September 15, 2023 • 51 mins
This time out, Gordon and Ger check-in to fly social with Ryanair (no checked luggage and the crisps are extra). Their pilot is Michael Corcoran, until recently Ryanair's Head of Social and Creative Content.
Michael talks about the importance of reach over followers, why community matters, what social media really is (and isn't), and outlines a non-scientific (but completely scientific) way of effective content creation.
Beware: this episode may even make you like Ryanair—the airline we all love to despise, but fly with anyway.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:01):
This is Functional & Fabulous, the omnichannel podcast where we unbox tales of online retail and digital transformation.
In this episode, we ask the big questions...
That was a whopper question.
We ask the difficult questions...
It feels like I'm in the Oireachtas.
We repeat the questions...
(00:22):
I'm gonna have to say that again because I was...
Ger fights for his intellectual property...
So kind of, like, fortune favours the brave.
Yes, but I made a better one...
Serendipity comes to those who plan.
And Gordon writes the show notes...
The episode where Ger asks a really long question.
This episode of Functional & Fabulous is brought to you with pride by StudioForty9, retail ecommerce experts, omnichannel growth consultants and cut-through performance marketing specialists.
(00:54):
StudioForty9, where your digital retail success is built.
Hello, you're very welcome to Functional & Fabulous.
Today, we're delighted to welcome Michael Corcoran to the show.
Until recently, Michael spent two years as Head of Social and Creative Content at Ryanair, where he built and led the social media team that generated some of the world's most talked about and successful social media content.
(01:16):
Not shy of a challenging role, prior to that Michael spent nearly three years as Head of Social and Content for Paddy Power Betfair.
Michael, we're delighted to have you here.
You're very welcome.
All right, guys.
Thanks for having me.
Welcome to the podcast.
Cheers. Where do we start?
What an intro.
Where do we start?
Don't give me a big ego.
I have a long and wandering question to start off with, so you're going to have to bear with me a little bit.
(01:41):
It's about strategy.
It's always struck me that Ryanair has been super clear about their strategy and mission, which is you will not find a cheaper seat for a given route with any other airline.
Everything the company does from the 25-minute turnarounds to charging for boarding pass printouts to slots in airports with gates a million miles away focuses intently on servicing that strategy.
(02:05):
When I hear you talk about the social media strategy for Ryanair, it struck me that you're equally clear on what you're trying to do, which was, the goal was to be the most talked about brand on social media with these tactics of dropping grenades to change the sentiment about the brand and create the brand advocates.
So everything you're doing on social media
either educates the prospective customer
(02:27):
about the nature of what low-cost air travel actually is
and then invites the customer to become empathetic
towards the brand proposition
and the restrictions that it poses
on what you can actually do as a business
by making self-deprecating jokes about the restrictions
and inviting people to share or increase the reach of the brand,
(02:47):
ensuring it'll always be considered by the customer.
It seems really easy in retrospect to do that sort of a thing and I suppose in practice, how difficult was it to set the strategy and what advice would you give about strategy setting and then aligning the team around it?
That was a whopper question.
Whopper, wasn't it?
That was, like, the most whopper...
And thank you for joining today's podcast.
(03:08):
Thanks for listening.
Goodbye.
Like the most whopper question ever.
God, it feels like I'm in the Oireachtas getting, you know...
Who are you lying to?
Minutes or questions here.
I think it's a lot simpler than you think.
The strategy in its purest form has to ladder back to brand or business in some shape or form.
(03:30):
If it's not, you're not really addressing the important whys and certainly in social media, a lot of what happens incorrectly is it's a lot of tactics and being present there for the sake of being there and not understanding why you're there in the first place.
So it's very simple for Ryanair because it's automatically connected to brand or business and it's been kind of underpinned by your quintessential pieces of insight from a strategy-building point of view, brand category, customer and we layered then that over with social media.
(04:05):
How easy was it to convince to do?
Well, not very easy at all when we haven't really reinvented the wheel per se in what we do on social media for Ryanair as a form of communications.
Anyone who's familiar with Ryanair in their earlier days, PR was a very low-cost, high-return marketing tool for the business for a very, very long time and our wonderful and intelligent CEO Michael O'Leary, even I know we're not time stamping this podcast, but yesterday getting cream-pied in the face in Brussels...
(04:38):
You know, he has been using that as a means to generate top-of-mind awareness for quite a long period of time, and as time went by and PR started, I guess, to saturate and the growth of social media started to increase,
it was a natural transition to deliver a similar form of low-cost, high-return reach for the business.
(05:00):
Now, before I started, I can't take the credit.
It was kind of being done in its early days anyway, but when I came in, I was given permission, the carte blanche opportunity to put shape on that actual strategy and put the building blocks and pieces to actually execute it correctly.
There was a lot of ad hoc opportunities where it delivered really good talkability, but it allowed me to put shape on it, put some thought on it, direct it in the way that the current landscape suited and then started to build the team around it to execute on it quite effectively.
(05:36):
So yeah, look, it's been quite simple.
Like, people think it is a lot harder to do than what a lot of people, again, I'm not wording this correctly, but it's easy because it's already been done, only done differently.
And once we had a couple of opportunities where we proved it could emulate what we did in the past, we got the full permission to go full charge and we supercharged it then over the course of the last two years.
(06:07):
And I know that's a struggle for many because I sit here in a very privileged position, being given that carte blanche opportunity, being given the responsibility that many other brands and businesses either don't have the bravery to make the right decisions for their brand or business, or there's people too high up who are getting in the way of actually doing it correctly.
(06:27):
This is something I'd kind of, like, to zero in on a little bit, if we can, because, like, I've heard you speak a couple of times, and you always say Ryanair is very unique.
It's in a very unique position, or it was in a very unique position that it's had this history of quite controversial PR.
And a lot of other brands don't have that history and maybe don't have that clarity.
(06:53):
And I'd love to hear a little bit from you about where you think those brands have been going wrong, because there seems to just be a need of, like, let's repost influencers.
Again, where I have a problem with say social media as a form of marketing or as an industry is it's still too early days and people think they know what they're doing.
(07:16):
And it's almost like a really bad game of Chinese whisper mixed with some people selling a pyramid scheme.
And what essentially has happened is you've had a group of people who have been quite influential in what is the right or wrong way to deliver social media.
And that's kind of fed into the ether of how people are trying to approach it all the time.
(07:37):
And also, when it started to become popular and again, I go back to, funnily enough, I worked in PR in my first job in my early days.
I was absolutely terrible at it.
The media relations wasn't great.
I couldn't stand kind of working with journalists and selling my soul for the latest can of beans or this new diet soda drink, trying to get publications to write about it.
(08:04):
But also I couldn't write for shit either because I'm dyslexic.
So it really didn't suit me at all.
And thankfully, the person who headed that business told me that in the most bluntest way.
At the time, I was very, very upset.
But when looking back, it was the best thing she could have ever done for me.
But what happened was, like, in those early days, you saw advertising agencies, PR agencies, all the agencies who were service marketing companies saw social as this big, new, shiny Holy Grail.
(08:32):
And the only solution to them to grow in that space and generate more business is to make content or to manage content.
And content and management of content equals money.
And then what happened and what grew and grew and grew was that in order to make more money in the industry, we'd make more content.
Then the recommendation was always volume in organic rather than really looking back and taking a step back and thinking, what is my problem?
(08:56):
What is my opportunity?
Where can social actually deliver some sort of impact?
We focus on that and make a strategic, informed decision to do what's right for the brand or business now on the platforms based on so many variables and take it forward.
The problem has been, is we created this big echo chamber of volume of content frequency in organic and we've just all done the same thing in the same way.
(09:20):
And it's created this big corporate vanilla, see a sameness that switches most people off.
Because if you really think about it, what are the main reasons why people go to social media?
One is to be entertained.
It's between what they're doing during their day.
It's jumping on, it's binging, it's finding instant entertainment or some form of escapism from the shit show that's going on in the world today.
(09:44):
And most brands aren't really catering to it.
They're trying to push what they want them to consume rather than what the, let's call them customers or social media users want.
And that's where it's kind of going wrong all the time.
Now, you can still sell on social media in a very clever way.
But if you think organic or the unpaid side of things is going to do it, you're a bit deluded.
(10:06):
Is there anything in social media that is actually really social anymore?
That's a kind of esoteric question now.
It's like...
Because if you think about it, so anybody who wants to be social with their friends, we'll say, they're going there and all of the younger generations are already doing this.
They're off on private group chats and that sort of thing.
(10:29):
If I'm going to Twitter, it's because I want to be entertained.
I want to see what Donald Trump is up to.
I might go and see what Ryanair is up to so I can have a giggle.
So what's the element of it that is still actually social?
So we're on to the bigger question.
Is social media social?
It's probably the wrong name for it in its entirety anyway.
We should have called it something else.
We should have just called it some form of media or channel or platform because even at MAP, the collective term for social media right now is probably incorrect when you look at all the platforms that are out there.
(10:59):
Even TikTok.
TikTok don't consider themselves to be a social media platform.
They're an entertainment channel.
They're a media channel and that's what they're trying to push rather than social.
But it is a very good point and it's like the generational changes.
The Instagram era kind of ruined social media.
This fake filtered nature of what's happening.
The perfect you rather than the real you.
(11:19):
And Gen Z's absolutely detest that.
They want honesty.
They want realism.
They want to see you live and breathe your traumas on the internet because that's being honest.
And it's almost a form of dark humour or entertainment that they get from it.
But they don't go there to try and be something they're not.
They are also the behaviour that they're using a lot of, as you said, dark social media messaging channels or dark platforms to message rather than public because, I don't know, it's just a generational shift that it's how they engage.
(11:49):
It's just a culture change.
But as a collective, yeah, look, social media is not really a social place.
I think we all just ate into the Kool-Aid of the Zuckerbergs of the world when it was introduced, you know, back, what, 15 years ago?
Yeah.
And it's carried on ever since.
It's probably a really bad name for it.
Yeah, because in reality, I know that, you know, you're not really counting followers.
(12:12):
I mean, followers, it's a good metric.
It's useful to have it, but it's a bit of a vanity metric.
You're looking to get reach and your reach is going to be determined on how entertaining you are, really, because then it's going to, the product or the content you produce is going to be shared.
