Brendan Kane: Dominate Social Media with Actionable Tips & Storytelling Mastery

It's through what we call storytelling formats, and these are kind of structures that help us convey our message, our genius out there.

And the fascinating thing is, people look at social media as it's like this brand new thing.

It's this mystery black box, and it's like playing the lottery.

We can't figure it out.

But in reality, it's just another storytelling medium.

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Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to another powerful episode of Mick Unplugged.

And if you think you are an influencer this is the episode for you from pioneering YouTube influence campaigns and building digital platforms for Taylor

for Taylor Swift and Rihanna to generating 1 million views and follows in just 30 days he's the visionary who cracked the code on instant attention in our three-second world get ready for the dynamic the daring the disruptive My guy, Mr.

Brendan Kane.

Brendan, how you doing today, brother?

It's a pleasure to connect with you and everybody that's tuning in for this.

Absolutely.

Honored to connect with you, man.

Like, there's so much that I want to talk to you about, Brendan, because I feel like,

and I hate using the term guru and expert, but I feel like you are that in the social media space.

And I want to talk about your books.

But my first question for you, Brendan, is what's your because, man, like what's that thing that keeps you doing what you do?

That thing that's deeper than your why?

Like, if I were to say, Brendan Kane, brother, what's your because what would that be i think i'm fascinated with what it takes to stand out at the highest levels and that you know starts as like most people does in childhood like why do we do most of the things we do is because of the experiences that we have in childhood and you know for me there was a lot of instances of being bullied or you know trying to make friends or things of that nature that you know oftentimes you struggle with and i struggled with and through that experience, I just,

for some reason, I just kind of latched on, well, how do you connect with other people?

How do you connect with the people that you truly want to connect with, whether it's a friend group, a teacher, as you get into the workforce?

You know, in my instance, it was in the movie studio.

How do you connect with a movie producer or an actor, things of that nature?

But I've always been fascinated with.

how you can stand out at the highest levels.

And the work that I do today, I just firmly believe that there's people all over the world that have the ability to transform it in a positive way.

They just need that helping hand, those tools, that knowledge to get their message heard.

And that's what really drives me every day.

I love that, dude.

I love that so much.

And I told you offline, I've been a huge follower, believer, subscriber to all the things that you do.

And one of the things that you're very clear about, and it's why I love you, is you don't have to be a celebrity or a big name to connect with people that want to connect with you, right?

I think there's always

this big misconception that people believe, oh, you need a billion followers, you need 60 billion views to gain credibility, but your message to people is always the first step is authentically.

You have to be you and you have to know who you are to connect with others.

Why is that so important for people to grasp and understand?

Because especially in the world today where

we consume so much content, we are seeded so much content, like we're all professionals at consuming content, whether it's mostly on our phone through all the social media content, but even like if you think about all the streaming services that we have at our disposal today, because we are so accustomed to all of this, people can see through that inauthenticity super quick.

And it may not even be happening on a conscious level.

It may be happening on an unconscious level.

So the minute that you're trying to be something that you're not,

people can see through that and you just won't have the impact that you're looking for.

I dig that.

I usually do tips and tricks later, but I have the great Brendan Kane on here, right?

So, so what's a tip for the listener or viewer to discover that first step that you're talking about?

Like, what's something that they can do to truly understand their true authenticity?

so the way that the way that i look at the world of social media and all of the work that that we do is uh it's through what we call storytelling formats and these are kind of structures that help us convey our message our genius out there and the fascinating thing is people look at social media as it's like this brand new thing.

It's this mystery black box and it's like playing the lottery.

We can't figure it out.

But in reality, it's just another storytelling medium.

And the people that rise to the top are the best storytellers.

So it's survival of the fittest, but in this case, survival of the fittest, the best storytellers.

So what we do

is we analyze these different formats or structures.

Now, a format that everybody knows outside of social media is movies.

So I started my career in the movies, and every movie over the past 100 years has used the same three-act structure.

That is their format.

Whether it's Steven Spielberg making Jaws or Quentin Tarantino making pulp fiction, whatever your favorite movie is, it's following that same format.

