Winning the Money Game through Social Media

me today a special guest. But before I introduce him, I'm going to tell you something. I decided this morning that I'm going to teach some principles around how to win the money game. And as I was thinking about it, I was thinking, you know, poor people and rich, I mean, poor people and middle class people, they work really hard for their money. But a lot of rich most of the rich people I know, we play to make money. And if you think about it, so my wife and I, we just got back from North Carolina yesterday. I went up there to speak at a friend's church, and we got back. When we left... the Eagles airplane was right there. We were like, oh, the Philadelphia Eagles must be playing the Tampa Bay Bucks, right? And we came back yesterday. Their plane was still there, but they weren't there. It was just their plane. So anyway, so when we landed, I was thinking to myself, those guys that play for the Eagles and the people who play for the Tampa Bay Bucks, they're playing a game and making millions of dollars while you're working your fingers to the bone to make tens of thousands of dollars a year. And then I started thinking about actors. What are they doing? They're pretending to be somebody they're not in front of a camera and making millions of dollars. And then you think about people like Warren Buffett. What does he do? He just plays money games all day. He just moves money around and plays with money. And so I'd like to teach you some things about how to win the money game. And first, you've got to realize it's a game. Second, you have to learn the rules of the game. And then you have to learn how to play. played by those rules. If you can do that, you can turn making money into a game. Find something that you're really, really good at, that you've mastered. What is mastery? Mastery is the ability to execute effortlessly without the use of conscious resources. Find something that you've mastered, figure out if you can use it to serve a large number of people with a very big problem who have relatively deep pockets and are willing to use some of that money to solve it, and you can win the money you gave as well. One of the best ways that I I've found to win the money game is using social media to get people to pay you with their attention. And then if you can get them to pay you with their attention, it won't be long before you get them to pay you with their assets. And I have with me today in studio the ultimate viral scientist. I don't know if he's going to take on that name and maybe get a lab coat or something. but that's what I would do. Anyway, but he's brilliant. Every time I talk to him about making content go viral, he just makes my head explode. It's just absolutely mind-blowing that one person can know this much about how to go viral on social media, and then not just how to go viral, but how to use that virality to generate revenue for your business. So we're going to look at going viral as a methodology for... building a brand and building a business, and I have with me in studio today, we already recorded one video, which you'll see later. You'll see part one to this video later. I have none other than the multiple-time best-selling author, author of one million followers, because he got a million followers on Facebook in 30 days, author of Hookpoint, and now the author of his new book, The Guide to Going Viral, Brendan Cain. Brendan, glad to have you here today, Brendan. Thank you. All right, appreciate it. Give it up for Brendan, y'all. All right. So when we... When we talk about the money game and how to win it, I know a lot of people go to YouTube, for instance, because YouTube has a monetization program, and they think, I'm gonna make YouTube videos, and YouTube's gonna pay me money, and I'm gonna get rich like Mr. Beast. But that's probably not gonna happen, is it? You know, I think the best place to kind of start off with the money game and how it pertains to social media is kind of set the stage of like, what is possible with social media? And I'll give you a prime example. So there, we'll take two kind of beauty influencers, both same amount of subscribers on YouTube. And one just does AdSense and kind of brand deals and maybe she makes $150,000, $200,000 a year. Not bad. But then we take another beauty fashion influencer, somebody I know, a friend of mine, Michelle Phan, who turns that same size audience into a company called Ipsy that's... that's valued at over a billion dollars. So if we just think of-When you say same size audience, what's the size of the audience? Millions of subscribers. Okay, millions of subscribers. Yeah, so same audience, and this is just kind of a general analogy, is you can have people with the same audience-Same audience size. Same audience size, same amount of number of views-Same niche. Engagement, same niche, and one generates six figures, and one builds a company worth a billion dollars. So the reality is, is social media- can build your revenue stream as big as you can dream. And as we were talking about the other video, the important thing is, do you have a business? Do you have a way to capture and monetize the attention? And you can talk about how much revenue has increased since you've used social media, and you can see other people that have a tenth of, or have ten times more people following or subscribing. and you'll outperform them from a revenue perspective by 20x. 100%. Yeah. It's really fascinating to find out how little. It's kind of like you said when we were talking before, like when you went to film school, they didn't teach you anything about business in film school. What's so interesting, how when people have businesses, they start businesses, and I have conversations with people who own businesses, they're making money. It's fascinating to see how little they understand about business. 100%. And one of the things that is an interesting observing factor of social media, I've seen this for 20 years, is social media is a blessing in one way that anybody can pull out their phone, press record, post something, and reach millions of people. It's completely democratized communication to the world. You don't have to have millions of dollars or a huge team or anything to reach millions of people. Anybody can literally do it. The downside is, like you said, Nobody's really teaching the fundamentals of, A, how do you actually do it consistently, but B, what do you actually do with that audience once you get it? Yeah, yeah, so good. So it's interesting to me, one of the biggest challenges I see, and I just see this because of my experience, not because I read it in a book or heard it somewhere, is that so many business owners are looking for people to sell their stuff to. When there are already millions of people in the world, potentially, at least hundreds of thousands of people in the world, who would already love to buy what you'd love to sell, but if they only knew you existed. And so, like, instead of, this is, and you can, like, you know more about virality than I'll probably ever learn. So I share with people. Instead of looking for people to sell stuff to, make yourself more findable for people who are already looking to buy what you're already looking to sell. And then when you're selling something, you don't have to work so hard. What do you think about that? A hundred percent. And I think that, I think for people tuning into this, especially from a money-making standpoint, they hear the word viral and they're like, well, Brendan, I just want to make money. I want to generate more leads and more customers and more sales. So when we look at virality, we... Consider there has to be three core pillars Involved the the first core pillar is grabbing attention Because you can't really get people to pay attention to what you have to say if you can't grab their attention in addition The thing that controls reach and distribution of our content is the algorithms and the algorithms Only care about one thing and that is keeping keeping people on the platforms longer because the longer they stay on the platform The more ads they can serve the more profit they will generate so they're looking at two key variables. The first one is Are you able to grab attention? If you're not able to grab attention in those first few seconds, you're dead. You're not going to get any reach because you're proving to the algorithms you're not a great storyteller. You can't keep people on the platform longer. So that goes to the second aspect, or the second core pillar, which is holding attention. Because holding attention is where the real substance comes in. That's where you can actually convey your value to them. You know, you can... Hold that attention so that you can really get your point across to the person viewing it, but also you can prove to the algorithm that you can keep people on the platform longer, so they will then push your content to more people. And the big distinction is the algorithms are not out to get us. They want to partner with us. They need us. We are the fuel that runs them. They're not like Netflix or Disney that invest billions and billions of dollars for their streaming platforms to keep people on them. Facebook, Instagram, YouTube want us to succeed. They want to be our partners. So... The first two core pillars are grabbing attention, holding attention. But then the third and final core pillar is monetizing attention. Because we're not talking about tricking people. We're not talking about silly cat videos or pranks. Main switch, none of that. Yeah, none of that. Because that's not going to lead to our end goals and our business objectives. So we have to monetize that attention with our core business and service. So everything that we're talking about in terms of going viral, a lot of people are just like, I don't want to go viral because they think about that. Silly kid down the street dancing on TikTok, or they think about, you know, a funny dog video, or a prankster, or things like that. And they're like, well, I don't want to do that because that's not related to who I am. And I completely agree. That's not what we want to do. We want to create content that plays to our business goal and objective. And I can definitively tell you, if we're doing this for 20 years, anything can go viral. We talk about taxes. There's a YouTube account called Clear Value Tax that has a million subscribers. Talking about taxes. Real estate can go viral. Fitness, nutrition, whatever your expertise is, it can go viral. So again, those three core pillars that we have to pay attention to is grabbing attention, holding attention, but just as important is monetizing attention. Now, monetizing attention doesn't mean you're selling things with every post. If you're doing that, it's likely going to kill your reach with audiences because they'll tune out. But you want to have that underlying business goal and objective in mind. Wow. So what you just said about you don't want to... Be selling something with every like post. So here's one of the things, like a lot of people, like for years, I didn't buy ads at all. I just. Did organic, right? Organic reach. And we made millions of dollars with organic before we ever started. I mean, we were making $15 million a year before we ever started spending money on ads. Okay, which is not normal in the business space. Would you agree with that? Yeah. Because most people want to buy the attention first. But I believe, and you can tell me if I'm wrong, I believe if you can't hold their attention organically, you're not going to be able to hold their attention just because you spent money on it. 100% I agree. Because the reality is, let's just talk about like... We're serving an ad on Instagram, and you're scrolling through, you're seeing organic content that's really engaging, organic engaging, and then there's an ad comes. Just because you're paying for an ad, you're just paying for reach. Right. It doesn't guarantee that they're going to click. And your ability to tell stories in organic makes you a better storyteller when it comes to paid. That was good. That was good. And by the way, the only way to get better at telling stories is to tell more stories. Yeah. You're not going to get better at telling stories just by reading a book about telling stories, or listening to you talk about telling stories, or listening to me talk about telling stories. You actually have to tell some stories and then watch people's eyeballs. And when they start thinking, man, I wish this guy would just like, just they inhale, I'm out of here, right? So you have to be able to like pick up on those social cues as well. So here's one of the things I noticed. I noticed that a lot of people who