Read The Transcript

Connect with Chaz
https://socialcycle.io/
https://eic.agency/
https://www.linkedin.com/in/chaz-van-de-motter-73600a113/

Connect with Russ
https://russjohns.com/
https://thepiratesyndicate.com/
https://nextstepnext.com/
https://www.linkedin.com/in/nextstepnext/

Audio digitally transcribed by Descript

Introduction: [00:00:00] Welcome to the #PirateBroadcast™, where we interview #interestingpeople doing #interestingthings. Where you can expand your connections, your community, #kindnessiscool and #smilesarefree. Let’s get this party started.

Russ Johns: [00:00:10] Hey, happy Friday. Good day. Good morning. Good afternoon. Wherever you happen to be in the world. Thank you so much for joining us on the #PirateBroadcast. We have Chaz in the room. Chaz, welcome to the pirate community. How you doing man?

Chaz Van de Motter: [00:00:25] I'm doing well, man. I know we were just talking about how I feel like I've got my right of passage with my hair grown out. I think I'm ready to be a pirate.

Russ Johns: [00:00:33] No kidding. No kidding. I have to ask this question. What prompted you to jump on and join the pirate community today?

Chaz Van de Motter: [00:00:41] I think we crossed paths a few times and your energy is contagious. I've seen the show a few times. And and we were talking about, hey we're I think we're in the LinkedIn DM's going back and forth and I'm trying to spread the love, get you on a few shows and, inviting me on a few shows and it's just a lot of synergy building here. Yeah, I just love what you're doing on LinkedIn.

Russ Johns: [00:00:57] It's really about how you can actually help each other out. And the reason I look at it that way is there's no shortage of pie. You can just build a bigger pie and there's more out there and you can actually produce more content, more community, more collaboration. Every time you reach out to somebody like yourself, and you've been doing this. I've been around a little while longer. And so what prompted you to start in the media and the marketing business and in some of these social attributes that we call business nowadays.

Chaz Van de Motter: [00:01:35] As you mentioned,  I'm a young guy. And when I was figuring things out in  and as I was getting into college, I was like, what can I pursue where I can really have a level playing field and I don't have to do 40 years to be able to be a trusted source of authority  in my space. And I just don't get it in marketing and how everything's evolving. I grew up with social media and storytelling has gone from newspaper to now online and obviously the pandemic is becoming an even more important piece. And I was just looking for where can I really compete at a young age? And I looked at marketing as just a place that was continuing to innovate. And where it seemed every year it was okay. Everything that worked last year is gone now, we're doing a new thing. And so I really felt that I could build my kind of competitive advantage in this space.

Russ Johns: [00:02:27] Yeah. It's funny because as you were saying that I was reflecting on the fact that you've been a gymnast and you've been in the gymnastics industry and the community and the parallel for me is the discipline. And the opportunity to innovate. So it's very parallel in those mindsets and what can we create? What can we influence here to get one more point out of the equation?

Chaz Van de Motter: [00:02:55] No, it's funny. I used to be known for  there's a code of points in gymnastics. They have this big Bible with a bunch of pictures of all the skills and the values, and then the harder the skill, the higher the value. And we just sit, practice and flip through this thing, looking for what's a skill we've never seen anybody do or haven't done in 20 years? Or can we add another spin to this thing? And I think that is where the creativity was born in terms of wanting to do something different, wanting to do something challenging. And I found that with with marketing and sales technology and still trying to innovate in my own unique way through that stuff now.

Russ Johns: [00:03:33] And it's also the parallel for everyone here in the pirate community is, the consistency. We've got hundreds of episodes in the pirate community. I put a shout out to a couple of pirates and now I'm booked through August. I'm booking to August now. And the reality is that you just have to show up, do the practice innovate and make sure that you're making sure that everything you're doing is building on the next thing you're doing. And so in the last four years, five years that you've been doing this, has that been your experience?

Chaz Van de Motter: [00:04:11] Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. As I think there is aresounding yes to that question.  I started in Instagram  services was my first dipping my toe in. Instagram is starting to get hot. How can we help people to grow their audience, grow their engagement level? And yeah, that became something where I had to innovate and I had to go to the next thing because the algorithms change, what worked last year, doesn't work this year. And now we've built a SAS technology off of the managed service. And just one example is always trying to pivot and, business success seems to always be a moving target. If you've got growth in the K and you're going in one direction to the other.

