We’re going to kick off the year talking to one of my favorite people. Krista Neher has been a leading authority on digital marketing for as long as I can remember. She’s a six-time best-selling author and found of Bootcamp Digital, an education brand that offers digital marketing certification.

Along the way, Krista has had to not only teach people about influence marketing, but dig in and practice the craft a bit as a consultant, too. But her wide range of expertise and ability, plus her focus on making digital marketing a practical and cost-efficient investment for her clients gives her that broad perspective I look for in someone to just chop up and chew through the conversations in the space.

Today on Winfluence, I’ll dig into influence marketing with Krista. We’ll talk about how to build an influence plan, calculate the value of your influencer relationships and I’ll see if my assertions about influence marketing hold up to her scrutiny … it’s a perspective I certainly respect and know you’ll enjoy.

This episode is presented by CIPIO.ai. Scale acquisition of user-generated content and flip those social videos into ad creative using powerful generative AI toolset. Sign up for a demo at https://jasonfalls.co/cipio

Find this episode online at https://jasonfalls.co/kristaneher

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Instead of rushing to crank out something mediocre, I opted to step back, focus on the client work and reassess what Winfluence is and can be. For the last few weeks, I’ve thought long and hard about the show. I even entertained the notion that maybe it had run its course and wasn’t worth the energy to crank out more episodes in 2024. 

But then two things happened. First, I thought about the state of things. And to be quite honest, we’re not done. There’s a lot still to accomplish in influence marketing. A good portion of the industry is still falling over itself doing things poorly. 

The bigger the creator, the more likely you’re going to have to deal with talent managers. 

Every talent manager I talk to these days seems to be more and more out of touch with the reality brands face with budgets and return on their marketing dollar.

Brand managers are still pushing influencers to just be advertising shills.

And we are still thinking of influencers as the key to success, when the whole premise of this show and my approach to the craft is centered around the influence … not the influencer. 

It’s about to be 2024. And most of the people in the industry spending dollars on influence marketing are still functioning like it’s 2007.

The other thing that informed my thinking, I want to save for later, so listen to the full episode for that.

In this episode of Winfluence, I’m going to list some things that are still broken about our industry. I’m going to carve out a few ideas on what we can do to fix them. And I’ll recommit to you that this show is not only not going away, we’re just getting started.

Watch or listen to the full episode at jasonfalls.co/2024reset

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Some people say they think of an ad agency only that only focuses on influencers. Others say a consultant or small shop that handles all that busy work for you. Another contact said they think of the team at the software company they use, like CIPIO.ai for instance, which does the cat herding as it were.

The truth is none of those answers are wrong. The third party that handles some degree of influencer marketing for you is probably the right answer, regardless of which pieces of the puzzle are theirs. 

But in truth, there is a difference between a software company that has managed services and a strategic consultant. That’s different than an influencer marketing agency that focuses on influencer campaigns and one that does more media buying using influencer content. The “influencer marketing agency” is a big sea of muddy water. 

Brad Hoos runs an influencer marketing agency. It’s called The Outloud Group. They’re based in Detroit and they handle all aspects of influencer marketing from soup to nuts. They aren’t a software company … though they use software to help manage their work. They do more than just strategy. And they do more than just execution. 

Who better to break down not just the various facets of what a brand might need out of influencer marketing, but the ins and outs of influencer campaigns, choosing the right creators, negotiating with the big (and little) egos in the creator world and such than Brad?

I asked him to pay a visit to the old Influence bar here on Winfluence and chat a bit about the state of things. The Outloud Group’s approach is a little different than some agencies and they’ve got some interesting clients and case studies of course. 

But it’s also an opportunity for me to bounce one of my rant-y ideas off someone who can push back and tell me I’m wrong if I am, so we’ll get into that a little bit, too.

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And yet, this behemoth of a segment is still a mystery to most of us in the influence marketing space. Some consumer brands have played on Twitch and sponsored various gamers to some degree of success. But the businesses and agencies that succeed with the gaming segment are almost always the video game companies themselves. 

It’s like gaming is some sort of nerd herd stratosphere few of us are able to find entry to. 

Emilee Helm is the Head of Influencers for a company called Gamesight. It is an agency that focuses on helping video games and their parent companies market their products. And tapping into influencers is a big portion of what they do. 

But Gamesight does more than that. It monitors and ranks top Twitch channels, as one example. In fact, data is one of the company’s leading propositions. They track and measure things I’m not quite sure can be measured adequately. Imagine my delight when Emilee agreed to come on the show.

On this episode of Winfluence, Emilee and I are going to dive into this cryptic world of gaming and gaming influencers, learn about what Gamesight has that other agencies and influencer marketing firms don’t, and see what doors open to that world, plus which ones we can kick open wider by taking some of that expertise and applying it to our brands and campaigns.

This episode of Winfluence is presented by CIPIO.ai. We are helping brands transform their digital marketing with user-generated content videos and images at scale. Come see us at CIPIO.ai. If you want me to personally show you the platform and how we can solve your digital marketing performance problems with high-performing UGC, just go to jasonfalls.co/cipio … fill out that form and I’ll personally set up time to chat with you.

Find show notes for this episode at jasonfalls.com/emileehelm.

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But if you weren’t spot-on, that’s my fault, not yours. It’s an example of my marketing and communications with you failing to deliver the point.

It’s an exercise in clarity. And Steve Woodruff is probably the person on the planet with the most expertise and focus on helping business, brands and leaders nail clarity. His new book is called The Point: How to win with clarify-fueled communications. 

It is a handy guide and reminder to its readers of how to get to the point and not allow your communications to get lost in translation. Or drown out by the sea of noise that is our media landscape. 

I asked Steve to come on the show to talk to us about getting to the point. Why do we have so much trouble doing so, even when we’re supposed to be professional communicators? What barriers are in our way to communicating effectively? And how can we as brands, or influencers and content creators, check our work to ensure that we are always, getting to the point?

We’ll ask him all those questions and more today on Winfluence.

This episode of Winfluence is presented by CIPIO.ai. We are helping brands transform their digital marketing with user-generated content videos and images at scale. Come see us at CIPIO.ai. If you want me to personally show you the platform and how we can solve your digital marketing performance problems with high-performing UGC, just go to jasonfalls.co/cipio … fill out that form and I’ll personally set up time to chat with you.

Find show notes for this episode at jasonfalls.com/stevewoodruff.

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But allow me a moment to be rather frank. Those are exceptions to the rule. Most talent managers are in it for one thing: maximizing the take so they maximize their commission.

Too many managers ask for inflated rates that show no economical connection to how many people will actually engage with the content. Yes, there is value in just the content, usage rights and the like. But if the purpose of an influencer collaboration is to get a message in front of their audience, then there has to be some attention paid to how many of said audience the message will reach and resonate with.

I've also been frustrated with conversations around usage rights.

But, I digress.

As much as we’ve been propping talent managers up lately on the show, I feel like we need to have a different discussion about them and the practice. Just so happens Jessy Grossman also thinks talent manager roles have changed and should be changing.

Jessy is the woman behind Women in Influencer Marketing. She’s got a great community and podcast, both by that name and abbreviated WIIM sometimes. 

You may recall she was a previous guest on the show, back in May of 2021. We talked mostly about WIIM back then. 

But she reached out recently and said, “Traditional talent management is becoming obsolete and needs to change.” Color me both curious and delighted.

Now, I’m not implying Jessy agrees with my semi-rant about fees and licensing and such. But I did think it was suitable to bring her back to Winfluence to have the conversation.

This episode of Winfluence is presented by CIPIO.ai. We are helping brands transform their digital marketing with user-generated content videos and images at scale. Come see us at CIPIO.ai. If you want me to personally show you the platform and how we can solve your digital marketing performance problems with high-performing UGC, just go to jasonfalls.co/cipio … fill out that form and I’ll personally set up time to chat with you.

Find show notes for this episode at jasonfalls.com/jessygrossman2.

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I pursued radio through high school and college, navigated the world of broadcasting and sports hoping to one day land at ESPN. I actually interviewed there the same week I interviewed for its parent company, ABC. My first full-time job out of college wound up as a producer at ABC Radio Sports in New York.

My experiences included working on a nationally syndicated radio show, managing stringers and reporters for day-to-day sports coverage, producing longer-form feature pieces you could argue were essentially podcasts. But this was well before most people had access to the Internet and devices, bandwidth and such were affordable. Or even possible. 

We talk about influence on this show and radio is one of those mediums that we’re quick to overlook. My mother developed a nationally recognized, award-winning communications program a few years back in my small hometown in Eastern Kentucky. It wound up being a success because she knew what most of us don’t know. In a rural community, the local morning show deejay is probably the most influential person in town outside of the county judge. 

Tony Garcia knows the power of radio. Like me, he worked in the broadcasting industry back in the 1990s. He is the co-founder of a company called Now! Media. You may not recognize that company. But the other “company” he co-founded in conjunction with it is the Bob and Sheri Show.

It is a nationally syndicated radio show hosted by Bob Lacey and Sheri Lynch. They’re based in Charlotte, but are syndicated on 70 affiliates across the U.S. The weekday morning show is also heard in 177 countries and on 150 ships at sea along the American Forces Network. 

Now, a traditional, terrestrial radio show isn’t something you’d think would flourish in our on-demand, always connected, internet world. But the Bob and Sheri Show is different. Not only have they spun the show and segments of it into podcasts and an active social media presence that includes a Facebook Group number over 115,000 members. But they have hacked the advertising and sponsorship model for even small businesses. 

When I learned that, I knew we had to have Tony on the show. Because what they’ve built is a hidden gem of influence, both online and off. And we can learn from them.

This episode of Winfluence is presented by CIPIO.ai. We are helping brands transform their digital marketing with user-generated content videos and images at scale. Come see us at CIPIO.ai. If you want me to personally show you the platform and how we can solve your digital marketing performance problems with high-performing UGC, just go to jasonfalls.co/cipio … fill out that form and I’ll personally set up time to chat with you.

Find show notes for this episode at jasonfalls.co/tonygarcia.

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So we on the agency or brand side of things may run into a content creator we find on Instagram who is doing interesting things around the topic we’re focused on for our brand or client. We reach out to them, maybe do a sponsored post or some other type of trial run content collaboration. We appreciate their work and their, let’s say 50,000 followers there.

And then we move on to other clients, other campaigns, other creators. A year or two passes by and we think, “Hey! That one creator might make a good candidate for this campaign.” We reach out to them and chat about the possibility, then have to swallow hard when their rates have grown exponentially. Because they have changed.

Now they have 1.5 million followers on TikTok or their YouTube channel exploded. Or they were hired to be the host of a TV segment for some brand. Now they have a talent manager and have turned their content into a business. 

We saw it, but didn’t watch. If we had, maybe we would have kept that relationship going. 

Content creators who are doing so with intent are trying to become media properties. They want to hire teams of people to do all the busy work while they create the concepts and sit out in front of the camera. They build audiences to sell advertising or brand partnerships for so they can grow their empire.

It’s that leveling up that falls into the purview of Kevin Grosch. He is the founder and CEO of Made In Network. The company does a lot of things, but its core capabilities are focused on creating content and building media properties for content creators.

They do the same thing for brands, too. 

When I connected with Kevin recently, I had a ton of questions. When do content creators turn to outside help for doing what they already do? What tricks do you have to build those big media properties? Can you make me famous?

Instead of just chatting about it offline, I asked Kevin to come to the show and help us all understand more about that evolution of today’s content creator past influencer to media property and brand. How his company helps them and brands and how we can all benefit from knowing how its done.

We learn more from Kevin Grosch today on the show.

This episode of Winfluence is presented by CIPIO.ai. We are helping brands transform their digital marketing with user-generated content videos and images at scale. Come see us at CIPIO.ai. If you want me to personally show you the platform and how we can solve your digital marketing performance problems with high-performing UGC, just go to jasonfalls.co/cipio … fill out that form and I’ll personally set up time to chat with you.

Find show notes for this episode at jasonfalls.co/kevingrosch.

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If you want to read the full report for yourself, which I encourage you to do, you go to their website and sign up and trade your email address for their research. You become a lead in their platform … that’s how B2B marketing often works. But it’s a fair trade and, who knows? Linqia might be just what your company needs. So, go do it. We’ll certainly share the link to do so in our show notes for this episode. 

But Keith Bendes, who is the vice-president of strategy for Linqia is here today to dig into the highlights of the report with us. He is also the co-host of another great podcast, by the way. It’s called Creator Economy Live. So go check that out when you have a moment as well. 

Keith knows the influencer space as well as anyone. And you know what that means … we just turned on the mics and cameras and had a fun conversation I think you’ll enjoy. We hit on plenty of the report insights as well, so you’ll be informed as much as or even more so entertained today on the show. 

Here are some of the nuggets the report surfaces we’re going to touch on:

• Influencer Budgets are increasing. 75.5% of Linqia’s survey respondents either increased or remained unchanged from last year’s spending. 
• Brands are using influencer content in more places. It’s no longer about organic posts with a few paid ads. Influencer creative is driving brand creative now. 
• Paid amplification is bigger than you thought. More than half of brands are spending at least half their budgets on media amplification.
• But there are still challenges. ROI is still the big one. 
• And of course, new topics like AI, Threads, and Creator Generated Content … which we’ll distinguish from User Generated Content makes its first appearance in the Linqia study. 

