116: Profitable Popularity: Be Interesting, Build Popularity and Use Social Media to Make Money with Rachna Jain

Robert Plank: Our guest today is Dr. Rachna Jain. She's the founder and owner of Profitable Popularity. She's the industry leader in helping people gain exposure online and teaching them to monetize that popularity. It sounds like lots of cool stuff. I'm super excited. Welcome to the show.

Rachna Jain: Oh thank you so much. I'm glad to be here.

Robert Plank: We were just talking before the show that we've both spoken at the same event and I know that you've used Backup Creator and Webinar Crusher. That's all about me, but I'm more curious about you and what you do. Where's your website and what is it that you do that makes you different and special?

Rachna Jain: Yes, my website is profitablepopularity.com. Really that website and my whole business model grew out of the idea that a lot of people were building these huge followings in social media or trying to, but they didn't actually have a business model that they could make money from or be profitable. My whole goal is to really help people to become more well-known, but also to help them become more profitable and build a sustainable business at the same time. I tend to work with people who you consider to be thought leaders or visionary entrepreneurs, people who have a message and a purpose, and they are needing some help creating the business structures to be able to build an online business and gain attention and be able to make money from it.

Robert Plank: I like that, and I think that what I see a lot happen with a lot of these people with social media is they either get too far down the rabbit hole or it ends up taking up all kinds of time, or they end up doing all these little tasks that seem like they're just a waste just to get a number appearing. Wasn't there like a service a few years where you could get your Twitter score or something like that?

Rachna Jain: Yeah, there absolutely were and they still are services like Cloud and Empire Cred. They're always ranking you on on how much engagement you could get, and you get points for it. I don't know if you can redeem the points for anything, but yeah-

Robert Plank: It feels good.

Rachna Jain: Exactly, it feels good. I think that there's still a lot of focus. I think people have the false assumption that just because they're very visible, they'll automatically become very profitable. That is a mistake. I've had people come to me and they say things like, "Well I want to have 10,000 Facebook fans." I'll say, "Okay, so what are you going to do with 10,000 Facebook fans?" They really have no idea. They really are pursuing the number more than actually what the meaning of that could be for their business. I think that there's still a lot of desire to be seen and recognized and lauded and applauded and all those things without people really understanding that that's not all it takes to build a business.

Robert Plank: What do they have to do? How do they get from being the person who chases the number to someone whose social media activity actually pays off?

Rachna Jain: Absolutely. I use a model that I've developed. It's called the M6 model. It really relies on the idea of having an understanding of a very specific market, building a very strong message, and then building a business model that can support getting that message out. There's more steps to it, but those are the first three steps. I've been working online since 1998 and social media didn't even exist then. When social media began to become a force that it is today, you begin to see a lot of people using social media as a way to talk to everyone at the same time. What I began to observe about 2008 and that's continuing even today is this concept of microfragmentation where people are selecting into smaller and smaller groups. At first, we were all excited that we could even find each other online. Now, you find that the groups are becoming more and more targeted and more and more specific. Our messaging has to change too where we're not really looking to talk to everyone; we're looking to talk to just one person in a very specific group.

There's a lot of work that has to be done around that because again, people get seduced or they get swayed by the idea that because they can talk to 10,000 people at once that they really ought to try to do that. That tends to be the least effective way.

Robert Plank: I've seen along with you the way that the social media stuff has evolved. Maybe you can clear up what's the right way to go about it as far as talking to everyone or talking to a few, or maybe there's a right way or maybe everyone has their own unique way. When you mentioned the things that you're mentioning, I'm thinking about Old Spice or Dollar Shaving Club. A lot of people, it seems like they want to replicate that. They want to repeat the magic. Then on the other extreme of that what I've noticed a lot of is, I can't remember if it was Coca-Cola or Head & Shoulders but there's been some companies and I've seen them do things like, for example, on Facebook they'll post the same message but in different languages and target it to each of their audiences. They'll post the English message and then post it in Spanish but only to the Spanish-speaking crowd. I thought that was interesting segmentation.

