You’ve seen it. At least, if you watched the College Football Playoff this year. Or the Super Bowl. Or the NCAA Basketball Tourney. Or you’re one of the 9 million people on YouTube that watched it on purpose (hint — it’s working!). Or you clicked the play button below.

But what can your brand learn from it?

In my opinion, the ad is genius — absolutely packed with great stuff brands should start applying today, no matter what their advertising strategy.

(Also, absolutely massive congratulations to TBWA\Chiat\Day LA, for putting together a brilliant piece of work.)

1. Listen To Your Community

TBWA has been working with Gatorade for a while now, and it’s clear to me they really get Gatorade’s community. Lemme ‘splain.

I’ve watched the Lights ad a couple hundred times. Seriously. Ask my wife. I’ve also read a lot of discussions about it online. I know the things people say about it. But one of the funniest things I saw was a discussion in which one person was totally amazed that Gatorade had used “All of the Lights” as the song for the ad.

“Don’t they know what this song is about?” Another commenter followed that with a million ridiculous speculations about how the lyrical content of a song about restraining orders and jacking up a dude who’s replacing you with your girl relates to the ad.

News flash: it doesn’t.

But TBWA and Gatorade know that. They also know that after the song came out in 2010, this happened (fast forward to 4:55):

Then this happened.

Then this (not as good as the LSU Tiger band, but you get it):

Then this:

Then this:

And this:

And this:

And this:

You get the point! I won’t keep adding them, ’cause there are hundreds. Literally.

You can talk about this all day. Kanye’s huge chorus, the big brass and electric quad drums. The fact that the words are easily applicable to one of the best things in sports, i.e., the lights. All of these are probably reasons why, beginning with marching bands, Kanye’s track made a tear through the sports world and became a sign of legitimacy in sport culture. (The real genius is that Kanye absolutely intended this, but that’s another story for another day).

TBWA and Gatorade knew this. And they knew not only that playing the song as a get-hyped song, but even showing the brief shot of a marching band, would be heard as signs of real authenticity with their sport-obsessed audience.

The song doesn’t have a damned thing to do with sports (and even less to do with Gatorade). But Gatorade and TBWA had listened to their community and listened well. They saw what their community was into, and they’re talking with them.

Before the commercial even leaves the weight room, the message is clear: this commercial is about what you see on highlight reels.

What’s the point: it pays to know where your people are and what they’re talking about. You listen well, and your answer will carry authenticity without you having to say “I’m authentic.”

2. Identify with Their Aspirations

Once it was decided to use Kanye, there were still so many wrong ways to make this commercial.

It could have been all professional athletes. It could have been actual highlight reels with Gatorade logos or pros drinking Gatorade (which, you know, does happen).

What they did instead was to show amateur athletes, the people hoping to be under the big lights one day. The emotional hook of the commercial is the teams we were on or still are, showing what high school and college sports have in common with the competition under the big lights.

And to make the point explicit, one professional athlete gets a cameo and solo: Serena Williams, one of the biggest stars of her generation.

Her presence provides a short break from the intensity before and after. But also, Serena is a sports hero who has handled the light with grace despite trolls really taking shots at her in the press. She’s the best her sport has seen, and yet her brand is individual, relatable, and human.

She’s one of the first women to achieve what even the most hard-lined chauvinist would have to agree is sports greatness. This makes her a point of aspiration for girls everywhere.

Because Gatorade didn’t just make this ad an ensemble of greats, the ad is about us, about how we aspire to that kind of greatness, and about how we get there.

The ad is about how you become great. For that reason, it begins in the weight room and ends on the field. The story arc positions Gatorade’s bars as crucial ingredients in the recipe for the greatness, as part of how you become the person who will shine on the big stage.

When building your brand, positioning is the execution that brings a marketing strategy to life. And by connecting with their customers’ aspirations, Gatorade positions their product between the customer and something they want with all their heart.

They could have spent ten times this ad’s budget putting their names on marquis in a stadium and not had anywhere near the same effect.

Identifying with your customer’s aspirations and hopes allows you to position your brand between them and something they want way more than they could ever want what you’ve got. When you become an ingredient in the recipe for what they really want, you stop being an option.

3. Pattern Interrupt and Confirm

People who don’t like this commercial are virtually unanimous in their reason. I’ll let my friend Paul Horn explain:

I’ve seen this comment more times than I can count. The reason I don’t share the opinion is not because any press is good press. It’s because the decision to have dudes singing with their mouths full is nothing less than brilliant.

First, it’s more positioning: Gatorade bars belong in the same place where Kanye’s track belongs: even in the same mouth!

Second, the singing with the mouth full agrees totally with how young testosterone-fueled athletes act. Baseball players chew tobacco and bum. Steph Curry puts an absolute beating on his mouthpiece every game. Having something in your mouth is part of sports.

But it is not part of how other people eat food. It’s not part of how people sing songs. And it’s not what you do with precious seconds of a 30-second spot. Nobody even understands the words!

This move confirms one pattern — and creates authenticity — while interrupting another. You see this commercial, and you find yourself wondering “what’s he saying again?” It gets attention, and it makes you feel like you’re not “in.” Unless, of course you are. And Gatorade’s interests are served either way.

TV advertising is expensive, and Gatorade’s market is absolutely swarming with new competitors. But this kind of pattern interruption opens up a space for them to speak where nobody is.

Brands are under more and more pressure, especially in paid media, to give the audience something new and different, to say something no one else is saying, or in a way no one else is saying it.

TBWA and Gatorade nail it here, and brands who learn from it can create the space to speak and be heard attentively and without interruption. In Gatorade’s case, this space has allowed them to grab the holy grail of advertising: turning paid media into earned media.

How often does a commercial get 9,000,000 views by people who sought it out to watch it?

4. Call to (Bigger) Action

The ad ends with football players running onto the field screaming “Let’s Feeeeaaaaast!” The slogan of course works perfectly for a product you eat.

But the positioning of the product, between weight room and trophy room, makes the call to action one that refers not to the product but to the whole life of an athlete.

It’s not a call to go buy Gatorade bars. It’s a call to work hard in the weight room, to practice like nobody else, to sell out for your team and do your job, and to win.

To feast is to satisfy your hunger. You’ve worked like you were hungry. Now it’s time to get what you hunger for. It’s time to shine under the big lights. It’s time to feast.

Gatorade Results w/o Gatorade $$$:

Success leaves clues. Very few brands have Gatorade’s advertising budget. But every brand can learn from the success of others.

Gatorade has spent a generation positioning themselves as the drink for athletes. This is the story they’ve been telling since the days when MJ walked on air and then sipped Gatorade on the bench.

That work means they have a very quick finger on the pulse of their customers. They know what matters to them, and they know how to tell stories that will catch those customers where it matters. Where they dream and fear and hope and work.

And on a much lower budget, other brands can listen well, meet their customers where it matters, interrupt the normal patterns of exchange, and position their product in a way that shows its place in the customer’s most important pursuits.

And if they do it well, it’ll be time to feast.

I’d love to hear your thoughts on the ad. Or what other ads you’ve picked up great stuff from. Holla back here or on Twitter.

Gratitude, like anything else after Gary Vaynerchuk has written a book about it, is trendy. Everyone’s talking/tweeting/instagramming/snapping about it.

And hey, no complaint here. That’s far from the worst thing we could be talking about. But I do wonder sometimes whether we’re not just doing it because it works.

By the way, it does.

