Real Time Digital: Episode 1
Hello and welcome to Real Time Digital! We will be posting transcripts of our show, including links to all kinds of fun, informative sites. We hope you love our show as much as we love hosting it. (If you haven’t heard it yet, listen now!) On this episode, Emily and I speak with Oleg Voss, one of the owners of Schnitzel and Things, voted New York Citys number one mobile street vendor. Oleg describes the fascination surrounding their concept and how social media has added to their marketing buzz. We also speak with Peter Shankman, Founder of Help A Reporter Out (HARO).
So without further ado, here is the transcript of our pilot episode surrounding Social Media Marketing Buzz:
Announcer 1: The opinions expressed on this WebmasterRadio.fm program are those of the hosts, guests and callers and do not reflect those of the staff, management or advertisers of WebmasterRadio.fm. Any re‑broadcast or re‑transmission of this program without the express written consent of WebmasterRadio.fm is prohibited. [music]
Announcer 2: You are now logged in to “Real Time Digital” presented by TheJARGroup.com, online marketing with measurable results. Welcome two of The Jar Group’s savviest Internet marketers, Emily Liedblad and Lauren Garcia. Listen as these digital divas analyze hot trends and chat with the in‑crowd of the digital world. “Real Time Digital” starts in real time right now.
Lauren Garcia: Hello and welcome to “Real Time Digital” presented by The JAR Group. I’m Lauren and I’m here with Emily. We are digital analysts at The JAR Group.
Emily Liedblad: Woo. And we’re super‑excited to be the hosts of this radio show. [music]
Emily: We have tons of great content for you guys that we’ll be delivering over the next few weeks, so we hope you tune in every time there’s a new show from “Real Time Digital”.
Lauren: Today we will be interviewing two awesome people. The first one is Oleg from the famed Schnitzel Truck, and then later in the program we will have Peter Shankman, best known for his work with “Help A Reporter Out”, also known as HARO.
Emily: Yes, and the point of the show “Real Time Digital” is that we’re interviewing all these interesting folks from a bunch of different industries, all who are in some respect or another, living in the digital present. So people who really understand what it means to live in real time. We’re from The JAR Group, it’s a full‑service digital marketing agency and we live in this space. We work in DUMBO, which is a really hip part of Brooklyn.
Lauren: Yes.
Emily: Yes, exactly. It’s really fun. We really internalize this stuff, it’s not just a job. We eat this, we breathe this, and then we do it for fun too, which also translates into work.
Lauren: It’s a great time.
Emily: Yes, we’re super‑excited. OK. We’re going to start off our show with a quick “What’s hot and what’s not” segment. Lauren is always quick to tweet on any subject that sounds interesting, and we both love perusing through blogs pretty much every morning. So we’re going to update you guys on a few of the things that have been taking the blog world by storm.
Lauren: Yes. Obviously we know everybody has heard all the buzz about the iPad, so that’s obviously our first “What’s hot”.
Emily: What’s hot. Ding, ding, ding.
Lauren: The iPad. Huge seller, kind of a steep price‑point, but I’ve already seen a couple on the subway, on the bus, everywhere, it’s popping up.
Emily: I saw a guy toting one today in the elevator. I was that close to snatching it and trying to get away.
Lauren: Actually, I don’t know if anybody has heard about this, but someone actually had to have his pinkie amputated. Or maybe it wasn’t his pinkie… One of his fingers amputated, because he had the bag wrapped around his hand that was holding his brand new iPad and it was snatched out of his hand by the thief and…
Emily: Did the pinkie get cut off?
Lauren: He had to have it amputated at the hospital.
Emily: Oh. Oh my gosh.
Lauren: It’s crazy, right. There’s a definite demand for these things.
Emily: There are certain hazards that come with the iPad, I guess. Well, that’s certainly not hot.
Lauren: Losing a finger, not hot. The iPad, very hot.
Emily: Very hot. And going off that, what’s not hot? The iPad, hyper‑smoking, but there’s been all this buzz about the new iPhone. The iPhone 4G, which, and I’m sure you’ve all heard, was apparently, either intentionally or unintentionally, left in a bar in the San Francisco Bay area this last week by an Apple employee. Although it’s definitely on our radar, not hot.
Lauren: Not hot.
Emily: Not hot at all. I know that it’s really easy to lose the iPhone, all my friends have had at least two or three of them. But really Apple employee, got to be a little smarter than that.
