Aviation sales and marketing professionals Paula Williams of ABCI, Larry Hinebaugh of Business Aircraft Records, Debbie Murphy of JetBrokers, John Chvatal of Trinity Aviation Solutions, and Mickey Gamonal of Gamonal Tutors share their favorite social media tips for Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, Twitter and more!
[embedyt] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a4AX2-uIfbE[/embedyt]
Mickey Gamonal:
If I guys want to get started, I know that the official title of today’s meeting is What is Your Best Social Media Tip for Aviation Sales or Marketing Professionals? So in the beginning of these we usually do a quick pitch, just basically saying who you are and what you sell, and then if you want you can include like how to get in contact with you and all that sort of thing. So I’ll go first, and then [inaudible 00:00:44] and then if you guys are cool with this we’ll go Debby, John, and Larry. Is that good for everybody? So I’ll go first, my name is Mickey Gamonal, I am the CEO and founder of Gamonal Tutors. Right now we are hosting ASVAB Domination.
We have an October class starting here very shortly, so if you or someone you know is interested in joining the military at the highest possible level, don’t hesitate to reach out to me. I have free resources and paid resources if you’re ready to go invest in your success.
Paula Williams:
Paula Williams, ABCI, we help aviation companies sell more of their products and services, and we have our October aviation sales professional course starting very soon also, and this is if you are a broker or a charter operator, an FBO, a flight school, doctor, lawyer, insurance person, butcher, baker, candlestick maker, in the aviation industry, you need to sell more stuff, so that’s what we do, is we help people make those connections, do their digital … their personal branding, do role playing, learn how to do calls in all of those things, including social media marketing in aviation that are so hard for people who aren’t used to sales. So that’s what we do.
Debby Murphy:
Hi I’m Debby Murphy with Jet Brokers, I’m the VP of marketing and digital strategy, and Jet Brokers helps our clients buy and sell je
John Chvatal:
My name is John Chvatal, I’m the CEO and founder of Trinity Aviation Solutions. I help aviation businesses build better websites to serve their clients.
Larry Hinebaugh:
I’m Larry Hinebaugh, I’m the executive director of Business Aircraft Records, and Paula I’m going to read this if it’s okay, because I haven’t had time to really go over this too much.
Paula Williams:
Go ahead.
Larry Hinebaugh:
[crosstalk 00:02:32] Recently just today working on this elevator pitch thing, so I’ll start it off, I’ll say I’ve worked in the business aviation industry for over 40 years, and I’ve seen and experienced the horror stories that we see every day in our industry from our poor aircraft logbook practices that we have. The value of an aircraft highly depends on the quality and the thoroughness of the logbooks, but unfortunately most people don’t know how to fix the problems that we’re seeing over and over again in our industry, and no one realizes that the functional record keeping that we have today is actually costing our industry $125 million every year, or $5000 for every airplane that operates.
So I started this non-profit at the end of last year, it’s called the Foundation for Business Aircraft Records Excellence, and I’ve been producing articles, blogs, and videos in an effort to educate the business aircraft community that there are steps we can do now, to rectify this situation, and I am currently looking for people to join me in the effort of educating the industry, so that we can join the professionalism of the industry instead of always being considered the red-haired step-child that nobody wants to talk about. You can join us if you go to businessaircraftrecords.org and there’s a contact link, or you’re always welcome to call me, my phone number’s posted there and if you think you have something to contribute to what we’re doing, I would very much appreciate hearing from you. Okay.
Mickey Gamonal:
I like it. I like the statistics on it, it was powerful. Good stuff. Yeah you hear millions [inaudible 00:04:12] cool.
Paula Williams:
Exactly. Billions always gets people’s attention.
Mickey Gamonal:
I guess you guys have that as an advantage, right? As an aviation company you can always … you know, these numbers aren’t really that outlandish, like those are big numbers that are associated with theses planes, so that’s cool.
Paula Williams:
Yeah. We help one company sell one more airplane a year and that’s, you know, millions. Usually not billions, but millions.
Mickey Gamonal:
Yeah absolutely. No that’s cool. So I’ll start with the social media tip that I believe to be the best, and that’s going to be audiences inside of Facebook. So if you look up … if you’ve ever done a promotion on Facebook, you can specifically request to target audiences. I’ve used this in proximity, so geographic location, so I could say within 20 miles of my house, I’m a tutor if you need it, and then more lately I’ve been using it more broadly, so I’ve been looking for and targeting fans of ROTC and JROTC and marines, air force, each individual branch of military to see what gives me more traction. So that is the tip that I would recommend to anyone who’s starting out, or even already deep into their business is looking at the audiences.
And the numbers are there, like it’ll show you exactly how many people you’ll reach, given the audience that you’ve put in, so you can be as specific or as broad as you want, and it gives you a lot of opportunity to see what works.
