Mount appealed to those in the crowd who may already be confident in their business, suggesting they too are vulnerable about things they’re not willing to share. Everyone is vulnerable about something and accepting that, Mount concludes, can lead to marketing success.
“Did you know that 86 percent of consumers believe that authenticity is the key factor when choosing a brand to support,” Mount said, referencing a McKinsey study. “That 90 percent of millennials cite authenticity as the number one factor in who they follow?”
Mount played two different social posts, one being a high-end social media production for a fashion brand and an organic, manually edited Reel from a woman sharing how she altered and dyed a dress she needed for a wedding. The first had impressive viewer stats, but they were proven paltry against the second’s statistics. His take is that advertising budgets don’t always equate to campaign success. What matters is the person in front of the camera.
“If you are showing up in the online space being anyone other than who you authentically are, you have already lost,” he said. “At the end of the day, social is not a venue to sell; it is a venue to connect.”
Mount reminded the crowd that no one is looking up your website; they’re looking at you through the lens of Google. That means every instance of your online persona — the old real estate team pages, previous brokerage biographies, lagging social accounts and headshots with bad haircuts — are all there for the consumer’s judgment.
“Google is the epicenter of your ecosystem,” he said. “Instagram and LinkedIn are highly searchable and indexable. If your Instagram looks like trash, the consumer perceives your business as trash. That’s a fact.”
Mount does work for Ryan Serhant, whose website has a profile of him, about which Mount said, “I can’t control.”