We dig in more with Keith Bendes from Linqia today on the show.

This episode of Winfluence is presented by CIPIO.ai. We are helping brands transform their digital marketing with user-generated content videos and images at scale. Come see us at CIPIO.ai. If you want me to personally show you the platform and how we can solve your digital marketing performance problems with high-performing UGC, just go to jasonfalls.co/cipio … fill out that form and I’ll personally set up time to chat with you.

Find show notes for this episode at jasonfalls.co/keithbendes.

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For brands, you can be super nimble with your budget and work with the former of those. You can go big and work with the latter. But most find themselves somewhere in the middle jockeying around a mix of small and medium creator partners with a few big ones popping in from time to time.

That same range is found in the software space. You can find influencer marketing solutions for free or close to free. And you can also sign up for enterprise solutions that run thousands of dollars per month.

Then there’s the talent management segment. You don’t find many who work with creators under around 40-50,000 followers. But there is a huge difference in those who work with that level and those who manage six figure brand deals with the biggest stars on social media. 

Temima Shames falls into that last category. The 24-year-old former child actor started Next Step Talent at age 21. Its employee roster is all people under 30. And they are responsible for amplifying creators to become some of the most followed influencers in the world. Their roster includes a bunch of Gen-Z creators I’ve never heard of, but that’s what makes the next tidbit most impressive. 

That roster has more than six billion YouTube views, one debuted an album at No. 7 on Spotify. Another was TikTok’s biggest POV or point-of-view star. They had talent featured in YouTube’s Black Creator Class of 2023 as well.

I’ll drop a link to their roster page in the show notes so you can go see who they are. I didn’t recognize any of them, but I’m certainly not their target audience. 

Temima knows how to shape content creators into influencers with massive followings. I asked her to come on the show to share some of that knowledge with us, as well as talk about the impending threats to the big influencers businesses as brands recoil from inflated prices and an abundance of UGC.

She’s a smart one, gang. Get ready to learn a thing or two from the queen of influencer talent, Temima Shames today on the show. 

This episode of Winfluence is presented by CIPIO.ai. We are helping brands transform their digital marketing with user-generated content videos and images at scale. Come see us at CIPIO.ai. If you want me to personally show you the platform and how we can solve your digital marketing performance problems with high-performing UGC, just go to jasonfalls.co/cipio … fill out that form and I’ll personally set up time to chat with you.

Find show notes for this episode at jasonfalls.co/temimashames.

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How would it affect your business? 

Now, certainly for you social media content creators and brands that rely heavily on social media creators and content to drive customers, I’m sure if could be catastrophic. But really? Are there no other alternatives?

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not here to advocate for a social media shut down, but someone did it recently and lived to tell. Meg Casebolt is a B2B SEO consultant. For a long time, she followed the crowds to social media, leveraged it for her business and her clients and did what we all do. 

Now, SEO is a different discipline from social media. But it still requires creating content, promoting that content and staying relevant in the online world. That can imply staying connected on social media, too.

But the perfect storm of social media fatigue, mental health concern and simply being too busy running all the other aspects of her business led Meg to do something amazing. She took a 100-day detox from social media. Cold turkey. No Facebook. No Instagram. No Twitter. No TikTok. No LinkedIn.

And guess what? Her business not only survived, but thrived. Her mental health issues subsided. She was happier. She reconnected with previous clients, worked referrals, grew her business. 

She created the Social Slowdown Podcast from all she learned. There, she leads business conversations around the reality of not using social media as a primary tool. Business does go on without it.

Meg took a lot of the conversations from that podcast and has now shaped it all into a book called The Social Shutdown as well. It documents her experiment to leave social media for 100 days and not show a negative impact on her business. 

She’s here today to share those insights with us and talk about the reality of social media, where it fits and how we all … creators included … can perhaps look at social content and channels in a more healthy light for us and our audiences.

I know you’re skeptical, but trust me. This conversation is worth hearing.

This episode of Winfluence is presented by CIPIO.ai. We are helping brands transform their digital marketing with user-generated content videos and images at scale. Come see us at CIPIO.ai. If you want me to personally show you the platform and how we can solve your digital marketing performance problems with high-performing UGC, just go to jasonfalls.co/cipio … fill out that form and I’ll personally set up time to chat with you.

Find show notes for this episode at jasonfalls.co/megcasebolt.

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Tagger was actually also responsible for bringing me to the Influencer Marketing Show a couple of years ago. Pete Kennedy, its founder and I became friends with a shared vision and passion for the space. We had him on the show back in March of 2022. You can find that episode in our show notes at jasonfalls.com. 

I loved what Tagger’s software could do. I used it exclusively for a couple of years. I still do for certain strategy and research projects, though CIPIO.ai and other tools are a part of my strategy arsenal as well.

When the announcement came down that Tagger had been acquired, it was a personal celebration of sorts. My friends there reached the end game of the original goal of a startup business. It was sold for a reported $140 million in cash. So I have a couple of contacts who are a considerable amount wealthier now. That’s always a good thing to celebrate. 

But the news and the move also leave a lot of questions. 

So I reached out to Pete Kennedy and asked him to come answer them. We caught up last week and ironed out the what-ifs and what-nows of the big move, dug into the issues of the day in the influencer space, and I got Pete’s take on how AI factors into the influence space moving forward.

We’ll dig into the news of the day and get one smart man’s perspective on other things, too. Pete Kennedy is coming up on Winfluence. 

This episode of Winfluence is presented by CIPIO.ai. We are helping brands transform their digital marketing with user-generated content videos and images at scale. Come see us at CIPIO.ai. If you want me to personally show you the platform and how we can solve your digital marketing performance problems with high-performing UGC, just go to jasonfalls.co/cipio … fill out that form and I’ll personally set up time to chat with you.

Find show notes for this episode at jasonfalls.co/petekennedy2

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When you think marketing automation, you almost always think of email. Set up sequences of emails for people who fill out a form on your website or register for an event. They get an initial thank you email, then you automate one that sends them an offer or interesting reason to reengage on your website a few days later and so on until they buy.

Marketing automation almost always leads people to think about businesses, usually larger, complex ones, where automation can save thousands if not millions of dollars and hours in labor. But marketing automation is far more accessible and an untapped opportunity for even small businesses. Including content creators. 

Adam Tuttle is the senior director of customer activation for ActiveCampaign. It is a marketing automation software platform that has over 185,000 customers around the world. Some of them are small businesses. Some are even individuals like thought leaders, speakers and even content creators from the social media space.

Adam’s company, ActiveCampaign, is a sponsor of the Marketing Podcast Network, but I thought it would be useful to have him come on the show and dig into how marketing automation can help content creators treat their influence and content business like other businesses leveraging tools and approaches like it. 

Get ready to learn a few things and get inspired to level up your marketing today on Winfluence. 

As always, this episode of Winfluence is presented by CIPIO.ai. Let us scale your user-generated content needs and deliver authentic, high-performing UGC to fuel your paid, owned and earned content strategies. Learn more at CIPIO.ai.

But today, we want to take a reminder moment to tell you about Adam’s company, Active Campaign. If you looking for a way to grow your business, you need to check them out.  ActiveCampaign is a powerful marketing automation platform that can help you to increase your sales, improve your customer service, and build stronger relationships with your customers.

With ActiveCampaign, you can create and send email campaigns, manage your leads and customers, create landing pages, set up automated workflows, and track your results. All in one approachable platform!

And don’t take my word for it! ActiveCampaign has over 10,000 five-star reviews on G2 from happy users. 

We’ll get into some examples in today’s conversation with Adam Tuttle. But as a sponsor of Winfluence and MPN, and for a limited time, ActiveCampaign is offering our listeners a chance to double your contacts for free. When you sign up at activecampaign.com/activate, if your email list has 10,000 contacts, you only need to pay for 5,000. Or, you can pay for the 10,000 and get an extra 10,000 totally free. 

And if you’ve worked with any CRM or email software out there, you know additional contacts are like gold.  Once you start engaging all contacts in a personalized way at scale, your subscriber numbers will start to grow dramatically. It’s easy to hit those limits. So doubling your contacts is killer. 

Go to activecampaign.com/activate to sign up today. And thanks to ActiveCampaign for their support of the Marketing Podcast Network. You should check them out even if only that they help bring great marketing podcasts like Winfluence to you each week.

Links for this Episode:

• Adam Tuttle on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/j-adam-tuttle/
• Active Campaign online: https://activecampaign.com/activate
• Scale UGC with CIPIO.ai: https://jasonfalls.co/cipio

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Mavrck is out this week with its annual Creator Compensation Report. It’s a yearly survey of several hundred content creators that asks specific questions about how much they make, what type of work fuels that revenue, what kind of brand deals are they working and the like. It’s usually an insightful measuring stick to see where your brand is trending … are you paying well enough or not enough … are you offering the types of value others are and such.

I started telling you about six months ago that the brands I and CIPIO.ai were working with had started to shift what they were asking for. Many were foregoing the traditional ask for influencer marketing collaborations, opting instead for just user-generated content. 

Brands want content to fuel their paid and organic social. That’s good for companies like CIPIO.ai. We go get UGC on scale for brands. But it’s not a great sign for influencers who monetize their audience as much as their content. 

Now, that alone is only one tea leaf if you will. And influencers can still create content for payment and still benefit from UGC-driven campaigns. 

But Mavrck’s new Compensation Report has a few more tea leaves turning up of interest.

Rachael Cihlar is Mavrck’s vice-president for corporate communications and public relations. She is busy getting this handy compensation report out to folks, but took some time to visit with me to go over some of the findings and talk about their implications.

Some things I explore with her include these nuggets, surfaced by the report:

• The rates offered by brands are lower than previous years
• Affiliate compensation offers seem to be on the rise
• More than half of creators say affiliate income is a part of their array of earnings

Does this mean brands are starting shift away from sponsored content and brand collaboration deals in favor of more performanced-based compensation? Or are these numbers just a settling of the market? Only time will tell, of course, but the time we have with Rachael today gave me the opportunity to ask how she interprets the data.

She and I do that on this episode.

Links for this Episode:

• Rachael Cihlar on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/influenceexpert/
• Mavrck’s Website: https://mavrck.co/
• Mavrck’s 2023 Creator Compensation Report: https://info.mavrck.co/creator-compensation-report-2023
• Scale UGC with CIPIO.ai: https://jasonfalls.co/cipio

This episode of Winfluence is presented by CIPIO.ai. We are helping brands transform their digital marketing with user-generated content videos and images at scale. Come see us at CIPIO.ai. If you want me to personally show you the platform and how we can solve your digital marketing performance problems with high-performing UGC, just go to jasonfalls.co/cipio … fill out that form and I’ll personally set up time to chat with you.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Or are you like me and have vague ideas of what you want to accomplish in your head, but they kind of morph and change depending on the day?

Certainly, we’re more disciplined about business goals. They typically have to be articulated in strategies and presentations, discussed in meetings and conference calls, probably ad nauseum. But they’re important to have, to revisit frequently and to refer to when making strategic decisions for your business. 

Debra Eckerling is a goals strategist. She helps entrepreneurs, executives and employees identify and make a plan for personal and professional goals. She’s even got a clever methodology … the DEB Method … that is spelled out in her book Your Goal Guide.

I’m familiar with Deb because her weekly live stream show and podcast, called The DEB Show, is a sister podcast of this one on the Marketing Podcast Network. I’ve had the pleasure of sitting in on her weekly themed discussion. It’s well worth the subscription, the links to which we’ll post in the show notes. 

But Debra is also an influencer away from the marketing space, too. She’s a foodie writer and podcaster, too. Her show Taste Buds with Deb digs into her culinary side with guests to discuss and debate various food-related topics. It’s distributed by the Jewish Journal where she has been a contributor for a while.

Whether you’re a brand or agency marketer, a service provider in the influencer space or a content creator, you could certainly use a refresher on goal setting and goal getting. So I asked Deb to join us this week to talk about goals, the DEB Method and her experiences as a foodie creator. 

We’ll probably get hungry and set a goal of satiating that need on today’s show.

Links for this episode:

• Debra Eckerling on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/coastbunny/
• The DEB Method online: https://thedebmethod.com/
• Your Goal Guide on Amazon: https://amzn.to/3DepnY5
• Jason's appearance on The DEB Show: https://marketingpodcasts.net/2023/05/320-storytelling-with-jason-falls-peter-markel-christy-smallwood/
• Taste Buds with Deb: https://tastebudswithdeb.com/
• Scale UGC at CIPIO.ai: https://jasonfalls.co/cipio

This episode of Winfluence is presented by CIPIO.ai. We are helping brands transform their digital marketing with user-generated content videos and images at scale. Come see us at CIPIO.ai. If you want me to personally show you the platform and how we can solve your digital marketing performance problems with high-performing UGC, just go to jasonfalls.co/cipio … fill out that form and I’ll personally set up time to chat with you.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

There are also many ways to approach influence marketing. If you’ve been listening and following along with Winflunce for any amount of time you know that we focus on influence marketing, without the R. While social media celebrities with big followings are one way to slice the influence apple, there are many other ways to ultimately persuade an audience to take action. 

Sam Katz knows this. He is an influence marketing strategist and consultant. His history of work includes stints with Edelman and Publicis One. He and I happened to share the stage at the Influencer Marketing Show in New York last month. He led a panel discussion on creators and owning their own content in the world of unstable social networks. 

