← Right About Now - Legendary Business Advice
Right About Now - Legendary Business Advice
The Science of Going Viral: Why Storytelling Beats Algorithms and AI
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- [00:00]
Ryan Alford
Hi, I'm Madison Tevlin. And I'm Presley Hosbach. We're the co host of Serving Smiles, a podcast where we try to make health and wellness way less overwhelming. In partnership with Colgate Palmolive, we're breaking down topics like oral health, skin health,
- [00:14]
Presley Hosbach
and more with the help of expert guests.
- [00:16]
Ryan Alford
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Brendan Cain
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Ryan Alford
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- [01:03]
Brendan Cain
and other limits in terms Apply AI is a tool. It's not a solution. And people think that AI is automatically going to make them go viral or have success. And the reality is, it's only as good as your understanding of how to use it. It's only as good as the data set, the prompts that you put in, and your ability to analyze the output of it.
- [01:23]
Ryan Alford (Outro)
You don't win by following the playbook. You win by rewriting it. 700 episodes de with the people who actually built something real. No theory, no fluff, no shortcuts. This is Right about now with Ryan Alford.
- [01:44]
Ryan Alford
What's up guys? Welcome to Right about now. We're always talking about how to get your marketing right now. We could talk about last month, last year, a year from now. We could look out too far. But we get you nowhere. You need to be. You need to be living in the here and the now. That's why we have author Brendan Cain. I've got his book right here. It's the most gorgeous white I've ever seen. It is the guide to going viral. It makes me think back to my days with Steve Jobs and Apple. It's all white all the time, baby. The art and science of succeeding on Social media. We're ready to succeed. What's up, Brendan?
- [02:15]
Brendan Cain
It's a pleasure to connect with you, Ryan, and everybody that's tuning into this. Appreciate your time.
- [02:19]
Ryan Alford
Hey man, appreciate your time. Appreciate the value that you're giving on social media. I'm gonna go ahead and plug him because I'm doing my normal research for guests and getting to know them before I get to know them. Brandon's putting out a ton of value. He's got these books. We're going to talk about how to get his latest book. He'll ment that, but I want to go and just tell you, just go follow him on Instagram. I went down the rabbit hole and 45 minutes later and seven bullet points of ideas I had from some things I'm doing. I'm like, wait a second, I'm supposed to be researching this guy, not just taking his wisdom. You got a lot of great insights, Brennan.
- [02:50]
Brendan Cain
I appreciate it. I'm fascinated with it. Even doing this for 20 years. I just love digging in and understanding how things work.
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Ryan Alford
The most successful people are the most curious people. You got to know how it works so that you can do it for yourself. But also, I just think it's what it takes to kind of go down the rabbit hole. It's so funny, I don't even like, say that anymore. So many people I talk to is like, you know, I have to know the way this works. So I'm curious about that. It's a common attribute, right?
- [03:14]
Brendan Cain
Yeah. Even things that I have no desire to get into as like a business or even studying. I just, the minute I hear a subject, I'm like, how does that work? Peppering people for questions or just going online and researching as much as possible?
- [03:25]
Ryan Alford
We're going to get into the value that you bring in the books and how to make the mark on social media. But Brendan, I mean, like, set the table for everyone. I mean, just so they know if they haven't heard of you, if they haven't stumbled upon your magnificent books or channels. What got you into this field? What does our audience need to know about Brendan Cain?