Paula Williams:
Let me throw in on that, when I used to work for Fortune 50 companies, like Wells Fargo and so on, years ago, we used to pay tens of thousands of dollars for the kind of of research that Mickey is using for free, and you know, we used to use Gartner Group and Forester Research and Nielsen Research and those kinds of things, and it used to be just very, very … only the very most … only the very biggest companies could afford this sort of data, you know, to know how many households there are at this income level within the zip code. I mean that is data that we used to pay through the nose for, and I think it’s just absolutely insane that you can just get that now for free and use it any time you like.
And you know, you can boil it down even more specifically than we used to, down to only households in the top, you know, 10% that have an interest in NBAA or Mooney’s or you know, whatever the situation is, and boil it down so specifically, so you’re not throwing money at advertising to people that have no interest, you know? So I think it’s just cool, and you know, I know there’s a lot of problems with social media, but this I think is really a great democratizer, is that a word? Of being able to use this data and having access to stuff that nobody else used to, except for the world’s biggest companies. So you know, now little tiny companies can use this.
Mickey Gamonal:
By democratizer you mean like it levels the playing field for delta versus everybody else?
Paula Williams:
Right. So a one man show can do what Wells Fargo used to do, and only … you know, only the world’s biggest companies used to be able to do.
Mickey Gamonal:
Yeah I think that’s accurate. I think … I mean those big companies still tend to have a lot more resources than the smaller businesses-
Paula Williams:
True.
Mickey Gamonal:
So they are able to test a little more thoroughly a lot of the time.
Paula Williams:
Yeah.
Mickey Gamonal:
But because we have access to the same information. It does level the playing field quite a bit as far as figuring all that stuff out, so yeah, completely [crosstalk 00:08:21].
Paula Williams:
Oh yeah, I mean they can throw a million dollars into your ads, where you’re throwing, you know, a hundred, but still, you’ve got the data which is … knowledge is power for social media marketing in aviation, right?
Mickey Gamonal:
True that. 100%. Have any of you guys seen the Social Dilemma? I have to ask … I should ask now-
Debby Murphy:
Yeah, I’m afraid to watch it.
Paula Williams:
Me too, I’ve been meaning to watch it [crosstalk 00:08:44]-
Debby Murphy:
I don’t really want to know. Well I kind of do know, but I don’t want to watch it right now.
Mickey Gamonal:
Yeah, no it’s pretty … but yeah, it says the same thing. It’s funny because I’m the evil corporation in that movie, which is great right? It’s like-
Debby Murphy:
You’re not big enough to be the evil corporation.
Mickey Gamonal:
Well maybe I-
Debby Murphy:
You have to have that money.
Mickey Gamonal:
I’d like to think that it’s I’m not evil enough.
Debby Murphy:
True. That too.
Mickey Gamonal:
Oh shoot, but yeah. No it’s great, it’s crazy just how much information is out there. It is an information age as people like to say, so-
Larry Hinebaugh:
Well that’s funny, I haven’t seen that yet, and I do want to watch it, but I was thinking when Paula was talking about what you do Mickey, I was thinking you know, that is, I think, one of the advantages of computers and the internet, although it drives us all crazy, it does give us access to information that people like yourself don’t have to be the evil corporation charging tens of thousands of dollars to other evil corporations like Wells Fargo for the information, you can give it to us at a cost that we can all afford and you can make money doing that and everyone’s happy. So I think that’s one of the benefits of technology.
Paula Williams:
Right [crosstalk 00:09:54] there’s no such thing as a single-edged sword, so you know, of course every good thing comes with consequences right? And yeah, John I know you’ve been in the social media thick of it, you know, and you have some opinions about Facebook and other things and you know, different social media. I don’t know if you’d care to share or if that’s something you want to-
John Chvatal:
Yeah in the organic SCO … not SCO, social media, so I’ve done very little paid advertising, and so my tips are from that point of view-
Paula Williams:
Right, well we’ll go around and do the tips, I just wanted to know if you had any thoughts on the evilness of using the data.
Debby Murphy:
I don’t think it’s evil. I think if we don’t use it, it’s going to be used against us. So you better figure out how to do it.
Larry Hinebaugh:
Yeah I agree with that.
Debby Murphy:
That’s my opinion.
Larry Hinebaugh:
Yeah.
John Chvatal:
Well I think these large tech companies have had a free ride for so long with [inaudible 00:10:56] and unenforced rules like section 230, and so now they’re advocating regulations now that they’re so big, and so that kind of shuts out competition, you know, smaller social platforms that are up-and-coming that may have a new business model and so I’m more of an advocate for, you know, light touch but effective regulations, and in my opinion, some of the things that the social media giants are proposing are heavy-handed, and especially burden some for smaller companies that are up-and-coming that may not have the financial backing to sustain and grow.
Paula Williams:
How so?