Russ Johns: [00:04:50] Yeah, we could recreate an entire episode on just Instagram and Instagram stories and I'm hesitant to get involved, producing a lot of Instagram stories right now because it seems to be changing right now and evolving and I'm waiting to see where it will settle down. And so you can make an impact, any recommendations for us on the wings.

Chaz Van de Motter: [00:05:15] From a social media standpoint, that the big thing that is trending across really every channel from Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, YouTube, like Tik TOK, they're embedding more of this kind of product feed into their platform. So they're making it easier to transact and whether it's on a product service that is one big piece. And so obviously on the horizon is how can you get customers to transact with your goods and services through the platform? But really what we speak a lot about and with social cycle is really all about is content isn't king anymore. And I think that's a controversial thing. It's a contrarian stance that I take and people go, what are you talking about? And I say content is great. Obviously you have to have content, you have to build your brand around content. But there's, for instance, on Instagram, there's 600 million posts going up a day on Instagram. So it's mind boggling. There's a cacophony of content being published with every hashtag you can think of. And your content only shows up to a fraction of the audience that you've got. So let's say you have a hundred followers, you post a piece of content, maybe 30, 40% of those people will see that content. And that's just in your audience, yet two or three other people to see a hashtag, but they don't really do anything other than see it. We look at it and go, the real thing now is engaging with your audience, find the right audience and engaging with them, being interested in that. And if you spend hours and hours posts and videos, and that's all you do to grow your community, then you're going to show it to that small sample size over and over again. So it has to involve some sort of engagement. And again, that's what social cycle does is to help people to identify people that are relevant to their community or the community that they're building, and then systematically engage with them in a non transaction.

Russ Johns: [00:07:13] And I can't disagree with you at all because I have been saying this for years. And although I create an abundance of content, I create content every single day. I create something. And we really have to think about how we can create content as a part of the engagement process. For me, it's hey, it's super simple. We can actually have a conversation here. We can engage before and after I can invite people on that. I want to meet, hang out with, have a conversation with, and it's an easy, it's an easy process for me to invite you to say, Hey, be on my show because I want to share what you're doing. And also maybe there's something we can do together. It's a super simple, and I call it removing the friction and building a traffic circle where you could take this, now. This live stream will become a YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Twitch, LinkedIn. It becomes a post. It becomes a transcription. It becomes a podcast, which is yeah, 20, 30 other locations. And so that engagement is key to making sure that you can show up where people want to consume your content or consume your message or your engagement.

Chaz Van de Motter: [00:08:33] What you've done is engineer a frictionless kind of experience from that engagement to taking the next step. And I think that just posting your content out there, especially for people that maybe don't have the established following, or trying to build their community. Just posting content, you're going to get really frustrated really fast because you can keep posting content thinking. I'm getting in front of the video, I'm doing all the reps, but nothing's happening. You have to have a means to drive people into that engineered customer experience. And, oftentimes the less, the least transactional approach is just being interested instead of being interesting and, really engaging with people, starting the dialogue. And then just being authentic and from there, that's what leads into that customer experience.

Russ Johns: [00:09:20] Yeah. I have to agree with you Chaz, also, just as an example of that exercise, I want to give a shout out to Howard Kaufman.  You may know Howard. He's creative.  And  now you can find his products in select fries stores in Arizona. Here as an experiment. He's getting out there. He's busting his chops, his book and business he's growing. And I just want to give a shout out to Howard for the work that he's doing. And also, I want to give a shout out to another wonderful friend of mine. Marcia Reece, who has done this amazing journey in creating copper it's Staywell copper. I think you've heard me talk about it. I don't know. So Marcia has created this Staywell copper and she's going to be on Lowe's and other fine sites, e-commerce sites. And that's an example of how  I know Howard and I met Marcia through Howard and this whole economy in Arizona, the startup economy. I met so many people here, Chaz, and that's the engagement that we can have and we help each other out. We promote each other and we talk about each other and bringing you on here and sharing what social cycle is doing, it's really important for us to get the word out.

Chaz Van de Motter: [00:10:45] I appreciate it. And yeah, big shout out to both of them. Marcia, I haven't seen you in awhile. Howard, I hope everything is good with you, too. But yeah, no, that's we got it. And you guys gotta use social media. You guys both get your products on on all these different applications and really embed your customer experience in these social channels.

