Hi, this is my friend, Timmy; I'm going to set him up here with Roger, 0:04 for some obvious reasons, one of them is that I have a really weird job. 0:08 This is our mascot, Timmy; he's a code monkey. 0:13 He goes with me pretty much wherever we go, 0:15 and I'll talk a little more about him later. 0:17 So, as Cyrus mentioned, I handle ThinkGeek's social media program, 0:19 and I'm a little unusual here today in that I'm a brand, 0:23 and I'm going to talk about what we do online, 0:26 and I hope it doesn't sound too much like a commercial, 0:28 but I do have data to share, which is nice. 0:30 So, before I get down deep into that, a little bit about ThinkGeek. 0:32 We are an online retailer, we're based out of Fairfax, Virginia, 0:35 and we have about 70 employees total. 0:38 Two of us work on social, and we spend a lot of time 0:40 on our social channels, so while we rank 180 on Internet Retailer 500, 0:43 we're number 22 on their social media list, 0:47 and that's based on percentage of revenue from social media. 0:50 So a little bit about our accounts, 0:53 we do have a Facebook page, 0:56 and we have over half a million fans right now 0:58 and a 25 to 50% "talking about this" rate on a weekly basis. 1:01 We also spend time on our Twitter account 1:06 where we have over 700,000 followers 1:09 and about 4300 retweets a week, more on better weeks. 1:11 And we're also active on Google+, great for SEO. 1:16 And there we have 75,000 circlers 1:19 and about 3000 plusses per post is where we top out 1:24 when things go really well. 1:26 We're also on Pinterest, as a lot of retailers are. 1:28 And there we have 25,000 pinners 1:32 and each of our pins gets about 55 repins on average. 1:34 So, as you can tell from some of these numbers, 1:37 what we're doing is working, and what is a little bit unusual 1:39 about ThinkGeek is that we focus on our social channels 1:43 a little bit like network television 1:45 where we slot in our content between really solid stuff 1:47 that isn't necessarily about us, kind of as commercials. 1:50 So, instead of sharing things about our products all the time, 1:53 we'll talk about the fandoms that our products come out of 1:57 that make our products possible and desirable in the first place. 1:59 And that is because we're tucking our stuff in around valuable content, 2:04 and that could mean anything for any company. 2:08 And I know that I'm going to go through these slides, 2:10 and you'll say, ThinkGeek's crazy, they can be funny and do that kind of stuff, 2:11 but I can't do that; we manufacture caskets. 2:14 You might get a pass on caskets, that's a little weird, 2:17 but at the same time, there's all kinds of valuable content 2:20 that you could use as a company to share with your fans. 2:22 And there's a few things to think about when you're talking about valuable content. 2:26 First is timeliness; you want it to be in the moment, 2:29 part of the conversation, useful in that time. 2:31 If it's a day late, you might not have needed to post it at all. 2:34 Informative, something that people get some information from, 2:38 something that they can use later. 2:42 Or just useful in the sense that it's good to share socially. 2:44 If we share something that's fun, they'll want to share it with their friends, 2:47 so it's useful in another sense other than just getting some information. 2:50 And you can also be entertaining, which is huge, 2:55 and luckily for us, I can get away with that a lot. 2:57 Not everyone can, but when you can use humor, it shows you have 2:59 a human presence behind a brand or behind a company. 3:02 I'll show you some examples of what I'm talking about here. 3:07 When the Iron Man movie came out this summer, 3:09 we released a new shirt called the LED Arc Reactor Iron Man shirt, 3:12 and the arc reactor lights up in the chest, 3:16 but instead of talking about that all the time, 3:18 we showed things the fans had made, like this arc reactor lamp, 3:20 which got 500 plusses on Google+. 3:23 And instead of talking about our Build-On Brick mug, 3:26 which is great because we love Lego, 3:28 we'll talk about Lego all the time instead. 3:30 And this is a Facebook post that has gotten the most reach to date 3:32 for us, and it is of a Lego spill in West Virginia on a highway. 3:36 And instead of talking about our iPhone gadgets like the iCade, 3:42 we'll talk about timely and, in this case, very sad, news 3:45 but it is our most retweeted tweet to date, 3:48 and I managed to tweet this about 3 minutes after the news broke. 3:50 It's the kind of thing you wouldn't want to tweet the day after. 3:53 So timeliness is very important. 