A perfect blend of animation, Willie Nelson, a great Coldplay song, and Chipotle’s message. I loved it when I first saw it and heard it. It’s great because, as the description says, it’s more than a commercial, it’s a short film. So Chipotle is already a social media success just for posting that viral video.

That being said, this morning I tweeted this brilliantly clever quip from my twitter account:

If this was the first thing to come on my computer in the morning, I would eat at @ChipotleTweets every day: ow.ly/9cg97

I thought I was being pretty clever. However, within minutes of tweeting this, I got this response back from Chipotle:

@alecteefer I will work on that with my IT guys -Rusty

Game, Set, Match Chipotle. How awesome is that? I didn’t ask for a fast response, but I got one — and a clever one at that. In ten words, Chipotle was able to say to me, “We appreciate your business, we’re not a stuffy corporation, and what you think about us is important.”

I’m a Chipotle fan for life. That’s an effective Social Media strategy.

“But Alec!” you scream. “We’re a small and/or medium sized business! We can’t afford an extensive team of social media experts to patrol the interwebs, responding to every tweet that comes our way!!” I know, I know.

You don’t have to have all that.

Southwest Airlines’s success with social media has been well documented. As I wrote on the Acumen Web Solutions’s blog, Southwest’s social media team is only five people. Five.

Now I don’t know what kind of social media staff Chipotle employs, but it doesn’t take much. Do you have twenty minutes a day, ten in the morning and ten in the evening? Maybe you won’t have an immediate response, but within a few hours is pretty impressive.

Do you have a smart phone? There are tons of apps that will notify you when you have an incoming tweet, and will allow you to respond directly from your phone.

Do you have a teenage employee who wants to be on Twitter and Facebook anyway? Now you can make that wasted time into something productive. “But what if the teenage employee says something bad?” Well, don’t give a bad teenager a job in the first place. If you empower an employee to do something they enjoy, you’ll get results you never expected.

All I’m trying to say is an amazing, timely social media strategy is not impossible, even for a small business. And the results are priceless.

Like I said, I am a Chipotle fan and customer for life. And I’m writing about them now.

Full Disclosure: I am not a Chipotle employee and I am not being given any promotional consideration for writing about them. I am just blown away by everything they do, and this morning’s social media experience made me want to give them some public love. However, if they want to send me free burritos, I will gladly accept them.

He was warned that releasing the project this way made it a huge piracy risk. The result? He’s made over a million dollars in downloads so far.

I’ve seen quite a few blog posts about the lessons to be learned from this, but a few things jump out at me, both for marketers and content creators:

1. Build an audience. A lot of media commentary has been focused on the fact that he’s not a huge star, a la Jerry Seinfeld or Ray Romano. His cable show gets very modest ratings. However, while he’s not a huge star, and his cable show isn’t a hit, it still gets over a million viewers every week. And he has over 900,000 followers on Twitter. No, not a superstar, but enough to get 200,000 people to pay five bucks. Before you make your independent album or film and expect to sell a million dollars worth, remember that you have to have an audience.
2. Be honest with your audience. Louis C.K. knew the risks in making his product available for download, so he simply leveled with his audience. He told them he put up his own money, and asked them to support him by not pirating. He was upfront about what he spent to make the show, and told them he wanted it to be accessible to his fans. His audience appreciated it, and rewarded him with their purchases.
3. People will pay for your product. I think part of what makes piracy justifiable in many people’s minds is that they feel like they are taking from a large corporation that won’t miss their few bucks. However, when confronted with an honest approach and a price-point that is fair, people were more than willing to drop five bucks for some entertainment. You don’t have to give it away. You just have to be honest and fair.

I really hope we’ll start seeing more success stories like this.

It’s that time of year again. We’ll get a month of Weight Watchers and Jenny Craig commercials, and then it’s back to business as usual. Let’s face it, New Year’s Resolutions are a joke. It’s a nice exercise we undertake to help us not be overwhelmed by a combination of post-holiday family departures, reflection on the disappointments of the past year, and the winter blues. I’ve been very hesitant to make resolutions in years past because of this.

Why do resolutions fail? Because the cliche is very true: old habits die hard. Very, very hard. 90% of patients who have had a life-threatening heart issue will not make simple changes to their lifestyle that could save their life, even though they have full knowledge that they are in mortal danger (Change or Die, fastcompany.com). If 9 out of 10 people staring down the barrel of a cocked gun won’t change, then how can I expect I’ll “watch less tv”?