- [03:43]
Brendan Cain
So I initially didn't plan to get into social media. So it started back around 2003. So I wanted to be a film producer and I wanted to produce movies. And I went to film school and what I thought was, like, to be a movie producer, you need to know something about business. But I show up at film school and I quickly realized they don't teach you anything about business there. So I figured the best way to learn about business is start your own. And being a broke college student, I had to find the most cost efficient way to launch something. And at the time, and it still holds true today, was to start online companies. So I Started a few online companies while I was going to college, just to learn and experiment. And then when I moved to Los Angeles in 2005 to pursue a career in film, like everybody else, you start at the bottom. You're making coffees, deliveries and just being an assistant, doing whatever they ask you to do. And like anybody, you want to stand out. You want to rise to the next level. You want to connect with studio executives, directors, actors. But when I had those opportunities and they asked me, why did you move to Los Angeles? And I would say, I want to be a movie producer, you could see everybody's eyes glaze over. I was just one of a million people with a pipe dream. So I knew I needed to take a step and analyze how do I actually stand out in this ultra competitive industry. And I just noticed at the time, we were spending all of our marketing budget on traditional television, print, billboards and things of that nature. And I also noticed every time we finished a movie, there would be a sense of anxiety and stress that would come over the office because we were investing tens of millions of dollars into a single piece of content. And this isn't like a normal business where you're building a brand, where you have years or decades to get awareness. You literally have months for hundreds of millions of people around the world to know about this. And at the time, social media was just starting to come on the scene. So I just went to the head of the studio and I said, hey, there's this new platform called YouTube and there's these people that are generating millions of views. There's no such thing as an influencer. And I said, I want to go off and engage these people to interview our movie stars that are in this movie. It was called Crank by Jason Statham. And he was like, ah, I don't know if I want to do this. It sounds risky. I was like, it's not going to cost you any money and the only upside is you're going to get millions of people to see your movie for free. So that kicked off what was the first ever influencer campaign on YouTube. And then I just kept continuing down that path, exploring these new platforms of social media and just growing and learning there. And I eventually just made the decision is like making movies is just another corporation. And I'm not a corporate guy, I'm an entrepreneur. And I just saw more upside and potential in just exploring social media and the growth that it was starting to take shape.
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- [06:39]
Ryan Alford
Something just hit me when you were talking, Brendan. More people need to think like movies. It's a really interesting comparison of the way people think. And I am an overtime brand guy. I really believe in that. But at the same time, when you have the desperation and the urgency of a movie because you've got this point in time, you've been all this time building this product, this thing, this wonderful thing you've done, and the way the movie cycle works, you've got this moment and you've got to sell this amount of tickets, got to put butts in the seats. And that urgency and creativity that comes, you know, when you have the right people thinking about it is a very interesting comparison to maybe giving someone a way to think about the. The way they should market whatever they're doing to kind of here and now make an impact.
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Brendan Cain
Yeah. One of the blessings of starting in that environment is you are forced to think as big as possible.
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Presley Hosbach
Yeah.
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Brendan Cain
Because if you go in and start pitching an idea that's going to reach 10,000 people or a hundred thousand people or just a million people, you're going to get laughed out of the room. You can't survive on the limited kind of scope of like, we're just going to go after this small audience and it's going to lead to success because the stakes are just way too high.
- [07:45]
Ryan Alford
I'm thinking of a piece of content. If you haven't already done it, you got to think like a blockbuster movie as a brand brand, you know, It's a good book. It is. I like that. You mind if I borrow it?
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Brendan Cain
Go for it.
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Ryan Alford
I'll footnote because of my interview with Brendan Cain and his brilliance in, again, how he creates virility and interest in YouTube. Hey, you're an YouTube OG back then.
