The Business of Kayfabe

by Sean Oliver

  Social media makes personalization very easy today. It doesn’t mean you have to engage with every tweet or Facebook post. You probably couldn’t, and you’d be answering the same questions multiple times. Fans need to scroll down every once and a while. Kayfabe Commentaries has a Facebook page and a Twitter feed. Posts and tweets from those accounts deal with company issues, teasers of upcoming shows, behind the scenes photos, and anything our company wants to bring to mass market eyes.

  My personal Twitter feed is a different story. That’s where I’ll post things that I, not my company, want to share with you. In the quest for personalization, don’t have your company sharing political views or photos of your dinner. That’s for your personal Twitter or Facebook accounts.

  Your personalization starts with your product and that’s actually the easiest part. We’ve already established that your passion for this field has created that sense of awareness and insight into your customers. The Blood grants you that all-important initial bond. That’s a huge point of contact, that touch. The next touch is usually when the package arrives, when they get it home, or when the service is performed. So be quick about shipping and appointments if that’s your business.

  At Kayfabe Commentaries we go to great lengths to ensure our customer service is remarkable. That’s a major touch for us. While every company talks about customer service being important, they really mean customer service should be convenient for them, not necessarily the customer. Automated or outsourced customer service takes a real gamble with that important touch. In many cases, it destroys it. I get physically ill when I have to reach out to a company for whom I was a patron. I know the runaround is about to begin. It blows.

  Today you even see companies use a system that, upon receiving you customer service email, generates an automated email reply that appears to have been written by a person. But if you read carefully you can see that it’s automatically generated, triggered by a few keywords and phrases in your initial support email. The reply partially addresses what you’ve written about but it never fully answers the question. In some cases I’ve just been directed to a FAQ page or even a forum on a website, which I have already scoured for my answer, to no avail. If I’ve taken the time to write a three paragraph explanation of this issue I’m having with your product, don’t send me, “Maybe this is what you’re looking for...otherwise go look for the answer yourself here.” That’s what I hear in those autoreplies. That sucks.

  Hey, let’s be honest here—are some customers ridiculous? Oh my Lord. If I asked Brian from shipping to write this chapter it might never end. He loves emails asking where the DVD is that was ordered yesterday. Hey, we understand you guys like our stuff. But give the post office a chance.

  Then there are the pissed off emails about WWN moving their login screen, making it tougher to get in and watch our OnDemand programming. We help as much as we can, but we aren’t WWN. We’re not DIY Wrestling who handle our download sales. We don’t want to send you away without an answer, so we’ll get on the site and try and help with locations and the like. But guys, we can’t handle technical support for a website we don’t own. They’re vendors. We shoot the shows.

  Internet business marketers love to tout the merits of automation—citing these efficient ways to handle customer service. Our Business of Blood has a very different goal than those overnight entrepreneurs. We are seeking to build an army of dedicated and loyal warriors. We are looking to forge a bond that will last a lifetime. Our relationship with our fans is built at an emotional level, while these other Internet marketers are short-sighted, concerned with only convenience—and as a result, any devotion on the part of a customer is not a devotion to that cold company, but rather to only product and price. And when the company across the street produces it more cheaply, guess what? Exactly. The bond with their company is not a bond with the company at all.

  The good news is that as a start-up Business of Blood, you will not have the volume of customer service emails that you and a helper or two will not be able to address. Answer them personally, address the problem as soon as you can, fix it somehow, and offer a follow-up option like, “If that doesn’t work, please write us back and let us know.”

  We generally get a few types of customer service emails at KC—a lost or late package, which we can track easily for the customer via USPS; a programming question or suggestion; or a big ol’ thank you email. We respond to each of them with equal vigor. If someone took the time out of their day to tell you they’re happy or unhappy about something, then that means your company is quite important to them. That deserves a personal response. Not just a response…a personal response. All of these interactions are opportunities. They are touches with your customers, after all. It’s yet another opportunity to solidify your brand promise to them, and if you’re thinking the right way, to give them a little something extra.

  At KC we offer our customers a few opportunities for touches. For a long time we maintained a message board at a partner website called Kayfabe Memories, before social media replaced message boards. On the board, fans discussed releases, asked me questions, and even posted questions for YouShoots. The discussion on this forum was often invigorating and challenging and I enjoyed going on and answering all the fans’ questions about the company and anything else they came up with. We also had Jason Hart, son of the late booker Gary Hart, hosting a forum on our board. Jason fielded all questions about his brilliant father who had a memorable appearance on our show Guest Booker. This kind of personalization keeps our fans in direct contact with us and also adds some value to the customer experience.

  Through our forum and our activity on Twitter and Facebook, we were able to maintain meaningful and informative touches with our fans. Using these outlets for a series of shills for your product will get pretty tiresome, pretty quickly for your customers. These outlets will not be looked upon favorably by anyone with whom you wish to engage if the conversation is only one-way. You’re not there to sell, per se. Many message boards didn’t even allow you to shill and would suspend your account for doing so. But most will allow you to place some art in the signature of your posts, and that art should definitely be a graphic which links to your website. This was a great, free tool to market our wares, especially early on. We did this voraciously when we launched. It was a huge part of our marketing. It took a massive time commitment, but the price was right.