However, it’s not impossible, and I think this year could be different. I think the key to any real lifestyle change is to get away from bad habits while adopting new, good habits. But old habits die hard. Why is that? I believe it’s because most people employ a “cold turkey” approach to quitting old and adopting new, and it just doesn’t work. 9 out of 10 heart patients can tell you that. When you are focused totally on the result – lose weight, stop cussing, write a book, blog more, etc – you have no way of gauging success outside of your lofty goals. When your old habits don’t die cold turkey, you quickly fall short of the lofty goal. Disappointment reigns, the lofty goal dies, and you cancel your gym membership February 1st.

So, stop chasing results, and embrace the process. What do I mean by process?

On January 9th, Nick Saban will lead the Alabama Crimson Tide as they play for the BCS National Championship. Saban already has a championship with Alabama, as well as a championship with LSU. He has two BCS National Championships from two different schools, and is about to play for a third. This is unprecedented. Really, really amazing. How does he do it? It’s all about the process.

I’m not result-oriented. I’m more process-oriented. So every day, I’m thinking about what we have to do to continue to get better. Once you accomplish one thing, you’ve got to get to the next one. Was (beating) Florida the end or the beginning? Was the U.S. hockey team beating Russia (in the 1980 Winter Olympics) the end or the beginning? It was the beginning for those guys; they had to beat Finland to go on and win the gold medal. It keeps growing, and you’ve got to stay focused on the process and not necessarily the outcome. — Nick Saban, The Process of Winning, leadershipsimplified.com

Where a results-oriented approach is focused on outcomes, a process-oriented is focused on the steps need to reach an outcome. Without the right process, you won’t get the right results. Without good habits, you won’t reach lofty goals.

So your lofty goal is to lose weight. First things first, forget that your goal is to lose weight. Now, focus on the process. How do you do that?

1. Identify the bad habits. Do you visit the candy machine during the day? Do you lie on the couch and watch TV all evening, instead of doing something more active? Do you not go to the gym because you stay up too late, making it harder to get up in the morning? Do you have too many second helpings at supper?
2. Identify good habits that could replace the bad habits. Take an apple to work with you for those afternoon cravings, replace TV time with a walk around the neighborhood, go to bed earlier, eat your full plate then stop, etc.
3. Create the process. Bad habits die hard, so it’s best to ease into the good ones. Don’t eliminate sugar. Start by simply replacing one snack a day with a healthy alternative. Maybe even one snack a week. Once that’s happening consistently, up the ante. It’s the same with going to the gym — maybe even more so. If you haven’t been going to the gym, you can’t expect you’re going to make it five days a week. But you could make it twice a week. After a month of that, up that ante.

The process is all about small victories. When you establish a groove, it’s easier to increase the tempo. Again, the focus is on the simple steps, not the lofty goal.

So, what’s your process?

How come the only thing at the movies is super heroes?

How come the only thing on television is housewives and people from New Jersey?

The answer? The internet happened. Okay so it’s a lot more complicated than that, but the root cause of the awfulness of the current state of mass entertainment is the fact that we are no longer held hostage by only a few outlets for media consumption. Let me illustrate it with a brief, imaginative story about a woman named Wanda:

It’s 1991. Wanda is a dog lover who lives in Smalltown, TX. She is an avid dog lover. She wears tacky, printed t-shirts covered in dogs and the American flag. Her house is full of little puppy figurines and commemorative plates with her favorite breeds. It’s Friday night, and she has a couple of choices for what media to consume. She can watch Full House and Family Matters on TV, or she can go see a romantic comedy with Meg Ryan and some guy who’s not Tom Hanks. Truth be told, she doesn’t really want to do either, but given those are her only real options, she wastes six bucks on the romantic comedy. Hollywood makes a ton of money.

Fast-forward 20 years. For some reason Wanda hasn’t aged. She must be immortal. And she still loves dogs. It’s Friday night, and there’s television. There’s a new rom-com with Sandra Bullock. But there’s also thousands of hours of cute dog videos on YouTube. There’s a whole queue of movies just about dogs on Netflix. There’s Animal Planet, though they haven’t been running as many dog shows lately … why are there so many people from New Jersey on that channel? I guess she could log in to the DogLovers.net forum and see what her online dog community is up to, or catch up on dog blogs, or look at some dog pics on Tumblr … you get the idea.

Stephen Spielberg is lamenting the lack of good movies being produced in the past twenty years, and in my opinion, it’s no coincidence that this dearth of quality entertainment coincides with the rise of the internet. There are just too many options out there. The mass-media big three: Theatrical Release, Television, and Radio, no longer have a stranglehold on what we consume.

