5 Counterintuitive Things I learned from Derek Halpern during Social Media Week

I got to host Derek Halpern (with the help of Channel V Media too) last night during Social Media Week.

Our topic? Rapid Results: How to build your business quickly with on and offline marketing.

Our intimate fireside chat involved wine (both in cups and on shirts), plenty of audience interaction, and plenty o' nuggets to take home/to work and implement.

And now, my recap of things that made me go hmmm:

1. Avoid the scattershot.

It's all about implementation. Derek offered a peak into how he goes about learning and implementing and iterating. He learns all he can for one month about subject. (Let's say fb ads.) Then he takes three months to use all that he's learned. He starts out and notices a 7x return per dollar invested in fb ads. So he uses it some more until it doesn't work. (When he raises his daily ad buy from $100 to $500 he notices a negative return!) Then he stops and learns something else.

Contrast that to how a lot of us (me too!) go about our knowledge acquisition: read tons of newsletters, willy nilly watch videos and purchase programs. Implement half-heartedly. I call it the scattershot approach. Don't do it. I'm currently learning about Linkedin marketing (because I get lots of warm leads from linkedin). I'll let you know what I learn from implementation.

2. Strip down. 

Your website that is. He's saying no social media badges, no extraneous buttons, nothing. Make it all about the opt-in. (And I forgot to ask him about pop ups. Dang.) But it's pretty simple: three opt-ins per page. Top right or header, sidebar, foot of the blog post. Bam.

3. The PR Blitz is your friend. 

Whether you hire a firm or DIY, make your PR multiply its impact by getting it ALL set up for one month. Yep. 15 hits in one month. Become hard to ignore. (No Long Island accent necessary.  Though apparently it helps Derek win friends and influence people.)

4. Spark controversy. 

Derek stirred the pot when he wrote posts about "Content is King!" or "Design Rules!" He galvanized people with strong opinions to engage on the topic and they forwarded his posts to thousands of others. With few other distractions on his site (perhaps online porn can learn from him too?) he racked up the email opt-ins.

5. Don't give a flip about comments. 

Other than social proof, he just don't care about comments on his blog. Comments are usually about the commenter, not the poster, so who needs em? More distraction from....the email opt-in!

If you missed out, the video will be up later today. Want to come to more events in NYC (and online) for entrepreneurs? Sign up below!

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