Rachna Jain: Ot absolutely really is interesting. The thing about it though, for a big brand like Coke or any of the large brands, they do it as a way of constantly raising awareness. My guess is they don't need to tie it to income-earned or result obtained as tightly as us small business owners do. I really think that when you're looking to build an audience online, I think that the idea is to really be as targeted as you can, as specific as possible. You want to definitely talk about what is interesting to that group or those people. If you're building it on your personal profile, you obviously want to also be a real person. You don't just want to be constantly talking about work all the time, but you want to share about what's important to you. I think that the key in really getting noticed at this point, and examples you gave about Dollar Shave Club and all the people like that, they're really really good at telling stories and they're really good at telling stories that interrupt and gather attention.

Anyone can build a powerful story out of their life and business if they know how. Being able to interrupt attention and stop the mindless Facebook scrolling by grabbing someone's attention and being able to tell a good story that's compelling. I think that that sort of skillset is within the reach of entrepreneurs of all sizes.

Robert Plank: That's cool. By you breaking it down even in just those two terms, have a story and have an interrupt. That way, it can help people make sense of the things that they're seeing on social media that are getting them to pay attention and then figuring out a way to replicate it for themselves. Could you walk us through a little bit about that? Could just tell us about maybe a client you've had or something like that where their social media just maybe wasn't very effective and then you went in and added in their own story and their own pattern interrupt to make it better?

Rachna Jain: I work a lot with people who are coming onto the internet from professional services. I have a background in psychology so it's not surprising that I get a lot of psychologists and therapists who want to work with me and they're looking to build an online following for some of their clinical expertise, but they're looking to bring it to a larger audience. They're a perfect example. They come online and they talk about a lot of things in very jargon-y ways, things that only other therapists would actually know or understand. There's one client that I'm actually working with now who is seeking to develop an online training course and some coaching. We're still working out what she's going to offer, but what she's really looking to is she's really looking to help women have more self-esteem. The way that she had began talking about it online, doing Facebook Live videos for example, is she was just starting with, "Hi, I'm a therapist and I've worked with women. Are you very depressed? Do you have any confidence?" She would go on and on about without even finding a way to engage people originally.

Then as we began to look at her videos, and we're still working on some of the messaging in her story, but we began to talk about, "You starting off with an introduction about yourself is not what's going to grab people. What's going to grab people is something that is like a feeling that you've taken a slice or a cut out of their daily life. It would be something like, 'Oh, did you look in the mirror this morning and absolutely hate how you looked? Did you get sick of feeling that way, or are you sick of feeling that way?' Then being able to go into some story about how she can help." Really direct language, something that really lets you put yourself in the conversation that your potential client is already having, and being able to build a story about that and how you can help.

Robert Plank: There's some cool things in there. Aside from just posting the content you post with the intent of solving a problem, the whole thing of stopping them and asking a question. That seems like an easy way to uncover that interrupting question without having to spend all day or all month trying to figure out, "Are you ___________ almost? Do you hate your appearance in the mirror? Are you tired? Are you stressed out?" It seems like just right there alone saying, "Are you ____________?" just seems like an easy way to create some social content.

Rachna Jain: I think it absolutely does. Of course there's different things you can do like in Facebook Live versus an ad on Facebook. You just have to be aware of what your message is and the content is based on the mechanism that you're using to get people to watch or take action. I think asking a question is a really good interrupt. I think also using surprise or things that people don't think go together, something like, "What I learned about sleep from staying up all night," or, "What I learned about being a good mother even though I don't have kids." Just things that people would feel interested in like, "Wow, what does somebody who doesn't have kids know about being a mother?" Or, "What can you learn about sleep from not sleeping?" Anything that creates some interest or some intrigue I think is another really easy way, and a good way to do it is to take opposites and say, "If I tie these two opposites together, do I come up with anything that's worth talking about?"