So like in the olden days, followers was a good indication because you were offered and it's kind of like this life cycle of social media platform.
(12:34):
When they start, you've got loads of free reach.
You get loads of followings.
You'll reach as many of those people as possible.
Then they invite brands and businesses to come in and they say, oh, here, this is a rich space for a free audience for you to actually reach your customers.
And then they'll get to a point where there's so many brands or businesses or whether that platform now has the advertising tech built in the background.
Now we're going to start offering you ads and penalising that reach so you can spend more.
(12:58):
And now the platform is broken for when it comes to an organic play.
And now they're trying to generate advertising and they have this big, rich, active audience for you to reach at a cost.
But for me, followers is not and followers should never be...
Like in the olden times, it was and it's again, there's outdated metrics and things.
If you were to ask me what is the most important metric for any brand or business using these platforms to actually get value from its reach and its reach only.
(13:24):
You know, everything else is irrelevant.
Like engagement is probably one of the most over-fluffed metric used on it because, you know, that doesn't take into account positive or negative.
And any social media technical solution or tool out there trying to tell you that they know how to break that down is also talking bullshit because you can't.
Now, maybe this might change with AI.
(13:44):
I don't know.
And again, I might eat my words in the future, but, you know, sentiment and culture and tone can't be picked up on a lot of these platforms and you can't determine.
But also take Ryanair, for example.
If we were to measure engagement rate as a sign of success, we would probably be saying we're, again, the best brand on the internet.
(14:06):
Probably that engagement rate is inflated by more negative comments than positive comments, more customer queries than anything else.
And the whole thing becomes flawed and skewed because you don't really have access to all that information to test it properly anyway.
You could pull a bit of a Suella Braverman.
I saw you were talking about her on Twitter recently and you can say, whatever about the actual numbers, it is record-breaking engagement.
(14:27):
Yeah, of course.
Again, you can spin it whatever way you want.
But like for me, it's reach.
And then it depends on the objective or the use of the platform as well.
Like if you're going paid first, which most brands should really be doing and not doing organic and wasting time, energy and budget.
And now you're starting to look at conversion metrics, you know, when it comes to running DR campaigns or conversion campaigns.
(14:48):
And then from brand side of things, uplift studies, which you can get with paid media campaigns that are a very, very effective measurement tool as well.
So you actually, have you shifted the dial in any shape or form?
Are you just buying eyeballs of people and getting an impression for something somebody may not have even watched in the first place?
But when it comes to the follower thing, it has changed recently because we would have been reliant on the follower interacting with that piece of content to push it to other humans on the Internet for us to get more reach.
(15:19):
But since TikTok's algorithms have been very fortuitous, where discovery and explore is an important part of what they do, a lot of your content gets pushed beyond your follower base immediately and it gets an opportunity to win if it meets the threshold of whatever the algorithm is.
And again, if anybody tries to tell you any algorithm hack or how it works, they're completely again talking through their bloody arse.
(15:41):
What you need to know is it probably needs to reach a certain amount of people, have a certain level of engagement, at a certain amount of pace, to let this machine say, oh, this looks like something somebody likes and enjoys.
It's similar to another topic some other human enjoys.
We're now going to push this further and further and get more reach.
So the follower number becomes more irrelevant these days because the nature of the algorithm has changed to push better quality content.
(16:05):
And by quality, I mean entertaining, engaging, where the audience is reacting on it, not just polished, beautiful, made video content.
Yeah, and being kind of, let's say, straight in how you look at it allows you then to build up some of the tactics and some of the playbooks and some of the checklists, I'm assuming.
So, for example, you talk about, okay, I need the pace of engagement to be quick at the uptake.
(16:31):
You know, I don't want to, I need it to gain traction.
I need it to be kind of, have an entertainment value of some description.
So that then allows you to say, right, well, which of my posts today are meeting those metrics?
The ones that aren't doing it, I'm going to take them out, for example.
So I know that you guys do that on Twitter.
So you have that ability to kind of build up, let's say, a playbook and a checklist on a post-by-post basis.
(16:56):
So I presume that you, in Ryanair, and this is one of the things that I'm kind of interested in, is when you're trying to align the team, you know, just saying, you know, like, our strategy is to be the most, the world's most talked about brand.
You need to then say, and these are the parameters we're going to operate within.
Obviously there's always this question of the legality and, you know, whether or not you're going to say things that are going to cause problems from a legal perspective, et cetera, et cetera.
(17:26):
So you have these parameters and then here is how the post should look.
Here are the things that we need to check off.
If it doesn't make it, let's throw it out.
And then this is our playbook and here is how we're going to, once we get this viral post or this post that is actually gaining a lot of engagement, here are the things that we're going to follow up with.
(17:46):
I presume you guys had that kind of playbook and set of, set of...?
Yeah, no, it was iterative.
And like, let's go on a little bit of a journey here.
So our strategy, if best articulated, is to take a creator-led approach to social media by doing two things.
Creating newsworthy, relevant, topical content, the news tracking, the reactive stuff.
(18:07):
I think a lot of people would allude to when they think about Ryanair Social, but then always on is the second part.
So deliver always on content that changes the perception.
So the first word problems that we unearthed from our insight that we want to change the expectations of flying low-cost.
And within that, we have what's called like a jab-jab-hook approach.
You know, we know the reactive content, if time and delivered correctly and starts to get momentum and reach, gives us huge amounts of reach on a day-to-day basis.
(18:35):
But what it also does, it gives us an opportunity to follow up with equally entertaining content if somebody interacts with that piece of content.
That's one thing about the algorithms.
I think it's fair to say we can and say we agree with.
If somebody interacts with a piece of your content, whether it's watching for a certain amount of time or physically engaged with it, it's telling them that, oh, I like this account or this type of content.
(18:58):
I'm probably going to serve it to you a couple of more times to see do you like more of it and would you like to see more of it?
And what that allows us to do creates this window of opportunity across our channels to be seen by more people.
And it's that always on content then that delivers continuous growth in our reach.
And what we try and do then is, like, how we were set up, we were split into like two pods.
(19:23):
There was a reactive and community team.
It does what it says on the tin.
They were the newsjackers.
They were the people who had their tools and processes to discover newsworthy opportunities across a number of different platforms using Twitter, TweetDeck, Reddit and the likes to see what was on the pulse, to curate the topical news stories of the morning and the evening to see where are the windows of opportunities that they could win.
(19:45):
And in that discovery process, those people would also be at the same time probably generating starting ideas that they could actually then execute on.
And sometimes they wouldn't have it.
But when they pulled them and they took turns, they put it into their chat environment and then they tissueed out those ideas.
And what we would do is in that we would have five seconds, or five minutes on the clock when it came to actually delivering those concepts.
(20:05):
If you couldn't think of a strong, simple and smart concept within that five minutes, the idea was gone.
The news story probably wouldn't have legs.
If you had merit where you wanted to design something that you felt would deliver on it, you were given more time to execute on it because timing is everything when it comes to getting that attention.
Even if an idea is half-cooked or even if it's okay in its humour, if you're out faster than anybody else, and you're talking about something that is breaking in that moment, you're probably going to get the most amount of interactions. And once you get that most amount of interactions in those early stages, it's probably going to feed it to more and more people.
(20:45):
So therefore, your content is going to take off.
So the timing is everything when it comes to that.
And that's part of the process of those discovery phases.
It's part of the tissueing of the ideas, but also it's part of the conditioning process as you're embedded and grow within the team that as we moved on things faster, the ideas were coming quicker and almost you naturally were able to react and deliver content in a better way.
(21:13):
And that didn't necessarily happen all the time.
And you mentioned earlier that if something did go out and it just didn't perform, we'd delete it because it just didn't meet the criteria or the strength.
And we did not want that to get in the way of other content that would go out that day to potentially perform or reach those eyeballs.
And on the other side, you've got always on.
(21:34):
So the method and the processes is much more different there.
So from an always on point of view,
that's a little bit more thought out
than quickly curated
of what's happening in the world.
That was really focused
on the pain points
or the first-world problems
of travel and traveling low-cost,
that we could shift the mindset,
explain or educate
(21:54):
in an equally entertaining way,
taking a very similar
design approach to it,
which is quite lo-fi,
unpolished, the anti-corporate,
let's call it,
and deliver that in advance.
And the process there for us was all about getting a week's worth of content.
There was no science to this of how much it was.
All we wanted to do was commit to a threshold or a volume of content that we knew that part of the team could deliver on a week-to-week basis and deliver that consistently every day of the week.
(22:26):
And how we figured that out is again similar.
We looked at trending sounds.
We looked at the pain points, the consistent first-world things that people were talking about that we could then recreate entertaining content off the back of it.
The team would produce that one week in advance and then we would then run it as a scheduled between the reactive things that happened during the day.
(22:47):
So as that happened, that cocktail of jab-jab-hook, that reactive content plus that always on content working together created this system of volume, volume, volume and allowed us to reach scales of content that probably people are impressed with and don't understand how we get there.
And I can even talk to you about always on and how we got to even a smarter way of doing that as well.
(23:09):
Yeah.
What is the smarter way of getting to the always on?
So there's this, again, this goes back to my point earlier over that, you know, the success or what people thought was the best way to do content was volume, volume, volume.
And that is to an extent, but for the vast majority of people, there's only so much time, resource and budget you have to max out on that every time.
(23:32):
And if you're relying on agencies to do that, it's going to cost you an arm and a leg.
So the point I made earlier was this is this little bit of an echo chamber that, you know, volume and making content was the Holy Grail of doing the best work.
And there was an attitude for a long time that when you made something and posted it on the internet, it's done.
You can never use it again.
(23:52):
Now you imagine going to a creative agency or brand and telling them we need to make a TV ad.
It's going to cost a quarter of a million euro.
We're going to put it on TV, but only going to publish it once and it's done.
It has no value anymore.
It's run its course.
You tell them that, no, that's stupid.
(24:13):
You know, you run your TV spot numbers of times to reach as many people as possible and also deliver recall, you know, so people can actually remember the message or remember the creative that you delivered in order for them to think of you and be top-of-mind, the basics of marketing.
But for so long, people think, and they still do, once I create one piece of content and publish it, it's done.
(24:35):
I can never use it again.
So for me, that was absolute bullshit.
And I wanted to create an environment where we were reusing the best content, because when you publish it once, you're only going to reach a certain amount of people.