Russ Johns: [00:11:01] One thing that is challenging at times is in the podcasting world and the live streaming world is a lot of business owners that don't necessarily focus on engagement. They produce a couple of live streams. They produce a podcast and they say, nobody's watching my stuff. I don't want to do this anymore. And so what would you suggest Chaz that would allow somebody to either assist in their engagement or helping their engagement or produce some results in that direction?

Chaz Van de Motter: [00:11:38] Yeah, no, it's a good question. This is a generic kind of start to it, but you got to understand who your ideal customer is and you gotta have a niche. Like I mentioned, there's a cacophony now on social. And so finding ways to really stand out to a certain type of person, I think it is step one. But once you've identified that type of person at least with social cycle we see is that being able to engineer engagement journey the same way that, like your engineering, that experience from the time that, okay now I've said yes to wanting to be on the show. Here's everything that flows from there. I think that we engaged or we engineered engagement journeys, so it's okay. Step one, you're following them, and a couple of days later you're liking a post, you're commenting on a post and it's not just great posts. It's not just an emoji. It's something meaningful. Hey, I watched this and here's my honest feedback. I'm going to take five seconds to actually spend some time and give you something more than cool. And from there, you engage a few times and then maybe at that point you've earned and we'd call it a relationship equity, but maybe you've earned the right at that point to send them a DM. It's not a connection and pitch fest DM right out the gate. It's let me earn the right, I've credited my account on this relationship with non transactional engagement. That's meaningful. I've shown interest in you. Now I'm going to send you a DM, and the DM is going to be something that isn't a paragraph essay with four links saying, hey, can you leave me a review? You would go on my website and do this and do that. And give me a good referral. You're not asking something or putting mental work. It's just reciprocating back the engagement that you've given them. And we try to, like I said, engineer that experience through social cycle. What we're really excited about is that we put people through a cold, warm and hot pipeline. And you start in cold, you start with a follow, like a comment over the course of time. If they follow back, they connect back with you on LinkedIn, it moves them from cold into warm automatically. And so it's cool. I have now filtered out the people that are not following me back and having reciprocated my engagement by following me now you're in warm. Okay. Now you engage them three more times. Another like a profile visit a comment. And then you send them a DM. The DM is not meant to be, hey, buy this. It's meant to, and he'll say, hey, we've been engaging. I've been seeing what you're doing and I'm interested in whatever it may be, from their social.  Then if they respond to the DM, it'll put them into the hot. Now it's cool. You've responded. You've connected with me. Now. I'm going to spend even more meaningful time with you. If you're not connecting back with me, I don't need to continue to spend time with you because you're not reciprocating my engagement to you. And so by the time I get to hot, that's when you're able to, for instance for you Russ, it's now I can send you the Calendly link and we can schedule a time to connect further. I can get you into my CRM. I can get you into whatever it is that you're managing your leads with. But it's just a way to engineer the engagement process, the same way you engineer a customer experience, the same way you engineer your content calendar. People ask us all the time. Oh, I have fixed suite. I don't need that. It's okay, HootSweet is going to schedule your your content out, but it's not going to help you streamline and systemize how you identify people in your community and engineer and engagement journey that leads them to actually take action through brands. Yeah, hopefully that gives you kind of the full scope about social cycles applied, but really how we think about, engaging  with people on social media.

Russ Johns: [00:15:07] I love it. And I'm an advocate for engagement over transactions and just what I call I'll give you an example. Somebody you connect with, somebody on LinkedIn and the first thing they do to say, hey, let me tell you about me. Okay. Now that I've told you everything about me, what do you love about me?  Oh, and here's some things that you can buy for me. It's an epidemic. It's an epidemic. It's an epidemic and it comes from a place of scarcity and people are working hard to get their stuff out there. And I understand for business owners and entrepreneurs that really know the business, it has to be a long game. It's a marathon. It's not a sprint. It's not one and done, it's a marathon. And once you realize that and you know what  your goals are, it's really important to understand that you can grow and it doesn't have to be overnight.