Now, as it applies to social media, there are hundreds, if not thousands, of these formats.

So our team has done about 10,000 hours of research analyzing over 450 formats.

And the reason we go that to that level is we want to make sure that we can find the authentic format to the individual.

So like to give you an example,

one format that people have most likely seen is called Man on the Street, where you approach a random stranger on the street and you engage and unfold.

Now that format, that structure is used for many different industries and many different subject matters.

So I have a friend slash client, Alex Stemp, who's a photographer, who massed an audience of 20 million people approaching random strangers on the street and offering them professional photo shoots.

Then you have people like School of Hard Knocks that ask people, how did you make your first million dollars?

Or Body by Mark, he asked people what they do for their fitness workout.

The reason I say that is one of the first places to start in finding how you can show up as authentic is make this shift in your mindset from a passive experience when you're on social media of just scrolling through, scrolling through, scrolling through.

and make it an active approach.

When you find something that's working, immediately just think to yourself, could I see myself doing that?

Like, could I share my message through that?

If not, don't do it.

Like, because there's so much to choose from.

And I hate when people kind of give this advice or feel that they have to do something or show up in a certain way if it doesn't feel authentic to them.

Because there's so much opportunity.

So the first place to start is really become a student and start identifying, well, what structures or what content creators are doing something in a way that you could see yourself sharing your message in that same way?

I love that, dude.

And I parallel that same thing in speaking, right?

Like I do keynote speaking and I tell, and I coach other speakers, and I tell them, you have to find your voice, right?

Because I'm me personally, I'm not someone that yells and screams and does a lot of voice inflection on stage.

That works for some people.

When I try that, it's awful because I hate it.

It's not who I am.

And I tell people the same thing.

You have to find your voice.

And I think you're saying that same thing with social.

You have to find who you are.

And I wanted to ask you this question more for me personally, because I know you test everything.

You just talked about what your team does.

You write about, you know, you're an over-tester, right?

Like, you're not just an overachiever, you're an over-tester, but you want to have the right data for your clients and also for you.

So my question is, can you have multiple templates?

Is that a thing that you can do in social, right?

Can you be person on the streets?

Can you be master class type?

Can you be the, hey, here are five tips and tricks to help you do whatever?

Like, can someone have multiple templates in social?

And then two, should they?

Great question.

The answer is yes, you can.

What I typically recommend is

start with one and master the process of one because you're going to learn a tremendous amount.

So like the analogy I give is like, let's just say that we're going to learn a musical instrument you know when you learn a musical instrument you don't want to shift the goalpost each week like you start with the drums week one and then move to the violin week two and then the you know the flute week three and keep switching it up no you want to spend let's just say we're going to spend the next few months mastering the piano and through that process you can do it or if you think about learning a language you don't learn five languages at the same time you learn one but that process of learning one language is applicable to learning the next one so yes you can diversify, but what I always tell people is, you know, try and find, you can do a little bit of experimentation in the beginning to see which one you like, because obviously you need to enjoy this.

Like, this needs to be fun for you.

But then, kind of, once you've found that, just try and stick to one.

If not one, I wouldn't go more than two until you've actually gone through the process of mastering one.

And then you can

diversify out from there.

Yeah, that's so I need that.

And I'm writing that down for me personally because I feel like I've mastered one, but I have folks who are like, oh, well, you know, you should do like a masterclass look.

And I'm like, well, I don't know if that's really me.

Like, I feel like it's me, but I don't know.

And so I'm going to take some of your principles and I'm going to test.

I'm going to start testing out some formats and templates that actually are truly authentic to me now that I feel like I've mastered.

I've mastered one style.

Brendan, another question that I have for you before we get into your book.

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For the listener, the viewer that's out there that's like, I'm on social, but I don't know if it's relevant for my business or for me and my brand to be on social.

Or, you know, they're out there, but they haven't put the energy into, I'm not even going to say try growing their followers, but just putting out content.

What's some advice that you have for that person?

And Roger Sitkens, I'm talking to you on this.

So

I always like to start with, why aren't you doing it?

Because there's different reasons.

Some people will say, I hate social media.

