Yu-kai Chou

Hung out in Santa Monica (LA) with cool people

Hung out and learned a lot from Sean Percival (LALAWag), Lotay Yang (Black Card Circle), Andrew Warner (Mixergy)

Andrew Warner’s Extreme Gutsy Move for his first business

Andrew needed to sell ads on his first business, but he was too small for the advertisement agency to consider. He wrote a check that is all of his and his brother’s personal money and asked the company to do business with them. That converted into a company with over $30M in revenue.

Lessons from Chinese History

This general in China (just checked it’s Xiang Yu) burned all the boats and cooking tools to make sure that his focused army would beat the other army that were outnumbering them but didn’t have that determination. I also just realized that the same thing happened with Spanish Conquistador Hernando Cortez.

Chou Notes

Pivot means switching directions for your startup. Yu-kai’s advice is to stick to it if you still believe in it AND you are still passionate about it. If you no longer believe in it or because of the tweak it’s not as something you are passionate about, you might be better off just switching directions.

Chou Notes

Being a good communicator and being a good video blogger are two very different skills. Communicating is as much reading people as much as it is talking. Building rapport is a lot more difficult when you are talking to a camera, so when we talk to the camera we subconsciously want some feedback. That’s why I tend to say “Right?” a lot more in my videos, to fullfil that unmet need of feedback.

I’m still working on this, but I promise eventually it will all be gone and I will become a good vlogger

YK

5 Dominant Techniques to Social Media Marketing

After helping a variety of companies with their social media marketing campaigns in the past 2 years, I noticed that social media marketing narrows down to a few dominant techniques that work well and produce results.

However, a big problem in the industry is that most people just think about Social Media Marketing as one big technique, and without understanding what they truly want, they pay consultants(mostly self-proclaimed experts who have never driven an ROI for companies) to help them do this social media marketing thing that everyone says is essential.

The result is unsurprisingly disappointing because every company, every budget, and every goal requires different social media marketing techniques. If you are a low budget company looking to get tons of traffic in one month, you can’t make online video shows everyday like Gary Vaynerchuk did because even the great Garyvee took two years to make it big. If you hire a “social media expert” to run a blog and Twitter account for you, you will quickly lose faith in social media because they’re not going to get you 100K visitors in a month by just doing that.

Different companies with different goals should have different social media marketing techniques

This is a serious pain in the industry because social media marketing is something that truly works and can be very powerful, but most people(companies and consultants alike) have a lot of misconceptions regarding the different strategies and how they should be used.

In this post, I attempt to break social media marketing down into 5 Main Techniques. In that way, if you are a company, you can ask your social media experts to do a Social Media Targeting Campaign, instead of just a vague Social Media Marketing Campaign. If you are a consultant, make sure your client knows what you are doing for them and what results they can expect.

Social Media Marketing Technique 1: SM Brand Management

This is the most common technique that the “experts” promise to do. This includes creating and maintaining a blog and Twitter Account, engage people who are interested, share valuable things in your industry, and eventually build up followers, visitors, and trust. It might even involve maintaining a Facebook Fanpage (not effective if you DO NOT already have a strong brand established) or a LinkedIn group.

This technique is effective because it fully utilizes the SOCIAL part of social media. You are out there engaging your target audience. You are making friends with them and creating value for them. You are building your own popularity and trust. If someone knows what you do and thinks positively of you, when they need your product or services, they will not go on Google and find a random service they don’t know. They will buy it from you. If their friends are looking for services you offer, they will refer their friends to you.

The problem with Social Media Brand Management is that it takes time, patience and persistence. Since you are not out there to close deals but to build trust, you won’t see an immediate increase in sales or signups. It’s only when people really trust you and care about you do they start to check out your stuff, and that could take months to years to build.

Companies who consistently pressure their Social Brand Building workers to self-promote, get traffic, and get sales will hurt themselves in the longrun and fail in social media marketing. They clearly do not understand that this technique was not appropriate for their 1 month ROI agendas.

