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Scarcity -> Social Media Influence in Racing
As you might already know, this month I’m participating in the 2013 Social Media Success Summit. Going forward, I’ll be sharing my thoughts on how to apply what’s presented in the seminars to racing social media.
Not surprisingly, the opening sessions of the Summit started out with social media theory and building influence. This is somewhat unsatisfying for those of us who like tools (duh) but these topics are the most important blocks of the foundation for your social media house. Or garage. If we’re talking about what’s important.
Without a strategy on how to build influence, you’re just shooting in the dark with your efforts. And you know most of us don’t have time for that.
If you’re trying to build a real racing program, with sponsorship and loyal fans, you have to figure out how to build influence. And since we don’t race every day, one of the most effective ways to do that is online.
So here’s the deal with influence: the things that might make you powerful offline don’t apply to social media. This includes power that comes from an organization, hierarchy or job title. Maybe you’ve made it to manager at your company. The Internet doesn’t care. Maybe you’ve got a diploma from a great college. Internet also doesn’t care. Maybe you’ve got lots of money. Unless you’re rolling around in it on YouTube a la Uncle Scrooge McDuck, the Internet (mostly) still won’t care.
The Internet hates real-world rules. And that’s a great opportunity for racers.
One of the best presentations of the week so far was Mark Schaefer’s seminar on How to Grow Your Social Media Influence. In it, he talks about one of the things that I think racers can really use to their advantage: Scarcity.
Schaefer argues that we can apply Robert Cialdini’s Six Principles of Influence (below) to gain influence in the online world:
- Scarcity
- Likability
- Reciprocity
- Authority
- Consistency
- Social Proof
As I said, my favorite principle for racers is scarcity.
First, let’s talk about what it means. In the offline world, people become powerful in theory because they control scarce goods – oil, water, or other resources. So what’s a scarce good on the Internet? Something that stands out when everything looks the same.
We have that unique ability with racing. We have access to things that most people don’t – scarce information, events and opportunities.
Schaefer asks us to finish this sentence: “Only we___.” The blank is what sets you apart from the crowd. It should be so specific that it sets you apart just from other people but from other racers. All of the other racers, in fact.
“Only we – consistently make quick time at our local track.”
“Only we – take our racecar to church events in our community.”
“Only we – have a unique paint scheme that everyone recognizes.”
“Only we – run into every thing that does and doesn’t move on and off the track.”
See what I mean?
Get specific. Once you start answering that question, you can create content that reflects that.
If your ‘only we’ or ‘only I’ is your professionalism and how you treat your team like a business, down to the amazing charts and graphs you create, then show that off. Make sure your website and social media channels are extremely professional and have statistics and information that only you have access to.
If your ‘only we’ is having a hilarious driver who loves to perform, then have someone follow him around with a video camera and post them to your channels with a witty hashtag.
Your ‘only we’ is the reason that you already have fans – people recognize qualities in us or things that we do that sometimes even we don’t – and if they already like you, they want more of that ‘only we’ thing. So make the most of it. Plus, you’ll attract even more people that like that ‘only we.’ Those people will become interested, interact and eventually become a loyal fan if we treat them right.
So what’s your ‘only we’?
xoxo,
Kristin
P.S. My ‘only I’? Only I apply business sense to racing nonsense with practical, real-world advice – which is the tagline I’ll be debuting along with the rest of my website re-launch in a month. Super excited.
P.P.S. If you like this post, you might also like my post on why we race and why it matters.
Social Media Success Summit + Racing
Just a quick note to let you all know that I will be posting quite a bit about social media over the next few weeks, as I’m attending the 2013 Social Media Success Summit.
I often attend conferences and workshops to benefit both my own business and to help my consulting clients. It’s crucial to my business to be on the cutting edge of the public relations, marketing and social media industries so I can give them the best advice possible.
This one is especially worth the investment, as it’s broken out into multiple sessions over four weeks. This is not the first social media event I’ve attended, but it is the first month-long workshop I’ve taken part in and I’m looking forward to being able to take the content and digest it before moving on to the next sessions.
I’m hoping to share a number of insights from this social media conference on how it relates to racing, from motorsports sponsorship to fan marketing and public relations. I’ll be posting at least once a week on my takeaways from a variety of seminars, possibly more often if I’m able to balance the workload.