The words “thank you” have brought about pretty much every good thing in my life. People like to be thanked, and making a regular point of doing so will bring people to your side.

Of course, you can’t be an idiot about it. Posting “thank you SO much” as a comment on an Instagram post where someone took a photo of their driveway will not get you far. It looks inauthentic, spammy, and weird.

Gratitude that is genuine, that thanks people for the ways they are actually expending real effort, is a human catnip. It lets people know you’re paying attention and motivates those who are doing you good to keep it up.

But all this may only show that we’re all opportunistic. Perhaps we’re only saying “thank you” because of the “economy” of it.

Again, that’s better than a lot of things you could do for money. But it might not by itself cultivate the virtue of gratitude, which is one of the things that makes some people absolutely irresistible to be around, not to mention happy as hell.

What happens when you say thank you a hundred times and the sale doesn’t go through or the client walks? What will you do then?

To help you cultivate actual gratitude, here are some exercises I lead myself through regularly (so you should interpret the second-person pronouns as my self-talk, which you are overhearing).

1. Look at the Stars . . . and Everything Else

I don’t mean in the cheesy way Disney characters do it. I mean really look hard at them. Count them if you can (people in NYC, you’re exempted from that task — ya’ll might not even know if they went out!).

Realize that every star you can see represents billions that you cannot. Do that math, and consider that the only planet you know for sure your organic ass could live on is this one. And what are the odds that your particular set of molecules and breath would gather up on earth?

And once you’re here? You’re not done. There are 35,000 species of freaking spider on this planet! Do you KNOW how small the odds are that you’d be a person?

Look, then, at all the horrible places and times to be a person. You could have been born under a brutal dictator or to an enslaved people. You could have been born at a time when a small bout of the flu got you leeched to death by well-meaning doctors who knew less about the human body than some fifth graders do now.

Really think about that. It helps, by the way, if you’ve got a snifter full when you go at it.

But when I consider how spectacularly unlikely it is that I would get to live as a human being; how against the odds it is that I would get to live in this time and place; how easy it would be for me never to exist at all; I find a warm vertigo flowing over me. That vertigo tells me I’ve actually reckoned with the infinity of the stars, with the very real possibility that I might not have been.

Gratitude is the name for the wonder that follows that reckoning.

Spend some regular time doing the same. Feel, honestly, without deflection, how strange and unlikely it is that you would be. Make yourself at home in that feeling. Look at how amazing it is that you have come to be here. That vertigo rising and making you want to call someone you’ve let slip out of your life? That’s the real thing.

2. Live Out of the Past, not In It

I grew up in a pretty unstable house. From 4th to 10th grade, I changed schools 7 times. My pops would do okay for a while, and then drugs or alcohol or whatever would rear a head again, and soon enough we’d get evicted or have to leave for some other reason.

I had almost no friends until high school, because I was never in a school long enough to make any. So even if it hadn’t been for the terrible money situation, fighting parents, dad’s drugs, and the abuse, life still would have sucked.

There were times when our floors had holes, and times when our holes had what appeared to be floors over them. For two or three years straight, we ate Tomato soup 4 nights a week. For the better part of a school year, my bed was a hard couch too small for my lanky frame in the living-room of my Grandma’s single-wide.

Back then, I knew the occasional sting of a hunger pang in a stomach at bedtime, knowing nothing is going to come until the next day’s school lunch.

But my mother was a hero. She made sure we also remembered that a lot of people felt it far more often than we did. In all that nonsense, my mom somehow taught us gratitude.

I’m ashamed of how little I’ve absorbed from my mother. But I’ve absorbed that lesson deep.

I’m much better fed now (maybe too well fed). I have friends all over the world, who care about me and who occasionally let me know how it feels not to have me around. I have a business that makes good money and a (thankfully) dwindling student loan balance.

And there is more opportunity in front of a person who comes from where I come from now than at any point in the history of the world. I don’t want to forget it. I don’t want to grow entitled or envious and miss how totally astounding it is that I’m here in this present, out of that past!

And I want you to remember what you’ve survived, and how unlikely it was that you would. I hope you feel wonder at the good fortune of it. That kind of gratitude is gasoline for your motivation, to excel yourself and to help others wherever you can.

3. Know that You’re Going to Die

In my life before business, I was a seminary student at Duke University (thankful thankful thankful). One of the most important books I read was Ernest Becker’s The Denial of Death.

The book is about the twisted ways we pretend not to be mortal beings. We ignore, deflect, and flee our mortality. And one of the tragic side effects of that pretense is that we don’t experience our lives for the precious, unlikely, wondrous things they are.

We go through our lives like we get more than one turn. Like there’s not a timer on us.

That’s the drama of A Christmas Carol. Ebenezer looks into his own grave, and it changes him. The first time I seriously contemplated it, I shivered from head to toe. The fact that I’m alive became real to me. Life, this thing that I so often forget I have, will at some point be taken away from me. I will not have what I have now. And no amount of money or friendship will fix that.

Can you feel the frightening thrill of that wash over you?

You’re going to die. You’re going to die. You’re going to die. You’re going to die. You’re going to die. You’re going to die. You’re going to die. You’re going to die. You’re going to die. You’re going to die. You’re going to die.

Don’t let denial of that fact rob you of the life you can only have now. I challenge you to spend regular time contemplating your mortality. Don’t let yourself squirm out of it. Consider it seriously, head-on, and honestly.

What do you want your life to mean? How will it be remembered? What is it worth doing, even if no one ever remembers you?

Recognize the gift you have. Realize how low the odds were that you’d have it, and now that you do, how sure and certain it is that you will lose it at some point.

The Last Drop: Be Good to It.

My glass is almost empty, so I better wrap up. Look — these are exercises; they are meant to be repeated, to help you cultivate recognition of the unbelievable gift your life is. Once you see that, gratefulness will be the immediate result.

If you read this post, think to yourself “hmmmn,” and walk away, I will be disappointed. I don’t care if you remember that it was me that wrote it. But I do care that you get the most possible value out of the time you’ve spent reading it (for which I’m grateful).

I do care that you make the world better in the time you have on it, in whatever way you can find to do that.

I do care that your grandchildren speak of you with hushed tones of grace-filled pride to those who weren’t lucky enough to have you as an ancestor.

I do care that your one, blisteringly short and unlikely life is everything it can be, good to the very last drop.

Last week, I sipped a double of Tennessee bourbon and found myself reflecting at length on the human side of being an early-stage entrepreneur. You can find that post here.

In the meantime, what are you grateful for? How do you cultivate gratitude? I’d love to connect with you on Twitter, to keep the discussion alive!

I have an occasional sip of whiskey. When I do, I’ll get real about my life in business.

I’m surprised whiskey still has a stigma. It is definitely among the more pleasant-tasting alcohols and is often powerful enough to de-incentivize overdoing it. Some people do, but there’s somebody overdoing everything.

If you don’t drink too much, a great thing happens to you. Alcohol dilates surface blood vessels while slightly depressing the central nervous system. For most people, anxiety diminishes a bit while the body gets warm. Just a thimbleful can cause comfort, give a feeling of security, and lower inhibitions. This can of course be bad. But the first time I told a friend I loved him, even though it had been true for years, I was under an alcohol-knitted security blanket.

Some people’s inhibitions are overactive. For those people, a sip of whiskey brings out the truth. In me, it brings out an excess of felt affection towards those I love and an urgency to say the things that matter. Because I’m a businessman, sometimes the things that matter are business-related. So, from time to time, when I have a drink, I’ll share a thing or two that might not quite come out right any other time.

