. I think another brand that does social media really well is Wendy's. And they're a brand that has come up in the news a lot lately because they really don't have a filter so to speak. They've been known to address when people are talking bad about them. They'll go head on with trolls. They'll talk to people. They're talking about their competition and it's great. Because there's this healthy competition that social media creates where you can see if you're Wendy's who's talking about Burger King or who's talking about McDonald's. You can speak to those people. Like there's no barrier that prevents you from speaking to your competition's customer. It's beautiful about this whole ecosystem that we're in. And another brand that I think does social media really well from a storytelling aspect is Taco Bell. And once again another example that I use in my talks is Taco Bell because A, they know that they're speaking often times so much younger millennial audience. They're using some of the different tools and features like doodling on Snapchat. Their content that they create is unique across the board. One of the things I often talk about that you shouldn't do is repurpose content. You see Taco Bell creating original content. So I'd probably say those are some of my favorite brands to follow. So storytelling is the new content marketing. What I mean by that is people relate to other people. When you look at some of the most followed individuals online today, they're getting more views and more engagement than the largest brands in the world receive. I challenge you to do this. Go look up the top 10 Fortune 100 companies in the world. Look up the Walmarts and the Amazons and the Apples and the Nikes. And then go look at someone like Casey Neistat. Go look up someone like Gary Vaynerchuk. Go see what people are putting on social media and how it's outperforming what brands are posting. Think of brands take a step back and they start observing that normal everyday people, not celebrities, and in a way you can consider creators and influencers as the new celebrity. But these are normal people. They're not Kim Kardashian or DJ Khaled. They're regular people. If you see what they are posting and they get much higher engagement and you're not, then there's something that they're doing right that you should be doing that you're not currently doing today. Telling people a story is really taking them through a progression. And you don't have to just go out and work with an influencer or a high-profile thought leader. The narrative of your brand can be told by someone that works for your company. I'm a big fan of leveraging employees as advocates for your brand. The other is customers. So you can take existing customers. You can use a platform like Twitter, for example, and see who's talking about your brand. Take the people that are like the top five most engaged fans of your brand who are consistently retweeting your content, commenting on posts on Facebook. Take those individuals and reel them in and give them an opportunity to tell your brand story for you from their perspective on your social media channels. And if you do that consistently, what's going to happen over time is people are going to start seeing your brand as being relatable and human. Because now it's not you, the brand, telling the story. It's your actual customers that's doing it for you. I think people don't want to read anymore, quite frankly. I think they look at written content, blogs, as it takes too much time. And let's face it, the world is moving from macro to micro. Short content, that's where I really think that Snapchat and even Instagram stories is outperforming in terms of YouTube and Facebook. People just don't really have the time to consume long form content. So if you can get in 10 to 20 seconds the same amount of content that you would be able to get by reading an article over five minutes or watching a 10 minute video on YouTube, why not? I think also technology makes it that much easier that from your iPhone or your Android you can consume, I once again use this example, you can consume in under three minutes through the discover section of Snapchat as opposed to watching 30 minutes of programming on TV. So there's a few ways that you can measure success. One is views. If people like your content they're going to keep coming back and they're going to keep watching. If not, they're not going to tell anyone about it and they're not going to keep watching. At the end of the day we're all in business for a reason and that's to drive revenue. And I think that brands really need to make the focus, how do we tell great stories that convert and engage and get people to come back to an own channel? So as we all know social media is rented land. You're not going to build a mansion on rented land. You need to drive people back to your website. So your form of measurement, if people aren't going to your website to buy, is at least get them to opt in. One of those two barometers should be your form of measurement. I firmly believe over the next five years Instagram and Snapchat will be the two predominantly most used social networks out there. I also believe that Facebook is disrupting how we communicate as a whole. So you really look at Facebook's portfolio of businesses. And outside Facebook they own Instagram. They own Messenger. I think Messenger and also WhatsApp are the two greatest social networks that exist today that get absolutely no love and they don't get talked about enough. You go to any marketing conference in the world, no one's talking about WhatsApp or Messenger, at least to the best of my knowledge. And these are two platforms that are used by over a billion users in the United States because let's face it, social media is not limited to a Facebook page or a Twitter account. It's not just marketing content. It's media amongst people. They're doing this. What you and I are doing over face-to-face, over a conversation, a conference, is what millions and billions of people on the planet are doing every single day, every moment throughout the day. These platforms really facilitate that. So you look at once again Facebook's portfolio between Instagram, WhatsApp, WeChat, Messenger, Facebook the platform, and now Oculus, which is virtual reality. They're not going anywhere. You look at Snapchat, which is just Snapchat right now, but very publicly they've said that they are a camera company. They're not a social network, which is very smart. They're not looking to compete head on with Facebook. They're really looking to change the way that we see the world. You've seen that with the augmented reality features within their platforms, such as the different lenses and filters. And you've also seen that with Spectacles, which is their version of sunglasses that allow you to snap. So again, two very unique companies, one that's really disrupting and transforming the way that we communicate, the other that's transforming and disrupting the way that we see the world around us. And I really think that they have a very strong position to stay for a very long time. You need to be more like DJ Khaled and be less like a brand. He has the keys to success. He gets over 3 million views per snap. He's one of the most watched people online today. He gets over 6 million views on Instagram per post. The reason why people consume DJ Khaled's content is because he's figured out in the year 2017 what most Fortune 500 brands today have not. And that's how to be real. Once again, people relate to people. They don't relate to brands. They don't relate to logos. They don't go on social media to even consume brand content. We saw that here today. There's over 500 people in the room. And I asked a question, who woke up this morning and went on Facebook to see what your favorite brand posted? Not a brand, but your favorite brand. Not one hand went up. So that's your answer. Be much more like DJ Khaled. Be much more like the KC9 stats of the world. And you'll see that over time people will start to care. And once you get them to care, then you can get them to convert.