have really big businesses, bigger businesses than mine, okay? They have bigger audiences, bigger audiences than mine. They're way more famous, way more famous than me. My content gets way more engagement. I'm going to guess, I'm going to guess, and then you can tell me whether I passed the test on my guess, which reminds me, you know those little tests where you used to scribble the little circles? Remember those tests when you were in school? Yeah, those scan tests? There's no universe in which I was reading all that stuff. I'd just go through and just pick. I don't know if any of y'all ever did that. Anyway, so I'm going to guess, like I used to do when I used to take those tests. And I believe that one of the reasons we have more engagement than a lot of people who feel like they're in my competition, who have bigger audiences, bigger businesses, is because we spent so little on ads. So it seems to me that if people see you predominantly on ads, When they see you, the question comes to their mind, I wonder what they want from me. But if you're constantly delivering something they value on social media, when you show up in their feed, they're thinking, I wonder what they have for me. And I think if somebody's thinking, I wonder what they have for me, they're going to pay attention to you longer than they are if they're wondering, I wonder what they want from me. What would you say to that? I'm not going to rule it out and say it's never the case, but I would say that... Most of the time if somebody's running a lot of ads, it's because they haven't mastered the art of storytelling and organic and it doesn't mash up there. I would and And I don't know if you have examples we can talk about it But I see very few people that are mastering organic at a very high level that are over indexing on ads Meaning that they're serving they're buying a lot of media to drive I I honestly see it the opposite is you you see a lot of people that are driving a lot of traffic through paid And then it'll ultimately look like their organic is down, but their organic is down because they're really not masterful storytellers and they have to kind of over rely on ads. That was so good. That was such a good answer. But what I want to do is I want to make a clear distinction because I think people kind of kind of misunderstand this of what is the role of organic social media versus paid because they're completely. Okay, let's talk about that. They're two completely different. Objectives. Objectives and communication methods. Okay. So organic... The primary purpose of organic is not to sell anything. It's to get people to know, like, and trust you. And if people know, like, and trust you, they'll automatically want to buy. That's how you generated millions of revenue from organic content. Paid, you can be a little bit more direct in terms of how you're trying to push some type of action with them. Now, organic and paid can play off of each other. And that's where the real scale comes from. Is if you master organic and then you understand how to leverage. like retargeting and all those audiences to play off of that organic with the paid, that's where real revenue kind of really drives to the top. Now with organic, that doesn't mean if we're focused on getting people to know, like, and trust you, that it doesn't translate to revenue. It definitely does. You're a use case for it. Another client of ours, a leather craftsman, Tanner Leatherstein, all organic content with a format called Is It Worth It? Well, he'll deconstruct a handbag, like a $1,200 Chanel handbag. and tell you whether it's worth the money that you're paying for it. Prior to that format, he was at like 2,000 followers. He's paying all of his traffic was paid traffic like Google pay-per-click, and he was generating about 10,000 visitors a month. But with that format, and if you watch it, there's no calls to action in any of his videos. There's just a link in his bio. And through that, his organic traffic jumped from 10,000 to 100,000 visitors a month, and his most expensive products were selling out because he built so much. trust and credibility with his audience through that communication method of using organic to build that trust and credibility with the audience. So I think that that's a huge distinction of, are you focusing on organic or are you focusing on paid and understanding the difference between the two? Because I can tell you, I run into so many people coming to us and thinking that organic is about selling your product or talking about your product. Nobody logs onto social media. Wanting to see a great product shot. Nobody wants to log on to social media and see a great commercial. They really want to connect and be engaged in content that really keeps and peaks their interest. Wow, so good. So I said, I asked you on the last video, we didn't get to the answer, I don't think. We got to part of it. You talked about different formats, right? And there are how many different formats? 200 and something? So we've done analysis on 220 formats, but there's more than that. I mean, we're uncovering like three to five new ones a week at this point. So you've already uncovered 220 formats and you're doing four to five a week. Okay. So you've seen my videos. What's my format? And then you said something about, well, you made your own format or something like that. So like, what is my format? So... I have an idea, but I don't know what it is. You're a bit of, like, you've kind of made your own format where it's kind of a mixture between an explainer format and a keynote format. And you kind of merge the two, and I think that that's where I want to go in our work together is kind of look at some elements of either kind of really diving into the explainer side or diving more into kind of the public speaking side and dialing in kind of those specific elements because... You've done an amazing job and your success comes from your understanding of how to effectively communicate. Like you've been studying communication forever. Like you're a master at communicating. For a long time. So it translates. But for most people that don't have that level of experience with communication, they need to start with a bit more of a baseline of a format. And just to kind of introduce that kind of further for people that haven't watched the other video because it isn't out yet. Is a format is like a... a storytelling structure to deliver your message. So an example that we talked about in the other video is Man on the Street. Like you were just on a video that generated 70 million views, what is Man on the Street? Somebody approaches a random stranger on the street and interacts with them in some way. You were on School of Hard Knocks where they interview successful people and break down that success. There's many different versions of that. There's another one called Two Characters, One Lightbulb where the same person plays an expert and a novice and they... Break down a misconception about a subject. That seems like it would be so much fun. It is. It's a lot of fun. So like Erica Kohlberg has killed it with that format with legal, but it's used for finance, nutrition, diets. Dr. Julie Smith uses one called visual metaphors where she's breaking down subject matters like PTSD, anxiety, panic attacks, using visual metaphors to tell that. So those are just examples of formats. There's hundreds of these formats available. And. We always recommend choosing one that you're truly excited and passionate about. We never force a format on somebody. But we're just talking about a format to show that there's a clear blueprint. to success. Like if you think about, again, I went to, started in the film industry, went to film school. Any film made in the past 50 years all uses the same format. It's called the three-act structure. It doesn't matter if we're watching Star Wars, Harry Potter, Friday the 13th, Oppenheimer, all of those movies are using the same structure. If you think about Steven Spielberg, one of the greatest storytellers of our lifetime, he doesn't reinvent that structure each time he makes a movie. He's perfecting the nuances of it. Now, most people hear about trends. And people tell you, do a trend. What is a trend? Well, if you think about one of the most popular ones back in the day was the Ice Bucket Challenge. Everybody was involved in that. Does anybody do the Ice Bucket Challenge anymore? No, because it died out. And that's the difference between a trend and a format. Trends are very fleeting. And if you keep chasing trends... How are you going to master the nuances of communicating through these mediums if you're just chasing the ball over and over again? The other analogy I can say is like, let's say we want to learn a musical instrument. But one week you started with the piano, the next week you started with the saxophone, and then you were the flute, and then you're the xylophone. Are you going to be good at any of those instruments? No. So that's the power of a format is we choose that format and we perfect the nuances of how we use that format to communicate with the world. That is so, so good. So it seems like, well, let me ask you a question, because you said all movies use the three-act structure. What are the three acts? So there's basically an inciting incident in the first few minutes, like the actor, the main character, experiences some type of major shift in their life. And then there's a plot point. twist in the first act that leads to the second act, where they're going through different elements of challenges and struggles before that final third act plot that hits, and then there's a climax in that third act, and then the resolution at the end of it. So within that structure, there's a lot of nuance that can happen. Like, if you think about, like, Harry Potter versus, like, Jaws, they feel like completely two different movies, but they're using that same structure to kind of the story that's being told. Wow, so good. So I have a, what's the word I'm looking for? I think that you can be, like you talked about before, you can be your authentic self, use a format, and still your content can go viral. So I have a unique niche that I discovered, right, in that I teach business based on biblical principles. That's not, those... That seems to be a strange combination until somebody hears it, and then it's like, oh, okay, well, that makes sense. So how important is it for a person to remain who they are while they're exploring which format to use? It's incredibly important to remain who you are because, again, going back to those three core pillars, if we want to monetize that attention, if we're disjointed from what our core service is to the world or our core business, it's not gonna be aligned. So one of the elements that we do talk about, so definitively you wanna stay core to who you are. But you need to figure out what is the best way to contextualize my expertise so the widest possible audience can connect with it. Because again, we have to go back to what causes us to get people to watch our content. It's the algorithms control that reach and distribution. And what they care about is keeping. people on the platform longer. But what they want, they want us to do the heavy lifting for them in terms of they're not going to do all these calculations on the back end to find exactly who your specific audience is and connecting with them at the right time and things of that nature. They want content that they can see to millions of people and still hold attention. And then let people raise their hands and say, hey, I like this. Exactly. So the real goal is how do we stay true to who we are, communicate, to our core audience, but also make what we're talking about interesting to the wider population. So to give you an example, there is a luxury real estate agent, Ryan Serhant. He just had a show on Netflix, but I can definitively tell you he's successful on social media because he understands social media. It was well before the Netflix series. And if you think about him, he's selling $15 to $250 million properties in Manhattan. You can't get more niche than that in terms of who you're trying to reach with your subject matter. So he has a core audience that drives his business. But what he understands is the mastery of this, what we call the generalist principle. So what does he do is he does videos on YouTube like, let me take you on a two over $7 million closet. Let me take you on a two over $250 million ranch. So what he's doing is he's playing to the wide generalist population of I want to see that video even though I can't afford that. Right, I want to see what it looks like. Exactly. But at the same time, he's generating millions and millions of