I don't want to be on social media.

And my

question is why like is it you don't feel comfortable on camera is there something about it that's holding you back and oftentimes it really has nothing to do with social media has to do something with themselves that they haven't just really worked through

is it a time restraint is it a resource restraint like what is holding you back because

One of the other reasons that we do so much work on our end to really analyze all these formats is I want people to be able to start with the resources that they have available.

Literally with this thing here, a phone in our pocket, with this and a great story, you can reach millions of people.

You don't have to have a massive team.

You don't have to have fancy equipment.

Now, there are formats that lend itself to that.

And if you want to do that, that's great.

But where people are starting today

is I want them to just be able to start with the resources they have.

So there's nothing holding them back.

Another thing people will say that holds them back is, you know what, my business isn't interesting enough.

I'm a dentist.

I'm a tax accountant.

I'm a lawyer.

That's not going to work on social media.

But the reality is anything can work on social media.

We made a dentist go viral, got 21 million views on a single video.

Like any subject matter, if it's packaged in the right way,

can go viral, can gain traction to grow your business.

Now, obviously, social media is not the only only way to grow a business, and I'm not going to say it's the only way because there's multiple facets that you can grow businesses.

But if you're looking to really scale your audience, having that impact and beating out any competition that you have, if you master this skill set, it will put you light years ahead of anybody else and will continue to scale to whatever level that you want to scale to.

Freaking genius.

That's why you're the one.

Well, the other interesting thing that I'll say to this is people always ask me, and I hear this question a lot, is like, what is the true ROI of social media?

And the fascinating thing to that is the answer is, well, it's as big as your vision.

Like, I know people that make zero dollars off of social media.

I've known people that have leveraged social media to build billion-dollar businesses.

Like somebody I know, Michelle Phan, was one of the original YouTube influencers.

She took her audience and founded a company called Ipsy.

Within three years, it was doing $120 million a year in revenue.

At one point, it was valued at over $800 million.

Like, literally,

this platform, the tool that we have at our disposal, in our hand, in our pocket, can achieve whatever it is that you want to achieve.

And that doesn't mean you have to create a billion-dollar company.

Maybe you just want to, you know, put enough food on the table, put your kids through college, whatever your dream is.

Social media is a tool that can help you get there in a faster,

more scalable, and predictable way than anything else that we've seen in history.

Totally agree.

Totally agree.

You know, Brendan, a lot of times people get overwhelmed by the different social platforms, right?

Because the content on YouTube might be different than the content you put on LinkedIn, which might be different than the content you put on Instagram and Facebook.

How can people get over that feeling of overwhelm and like for me i started out just focusing on one platform and then i added in instagram and i i told you i still haven't figured out youtube like that but like i didn't allow myself to get overwhelmed i i knew who my audience my audiences are on the various platforms right and i learned that from you through testing like mick the content that you put on instagram might not work on linkedin but some of the content you put on linkedin might work on Instagram.

Like, how can you help people not be overwhelmed by the multiple platforms and thinking that they need a ton of content on various platforms?

So, the first place that I like to, everything should be,

everything should start with what is the format that is the right fit for you.

And that format will then dictate the platform.

So, there are certain formats that work better on certain platforms.

With that in mind, the other thing that I really advise people is start with the platform that you love the most what is the platform that you use every day because that is because again we have to be students of the game like we have to be able to kind of go in there and understand how not just how our content's performing but how other people are performing what are they doing differently than me so the the first piece of advice is um choose the format and the format will dictate the platform and the second piece is like go with the platform that you use the most and then just focus on that.

You can, what I say, again, like when we were talking about choosing the format, we want to pick one thing and get really good at and master it.

The more we spread our attention, the less we become a master of anything.

So with social media is I say choose one platform, master that platform.

Now, that doesn't mean you can't take that same content and post it on other platforms.

but don't expect a lot from it.

Don't get upset if it doesn't perform.

Just focus on the one.

You can still distribute the others.

But it does create a lot of anxiety and it does burn people out when they think about, oh my God, I've got to create 20 pieces of content a day across all these platforms and things of that nature.