I’m calling it whiskey business. Enjoy. And please do connect with me on Twitter to tell me your stories or share slightly drunken rants.

I probably wasn’t born to do this, by anybody’s guess. No one in my family had ever run a successful business before, or even started one as far as I knew.

I was a kid with a knack for words and a competitive steak so big that I never really stuck with anything I didn’t have natural talent for – bad personality trait for an entrepreneur.

In college, most of my friends had parent money and studied Business Admin. I studied medieval English literature on student loans. And loved it. Still do. Also, I didn’t understand money enough to know what a dumb choice I’d made. But I was a natural at the work, and I knew it. I wrote a paper that a professor responded to by telling me of the physical effects of the impression it left on him. It wasn’t the first or last time that would happen.

I took odd jobs after college, because my undergrad advisor thought the academy had become a waste. He didn’t know anymore that the world outside was no better.

Eventually, I realized there weren’t other options for someone with my training and went for the academy anyway. It might have been a bad call, but I figured there was just enough meritocracy left in it that I could make it. If I surpassed my peers by twenty times, surely I’d be recognized to be twice as good. I did, and I wasn’t.

I applied for PhD programs with the CV of most junior faculty members up for tenure review. I got rejected at all but one.

Fashion in the academic world is every bit as brutal, capricious, and nonsensical as it is anywhere else. The rules change for no reason, leaving those who have made it to reminisce about the good old days and those still coming up to scratch heads and wait tables.

You can complain if you want. But don’t, because nobody cares. I did what I had to.

There is no job title left in civilization whose desired capabilities even include – let alone demand – a degree in medieval literature. Or a PhD in Marian theology. You might as well put “proficient in abacus” on your resume. Or worse, Windows Explorer. Plus, after a seven-year break from the work world, I couldn’t even get a temp company to take me seriously for an admin job sorting files and documents.

“Sure, you’ve nearly got three degrees, but can you order things according to the alphabet?”

There was no sense griping. This is how it is.

I have only three real skills. Leadership, the ability to tell a story, and the ability to learn fast.

The first I inherited from my father, which is amazing because he squandered the greatest gift for leadership I’ve ever seen and was never around to pass it on. He was the guy who walks in a room and everyone says “I’ll have what he’s having.” At least, that’s how it was until he started having meth. Still, I think of him sometimes, how like him I am, and it’s not terrible.

Storytelling was called lying when I was little. I wasn’t impressed by people’s reactions to me, so I enhanced the truth until they were and stopped before I overdid it. It was some time before I realized there were genres, places where you could say things that weren’t true without losing all your friends! I’m not proud of the fact that it took me till college to figure that out. I am proud of what I’ve done since then.

And I learn fast. Not quite Rain Man fast, but close. There’s almost nothing that depends on analysis and focus that I can’t learn. I picked up French in three weeks. I’m not bragging. I can’t do what LeBron James can and I’d much rather. It is what it is.

So when I realized you can learn everything in the world with a simple combo of YouTube plus practice, I got to work. Gritty, thankless, slightly obsessive work. Videography, photography, web design, and data analysis all came natural enough that before long I had a skill set. (Btw…my phone really wants to call it my skull set. I better humor it once or it might take its revenge later).

It turns out that if you have a marketable skill and the ability to lead people, you can start a business. Those are really the only things it takes. Oh there’s lots to get better at. I talk to business owners every day, some for my podcast and some who are my clients. I’m better aware than most of all the things there are to know and do. But in the end, they’re variations on marketable skill and leadership.

I say this, because some of my friends are still looking for permission. They think there’s so much to learn that they couldn’t possibly start without some kind of guarantee that they’re the type. I get that. We were raised to do that.

You raise your hand. You ask to go to the bathroom. You ask your guidance counselor or your academic advisor. Other people set policy, and you obey it. Only here’s the problem.

Things didn’t ask your permission before they got all torqued up. The economy shifted underneath your feet and all the King’s horses and all the King’s men can’t make it great again.

The world is changing. In a few years your car will tell your oven that it’s almost home with you and the groceries and your oven will start preheating itself while the iPads start checking the kids’ homework. In that world, if your skill is turning screws, the screw is you.

But that’s your skill because somebody decided more stuff would get built faster if your only skill was screw-turning. They decided that without asking your permission. Are you waiting on them to tell you it’s okay to change?

Yesterday ain’t coming back. It’s time to get real. The genre of this story is reality. While you’re waiting for permission, the economy is shamelessly and recklessly leaving your ass in a cloud of dust.

I don’t want that to happen to you. So I’m telling you what you need to know. I’m telling you how someone who never meant to do this is building a real business, with sweat and stress and payroll and taxes and a paycheck.

And I’m loving it. I’m loving the building and developing. I’m loving the strategy and the field of play. I’m loving that a complicated world forced me to get over my fear of being bad at things so I could get good at things.

So here’s your permission. Get a marketable skill or stop ignoring the ones you have. My friend Donnie has a business cleaning windows and pressure washing stuff. It’s not glamorous. But it’s marketable, and it gives him the control over his schedule and life he needs to go after a career in comedy).

But even he’s a more obvious businessman than I. His dad was one.

But the world didn’t ask my permission before I got a deadbeat dad. It didn’t ask yours before it gave you whatever tough hand you’re playing with now.

So why are you waiting for permission to go do the one thing that’s gonna help you survive and maybe even be happy?

This is the first of our Socialhacking Medium Series. In this series, we will perform deep dives into the workings of great (and not so great) social media accounts to understand their storytelling, strategy, messaging, influencer relationships, technique, and more.

All with the goal of helping business owners up their social media game, deliver more value, and close more sales!

Fair warning: these posts will be somewhat long in form, because they deliver a ton of value in terms of deep analysis of particular social accounts and what makes those accounts work.

But part of the reason we’ve chosen Medium’s Series feature as the way to deliver this content is that it’s perfect for long-form content.

Just read where you can, and Medium will save your place. When you come back, you pick up where you left off.

So, on with the show.

For our first Socialhack, we dig into the Instagram account of Rachel Pedersen, Minnesota entrepreneur, social media marketer, and viral Facebook poster.

Hard as it may be to believe if you see her account nowadays, 16 months ago her Instagram was absolutely nothing to get excited about.

Now it’s hot, inspiring, and delivers tons of value to entrepreneurs on a regular basis.

We’re gonna tell you why.

Viral on Purpose

On March 27, 2016, at 1:30 am, Rachel Pedersen tweeted:

Less than two weeks later, she had appeared in Cosmopolitan, Glamour, The Today Show, and Huffington Post. Millions of women had read her post, and over 17,000 people had commented on it.

“On April 6th, 2016, my phone looked like a strobe light.”

In the next 9 months, she would appear on over a dozen podcasts about social media marketing, her Social Media University education platform would balloon, and she would become a sort of celebrity in the Social Media Marketing world.

Is there anything to learn from this?

Some would say “no.” They would say that Rachel caught a lucky break. That her song caught fire and she capitalized.

Those people would be wrong.

In fact, that post would never have gone viral if Rachel weren’t already doing some very important things on social media.

Which is good news, for her and for us, because it means we can learn from it and she’s not gonna be a one-hit wonder!

Gimme a few minutes, and I’ll show you both what she was doing and why it mattered.