views on that content. And if less than 1% is his core target audience, he wins and beats out his competition by 100x. Because he's generating millions of views on his content, whereas competitors are probably generating thousands of views. He's even said that he has sold a $30 million penthouse through a YouTube video. So that is the power of Virality playing to the generalist principle, but not losing sight of who he is, what he represents, his message and his core clientele. Wow. So it doesn't matter. I mean, it doesn't matter what your niche is. As I mean, as long as you have a real business that's already viable. Yeah, that matters. You've got to have something actual. You have to be able to provide value for somebody other than yourself. But apart from that. Pick a format that resonates with you and then be consistent in that format and work on getting better at it and You should be able to reach more people 100% in when an interesting you know some of the work that we did together was initially do an analysis on your thumbnail and headlines and one of the Aspects that is kind of an easy lift For for your channel is look at your most viewed videos and your least viewed videos, and then just go create three new thumbnail and headlines for your most viewed and least viewed and see what happens to the views after that. Because YouTube has an A-B testing tool where you can test three thumbnails and headlines at the same time. And that can give you clues in terms of going forward, how to contextualize the content going forward, to see what the impact is in terms of shifting the messaging in a subtle way to see if it drives up to performance. So good. And for those of you on YouTube who are watching right now and you're thinking, why are they talking so much detail about like a format and going viral? Here's why. Because if I were to ask those of you who are watching on YouTube or anybody in the studio today, how many hours in a day, what would you say? You'd say, well, there are 24. And I would say it depends on whose day. What does that mean? Well, um, There are 24 hours in a day. There are 8,760 hours in a year. And yet, yesterday on YouTube, yesterday on YouTube, people spent, let me see here, watch time hours. People spent 10,191 hours. Watching my videos on YouTube yesterday. People spent 327,200 hours in the last 28 days watching my YouTube videos. And so I'm talking to a lot of people who have businesses and a lot of people who are aspiring to have businesses. And, like, in order to have that much attention 20 years ago, and if you were going to buy that much attention on television, it would have cost you more money than you could afford to spend. I mean... There are billion dollar companies that weren't spending enough money to get that much reach 20 years ago. Am I wrong? You couldn't even buy 10,000 hours of focus in a single day. In a day. In TV. In TV. It didn't exist. Do you understand? When he says the democratization of attention or the democratization of reach, like anybody can reach everybody. But almost nobody does because people don't want to go deep. On creating or developing a skill that's valuable enough that a large number of people care, right? So what happens when you do, when you create a skill that a large number of people care about? I'll tell you what happens. It can bring in more revenue than you have time to make. You know what's really fascinating to me? I've never had a job. I want you to think about this. I'm 63 years of age, okay? I have never had a job in my life where I made more than $30,000 a year, never. And our business, predominantly because of social media, Average is over $30,000 a day, 365 days a year. That's mind-blowing. That ought to show you. And I'm not flexing. I don't need you to think anything about me. I'm telling you this because your life can change. I was you. I was you. Like, there were times in my life, Brendan, where I had to decide, am I going to pay my water bill this month, my gas bill, my water bill, my gas bill, or my water bill, my electric bill? Right? That's not even, like, when I think about that, like, you know, you'd get insurance so you could get a tag on your car, and then the insurance would expire, but you already had the tag, right? You just, if you got pulled over, now you got a ticket for not having insurance. I remember what it's like to be so poor I couldn't pay attention. And now, because... I've created content that's valuable to large numbers of people, apparently because people are paying attention to it. Now we don't have to worry about money anymore. This is what I'm talking about, money game and how to play it. Like, what am I doing? I'm sitting here on a Monday morning in a studio that's air-conditioned in Florida, thank God, and having a conversation with my friend in front of a camera, and thousands of people were like... probably 10,000 people to 20,000 people will watch this in the next 24 hours, I'm playing a game. I'm not sawing a board. I'm not hammering a nail. I'm not driving a truck. I'm not lifting anything heavy. And people will say, but it's so hard. And my question would be, compared to what? I mean, that's the huge thing, is you've just laid out the power of it, yet people say it's too hard or it's too much work. And it's like, well, look at the return on that work. 10,000 hours in a single day people spend with their content. Right, that's more than a year. Yeah. More than a year for most people they can get to focus on their business. And yet they think it's a lot of work. Well, yeah, anything that you want to be good at takes time and energy and hard work to be good at it. But if you put in the work, 99% of the people in the world that have businesses and brands, especially your competitors, are not putting in that work. So if you put in that work, you will beat them out. You will be in a position. Where you can generate more money than you ever imagined. I think about when I first started my YouTube channel, all of my videos were created on a cell phone camera. All of them. That's all I had. Like, and maybe it was an iPhone. It wasn't even an iPhone because iPhone wasn't even out. iPhone didn't come out until July of 2007. So, like, they were just on whatever camera I happened to have when I first started creating videos. And even when we first, like, definitively launched our channel, April 1st, 2022. The equipment that we used, the space that we did it in, was very different than this, but YouTube paid for this entire studio, and then some. So all I'm saying, okay, so I've got a question for you. What am I doing right now is I'm really doing everything in my power to compel you, like, stop dragging your feet. What if you could have a million subscribers? What if you could have 300,000? What if you could have 100,000 watch time hours a month 10 years from now? What if it took you 10 years? Here's the thing. 10 years is going to go by anyway. You might as well do it. You're going to be doing something. You might as well do something that matters. So here's my question for you, Brandon. You wrote 1 million followers. Like, I mean, that's pretty compelling, 1 million followers. But then you wrote Hookpoint. Why did you need to write another book? And now you've written a third book, The Guide to Going Viral. Like, what did you feel like? You learn between 1 million followers and Hookpoint. What did you feel like you learned between Hookpoint and the guide to going viral? Or what did you feel like you left out of the first one that you needed to create the second one, and the first and second one that you needed to create the third one? Does that make sense? Yeah, so there's a few different answers to it. One is one million followers attracted a very specific audience with its title. So one million followers in the subtitle is how I built a massive social audience in 30 days. And then Hookpoint is how to stand out in a three-second world. It's just interesting the dynamic. First, they cover two different things. But first, I've just noticed, because we just finished doing a rewrite of Hookpoint. I spent the time rewriting it. Because we just see that they're attracting two different audiences. One million followers is kind of more that personal brand that wants to grow, that solopreneur that wants to build their personal brand and scale. Versus Hookpoint caters to, like for example, I had a chairman of a $16 billion company pick up that book. That guy is probably not going to read one million followers. Just because of the hook, the same thing we're talking about, thumbnails and titles, I kind of look at it from a book perspective as there's different titles, there's different covers and things of that nature that will attract different audiences. But in terms of when we go back to those three core pillars of grab attention, hold attention, monetize attention, Hookpoint really focused on how do you actually grab the attention in those first three seconds and also it talks about monetization. But I just saw that one million followers, there's a lot of great information in there. We did have a section about hook points, but I wanted to dive super deep into that because if you don't have the ability to master that attention those first three seconds, then you can never get to the ability to hold that attention. And then the guide to going viral, the reason I did that is, you know, we've been spending the past six years and several million dollars building out our viral content model. And we just didn't have it kind of fully. Flushed out and formalized. We were just using it with our clients and kind of testing and iterating how to kind of really package it. And that is really almost like a how-to guide from scratch of like how to really use our model, which wasn't really as flushed out, you know, when the 1 million followers and hook point books were published. Gotcha. What is the subtitle for the guide to go? The Art and Science of Succeeding on Social Media. Okay. So can I give them a little? Can I give them a little sauce on your book titles? Okay, so a lot of authors, when they write books, they give it a title that they think is clever. I'm gonna tell you something. You don't wanna be clever, you wanna be clear. I see authors who make a book title a riddle. It's the worst idea in the world. You think you're, oh, yeah. I've got this great title. It's not a great title. If it's a riddle, it's not a great title. If you're making people use mental bandwidth to figure out what you mean, they don't have any mental bandwidth left over to figure out whether or not they want to buy your book. Okay? So every one of his titles is a very clear word picture. One million followers. I don't need to read. anything else, but I know what that book is about when I read 1 million followers. I'm like, oh, 1 million followers. I'd like to have 1 million followers. Boom, I pick up the book. Hook point. It's a clear picture. There is a point at which you hook people. The guide to going viral. Oh, he's going to guide me into going viral. They're all three very clear pictures. What's the subtitle of 1 million followers again? How I built a massive social audience in 30 days. How I built a massive social audience in 30 days. So now he's telling me 1 million followers, how I built a massive social audience in 30 days. He got a million followers. 