So

the reality is, each one of these platforms has close to 2 billion people on it, the major ones.

Like your audience is there in scale.

If you master any one of these platforms, you're going to have more business than you know what to do with.

So start with, so just simplify it, start with one, master it.

And if you still want to syndicate that same content out to others, you can.

yeah

so you kind of hit on it a little bit with the the billions of people that are on the various platforms your latest book

one million followers how i built a massive social following in 30 days dude so one thank you to your team for for sending me a copy of this And I'm going to order copies because I have clients that need this because I've read this in two weeks.

I've I've literally have read this twice.

That's how amazing the book is and how much insights are there.

One, I want to know what was your reason for saying I need to put this book out.

So it was,

so I started my career in the entertainment industry.

I worked for movie studios and then I did several partnerships with MTV and Viacom that allowed me to work with a lot of, you know, mainstream celebrities and musicians and things of that nature.

And

as we were talking about earlier, a lot of people will think that social media is just reserved for the celebrity.

It's reserved for the rock star.

It's reserved for the corporation.

And

I just

doing this for 20 years, I know that's not the case.

Like the power of what we have in our pocket and the mobile device has changed.

the world for all of us.

And what do I mean by that?

If we think about 20 years ago, pre-social media, or just, you know, 25 years ago, where there's no social media,

literally, how did we reach the masses?

How did we reach millions of people with our message?

99% of us couldn't.

We had to go through a television station.

We had to have a publicist.

We had to have massive marketing budgets.

But literally, today, with a phone in our pocket, we can pull it out, record something.

And if it's a great story, we can reach the masses.

So it's democratized communication to millions of people for everyone.

So what I wanted to really show with that book is

when I was writing that and did that experiment, you know, yes, I worked in the entertainment industry, but I wasn't in front of the camera.

I wasn't on television shows or in movies or on posters or any of those things.

I wanted to demonstrate for people that you yourself can build a massive audience.

You yourself can achieve your dreams or whatever your vision is with these platforms that we have available that's available to all of us today.

Yep.

You know what my favorite part of your book is, Brenda?

When you address your haters.

So for those, and again, definitely go get the book, One Million Followers, How I Built a Massive Social Following in 30 Days.

But I think it's like preface two when you're like, if you're a hater, this section is for you, right?

And I love it because you address all the questions that I'm not going to call them haters.

I'm going to call them doubters would have, right?

Like, wait, did you do this organically?

Did you use bots?

Are your followers real?

Is it true engagement?

And you answer it precisely and succinctly.

And I love that because

I love all humans, but I also feel like there's a group of people whose natural instinct it is to doubt everything or to hate on everyone else's success.

And you do a beautiful job of addressing that.

And I love the fact that you're very direct.

Like, hey, I test everything.

You talk about it in the book.

I test everything.

Like, this doesn't just happen.

There's work that goes into what people see as the end result.

And I don't think people understand or appreciate enough of the work.

that you actually do before you ever talk about it.

Yeah, because when I, and it still holds true today, is like when I started in 2005 in this space

there's no manual there's no like handbook to this and even today things are are changing things are adapting these platforms are are continuing to scale is

everything that i do and you asked me like my because my why

like i'm not doing this for myself to make myself famous.

I'm doing this because I want to learn as much as possible possible and I want to create things that are, that people can replicate so that I can help as many people as possible get their message out into the world.

So over the course of 20 years, I've tested so many things that don't work.

But how do you figure out if something doesn't work if you don't test it?

Like that's a big part of that.

And yeah, I've rewritten that book a few different times and, you know, you, you obviously see a lot of those, you know, comments and things being brought up without people that haven't read the book.

So, I'm like, you know what?

I'm just going to throw it, throw it in the beginning and just call it out there.

So, and I even put in there, it's like, if you bought this book and you don't like it, I will more than happy to send you a refund for it.

Like, if you thought it was something else, and that's why I also put in front of the book because I don't want to waste people's time too, if they don't think it like it's the right, right fit for them.

Yeah, absolutely.

So, 1 million followers in 30 days.

Not to give the recipe because you give it in the book.

