Summary

Brendan Kane has been described as an outside the box thinker who empowers brands to scale, expand and accelerate their business and influence.  He has acted as an innovation strategist for Fortune 500 corporations, brands, and celebrities including Taylor Swift, Rhianna, MTV and Yahoo!, helping them to unlock value and transform their businesses via his strategic approach and global network.

Through a deep understanding of client needs and goals, Brendan tailors strategies, tools and intelligence to help them capture opportunities and add value.  He has shared some of his most powerful insights within a pair of books – One Million Followers and Hook Point.  The former focuses on how to grow an entity at pace by understanding how some of the greatest minds in the game have done the same, and its follow-up talks about how to stand out and create a compelling brand in today’s micro-attention world.

In this episode of The Remarkable Project Brendan discusses the foundations of successful social media scaling, how to encourage content shareability and why understanding what keeps clients and consumers up at night is key to crafting solutions that they will truly value and talk about.

Takeaway points:

• Simply amassing eyeballs via digital platforms is a job half done – it’s turning these into customers and advocates that really counts, and this isn’t automatic.
• Without understanding the underlying business goal for using a platform, it can be difficult to benchmark success and hold ourselves and our partners accountable for their efforts and outcomes.
• With nearly four billion content creators active globally, it’s fundamental to realise that we’re not just competing against direct industry competitors, we’re competing for attention against everyone else who is also sharing content, full stop.
• Not only do we need to be creative in how we get audiences to stop and take notice within the first three seconds, but we need to act authentically, so that we encourage on-sharing but avoid becoming click-bait.
• Taking time to understand who we’re talking to is crucial, but so is figuring out who it is talking to them – who are we, or who do we want to be in this intimate interaction?
• We’re more emotionally connected to what we ‘want’ than what we ‘need’, so it makes sense to create a hook which talks to the former first. Once we’ve grabbed attention by cutting through the clutter, we can proceed to engage the ‘thinking brain’ by laying out how to fulfil the needs that will unlock the want.

Remarkable Quotes:

[09:51] “...if you’re not stopping the scroll when people are going through their social feeds, they’re never going to get to your story.“

[14:47] “…one of the biggest mistakes people make on social media is that they’re designing their content as though it’s a one-to-many platform, but in reality it’s a one-to-one platform.”

[17:21] “…people will get on and they’ll say “hey everybody, how’s everybody doing?” – and it’s like “I’m on my phone, who is everybody, who are you talking to?!”

[23:45] “…the businesses that thrive and survive are the ones who can constantly adapt and innovate.”

[25:25] “…all the attention in the world doesn’t mean anything without any substance to it.”

Resources Mentioned:

‘Hook Point’ by Brendan Kane [2021]

‘One Million Followers’ by Brendan Kane [2018]

Get connected with Brendan and his team:

Understand what he and his team do to help create Hook Points and how to talk to them here

Learn more about his books

Hook Point and One Million Followers

Connect on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/brendankane/