John Chvatal:
Well like for example, I use MeWe which is a smaller social media app, but it’s … at times it’ll get at number 20 on the social media charts on Apple, on the IOS app store, and the … just to put that in perspective, Telegram has been around for seven years, and they … sometimes MeWe will surpass them on the Apple app store, it’ll bounce back and forth, and they’re very much, you know, within a basic set of guidelines they’re pretty much no algorithms, we don’t manipulate things, we just … you see a feed and you know, you scroll through and look at what your friends post in chronological order, so you know, it’s companies like that that if these regulations were put down, I think it would hurt them. You know, they don’t do advertising but they do, you know, charge for pages and some different features that the users … so it’s a totally different system, it’s not … you know, the user is not the product, they’re the customer.
Paula Williams:
Mm-hmm (affirmative) okay.
Debby Murphy:
I use Slack a lot with different groups for conversations, because you can see the feed, you can … you know, it sort of works [crosstalk 00:13:24] it’s not really social media but it is almost, you know?
Paula Williams:
Kind of a social media.
Debby Murphy:
Cuts through the noise.
Paula Williams:
Right.
John Chvatal:
Yeah I set up Slack to … for a lot of the notifications for, let’s say there’s a new update for a website or something broke, I’m starting to use Slack to kind of feed everything into one place so I can kind of monitor everything.
Debby Murphy:
Yeah I find [crosstalk 00:13:50] useful yeah.
John Chvatal:
I don’t like cluttering up my email with just notifications.
Paula Williams:
Right.
Debby Murphy:
That makes sense.
Paula Williams:
So I was going to share the same tip, audiences. Great minds think alike, but my … I’m going to do just a slight angle on that and say retargeting audiences. So if you re-target using any social media, Facebook being the easiest, people who have visited your website, I think that is one of the most cost-effective ways to bring people back to your website and kind of build a community and build your audience. So basically you just create an audience that is people who have visited your website in the last 90 days, so those are people who are already in your [inaudible 00:14:39] or people who have some relationship with you, and then by using those as a re-targeted audience you’re just bringing them back, and since we know, you know, in order to make a sale we have to have up to 20 touches, and you know, that just gives us the most touches for the least amount of money in my opinion.
So I think if we’re doing digital marketing for anybody, first thing we do, we set up that retargeting [inaudible 00:15:05] and set up some retargeting ads, because you can spend 20 bucks a month and start seeing some really big increases in the number of people returning to your website, and also the number of people using your social media as well. So that’s my tip.
Mickey Gamonal:
Nice. Yeah, it’s a finite … it’s like audience but like very specific.
Paula Williams:
Yeah.
Debby Murphy:
Am I next?
Paula Williams:
Yeah.
Debby Murphy:
[inaudible 00:15:32] I’m going to give you two tips. One is you really have to have a communications plan that you’ve decided what you’re going to talk about each week, and then I use that plan to share all my … on all my communications channels, including social media and email, and the other tip is, is I’m a graphic designer and I actually create video and all sorts of things, so I have been using a little bit of motion in my posts, and I find it gets a lot more eyeballs.
Paula Williams:
Right, we’ve been watching the [crosstalk 00:16:09] charts on your social plus, and once you started using the same posts, or really close to the same posts, but putting a little bit of motion, either the sky is moving in an aircraft ad or something like that, and her posts have just gotten, what, 30% more traffic than the ones that have-
Debby Murphy:
Yeah, it’s amazing … and I’m actually … I get bored looking at the same thing, so that’s probably why that came about. I’m like, “This is boring me, it’s got to be boring anybody else who’s looking at it.” So you know, I just tried to make it interesting.
Paula Williams:
Right.
Debby Murphy:
And that seems to work, and that’s not all that hard to do if anybody knows how to use Photoshop.
Paula Williams:
Yeah. You also put out these weekly, you know, state of the market kind of snapshots. What are those called? I don’t remember. I should.
Debby Murphy:
Business Jet Values.
Paula Williams:
Business Jet Values [crosstalk 00:16:58].
Debby Murphy:
Yeah, what … [Biz 00:16:59] Jet Values in Sales or something. Yeah [crosstalk 00:17:01] yeah-
Paula Williams:
Right, and the way that you animate those let’s you put a lot more information into that very small space, because it shows you this, and then this, and then this, and you can just watch the charts move, and it just communicates the information very, very clearly, very simply.
Debby Murphy:
It’s three screens.
Paula Williams:
Yeah.
Debby Murphy:
The first one is a … the Alps with our logo and a plane that flies over it, the next one is two different graphs that doesn’t have any movement, and then last one is a snapshot of one single aircraft, and then it has our, you know, how to contact us there, like typed across the bottom, and that works really well.
Paula Williams:
Great.
John Chvatal:
Is this like a gif or a gif, however you pronounce it, or is that a video?
Debby Murphy:
I can make it … it’s an mp4 and I can make it a gif.
John Chvatal:
Okay.