We got to talking backstage about a few topics and I thought his take on how businesses and brands can approach influence from a bunch of different angles would make for a good conversation. He told me one thing he sees from clients a lot these days is they don’t know what they don’t know. And that is typically that there are many ways to go from start to finish with influence marketing.

I asked Sam to join us today to talk about that topic along with a few others. He also has a current top-of-mind set of advice for brands and creators about content usage rights we’ll get into as well. He’s a smart one. And we’ll dig into more with Sam today on the show. 

Links for this episode:

• Sam Katz on LinkedIn
• Sam Katz on Instagram
• Popsixle
• Scale UGC with CIPIO.ai

This episode of Winfluence is presented by CIPIO.ai. We are helping brands transform their digital marketing with user-generated content videos and images at scale. Come see us at CIPIO.ai. If you want me to personally show you the platform and how we can solve your digital marketing performance problems with high-performing UGC, just go to jasonfalls.co/cipio … fill out that form and I’ll personally set up time to chat with you.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Writing a book certainly had a big impact on my professional credibility and personal brand. Though anyone with an idea and the Internet, and maybe a little bit of money, can self-publish, all three of my books have been with legit, business publishing houses. For Winfluence, I even had an agent to help me shop the book around.

As an aside, I love the sound of saying, “My agent will get back to you,” and having one sounds like a big deal. I love ya, Gary, but in reality, it’s not as big of a deal as you might think. It’s like having a real estate agent for your ideas.

Nonetheless, people are curious about writing books. Content creators should be. For the influencer types out there, writing a book takes you to a new level of legitimacy and credibility. If you’re not an influencer but still want to write a book, the hard truth is you’re going to need an audience to market it to if you want a publisher to pay attention to your idea. 

All those nuances of writing books, or at least business books, stuck in Josh Bernoff’s crawl, as they say where I’m from. Josh has three published titles to his name including the groundbreaking book Groundswell he co-authored with Charlene Li. But he’s collaborated on, ghost written or been involved with 45 non-fiction book projects. 

His latest is a new how-to guide that cuts through the fantasy and makes writing a book a very practical thing. It’s called Build a Better Business Book: How to Plan, Write and Promote a Book That Matters.

Sounds a little like the advice we got from Jay Acunzo recently on the show, right?

Josh is here today to share his comprehensive guide for authors to help you write a better book. Or write your first one in a better way. We’re going to dig into whether or not you should be an author, how to be a good one and where books fall into the schema of influence success for creators and brands. 

This episode of Winfluence is presented by CIPIO.ai. We are helping brands transform their digital marketing with user-generated content videos and images at scale. Come see us at CIPIO.ai. If you want me to personally show you the platform and how we can solve your digital marketing performance problems with high-performing UGC, just go to jasonfalls.co/cipio … fill out that form and I’ll personally set up time to chat with you.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The first sport I was ever placed in charge of as a student assistant at Morehead State University was the Eagle volleyball team. I hadn’t ever seen volleyball in person before going to college, but was trained to keep statistics at matches by hand … now they do it on computers. I designed the team’s media guide, wrote press releases, pitched ideas to newspaper reporters and TV journalists. 

While volleyball wasn’t the only the sport I worked, it was always my favorite. It was fast, the young women playing were always super athletic, jumping high and crushing the ball into the opponent’s court. I never worked at a school that sponsored men’s volleyball, but I’m kind of glad for that. It helped me appreciate how strong and dominant women can be on the playing courts and fields. 

Last fall I had the opportunity to speak to a public relations class at the University of Louisville. Dr. Karen Freberg is a professor there. She and I have shared the stage at conferences and traveled along side one another a few times. She’s kind of a social media pioneer in the academic circles, building out curricula for the new world of PR thanks to social media, influencers and the like. She has me speak to her class each year, which I always enjoy doing.

Low and behold one of Dr. Freberg’s students last fall was Aiko Jones. She is a star blocker for the Cardinals and was instrumental in the team’s run to the Final Four and National Runners-Up finish. UofL was 31-3 overall with an amazing 17-1 record in the ACC. 

For those of you who don’t know sports, Aiko was one of the dominant players on one of the most dominant teams in the entire country at the college level last year. 

She’s back for her senior year in 2023 and will no doubt make a run at racking up another string of honors. She was Final Four All-Tournament Team and All-Louisville Regional Team in the NCAA Tournament. First Team All-ACC, First Team All-Region.

In layman’s terms, she’s one of the best college volleyball players in the country. 

Which means, she’s well versed in Name Image Likeness benefits and parlaying her athletic prowess into brand deals and collaborations. So, I asked my pal Aiko to come on the show to share some of those experiences with all of us. We’ll learn about NIL from the student-athlete perspective today on Winfluence.  

As always, this episode of Winfluence is presented by CIPIO.ai. Let us scale your user-generated content needs and deliver authentic, high-performing UGC to fuel your paid, owned and earned content strategies. Learn more at CIPIO.ai.

But we want to take a moment to tell you about a new sponsor of the Marketing Podcast Network. Support for all the shows on MPN, including Winfluence, is provided by ActiveCampaign.

If you looking for a way to grow your business, you need to check out ActiveCampaign. It is a powerful marketing automation platform that can help you to increase your sales, improve your customer service, and build stronger relationships with your customers.

With ActiveCampaign, you can create and send email campaigns, manage your leads and customers, create landing pages, set up automated workflows, and track your results. All in one approachable platform! Go to activecampaign.com/activate to sign up today.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Kind of a two birds with one stone approach, if you will. 

In this episode of Winfluence, we’ll follow in that direction a bit. Dean Mercado is today’s guest. He’s a business coach who also happens to run a digital marketing agency. So he brings a couple of nice perspective to the table for you brands, agencies and content creators. His Mind Stretch Methodology to level up your business came after over 10,000 hours of coaching businesses to do just that.

The thing he brings to the table that got me excited to bring all of you was his concept of clone the owner. It’s a lesson in prioritization, hiring, outsourcing, training and delegation to take the tasks that aren’t the best use of your time off your plate and onto someone who is an owner clone to execute for you.

I don’t know about you, but I know in my own businesses, working a solid process and workflow that optimizes my time and energies is probably my number one problem. I thought we could all use a good lesson in how to clone ourselves and level up at the same time.

As always, this episode of Winfluence is presented by CIPIO.ai. Let us scale your user-generated content needs and deliver authentic, high-performing UGC to fuel your paid, owned and earned content strategies. Learn more at CIPIO.ai.

But we want to take a moment to tell you about a new sponsor of the Marketing Podcast Network. Support for all the shows on MPN, including Winfluence, is provided by ActiveCampaign.

If you looking for a way to grow your business, you need to check out ActiveCampaign. It is a powerful marketing automation platform that can help you to increase your sales, improve your customer service, and build stronger relationships with your customers.

With ActiveCampaign, you can create and send email campaigns, manage your leads and customers, create landing pages, set up automated workflows, and track your results. All in one approachable platform!

And don’t take my word for it! ActiveCampaign has over 10,000 five-star review on G2 from happy users. 

For a limited time, ActiveCampaign is offering our listeners a chance to double your contacts for free when you sign up at activecampaign.com/activate. That means if your email list has 10,000 contacts, you only need to pay for 5,000. Or, you can pay for the 10,000 and get an extra 10,000 totally free. 

Go to activecampaign.com/activate to sign up today.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The main focus of many an influencer today is creating videos for TikTok, Instagram and YouTube. For posting Stories on various platforms and engaging their followers and fans there. But those platforms aren’t owned by the creators. There’s a significant amount of risk influencers and content creators are taking by putting their main source of income on borrowed land.

Montana recently banned TikTok. I don’t necessarily think that ban will stick. Nor do I think TikTok will soon be banned across the U.S. But it’s not far-fetched for that to come to fruition. If it does, TikTok creators could be in a very bad position.

The problem in the influencer marketing space is that we’ve gotten away from having our own websites. Owned channels. Creators are assuming the social networks are forever and won’t go away. They’re putting the precious eggs of their business in someone else’s basket.

I hate to use this phrasing, but “Back in my day …” you wrote blog posts and had your own website. You used social networks to promote the content there and build your email lists. You owned not just your content, but your audience as well. 

Creators today don’t think that way and it may come back to bite them.

If you do have a website, you probably know a thing or two about SEO, or search engine optimization. Search engines like Google are the lifeblood of just about any website’s traffic. Figuring out how to rank well for certain keywords or phrases helps more traffic come to your site, subscribe to your content or buy from you. 

But if these creators don’t have websites, what are they to do? Can they do anything?

Kevin Roy is the CEO of GreenBananaSEO out of Boston. He’s helped dozens of companies drive growth and revenue using innovative digital marketing approaches. His company has been ranked several times in Inc. Magazine’s 5000 Fastest Growing Companies.

I asked Kevin to join us on Winfluence to talk about the state of SEO today, how creators can leverage it to build their brands and businesses, and what they can … or can’t do … to use SEO to build their social network cache even if they don’t have a website. 

We’ll talk to Kevin about that and more today on the show.

As always, this episode of Winfluence is presented by CIPIO.ai. Let us scale your user-generated content needs and deliver authentic, high-performing UGC to fuel your paid, owned and earned content strategies. Learn more at CIPIO.ai.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

I happened to be in the audience at CEX, the Creator Economy Expo, in Cleveland last month, to see Jay Acunzo speak. He’s formerly with ESPN, Google, HubSpot and a few other places. He’s a content guy and a podcaster (subscribe to his show Unthinkable) so I wanted to see what he had to say. His talk on podcasting at CEX was that perfect explanation of how to take a brand story and put it into action.

So I asked Jay to come on the show and talk about that, not just from a podcasting perspective but for any creator, or brand for that matter. The essence of what I took away from his talk is that as content creators, we don’t need to worry about being the best or the biggest. We only need to worry about being our audience’s favorite. 

Today on Winfluence, we’re going to dig into Jay’s approach to building great content and find out from him how we can do just that with our brand and our content. In doing so, we’re going to move from our brand story, to actual storytelling that drives our execution. 

Get out your notebooks and pens, gang. This one is going to be a note-taker.  

This episode of Winfluence is presented by CIPIO.ai. We help brands solve a couple of big problems. We also have free solutions for creators you need to know about. 

For the brands out there, what CIPIO.ai does best is source authentic and high-performing user-generated content you can use to fuel your paid, owned, earned and shared content strategies. UGC performs better. We help you get as much of it as you want. If you also want those users to post the UGC on their channels to become influential voices for your brand, our software helps make that happen, too. 

For you creators, when you authenticate into CIPIO.ai’s platform, we have a free media kit you can use to market your influence, content and channels to brands. You can customize it, then pop out a PDF or a web version to share. You can even create different versions for different clients on the fly. We also have an incredible referral program that pays you 20% commission on the first year’s revenue from any brand you refer to CIPIO.ai. 

You can learn more at CIPIO.ai. And if you’d like to set up a call with me to personally show you the platform and how it can benefit you and your brand, jump over to jasonfalls.co/cipio, fill out that form and we’ll set up some time to talk. 

CIPIO.ai - We’re building a Community Commerce Marketing Super App that has something in it for you and your business. Come see us. 

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The topic of branding is quite intriguing to me. When it’s done right, the brand is memorable, if not successful. So I wanted to continue the conversation, but add some different perspective to it.

Rick Ray is the co-founding partner of brandstory. It is a brand marketing consulting firm currently based in Italy, though Rick has worked on both sides of the Atlantic over the years. Rick’s experience is leading big agency brand efforts globally, but he’s spent the last 19 years helping companies define their brand story.

Rick’s general philosophy is that success comes from standing out. Brands need to tell a compelling story. That sounds similar to our conversation about Primal Branding recently, doesn’t it. That’s because it is.

Rick’s spin, though, often starts with HR so you’re hiring people who buy into that story. 

His firm digs deep into an organization to find the untold, unheard, unknown and sometimes untellable stories that surprise and delight, move emotions and what he says, “Liberates people power.”

As you might imagine, the same process can apply to creators and personal brands, too. 

But for you brand-side marketers out there, how can you brand story inform the creators and influencers you choose to work with? We’ll find out more from Rick on Winfluence.

As always, this episode of Winfluence is presented by CIPIO.ai. Let us scale your user-generated content needs and deliver authentic, high-performing UGC to fuel your paid, owned and earned content strategies. Learn more at CIPIO.ai.

But we want to take a moment to tell you about a new sponsor of the Marketing Podcast Network. Support for all the shows on MPN, including Winfluence, is provided by ActiveCampaign.

It is a powerful marketing automation platform that can help you to increase your sales, improve your customer service, and build stronger relationships with your customers. ActiveCampaign has over 10,000 five-star review on G2 from happy users. 

For a limited time, ActiveCampaign is offering our listeners a chance to double your contacts for free when you sign up at activecampaign.com/activate. That means if your email list has 10,000 contacts, you only need to pay for 5,000. Or, you can pay for the 10,000 and get an extra 10,000 totally free. 

Go to activecampaign.com/activate to sign up today.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The ever-changing landscape also impacts the power and effectiveness of creators. To many, the individual content creator is the television network of today. Each individual one their own enterprise with all the accouterments that go with that … staffs, budgets, egos. 

One man who has seen all of it and continued to innovate and build solutions, both products and services, to address the needs of the industry is Joe Gagliese from Viral Nation. That firm has been around a while now and has grown considerably. 

