For Kent: Customer Engagement

John Robbins, Illustrator, Educator, Life Saver.
http://bit.ly/1rA7X0W

I was a lonely, scared, severely gay little 12 year old in 1973. I mean, Bette Midler hadn't even come out yet, but I was sure trying to.

You know how spastic I am now, you can't believe how spastic I was then, and even the teachers didn't know what to do with me. I guess now they would just drug me and put me in a corner. But my interests were all over the place and I couldn't really find a focus for any of my energy. Enter: John Robbins. What a huge crush for me.

Before we consciously knew what Stranger Danger was, there were people like Mister Rogers who would invite you over to his house and talk directly to you, just the two of you together, and tell you stories, and play with you, and sing you songs, and introduce you to his friends ... John Robbins did the same thing, only for the pre-teen set. He was a teacher, yes, but he was also an illustrator, and he would start out sketching, and then turn to the camera and tell you how that drawing fit in to the story of an exciting new book ! Then they would have a voice-over of people reading from the book, and then at the end the picture would be done, or we'd come back to him and he'd give us a bridge to a later portion of the book, and then he'd say goodbye. AMAZING books, and he loved to introduce you to series. Some of these books I read annually to this very day.

Now...my physical attraction to this man is so obvious, not only for my "type" but for the era, #GayClone, #PornStache, and his soft southern lilt was so inviting, and he was in jeans and had that groovy necklace shining, it was like a real teacher you had a crush on inviting you over to his own house ! to make drawings for you and tell you stories ! (Later when he went from The Book Bird to Cover to Cover, he got a leather wrist band just like Bobby Sherman in Here Comes the Brides.) But the other thing I remember was the books he had in his apartment behind him. I remember loving the word Bauhaus and looking it up at the library and going down a rabbit hole of beauty and excitement and ingenuity, and realising for the first time that there was a world outside of the one I could find in the pages of a Sears and Roebuck catalogue.

Here's a whole episode of him introducing us to Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House series ... [you may know them from television, but] you may not know that you can read about this family in 8 different books."

I'm engaged because someone I find attractive is telling me a secret about something and he's telling me about it while I'm watching him create something himself.

Now, it's this one-on-one engagement, this secrecy, too, this being invited in to someone's home and life that's made YouTube the phenomenon it is. A perfect example of this is in the life of a fanatic. I couldn't become engaged with the original casting of WICKED, but then my cousin went in as the percussionist and I needed to do some homework so that I could talk to him about his life. There became nothing I didn't know about the show from the audience's POV and then the DELIGHTFUL, DEEPLY talented, and delicious Lindsay Mendez of Dogfight fame went in to the show for its 10th Anniversary and did one of thee most SPECTACULAR series of videos from HER point of view. Her day before the show, what it's like in her dressing room, we got to meet all of her cast mates, she'd take us through her quick changes, we got to run around backstage with her before and during ! the show ... we became a part of her life and part of the life of the show we'd known for ten years, but now we knew lots of secrets.



Hamilton has recently made good use of this type of marketing as well. Knowing so many people can't get in to see the show, but know the show, they come out on to the steps of the theater and perform Ham4Ham, selections from the show, fun skits, audience involvement, and it keeps us engaged with them on a personal level.

So too, Twitter comes in to play and these people read Tweets during the filming and answer questions, or like or answer back on Twitter. It makes the audience member feel special, noticed, engaged.

Where I'm going is, I don't have a brick-and-motar to stroll into anymore. I can't put aside an afternoon to look at dust-jackets and find a few new titles. The Times and the NYR are fine (my 12 year old self didn't even know those things existed, although if I were 12 now I might...), but these same conversations come up in the Episcopal Church: those are viable but antiquated ways to communicate information and they're not really bringing new butts in to the pews. I'm still spastic and my tastes are still all over the place. I just finished the Nicolle Wallace three-parter White House backstage novels, Game Change by Heilemann and Halpern, I'm in the middle of Off Script by Josh King and I'm also reading a YA steampunk series by Jackqueline Garlick called The Illumination Paradox.

I need faces to fall in love with to guide me to books, or at least faces to trust, to tell me what THEY find exciting...a LIFE of books, an ARC of books, not necessarily XTITLE coming out YDATE. And I don't mean SPECIFIC faces, they could be an avatar or a comic, I just need the IDEA of someONE who HEARS ME, who responds to MY questions and needs, who interacts with ME. I need someone to NOTICE me. The 9 year old girl inside me needs someone who looks like Six from Blossom to tell me about Ann M. Martin’s The Baby-Sitters Club series.