Debby Murphy:
I make it in Adobe After Effects, and then I do make gifs out of it as well, because you can just dump it in Photoshop and it makes a gif.
John Chvatal:
I haven’t looked into it, but I guess Canva you’re starting to be able to do some of that too.
Debby Murphy:
Yeah, so some of the things I use in it are from Canva, but I’d like to manipulate my stuff exactly the way I want.
Paula Williams:
Right, yeah I [crosstalk 00:18:14] love the After Effects and the Photoshop and things like that, I love Canva because it helps me communicate to an artist, “This is what I want.” [crosstalk 00:18:22].
Debby Murphy:
You can do a lot of great stuff in Canva if you don’t know how to use these other things. Absolutely check it out.
Paula Williams:
Yeah.
Debby Murphy:
[inaudible 00:18:30].
Paula Williams:
Right.
Mickey Gamonal:
And I liked your first point, the communications plan with the consistency throughout. Do you mean like establishing … like saying the same thing on different platforms or what exactly … what do you mean?
Debby Murphy:
We decide what topics we’re going to talk about at the beginning of the week, and the I do it on all the … I do … and I do all the platforms, the same thing happens. Sometimes the graphic is obviously … has to be a different shape because they’re not all the same size, or you know, one you can use video, another one … you know, it just depends what’s the best graphic for that platform, and I also send that out in email.
Mickey Gamonal:
Shoot. Yeah that’s great.
Debby Murphy:
In a different format, so we do the same exact discussion everywhere.
Mickey Gamonal:
Well and then you also establish consistency with the way that you were talking about how you sandwich those graphs in between the different things. So that shows consistency as well, so I think that’s actually … that’s definitely something that I overlook, because I think … I’m all about being spontaneous and like oh I’ll create this, I’ll create that, but it doesn’t give it as much of a professional-
Debby Murphy:
A brand. I’m the brand manager basically, even though I do VP marketing. My main job is brand management.
Mickey Gamonal:
Yeah, and that comes from the brand book right? The no BS, it’s like a happy byproduct because of your consistency, because of what you put in, so that’s great.
Debby Murphy:
Yeah, I just think if you’re going to be a corporation and you’re going to communicate with other corporations, you’ve got to look like one and talk like one for them to believe you are one.
Mickey Gamonal:
Cool. Excellent. Good tips.
John Chvatal:
So I’m going to piggyback off of Deborah’s comments. I believe strongly in consistency and timing. When I was posting … I haven’t been posting a whole lot lately, but when I was posting, I would be right around the 7:30 to 8 o’clock in the evening is my posting time, and if I started missing a day or two in there, it took a few days, whether it’s the algorithm or people got untrained, whatever, to pick back up. It was noticeable. You know, I come from Google+, you know that’s now defunked, but I think that the algorithms over there were a whole lot easier to understand, and so there’s definitely an impact on the individual social media user, you know, when you don’t post consistently. It’s not just the algorithms. I think it’s a little bit of both, and the thing I value most on the posts were comments, and then secondarily shares, and then thirdly likes. Likes are so easy, shares are somewhat easy and comments, especially well thought out comments are the hardest and I think algorithms generally follow that rule too, you know, if a post gets a lot of comments, generally it will do a whole lot better organically so.
Paula Williams:
Yeah I’ve noticed especially with the crowd that you’re hanging with, you know, some of those … especially aviation history [inaudible 00:22:04] and things like that, people are so passionate about those topics, it’s very easy to get a conversation going which is great, and also the law of reciprocity applies here because you thoughtfully reply to the comments you get, so everybody knows, you know, when they take the time to comment, that they’re engaging in the conversation because they have that expectation, I’ve seen that happen before with you, and I also know that you comment on their posts in a thoughtful way, so you’re not just throwing stuff out there and broadcasting, you’re a participant in a real human being conversation.
John Chvatal:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Debby Murphy:
He’s being social.
Paula Williams:
Yeah.
John Chvatal:
Yeah I-
Paula Williams:
That’s the social part. People forget that, they think it’s just a giant megaphone.
Mickey Gamonal:
I think [inaudible 00:22:53] says if you take the media part out of social media you’d probably get it right.
Paula Williams:
Yeah.
John Chvatal:
Mm-hmm (affirmative) yeah.
Mickey Gamonal:
[inaudible 00:23:00] in line. That’s cool, I didn’t … I’ve heard that, that the timing is really important too, I’ve heard that from YouTube people, Instagram people, establishing that consistent timing. I kind of find it difficult. Do you schedule your day around it? Like do you schedule the time around it?
John Chvatal:
Well there for the longest time I did have a social media scheduling application, and then I went without it, and at that time I was able to keep up because I was home a lot at around that time. So then I posted manually and yeah, now I haven’t posted in a little while. I might pick back up on that but I do have a social media scheduling tool again that I haven’t really used yet. So yeah, I would suggest a … you know, a scheduler, in fact I do believe … I haven’t used it in a while, on Facebook pages you can actually schedule posts, you know, within the Facebook page-
Debby Murphy:
Yes. You can do that on Twitter too.