It bills itself as a global digital media innovation group that powers the social ecosystem through integrated solutions that align strategy, talent, media, and technology. Viral Nation includes full-service digital and social agency, VN Marketing; creator and athlete-influencer management agencies, VN Talent and VN Sports; and software division, VN Tech.

If you want something done with influencers, Viral Nation can probably do it. And Joe’s take on how we’re all doing what we’re doing is an interesting filter for what is and what may come. 

I asked Joe to come on and talk to us about the landscape, the future, the opportunities and more. You’ll get to hear the conversation today on the show.

This episode of Winfluence is presented by CIPIO.ai. We help brands solve a couple of big problems. We also have free solutions for creators you need to know about. 

For the brands out there, what CIPIO.ai does best is source authentic and high-performing user-generated content you can use to fuel your paid, owned, earned and shared content strategies. UGC performs better. We help you get as much of it as you want. If you also want those users to post the UGC on their channels to become influential voices for your brand, our software helps make that happen, too. 

For you creators, when you authenticate into CIPIO.ai’s platform, we have a free media kit you can use to market your influence, content and channels to brands. You can customize it, then pop out a PDF or a web version to share. You can even create different versions for different clients on the fly. We also have an incredible referral program that pays you 20% commission on the first year’s revenue from any brand you refer to CIPIO.ai. 

You can learn more at CIPIO.ai. And if you’d like to set up a call with me to personally show you the platform and how it can benefit you and your brand, jump over to jasonfalls.co/cipio, fill out that form and we’ll set up some time to talk. 

CIPIO.ai - We’re building a Community Commerce Marketing Super App that has something in it for you and your business. Come see us. 

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Mr. Beast is an example of the latter. Jake Paul is another influencer turned big star. Lilly Singh went from YouTuber to late night TV star. Technically, you can add Justin Bieber, Carly Rae Jepsen, Megan Thee Stallion and many more big celebs to that influencer success journey. 

The ones who leveraged their influence to launch their own products range from the Khardashians to Michelle Phan. You may remember our chat with Aaron Hefter and Felicia Hershenhorn from July of 2021. They launched Imarais Beauty with Sommer Ray whom I chatted with for an article I wrote around the same time. 

Another previous episode of Winfluence you may recall is my talk with Daniel Stone and Lou Montemayor from Bandolier Media. That was in June of 2021. Bandolier Media is a multiple time Ad Age Small Agency of the Year award winner that earned a reputation for creating influencers.

They launched Just a Construction Guy, Unemployed Wine Guy, Duck Tape Man, the Lawn Whisperer. These half-real, half-advertising creations were intentionally tied to brands and created as Instagrammers and YouTubers … regular old influencers. Just a Construction Guy broke off from his original brand collaboration and just became a regular creator. He’s a real guy. And really a construction guy, too. 

Well, Daniel, Lou, George Ellis and the Bandolier Team is up to a variation on the theme. They’ve used their content creator thinking and inspiration to launch … a new product. Roasty Buds coffee hit the virtual shelves last fall. It’s the world’s first spicy coffee. Since the launch Roasty Buds has become one of the premier flavored coffees in the world with variations that include Kinda Spicy, Xtra Spicy and Xxxtra Insane Spicy. They recently added Texas BBQ and Cherry Glaze Smoked BBQ flavored coffee.

The idea is just weird enough to get attention, which is Bandolier’s pedigree. So the agency that creates influencers has now skipped the influencer and created a product. 

On this episode of Winfluence, we’ll welcome Daniel and Lou back to the program, and add George to the conversation, to explain how Spicy Buds evolved from influencer marketing and where the Bandolier of crazy creative brains are going with influence in 2023. 

This episode of Winfluence is presented by CIPIO.ai. We help brands solve a couple of big problems. We also have free solutions for creators you need to know about. 

For the brands out there, what CIPIO.ai does best is source authentic and high-performing user-generated content you can use to fuel your paid, owned, earned and shared content strategies. UGC performs better. We help you get as much of it as you want. If you also want those users to post the UGC on their channels to become influential voices for your brand, our software helps make that happen, too. 

For you creators, when you authenticate into CIPIO.ai’s platform, we have a free media kit you can use to market your influence, content and channels to brands. You can customize it, then pop out a PDF or a web version to share. You can even create different versions for different clients on the fly. We also have an incredible referral program that pays you 20% commission on the first year’s revenue from any brand you refer to CIPIO.ai. 

You can learn more at CIPIO.ai. And if you’d like to set up a call with me to personally show you the platform and how it can benefit you and your brand, jump over to jasonfalls.co/cipio, fill out that form and we’ll set up some time to talk. 

CIPIO.ai - We’re building a Community Commerce Marketing Super App that has something in it for you and your business. Come see us. 

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Big brands are eating it up. The influencer marketing industry is growing by billions of dollars per year. The creator economy is booming. 

One area where influencers and content creators can have a huge impact on a brand is their purpose-driven or cause marketing. But the impact can be both hugely positive or hugely negative. 

There’s a conundrum brands face when trying to message their sustainability, social justice and other cause-related initiatives. On one hand, reaching out to influencers means you have to peel back the curtain a bit and be more transparent about what you’re doing to help along said cause. But doing so means the creator in question may find flaws, gaps or black eyes and you can bet it will be hard to keep them from sharing that about your brand, too.

On the other hand, if you sit on issues like sustainability, social justice, diversity and others, you and the topic only get mentioned when a PR crisis erupts. At that point you don’t have the relationships built with influencers to effectively explain or put out the fires.

Nick Guy has figured out a way to solve for this. He’s built a creator-led agency in the United Kingdom called The No Logo Agency that offers up purpose-led creators, vetted and qualified, for brands to engage who want that all-important influence partner to help communicate their cause marketing and other initiatives.

Nick even says that influencers are the secret weapon brands can use in the battle for sustainability recognition. We’ll ask him to explain and share his thoughts on the conundrums and more. 

This episode of Winfluence is presented by CIPIO.ai. We help brands solve a couple of big problems. We also have free solutions for creators you need to know about. 

For the brands out there, what CIPIO.ai does best is source authentic and high-performing user-generated content you can use to fuel your paid, owned, earned and shared content strategies. UGC performs better. We help you get as much of it as you want. If you also want those users to post the UGC on their channels to become influential voices for your brand, our software helps make that happen, too. 

For you creators, when you authenticate into CIPIO.ai’s platform, we have a free media kit you can use to market your influence, content and channels to brands. You can customize it, then pop out a PDF or a web version to share. You can even create different versions for different clients on the fly. We also have an incredible referral program that pays you 20% commission on the first year’s revenue from any brand you refer to CIPIO.ai. 

You can learn more at CIPIO.ai. And if you’d like to set up a call with me to personally show you the platform and how it can benefit you and your brand, jump over to jasonfalls.co/cipio, fill out that form and we’ll set up some time to talk. 

CIPIO.ai - We’re building a Community Commerce Marketing Super App that has something in it for you and your business. Come see us. 

Other notes mentioned in the show:

• The Influencer Marketing Show New York - June 20-21 - New World Stages

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

If you haven’t articulated what that brand is, you’re kind of leaving it up to those around you to define or even assume what it is. 

The more you can articulate what that brand is, what it stands for, what it strives for, the better chance you have of recruiting fans and followers. If you’re rather extreme in defining it, you can evolve that brand following into a brand community. 

What if I told you there was a process to branding that is so relevant to the influence marketing world that YouTube requires its study for employees so they understand how to build audience and advocacy? There is. It’s called Primal Branding and it’s the brainchild of Patrick Hanlon.

Today on Winfluence, we’re going to dig into what Primal Branding is. How you can apply its principles to your brand, whether you’re a personal brand content creator or a marketer for a company or product. We’ll look at case studies of Primal Branding in action – I’m sure there’s one big one you know well but just don’t know it’s Patrick’s work – and dig into how it can solve some of the marketing world’s biggest challenges. 

This episode of Winfluence is presented by CIPIO.ai. the community commerce marketing platform. You brands out there probably have a content problem. You need more and better performing content for paid social campaigns. Facebook, Instagram, TikTok … the ad creative that performs best is user-generated content. CIPIO.ai does two things really well. We source authentic UGC from your community of customers, fans and followers and fill those content coffers. The other thing … identify the influential people in your community and have them also post on their channels, sharing valuable word-of-mouth recommendations with their friends, family and followers. 

Book a demo with me … Jason Falls. I’m going to do the demo with you. Just go to jasonfalls.co/cipio now and fill out that form. 

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The one I’m referring to was inspired by a friend who asked how one would uncover the influencers online who really have true influence. Not just followers or decent engagement rates. But the ones who can post something that drives people to actually do something or think differently about something.

The answer to that question isn’t what most people want to hear. You have to roll up your sleeves and really do some digging. You have to triangulate social networks and content platforms and see who’s being quoted in the media, interviewed on podcasts, speaking at conferences. 

But in my Winfluence Tip, I shared one idea that always pays dividends for me. When I’m looking for a thought leader or subject matter expert in a given vertical, I go fishing for the people who run Groups.

There’s no influencer marketing software that indexes admins for LinkedIn or Facebook Groups. You simply have to go find the groups that are active and engaged, look up the admin, research them. Sometimes have to join the group and participate for a while before you get anywhere. 

The Group Leaders are gate keepers for information for that audience. People join most groups because someone is helping filter out the spam and nonsense so the content is more trustworthy and qualified for their viewing pleasure.

Kevin Marcus Miller is a lot of things. And one of them is a Facebook Group admin. He is the host of the Marketing Agency Owners Group, which as of this writing has 53,000 members. And it’s growing by hundreds of new users every week. 

I’m a member and was so impressed with what and how Kevin was managing everything there, I thought I’d have him on to chat about running a group, what goes into it, what brands should and should not do to be involved with one, and share ideas on how you can perhaps build one of your own to solidify your influence.

We’ll also dig into those other hats I told you about. Kevin’s new podcast, Agency Talk, is one of the newest shows on the Marketing Podcast Network. It was a spin-off of the Facebook Group actually. He’s a noted musician and songwriter. And a survivor 12 times over, of sudden cardiac arrest.

This episode of Winfluence is presented by CIPIO.ai where you can create a consistent flow of authentic user-generated content to fuel paid, earned, shared and owned campaigns that set your content marketing on fire! One of the main methods of doing that is by shifting your influencer marketing focus to a Community Influence Marketing one. That’s where you discover the influential voices in your own community of customers, fans and followers, and partner with them to create authentic content that recommends your brand. 

Download CIPIO.ai's new ebook called The Marketer’s Guide to Community Influence Marketing. It’s a step-by-step manual that shows you how to do it. The result is a more cost-efficient way to engage creators and drive word-of-mouth marketing while capturing better-performing content for your paid and owned social media efforts.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

While that refers to far more than just race, a good portion of the conversation around DEI circles around people of color. In the influence marketing space, that conversation has driven progress around the pay gap from white to black or brown creators, representation in influence marketing campaigns and sensitivities for businesses and brands to ensure they are not just checking a box, but changing behaviors. 

Without question, the conversations have led to progress. And that’s a very good thing. As an aside, if you don’t think progress in this category of our world is a good thing, I’d rather you didn’t listen to this podcast. 

Still, there’s much more progress to be made. I’ve made it a point to come back to the topic of diversity, equity and inclusivity, the conversations around race and how we can collaborate and cooperate more than not. Why? Because these conversations are what will continue to move us forward as an industry, a community and a species. 

Monique Russell happened upon me recently. She’s a dynamic speaker, trainer and communications guru who hosts a podcast of her own that focuses on diversity and inclusion and understanding black cultures. Her perspective is that it is incumbent upon us all – regardless of color or race – to do our own diversity, equity and inclusivity work to build unity. 

The show is called Bridge 2 U. It is now a member of the Marketing Podcast Network and a sister show to Winfluence in that regard. 

As such, I asked my new podcast partner of sorts to join us on the show. Today we’re going to talk to Monique Russell about communications, including the practice of influence marketing and marketing overall, through the lens of diversity. 

And you know me … I’m just dumb enough to ask the hard questions in hopes we land at an answer that bridges those gaps.

This episode of Winfluence is presented by CIPIO.ai where you can create a consistent flow of authentic user-generated content to fuel paid, earned, shared and owned campaigns that set your content marketing on fire! One of the main methods of doing that is by shifting your influencer marketing focus to a Community Influence Marketing one. That’s where you discover the influential voices in your own community of customers, fans and followers, and partner with them to create authentic content that recommends your brand. 

Download CIPIO.ai's new ebook called The Marketer’s Guide to Community Influence Marketing. It’s a step-by-step manual that shows you how to do it. The result is a more cost-efficient way to engage creators and drive word-of-mouth marketing while capturing better-performing content for your paid and owned social media efforts.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

But the constant thread in all those journeys is their stories are fascinating to me. A couple of weeks ago, I came across a local content creator, influencer and podcaster here in Louisville, honestly by happenstance. I knew who she was, of course. I like to keep my eye on who is creating content in my backyard. But she and I hadn’t had reason to make a more one-to-one connection. Until we did.

Rosa Hart runs LouReview.com. The cornerstone content there is the Lou Review Podcast. She has the obligatory social media channels, too. She mostly reviews restaurants around town, but also shares more broad experiences with events, attractions and the like. 