3:56 In between these kinds of posts, we'll post about our products, 4:00 things that harken back to the content we were sharing before 4:03 about the fandoms, and in this case, we launched some 4:06 Star Wars family car decals, much like the little 4:10 kids drawn on the back of a van, 4:12 these are Star Wars characters, and we posted on all our 4:14 social networks, but our Facebook posted the best. 4:17 And this particular post alone accounted for 36% of product views 4:21 and 41% of revenue of that product in the first 24 hours after launch. 4:25 And all of our social campaigns across all of our networks 4:28 accounted for 61% of product views and 48% of revenue. 4:31 You can also share small things like a quote. 4:36 We just launched this shirt with a Jane Austen quote, 4:39 which is a great quote, 4:41 people on Twitter love quotes, 4:43 shared as a quote with a link to the product, 4:44 and that one tweet accounted for 23% of product views 4:45 and 5% of revenue in the first 24 hours, which is a lot for Twitter. 4:51 We don't get as many conversions off Twitter as we do with Facebook. 4:54 Another Facebook post, this is a Grumpy Cat 4:58 Soft Kitty/Big Bang Theory mash-up shirt, 5:01 which got a lot of love on our Pinterest account, 5:04 so we shared it on Facebook. 5:06 That post alone accounted for 40% of product views 5:08 and 36% of revenue in the first 24 hours. 5:12 So, what we're doing seems to be working. 5:15 We're meeting our bottom-line goals. 5:17 Being a retailer, we need to sell things. 5:19 But we're also keeping engagement very high, 5:21 and we know that because we track a lot of metrics. 5:23 There's a couple of levels to metrics of course 5:26 and the first that people think about are follower counts, 5:29 which is pretty crappy and really doesn't give you the whole picture, 5:31 and it doesn't really matter if you have a trillion followers 5:34 on Facebook if nobody is actually looking at your content 5:36 and clicking on it and converting on your site. 5:39 But it is a good barometer to know if you're doing things 5:41 really wrong or really good week to week. 5:43 You can look at a follower count and see if you're growing your accounts 5:45 at a normal rate or if you've done something 5:48 really terribly wrong, so that's fine. 5:50 Where things get interesting is when you start talking about 5:53 engagement rates, and there's a couple of different levels to 5:55 engagement rates, but the first is the kind that shows 5:57 that people are paying attention at least, and those would be 5:59 mentions, comments, replies, clicks, and image views, 6:02 so they're there and they're engaging with your content, 6:05 they're paying attention, and they might be there again next week 6:07 when you need to share something that you'd rather 6:09 make some money from. 6:11 Then there's a second part of engagement, 6:14 and that's when you get into customer acquisition. 6:16 That's when they share your content with their friends. 6:18 That's much better than you sharing it with just your network obviously, 6:20 and those are retweets, favorites, likes, shares, plusses, and repins, 6:24 and this is where you want to focus your time. 6:27 You want to make sure that people are sharing your content 6:30 because then you get into conversion and revenue, 6:33 which, as a retailer, is very important to us, 6:36 and we do that by tracking code and domain tracking. 6:38 We shorten all of our links that we share on our social networks 6:40 and we use tracking codes at the end of each for each network, 6:44 so Google+, Pinterest, Twitter, and Facebook 6:46 each have their own tracking code, 6:48 so we can see exactly where people are coming from. 6:50 You can also track by domain to get a broader picture. 6:52 Now I'm going to say that engagement rates are the most important 6:56 to follow because that brings you at least down the funnel 6:59 towards conversion and trust and all the other good branding stuff, 7:02 but of course conversion and revenue are important. 7:05 And there's also some other metrics that are a little softer 7:08 that I focus on as well because even if you aren't 7:12 getting a ton of money every day, 7:15 you can at least say you've got these softer social ROI points, 7:17 like branding. 7:20 Social is a great place to tell your company's story. 7:22 It's timely, it's in the moment, you can talk directly to your customer, 7:24 which can be very hard to do, you can be accessible, 7:28 you can share pictures from your company headquarters, 7:30 you can share events; it builds the picture of your company out. 7:33 And that's really important for customer loyalty. 