The 13-year old rebel girl in me needs someone who looks like Pauley Perrette from NCIS to tell me about Kim Harrison's Hollows series with all those kick-ass woman in them.

and all of Sybil's "alters" need Scott Hoying & Mitch Grassi from SUPERFRUIT and Pentatonix to tell me about the novel Auntie Mame and DV by Diana Vreeland.

Now, I do love my BookBub, it shows me pretty pictures, there are sales on books, I can choose all the genres I'm interested in, but my problem is (a) I feel like I'm not getting a very WIDE selection of publishing houses, and (b) it comes TOO OFTEN ! and (c) some of the titles are ... uninspired ...



I KNOW it's TL;DR, but Social Times has a fantastic article about INFLUENCER MARKETING here: http://bit.ly/1TLpUTn and an article summarizing something from MILLENNIAL MARKETING here: http://bit.ly/1TuGKTQ which tell us that

...a stunning 97 percent of millennials today don’t turn to TV news or magazines to influence their purchasing decisions, which doesn’t bode well for the ads that support them. As a result, more and more brands are turning to influencer marketing to establish meaningful connections with their target audiences. It’s no surprise that 75 percent of brands are currently using influencer marketing in some capacity… Influencer marketing is most effective when the influencers produce sponsored content in the same style that made them successful in the first place–engaging and trustworthy stories, opinions and reviews. This content is valuable because it has been proven to establish a meaningful emotional connection with people, ultimately influencing them to take action. If a brand is too “hands-on,” it is easy for the content to lose its authentic tone and feel, making it just as ineffective as traditional advertising…

THE ! KEY ! IS ! CONSISTENCY ! ! ! and a private, shared lexicon. This gives the audience "a sense of control in a world filled with chaos" (CLUELESS). Some of THEE most successful YouTubers became so because, like, Simon and Martina, who I've been following for a decade on EatYourKimchi.com, have regularly scheduled segments:

• Wednesdays: TL;DR (Too Long; Didn't Read) - Fan questions about living in Korea, Korean culture and society and their personal lives answered by the Stawskis
• Thursdays: WANK (Wonderful Adventure Now Korea) - Showing popular places to hang out as well as road trips, or
• FAPFAP (Food Adventure Program For Awesome People) - Eating out in Korean restaurants, food delivery services, cooking Korean dishes and convenience store items
• Fridays: Livechat - Chatting with fans, opening of care packages
• Saturday: WTF (Wonderful Treasure Find) - unusual products and devices from all over the world, an Open The Happy video - Korea unrelated videos such as movie reviews, make-up tutorials and montages of their pets or DICKS (Discussing Interesting Contemporary Korean Slang) - a segment hosted by employees SooZee and Leigh about Korean and North American slang words
• Sundays: K Crunch Indie - Introducing Korean indie music, or Speaker's Corner, uploaded every Sunday on their You are Here Cafe channel, with many people leaving messages in their coffeeshop booth, discussing popular topics in the news in Korea or around the world.

Lastly, and not off-topic, I promise, is my participation in panels. I ALWAYS want my voice heard because they're my gay dollars and, although I am penurious, I am a BRAND queen and I love a bargain but I want P&G and other big corporations to KNOW that I'm choosing them over a bargain brand because I think it worth my time and expense. I've been on the NPR panels for decades, but that's more for feedback about what to keep funding, but the most satisfying brand relationship in my adult life has been with Stop&Shop. I signed up to partner with them about five years ago and it's electrifying. One of their concentrations during this period has been to offer local produce, local ingredients, and ask why we don't buy the already-made foods instead of getting the ready-to-make offerings ... I'm sent surveys once or twice a week and, although the chance to win $10 gift cards is a nice incentive (I've probably won about 10 times), the point is, they will present X logo or Y logo, would you like peppermint-flavoured treats during Christmas, how early should we put them out, should we keep using paper coupons  ... tell us in DETAIL WHY you like this over that ... and I'll participate and then I'll walk in to the store and see my vote counting ... or not ... but it makes me an integral part of not only their corporate life but with decisions that directly impact me. And it gives me, however false, a sense of satisfaction that I'm being heard, that my voice matters, and so I go back time and again to their brand because it's OUR brand, it's my brand, and I'm helping to make it great.

 So, anyway, that's my two cents. xoxo