Lauren: Well here’s my thing. Was it intentional or was it not? Because that generated a lot of buzz. And while they hadn’t released it yet, I’m like “Hmm? Marketing ploy or actual slip‑up?” But they can frame it either way.
Emily: No, it’s true. I almost think it’s funny because when that employee lost the phone, whether or not he meant to do it, if he did indeed do it on accident, he must have been scared to death. Who wants to go in to their boss’ office and tell them that they lost the next huge generation of iPhones? So it might have saved his a**, honestly, in the end, because it turned into this huge thing, everybody’s picking up on it. I don’t necessarily think it’s hurt them in any way, and I think, if anything, it’s just given the iPhone 4G more hype.
Lauren: Yes, everybody’s pretty pumped to see what actually comes out.
Emily: So I’m glad it’s not me.
Lauren: Yes. So pros and cons, but mostly not hot about losing your phone.
Emily: Not hot.
Lauren: What’s next? Location, location, location, very hot right now.
Emily: Oh, location, location, location, you’re absolutely right. We actually covered this on our JAR Group blog, our company blog, a few weeks ago. One of our digital strategists, Dylan Spencer, wrote covering the geolocation wars at South By South West.
Lauren: Woo‑hoo.
Emily: First in the ring is Foursquare versus Gowalla. I don’t know. Who do you think is the winner right now, Lauren?
Lauren: I don’t know. I’ve heard a lot about Foursquare and again, you can read about Dylan’s blog posts on the JAR blog, and that’s www.TheJARGroup.com. I don’t have an iPhone, but I wish I did, all these amazing apps that are coming out. But Foursquare, everybody’s checking in everywhere. We’ll talk about this later with Oleg, and people are checking in at the Schnitzel Truck. People are checking in all over the place. I think from just what I’ve been reading, Foursquare is winning the battle right now.
Emily: Yes. Foursquare actually does have a lot bigger following. I wish that they could just find a way to live in peace, because I think there’s an opportunity there. You can only be the mayor of so many things. But I definitely know that there’s some inter‑office competition as to who’s going to be the mayor of The JAR Group.
Lauren: Definitely, definitely.
Emily: It’s like on your daily to‑do list is “Check in wherever you are at your place of work.” That’s definitely hot, that’s smoking.
Lauren: Location, hot. What’s not hot?
Emily: I don’t know, not knowing where you are at all times. [laughs]
Lauren: Yes. I don’t know. I’ve heard some jokes, a little while ago, saw some jokes flying around online, how thieves are going to be better able to rob your apartment because you’re checking in wherever else, obviously not your home. So they’re going to know when to strike. So that’s not hot.
Emily: That’s really not hot. That’s true, there are definitely things that you have to think about when you’re telling your Facebook friends where you are. Yes, but it’s also pretty cool, it’s also pretty smoking.
Lauren: Yes. All right. We’re going to keep tracking these “What’s hot and what’s not” subjects over the next few weeks. But now we’re really excited to get a move on and start interviewing our guests for today. When we come back from the break, we will be talking to the famous Oleg Voss. You may not recognize that name right off the bat, but he is the man behind the Schnitzel Truck. So stay tuned with us, and when we come back, we’re going to be talking about the Schnitzel Truck and social media and how the thing has just blown up all over Manhattan and how it’s huge on Twitter. So you’ll want to stay tuned for us after the break.
Announcer 2: ”Real Time Digital” will be back after this download from our sponsors. [radio break]
Announcer 2: Welcome back to “Real Time Digital” presented by thejargroup.com, online marketing with measurable results. Here are your digital divas, Emily and Lauren.
Emily: Welcome back to the program. We are extremely excited about our next guest. He is Oleg Voss of the famous schnitzel truck which has been making rounds around Manhattan since last July and has been experiencing explosive success. Schnitzel holds, you know, a very near and dear place to the JAR Group’s heart. They make their weekly rounds in DUMBO. And we’re just so thrilled to have you on our show Oleg. Thanks so much for joining us.
Oleg Voss: Thank you Emily and Lauren. I am very honored to be on the show. And I look forward to your questions.
Emily: Great, all right. Why don’t you give us just a quick background on the schnitzel truck? I know that you started in last July, and it must have just been a whirlwind since then as you’ve been making rounds everyday visiting different parts of Manhattan. So how did this thing get started? Tell us a little bit about the schnitzel truck concept.