7:36 When you need to give your customer a reason to shop on your site 7:39 when your shipping is a little more expensive, like ours, 7:42 than Amazon, you need to have a likeable presence 7:44 and a reason for people to come back. 7:47 And social can also give you that top-of-mind presence as well, 7:49 so that as you're shopping for something about Iron Man, 7:52 they'll know that ThinkGeek is out there. 7:54 Social can also influence customer evangelism and recruitment. 7:58 For us, we have such dedicated fans and such a core customer group, 8:01 that if something goes wrong on a blog 8:05 or someone has trouble with a product, 8:06 they'll often jump into our comments or into blog comments 8:08 on another site for us and help to resolve the issue, 8:11 either to say, "don't worry, ThinkGeek will take care of this, 8:13 they've done it for me before," or they'll even just let us know 8:15 that's something's going wrong, so we'll see tweets 8:18 or be emailed about things before we knew that they were happening. 8:20 And that way, you can have like a customer service Ninja army out there 8:24 that's taking care of things for you and letting you know, 8:27 and that's invaluable. 8:29 You can also use customer feedback from social, 8:32 which seems kind of normal, 8:34 but a lot of companies don't seem to pay attention 8:37 to what some of their fans are telling them, 8:38 and for us, if we see a lot of questions pop up on a certain product, 8:40 over and over again, we know that the product page, 8:43 for example, isn't doing its job in selling the product 8:45 and answering the questions they have 8:47 at the point where they want to make the purchase. 8:49 So, instead of answering all the questions on social, 8:51 we'll go and fix the product page. 8:53 And with great metrics comes great responsibility, 8:57 and that's testing. 9:00 You should always be testing and tweaking and trying new things 9:02 because social networks, much like Google or any kind of 9:04 search algorithm, is always changing, Facebook especially. 9:07 A few things you could test right away: 9:10 Frequency; we've tested frequency over the years and found that, 9:12 for us, we can usually tweet between 4 and 7 times a day, 9:16 and that's a good mix for us, but never more than once an hour. 9:20 Facebook and Google will tolerate us for 3 times a day, 9:22 morning, noon, and evening. 9:25 And Pinterest we can throw stuff at all day long. 9:27 They don't complain. So we keep doing that. 9:29 You can also talk about the best time of day 9:32 because social, when you tweet, that tweet might not last 9:34 but maybe for half an hour. 9:38 We see our clicks drop off almost immediately, 9:40 so those clicks on a link are peaking at 5 minutes 9:42 and they drop off steeply until the tweet's almost dead 9:46 half an hour or an hour later, unless it does amazingly well, 9:48 and then it could stick around for the whole day. 9:51 So for us, our inbound tweets peak 9:54 between 12 noon and 1 p.m. every day. 9:55 That's when our followers are around and using Twitter, 9:57 so we try to back up our posts or our tweets to be 10:00 the most important ones around noon. 10:02 Here's a graph of our twitter mentions by hour, 10:05 and the white dots are where we post right now, when we tweet. 10:07 So around 10:00, noon, 1:00 p.m., 3:00, and again in the evening. 10:11 So we're meeting those peaks when people are actually paying attention. 10:15 You should also tailor your content to the time of day. 10:19 You can think about the morning being a little bit rushed; 10:22 people might not want to spend a lot of time reading an article, 10:24 but something pithy and about the day's events 10:26 would be very useful at that time, and then maybe in the afternoon, 10:29 you can post a longer form article 10:32 when they have a little more time to read. 10:34 I should say this should all come with a grain of salt 10:37 because every network is different and every customer is different. 10:39 One study says that 5:00 p.m. Eastern is the best time for retweets, 10:42 but for us, it's between 10:00 a.m. and 1:00 p.m. 10:45 And it's also very different depending on the network. 10:48 This is our Facebook post reach by hour, 10:51 and you can see that it's a little bit inverted from Twitter 10:53 where things really heat up in the evening. 10:55 We still post at 10:00 and noon in the day 10:57 because we see those get pretty good traction, 11:01 but that evening post is the really important one. 11:03 You can see there's a peak at 4:00 p.m. as well, 11:05 when we're not posting right now, 11:07 but it's something we should be considering. 