My team at CIPIO.ai put her on a list of creators matched up with one of our clients. We reached out and were moving through the agreement and deliverables when Rosa decided she didn’t want to connect her channels to our platform. Just didn’t know who CIPIO was and whether or not connecting her social channels to a company like that was a good idea.

My team let me know and I reached to introduce myself more formally and reassure her that we use that connection just to make measurement easy for everyone, we’re a trusted partner and I’m literally a 10 minute drive up the road so you can come ring my neck if we ever do you wrong.

Rosa … invited me to her house. So I went. And probably heard several of the most interesting explanations of a content creator’s origin story, motivations and journeys I’ve ever heard. And, as a bonus, Rosa’s now three-year journey as a content creator has opened up a surprising and awesome new project that brings her day job and her passion together. 

That project is Strong After Stroke, a new offering from Norton Healthcare in Louisville. Rosa's day job is a stroke after care nurse for Norton's Neuroscience Center. The new show launches the very day this episode dropped. You can find it on YouTube as well.

Today on Winfluence, I’m going to take you with me to meet Rosa Hart. This isn’t a virtual interview. We’re going to her house. We’ll meet her dog. Her daughter’s cartoons will play faintly in the background. 

Today’s Winfluence is an audio journey. Come along for the ride. 

This very special episode of Winfluence is presented by CIPIO.ai where you can create a consistent flow of authentic user-generated content to fuel paid, earned, shared and owned campaigns that set your content marketing on fire! One of the main methods of doing that is by shifting your influencer marketing focus to a Community Influence Marketing one. That’s where you discover the influential voices in your own community of customers, fans and followers, and partner with them to create authentic content that recommends your brand. 

Download CIPIO.ai's new ebook called The Marketer’s Guide to Community Influence Marketing. It’s a step-by-step manual that shows you how to do it. The result is a more cost-efficient way to engage creators and drive word-of-mouth marketing while capturing better-performing content for your paid and owned social media efforts.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The shift I’m talking about has to do with advertising models. The economy has forced brands to find more efficient ways to get the word out. Spend less, while doing as much, or even more. And while that makes perfect, smart business sense for the brand in question. The impact that tightening has on the services, agencies, vendors and media channels isn’t around the waist. It’s around the neck.

More and more brands are insisting on cost-per-performance ad models. You may also hear them referred to as cost-per-acquisition approaches. Or, if you want to get down to the pedestrian level and call a spade a spade, it’s basically affiliate marketing.

If an influencer. Or a podcast. Or website. Or any other advertising channel helps the brand make money, then and only then, do they get paid. Conversions are the key. Measurement and attribution are most crucial. But if my audience clicks on my link or uses my code upon checkout, I make a commission off the sale.

Pretty simple, right? Pretty fair? 

You brand folks are probably saying yes. I’m saying no. And not only is it not fair. It’s borderline criminal. 

This episode of Winfluence is presented by CIPIO.ai where you can create a consistent flow of authentic user-generated content to fuel paid, earned, shared and owned campaigns that set your content marketing on fire! One of the main methods of doing that is by shifting your influencer marketing focus to a Community Influence Marketing one. That’s where you discover the influential voices in your own community of customers, fans and followers, and partner with them to create authentic content that recommends your brand. 

Download CIPIO.ai's new ebook called The Marketer’s Guide to Community Influence Marketing. It’s a step-by-step manual that shows you how to do it. The result is a more cost-efficient way to engage creators and drive word-of-mouth marketing while capturing better-performing content for your paid and owned social media efforts.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Now, I’m the last person in the world interested in talking politics. I gave up on the possibility our elected officials actually represented the public’s interests in the 1990s. I keep informed so my vote still counts for something, but have zero interest in discussing or debating our dysfunctional, two-parties with all the power system.

So, that’s not what we’re going to do on this episode of Winfluence. We’re going to actually look at a real TikTok ban and imagine the implications for the what-if scenario. 

India banned TikTok and more than 200 other apps three years ago. It was in response to Chinese military aggression along the border between the two countries in June of 2020. The Indian government cited privacy and national sovereignty as the main issues. The move abruptly turned off the app for 200 million Indian users. 

Once again, that was almost three years ago. So we’ve had time to see how such a ban would take hold. Yes, India and the U.S. are different countries and cultures. But we’re not that far apart. Surely, we can glean some insights and peer into a possible future by understanding India now versus India with TikTok.

Pooja ParasuRaman is my professional counterpart at Affable.ai. It is an end-to-end influencer marketing platform. While Affable is a competitor of CIPIO.ai, technically speaking, we both have different philosophical approaches to the practice. And a common level of respect for one another.

Pooja operates out of India. So she not only has first-hand experience with what the TikTok ban has done to her country, but she’s working in the influencer marketing world where TikTok is for many creators, a primary source of income, and for brands engaging in influencer marketing, a fairly effective channel on which to market.

I asked Pooja to join and educate us on the ban and its effects in India so we can have a peek at what might soon be our own reality in the States …or perhaps your reality in your country should a TikTok ban be in the offing.

This episode of Winfluence is presented by CIPIO.ai. the community commerce marketing platform. You brands out there probably have a content problem. You need more and better performing content for paid social campaigns. Facebook, Instagram, TikTok … the ad creative that performs best is user-generated content. CIPIO.ai does two things really well. We source authentic UGC from your community of customers, fans and followers and fill those content coffers. The other thing … identify the influential people in your community and have them also post on their channels, sharing valuable word-of-mouth recommendations with their friends, family and followers. 

Book a demo with me … Jason Falls. I’m going to do the demo with you. Just go to jasonfalls.co/cipio now and fill out that form. 

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

But what does AI have to do with influencer marketing? And how will it impact what we do as brands, agencies, and creators? How will it impact the software vendors we work with?

I wanted to explore that topic a bit with Daria Belova and Anne Puzakova. They are both with HypeFactory, a very successful global influencer marketing agency. They’ve been winning awards and making some noise working with a lot of clients in the gaming world, among other verticals. 

We dug into AI and how it will impact influencers and influencer marketing, but then also took a tour through the Metaverse and influencers there, virtual influencers and how or whether they can even be trustworthy and a lot more. 

This episode of Winfluence is presented by CIPIO.ai. the community commerce marketing platform. You brands out there probably have a content problem. You need more and better performing content for paid social campaigns. Facebook, Instagram, TikTok … the ad creative that performs best is user-generated content. CIPIO.ai does two things really well. We source authentic UGC from your community of customers, fans and followers and fill those content coffers. The other thing … identify the influential people in your community and have them also post on their channels, sharing valuable word-of-mouth recommendations with their friends, family and followers. 

Book a demo with me … Jason Falls. I’m going to do the demo with you. Just go to jasonfalls.co/cipio now and fill out that form. 

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

But, clients need cajoling. Educating. They don’t always know how influencer marketing works. Sometimes they don’t even really believe in it. And more often than not, they try to turn it into a programmatic ad buy and say, “Just tell them to post about the product and tell people to buy it.”

Certainly, not all clients are like that. Some push the envelope and bring cutting edge ideas to you. Others trust your judgment and vision and let you build concepts that may move the needle. Or even win an industry award or two. 

Zach Walker knows all about the ebb and flow influencer marketing at an agency. He is the social media director at The Motion Agency in Chicago. Influencer marketing is one of his charges there. 

He’s worked with brands like Oscar Meyer, Burt’s Bees, Triscuit, Kool-Aid and Fireball Whiskey, which we actually have in common. I also found out he’s actively running an influence marketing effort for the smart app capabilities of my garage door opener brand. I’m kinda bummed I wasn’t on his list.

Then again, you don’t listen to me because I can give you good advice on smart home appliances, right?

I invited Zach to sit in with me on Winfluence to talk about the unique linchpin position of leading influence marketing for an agency, get his thoughts influencer compensation, coaxing clients into investing in the practice, and a lot more. Just a show full of good tips and tricks for those of you in similar positions … or those brands, creators and partners who work with agencies to get better feel for their perspective on what we do.

This episode of Winfluence is presented by CIPIO.ai, the community commerce marketing platform. One of the family of apps in CIPIO.ai’s arsenal is turning heads at brands and agencies. And that is our Community Generated Content application. It helps you source UGC on scale for paid and organic social creative and beyond. To learn more about CIPIO.ai’s user-generated content solution, visit CIPIO.ai/cgc. 

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Mark Schaefer is another marketing industry expert and author-speaker type. He and I have been friends and collaborators for several years. I’ve always enjoyed his perspective on the marketing world. He actually authored one of the first big books about influence marketing called Return on Influence. Well worth the read, though it’s a few years old now.

Well, Mark has a new book out now called Belonging to the Brand. The subtitle of the book is “Why Community is the Last Great Marketing Strategy.” As you might expect for a guy who leads marketing for CIPIO.ai, which is the Community Commerce Marketing Company, this book immediately won me over. It’s chock full of goodness so having Mark on The Rise was a no-brainer.

But his insights and ideas are very relevant for us on Winfluence, too. Your content creators and influencers you work with are extensions of your community. If you do it well, they become beacons both in and for your community to stay connected, engaged and informed. 

Today, we’re going to watch and listen to that episode of The Rise and learn more about Mark’s new book, his take on why community is the last great marketing strategy and a lot more.

You can subscribe to The Rise at cipio.ai/podcast or by searching for The Rise – The Community Commerce Marketing Show wherever you get your podcasts. The show’s also stream each Wednesday at 2 p.m. Eastern, 11 a.m. Pacific on CIPIO.ai’s LinkedIn, YouTube and Twitter channels. I often simulcast it on my Twitter channel, too. Make a note on your calendar to check it out, if you’re interested.

This week, though, you don’t have to do anything more than you’re doing now. I’m going to play an episode of The Rise from a couple weeks back when my pal Mark Schaefer came on to talk about Belonging to the Brand.

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When I explained to him that not only is B2B influencer marketing possible, but in my opinion, B2B brands have been deploying influencer marketing in far more sophisticated ways than B2C brands for a long time. I asked him rhetorically, “Who do B2B brands call on to be guests on their webinars or co-author reports and white papers? Industry experts, right? Who are influencers.”

My friend is a pretty bright guy. He actually responded with a “Duh” moment and thanked me for correcting his blind spot. 

It is true. Business to business brands use influence marketing all the time. I happen to host second podcast and streaming video show for CIPIO.ai called The Rise – The Community Commerce Marketing Show. You can find that wherever you get your podcasts or at CIPIO.ai/podcast. 

Our guests on that show are influential people in the world of marketing, business, technology and community building. We’ve talked to big-shot industry thought leaders like Bruce Cleveland, author of The Traction Gap, former Hubspot marketing lead Jeanne Hopkins, and many more. The reason we’re bringing those people to the podcast is because they are influential in the space of marketing decision makers and C-level executives we hope to reach with our product. They are influencers.

Soon, we’ll be rolling out webinars featuring someone other than me to help our customers and prospects learn better techniques to build and nurture community. CIPIO.ai’s suite of applications facilitates things like community influence marketing, so leveraging influential people who are knowledgeable about the topic attracts more people to our content which drives more leads and customers.

In fact, every webinar you’ve ever attended that featured a speaker from outside the company presenting the webinar … influence marketing for that company.

I can talk about this all day, but I thought it best to bring an influencer in the B2B influencer marketing space to the show to bring far more wisdom than I can muster. Rachel Miller lead influencer marketing efforts for SAP for a long time. She’s now heading up her own agency working with other clients on influence strategy in both the B2B and B2C space. 

Rachel has long been one of the big B2B brand representatives at the various influencer marketing marketing events out there, so a lot of the world of B2B influence marketing thinkers have learned from or been inspired by her. 

Today, we’re going to mine Rachel’s experience for insights on B2B versus B2C, what issues are holding brands back in influence marketing and more.

Winfluence is made possible by Cipio.ai – The Community Commerce Marketing platform. What does that mean? It’s an influencer marketing software solution, but it has additional apps that function to tap into your brand community to drive commerce. Community Commerce Marketing moves beyond influencers to fans and followers, customers, employees and more. Try its generative AI application, Community Generative AI (GCI), with a two-week free trial at cipio.ai/cgiapp, and generate a library of social captions in minutes you can use right away.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Jay and I came up together as social media talking heads, if you will. His Convince and Convert blog and his awesome insights and ideas about social media catapulted him to become one of the most sought after speakers in the marketing space. His work took him through several themes, and best-selling books, but has sort of always revolved around customer service, customer care and customer experience.

His book Hug Your Haters was a fantastic look at how the social media customer care theory of engaging those who slam you online became an instant handbook for customer experience professionals. He followed that with perhaps the best book ever written about word-of-mouth marketing. It’s called Talk Triggers. I refer to it a lot and even included some of the research from it in my book.

One of the fundamental things that makes Jay’s books far more thorough and impressive than mine or those of many others, is they are typically based upon a foundation of original research. Hell of a formula to write best-selling books if you can muster it. Jay can. And he’s good at it.

For his next big act, Jay has done original research around that topic of brand responsiveness. And the ideas and insights he’s sharing as part of his speaking engagements and webinars these days are fascinating and inspiring for all brands and businesses. 

I invited Jay to join me to talk about The Time to Win on a recent episode of The Rise – The Community Commerce Marketing Show. That podcast and streaming video show is the second reason this episode of Winfluence is a bit of a treat. I’ve not shared a lot about my other podcast here, so this gives me impetus to do so.