Oleg: Well, the concept came, actually, while I had a job in Vienna in 2008. I used to work as an investment banker. And, fortunately, for me right downstairs from my office was a local schnitzel eatery that I would frequent quite often. So I gained an appreciation for schnitzel while I was in Austria. And then in, I guess, the middle of 2008 when the financial crisis hit, my company started to downsize. And then in early 2009 they formally laid me off. So that’s, I guess, where the idea came from because I don’t speak German. And I was in a foreign land. And I missed home which was New York. I grew up here. And I knew I needed to do something outside of the financial industry. Because it would be extremely tough to get back into it considering the amount of people that got laid off and the amount of people that had more experience than me.
So I decided to do this crazy thing which is open up a schnitzel truck. I mean I do have somewhat of a culinary background. I used to attend the French Culinary Institute here in New York City. So I always had a passion for food. I lived in Paris for four years during my high school years. So I really gained an appreciation for gourmet fine dining at a very early age. So I always wanted to get back into the industry, just didn’t know how. And I thought this was a perfect niche to bring the product to the people.
Lauren: That’s awesome.
Emily: Well, we love it. We are so happy you decided to come to New York City. We wouldn’t even know what we would have been missing at all had you not decided to bring the wonderful schnitzel to the streets. It’s incredible. Did you know what kind of competition you were getting into when you decided to have a food truck in New York City of all places? And how did you come up with the idea of the traveling food truck? That’s what’s so, you know, new and different about the schnitzel truck.
Oleg: Well, in terms of competition I researched the market while I was back in New York in early 2009. And I really saw that this whole food truck thing had some buzz around it. And in terms of savory food trucks here in New York City, I really saw no competition because I knew that if we would come out with this concept, we would do it on another level. A very gourmet level, yet very affordable. It’s not that expensive for what you’re getting. So I saw maybe three to four savory trucks that really weren’t going to compete with us. We had a completely unique product that hasn’t really been tested on the streets of New York. It was just a matter of whether it was going to work. And fortunately for us the people embraced the “schnitz.” And everybody’s loving it. I mean it’s very validating and gives us a lot of confidence that we made the right decision.
Emily: Oh, yeah, and so you’ve really embraced social media in marketing the schnitzel truck. And, you know, social media has been one of the really main ways that the fans of the “schnitz” communicate, interact with each other, and express their loyalty to Schnitzel. So tell us how you started embracing Twitter and really started building up your followers.
Oleg: Well, you’re absolutely right. I mean social media has played a tremendous role in getting us started and attracting customers. I believe Twitter has been a tremendous business tool, forget the social aspect of it. But as a business tool it really helps us to communicate with a large number of people about our locations and daily specials. And I really saw it as an opportunity to have fun with it and not just give the bland, you know, we’re here today or we’re here tomorrow. I try to communicate with as many people as I can on Twitter. And there’s no manual to how social media can impact your business. But I can certainly tell that it has had a major impact on our business. I can’t give you a measurable. But I can say that it’s definitely been a big help. And I’m very grateful for Twitter.
Emily: So that wasn’t necessarily part of your original plan? It just sort of was organically, you know, developed once it hit the streets?
Oleg: When I came back to New York, I didn’t really know what Twitter was or how to operate it or what the purpose was really. But as soon as we started the company and as soon as the idea came about and I started to get the word out, I immediately saw the potential impact of this. And, yeah, I started to get the word out to the different bloggers and journalists, and eventually, slowly, the fan base grew and grew and keeps growing on a daily basis. So, it wasn’t part of my, like, scheme to grow the business, but thank God for Twitter because it’s been a big help.
Lauren: Awesome, Oleg. Well, I know I’ve interacted with you a lot on Twitter, both for my personal handle and for the JAR Group. It’s great. You guys are really active on there. I was just wondering. I know you guys have a Facebook group, rather a fan page also. How do you see a difference? Do you use it differently than Twitter, and do you see it as just as effective a tool as Twitter for getting your business out there?
Oleg: I don’t, actually. I thought it would be the other way around. I thought that we would have more Facebook fans and so on and so forth. I do interact with those two programs differently. Like for Twitter, I won’t post interviews of myself and press articles because mostly people on Twitter just use their phone, and they can’t really access this kind of content. But for Facebook, I like to really advertise where we’ve been, what we’ve been on and so on and so forth. That’s, I guess, the different way that I use Twitter and Facebook. And we have a lot less fans on Facebook which… I don’t know whether that’s a surprising thing or not.