So, everybody can get the full recipe in the book.

He goes line by line.

But could you highlight a couple of things that

the average ordinary person should do, not can do, but should do to grow an audience?

And I'm not even going to say a million followers because for a lot of people,

20,000 followers is a lot, right?

Like I like to

correlate this to my followers and my engagers.

If they showed up in your front lawn, what would that look like, right?

And so for some people, a thousand is a big number and should be a big number to them.

So what are the recipe?

What are a couple of things that people can do to start growing their following now that they're active on it?

So

the first place to start is to know that success in these platforms is not luck.

It is a science, and that science is storytelling.

So the better you are at telling stories, the more success that you're going to have.

You don't need to focus on what what time a day you're trying to post, what hashtags you need to use, how many times a day that you need to post.

None of those things matter in today's social media.

The bottom line is how can you become the best storyteller possible on this platform?

So the first place to start, as we were talking about earlier, is what is the format

that is best suited for you?

Because this is not about reinventing the wheel.

Again, stories as we know it, like the earliest stories date back to 50,000 years ago.

50,000 years we've been telling stories.

Stories have been used to build civilizations.

It has been used to build humanity.

And today, stories are being used to build brands.

So if it can build a civilization, it can help you build your brand.

So what we do is we start with the format, the structure that we can insert our message into it.

Now, The amazing thing is a lot of these formats that we talk about predate social media and that's how we know they work.

So we mentioned Man on the Street.

The first time Man on the Street was used was back in 1954 for the first season of The Tonight Show.

1954 and it's still being used today to generate billions and billions of views.

Another format that's popular that people have probably seen is called two characters, one light bulb.

And it's when it's the same person that plays two different characters.

So they play the expert and the novice and then they break down a common misconception about an industry.

So you have like Mark Tilbury that does it about finance, or Erica Kohlberg, that does it around like the fine print in legal contracts.

I remember seeing that

format in the first Austin Powers movie in like 1998, where he played Dr.

Evil and Austin Powers and breaking down these poignant things about society and things of that nature.

So the first thing is, as we're tackling social media, we need to learn from those that have mastered it before us.

Like I said, I started my career in the film industry.

I went to film school.

So, what do you do when you go to film school?

Well, you sit down and you watch classic movies.

You learn how to write screenplays and these things to learn, well, how do the masters do it?

How do the best storytellers in that format leverage it?

So, the best piece of advice that will, it works every single time

if you do it is

study the platform you want to master, find the format that works, that excites you, and then just study what's the difference between that format generating millions of views versus that format generating thousands of views.

And study all these small elements and tweaks to it.

And if you do that, that is the only thing, the only thing that you need to pay attention to, and you will have success.

If anybody else is telling you otherwise, I would just ignore them because you're going to spin your wheels and waste a tremendous amount of time, energy

in doing that.

But if we think about anything that we do in life, we learn from those that come before us.

And telling stories on social media is no different.

Absolutely.

Absolutely.

So,

your other books, man, like, again, I'm so gravitated towards them.

And like I told you, I have them for everybody that's watching.

They're literally the top two, the first two books that you could see: The Guide to Going Viral and Hook Point.

The Guide to going viral so i i know you talk about it in the book and i want to i want to say this message to people um because i think sometimes people

try too hard to go viral instead of letting it be a natural thing i'm not saying that you shouldn't put energy into it but where people go wrong is their first few posts that they do they're like oh i'm going viral with this one and it misses the mark because it's not who they are what are some tips that you give out in the guide to going viral that are very important for people to know?

So I think very valid and great points.

Number one is

I never believe in going viral for the sake of going viral.

Like

it just, that's not why we're here.

We're here to have whatever your goal is.

If you're trying to build your brand, you're trying to sell.

products, you're trying to share your message, it needs to be related to your end goal.

And if you're doing something that's not related to your subject matter, your expertise, or what you're trying to achieve, even if it gets a billion views, it doesn't matter.

It has to correlate to who you are, how you want to show up, and what you're looking to achieve.

In addition, like that term virality, and it's funny because

we developed that title as initially a keynote probably like two and a half, three years ago.