As you all know I took on the challenge of becoming the executive vice-president for marketing at CIPIO.ai, in November. We’ve since launched a content strategy to help educate the market … and that means all of you … on the concept of Community Commerce Marketing. That’s activities that help brands grow by working through its community of customers, fans, followers, employees and more as a starting point. 

The Rise – The Community Commerce Marketing Show is our weekly interview series with thought-leaders and experts from the world of marketing, business, sales, e-commerce, and community building. The underlying focus is to make the audience smarter about leveraging community to drive their brand’s growth. 

Influence marketing is part of it. CIPIO.ai even has a dandy influence marketing software solution that starts with your brand community as influencers. But the show goes beyond that into topics we wouldn’t normally cover here on Winfluence. 

You can subscribe to The Rise at cipio.ai/podcast or by searching for The Rise – The Community Commerce Marketing Show wherever you get your podcasts. The show’s also stream each Wednesday at 2 p.m. Eastern, 11 a.m. Pacific on CIPIO.ai’s LinkedIn, YouTube and Twitter channels. I often simulcast it on my Twitter channel, too. Make a note on your calendar to check it out, if you’re interested.

Today, though, I’m going to play the episode of The Rise from a couple weeks back when Jay Baer came on to talk about the Time to Win. Those of you watching will see a replay of that stream, in full technicolor. Those of you listening on the podcast feed will hear the full episode as well. I’ll come on after as I usually do to share some final thoughts.

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Why is that? Well, content from users … the normal, regular social media user who posts content about a product or service is, by definition, more authentic. We’re talking about your normal fans and followers here, not necessarily influencers or professional creators, though they cross over into the same space sometimes, too. 

That authenticity is present because the content is coming from people just like the audience … people who are thumb-scrolling on a social network hoping to see something interesting. If I see a professionally produced photo or video from a brand, it has to be super compelling right away to stop and look or watch. If I see content about a brand from a friend or person who seems more real to me, I’ll give it more of a chance to sink in because they’re using or showing me a product the way I might see it or use it.

Some of these users … consumers … whatever you wish to call them … actually produce some pretty good content. Brands can then seek permission to repost or even license that content for everything from their own social media content to paid advertising creative and everything in between.

Influencers and creators can also be tapped for their content without any requirement they post it on their own channels. Many brands are tapping into this influencer-as-freelancer approach because in many cases, online content creators are better at speciality content like Instagram Reels, TikToks and the like, than, say, classically trained advertising creatives at agencies. Using a professional influencer as your creative production outlet can save costs from professional photographers or videographers, but it can also come with the other part of influencers … exposure to their audience as well. 

But therein lies a bit of a conundrum for marketing professionals. If you start sourcing creative from the crowd, what happens to our production houses, professional photographers and other creatives that are an important part of our ecosystem?

I wanted to dive into UGC a bit more so I called upon Adam Dornbusch. He is the CEO and Founder of EnTribe. It is a software company that helps brands cultivate, license and organize UGC. So if anyone knows about this stuff, it’s him.

Adam got his start in the entertainment industry and at one point wound up at GoPro where content acquisition was one of his duties. Remember that GoPro campaign that awarded up to $5 million for the best photos and videos submitted from GoPro users? Adam had something to do with that. 

You could say he’s spent the better part of the last 10 years helping brands figure out how to get authentic content from the crowd. And often at a much better cost than the alternatives. 

So today, I’m going to ask him to fill us in on all things UGC, then arm wrestle a bit and ask how much is too much? I think you’ll be interested in what he has to say.

Winfluence is made possible by Cipio.ai – The Community Commerce Marketing platform. What does that mean? It’s an influencer marketing software solution, but it has additional apps that function to tap into your brand community to drive commerce. Community Commerce Marketing moves beyond influencers to fans and followers, customers, employees and more. Try its generative AI application, Vibe Check, with a two-week free trial at cipio.ai/vibecheck, and generate a library of social captions in minutes you can use right away.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Of course, in full transparency, the more I know about you, the audience, collectively, the better I can select sponsors or advertisers to bring to you. I don’t want a podcast ad to turn you off, so knowing you better allows me to say within some degree of reason that an advertiser either is or isn’t relevant for you to know.

Either way, my focus on wanting to know more about you is to continually improve your experience. If I don’t do that, I won’t have listeners or advertisers. 

Fortunately for me, my friend Tom Webster shared some great insights about discovering more about your podcast audience this week on Sounds Profitable. That’s the podcast from the company of the same name. Sounds Profitable is an industry think tank if you will for podcasting and podcasters. The Marketing Podcast Network which I run and on which Winfluence airs is a Sounds Profitable partner. 

Tom has deep experience as a consumer researcher. He spent nearly two decades at Edison Research and was the main engine behind its Infinite Dial research which is still the social and online media research report of record. I attend its unveiling each year and devour the stats as it informs all the strategies I develop for clients. 

Tom shared questions he would ask listeners of a podcast to get to know them better. I have borrowed those recommendations with some minor tweaks into a listener survey I’d like to direct you to. But I thought I’d choose this episode of the podcast to share those questions with you and give you time to think before you jump in and answer.

If I can persuade you to jump over to the Winfluence survey after sharing the questions and why I am asking them with you on the show today, I will be very grateful for your participation in helping me make a better show for you. 

And even if you’re not necessarily inclined to have a small take-home assignment and fill out a survey after listening to a podcast, please do listen to the full episode. It may give you a better understanding of what you like and dislike about podcasts and help you choose more satisfying ones in the future.

I’m going to break down Winfluence, all of its elements, explain my intention and expectations for them, then ask you for feedback to make it all better.

Fill out the listener survey at jasonfalls.com/survey.

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Some of them add features like social listening. Most of them just have a social inbox and call it social listening, but that’s a different rant for a different day. But each social media management platform out there has some bell or whistle that makes them cool or unique. 

Every now and then someone comes along and looks at the category from a different angle and innovates a bit. Normally when that happens the new social media management solution combines functionality from some other software category for a mashup that serves a given niche. 

At a startup event in Silicon Valley recently, one such platform caught my eye. 

The platform is called RellaSocial. It’s the brainchild of Natalie Barbu. If you recognize that name it’s probably because you’re one of her 300,000-plus subscribers on YouTube or followers on other social media platforms. 

Natalie has been creating content on YouTube for well over a decade. But she was always frustrated with trying to manage her content calendars and creation, goals, plans and even income from brand collaborations. She was tracking things in spreadsheets and in multiple software packages. One day, she decided to solve the problem by building her own app.

RellaSocial combines social media management, content planning and scheduling, project management and even income tracking. Because this is built by a creator for creators, there’s even a handy tab where you can see what other creators are charging for various types of posts. 

I’m sure I disappointed Natalie a bit when I approached her in the pitch room at the startup event. She was standing at a table hoping to talk to potential investors. I was just some dork hoping to have her on my podcast. But she said yes, so she’s here today to tell us how she became a creator, why she decided to build RellaSocial and how it helps content creators do what they do.

Winfluence is made possible by Cipio.ai – The Community Commerce Marketing platform. What does that mean? It’s an influencer marketing software solution, but it has additional apps that function to tap into your brand community to drive commerce. Community Commerce Marketing moves beyond influencers to fans and followers, customers, employees and more. Try its generative AI application, Vibe Check, with a two-week free trial at cipio.ai/vibecheck, and generate a library of social captions in minutes you can use right away.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

I’m secure in the knowledge you understand that I’m deeply invested in podcasts. I think they’re a great tool for any marketing effort and I’m always happy to discuss that if you’re interested. 

But what I want to go over today is leveraging the ability and opportunity to be a guest on other people’s podcasts as a business tactic. Now, we’ve covered that topic a few times on this show. I’ll refer you back to episodes with Spencer Carpenter from Outlier Audio. That was in late October of 2022. Trevor Oldham from Podcast U was a guest in December of 2021. 

To get to those episodes all you do is use jasonfalls.co/ and type in the name of the guest. So the URL for Spencer Carpenter’s episode is jasonfalls.co/spencercarpenter. Trevor’s is jasonfalls.co/trevoroldham. 

But I want to tackle the topic on this episode with a little of my contrarian, piss and vinegar rants. I have come across some examples of people out there in the business world whose behavior when it comes to being a guest on a podcast illustrates they not only don’t understand the value, but think they’re doing the podcast world a favor by being on one. 

Now, we all know that creating content or being interviewed for someone else’s content brings with it people who have some degree of ego. There’s a diva in every crowd. And probably a little bit of one in all of us. I know, I’ve been one on occasion before. I try not to be, but I also have a short fuse when someone is just blatantly disrespectful or ignorant of what I bring to the table. 

Because I’ve been on both sides of that coin, I’m not going to make this about diva bashing. My advice and cautionary tales today are not meant to attack anyone who might think they’re above others. If I kick out the frail legs of the ladder of overcompensation they stand on, it will only be by accident.

But we’re going to talk about why you should want to be a guest on podcasts, how you can be, and how you’d better behave if you know what’s good for you.

Winfluence is made possible by Cipio.ai – The Community Commerce Marketing platform. What does that mean? It’s an influencer marketing software solution, but it has additional apps that function to tap into your brand community to drive commerce. Community Commerce Marketing moves beyond influencers to fans and followers, customers, employees and more. Try its generative AI application, Vibe Check, with a two-week free trial at cipio.ai/vibecheck, and generate a library of social captions in minutes you can use right away.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The new video episodes will also be offered up on YouTube, LinkedIn and Twitter each Monday. We’re going to shift the publishing of the show to 11 a.m. ET so folks can join us for lunch, brunch or breakfast viewing on the stream. The audio podcast will still be there for you, just a couple hours later than it normally fires. 

Regardless of where you’re listening or watching, thank you for being here and following along our journey to understanding more about influence and influence marketing.

And now to today’s topic.

It’s been more than two years now since the NCAA passed legislation that allowed college athletes at its institutions to accept payment for use of their name, image and likeness. The NIL push as most people know it has created millions of dollars for student-athletes who had long been handcuffed by eligibility rules that prevented them from profiting from their status as influential or celebrities within their sport, or geographic relevance. 

We’ve seen some interesting, if not amusing, uses of NIL deals between brands and athletes. One law firm in Kentucky has billboards all over the state for personal injury service with several University of Kentucky athletes on it, claiming “Bigger is Better,” talking about the size of their firm … law firm, that is. 

The kid of the Popeye’s chicken meme now plays college football and just signed a long overdue NIL deal with the chain restaurant to actually profit from its use of his likeness, too. 

As the usage of NIL has grown, there are some interested people out there studying it to see how well they work, what athletes are profiting, if it’s actually leveling the playing field for some sports and such. One of those such people is Tiffany Kelly from Curastory. 

Her interest in student-athletes migrated from her work as a student at Nova Southeastern, then a tutor and athletic department intern at LSU. She then worked on staff as an analyst for ESPN. She’s a statistics and analytics person … not in the points per game sense, necessarily, but analyzing the data around things. Some of her work at ESPN included analyzing fan passion, for example.

Under her leadership, Curastory, which is a video editing platform, did an analysis of NIL student athletes and projected the average monetization amount per video each had across all sports. The results were quite surprising. Let’s just say football and men’s basketball student-athletes are not the highest earners. 

I asked Tiffany to come on the show and walk us through the analysis and discuss what it tells us about student-athletes we should, and maybe shouldn’t, be investing in as brands. We also talked about Curastory and how it can be a useful addition to the content production and distribution for any brand or creator.

Winfluence is made possible by Cipio.ai – The Community Commerce Marketing platform. What does that mean? It’s an influencer marketing software solution, but it has additional apps that function to tap into your brand community to drive commerce. Community Commerce Marketing moves beyond influencers to fans and followers, customers, employees and more. Try its generative AI application, Vibe Check, with a two-week free trial at cipio.ai/vibecheck, and generate a library of social captions in minutes you can use right away.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

It’s causing a stir in industry conversations. 

But it shouldn’t. Jason explains why on this commentary episode of Winfluence

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The new episodes will also be offered up on YouTube, LinkedIn and Twitter each Monday. We’re going to shift the publishing of the show to 11 a.m. ET so folks can join us for lunch, brunch or breakfast viewing on the stream. The audio podcast will still be there for you, just a couple hours later than it normally fires. 

Regardless of where you’re listening or watching, thank you for being here and following along our journey to understanding more about influence and influence marketing.

Now on to today’s show. 

There’s a lurking problem in the influence marketing space today. I’ve noticed it and mentioned it a few times on the show. A few others are starting to see it, too.

The problem is not with the mechanisms, softwares or logistics of influence marketing. Brands engage creators they probably find via software. There’s an exchange of value … the influencer is compensated somehow and the brand gets exposure or content or both. All of that is well and good. But all of that is becoming a commodity of sorts. 

The problem is the thinking behind most influence marketing efforts today is, well, meh. A brand says, “here’s product and money, tell your fans to try it.” The creator puts on their best happy face and gushes about said product and cashes their check. The audience sometimes buys it. Sometimes not. (The product or the pitch.)

That failure is why I originally launched a consulting firm. I wanted to focus on the strategy and creative concepting that was so blatantly missing from the industry. It’s also a part of why I pivoted to join CIPIO.ai because we go at influence from a different perspective. Plus, I can still bring that strategic thinking and concepting to the table for our customers. 

But I’m not the only one who sees the gaps.

Noah Eisemann is a similar thinker in the space. He’s the partnerships lead at Lumanu, a software company that is building infrastructure pieces for the creator economy. They’ve been working on some innovations in approach to payments I found pretty interesting. 