30 days. Like, I don't have a million followers in my whole life. So now that's interesting to me. So notice that the title of all three of his books are a very clear word picture, but the subtitle is a powerful promise. So it's implied in One Million Followers, How I Built a Massive Social Audience in 30 Days. It's stated in Hookpoint, Hookpoint. How to... Stand out in a three second world. How to stand out in a three second world. That's a promise. You will be able to stand out. When people only give you three seconds of their attention, you're gonna learn how to stand out in three seconds. That's a very powerful promise. Most people can't stand out in three minutes. Most people spend the first three minutes of asking a question on what I call a drunk-a-log. They just, well, what happened was... And I just, no, don't give me the background, just get to the point. When you create a book title, it needs to be a clear word picture, then... The next thing, the subtitle needs to be A Powerful Promise. The third book is The Guide to Going Viral. I know what that book is about. Like, if I have a desire to go viral, and I pick up a book that says The Guide to Going Viral... Mmm, that's pretty compelling. And the subtitle is again? The Art and Science of Succeeding on Social Media. The Art and Science of Succeeding? I'm not just going to get the art. I got the Mona Lisa and the Einstein? What? Right, so understand, this is not a man who is faking the funk. He knows his stuff. Just, I can tell just from his book titles that he knows exactly what he is doing. Anyway, I just... But I think that what you just laid out can be used for anything. Yes. It could be used for a landing page. It could be used for a website. It could be used to be a YouTube thumbnail and headline. And I think people often think of, like, I've designed probably like 2,000 websites over the course of my career. And it's just like, people just think that they're going to spend minutes reading all the things. Like, you need to be able to articulate why are they there? What are they going to get? What's the value? So that they want to go deeper. You know, like the second book, How to Stand Out in a Three-Second World. Yes, we live in a three-second world in terms of grabbing attention. But once we have that attention, people will stick with us. You think about your content. Your content's long form. Think about Joe Rogan. People will watch a four-hour podcast. Lex Friedman just did an eight-hour podcast on Neuralink. Or if you think about Netflix, like people will binge watch, you know, a whole series in a day. So it's not that there's a short attention span in terms of... you know, holding it, it's the short attention span comes into grabbing it. So when you have that little amount of time, and one of the exercises that, and I put it in the Hookpoint book, but that I give to people when they're, when they're really trying to kind of figure that out is, if you have time, go to a magazine stand and look at all the titles on the magazine stands and what pops out to you. And then think about, well, what if Time Magazine gave you the cover? What would be your thumbnail and the subtitle on that? And it kind of frames you. That was really good. And even if you could do it sitting in front of a magazine with a notepad and just write down and come up with as many ideas as possible and then start ranking those and ask people and things of that nature, it starts training your brain to kind of think about the world in a different way. And once you kind of get clear on that, that also helps the ability to monetize what you're trying to put out into the world. So good. So good. So here's my question for you. We have probably... I don't know, eight, 900, 1500 people watching on YouTube right now. We've got, I don't know, 20, 30 people in the room. What would you say to that person who's still on the fence about whether or not to use social media to garner attention for their business? I mean, I would first ask them, what is really holding you back? Because I think oftentimes it may be something that you think on the surface level, but on a deeper level. It's holding you back. I would say in our business, oftentimes what's holding people back is they don't think it's possible. You know, they can't imagine themselves communicating to millions of people. And that's where, you know, we talked about earlier is one of the things that Taylor Swift taught me and that she mastered to become one of the biggest global superstars in the world is she understood social media is a one-to-one platform, not a one-to-many platform. Meaning when people are consuming social media, they're watching it on their device, on the couch. or on the bus or on the train or wherever that is. So if your holdup is that you don't feel like you can be on a stage in front of people, just focus on communicating on one person. If the other holdup is that it's too much work, it's too much energy, it's too much time, or I don't have the expertise, well I can definitively tell you we've worked with people with zero social media experience that are creating content on their iPhones. We just worked with a hand doctor with no social media experience, creating content on our own. In the hospital with her iPhone, just speaking to the camera, she got over 700,000 followers and got a book deal and a TV deal. So if you think that it's about your expertise, the resources you have, it's not about that. If it's about the hard work, yes. Unfortunately, it is hard work. It's going to take time and dedication. But they're going to be doing hard work on something anyway. But tell me, you just said 10,000. People spent 10,000 hours of your content yesterday alone. Tell me any other medium or any other skill set that you can develop that will allow you to get 10,000 hours of people focusing on your content in a single day. I can't imagine what it would be. Yeah. I can't imagine what it would be. So yes, it takes time and work and dedication. But just imagine if you had, in a single day, 10,000 hours of people watching your content. Like what would that do every day? What would that do to your business, your brand, or just the message that you're trying to get out into the world? Because that 327,000 hours... in 28 days, that's more than 10,000 hours a day on average, which is mind-blowing. That's more than a year of attention every day. That blows my mind. Like you said, people think they can't do it. I didn't think I could do it. I didn't think I couldn't, right? But I didn't think I could. I had no idea that my YouTube channel was going to do what it does. I had no idea that that interview that I did with James on the School of Hard Knocks was going to do it. In fact, people were texting me, hey, I saw your video. I'm like, I hadn't even seen it yet. Right? And here we are now, 10 or 11 days later, it's got over 100 million views between TikTok and Instagram. It just released yesterday on YouTube. And what I'm saying is I didn't know this was going to work this well. I just knew I was going to do it for 10 years, and hopefully in 10 years I'll be good. And I've been at it now for two and a half years. And, like, even based on the stuff I learned today, I know. And people are going to think I'm trying to sound humble, but I'm not. I know I'm not good. I'm not good yet. I mean, I'm good at what I do as a business. I'm good at that. I'm not good at YouTube yet. I'm not good at social media yet. But I'm going to keep doing it. And I promise you, in 10 years, you're going to see what good looks like. Because I'm not just doing it to do it, and I'm not just doing it to reach people. I'm doing it because it's something I want to get really, really, really, really good at. And the more I do it, guess what happens? The better I get. I remember when, in 1997, well, prior to 1997, I was a traveling evangelist. So let me tell you, let me kind of give you the mindset as a traveling evangelist. You got 20 or 30 sermons, you're good for five or six years. Is that too transparent? Okay. So I spoke at this church in Georgia, and they're like, you know, we think we'd like you to come be our pastor. We've been without a pastor for a couple years. You know what one of my greatest fears was about becoming the senior pastor of a church? I got to come up with something to talk about Sunday morning, Sunday night, and Wednesday night because they had services three times a week. I got to come up with content three times a week that keeps the same people engaged. That's got to be so hard. And I talked to a friend of mine. The guy who started that church, he was a pastor in Savannah. I said, Kenny, I said, I'll be honest with you, bro. There are people here who have been to seminary. I've not been to seminary. I'm like, I've got to come up with something to say three times a week. How do you do that? Here's what he said to me, and it blew my mind. And it was, here's what he said. He said, Myron, I'm going to tell you something. All you've got to do is stay a week ahead. I'm like. I can stay a week ahead. I can do that. I can study a week in advance and stay ahead by a week. I can do that. It changed my life maybe more than any other experience I've ever had. And I'm telling you, like, let's say you only, if you start doing one video a month for the next 10 years, and you focus on getting better, regardless of how it starts out in 10 years, it's going to be something. that you're not gonna recognize. Would you agree with that? 100%, but my goal is I'm gonna cut that learning curve down by nine years. My man, that's what I'm talking about. He's like, it's not gonna take you 10 years, bro. Okay, cool, sign me up. You had me at hello. All right, so in closing, like we got a lot of hopeful people here who would love to have 10,000 subscribers on YouTube, 10,000 followers on Instagram, 10,000 friends or whatever. or 10,000 followers on Facebook or TikTok or whatever. Like, what would you say to them? They want it to be true. They'd like to believe it, but they don't know how. What would you say to those people? Well, I think the first thing that I would say is, what is your why? Like, what are you trying to achieve? Like, what is your goal with your business or brand? Or maybe it's a personal reason. Maybe you're working a job and you want to get out of the nine to five. Or maybe you have your business, and if you could just get an extra $10,000, $20,000 a month in revenue, it would set you free. Whatever that is, write that down on a piece of paper and remind yourself. what you're ultimately trying to achieve and what that will do for your life, for your family, for the personal or business goals that you have. And then once you have it, I also want you to just know that being successful in social media is not about how experienced you are, how much equipment that you have. You can create stuff on iPhones. You don't need to have a social media manager or any of these things. You can start today and be successful. It's just really starting to look at social media and understanding that there is elements to how to craft a story on these platforms. We call them formats. We talked about, with Myra, we talked about the man on the street. We've talked about visual metaphors, two characters, one light bulb. Start consuming content from an active experience and looking at these formats and identifying the format that you think would work best for your message. And then once you identify that format, really dive in and study what's the difference between... Using that format to generate millions of views versus tens of thousands of views. So that's really where I would ultimately start. And because I believe in everybody that's watching this, I will give you my book, The Guide to Going Viral, just to Myron's audience. If you go to hookpoint.com forward slash golden, you can download The Guide to Going Viral for absolutely free. So you can get all of our knowledge that I've spent the past 20 years so that you have a clear blueprint to succeed. But the reality is, is you have to understand what is holding you back. What is holding you back from moving forward, putting in the work and the time? Because we've talked about today that you put in that time and energy, it's going to save you a tremendous amount of heartache trying to build a business and trying to find revenue and customers in the long run. So it's going to free up so much of your time and you're going to have such a bigger impact on the world if you just take that step and you stay dedicated to it. I love the fact that like in your illustrations. You talked about so many different people, men and women, across so many different niches, who are having success with so many different formats. What that tells me is there's hope for everybody. Because today, if we haven't hit it yet, we're close to hitting 5 billion people on social media. So your audience is on social media, whether you think so. I mean, people often say, well, which platform should I choose? If you choose any of the big ones, your audience is on there. People think like TikTok is only, you know, teenage influencers. Like it's not. There's over a billion people on that platform. Your audience is everywhere. So the reality is, is anything can go viral on social media because everybody is on social media. So no matter what you're talking about, it can work and can succeed. So good. Brendan, this has been an absolute masterclass today. I appreciate it more than you can imagine. Thank you, thank you, thank you. And for those of you who missed it, he said if you want his latest book, The Guide to Going Viral, you can get it if you go to hookpoint.com forward slash golden. You can get it for free. And it's not, I mean, it's a thick book. It's got a whole lot of gems in there. He's been dropping bars all morning. You can get the whole book full of gold bars. It's like a Brinks truck for free. Don't miss this opportunity. Brendan, once again, thank you for being here. Thank you. One more time. Give it up for Brendan Cain, y'all. Wow. Wow. That was so much fun, bro. Yeah. Thank you. That was so good.

