Helping you get business done. Hi, everyone. Im jj ramberg. And welcome to your business, the show dedicated to helping you grow your company. Love it or hate it, social media, particularly facebook, is a big deal. And while there are endless questions right now about how its being used and abuse in the political world n the business world, many entrepreneurs take it on faith that their Company Needs to be on social media if they want to stay in the game. We have decided to take a closer look to find out whats the payoff . Is social media really Cost Effective . Its a refrain we hear from almost every company these days. Like us on facebook, follow us on twitter, join us on instagram, sign up for weekly updates. Even on this show, we say it every week. And dont forget to connect with us on all our digital own social media platforms as well. Social media has been hyped for its ability to connect brands directly to consumers, increase brand loyalty and boost sales. And all for a bargain price. But does it work . For some, it does. But it is not a slam dunk. The study that Harvard Business review published last year showed that following a brand in social media has no impact on their buying. How much else do you need to know . Its next to nothing. Bob hoffman is a 40year veteran of the advertising industry. As a businessman, i dont care about engagement. I care about sales results. I want to see what has actually happened as a result of the money im spending on advertising. Now hes an industry critic through his blog, the ad contrarian. He says too Many Companies are putting too much effort into social media for all the wrong reasons. Followers like engagement to me are a false goal. The goal is to sell somebody something. Not understanding how to use social media in a larger Marketing Mix is one place where experts think brands get it wrong. I think social media and probably the open web, too, for a small to mediumsized business is more creating awareness. Less so getting someone to immediately click on a thing and doing the action. Dan greenberg is the founder of share group, a san franciscobased International Agency specializing in website advertising. He says social media should just be a tiny part of a much more complex advertising recipe. Facebook and social media cant be the beginning of the strategy. That needs to be a tactic. The strategy needs to be who are we trying to engage and why. And what do we want them to do . If you want to generate sales through social media, he says, you need to first get to know your reallife customers and why your product matters to them. It has to start with somebody who actually does like your brand. So if you have people who actually like your brand or actually like your company, what social medias good for is to nudge them to help them amplify that to their people. The founder of l. A. Based digital ark terchitects makes a similar point, you need to think of social media like attending a Cocktail Party. If you are just standing in the corner of the Cocktail Party and not engaging or asking questions, youre bad at a Cocktail Party and bad at social media. Rena represents social media influencers, people who have built up a large number of loyal followers. Her clients make paid endorsements to beef up the sponsors online likes and comments. You have to be really specific about your goals. While influencers can do a lot to boost brand awareness, rena warns when it comes to actually selling products, many influencers have trouble turning the likes into sales. If ultimately your goal is to drive x units of a product, thats a smaller segment of the Digital Population who have the ability to have their content translate in direct sales. Anybody is going to be turned off if someone just starts yelling at them, buy my product all the time for those who can get their customers excited online, social ya can sometimes deliver a windfall. There are thousands of musicians all over the world making six or sevenfigure incomes that you have never heard of. And they are using social media to do that. I thought i needed more Los Angelesbased singer songwriter ari knows how they do it. He knows because he helps to use social media to build their careers and make money through his online blog. Youtube is absolutely one avenue where you can do that. And you can have, maybe, 2 million subscribers on youtube. For many businesses like aris clients, youtube is the right platform. But it is not for everyone. Facebook, instagram, twitter and the others each have their own dynamic and success is difficult without understanding the differences. Each social network has its own community, has its own etiquette. And so the way that you interact with people on facebook is so different from the way you interact with people on twitter or different than the way you interact with people on instagram. Facebook is really great at engaging with a little bit of an older audience, instagram is great for younger audience. On facebook, people share articles all the time. And they say, hey, i cant believe this just happened, link to an article. You cant do that on instagram. You cant link to things on instagram. Comedians blow up on twitter because they write hilarious tweets and then everybody retweets it. Given these dimpfferent qualities and routines, scotty who is a maker of College Party items says to approach social media like you do going to the gym. Its going be completely different if you are trying to gain 15 pounds or muscle or trying to lose 45 pounds of fat. Its completely different in the outcome. You select which equipment to use based upon the goals that brought you there in the first place. But unlike a gym where hard work usually delivers results, social media metrics dont always translate into increased awareness or sales. What is not clear to us is how the advertising works or whether it actually reaches real people. Samuel wooley of the Digital Intelligence lab in palo