Preface
A Tale of Two “Tweeties”
On September 9, 2012, the Kansas City Chiefs lost to the Atlanta Falcons by a score of 40 to 24. The next evening, Travis was chatting with his buddy since fifth grade, Bryan, and they were complaining about how the Chiefs were approximately $30 million under the salary cap for the fifth year in a row.
Travis said, “You mean to tell me the Kansas City Chiefs have been approximately $100–$130 million dollars under the salary cap in the last five years? OMG, I'm sooo tweeting that.”
So he sent this one tweet: “I'm not much of a @KCChiefs fan anymore. Clark Hunt's yearly [$]30m under the [salary] cap is bullshit. Greedy bastard owners can F.O. cc @nfl”1
Figure P.1 “The Tweet Heard ’Round the World”
This was not a friendly tweet, Travis understands that. He was angry, as a fan, and decided to tweet about it. It was one glorious tweet from one gloriously disgruntled fan. It was only one rude tweet, not a barrage of tweets.
As you'll soon find out from this book, both Travis and Chris tackle the consequential and inconsequential, in life and in business, with strong opinions and tremendous fervor, with a balance of hilarity and humility, that comes from an insatiable thirst for continued learning and teaching.
After Travis complained about the salary cap on Twitter, he was over it. He sent that one tweet and went on his merry way. It wasn't until the next day at lunch that he looked through his Twitter direct messages. It was only then that he noticed the tweet from the Chiefs. He nearly choked on his delicious Chipotle burrito! Travis thought about it for a few minutes, and then took a screencap of the direct message, as shown in Figure P.2. It said, “Would help if you had your facts straight. Your choice to be a fan. cc get a clue.”
Figure P.2 The Tweet Response with No Digital Sense
The Chiefs had sent this tweet just three minutes after Travis sent his rude, disgruntled tweet. Somebody from the Chiefs' social media team immediately tweeted to Travis, while in an emotional state, from the Chiefs' official Twitter handle, @kcchiefs. Note: the Chiefs switched their official Twitter handle to @chiefs in 2016.
The Chiefs' social media manager didn't seem to have much “digital sense.” That person clearly gave zero f's at that time. It was not a good common sense approach to attack Travis. In fact, Travis wasn't even that angry. He was just sending out a bit of a rant regarding his displeasure with how the Chiefs were being cheap and spending significantly less than the salary cap.
Jay Baer recently published a great book on this subject called Hug Your Haters.2 The Chiefs' social media team should have tried to defuse the situation, not fuel the flame. The first indicator that it would be wise to hug their hater was that at the time, Travis's account had more Twitter followers than the Chiefs'.
After seeing the emotionally charged response to his tweet, Travis did what any social media savvy person would do, who has just had a crummy customer experience; he took the screencap of the Chief's' message and tweeted it out to his followers.
This is where the social s#%t-storm started.
Travis replied to the private, direct message by sending out this tweet: “It's good to know the @kcchiefs social media is ran [sic] by immature teenagers. Fact. Hunt hoards salary cap $$$. #KC” (Figure P.3).
![Figure depicting a screenshot of a Twitter post of Travis in which he replied to the private, direct message by sending out this tweet: “It's good to know the @kcchiefs social media is ran [sic] by immature teenagers. Fact. Hunt hoards salary cap $$$. #KC”](http://images-20200215.ebookreading.net/18/4/4/9781119291701/9781119291701__digital-sense__9781119291701__images__f03__npreff004.gif)
Whoever responded to Travis's tweet from the Chiefs' Twitter handle lacked both common sense and digital sense. He made a hasty assumption that it was appropriate to defend the Chiefs in private via direct message, indicating the absence of a social media governance policy. He lacked or ignored any protocol that would enable him to respond in real-time, proactively, to Travis' public complaint in a way that allowed for a productive dialogue. He also failed to acknowledge that in a world of noise, Travis's initial tweet was far less damaging to the Chiefs' image than was the tweet storm that followed.
