Rough and ready is okay
Slick production values define so much brand marketing, even on social media, but that’s not always what the audience cares about and it’s not always necessary.
As Frankel was building her social-media following, she admits there was a “WTF factor” to her content. Her lighting was bad. Smudges covered the camera lens. But ultimately, it didn’t matter. “I was just playing—[but] I was getting views,” she said. “I was fully going viral.”
So long as the content is relatable, then, viewers will forgive a rough-and-ready presentation.
“If somebody drops off a Cadillac in my driveway,” Frankel added, “I’ll go outside and, in five minutes, I shoot something about what I honestly think about it and post it two seconds later with no editing.”
Talk to your audience, not at them
Frankel thinks back to a shoot for a TV spot where a major brand had hired a director to make sure that she touched on all the key brand attributes and said all the right things.
“He was a lovely person, and he was doing his job, but he wasn’t dealing with me the way that I should be dealt with,” Frankel said.
After hours of supervised shooting, the creative team took Frankel aside five minutes before quitting time and asked her to ditch the script and just improvise in her own voice.
“They were like, ‘Can we just get the unhinged Bethenny for five minutes?’” she remembers.
The takeaway: talk to people like they’re people, not just a demographic target.
Do your homework
Asked what her biggest business mistake was (and what it taught her), Frankel says it’s only a small one—but one she still thinks about.
“This social media person told me—long before [mega influencers like Charli] D’Amelio and Addison Rae—that Tiktok would not be for me because it was for people between eight and 13 years old,” said Frankel, who took the advice.
“I should have just gotten on my phone and been like, let me play around with it,” she said.
As a result, Frankel took up TikTok—where she has 2.4 million followers—later than she’d have liked. “I talk about it more than I should, because we can’t go backwards,” she said. “But it annoys me.”
So don’t take advice from the experts before you check out a strategy on your own.
Your execs may not be the best faces for your brand
In a time of executive biographies, TED talks, and founders-turned-pitchmen, it’s understandable that the company brass would want the limelight.
Well, think twice.
“CEOs or founders want to be in front of the camera and want to be the face of the brand—and they often shouldn’t,” Frankel said. “They want to tell their story, and not everyone wants to hear [it]. People want to hear a business story at a business conference—not in infotainment.”