Episode 25: Interview with Brent Csutoras

Brent Csutoras is an entrepreneur and social media strategist at Kairay Media. He is specializes in social media marketing and content marketing as well as viral content creation. Regularly Brent speaks at well known Online Marketing Conferences, like Pubcon, SES and SMX.

Andre Alpar: So today’s OMReport is with Brent. Brent, can you please introduce yourself.

Brent Csutoras: My name’s Brent Csutoras and I work at a couple of different companies but I primarily work at Kairay Media, which is a social media consulting strategy company.

Andre Alpar: Right, so I read some of the case studies you published last year. You were kind of lazy this year, you didn’t publish any case studies. Why is that?

Brent Csutoras: Uh, I published two or three actually, they’re just maybe not very visible.

Andre Alpar: All right but they’re not on the website in the case studies section, probably they’re in the blog and I missed them for that reason.

Brent Csutoras: Ah yeah, yeah… The thing with case studies is we have a lot of them, but we’ve been so focused on building our channels up, you know with GooglePlus getting a lot of visibility and a lot of growth, and with Pinterest and a lot of things that went through with that and even with Tumblr, that it’s really hard for me to take somebody off of that in order to do a case study.

Andre Alpar: So one of the case studies where even I know I have seen the story you have pushed… there was this Chinese gangster that supposedly was… like a lost mobile phone and then somebody downloaded the pictures from the mobile phone and even I know I’ve read that, like I could hear about it when you guys pushed it…

Brent Csutoras: That kills me, that kills me, because…

Andre Alpar: It’s amazing, it’s been everywhere, this thing…

Brent Csutoras: There’s one of my employees, his name is…

Andre Alpar: So it’s basically a story that you guys made up, you’ve found the pictures on the…

Brent Csutoras: No, no, no, no…

Andre Alpar: You found the pictures like on a Chinese website but then you pushed them and published all the information about what you did publicly, which is amazing.

Brent Csutoras: There’s a guy… there’s a guy who works for me named Alesh, and Alesh is a genius, he was the one who wrote the script for Digg very early on that would automatically vote all your friends and ended up causing a couple of people to get banned and stuff. So I ended up hiring him, I was like ‘oh I… he can do that…’

Andre Alpar: There’s potential there.

Brent Csutoras: There’s potential there, and we had some conversations, and he’s been working with me a long time and he actually does a lot of that, he’s really very good at identifying from various different sources, he’ll go and find that kind of content. So he came to me, and I actually have a website called Weird Asian News, cos he asked me, he said ‘hey I have these pictures I found, I think they’d be really good’… but to be honest this is the whole thing about success and social is it’s very opinionated. So I looked at the pictures and I was like ‘yeah, all right, you know, there’s some cool pictures but it’s not like crazy or anything, it wasn’t like that outrageous so I said to myself, you know, I said you know, we were trying to test Imgur, we were trying to see… because Imgur will show the view counts, and we wanted to see how pix were doing with view counts and stuff like that from Reddit, and so I was like ‘you know what, just throw it on Imgur and see like let’s count the stats and stuff like that, so we actually submitted it and it didn’t do well. In the last minute before he went to sleep he was like ‘you know what, I’m gonna throw it in this other category on Reddit’ and he threw it in there and went to sleep, and when he woke up it had thousands of votes…

Andre Alpar: It has fifteen billion now…

Brent Csutoras: Well yeah there was that, but it probably had even more because it got reused across the board so yeah, it has 15 million views, ended up getting links from everywhere you can imagine.

Andre Alpar: Even newspapers were talking about it.

Brent Csutoras: Vice, Yahoo, Huffington Post, everyone, it had thousands of links… Yeah it was really interesting.

Andre Alpar: You have all this equity now on Imgur and it doesn’t send traffic to anywhere, it’s also hard to get a link from there, right…

Brent Csutoras: There’s nothing to get from it. It’s all for them, not for me.