Emily: You already have some pretty funny stories that have to do with Schnitzel and social media. Do you have one off the top of your head that just cracks you up every time? Like, do you have a person who stalks you on Twitter or something like that?
Oleg: Well, there is this application called Four Square where people like to check in at different locations, and you can be the mayor of whatever, Schnitzel & Things. And we have this guy; his name is Mike O’Day. I don’t know if I’m supposed to say this, but he’s a great guy. He comes every single week just to check in so that he can say he’s the mayor of Schnitzel & Things. But recently he lost his mayorship, and he’s been coming more frequently to regain it. It’s just so funny to me that people would go to such extremes. He travels. I don’t know. He’s there a couple times a week just to check in at the Schnitzel & Things truck. It’s crazy to me.
More recently, we park on 48th and Sixth. If you guys have a chance, please, these guys are fantastic. They created a Facebook fan page that’s called the Schnitzel Fathers, and it’s a play off of the Godfather. They’ve been sending me messages of a talking puppet with, like, a real kind of Italian accent.
I’m, like, yeah, if you’re not going to be here today, I’m going to kick your butt from here to Buffalo and just complete hilarity. I mean, I love these kinds of things, and this is why I do this, to have fun. And it’s great when people join in the fun and express themselves in creative ways.
Emily: I love. I love it. That is too funny. You probably are spurring on competition, and now that you’ve got that out there I’m sure a few other people will try to be contenders for the mayor of the Schnitzel truck because that’s quite a badge to have to your name.
Lauren: Well, it sounds good. Hopefully, we’ll see you more often in DUMBO. We can re‑establish our constant Schnitzel Fridays.
Oleg: Yeah.
Emily: I have another question.
Oleg: Actually, we left DUMBO recently. We haven’t abandoned it. That’s what the people on Twitter are kind of upset with us about over abandoning DUMBO. It’s just really funny some of the comments that some people are saying. It’s just really funny. I don’t know.
Emily: So, what happens when you move from different places and you’ve established a regular schedule, and then you interrupt that by going to another place. I know a few of us in DUMBO for the last Fridays in a row said, “Where is the Schnitzel truck?” And we’ve been desperately yearning for the Schnitzel truck. I’ve just been so disappointed when I see that you’re not on the corner. So, what do you do when people feel like you interrupted their weekly schedules? I think people are calling it abandonment on Twitter.
Oleg: Yeah. And some people are saying‑‑this one guy on Twitter said that he’s going to rip his mouth off and never breathe again unless we come back to DUMBO. I mean, I feel terrible. I want to be back in DUMBO, but unfortunately there’s just not enough people. The kind of crowds we saw on DUMBO when we first launched aren’t there anymore, so we have to kind of make up for that kind of slowish Friday. And we’ve chosen now to do it only because this is a temporary thing. We will be back in DUMBO once DUMBO misses us a little bit. If you see us every week, it’s not going to be so special. We need the relationship to be a little special.
Lauren: Well, we’re looking forward to seeing you back there whenever you choose to come visit us but given that…
Oleg: We’ll be back for sure. We promise. On a side note, we do have a second truck in development. So, in any case, DUMBO will be included in our plans always.
Lauren: Awesome. Well, that’s actually what I was going to ask you.
Emily: Me too.
Lauren: It looks like that’s what our last question will be, given our timing. But what are your plans for the future? I know you just said you’re getting another truck in the works, but what are your plans going forward and how do you feel social media is going to play a factor in that?
Oleg: We want to build a Schnitz empire. [laughter]
How to do this, I’m not sure. This is my first attempt at a food truck, and to this day I can’t believe how crazy it is. There are a lot of obstacles, so for the future it’s difficult to predict that, like I said, a second truck, OK, we’ll have. But a fleet of trucks, I don’t see that happening. So, maybe, at some point a retail location or partnering up with some other people that provide some synergy. There’s just a lot of opportunities that we’re pursuing, but one thing is for sure, we will have a second truck out on the road.
Emily: Oh, man, well you’re doing a bunch of things right. You’ve got the great Schnitzel. You’ve got the Twitter fans and so we’re super excited to see what’s going to happen with the Schnitzel truck. I’m sure we’ll be seeing great things. So, viva la Schnitzel empire. And thanks so much for joining us today. That’s all the time we have, but it was a great pleasure.