Robert Plank: That's pretty cool. It just gets that curiosity going. As you were explaining, something that I think I've noticed just in the last couple of months ago and I'm not sure if it was always there or not, but it seems like what I've noticed very recently is that a lot of people are posting on Twitter and they're posting on Facebook with the intent of impressing their peers not their customers. You mentioned doctors and psychologists. A lot of people like you said, they'll mention the jargon or they'll mention their credentials. I look at it and I'm not really sure why some of these things are being posted. Are you seeing that? Maybe like psychologists might be posting things to impress other psychologists as opposed to actually help people?

Rachna Jain: I think it's actually less conscious than that. I think what everyone's trying to do when they do that is they're trying to build credibility which is actually a very positive and useful thing. I think it's just the difference between the way that you get credibility in the offline world has historically been "Where did you go to school?" "What kind of education do you have? "What kind of job do you have?" "How much money do you make?" "What kind of car do you drive?" All those kinds of things that are status symbols or could be credibility symbols. I think online for all of us, it's just our picture and whatever we say about ourselves. Nobody necessarily is going to see the car that you drive or where you live or anything like that. I think that people use some of those same mechanisms that they would use offline. They try to bring them online, and the challenge becomes exactly what you raised. People feel like, "Well why is relevant or why do I care?" I really care more about your information than I care that you graduated in x, y, z, year with this degree.

Robert Plank: The question is, "Why do I care?" I like that because one thing that I've been thinking about when I try my own social media or I have a couple coaching clients who are starting to get into this kind of stuff, one thing that comes to mind is one of our favorite people is a doctor. Being a doctor, there's that paradox there where like you said, if he gets too much about the credentials then he's out of touch in the Ivory Tower but then he sometimes tries to do some kind of aggressive marketing. This doctor has a procedure where it involves taking the blood and reinjecting it and stuff like that, so he branded himself as the Vampire Doctor but then he gets to the point where it's almost like a little too shady. It's this doctor who's doing important stuff. Is the answer just to put it through the filter of "why do I care?", or do you have any other insights about that? Like how to avoid either being too out of touch or too much like the convenience store or the shady back alley?

Rachna Jain: Exactly. I think that in that case, what you're really looking at is you're looking for subtle ways to credentialize yourself. You obviously can say that, "I'm a doctor of such-and-such," or, "I've studied here." You don't need to spend 20 minutes talking about that, but then I think through the course of your presentation, the way that you present yourself speaks volumes about who you are and how you are. Then I think any time you can use real life examples, like you asked me at the beginning if I could talk about a client. I'm not sure if that's exactly what you meant, but it was a way to credentialize me also because just the fact that I have clients who pay me makes me more of an expert. If I were a physician and I was going to talk about what I did, I'd really focus a lot more on the outcomes and the benefits. If I were doing this blood reinjection thing, I might shy away from that a little bit and save that for a little bit later in the process. I definitely would credentialize myself.

This is something that these celebrities use, this is something that the top athletes use. It's the same mechanism that helps so-and-so place in the Olympics or anything like that. Any time you can credentialize yourself, you can use these subtle ways of saying "other people trust me and you should too," like social proof. Any time you can tie it to some kind of news story or current event, it gives people a hook that they can tap into and they can immediately understand, and they're more likely to pay attention because that's something that's equally relevant going on.

Robert Plank: I like the real world case study stuff anyway because that's more interesting as opposed to just talking about some abstract concepts. Hooking me into a story is a lot more fun for me.

Rachna Jain: Yeah, absolutely. Stories are our oldest form of oral communication. There's a long history that we're all oriented to pay attention to stories.

Robert Plank: Oh yeah. That makes a lot of sense to me, and that resonates a lot with me too. As we're winding this down in the last five minutes or so of this, aside from everything that we've covered already what's the number one mistake you're seeing people making on social media? Like you see all kinds of people going wrong with this.