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Brendan Cain
Back in 2005, nobody took it seriously in its first year. By the end of the year, I think it was at like 8 million users, but it was like karaoke videos, pranks and things of that nature. Nobody took it seriously. Nobody knew what it was going to become. Now it's over 2 billion people. And the latest statistics are crazy. 11% of households in America have YouTube on their television. And that number is only going to grow so literally you have the power to create your own TV channel from your home. It's truly remarkable where we're at from where we started less than 20 years
- [08:37]
Ryan Alford
ago, YouTube is television now because of a smart TV proliferation and obviously the smartphone, you are your own walking TV station for whatever you choose. We've had this democratization of content. Used to be TV giant media budgets. The only way to get seen and heard is if your celebrity or you can afford commercials. Now with the proliferation of the app and smartphones and smart TVs, like you said, it's there for the taking, but you've got to do the right content
- [09:04]
Brendan Cain
100% and it gets underappreciated. What you just said. If we think back to pre social media, how did we reach the masses? You needed to have television ads, radio ads, print. You needed to have a big marketing team, big budgets. And when you fast forward today, literally with this thing in your pocket, a mobile device, if you tell a great story, you can reach millions of people and not have have to pay a single dime. We just had a client where we gave them a 500 million view award. And if you think about that's essentially five Super bowl commercials. And how much does a Super bowl commercial knock out the production budget? It's minimum seven to eight million dollars just to get the 32nd spot. But now literally with a phone, a small business can reach that many people. It's truly democratized communication to the masses just to fundamentally understand and realize that the world that we live in is completely shifted to where it was before these platforms existed.
- [09:56]
Ryan Alford
And the that I agree is talked about a lot, but I don't think it's absorbed enough. But it's also the fact it's sort of even counter to what we're going to get into, which is how to actually make it viral and how to get as far as you need to for the market that you have. But why wouldn't you leverage this like even if you got 20 people and it was free with your own time in sweat equity or something, and creating that piece of content, that's what sort of blows my mind sometimes is the fact that there's still a lot of people that do not leverage this.
- [10:23]
Brendan Cain
I mean if you just even think about it on the smallest scale, like think about like 200 people watching your content. Now imagine mentioned the last time you went to a big movie theater, like an IMAX Theater. You're standing in front of all those people that are paying attention to you. Or like some people think, like 60,000 views is not a huge breakthrough. Think about the last sporting event that you were at. A stadium filled with people and they're listening to you. That is literally the power that you have in your pocket.
- [10:47]
Ryan Alford
Yep. And it's funny, I joke all the time because these numbers, like you said, they get thrown around and underappreciated for that volume. Anything with like monetary there people talk about million this, billion that. I'm like, you just throw that around sometimes like 10 million this, that much less what you're talking about. Even just a hundred people in a room's a lot of damn people. And gotten desensitized a bit, I think, to some of these numbers for whatever
- [11:11]
Brendan Cain
reason, to be honest. Like, sometimes I have to take a step back too, because you're so immersed in it and you're always trying to push the boundaries of what's possible that you have. Because when you're looking at numbers on a screen, it's sometimes difficult to conceptualize that. So even for myself, I have to take a step back and kind of remind myself, like, the level of scope that we're dealing with.
- [11:29]
Ryan Alford
All these books are in the same, like, territory. But talk to me about the guide to going viral. What are we getting here and what kind of guided the writing of this book?
- [11:39]
Brendan Cain
The past eight years, we've been developing a creative model from scratch. So myself and my team at Hookpoint and basically it build a one of the first social media advertising companies. When the ad platform first started to launch and we worked with Fortune 500 companies and we scaled to managing about 100 million a year in ad spend. And I just saw a tremendous amount of inefficiencies in terms of the creative process that goes into creating content for social media. So the first phase of it was, hey, we're just gonna take our traditional assets, our TV assets, our billboard, you know, magazine ads, and we're just gonna put it on social media. And then it evolved to, we know that doesn't work, but we're gonna still use the creative models that were designed pre social media to develop content for social media. Seeing those mistakes happen time and time again, I was like, there has to be a better way to go about this. Over the past eight years, we've developed this creative model which is the core premise of the book, and it dives deep into that creative model, but essentially what we what we call storytelling formats. So these are our Structures that have proven to succeed time and time again. And through the model, what we do is we show people how to identify these formats, but more importantly, how