alto studies the Automated Software or bots on social media. He follows all the platform owners for not releasing these fake phony followers or likes. That bots get used in and around the business sphere to drive up supportive advertisements to give the illusion of popularity to advertisements, to make it look as if these things are more popular than they are. And that is very problematic from a business perspective because the promise that the companys making to you is you have interaction. However, anonymity believes the social value can be made. The dollar value of a Facebook Like varies based on community, based on demographic. And how many other likes does it lead to and who was it that liked it . How many people are interacting with the content . Are they liking it or is it bots liking the content . Based on the audience. And how large is their audience . What is your outcome . In some regards, its a telephone chain. Based on the product, based on the company. Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. There is lots of talk in every hallway here at south by southwest about artificial intelligence. And how it is going to change everything. So we wanted to know, how can it change your business and what things you need to be thinking about . So were sitting down with steven who is the chief marketing and communication officer to break it down for us. Happy to. Thank you. I just mentioned artificial intelligence, but when we talk about business, were talking about Machine Learning from most of us. What is Machine Learning . Thats right, jj. You have tech yesterday by calling it Machine Learning. Artificial intelligence is a general umbrella for all the different techniques that include natural language processing, using voice and google assistant, certainly vision and lidar in autonomous vehicles. But marketing for people with powerful tools we have seen learning, that will help you understand how to identify patterns in the data. And using statistics to make predictions around the world. So i, as a company, am collecting all kinds of data from im a dry cleaner, i know what time they come in, how many shirts they press each week, what time they leave. I have all this data. How do i parse all that . How does Machine Learning happen . Sure. So thats a really great example because you have all the inputs, but you dont really have intelligence. You dont have insights. So part of the challenge is, how do you go up the brand hierarchy of intelligence and data. But only with Machine Learning can you get the inside and the epiphany to discover something you would have never been able to do before. Thats where the power of Machine Learning is. The reality is you can have all the different touch points to understand the Customer Journey and improve the customer experience. This ultimately has to be putting the customer at the center. If you know when they come in every day of the week, the items after leaving, how are we going to improve Customer Service . How does that improve the product . Its understanding all the patterns in the data to deliver that experience. But what tools do i need to take all this data, i want to take it and stick it in the data machine and spit out the insights for me. There are a lot of data tools out there. You can use a marketto to amazon web sources that has a ton of tools at your disposal. And facebook, google and comcast are providing solutions for the audience to use machines. Well talk about the chat bots and how that is changing business on a small scale. Thats just the beginning of what we are going to see from businesses. Tech bots are providing the way to have realtime twoway communication between the company and the customer. Think about it very efficiently because you dont have 20,000 people answering the computer. Very efficiently, but youre able to weave in Machine Learning and human learning. How do you fuse the two so that the Machine Learning can inspire the human learning. And the bots are effective because theres going to be the same ten questions, what time does the store open . What is the inventory . Right now go to a website and go down all the sub navigation menus. That is time consuming. If you answer the question through a tap bot, get the answer in realtime and you choose your own adventure. You may understand the questions to lead you down the path. Now you can figure out when to uplevel that and have Human Interaction because we want to provide more Personalized Service or an opportunity to provide an upsale. Thats where the Machine Learning will impact now we are starting to see, but what is coming up ahead . What do i expect out of a. I. . Are you going to walk into a store and suddenly water is going to magically appear in my hand because they know at 2 00 on thursday i get thirsty . Well, the reality is youll see a lot of onetoone communications as were driven by insight. The reality is people dont have insight, youre sitting on the data. But if you understand you need the human judgment to make analysis of that. For example, lets say its june and you see lots of shark attacks and lots of sales of ice cream. You dont want to coor rate the two things. They just happen to be in the same time period. But if you understand the patterns in the data, you can understand how to deliver a better customer experience. Thats one of the most exciting things. But a. I. Is going to transform every customer experience, every company and every industry. You have to think about this as almost like electricity. Its going to permeate every aspect of society. It will be bigger than the internet. So how are you preparing for this . What is your a. I. Strategy . You should start now. Thank you for explaining this. Really helpful. Thanks, jj. It started the way so many of the companies we provile do, with a pro we profile. They couldnt find a simple solution so they built their own. Then they realized other businesses could benefit from what they