I wanted to call this week’s installment of How to Be (Internet) Famous, “GO THE FUCK OUTSIDE!”

But. I had a feeling people who are just joining us, and haven’t been reading the series from the start, will have no idea of who I am and why I’m yelling at them about the importance of doing most of your early marketing and promotional work offline. That’s … That’s a terrible first impression to make. Especially since a lot of you are finding this column through word of mouth and Google.

So even if you’re just joining us, I want you to take this piece of advice to heart because it really is the key to everything I’m going to tell you going forward: “What you do offline matters more than what you do online.” We’re going to spend some time on that theme over the next few posts, beginning here with “The Whiskey Test”. The Whiskey Test is one of the first things you’ll do offline when meeting your potential audience (and the general public) for the first time. I’ll explain how that test works here.

Now, don’t do that thing and assume I’m saying nothing you do online matters. I get that a lot. I’ll tell people about how most statistics we get concerning YouTube are presented out of context and that it’s nowhere near as popular as you’d think, and they’ll take that to mean “Don’t use YouTube”.

Nope. Didn’t say that. You use the right platform for the right audience at the right time. That could be YouTube. That could be traditional radio. But when you say things like “What you do offline matters more than what you do online”, sometimes people take that to mean I’m suggesting they ignore the online stuff entirely.

Not the case. I’m just telling you it’s ass backward to focus on the online end of things first, which is generally what we all do, and we’re doing it wrong.

Buy Your Customers A Beer

Last week I gave you a test to help determine whether or not you, your product, or your idea sucks. Then I mentioned that if you pass that test, the next thing you ought to do to raise your probability of success is to make tweaks and then present your product / idea / whatever to the general public. (For sake of clarity, I’m just going to say “product”, but you can swap out that word and replace it with “idea” or whatever and it’s the same sort of deal.)

The thing you want to avoid doing is being super obnoxious and shout, “HEY! HEY EVERYONE! THIS IS MY PRODUCT! COME LOOK AT IT!”. In fact, now is as good as time as any to remind you that while you can target everyone as a potential customer, you shouldn’t do that in the beginning.

Marketing authors like to botch that little piece of advice. (As they do a lot of things.) They get the last part right and the first part wrong. They’ll tell you that you can’t target everyone and that everyone is not an appropriate answer for when someone asks you who your audience is. The truth is, everyone can eventually be your audience, provided that your product doesn’t suck and it’s been around long enough to become a known thing that total strangers on the street can vouch for.

For example, Coors, which I think tastes like piss and you should never, ever, drink, is a product that can be targeted at everyone because everyone is familiar with the brand because of their commercials and media presence. So whether or not I like Coors (I totally don’t) is irrelevant. What is relevant is that if you were to walk up to some random person on the street and ask if they’ve heard and tried of Coors, the odds are they’ll say yes.

That little bit of external validation is (usually) just enough to convince someone to try out something they haven’t tried before. To boil down a whole lot of social networking theory and a few hundred thousand years of evolution: Monkey see. Monkey do.

Although why you’d walk up to some random person on the street and ask them what kind of beer they like is a little weird. The following bit of advice is as equally important as the thing I just said about not targeting everyone at first: Don’t be a weirdo.

How do you get to the part of the process where everyone knows your product? You first have to identify your potential group of customers. And then in the single most important thing you will ever, ever, ever do when it comes to marketing, advertising, and PR, you’ll make sure those god damn people exist.

(You see, the use of “god damn” is important here, because a lot of places will develop Customer Personas for you, and then operate under the assumption that those personas are real and not idealized pieces of nonsense formed by people who just cashed your check for $25,000 and couldn’t care less if they’re real or not.)

How you find out that they’re real is by buying them beer.

Ok. It doesn’t have to be beer. How about whiskey?

The Whiskey Test

There are already a bunch of things called “The Beer Test”, and since I’m more of a whiskey guy, that’s what I’m going to go with here: Whiskey.

And if you’re thinking, “Oh man, another test”, yes. Sorry. I said last week that the only way to raise your probability of success was to ask a lot of questions, and if you get truthful answers from those questions, you’ll be able to make use of them and move on to the next step. Now that we’ve established that your product doesn’t suck ( I hope), we can move on to the next test, which I call The Whiskey Test.

The Whiskey Test goes like this: Let’s say you’re building an app or launching a new website. What’s the most important thing about your website / app? That it looks cool? Sure. That it’s informative? Yeah. Both of those things are important, for sure, but what’s the most important thing? That it works.

If your product doesn’t deliver what it says it will in an easy to use and pleasing way, go back and keep working on it until it does.

How will you know when you got things right? Well, fun fact. Or at least, an observation I’ve made and I’ve heard shared by many startup founders: The way drunk people use the Internet is the same way sober people use the Internet. So, if a drunk (or at least, a slightly buzzed) person can use your product or identify / understand / and remember it, then the product has passed this test.

Now, this does not mean you should go and start getting your customers wasted. Or that what a drunk person says to you is more valuable than what a sober person says to you. When it comes to testing usability, yes, what the drunk person does on the iPad you give them to test out your app / website is incredibly valuable. But if you’re making a pitch and that drunk person barfs all over your shoes? Not so much.

So here’s a handy thing to remember: If you are testing a product that lives entirely on the Internet, whether it’s an app or a website, then how the drunk person uses your product is incredibly valuable and you should make adjustments (and keep making adjustments) until that drunk person can use your product effortlessly and without complaint.

If you have an offline product (or a more conceptual pitch), you’re not looking to get your potential customer buzzed. You’re looking to confirm that the Customer Persona is real (in that the people you see that would fit that persona are in fact like how the persona says.). Same test, but you’re looking for a different thing by buying them a drink and getting to know them.

When looking to confirm your audience exists (and that they like and need your product), you’re buying them a drink (or giving them some other kind of gift / incentive) to basically pick their brain and see what they think.

In other words: You don’t have to buy them a drink. Find where your perceived customer goes for fun, and try to get to know a few of them by providing some kind of incentive that makes it worth talking to you. (Gift cards. Money. Free pizza. It can be anything. Just don’t be a weirdo when approaching them for the first time.)

Now, the last thing: As people start to actually use your product (and we’ll get to what you need to do to bring those people to you), there is something you absolutely need to do: Get to know every single one of your customers. As many of them as you can.

Typically you’ll hear startup founders say you need to know your first 100 customers , but I think that’s more of an arbitrary number they pulled out of their ass.

You (and/or the people who eventually work for you should you ever have employees) should know your customers. As many as possible. There is no greater marketing tool than happy customers doing your marketing for you, and from a non-business point of view, there’s no better feeling than creating a bit of a community among your fellow man and woman. So as people pass The Whiskey Test, make sure to get their information so you can keep in touch.

It may sound silly or sappy, but it’s absolutely critical to your success to do this. Remember: Life sucks. It’s cruel, horrible, and sometimes short. Everyone you know is going to die and there’s nothing that can be done about it. So the LEAST you can do, especially for when it comes to people giving you their money, is to be nice enough for them to think of you as a friend, make an effort to listen to them and make adjustments, and to not be an asshole.

Check out this post on VentureBeat

Image Credits: Drunk guy by Gideon on Flickr. Duff Beer and Irish Whiskey via Wikimedia Commons