So the term virality wasn't as like loaded as a term as it is today, but everybody seems to be talking about like social media virality.

But to me, like going viral isn't a specific number.

To me, it's about the impact.

And like you said, some people can get 50,000 views on something and they've made the impact.

They've generated the revenue.

They've grown their business, whatever that is.

And that's amazing.

Like if that is what you're trying to achieve, don't let anybody else cut that down.

Some people are looking for 50,000 views.

Some people are looking for 500,000.

Some people we work with are are looking for millions or tens of millions or hundreds of millions.

Whatever that number is, that number is based upon what you are trying to achieve.

So with all of that, we have to look at what are the stories that connect people to who we are,

what we represent, and how we are going to serve them.

And that's where that level of scale and success comes from.

So that's the entire

guide to going viral book dives deep into the creative model we've developed over the past eight years that tells you, well, how do you choose a format?

How do you do that research?

How do you analyze it?

How do you essentially learn all these nuances to tell your story to show up authentically for yourself so that you can achieve the level of goals that you're looking for?

Got it.

That is, that is so needed, man.

Like, again,

I think people put the wrong energy on virality and not focused on the actual content.

Like, I know you've seen this.

People can go viral with awful content, right?

But I think what's more impactful is the messaging, the storytelling, and what's your end goal that you're actually trying to accomplish.

And again, you go through all of that in all of your books.

That seems to be a central theme.

How important

is it for you to know who your audience is?

Because again, I think people miss that mark too.

Everyone on Instagram isn't your audience.

Everyone on LinkedIn isn't your audience.

The 2 billion people on YouTube are not your audience.

How important is it to signify who that is?

So number one, I think it's critically important that you understand the audience that drives your business.

Because if you don't know that, then your business is probably struggling pretty significantly right now.

So I think number one is like,

how are you going to drive business growth?

And the reason that I focus on that a lot is sustainability.

Like I've seen this.

I worked with the first wave of influencers back in like 2006, 2007.

And it repeat, there's these cycles that repeat like every two or three years where you have

a slew of content creators or influencers or even business owners that kind of scale on social media, but then they fall off.

And a lot of them burn out.

A lot of them quit.

Why?

Because it's not driving the underlying revenue goals or business goals that allows them to keep doing it.

Like you need the foundation to allow you the time, the energy to keep doing that.

So that's critically important.

Number two is one of the big things that we work with people on and

really advise is

we leverage something called the generals principle.

So if you take take your core expertise, obviously you have specific people that are going to buy your products or services.

Those are your core customers and you want to speak to them clearly and connect with them.

However, the way social media works, like the algorithms are looking for content that they can see to millions and millions of people and can grab and hold their attention.

So anytime we open up our favorite app, there's probably 150,000 pieces of content it could see to us and our customers based upon who we follow, the content we've engaged with.

So, what that means is there's a ton of competition out there.

We're no longer just competing against our direct competition.

Let's just say we're a dentist.

We're not just competing against other dentists.

We're competing against LeBron James.

We're competing against Kim Kardashian, Netflix, Kevin Hart, like all that teenage influencer down the street.

So, what the algorithms are looking for is how do we hold people's attention as long as possible so we can serve more ads.

So, what we look at is how do we take something like like dentistry or taxes or legal advice and speak to the core audience, our core customer base, but also broadening it out from there.

So, for an example,

we worked with a leather craftsman named Tanner Leatherstein that sells leather goods and products.

He's just super passionate about high-end leather goods.

But when he first started out, he was stuck at 2,000 followers because he was just making commercials about his leather wallets and things of that nature.

So, we helped them develop a format called Is It Worth It?

where he buys a $5,000 Chanel handbag, deconstructs it on screen, and tells you whether it's worth the money that you're paying for it.

That format, that ability to tell stories, took him from $2,000 to $2.5 million with over 500 million people viewing his content, and he can't even keep his products on the shelf.

