Business Relationship Optimization

You become who you hang around. Travis realized while working on a couple of startups that he didn't have enough connections and business relationships outside of Kansas City. In 2007, Travis was working on a startup called AdiQus. The inspiration for the company was to create Advertising Intelligence. Ad IQ, get it?

Quite frankly, most ads suck. Both of us have a deep hatred for shitty advertising and marketing but Travis and his partners at the time decided to do something about it.

What about ads that could be targeted on hundreds of various parameters and geo-based? AdiQus was to be a cross between Gowalla and Groupon, neither of which existed yet. Partners Gary Jones, Joey Knight, and Travis had built quite a team in Kansas City. Kansas City has been historically conservative with its capital allocations. The Kauffman Entrepreneurial Foundation in Kansas City wasn't as accessible to the community then, as it is now. When Kansas City was chosen as Google Fiber's first Gigabit City in 2012, the town erupted with entrepreneurship. Having superfast Internet connectivity has been great for the area.

In the 2007 version of Kansas City there were few investors, but through mentors, AdiQus was introduced to an unnamed angel capital firm in Texas. AdiQus was to get a check for $500,000 in four days, when the FBI came to the office.

What?????

1. The principal of the capital firm gets arrested by the FBI for a Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA) stock market violation.
2. AdiQus doesn't get the funding and
3. Travis had already trained his replacement at Centriq Training.
4. Travis gets really f#%king drunk that night.
5. Travis wakes up next day and hustles on to what's next.
6. Travis starts doing freelance web-dev and marketing.
7. ???
8. Profit!

Instead of crying about his First World problem, Travis got up, put on his big-boy pants, and found a way to not sink. Economy be damned. Travis was able to choose one conference to go to, and he chose the Web 2.0 Expo, an O'Reilly event April 2007, at Moscone Center in San Francisco. Biz Stone was a presenter and that's when Travis first heard about Twitter. Also during the week, Travis got a ticket to attend the Digg 1 Millionth User Party with founder Kevin Rose and Jay Adelson.

Travis had an epiphany at the Digg 1 Million User Party. “It's all about who you know, what you know, and who knows that you know what you know.”

Travis needed to know people who knew people, because he didn't know anyone outside of Kansas City.

Travis needed to optimize his business relationships. Business Relationship Optimization. Boom goes the dynamite. Building, growing, and nurturing relationships with influencers is genius. Social media helps you build the hell out of online relationships. Who knew? Well, once he did there was no going back.

Ass Kiss it Forward

As a standard rule of thumb, you need more and better relationships with experts, thought leaders, practitioners, and influencers in your chosen field. It's real life PR hacking for your personal brand. Who do you want to know? First, find ways to add value to them. Add lots and lots of value. Optimize the relationships. Engage with them on social media. Tweet or retweet them, comment on their blogs, maybe interview them for a podcast. Give them some publicity. Do favors for your customers, partners, vendors, friends, and so on. Ass kiss it forward; do a favor for them first. As Chris says, #GiveFirst, #GiveOften, #GiveTilItHurts, and then #GiveSomeMore.

Both us will rarely ask anyone for anything up front, but we'll provide all types of value. This is a great habit because when you actually do need a favor, you're withdrawing from a bank account that has plenty of good will already banked.

Relationships are like a bank account. You can deposit into it, or withdraw from it. If you overdraw on your account, you will probably lose that friendship. You need to optimize your business relationships, not just around social media, but in all mediums. Spend time with people, not just on e-mail or messenger, but on video call or human to human (H2H), in person at events.

It's one more reason that Zappos is such a great company. They kiss their customers' asses. They have hassle-free shipping and returns. The CEO, Tony Hsieh, wrote a book called Delivering Happiness. That's all about customer experience. Business in the twenty-first century requires that you nurture relationships with your customers, employees, partners, vendors, and industry influencers. It's crucial, bro. Seriously though, isn't BRO a great acronym?