John Chvatal:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Paula Williams:
Right.
John Chvatal:
So you know, if you want to go low-budget, go ahead and do it that way.
Paula Williams:
Right. You know it makes me think, I think part of it is the algorithms, and you know, part of it is the volume of posts that they have at that particular time, if you post at a time when maybe it’s not quite so flooded, and another thing, is not even technology, it’s just becoming part of people’s daily habit. So you know, like we send out our newsletter Monday mornings at eight, and that’s probably the worst time to be sending a newsletter now that we’re thinking about it, but we’ve been doing it for 15 years, so we can’t change it now without taking a hit on that. We just become part of people’s habit and if they don’t get their newsletter, you know, by 9 o’clock if something weird happens that week, I’m getting messages saying you know, “Did I drop off your list?” Or, “What did you do tick you off?” Something like that.
So the habit is not a technology thing, but I think that’s part of the equation though.
John Chvatal:
For sure.
Paula Williams:
Yeah.
John Chvatal:
For sure.
Mickey Gamonal:
Larry?
Larry Hinebaugh:
Well actually I just dialed in to listen to all of you talk because I am not a salesman, I am an AMP mechanic and an aeronautical engineer by trade, so I guess I’m the anti-salesman, so this whole thing of learning branding and learning social media and how to do all that, for me right now, is drinking out of the fire hose. So all I could tell you is that when I do post a blog, most of my feedback comments, even though I post it on Facebook and LinkedIn and a lot of different platforms, I guess, it’s always LinkedIn that I get the responses back from the community.
Now, I am posting blogs that are pretty specific about, you know, aircraft logbooks, it’s only appealing to a certain small segment of our industry, but still, the timing thing though still throws me, because I will post blogs and I’ll get a couple of comments coming in on that same blog and then you know, four weeks later I’ll get a comment coming in on that blog again, and I’m like, “Why is that that they just saw this?” I don’t understand the whole timing thing yet so-
John Chvatal:
Well looking at how LinkedIn … I don’t do a lot of LinkedIn yet, but I’ll be ramping that up. I probably have the least amount of experience with LinkedIn, but I’ve noticed that when I get notifications for other people’s post, generally they’re three, four, five days, even a week or so old. So I haven’t figured out how that algorithm works, it just seems like there’s no rhyme nor reason to that yet.
Paula Williams:
Yeah it’s a great reason to use more than one media, because you know, you’ve got a half-life of minutes on Twitter and Instagram maybe, and hours or days on Facebook, and weeks or months on LinkedIn, you know, just because of the way those platforms work, and because of the habits of people who use those. It used to be LinkedIn would have … you know, send me a weekly digest of the news in my industry and that kind of thing, and then they would send you once a week, you know, a nice little email. I don’t know if they do that anymore, but people got into kind of a weekly habit with LinkedIn, whereas Facebook is a daily habit or multiple times a day habit for a lot of people. So.
Mickey Gamonal:
Yeah, that’s something [crosstalk 00:27:42].
Debby Murphy:
The other thing with … if you’re not really doing a lot of social media is just follow things that interest you.
Paula Williams:
Yeah.
Debby Murphy:
I started on all these things years before I really posted very much, and just watched, so that’s okay too, it’s a news source.
Paula Williams:
Right. That’s very Garry Vaynerchuck, and [inaudible 00:28:04] thing we’ve been doing actually with a lot of clients lately is, you know, setting up those alerts for different topics in your industry, and then getting a digest once a week of the news about aircraft logbooks, or you know, aviation websites, or aircrafts for sale and you know, that kind of thing, and then you can … from those news items you can repost with a sentence or a paragraph, you know, here’s this thing that’s going on in our industry, here’s what I think about it, you know? And just adding your own little twist, and that is a super easy way [crosstalk 00:28:41] yeah.
Debby Murphy:
The building conversations with people who come back and talk about your stuff.
Paula Williams:
Right. Newsjacking is what it’s called in the industry, but nobody cares what it’s called, it’s just the thing people do.
John Chvatal:
Yeah to kind of throw this out here, what I’ve been thinking about for LinkedIn, is I have a LinkedIn page for my web development business, and I’ve posted almost nothing there, and I have almost 200 followers on there, I think it’s because there’s aviation in the name, so people maybe find that because of that keyword in the business name, but anyways, I’m thinking about more … you know, using my personal profile on LinkedIn for more of the fun things, like aviation photography and stuff, and then cross-post from my LinkedIn page about web development and updates and WordPress and stuff that I think would be important, you know, not cross-post everything over, but … and then cross-post my … kind of the fun things, you know, aviation photography once in a while over to the business page, so-
Debby Murphy:
That makes sense.