So, that's kind of the big element here: how do we speak to our core audience, our core customer base, but still make it accessible and interesting to the general wider audience

brandon man like so i i could literally talk to you for hours and i'm not going to do that because nobody will listen to to me and my show but they should totally listen to you man like

last question and i want to go to hook point here

you talk about the three seconds right like we we've got three seconds to capture people but then you also talk about you've got to build meaning meaningful long-term connections as well.

How do you balance three seconds and long-term connection?

So we live in a microattention world, but it's microattention from grabbing that attention.

So we have three seconds to grab the attention,

but once we've grabbed it, and if we're a good storyteller, we can hold it.

So if we look at, like, look at the medium that we're talking on right now.

Like, this is half an hour or longer.

Like, if we grab the attention, people will sit here and listen to us for 30 minutes.

If you think about like the latest season of Squid Games just came out, people will literally sit there and binge watch that entire thing in one day.

And it's the same thing with social media.

It took me like two or three days.

It wasn't,

I couldn't do it in one because it's so heavy.

But there's the same thing applies for social media is like, we need to master those first three seconds to have a chance to tell our story.

Now, it's not just about mastering the first three seconds because we have to retain that attention.

But we live in a world where there's now 5 billion people on social media.

There's over a billion pieces of social media content uploaded every day.

There is a lot of competition, but that doesn't mean that once we've got somebody to stop and pay attention to us, that they won't stick with us for a long period of time.

I like it.

I like it.

What's a quick tip that you have to dominate three seconds?

What's something everybody could do now to win or should focus on to win three seconds?

Let me start with a major mistake that I see people make.

They try to do too much, too much in the first three seconds.

So they'll have like a title card, they'll have captions, they'll have somebody talking.

And you can't do that, but it's very, it's an advanced thing.

Like you need to have a clear visual hierarchy.

It's like, what do you want somebody to pay attention to in that first three seconds?

Like,

we were just analyzing a video yesterday, and there was a title card.

And we're like, there is no way that somebody can read this in three seconds.

They won't connect with it.

So be super clear about what you want people to pay attention to in those first three seconds.

In addition, have a very strong promise of value.

Like, why should they stop?

Why should they stick around?

What is the promise of value that you're going to deliver on that says, you know what, I'm going to stop and watch and consume this piece of content?

Amazing.

Amazing.

Brendan, man, I know you're a busy human.

You're one of the most sought-after,

I don't want to call you a consultant, but you're one of the most sought-after strategists in the world.

So I just appreciate you taking time.

This was truly honorable for me just to be able to pick your brain because a lot of these questions are questions that I personally have.

So, bro, I just wanted to thank you for taking time.

No, thank you.

It was a true pleasure connecting with you and everybody that tuned into this.

And I definitely look forward to seeing your content in my feed soon and seeing your progress and success.

Yes, because I'm hiring you as my coach.

So we'll have that conversation when we hang up.

But where can people find and follow you?

And where do you want people to go to?

Well, just a little bit of a gift for your audience.

Like,

if they go to goingviral.cc forward slash M-U-P,

you know, stands for MIC Unplugged Podcast, they can download a copy of the Guide to Going Viral book for free.

They can get a PDF there and it breaks down a lot of what we talked about today.

If they want to learn more about

HookPoint, they can just go to hookpoint.com or they can check out like Instagram, LinkedIn.

I release a lot of information there.

I respond to DMs there as well.

But those will probably be the best places to start.

That was such a generous offer, brother.

Like,

I appreciate you genuinely for that.

As this episode is coming up, I'm going to make sure that I'm sharing that code.

I'm going to share all of your links and everything.

If you're listening, if you're watching, go connect with Brendan right now because you're missing out.

And Brendan, I'm going to tell you, you can't charge enough for what you do, brother, because the impact that you make, the lives that you change.

is second to none.

No, I appreciate you.

Thank you so much for having me on the show.

And yeah, I look forward to continuing the conversation.

you got it and for all the viewers and listeners remember your because is your superpower go unleash it

thanks for tuning in to this episode of mick unplugged if today hits you hard then imagine what's next be sure to subscribe rate and share this with someone who needs it And most of all, make a plan and take action because the next level is already waiting for you.

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Send us an email to hello at mickunplugged.com.

Until next time, ask yourself how you can step up.