And I disagree with Spielberg …I believe that there is good content out there being created right now, it’s just that the major outlets can’t afford to release it. They are competing with a thousand user-generated voices, all being given substantial attention by small niches of like-minded individuals. The big guys have to focus on an ever-shrinking, mass audience. And so all they can give us is rehashed comic book movies and New Jersey.

But out in the outliers – in the niches – there are active, eager, willing audiences who are looking for quality content. There’s a place for good movies and entertaining media. It’s just not going to come from the mainstream. In my opinion, that’s good news for content-creation, as a whole, and good news for consumers.

So what does this mean for content creators and marketers? Find your niche! Understand that you no longer have to go for mass appeal, because it’s going to require compromises and “dumbing down” that you may not be comfortable with of or even able to accomplish. The gatekeepers are going to be even tighter with their resources and control, and if you aren’t a part of that game already, it will be increasingly harder to play. But in your niche, you won’t have to compromise your core message.

It’s true for filmmakers, writers, marketers, and small business owners: be yourself, and find your niche!

Last week I talked about how not to use social media. This week, here’s three ideas on how to effectively use social media.

1. Customer Support: We typically think of customer support being best handled through a phone center, email program, or some sort of FAQ/self-help portal on our website, but social media can be an incredibly effective place to handle customer issues. Why? Because when you provide support in a public forum, you not only answer an individual issue, but you potentially address the issue with others who may have had a similar problem but have not yet initiated contact. You can kill a lot of birds with one stone, saving you time and saving your customers hassle. In addition, by being attentive to issues brought to your attention on social media, you show your customers and future customers that you care about their feedback in a very public forum. Social media makes your commitment to customer service visible to your entire audience. This can build trust and loyalty, as well as attract positive attention from your supporters’ friends and connections.
2. Product Development: What better audience to test your new ideas and products than your active supporters? You can believe that – for the most part – the feedback you get from your social community will provide valuable insight into your development efforts, since your social community is made up of people who have some level of experience with your business, and have indicated that they “like” what you do. This is your target market. Why not test your ideas with them? By engaging them, you also build loyalty by providing them a level of ownership of your products. If they already own it, then they’re much more likely to purchase it or share it with their friends.
3. Personalization: The biggest mistake I see most companies make with their social media is that they treat it only as another outlet for their marketing messages and press releases. There’s nothing necessarily wrong with using social media this way. People engaged with your brand want to know what you’re up to. But when this is your sole approach, you miss what makes social media unique. Social media gives companies a way to connect with fans on a personal level. Silly videos of your staff or anecdotes about something funny or interesting that happened at one of your storefronts help to show the “human” side of your business. In addition, you can invite your customers to share their feedback, or seek your expertise. Of course, by encouraging feedback like this you have to be diligent in acknowledging and responding to their stories. In doing so, you’ll increase interaction and brand recognition, as well as brand loyalty.

What I like about the above list is that none of these three approaches generate a direct ROI. In other words, it’s not like a flyer you put out there, whose success is measured by how many calls and sales you get. Instead, all of these uses deal with the relationship you’re building with your customers. While it may not lead to a sale today, it could have an exponential effect on your future sales.

Whenever I talk to folks who are new to the whole social media phenomenon, one of the most common questions I get is, “How do I market my business/myself using social media?” The answer? You don’t. It’s a social network, and like any social environment, you can’t have a singular approach. Is there a time to market your business using social media? Absolutely! Should your main focus in using social media be marketing? No.

Think of your social media presence as if you were attending a social event. You wouldn’t walk in and shout your sales pitch to the entire room, interrupting everybody’s conversations. If you’ve done that, I am willing to bet you didn’t have much success. In addition, you probably wouldn’t find much success controlling every individual conversation with a hard sale, either. You’ll probably get a lot of polite nods and awkward departures.

It’s the same with social networks. Don’t think of your Facebook presence as a place to merely post product pictures, invite people to your marketing events, and throw out your marketing pitch. It’s a big room with a lot of people there for a lot of different reasons. You have to remember that every time you log on, people are connecting with distant loved ones, finding old friends, and keeping up with acquaintances. People are expecting a relational experience.

It’s about relationship (pretty sure I’ve said it before, and I’m sure I’ll say it again.)

Yes, they’ve liked your business. That means they want to connect with you. But it doesn’t mean they’re inviting you to harass them with your sales pitch. The invitation is to connect, and you’re goal should be to build connections.