But a lot of rich most of the rich people I know, we play to make money. And if you think about it, so my wife and I, we just got back from North Carolina yesterday. I went up there to speak at a friend's church, and we got back. When we left...

the Eagles airplane was right there. We were like, oh, the Philadelphia Eagles must be playing the Tampa Bay Bucks, right? And we came back yesterday.

Their plane was still there, but they weren't there. It was just their plane. So anyway, so when we landed, I was thinking to myself, those guys that play for the Eagles and the people who play for the Tampa Bay Bucks, they're playing a game and making millions of dollars while you're working your fingers to the bone to make tens of thousands of dollars a year. And then I started thinking about actors.

What are they doing? They're pretending to be somebody they're not in front of a camera and making millions of dollars. And then you think about people like Warren Buffett.

What does he do? He just plays money games all day. He just moves money around and plays with money. And so I'd like to teach you some things about how to win the money game.

And first, you've got to realize it's a game. Second, you have to learn the rules of the game. And then you have to learn how to play. played by those rules.

If you can do that, you can turn making money into a game. Find something that you're really, really good at, that you've mastered. What is mastery? Mastery is the ability to execute effortlessly without the use of conscious resources.

Find something that you've mastered, figure out if you can use it to serve a large number of people with a very big problem who have relatively deep pockets and are willing to use some of that money to solve it, and you can win the money you gave as well. One of the best ways that I I've found to win the money game is using social media to get people to pay you with their attention. And then if you can get them to pay you with their attention, it won't be long before you get them to pay you with their assets. And I have with me today in studio the ultimate viral scientist.

I don't know if he's going to take on that name and maybe get a lab coat or something. but that's what I would do. Anyway, but he's brilliant. Every time I talk to him about making content go viral, he just makes my head explode. It's just absolutely mind-blowing that one person can know this much about how to go viral on social media, and then not just how to go viral, but how to use that virality to generate revenue for your business.

So we're going to look at going viral as a methodology for... building a brand and building a business, and I have with me in studio today, we already recorded one video, which you'll see later. You'll see part one to this video later.

I have none other than the multiple-time best-selling author, author of one million followers, because he got a million followers on Facebook in 30 days, author of Hookpoint, and now the author of his new book, The Guide to Going Viral, Brendan Cain. Brendan, glad to have you here today, Brendan. Thank you. All right, appreciate it. Give it up for Brendan, y'all.

All right. So when we... When we talk about the money game and how to win it, I know a lot of people go to YouTube, for instance, because YouTube has a monetization program, and they think, I'm gonna make YouTube videos, and YouTube's gonna pay me money, and I'm gonna get rich like Mr. Beast.

But that's probably not gonna happen, is it? You know, I think the best place to kind of start off with the money game and how it pertains to social media is kind of set the stage of like, what is possible with social media? And I'll give you a prime example. So there, we'll take two kind of beauty influencers, both same amount of subscribers on YouTube.

And one just does AdSense and kind of brand deals and maybe she makes $150,000, $200,000 a year. Not bad. But then we take another beauty fashion influencer, somebody I know, a friend of mine, Michelle Phan, who turns that same size audience into a company called Ipsy that's...

that's valued at over a billion dollars. So if we just think of-When you say same size audience, what's the size of the audience? Millions of subscribers. Okay, millions of subscribers.

Yeah, so same audience, and this is just kind of a general analogy, is you can have people with the same audience-Same audience size. Same audience size, same amount of number of views-Same niche. Engagement, same niche, and one generates six figures, and one builds a company worth a billion dollars.

So the reality is, is social media- can build your revenue stream as big as you can dream. And as we were talking about the other video, the important thing is, do you have a business? Do you have a way to capture and monetize the attention? And you can talk about how much revenue has increased since you've used social media, and you can see other people that have a tenth of, or have ten times more people following or subscribing.

and you'll outperform them from a revenue perspective by 20x. 100%. Yeah. It's really fascinating to find out how little. It's kind of like you said when we were talking before, like when you went to film school, they didn't teach you anything about business in film school.

What's so interesting, how when people have businesses, they start businesses, and I have conversations with people who own businesses, they're making money. It's fascinating to see how little they understand about business. 100%. And one of the things that is an interesting observing factor of social media, I've seen this for 20 years, is social media is a blessing in one way that anybody can pull out their phone, press record, post something, and reach millions of people. It's completely democratized communication to the world.

You don't have to have millions of dollars or a huge team or anything to reach millions of people. Anybody can literally do it. The downside is, like you said, Nobody's really teaching the fundamentals of, A, how do you actually do it consistently, but B, what do you actually do with that audience once you get it? Yeah, yeah, so good.

So it's interesting to me, one of the biggest challenges I see, and I just see this because of my experience, not because I read it in a book or heard it somewhere, is that so many business owners are looking for people to sell their stuff to. When there are already millions of people in the world, potentially, at least hundreds of thousands of people in the world, who would already love to buy what you'd love to sell, but if they only knew you existed. And so, like, instead of, this is, and you can, like, you know more about virality than I'll probably ever learn. So I share with people.

Instead of looking for people to sell stuff to, make yourself more findable for people who are already looking to buy what you're already looking to sell. And then when you're selling something, you don't have to work so hard. What do you think about that? A hundred percent. And I think that, I think for people tuning into this, especially from a money-making standpoint, they hear the word viral and they're like, well, Brendan, I just want to make money.

I want to generate more leads and more customers and more sales. So when we look at virality, we... Consider there has to be three core pillars Involved the the first core pillar is grabbing attention Because you can't really get people to pay attention to what you have to say if you can't grab their attention in addition The thing that controls reach and distribution of our content is the algorithms and the algorithms Only care about one thing and that is keeping keeping people on the platforms longer because the longer they stay on the platform The more ads they can serve the more profit they will generate so they're looking at two key variables. The first one is Are you able to grab attention? If you're not able to grab attention in those first few seconds, you're dead.

You're not going to get any reach because you're proving to the algorithms you're not a great storyteller. You can't keep people on the platform longer. So that goes to the second aspect, or the second core pillar, which is holding attention.

Because holding attention is where the real substance comes in. That's where you can actually convey your value to them. You know, you can...

Hold that attention so that you can really get your point across to the person viewing it, but also you can prove to the algorithm that you can keep people on the platform longer, so they will then push your content to more people. And the big distinction is the algorithms are not out to get us. They want to partner with us. They need us. We are the fuel that runs them.

They're not like Netflix or Disney that invest billions and billions of dollars for their streaming platforms to keep people on them. Facebook, Instagram, YouTube want us to succeed. They want to be our partners. So...

The first two core pillars are grabbing attention, holding attention. But then the third and final core pillar is monetizing attention. Because we're not talking about tricking people.

We're not talking about silly cat videos or pranks. Main switch, none of that. Yeah, none of that.

Because that's not going to lead to our end goals and our business objectives. So we have to monetize that attention with our core business and service. So everything that we're talking about in terms of going viral, a lot of people are just like, I don't want to go viral because they think about that.

Silly kid down the street dancing on TikTok, or they think about, you know, a funny dog video, or a prankster, or things like that. And they're like, well, I don't want to do that because that's not related to who I am. And I completely agree. That's not what we want to do.

We want to create content that plays to our business goal and objective. And I can definitively tell you, if we're doing this for 20 years, anything can go viral. We talk about taxes.

There's a YouTube account called Clear Value Tax that has a million subscribers. Talking about taxes. Real estate can go viral. Fitness, nutrition, whatever your expertise is, it can go viral. So again, those three core pillars that we have to pay attention to is grabbing attention, holding attention, but just as important is monetizing attention.

Now, monetizing attention doesn't mean you're selling things with every post. If you're doing that, it's likely going to kill your reach with audiences because they'll tune out. But you want to have that underlying business goal and objective in mind. Wow. So what you just said about you don't want to...

Be selling something with every like post. So here's one of the things, like a lot of people, like for years, I didn't buy ads at all. I just. Did organic, right? Organic reach.

And we made millions of dollars with organic before we ever started. I mean, we were making $15 million a year before we ever started spending money on ads. Okay, which is not normal in the business space.

Would you agree with that? Yeah. Because most people want to buy the attention first.

But I believe, and you can tell me if I'm wrong, I believe if you can't hold their attention organically, you're not going to be able to hold their attention just because you spent money on it. 100% I agree. Because the reality is, let's just talk about like...

We're serving an ad on Instagram, and you're scrolling through, you're seeing organic content that's really engaging, organic engaging, and then there's an ad comes. Just because you're paying for an ad, you're just paying for reach. Right.

It doesn't guarantee that they're going to click. And your ability to tell stories in organic makes you a better storyteller when it comes to paid. That was good. That was good. And by the way, the only way to get better at telling stories is to tell more stories.

Yeah. You're not going to get better at telling stories just by reading a book about telling stories, or listening to you talk about telling stories, or listening to me talk about telling stories. You actually have to tell some stories and then watch people's eyeballs.

And when they start thinking, man, I wish this guy would just like, just they inhale, I'm out of here, right? So you have to be able to like pick up on those social cues as well. So here's one of the things I noticed.

I noticed that a lot of people who have really big businesses, bigger businesses than mine, okay? They have bigger audiences, bigger audiences than mine. They're way more famous, way more famous than me.

My content gets way more engagement. I'm going to guess, I'm going to guess, and then you can tell me whether I passed the test on my guess, which reminds me, you know those little tests where you used to scribble the little circles? Remember those tests when you were in school?

Yeah, those scan tests? There's no universe in which I was reading all that stuff. I'd just go through and just pick.

