The Accidental Viral Moment That Changed Everything

0:00Hey, Ryan here. Before we dive into the show, let me ask you something real quick. Are you a seven or eight figure founder who's tired of carrying the whole business on your back? If so, then you're exactly who we built Get Scalable Live for. This is the only room where real business owners just like you come together to share what's working now when it comes to strategy, scale, and exits. There's no fluff. It's just results. And it's happening November 18th through the 20th in San Diego. And yes, Roland and I will both be there. You can grab your ticket now at GetScalableLive.com and don't forget to use code LUNCH to save 25%.

0:37Again, GetScaleableLive.com, code LUNCH. All right, let's get you into today's episode. Yeah, so the backstory is where I decided, you and I talked about this, I've been making marketing courses literally since the year 2000. I sold my very first product online in 1999.

1:02Going viral by accident. We recently accidentally created a viral social media frenzy from a post about Ryan's retirement from digital marketing that sparked unexpected controversy and opportunity. Most entrepreneurs fear going viral for the wrong reasons, but what if controversy could actually be your biggest business accelerator? Here's what happened in our case and also how you can capitalize on accidental virality in your business. Ryan, how are you doing today? I'm doing really well. How about you? I am doing well. I just want to know how is retired life going? I know that you posted that you were retiring from digital marketing in a nice black and white kind of serious, you know, somber announcement format.

1:49And I'm just excited to hear, I guess you're on the golf course, you're hanging out with the kids, you're probably traveling. What's going on? Yeah, feet kicked up, you know, sleeping until noon, playing a lot of golf. No. Yeah. So the backstory is where I decided, you and I have talked about this. I've been making marketing courses literally since the year 2000. I sold my very first product online in 1999. That's a quarter century. A quarter century, dude. A quarter of a century. So I'm 44 years old. I've been selling, I've been creating marketing related courses for 25 years, which means I've been doing it longer than I haven't.

2:29Right. That's, and, you know, and it's because as long as I've been doing business, the thing about the marketing community, because my very first product online wasn't about marketing. It was literally a product on how to make your own baby food, which that's its own kind of story for probably a different, you know, podcast episode. And I've always had businesses that had nothing to do with, you know, marketing and digital marketer and stuff like that. But at the same time, I've always talked about what I was doing. And that came out of the earliest days of the internet marketing community where people were sharing and we were learning from one another and we benefited from the sharing of the stuff.

3:07And so I've always been teaching, always been sharing every year for the last, you know, 25 years. But I kind of made the decision at the end of last year that I was going to produce one more training. It was going to be kind of the last one. And that was going to be my swan song. And that was going to be it. And there were a number of reasons why I wanted to do that. But yeah, I kind of made the decision that I was going to sail off into the sunset with respect to, you know, marketing, teaching, training courses. Posted up, and this kind of coincided with a big pivot. We were making a digital marketer, posted up the announcement.

3:43Didn't think much of it. It was this picture of you kind of in a chair, full you looking off into the distance. And it said, I think it said, I'm retiring or I'm retiring from marketing. I'm not sure. It just said, I'm retiring. I'm retiring. Okay. Yeah. So, cause I got a whole bunch of people texting me. Oh man, what are you going to do now that Ryan's not, you know, I guess, you know, y 'all aren't doing anything anymore, et cetera, et cetera. Yeah. And it was, it was funny because it's the classic case of, you know, people not reading below the second line. And obviously look, I, when I, when I created the picture, when I wrote the post, I intended for it to be provocative.

4:23Sure. Right. Of course, because I'm a marketer. And to me, this is like, this is my swan song, This is kind of like I'm going out. And so I'm going to go out the way that a marketer should, by like, let's have a solid headline. And so I wrote a really good headline. I had a really solid image to go along with it. We had a solid offer to go along with it. And I was just, frankly, I was surprised by how much traction it got. And I was surprised by how few people actually read. It's the classic case of kind of people only read the headline, nobody reads below that. Yep. What happened? So, I mean, what wound up, well, I can tell you what wound up happening.