Look at the data: the first tweet had 15 retweets; the follow-up had more than 3,200!
The Chiefs' staffer didn't have, or ignored, any protocol that would enable responding in real time to this public fan rant in a way that could allow for a proactive dialogue. They also forgot that in a world of noise, his initial tweet was far less damaging than the tweet storm that followed. They had no social media governance policy in place to make a decision as to whether to respond at all, and it had big consequences.
What did the social media manager have to gain by being rude back to a rude fan? Nothing except the brief satisfaction of telling someone off. You can do that, all day long, on a personal account. However, if you do that on a corporate branded account, get ready for some backlash.
Keep in mind, in the beginning, Travis was just complaining. People bitch about their sports teams ALL. THE. TIME. This was nothing out of the ordinary. Immediately after Travis publicly replied to the Chiefs' tweet, all hell broke loose. He received a bunch of responses (Figure P.4).
“TW, did the Chiefs actually send you that?” —name removed
“Are you serious, bro? The Chiefs said that?” —name removed
Figure P.4 This Is One of the First Recorded Selfies by Travis Wright in 2012
Tweets started flying back and forth asking him questions about the situation. Many of them had the @KCChiefs twitter handle included. Even some local Kansas City sportscasters started asking him, “Hey @teedubya, is this real? Did the Chiefs really tweet that to you?” The response: yes. And then the Chiefs blocked @teedubya on Twitter.
When they blocked Travis, he could no longer see their public tweets, and any private tweets they had between them disappeared. Now that made him angry.
After being blocked from his beloved team on Twitter, Travis decided to teach them a lesson for their lack of digital sense. The first thing that Travis did was go to Reddit.com, and to the NFL subreddit, Reddit.com/r/nfl, and he posted his rant.
Keep in mind the customer's (fan) perspective as context for this situation. The Chiefs had not drafted a quarterback since 1983, and it was 2012! The Chiefs hadn't won a playoff game since 1993. They were in the middle of a nearly 20-year playoff-win-drought. The Chiefs lost seven playoff games in a row, and they were spending millions below the salary cap.
Early in the 2012 season, when Travis sent the tweet, the announced amount under the cap was $26.6 million; it was later adjusted to $16.1 million. In 2011, when there was no salary cap or salary floor, the Chiefs spent the least in player salaries. Beginning in 2013, teams had to spend at least 89 percent of the cap or be subject to penalties.3,4
The NFL football is serious business to paying fans in America. And being under the salary cap for multiple years in a row had angered many Kansas City Chiefs fans.
The rant made the front page of Reddit. Some readers were mad at the Chiefs. Some were mad at Travis, calling him many different colorful terms. The story began to go viral because of this activity.
Once it made the front page of Reddit, the social media shit-storm gained strength and started being referenced on big news sites and the local media.
One local disc jockey in Kansas City named Lazlo started going off about the situation on his broadcast that day.
Lazlo has a show called The Church of Lazlo in the afternoon in the Kansas City market. He was yelling about how people behind their computer screens are keyboard warriors. How weak and ridiculous they are! Lazlo (on air) said, (paraphrasing)
“The Internet trolls would never talk like that in public, like they do on the Internet! That ASSCLOWN on Reddit, who was talking about the Kansas City Chiefs rude tweet today, Oh! they told him to get a clue? Boo hoo! Big freaking deal!”
One of TW's buddies called him up and said, “Hey Travis, Lazlo's talking about you and your Reddit post and the Chiefs deal. You should call into the station and chat with him.”
So, Travis did. He couldn't get through the phone line, so he sent a text to the Church of Lazlo show saying, “Hey this is Travis Wright @teedubya, the guy who got the tweet from the Chiefs, and if you want to have a conversation, let's do it.”
Lazlo called Travis, and immediately they were on air. In the digital world of media today, it is all about attention and trust, and Lazlo couldn't pass up the chance to hype the story for his show's gain. Lazlo was chomping at the bit to destroy an Internet troll, live and on air. At first, he was echoing some comments from some Redditors, trying to make Travis look like a whiny idiot. It was clear that he had an angsty attitude about keyboard warriors and disdain for Internet trolls, who are always louder and braver behind a keyboard. Little did Lazlo know that Travis is that loud in real life, too.