Andre Alpar: Before you would have put it on Weird Chinese News…

Brent Csutoras: I would have put it on Weird Chinese Nßews, but I made a decision cos I thought, you know, it was last minute, you know, and there’s no real benefit from that site either to be honest, it’s just an R&D site for me, so…

Andre Alpar: But now it’s a great case study for people to see what kind of stuff you can do.

Brent Csutoras: Yeah it was really good, and we have a lot of interesting ones, I mean we try to focus some of the experiences on various different elements that we see like high comments, like sometimes comments, a lot of good feedback and stuff… There’s a lot of interesting things out there but that one was last year, but we’ve seen even stuff this year that’s doing really well, I mean it’s gonna continue to do well because as we are seeing that’s where the majority of the marketplace is really going is social, so…

Andre Alpar: So basically what you do for your clients is they come up to you and they say ‘hey we need, you know, ideas for a campaign’ then you come up with a topic, then you help them also produce the content and also help it push through the various social channels. Is that how your services…

Brent Csutoras: For the most part. What happens is people come to us and they’ll say… You know, it’s the same thing with everybody for social: ‘Oh I saw something, it was amazing, I want that. Give it to me.’ You know, ‘can I have that too’, right.

Andre Alpar: Guaranteed! Everything has to be guaranteed!

Brent Csutoras: Well it’s getting better, it’s getting better, and I said this to somebody the other day, I was like, you know, for whatever reason social marketing is really closest to visual marketing, brand marketing in the real world, right? It’s very much like a commercial or a newspaper or a magazine ad, right. And all the value ROI is based purely on what everybody else has seen, like you know, kind of like an accepted norm of when you do a magazine ad, this is what you can expect from it. But there’s not really hard, tangible tracking on that, right. But for whatever reason when we went to social media marketing online we applied kind of a PPC ROI to it, we were like ‘I wanna spend a dollar, I wanna see 5 dollars’ and it doesn’t always work that way. It’s extremely valuable and I think people are starting to understand that…

Andre Alpar: So it’s more like a tube rather for branding than for direct conversions. Could you say that, or…? Is it a combination?

Brent Csutoras: Well it’s just like if you would link build before, why did you link build? Not because you wanted to get conversions from that traffic, you wanted the authority that came with that so that your site would rank. It’s an indirect effect in a lot of ways, like people don’t realize that the majority of advertising is not ROI-driven, not specifically, not purchase-driven. I mean when you see Nike ads, I mean you can’t click them, you can’t buy, I mean… they don’t necessarily all have a store on their site, there’s a lot of brands and there’s a lot of money that’s spent on branding, and I think that you have to realize that there’s a lot of levels of value, but I think the most important thing for people going into social is to really understand what they want. I mean, so many people go into social with no idea of what they really are looking to get out of it.

Andre Alpar: So basically they come up and you have to ask them these questions and help them come up with answers there…

Brent Csutoras: And I have to make sure I can do something to help them get to their goal. If their goal’s off, normally what I’ll do is say ‘look, I understand where you’re trying to go, but let’s be realistic. These are the ways in which you’re going to.” You know… Something that’s real goals and… Will what we’re doing reach that and what do you have to put up in order for us to be able to attain that, and what would I do to help accomplish that. And if there’s a good rapport…

Andre Alpar: Are they aware that they sometimes have to help you for you to be able to help them?

Brent Csutoras: I don’t know that they’re always aware initially but I’m very transparent with that, I mean there’s… look, to be honest, I’ve learned over the years that there’s no point in getting into an engagement with bad expectations. Or that’s gonna turn out to be a dispute or have somebody feel like they’re not getting what they want. Because I’m an honest kind of person and I don’t really, you know, I don’t run like a typical agency, so if somebody comes to me and they’re not happy…

Andre Alpar: So you have to do a lot of education at the beginning.

Brent Csutoras: Yeah well most people don’t find me unless they kinda know what they’re doing. You don’t get a lot of people that email me that don’t have some knowledge or they’re not an agency or somebody who’s within the industry. Most of my recommendations come from within the industry.

Andre Alpar: Are most of your customers agencies who have a client who want then the social media part that… that your talent’s added to that?