You don't reach everyone.
And when you publish it a second time, you might reach some of those users again, those high-engaged users on your platform, but you're probably going to reach 90% plus of new people again.
(24:58):
So what we did was, again, it wasn't science.
It was all about, we have four members of the team who are dedicated to this.
How much content can they produce on a week-to-week basis without going into overdrive?
So we set a benchmark of, right, we need to deliver, say, 10 pieces of video content that can be published across multiple channels and 10 pieces of static creative one week in advance every week.
(25:24):
And we started to build that system.
Now that took forever to get to, because they weren't used to doing it in advance.
They weren't used to working together.
They weren't used to figuring this out of concepting, executing, having fully planned with copy on a plan, finalised the week in advance.
And that took time to train and train.
But we eventually got to that threshold of 10.
Then what we did is, as that content was being published, we were looking at which stuff was being stickier, what was resonating more, what was reaching more people.
(25:52):
And we set a benchmark, again, not a science.
We started just to see how much people we were reaching at first.
And it was modest enough.
It was 60,000, 70,000 views.
Again, modest for Ryanair.
If anybody else said, oh, I'm getting 60,000, 70,000 views on one publish of the video, they'd bite your hand off.
But what we were doing was we were trying to set a threshold.
Okay, this is good.
People like this.
So we started to create what's called a banger bank.
(26:15):
So what the banger bank was, if any piece of video content reached 100,000 views, we stored that in our bank to reuse for another day.
Anything else that didn't, we parked for now.
We did still look at it, see could we have made it better?
Any learnings we could work on to improve that idea the next time.
And we'd go again.
And essentially what we did was over the course of months, we built that banger bank of the best-performing content of those, say, 10 videos or static means every week that hit 100,000 views.
(26:42):
And we worked it back into the content planning cycle.
So what we got to eventually was we had about 150 or more really good-quality videos that were sticky already that we started to cycle into the mix.
So what did that allow us to do?
It allowed us then, rather than taking, making 10 of each every week, we started to make eight of each and bringing two previous pieces of content.
(27:02):
And we started to move that cycle along where we got to six and we got to four.
Now we're only focusing on making four pieces of really quality, well-thought-out pieces of content every week.
And we're cycling the content time and time again.
Great.
I love the way you, I love the way you say that's, this is not a science.
That sounds very scientific to me.
(27:22):
It is quite scientific.
Very, very intent, like high intent in what you're doing there.
A practical question.
So I can imagine people are listening to this going, right, okay, yeah, we should actually, we do make good stuff that we could reuse.
So in practical terms, if you think about the Instagram wall, how would you repost that content?
(27:46):
Would a piece of content appear multiple times?
Would it, would you delete the original and repost the new?
How did you even manage that?
This is another bit of a behaviour thing that we all need to get over, especially marketeers.
The only people who probably go to your wall or your newsfeed to look at that content is people who work in social media.
(28:09):
Most other people, their behaviour on the platforms is not to go to the channel because they're in the feed.
You know, so they don't care about that.
So again, take a news story.
They might see the same news story, the same video of, let's take, Michael O'Leary getting cream -pied in the face, which is all over the internet yesterday.
It's appearing between other pieces of content, whether it's in the story format or the upswipes format of Instagram and all channels.
(28:34):
They don't care.
They don't consume the content in that way, unless they're purposefully going to do it in a passive way.
And most times that's social media people, or that's a behaviour that's similar to YouTube.
Now Instagram over the past tried to do that with how they tried to build a platform to compete with YouTube.
But the vast majority of people do not go to your channel to do it.
(28:55):
So again, these are things we didn't care about.
There was things like your highlights on Instagram.
We didn't care about it at that moment in time, there was how beautifully and polished and laid out your Instagram wall is.
We didn't care about it.
That was time, energy and focus that wasn't delivering reach for us.
Now, having said that, now that we've reached a certain volume of reach on a consistent basis and built the systems to do that.
(29:20):
Now there are more people coming looking at the profile to figure out, maybe binge and maybe consume.
So now is the time we can start looking at maybe the aesthetics a bit more or making more decisions like that.
It's a great mindset.
When it came to publishing on multiple times, we set a minimum, say, timeline of I think it was 12 to 16 weeks.
You couldn't post that same piece of content.
(29:41):
So in that poor theory, it was probably enough time for whoever was, whoever saw that piece of content the first time to maybe not see it again.
And even if they didn't, we did see, we did see one or two people...
And I'm talking one or two people in the comment sections,
"Why are reposting your content, you did it again."
(30:01):
Now, at first, the team started to freak out a little.
It's just like, no, don't, forget about that.
That's only two people of potentially 150 to 200,000 people who are going to see this piece of content that have never seen it before.
So we got over it quite fast.
Can I ask, because I'm, we're getting the warnings already to wrap up and all of that.
It went really, really quickly.
We've only started, lads.
(30:22):
I know, I know.
There's actually two or three things I wanted to talk about.
I'm going to try and reduce them down to two.
See, most of our half an hour was taken up by Ger's whopper question...
You can take your pick.
But one area is community.
And, you know, we talked a little bit about this, the challenge of having built up a community on a particular platform.
(30:48):
What can you then do with it?
How portable is it?
What are the opportunities for the future?
Especially in the world of Elon Musk, who might whip an entire community out from under you.
And then the other one is the building of the team.
Because there is no doubt, but you built an incredible team.
And when you're talking about the team there, I mean, I think it might even surprise some people.
(31:13):
You know, it's not a huge team.
It's, what is it, eight people?
Eight people, yeah.
Eight people, yeah.
So, dealer's choice, community or team?
We'll try to do both.
Okay, go.
When we're talking about community, to me is there's, community is probably the biggest, one of the biggest things we all need to be focused on about the social media of next and the future.
(31:38):
Like for us, it's reach of play right now.
But because we've cultivated such a big audience, that if that channel gets switched off overnight, we don't own that audience.
You know, and you've put in such time, effort and energy into building that audience and that reach.
And this kind of contradicts the whole follower thing.
But nonetheless, we still have over 10 point something million followers.
(32:01):
But we reach people even without them following us on a large scale.
And if the lights go off, all that investment, yes, we can quantify it as we've delivered reach.
But there's a value to potentially building communities on the platforms that other brands may need to have as part of their strategy, because that's what they're trying to do.
(32:23):
Or that might be the objective of what they're trying to do.
And to me it's like, I'm concerned that if we walk away and it's switched off, we lose that audience.
So it's good to see right now that people are thinking about it and platforms like Meta, who are building Threads and are now allowing you to build a subscriber base predominantly, I think, it's going to be built from email and take that wherever you want to go.
(32:48):
So when we talk about that, is that's something that's keeping - not keeping me up at night - but it's making me think about, okay, if we garner and build these communities of people, we need to try and make sure that they can carry and come with us on the journey, wherever that may be next.
There's an apocalypse of social media channels or, even take Gen Alphas...
Gen Alphas aren't even that heavy publicly.
(33:09):
And this is the next generation that are coming.
They're turning into teens, I think, next year.
The other area like community again, again, another light bulb moment I was looking at was the next big social media app.
People are thinking it's Threads.
To me, it could be CapCut.
And CapCut, for example, is a TikTok-owned video creation tool.
But it's not, it's more.
(33:29):
They've literally integrated the search functionalities of TikTok and the trending sounds and functionality of TikTok into CapCut.
They also have follower functionality, community commenting, DMs. And why I think it's interesting, especially for the next generation on top of the community side of things, is most people or kids that are wanting to be on social media at the moment are not being allowed by their parents, especially TikTok, because, again, they're too young and it's safety concerns.
(33:56):
But they are giving them access to CapCut on their tablets with access to the internet, where they're essentially being and doing what they're doing, what they could be doing on TikTok in a more darker environment.
And CapCut is in, I think, the top five or six most downloaded apps already on the internet.
And if natively, these younger generations are already starting to engage and build communities and followings within this app, surely that's going to explode because they're native.
(34:25):
It's going to become second-nature to them as an actual platform.
And as they move to TikTok, it's going to work as two really incredible places for people to tap into.
That's a random thought built onto it...
so there's a bit of an extra free at no cost.
When it comes to the team side of things, your strategy is only as important as the execution of it.
(34:46):
And it's not just the tools and processes I talked about earlier, about the kind of the setup of the reactive and always on based on their two core parts of the strategy.
And you basically fundamentally build a team around those.
Is that is making sure you have the right people to deliver on your strategy.
And there are a lot of traditional social media people out here who are from the social media of old, who are thinking and acting in that way, who may not be fit for purpose for your team.
(35:12):
So I found it incredibly important building the one for Ryanair that I tried to identify people who could actually execute on the strategy in the way we needed.
We needed creators, but we also needed social media professionals.
And essentially building that team, I headhunted.
I didn't look in the normal places.
And again, I said this at a talk before and somebody asked, where do you find your team?
I don't find them on LinkedIn because that's definitely not the resource or the place to get the people I need.
(35:36):
You're probably going to identify the wrong characters.
So it takes a bit of groundwork.
And it's something I quite enjoy is identifying people with a particular set of skills that are a bit unpolished or rough around the edges, because I just need them for their strengths.
And if they're willing to come on board to improve their weaknesses, well then they have an appetite and a hunger to do their best for me.
And if I know where they want to go to next, that's also something I can commit to, because if you deliver for me in the best way possible now, I'll support you and where you want to go in your next step.
(36:06):
So essentially we headhunted and I found a particular set of people.
I wouldn't want to call them misfits, but they were just different skills, different personalities, all from different areas as individuals.
And they were all quite different.
But as a collective in time, they actually started to assume and played the role of the Ryanair admin.
(36:28):
And the combinations of all their strengths together is what made Ryanair social media team and its execution what it is today.
And I don't think we would have got there without that.
And I think the best and most proudest moment for me on that is they hated it at first working together.
Their personalities were all different.
(36:48):
You had people who are detail-oriented.
If you didn't follow the plan or stick to the plan, you weren't competent, you weren't able to do it.
And then you had incredibly creative people who knew the world of social media from a creative side of things, who were just these amazing, talented, creative people who could not organise their own birthday, like.
It was just, it was, they were terribly unorganised people.
(37:11):
And admittedly so.
But they were all hired to work together as a unit to execute.