do we analyze these formats? Because just because you see a viral video doesn't mean you're able to create a viral video. So just to give you some examples, one format I'm sure everybody has seen that's tuning into this is man on the street, where you approach a random stranger on the street and engage with them. So there's an account called School of Hard Knocks, where they approach successful business people. They ask, well, how did you make your first million dollars? There's a friend in client of mine, Alex Stemp, who is a professional photographer that approaches random strangers on the street, offers them a professional photo shoot. He's built an audience of 20 million people doing that. There's a guy Body by Mark that approaches fit people on the street and ask them, what is your fitness routine with that format? Very straightforward. You approach a random stranger on the street and interact with them. However, 99% of people that see that format will fail in executing it because they don't understand what makes it tick, meaning what we do with the process outlined in that book. Our team will spend anywhere between 15 to 25 hours analyzing what's the difference between a high performer in that format versus a low performer. And these are small kind of nuanced elements. The pacing, the tonality, facial expressions, what's the hook, the captions? Is there a perspective shift? Is there tension? Is there contrast? All of these storytelling elements that come into play. Another format that people have seen is two characters, one light bulb, where it's the same person that plays two different characters, where they're debunking a common myth about something. So there's Mark Tilbury that does it about finance. There's Erica Kohlberg that does it about the finance fine print in legal contracts. What happens when your flight gets delayed or your AirPods break? We have used this model. We spent tens of thousands of hours analyzing over 500 of these formats, and we have a team of researchers that's researching it every week. So what the book does is it walks you step by step through that model to understand that social media is not some mystery. Social media is very simplistic in that it's just another storytelling medium. It's another storytelling platform, and it's literally survival of the fittest for the best storytellers. Now, the reason I pointed out those two formats, if you think about man on the street, when was the first Time that man on the street was introduced. Do you know, I was trying to
- [14:49]
Ryan Alford
think of that when you were saying that. We did it with Verizon Wireless back in the day asking people about their cell phones. We had a radio campaign that was very successful in that. But like this is in 2001.
- [15:00]
Brendan Cain
So the first time was 1954 for the first season of Tonight Show. So we're talking about a social media format that is generating billions and billions of views that was invented in 1954. The two characters, one light bulb. I don't know the official initial first person. It's hard to find the first person. But I remember watching the first Austin Powers movie. I think it was like 1997 where he's playing Austin Powers and Dr. Evil. So I say that because history keeps repeating itself. Human beings love structure, they love stories. The reality is civilizations have been built and destroyed based on stories. The first stories started to emerge 30,000 years ago when the cavemen were putting cave writings on the walls and telling stories that way. Social media is no different. If you tell great stories, you will succe. Now there's so much information that people take you down the wrong track of like, oh, it's all about how much you post, it's what hashtags you use, what time of day. They're trying to find the hacks and the tricks and the things of that nature to game the system. But in reality, social media is just repeating itself in a new platform that allows people to tell stories. And that's all that you need to do. If you are a great storyteller, you will succeed. Ignore everything else and just focus on what is the ideal format for me and what will allow me to tell the best stories about what I want to represent for myself. My business, my brand, my message.
- [16:18]
Ryan Alford
When I think about some of the viral moments, it's one thing to sort of break them down after the fact and create playbooks, but how much of are by accident? When I think about some of the best ones, I'm like, I don't know if they had virility in mind.
- [16:32]
Brendan Cain
Yeah, there is. Especially when TikTok kind of changed the game a little bit. There's a lot of people that go viral once or twice and get their 15 minutes of fame. Those people, I don't think they know what they're doing. I think the reason real success comes from when you can do it consistently. So if you look at somebody like Mr. Beast, he's not lucking into it. Like he spent thousands and thousands of hours into it. Or we talked about Mark Tilbury or Eric Kohlberg. Mark Rober, Channel Veritasium. What fascinates me, the reason we spent eight years developing this model and do so much research, is I'm not really interested in helping somebody do it once, because what are you going to do if you just go viral once? It's not really going to change the dynamics of things because as we know, people are going to move on to the next thing and the next thing and the next thing. The real challenge and the. The real possibility is how can you actually engineer it to your favor? How can you actually understand why something works, but more importantly, why something doesn't work? So you can fix those mistakes and reproduce the results that you want.