And when it’s done, you’ll have a ton of insight and actionable steps to kick ass in 2017 just like Rachel did the year before. More importantly, you’ll have a model for how to analyze the whole story your social media presence is telling, and how you might do it better to reach your ideal customers and make them raving fans.

How She Started

In 2013, Instagram was for Rachel more question than answer. She was taking and storing photos, and some of them are quite nice. But there’s nothing remotely resembling a story.

Which is no problem; it was a new platform, and it takes time to know how to use it.

For Rachel, as for a lot of us, our first engagement with Instagram was basically as a less-texty Facebook. The pictures are low-res and mostly not well-composed. Also, each tells its own story. There’s no sense for how they fit together.

Which means Rachel had not yet fully grasped the significance of the Instagram’s grid view.

In fairness to her, though, this is what most Instagram accounts looked like in 2013.

But this is also a time for Rachel of increasing fluency with the platform, what its users are after, and what they like about her account.

And hashbrowns! For God’s sake, don’t miss the hashbrowns!

An Emergent Story:

Even at this stage, however, where Rachel is still learning what Instagram was going to be for her, you can see hints of the storylines that will be such a huge part of her later success.

1. A HUGE love for her Family.
2. The importance of community.
3. A delight in the occasional culinary indiscretion or splurge-buy, to remind us she’s a human and not a robot.

Over the next year and a half, Rachel would get better at evoking these themes in a way Instagram users could understand and connect to.

The Picture Starts to Clear

As Instagram grew up, Rachel focused mainly on cultivating an audience through Facebook.

Her Instagram pictures in those days (2013–2015) hover at around 1–5 likes with the occasional spike to ten and the rare comment.

But in late 2015, Rachel started to catch a vision for Instagram’s ability to tell a big-time story.

This last post is one that connects in a deep way with a lot of women’s aspirations. Posts like this get thousands of likes. Identical posts get none. It’s the story that builds up around it that will make the difference in Rachel’s case.

For her, this is not only the first post with multiple hashtags.

She also starts to find voice for what would become a consistent theme of her account: that of empowering single mothers and family women, women like Rachel, to dream big about their own success. It mattered, even back in 2015, when she spoke into this space, because people knew she already lived in it.

It’s not much surprise, then, that following this post, her next couple would have more engagement than any she had posted before that time.

These hashtags are probably not driving big traffic at this point. They show an emerging awareness of one way Instagram is connected, but they’re not popular enough to bring many new eyeballs. The higher engagement of these posts is almost certainly due to new followers from the post about the book.

Late 2015 also finds Rachel sharpening her technical skills with Instagram.

As her understanding of the platform and of its users deepens, the resolution on the photos grows as well, and the page view starts to really pop.

By late 2015, she also increases her volume. The twelve posts in the next page are all from three days.

By the end of 2015, most of the elements for Rachel’s future brand are here, though they are not as organized as they will be later.

Her two-post block at the top on time-saving makeup for professionals gets great response and hints at a major theme later to be developed.

Similarly, the emerging motivational/personal development story gets buzzed by the “Good to Great” book, the “remember where you came from” post below it, and the “thank you” card (included with a rent check!) on the bottom row.

And in the top 9 frames, her face appears 4 times. The two makeup posts, with the one immediately before, are the first times she gets over 20 likes on consecutive posts. And affixed to all of these are multiple, relevant, increasingly strategic hashtags.

She’s a year out from being a star, but it’s coming together. The total story here is of a woman in the midst of a massive transformation — in both mindset and career. It really shouldn’t be any surprise, then, that her most regular engagement during this period comes from women just like her.

What is surprising, and massively important to what follows, is that she engages with every single one. Each comment gets a response, even obvious spam.

She is literally talking, thanking, resharing, answering, and asking questions multiple times a day throughout the end of 2015 and the first quarter of 2016.

I can’t overstate the importance of that, in Rachel’s case and that of any significant social media success story I know about.

It’s not time-consuming; it’s time-investing. If more businesses understood the ROI of this kind of in-person engagement, the way it turns people into invested stakeholders in the success of your brand, they’d start rerouting marketing dollars tomorrow.

And they might well have a 2017 to match Rachel’s 2016.

#GirlWork: the arrival of the big story.

In late 2015, Rachel’s client-services business starts to really move. And just before Christmas, she posts this:

This is the beginning of a whole set of posts telling the story of Rachel (and, indirectly, of women like her) at work.

She adds to the #work theme a raw but serious effort at influencer outreach and cross-channel promotion.

Over time, she sharpens her skills at both of these. But at this point, they fit well with the transformation story and, importantly, show her work as it happens.

They are among her best performing posts from late 2016.

You can see the likes growing, and the comments do as well. Rachel’s hashtag game gets really serious at around this point, and her bio link becomes a serious traffic tool, though the traffic could not have been great just yet.

But most importantly, with the addition of posts that opened a window into her marketing biz, her big story at last rounds into form.

And as it happens, that story is the story of millions of women (hang tight — I’ll tell you what it is in just a sec). First, it’s important to notice the boost in her numbers during this period.

This is a story people will spend time to watch.

Her posts climb to around a 100–200 likes per post at the turn of the year.

The first of these three posts shows Rachel’s work environment, and it is laced with a nice set of #profeshtags.

The later two are very high-res, well-lit selfies, cropped at interesting points so that they pop in their square frames and given inviting hashtags and emojis.

The selfies get more engagement per post, as they always do for Rachel, but it’s in the way these posts relate to each other that we see the story people keep coming back for.

And it’s that story, more than anything else, that explains how a facebook post in early April escaped the bonds of Rachel’s social network and conquered the world in a week’s time.

Going Viral

The viral post dropped on April 6. Is it a coincidence that Rachel posts a “goodbye 9 to 5” post on that same day?

I can only give you my humble opinion:

No No No No No Way Not No Way Not No How Absolutely Not Of Course Not WTF Are You Thinking Of Course It’s Not A Coincidence Are You Joking?

Why do I think so? First, let’s look at what we might expect to happen after a viral post. Does she gain 5,000 followers? Maybe, but her engagement shows only a modest bump.

After a viral post, you might think the numbers blow up.

In terms of engagement, this period shows the increase in what had, up to this point, been a steady curve of growth.

The next post, from about two months after the viral Facebook post, shows clearly that a viral post did not automatically rocket Rachel to social media fame and immortality.

Actually, her numbers drop quite a bit.

Is this a one-hit wonder already fallen out of memory?

It’s not. Less than two weeks later, she’s close to matching her “viral period” numbers.

And it doesn’t fade. Two months later, she’s doing even better.

This post isn’t a fluke.

Between all these portraits were several posts of other kinds, all touching her various themes: personal development and transformation, motivation, and the hard work of entrepreneurship.

In general, these posts play a couple of important roles. They allow her Instagram to be a place she can build relationships with clients, true.

But they also tell important subplots to her story.

They play a necessary role in connecting Rachel with her audience. She could not do without them.

But those other posts never bring big numbers.

Rachel’s clients may be interested in her for the work. But Rachel’s Instagram followers are here for this woman working.

They are here, that is, for this one story: a beautiful, very feminine mother of two and devoted wife, clearly human and forthcoming about flaws, wrestling with the demands of starting and growing a real business.

The bad guy in this story is not only the rat race but also the temptation, in order to succeed in the ultra-masculine world of entrepreneurship, to dial femininity back a bit.

In that world, Rachel’s beautiful face and gorgeous blonde waves are an act of defiance against pure utility and too much testosterone.

