Loic Le Meur Blog

Build Your Own Brand Season 1 Episode 3: Unlearn what you have learned

Social networking isn’t like traditional marketing. It’s about building trust, long term, building a community. In this episode of the 30 HD videos series Build Your Own Brand we are discussing how you can create a real relationship with your followers and fans on social networks. The series is also available on iTunes as a video podcast.

Episode 3: What you learned. Unlearn it.

Here is the transcript:

Before you start sharing on social networks, you have to unlearn what you have learned.
Unlearn any marketing, any communication skill you have. That’s not easy.
First, social networks aren’t a campaign.
Do you know who are the best at doing this wrong? Politicians.
They do it. Done. They win. They lose. Then they move on.
It’s not about that. It’s about trust.
It’s like if you were making friends and you were saying “let’s do something together”…
and then you never talked to them anymore. Exactly how it feels.
Forget about this and think that you are treating this thing, regardless of you business,
as if it was a conversation. A lunch. I can tell you the French know all about long lunches.
Let me give you an example. A conference I build called LeWeb, it’s the largest european tech event.
It’s only relying on social networks and blogs and Twitter and Facebook.
It took 7 years.
Here is another thing you don’t do.
You can’t speak like a press release. You will be boring.
You don’t talk to your friends like a press release or like a marketing brochure.
Don’t talk about your products. You can talk sometimes about your products. Just don’t talk only about your products.
Think about talking to friends. Helping people around your community, around your space, around your topic.
Not “what can I sell you”. Don’t talk about yourself all the time.
It’s difficult, I know about that…
Last one for this episode is
don’t be obsessed by the number of fans or number of followers.
We all need a measure of success, how many fans and so on…
I don’t think you should be obsessed by the numbers only.
For example, there are even companies that help you buy Facebook fans or buy Twitter followers.
Generally they are fake followers or fans, they are robots.
I’d rather have 100 really committed followers or fans than a million bots.
It’s going to take time. It’s going to be difficult. This is not easy. It doesn’t come for free.
But, if you keep creating trust and talking in a friendly way and helping people and
trying to understand and creating community, then it will work.

If you think @scobleizer and I don’t get along you should read this (yeah I can be stupid too)

We had another little fight on Twitter with @scobleizer alias Robert Scoble this week-end about Twitter lists. Basically I was saying that I love and use Twitter lists but that they’re not really growing to be adopted by mainstream users and Robert argued the opposite.

It was nice and cool, another classic fight between us, we seem to like the format, until I screwed up. For some reason I started to like to push Robert to his limits and posted non sense on my Twitter, just for fun. I thought everybody would get it was so obvious it was a joke. But 140 characters don’t really help sometimes, not only many people thought I was dead serious, but Scoble himself started to think I was serious and responded to me in an audio microblog post on Cinch.

That’s when I understood I went too far in my “jokes” as both Scoble and many people in both Robert’s and my communities of friends started to doubt. I received emails, some users started to post angry tweets against my behavior.

I understood and I immediately texted Robert to apologize, deleted the tweets, then called Robert the next day. Issue closed. We have been friends for 10 years and I love Scoble, I would never do anything to hurt him, I joked and 140 characters caught me translating that into something that did not look like a joke. It’s a good lesson.

I should probably not fight with Scoble on Twitter anyway, we both like it, it was a week-end and sometimes I’m stupid, what can I say. Sorry again, Scoble, but please everyone don’t ever think I would hurt him, I’m such a fan, it’s all the contrary.

If you own more than one YouTube channel, you should know this

Today I pushed on my blog the second episode of our series Build Your Own Brand and to my surprise the video was blocked for copyright infringement at the request of…. seesmic!

Here is what happened. We had uploaded for testing and in private that video to the Seesmic YouTube channel. Then we uploaded on mine, the loiclemeur YouTube channel where I chose to publish those videos because it has more subscribers (passed 3,000) and juice.

What happened next wasn’t expected. YouTube automatically blocked it thinking that it was a user pirating Seesmic’s videos. I thought it would be an easy thing to fix and got help from friends at YouTube.

They told me, yes, it’s a protection for your content, we think someone hacked it so we block it automatically. Good protection indeed. Now how do I unblock the video. I was told something should show up on both channels that I could resolve if I was the admin of both. I am the admin of both but saw nothing. Then YouTube told me to check the YouTube CMS did not even know that existed.