Oleg: Please, please, please don’t be upset at us. We haven’t abandoned DUMBO. Let all the people in DUMBO know that Schnitzel Friday will be in effect at some point in the near future.
Lauren: Awesome.
Emily: All right. Schnitz you later, Oleg.
Oleg: Schnitz you later, everybody.
Lauren: Bye, Oleg.
Oleg: Bye.
Announcer 2: Real Time Digital will be back after this download from our sponsors. [radio break]
Announcer 2: Welcome back to Real Time Digital, presented by jargroup.com, online marketing with measurable results. Here are your digital divas, Emily and Lauren.
Lauren: And welcome back to Real Time Digital. Once again, I’m Lauren, here with Emily.
Emily: Hey.
Lauren: We’re from The JAR Group. And we are now here with Peter Shankman, founder of HARO, Help a Reporter Out, and The Geek Factory. So we’re very excited to have you on the show, Peter. Thanks for joining us.
Peter Shankman: My pleasure, thanks for having me guys. It’s great to be here.
Emily: Great and before we get into the interview, we just want to say we are huge fans of HARO. A bunch of us at The JAR Group subscribe and look forward to getting the daily free email. It’s a really, really cool tool that we use for our clients, that we use for our company, The JAR Group. So it’s really cool and we’re really looking forward to hearing more about it from your perspective. So without further ado.
Peter: Thanks.
Lauren: I guess just to get started, Peter, where did you get the idea for HARO?
Peter: Deep question. HARO is one of those things that started because I had an idea of a way to help people. And most companies that tend to grow really fast and really big usually start because someone had a better idea of a way to do something. And I didn’t know that I had a better idea or anything, all I knew was that I had run a PR firm for 10 or so years, and I had journalists who all the time would call me and say “Peter, I know you talk to everyone. And you’re like the most connected person I know, because for some reason you do talk to everyone. And you know everyone in the world. So I’m doing a story on how aluminum cans are made from recycled goods to be turned into soda cans and do you know anyone who could talk about that?” And I’d be like “Oh yeah, I sat on a plane last month with some guy that worked for Pepsi in development. Let me email both of you and put you in touch.”
So part of it was good karma, part of it was why wouldn’t you want to be a nice guy, and that’s what I started doing. And that led to reporters calling me pretty much daily and saying, reporters I knew, and saying “Hey, Peter, I need someone who knows about this and you know so‑and‑so?”
But then what started happening is it was reporters I didn’t know started calling me, asking me for things I didn’t necessarily know about. Hannibal Lecter from “Silence of the Lambs, ” he said it best. He said “We covet what we know.”
[laughter]
But if you don’t know, for someone like me who is trying to help journalists, the straw that broke the camel’s back was a reporter from a major New York newspaper called me and said “Hey, I got your name from so‑and‑so at another major New York newspaper, and he said that you have… I’m doing a story on Nigerian farming, and he said that you have a ton of friends that are sub‑Saharan soil experts.”
Lauren: Oh my goodness.
Peter: You just sort of had to imagine me looking at the phone and going “Oh, yeah, that’s how I organize all my friends.” [laughter]
And so I was calling everyone I knew. I found some professor at USC, in Earth Science or whatever, and I put the two of them together. And I’m like “All right, this took me six hours. This was my entire day. There has got to be a better way to do this.” So I started a Facebook group. And I told my friends. I’m like “Hey, get in this group. Every time I have a query, I’ll just send it to all of you. And if you can answer it, do it.” That lasted two months and we outgrew the Facebook group. And it got to the point where Facebook sent me a note and said, “Hey, you’re approaching too many members. If you go past this certain number we can’t let you send anymore emails.” I said, “Well, oh crap that defeats my whole purpose of this group.”
So I have a friend of mine, a kid who lives in Canada, he’s like 23, lives in his parent’s basement. He’s an awesome web programmer and he’s never discovered girls. So he spent all night in his parent’s basement, coding, for like $100 and a case of beer. So I hope he never changes. But I say to him “Can you build this idea?” He’s like “Yes, sure, no worries.” Twelve hours later, he had the first draft of what was Help A Reporter. And I posted one more time to the Facebook group. It was an email that I wrote saying “Hey I’m moving to this website if you guys want to keep helping me out. I’m doing this to be a nice guy. You know, it’s good karma.”