11:09 It's a little bit of outlier data because we don't usually post at that time. 11:11 But it is something we should be looking into. 11:14 You can also think about the best day of the week, 11:18 which brings up the question, should I be posting on the weekend? 11:20 Great question, and it really depends on what your goals are. 11:23 For us, on Twitter, Saturday and Sunday have a steep drop off 11:26 in activity on our accounts, so posting on a weekend 11:29 might not be necessary, unless it's of course 11:32 Game of Thrones, season premiere, yes, of course 11:36 we will tweet that on a Sunday. 11:38 Facebook, on the other hand, Saturday and Sunday are a bit stronger, 11:40 so we could post on Saturday and Sunday. 11:43 You could even queue up posts to post in advance, 11:46 but there's risk in that. 11:49 With any queued up post that you might have, 11:52 the day's events might change the tone 11:54 or the way a post would be received, 11:56 and there's plenty of examples of mistakes being made there. 11:58 If you Google "social media fails," there's plenty, 12:01 so I would say be careful with that. 12:04 And the way that we approach social at ThinkGeek 12:07 is very customer oriented, so when we post something on Facebook 12:09 or Twitter, we're watching immediately to make sure 12:12 that there's no mistakes in what we posted, 12:14 or people aren't trying to kill each other in Facebook comments, 12:16 so we'll take care of those things immediately, and if we auto-posted 12:19 it on Saturday or Sunday, we would not have that kind of control. 12:22 So, it depends on what your goals are. 12:25 The reason I bring up Facebook so much, especially with engagement, 12:29 is because, unlike Twitter and Google+ and Pinterest, 12:31 which are pretty egalitarian and will show your content 12:34 to just about everybody all the time, Facebook, much like Google, 12:36 is trying to decide what they think your followers want to see, 12:39 which is to say, a lot of your followers probably aren't seeing 12:42 what you're posting on Facebook. 12:45 And that has to do with Facebook's edge rank. 12:48 It's an algorithm that determines what people see, 12:50 and there's a few different parts. 12:52 The first is affinity; that's Facebook trying to decide 12:54 if a Facebook post—or Facebook user—prefers a text only post 12:56 versus image or video or link. 13:00 So if your customer has clicked on a text only post in the past, 13:03 they might be less likely to see an image only post 13:08 that you post in the future. 13:10 So mixing things up is good, so that you can get to everybody, 13:12 but also be aware that people are being segregated by Facebook. 13:14 Edge rank also takes weight into account, and that's what 13:20 the value they're assigning to comments and types of posts, 13:23 so comments have a different value than likes. 13:26 I've seen posts that have a lot of comments get more reach 13:29 than a post that has more likes, and that's all depending 13:31 on how Facebook is deciding how to weigh those, 13:34 and that could always change as well. 13:36 There's also time decay or velocity. 13:38 This is how fast it's accruing those likes and the comments 13:41 and the engagement, and the faster a post is getting that kind of data, 13:43 the more likely Facebook is to share it out with your other followers. 13:46 So if you see a post die out in the first half hour, 13:50 it's probably because it wasn't getting enough traction right away, 13:53 which is another reason to really think about what time of day 13:55 you're posting so you're not doing—you're not posting 13:57 when no one's there. 13:59 There's also of course a bit of black magic involved in this, 14:00 which is to say we don't know when it's going to change, 14:03 how it's going to change, or what might happen with it in the future. 14:05 There was a great example of this last year, in February 2012. 14:09 They stated publicly that only 16% of a page's fans see their posts, 14:13 which is pretty scary; that's a lot of content that's not getting any views. 14:16 Then in September 2012, they began under-reporting reach 14:20 with a new bug, so you didn't even know that your reach 14:23 was being hit by this, and they didn't tell us until February 2013, 14:26 this year, that it was even happening. 14:30 And that's when they announced the bug fix, 14:32 and reported reach shot up about 31% per fan on average, 14:34 while ours tripled. 14:37 And I'll show you our reach before and after, so that first white dot 14:40 is when it started and then the second is when it got fixed. 14:43 So you can see, there's a very deep trough there, 14:46 and while we knew it was going on, it's still unclear to us 14:48 if it was actually reaching that many people in that time or not, 14:51 but it is worth noting that Facebook was really pushing 14:54 the boost post option really strongly during this period. 