  Message boards and social networks really hate shilling. It’s top-down marketing (more later) and that is the antithesis of the tenets upon which social media has been built. The global Internet community and all its tools were founded on bottom-up philosophy. Don’t take that lightly.

  On Twitter and Facebook, if you are on there as your company rather than an individual, and you’ve told people to follow you on these social nets, then you can disseminate product info there. It’s likely that your followers have agreed to follow you on there for exactly that kind of information. They already get the cat videos from their mom. Ensure there’s some added value for customers and fans to sign up. Offer them an advantage, perhaps. At KC, when we had a limited-run item, like our popular and rare Signature Edition DVDs, wherein the star of the show autographs a replica disc to be framed and displayed, we’d announce the sale of these limited run items on Facebook, Twitter, and our email list first. They often sold out very quickly to these followers. That’s an advantage of staying in close contact with us via these social nets and our mailing list.

  Our programming also has fan-centric elements too, which tie all of this together. Our popular series YouShoot features all of the questions being asked by fans submitted via email, webcam, and our social media outlets. If you posted one, you may have had yours asked.

  Our show Wrestling’s Most was a countdown show in which the fans voted on a particular topic that was tabulated, counted down, and commented on by stars of the ring. The fan, our customer, has a huge stake in our programming, and ultimately, our business. That’s the ultimate part
nership that yields ultimate brand loyalty.

  But if you open up to the public you will have to deal with what the public has to say. You need to read the criticism, both justified and ridiculous alike, and understand it’s part of the price paid for the passionate engagement with fans.

  On Facebook, our fans can post reviews and comments on our titles that other fans can see and join in on the discussion. These outlets feature meaningful content and we really do view these social networks as added value for our fans more than anything. We always work to give our Kayfabe Commandos, as they’ve come to be known, a greater KC experience. And you should start to think in those terms also, and figure out how your business can be an experience.

  We were very close to producing a series called House Show, where a star of the wrestling business would spend the day at a fan’s house and we’d film it. We solicited entries for the first editions of the show, and if you wanted Kamala, Val Venis, or The Iron Sheik in your house chilling with the family for the day, you could send us an email. Talk about bringing our shows to the fans. We had these fantastic images in our heads of Sheiky working the grill in an apron, maybe Grandma sitting on Val Venis’s lap.

  We ultimately scrapped the series when we could not legally insure ourselves against some liability if something happened to a fan or a star. We love that personalization we’ve built with our Commandos and we don’t want any hurt or killed. That should probably be a priority of yours as well.

  House Show isn’t alone as far as shows that never saw the light of day, though most weren’t announced like House Show. Hell, some weren’t even discussed outside the KC sets, but served as a fine source of amusement and fantasy for us. And I don’t necessarily think they were all bad ideas—I would have loved to watch some of these, irrespective to profitability.

  How about another countdown? Here are the Top 5 KC Ideas for Shows We Just Couldn’t Bring Ourselves to Shoot:

  #5 - Tuesdays with Orndorff - Not sure if that would’ve been the title, but it’s a damn good one. Ever wonder what it would be like to accompany “Mr. Wonderful” Paul Orndorff on an average day? Well, this show would’ve been for you. Imagine a cinema verite style journey with Paul as he does some grocery shopping, gets a haircut, and does whatever the day requires. Wouldn’t be wrestling, or anything like that—strictly a slice-of-life portrait of Orndorff. Anthony pitched it, as he did most of this list, and we would have been marks for it. But it would never generate significant, single-release sales.

  #4 - Therapy - We didn’t have a title for this but it was to be an actual, 50-minute psychotherapy session with a licensed psychologist. We wanted The Iron Sheik to be the first guest, but as soon as we cooked up the idea, Howard Stern started doing a show on his Sirius channel called Meet the Shrink. He had members of his wack pack in recorded therapy sessions, which was basically our idea.

  Truthfully, I thought this was a little exploitative. (Ya think?) If anything very private and damaging were ever revealed I think I’d regret airing it. Maybe I wouldn’t have. Either way, I felt like a dirtbag approaching doctors with the idea.

  #3 - YouShoot: From Beyond - It’s me, a psychic medium, and a Ouija board, getting answers to all your questions from guests in the afterlife. I imagined you would have had a lot to ask Randy Savage, Curt Hennig, and Professor Toro Tanaka, and this could have been your chance. But the problem here would have been authenticity. No psychic could have faked this. Unless it was a real communication from the other side, no purported medium could sustain exhaustive questioning, answering as Ivan Koloff the entire time.

  Was there a big part of me interested in seeing how this would play out? Yes. But for the most part, I don’t believe in the ability of anyone to talk to the dead, though if you watched me interview Chyna you could make a case for it. She was allegedly alive at the time of the taping.

  More so than the fact that I thought the show would be a work, was that I was struggling with the ethics. I have a very broad gradient in what I would classify as entertainment, but this was hazy. It was probably poor taste.