Pros
Really engages your target market. Builds trusts. Leads to sustainable success.
Cons
Extremely slow. Takes a lot of time. Need to truly care about your audience.
When to use Social Brand Building
When you have a longterm vision of your brand and social influence on the internet, and you can dedicate at least one longterm person who understands what it takes to be popular online and engage with your target audience.
End Result: Brand

2. Social Media Marketing Technique 2: SM Targeting

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Outsourcing Web Development to India creates the Illusion of Saving Money

A lot of people talk about saving money by outsourcing to India. However, my personal experience is that it actually costs way more than doing it in the US if you are a resourceful entrepreneur.

I’m sure there are some firms out there that are truly good and cheap. I also know that there are way more US development firms that overcharge, but if you can find the cost efficient in the US, the effects are much better than the good in India.

This post is not about how the miscommunication, off hours and what not could make development more expensive. No, I’m talking about pure projected spending at the beginning. Here are my experiences:

Outsourced Indian Firm I estimates 3x more hours than my in-house developer

There was one point where I seriously looked for an outsourced company as backbone developers for Viralogy. After looking around, I found a firm that seems really professional, has been around for close to a decase with dozens of engineers, and built all the websites for National Geographic in each country.

More importantly, their programmers charge $10-15/hour. Compared to a full-blown traditional development firm in the US, that’s a tiny fraction of what it would cost. It all sounded very promising (besides a tiny bit of that language barrier).

However, very safely, I asked them to do an estimate of a project that we were working on. My in-house programmer previously made an estimation, which was about 88 hours(which he didn’t exceed much afterwards). The Indian firm gave me an estimate too, and it was shockingly 350 hours.

WHAT?

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Chou Notes:

Today I talk about Vertical Networking and why I think it’s more meaningful than Horizontal Networking. Making others more successful in your network can be more meaningful than constantly meeting new people.

If you were all stuck in a pit, helping people out of it would benefit you more than stepping on someone’s shoulders.

Influential people are generally too busy with their emails, meetings, tweets etc

There are always benefits when more influential people know about you and think positively of you. If they like you, they are able to give you shootouts, advice, connections, and all that good stuff. However, it’s often very difficult to get their attention since they’re always bombarded with all sorts of things.

Twitter creates that opportunity for you to contact them instantly. But still, you’ve tweeted out to them before, and either they completely ignored you, or they responded back, made you feel great, and you know they forgot about you right after.

Engage your followers those you follow

Most advice out there tell you to engage your followers. I can’t agree more with that. However, if you want to get non-followers to know who you are (read: not to “follow” you), you’ll need to do more than that.

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No one likes excuses…besides their creator

Often times when someone did their tasks incorrectly and it was pointed out to them, the person would blame it on their tools or environment. It could be pretty frustrating when you are working with people like that and their work/attitudes directly impact how you do.

When that happens, instead of just saying “That’s just an excuse!” and create an emotional response (these RARELY solve your problems and they’ve managed to bring you down to their level of negativity), I find it useful to ask, “I understand that. But is it humanly possible for a normal person to do this correctly, even with these obstacles?” If their response is “No! That’s not possible for anyone to do it!”, then either you should probably drop what your team is doing, or find someone else to work with.

But the chances are their responses will be “Yes.”

Making people understand is better than making people feel guilty

I then followup with, “Then is it possible for to you do it correctly, even with these obstacles?” At this point, most people would say yes too and understand that it’s ultimately up to them to overcome these problems and it’s pointless focusing on the obstacles and excuses. It’s humanly possible for non-geniuses to do it. You can do it too.

The non-excuse is on you

While we realize this is a good way to shut people up and stop them from complaining, it’s also a good idea to apply it to ourselves. When we face obstacles and failures in our lives, instead of focusing why we couldn’t do it, we should again think, “is this humanly possible for a normal person?” And if the answer is yes, stop the complaining and just get it done.

Being cautious can be useful for in life. But being negative creates value for no one.