So how do you do that? Ask questions. Tell stories about what’s happening in your business that don’t necessarily include a product promotion. Invite interaction not just around your brand, but around subjects that relate to you and your staff personally. Give free advice and offer your expertise.

And here’s the kicker: as you increase interaction, you’ll build loyalty with your current customers, as well as increase the chances that your customers’ friends will see your posts. Both can lead to increased sales. That’s how you market your business using social media!

Here’s a very interesting article on Decision Fatigue. The idea is that the more decisions you make during the day, the more “mental energy” you use, making it increasingly difficult to make decisions as the day wears on:

Decision fatigue helps explain why ordinarily sensible people get angry at colleagues and families, splurge on clothes, buy junk food at the supermarket and can’t resist the dealer’s offer to rustproof their new car. No matter how rational and high-minded you try to be, you can’t make decision after decision without paying a biological price. It’s different from ordinary physical fatigue — you’re not consciously aware of being tired — but you’re low on mental energy. The more choices you make throughout the day, the harder each one becomes for your brain, and eventually it looks for shortcuts, usually in either of two very different ways. One shortcut is to become reckless: to act impulsively instead of expending the energy to first think through the consequences. (Sure, tweet that photo! What could go wrong?) The other shortcut is the ultimate energy saver: do nothing. Instead of agonizing over decisions, avoid any choice. Ducking a decision often creates bigger problems in the long run, but for the moment, it eases the mental strain. You start to resist any change, any potentially risky move — like releasing a prisoner who might commit a crime. So the fatigued judge on a parole board takes the easy way out, and the prisoner keeps doing time.

Interestingly enough, a study by social psychologist Roy F. Baumeister at Florida State University (my alma mater — Go Noles!) revealed there is a fairly simple solution to this: food. With a spike in glucose, a decision weary mind has the energy it needs to get back on track, making good decisions.

This news affects me in two ways. As a creative, I make small decisions all day long: red or blue, cut here or cut there, use this word or that word, as well as large decisions, which is necessitated by working on multiple large projects (trying to decide what to work on and when is exhausting). As someone who is trying to lose weight, it’s disheartening to hear that the thing that might give me the willpower I need to resist the cupcakes is, in fact, the cupcake.

The good thing about this research is that it suggests there is a strategy for maintaining mental sharpness over the course of the day. Here’s my strategy:

• Eat healthy, eat consistently. Breakfast, snack, lunch, snack, and an early dinner consisting of high fiber foods with healthy carbohydrates (veggies and fruits that are low in starches and simple sugars) is essential
• Schedule accordingly. Begin the day with the most creativity intensive and decision-requiring work. Don’t schedule meetings back to back. Push paperwork and non-critical emails to the end of the day. Don’t make major decisions late in the day.
• Schedule time for silliness. Take fifteen minute walks to daydream, or doodle, or unplug for awhile to let your mind wonder. Basically, let your brain take a break from making decisions three or four times a day — maybe more on particularly stressful days. While it’s hard to take breaks when there’s a lot going on, it might be the key to making sure stuff gets done.

What’s your strategy?

Seth Godin strikes again. His latest book, We Are All Weird, makes a very compelling argument for the end of mass production and marketing. Basically, the information age has made the access to and the creation of information happen at an exponential rate, creating an ability for niche groups to arise, grow, and unite with relative ease.

Gone is the ability for marketers to create the “mass” where everyone tries to fit a particular, broad mold. According to Godin, the mass market was fueled by factory efficiency, where average products were created to supply the average person. It depended on the un-average — the weird — being isolated. If you weren’t a part of the mass, you were missing out, all alone in the universe. But now we have the internet, and no matter how weird you are, no matter how isolated you feel in your interests and passions, a community of like-minded individuals is a Google search away.

Mass marketing is over. That should be great news for salespeople, marketers, entrepreneurs, small business owners, writers, musicians, filmmakers, and artists. You can no longer distinguish yourself from the masses, because the “mass” is going away. That means you don’t have to try anymore. In other words, you no longer have to distinguish yourself from the masses. Now, the goal is to identify your tribe, and connect with them.

In the future, successful businesses won’t be built by identifying competition and crushing it. Successful businesses will be built by identifying your target audience, and taking very good care of them as only you can. It’s not about the power of your company, it’s about you. You should think about your company as a “You” — a living, breathing organism with a mission and values, created by the mission and values of the individuals who make up the company. Your company is no longer a force to be reckoned with, but a part of a community.

In other words, stop trying to impress everybody. Stop flaring out your feathers like a peacock. Take of your jacket, role up your sleeves, and get to know people. Determine what makes you unique, and celebrate it. You’ll find others ready, willing, and able to celebrate with you.

