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Kate: Welcome to Distilled Live. We are in Seattle. My name is Kate Morris, and this
is . . .
Kristina: Kristina Kledzik.
Kate: We are here to talk about RCS, or real company . . .
Kristina: Stuff.
Kate: Okay. I'm just going to say ***. I would kind of hide it, but you guys, anybody
that knows me, knows that I'm just going to throw out curse words every once in awhile.
Sorry. There have been a few questions on Google+, on Twitter here and there, about
what RCS actually is. We wanted to dig a little bit deeper into it, give you some examples
of what we think RCS is; what we think RCS is not. To start it all out, we're actually
going to show you a snippet from Will Reynolds' video, when he spoke at MozCon last year and
actually intro'd RCS to the world.
Will: Stop it. We're going to talk about revenue, man. Share a voice. Let me take you to the
land before time. You guys in this room realize that businesses sold things before search
engines existed, right? You remember this. There was a whole thing called business well
before Alta Vista. Like '96 or '86; two of the guys in this picture aren't even here
anymore. It's freaking sad. I'm going to take you back to that time. The clicker's a little
bit off.
I want you to think; how would you sell a software product if you couldn't build a bunch
at link juice? How would you sell it? How would you sell software if somebody gave you
a $500 budget and asked you to help them sell their software? How would you sell the first
Jordan? Link juice doesn't exist. You got to think, how did people market this stuff?
They did real company ***.
Very often, SEOs do fake company ***. Let's bridge that so we can get the budgets that
we deserve and stop begging.
Kate: Now that we've heard that, Christina, if somebody asked you on the street, not that
anybody would ever ask you this on the street, because nobody on the street really knows
what anything we do is anyway.
Christina: If you mention SEO in a bar, they will have questions.
Kate: Precisely. If someone were to ask you what RCS is, what would you say?
Kristina: RCS is when you do something as a company that actually brings value to your
users, specifically value that they're going to remember.
Kate: Yeah. Mine's pretty close to that. Mine is doing things for your end-user. RCS is
not a set of tactics; it's actually doing things to make your customers happy, to grow
your community. It's not to grow your bottom line; your bottom line grows anyway. It's
really to grow your customers, and grow your community.
Kristina: Now that you've seen Will's video, we want to go into specifics of RCS. Like
I mentioned earlier, RCS is really bringing value to your customers. One of the big ways
that you can think about that is you're building a relationship with your customers. For example,
if you have this good relationship with your customers, they're going to come to your store
looking for things before they look anywhere else. If your competitor is selling something
for the exact same price, they're still going to buy from you because they already have
this relationship with you. It's something that they're going to want to tell other people
about. They are going to be your marketing for you; you don't even have to do that. If
people are telling their friends about you, that's way better marketing than you could
ever do through any way that's paid.
Kate: To be clear, building relationships is not about giving people a free shipping
coupon. They are not following you . . . don't build your relationships by giving things
away just to get followings on Twitter or just to build followers on Facebook. If you're
doing contests to build followers, that's fantastic, but that's not RCS. Real Company
*** is making people love you, making people want to talk about you. A free shipping coupon
is not really something that is going to make them want to talk about you, so you really
want to do the good stuff. Things like free shipping coupons, not so much.
Kristina: Not great. Just to be clear when talking about RCS, it doesn't roll into ranking
better. There are a lot of companies that we talk to who say, "If we rank better, then
more people get to find out about us. We are an amazing company and that's what we want."
Yes, we're SEOs, and yes, that is our job is to make you rank better, but really, RCS
is not about ranking better. Ranking better is going to get the results doing better RCS.
Kate: What we've reviewed so far is we want you to be building a community. We don't want
you focusing on tactics like free shipping coupons, increasing numbers, or things like
that. We don't want you focusing on ranking better. What we really want you focusing in
on are the bigger things; are the not-tactics. Sending a birthday card to a customer is a
great thing, but if you're sending a birthday card just to send a birthday card, that's
a tactic. If you're sending a birthday card because you genuinely wanting to wish them
a happy birthday, and it's just that, that's Real Company ***. Sending them a $10 coupon
in hopes that they'll come buy something on their birthday; not Real Company ***. See
the difference there?
