The Home Service Expert Podcast
Breaking Down the Science of Virality with Brendan Kane
Fri, 06 Dec 2024
Brendan Kane is a Managing Partner at Hook Point. He is a digital marketing expert who has been helping top brands and celebrities create viral content since 2005. Overseeing $300 million in marketing spend, he has worked with major corporations like MTV, Paramount Pictures, and IKEA, generating over $1 billion in revenue. His celebrity clients include Taylor Swift, Rihanna, and Adriana Lima, for whom he crafted successful digital strategies. Brendan is also the best-selling author of “One Million Followers” and “Hook Point: How to Stand out in a 3-Second World.” In this episode, we talked about social media presence, virality, content format, organic media strategies…
Chapter 1: What is the main topic of this episode?
business owners can kind of think about virality and be like, well, I just want to generate more leads. I want to generate more customers, more purchases for my brand. And they can't kind of correlate it because they think virality is like that pesky teenager down the street that's making dance videos on TikTok.
But the reality is, if you think about almost all businesses today have some type of social media presence. And let's just say that on average, you're generating, let's say, 10,000 views a video. Now, people listening to this, I want you to take whatever that number is, 1,000, 10,000, maybe some people are generating 100,000, and then multiply that by 10. Then multiply that by 100.
Then multiply that by 100,000. What would that do if that many people were paying attention to what you had to say? Now, the potential of social media is only capped at how big you can dream, how big your business is.
Welcome to The Home Service Expert, where each week, Tommy chats with world-class entrepreneurs and experts in various fields, like marketing, sales, hiring, and leadership, to find out what's really behind their success in business. Now, your host, The Home Service Millionaire, Tommy Mello.
Chapter 2: How can businesses leverage social media for virality?
Before we get started, I wanted to share two important things with you. First, I want you to implement what you learned today. To do that, you'll have to take a lot of notes, but I also want you to fully concentrate on the interview. So I asked the team to take notes for you. Just text NOTES, N-O-T-E-S, to 888-526-1299. That's 888-526-1299.
And you'll receive a link to download the notes from today's episode. Also, if you haven't got your copy of my newest book, Elevate, please go check it out. I'll share with you how I attracted and developed a winning team that helped me build a $200 million company in 22 states. Just go to elevateandwin.com forward slash podcast to get your copy. Now let's go back into the interview.
All right, guys, welcome back to the Home Service Expert. Today is a really exciting day. I got Brendan Cain in here. He's got three amazing books, One Million Followers, Hookpoint, and The Guide to Going Viral. A lot of us have thought about going viral. I hate the people that say they're influencers, but this guy is the epitome. He's like the influencer.
He's an expert in creative direction, interactive marketing, SEO. He's from Chicago, lived in California, spent some time in Austin, and spends part of his time in Europe and London now. Managing partner at Hookpoint, author of 100 million followers, mentor, tech stars, growth consultant.
You know, there's a lot of stuff here, but you're overseeing 300 million in marketing spend and has worked with major corporates like MTV, Paramount Pictures, Ikea, generating over a billion in revenue. He's worked with Taylor Swift, Rihanna, and Adriana Lima, of whom crafted successful digital strategies. I am so excited you're here. Thank you for making the time.
Thanks for having me. It's a pleasure to connect with you and everybody that's tuning into this.
Yeah, man. I'm sure the story is amazing, but tell us about yourself. I know this is how every podcast starts, but I want to hear the success, what your passions are, wherever you've been, where you're going, what gets you excited.
So I didn't set out to be in marketing. I actually wanted to be a film producer. So I went to film school to hopefully learn the business side of the industry. Showed up at film school, quickly realized they teach you nothing about business there. So I figured the best way to learn about business is start your own. So this was like 2003, 2004.
So the most cost-efficient way at the time was to start internet companies. So I started a few internet companies just to learn and experiment. And then when I moved to LA to pursue a career in film, like everybody else, I had to start at the bottom, making coffee and copies and deliveries and And people would ask me, well, why did you move to LA? What do you want to do?
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Chapter 3: What is the difference between trends and formats in content creation?
You built a massive garage door company. Now, when you were first starting out, if you were trying to start 10 other companies that were all in different industries or sectors at the same time... Horrible. Horrible idea. It's the same thing with social media. How do you go viral, build a massive audience so that you don't have to rely on other people's eyeballs?
You choose a format or a series and you master that. So you may ask, well, how do you master a format or a series? What does that look like? So what we do is we take that specific format. Let's just say it's the man on the street. There's many different examples of it. There's another one called the school of hard knocks. I don't know if you've seen.
Yeah. So school of hard knocks. I came and interviewed me and Jeremy.
Generated millions of followers and hundreds of millions of views off of that. Okay. So what we would do is most people will look at that on the surface and just say, oh, I see what he's doing. He's just approaching random strangers in the street and asking them about their success.
But if you look at his hit rate, there's certain videos that generate tens of millions of views, and there are certain videos that generate less than 100,000 views. So how we really understand what drives that format is we have a qualitative analysis process called gold, silver, bronze, where we'll open up a spreadsheet.
We'll take 10 to 20 of the highest performers in that format, which is 10 million views plus, 10 to 20 of the average performers, which is like 500,000 to a million, and then 10 to 20 of the underperformers, which is like under 100,000. And what we're looking at is not the content, but the context of what is happening.
What is the difference that's happening to those high performers that's showing up there that's not showing up to those underperformers? So that we can get a deep understanding of why they are so successful. Because I guarantee 99% of people that try the Man on the Street format fail. We just don't see them because the algorithm doesn't serve up to us.