And that was in March, when did we move? We moved in March of 2008. And the first day we had about, I think, 200 people from the group, out of about 1,000 people moved over to the email list off of Facebook.
And that was March 20th. And we just celebrated our two year anniversary and we have over 130,000 members that receive queries from over 50,000 journalists.
Emily: Wow. That’s incredible.
Lauren: Big numbers. Big numbers. That’s awesome.
Peter: It’s pretty crazy.
Lauren: Yes, I know I participated in your anniversary contest. And that kind of leads me into another question, how are you using social media, or are you, for Help A Reporter, kind of using that idea of listening in the community versus talking and kind of putting your own stuff out there. I know you’re talking a lot about karma. How does the listening kind of play a role in what you’re doing?
Peter: Well, I think the thing about social media that people just, people are starting to get it, but it’s just taking so damn long for big corporations and even small companies to realize this, is that social media is the first media in the world that is not broadcast first. If you look at TV, if you look at radio, if you even look at websites back 10, 12 years ago in the dot‑com boom, every type of media that has ever existed has always been broadcast first. So TV started, people broadcasted their ads. Radio started people broadcasted radio ads. Even when AOL started in the mid‑90s, in all those chat rooms and everything. What was keeping those things alive other than the membership fee were ads.
And so people expect media to be, social media is the next form of media, it just happens to have the word social in front of it, and people still see it as broadcast. But this is the first type of media ever that is not broadcast.
The thing about social media is it’s the first type of media that’s not only broadcast. Social media is a two way street. It’s listening followed by broadcast. And there’s never been something like that before.
If you wanted to get the pulse of your audience, to figure out if they liked your commercial or to figure what commercial to broadcast, you sat 100 people down across the country, paid focus group companies lots of money to poll these people and the answers were never scientific, because they knew they were getting polled.
Social media eliminates that, and social media turns the concept of “Just broadcast” on its ear and lets you listen first and use that information to then broadcast much much better and to a much more targeted audience exactly the way the audience wants it. And the people and the companies that get it realize that what that allows you to do is sell a lot more and make a lot more revenue and generate a lot more revenue and increase profits, because I don’t care how cool companies think social media is, or how cool the social media is to the tech guy who’s trying to sell it to the CEO.
If the tech guy or the Internet guy who’s talking to the CEO, and the CEO says, “Why should I give you some money to hire someone to do Facebook or to do Twitter?” If the tech guy’s answer is, “Because it’s cool, and it’s the next best thing, ” he’s going to get shot down.
The people who are trying to explain it to the CEO have to explain it in the way that, look, if we use this stuff and listen first, it will generate more revenue and save us more money than if we don’t. Because that’s how CEOs are trained to think. And social media does actually allow you to do that. You can listen and adjust on the fly, immediately and in real time to change your campaigns, your attitudes, your style of customer service, whatever. We’ve never had that opportunity before.
Lauren: Right. Well, stepping off of that, how has this type of new real‑time generation and revolution changed traditional PR and like the agency side of things? You said you worked in the traditional PR agency for ten years before conceptualizing HARO. So how has that really affected the agency side for you?
Peter: When I ran my agency… It’s funny, I get that question a lot, and I guess the best answer I can give is this. Every time something new comes out… When the Internet came out and everyone was using email and everyone sort of stopped… Email came about and people realized they could email press releases right to the journalists. When email first arrived and the Internet first blew up, there were really really smart people who still have jobs today who went on record and said, “Paper will be dead in ten years. None of us will be using paper. We’ll be using digital walls. And we won’t use pens, and our children will see this stuff…”
Lauren: [laughs] Never heard that one.
Peter: ”…In a museum.” And I remember hearing these interviews on CNN and MSNBC and thinking, “Wow, that’s a bit short‑sighted.” What I’m saying in terms of social media, how does it affect PR? It does change public relations. It does change marketing health, it changes sales, but the social media revolution, and I hate to call it that because it sounds really really cheesy and tacky, but the concept of social media invading our lives is in a lot of ways similar to the way Google invaded our lives. Ten or 12 years ago you didn’t say “I’m going to Google something.” You said, I’m going to go on the web and look something up on this search engine, if you even knew the term “search engine.” That’s what you did originally. And then over the past ten or 12 years, the term “Google” had entered the lexicon. And now you Google something.