Kristina: What we've been talking about this, we've been talking about offline and online
examples, but RCS is something that didn't really start until last year at MozCon, so
lots of times people think of this as an online marketing thing that online marketers keep
focusing on non-RCS and all of that. Really, this is the something that's been around for
ages. It's actually something that if you're a business major or an accounting major, that's
called goodwill. It's that part of a company that people value beyond the value of its
assets, which is the very technical term for when people just like a company, and then
are more willing to give it more money and buy more things from it because they like
that company. Goodwill values much higher or lower. Walmart is obviously small goodwill.
I would say something like Nordstrom's has a very high goodwill.
Kate: Nordstrom's has been around for a long time; lots of people have shopped there for
many, many, many years. One of the greatest things about Nordstrom is not only their Christmas
sign that says, "We will not put up Christmas stuff until the day after Thanksgiving." P.S.
I love you for that. They also do great things for their customers beyond that. They have
easy returns; if something goes wrong, you just bring it back in. They do run the risk
of having prom dresses returned the day after. They just kind of suck that up because they
want to be known as a great place to shop. They want the best customers, so they give
the best customers the best service. When you buy something and it's not just right,
they'll tailor it to you. They do all of this to make themselves the best place to shop
and that right there, that is Real Company ***.
Kristina: To give an example of that, that's happening on the online world, one company
that we like to talk about a lot is ModCloth. This blazer actually comes from ModCloth.
It's something that I like to talk about. It's something that, literally friends who
are not in the online world at all, these are PHD candidates . . .
Kate: This is what should be happening.
Kristina: . . . will have full-on conversations with me about ModCloth and about how ModCloth
is amazing. ModCloth is a lot like Nordstrom's, in that they have the same free returns, they're
really nice about things. A really good example is at one point I had a zipper that got stuck
in the dress. I got stuck in the dress; I had to cut it out, and they just comp'd me
for the dress. They said, "We're sorry. That was a bad experience for you to have. We don't
want you to think about ModCloth and having this bad experience. Here's your money back.
We're sorry."
Things like that, I think lots of times, especially when you're in the online world and you're
thinking of how small your margin has to be because it's so easy to go to competitors,
what you really need to remember is that something like that with ModCloth; if I got stuck in
a dress, I had to cut myself out, I'm going to think "Never buying another dress from
ModCloth. I just had to spend $50 on a dress that's down the tubes for me." For me, as
a customer that just went away to 0-value. For the company, because they gave me that
money back, they just gave me $50 back and they got a customer who's going to return.
I am going to keep going back, I'm going to keep buying from them because I feel like
that risk is negated; I don't want to say totally gone, it's going to be less. I feel
like I can trust them with my business, I can trust them with my money, and I'm going
to go and shop on ModCloth before I look in other places.
Kate: What you're hearing from us right now is really all about customer experiences.
Notice, we're not talking about any specific tactics. We're going keep driving this home
because a lot of people mix up RCS with a tactic, and it's not a tactic. It's really
just about what makes your company great.
Kristina: Talking about this and calling this RCS sometimes can lead you to believe that
anything that a company's been doing successfully for a long time must fit into that example
because it's a real company and it's been successful, but that's not what we're talking
about. We're talking about bringing value to your customers, having them recognize that,
and think of you in terms of, "This company brought me some value. I like that." Like
we said, building relationships.
For example, sending out spam mail has happened ever since there's been a US Post Office,
because it's insanely cheap to send out spam mail, and now it's insanely cheap to send
out spam emails. Neither is a good tactic. When people get those, they actually like
you less than if they didn't. There's a very small percentage that is going to chose to
work with you and that's why people do it. Overall, that's not going to be a long-term
good strategy for a business. Another one that sometimes people get confused about,
and we just want to clarify, is bringing value to customers has to be related to you. A lot
of times, companies will want to do something like a sweepstakes and they're going to give
away money. Once people win money, that money isn't going to be tied to you; it's now their
money. Yes, they're going to remember that your brand was on it, but when they're telling
everyone about it, they are going to say, "I won a sweepstakes."