Then at the same time, I made sure that the detail-oriented people were conditioned and developed better creative skills.
I had the creative people getting a little bit more organised.
They're still an unorganised bunch of individuals you'll ever meet.
But there was a moment in time, I think, three monts into it, where they understood and it clicked when they started to see the role each of them played, and the little things that they were getting pissed off with within the team environment started to alleviate because they knew their purpose and where they sat within the execution of the strategy.
(37:50):
And it just started then to go big, big, big, big, big from there.
It's definitely something to be very proud of.
I mean, the building of a team like that.
Again, it's not a, not an easy thing to do.
And I just want to ask you, Michael, and I'm sorry, I know I'm taking all the questions.
So beyond Ryanair, because that's where we are now.
What's next for Michael Corcoran?
That's a great question.
(38:11):
I'm enjoying a couple of months of gardening leave right now, and I'm, I'm lucky enough to be inundated with requests, but not enough.
So if people are listening and you're a chief marketing officer, a commercial officer, CEO who's got lots of money, wants to give me lots of money, please, please, please get in touch.
I'm looking, a lot of people from the calls I've had, and I've been very lucky to talk to some amazing people over the last couple of months who have seen what I've done at Ryanair and not just the execution side of things.
(38:41):
They've come to a talk.
They've listened to a podcast and hopefully they'll listen to this too.
And they've seen that there's thought put behind things.
There's also somebody who likes to put together the right teams and processes to execute, based on whatever time, resource and budget an individual brand or business has, and starts to put the building blocks in place to execute on it.
(39:02):
And is not afraid to push back and make the best-informed decisions.
So with the calls that I'm having, the conversations, they're all screaming at me to go consulting.
So it very may well be the route I take.
But I need to probably get somebody to hold my hand, because when I talked about those team people earlier, you've got the great creative people on one side of the detail-orientated.
(39:24):
I'm probably in the middle, leaning a bit more to the creative side.
So somebody with a bit more attention to detail and maybe a whip or a hurl or something to beat me with would be a good partner to have.
Well, you heard it here first.
So if that consultancy pops up, I think we're going to claim that we broke that news.
Whether we did or we didn't.
You can take it and send it to the masses.
(39:46):
Get me on Sky News and throw a cream pie in my face as well.
Excellent.
We'll see what we can do because it's all about reach.
That's my takeaway.
Michael, thank you so much for that.
I'm sitting here and my head's spinning of all of the things that I'm going to take away and take inspiration from, which is Gordon Code for steal and apply.
(40:10):
Steal with pride.
There's nothing wrong with that.
Most intelligent people steal with pride.
So thank you very much for joining us.
I had fun with you, guys.
Thanks very much. Take care.
Ger's sitting on his cable.
He's wrapped around his chair.
(40:35):
Come on, Madonna.
Sorry now.
Excuse me.
So what did we learn today?
What did I learn?
What did you learn?
What did I learn?
Well, I learned one thing.
Michael Corcoran is either very, very modest or very self-deprecating.
I think this idea, I really liked the, well, it's not science, but if we set a threshold of 60% and we bang out 80,000 views and we arrange that it doesn't reschedule for four months and then we do this...
(41:12):
It sounds very scientific to me.
That does sound like a science bit, doesn't it?
There's quite a lot of technique in that.
Well, I think, like, measurement...
Yeah.
So it's like, here's the objective.
Here are the measures.
What happened when we executed against those measures?
Did we hit them?
Didn't we?
Shall we make some changes?
So we've got some variables.
Change those variables.
(41:32):
See if it works.
Sounds quite science-y to me.
Test-and-learn in a live environment.
The other thing was the jab-jab-right-hook approach that he takes, and this idea of the reactive and always on.
And those two approaches, so there are the two teams that are set up to do this and those two approaches kind of combine together and it takes, in my opinion, it takes quite a bit of planning and quite a bit of laying the groundwork to get all of that working so that it seems on the front end incredibly whimsical and, oh, we're reacting to what's happening and, you know, oh, this just came up.
(42:13):
But in reality, it's always servicing the proposition and the strategy that he has put in place for the business.
Which I really enjoyed because actually he made strategy quite simple, which is as it should be and easy to understand.
(42:33):
So they have their core messages that they're trying to deliver, and the bit that he then layered in that I think was particularly useful, was this idea that the most important metric is reach.
And back to our question of is social media really social?
(42:58):
Really, it's a reach channel and that's how the channel is to be viewed.
And the message that you're trying to land has to be consistent, it has to be repetitive and then you're going to start seeing results.
Driven through to the rest of the business, and my little brain's going, oh, I can think of a couple of ways that I can now use that in some of the work that I'm doing to actually make some of the activity better through simplifying it and then adding the science bit.
(43:34):
But it's just being clear on what it is that you're doing.
You're not really trying to be social, make friends, et cetera.
You're, you know, you're trying to hit reach.
How do we hit reach?
By producing something that is shareable, you know, talk-worthy, entertaining, and then how do we identify when we've actually hit that reach?
Because we've got some momentum early, people are reacting to it quickly, you know, so there's quite a bit there under the hood that we were able to tap into.
(44:04):
The ad analogy is great as well.
This whole, like, you can use a piece of content more than once and the fact, when he spells it out, like, you wouldn't make an ad and then just share that once and that's it.
I thought that was so important
because it's certainly something
that I've never thought about,
you know, even as we were,
(44:25):
you know, preparing for this episode,
I went to the Ryanair site,
you know, there was four or five different posts
in one day about the cream pie
that Michael O'Leary got in the face
and, you know,
you're kind of looking at it going,
why are they,
they're basically reposting this?
But of course they are because people are sharing it, people are talking about it and not everybody is going to their actual profile and checking to see how many times they posted about it.
(44:50):
The magic of the For You page.
Yeah.
Of extending the reach beyond your followers.
So the question is, did Michael O'Leary pay the people to cream-pie him, I wonder?
It doesn't matter.
It doesn't matter whether he did or he didn't.
It's such great PR...
Did he pay them? Didn't he pay them?
No, he didn't.
Did he get all over the news?
If he didn't pay them, was he insanely, insanely witty? Absolutely.
(45:13):
But isn't it great...
That's what he's always done.
I used to love the Ryanair press ads and the Ryanair PR.
And really what Michael's done there, Corcoran, not O'Leary, is work on the translation of that into these new media mechanisms to make them relevant for today.
Whereas the newspaper would have been relevant when Ryanair first kind of rose to prominence in the early 2000s.
(45:41):
Yeah.
One of the things I like as well is they kind of turn the challenges that the business has into a thing that injects creativity into what they're doing.
So, you know, like the challenges, in order for it to be incredibly cheap, they can't, you can't print the boarding passes, you can't, you know, some of your options in terms of how you fly are taken away from you.
(46:05):
You can't take a lot of stuff with you when you go, et cetera, et cetera.
They have a post on Twitter at the moment and it's a photograph of a fashion show.
There's a guy wearing a jacket and the jacket has like 100 pockets in it.
And the Ryanair post says, don't even think about it.
I love that.
And you know, we all do.
But like, when you're looking at that post, you start to feel empathy for the brand.
(46:27):
You kind of think, oh, that's a nice, you know, they know themselves that it's, that they're restricting my option to take a load of stuff on board.
You get a little bit more ready to defend them, and you start to see people defending Ryanair and kind of saying to other people on Twitter, you know, well, it's a really cheap seat.
What do you expect?
I mean, what else do you want, you know, when you're buying a cheap seat?
(46:48):
You can add so many other things on.
You can buy your own Pringles, you can buy your own Coke.
Do you really want to get a more expensive seat but you get the Pringles for free?
Well, exactly.
It's, I have always argued controversially with, with a lot of people who particularly work in marketing communications and marketing that Ryanair has always been a great brand.
(47:14):
I don't think it's always been a particularly pretty brand or a particularly aesthetically appealing brand.
However, if you look at those core brand metrics that Ryanair's always had, they have, like, very much great reach and awareness and recall.
(47:38):
And they've also got real clarity on what they stand for.
It's always been about cheap seats.
Yeah.
And it's been about cheap seats for, like, 20-odd years, or however long Ryanair's been been particularly prominent on this model.
And for me, that's what makes a great brand is that people know about it.
People understand what it stands for.
(47:59):
And then people decide whether or not it's for them.
And I wonder when a brand, because for me, because they're so clear on it, it's almost like it's something that you can believe in.
It's undeniably strong.
And I wonder how important that is for when you're trying to push the edge, you're trying to get as close to the line as possible and you need to have belief that the one thing that you're building your proposition or you're building your message on is completely true.
(48:26):
Sometimes you have brands where you're trying to be something that you're not and you can tell, you can tell that the marketing around it is a little bit like, yeah, do we really want that?
But with Ryanair, you know for a fact we are the cheapest you're going to find.
The cheapest seat you can possibly have that is going to be totally and utterly true.
Nobody will ever catch us out for that.
(48:47):
Even if it's just one euro cheaper on that Saturday afternoon when it's really busy, it's the cheapest seat.
But, like, with risk of steering into debates around what brands are and what brands aren't, to bring it back to what Michael was saying around having that clarity, and viewing social media as a tool which gives you the reach to communicate the message which is always clear and everything loops back into that.
(49:19):
And I'd like to see Michael do more of that in different brands.
I think there's a great consulting opportunity there.
I hope he takes it because I'd like to see what he does.
And I really do believe that the serendipity comes to those who plan for it.
And it is, you know, if you've built your plan and you're allowing yourself to iterate on that plan and you have some license around what you're doing and you're ready to be flexible, when the luck happens, in inverted commas, you know, you're ready there to receive it.
(49:55):
So kind of like, fortune favours the brave and...
Yes.
But I made a better one.
Serendipity comes to those who plan.
Exactly.
You didn't let me finish.
I was going to say, fortune favours the brave and serendipity comes to...
I'm going to have to say that again because I was...
Fortune favours the brave and serendipity comes to those who plan.
(50:18):
Exactly.
Is that, like, the tile for this episode now?
That is, yeah.
Or should we just be, like, the episode where Ger asks a really long question...
Okay, so I think that's a wrap, Gordon.
It's been a pleasure.
Loved every second, as ever.
(50:39):
Thank you very much.
And thanks everybody who's listened in today.