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Ryan Alford
Yeah, that's the key. Because like you said, easy come, easy go sometimes. And, you know, 15 minutes of fame is great, but what you see is a lot of people just never capitalize on it. They don't know how to replace.
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Brendan Cain
They're not ready for it.
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Ryan Alford
Talk with Brendan Cain. He is the author of the Guide to Going Viral, the Art and Science of Succeeding on Social Media. If you're watching this on YouTube, which you should be, you'll see this beautiful white book sitting here on the desktop surrounded by his other two books. We've got Hook Point and one million followers. I couldn't believe you built up a million followers in 30 days. I didn't believe it until I kind of watched the video. I mean, how the hell did you do that, Brandon?
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Brendan Cain
So it started with me working behind the scenes. So I had spent 10 to 12 years of working behind the scenes, of working for movie studios, professional athletes, celebrities, journalists, and everybody else. At the time, there was no playbook for social media. So I was just testing things, what worked, what didn't work, and things of that nature. And eventually it got to a point where I had tested so much. I had tested hundreds of thousands of pieces of content, started creating the foundations of the principles that were in 1 million followers, and then following in the other two books. And one of the reoccurring things that kept coming up when I was talking to people, it's like, Brendan, it's great that you work with MTV or Taylor Swift or Rihanna or ikea, but that stuff is. It's because their celebrities are ready, because they have these big budgets. And I knew, like, no, that that's not the case. You can use it for anything. So I set out to kind of do this experiment with the knowing of turning it into a book. I initially just Called the literary agent I knew. And I said, hey, I'm thinking about doing this experiment of generating a million followers in 30 days on myself. If I do it, will you sign, sign me as a client and give me a book deal? And he said yes. So basically the whole kind of premise was an experiment. It wasn't about necessarily making me famous, turn into an influencer. It was simply to show the process of how to get people to connect with the piece of content, share it, and then ultimately motivate them enough to click the follow button. So over the course of 30 days, I tested over 5,000 variations of content just to show that this methodology could use, whether it was like motivational quotes, podcast clips, political based content, pet based content, to kind of just demonstrate that these models could get somebody to follow somebody that was not famous. I started from zero. I was behind the camera, camera. I was just behind the scenes that entire time. So I just used that as an experiment to show different ways that you could tell stories. To ultimately get somebody to share your content at a high velocity lead to tremendous amount of followers in a short period of time.
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Ryan Alford
And you did it. I say all the time. But the trademark for this phrase, it pays to be known. And it's not pays to be famous, it pays to be known. What is Brennan Cain's opinion? On the one hand, this philosophy that leadership can't be behind the desk anymore. Leadership needs to be out there, building authority, being known, being famous and all that. Where do you fall on the belief of company, brand versus people and you know, all this social media stuff and being known and being not known. Elon Musk, you think about the largest companies, all their CEOs are kind of out there. Bezos, Elon Musk, Donald Trump, you know, whatever, is the president too. But like, same thing, they're out there, they're out behind the corporate veil, so to speak. Where does Brennan Cain fall in all that? If that's necessary or recommended today, I
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Brendan Cain
would say it's recommended. I wouldn't say it's necess. We could point to a bunch of companies where they're. The CEOs are not out front. And it also depends on like where you're at in the kind of growth stage of your business. The reality is, is all the names that you listed, they benefited. Their companies benefit greatly from being in front. Also it can detract from it as well. You look at, you know, Elon getting into politics and things of that and what that does. But listen, the reality is it's a lot easier to get people to connect with a person than a company. Now that's not to say that you can't do it, but you look at also over reliance that we see today on influencers, the amount of money that's spent on professional athlete endorsements, celebrity endorsements, a lot of that money is funneled into those sources because brands struggle to find a way to connect on a personal level with those audiences. So I highly recommend that if you have some type of interest in it, that you pursue it. Because the power and the benefit that you're going to get from it, just even think about the fact that nobody can take your personal brand away from you. The personal brand that you build today, maybe you sell your company in five years. If you sell your company in five years, you start from scratch. But if you have your personal brand and you sell your company in five years, when you go on to the next thing, you can take that with you. So there's a lot of energy and resources and efforts that go into building a personal brand, but the returns are massive. And you also just gotta look at the competitive landscape like who are you competing against? You know, are your competitors putting personal brands out front and what are they doing to tackle the market? So again, I think it's definitely recommended, but I'm not gonna say it's requirement for success in today's world.