created, so they launched shopify in 2006. Now shopify is the ecommerce platform for Online Stores worldwide. We sat down with tobaccoy to tr about why diversity is so important when hiring. I packed a backpack and a suitcase and then went i had never heard these terms and would take notes. Then i would go back to my hostile and use the wifi from a neighbor to go to wikipedia and learn about the terms. Then i could answer one more question the next time i had a meeting. You always hope the crystal ball is fairly clear. One of the things that has been leading to Small Businesses getting into trouble is that reality shifted and suddenly they are no longer current. So shopify is ruralbased of inoculating people from these forces. We need to be exceptionally inhave to vinv inhave i innova innovated. If you think about commerce, commerce fundamentally is at the intersection of technology and in sort of a weird way, if you wish. People have they see something they want and go to say, i would like this. Technology is coming, like virtual reality, augmented reality, which are kind of bringing these things ever so much closer. And it is wonderful for Small Businesses. I absolutely committed the startup founder and i got this piece of feedback that meant to say, i love the company youre building. Just one thing that is irritating. Everyone is a version of you. At this point, this was so obviously true. And we made a pint of hiring people who are very different from us, but also, that didnt just mean gender diversity, people who spend their lives differently. People in Different Industries or different degrees and so on. And the moment we get this into meetings, suddenly everyone had this really completely but different and interesting ways to look at this. I spend most of my former years in my life with computers. I spend, especially a 16hour day where i was programming. And probably my earliest attempt at management was to treat people just like that. And that didnt quite work out. So i had to at some point say, i have to go back to square one and say, i need to understand how other people function. We called a trust battery between two people. As you work together, you fully charge and trust each other. That means very low process. We can treat process as a way of corporate world babyproofing. Theres no limit to personal growth. Weap we found this is something that can take action as a business. We have been confident saying, shopify is going to be a better Company Every year. And therefore we have to become better people every year to be able to keep the harmony. Apps have completely changed the way we do so many things. Thats why i was so interest in the company talk space, which people use to connect with therapists. With it, the couch and appointment book are things of the past. Unlimited texting is the way you can communicate with your doctor. And while the company is only a few years old, their number one priority is advancing the conversation about menital healh care, even if the approach is controversial. Just a few years ago, their marriage was on the brink of collapse. Our marriage was about to collapse. We gave it one last chance. In a lastditch effort, they tried couples therapy. For us, it was a wonderful experience because it taught us how to communicate with each other. And we can see the value. And i could extrapolate the value to see how it applies to so many people. Therapy saved their marriage and gave them a business idea. In 2012, they lawn unched talkse in new york city to replace the traditional Therapy Office with something more immediate, unlimited texting directly to a licensed therapist for 25 a week. Im just taking my phone and im texting when i feel the need. Now im anxious, am i overwhelmed . Im texting you. It feels so normal because this is how im communicating with everyone in my life. This is unchartered territory for the couple. Orrins background was in marketing. And roni recently completed her masters degree in psychoanalysis and psychotherapy. Neither of them knew the industry and werent sure if the company would survive. We lost people, we had no money. But they saw a glimmer of hope in a very unlikely place. We had a link called customer support. And obviously, i was sitting there because we were just, like, two, three people. We just started. I think our clients, our members interpreted this name to customer clinical support or therapy support. And i started getting hundreds of emails telling me about their clinical issue. We said, okay, we know that people feel very open and very willing to share everything. So im thinking, why dont we do it with two people. We tested it immediately. After rebooting the company, they quickly got traction with the oneonone model. A therapist paired with a single client via text, usually on a smartphone. If you were to come into my office and sit down, it would feel probably a little bit like formal. If youre on your computer or on your app and youre at home and youre in your comfort zone and you dont have to look at me and see what my reaction is going to be, maybe it is a little easier you to share things. Kate denahan is a licensed clinical social worker. She has an office with a couch but finds the flexibility of having clients text her when she is at home easier and sometimes more effective than a facetoface appointment. If a client has a bad day or a crisis happens, they dont have to wait until next week or month to see me, so theyll get that Immediate Response theyre looking for as opposed to holding those feelings, which can sometimes make people feel worse in the end. Of course, therapy via text is new and largely untested, which means it is not without controversy. So oren and ronnie feel in order to build the company they need to build trust in the community. Thats why they launched their future of therapy conference. Ronnie and myself both fell in love with this profession thats called therapy. This firstever g