On air, Travis stated many of the reasons why KC Chiefs fans should be fed up with the Kansas City Chiefs at that point. He mentioned a litany of strategic, management, and cultural errors that the organization had made, and while they were having this conversation, he actually started converting Lazlo to his line of thinking.
Lazlo recanted, acknowledging how Travis was right, how it had been since 1983 that the Chiefs have drafted a first-round quarterback! The Chiefs hadn't won a playoff game since Joe Montana was the Chiefs QB. Maybe the Chiefs were bad because they weren't spending enough on salaries? Why do the Chiefs not let the former players and alumni come to Arrowhead? Why are they hoarding salary cap dollars?”
Nobody changes Lazlo's opinion, yet on that day, Travis did with his own well-informed and impassioned one.
After Reddit and Lazlo, Travis was contacted by local TV stations to do interviews about the scenario. It made Yahoo!'s front page. USA Today talked about it. Mashable wrote about it. There was even a segment on it on ESPN.com.5
When you have digital sense, you realize that page views are an economic driver that has forever bastardized traditional and nontraditional journalism and media, in potentially irreparable ways. The 2016 election debacle in the United States proved this more than any other single event in recent history.
Travis never expected the Chiefs to respond to him and tell him to get a clue. If you look at the comments of any YouTube video on the Web, you see people saying way more rude, and sometimes disrespectful or disgusting, things about artists or brands than TW was saying to the Chiefs. And most of these comments are never replied to by the brand.
As a fan, Travis had been to more than 100 games at Arrowhead Stadium. He was a loyal paying customer (100 games ain't cheap). A passionate advocate for Kansas City sports teams, he had been to every crushing home playoff loss the Chiefs had had since 1986. Them telling him that “it's his choice to be a fan and get a clue” just wasn't good digital sense. Of course it was his choice. It was also his choice and his right to vent his displeasure, as any customer can, when the product they support fails to deliver.
Shortly after the 2012 NFL season, Travis spoke at the SMX Social Media Conference in Las Vegas. After he shared the story about the Chiefs, a half dozen other social media directors and managers of other sports teams approached him. They all stated that the day after the Chiefs told him to get a clue, every one of those six sports teams had a meeting. The all told their social media managers to not be rude to their fans and they began to institute formal governance around their branded accounts on social media channels.
The “Save Our Chiefs” Movement
The situation with the Chiefs continued to gain momentum. The wave of public disgruntlement grew toward the Chiefs almost daily, and the compounding losses in future weeks did nothing to quell the rage. A couple of more losses into the season and people from all over began to reach out to TW about doing something bigger.
ChiefsPlanet.com had been around since 2000, before Internet 2.0, and was one of the few remaining independent message boards about the Chiefs. It was founded in August 2000 after a group of core users were fed up with the Kansas City Star message board moderators. After a negative experience with moderators at the KC Star happened in 2000, they started their own private community to commiserate with fellow Chiefs fans. Travis has been a card carrying member since 2003.
Message forums are a form of social media organized around communities of common interests. As a participant, you can really get to know people, over time, through the medium. There had been several ChiefsPlanet in-person bashes and tailgating events at Arrowhead with members of this forum over many seasons. It remains a great community, that commiserates over the 16 years of Chiefs futility. ChiefsPlanet is still going strong today.
A couple of weeks after the initial tweet shit-storm, Travis was perusing ChiefsPlanet and one of its users, Eric Granell, created a thread that said “Hey we're thinking about flying banners over Arrowhead Stadium before each Chiefs game. What do you think of this idea?” In another thread, Marty McDonald was setting up a Facebook page and a Twitter page for something he coined Save Our Chiefs.6 As they were all talking virtually on the thread, it was decided to merge efforts. Save Our Chiefs was born after the fourth game of the 2012 season.