But Noah also thinks there are shortcomings and shortfalls in how brands engage with creators, creators engage with brands and the folks in the middle like agencies and software companies are playing. I invited him on the show today to fill those gaps with me. We also touch on what Lumanu is up to.

A good conversation about what needs to get better in the influence marketing space is coming up.

Winfluence is made possible by Cipio.ai – The Community Commerce Marketing platform. What does that mean? It’s an influencer marketing software solution, but it has additional apps that function to tap into your brand community to drive commerce. Community Commerce Marketing moves beyond influencers to fans and followers, customers, employees and more. Try its generative AI application, Vibe Check, with a two-week free trial at cipio.ai/vibecheck, and generate a library of social captions in minutes you can use right away.

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The social network sites prioritize live video content over anything else in their algorithms. They even force feed pop-up notifications on you to tell you when someone you’re following is live while you’re there, hoping you’ll come over and watch. It makes the social network experience stickier. You stay longer. You’re more engaged. Your more likely, then, to satisfy the site’s need to present better user statistics which means they can sell more ads. They can also present more ads to you the longer you’re on the site.  

According to Statista in 2020 consumers spent 482.5 billion hours on live streaming apps. Live streaming videos reach almost 30% of all consumers worldwide. Consumers are expressing interest in live shopping, too. As of 2021, 14 percent of U.S. consumers said they are interested in live shopping experiences on social networks. TikTok and youTube are already deep into live commerce features. Amazon Live is turning the register regularly for many creators. 

I even used it as a test to sell copies of my book. It worked to a degree. I didn’t have an established audience on Amazon to work with, but every time I went live, a few copies sold. That’s not bad in an uber-competitive and oversaturated publishing market.

But live streams aren’t really engaging for the viewer. It’s basically the home shopping network online. Until now. 

Lux Narayan is the founder and CEO of StreamAlive. It’s a platform that uses a combination of interactive questions and content devised by the live stream host and AI technology to ensure everyone in the audience is represented in the live engagement of a stream. For example, the hosts asks where everyone is watching from, people just drop a city name, state or country in the comments and a live map dynamically plots all the watchers for all to see. 

There are many more applications of it, of course. Since it’s something that can help both creators and brands improve their live stream content, thus commerce output on the other end, I thought it would be good to have Lux on to tell us all about it.

Winfluence is made possible by Cipio.ai – The Community Commerce Marketing platform. What does that mean? It’s an influencer marketing software solution, but it has additional apps that function to tap into your brand community to drive commerce. Community Commerce Marketing moves beyond influencers to fans and followers, customers, employees and more. Try its generative AI application, Vibe Check, with a two-week free trial at cipio.ai/vibecheck, and generate a library of social captions in minutes you can use right away.

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In that broad category of brand decision makers, there are a wide variety of businesses and brands. You have small businesses, often mom and pop, local shops, who are regular businesses we encounter all the time. They’re probably not often called startups, which is a separate category. 

These are companies that often take on investments and try to grow to be medium to large businesses. They’re tricky because when they’re really new, they don’t have any money to invest in marketing. As they grow or take on investments, that budget grows and they can wind up being a godsend for those of us looking for brands to help who area also able to pay for that service.

And then there are mega brands … the ones you always hear about. They have big teams, multiple brands within portfolios and lots of money to spend.

A few weeks ago on LinkedIn, one person at the latter of those three types of companies struck up a conversation that caught my attention. Kyle Peters works in the strategy and innovation department at Nestle … the largest retail company in the world. He focuses on internal innovation, but he joined the team there after building a startup ice cream brand. So he’s been on the startup and small business side, too.

Kyle asked this: What is the value of an influencer? I was intrigued. So I jumped in and contributed to the comments, but then asked Kyle if he’d like to come on Winfluence and talk about the topic. We’d be tickled to have someone from Nestle sharing that kind of conversation with us. His perspective from the startup and small business side are helpful too.

So today, Kyle joins me to talk about his background, but then, the value of influencers from both sides of the aisle … how influencers and creators value themselves versus how agencies and brands do. 

Winfluence is made possible by Cipio.ai – The Community Commerce Marketing platform. What does that mean? It’s an influencer marketing software solution, but it has additional apps that function to tap into your brand community to drive commerce. Community Commerce Marketing moves beyond influencers to fans and followers, customers, employees and more. Try its generative AI application, Vibe Check, with a two-week free trial at cipio.ai/vibecheck, and generate a library of social captions in minutes you can use right away.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

But when you can learn amazing insights from someone who leads influence marketing for a big brand, but that person also happens to be a content creator themselves, well now we can double our takeaways and smarts without having to go two different directions.

Zeena Koda has been a content creator and media personality for the better part of the last 15-20 years. She’s been everything from a red carpet host on television to a voice-over artist to a podcast host and even a standup comedian. Her background is in the music industry … she’s been in a band as well … and like any artist or creator, she has multiple avenues and outlets for that content and creativity. 

But sometimes we also have to pay the bills if that art doesn’t necessarily take off right away, so she’s also built a nice career on the brand side of things engaging communities, building marketing and influence programs and more.

She recently landed at 2K Games, which is one of the most successful video game companies out there. With titles like PGA Tour 2K23, Marvel’s Midnight Suns and the Borderlands series, Zena has the interesting challenge of managing community and influencers for 2K … the brand … but also the sub-communities and influence programs for each title, because each game is different with a different audience, and influencers.

When I realized we had the opportunity to learn two volumes of expertise from one guest, well, I jumped on it. 

Zeena and I caught up recently to dig into her new role at 2K, her approach to influence and influence marketing, and some of the other issues she tackles in the business. She still has a popular podcast called Everything is Political, so she’s still a creator and influencer in her own right. She is also a co-founder of the Asian-American Collective, which is an organization worth paying attention to.

We’ll explain why and dive in deeper with Zeena on Winfluence.    

Winfluence is made possible by Cipio.ai – The Community Commerce Marketing platform. What does that mean? It’s an influencer marketing software solution, but it has additional apps that function to tap into your brand community to drive commerce. Community Commerce Marketing moves beyond influencers to fans and followers, customers, employees and more. Try its generative AI application, Vibe Check, with a two-week free trial at cipio.ai/vibecheck, and generate a library of social captions in minutes you can use right away.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Soon, places like Google that not only allows the use of 3rd party data for targeting, but helps you capture it, too, will sunset that ability. Other browser makers like Apple with its Safari browser and seemingly ubiquitous iOS mobile devices, have long been anti-cookie … at least so far as to give consumers clear access to prevent the data from being captured.

What that means is within a year or two, the only data you’ll likely be able to use for audience targeting and data insights will be that you capture yourself … first party data. 

Now, in general, this is a good thing. It respects consumer privacy. It allows them to control or choose what to give you and what to not. It holds us accountable and honest and prevents some marketers for spinning out of control and becoming creepy. 

But that doesn’t change the fact that it makes it harder for companies to get first party information to better inform their marketing.

Well, I happened to use a clever little app recently to help run a ticket giveaway on Instagram. It allowed me to have my Instagram followers come to a landing page where they could give me their email address, birthdate and other pieces of information about them voluntarily. First party data. 

The lightbulb went off. This is how we get to know our social followers and even customers better. We incentivize them to give us that information we need voluntarily. Excited at the prospects of making this happen more regularly, I thought I’d invite the people behind that app to come talk about it.

The app is called Stampede Social. Jeff Dwoskin is one of the founders and people behind it. 

Jeff dropped in to talk about the tool, what it does and how it helps solve the third party data problem for brands. But he also has some big brand experience, heading up digital customer engagement for Little Caesars and such, so we had a good time talking about marketing in general. 

You’ll hear more about how to solve for the big data issue, but also learn a few more things today as we chat with Jeff on Winfluence.

Winfluence is made possible by Cipio.ai – The Community Commerce Marketing platform. What does that mean? It’s an influencer marketing software solution, but it has additional apps that function to tap into your brand community to drive commerce. Community Commerce Marketing moves beyond influencers to fans and followers, customers, employees and more. Try its generative AI application, Vibe Check, with a two-week free trial at cipio.ai/vibecheck, and generate a library of social captions in minutes you can use right away.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Sometimes, I’m not sure those voices are wrong.

Don’t get me wrong! I love what we do. And I do think that connecting brands to the audiences that can benefit from knowing them has meaning. While that might be a stretch for someone who markets luxury footwear. It becomes more relevant for those of us who do it for non-profits or businesses that have a real impact on people’s lives. 

But when I stumble across someone who looks at the creator economy or influence marketing and sees a real path to change the world, I am both excited and humbled. Excited that what we do can have great meaning and impact. Humbled that I’m some schlep who does it more for money than for a greater purpose. 

Last spring, my friend T. Adeola, invited me to speak at an event he was putting on in Dayton, Ohio. T, who is more formally known as Temitayo Adeola Osinubi but thankfully is comfortable with just T, is an experienced digital marketer. I met him years ago at an event he says was the first digital marketing event he ever attended. 

He’s done time with several brands over the years, including Proctor & Gamble. He also teaches as an adjunct professor at more colleges than most people can name. 

It’s that role of educator that makes him invaluable to our community. I saw how invaluable in Dayton almost a year ago. 

The event was a creator camp – a weeklong workshop to teach people how to be content creators. The attendees? Underserved children in disadvantaged communities. And, to an extent, their parents. 

T asked me to come talk to both groups about the creator economy and how there is real opportunity for young people to earn a living from content creation. The focus of the event, and the organization T leads, which is called STEM Whisperers, is to disrupt what he calls the School-to-Prison pipeline and give at-risk youth inspiration, training and opportunities in the creator economy. 

I get chills just explaining it. 

T uses the data that kids today say they want to be influencers, YouTubers, Instagrammers. Not astronauts or doctors or lawyers. He thinks we should be embracing that and fostering their education, aspiration and opportunity. 

T also just launched a companion podcast for STEM Whisperers on the Marketing Podcast Network. It’s called Tiny Giants. I was honored to be the first guest on the first episode this month. 

I invited T on to talk about the problem, his solution and what challenges he needs our help overcoming to make STEM Whisperers successful and disrupt that misdirected pipeline for our young people. Pay attention folks … I’m going to ask you to jump in and help him in the discussion. I think you’ll see why. 

T. Adeola and the finest reason to focus on influence marketing I’ve ever heard of is coming up on the show.

Winfluence is made possible by Cipio.ai – The Community Commerce Marketing platform. What does that mean? It’s an influencer marketing software solution, but it has additional apps that function to tap into your brand community to drive commerce. Community Commerce Marketing moves beyond influencers to fans and followers, customers, employees and more. Try its generative AI application, Vibe Check, with a two-week free trial at cipio.ai/vibecheck, and generate a library of social captions in minutes you can use right away.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Some of us talk to the C-level. Some of us are at the C-level in our organizations. But the hard truth of the matter for marketers, even the CMO, is that those of us in the weeds of building marketing strategies and executions are seldom understood or even trusted by the CEO, COO, CFO and other executives in charge. That makes it harder to do our job.

So we need to market internally to the C-Suite. And that means we have to market ourselves.

Stacey Danheiser knows all about marketing internally to the C-Suite. She is the author of the books Stand Out Marketing and Value-Ology. She’s also the CEO of Shake Marketing, which works with C-Suite executives at B2B brands help help them understand marketing and growth.

She took some time to sit down with me recently to talk about what the C-Suite’s perception of Influence and Influence marketing was, how we can better market ourselves to them and what the future may hold for us and our work. 

Some executive level smarts coming up from Stacey on the show today.

Winfluence is made possible by Cipio.ai – The Community Commerce Marketing platform. What does that mean? It’s an influencer marketing software solution, but it has additional apps that function to tap into your brand community to drive commerce. Community Commerce Marketing moves beyond influencers to fans and followers, customers, employees and more. Try its generative AI application, Vibe Check, with a two-week free trial at cipio.ai/vibecheck, and generate a library of social captions in minutes you can use right away.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

That brand-to-creator-to-audience style of influence makes up the lion’s share of how we think in the influence or influencer space. 

But then along comes a slightly different model that makes us take note and perhaps inspires us to think differently.

Cooper Lycan is not your typical marketer. Nor is his company in a typical vertical. His background and instincts are different enough, that he came up with a slightly different model for using influencers, even though he may not have labeled that as influencer marketing.

Cooper is the founder and CEO of a sports betting community called SoBet. It’s a place where sports bettors can get wagering advice from influencer in the handicapping and betting space. These influencers exist on social channels and with their own websites. Cooper, though, has built a place where the influencer can find more fans and followers because SoBet shows off their results and recommends them to a community of bettors. 

The brand is taking the audience to the influencers, not the other way around.

I was fascinated by the model so I asked Copper to come on the show and walk us through how it came to be, how it’s working and so we could get some inspiration for perhaps looking at our influence marketing differently.

This conversation is going to be quite insightful. I’m willing to bet on it. 

Winfluence is made possible by Cipio.ai – The Community Commerce Marketing platform. What does that mean? It’s an influencer marketing software solution, but it has additional apps that function to tap into your brand community to drive commerce. Community Commerce Marketing moves beyond influencers to fans and followers, customers, employees and more. Try its generative AI application, Vibe Check, with a two-week free trial at cipio.ai/vibecheck, and generate a library of social captions in minutes you can use right away.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Of course many of you will be traveling … perhaps with family or alone to see family. Some of you will be driving for a considerable distance while the kids zone out to their devices or DVDs in the back. So, an episode like this has some utility for you.