I understand it’s designed for big publishers to be able to claim (and therefore take down any infringement) of their content. Problem is that you need to apply for an account and it seems to take time… I am still waiting to get approved.

Found another, quick solution, I thought. We re-uploaded the video after having made sure that we deleted it from the other channel. It showed processing, fine. To our surprise, after the processing time, it went down again as “duplicate video” even though it was deleted from both other channels, I guess another copyright protection thing.

The only other and last solution we found was to re-edit the video, basically changing the order of a few things in it, recompressing it and reuploading it different enough that YouTube copyright systems could not recognize it. I would really rather have just solved the issue with the original video, but that was too complicated.

Conclusion: if you own several channels do never ever upload the same video on more than one channel, even if you upload it only for testing and in private or you will end up in the same impossible to solve loop. Having said that I thank the YouTube team who tried to help me resolve this.

Build your own brand Season 1 Episode 2: Setup your accounts

Here is the second episode of the 30 HD videos series Build your own brand on YouTube (that featured it on the YouTube home page!) also available as an itunes video podcast. Thank you ReadWriteWeb (30 Days of Online Branding) and Chris Pirillo (How to Build Brand Awareness) for blogging about the series. You can also make sure you don’t miss an episode by subscribing by email to my blog using the form on the right side (no spam, powered by feedburner you can optout anytime).

As I mentioned, this series aims at helping people who really don’t know much about social networking so I am starting by the basics in this episode, setting up accounts.

update, here is the video transcript:

To build your brands in social networks, the first thing you need to do is create an account in all those networks.

Maybe not all of them but, in the most important ones.

Let’s talk briefly about what you can share.

You can share text.

It can be short text, like a sentence. We call that a tweet, or a quick update.

It can be a full page. That’s more like a blog post.

It can be an image, of course. It can be a video.

It can be location. Location is an update, when you say “I am here right now”.

Just a link is an update. There are many others of course but, those are the main ones.

Go ahead and create an account in all the major social networks.

Let’s have a look at them.

Facebook, you probably have a Facebook account but, you probably don’t have a Facebook page.

If it’s you for your personal brand, or you as a brand, or your brands, if you have 10 brands,

you need as many Facebook pages as you have, ideally. Otherwise you can do just one for your business.

So, go ahead and search pages, you will find how to create a page pretty easy.

Then, when you have done that, you can start sharing on that page.

The reason why you want a Facebook page is that

a Facebook Profile is limited to 5000 friends at the moment. Facebook Pages is absolutely unlimited.

You have to find a cool name for it. If you can get the name.

facebook.com/loic, that’s mine for example.

One account as well with LinkedIn, the professional social network.

You will see there are pages there as well, which we can set up.

If you know how to do that, go ahead and set up a page for you company as well.

Keep going with YouTube for video. Create a YouTube channel,

get everything ready and be ready to get some subscribers to your channel.

Then go to Twitter.

The difference between Twitter and Facebook,

is that Twitter, since the beginning, is mostly about being public, being followed.

If the name you want is already taken, that happens, find another one.

My advice would be to find one that is as short as possible and easy to remember.

When you have done that, go ahead and keep going with flickr, for photos.

Finally, I would do one with a question & answer site such as formspring.

Try to get the same name everywhere if you can. You are going to establish a brand online.

Finally, I would also create an account on FourSquare, the popular location service, where you can check –in.

The other one is Gowalla.

We will see after that, after you are done with all of those, how to update them.

Oh, last one, Google Buzz, which is the new one from Google, create your presence there, set everything to public.

When you are done with all of this, it will take you some time, we can move to the next step

and start customizing it.

Before leaving you here, you can also, in some services, customize your background.

Just do something basic, you don’t have to do that. We can do much more advanced stuff later.

See you at the next Episode.

30 videos to learn How to Build Your Own Brand online

After many presentations on social networking around the World, I found myself getting the same questions all the time so I decided to share everything I learned in a series of 30 HD videos. They aren’t aimed at experts but rather anyone who would like to learn from scratch how to make the best from social networking and building their brand.

We will release one every day as of today on my YouTube channel loic.tv and on my itunes podcast. We hope you enjoy the content and the editing by Whit Scott as you will see there is a bit of work in them! Please give us feedback and suggestions, if you like them we will continue the series.

related post: How to best promote a video series online