Brent Csutoras: It’s across the board, I mean I have start-ups, you know, big businesses, fortune companies that I work with…

Andre Alpar: That directly book?

Brent Csutoras: That directly book, and then I have a lot of agencies as well. So it really just comes down to: what’s the goal, what’s the medium that I have to work with, and how can I accomplish that goal or not accomplish that goal and a lot of times I tell people: ‘it’s not… you know, you need to come back to me in six months when you’re, you know, set up’. And I don’t do a whole lot of secret sauce, I mean I’ll tell people ‘look, this is what I think, this is how I think it’s gonna work, this is what I think your percent chance is, this is what your job’s gonna be, what my job would be… If all of this sounds good then let’s work together. If not, then let’s not.’

Andre Alpar: How do people deal with, you know, the awareness that something also might not work in social media because it doesn’t take off or, you know, is your gut feeling already that good that you can always say: ‘OK this is gonna take off?’

Brent Csutoras: Well we have a baseline because the way we promote… the old day was like aggregate sites, social aggregate sites where, if you won, you got the front page and you got a lot of visibility but if you failed you got nothing. Well, that can still happen if you’re just like promoting something without a network, right, if you’re just saying like ‘Hey I’m just putting this out there and if it catches, great; if it doesn’t, it doesn’t.’ But one thing that we’ve been doing for the last… Really for eight years now, is building up networks and accounts so we have like 20 or 30 facebook accounts that have niche space so we have like ‘did you know’, ‘today I learned’, or ‘amazing photos’ or ‘places you wanna be’… We find and build up these different niches that can apply to different clients, and so what we have… we have enough accounts and we have enough exposure and enough experience that we are able to have a baseline of success… It pretty much equates to what you would pay for. What you get on top of that is kinda like a lottery ticket, if it takes off and goes to the roof then you’re gonna have mass exposure. But we work with a lot of publishers who we… We’ll do like two or three campaigns a day, and just the baseline alone… you know, some of them have like five or six websites or something, you know, real public, we deal with some pretty…

Andre Alpar: So you have your own channels but you also work with partners that have their channels.

Brent Csutoras: Sure, we do outreach and have partners and stuff, but when I say we work with them I mean they hire us to do promotions for their content and, you know, the baseline alone is enough to… where we’ve continued to increase our engagements over time with them because they’re… you know, we have a good baseline from our networks, but the goal is to have networks that are targeted to where people really do want that type of content because what we see is you’ll get something out there, somebody will re-share it, somebody will pick it up and blog about it, you know, some people will do something with it, and when we get spikes, when we hit the front page of Reddit or if we hit, you know, really take off on Facebook or something you’ll see, you know, 50,000 to 500,000 visits and some good links and some good exposure, but what the goal really is, is knowing where everything’s gonna be in two years so right now…

Andre Alpar: It’s hard to say.

Brent Csutoras: It is, but it’s not…

Andre Alpar: I mean even now I was wondering, you know, there’s quite a proliferation of different social networks, you know, because you can’t have, you know, all the channels on Facebook, that 100%, but then there’s Vine, there’s Instagram, there’s, I dunno, Instagram videos, probably that’s a different, you know, pool of channels so, you know, I mean there seems to be more and more…

Brent Csutoras: Granted, but you know you could say the same thing…

Andre Alpar: Do you have more and more channels?

Brent Csutoras: Yes and no, it really depends on where the average… It really, you know… you can take a real world example to it and say: ‘look there’s a lot of stores all over the place’, but in certain areas of town where people put a lot of stores together: you have a mall or you have a shopping centre. And when you do that you do that because people want that visibility that comes from being in a larger group so, you know, there are accounts like Instagram and there’s places like… but Instagram has limitations in its certain areas and it can be really effective for certain people and not for others. We tend to focus on the demand, you know, we know that…

Andre Alpar: So if everybody’s asking you for Pinterest you will be building up Pinterest accounts or reaching out.

