133: Social Media Marketing Power, Customer Service and Rebranding with Kyra Reed

Robert Plank: We have, today, Kyra Reed. She's the co-founder of MTO Agency and author and business coach and is a nationally recognized industry veteran and a community-focused brand innovator. Sounds like lots of good stuff, so, strap yourselves in.

Kyra, welcome to the show. Tell us about yourself and what makes you different and special.

Kyra Reed: I've been in the industry 12 years now. I was very fortunate to have my first client in my agency in LA. The Roxy Theater on the Sunset Strip in Los Angeles in West Hollywood ... Legendary club, family owned ... I was able to at the very beginning of social media, go in and really help them save, not only the business, but the entire Sunset Strip. It was featured in "The New York Times," "TechCrunch," "Entrepreneur Magazine" and on and on. Lots of national publications ...

Became one of the biggest case studies around music and social media to date ... That gave me a tremendous amount of insight. I had a lot of freedom to really play and explore and check out this new emerging technology. Really see what works, what doesn't because I've been there since the very beginning.

That led me and my business partner to develop a process that we call "The Social System," where we help companies, actually, in our 5-point system accomplish everything that they need in their social strategy. No one has anything like it. Whether you're a solo-preneur or a Fortune 500 company, it scales. It's usable. It's simple, and it encompasses everything that you need. That's what makes me different.

Robert Plank: Cool. What are the 5 points of that system, or is that a secret?

Kyra Reed: No. We're happy to talk about it. It is something that we developed because we wanted to create some standards in this industry. Everybody seems to be an expert or a guru. The industry itself, can't decide on what are the specific processes that we should all agree with.

What we came up with is very simple 5 steps. They boil down to this. Number 1, first thing you have to know is who are you? You got to look at your branding and your messaging. That has to come first. Second, who are you talking to? How do you look at your customers and really understand them from a social perspective, which means, how are they feeling when they come through that door? What is their emotional state? What is your promise to them and the needs that they have? This is a very different way of looking at your customers.

Next is, what are you saying? That's your content strategy. We can't put your content strategy together until we know who you are and what you're saying. Thing is, most people want to come in, and they want to get right into that content strategy or right into growth strategy. It's impossible to do that effectively and authentically, which you must do when you're working in social media, unless we know who are you and who are you talking to.

Who are you? Who are you talking to? What are you saying? How are you selling? Selling on social media is absolutely possible. You can do it very successfully, but again, you've got to know who are you, who are you talking to, and what are you saying, before you can get into the sell.

The last piece of it is, actually, growth and maintenance. That's where your policies come in. Which platform should you be on? How are you going to grow your community? All of those things people want to start with, but they're not important. They're not something you can really focus on, until you know, who are you, who are you talking to, what are you saying, how are you selling.

Robert Plank: I like how that's all broken down. Like you said, it has everything you need, but it's simple and you can just easily look at it and see. See if someone's starting over with the social media or looking at what's working and what's not working. You mentioned a couple of minutes ago that the way you got your start was by fixing and helping out The Roxy Theater's marketing effort. How long ago was this? Was this marketing, in general, or were you helping with their social side of things?

Kyra Reed: Yeah. It was social-specific. I started working with them 10 years ago in November. At that time, the Sunset Strip was really pretty much the has been. I worked in the music industry and my friends would say, "Don't think I'm going to to go The Roxy, just because you're working with them. That place sucks."

It had gone from this club in the '60s and '70s and '80s ... It was just the be all, end all. They were launching all these great bands to nobody wanted to go. They were really close to closing their doors. It was when Tower Records shut down. The owner had this epiphany, "Oh my gosh, I'm next if I don't get my act together, but we don't have any money to do a re-branding and re-marketing."

I met him right at that time and I said, "Look, let's shake it up. Let's take down your website and put up a blog." Now, that sounds like no big deal, but we were the very first ever to do that. Now, every music venue has a blog as their website. We were the first. We got ridiculed for it, actually.

I got the owner on Twitter. I got him on Facebook. I think we were number 1,900 on Twitter. We'd completely revolutionized the way that the whole club process was done because we went from having what we called a "velvet rope mentality," where we kept everybody out.

We took those ropes down. We invited the whole world into the club. We made friends with everybody. We gave away tickets. We started the Tweet Crawl. The very first ever Tweet Crawl. We brought the entire community of the Sunset Strip together. The first time in 40, 50, 60 years that that entire street was working together as opposed to these siloed businesses. What we did is we took all of these principles on social media, authenticity, transparency, community and we looked at how can we integrate these into what we're doing every day?

As a result, not only The Roxy but Nic Adler, the owner of The Roxy became a real social media pioneer. For several years, he was on the speaking circuit. Everybody wanted to know, "What had The Roxy done? What had the Sunset Strip done to save itself." We did it with no budget. We did it all with social media, using community, using the ability to communicate with customers and really be on top of customer service.