I don't know if any of y'all ever did that. Anyway, so I'm going to guess, like I used to do when I used to take those tests. And I believe that one of the reasons we have more engagement than a lot of people who feel like they're in my competition, who have bigger audiences, bigger businesses, is because we spent so little on ads.

So it seems to me that if people see you predominantly on ads, When they see you, the question comes to their mind, I wonder what they want from me. But if you're constantly delivering something they value on social media, when you show up in their feed, they're thinking, I wonder what they have for me. And I think if somebody's thinking, I wonder what they have for me, they're going to pay attention to you longer than they are if they're wondering, I wonder what they want from me.

What would you say to that? I'm not going to rule it out and say it's never the case, but I would say that... Most of the time if somebody's running a lot of ads, it's because they haven't mastered the art of storytelling and organic and it doesn't mash up there.

I would and And I don't know if you have examples we can talk about it But I see very few people that are mastering organic at a very high level that are over indexing on ads Meaning that they're serving they're buying a lot of media to drive I I honestly see it the opposite is you you see a lot of people that are driving a lot of traffic through paid And then it'll ultimately look like their organic is down, but their organic is down because they're really not masterful storytellers and they have to kind of over rely on ads. That was so good. That was such a good answer. But what I want to do is I want to make a clear distinction because I think people kind of kind of misunderstand this of what is the role of organic social media versus paid because they're completely.

Okay, let's talk about that. They're two completely different. Objectives. Objectives and communication methods.

Okay. So organic... The primary purpose of organic is not to sell anything.

It's to get people to know, like, and trust you. And if people know, like, and trust you, they'll automatically want to buy. That's how you generated millions of revenue from organic content. Paid, you can be a little bit more direct in terms of how you're trying to push some type of action with them.

Now, organic and paid can play off of each other. And that's where the real scale comes from. Is if you master organic and then you understand how to leverage.

like retargeting and all those audiences to play off of that organic with the paid, that's where real revenue kind of really drives to the top. Now with organic, that doesn't mean if we're focused on getting people to know, like, and trust you, that it doesn't translate to revenue. It definitely does. You're a use case for it.

Another client of ours, a leather craftsman, Tanner Leatherstein, all organic content with a format called Is It Worth It? Well, he'll deconstruct a handbag, like a $1,200 Chanel handbag. and tell you whether it's worth the money that you're paying for it.

Prior to that format, he was at like 2,000 followers. He's paying all of his traffic was paid traffic like Google pay-per-click, and he was generating about 10,000 visitors a month. But with that format, and if you watch it, there's no calls to action in any of his videos. There's just a link in his bio. And through that, his organic traffic jumped from 10,000 to 100,000 visitors a month, and his most expensive products were selling out because he built so much.

trust and credibility with his audience through that communication method of using organic to build that trust and credibility with the audience. So I think that that's a huge distinction of, are you focusing on organic or are you focusing on paid and understanding the difference between the two? Because I can tell you, I run into so many people coming to us and thinking that organic is about selling your product or talking about your product.

Nobody logs onto social media. Wanting to see a great product shot. Nobody wants to log on to social media and see a great commercial.

They really want to connect and be engaged in content that really keeps and peaks their interest. Wow, so good. So I said, I asked you on the last video, we didn't get to the answer, I don't think.

We got to part of it. You talked about different formats, right? And there are how many different formats? 200 and something? So we've done analysis on 220 formats, but there's more than that.

I mean, we're uncovering like three to five new ones a week at this point. So you've already uncovered 220 formats and you're doing four to five a week. Okay.

So you've seen my videos. What's my format? And then you said something about, well, you made your own format or something like that.

So like, what is my format? So... I have an idea, but I don't know what it is. You're a bit of, like, you've kind of made your own format where it's kind of a mixture between an explainer format and a keynote format. And you kind of merge the two, and I think that that's where I want to go in our work together is kind of look at some elements of either kind of really diving into the explainer side or diving more into kind of the public speaking side and dialing in kind of those specific elements because...

You've done an amazing job and your success comes from your understanding of how to effectively communicate. Like you've been studying communication forever. Like you're a master at communicating. For a long time.

So it translates. But for most people that don't have that level of experience with communication, they need to start with a bit more of a baseline of a format. And just to kind of introduce that kind of further for people that haven't watched the other video because it isn't out yet. Is a format is like a... a storytelling structure to deliver your message.

So an example that we talked about in the other video is Man on the Street. Like you were just on a video that generated 70 million views, what is Man on the Street? Somebody approaches a random stranger on the street and interacts with them in some way. You were on School of Hard Knocks where they interview successful people and break down that success.

There's many different versions of that. There's another one called Two Characters, One Lightbulb where the same person plays an expert and a novice and they... Break down a misconception about a subject.

That seems like it would be so much fun. It is. It's a lot of fun.

So like Erica Kohlberg has killed it with that format with legal, but it's used for finance, nutrition, diets. Dr. Julie Smith uses one called visual metaphors where she's breaking down subject matters like PTSD, anxiety, panic attacks, using visual metaphors to tell that. So those are just examples of formats.

There's hundreds of these formats available. And. We always recommend choosing one that you're truly excited and passionate about.

We never force a format on somebody. But we're just talking about a format to show that there's a clear blueprint. to success.

Like if you think about, again, I went to, started in the film industry, went to film school. Any film made in the past 50 years all uses the same format. It's called the three-act structure. It doesn't matter if we're watching Star Wars, Harry Potter, Friday the 13th, Oppenheimer, all of those movies are using the same structure.

If you think about Steven Spielberg, one of the greatest storytellers of our lifetime, he doesn't reinvent that structure each time he makes a movie. He's perfecting the nuances of it. Now, most people hear about trends. And people tell you, do a trend. What is a trend?

Well, if you think about one of the most popular ones back in the day was the Ice Bucket Challenge. Everybody was involved in that. Does anybody do the Ice Bucket Challenge anymore? No, because it died out. And that's the difference between a trend and a format.

Trends are very fleeting. And if you keep chasing trends... How are you going to master the nuances of communicating through these mediums if you're just chasing the ball over and over again? The other analogy I can say is like, let's say we want to learn a musical instrument. But one week you started with the piano, the next week you started with the saxophone, and then you were the flute, and then you're the xylophone.

Are you going to be good at any of those instruments? No. So that's the power of a format is we choose that format and we perfect the nuances of how we use that format to communicate with the world. That is so, so good.

So it seems like, well, let me ask you a question, because you said all movies use the three-act structure. What are the three acts? So there's basically an inciting incident in the first few minutes, like the actor, the main character, experiences some type of major shift in their life.

And then there's a plot point. twist in the first act that leads to the second act, where they're going through different elements of challenges and struggles before that final third act plot that hits, and then there's a climax in that third act, and then the resolution at the end of it. So within that structure, there's a lot of nuance that can happen.

Like, if you think about, like, Harry Potter versus, like, Jaws, they feel like completely two different movies, but they're using that same structure to kind of the story that's being told. Wow, so good. So I have a, what's the word I'm looking for? I think that you can be, like you talked about before, you can be your authentic self, use a format, and still your content can go viral.

So I have a unique niche that I discovered, right, in that I teach business based on biblical principles. That's not, those... That seems to be a strange combination until somebody hears it, and then it's like, oh, okay, well, that makes sense.

So how important is it for a person to remain who they are while they're exploring which format to use? It's incredibly important to remain who you are because, again, going back to those three core pillars, if we want to monetize that attention, if we're disjointed from what our core service is to the world or our core business, it's not gonna be aligned. So one of the elements that we do talk about, so definitively you wanna stay core to who you are.

But you need to figure out what is the best way to contextualize my expertise so the widest possible audience can connect with it. Because again, we have to go back to what causes us to get people to watch our content. It's the algorithms control that reach and distribution.

And what they care about is keeping. people on the platform longer. But what they want, they want us to do the heavy lifting for them in terms of they're not going to do all these calculations on the back end to find exactly who your specific audience is and connecting with them at the right time and things of that nature.

They want content that they can see to millions of people and still hold attention. And then let people raise their hands and say, hey, I like this. Exactly.

So the real goal is how do we stay true to who we are, communicate, to our core audience, but also make what we're talking about interesting to the wider population. So to give you an example, there is a luxury real estate agent, Ryan Serhant. He just had a show on Netflix, but I can definitively tell you he's successful on social media because he understands social media. It was well before the Netflix series. And if you think about him, he's selling $15 to $250 million properties in Manhattan.

You can't get more niche than that in terms of who you're trying to reach with your subject matter. So he has a core audience that drives his business. But what he understands is the mastery of this, what we call the generalist principle. So what does he do is he does videos on YouTube like, let me take you on a two over $7 million closet. Let me take you on a two over $250 million ranch.

So what he's doing is he's playing to the wide generalist population of I want to see that video even though I can't afford that. Right, I want to see what it looks like. Exactly. But at the same time, he's generating millions and millions of views on that content. And if less than 1% is his core target audience, he wins and beats out his competition by 100x.

Because he's generating millions of views on his content, whereas competitors are probably generating thousands of views. He's even said that he has sold a $30 million penthouse through a YouTube video. So that is the power of Virality playing to the generalist principle, but not losing sight of who he is, what he represents, his message and his core clientele. Wow.

So it doesn't matter. I mean, it doesn't matter what your niche is. As I mean, as long as you have a real business that's already viable.

Yeah, that matters. You've got to have something actual. You have to be able to provide value for somebody other than yourself. But apart from that.