Brent Csutoras: Yeah and we have Pinterest accounts… We still build up each account because you never know where it’s gonna have an effect or where it’s gonna have a benefit or where it’s gonna take off, so we…

Andre Alpar: Is that kind of the area where you say you have to know where it’s gonna be in two years because you have to invest so much in building up the accounts, that you kind of have to have the foresight… OK you know, we’re gonna bet on, I dunno, the audiences in this social network?

Brent Csutoras: For the average person I would say absolutely. It gets to be really tough and that’s one of the things that I really push on people to make a decision, is really take the time to understand what the site is for, who’s the audience that it’s built for, how are they really using it, and how does it really fit into your marketing plan long-term, not just as a band-aid solution like ‘oo I’m gonna do this because it’s…’ But how does it really like benefit you, and how does it long-term have an effect. Two years from now when you’ve built up a community on Instagram, what is your real plan for using it for your company, and if you have a plan that makes sense, then do it absolutely. But for us, we’ve been building accounts since day 1, so we’re really good at being able to use existing accounts to create new accounts, so when we’re building our Pinterest accounts we’re able to utilize all of our social networks to build those Pinterest accounts up quickly, right, so for us it’s a little bit different but for the average person it can take a lot of time and energy, so really there’s so many social networks, but beyond that you really have to understand what you’re trying to get from social in general, you know, it’s no longer really… shouldn’t be something that’s like an SEO side-budget, it should be a company-wide kind of initiative and so forth.

Andre Alpar: It’s a different channel for it than search. It’s a different channel.

Brent Csutoras: Well it’s a big part of search now. I mean social signals, you know, I was saying this earlier today, I was just having a conversation with somebody: the thing that people don’t understand is that, like, let’s say me and you are out at a restaurant and we love an item of food that we’ve had. We might go back and we might actually write a blog post, but if the average person… If you have a thousand people out there…

Andre Alpar: Take a picture, put it on Facebook, that’s it.

Brent Csutoras: But even before that, forget social even existed: what did people do for recommendations? They didn’t blog.

Andre Alpar: Ask friends.

Brent Csutoras: They would just tell each other or they would do it… So there’s a massive amount of recommendations and references and referrals and things like that, that never got recorded before, never got on the web. So we were using links as an authority signal but how many people actually linked? You know, so now you have social…

Andre Alpar: It’s a strong bias, if you wanna take that as a recommendation.

Brent Csutoras: It could be… But the thing is that with social signals now you actually have millions more signals. You have the actual audience. It’s not just the influencers but the actual audience who are putting out there what they like and don’t like and you’re getting a… So the big strategy from the search engines and everybody else now is not the signals, but it’s how do you correlate the signals? How do you determine the connection? How do you determine when a signal becomes a real referral, and a real authority? So, even beyond all of that, I mean, social signals is really important because it’s the first time we have everybody’s voice, and somebody on Facebook has the ability to give it in two seconds, and I barely blog anymore because it’s easier for me to just share it on my Facebook. So I think that, you know, when you look at where things are going signals are really, really important, and we’re already talking about hiding… Google starting to retain their data more, I mean if you look at where we’re going with the augmented reality with Google glasses, with the way our devices allow for advertising, we’re really looking at signals being able to define what the signals mean as far as authority and then applying that to whatever device through cloud data that you have, so I think that that’s the value that people really need to look at, when they’re looking at their engagement in social medias: how am I positioning myself to have an influence in the way that people are talking about us and the way that people are engaging with our brand because that’s really gonna be the authority in the future.

Andre Alpar: So when you look at an individual campaign and let’s say, I would say, you know, it has probably three parts like a planning and strategic part, then it has a production part, and then it has a, I dunno, promotion… If you split the costs, you know, where would they be percentage-wise? What’s like a gut feeling or like something I could hold onto, is it like a third and a third and a third or is most of it promotion and strategy, and production is just a little bit?

Brent Csutoras: So promotion ends up becoming the easier part of it.

Andre Alpar: Really?

Brent Csutoras: But it takes the longest part to create. So it’s really hard to break it apart like that.