After he started his post-apocalyptic rebuild in 2008, Travis began connecting with the top thought leaders in the marketing industry, following them on various social media sites. Twitter was huge as a tool and just gaining real traction so he rode that wave of attention. The ability to read what the smartest minds in Silicon Valley, NYC, and Hollywood had to say was fascinating.

In Kansas City, a great community of like minds were also assembling via social media. The community grew rapidly. Amazing entrepreneurs and marketing minds like John Jantsch, Shelly Kramer, Shawn Elledge, Davyeon Ross, Mike “Jortsy” Gelphman, Lisa Qualls, Alisha Templeton, and Jessica Best began to percolate in the city.

You've heard the adage, “You become who you hang around.” Your circle of influence is crucial to defining your moral compass, and helps shape who you become. So, choose wisely. We both tell are kids that in life, you should flush the turds. Don't let the turds or—Zombies—bring you into the toilet with them.

Social media has helped connect the world with the best and the brightest. Web 2.0 and social media has brought the world together. You can communicate with almost anyone, almost anywhere, at almost any time of day. Over time and over 35,000 tweets later, Travis grew this huge network, optimized the relationships, and has grown and helped several businesses as a direct result of those relationships. As a matter of fact, to show the power of these platforms, this entire book was written using Google Docs and Facebook Messenger; Travis and Chris never sat face to face in the same city once during the entire process. The final day before submitting this manuscript to Wiley, Chris was online for 15 straight hours editing and formatting away in the Google Doc while Travis was 37,000 feet in the air on a flight to Shanghai connected to the in-flight Wi-Fi. What an amazing time to be alive!

The Internet today is social. Proximity is now possible from anywhere in the world. It is because of this new reality that there are three types of ROI you must measure. They have an interrelated relationship over time to your personal and enterprise value.

• ROI=Return on Investment
• ROI=Return on Influence (aka, “ROR”=Return on Relationships fans of Ted Rubin)
• ROI=Risk of Inactivity

According to Deloitte, the average human being alive today (age 18–74) with a smartphone checks it an average of 46 times per day.¹ Those in the 18–24 age bracket check it an average of 74 times per day. Other reports have shown even higher volumes of more than 150 times a day, but the point is every 6 to 15 minutes of a normal waking day, human beings are interacting with their mobile devices.

This unprecedented and ever-compounding habitual thirst for engagement is the current state of the Internet. It is not a fad or a phase, but a new reality. An always-on demand level that is ubiquitously available to the majority of western society. By 2018, 3 billion more people that have lived on this planet outside of the commercial market will come online via the mobile web. In the new reality none of us are actually just employees or consumers.

ProSumerTribuDucers

With the power and processing speed in our hands and the addiction we all have to this digital sixth sense, we are now all what Chris likes to call “ProSumerTribuDucers” living in an age of opportunity. Say that three times quickly. Every human now has the ability to produce, consume, distribute data, curate information, and create content, goods, and services, in real time with nothing more than a mobile web connection and their voice or thumbs.

With an additional 3 billion people joining this new truth in the coming few years, we have an unprecedented challenge and opportunity to build or lose our relationships value at scale at the speed of trust.

H2H was an old-school yet unscalable way of doing business in the pre-Internet era. As we are firmly embedded in the third decade of a World Wide Web, it is now not only scalable but imperative for brands that wish to succeed. Bryan Kramer speaks about human-to-human at scale in his book, There is no B2B or B2C: It's Human to Human #H2H.

Where big data has failed, small data has become more relevant than ever. Personalization is an expected commodity because of machine learning, search, AI, cookies, pixel tracking, etc. This all boils back down to the fact that your business is a relationship before it is anything else. Like all relationships that last, there must be a consistent and mutually beneficial return on the investment of time, energy, and money put into the maintenance of that endeavor. It requires constant, consistent, and clear communication in good times and bad.

Return on investment is now completely dictated by how great you are at engagement at the right time with the right information to generate a return on influence. You have spent the bulk of this book learning how to apply these social business strategies to your business, but you must apply it to your personal brand of relationship building as well.