Pick a format that resonates with you and then be consistent in that format and work on getting better at it and You should be able to reach more people 100% in when an interesting you know some of the work that we did together was initially do an analysis on your thumbnail and headlines and one of the Aspects that is kind of an easy lift For for your channel is look at your most viewed videos and your least viewed videos, and then just go create three new thumbnail and headlines for your most viewed and least viewed and see what happens to the views after that. Because YouTube has an A-B testing tool where you can test three thumbnails and headlines at the same time. And that can give you clues in terms of going forward, how to contextualize the content going forward, to see what the impact is in terms of shifting the messaging in a subtle way to see if it drives up to performance.

So good. And for those of you on YouTube who are watching right now and you're thinking, why are they talking so much detail about like a format and going viral? Here's why. Because if I were to ask those of you who are watching on YouTube or anybody in the studio today, how many hours in a day, what would you say? You'd say, well, there are 24. And I would say it depends on whose day.

What does that mean? Well, um, There are 24 hours in a day. There are 8,760 hours in a year. And yet, yesterday on YouTube, yesterday on YouTube, people spent, let me see here, watch time hours. People spent 10,191 hours.

Watching my videos on YouTube yesterday. People spent 327,200 hours in the last 28 days watching my YouTube videos. And so I'm talking to a lot of people who have businesses and a lot of people who are aspiring to have businesses. And, like, in order to have that much attention 20 years ago, and if you were going to buy that much attention on television, it would have cost you more money than you could afford to spend.

I mean... There are billion dollar companies that weren't spending enough money to get that much reach 20 years ago. Am I wrong? You couldn't even buy 10,000 hours of focus in a single day.

In a day. In TV. In TV. It didn't exist. Do you understand?

When he says the democratization of attention or the democratization of reach, like anybody can reach everybody. But almost nobody does because people don't want to go deep. On creating or developing a skill that's valuable enough that a large number of people care, right?

So what happens when you do, when you create a skill that a large number of people care about? I'll tell you what happens. It can bring in more revenue than you have time to make. You know what's really fascinating to me? I've never had a job.

I want you to think about this. I'm 63 years of age, okay? I have never had a job in my life where I made more than $30,000 a year, never.

And our business, predominantly because of social media, Average is over $30,000 a day, 365 days a year. That's mind-blowing. That ought to show you. And I'm not flexing. I don't need you to think anything about me.

I'm telling you this because your life can change. I was you. I was you. Like, there were times in my life, Brendan, where I had to decide, am I going to pay my water bill this month, my gas bill, my water bill, my gas bill, or my water bill, my electric bill?

Right? That's not even, like, when I think about that, like, you know, you'd get insurance so you could get a tag on your car, and then the insurance would expire, but you already had the tag, right? You just, if you got pulled over, now you got a ticket for not having insurance.

I remember what it's like to be so poor I couldn't pay attention. And now, because... I've created content that's valuable to large numbers of people, apparently because people are paying attention to it.

Now we don't have to worry about money anymore. This is what I'm talking about, money game and how to play it. Like, what am I doing? I'm sitting here on a Monday morning in a studio that's air-conditioned in Florida, thank God, and having a conversation with my friend in front of a camera, and thousands of people were like... probably 10,000 people to 20,000 people will watch this in the next 24 hours, I'm playing a game.

I'm not sawing a board. I'm not hammering a nail. I'm not driving a truck. I'm not lifting anything heavy.

And people will say, but it's so hard. And my question would be, compared to what? I mean, that's the huge thing, is you've just laid out the power of it, yet people say it's too hard or it's too much work.

And it's like, well, look at the return on that work. 10,000 hours in a single day people spend with their content. Right, that's more than a year. Yeah.

More than a year for most people they can get to focus on their business. And yet they think it's a lot of work. Well, yeah, anything that you want to be good at takes time and energy and hard work to be good at it. But if you put in the work, 99% of the people in the world that have businesses and brands, especially your competitors, are not putting in that work. So if you put in that work, you will beat them out.

You will be in a position. Where you can generate more money than you ever imagined. I think about when I first started my YouTube channel, all of my videos were created on a cell phone camera.

All of them. That's all I had. Like, and maybe it was an iPhone. It wasn't even an iPhone because iPhone wasn't even out. iPhone didn't come out until July of 2007. So, like, they were just on whatever camera I happened to have when I first started creating videos.

And even when we first, like, definitively launched our channel, April 1st, 2022. The equipment that we used, the space that we did it in, was very different than this, but YouTube paid for this entire studio, and then some. So all I'm saying, okay, so I've got a question for you. What am I doing right now is I'm really doing everything in my power to compel you, like, stop dragging your feet.

What if you could have a million subscribers? What if you could have 300,000? What if you could have 100,000 watch time hours a month 10 years from now? What if it took you 10 years?

Here's the thing. 10 years is going to go by anyway. You might as well do it. You're going to be doing something.

You might as well do something that matters. So here's my question for you, Brandon. You wrote 1 million followers. Like, I mean, that's pretty compelling, 1 million followers.

But then you wrote Hookpoint. Why did you need to write another book? And now you've written a third book, The Guide to Going Viral.

Like, what did you feel like? You learn between 1 million followers and Hookpoint. What did you feel like you learned between Hookpoint and the guide to going viral? Or what did you feel like you left out of the first one that you needed to create the second one, and the first and second one that you needed to create the third one? Does that make sense?

Yeah, so there's a few different answers to it. One is one million followers attracted a very specific audience with its title. So one million followers in the subtitle is how I built a massive social audience in 30 days.

And then Hookpoint is how to stand out in a three-second world. It's just interesting the dynamic. First, they cover two different things.

But first, I've just noticed, because we just finished doing a rewrite of Hookpoint. I spent the time rewriting it. Because we just see that they're attracting two different audiences. One million followers is kind of more that personal brand that wants to grow, that solopreneur that wants to build their personal brand and scale. Versus Hookpoint caters to, like for example, I had a chairman of a $16 billion company pick up that book.

That guy is probably not going to read one million followers. Just because of the hook, the same thing we're talking about, thumbnails and titles, I kind of look at it from a book perspective as there's different titles, there's different covers and things of that nature that will attract different audiences. But in terms of when we go back to those three core pillars of grab attention, hold attention, monetize attention, Hookpoint really focused on how do you actually grab the attention in those first three seconds and also it talks about monetization. But I just saw that one million followers, there's a lot of great information in there. We did have a section about hook points, but I wanted to dive super deep into that because if you don't have the ability to master that attention those first three seconds, then you can never get to the ability to hold that attention.

And then the guide to going viral, the reason I did that is, you know, we've been spending the past six years and several million dollars building out our viral content model. And we just didn't have it kind of fully. Flushed out and formalized. We were just using it with our clients and kind of testing and iterating how to kind of really package it.

And that is really almost like a how-to guide from scratch of like how to really use our model, which wasn't really as flushed out, you know, when the 1 million followers and hook point books were published. Gotcha. What is the subtitle for the guide to go? The Art and Science of Succeeding on Social Media.

Okay. So can I give them a little? Can I give them a little sauce on your book titles? Okay, so a lot of authors, when they write books, they give it a title that they think is clever. I'm gonna tell you something.

You don't wanna be clever, you wanna be clear. I see authors who make a book title a riddle. It's the worst idea in the world.

You think you're, oh, yeah. I've got this great title. It's not a great title. If it's a riddle, it's not a great title. If you're making people use mental bandwidth to figure out what you mean, they don't have any mental bandwidth left over to figure out whether or not they want to buy your book.

Okay? So every one of his titles is a very clear word picture. One million followers.

I don't need to read. anything else, but I know what that book is about when I read 1 million followers. I'm like, oh, 1 million followers. I'd like to have 1 million followers.

Boom, I pick up the book. Hook point. It's a clear picture. There is a point at which you hook people. The guide to going viral.

Oh, he's going to guide me into going viral. They're all three very clear pictures. What's the subtitle of 1 million followers again? How I built a massive social audience in 30 days.

How I built a massive social audience in 30 days. So now he's telling me 1 million followers, how I built a massive social audience in 30 days. He got a million followers. 30 days. Like, I don't have a million followers in my whole life.

So now that's interesting to me. So notice that the title of all three of his books are a very clear word picture, but the subtitle is a powerful promise. So it's implied in One Million Followers, How I Built a Massive Social Audience in 30 Days. It's stated in Hookpoint, Hookpoint. How to...

Stand out in a three second world. How to stand out in a three second world. That's a promise.

You will be able to stand out. When people only give you three seconds of their attention, you're gonna learn how to stand out in three seconds. That's a very powerful promise.

Most people can't stand out in three minutes. Most people spend the first three minutes of asking a question on what I call a drunk-a-log. They just, well, what happened was...

And I just, no, don't give me the background, just get to the point. When you create a book title, it needs to be a clear word picture, then... The next thing, the subtitle needs to be A Powerful Promise. The third book is The Guide to Going Viral. I know what that book is about.

Like, if I have a desire to go viral, and I pick up a book that says The Guide to Going Viral... Mmm, that's pretty compelling. And the subtitle is again? The Art and Science of Succeeding on Social Media. The Art and Science of Succeeding?

I'm not just going to get the art. I got the Mona Lisa and the Einstein? What? Right, so understand, this is not a man who is faking the funk. He knows his stuff.

Just, I can tell just from his book titles that he knows exactly what he is doing. Anyway, I just... But I think that what you just laid out can be used for anything. Yes. It could be used for a landing page.

It could be used for a website. It could be used to be a YouTube thumbnail and headline. And I think people often think of, like, I've designed probably like 2,000 websites over the course of my career. And it's just like, people just think that they're going to spend minutes reading all the things. Like, you need to be able to articulate why are they there?