They are her (and her followers’) insistence that they will remain who they are, even as they transform and develop in order to build the skills that build their life’s work.

And so the various elements of this story, as it plays out on Instagram, each reinforce and depend upon the other.

Every post of her very cute daughters pushes the pressure one way: “how can she be an entrepreneur and look after those two?” Every post of her at work says “somehow, she gets it done.” And every picture of her face says at the same time both “pretty girls can hustle” and “pretty isn’t enough.”

When you understand these dynamics, you can begin to make sense of why the post in April of 2016 went viral.

Of course, her post went viral because it touched a deep nerve in the culture. 2016 was a year in which familial institutions and economic uncertainty were thick in the air.

Political debates had pressed these questions, and a woman was running for President against a brash New York business owner many thought to be a misogynist.

A post about a successful businesswoman resisting a friend’s advice to “upgrade” to a bigger ring was bound to catch a cultural tailwind.

But this is not what’s interesting about viral posts. When a post that has been shared 400 times comes to you and it’s about culturally relevant stuff, it’s not really a marvel that you share it too.

But the first sharers are everything. When you understand what this post meant to them, you begin to know why this post caught fire as it did.

The woman who posted it is a serious entrepreneur with a beautiful face. She is a mother of two who makes much of the unlikely nature of her family and the gratitude with which she holds it.

She is feminine in a way that appeals to a whole lot of women, who also worry that they will suffer professionally if they let their hair down.

Rachel’s hair is down about 2/3 of the time, or at least so her Instagram says.

It’s the femininity, the #hustlelife, and the family story, all of it together, that evoked the strong emotion in this story’s first readers.

That’s why they shared it. Take away any part of that from Rachel’s story, from the way it built over the last couple of years, from the way it routinely touched her audience with all those notes, and you lose that emotional hook.

This post was authentic, even if it was planned. It tells a story that its first sharers already knew was true: one of weddings and children, of real-world thrift, of hard work, and nail polish.

And if they hadn’t known that, the stakes wouldn’t have been high enough for the post to get shared by enough people in Rachel’s network to bust out the way it did.

In viral posts, the first 500 sharers are far more interesting and important than the most recent 5,000.

And if there’s not a strong brand story in place ahead of time, in Rachel’s case at least, those first 500 shares simply don’t happen.

Action Items: Preparing the Second Single

So how can she make a new hit?

Rachel’s post engagement has slipped a little of late. With the exception of a few that I will discuss in a moment, her posts are getting 250–350 likes and around a dozen comments.

But there are exceptions, which I will discuss, in order to make recommendations she — and you — can put to use in generating the next hit.

1. What the People Want (and Why?)

Rachel’s audience thinks she’s beautiful. But that’s not remotely enough to do justice to what they see in her.

See, for example, the lackluster numbers on this post:

Now see these.

Rachel’s audience loves her eyes and her hair. They don’t react as much when these aren’t there.

It could be argued that this is just shallow. But I think it’s more than that. I think her eyes and her hair reinforce the story with which she has connected them, a story of feminine charm and grace that refuses to hide or live in a updo in order survive in the working world.

I suspect Rachel knows all this already, but the ratio of portraits to other kinds of content has fallen a bit, which I think explains the drop in engagement. This last picture, however, is among the newest, so she’s shown that she can bring IGers to the yard right now if she wants.

The magic is knowing why your users like what they like — so you can find creative ways to connect with them: perhaps not only with mascara and wavy hair but with lipstick. Or red nail polish and a wedding ring.

I suspect #busymakeup posts, like those from a year or so back, would be quite successful in this vein.

For the rest of us, the lesson here is to interrogate what our users tell us, in as much detail as we can, to see if they’re letting us know where the different parts of our story resonate.

Knowing why they like what they like will put us in the driver’s seat to test how often telling that part of the story will give us maximum room to call them to action.

And if you’re sitting on an IG account that reads triple zeroes, the best thing you can do is spend a ton of time on incredible accounts like Rachel’s to learn how masters like her tell a story that makes her audience feel that she knows them and can help.

2. Take Your Authority

There’s no getting around it. Rachel is a real-deal thought leader in social media marketing space. Curating other people’s content might be one way to continue to maintain and use that authority. But a post from January of this year, I think, points in a better direction.

A direction that may call on Rachel to challenge herself, but will also deliver big time in both influence and in actual sales.

On January 2, Rachel posted this:

For context, it’s helpful to know that work pics, inspirational quotes, book covers, offers, or people other than Rachel usually get 2/3 (or less) as many likes as her portraits and selfies do.

As we already noted, it’s still vitally important that they be there; they play a large role in the story, in making Rachel an aspiration for busy women rather than a fashion model.

But this post’s engagement numbers compete with most of her portraits! Why is that?

Go on and see.

(…Say it with me): Long-form written content!

Rachel needs to lean into this. The comments in this last post made clear that her audience absolutely devoured it.

She is a thought leader now. She can make bigger thought-asks. People are going to read her that won’t read things other people write. She’s an expert, and they’ll go to her for expertise.

She’s a person whose hour-long keynote addresses people will watch now.

This allows her a whole new avenue for fresh content delivery and outreach. At the moment, “work” posts deliver her around 2/3 to 3/4 the engagement.

But if she goes longer-form and delivers real practical and expert value in her captions, her work posts could grow to what the portraits get now.

If that happens, expect her portraits and selfies to be over a thousand likes each in no time, as more people connect to and embrace the story she’s telling.

And, most importantly, the woman who has already turned a side hustle into a six-figure business will rope in even bigger brands and even more cash!

I suspect this long-form post was a test balloon for her, and she may already be adding posts like this to her calendar. If not, she should.

It not only agrees with her “busy and beautiful” brand; it commands the respect that people are very much willing to give her nowadays.

This approach obviously will not work for everyone. It’s the result of building trust over a couple of years and of excelling in the field she’s advising on.

People who are not where Rachel is would be better-served becoming expert curators first, as she did. Use curation to develop a voice that lets your audience know you understand them.

Select material that will actually be helpful and ask of it the questions your audience will have. Gradually, you’ll win trust, which you absolutely have to do.

There is simply no shortcut to real influence.

Influencer Marketing 2.0:

Rachel has what almost nobody on Instagram has: an identifiable brand with serious stakeholders. This fact gives her very interesting opportunities for influencer marketing.

If she knows her brand story, she will not simply (or only) have to pay to have influencers line their brands up with hers. She has something besides (or in addition to money) to offer.

Nor do her “influencer” relationships have to come only from within the niche of social media and its marketers.

She’s got a brand that speaks deeply to a wide range of women, even women who will never market a single thing on Instagram.

The next step for her, where influencers are concerned, is to leverage her “busy and beautiful” message to line her brand up with brands that would use her influence to consolidate their own customer base and messaging.

Brands like Lord and Taylor, Ann Taylor, IT Cosmetics, and even Ivanka Trump are all courting the “busy and beautiful” crowd with a message of empowerment without giving up femininity (as those brands understand it) or family.

Rachel has a perfect story to tell to their prospects even as those brands have already shown they share the values of those who love and follow Rachel.

These brands would love to have the relationship with Rachel’s audience that she does, just as associating with them raises her profile in every part of her game, including quite likely making bigger brands a part of her growing client list.

This will be a hard play, since an overly commercialized Instagram account can be the kiss of death for an influencer greedy to monetize too early.