Simply put, stop focusing on your marketing message, and start telling your story!

It’s a parody, but it’s not much of a stretch. Agony in black and white are hallmarks of the infomercial/direct-response commercial, and they’ve been used to sell everything from carpet cleaners to blankets with sleeves. I don’t mean to knock this method. If it didn’t work, we wouldn’t see commercials like this. But, to say this method works across the board would be incorrect as well.

These types of ad follow a similar pattern:

1. Create a problem
2. Provide the solution
3. Create urgency
4. SELL

While this works in a minute long commercial with a captive audience — usually channel flippers who have settled on an unplanned program (i.e. non-DVR’d) — you shouldn’t apply this same strategy to your social networks. The relational currency is totally different.

Why?

It’s about relationship

You don’t have to hard sell your widgets on Facebook! You don’t have to do it. If you are friends with someone on a social network, chances are it’s because there is some sort of relationship there. They accepted you, either because they know you, they know of you, you have mutual friends, or they really like what you’re all about.

You have the foot in the door already. There is some interest. You don’t have to beg for attention. Rather than cultivate problems and solutions, talk about ideas. Ask questions, and engage responses. Get to know people who have shown an interest in you. Build relationships.

TV is a one-way relationship. You don’t get to have a conversation with a commercial – at least not one the commercial can hear. You get direct feedback on social networks. It’s a two way street. If people aren’t engaging with you on Facebook, yelling louder or more often is not the solution. In fact, it’s the fast lane to getting blocked or un-friended.

Ask questions. Ask for ideas. Share and comment on news stories related to your field. You’ll build relationships. When you’ve established that kind of bond, you won’t have to hard sell, or even bait and switch. People will come to you, because they know you and trust you.

It’s finally here. Google has unleashed their serious entry into the social media market. The initial reaction has been very favorable, and with an estimated 18 million users already signed up and circling their friends, it would appear Google’s latest attempt at being social, unlike their less than spectacular Buzz and Wave projects, is off to a great start.

Of course, this successful social network has many predicting the demise of Facebook and Twitter. I don’t think so. Every new phone that is released is the supposed “iPhone Killer”, and iPhones have been just fine. In fact, I tend to agree with Vincent Wong, who used a photo slideshow to express what he thinks G+ is really about. It’s going to be tied into Google’s other products, like documents, calendars, and YouTube, to make it the ultimate collaborative tool. Unlike Facebook, Twitter, and Myspace, Google+ starts as an information and collaboration tool.

Myspace was built around music and pop culture, and drew users who wanted to rally to their favorite mass media icons. It was high school, where everyone wanted to be at the cool table. Facbook took the social network to college, with much more tightly knit groups of friends. Friends were friends, and like college, it was all about forming your niche community. In the end, however, it came down to who was dating who.

I believe Google+ is the first social network for adults. Mark Cuban described it perfectly here. It’s all about collaboration and information … and ideas. If the other social networks grew to incorporate this concept, Google+ got it right from the beginning. Google+ also embraces a very adult way of organizing your social connections. Google+’s circles allow you to build your own spheres of influence while also allowing you to become a part of the spheres of influence of others.

Google+, with it’s adoption by professionals, has created a culture of sharing. It’s not just a place to sound off about what was on your vegan pizza. It’s a place to share your thoughts with the expectation of engagement. It’s about ideas.

So what role will web video play in all of this?

Google+ has illustrated the importance of web video by integrating it into their Hangout space. Hangouts might be the coolest feature of Google+. It allows up to ten users to video chat with each other at the same time. And built into this is framework is the ability to easily share YouTube videos with your fellow hangers.

If Google+ is about ideas, what better way to share an idea in a very visual and auditory environment — i.e. the Hangout — than with a visual and auditory tool. And of course, like with other social media, you have the ability to easily add web video to your stream. Web Video is only going to grow in importance with Google+.

So what will this mean for the way web video is made? Again, it comes back to ideas. People don’t want to interact with your hard sale. For years, marketing has been about creating problems. You really need a better mousetrap, whether your knew it or not. People don’t want you to share your commercial on Google+. People want you to present an idea, an abstract, or a concept, and they want to take that and make it their own. If that interaction brings them closer to you and your products, mission accomplished.

Web videos must tell stories that introduce ideas. Commercials are things you have to sit through while you’re waiting to get back to the story (unless you have a DVR). People don’t share commercials. People share ideas. And Google+ is the perfect platform for that.