How Dorie Clark Went from 20K to 600K Instagram Followers | Lessons & Frameworks

[00:00] Hey there and welcome to another edition of the Learning Revolution Podcast. I am Jeff Cobb, your host and Learning Revolution is the podcast for people who want to build a successful business in the market for a lot of

[00:25] for lifelong learning, training, and education. Today you’ll get to listen in on what I think is just really a fantastic conversation with marketing and branding expert Dorie Clark. I’ll give Dorie a more proper introduction in just a minute, but first I’d like to offer up a quick tip and here it is. Most listeners are probably familiar with the whole process of going to iTunes, subscribing to podcasts there.

[00:50] their downloading them to your computer and then hooking up your iPod or other device and syncing them over there so that you can actually listen to them. It can be a bit cumbersome but there’s some good news and that is that there’s now a much better way to do all of that. If you have a smartphone which so many people now do there are apps available that make it easy for you to subscribe to and download podcasts right to the smartphone.

[01:15] phone without ever having to hook up to a computer. One of these is Instacast. That happens to be my app of choice. I use that to load podcasts onto my iPhone. But Instacast only works on the iPhone, so for another option for both the iPhone or the Android, you can try Stitcher Radio. Now you can get the links to both of these by visiting the show notes for today’s episode. Just go to Learning Revolution.

[01:40] LearningRevolution.net/episode5. So give that a try and I hope you’ll use one of these apps to subscribe to the Learning Revolution podcast. If you do, you’ll get great content like my interview with Dorie Clark. Speaking of which, let’s get on with the interview.

[02:05] I am joined today by Dorie Clark who is the author of the forthcoming Reinventing You. Define your brand, imagine your future from Harvard Business Review Press. Dorie is also a regular contributor to Forbes and to the Harvard Business Review among a number of other publications. And in her work she helps businesses increase sales and attract new clients by enhancing their reputation as

[02:30] as industry leaders. So, Dorie, welcome. Thanks for having me, Jeff. Well, thanks so much for being here and I thought maybe we’d start off talking about that word “reputation” that I know factors heavily into the work that you do. Maybe tell me a little bit about how you see reputation tying into classic concepts like positioning and branding and why has it become so

[02:55] Has it become so important in the age we live in? Absolutely. Reputation is really even more critical now than I think it has been in the past because the number of competitors in the marketplace has proliferated. Now you’re competing with people nationally, internationally, in whatever niche your business is in. You need to find ways to draw people to

[03:20] to you. It’s no longer sufficient that you go to road with someone or they went to the same college as you. That’s nice, but if you want to run a successful business, it’s reaching the people who you want, your real buyers. You need to have a reputation that draws people into you and makes them say, “You were the person that I’m going to work with.” And frankly, the good news is that it also means that they’re willing

[03:45] they’re willing to pay almost any price to work with you because your reputation engenders a kind of comfort level. They know that you’re not going to screw up. They know that you’re the right person for the job. So the challenge is that there are more things that you have to monitor these days than ever. It used to be that if people talked about you in the rotary meeting,

[04:10] meetings or in your local community, in your local chamber, and you had a pretty good sense of what they thought about you, and that’s great. That’s your reputation. These days, you’re actually vigilant about what’s being said about you online through social media and other channels, and perhaps even more importantly, what’s not being said about you? Because if your competitors are taking up all of the airtime, then you run some risks. So you need to be making sure that you’re cognizant.

[04:35] of the marketplace and you’re putting yourself out there because one thing that we’ve learned is that the marketplace abhors a vacuum. If you are not putting out information about yourself, then that means other people are controlling a dialogue and usually that means bad things for you. And now I assume there are two sides to that coin because on the one hand you want to note

[05:00] You want to know if people are talking about you, you want to know how they’re talking about you. But at the same time, you know, assume from your perspective, you’re listening and you may actually find out things in the process of monitoring that are going to help you deliver even more value. Is that your perspective? Yeah, that’s absolutely right. One of the great innovations of social media and the listening tools that we have now.

[05:25] Now is it whereas in the past you would have had to pay thousands of dollars for focus groups or customer surveys or things like that. You can get a lot of information now simply by listening on online channels. It doesn’t necessarily replace the other things but it supplements it in an important way and depending on your budget it’s also a much more economical way of finding out what’s on the minds of your customers.

[05:50] of your customers. One of the running jokes is that if you are experiencing poor service by an airline, for instance, you can call the helpline, the 1-800 number, like every other sap in the airport and wait for hours until they help you, or you can send a tweet and tag the Twitter account of that airline.