Below is a list of the nine sessions I’ll be attending just this week. If you have specific questions on any of the topics, you can email them to me or post them below and I’ll do my best to address them as I go through the material:
- KEYNOTE: Why You Need to Rethink Your Social Media Marketing – INSTRUCTOR: Jay Baer
- How to Improve Your Facebook Marketing: 7 Power Techniques – INSTRUCTOR: Mari Smith
- How to Use Twitter to Grow Your Traffic and Sales – INSTRUCTOR: Kim Garst
- How to Grow Your Social Media Influence – INSTRUCTOR: Mark Schaefer
- How to Simplify Your Social Media Marketing With Free Tools – INSTRUCTOR: Ian Cleary
- How to Build a Facebook Community in 10 Minutes a Day – INSTRUCTOR: Andrea Vahl
- How to Integrate Social Media Marketing With All of Your OnlineMarketing Efforts – INSTRUCTOR: Lee Odden
- How to Leverage SlideShare Marketing for More Exposure and Revenue – INSTRUCTOR: Todd Wheatland
- How to Succeed on Instragram: A Brand Panel – INSTRUCTORS: Stephanie Shkolnik with Kathleen Ngo (Sony) and Joe Paulding (E! Online)
Also, there’s still time to join the conference if you want in. There are 33 sessions over the course of four weeks, which makes the cost less than $20 per seminar. Can’t beat that.
Why do we race? (Gaga-fied.)
Silly question, I know. We race to win. Obviously.
It’s like asking why you go to a bar, right? Most people would say the answer is to drink.
But that’s only partially correct. It’s cheaper and easier to drink at home, where you don’t have to tip the bartender or find a taxi.
We drink in bars because we want to interact with people. We choose one bar over another because we want to be associated with the other types of people that chose that same bar.
We don’t drink in bars because we want to drink. We drink in bars for all of the other reasons.
The choices we make go beyond the obvious, logical, need-based reasons.
It’s easy, looking at racing from the outside, to assume why one races. There are so many apparent reasons. But at the core of it all, we could achieve the same things with other activities that didn’t cost as much, weren’t as dangerous and didn’t require a heavy time commitment.
So why do we do it?
At the most basic level, drivers race to win.
But the desire to win comes from a different place in all of us.
For some, it’s for the applause (applause, applause ← there it is! The Lady Gaga moment. Don’t resist.) For others, it’s the look of pride on their father’s face. The victory lane pictures they can post on Facebook. The kids that ask for their autograph. The feeling of satisfaction when they’ve proven the voice in their head wrong.
The answer is different for everyone.
But why does it matter?
At the end of the day, we need to pay for it all. We need to be able to fund our reason to race. And that happens primarily through winnings and sponsors.
Knowing why you race is one of the first steps in knowing why someone would sponsor you. And knowing why they would sponsor you is one of the fundamental steps in knowing who you should approach and how.
So, why do you race?
xo.
Kristin
Just for Fun Friday: WoO Drivers Infographic
The title is pretty self-explanatory. Feel free to share wherever you’d like!
Change: It’s hard, scary, and totally worth it. Also: Donuts and Bacon
We’ve all heard the quote, “Insanity is doing the same thing, over and over again, but expecting different results.”
Unless you’ve been living under a rock, in which case point me in your direction. It sounds peaceful and me (and my bottle of wine) would love to shack up next door.
The quote, often misattributed to Albert Einstein, first appeared in a Narcotics Anonymous text in 1981.
How ironic that I’d be using advice given to addicts to discuss the state of the racing industry. NOT.
Aside from you under the rock, how many of us have heard racetracks complaining about how hard it is to fill seats? Not enough viewers for TV broadcasts? How many of us have complained that there aren’t enough sponsors in the sport?
Guess what? Nothing will ever change unless you try something new.
And the tough fact is that everything you try won’t work, so you’ll have to try lots of things before you succeed.
Sounds hard? It is. But the alternative is death. Or not racing. (Same?)
Here’s a useless fact about me: I avoid my own mailbox three days a week for fear of having to face a certain weekly publication.
Side rant: It should only be one day since it’s mailed on the same day every week, but it always arrives on a different day. Thanks, USPS, for not one but three days of mailbox-Russian-Roulette.
ANYWAY. This publication has always been a running joke in our house, and not because of its wit and bravado. It’s the offensive number of typos, misquotes, inaccuracies and errors that make it to print.
But lately, I haven’t found it so funny.
I used to just avoid the mailbox and pretend like I don’t see it on the counter when someone else – not naming names (CARL) – has the gall to bring it in.
This week, I was going through back issues and got downright incensed. And that’s when I realized; it’s not the typos that offend me so much.