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Ryan Alford
Yeah, good answer. And you nailed it on the long term of the brand following you. I mean, I've experienced myself, I've had a couple crashing burns, but getting myself out there more has opened doors and opportunities and brought now it's like compounding a little bit of opportunities and things that kind of come through the front door. And that just doesn't happen if you're not out there because. And you can totally do it without it. But I've never regretted it and I doubt you have.
- [22:57]
Brendan Cain
No, never. And again, as we talked about before, the opportunity that we've been given has never occurred in history. Never before social media was the common person allowed to reach millions, tens of millions, hundreds of millions, billions of people with their message without a major budget behind them. If you master this art form, you literally can scale to as big as you want with your message. And that opportunity has never been in history. I think that the opportunity is going to be around for the next five, 10, 15 years, but it's not a given. Things change, the world changes. So this is gift that we've been given and I just recommend that people take advantage of it while it's here.
- [23:33]
Ryan Alford
If you're a company or someone listening, using your principles and things like that, like how would you start? I'm going to come back to that and let you kind of mentally process that for a moment. And while we kind of talk about the impact that AI is having, it's here, I'm sure it impacts, I mean, you own an agency, you do these things fundamentally, both in maybe the principles and the art of social media and doing all that. The impact of AI, are we over underestimating the impact that it'll have and just your overall kind of sentiment on what artificial intelligence is doing to the business world and social media content?
- [24:05]
Brendan Cain
I think in the short term, the there's a lot of overestimation on its impact on social media and that is because AI is a tool, it's not a solution. People think that AI is automatically going to make them go viral or have success. And the reality is it's only as good as your understanding of how to use it. It's only as good as a data set, the prompts that you put in and your ability to analyze the output of it. The analogy that I give is if everybody woke up tomorrow and was using AI to create social media content, there's going to be clear winners and losers. As it pertains to that, I think it's a tremendous tool. I think that everybody should be experimenting using it. But I the short term, as it pertains to social media, I think there's a little bit of an overestimation of what its capabilities are now, the future of the application, the sky's the limit in terms of what it's going to be able to do. But I will tell you that if you don't understand the nuances of storytelling, you don't understand what it means to tell a compelling story and connect with people, you're going to be limited in terms of what success that you're going to have with these tools. And I firmly believe the people that adopt AI that have that foundational element will be the ultimate winners in this game. I started my career in the movie industry and everybody's freaked out about AI and what it's going to do in movies. And could chatgpt write a script today? Sure it could. Is it going to be any good? Well, again, like a script is a script. You have to still direct it, you have to cast it, you have to have all of these elements come into play to be successful with it. In addition, we don't know how these social media platforms are going to regulate or treat 100% AI content. We're seeing this with SEO and email deliverability and things of that nature. Is there are AI detectors out there that are determining whether something is a hundred percent AI driven and they'll derank it. Now, there's ways that you can get around it for the time being. But will a YouTube, will an Instagram? Will a TikTok? How is it going to treat content that's 100% AI driven? Are they going to treat it differently? Are they going to prioritize differently? We just don't know yet. I will say it's going to be a massively powerful tool that'll enable people to tell compelling stories. I firmly believe maybe it's not for 10 or 15 years, but 10 or 15 years, the next Star wars may be created out of somebody's basement because it'll bring down that barrier of entry. But it's going to be coming from the people that have actually studied the craft, understand how to shape these tools to tell the stories that really break through.