5:04The, you know, the post, let's see. So far to date, I can go back to the original post, pull that up. So it's received, you know, a couple hundred thousand impressions, which is more than usual for me, over 300 comments, which again, I'm not particular. this is just on LinkedIn where I'm not that active. Haven't been for a very long time. Facebook, there was even more Instagram, you know, there was a ton. And again, I'm not super active on these different social channels. So in a normal post for me might get 2000 impressions because like I said, I'm not a, I'm not a social influencer. So we're talking about, you know, a few hundred times the amount of engagement that it would get.

5:50And it was everything from, like you said, people being like, oh my gosh, I can't believe, you know, you're retiring completely, you know, who didn't read to people being like, this is awesome. This is so, you know, cool. I'm, you know, congrats on the pivot, right. Both in your career and for digital marketer. Cause that's what it was to people being like really mad. Cause they were like, how dare you? This is, yeah, I can't believe that, that you would, you know, commercialize this, that you would say you're retiring when you're not actually retiring. And that was one that surprised me the most for a number of reasons.

6:22Because number one, I am retiring from something. I'm retiring from something that for me has been a significant aspect of my life. For me to say that I'm no longer going to create a marketing course when I've been doing it for 25 years, that is very much retiring from a pretty significant job. And for Digital Marketer, a company that has been in the training and certification space for the last 10 years to say, we're going to stop selling courses and certifications. That's a giant pivot. But I guess, you know, in thinking about it, I get the cynicism because there have been a number of marketers, not to name names who have said, I'm retiring, I'm pulling all my course off the market, buy them for a little bit.

7:12And then two weeks later, they're right back. Well, and there are things about, think about, uh, celebrities and musicians, they, how many farewell tours has Elton John and, you know, and people like that done. It's, it's like, you know, we're retiring, but now we're back, you know, it's so it's, I think it's, uh, it's interesting, but you were actually honest in the ad. It was, it was a, uh, you know, a little clickbaity headline in that, you know, Hey, it's curiosity. And I should want, should want to read more than that. I don't just read the headline. And that's the, that's the thing. Cause what happened to the people that are mad is they probably went out and told a bunch of people.

7:44And then somebody who had read the as it, he's not retiring. He said he was pivoting. What? You know, so they embarrassed them or something, but let's talk about two things today. The first I'd like to talk about is, um, why you posted that, uh, cause you are a private person and it's not something that you would typically share. Um, what was the purpose of it? Um, and how, you know, um, did it achieve the purpose that you desired? And then let's talk a little bit about virality and how to take advantage of accidental, which is what this was, virality. Because you really, I mean, despite all the marketing that says that you can plan and create viral posts, the truth is you never know until you put it up there.

8:20So a lot of times there will be something. And then if you're not careful, it'll just slip away and you won't have taken the opportunity to optimize the benefit from it. So let's start with why did you make the post in the first place? Yeah, this is good because I haven't talked about the to anywhere, the full backstory because I wasn't planning on doing it. We had decided at Digital Marketer that this change needed to take place, that we needed to make this pivot. And I think that - What is the pivot? I'm sorry? What is the pivot? So the pivot at Digital Marketer is, you know, Digital Marketer again has been in the training and certification space, primarily selling courses, certifications for the past 10 years.

9:01In 2015, we said that Digital Marketer is a certifications business. And over the last couple of years, that has just fallen off a cliff for a variety of reasons. Certainly post-COVID, there's not as many people buying courses anymore. Also, at the same time, you have big brands like Meta is coming out with their own certifications. HubSpot is, and they're largely making them free. Obviously, there's more people on YouTube and there's great content on YouTube. And then the emergence of AI just has a lot of people saying, I don't need to learn this because AI will just do it for me. So all of these kind of factors coming together, specifically in the marketing space, made it to where digital marketers' courses, course sales were down to about 20 % of what they were.

9:50Not down 20%, down to 20 % of what they were. And that was if it was halfway decent. So we knew that if we didn't change the business model, that this brand wasn't really going to be around or relevant at all in 12 to 18 months. So we knew that going into this year. And we knew the pivot that we were going to make. And we knew that we needed to make some AI-related pivot. We didn't, going into the year, know what it was going to be. And we figured it out at the end of last quarter and then set about executing it this quarter. And that pivot is into AI-enabled services. And just briefly on that, I know you and Richard did an episode on it.