You've been listening to Functional & Fabulous with Ger Keohane and Gordon Newman. If you'd like to know more about the podcast, or about StudioForty9 and Omnichannel Stories, please go to functionalandfabulous.ie. Our sound engineer was Elaine Smith, and the show was produced by Roger Overall.
This is Functional & Fabulous, the omnichannel podcast where we unbox tales of online retail and digital transformation.
In this episode, we ask the big questions...
That was a whopper question.
We ask the difficult questions...
It feels like I'm in the Oireachtas.
We repeat the questions...
(00:22):
I'm gonna have to say that again because I was...
Ger fights for his intellectual property...
So kind of, like, fortune favours the brave.
Yes, but I made a better one...
Serendipity comes to those who plan.
And Gordon writes the show notes...
The episode where Ger asks a really long question.
This episode of Functional & Fabulous is brought to you with pride by StudioForty9, retail ecommerce experts, omnichannel growth consultants and cut-through performance marketing specialists.
(00:54):
StudioForty9, where your digital retail success is built.
Hello, you're very welcome to Functional & Fabulous.
Today, we're delighted to welcome Michael Corcoran to the show.
Until recently, Michael spent two years as Head of Social and Creative Content at Ryanair, where he built and led the social media team that generated some of the world's most talked about and successful social media content.
(01:16):
Not shy of a challenging role, prior to that Michael spent nearly three years as Head of Social and Content for Paddy Power Betfair.
Michael, we're delighted to have you here.
You're very welcome.
All right, guys.
Thanks for having me.
Welcome to the podcast.
Cheers. Where do we start?
What an intro.
Where do we start?
Don't give me a big ego.
I have a long and wandering question to start off with, so you're going to have to bear with me a little bit.
(01:41):
It's about strategy.
It's always struck me that Ryanair has been super clear about their strategy and mission, which is you will not find a cheaper seat for a given route with any other airline.
Everything the company does from the 25-minute turnarounds to charging for boarding pass printouts to slots in airports with gates a million miles away focuses intently on servicing that strategy.
(02:05):
When I hear you talk about the social media strategy for Ryanair, it struck me that you're equally clear on what you're trying to do, which was, the goal was to be the most talked about brand on social media with these tactics of dropping grenades to change the sentiment about the brand and create the brand advocates.
So everything you're doing on social media
either educates the prospective customer
(02:27):
about the nature of what low-cost air travel actually is
and then invites the customer to become empathetic
towards the brand proposition
and the restrictions that it poses
on what you can actually do as a business
by making self-deprecating jokes about the restrictions
and inviting people to share or increase the reach of the brand,
(02:47):
ensuring it'll always be considered by the customer.
It seems really easy in retrospect to do that sort of a thing and I suppose in practice, how difficult was it to set the strategy and what advice would you give about strategy setting and then aligning the team around it?
That was a whopper question.
Whopper, wasn't it?
That was, like, the most whopper...
And thank you for joining today's podcast.
(03:08):
Thanks for listening.
Goodbye.
Like the most whopper question ever.
God, it feels like I'm in the Oireachtas getting, you know...
Who are you lying to?
Minutes or questions here.
I think it's a lot simpler than you think.
The strategy in its purest form has to ladder back to brand or business in some shape or form.
(03:30):
If it's not, you're not really addressing the important whys and certainly in social media, a lot of what happens incorrectly is it's a lot of tactics and being present there for the sake of being there and not understanding why you're there in the first place.
So it's very simple for Ryanair because it's automatically connected to brand or business and it's been kind of underpinned by your quintessential pieces of insight from a strategy-building point of view, brand category, customer and we layered then that over with social media.
(04:05):
How easy was it to convince to do?
Well, not very easy at all when we haven't really reinvented the wheel per se in what we do on social media for Ryanair as a form of communications.
Anyone who's familiar with Ryanair in their earlier days, PR was a very low-cost, high-return marketing tool for the business for a very, very long time and our wonderful and intelligent CEO Michael O'Leary, even I know we're not time stamping this podcast, but yesterday getting cream-pied in the face in Brussels...
(04:38):
You know, he has been using that as a means to generate top-of-mind awareness for quite a long period of time, and as time went by and PR started, I guess, to saturate and the growth of social media started to increase,
it was a natural transition to deliver a similar form of low-cost, high-return reach for the business.
(05:00):
Now, before I started, I can't take the credit.
It was kind of being done in its early days anyway, but when I came in, I was given permission, the carte blanche opportunity to put shape on that actual strategy and put the building blocks and pieces to actually execute it correctly.
There was a lot of ad hoc opportunities where it delivered really good talkability, but it allowed me to put shape on it, put some thought on it, direct it in the way that the current landscape suited and then started to build the team around it to execute on it quite effectively.
(05:36):
So yeah, look, it's been quite simple.
Like, people think it is a lot harder to do than what a lot of people, again, I'm not wording this correctly, but it's easy because it's already been done, only done differently.
And once we had a couple of opportunities where we proved it could emulate what we did in the past, we got the full permission to go full charge and we supercharged it then over the course of the last two years.
(06:07):
And I know that's a struggle for many because I sit here in a very privileged position, being given that carte blanche opportunity, being given the responsibility that many other brands and businesses either don't have the bravery to make the right decisions for their brand or business, or there's people too high up who are getting in the way of actually doing it correctly.
(06:27):
This is something I'd kind of, like, to zero in on a little bit, if we can, because, like, I've heard you speak a couple of times, and you always say Ryanair is very unique.
It's in a very unique position, or it was in a very unique position that it's had this history of quite controversial PR.
And a lot of other brands don't have that history and maybe don't have that clarity.
(06:53):
And I'd love to hear a little bit from you about where you think those brands have been going wrong, because there seems to just be a need of, like, let's repost influencers.
Again, where I have a problem with say social media as a form of marketing or as an industry is it's still too early days and people think they know what they're doing.
(07:16):
And it's almost like a really bad game of Chinese whisper mixed with some people selling a pyramid scheme.
And what essentially has happened is you've had a group of people who have been quite influential in what is the right or wrong way to deliver social media.
And that's kind of fed into the ether of how people are trying to approach it all the time.
(07:37):
And also, when it started to become popular and again, I go back to, funnily enough, I worked in PR in my first job in my early days.
I was absolutely terrible at it.
The media relations wasn't great.
I couldn't stand kind of working with journalists and selling my soul for the latest can of beans or this new diet soda drink, trying to get publications to write about it.
(08:04):
But also I couldn't write for shit either because I'm dyslexic.
So it really didn't suit me at all.
And thankfully, the person who headed that business told me that in the most bluntest way.
At the time, I was very, very upset.
But when looking back, it was the best thing she could have ever done for me.
But what happened was, like, in those early days, you saw advertising agencies, PR agencies, all the agencies who were service marketing companies saw social as this big, new, shiny Holy Grail.
(08:32):
And the only solution to them to grow in that space and generate more business is to make content or to manage content.
And content and management of content equals money.
And then what happened and what grew and grew and grew was that in order to make more money in the industry, we'd make more content.
Then the recommendation was always volume in organic rather than really looking back and taking a step back and thinking, what is my problem?
(08:56):
What is my opportunity?
Where can social actually deliver some sort of impact?
We focus on that and make a strategic, informed decision to do what's right for the brand or business now on the platforms based on so many variables and take it forward.
The problem has been, is we created this big echo chamber of volume of content frequency in organic and we've just all done the same thing in the same way.
(09:20):
And it's created this big corporate vanilla, see a sameness that switches most people off.
Because if you really think about it, what are the main reasons why people go to social media?
One is to be entertained.
It's between what they're doing during their day.
It's jumping on, it's binging, it's finding instant entertainment or some form of escapism from the shit show that's going on in the world today.
(09:44):
And most brands aren't really catering to it.
They're trying to push what they want them to consume rather than what the, let's call them customers or social media users want.
And that's where it's kind of going wrong all the time.
Now, you can still sell on social media in a very clever way.
But if you think organic or the unpaid side of things is going to do it, you're a bit deluded.
(10:06):
Is there anything in social media that is actually really social anymore?
That's a kind of esoteric question now.
It's like...
Because if you think about it, so anybody who wants to be social with their friends, we'll say, they're going there and all of the younger generations are already doing this.
They're off on private group chats and that sort of thing.
(10:29):
If I'm going to Twitter, it's because I want to be entertained.
I want to see what Donald Trump is up to.
I might go and see what Ryanair is up to so I can have a giggle.
So what's the element of it that is still actually social?
So we're on to the bigger question.
Is social media social?
It's probably the wrong name for it in its entirety anyway.
We should have called it something else.
We should have just called it some form of media or channel or platform because even at MAP, the collective term for social media right now is probably incorrect when you look at all the platforms that are out there.
(10:59):
Even TikTok.
TikTok don't consider themselves to be a social media platform.
They're an entertainment channel.
They're a media channel and that's what they're trying to push rather than social.
But it is a very good point and it's like the generational changes.
The Instagram era kind of ruined social media.
This fake filtered nature of what's happening.
The perfect you rather than the real you.
(11:19):
And Gen Z's absolutely detest that.
They want honesty.
They want realism.
They want to see you live and breathe your traumas on the internet because that's being honest.
And it's almost a form of dark humour or entertainment that they get from it.
But they don't go there to try and be something they're not.
They are also the behaviour that they're using a lot of, as you said, dark social media messaging channels or dark platforms to message rather than public because, I don't know, it's just a generational shift that it's how they engage.
(11:49):
It's just a culture change.
But as a collective, yeah, look, social media is not really a social place.
I think we all just ate into the Kool-Aid of the Zuckerbergs of the world when it was introduced, you know, back, what, 15 years ago?
Yeah.
And it's carried on ever since.
It's probably a really bad name for it.
Yeah, because in reality, I know that, you know, you're not really counting followers.
(12:12):
I mean, followers, it's a good metric.
It's useful to have it, but it's a bit of a vanity metric.
You're looking to get reach and your reach is going to be determined on how entertaining you are, really, because then it's going to, the product or the content you produce is going to be shared.
So like in the olden days, followers was a good indication because you were offered and it's kind of like this life cycle of social media platform.
(12:34):
When they start, you've got loads of free reach.
You get loads of followings.
You'll reach as many of those people as possible.
Then they invite brands and businesses to come in and they say, oh, here, this is a rich space for a free audience for you to actually reach your customers.