Andre Alpar: So to create the content would be…

Brent Csutoras: No, no, no… To create the networks that you can promote with. So the thing is that like we might go out and… and we already have all the accounts, so if you’re talking about an individual promotion, you know, being able to say ‘hey this is the kind of content we should make, and this is the type of direction and this is how it should apply to your overall marketing strategy and stuff like that. I definitely would say it’s, you know, in the long term it’s equal, it’s one third, one third, one third. To create the content, you know, it’s an individual who’s saying ‘OK now I have the topic, I have the direction, now I’m just gonna write it’ and then you have the ‘OK well now we have to go out and promote it’. We promote things a long time. Personally. Like, we don’t just do the submit-and-forget kinda thing, so we actually promote for two weeks.

Andre Alpar: Right.

Brent Csutoras: On every campaign. And we follow up and we do a lot of reporting to kinda figure out where the successes have been and where there’s been kinda lulls. And we try to fill all that in so the baseline continues to stay strong. But… So that can end up in our particular case being a little bit more of the equation. But I mean, I don’t even look at it as three parts, I mean it’s a campaign: it’s the concept, it’s the content and it’s the promotion, and for me it’s all one thing. If you don’t have a good place to publish it, if you don’t have snippets that can be easily shared, if you don’t have images that can be easily used, if the site doesn’t have a quality to it, then nobody’s gonna share it.

Andre Alpar: So… but that’s in the creation part where you have to think up the concept.

Brent Csutoras: But even just for the website itself, just you know, the page that it’s gonna be published on, and then the content itself, does it have, you know, the right tone, is it, you know, informative? Does it actually engage somebody, you know, does it have the opportunities for sharing, and then once you actually are promoting it then of course there’s all the elements of going out and submitting to the right categories, like Reddit’s one of the hardest, you know, social communities to submit to and have success with, but mostly it’s because nobody ever takes the time to understand it, right? It’s not a social community, it’s a software that allows you to make your own communities. And people don’t realize that, so they’ll go in and they’ll say ‘Oh I wanna submit to, say, business category.’ Well, business category has like 100 active users at a time. You know, just because it has a large number of people that have signed up for it doesn’t mean it’s really active, so there’s so many elements of Reddit that if you don’t take the time to understand, you’ll have no success with it.

Andre Alpar: I wonder, what do you think… How do the social networks that you use for distribution and promotion, how do they look at what you guys do? I mean, is there like this slightly, you know, imperfect relation between, you know, Matt Cutts and his team, and the SEO guys that are manipulating, and then there’s this black hat and this grey hat area, so are you…

Brent Csutoras: Yeah I understand what you’re asking, yeah.

Andre Alpar: Will that be an issue over time?

Brent Csutoras: That hasn’t been an issue, I mean it has for a lot of people…

Andre Alpar: You mentioned the Digg incident, which is obviously old and it was automated so it’s not the same thing, I mean, you know, the stuff that you’re doing, people are… they’re following you because they want to so you’re not forcing them to so it’s different, but I was wondering if it’s… if you see it in two years that they’ll… the social networks will go on like that?

Brent Csutoras: No, and here’s why, I mean… The reason being is that there’s a couple of factors to this. We have become acceptable for the idea of commerce, I mean, you know, Reddit right now is doing a massive campaign because they have no money. Like, you know, they need money and so they’re doing all this, like, gilded, like, ‘buy gold for each other’, you know, you have to spend 5 bucks per person and give it for comments and they’re focused and they’re asking people to spend a lot. The problem is, is that, you know, Silicon Valley, all of these start-ups, they didn’t really care about making money and the whole concept of ‘oh if you have ads we don’t like it and we don’t want it and we don’t want anything that’s commercial’ and stuff like that, but there’s been a massive shift in the acceptance: a lot more average people are coming online and they’re used to that type of thing, they’re not put off by it, so the companies are really starting to understand that you need to accept the business angle if you’re gonna have success.

Andre Alpar: So you’re like the professional publishers on these… can you say that?