10:31But what we realized is that a far better use of our courses, instead of training humans, who, let's face it, humans don't actually go through trainings. Like the consumption rate is terrible. And the actual action rate, like people doing anything with them is even worse. let's not take our courses and use that to train people. Let's take our courses and use that to train AI. Because AI is pretty smart, but it's not that smart, right? And so, ChaiGPT, if you ask it to produce you a marketing asset, it will produce you a marketing asset that is just kind of okay. But if it knows everything that Digital Marketer knows, if it's trained with all of our frameworks, models, our certifications, it gets really freaking good, really freaking fast.

11:25So that's what we said. Let's take this. Let's train bots. Let's train GPTs and let's give people access to these. This will be our new business model. So that's the pivot that we're making. And if we're doing that, then it doesn't make sense to have our courses out there. And I said, you know what? In the context of this, I'm also going to announce that I'm not making any new courses because I wasn't planning on publicizing that. I'm like, I'll go ahead and do it. And I did that. I'll tell you as much for me as a forcing function as for anything else. Like I didn't think it was a particularly great hook.

11:57I did it more so that I would have planted a flag in the ground to say, okay, I'm not going to do this because I know it's my tendency to go back. And so, and you and I have talked about this. Yeah. Anytime. Okay. Got to generate some revenue. Ryan, go create a course. Right. And I didn't want to do it. Yeah. I didn't want to do it. So that's kind of the backstory. So we're going to go out with this promotion. We're taking all of our courses off the market. Let's give everybody one last chance to get them all at one low price. That was the promotion. One last chance to get all the courses and training that we have in our library at one low price, kind of like what Disney does.

12:36Last chance to get it before it goes in the vault. And the first email that was due to go out, you know, obviously this email is coming from me. the first couple of lines was exactly what the first line was in the post. I'm retiring from digital marketing and I'm taking my company digital marketer down with me. Yeah. Now I wrote that because I knew, and in general, I don't write the emails for digital marketer anymore. I haven't for years. We've got a copywriter. I wrote that and I knew it was a heater. Like I was like, this is good. This is good. And, and all I did was write that. And And then there was a much longer email that went into the explanation about it.

13:18Well, this got passed on to our email marketing manager to send. And our email marketing manager, in his infinite wisdom, saw this email, which was approved, right? And it opened with this very aggressive, admittedly clickbaity type opening line, but then was promptly explained in the lines below about giving, you know, contextualizing it. And what he did instead was he removed all of the explanation, just left the top two lines with a link to the website. And so when I saw that email hit my inbox with just the top two lines, and then when you went to the page, there was an explanation, but the explanation was below the actual offer.

14:14I see. So basically you get an email. If you're on the digital marketer list, you get an email that says, I'm retiring from digital marketing and I'm taking my company digital marketer down with me. Here's a page with all the details. You click the link and all you see when you go to that page is the offer. I see. So I see this and I flip out. I don't get mad very often, but I was pissed. And I asked this person who I now want to murder, why did you do this? This was approved. He's like, I just knew it would get more click throughs if it didn't have all the stuff below. Now, he's right. But that wasn't the point.

14:52And to me, this message was very personal. Right. To me, it meant a lot. And it was just such a poor cuss. So we had a good talk. It was a good learning moment for all involved. Once an email is approved, you don't just get to unilaterally change it. but we had to move quickly. So Matt Swan, our head of marketing, he took the explanation that was at the bottom, moved it to the top so that effectively, if you clicked on the link and went to the page, you got the rest of the email. But I was frankly worried about blowback. I was worried about people seeing this and hitting me up on social and being like, hey, that was kind of an uncool email to send.

15:33So I went to social and essentially posted what the email was so I could preempt it. And because it was so quick and I wanted to make sure I got ahead of it, I basically just copied and pasted what the original email was as the social post. Okay. That was it. I wasn't planning on it being anything. And then when I made the, uh, when I, when I did the picture, this is a picture that is in my media kit and it was just the one that i grabbed and so i pulled it in there went into canva put i'm retiring over it i knew it was you know i knew it was a good one and i wanted it to get noticed but this was not planned at all so that is the long-winded extended explanation of how this whole thing came about okay interesting and um and then it was also part of a marketing campaign of sorts, right?