And then they'll get to a point where there's so many brands or businesses or whether that platform now has the advertising tech built in the background.
Now we're going to start offering you ads and penalising that reach so you can spend more.
(12:58):
And now the platform is broken for when it comes to an organic play.
And now they're trying to generate advertising and they have this big, rich, active audience for you to reach at a cost.
But for me, followers is not and followers should never be...
Like in the olden times, it was and it's again, there's outdated metrics and things.
If you were to ask me what is the most important metric for any brand or business using these platforms to actually get value from its reach and its reach only.
(13:24):
You know, everything else is irrelevant.
Like engagement is probably one of the most over-fluffed metric used on it because, you know, that doesn't take into account positive or negative.
And any social media technical solution or tool out there trying to tell you that they know how to break that down is also talking bullshit because you can't.
Now, maybe this might change with AI.
(13:44):
I don't know.
And again, I might eat my words in the future, but, you know, sentiment and culture and tone can't be picked up on a lot of these platforms and you can't determine.
But also take Ryanair, for example.
If we were to measure engagement rate as a sign of success, we would probably be saying we're, again, the best brand on the internet.
(14:06):
Probably that engagement rate is inflated by more negative comments than positive comments, more customer queries than anything else.
And the whole thing becomes flawed and skewed because you don't really have access to all that information to test it properly anyway.
You could pull a bit of a Suella Braverman.
I saw you were talking about her on Twitter recently and you can say, whatever about the actual numbers, it is record-breaking engagement.
(14:27):
Yeah, of course.
Again, you can spin it whatever way you want.
But like for me, it's reach.
And then it depends on the objective or the use of the platform as well.
Like if you're going paid first, which most brands should really be doing and not doing organic and wasting time, energy and budget.
And now you're starting to look at conversion metrics, you know, when it comes to running DR campaigns or conversion campaigns.
(14:48):
And then from brand side of things, uplift studies, which you can get with paid media campaigns that are a very, very effective measurement tool as well.
So you actually, have you shifted the dial in any shape or form?
Are you just buying eyeballs of people and getting an impression for something somebody may not have even watched in the first place?
But when it comes to the follower thing, it has changed recently because we would have been reliant on the follower interacting with that piece of content to push it to other humans on the Internet for us to get more reach.
(15:19):
But since TikTok's algorithms have been very fortuitous, where discovery and explore is an important part of what they do, a lot of your content gets pushed beyond your follower base immediately and it gets an opportunity to win if it meets the threshold of whatever the algorithm is.
And again, if anybody tries to tell you any algorithm hack or how it works, they're completely again talking through their bloody arse.
(15:41):
What you need to know is it probably needs to reach a certain amount of people, have a certain level of engagement, at a certain amount of pace, to let this machine say, oh, this looks like something somebody likes and enjoys.
It's similar to another topic some other human enjoys.
We're now going to push this further and further and get more reach.
So the follower number becomes more irrelevant these days because the nature of the algorithm has changed to push better quality content.
(16:05):
And by quality, I mean entertaining, engaging, where the audience is reacting on it, not just polished, beautiful, made video content.
Yeah, and being kind of, let's say, straight in how you look at it allows you then to build up some of the tactics and some of the playbooks and some of the checklists, I'm assuming.
So, for example, you talk about, okay, I need the pace of engagement to be quick at the uptake.
(16:31):
You know, I don't want to, I need it to gain traction.
I need it to be kind of, have an entertainment value of some description.
So that then allows you to say, right, well, which of my posts today are meeting those metrics?
The ones that aren't doing it, I'm going to take them out, for example.
So I know that you guys do that on Twitter.
So you have that ability to kind of build up, let's say, a playbook and a checklist on a post-by-post basis.
(16:56):
So I presume that you, in Ryanair, and this is one of the things that I'm kind of interested in, is when you're trying to align the team, you know, just saying, you know, like, our strategy is to be the most, the world's most talked about brand.
You need to then say, and these are the parameters we're going to operate within.
Obviously there's always this question of the legality and, you know, whether or not you're going to say things that are going to cause problems from a legal perspective, et cetera, et cetera.
(17:26):
So you have these parameters and then here is how the post should look.
Here are the things that we need to check off.
If it doesn't make it, let's throw it out.
And then this is our playbook and here is how we're going to, once we get this viral post or this post that is actually gaining a lot of engagement, here are the things that we're going to follow up with.
(17:46):
I presume you guys had that kind of playbook and set of, set of...?
Yeah, no, it was iterative.
And like, let's go on a little bit of a journey here.
So our strategy, if best articulated, is to take a creator-led approach to social media by doing two things.
Creating newsworthy, relevant, topical content, the news tracking, the reactive stuff.
(18:07):
I think a lot of people would allude to when they think about Ryanair Social, but then always on is the second part.
So deliver always on content that changes the perception.
So the first word problems that we unearthed from our insight that we want to change the expectations of flying low-cost.
And within that, we have what's called like a jab-jab-hook approach.
You know, we know the reactive content, if time and delivered correctly and starts to get momentum and reach, gives us huge amounts of reach on a day-to-day basis.
(18:35):
But what it also does, it gives us an opportunity to follow up with equally entertaining content if somebody interacts with that piece of content.
That's one thing about the algorithms.
I think it's fair to say we can and say we agree with.
If somebody interacts with a piece of your content, whether it's watching for a certain amount of time or physically engaged with it, it's telling them that, oh, I like this account or this type of content.
(18:58):
I'm probably going to serve it to you a couple of more times to see do you like more of it and would you like to see more of it?
And what that allows us to do creates this window of opportunity across our channels to be seen by more people.
And it's that always on content then that delivers continuous growth in our reach.
And what we try and do then is, like, how we were set up, we were split into like two pods.
(19:23):
There was a reactive and community team.
It does what it says on the tin.
They were the newsjackers.
They were the people who had their tools and processes to discover newsworthy opportunities across a number of different platforms using Twitter, TweetDeck, Reddit and the likes to see what was on the pulse, to curate the topical news stories of the morning and the evening to see where are the windows of opportunities that they could win.
(19:45):
And in that discovery process, those people would also be at the same time probably generating starting ideas that they could actually then execute on.
And sometimes they wouldn't have it.
But when they pulled them and they took turns, they put it into their chat environment and then they tissueed out those ideas.
And what we would do is in that we would have five seconds, or five minutes on the clock when it came to actually delivering those concepts.
(20:05):
If you couldn't think of a strong, simple and smart concept within that five minutes, the idea was gone.
The news story probably wouldn't have legs.
If you had merit where you wanted to design something that you felt would deliver on it, you were given more time to execute on it because timing is everything when it comes to getting that attention.
Even if an idea is half-cooked or even if it's okay in its humour, if you're out faster than anybody else, and you're talking about something that is breaking in that moment, you're probably going to get the most amount of interactions. And once you get that most amount of interactions in those early stages, it's probably going to feed it to more and more people.
(20:45):
So therefore, your content is going to take off.
So the timing is everything when it comes to that.
And that's part of the process of those discovery phases.
It's part of the tissueing of the ideas, but also it's part of the conditioning process as you're embedded and grow within the team that as we moved on things faster, the ideas were coming quicker and almost you naturally were able to react and deliver content in a better way.
(21:13):
And that didn't necessarily happen all the time.
And you mentioned earlier that if something did go out and it just didn't perform, we'd delete it because it just didn't meet the criteria or the strength.
And we did not want that to get in the way of other content that would go out that day to potentially perform or reach those eyeballs.
And on the other side, you've got always on.
(21:34):
So the method and the processes is much more different there.
So from an always on point of view,
that's a little bit more thought out
than quickly curated
of what's happening in the world.
That was really focused
on the pain points
or the first-world problems
of travel and traveling low-cost,
that we could shift the mindset,
explain or educate
(21:54):
in an equally entertaining way,
taking a very similar
design approach to it,
which is quite lo-fi,
unpolished, the anti-corporate,
let's call it,
and deliver that in advance.
And the process there for us was all about getting a week's worth of content.
There was no science to this of how much it was.
All we wanted to do was commit to a threshold or a volume of content that we knew that part of the team could deliver on a week-to-week basis and deliver that consistently every day of the week.
(22:26):
And how we figured that out is again similar.
We looked at trending sounds.
We looked at the pain points, the consistent first-world things that people were talking about that we could then recreate entertaining content off the back of it.
The team would produce that one week in advance and then we would then run it as a scheduled between the reactive things that happened during the day.
(22:47):
So as that happened, that cocktail of jab-jab-hook, that reactive content plus that always on content working together created this system of volume, volume, volume and allowed us to reach scales of content that probably people are impressed with and don't understand how we get there.
And I can even talk to you about always on and how we got to even a smarter way of doing that as well.
(23:09):
Yeah.
What is the smarter way of getting to the always on?
So there's this, again, this goes back to my point earlier over that, you know, the success or what people thought was the best way to do content was volume, volume, volume.
And that is to an extent, but for the vast majority of people, there's only so much time, resource and budget you have to max out on that every time.
(23:32):
And if you're relying on agencies to do that, it's going to cost you an arm and a leg.
So the point I made earlier was this is this little bit of an echo chamber that, you know, volume and making content was the Holy Grail of doing the best work.
And there was an attitude for a long time that when you made something and posted it on the internet, it's done.
You can never use it again.
(23:52):
Now you imagine going to a creative agency or brand and telling them we need to make a TV ad.
It's going to cost a quarter of a million euro.
We're going to put it on TV, but only going to publish it once and it's done.
It has no value anymore.
It's run its course.
You tell them that, no, that's stupid.
(24:13):
You know, you run your TV spot numbers of times to reach as many people as possible and also deliver recall, you know, so people can actually remember the message or remember the creative that you delivered in order for them to think of you and be top-of-mind, the basics of marketing.
But for so long, people think, and they still do, once I create one piece of content and publish it, it's done.
(24:35):
I can never use it again.
So for me, that was absolute bullshit.
And I wanted to create an environment where we were reusing the best content, because when you publish it once, you're only going to reach a certain amount of people.
You don't reach everyone.
And when you publish it a second time, you might reach some of those users again, those high-engaged users on your platform, but you're probably going to reach 90% plus of new people again.
(24:58):
So what we did was, again, it wasn't science.