[06:15] they’ll get to use them probably within minutes because it’s a public forum. And so if you’re complaining about them publicly, it’s not just you that is sitting on a line and waiting and bored and frustrated. You’re telling the world that they’re screwing up. And all of a sudden that raises the stakes. And so they’re more likely to help you. So that’s a powerful thing for consumers. And as business owners who are

[06:40] or association leaders. It’s important for us to think about that two people’s expectations have risen. They do expect higher levels of responsiveness and customer service. But also it’s a great way to reach out to people proactively, to really surprise them. You can go above and beyond if you’re following key people on Twitter and you see that they are writing about things related to your industry, related to (audio cuts out)

[07:05] to your company related to keywords that you’re monitoring. You can reach out and, you know, tap them and say, “Hey, have you thought about this? Have you heard about this?” And that level of responsiveness of feeling like you’re really being listened to and heard is pretty remarkable and it can build some serious brand loyalty. – Yeah, it’s funny you mentioned the airline thing. I actually had that experience myself.

[07:30] myself recently with american airlines uh… right i got to the point where i was just kind of exasperated with them and uh… i sent out a tweet to that effect and uh… i heard back from them within a matter of minutes i have to say in in that case it was a tweet too late but uh… but nonetheless it was impressive that that they were out there and they were listening related to that i’d like to talk about uh… the subject of content

[07:55] But to tee that up a little bit, the organizations or individuals that I’m working with are content producers in one sense. They’re creating educational products, they’re delivering courses, seminars, whether online or off. So that is the core of their business. That’s what they’re delivering, are these traditional types of educational content. But there’s this whole other world of content out there now that

[08:20] that really any business I think needs to use to help establish their brand, their thought leadership in the marketplace. And I know you’ve done that effectively with your own brand. How do you think about content of factoring into how you establish reputation, maintain reputation, and build a brand? I love the possibilities that the digital era.

[08:45] has provided in terms of content, creation and distribution. I actually think that this is the number one possibility that has been open to us in the past 10 years. And the reason I feel so strongly about that is that before, no matter how good your ideas were, if you didn’t have capital, if you didn’t have a distribution mechanism of some sort,

[09:10] you were just fundamentally limited. If television is the only way to really reach a mass market, well guess what? If you don’t own a television studio, if you don’t have a production company, you can’t pay for the ads, you can’t pay for these expensive hulking machines to be rented and do it. And now we can do it with our phones. It’s an incredible democratization. And certainly, ABC, your C,

[09:35] your NBC or CBS has a huge reach. It’s built in. They’re still going to probably reach a lot more people than you are. But that being said, there’s the potential, particularly for businesses and associations like your readers, who are targeting a specific niche audience. They want to be reaching all the accounts.

[10:00] in North Carolina. They want to be reaching all the civil engineers in the Northeast. But things like that, mass media broadcasting isn’t the answer anyway. You want to find people where they are and you want to attract them to you. And so it’s easier than ever. You can blog for it. You can set something up with WordPress. You can use your phone to create a video, edit it on

[10:25] on iMovie and upload it for free to YouTube. You can create a podcast literally recording a telephone call like we’re doing right now, edit that lightly on something like GarageBand and upload it. And you have huge streams of content that are going to draw people in to you and make them come to you. So it’s very exciting. I think the biggest thing to keep in mind here

[10:50] mind here in terms of content production is the fact that, you know, as is the case with most ratios, you know, like if you’re a teacher, they always say if there’s one kid in the classroom raising his hand, there’s probably 10 kids in the same question, right? There’s always fewer people who are stepping up and doing things. And similarly, in the online world, for every one person who’s creating something, you know, there’s

[11:15] There’s probably 10 who read it and comment on it and there’s 100 who read it and take it in and appreciate it and say, “Oh, that’s really interesting.” It’s just tiny numbers of people who are actually producing the content and it has a disproportionate impact because everyone else out there is a consumer taking it in. You put yourself in the limelight if you’re creating the content. You are setting the tone

[11:40] the tone of the conversation and that means you’re becoming a thought leader. You are really setting the parameters and making other people come to you. That’s a very powerful thing if you’re an association or an association leader. And so it sounds like from a strategic perspective and I know for you you’re thinking about strategy, you’re thinking about vision, it’s not just a single campaign.

[12:05] Basically the idea that you’re building really a platform over time You’re using content you’re using these social tools to really build Context I guess I would say around Whatever your core products and services are is that you know Does that sound like the right way of thinking about it? How do you describe how this whole concept of reputation?