But Rachel is brilliant at this, and if she knows her brand’s key story, she’ll have no problem working up ways to tell “cross-stories” that just happen to bring her into contact with brands in her space.

And how much fun will it be if that space is bigger than she thought?

Most business owners have little to offer a brand. But little is not nothing. Even a building audience has a value to somebody, and getting clever with helping others deliver value to your audience can be a big help to growing it.

This isn’t there place for a while separate piece on influencers, but keep your eyes open (or hit Medium’s follow button). I’ll have one out within a week or so.

But you can’t begin to explore options like that until you know what your brand story is.

Final Thoughts for People Who Aren’t Rachel:

You don’t just decide to get good at storytelling. It takes energy, effort, and attention.

At the same time, knowing how to do it well is what allows you to be deliberate about the kinds of content your brand delivers, its frequency, and its role in moving your customer to the shopping cart page.

Knowing how to tell a story that relates to your client’s longings and desires breeds connection and builds loyalty and solidarity.

And you’re not going viral without those.

Rachel could plan to go viral because she knew her customers. She knew exactly how they were like her, and what kind of content was liable to stir emotions and move to action.

Once you have that in place, you may need to tighten and tweak, as Rachel has done at points, but it’ll be a question of photo resolutions and hashtags. Then it will be time for tactics. Then it’ll be a question of when you hit the home run, not if.

Thank you for your time. If this piece was valuable to you, gimme a few hand-claps at the end and let me know. And speaking of connecting, feel free to get in touch with me here or on Twitter, and to follow Rachel on Instagram at @themrspedersen.

Looking forward to continuing the discussion.

Cheers!

Over the next several weeks, I will be releasing a set of series that I hope will bring big time value to social media marketers and managers for businesses I serve. I will be taking social media accounts, the great and not-so-great, and talking about what I see that makes them work like a new Lambo, or, in some cases, an old Pinto. (They called them hand-grenades on wheels. Three guesses why!).

My aim is to track down clues to social media success in a way that shows business owners actionable steps and the results that have come about because of them.

Nothing’s off limits: from colors on Instagram accounts to Donald Trump’s Twitter messaging, to storytelling on Facebook, to customer avatars to Snapchat Filters, to offers, to jokes, and even trolls, I will uncover everything I can find in my attempt to Sherlock the shit out of social media.

First up will be a deep dive into the Instagram success of Social Media University founder Rachel Pedersen (@themrspedersen on Instagram).

Rachel has a booming social media marketing business serving her own clients. She also teaches other business owners and marketing managers how to incorporate social media into their own businesses.

And she has gone viral on purpose. We’ll dig into what has brought her to over to over 20,000 followers in what effectively amounts to 18 months of time.

I hope you’ll like what you see and even that you’ll tell me what you think, point out new accounts you’d like checked out, tell me to shove it, whatever will add value to your life and business.

I look forward to the discussion.

(Not Yet) Frequently Asked Questions)

1. Who the hell are you? Why should we care what you say?

Fair enough. My name’s William, founder of a social media marketing and creative Agency called HeelFlip Media and host of a podcast on local business called The Local Storecast. My agency is just over a year old and my podcast about half that age. If that means you think I’m not worth listening to, no worries.

But I think you’ll find the content in this series is going to speak for itself. And there will be a premium on listening early, before others do and before the power of your putting into practice what we discover becomes diluted.

2. Why are You Publishing as a Medium Series? You Dunno From Blogging?

Good question. I think blogging is a fantastic way to bring awareness to a brand and deliver value to potential customers.

My problem is I hate it.

Not because I don’t like writing. I hate the hassle of blogging. Of not just creating content but being responsible for design, for scheduling, for archives, for having a domain name and making reasonably sure a site appears there, etc.

Other people are great at that. It makes me want to feed myself raw cactus.

In fact, what blogging I do is usually on Medium or my LinkedIn page for just this reason — they’ve each done a beautiful job letting me just deliver content on their brilliant, intuitive, and beautifully-designed platforms. They’re a joy to write on and to read.

I feel a similar joy when I think about Medium’s new Series feature. It’s perfect for long-form content, ‘cause it adds pagination, saves your place, and makes it hella easy to read long content as you’re able. You can read, go close a deal or eat a cheeseburger, and come back and finish. And you can give me loads of applause at the end (instead of just one like!).

It’s really one of the best products the blogging world has seen in a while.

And it’s perfect for the long-form value-rich deep dives we wanna do.

3. How Often Will You Release Them?

As you will shortly see, I’ve already done one and will release it not long after this one. As you will also see, they’re not small projects.

So I’ll probably do them every week or so, though if you find an account you are puzzled about and you just really need to see how it works, let me know.

I’ll see if I can speed one up for you.

Anymore questions? Feel free to connect with me in the comments or on Twitter and let me know how I can help you out.

Cheers.

Well, the other day, Amber tweeted this.

I agree with Amber; this deserves an investigation. Look at me mom, I made it! I’m going to write a whole article in response to a tweet.

But I think it matters! The culture of under-30 urbanite startup wannabes might well just depend on getting semantic stability out of this word. So, here goes (RESEARCH!)

The Two Parts of Meaning

Discussions about how words mean things resemble English parliamentary debates: unending, serious, and snarky as shit! Philosophers hate each other based on disagreements on this.

But in general, there are two main parts to meaning: denotation (i.e. what a word means across contexts) and connotation (what the word, in a particular context, used by a specific speaker, might also entail). We’ll dig into both.

Hustle Discovered and Denoted

Like raw Herring lunches and homebirth, the word hustle comes to us from the Dutch! The verb “hutselen” in Middle Dutch meant something like “to stir up or shake.”

From Dutch, “hustle” makes its way into English in the seventeenth century, where, like everything in early modern England it had a bunch of kids, many of which bore only passing resemblance to their progenitors. Until one of them caught a boat west and things got way the F*** out of control!

“Hustle” peaks in the roaring teens and twenties, when American optimism and can-do attitude had not yet been chastened by 30 years of world war. But in the years after the war, the word’s usage mirrors the rapid economic growth of the US. Why is this?

Like “shake,” the word would come to possess a wide range of denotations, everything from moving quickly and purposefully (which was my first encounter with the word on a hot Florida little league practice field) to practicing the world’s oldest profession. If you’re in a hurry, you can “shake a leg” or if you’re in need of cash and have a marginal relationship with law and morality, you can perform a “shakedown” on that dude whose shoes are way too nice for the F train.

Or, to save breath, you can hustle and hustle.

Held in common here is a sense of getting more than a person would by run-of-the-mill effort. It can be good or it can be bad. But in either case, it’s focused and intense. It’s about effort. Morally indifferent, Machiavellian force of will.

And it’s optimistic. Hustlers have positive expectations about the relationship between high levels of effort and positive results. People do not hustle in dictatorships (except perhaps the dictators!). But in places where individuals are more or less free to do what they want, or where they can figure out a way to bend the law, hustle abounds.

This makes hustle a characteristically American thing. Like New York City, it’s a Dutch thing that Americans stole and made better!

Imagine a family reunion in which Mark Cuban arrived and found out that Susan B. Anthony and John D. Rockefeller were his grandparents, who also gave birth to the ancestors of Kanye West, Vivian Ward from Pretty Woman, and Stringer Bell.

That family’s sitcom would be called “The Hustles.”

So much for denotation, for what the word seems to mean across contexts. But that’s only part of what makes it interesting. To really get at the word’s usage by such a wide array of people, with such different ends, we need to pay attention to what speakers do. What are we saying about ourselves when we use words?