It was all about, we have four members of the team who are dedicated to this.
How much content can they produce on a week-to-week basis without going into overdrive?
So we set a benchmark of, right, we need to deliver, say, 10 pieces of video content that can be published across multiple channels and 10 pieces of static creative one week in advance every week.
(25:24):
And we started to build that system.
Now that took forever to get to, because they weren't used to doing it in advance.
They weren't used to working together.
They weren't used to figuring this out of concepting, executing, having fully planned with copy on a plan, finalised the week in advance.
And that took time to train and train.
But we eventually got to that threshold of 10.
Then what we did is, as that content was being published, we were looking at which stuff was being stickier, what was resonating more, what was reaching more people.
(25:52):
And we set a benchmark, again, not a science.
We started just to see how much people we were reaching at first.
And it was modest enough.
It was 60,000, 70,000 views.
Again, modest for Ryanair.
If anybody else said, oh, I'm getting 60,000, 70,000 views on one publish of the video, they'd bite your hand off.
But what we were doing was we were trying to set a threshold.
Okay, this is good.
People like this.
So we started to create what's called a banger bank.
(26:15):
So what the banger bank was, if any piece of video content reached 100,000 views, we stored that in our bank to reuse for another day.
Anything else that didn't, we parked for now.
We did still look at it, see could we have made it better?
Any learnings we could work on to improve that idea the next time.
And we'd go again.
And essentially what we did was over the course of months, we built that banger bank of the best-performing content of those, say, 10 videos or static means every week that hit 100,000 views.
(26:42):
And we worked it back into the content planning cycle.
So what we got to eventually was we had about 150 or more really good-quality videos that were sticky already that we started to cycle into the mix.
So what did that allow us to do?
It allowed us then, rather than taking, making 10 of each every week, we started to make eight of each and bringing two previous pieces of content.
(27:02):
And we started to move that cycle along where we got to six and we got to four.
Now we're only focusing on making four pieces of really quality, well-thought-out pieces of content every week.
And we're cycling the content time and time again.
Great.
I love the way you, I love the way you say that's, this is not a science.
That sounds very scientific to me.
(27:22):
It is quite scientific.
Very, very intent, like high intent in what you're doing there.
A practical question.
So I can imagine people are listening to this going, right, okay, yeah, we should actually, we do make good stuff that we could reuse.
So in practical terms, if you think about the Instagram wall, how would you repost that content?
(27:46):
Would a piece of content appear multiple times?
Would it, would you delete the original and repost the new?
How did you even manage that?
This is another bit of a behaviour thing that we all need to get over, especially marketeers.
The only people who probably go to your wall or your newsfeed to look at that content is people who work in social media.
(28:09):
Most other people, their behaviour on the platforms is not to go to the channel because they're in the feed.
You know, so they don't care about that.
So again, take a news story.
They might see the same news story, the same video of, let's take, Michael O'Leary getting cream -pied in the face, which is all over the internet yesterday.
It's appearing between other pieces of content, whether it's in the story format or the upswipes format of Instagram and all channels.
(28:34):
They don't care.
They don't consume the content in that way, unless they're purposefully going to do it in a passive way.
And most times that's social media people, or that's a behaviour that's similar to YouTube.
Now Instagram over the past tried to do that with how they tried to build a platform to compete with YouTube.
But the vast majority of people do not go to your channel to do it.
(28:55):
So again, these are things we didn't care about.
There was things like your highlights on Instagram.
We didn't care about it at that moment in time, there was how beautifully and polished and laid out your Instagram wall is.
We didn't care about it.
That was time, energy and focus that wasn't delivering reach for us.
Now, having said that, now that we've reached a certain volume of reach on a consistent basis and built the systems to do that.
(29:20):
Now there are more people coming looking at the profile to figure out, maybe binge and maybe consume.
So now is the time we can start looking at maybe the aesthetics a bit more or making more decisions like that.
It's a great mindset.
When it came to publishing on multiple times, we set a minimum, say, timeline of I think it was 12 to 16 weeks.
You couldn't post that same piece of content.
(29:41):
So in that poor theory, it was probably enough time for whoever was, whoever saw that piece of content the first time to maybe not see it again.
And even if they didn't, we did see, we did see one or two people...
And I'm talking one or two people in the comment sections,
"Why are reposting your content, you did it again."
(30:01):
Now, at first, the team started to freak out a little.
It's just like, no, don't, forget about that.
That's only two people of potentially 150 to 200,000 people who are going to see this piece of content that have never seen it before.
So we got over it quite fast.
Can I ask, because I'm, we're getting the warnings already to wrap up and all of that.
It went really, really quickly.
We've only started, lads.
(30:22):
I know, I know.
There's actually two or three things I wanted to talk about.
I'm going to try and reduce them down to two.
See, most of our half an hour was taken up by Ger's whopper question...
You can take your pick.
But one area is community.
And, you know, we talked a little bit about this, the challenge of having built up a community on a particular platform.
(30:48):
What can you then do with it?
How portable is it?
What are the opportunities for the future?
Especially in the world of Elon Musk, who might whip an entire community out from under you.
And then the other one is the building of the team.
Because there is no doubt, but you built an incredible team.
And when you're talking about the team there, I mean, I think it might even surprise some people.
(31:13):
You know, it's not a huge team.
It's, what is it, eight people?
Eight people, yeah.
Eight people, yeah.
So, dealer's choice, community or team?
We'll try to do both.
Okay, go.
When we're talking about community, to me is there's, community is probably the biggest, one of the biggest things we all need to be focused on about the social media of next and the future.
(31:38):
Like for us, it's reach of play right now.
But because we've cultivated such a big audience, that if that channel gets switched off overnight, we don't own that audience.
You know, and you've put in such time, effort and energy into building that audience and that reach.
And this kind of contradicts the whole follower thing.
But nonetheless, we still have over 10 point something million followers.
(32:01):
But we reach people even without them following us on a large scale.
And if the lights go off, all that investment, yes, we can quantify it as we've delivered reach.
But there's a value to potentially building communities on the platforms that other brands may need to have as part of their strategy, because that's what they're trying to do.
(32:23):
Or that might be the objective of what they're trying to do.
And to me it's like, I'm concerned that if we walk away and it's switched off, we lose that audience.
So it's good to see right now that people are thinking about it and platforms like Meta, who are building Threads and are now allowing you to build a subscriber base predominantly, I think, it's going to be built from email and take that wherever you want to go.
(32:48):
So when we talk about that, is that's something that's keeping - not keeping me up at night - but it's making me think about, okay, if we garner and build these communities of people, we need to try and make sure that they can carry and come with us on the journey, wherever that may be next.
There's an apocalypse of social media channels or, even take Gen Alphas...
Gen Alphas aren't even that heavy publicly.
(33:09):
And this is the next generation that are coming.
They're turning into teens, I think, next year.
The other area like community again, again, another light bulb moment I was looking at was the next big social media app.
People are thinking it's Threads.
To me, it could be CapCut.
And CapCut, for example, is a TikTok-owned video creation tool.
But it's not, it's more.
(33:29):
They've literally integrated the search functionalities of TikTok and the trending sounds and functionality of TikTok into CapCut.
They also have follower functionality, community commenting, DMs. And why I think it's interesting, especially for the next generation on top of the community side of things, is most people or kids that are wanting to be on social media at the moment are not being allowed by their parents, especially TikTok, because, again, they're too young and it's safety concerns.
(33:56):
But they are giving them access to CapCut on their tablets with access to the internet, where they're essentially being and doing what they're doing, what they could be doing on TikTok in a more darker environment.
And CapCut is in, I think, the top five or six most downloaded apps already on the internet.
And if natively, these younger generations are already starting to engage and build communities and followings within this app, surely that's going to explode because they're native.
(34:25):
It's going to become second-nature to them as an actual platform.
And as they move to TikTok, it's going to work as two really incredible places for people to tap into.
That's a random thought built onto it...
so there's a bit of an extra free at no cost.
When it comes to the team side of things, your strategy is only as important as the execution of it.
(34:46):
And it's not just the tools and processes I talked about earlier, about the kind of the setup of the reactive and always on based on their two core parts of the strategy.
And you basically fundamentally build a team around those.
Is that is making sure you have the right people to deliver on your strategy.
And there are a lot of traditional social media people out here who are from the social media of old, who are thinking and acting in that way, who may not be fit for purpose for your team.
(35:12):
So I found it incredibly important building the one for Ryanair that I tried to identify people who could actually execute on the strategy in the way we needed.
We needed creators, but we also needed social media professionals.
And essentially building that team, I headhunted.
I didn't look in the normal places.
And again, I said this at a talk before and somebody asked, where do you find your team?
I don't find them on LinkedIn because that's definitely not the resource or the place to get the people I need.
(35:36):
You're probably going to identify the wrong characters.
So it takes a bit of groundwork.
And it's something I quite enjoy is identifying people with a particular set of skills that are a bit unpolished or rough around the edges, because I just need them for their strengths.
And if they're willing to come on board to improve their weaknesses, well then they have an appetite and a hunger to do their best for me.
And if I know where they want to go to next, that's also something I can commit to, because if you deliver for me in the best way possible now, I'll support you and where you want to go in your next step.
(36:06):
So essentially we headhunted and I found a particular set of people.
I wouldn't want to call them misfits, but they were just different skills, different personalities, all from different areas as individuals.
And they were all quite different.
But as a collective in time, they actually started to assume and played the role of the Ryanair admin.
(36:28):
And the combinations of all their strengths together is what made Ryanair social media team and its execution what it is today.
And I don't think we would have got there without that.
And I think the best and most proudest moment for me on that is they hated it at first working together.
Their personalities were all different.
(36:48):
You had people who are detail-oriented.
If you didn't follow the plan or stick to the plan, you weren't competent, you weren't able to do it.
And then you had incredibly creative people who knew the world of social media from a creative side of things, who were just these amazing, talented, creative people who could not organise their own birthday, like.
It was just, it was, they were terribly unorganised people.
(37:11):
And admittedly so.
But they were all hired to work together as a unit to execute.
Then at the same time, I made sure that the detail-oriented people were conditioned and developed better creative skills.
I had the creative people getting a little bit more organised.
They're still an unorganised bunch of individuals you'll ever meet.