16:28Oh yeah. Well, the post became a part of the marketing campaign, but that wasn't the original. The original plan wasn't necessarily for me to be posting about this on, on my social channels. In general, I haven't been posting about marketing and digital marketer stuff for a while. I've kind of pivoted my personal brand to be more business related, to be more related to scalable type things. So I wasn't planning on posting that this week. Okay. Had the person not messed up, it wouldn't have gotten posted. So it was kind of a happy accident. Okay. So, which is great because it goes directly to what we're talking about, right?

17:08So we have the happy accident. Now, what have you done? What did you do? Or what do you think are the best ways to take a happy accident like that, where now you've got attention, which we normally have to pay for, and that attention is focused on you, now what? What should you do? What should people do when they have that? Well, I essentially made it my full-time job to reply as best I could to every single comment. And I wanted to do that because I wanted to keep the engagement going. And I know that that is one thing that helps. It doesn't just help with the people that are there, but algorithmically, it helps.

17:43And so I there were lots of things that I had planned to do that were on my big three to get done that week that I reprioritized to spend time essentially being my own social media manager. And I did pull in some additional help. So people on my team who manage it, I was like, hey, if anybody responds with something like this, just respond like this. Make sure we're going in there and liking the posts that, you know, that are positive. If it's a negative one, or if somebody's like, hey, this is uncool, let me respond to that one. Cause I wanted to see the negative one. So I knew how to reply. So that was the first thing that I did.

18:16So that's what I was also, oh, sorry. That's cause I want to take it step by step. So that's awesome. And really you did the, what, you know, I think the strategy playbook on this is, is that you really want to have both sides content, right? You want to, you're going to have good things. You're going to have bad things. People always love you. People always hate you. So create content that addresses the concerns from the critics. Don't just ignore them. Definitely don't delete their posts. Use that to create engagement, which feeds the algorithm. Show that you understand the different positions that they might be taking and that you can relate with it.

18:54And then a lot of times you can build credibility with people that originally disagreed with you as you're having the conversation because they're like, oh, okay. you know, like maybe I should have read it, for example, or, you know, or you can say, you know, well, this is why my critics are actually right about a specific point. And now that's helped me learn. You're actually having a conversation and it's not one way. It's, it's not one sided. It's, it's both, it's empathetic and supportive. And, you know, that, that really helps everybody to feel good about it so that even though it might be controversial, it still has, and you might have detractors.

19:36Most of those people you're going to want over. There's always going to be some, you know, Yahoo, you're just going to just, you know, you, you, you take your, your attempt to do it and then thank them when they say you're still stupid, you know, okay, well, thank you. I appreciate your opinion. Right. Okay. So what were you going to say after that? Well, just to, to stay on this point, just for one second longer, it was probably at least 90, 10 positive, like very positive. And a lot of people taking time out of their day to talk about how Digital Marketer had impacted their life and how, you know, the certifications had helped them, you know, launch their career.

20:11And so there's just these glowing and gushing testimonials, which was nice because number one, it made me feel good. And to share it with the team, it made the team feel really great. But there were people who commented and said, you know, I was going to comment that, oh, this is just another marketing gimmick. But then when I read all the testimonials, it's clear that like, this is legit. And so that felt really good. So it did just become this snowball of social proof that I wanted to keep going. And I wanted people to see that I was engaging. And so it took a lot of time. And it's one of those things that's unscalable.

20:44But I also knew that it wasn't going to last forever. We had a little window. This offer launched on Tuesday. It was going to close the following Tuesday. So it was just a week that was there. So, you know, we had that at the same time I'm gathering what are the most frequently asked questions and I'm figuring out what those are and I'm getting a chance to test out what are the replies that are making people say, okay, yeah, that makes sense. You know, I get that. And so what I then did the following Monday, so keep in mind, like, so basically that, that week, everything's happening. And I'm just generally responding.