Rachna Jain: I think again, that sense of gathering people who are just numbers rather than interested fans or followers. I think talking too much about themselves, using their social media as a broadcast platform rather than a dialoguing or connecting platform. I think that as a business, you also just want to be really careful at how you present yourself around topics that are really charged. This whole election thing that's going on, there's people who are feeling the need to express their distinct opinions politically one way or the other and it's causing them some challenges within their community. It's not that they shouldn't have their opinions, but I use Facebook as a hybrid. I use it for social and for business, so I'm always aware of how what I say personally is going to have impact on my brand or my business also.

I think that there's times where people who run business, they forget that people are paying attention to everything and whatever you say or do as an individual person, it does have impact on how people perceive your brand. To have an awareness of that, like if you're just using it for social interaction that's completely fine but if you're thinking it's going to become a platform by which you build your business brand and make contacts and get clients and things like that as well, you just need to be aware of how some of your personal opinions may be taken. In the normal course of my work, I never talk to be about their politics. It wouldn't be something that I would lead with on social media either, for example.

Robert Plank: It seems like especially with the political stuff, it's easy to get attention that way but maybe it's the wrong kind of attention.

Rachna Jain: Yeah, and you just have to think. I'm certain that there's clients that I have and we have different political views, but it's not relevant to the work we do so it never comes up. I would hate that I have a really good relationship with a client of mine, they see something that I posted on Facebook that they disagree with, and it creates a rupture in our working relationship just because I was so passionate about something. I'm not saying that's right for everyone. I'm just saying that that's how I navigate the line for myself.

Robert Plank: Yeah, that gets kind of scary because every now and then, there's always some celebrity like Gilbert Godfrey or someone who just says one little remark and then loses all kinds of business and clients.

Rachna Jain: Absolutely, and loses all kinds of credibility. It's like one small action, people lose big endorsements, they lose status, they lose all kinds of things. It's just something that I think that is important to consider if you're planning to use a social media for business.

Robert Plank: Double-edged sword sounds like.

Rachna Jain: Yeah, I think so.

Robert Plank: Cool. As we're winding this down, social media stuff's always changing. Do you have a really cool, cutting edge strategy or tool or website that you're using to do all this social marketing?

Rachna Jain: Actually, I really do things the old-fashioned way because I'm really about strategy and not tools. The tools come and go, but if you really are clear on what your strategy is you can find the tools to make that happen. One thing though I think is a really big deal that most people want to pay attention to right now is the huge rise in visual marketing. Even if you have blog posts, find ways to turn them into images and memes and infographics. I've been actually recently just putting a lot of stuff up on Slideshare again. Really looking at ways to turn your message into multiple formats and get it in front of people who can consume it easily. Look at how you can turn written content into visuals and be able to put them on Instagram and Pinterest and Slideshare, and a bunch of other sites like that.

Robert Plank: As opposed to just that boring old text.

Rachna Jain: Correct, as opposed to just that.

Robert Plank: With the Twitter stuff, I've been having fun with Giphy with the animated GIFs but maybe a little too much fun.

Rachna Jain: Exactly. Again, moderation in all things but yes, things like Giphy also can work really really well.

Robert Plank: It gets attention. If most people are not using that attention-getting tool, then I'm fine using it.

Rachna Jain: Absolutely.

Robert Plank: I like everything you have to say and I like your message, and you had lots of really good advice. Could you tell everyone where to go and find you and your blog and your coaching and your books and all that good stuff?

Rachna Jain: Sure. You can visit me online at my website which is ProfitablePopularity.com.

Robert Plank: Awesome. Nice and simple, gets you there. Profitable Popularity, and then it looks like everything is available from there. Awesome. ProfitablePopularity.com. Dr. Rachna Jain, I'm super glad that you came here and you shared a lot of stuff. The number one thing I like about what you shared with us is just that you didn't say, "Okay, it all relies on this one super fancy tool that's cutting edge, just came out." It's just the strategy and just little things that you notice. For example, if the trend now is visual marketing and images, instead of relying on some fancy-schmancy tool to do it just do it yourself and model what's working.

Rachna Jain: Yes.

Robert Plank: Thanks for being on the show and sharing your insights on social media. It was a pleasure having you.

Rachna Jain: Thanks so much, Robert.