Dr. Barnes shares the fourth social media mistake that many business leaders often make. This one mistake can leave people confused about your mission as a business, personal brand, or nonprofit. And if that happens, you won't get the number one thing you need online to get engagement: attention. In this episode, Dr. Barnes explains how avoiding this mistake can help any organization get attention and engagement. This episode is based on Dr. Barnes' book "5 Social Media Mistakes Your Business Should Avoid." Transcription: James Barnes (00:07): Welcome to the Bricks-To-Clicks Marketing podcast. If you're a small business owner and you struggle with marketing your business, this podcast is just for you. I'm your host, James Barnes. And thank you for listening today. James Barnes (00:22): In season one, we've been talking about five social media mistakes your business should avoid. And today, I want to talk about mistake number four, and it's really this: You don't identify the villain in your customers' stories. Villains play a very important role in the story that you're telling on social media and brands use villains all the time. And there are all sorts of villains that you can identify in your marketing and especially to tell the story on social media. And I want to give you a few examples and then lead you through a process that you can use to discover what's the villain really on for your customer because remember the villain causes this customer, your customer to have a problem and ask the question, why are your customers not solving their problem? This leads us directly to know who the villain is or what the villain is. James Barnes (01:12): So if you look at this, sometimes a villain can be the competition. It can be your competition. Brands do this all the time. T-Mobile does this and did this many, many years ago. In 2012, when the new CEO took over, they identified their villain early on. This is written up in a Harvard Business Review article. You can check out. At the time, they had 33 million subscribers and by 2016, based on using the villain that they identified in their story, in their marketing, they jump to 69 million. So the villain was a competitor, AT&T and actually Verizon a little bit too. And so they really chose AT&T but of course, Verizon was lumped in there as well as they began to argue why their service is so much better. James Barnes (01:57): And so this happened in the mobile industry, and it also it's happened over the years in real software and hardware programs for computers. Years ago, there was a series of YouTube ads that were on Get a Mac and it pitted the cool guy in the ad who was the Mac person or Apple person against the nerdy looking guy in the image, [inaudible 00:02:24] glasses and all how they characterized him. And so they had this conversation back and forth as to who was better at what, and Apple always came out on top, of course, on different things that they're really better at. That's their whole idea. James Barnes (02:35): And so one villain that you can use is a competitor. And now just know when you did it just like it did with T-Mobile, they're going to engage in the fight. I mean, if you come out and say something, they're going to come out and say something. And so if you're wanting to pick a fight and really choose a villain like that, a competitor, it will do it. It will work. This happens in lots of other industries and lots of different examples, but that's one example of how people choose a villain and then use that in their marketing and they tell this story of how they're fighting against the villain. And everybody listens to those stories because it introduces something that holds our attention. It's called drama, and the villain's causing the drama, causing the problem for our customers. James Barnes (03:18): So problem and loss, we've talked about early on in the episodes for this season, how we need to characterize what that is. Well, the villain really causes the problem and the losses to happen. And if we can name it, if we can describe it, if we can show it, then we're going to amp up the drama that people are going to be listening to. Then soon after that, it's all about how you solve that drama and get rid of it. Well, you get rid of it by selling the service or product, whatever you have, that's going to defeat the villain. It gives the customer a tool, gives the customer a product or service that they can use to defeat the villain. James Barnes (03:52): Another example, a lot of times, small business owners won't have time to do their marketing is just there are so many different things they're doing. And so years ago, a marketing company created a time thief as a villain. And so this time thief would, or a thief would go around and steal your time as you were operating your small business. And so you didn't have time to do your marketing and something else would happen in the business throughout the day. And you wouldn't ...