Give people what they wanted ... Communicate with them. Use our great photos. Use the access we had with artists, and it changed everything.

Robert Plank: All this happened 10 years ago, and it sounds like you guys were the pioneers for a lot of this stuff. If none of this existed, how did you come across these ideas? Was it a matter of trying out these experiments, or was it seeing what the need was? How did you come up with all this?

Kyra Reed: Mm-hmm (affirmative)- It was a course of 5 years. We started 10 years ago, and we worked really hard at it for about 5 years. Then it kind of went on auto-pilot. The way that I came to these conclusions ... I was living in Portland. I was managing bands, and I was hired by a band manager who said, "I need you to figure out this blogging thing." It was a brand new word, brand new idea. They'd just broke in a band called "Clap Your Hands Say Yeah." It was the first band to ever break on a blog.

I started digging around and doing research. I saw this really interesting thing that music blogs were promoting their competition. They were reposting their competition's work, and everybody was happy to do it. Then I was fortunate enough to come across a documentary called "Revolution OS." "Revolution OS" talked about open source and how the idea of open source ideology, where we have this open sharing of information, that it's going to change everything.

It's going to change how people relate to each other. It's going to change how business is done. It's going to put consumers in the driver's seat. I saw this happening. Gosh, that was 2 years even before I met up with The Roxy. This is 12 years ago. Shortly after that, I picked up a book called "The Long Tail" by Chris Anderson. It all came together for me, exactly what was going to be happening and that it was going to be fueled by people's desires to connect and the fact that technology was going to make that happen. How that was going to change business ...

I applied those very abstract, vague ideas to company that I was fortunate ... Unlike my business partner, who was working at Live Nation and Ticketmaster at the time, she had to prove every single thing that she did based on a dollar. Which was really great because she was one of the first to actually be able to prove that social could make money ...

I had the freedom to play. I had the freedom to really experiment with community and what does that mean? How authentic and how transparent can you be? What do you need to keep to yourself? What do you need to share? What's being risky? What is really going to ... There are a lot of really interesting stories that I have from that time, and one of my favorites is when we had a concert at The Roxy.

The act was late, and so, people had to wait outside longer. They had problems with sound check, and it really wasn't The Roxy's fault. At the time, "The LAist" used to love to pick on The Roxy. Everybody loved to pick on The Roxy. It was like low-hanging fruit. It was an easy target. Of course they came back, and they wrote a horrible review and ripped the Roxy to shreds.

Based on this idea of authenticity, Nic went ahead, and he left this long comment explaining everything that happened. At the end of it, he said, "You know. We're here, and we are really trying. We know we have messed up with our public, and we are really trying. I want to hear from you guys because we're going to do everything we can to make this a better experience for you."

He put his phone number in the comment and said, "Call me and let me know if you have problems with The Roxy. We're going to fix it right away."

Robert Plank: Interesting.

Kyra Reed: That was the last negative review we ever had.

Robert Plank: That's cool, and I love little stories like that because it's one thing for you to say, "Here are the mechanics. Here are the steps" and stuff like that. I always like the little stories where you do something random and crazy, to not just get attention, make more money as well.

Kyra Reed: I'll tell you another really quick story to demonstrate because I think a lot of people do not understand the power of social. A lot of people just think, "Well, you know, I have to do this to promote my company. It's because it's where everybody is. It's just what I have to do." The power of social when you use it right ...

That's how we started with The Roxy. It was everybody's favorite whipping horse, right? Seven years later, "The Voice" ... The TV show "The Voice" ... Adam Levine starts reviewing a woman who did a Michelle Branch song. He says, "You know, Michelle Branch ... I played with her at The Roxy, and The Roxy sucks. They didn't give me a dressing room," and he looked right at the camera and said something really nasty about The Roxy.

They air on the East Coast ahead of the West Coast. Nic, the owner of The Roxy, his phone started blowing up about all these tweets about The Roxy. He got on, saw a real quick YouTube video about what was said and was shocked. He immediately got in touch with the Yahoo music editor, had them redo the marquee at The Roxy and tweeted, "Adam Levine? Come on? Really?"

That was it. Once it hit the West Coast feed, his response to the Yahoo music editor went out. It said, "Look. You were our house band for a long time. You know that it's not our fault. The lead band chooses who gets the dressing room, not us. We love you, man." It was with a photo of the marquee on The Roxy that said, "Adam Levine, your dressing room is ready." That was it.

"TMZ," "Hollywood Reporter," "Vanity Fair" ... Everybody picked that story up, and our community came to our rescue so seriously that it changed the face of The Roxy because our community loves and supports that venue so much now because of all the work that we did that we don't have to do much. Nobody could attack The Roxy. We went from being the favorite whipping boy in L.A. to the golden child of the music scene there.