On the flip side, if you're giving out a sweepstakes where you're giving out your own products,
that is a great way to do it. The winners are going to get your products, they're going
to show off what they won, they're going to be real proud of it, and everyone is going
to see your products. They're going to try your product; they are going to see your friend
having your product. Also when you do a sweepstakes with money, you have to give it a lot of money
for it to be a big deal. If you give out $100, people are absolutely going to forget about
it. Whereas, you give away one thing that's worth $100, that could change someone's life.
For my example, when I was in 5th grade, I was that close to winning an American Girl
doll; I was so excited about it. I was in the Top-5; they lined us up and I sat there.
As I waited for them to draw a name, I thought, "I have to have an American Girl doll. Even
if I lose, I have to have it, because I was that close to winning it." I lost, and I immediately
went out and bought an American Girl doll with my allowance money that I had saved up.
If I hadn't been on that sweepstakes, I would have already decided American Girl dolls were
too far out of my reach, but because I got that close, I went out and bought it. The
person who won it, now when she plays with people she's going to say, "I won this doll.
It was so exciting. I got to line up. They made it so exciting." Doing something like
that, they brought value not only to the person who won, but to the other people who almost
won, and then everyone who participated in the sweepstakes got to see that sort of event
play out. A lot of the times, it's not the actual money that you're giving, it's the
feeling that you give to the people who are there.
One thing that we really want to highlight, though, is that we lightly talked about spam
techniques. There are a lot of business tactics that are actually successful business tactics,
at the very least in the short-term, that are not RCS. One example that really explains
it is Monsanto; they are a huge agricultural corporation. They sell seeds, specifically
soy beans and corn a lot. Their seeds grow really uniformly, really big. One of the biggest
things with them is that they're resistant to Round Up, so farmers can put down seeds,
they can spray Round Up, their seeds don't die; everything grows great.
The tactic that they've been doing is they've been forcing farmers to buy seeds from them
for every round. Whenever you buy seeds from them, you have to sign a contract that says
you're not going to reuse the seeds. For now, that means that farmers are buying seeds from
them every round. Think about it: Soy beans are something that's huge right now for a
very educated group of people who do not like tactics like this. They don't like the idea
that because Monsanto's doing this, they've basically driven out everything that's organic
soy beans, because these are genetically modified. There's this huge bad will against Monsanto.
The farmers can't really do much to get out of it. There is one farmer recently who's
found that if you just buy soy bean seeds, because everyone uses Monsanto, there's a
good chance that even though you bought soy bean seeds that should be for feed that they're
going to have a lot of Monsanto in them. You can spray the Round Up, but you'll probably
get the Monsanto for free. Monsanto is suing them. If Monsanto loses, all the farmers are
going to start doing this. No one's going to support Monsanto wanting to still work
with them, and they're going to significantly lose a lot of business share.
The value in RCS is that because people actually value as a company, if you hit some hard times,
they're going to support you through it. You're going to be able to go through that rough
patch and get back to where you were before. If Monsanto loses this business tactic, if
it doesn't work anymore, they're going to have to find another spammy business tactic
or else they're going to go down.
Kate: After all of these examples, what we really wanting to drive home, and I'm sure
you've gotten this by now, is that while RCS may mean different things to different people,
different companies have different user bases, what it's going to mean to you is different
than what it's going to mean to the person next to you. It's not about the individual
tactics. What we really want to drive home is that Real Company Shed is about growing
your customer base full of people that are going to talk about you, that are going to
share what you do, what you sell. They're going to help grow your business exponentially.
An individual tactic is actually not going to grow your business very fast. Doing any
of these sweepstakes, doing schwag, they all help, but if you have a good user base that
is willing to talk about you, to advocate you, that is going to exponentially grow your
company. That's what RCS is really all about; it's about your users. It's about the intent
behind lots of different tactics. It has to be about helping them out, not helping you
out.
Thank you so much for joining us today. This is Distilled Live, from Seattle. We hope to
see you again for the next version. Bye.