Chaz Van de Motter: [00:15:59] Let me ask you something. Who said that having a thousand people in your pipeline compared to, a hundred or 10 people in your pipeline, meant you're going to sell more, not yet a thousand people to try to engage with. And it turns into a law of averages type of scenario, where it's like, find the right 10 people, find the right hundred people and spend more meaningful time with the right people and spend more time on the front end finding them as opposed to let me spray and pray. And if I send enough DMS and connect enough people that it'll happen for me or they'll buy eventually. That's not how social media works. You can't stand on the street and yell, buy my thing and tell somebody it's the same thing. We have to have social norms for social media, the same way we have social norms for human interactions.

Russ Johns: [00:16:45] Absolutely. Or alternatively, Chaz, I don't know about you, but I like growing a community where I can say hi to Angie in from the north here. And thank you Angie, for being a supporter. Marcia Reece, as she's always good morning to everyone and Marcia and I are working on a project that is going to be able to give back to the community and provide some benefits and killing some germs along the ways. So stay tuned for that. And I'm sure that you know, Tracie because Tracie has been here, she's probably sent you a few messages, allowed you to be notified that this has taken place going through the process. Marcia says, powerful synergy. I love it. I love it. Cathi Spooner is in good morning pirates. Cathi's an awesome individual that comes and visits us once in a while. James, jimmy jam. What's up? What's up in from Seattle. He's an amazing friend, client and somebody that helps builders and clients in Seattle with their funding requirements for building and a great conversation and excellent points. Absolutely. Howard Kaufman. Great. And Chaz,you are right on target. Yeah, Howard's awesome. Excellent information about engagement. Chaz, this is the kind of, it's simple engagement in, Marcia and I were talking yesterday about how we can increase and improve  the exposure to the pirate community. Because one of the challenges I have is I interview #interestingpeople doing #interestingthings, which is pretty broad. And if you're just coming on board, it's not necessarily focused about business. It's not necessarily focused upon any subject, as much as it is, as what I find interesting. And the conversations are always well, not always engaging, but I try to make them engaging. And from a social media perspective or a brand perspective, it would be nice to tighten that up and say, okay, what does Russ deliver every single day? And so going through that process for your clients is probably the same exercise, right?

Chaz Van de Motter: [00:19:01] Yeah. We see that social media is very I'm trying to grab things out of the stratosphere and remember engage with that person or say hi to this person. And, when you actually put some intention behind it and put some organization behind it, And actually have a system to help you to manage all of those, you're on right now and four or five different channels. You've got different community members engaging across it's like, how do you manage all that in one place? And I think we look at it in a very contrarian way where we say, email addresses are great, but we don't really care about email addresses anymore. You have a direct link. The social media is the yellow pages. You have a link to everyone's personal profile where you can send them a message. And when people are spending more time engaged on LinkedIn, or they spend 45 minutes on LinkedIn a day compared to maybe 10 minutes in their email inbox, or even if they got 5,000 unread emails, sometimes it engagement on a social channel where they're actually spending meaningful time daily, can mean much more than sending a cold email or sending something like that. And I think the numbers are there's 3.78 billion people that have social media accounts worldwide. As of last year, people spend an average of two hours and two minutes a day on social media. And so there's an abundance of people. There's an abundance of time spent here. And so how can we take the yellow pages and really streamline and systemize how you identify the right people you want in your community and engage with them in a way that's meaningful and non transactional, and more long form than maybe a follow in a connection DM. That's hey, buy my thing and then well they didn't buy it, I'm onto the next. And that's not how the world works and it's not our social media work. So that's really our mission, but that's what we see a lot of.

Russ Johns: [00:20:48] I love the idea of engagement overall. And one of the things that I've always shared on this show, as well as in other arenas is just add value, continue to add value. And it's not necessarily sharing all the secrets of everything you're doing. It's not necessarily sharing how tos or a list or listicles or any of that stuff. It's just listen to people care about people. Check in once in a while. I know years ago before social media was really a big thing. I used to text people and just check in and say, hey Chaz, how are you doing? Happy Friday, hope you have a great weekend. And that was it. And then because it's top of mind, It's just letting people know that you care about the fact that they're there and you're just checking in. It's just love the analogy. Cathi says love the analogy of social media is a new yellow pages. I'm from the yellow pages era. I'm right there with you. And I'm still an advocate for email to a certain degree and video email is one of...

Chaz Van de Motter: [00:22:00] oh, I love what you do with the video email stuff.