[12:30] and branding fit into longer term strategy and vision. Yeah, I think that’s exactly right, Jeff. I recently wrote a blog post for the Harvard Business Review called, “It’s Not a Job Search. It’s a permanent campaign.” And the basic idea behind that was that in this new digital world, if you’re an individual and you’re looking for a job, you can’t

[12:55] You can’t just kind of gear up a month or two before you want the new job and say, “Oh, I’m going to polish my resume and then I’ll send it out and someone’s going to hire me right away.” It just doesn’t work that way anymore. You’re going to be out of luck. We seem to be thinking about it. It’s just sort of reconceptualizing things that we have been operating on for the past 20 or 30 or 50 years is that you can’t just say, “Oh, I’m going to be

[13:20] say, “Oh, I want a job and one magically appears because your resume is so impressive.” You have to over time build up a reputation in the marketplace so that when you want a job, it’s easy for you to walk in somewhere because people have already heard of you. They’ve already been reading your blog. They already subscribed to your Twitter feed. They already think, “Oh, she’s sharp. We would like to have her here.” Because when you

[13:45] is when you build up that kind of reputation, you can write your own ticket. And I think the same thing is true at the corporate level or at the association level, what you want to do is establish yourself over time as being the place to go for the best information. And again, the niche aspect is what’s so terrific and critical here. I mean, if I’m writing in the Harvard Business

[14:10] you’re reaching a pretty broad swath of professionals and that’s great. But I am never going to be speaking to the needs specifically of accountants the way that an association could because if that’s your audience then you can go so deep into their needs, into their concerns, into the reality that they’re facing. And so consequently that’s going to be what is missing.

[14:35] what is most relevant and most serious to them and so there’s a building advantage if you’re targeting a niche audience who really going deep and you could leverage that and if over time you prove yourself in the marketplace you know they they go back once they like it they go back a second time they say wow you know in the news media they say you know once you know once is an accident twice as a coin since the three times is a pattern so it’s over time

[15:00] over time you build that trust and they say, “Geez, this is really good information.” All of a sudden you’ve justified your annual membership fees and they’re not going to peel off. Once you’ve built that relationship, they’re going to continue to be loyal because you’re meeting their needs in a way that no one else can. And I’m sure you must have one or two examples of whether it’s a company or an individual, but

[15:25] somebody, some organization that you think is just knocking it out of the park really getting this right. I mean, who are the icons you hold up in the whole world of branding and reputation? Yeah, I think there’s a lot of really interesting things that are going on over time in terms of content creation.

[15:50] It’s interesting, you know, just to think of kind of a silly example. I recently wrote an article for Forbes about Klout, the service that sort of measures at least in social media, your impact in the marketplace. And of course, you know, it’s not a perfect measure. You know, sometimes they’ll say you’re an expert in something and, you know, you wonder where that came from. But I think over time, measurement

[16:15] measurement and quantification is going to get both more exact and more important. Because people do want to try to measure these things as much as possible. But the person that they hold up is the yardstick. The 100 percent, everyone else kind of scales off of them, is Justin Bieber, the teen sensation. And I think why is that? Why is he so important? Why does that matter?

[16:40] And really what’s interesting, and I think it sort of shows what anybody can follow, is the fact that people are dying from behind the scenes intimate communication with the people and the brands and the companies that they support. For so long, the things that we saw were

[17:05] were just these formal institutional corporate things being pushed out of us. The archetype is the official press release from headquarters. It was really divorced from reality. It’s not how people interact. People were so desperate. They want the behind the scenes picture. What’s happening in the green room? What does Justin like to eat when he’s on his tour bus?

[17:30] The truth is they want that from your company too. They want that from your association too. They want to have a human connection so that they get what the value is. And that they’re loyal to something, you know, not some idea or some institution. They’re loyal to people and they see how things are being made. I mean, a great example, which I recently cited in a…

[17:55] a in a Harvard Business Review post that that actually just went up called uh… transparency is the new leadership imperative is uh… this guy Fred Wilson who’s a venture capitalist in new york and and through this guy he’s three thousand miles away from silicon valley you know that the reverse of the universally acknowledged hub of the tech world and you know i mean you know new york is no slouch but but it’s not where the action

[18:20] action is happening in the same way that Silicon Valley is. So if you’re Fred Wilson, how do you get in on the best deals? How do you get people to say, oh man, I wish Fred Wilson would fund me? Well, you know what? You can use a blog. And that’s why he’s there. He has a blog called avc.com. And it’s incredible. He writes a post. The post, every post, gets 100 or more comments. Some posts get 300, 400, 500,