Robert Plank: That's pretty cool, and the best part of that is that you guys were able to react within an hour or 2. You were able to react very quickly.

Kyra Reed: Mm-hmm (affirmative)- This is why you've got to get out there and build your audience because when you do, your audience is going to protect you. They're going to come and rally around you, and they're going to spread the word for you. Then when you can leverage and see what you can do, and you can keep an eye on who's tweeting about you, who's talking about you ... You can respond with levity. You cannot buy that kind of press and marketing. You just can't.

Robert Plank: I've noticed that some brands are really good about doing that. A few of the airlines and stuff like Taco Bell ... I noticed that all day long, they have, for sure, a team of some kind just responding every couple of minutes to whoever's tweeting them with whatever kind of problem. They're super responsive in that way.

Kyra Reed: Yes, and I'll tell you ... Southwest Airlines ... I just had a horrible experience with them, but man, they were on it. I've tweeted about it. They got to me immediately and made me feel like, "All right. Some things didn't work, but they cared. They care about their customers. They don't want people walking away feeling crappy about interacting with this brand." I have brands that won't do that, and it makes me want to leave them.

Robert Plank: Is this what you do? Is this primarily what you do? You go to these brands who may be could be marketing better on social, and you just whip them into shape, I guess?

Kyra Reed: I wish that more brands would let me do it, to be honest with you. Social is still something that is relegated to the back burner. It's an add-on. People don't understand the real value and power that it has, and they're scared of it because it requires making a transition from old-school marketing, which was one-way communication. "I decide, based on whatever focus group or arbitrary thing I want to say what my public is going to hear from me. I don't want to answer questions. I don't want to reveal too much, and I don't want to get involved."

That's really, truly the viewpoint of a lot of businesses. "I don't need social media. We're doing just fine without it." The reality is you could be doing a thousand times better because every brand gets checked out on Facebook. Every brand is getting reviewed by hundreds of people a day, whether they know it or not. How you interact with the public says so much to consumers these days.

People want to kind of pin it under PR. They want to pin it under marketing. They don't really understand that social is its own beast. It's its own dynamic, and it has the power to completely change a company. It has the power to affect sales and PR, marketing, customer service, product development, everything, even HR. There's a lot of untapped resource. The result is a lot of people entering the market that don't know what they're doing, so a lot of people say it doesn't work.

"Eh, social doesn't work. It doesn't work. It's a waste of time. It's waste of money. It's too noisy." It's noisy with a lot of people that don't understand how to use it. There's still a lot of untapped potential there for a lot of brands, and I do. I wish that more brands would hand over the keys to me and let me just turn them over.

Robert Plank: You start doing your thing and playing around, right?

Kyra Reed: Mm-hmm (affirmative)-

Robert Plank: Along those lines, what are your thoughts ... The thing I'm still trying to come to terms with, I guess with all this social media marketing stuff, is how do you reconcile the promotional part of it ... The tweeting the links versus everyone wants to be silly and go viral and be like the Old Spice guy. What are your thoughts in that whole area?

Kyra Reed: That's advertising. That's where you craft very a specific persona for a product release ... Oreo does that really well. Doritos does it really well. These brands ... They can get away with it because they're enormous brands, and their target market is Millennials. There's also a lot of inauthenticity that goes along with it. Smaller brands ... They actually really need to ... Go back to that 5-point system.

Who are you? Who are you authentically? You've got to show up as who you really are. They way you do that is by talking about your values. If you go in, just trying to push sales, you're going to lose people. If you go in, and you say, "Look, let's take a example of ..." A really easy one ... A company that makes baby gear that's an eco-company, right? This company is going to talk about the fact that, "Look, we value sustainable products. We value fair-trade products. Let's feature some of our vendors. Where we get the products from ... Let's take some product shots from our manufacturing facility. Let's really talk about why these products are really important to have around your baby and in your home."

If you really look at what your values are as a brand, you have so much to talk about that your customers want to hear. The brands go off on this other track, where they don't realize that that is the most important thing. We want to know about the companies that we're buying from. If they tell us what is important to them, and we find resonance with that, you've just made a loyal customer. You've just created trust, and trust is so hard to get with consumers these days.

If you're open about why you do what you do and what's important to you, you're going to draw the right customer, and they're immediately going to have trust for you. That's how we are as humans. If you and I meet, and we say, "Oh, we have the same religion," or "We have the same location" or the same profession ... We find these things very important, these principles of how we live and make our decisions in kind. It's inevitable. You have trust between each other now.

