How to Get Your Fans to Create Content for You

How We’re Scaling Our Content Creation

How we're incentivising our audience to create social media content for free.

Over the past six months, fan-created content has become our best-performing content at Rugby Bricks, so we're shifting to a user-generated content model.

To do this, we're creating an Ambassador program (more details here) to incentivise our fans to create more.

So when people sign-up to become a Rugby Bricks ambassador, we'll reward them with products that cost us little but are of high value to them.

Since we launched our program ten days ago, 39 people have applied to be an ambassador. We've also seen 202 pieces of content posted across social media featuring our #rugbybricks.

Based on these results, we expect our ambassadors will create at least 1,000 new pieces of UGC each year.

It's too early to tell how this will affect our sales, but they say word-of-mouth marketing is your best marketing source, so we're excited to see the results.

Notes: You don't have to create all your content yourself; you can incentivise your audience to make it for you.

Why You Don't Need Data To Know What Works

How I know when I've made a good decision for my business.

We don't need data to make the right decisions.

I recently read this maxim: "When something works, most of the time, it will keep working." In my experience, this is largely true.

We don't need a million-dollar ad budget to run x number of tests to prove that some copy or creative will work.

We don't need someone to work for us for x number of months to know if they are the right person for the job.

We don't need to change our prices for x number of weeks to know how they will affect our sales.

I've repeatedly seen that when I try something in my business, almost instantly, I'll know whether we should keep doing it or not.

I've run new ads that have doubled or tripled even 10xd our number of leads in a week on a tiny budget.

I've also run many more ads that did nothing after a week and never worked, no matter how many tweaks I made.

Good hires are almost immediately obvious, as are bad ones.

We've increased our gym membership prices three times in the past 18 months, and nothing changed - except we made more money. I've seen a price increase cut sales in half in a week.

Yes, data is helpful, you can use it to tell you why a decision is good or bad, and of course, it's useful for optimising or making trade-off decisions.

But in my experience, we don't need it to know what works. What works is obvious; you don't need to dive through data to know.

Notes: Data is useful but not necessary; qualitative stuff will tell you a story long before data can.

INSIGHTS FROM OPERATORS

…In 2010, after the iPad was introduced, he had a meeting scheduled with engineers on the MacBook team. The meeting was big pictures. What's the future of the MacBook?, that sort of thing. These engineers has prepared a ton of material to present to Jobs. Jobs comes into the meeting carrying an iPad. He goes to a then-shipping Macbook on a table and wakes it up. It takes a few seconds. He says something like "Look at how long this takes." He puts it to sleep, he wakes it it up. It takes a few moments each time. Then he puts the iPad on the table and hits the power button. On. Off. On. Off. instantly. Jobs said "I want you to make this" and he pointed to the MacBook "like this" and he pointed to the iPad. And then he walked out of the room and that was that.

Steve Jobs & ELI5

TL.DR: A thought about why Steve Jobs was great

That little story above about Steve Jobs is an example of a master communicator at work.

As far as I can tell, it takes great communication from company leaders to build a great company.

Our mission, vision, and ideas - only come to life when we can communicate them clearly to the people we need to help us make it happen.

Steve knew his vision for the MacBook and how to ask his team to make it happen clearly and concisely.

I have zero technical knowledge, but I imagine that request to make a laptop function like a tablet is a pretty complicated technical challenge to solve. However, even a young child can understand what he wanted.

Clear and concise asks lead to specific outcomes.

Vague asks lead to random outcomes.

There's this term floating around in the Twittersphere called ELI5. Which means, explain it to me like I'm five.

That is what Steve did so well. In the boardroom, on the phone or on stage reveling Apple's newest product - he explained it to use like we're five.

Notes: Clear communication might be the most critical skill of world-class leaders.