[18:45] hundred comments because people are so engaged you know just dying to find out because venture capital is an area that historically has been so secretive you know no one wants to talk about what they’re funding or why because they don’t want to give the other guys uh… aligning on uh… how their decision making processes done Fred Wilson has turned that upside down he’s been incredibly transparent and he’s been rewarded because of it he’s built such a brand that people are

[19:10] the people are now dying to have him be part of the lead round of investors and i think that’s a lesson we can all learn from uh… absolutely well and all those lines may be to them to wrap up our our conversation today and let you know give you a kind of uh… uh… a case study to address here i mean let’s say that you are you know maybe a small training firm uh… maybe an individual subject matter expert maybe in association but you’re in the

[19:35] You’re in the education business. You’re experiencing greater competition. You’re trying to build your business in this dog-eat-dog world. Hopefully have it grow year over year. And as part of that, you know you need to build your brand. You know you need to heighten your reputation out in the marketplace. What are the one or two first steps you would tell that organization, that individual to

[20:00] to take to get the ball rolling. Well I think the first and most simple is you always want to start with a real basic Google search of yourself just to see what’s out there. I mean it’s actually, I mean it seems silly but A, not everybody does it, but B. Even people that you would imagine,

[20:25] must have a strong online presence just because of who they are where they work. You’d be astonished. There was a guy that I met a couple of weeks ago at a dinner party and you know he was somebody that I thought was so interesting. I actually wanted to write an article about him and he was okay this guy number one he doesn’t have a business card on him. Fine you’ll problem with that you’re alright I’ll hook him up and then I can you know email

[20:50] you know emailing about this article I want to do. And he’s a senior guy at a branding for New York and I look him up and he doesn’t have a Facebook page, doesn’t have LinkedIn, not on Twitter. His company doesn’t even have an email for him. They have a general info at. The only things that I can find about him online were a profile of his house.

[21:15] house for some house in garden magazine. I mean it’s ridiculous. This man is a talented professional and yet you can’t even find him when you want to write about him for a magazine. Sounds like he’s going to go to Dorie Clark. That’s right. That’s right. And so you don’t want that to be you. You want people to be able to reach you if they want to or need to.

[21:40] So some really basic things. I mean, LinkedIn profile is just basic, but it’s a way that, you know, I mean, it takes five minutes to set it up, but it’s at least a way that people can find you and they know it’s you also. Because especially if you have a fairly common name, you know, if you’re Joe Smith, you are absolutely screwed. So you need to give people away. Oh, it’s Joe Smith and Millawatt.

[22:05] walkie that runs the training firm. Oh, okay. So, you know, that’s a really good basic thing. The other thing that I would say is more advanced, not at all technologically, but in terms of your time commitment, is blogging. There’s a fairly recent study that came out that showed the teenager who, for a long time, were in the vanguard of blogging, which you might expect because, you know, the early

[22:30] early adopters of new technology and things like that. They actually are abandoning blogging now. And fewer and fewer of them are doing it. And does this mean that they’re not interested in communicating online? No, what it means is they’re lazy because instead they’re turning to Twitter because it’s shorter and it requires less work. And so what that means to me is that if you want to establish yourself as a poor

[22:55] a pollinator. If you want to be out there in, you know, blue ocean space where there are fewer voices, that means that you should be blogging because it does require a higher threshold of commitment of dedication of smarts, frankly, because you have to put your spelling out there for the world to see. But it means that, conventionally, there are greater rewards. So I would

[23:20] So I would suggest that for people. I would strongly agree with that one. I know that’s made all the difference in my own work, in my own company. And you got to commit to do the work, but it pays off. So I think blogging is a fantastic strategy. Dorie, thanks so much for taking the time to talk. I know you’re busy writing away on your book, so I’m very grateful to have you contributing your–

[23:45] your thoughts to my thinking about my book. Thank you Jeff, I really appreciate it. That’s it for my interview with Dorie Clark. Be sure to visit Dorie on the web at dorieclark.com where you can find out more about her and also about her book from Harvard Business Review Press, Reinventing You: Define your brand, imagine your future. I also encourage you to visit Learning Revolution

[24:10] Revolution.net/episode5 to get show notes from this episode including links to Dorie’s site and to other great content. Thank you for listening today. If you enjoyed the podcast, I’d be truly grateful if you would tell others about it and also if you would go to learningrevolution.net/itunes and give a brief review of the podcast for others to read. This is Jeff Cobb.

[24:35] I’m Jeff Cobb, your host, signing off from the Learning Revolution.

[25:00] (buzzing)