Connotation: What We Do With Words

So what are speakers doing with this word?

Human interaction with language is funny. Words don’t only communicate semantic content. They also tell people something about the ones who use them.

So words become ways not only of identifying but of identifying with. One of the ways we choose between two ways of communicating a similar idea is that we use words that reinforce our allegiances, friendships, aspirations, etc.

We use the words, phrasing, and even the timing of people we love. And that, my friends, is why a room full of Mitch Hedberg fans is a dream come true.

But all of this is what makes “hustle” so tricky. As we just talked about, “hustle” names what Mark Zuckerberg and Al Capone have in common!

People use the word in order to reinforce their association with everyone from gangsters to Gary Vaynerchuk. And this identity-signaling makes it hard to know whether to trust someone who hashtags their Instagram feed, as I often do, with #hustle.

Another danger of the connoting function of language is that it allows you to reinforce allegiances and connections in a totally hollow way. That is, by describing something I’m doing as “hustle,” I can reinforce my aspirations and dreams without actually having to do anything.

The word connotes even if it the thing I’ve named “hustle” isn’t actually a proper referent of the word. I can feel connected to hustlers in a way that is false in fact but true in perception.

Hustle’s Dangers and Chances

So there’s a spectrum of good and evil to be done with this word. It can refer to somebody’s pretended likeness to Shug Knight or their actual likeness to Barack Obama.

Hustle is how con-artists create schemes that take advantage of good people. It’s how people get jobs they have no business getting. It’s how terrible products still sell.

But hustle is also how humans survive in a world where lots of things eat humans to get by. It is how we do all the best things we do. Hustle means that bad circumstances and a bad start don’t have to determine what becomes of you.

Good people are often suspicious of hustle, and understandably so, given the huge proliferation of bullshitters. But hustle is also what allows the good people, gradually but certainly, to send the bullshitters on a long walk.

And, believe it or not, I think he might be just the cure for what ails a lot of businesses.

And I’m totally not just saying that so I can write an article on Tracy. ;)

I actually met him once. Well, Tracy Morgan. I was working as a server in the Miami Improv Comedy Club when Tracy came in for a weekend set, before 30 Rock started.

His act, at the time, was about 20 minutes long, and then he would wing it for the rest of the time. Often, that meant mocking the staff. On night 2, I came out with a giant tray full of martinis. To keep them balanced, I was doing the “don’tdropitdon’tdropitdon’tdropit” walk. No way was he gonna let that pass.

“Hey white dude! Why ya’ mama taught you to walk like that? She didn’t think your legs would grow the same length?”

I almost spilled my tray of martinis on some lady’s very expensive white dress. I laughed so hard I slipped, the martini tray pounded the table with a thud.

And then a miracle happened.

Not a single drink tipped over. Twelve martinis, surviving like little John McClains when Hans goes off the balcony. Tracy didn’t let that pass either.

“White dude, that was awesome! How you make it do that? You studied at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry?”

Every time I came out of the back for the rest of that night, he would stop whatever he was doing, swish a hand in my direction, and say “expelliarmus!”

Now, maybe it was the fact that we witnessed a miracle while he was at the Improv. Or maybe it was the fact that he was the only person who ever made me laugh that hard by making fun of me. But I knew I was in the presence of greatness.

Still, I never knew how much I would learn from him, nor as an entrepreneur how often he would enter my mind. Which is something like daily.

Here’s why.

1. The rule of 3 and the Element of Surprise

The rule of three is an old writing rule that says things are more memorable, satisfying, or funny when they come in threes. Usually, the rule specifically refers to lists, but it has wider appeal in communication. Ideas just fit our minds better when they are packaged this way.

I’ve read dozens of accounts about why that might be so, from the three spatial dimensions to the three tenses (past, present, future), to the three persons of the Trinity. I have no idea how or why three is so important. But I know it is.

Tracy is a master of threes. I don’t mean he’s good at them. I mean he’s a freaking Jedi of triplicate ideas. Look at the joke he made at me as I came out with martini trays. Thing 1: “hey white dude?” Thing 2: “my mom teaching me to walk funny.” Thing 3: the ridiculous image of my legs not growing right.

Like every joke, explaining it takes the funny away. But I bet you laughed your when you read it. Think of what it takes to produce that off the top of your head, and you will start to appreciate how good he is.

We have kept this rule in mind while designing loads of ad campaigns, both for our clients and for ourselves.

We ran an advertising campaign for a coffee shop that consisted of a one-minute video in three parts, calling for the character to show us “how you do morning.” The first two acts were utterly conventional, designed to mimic coffee shop advertisements we had seen everywhere. The characters did mornings with a coffee stop on the way to work.

The third character had pretty clearly misunderstood the question, and the third scene opened upon him in all black with a veil over his head, wailing over a newspaper ad that announced Phil Collins was going back into the studio. The ad got great response, largely due to the zany third act misinterpreting the slogan (“Show us how you do mourning”) and making it more memorable in the customer’s mind. By the time the slogan came, it stuck: “Get morning right.”

In the case of this ad, as with so much of what Tracy does, what the rule of three gives you is a quick stutter step before the drive to the hoop. It’s about timing and cadence, and the 1 and 2 set up the 3 so that the surprise is perfectly timed for maximum effect on the hearer.

2. Selling a Bit and the Importance of a Setup

Ordinarily, on 30 Rock, the setup would be two normal ideas, joined by a third crazy misfit one. But occasionally, in the show and in his stand-up act, Tracy would flip the script. In the .gif above, for example, he takes two ideas that add up to something ridiculous. One baby giving a tattoo, one baby receiving one. The punchline works because the explanation is so normal.

Like, “they were so drunk” is an explanation for why adults do dumb things. It is a terrible explanation for the story that sets it up. The surprise creates the laugh.

This bit works because Tracy sells all parts of it so completely. He realizes that the setup is as important as the punchline. Sometimes, the joke inverts and the setup is the punchline. But that doesn’t work unless you sell all three parts.

Having a new, out-of-the-box solution is key to helping your business differentiate itself. But in order to make that uniqueness shine through, you need to sell the conventional parts of your business just as hard, and sell them as conventional.

For your customer to realize that, say, your accounting solution is totally unlike anything they’ve seen before, they’ve got to recognize it as an accounting solution. I know that our company is entering a crowded field (online advertising). But as I pointed out here, I think there’s room even in crowded fields to take something that has been done a million times and do it in a new way.

In order for the newness to work, though, there have to be some conventions. And we work hard to play those conventions as straight as possible.

3. The Third Heat, or Shooting the Market Gaps

No person or business can do everything. It’s crucial to know that. On the other hand, it’s important to know when there’s a big demographic you could be reaching and aren’t.

One of the great things about 30 Rock, a TV show about a TV show, is the meta-production element. Jack Donaghy brings Tracy into the Girlie Show as “the third heat” because he sees that an audience that already has high buy-in for television (adult male non-elites) is completely uninterested in his show.

By bringing in Tracy, he calculates he can reach that missing demographic, adding a crucial element to the show’s already marginally working recipe.

Good business execution, it seems to me, is about recognizing where you are underserving, and figuring out the difference between stretching too far to reach them (so that you bend your core offer out of shape) or making an enhancement that goes with the grain of your offer in such a way that the new audience will find it intelligible.