14:56 Was it a bug? I don't know. [laughs] 15:00 You should also think about the best kind of content obviously, 15:03 the things that you're actually posting, as well. 15:06 There's a lot of things you can do to test here and try different things, 15:09 and always keep pushing with your audience. 15:12 The first is to think about the actual kind of content you're posting 15:17 and on what network. 15:19 Facebook, for a while, did not seem to prefer text-only posts, 15:21 but now they are enjoying a resurgence for us, 15:24 so if we have a funny thing to say that's text only, 15:27 we'll go ahead and post it. 15:30 A lot of the time, or most of the time, we'll post images. 15:31 Those do extremely well for us. 15:33 Link posts, where you just put a link in and it sticks in that little box, 15:35 does terrible for us, and Facebook is not handling video as well 15:39 as Google+ does now, so if we're sharing video, 15:43 it's usually on Google+ and not Facebook. 15:45 You should also think about the kind of services you're using, 15:49 so here we're using TwitPic on our Twitter account, 15:52 and it's the kind of picture service that pops right into the Twitter feed, 15:55 so people don't have to click in necessarily to see the content. 15:59 This does very well for us on retweets; they don't have to click in, 16:02 they see it already, they like it, and they share it. 16:05 It does much better than linking to like a blog post, 16:08 where they'd have to click to find the image, maybe even scroll down, 16:11 and then share it. 16:13 You can also tailor content to your social network 16:17 that is special just for you. 16:20 We do a thing called Today in Geek History every morning 16:21 on all of our networks. 16:23 We do it in the morning because it's new and has fresh content 16:25 they might not have heard already, 16:27 and we focus on some historic facts that are real, 16:29 like man walking on the moon, 16:33 and then also some fictional items, like Voldemort. 16:35 These do very well for us, and they account for 30% of our 16:37 top 100 retweeted tweets this year. 16:40 So we'll continue doing this. 16:42 Facebook is kind of a special place where they're changing things a lot, 16:45 but earlier this year, the only way to get your entire image shown 16:48 in a person's stream was to crop it as a square. 16:51 As a square, it was shown at full width and therefore 16:55 full height, because it's the same. 16:57 So, on our annoyed kitty shirt, there's this extra white space. 16:59 If you actually pulled the image down and looked at it, 17:03 it's like, why is there extra white space? 17:05 That's because it posted like this so you could see the whole thing, 17:07 and then you get the grumpy kitty punch line at the end of the shirt, 17:10 whereas, if you had done it normal, sleeve to sleeve, 17:12 the punch line is gone. 17:15 So just think about how people are actually seeing your stuff. 17:17 If you're working in a tool that silos you away from the actual stream 17:19 and how people actually use social media, 17:23 log into your accounts and actually use the tool 17:26 maybe in a native environment and see how things are looking for you. 17:29 Contests are lots of fun, and retailers know that people love free things, 17:33 [laughs] so there's lots of contests on social media by retailers, 17:37 and we do a fair amount, too; we do a contest usually once a week, 17:40 but we have found that the weirder the contest, the better it does, 17:43 in terms of entries and excitement and retweets and shares 17:45 and all that good stuff. 17:48 So this particular contest was: 17:49 "how many T-shirts can you fit on an intern before 17:50 you can't get any more T-shirts on the intern?" [laughter] 17:52 The answer is 15; that's when it gets really uncomfortable 17:54 [laughs] and she can't raise her arms above her head any more 17:58 to get more shirts on. 18:00 This contest did very well despite the fact 18:01 that the prize was just the T-shirts 18:04 and a gift certificate of a smallish amount. 18:05 Which just goes to show, don't agonize over the kind of prizes 18:08 that you're sharing; make sure it's on brand and entertaining 18:11 or informative, but don't rely on iPads to give away. 18:14 Pinterest is our secret weapon in terms of content. 18:21 Because I said earlier we can post all the time, we really do, 18:25 and that includes products that we have on our web site 18:29 as well as things that we find all around the Internet. 18:31 So this is a blown out view of our Pinterest page. 18:33 I'll mark off the ones that are our products. 