With Travis being the disgruntled Twitter “cc get a clue” guy, he wasn't about to be on the forefront of this movement. However, he was able to give key strategic advice and help grow their social media channels rapidly. A fundraiser was created on ChiefsPlanet for airplane banners to fly over Arrowhead. When it was all said and done, they had crowdfunded almost $6,500 to have airplanes fly a banner over the home stadium and parking lot before each game. Once the banner was funded, Travis reached out to his local media contacts, who had interviewed him for the Chiefs Twitter story. He relayed the news back to the members at ChiefsPlanet.
Okay, I talked with Fox 4 and told them “ChiefsPlanet is a 12-year-old forum (at the time) for Chiefs fans from all over the world…and the banner idea got funded and organized here. Other groups of Chiefs fans are voicing their displeasure with sites popping up like SaveOurChiefs.com and many other Facebook groups. People are becoming very, very vocal in this social age, and expressing their choice to be a fan or not. LOL. They said they are doing a video news story on it, probably the 10 PM tonight or tomorrow night…and most likely an accompanying story on their website, that will have the video on it.”
WE DESERVE BETTER! FIRE PIOLI! BENCH CASSEL! the first banner said.
The local KC news outlets feasted on that development. Within two weeks, @SaveOurChiefs had almost 80,000 followers on their Twitter account. For perspective, that was more than the seating capacity (76,416) of Arrowhead Stadium where the Chiefs play. The perception of having nearly 100,000 followers on Twitter freaked out the Kansas City media. It was 2012. New stations were still struggling to figure out how to leverage Twitter. They ate it up. They were like, “Oh My God! The Save Our Chiefs movement (Figure P.5) already has 100,000 followers and over 20,000 Facebook fans!
Figure P.5 The Save Our Chiefs Facebook Page
The media freak-out enabled greater visibility. Eric and Marty were being interviewed on sports radio stations all over the nation, talking about what's going on with Save Our Chiefs.
Travis penned a letter and sent it to the CEO of the Chiefs, Clark Hunt, and the general manager, Scott Pioli, stating what the plan was and that the intended outcome was to see Pioli get his walking papers. Using e-mail technology called Yesware, he was able to track all opens for that e-mail. His e-mail never got a response from the Chiefs; however, it was opened up 49 times on 27 devices in 13 different cities. The movement definitely had the Chiefs' attention.
The group even worked out a deal with a local sporting goods company, Sports Nutz, and created custom black hoodies that said, “Save Our Chiefs Blackout-Arrowhead November 18th, 2012. (Figure P.6)”
Figure P.6 Arrowhead Stadium, November 18, 2012, During the #blackout
On November 18, 2012, roughly 50 percent of the fans were wearing black on that game vs. the Bengals. Save Our Chiefs literally blacked out the Guinness Book of World Records for “Loudest Stadium in the World.”7
The group had other, more positive community events planned as well, like a food drive. They were partnering with a local food bank on a canned-food donation campaign called “Can Pioli.” Phil Kloster, CEO of Edgewood Construction in KC with the username “Phobia” on the ChiefsPlanet forum, came up with that one.
However, in a parallel narrative, that was the week that a linebacker of the Chiefs, Jovan Belcher, committed a double homicide-suicide. Which was absolutely tragic and brought everyone back to reality about what really mattered in life. Out of respect for all parties involved, the entire group ceased all of the Save Our Chiefs activities until the last two weeks of the season.
The overall statistics from the movement were impressive: 41,545 mentions of Save Our Chiefs, with 359 news articles written about it, 160 blog posts about the movement, and 113 mentions (Figure P.7) on various message forums.
Figure P.7 The Social Media Mentions of #saveourchiefs after the @teedubya @kcchiefs Firestorm
At the end of the 2012 season, the Chiefs ended up with two wins and 14 losses. On the Monday following the last game of the season, Clark Hunt, the owner of the Kansas City Chiefs, went after the best candidate possible and hired Andy Reid as coach. He also hired John Dorsey from the Green Bay Packers front office as his new general manager. Former GM Scott Pioli and the Chiefs' head coach, Romeo Crennel, and the coaching staff were fired and a new regime began. The Chiefs were saved! For fans, it was long overdue justice. Travis immediately sent Clark Hunt, the CEO of the Chiefs, a note of thanks.