Brent Csutoras: No, but I think it goes even further than that, it’s like when we did it, there’s a lot of ways to do it dark. But we always thought to ourselves like… I’ve always been like… I worked… I was an alpha tester for Digg, so I went into the offices, I knew some people that worked there, we looked at their code that they were doing, we looked at their business plans, what they were talking about, what they were doing, how they were hiring. We would always determine what the direction was. And we knew where the line was. And we never crossed the line. So we always were very careful with promotions that it was aboveboard. Same thing, you know, I’ve known Matt for a long time, I’ve known the guys at Reddit for a while, I worked with them, I know some of the guys at StumbleUpon and I know the guys that have been…

Andre Alpar: So probably your approach of, you know, being able to promote will be the white hat approach.

Brent Csutoras: Yeah.

Andre Alpar: But probably if, you know, say, people who professionally promote stuff on social networks, you know, probably the social networks at one point in time start to say ‘OK this is…’ because you knew where the…

Brent Csutoras: But I think the quality stuff is normal. If you talk about promoting on Facebook today, you know, the black hat stuff, it doesn’t work. Like, they’re really good about… It’s not about an algorithm that counts plusses and minuses any more. It’s about the correlation of the reaction. Right, even Google when they talk about social signals, they talk about… It’s not just somebody getting to your site through a social channel, it’s about what they do when they get on your site, and that’s hard to manipulate. You can send, you know, a lot of people to, you know, through social. You can get your post out on Facebook and have a lot of fake channels like it, but that doesn’t do anything for the actual success.

Andre Alpar: Users won’t use it.

Brent Csutoras: And they’re looking at so many levels. Algorithms have advanced so much, the way that they look at them is understood to be about quality so much, that you would spend more time trying to gain the system than you do if you actually…

Andre Alpar: So the clean way is actually cheaper or more efficient.

Brent Csutoras: It’s better. It’s a lot better. And trust me, I mean we’ve done stuff, we’ve tested with everything, I mean there’s nothing that we don’t test, you know, finding holes, finding workarounds, finding ways to automate things. We do everything to test because we wanna know what the real limits are, but what we found the most successful is understanding all of that and then coming back and making a page the proper way, and building them out the proper way. And it really has led to us keeping accounts longer, I mean not having to turn to them… Like, Reddit’s a great example. Reddit, you know, people think ‘oh well if I submit something from a client and then I submit a bunch of other content, and then I submit another thing from another client and another bunch of content then I’m safe from this correlation right? I’m kind of like I’ve diversified my submissions, they’re not gonna figure it out. And then they say ‘Oh well you can vote on my thing, but vote on like 10 other things.’ But Reddit doesn’t care about your diversity, it cares about your connectivity. So when it sees that 5 people are voting on this URL, no matter how many other URLs they’re voting on, if the same 5 people are voting on this URL and if that URL, no matter how many submissions you’re doing, is coming from primarily one or two accounts, they will correlate that and they’ll just ban them. But they don’t ‘ban them’ ban them, you don’t get like a notice.

Andre Alpar: You just don’t pop up any more.

Brent Csutoras: It just doesn’t show up any more. So you continue to operate like you think you’re winning, and everybody else, they don’t even see your submissions. And because Reddit puts a fake voting count, so they’ll show up votes and down votes as it goes, it’s totally fake, you can’t even tell even on regular submissions how many people are actually voting and negative voting. So that’s not the first company that does that, that limits your exposure based on that. There’s a lot of companies that say ‘you know what, banning people flat out is a waste of time, we just silence them. We just make it so they don’t have an impact.’

Andre Alpar: They think everything is working like it should, and it’s not doing anything.

Brent Csutoras: We’ve just learned that, you know… Again, we’ve tried a lot of things, we have a lot of fun stories of things that we’ve accomplished and things that we’ve done for testing and stuff like that, and it’s very interesting and it’s very fun to talk about, and I’ll talk a lot more about that stuff in private, but the things that succeed the most today are really understanding the boundary and staying on the good side of it, but pushing the envelope. And you can have great success that way, and we have had great success that way.

Andre Alpar: I think that’s a great way to end the interview because that’s a perfect sentence for it. All right, thanks so much for the interview.

Brent Csutoras: Awesome, I appreciate it, thanks.