Mickey Gamonal:
And I think that’s one of the things that’s really tough to do, right? Like as marketers I think our main objective is to bring people over to a different platform to see us in our website as well as on Facebook and on Instagram and LinkedIn or what have you, but it’s definitely something that you can only … like you were saying, you can only ask for that once in a while, right? If you’re asking for that every single time, they’re not going to stay with you on LinkedIn long enough for them to see that you have a website, because they’re just like, “Oh this isn’t … this guy just wants me to go to his website,” and we have an aversion, right?
Because we didn’t … we don’t get onto these social media platforms to look to be sold to, right? As soon as somebody seems like they’re selling something, we disengage a lot of the time, unless we’re familiar with that person, unless it’s been … you know, this is the seventh post and I really like everything else that you’ve put out, then it’s almost worth … it’s like, I have to see what you’re talking about.
John Chvatal:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Paula Williams:
And Garry Vaynerchuck, jab, jab, jab, right hook. You know, you have to have enough jabs in there, and all of us who have … even old people like me grew up with Sesame Street, where we were entertained before we were educated, you know, so we had a lot of music and dance and colors and Muppets and everything else before they taught us the alphabet, and you know, especially somebody … especially like Larry where you’re in a situation where you have some pretty heavy materials, we need to think of some way to make that lighter, and I know we’ve had that conversation with cartoons and other things to get people started down that road, because they don’t want to spend 15 minutes and learn something if they’re just browsing through social media, you have to catch them with, you know, “Oh that’s a horrible aircraft disaster that happened, I need to find out more about that.”
And incite their curiosity or their humor or something.
John Chvatal:
Yeah I don’t know Larry what your day job is like, you know, working on aircraft, but you know, some behind-the-scenes photos might go over well [crosstalk 00:32:13]-
Debby Murphy:
It’s all beautiful aircraft, yeah.
John Chvatal:
Just keep it very simple and you know.
Larry Hinebaugh:
Yeah okay.
Mickey Gamonal:
like I think one of the best things that I’ve noticed as far as targeting audiences is considering what I go on for. So Larry, like if I were to ask you, what would you … like if you were to hop on Facebook right now or whatever, what would you be seeking out? Like what do you look for?
Paula Williams:
And what would make you stop scrolling, right?
Mickey Gamonal:
Yeah, absolutely.
Larry Hinebaugh:
Right, so because I have two different things that I do right now, I’m going to say the business aircraft record stuff, when I’m on the internet and I’ve got that hat on, I’m kind of looking for anybody that’s had a problem with selling an airplane or a logbook issue, or that or … so I like to see the comments coming back from what I’m producing, because this is kind of new territory. Nobody else does this, so it’s interesting to see what kind of feedback I get when it resonates with people. But the other thing I do is aircraft completions, and so that’s always catching my eye, and especially Boeing information, because my bread and butter is the Max airplane and it’s grounded right now, so that whole … just the whole completion industry for Boeing airplanes has come almost to a standstill, so I’m always interested and I key on anything that has news about that, so that’s what I’m going to spend time reading.
Paula Williams:
Yeah. Great, and what I love as far as the completion videos and things like that are the before and afters or the time lapse of how things happen, and I think a lot of people in aircraft technology love to see that. Turbines has some really neat … I don’t know if you’ve ever seen, there used to be a show on cable TV called How It’s Made, where they would show how something goes from raw ingredients to a finished product, and Turbines Inc has kind of done a similar thing where they take, “This is a fuel nozzle that comes in the mail,” you know, from South Africa or something like that, from an agricultural aircraft, and then they take it apart and they acid wash it and they put it in the thing and they sand blast it and they … and all of the testing and everything else, and then they show it going back into the mail and going back to South Africa and getting put on an airplane.
So you know, that’s just … that’s really cool to people who are into that sort of thing. As far as aircraft records go, that’s a little bit harder, so it’s almost more of a concept video, like a cartoon of, you know, here’s how you can take things from X state to Y state, and use cartoons and music, and … you know, something to make it more interesting than watching paper slide across the desk.
Larry Hinebaugh:
Yeah, it’s a little like trying to tell somebody how to do a bookkeeping practice a little bit better, it’s pretty boring and it has a very small audience. So yeah, adding some entertainment value to it is a big deal, and I am fortunately working with you Paula, and some others to maybe make that happen. Try to make it a little bit more of an interesting subject that people take heart, instead of just … everybody in my area, you know, EOM, structure and maintenance, and when people buy airplanes, so I’m sure you’ve gone through these [inaudible 00:35:39] a lot where people find a lot of book issues and that’s the only time it comes to the surface and people are interested in it, and then they just want the problem to go away, so yeah … and we all try to turn a blind eye to it and pretend … it’s like whistling through the graveyard, we try to pretend there’s nothing there when we don’t have to deal with logbooks.
Paula Williams:
Right, if I don’t look at my [crosstalk 00:36:01] bank account balance, it’s fine.