Mr. Hunt,
Thank you. You've proven yourself to be extremely tenacious in getting your man, Andy Reid. I'll never call you cheap again. You've displayed balls of steel, went above and beyond, and as a result KC fans are rejoicing, today, at your awesomeness. I put on a Chiefs jersey for the first time since preseason, just now. It feels good to have our Chiefs back from Pioli and in the hands of Andy Reid and John Dorsey.
I love the Chiefs and am grateful that we have an owner who cares. Could I be unblocked from the @kcchiefs twitter now? Thanks again for saving our Chiefs, Mr. Hunt. You're a badass. Sincerely, Travis Wright @teedubya
The day that Scott Pioli was fired, the Chiefs unblocked @teedubya and the Chiefs ticket department connected with Travis and offered him half-price season tickets for the 2013 season. He gladly accepted them, and has continued to be a die-hard fan.
What started, earlier in the year, with a disgruntled guy tweeting a forgettable tweet to the Chiefs after a loss had snowballed into this major movement all because one individual on the Chiefs' social media team did not use digital sense. Save Our Chiefs was a brilliant social media experience in that it showed how people can impact change when they handle it right. The idea was born from frustration: Create a social media experience to allow fans with similar thoughts a place to engage and interact with. Our movement became a cornerstone of daily life for Chiefs fans: we were talked about on multiple radio stations and local TV, and it drew national attention from NFL.com, ESPN.com, even the New York Times.
The fallout from this effort was amazing: the Chiefs' organization had a digital transformation. They listened to their biggest customer, the fan base. Sure, they fired their GM and head coach, and they cut ties with an overpriced sloth of a quarterback (we still relish in helping accomplish that), but that wasn't the amazing thing. The Kansas City Chiefs' organization physically and mentally shifted into a fan-friendly culture.
They rolled out “Chiefs Kingdom,” which serves as a universal rally cry to bring all fans back together. They were more positive in social interactions. They stopped banning people and started to listen, engage, and learn. In short form, it proved brands are capable of change.
From a digital media perspective, the main takeaway here should be this: by creating experiences and publishing content that is engaging as well as entertaining, brands and marketers will build relationships with prospects and cement foundational relationships with brand loyalists.
“As someone who has been involved in digital media and marketing since the late ‘90s, I don't think people set out to be marketed at in the social channel. Rather, you have to apply some ‘marketing psychology' to your message through various types of engagement,” says Marty McDonald, coconspirator of Save Our Chiefs and senior director of Strategic Development and Sales at G/O Digital. “Simply stated, your prospects and customers simply want to be a great guest at the dinner table of your brand. Treat them that way and they'll embrace your brand.”
Fast forward to January 2016, the Chiefs 23-year playoff futility ended, when they won their first playoff game since 1993. Saved indeed.
Optus in Australia
In November 2014, Travis was traveling to Australia for the first time to speak at Ashton Media's conference, the Data Strategy Symposium, north of Sydney in an area known for its wine, Hunter's Valley. It's a great conference put on by Mark Abay and his Ashton team.8
Before travelling, Travis sent out a tweet to his friend @ChrisBrinkworth asking if T-Mobile had service there, as he was feeling a bit unprepared for international travel and need to figure out his SIM card situation. The local phone carrier, Optus, was doing some social listening and tuned into the conversation. Paolo from @optus (Figures P.8, P.9, and P.10) sent a couple of tweets to Travis, instructing him to drop by once he arrived in Sydney and they could set him up with their prepaid options.9
“Sweet,” Travis replied. “Nicely done. Consider this a conversion, Paolo.” He then recommended that Optus connect with @MiaD, my former boss at Symantec, who was also speaking at the same conference.