But there was a moment in time, I think, three monts into it, where they understood and it clicked when they started to see the role each of them played, and the little things that they were getting pissed off with within the team environment started to alleviate because they knew their purpose and where they sat within the execution of the strategy.
(37:50):
And it just started then to go big, big, big, big, big from there.
It's definitely something to be very proud of.
I mean, the building of a team like that.
Again, it's not a, not an easy thing to do.
And I just want to ask you, Michael, and I'm sorry, I know I'm taking all the questions.
So beyond Ryanair, because that's where we are now.
What's next for Michael Corcoran?
That's a great question.
(38:11):
I'm enjoying a couple of months of gardening leave right now, and I'm, I'm lucky enough to be inundated with requests, but not enough.
So if people are listening and you're a chief marketing officer, a commercial officer, CEO who's got lots of money, wants to give me lots of money, please, please, please get in touch.
I'm looking, a lot of people from the calls I've had, and I've been very lucky to talk to some amazing people over the last couple of months who have seen what I've done at Ryanair and not just the execution side of things.
(38:41):
They've come to a talk.
They've listened to a podcast and hopefully they'll listen to this too.
And they've seen that there's thought put behind things.
There's also somebody who likes to put together the right teams and processes to execute, based on whatever time, resource and budget an individual brand or business has, and starts to put the building blocks in place to execute on it.
(39:02):
And is not afraid to push back and make the best-informed decisions.
So with the calls that I'm having, the conversations, they're all screaming at me to go consulting.
So it very may well be the route I take.
But I need to probably get somebody to hold my hand, because when I talked about those team people earlier, you've got the great creative people on one side of the detail-orientated.
(39:24):
I'm probably in the middle, leaning a bit more to the creative side.
So somebody with a bit more attention to detail and maybe a whip or a hurl or something to beat me with would be a good partner to have.
Well, you heard it here first.
So if that consultancy pops up, I think we're going to claim that we broke that news.
Whether we did or we didn't.
You can take it and send it to the masses.
(39:46):
Get me on Sky News and throw a cream pie in my face as well.
Excellent.
We'll see what we can do because it's all about reach.
That's my takeaway.
Michael, thank you so much for that.
I'm sitting here and my head's spinning of all of the things that I'm going to take away and take inspiration from, which is Gordon Code for steal and apply.
(40:10):
Steal with pride.
There's nothing wrong with that.
Most intelligent people steal with pride.
So thank you very much for joining us.
I had fun with you, guys.
Thanks very much. Take care.
Ger's sitting on his cable.
He's wrapped around his chair.
(40:35):
Come on, Madonna.
Sorry now.
Excuse me.
So what did we learn today?
What did I learn?
What did you learn?
What did I learn?
Well, I learned one thing.
Michael Corcoran is either very, very modest or very self-deprecating.
I think this idea, I really liked the, well, it's not science, but if we set a threshold of 60% and we bang out 80,000 views and we arrange that it doesn't reschedule for four months and then we do this...
(41:12):
It sounds very scientific to me.
That does sound like a science bit, doesn't it?
There's quite a lot of technique in that.
Well, I think, like, measurement...
Yeah.
So it's like, here's the objective.
Here are the measures.
What happened when we executed against those measures?
Did we hit them?
Didn't we?
Shall we make some changes?
So we've got some variables.
Change those variables.
(41:32):
See if it works.
Sounds quite science-y to me.
Test-and-learn in a live environment.
The other thing was the jab-jab-right-hook approach that he takes, and this idea of the reactive and always on.
And those two approaches, so there are the two teams that are set up to do this and those two approaches kind of combine together and it takes, in my opinion, it takes quite a bit of planning and quite a bit of laying the groundwork to get all of that working so that it seems on the front end incredibly whimsical and, oh, we're reacting to what's happening and, you know, oh, this just came up.
(42:13):
But in reality, it's always servicing the proposition and the strategy that he has put in place for the business.
Which I really enjoyed because actually he made strategy quite simple, which is as it should be and easy to understand.
(42:33):
So they have their core messages that they're trying to deliver, and the bit that he then layered in that I think was particularly useful, was this idea that the most important metric is reach.
And back to our question of is social media really social?
(42:58):
Really, it's a reach channel and that's how the channel is to be viewed.
And the message that you're trying to land has to be consistent, it has to be repetitive and then you're going to start seeing results.
Driven through to the rest of the business, and my little brain's going, oh, I can think of a couple of ways that I can now use that in some of the work that I'm doing to actually make some of the activity better through simplifying it and then adding the science bit.
(43:34):
But it's just being clear on what it is that you're doing.
You're not really trying to be social, make friends, et cetera.
You're, you know, you're trying to hit reach.
How do we hit reach?
By producing something that is shareable, you know, talk-worthy, entertaining, and then how do we identify when we've actually hit that reach?
Because we've got some momentum early, people are reacting to it quickly, you know, so there's quite a bit there under the hood that we were able to tap into.
(44:04):
The ad analogy is great as well.
This whole, like, you can use a piece of content more than once and the fact, when he spells it out, like, you wouldn't make an ad and then just share that once and that's it.
I thought that was so important
because it's certainly something
that I've never thought about,
you know, even as we were,
(44:25):
you know, preparing for this episode,
I went to the Ryanair site,
you know, there was four or five different posts
in one day about the cream pie
that Michael O'Leary got in the face
and, you know,
you're kind of looking at it going,
why are they,
they're basically reposting this?
But of course they are because people are sharing it, people are talking about it and not everybody is going to their actual profile and checking to see how many times they posted about it.
(44:50):
The magic of the For You page.
Yeah.
Of extending the reach beyond your followers.
So the question is, did Michael O'Leary pay the people to cream-pie him, I wonder?
It doesn't matter.
It doesn't matter whether he did or he didn't.
It's such great PR...
Did he pay them? Didn't he pay them?
No, he didn't.
Did he get all over the news?
If he didn't pay them, was he insanely, insanely witty? Absolutely.
(45:13):
But isn't it great...
That's what he's always done.
I used to love the Ryanair press ads and the Ryanair PR.
And really what Michael's done there, Corcoran, not O'Leary, is work on the translation of that into these new media mechanisms to make them relevant for today.
Whereas the newspaper would have been relevant when Ryanair first kind of rose to prominence in the early 2000s.
(45:41):
Yeah.
One of the things I like as well is they kind of turn the challenges that the business has into a thing that injects creativity into what they're doing.
So, you know, like the challenges, in order for it to be incredibly cheap, they can't, you can't print the boarding passes, you can't, you know, some of your options in terms of how you fly are taken away from you.
(46:05):
You can't take a lot of stuff with you when you go, et cetera, et cetera.
They have a post on Twitter at the moment and it's a photograph of a fashion show.
There's a guy wearing a jacket and the jacket has like 100 pockets in it.
And the Ryanair post says, don't even think about it.
I love that.
And you know, we all do.
But like, when you're looking at that post, you start to feel empathy for the brand.
(46:27):
You kind of think, oh, that's a nice, you know, they know themselves that it's, that they're restricting my option to take a load of stuff on board.
You get a little bit more ready to defend them, and you start to see people defending Ryanair and kind of saying to other people on Twitter, you know, well, it's a really cheap seat.
What do you expect?
I mean, what else do you want, you know, when you're buying a cheap seat?
(46:48):
You can add so many other things on.
You can buy your own Pringles, you can buy your own Coke.
Do you really want to get a more expensive seat but you get the Pringles for free?
Well, exactly.
It's, I have always argued controversially with, with a lot of people who particularly work in marketing communications and marketing that Ryanair has always been a great brand.
(47:14):
I don't think it's always been a particularly pretty brand or a particularly aesthetically appealing brand.
However, if you look at those core brand metrics that Ryanair's always had, they have, like, very much great reach and awareness and recall.
(47:38):
And they've also got real clarity on what they stand for.
It's always been about cheap seats.
Yeah.
And it's been about cheap seats for, like, 20-odd years, or however long Ryanair's been been particularly prominent on this model.
And for me, that's what makes a great brand is that people know about it.
People understand what it stands for.
(47:59):
And then people decide whether or not it's for them.
And I wonder when a brand, because for me, because they're so clear on it, it's almost like it's something that you can believe in.
It's undeniably strong.
And I wonder how important that is for when you're trying to push the edge, you're trying to get as close to the line as possible and you need to have belief that the one thing that you're building your proposition or you're building your message on is completely true.
(48:26):
Sometimes you have brands where you're trying to be something that you're not and you can tell, you can tell that the marketing around it is a little bit like, yeah, do we really want that?
But with Ryanair, you know for a fact we are the cheapest you're going to find.
The cheapest seat you can possibly have that is going to be totally and utterly true.
Nobody will ever catch us out for that.
(48:47):
Even if it's just one euro cheaper on that Saturday afternoon when it's really busy, it's the cheapest seat.
But, like, with risk of steering into debates around what brands are and what brands aren't, to bring it back to what Michael was saying around having that clarity, and viewing social media as a tool which gives you the reach to communicate the message which is always clear and everything loops back into that.
(49:19):
And I'd like to see Michael do more of that in different brands.
I think there's a great consulting opportunity there.
I hope he takes it because I'd like to see what he does.
And I really do believe that the serendipity comes to those who plan for it.
And it is, you know, if you've built your plan and you're allowing yourself to iterate on that plan and you have some license around what you're doing and you're ready to be flexible, when the luck happens, in inverted commas, you know, you're ready there to receive it.
(49:55):
So kind of like, fortune favours the brave and...
Yes.
But I made a better one.
Serendipity comes to those who plan.
Exactly.
You didn't let me finish.
I was going to say, fortune favours the brave and serendipity comes to...
I'm going to have to say that again because I was...
Fortune favours the brave and serendipity comes to those who plan.
(50:18):
Exactly.
Is that, like, the tile for this episode now?
That is, yeah.
Or should we just be, like, the episode where Ger asks a really long question...
Okay, so I think that's a wrap, Gordon.
It's been a pleasure.
Loved every second, as ever.
(50:39):
Thank you very much.
And thanks everybody who's listened in today.
You've been listening to Functional & Fabulous with Ger Keohane and Gordon Newman. If you'd like to know more about the podcast, or about StudioForty9 and Omnichannel Stories, please go to functionalandfabulous.ie. Our sound engineer was Elaine Smith, and the show was produced by Roger Overall.
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