Debby Murphy:
Eventually it shows up though.
Larry Hinebaugh:
Oh it does. Absolutely.
Debby Murphy:
Yeah.
Paula Williams:
Yeah. Well Debby, I think you know, you do a really good job of presenting dry data in an interesting way, and I think that social media really helps you do that, get it to more people than you would otherwise. So you know, that’s a … maybe you have some pointers on how to make that happen, how you go through the process of breaking something down and saying, “Well this is boring, let’s make it more fun,” you know?
Debby Murphy:
I get bored. I have … that’s because I went to art school, so you know, I keep thinking I need to make new things, and so whenever I’m doing my job, I eventually decide I need to make it new, but with the particular thing … I guess we’re talking about the Jet Business values and sales.
Paula Williams:
[crosstalk 00:36:58] Yeah I would love to hear more about your process [crosstalk 00:36:58]-
Debby Murphy:
I have created … that’s sort of been developing for several years that I’ve been making the material less wordy and more visual, because people aren’t going to look at it very long, so I kept removing more words and making it just more colorful and more just like a chart or something, and then I sort of boiled that down to just really all no words, and all charts, and then I picked out several of those and just decided to animate it, and it worked, and I have … they sky scene that we have from the Alps is something that we’ve used in a lot of our other materials, and it just looked like the perfect thing to have fly a plane over, so I did, and it worked. So it’s very catchy and it’s really easy to make, it doesn’t take me very long to do at all.
Paula Williams:
Right especially after you’ve done a few-
Debby Murphy:
Which is also important, I can’t spend a lot of time on it, so.
Paula Williams:
Right. So you take something that is boring but needs to be communicated, and then you say, “How can I make this visual?” And, “How can I make it more visual?” And then, “How can I animate it?” And … is that the process or?
Mickey Gamonal:
You have to, you know, avoid that tendency to over-explain things.
Debby Murphy:
Twitter helps with that, you only have so many-
Mickey Gamonal:
So many characters.
Debby Murphy:
So many characters, you’ve got to say it all in those characters.
Mickey Gamonal:
Yeah, that’s true.
Debby Murphy:
It’s a game.
Mickey Gamonal:
Well and that’s probably why Twitter is so successful right? Because you have these statements that have … you know, they just have so many words behind them, but you have to say it in X amount of time, and that’s really what these social medias are designed to do is save us time. We check in with our families faster, we check in with the world faster, and so that’s the appeal, I think, of these social medias. So it’s tough to remember that tough, as like someone who’s a professional in their craft, you want to be like … you want to, you know, grab someone by the shoulders and day, “Dammit logbooks are important and this is why, and that is why, and that is why, and that is why.” But really at the end of the day, you could show the logbook and like point to the specifics.
Like Deborah said, take out as many words as you can-
Debby Murphy:
Three points. Just make three points.
Mickey Gamonal:
Three points.
Debby Murphy:
Three points.
Mickey Gamonal:
Yeah, rule of threes, I’m all for it.
Debby Murphy:
Mm-hmm (affirmative) [crosstalk 00:39:29].
Paula Williams:
And then give them your link so they can find out more, because that’s what you really want them to do.
Mickey Gamonal:
Yeah, call to action [crosstalk 00:39:33] right.
Larry Hinebaugh:
I’m learning about that whole call to action and linking and cross-linking now too, it’s very … it’s really good, I understand the value of it, I just don’t understand how to do it technically so well. Yeah, but I guess it’s something we’re all learning to get better at, so I’m working on learning it.
Paula Williams:
Mm-hmm (affirmative) well we’re all learning all the time because it’s evolving, you know? I mean social media is so different now than it was 10 years ago.
Larry Hinebaugh:
Yeah.
Paula Williams:
Or even five years ago.
Mickey Gamonal:
Five months ago. Five months ago social media wasn’t on … like it seems to extreme, right? And that’s the scariest part of social media, is that if it’s getting this extreme this fast, what direction are we going if it’s like just so, you know, blood [pressure-y 00:40:23].
Paula Williams:
Yeah I think the cautionary tale really for social media is … there’s two, you know, one is that it’s super inflammatory, can be, and the other is that you don’t own anything that you put on social media, so you’d better have that intellectual property stored somewhere else so that you could run your business if Facebook went down tomorrow, or you know, whatever it is that you’re using as a tool, there’s going to be a different tool five years from now likely, and yeah, any other cautionary tales from those of you who have seen the social development, or anybody who’s run afoul of anything?
Debby Murphy:
I’m always careful what personal information I post about myself anywhere.
Larry Hinebaugh:
I agree.
Debby Murphy:
That’s my suggestion.
Paula Williams:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Mickey Gamonal:
John?
John Chvatal:
I just avoid … I mainly post about aviation, and you know, I reserve … I’m a little more unfiltered over on MeWe but still, I still keep it very high-level.
Paula Williams:
Yeah.