Russ Johns: [00:22:02] Yeah. It's really one of those things that I just did a campaign the other day that got 63% open rate. Which is unheard of in email, it's just, it's insane. However, it's a warm audience. It's somebody that knows me. It's people that recognize who I am because of my engagement.

Chaz Van de Motter: [00:22:21] The way that we look at this as more and more people, more and more entrepreneurs are using their social profiles as almost a website. Like for instance, a photographer, their Instagram page is more meaningful than anything else. Cause it's hey, I'm going to send you a DM. You can land on my page and look at my work without having to interact with me. And once you've seen my work, then maybe we can have a conversation.  It's starting to become a thing where, you know, when it is a cold audience, people are a little bit more willing to start a dialogue or entertain some kind of engagement that's cold. On social that then can lead into email once business is starting to be done. Text messages once business is starting to be done. Email and texts right out the gate seems to be a little intrusive. When it's I don't know who are you? You're just  a signature behind the screen. Or you're a random number.  I'm backing away going, how'd you get my information. But one's on social. It's I can see your face. I can see what you're interested in. Especially if you're not being transactional, it's just a more frictionless approach to starting relationships. And if you, like I said, we have a system where you can engineer and engagement process that pushes people into your existing business processes and go, cool, I'm going to feed you from my Instagram DMS into my email newsletter or into starting a free trial or into scheduling a podcast. Now it becomes a much more approachable way to get in touch with people.

Russ Johns: [00:23:47] Yeah. Yeah. I'm a fan of systems regardless of how they're starting or how they're wrapping up. I can tell you that. And I think that it's well, because there is so much information. You have to understand what information is going where, and I'm a squirrel in the lab all the time. It's oh, new toy, new platform.  I'll find out about this. And I've been a beta tester on a lot of platforms and there's just so many opportunities out there that it's really, it's not about how you do it. It's about how you want to do it. And how you want to build your engagement engine and how you want to engineer that engagement.

Chaz Van de Motter: [00:24:30] Well, so much falls through the cracks. If we talked about discipline to start this conversation in so much policy, the cracks, if you're not disciplined and you don't have that system in place that you can follow and you end up missing opportunities that you otherwise would have had if you just stayed organized, held yourself accountable. And, social media tends to be a place where we are a little laid back and go, oh, it's just social media. If we can tighten the screws a little bit, I always say you're one DM away from a really amazing kind of engagement with somebody. I found employees on social media. I found investors on social media. I found mentors on social media. I've gotten in touch with people that have millions of followers. And I thought, there's no way they're going to respond to me. But if you can break up the the the norm and maybe send an audio DM or spend some time actually engaging before sending the transactional DM. Those are the things that will actually differentiate your outreach and really give you really amazing opportunities that you otherwise would not have ever had access to. You don't have those people's emails and phone numbers, but you have access to them on social. If you play your cards right, you can get in touch.

Russ Johns: [00:25:35] Yeah. It's absolutely true. It's absolutely true. So I want to ask you a question before we wrap up today, Chaz. What would this episode bring to the table for anyone that wants to listen to it or is thinking about watching this episode or listening to this episode? What's the real message that we want to share today with this message?

Chaz Van de Motter: [00:25:59] Yeah. We're huge about engineering and engagement journey. We know that engagement is important and finding ways to actually engineer your process and engaging with customers systematically. Starting dialogue. You're trying to build a community, you're trying to build a business, a brand, whatever it may be. It starts with intentional and meaningful engagement. And when you can systemize that process you're going to get great results.

Russ Johns: [00:26:25] Beautiful. Beautiful. Thank you so much, everybody. Russ Hedge joined us. All right. Awesome. Russ, engaging with people is key. Jenny Gold is in the house. Good morning, Russ Johns. And Jimmy Jam says, excellent show. Thank you, gentlemen. Appreciate it, man. I think I'm going to be on their show later today. So stay tuned for that D-Roo and jimmy Jam and Russ, the pirate will be playing out on the ethernet, etherwebs, and they are webcasting all that good stuff later today. Chaz, thank you so much for being here. And as it's one of those things that we have an opportunity to share some good things, because #kindnessiscool, #smilesarefree.

Chaz Van de Motter: [00:27:12] Amen. Thanks for having me, man. This is awesome.

Russ Johns: [00:27:14] You bet. #enjoytheday. Everyone take care.

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