But in any case, this third part is probably as much art as science. You gain a sense for how to do it by practice and by watching it done by others. In its ridiculous and overstated way, 30 Rock lampoons that kind of attention in the person of Jack Donaghy. But in the person of Tracy Jordan, the show makes clear it has some Donaghys in its production team.

Wrapping Up:

Recently, I had a comic and entrepreneur from Chattanooga on my podcast show. As our conversation went on, it became clear that there was a serious overlap between a comedian connecting with a room full of people who also have iphones and a local business competing to deliver a product to market.

But we could have learned it from Tracy. Careful observation of his brilliant act shows us that the three important elements of a working bit — surprise, setup, and an audience to give it to — are also useful for helping businesses think about positioning and messaging in a crowded marketplace.

Where could you be delivering more surprise? And what conventions do you need to play off of as a setup?

I’d love to know what you’re thinking. Hit me up here or on Twitter.

Oh, and because I couldn’t resist:

Recently, I had a comedian on my podcast show who also happens to run window cleaning business. I was fascinated by the overlaps between the two worlds, and as our conversation stretched out to over an hour, I realized we were really getting into something.

Business owners don’t just need Guy Kawasaki (great as this book is). This is a human thing! And for business owners that want to connect with their neighbors, there’s a lot to learn by paying attention to all the things human beings do to connect with each other.

So I started digging into the lessons my artist friends have taught me that I think will serve me well as an entrepreneur in a local space. Here are my favs:

It’s Not Only What You Do; It’s How You Do It.

Of course, it’s good to size up competition. But it is easy to overreact, especially at the local level, to competition. If there ever was a bloated field, it’s art. Even so, great artists emerge and get seen. Great artists don’t just make use of a medium. They make it their own, each with a highly individualized way of seeing the world, the craft, themselves, and the relation between the three.

So, even though Pablo Picasso and Rembrandt are both painters, knowing that fact tells you almost nothing about what you get when you turn the corner into their galleries at the Met.

Of course, it’s good to have first-mover advantage and to claim an early stake in an emerging market or field. But art has been around at least as long as business. And if artists, amid all the tradition and all the contemporary noise can still get real differentiation if they’re good enough, that tells me there’s still room in the market for your unique vision. Even if you’re dumb enough to start an ad agency in 2016 and with almost no money.

If the field you desperately want to conquer is already full, that’s not necessarily an indication not to do it. It is, however, an invitation to master a field as fully as you are able, until you can stamp a character into it as unique as you are.

No Faking!

Getting serious with art means getting acquainted with yourself. It means learning — really learning — what your strengths and weaknesses are, where you should grow, and where you should realize you’re just not ever going to grow.

Almost every artist friend can tell me about a conversation, early on, where they got tired of politeness and asked somebody to really give them feedback that would hurt as long as it was true. Good artists know how to take that feedback and turn it into growth. That, in itself, is a talent.

Local business is as much art as science. It’s about serving people as customers you might well see at the game this weekend. Timing connections well, reaching out in the right way, with the right amount of energy and pressure for the right situation and time, is a talent. That’s to say nothing of actually delivering a great product, handling human resources, finance, etc. If you’ve got real talent, though, mistakes, challenges, and tough feedback are going to bring out the best in you.

If you don’t have it, that may hurt to learn. But sometimes the best thing you can do is move on. Either way, the noise of the market, like the noise of the art world, is a gift. It makes the barrier to entry high enough that fakers won’t stay in it that long.

Love Makes You Great.

Of course, there’s a modicum of talent any artist needs. But it’s love that keeps you at it long after it stopped being cute or a good conversation topic.

Walt Disney was rejected 302 times before finding funding for Walt Disney World. Colonel Sanders and his chicken recipe were turned away over a thousand times!

People tell stories like this often as a way to buck up people who are discouraged. Artist friends have taught me that the stories probably actually mean something entirely different.

They’re not about the rewards you might get if you persist. They’re about the kind of person who can’t do anything but persist. It’s what they do, because it’s what they love.

No amount of love for music will make me the singer my friend Ricky is. But love is what drove him to take his talent and turn it to greatness.

Likewise, it’s my love for healthy communities, for flourishing marketplaces, and for happy customers that drives me past every failure and discouragement.

I’m working my ass off, and even when it sucks, I’m doing what I love. What I can’t help but do.

I think that’s why, when I explain what it’s like to be an entrepreneur in the early days, it’s my artist friends who really understand what I’m saying.

What is the love that drives you past every disappointment? Would love to hear from you in the comments below or on Twitter.

When I was younger, I had this really bad habit of turning what everyone said into what I wanted to hear. If someone objected to something I did, it was 3–4 times harder to get me even to notice the fact that it was with most people.

At that point, we hadn’t even started to figure out whether I would listen. My friends called it bulldozing.

As I have begun in the last year to build an agency that helps businesses, this is a thing I see over and over again.

Businesses become tone-deaf. They stop hearing people tell them things. And then, almost instantly, people stop telling them.

So what do you do about it? It’s not as simple as sending out an email survey (which no one will see, and fewer will answer) is it?

So here are a couple or three things you can do to listen better.

1) Google Yourself

This can be painful (though I hope it isn’t). Lots of business owners I know don’t want to do this, with good reason. It can hurt!

But this will be a good start. While you’re at it, check Facebook, Yelp, anywhere someone might bother talking bad about you. If you really wanna get serious, have a look at this list by Capterra reviewing the best reputation management software out there.

You might consider using a trial or investing in one of those. The hours you could spend trying to dig your name out of the web will vanish as you enter your info in one single search bar and it crawls the net looking for dings on your spit-shined rep.

I hope you don’t find any. But also, I kinda hope you find one. Because reaching out to that person is gonna do some good for you (see below!).

2) Try a Different Place

Everybody knows those surveys aren’t getting read anymore. But that’s because they get sent where no one is anymore. Google chucks ’em over into that Promotions tab, where only hopeful marketers dare to tread, from time to time, looking for a good idea.

Try posting them on social media, and see if you do better. My hunch is you will. Even if the only person following your business is your mom, just go into local FB groups, start up conversations with the admins, and when you’re pretty sure you’ve got a group you can ask the question in without getting tossed, ask.

Be specific. Restaurant owner? Don’t ask about the food. Ask about the gravy on the mashed potatoes and whether the server got it to them quick enough to still be hot.

You might be swimming in feedback before long. And this is not a bad thing!

3) Tell Conversion Stories

In my more headstrong days, I would occasionally do something really stupid and bump my head. I’d go out with a girl I had no business going out with, cut a corner at the coffee shop I worked at, tell a white lie to a friend.

Once I dated a girl for over a year that everyone but me could see was no good for me.

When it crashed and burned, I asked friends: “why didn’t you say anything?”

Their answer, to a person: “you wouldn’t have listened!”

The number one reason your customers aren’t giving you feedback is because they think, rightly or wrongly, you’re not listening.

So, if I were you? I’d tell on myself! I mean it!

Make it a part of your communications with customers that you’ve goofed at times. When a customer brings something to your attention, fix the problem and then offer a special on it named after the customer who brought it up.

Make them heroes in your brand community. Because they are.

As you earn trust, you’ll soon be drowning in feedback. Which is awesome, because it means your customers are telling you how to beat the guys who are racing you to their wallets.

Make it clear you’re listening, and then celebrate those who speak. And then, even your mistakes will build your brand.

What are your biggest brand regrets? What brands have you tried to give feedback to, either positively or negatively?

Feel free to comment here or hit me up on Twitter. Can’t wait to chat with you guys!