Debby Murphy:
I started using it for work, and I managed a special business district that was like an entertainment area, and there were just so many people that were going to connect with me that I just always thought of it as not a personal place to discuss anything.
Paula Williams:
Right. [crosstalk 00:41:47] go ahead.
Larry Hinebaugh:
I was going to say my nephew, they [inaudible 00:41:53] one of those kids do … you know, post all of their personal issues on Facebook, this was years ago, but he posted on Facebook that he was taking anti-anxiety medicine because school was getting to him so much, and we was wondering if other fellow students had to do that as well, and five years later, he decides he’s going to join … he graduates high school and decides he’s going to join the Air Force, and goes to the Air Force and they pulled that comment and said, “So you used to take anti-anxiety medicine, are you still on it?” So those things can come back and haunt you, you know-
Debby Murphy:
It doesn’t go away.
Larry Hinebaugh:
Unbelievable. It doesn’t go away.
Paula Williams:
That’s true. When we do the personal branding in our course we talk about, you know, the onion. You have your personal information that nobody knows, you have the information that you are willing to share, and then you have the information that you absolutely want to get out there, and you know, everything falls into one of those three circles. You know, your inner or your outer ring I guess, and keeping … having thought through what those rings are before you go down the rabbit hole is kind of important.
Mickey caught me last weekend going down a rabbit hole that I wasn’t expecting to go down, you know, and he’s just like, “Mom your Facebook is blowing up. Did you really intend …” and I’m like you know what? I have spent way too much time on this, this is not going to convince anybody, I need to back up. So yeah, have a safety buddy to catch you when you start going down the rabbit holes.
Debby Murphy:
The only thing you’re ever going to see about me is I’ve gone some place for dinner or you know, took a picture of a cloud or … really you never see … if you look at my personal stuff you-
Paula Williams:
Right.
Debby Murphy:
There’s not much to see [crosstalk 00:43:43].
Paula Williams:
I think some of that is great, because you want to know a little bit about people you do business with, you know, you want to know that they have a cat or that their kids play soccer or you know, something that’s just human, you know?
Debby Murphy:
Picture of my garden-
Mickey Gamonal:
[crosstalk 00:43:56] I think John’s way of doing that’s the best way, like of conveying your humanness is talking to another human, is way better than … you know, I mean as cool as it is that I went on a hike last week, like that’s not going to really convey from human to human that I’m a human, right? It’s just another highlight reel, like what we use it for. So I think the communication is often overlooked, the social aspect is really key.
Cool, well does anybody else have any other statements as far as social media tips? Anything that we definitely missed?
John Chvatal:
No.
Debby Murphy:
No sounds good.
Paula Williams:
Yeah.
Mickey Gamonal:
Cool. Well I guess we can wrap up. Same deal, just you know, whatever you feel like saying, whatever your [inaudible 00:44:45] elevator pitch or mantra, whatever works for you. So my name’s Mickey Gamonal, I’m with ASVAB Domination by Gamonal Tutors. If you’re joining the United States military, look me up.
Paula Williams:
Cool. Well you now have a service and a product, that’s fantastic. Paula Williams, AVCI, and we help aviation companies sell more of their products and services, and our next big effort is an aviation sales professional course that is going to be starting in October. So yeah, join us at aviationsalestraining.com has all the details for that if you’d like to join us, we’d love to have you.
Debby Murphy:
Hi, Debby Murphy with Jet Brokers. We help our clients buy and sell jets. You can reach us at jetbrokers.com.
John Chvatal:
Yeah, I’m John Chvatal with Trinity Aviation Solutions, I’m the CEO and founder of Trinity Aviation Solutions and I help aviation businesses with their websites and reach new customers. You can reach me at trinityaviationsolutions.com.
Larry Hinebaugh:
And I’m Larry Hinebaugh, the executive director of Business Aircraft Records, and we are all about improving record keeping in our industry so that we can all enjoy it, rather than suffer from it, and I’d appreciate you looking at my … anywhere you see on social media, I’m attempting to get blogs and articles out there, and some of it I’m sure you’ll find interesting, even if you don’t have anything to do with logbooks, then you can always reach me at businessaircraftrecords.org.
Mickey Gamonal:
Perfect. Cool, well great work everybody, good stuff. Next one’s going to be in two weeks and it is on the red book, I don’t know what the name of the red book is.
Paula Williams:
Consulting Success by Michael Zipursky, and I think we all do consulting whether we want to or not. Right?
Mickey Gamonal:
[crosstalk 00:46:43].
Paula Williams:
Sales is consulting, right? Consulting is sales.
Mickey Gamonal:
Yeah absolutely. Cool. All right well good stuff. I’m going to jet, I’ll see you guys later.
Paula Williams:
[crosstalk 00:46:55] Thanks everybody. Great session.
Larry Hinebaugh:
Bye bye.
Mickey Gamonal:
Bye.
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