  #2 - Ribs - Who doesn’t love a good rib story? Ribs, or pranks, have been a part of the pro wrestler’s lifestyle on the road for decades. I’ve been around enough of the workers to hear them all. Mr. Fuji, Mr. Perfect Curt Hennig, Dynamite Kid, and Owen Hart were commonly believed to be some of the masters of such chicanery. I would have loved to ask them all about it on YouShoot: From Beyond. Maybe we should have gone with the show.

  For the living pranksters of the business, we would have had the show Ribs, wherein the workers sat and exchanged their best rib stories, while eating ribs. See what we did there? Gigantic plate, heaping with saucy spare ribs, while Don Muraco, The Honky Tonk Man, and JJ Dillon sat gnashing bones and licking their fingers, talking about pad locking someone’s gym bag to water pipe in a Boston Garden locker room. This was a brainchild of Anthony’s, one he enjoyed telling me was a sure-thing. I wasn’t sure he was serious, and was less sure of its potential.

  #1 - Ox in a Box - Here’s Anthony’s finest unfilmed creation. The concept is simple—Ox Baker in a hotel room, being taped by small, surveillance cameras. That’s it. What does he do all day and night? What would he order from room service? What does he watch on TV? Sports? Classic editions of I Love Lucy?

  I don’t think it was ever an attempt to catch anything salacious or shocking. It was the normalcy of it that would have been entertaining as giant, scary Ox Baker plodded around the room like your grandfather might. But it’s Ox Baker. Shortly after cooking this one up, Ox ended up in a permanent box, and that was that.

  13. Negotiation

  ONE NIGHT I was preparing to negotiate an offer for a real estate client who was also a friend of mine. I was preparing him for what was likely to come, and for how the jousting was likely to play out. This was the part of real estate that people seemed to both love, and also become bristly about. It is always a bit contentious, and always personal. When negotiations begin, it is no longer a product or a property being sold. From the perspective of the seller, the buyer is putting a price on the memories and hard work that their property represents to them. In the mind of the buyer, the seller thinks they’re an asshole who will try and rip them off because they’re desperate.

  There are entire books written on the psychology of negotiation. I’ve read some. I’m not sure what I was looking for, perhaps something to ease the uncomfortable process of you go high, I’ll go low, and the spectrum of emotions that ensues.

  As my real estate client sat there, ready to start this process for his first property, he asked, “Why does it have to be a game?”

  I was taken aback. I started to answer—I’m sure I gave some explanation about my being contracted to look after his interests, while the seller and their agent are looking out for theirs, so there’s a process, and blah, blah, blah. But I couldn’t get the poignancy of his innocent question out of my mind.

  Why the game? Why are we starting here in our offer…only to go there in a week? Why are the sellers listing there in price…knowing they’ll be coming down here? There are a ton of reasons, and I know them all, but none of them are good. Why, like Dave asked me, go through the game?

  We’ve become accustomed to accepting that this is the de-facto process for purchasing in certain situations. We don’t walk into the department store and begin negotiating the price of the item on the shelf. It has to be priced correctly by the store, or it won’t move. If there’s any negotiation, it’s internal as we decide whether or not the item is worth its sticker, or if we can afford it.

  So again, why the game? Regardless of the reasons, the underlying question cannot be ignored, and that is, “Can we eliminate the game?” Can we participate in no-game negotiations? Better still, are we strong enough to turn any negotiations, despite the actions of the other party, into no-game negotiations?

  Obviously we can. You will be the better businessperson for subjecting yourself to this grueling process of killing the
game, and the sense of empowerment is so very worth it. Your decisions will have so much more clarity. The process of eliminating the game takes discipline, and adhering to it takes even more still. And it starts with you.

  Entering the no-games negotiation with conviction is a must. I don’t mean faux confidence or arrogance. There is no real strategy, and there is no overabundance of thought. What you should be practicing is a total release of desire—perhaps a Zen state would be a good model. You will enter the process with just knowledge, and conviction…calm, cool conviction. Such conviction has been fostered by the myriad research and homework you’ve done before entering the no-games negotiation session. If your processes were correct and your numbers accurate, you will use them to get you into the open, Zen state.

  The best model I have for the no-games negotiation is that of shopping for shoes. Don’t laugh. This model will deliver you the discipline if you return to it. I wear a size 9 shoe. It does not change based on circumstantial events. It does not change based on the passion and sales tactics of the shoe salesperson. It doesn’t change on the attractiveness of the shoe designs available to me. I’m a 9. This will not change. When I enter the shoe store, I am looking for the 9. If they are not selling 9 shoes, I am out the door rather quickly. Can they realistically sell me an 11? How hilarious would that negotiation process be?

  You are shopping for shoes in negotiation. You need a 9, or whatever shoe size you wear. That dispassionate fact should permeate your attitude. If it doesn’t fit, then it doesn’t fit. Perhaps there are very tiny modifications you can make. I have added soft padding to shoes to get to a 9 1/2 when they don’t make the style in a 9. But that’s a small concession, and it’s only a concession I have made when my size isn’t available. I’d never pad a size 9 1/2 when I know the seller has a size 9.