21:21I'm not, I'm not doing a bunch of new posts because I'm trying not to stomp the one that's up there. I kind of want to let it still, you know, do its thing. You generally will have 72 hours or so of engagement from that before it fades. Exactly. So I was going to, I was going to let it go. I was going to let it, let it do its thing. And then on Monday I went through and I, and I did a share post on all of them. And I don't know enough about the algorithm to know if, you know, sharing the original post or doing a new post was the best thing. The share post didn't get as much traction as I thought it would.

21:55So probably doing a brand new post would have been better. But I made the decision just to share the original. And then in that, I, you know, I decided that I was going to answer and address some of the most frequently asked questions that we had starting with, you know, is this real or just another marketing gimmick? And, you know, then why would you commercialize this? And, you know, why the change? Why now? And what was nice is all of these replies were tested replies from conversations that I got to have with people in the comments. So I'll stop there. Yeah, I like it. So I think that really what you did and what somebody could do, who has the accidental success here would be to data mine.

22:46So data mine, engage with both sides of content, use it to gain a deeper understanding of the people who are your audience that are out there. If you want to copy the responses and replies and paste them into chat GBT or Claude or something like that and say, give me a sentiment analysis and tell me what are the opportunities to engage further with these people? What is the general sentiment that they've got? How might this be used to create better product services, et cetera. One way to extend that, that I think is worth exploring. So you mentioned that you tried sharing it and that didn't, you know, take like you were hoping would be to kind of do what like a BTS thing, like a behind the scenes documentary approach where you're showing the real story behind the viral minute, like moment.

23:34So here it might be how I made the decision to retire, you know, and that's based on legitimate questions that people have, because I'm sure people ask you that, you know, so that you can basically humanize yourself and the whole thought process that you've got behind it. It could even be, you know, episodic content that you're doing, you know, well, here's what happened for, you know, there were five things that caused me to do this and to make this decision. And you guys are probably doing it too. So I thought I'd break that down for you. Here's the first one. And now you've got this, you know, this extension of the original that got the attention for anybody that was and it probably won't have the same take rate that that initial did.

24:14But I bet you get quite a bit from it, particularly if you've got things that you feel people could really identify with. And you could use that data mind sensitivity analysis, sentiment analysis to kind of inform that documentary telling of the story. What are your thoughts about that? Yeah, if I had it to do all over again, I would every day just record an iPhone video answering some of the questions that I was getting in the comments. You know what could have been cool too? I'm thinking of retiring from marketing. Should I? Yeah. What do you think? Yeah. Right. Yeah. Like kind of a public decision input engagement kind of thing would have been interesting, right?

24:56Yeah. And so just to open it up, but changing up the medium and the mechanism and going to go into video would have made sense. Again, this wasn't really planned. And it's funny, the way that it hit me, it, it hit me more. I was more emotional about it than I thought I would be because I guess this was kind of the final nail in the coffin of, of like, I'm not going to be doing this anymore. And it's why I got a little bit defensive when people were like, oh, this is just a gimmick. Like there's a marketer, you and I both know him and he hit me up on, you know, on Twitter. He, he responded, he's like, oh, it's just a marketing gimmick.

25:34And I'm like, it's not Like, it's not a gimmick that I'm going to stop doing this thing that I've been doing for 25 years. It's not a gimmick that digital marketers pivoting after 10 years. He's like, oh, yeah, you know, come on. We're all marketers men. I'm like, it's not. And he kept pressing. And I'm like, you should have just said my bad because you and I both know each other and you piss me off. Right. And so admittedly, I got a little bit defensive because this does mean something to me. At the same time this week, you know, you know this. I went, you know, on Thursday, drove up to wake up to pick up my son from college.

26:04So I'm hanging out with my oldest for the first time in a while. And so I'm not thinking as clearly or as strategically as I, you know, now looking back on it would. So, yes, if I'm going back thinking about it, I'm busting out my phone and I'm recording a video and uploading that every single day to keep this, you know, train chugging. So but I didn't do that. So what I talk about what we continue to do, though. Yeah, let's let's do that. the other thing that I was thinking is, is obviously it's an opportunity to build your list. It's an opportunity to promote the posts that got the, you know, the initial organic virality so that you can reach larger audiences.