It’s the fact that the content isn’t interesting enough to distract me from the typos.
That enrages me because there are AMAZING stories to be told in the racing community. We all have a passion that’s ignited by this sport, and if you can find a racer that doesn’t have an interesting history, opinion, or thought to share, I will give you a unicorn.
Or something like that.
I just can’t handle the complaining about subscriber numbers dropping when I’m reading a newspaper full of press releases and results. WHO CARES WHO WON A RACE FIVE DAYS AGO?!
If I actually cared about who won that race (or what the track’s PR person officially thought about it), I would have gotten on the interwebs the next day to read all about it. If I didn’t have the Internet, I would be a dying market, first of all, and second I would pick up my rotary phone and call a friend who knew a guy who has the Internet.
You don’t have to drop the results all together. But put that $h*t in the back and tell me a story I can’t read anywhere else.
It’s that simple.
We all know how to lose weight: put down the donut. If you love donuts so much that you can’t bear to part with them, cut out the pasta. Love pasta, too? Get on the treadmill. (See where I’m going here?)
If you want to lose weight, you will keep trying different ways to do it until you find what works. The same goes with everything else in life.
At the end of the day, I will continue to pay this publication to enrage me every week because I think it’s important to support those who promote racing even if I don’t agree with how they do it. I will also let them know when they’re wrong – okay, not every time but when I find the self-control to edit the f-bombs out – and hope that they will change. In which case, I will call them up and say, “You, you terrible proofreaders, YOU WIN! I will now run to my mailbox every week to read your meaningful stories. Let’s get married.”
Want your stuff to change?
Try something different. (Repeat.)
It’s hard, scary and totally worth it. And it’s your only option if you want to succeed.
Cheers to that.
xo.
Kristin
P.S. If you do decide to put down the donuts, you have my permission to throw them away. HOWEVER, if you decide to give up bacon and you don’t call me to relieve you of your stash, we will never be friends. Kidding. (NOT.)
P.P.S. Just for fun:
Example: Resign or Re-Sign? Big difference. HUGE.
The September Effect: Marketing Budgets and Sponsorship
It’s disheartening but appropriate that when I started the work week in Pennsylvania the temperature was about 10 degrees cooler than over Labor Day weekend, when it still seemed like summer. My calendar isn’t the only one saying it’s nearly fall.
Although I don’t head back to the same kind of office I used to, September brings out the same kind of joy and panic I experienced in my ad agency days. It’s a month full of both reflection on past accomplishments and shortfalls, and opportunities for new growth.
Why? The month of September is often when companies start setting budgets for the next year.
September: You’ve got some ‘splainin’ to do. Photo Credit: WikiMedia Commons
Seems crazy, right? But it takes a freaking long time for companies to review the last year’s marketing objectives, decide what worked and what didn’t, and roughly hash out what the company plans to do in the future. All of that weighs in on the projected budget.
For many companies, September marks the beginning of the end of the year. At this point, you’ve got two months before the holidays hit and employees begin a downward, tryptophan-induced spiral of elf-yourself videos during conference calls, snooze-button-influenced outfits (and attitudes) and vacation days.
You’ve got to get to workin’ in while the work is still good.
Plus, with media deadlines set months in advance, the media buy calendars are already being turned to December or January. Since you buy ad space in chunks, sometimes guaranteeing a minimum ad spend for the entire year, September is the time that you need start finding a clear vision for the next calendar year.
If you’re not already connecting the dots for how this affects racers, let me do it for you: September is the beginning of the make-it-or-break-it time for racing sponsorship and marketing.
If a company doesn’t at least pencil in racing sponsorship before the budget is set and approved, there’s a small chance they’ll re-assess in January or February of next year. It goes without saying at this point that if you’re planning on racing in 2014, you need to be connecting with companies that are looking to spend money in 2014 right now.
So what are three things you can do this week to get your 2014 sponsorship program off the ground?
- Define your unique selling proposition: what makes you different as a racer? What type of audience does your team interact best with?
- Make a list of industries that would want to appeal to that audience, and then break that list out into a few companies within each industry.
- Do some light research on each company and start connecting with them on social media.
- In no time, you’ll have a feel for how they communicate with their audience, who they believe that audience is, and if they might be the right fit for you and your fans. Only then you can start the process of opening up a marketing conversation with them.
What else are you doing to ready yourself for 2014 sponsorship pitches? Post your own action items or questions below and I’d be happy to respond!
xo.
Kristin
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