Well, when Travis arrived in Sydney, he saw the Optus store and was ready to buy a SIM card for the trip. However, when Travis walked up to the store, an Optus employee, Jordan Zac, said, “Hello, Travis. Welcome to Australia. We've been waiting for you.”
“What?!” Travis was blown away (Figure P.11) by the customer service already. But wait, it gets better. Jordan handed Travis a huge Optus bag, and inside it were some Australian items, such as a six-pack of Victorian Bitter Beer, some flip-flops, some delicious Tim-Tam cookies, some Vegemite so he could make a sandwich, some other gadgets and gizmos, and, best of all, a free 4G hotspot with 10 GB of free data for the trip.
Figure P.11 Optus Australia
In case you were wondering if they had a system in place to serve others this way, they gave Mia Dand a similar experience (Figure P.12).
Optus gave Travis the free hotspot since Apple and T-Mobile wouldn't unlock his iPhone 5S, so they went the extra, extra mile and hooked him up. Talk about digital sense. Travis has been back to Australia twice since then, and guess which phone carrier he uses?
The moral of these two stories is that digital sense goes both ways. It can infuriate a customer or inspire them. It is also possible to gain real momentum out of a major commitment to redeem your organization when you have failed to have digital sense in the past.
The Genesis of This Book
What you have in your hands right now is a book that will teach you how to keep up with the pace of change, keep your customer at the center of your decision processes, and inspire the people inside your organization to lead from wherever they are with more honed Digital Sense.
Soon after the Chiefs incident in 2012, Travis and Chris were speaking on the same panel at the 2013 Denver Startup Week festival in Colorado. Chris, a serial entrepreneur, was on a personal sabbatical in Colorado, mired in ethnographic research around the Fourth Industrial Revolution and customer experience, following a venture exit. Chris and Travis immediately hit it off.
In Summer 2015, they reconnected and the concept of this book was born. Chris was back in build mode with Ethology (a customer experience performance media agency) and Travis had become one of the most sought after thought leaders in marketing technology. Travis was working on building his agency, CCP Digital, was a paid columnist at Inc. magazine, and had a new podcast on VentureBeat, called VB Engage, with the incomparable Stewart Rogers. We had originally decided to write the book and self-publish it, when serendipitously a few weeks later, Lia Ottaviano, from John Wiley & Sons, Inc. in Hoboken, NJ, reached out, and a deal for Digital Sense was born with the country's oldest and most prolific business book publisher.
In this book, you will learn how to blend customer experience, social business strategy, and marketing technologies using the Experience Marketing Framework.™ This book will teach you how to amplify that content correctly, and give you some different hacks and tricks on how to look at digital. It will help teach your organization how to be more digitally savvy at an individual and collective level.
We want digital sense to permeate your whole organization and the world at large.
With over 3 billion more humans coming into the commercial cycle globally in the coming years, as mobile web and smartphone access proliferates in the Third World, we no longer live in the information age, instead residing firmly in the age of opportunity.
You have an unprecedented chance to capitalize and thrive (not just survive) through what Klaus Schwab, the founder and executive chairman of the World Economic Forum, has called the Fourth Industrial Revolution.10
Having a model to cultivate a continually increasing digital sense will be an imperative. In the coming decade, the road ahead will not merely be a prolongation of the Third Industrial Revolution, which used electronics and information technology to automate production. It will be a complete and distinctly different revolution wherein everything exists as bits centered around velocity, scope, and impact as humanity enters a time of scale where technology has no historical precedent.
Our hope with this book is to share some of the wisdom we have picked up during our collective 40-plus years of marketing and technology startup experience. We have unified our sharp tongues and quick wits into one voice for the narrative to make your reading experience fluid.
You've heard the quote from Wayne Gretzky that says, “I skate to where the puck is headed, not where it is.” That's been one of the guiding lights and principles of Travis's whole existence. Chris's personal tagline for those who have seen him speak, mentor, or invest, is “The real risk is doing nothing.” Strap yourself in and let's begin.