18:38 So everything that is not grayed out now, is stuff that isn't ThinkGeek's. 18:41 This is just stuff that we found around the Internet that we liked. 18:43 And when we're going through our day's posts and trying to figure out 18:46 what we're going to say for the day or in the next hour, 18:48 we'll take a look at our Pinterest board and see what's floated to the top, 18:51 what's gotten the most likes, what's doing really well? 18:53 And then we'll share that content out with our other networks 18:55 where frequency is more of an issue and 18:58 you really want to pick the best stuff. 19:00 There's also some things you can do that show a little bit of humanity, 19:04 that there's someone behind the count that's paying attention 19:07 and is aware of what's going on, just a few little things. 19:10 First is, you can link to the best part of a video clip 19:12 with URL pattern at the end. 19:15 This is super important; if the cat is going to fall off the couch, 19:17 you want to see the cat fall off the couch right away, 19:20 you don't want to wait 40 seconds for the cat to fall off the couch, 19:22 so just skip right to it. 19:24 You can do the same thing with content in a page. 19:26 People still use div ID's in their markup on web pages, 19:29 and you can link right to the best kind of content 19:34 with the anchor links that they provided for you. 19:36 And this can skip past stuff in the header; 19:39 ads and that kind of thing will get in the way normally. 19:41 Don't overdo hashtags. 19:45 Twitter's text is also triple; 19:47 you don't necessarily have to hashtag everything all the time. 19:49 It's just one of those things that some companies seem to do 19:52 that's not necessary. 19:54 You can also dress up your icons for special occasions. 19:56 [laughs] This is super cute because we have a monkey for a mascot. 19:58 So I have a set of icons that we've built for him over the years 20:03 that correspond to different holidays or events, 20:06 so on Halloween, we'll change up his icon every hour or so 20:09 on our networks and people get really excited to see 20:11 what Timmy is coming out next. 20:13 It's just a little investment that shows that you're paying attention. 20:15 You can also set up offline events and share online. 20:21 This can be a little difficult depending on how much time you have, 20:23 but we've made an effort to host events in our local 20:25 Fairfax, Virginia, area and also when we go to Cons. 20:28 and to share photos and video and news from those events 20:31 with all of our social networks so people can see us in the flesh, 20:34 that we're actually people and that we like interacting with our customers 20:37 and we have a lot of fun when we do. 20:40 That's when we take Timmy to Cons. 20:43 Timmy has a set of about 200 costumes that are made by fans. 20:45 Not by me, that would be crazy, but they're made by fans, 20:49 and they're excellent, so at Cons, we'll go and meet with Timmy fans 20:51 who are often wearing the same costumes. 20:56 These are two little links here at PAX East earlier this year. 20:58 We host a geek trivia night in town 21:02 about every other month right now. 21:04 We'll do pie eating contests, bacon eating contests, 21:06 and then geek trivia. 21:09 Great photographs, it's a lot of fun, it's just 100 people in the room, 21:11 but we share it with our fans so they can see what we're up to. 21:14 This was from Comic-Con last year. 21:16 These were our stalkers that met us every day, 21:19 and I expect to see them next week, 21:21 and I'll have another Timmy for them. 21:23 You can also go to newsworthy events. 21:26 For us, ThinkGeek is very geeky obviously, 21:28 so NASA and space are very big to us. 21:31 And Udvar-Hazy, the Air and Space Museum, 21:33 is right down the road from us and Discovery— 21:35 the shuttle Discovery—and Enterprise were in town 21:37 to meet for the first and last time 21:40 before Discovery was housed permanently at Udvar-Hazy, 21:42 and we were able to get this great photo because we were there. 21:45 It was an awesome experience. 21:47 And that's where we met Ama, who, embarrassingly, 21:50 was wearing the exact same thing as Timmy that day 21:52 because they both want to go to space. 21:54 You can also love your community meaningfully online, 21:58 not just in person. 22:01 This is a lot of fun; I love this story. 22:02 We interviewed for social media interns last fall, 22:05 and the first half of the interview was very straightforward, 22:09 you know, on the table, we were talking, 22:12 and then the second half was giving them a laptop, 22:15 a new ThinkGeek account we called ThinkGeek nOOb, 22:17 and then having our social media people 22:20 hammer them with questions. 