I remember watching the Sex and the City episode, what, eight years ago or something, when Carrie Bradshaw, you know, HBO, she goes “Oh, I Googled him ” and I’m like, “OK. Google just jumped the shark.” It’s become mainstream, and that was the sort of symbol. Twitter hasn’t done that yet. Facebook is just starting to do that, but once something enters the lexicon, and people like you and me and people in the industry, and the majority of people listening to this interview, we’re already ahead of the curve.
When I worked at AOL, we used to call it seeing the world through T3‑colored glasses. We were on this really really fast Internet line because we worked at AOL. And the pipe that came from the Atlantic from the rest of the world literally terminated at AOL.
So we were on these sick fast Internet connections, like seven times faster than the cable modem you have in your apartment or house now. So we’d build these little pages on AOL and we’d think, awesome, that looked great, it loaded in less than a second for us. But we were looking at it through the glasses that we had. We weren’t looking at it through Joe Bob’s glasses. Joe Bob lived in a trailer in Tennessee and had a 1200‑baud modem that worked, maybe. So we had to learn to sort of adapt the way at work.
And the same thing’s happening here. We see Twitter as staples of what we do work every day. It’s just starting to enter the mainstream, but now that it is just starting to enter the mainstream, we’re going to see a massive shift in the way people use the technology and start to use Facebook. I don’t know if it’s going to be Twitter, but I definitely know it’s going to be Facebook. And they use these things to say, OK, this is how I’m going to plan my day, and as such, how I’m going to plan my life. I’m going to see what my friends are doing.
They’re going to stop trusting newspapers. Newspapers are dying, not because the news isn’t there anymore, but because half the newspapers were made up of the people who told us what to think. Restaurant reviewers, movie critics, things like that. Now for the first time, we have easy access to all of the people in our network, all of our friends we’ve ever known. And if ten of them say they just saw the new movie “Kick‑Ass”, and they all loved it and we know these ten people, we’re apt to trust them a lot more than the reviewer.
So for the first time we’re seeing social media start to play a part in how the masses… I’m not using this as an insult… But how the universe, the world, America, whatever, plans their day and goes about their daily lives as opposed to just the select few geeks like ourselves. So as the business needs to grow, that’s where businesses have to look. Right now, the CEOs are like, “What’s the point? I don’t see the point of Facebook or Twitter or having a blog.”
In three, four, five years when this is mainstream, even more so than it is right now‑Ashton Kutcher on Twitter does not make Twitter mainstream‑but 700 million people or a billion people or something like that on Facebook, doing everything from planning their day to visiting websites through the system to hearing what their top 20 most relevant friends say, that makes everything relevant. And that makes it much more important, so companies need to start thinking about 36 months down the line and so when the kid comes and says, “Hey, we should get on this because it can generate revenue, ” you should start to trust them.
Lauren: So Peter, just to wrap up our show really quickly, we’re almost out of time, what is the funniest HARO story that you’ve come across so far in your experience?
Peter: Oh my God, there are so many awesome stories. Some are funny, some are totally inspiring. Inspiring, there was a person in the Midwest, I think they ran a bakery or something, and they told me after the fact that they were really close to thinking about shutting it down because of the economy, and they used HARO and within a week of using HARO they were featured in the Wall Street Journal or something, in some article related to their knowledge and then that made them so popular they had to hire six people or something like that. I hear those stories every day and it just totally makes me so happy. In terms of funny stories, it is amazing what people will do stories about. HARO’s a phenomenal barometer of what’s going on in the news and in the world. So if I wake up in the morning and 15 queries came in overnight about divorce or about sexual escapades or something like that, I know that some celebrity somewhere probably just got busted by TMZ or something like that. When the Tiger story broke? Oh my God, it was like HARO was Tiger Central. It was crazy.
Emily: Oh my goodness. That is too funny. Well, thank you so much for joining us today, Peter. It was really enlightening. We love what you’ve done for PR everywhere. And thanks so much for taking the time to come out and talk to us today.
Lauren: Thanks, Peter.
Peter: My pleasure, any time.
Emily: And with that, that concludes the first show of Real Time Digital. So thanks, everybody for tuning in. We are looking forward to featuring tons more of really really interesting people. So keep coming back and listening to us.
Emily: Thanks, everyone. [music]