What are they going to get? What's the value? So that they want to go deeper.

You know, like the second book, How to Stand Out in a Three-Second World. Yes, we live in a three-second world in terms of grabbing attention. But once we have that attention, people will stick with us.

You think about your content. Your content's long form. Think about Joe Rogan. People will watch a four-hour podcast.

Lex Friedman just did an eight-hour podcast on Neuralink. Or if you think about Netflix, like people will binge watch, you know, a whole series in a day. So it's not that there's a short attention span in terms of...

you know, holding it, it's the short attention span comes into grabbing it. So when you have that little amount of time, and one of the exercises that, and I put it in the Hookpoint book, but that I give to people when they're, when they're really trying to kind of figure that out is, if you have time, go to a magazine stand and look at all the titles on the magazine stands and what pops out to you. And then think about, well, what if Time Magazine gave you the cover? What would be your thumbnail and the subtitle on that?

And it kind of frames you. That was really good. And even if you could do it sitting in front of a magazine with a notepad and just write down and come up with as many ideas as possible and then start ranking those and ask people and things of that nature, it starts training your brain to kind of think about the world in a different way. And once you kind of get clear on that, that also helps the ability to monetize what you're trying to put out into the world. So good.

So good. So here's my question for you. We have probably...

I don't know, eight, 900, 1500 people watching on YouTube right now. We've got, I don't know, 20, 30 people in the room. What would you say to that person who's still on the fence about whether or not to use social media to garner attention for their business? I mean, I would first ask them, what is really holding you back? Because I think oftentimes it may be something that you think on the surface level, but on a deeper level.

It's holding you back. I would say in our business, oftentimes what's holding people back is they don't think it's possible. You know, they can't imagine themselves communicating to millions of people.

And that's where, you know, we talked about earlier is one of the things that Taylor Swift taught me and that she mastered to become one of the biggest global superstars in the world is she understood social media is a one-to-one platform, not a one-to-many platform. Meaning when people are consuming social media, they're watching it on their device, on the couch. or on the bus or on the train or wherever that is.

So if your holdup is that you don't feel like you can be on a stage in front of people, just focus on communicating on one person. If the other holdup is that it's too much work, it's too much energy, it's too much time, or I don't have the expertise, well I can definitively tell you we've worked with people with zero social media experience that are creating content on their iPhones. We just worked with a hand doctor with no social media experience, creating content on our own.

In the hospital with her iPhone, just speaking to the camera, she got over 700,000 followers and got a book deal and a TV deal. So if you think that it's about your expertise, the resources you have, it's not about that. If it's about the hard work, yes. Unfortunately, it is hard work.

It's going to take time and dedication. But they're going to be doing hard work on something anyway. But tell me, you just said 10,000. People spent 10,000 hours of your content yesterday alone. Tell me any other medium or any other skill set that you can develop that will allow you to get 10,000 hours of people focusing on your content in a single day.

I can't imagine what it would be. Yeah. I can't imagine what it would be.

So yes, it takes time and work and dedication. But just imagine if you had, in a single day, 10,000 hours of people watching your content. Like what would that do every day? What would that do to your business, your brand, or just the message that you're trying to get out into the world?

Because that 327,000 hours... in 28 days, that's more than 10,000 hours a day on average, which is mind-blowing. That's more than a year of attention every day.

That blows my mind. Like you said, people think they can't do it. I didn't think I could do it.

I didn't think I couldn't, right? But I didn't think I could. I had no idea that my YouTube channel was going to do what it does.

I had no idea that that interview that I did with James on the School of Hard Knocks was going to do it. In fact, people were texting me, hey, I saw your video. I'm like, I hadn't even seen it yet. Right? And here we are now, 10 or 11 days later, it's got over 100 million views between TikTok and Instagram.

It just released yesterday on YouTube. And what I'm saying is I didn't know this was going to work this well. I just knew I was going to do it for 10 years, and hopefully in 10 years I'll be good. And I've been at it now for two and a half years.

And, like, even based on the stuff I learned today, I know. And people are going to think I'm trying to sound humble, but I'm not. I know I'm not good. I'm not good yet.

I mean, I'm good at what I do as a business. I'm good at that. I'm not good at YouTube yet. I'm not good at social media yet.

But I'm going to keep doing it. And I promise you, in 10 years, you're going to see what good looks like. Because I'm not just doing it to do it, and I'm not just doing it to reach people.

I'm doing it because it's something I want to get really, really, really, really good at. And the more I do it, guess what happens? The better I get.

I remember when, in 1997, well, prior to 1997, I was a traveling evangelist. So let me tell you, let me kind of give you the mindset as a traveling evangelist. You got 20 or 30 sermons, you're good for five or six years.

Is that too transparent? Okay. So I spoke at this church in Georgia, and they're like, you know, we think we'd like you to come be our pastor. We've been without a pastor for a couple years. You know what one of my greatest fears was about becoming the senior pastor of a church?

I got to come up with something to talk about Sunday morning, Sunday night, and Wednesday night because they had services three times a week. I got to come up with content three times a week that keeps the same people engaged. That's got to be so hard.

And I talked to a friend of mine. The guy who started that church, he was a pastor in Savannah. I said, Kenny, I said, I'll be honest with you, bro.

There are people here who have been to seminary. I've not been to seminary. I'm like, I've got to come up with something to say three times a week. How do you do that?

Here's what he said to me, and it blew my mind. And it was, here's what he said. He said, Myron, I'm going to tell you something.

All you've got to do is stay a week ahead. I'm like. I can stay a week ahead.

I can do that. I can study a week in advance and stay ahead by a week. I can do that. It changed my life maybe more than any other experience I've ever had. And I'm telling you, like, let's say you only, if you start doing one video a month for the next 10 years, and you focus on getting better, regardless of how it starts out in 10 years, it's going to be something.

that you're not gonna recognize. Would you agree with that? 100%, but my goal is I'm gonna cut that learning curve down by nine years.

My man, that's what I'm talking about. He's like, it's not gonna take you 10 years, bro. Okay, cool, sign me up.

You had me at hello. All right, so in closing, like we got a lot of hopeful people here who would love to have 10,000 subscribers on YouTube, 10,000 followers on Instagram, 10,000 friends or whatever. or 10,000 followers on Facebook or TikTok or whatever. Like, what would you say to them? They want it to be true.

They'd like to believe it, but they don't know how. What would you say to those people? Well, I think the first thing that I would say is, what is your why? Like, what are you trying to achieve? Like, what is your goal with your business or brand?

Or maybe it's a personal reason. Maybe you're working a job and you want to get out of the nine to five. Or maybe you have your business, and if you could just get an extra $10,000, $20,000 a month in revenue, it would set you free. Whatever that is, write that down on a piece of paper and remind yourself.

what you're ultimately trying to achieve and what that will do for your life, for your family, for the personal or business goals that you have. And then once you have it, I also want you to just know that being successful in social media is not about how experienced you are, how much equipment that you have. You can create stuff on iPhones.

You don't need to have a social media manager or any of these things. You can start today and be successful. It's just really starting to look at social media and understanding that there is elements to how to craft a story on these platforms.

We call them formats. We talked about, with Myra, we talked about the man on the street. We've talked about visual metaphors, two characters, one light bulb.

Start consuming content from an active experience and looking at these formats and identifying the format that you think would work best for your message. And then once you identify that format, really dive in and study what's the difference between... Using that format to generate millions of views versus tens of thousands of views.

So that's really where I would ultimately start. And because I believe in everybody that's watching this, I will give you my book, The Guide to Going Viral, just to Myron's audience. If you go to hookpoint.com forward slash golden, you can download The Guide to Going Viral for absolutely free. So you can get all of our knowledge that I've spent the past 20 years so that you have a clear blueprint to succeed.

But the reality is, is you have to understand what is holding you back. What is holding you back from moving forward, putting in the work and the time? Because we've talked about today that you put in that time and energy, it's going to save you a tremendous amount of heartache trying to build a business and trying to find revenue and customers in the long run.

So it's going to free up so much of your time and you're going to have such a bigger impact on the world if you just take that step and you stay dedicated to it. I love the fact that like in your illustrations. You talked about so many different people, men and women, across so many different niches, who are having success with so many different formats. What that tells me is there's hope for everybody. Because today, if we haven't hit it yet, we're close to hitting 5 billion people on social media.

So your audience is on social media, whether you think so. I mean, people often say, well, which platform should I choose? If you choose any of the big ones, your audience is on there. People think like TikTok is only, you know, teenage influencers.

Like it's not. There's over a billion people on that platform. Your audience is everywhere. So the reality is, is anything can go viral on social media because everybody is on social media. So no matter what you're talking about, it can work and can succeed.

So good. Brendan, this has been an absolute masterclass today. I appreciate it more than you can imagine. Thank you, thank you, thank you.

And for those of you who missed it, he said if you want his latest book, The Guide to Going Viral, you can get it if you go to hookpoint.com forward slash golden. You can get it for free. And it's not, I mean, it's a thick book. It's got a whole lot of gems in there.

He's been dropping bars all morning. You can get the whole book full of gold bars. It's like a Brinks truck for free.

Don't miss this opportunity. Brendan, once again, thank you for being here. Thank you. One more time.

Give it up for Brendan Cain, y'all. Wow. Wow.

That was so much fun, bro. Yeah. Thank you.

That was so good.

Transcript for:Winning the Money Game through Social Media

Transcript for:
Winning the Money Game through Social Media