- [26:25]
Ryan Alford
The analogy I was drawing when you were talking was almost like in golf. The drivers today versus what they were 30 years ago are incredible. Like those old wood persimmon woods that you'd hit and you know you'd be lucky if it went 200 yards. No matter how hard you hit it, it hurts. Hurt your hands. And now you got these beautiful drivers. Big head and all that. But a lot of people shank those things left, you know. Still takes a pro. Even though the tool is better.
- [26:51]
Brendan Cain
It's an amazing allergy. I think it was like a Nike shoe that got banned from marathon racers from races because it was. They were breaking records. But it was a professional runner that was using them. Not like the average person just slapping on the shoes and going out there and running a marathon. But I think it's an amazing analogy for it.
- [27:07]
Ryan Alford
Yeah, you hit it in the sweet spot. You still got to have some hand eye coordination and hit the sweet spot and. Or just learn it or practice a lot. The same thing.
- [27:15]
Brendan Cain
Let's just say that you hit it, you hit it 300 yards in the middle of the fairway. We still got to learn how to chip it and putt it. Your job isn't done.
- [27:24]
Ryan Alford
Exactly. I'm a business and I've got to start my new social media channels. I'm not a mom and pop, but I'm also not Nike. What's Brendan doing based on his principles to niche business. Not hyper niche, but niche. How are we using these principles to get this social media Rolling.
- [27:43]
Brendan Cain
There's a few different ways that we look at it. Number one, I never say go viral for the sake of going viral. So all of your content has to tie into who you are, what you represent, and what you actually do as a business. Number two, we look at what are the ideal formats that can deliver that message. Because we're not here trying to reinvent the wheel, we want to leverage formats that have been proven to succeed time and time again, that we can insert our message into it. Then the third thing about niching down, we have to fundamentally understand what drives success on these platforms, and that is the algorithms. The algorithms control reach and distribution in your content. They determine whether 10 people or 10 million people see your content. And they're looking for one thing and one thing only, and that's retention. Meaning the longer people are spending on these platforms consuming content, the more ads they can serve, the more profit they will generate. So they are always going to favor content creators. They're always going to favor pieces of content that can grab and hold attention longer than others. And if we think about our ideal customer, every time they open up the app that we're trying to reach them on, whether it's Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, Facebook, Facebook, there's probably 150,000 pieces of content it could see to that individual based upon all of the people that they follow, all the content they've engaged with. So you're stacking up against 150,000 pieces of content every time you're posting something, every time your customer opens up the app. What we say is we have to leverage what's called the generalist principle, which means we still want to communicate to our niche audience and speak to them to the point that motivates them to take the action that we want them to take. But how do we make it accessible and interesting to the wider possible audience? So the algorithm will pick up on it and syndicate it out. So from a business perspective, I look at it as, let's just say your average video is generating a thousand views, and of that, 70% is your core target. So that's 700 people. What if we can push it up to a million views a video, but it drops down from 70% to 5%, but still is on your subject, still on your speaking to your core niche. So we went from 700 to 50,000 people. Just to give you some examples of that, there's a luxury real estate agent in Manhattan, Ryan Serhant, and he represents properties that started like $15 million and go all the way up to 250 million. So he plays the principle by doing videos. Let me take you in a two over $250 million home. Let me take you in a two over $7 million closet. He generates millions and millions of views a month. And he knows for him that his core target is the top fraction of a percent in the world. But he knows if he reaches that top fraction of a percent of those millions of people, he will beat out his competition every time. He's even sold $30 million properties off of a YouTube video. So if you look at it from that perspective of how do we speak to our niche audience but make it accessible, that's where the massive growth is. That's where you can really. The competition. We've seen this time and time again. There was a guy, there's a YouTube channel about taxes that has a million subscribers called Clear Value Tax. And he tackled it during COVID saying, release videos about the stimulus check. When is the stimulus check coming out? Talking about what's going to happen, how much to expect and things of that nature. And he absolutely exploded. Everything needs to be tied to your business, tied to your message. But we needed to look at it from a larger perspective of how we build that pool to scale out so that our numbers significantly increase.