22:22 So our fans ask them questions as part of the interview, 22:23 and we got to watch them respond, 22:25 the questions they chose to answer, 22:27 how they handled things, 22:29 were they fast, was their grammar good, 22:31 how was their spelling—it was all so hilarious. 22:33 And our customers got a big kick out of this 22:35 because obviously they were talking to the person 22:37 that they were going to talk to online, 22:39 so they were really part of the interview process, 22:41 and they asked some really funny questions as well. 22:43 And that intern by the way was hired. 22:45 Her name is Lilly; she's working right now while I'm up here. 22:47 So if you want to say hi to her, that would be awesome; she likes that. 22:50 One last thing: Knows the news before you post. 22:54 This is kind of huge, but not everybody who mans a 22:56 social media account actually pays attention to the day's news. 23:00 As I mentioned before, there's been some social media fails 23:02 out there, and I won't go into detail unless you would like 23:05 to ask some questions later, but there's plenty of those instances 23:07 where people have queued up a post that made sense 23:09 the day before, and then in light of the new day's events, 23:12 it seems a little callous or ill-advised. 23:15 So know the news before you open your mouth, and be aware, 23:19 if you have posts in queue that you might need to change them later. 23:21 One final point is to ask how you're doing. 23:26 This is so small but so important to customers, 23:29 and we did this recently, 23:31 and the overwhelming response was, 23:33 "You're doing it right because you're asking if you're doing it right," 23:34 one, and we got some other really savvy comments. 23:37 Here, we made Christian smile a lot, which is great. 23:42 This is the response we got a lot. 23:44 We get to use humor, so that's good, and I appreciate 23:45 that we're doing our entertainment job well. 23:49 We're also useful in the sense that we provide some of the 23:52 best things that Jeff has forwarded. 23:54 And people love seeing our products, which is good 24:00 because we're retailers, so that's exactly why we're here, 24:02 but we're not doing it too much; we don't only share our products. 24:05 So we share links in the spirit of our products. 24:09 This is a kind of savvy comment—they know what we're doing. 24:12 My favorite comment of all is that we're a "Real, cohesive, active entity 24:16 who engages with your audience like a buddy, not a company," 24:20 which is huge, that's enormous. 24:22 This whole quote is great if you can read the entire post. 24:24 But the second part is, "A geeky cool person we can totally relate to 24:26 who happens to have super cool stuff to sell." 24:30 That's perfect! That's the exact thing I want to hear. 24:32 They know what we're doing, and they don't mind! [laughs] 24:35 That's amazing! 24:38 So, as long as we can continue to provide that kind of service 24:39 to our customers and drive those engagement rates with 24:41 the kind of content we're sharing, 24:44 ThinkGeek social will continue to grow. 24:46 As you can see, we've grown pretty rapidly over the years 24:49 for a smallish company. 24:51 And, no, I'm not an SEO, and I don't know too much 24:53 about a lot of what's been said this week. [laughs] 24:56 I've really enjoyed hearing about the changes 24:59 that are happening in this world right now, 25:01 and even though Google is taking away a lot of the transparency 25:04 and some of the short term strategies that you could use 25:06 with "not provided," it seems that the long term goal is good content, 25:09 so that you have something to share, 25:13 and people want to find your stuff, 25:15 and Google will help them find it. Thank you. [applause] 25:17 [male interview] You may not be an SEO, but that was awesome. 25:26 [she] Thank you. 25:29 [male interviewer] Tons of weird questions in my head, 25:30 but one thing I want to ask you, you start off with these slides 25:32 showing the revenue and page views generated from these 25:34 tweets and shares, but it seems like the majority of what you do 25:38 is not that—it's just adding value to the community. 25:43 How—we all face this conflict—how do you balance those two? 25:45 [she] I think a lot of it comes from management agreeing 25:49 to let this experiment happen, 25:56 because it really is an experiment to start. 25:57 Even if you are—you have a solid plan, you don't really know 25:59 what's going to happen when you start doing this, 26:03 and if you don't have a lot of followers, it's hard to say, 26:04 "Look! We got two orders last week from Twitter." [laughs] 26:06 But it builds over time and as that brand equity grows as well, 26:11 you have a little more to talk about there. 