So the best place to start is to first understand that there is this concept of a format and series, and then understanding which one you want to do because it excites you, but which one also is best for your business or brand. and then diving in to the contextual elements. So again, tying back to where I started, I went to film school. So what do you do in film school? You see this in movies.
You sit down and watch classic movies. You read screenplays.
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Chapter 4: How can you create a successful content format?
I talk about my kids and they measure every single piece of content they put out. They measure, when you talk about this, it gets this many views. When we talk about this, it goes down. When you talk about this, and he almost uses podcasts. He likes going to smaller podcasts because they ask weird questions. The big podcast, where did you come from? What are you doing? And he uses that as content.
What would be, he loves the interview style for his videos. And the book put them on the map, Buy Back Your Time. It's right there. What do you think, because their strategies, a little bit you get to learn about who I am. You get to learn about me as a person. You get to meet my dogs. You get to see what I do at home. And then we talk about business 30% of the time.
Or does your structures really just fall into one category for most of the time?
So everything that you said of what they're doing, there's nothing wrong with it. What I'm focusing on is how you be at the top 1% of social media. So everything that I'm saying is from that lens of how do we become the top 1% in terms of people following us, in terms of the views, the engagement, and things of that nature. What I would suggest, at least in the beginning,
is focused solely on that format and structure and mastering every nuance of that. Because just that exercise in and of itself is going to allow you to master that art. Same thing with your business. You spent years mastering all the other disciplines of marketing to allow you to spend $3 million a month.
You could take that knowledge into any other business because you spent the time harnessing that knowledge. The same thing here is focus on mastering a single format or series. And through that, you're going to become an expert in content creation. And once you've become an expert in content creation, then you're going to understand how to layer in those different elements.
But if you're starting out that way, and I'm going to do 30% personal stories and 20% business and 30% podcasts, it's just kind of like percentages that you're kind of throwing down there without any real kind of understanding of when something works, why does it work? Or when something doesn't work, understanding why it doesn't work.
Which is so interesting. This notion of, can you just go a little bit deeper? Context, not content. Because some of the stuff, you've seen this, but I'll watch a guy mow a lawn. He'll go to the ugliest freaking landscaping, and it's just kind of pleasing. Or a guy cleaning carpet. That's just visual. And then there's other things that I'm like, it's goofy and it's funny.
I'm just curious, can you kind of go into that a little bit more context-wise?
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Chapter 5: What performance drivers influence the virality of content?
Cost per lead, your booking rate, your conversion rate, and your average ticket.
Yeah, that is the first place to start. You need to know those numbers, and then you can start different levels of how you want to engage in that space. Paid media, as you know, is the easiest place to start because you're basically buying reach to get in front of eyeballs.
That doesn't mean that people are going to stop and pay attention, but at least you're not having to fight against an algorithm from an organic perspective.
You can turn that up or down. That's as nice as you can go. Capacity's filled up.
There's no minimum.
Yeah. You can scale as quick as you want to. You can do it faster.
Organic is, I would say... Earned. Organic is earned, and it's more of an advanced play, but there's much larger upside to it in terms of beating out the competition. Because paid, you're basically just bidding against your competition to see who can acquire that user versus organic.
When we look at companies' competitors, nine times out of 10, they don't have a single competitor in their space that's doing well with organic because they just don't focus on a lot of the nuances and things that we talked about today. So organic is major upside, but it's a little bit more kind of nuanced versus paid. It's time.
I tell people how to rank organically on Google. I'm like, listen, Google's got to trust you. You got to get links. You got to actually get, like, I'm on Forbes. I'm on Huffington Post. I'm on Inc. I get EDU backlinks. I get .gov. I get links all the time. I've got great content. My metadata is right. My schema data is right. My H1 tags are right. I'm putting out great content with videos.
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Chapter 6: How can you measure the success of social media content?
Why would you work with everybody? Why not pick an avatar? Why not find? I mean, you're just so good at it that you said we're going to be able to do it for the masses.
Yeah, because again, it's not about the content. It's about the context. So for us, it's content agnostic. And also because of how well the books sell, we have people from all over the world working with us. But we typically work best with the people that are doing hands-on with the content because they kind of need to understand that, those foundational elements.
Right. And if you want to get a hold of you, what's the best way to do that?
They can just go to hookpoint.com to learn more. Also, just for your audience, my new book, The Guide to Going Viral, if they go to hookpoint.com forward slash your last name, Mello, M-E-L-L-O, they can download a free version, PDF version, or Kindle version of the book.
This is awesome, man. I love this. If you had any book that really influenced you outside, so you wrote 100 Million Followers, How I Built a Massive Social Following in 30 Days, Growth Hacks for Your Business, Your Message, and Your Brand from the World's Greatest Minds, Hook Point, How to Stand Out in a Three-Second World, and The Guide to Going Viral. And this one's just basic, the cover.
I love it. So what other books inspired you? You know, like for me, it's The E-Myth Revisited and The Richest Man of Babylon. And I've got like probably 20 books that I can name that maybe even people don't know, like go for know. But is there any books that really changed the way you think about things?
I think one of my favorite books is How to Win Friends and Influence People. Yeah, Dale Carnegie.
Yeah. My top book.
Yeah, I think it's so simplistic, but so deep in so many ways. And I really love the writing style. We tried to adapt the writing style for my books. The 5-Hour Workweek, more from a hook perspective, he just nailed it with the hook and the content. The 4-Hour? Yeah, the 4-Hour Workweek.
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