- [30:45]
Ryan Alford
And I'm assuming in our guide to going viral, we've got all kinds of examples. I'm leading the witness because I know, because I've already gone through it, the ways with which to do this, 100%.
- [30:55]
Brendan Cain
We dive super deep into the model. We give examples of formats, how we break them down, things of that nature.
- [31:01]
Ryan Alford
If you're going to do one format, time, energy, you just couldn't do four, couldn't do five. Like, what's the one format you're going to do on Instagram?
- [31:09]
Brendan Cain
It depends on your personality. Like, man on the street. Amazing format, high potential. I tried it myself. It's not right for me because I'm not an extrovert. Two characters, one light bulb. I mentioned amazing format for people that like to act out scripts. There's another one called Walking Listicles, where you're basically just holding your phone, walking around the block and doing listicles of whatever your expertise is. There's a guy, Robert Croak, that does an amazing job of it. There's more kind of creative and fun ones out there. There's one that's called Tips on the Move, where you're basically delivering tips in different settings. So you move to a different setting outdoors. That speaks to what you're talking about. But there. There's hundreds and hundreds of these formats. The two biggest pieces of advice I would give you in choosing your format is, number one, what are the resources that you have? Because you don't have to extend yourself beyond the resources you have. If all you have is a phone, there are formats with just that you can do with the phone. Number two is what format excites you? What is a format that you could see yourself doing five, six, seven months down the road? Because if it doesn't excite you, you're just going to burn out and ultimately stop creating content?
- [32:08]
Ryan Alford
What's the biggest key for man on the Street?
- [32:09]
Brendan Cain
One of the biggest keys on man on the street is the reaction. So what is the reaction of the person that you're. Person you could. That's great. At man on the street, you can look at Simon Squibb. He's the guy that asks you what is your dream. But one of the biggest elements is you have to capture a strong reaction from the person that you're engaging with.
- [32:25]
Ryan Alford
Whether that's happiness, sadness, whatever. It is something.
- [32:29]
Brendan Cain
Yeah.
- [32:30]
Ryan Alford
Got a lot of wisdom to share. You're sharing it online, you're sharing your books. I really value your insights and appreciate you coming on. How can everyone keep up? Learn more about the books, get access to the books, all those things.
- [32:41]
Brendan Cain
All three of the books are on Amazon, for sale, but they want to learn more about Hook Point. They can go to hookpoint.com as you started off, like, I do a lot of free breakdowns on my Instagram, my YouTube and I responded to DMs on both Instagram and LinkedIn.
- [32:54]
Ryan Alford
Awesome, man. It was great meeting you, man. And appreciate your talents and for sharing them so openly.
- [33:00]
Brendan Cain
No, it's a pleasure to connect with you. I'm definitely gonna have to get down there and see you in person, so we can.
- [33:04]
Ryan Alford
Let's do it next time in person. We'll have to do some viral content, some hooks or something. I'm a man on the street guy. Hey, let's do it next week.
- [33:11]
Brendan Cain
So next time you go shoot some, I'll send you some research on man on the street and next time we'll break down your videos.
- [33:16]
Ryan Alford
Yes, that would be awesome. Brendan, thank you so much, man. Really appreciate it. Hey, guys, we appreciate you. You know where to find us. Ryan is right.com we'll have links to the Hook Point, the guide to going viral. We thank you for making us number one. We'll see you next time. All right about now, here's the truth
- [33:32]
Ryan Alford (Outro)
information doesn't change your life, execution does. So don't just listen to this episode and move on. Take the idea, make the call. Launch the thing. Fix the problem. Build what you keep talking about building. For more, follow Ryan Alford on Instagram at Ryan Alford and watch or listen to every episode@ryanisright.com this is right about now. Now quit waiting. Go win.
- [34:10]
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