26:14 But for us, our customer is so important to us, 26:17 and if customer is not central to your mission, 26:19 then it's a little harder sell, it is. 26:23 [male interviewer] Yeah, it seems like when you do it right, though, 26:26 you don't need Google any more. 26:27 [she] Right. Right. You just provide what they want. 26:29 [male interviewer] Yes. 26:32 [male questioner] Is each post that you make on the platforms 26:33 unique, I mean, can you post it on Twitter and then do the 26:38 same exact post on Facebook? 26:42 [she] Pretty close; we do do some overlap there, 26:45 so some things will change like the way that the image is cropped, 26:48 we can do some funkier stuff with Google+ because it 26:53 respects image size a little better than Facebook might, 26:55 and you might format things to be a little shorter for Twitter, 26:58 obviously because it's Twitter, 27:00 but if we're sharing the same kind of content on all of 27:02 our networks, we try to stagger it, so we'll do one Twitter 27:04 in the morning, one on Facebook in the afternoon, 27:06 and one on Google+ in the evening. 27:08 So assuming if somebody follows us everywhere, 27:09 they at least don't see it all at the same time. 27:12 [male questioner] Okay, real quick, software? 27:14 Do you use any particular software? 27:15 [she] I use the Internet. [laughter] What do you use? [laughs] 27:17 Tools are great, tools can be important, but what we do here— 27:22 the ROI is really high, too, I should mention because 27:26 there's two of us doing this and 27:29 we don't spend a ton of money on tools. 27:30 I mean, what you see is really what you get there, 27:31 and it's not about the tools, it's about the content. 27:34 [male questioner] By software, I meant, like Internet, like... 27:36 [she] Chrome. [laughter] 27:38 [male questioner] I mean, you just go directly to the sites 27:41 and not some sort of platform online? 27:43 [she] Right. Yeah. No, we do it the old-fashioned way. The cheap way. 27:45 [male questioner] Hey, I love ThinkGeek. I have a question about mascots. 27:48 So, I am, I guess jealous, of companies that have mascots, 27:54 I think, Roger works great for Moz because 27:59 tone of voice and all that kind of stuff. 28:03 We don't currently have a mascot at Distilled, 28:05 so I guess I have kind of a two-part question: 28:07 What would you do if you didn't have a mascot, how would you do 28:10 that tone of voice, do you just do it with the brand, 28:14 or do you make it a person? How do you go about that? 28:17 Or, would you just say, you need a mascot? 28:19 [Carrie] Oh, that's tough; if it's a person, you would build up 28:23 that person's equity, and if they left the company, that's tough. 28:28 Even if it's a founder, if it's somebody, I mean, 20 years from now, you don't know. 28:31 For us, Timmy's easy; he's a code monkey, right? 28:35 He's a code monkey, so it's central to our voice, and our mission, 28:39 and our customer, so that makes it simple. 28:42 I wouldn't say you always need a mascot, 28:44 but it really helps to have that smiling face there 28:46 when someone has a customer service issue, 28:49 that smiling monkey face coming back and saying, 28:51 "I can help you," is really important in a way that— 28:53 that's just psychology, right? 28:56 So, I would say mascots are great, do it, 28:58 but don't stress over it too much. 29:02 [male questioner] Yeah. It just feels like, we keep talking about it. 29:04 We keep coming back to it, and it just feels like we'd be 29:07 forcing it somehow, so if anybody has any great ideas 29:09 of what Distilled's mascot should be, let me know. 29:11 [male interviewer] We'll have to cut the questions off there, 29:14 but I want to go—you have some special news 29:16 going on in your life—today. 29:19 [Carrie] Yeah! I'm moving to Seattle today—wooo! [applause] 29:23 And the weather's beautiful for the next month. 29:28 My husband got a job at Google, 29:31 and I'm going to tell him to get right on that "not provided" thing. 29:33 [laughter] So we're moving to Freemont. 29:36 So if anybody has any ideas on what I should be doing in Seattle 29:38 and where the best tacos are, let me know. 29:41 [male interviewer] And are you staying with ThinkGeek? 29:44 [Carrie] I'm not, no. Yeah. 29:45 [male interviewer] So you're actually looking for the next opportunity in your life right now. 29:47 [Carrie] That's right. 29:50 [male interviewer] As of today. 29:51 [Carrie] I need a new mascot. 29:51 [male interviewer] Yeah. Carrie Gouldin, everbody, thank you![applause] 29:52