Who are you? Then you've got to understand really your customers. If you know what your customers need from you on an emotional level ... I don't mean emotional support, but I mean if somebody comes to you and they're frustrated, or they're angry, or they're fearful about something ... They're looking to your product to satisfy or change that for them, and you can say, "Hey, we understand that that's what you're here for. This is ... What we promised to you, we're going to give you."

That's amazing content. It also builds trust. It also gives people the reason why they need to choose you. Rather than just going for the sale, you've got to give people reasons why. That's what they want to know. They don't care what you did ... Ate for dinner ... They don't care about your employees' birthdays. They care about why you're in business and what you're going to do for them. Talk about that.

Robert Plank: Interesting ... The values and the reasons why ... That even makes me think of ... I think a day or two ago, I was just randomly sitting around my house, and I was randomly thinking, "Well, what would happen if ... Say my car was parked in a parking lot, and maybe someone opened the door on it and just dinged it. Just for whatever random reason ... I was just having this weird, random thought. I ended up doing some kind of search on my phone, and what showed up in the results was some kind of blog post by some kind of car, I guess ... People who repair cars, the little scratches and dings ...

Kyra Reed: Mm-hmm (affirmative)-

Robert Plank: It was just this little random story about someone went to some restaurant. The car was dinged up. They waited for the person who had clearly parked next to them and waited for them to come out.

Kyra Reed: Oh, gosh.

Robert Plank: It was like, "Who knows if this story was true?" They just told this blog post about this family ... Car got dinged ... They thought it would be not a big thing to worry about. They almost drove off. Then they did the insurance stuff, and then, it turned into ... Then they went to this little repair guy who just lives in this area, and they were ... The insurance covered it, and they just told this story. That just sticks out to me as you're explaining that just from a couple days ago, where I just randomly just had a weird thought, right? Landed on this blog post from this local business owner, who just told this random story and gave this helpful content that, "Okay, now. I've got it filed away."

All I need to do to find that person again is do that same sort of search, which somebody might actually be making that search if they're trying to solve that problem, I guess.

Kyra Reed: That's right. Now, if that happens to you, you've got that in your mind. You know exactly where you're going to go.

Robert Plank: Yeah. That's a pretty good first impression for me to make with this random, local business that I never even would have heard of otherwise.

Kyra Reed: Mm-hmm (affirmative)- This is the great thing about social. These things happen all the time. You never know where business is going to come from, and Nic used to call these "breadcrumbs." You spread them out throughout the internet, little marks that you leave behind. Positive reviews ... Little stories, blog posts, being on different social networks, engaging with people, leaving comments in people's posts ...

All of these things ... You never know who's going to see it. Do you know that 900 million people a day log into Facebook? That's almost 3 times the size of the United States.

Robert Plank: Crazy. It sounds like matter of just all these little things that on their own wouldn't mean much, but added up mean a lot.

Kyra Reed: Yes. Exactly.

Robert Plank: Cool. I like that most of the things that we're talking about here all lead back to the 5 things. Who are you? Who are you talking to? What are you saying? How are you selling, and then the growth and maintenance ... Along those lines, could you tell us, Kyra, about your agency and your websites and your books and all that cool stuff about you.

Kyra Reed: Sure. The agency is called "Made to Order." The Website is MTOAgency.com. You can find me at @KyraReed. You can find us on Instagram at social media for entrepreneurs. We have just released 2 new programs. One is for people who are struggling with self-promotion. There's a lot of fear around self-promotion, especially for women to step out and talk about themselves.

I've been working with a lot of female business owners, and what I realize is they need 2 things. They need a very simple plan that they can get their feet wet and start to see results. They need something to replace the fear. This program does both. It's called "Self-Promotion Mastery." Then we also have a program called, "Power to THRIVE Mastermind," and this is a 12-week course, where we take you through those 5 steps so that, by the end, you have a solid brand. You know who your customers are.

You know how to communicate with them. You have a content strategy. You have a sales strategy. You have your growth strategy. You know how to execute on all of them, and you'll be seeing results very quickly, like you never expected. Social will change your entire business.

Robert Plank: Awesome. I've already heard from you those lots of little tidbits about ... You saved a whole street basically, right?

Kyra Reed: Mm-hmm (affirmative)- Yep.

Robert Plank: Because of social media.

Kyra Reed: Yep.

Robert Plank: Awesome.

Kyra Reed: A very famous street. Actually, we've done it twice. We did it with Sunset Strip and Main Street in Santa Monica.

Robert Plank: Cool. It works over and over again. It wasn't just-

Kyra Reed: Yep.

Robert Plank: Wasn't just a fluke ...

Kyra Reed: Nope.

Robert Plank: That social media stuff is here to stay. There's something to that.

Kyra Reed: Yes, it is. Yep.

Robert Plank: Cool. Thanks for stopping by and sharing all your great insights, Kyra.