Today, I’m going to share with you an episode of The Fuel Podcast with Keith Smith. It is perhaps the finest podcast out there devoted to agency new business. It’s supported by The Advertist, which is a new business development resource based out of the United Kingdom. But the strategies, ideas and conversations Keith discusses in the show are perfectly appropriate and relevant for agencies anywhere in the world.

In fact, a lot of the conversations had on The Fuel Podcast are global in nature, including the one you’ll hear today.

I’m sharing with you the Christmas bonus special of the show which dropped on its main feed just a couple of weeks ago in which Keith interviews legendary creative strategist Paul Grubb. His current position is as regional creative director at Wunderman Thompson in Bangkok, Thailand. One of his charges is running Ford’s business across Asia. 

His career has included being a partner in Duckworth Finn Grubb Waters. They were one of the UK’s most respected and successful independent agencies of the 1990s. He also ran the Unilever business across Asia for Lowe Worldwide for sometime. .

Now, the Fuel Podcast is quite different from Winfluence in that Keith goes in deep on a number of topics with his guests without a lot of concern for a time limit. Some of the episodes of the show can go 90-minutes, up to two hours. But there’s so much goodness and insights to be had there, it’s worth the time, if you can make it.

Hopefully, you can with this episode. It runs about an hour and 20 minutes. You’ll get all of it as recorded … no commercial interruptions. 

If you like it, jump over to thefuelpodcast.com and subscribe. The Fuel Podcast is also one of our sister shows on The Marketing Podcast Network, so you can find it there … that’s at marketingpodcasts.net.

Enjoy this feed drop holiday treat from Keith Smith and The Fuel Podcast. I’ll be back with a new episode of Winfluence on Monday, as usual. 

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Not bad for a little idea called Sponsored Posts that Ted Murphy dreamed up at what was essentially a web development firm in Florida in 2006. 

Today, IZEA is one of, if not the, largest influencer marketing software solutions and managed services companies. In many ways it dictates what brands look for in a solution, largely because it’s been doing this a lot longer than everyone else. Its managed services clients are a Who’s Who of Fortune 500 companies. It’s lower-priced self-serve platforms and marketplace have served the industry well, too. And IZEA has done a nice job of keeping up with the trends, changes and innovations the industry needs.

A month ago or so, Murphy and team announced a whole new IZEA. They’ve reimagined what influence marketers need in a toolset and come out with a new platform called Flex. It features a series of toolsets that do one thing or another, but that can also be tied together nicely with links and associations to give people who build strategies for brands, more insight into everything from how right an influencer is, to the performance of their content, to their impact on ROI and beyond. 

Who better to ‘splain all this to us than Ted Murphy himself. He was actually the first guest on Winfluence back in September of 2020 when my old podcast rebranded to focus on influence marketing. Ted is often who I turn to for conversations and insights about the industry and it’s always fun to have him on the show.

I’ll admit it’s more fun now that he’s the CEO of a publicly traded company because, well from his PR team’s perspective, I’m a risk. Nevertheless, Ted and I always have a fun time chatting and he doesn’t mind a few hand grenades I toss him during the conversation. 

We caught up not long ago to have him tell me more about Flex, the new IZEA, and let me pull a pin and lob a couple hot ones at him. You’ll get to hear it all on today’s episode.

Winfluence is made possible by Cipio.ai – The Community Commerce Marketing platform. What does that mean? It’s an influencer marketing software solution, but it has additional apps that function to tap into your brand community to drive commerce. Community Commerce Marketing moves beyond influencers to fans and followers, customers, employees and more. Try its generative AI application, Vibe Check, with a two-week free trial at cipio.ai/vibecheck, and generate a library of social captions in minutes you can use right away.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Occasionally on Winfluence, we like to bring a content creator on the show to explore how they built their brand, but, for our brand and agency folks, I like to ask them how they partner with brands, what makes a collaboration work well and such. I find it helpful for us to see different approaches that we might incorporate into our influence marketing plans.

Corina Layton has built a fairly impressive social footprint on Instagram and TikTok. She’s young, attractive, has a dog and a lot of the other elements of the living your best life influencer crowd. And some of her content is that interesting lifestyle mix. 

But her core content is that of being a dental hygienist. With 2.4 million TikTok followers and another 125,000 or so on Instagram, she may be the most popular dental hygienist in the world. She’s done some very interesting brand partnerships and connected with brands in the dental care space, and has a unique perspective brands and agencies can learn from.

Of course, you prospective creators out there can pick up some inspiration as well. 

Winfluence is made possible by Cipio.ai – The Community Commerce Marketing platform. What does that mean? It’s an influencer marketing software solution, but it has additional apps that function to tap into your brand community to drive commerce. Community Commerce Marketing moves beyond influencers to fans and followers, customers, employees and more. With Cipio.ai, you get the vital social media discovery and data you need for your typical influencer marketing effort. But additional apps help you uncover raving fans in your own community to increase sales, retention and engagement.

The best thing about Cipio.ai? You can start using it for free. Influencer discovery and list building doesn’t cost a thing. Go to jasonfalls.co/cipio and see the software that was so good, I joined the team.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Social media content is not their primary thing. 

Now, before I go further, let me circle back to the very premise of this show and my approach to influence marketing. An influencer, broadly defined, is someone who can persuade an audience to take action. That can be someone offline. Not on social media. But for the sake of this discussion, we’re confining the definition to a social media influencer. 

So celebrities have big audiences on social media, but not necessarily because of their social media.

However, celebrity social media can be quite compelling and certainly advantageous to their career and visibility if managed properly. 

A lot of times, that’s where Cassie Petrey comes in. She is the CEO of CrowdSurf. It is an entertainment industry firm that handles social media content for big stars like Britney Spears, Camila Cabello and The BackStreet Boys. 

Cassie founded Crowd Surf with a friend after managing MySpace pages for country music stars back in the mid-2000s. She came to prominence in the music industry and quickly realized there was opportunity in handling these emerging online content platforms for the stars. That was 17 years ago. 

It’s that depth of experience with celebrities and social media that compelled me to ask Cassie to come on the show. It’s insightful for us to hear what the upper echelon of creators are doing, even if they aren’t the types of creators we in the influencer space are typically dealing with. 

Winfluence is made possible by Cipio.ai – The Community Commerce Marketing platform. What does that mean? It’s an influencer marketing software solution, but it has additional apps that function to tap into your brand community to drive commerce. Community Commerce Marketing moves beyond influencers to fans and followers, customers, employees and more. With Cipio.ai, you get the vital social media discovery and data you need for your typical influencer marketing effort. But additional apps help you uncover raving fans in your own community to increase sales, retention and engagement.

The best thing about Cipio.ai? You can start using it for free. Influencer discovery and list building doesn’t cost a thing. Go to jasonfalls.co/cipio and see the software that was so good, I joined the team.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

It’s important for all of us to continue to discuss these issues to ensure all parties at the table in influence marketing are mindful and thoughtful about inclusivity, diversity and equity. That’s the only way we can better ensure progress continues.

Jacques Bastien is someone who has been actively making progress for the industry, for brands and the agency partners he’s worked with. He is the CEO of Shade, an influencer marketing agency that focuses on black or brown creators. He’s managed both a digital agency, but also a black and brown talent management service. 

He says overall, we’ve made progress in closing those race gaps in pay and opportunity, but there’s a lot of progress still to come. 

We connected recently to talk about the challenges brands and creators face in working to ensure equitable opportunities come. He shared his perspective on working with brands and the concept of cultural relevance and sensitivity for not just creators, but your audience..

Smarts and a smart conversation with Jacques Bastien from Shade today on the show.  

Winfluence is made possible by Cipio.ai – The Community Commerce Marketing platform. What does that mean? It’s an influencer marketing software solution, but it has additional apps that function to tap into your brand community to drive commerce. Community Commerce Marketing moves beyond influencers to fans and followers, customers, employees and more. With Cipio.ai, you get the vital social media discovery and data you need for your typical influencer marketing effort. But additional apps help you uncover raving fans in your own community to increase sales, retention and engagement.

The best thing about Cipio.ai? You can start using it for free. Influencer discovery and list building doesn’t cost a thing. Go to jasonfalls.co/cipio and see the software that was so good, I joined the team.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

But many of us have either can’t distract ourselves from thinking about work for a four- or five-day weekend, or perhaps some of us have families that wear out their welcome and force us to run, hide and hibernate with a good podcast for a bit. So, I thought I’d share something fun with you in case you needed a little holiday distraction.

Of course, if you’re elsewhere around the globe and this isn’t a holiday for you, this episode can be at least a little weekend respite. 

Today on the show I want to share with you a very different marketing podcast. A different concept even.

You all know that Winfluence is part of the Marketing Podcast Network. And I am the network’s executive producer. One of the now nearly 40 podcasts on MPN is a unique one called Ace Stone: Marketing Detective. It's a radio drama that parodies marketing!

This is going to be fun.

I invited its creator, Lacy Boggs, to come on, tell us a little bit of the back story, then we share the first episode of the podcast with you as a holiday weekend treat. You should run over and subscribe and binge the rest of season one, then ready yourself for season two which is in the works now.

Do that at AceMarketingDetective.com, look for the show on the MPN website at MarketingPodcasts.net or search Ace Stone Marketing Detective wherever you get your podcasts. 

No need for more today, folks. Thank you for taking time to listen to Winfluence - The Influence Marketing Podcast. I am Thankful for all of you. 

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The nature of that exchange of goods and services means the government is going to want their share. Whether you’re in the United States or most other countries around the world, you as content creator, or those that you work with, are going need to treat what you do like a business.

Did you know the number of solopreneur businesses … those where the owner is the only employee … have risen 65% since 1997. The Internet and Social Media have fueled the individual business owner, in our case, content creators and influencers. 

Now, I’m not here to tell you that starting a business from a legal standpoint is all that difficult. I’ve done it a couple of times in my career as a consultant. But the legalities and requirements of anything can be confusing. So it helps to have legal counsel. Which I have turned to. And I’ve still run into tax issues over the years … nothing major … but it’s cost me more money than I’d care to recall. 

Mike Fiffik is an attorney with LegalShield. He operates out of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, one of my favorite cities. Mike knows the ins and outs of the legalities of setting up a business and helping content creators and influencers navigate those waters. He also has an eye on the most recent legal perspectives on other topics creators need to grapple with .. intellectual property.

I asked Mike to come on the show and share some wisdom with us. So you content creators out there had an easier path to follow than if you didn’t hear a lawyer tell you how to do all this. For those of you on the brand or agency side, the conversation is super relevant, too. Not only do you need to hear the running-the-business perspective of your creators, but the intellectual property issue is something you need a good grasp on as well.

We’re getting smarter about the law today.

Winfluence is presented by Cipio.ai, the Community Commerce Marketing Platform. See how influence marketing, without the 'r', comes to life in creating raving fans to grow your business from your brand's community – influencers, employees, customers and beyond. Sign up for a demo or the free influence discovery platform at jasonfalls.com/cipio.

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The first time anyone really took notice of what I was saying was when I started reviewing and talking about social media monitoring platforms. The industry vernacular knocked that term around a bit and they became known as social listening software platforms eventually.

In my book Winfluence, I tell the story of how one such social listening platform made a seven-figure sale because I wrote about them on my blog.

In the last 18 years, I’ve probably reviewed, demoed or tried hundreds, if not thousands, of software platforms. The one underlying theme that emerged in me from all that testing and trying was that I sure would love to get my hands on one. 

I would like to be a part of building a software solution. I’m guessing you’ve ascertained that from my occasional rant here about how the influencer marketing software companies aren’t providing good indexing for owned content. Or that none really take into account offline influence and other paths of identifying influential people for your brand beyond that which the social platform APIs provide. 

Well, I’m making a big move this week that finally puts me on the software side of the aisle. That’s right … as of today, I am officially the executive vice-president of marketing for CIPIO.ai. 

Those of you who follow my content might recall in July of this year I published a written and video review of Cipio.ai. You can find that review and the video on my website at jasonfalls.com/cipioreview. I’ll link to it in the show notes as well. 

In that video, I said this … 

“Because Cipio.ai also enables you to tap into the influence of your community … your customers, your followers and such … it’s the first platform I’m happy to call an influence marketing platform. Without the R.”

That alone should tell you why I jumped at the chance to merge my philosophy on influence marketing with a software platform and services company that thinks the same way. 

Today on the show, I want to tell you a little more about the move. What is in store for me and Cipio.ai in the near future. And explain what me being an employee of an software company that includes an influence marketing software application means … and doesn’t mean for this podcast. Spoiler alert … not much is going to change. 

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Unfortunately, it’s not easy to identify creators with smaller audiences but good influence, particularly in terms of whether or not they can convert.

But where there’s a difficult path, there’s always someone carving out a trail for us. 

William Gasner is the chief marketing officer at Stack Influence. It is a micro-influence managed service that specifically focuses on creators who will trade a post for product, and who are more likely to want to sign up for affiliate programs and referral deals to get paid more when they get you paid more.

Because Stack Influence has some very specific parameters for who should use it and what types of creators they’ll get, William actually has thought very deeply about the space and the differences between creators of various sizes and effectiveness. He makes for a good conversation about topics like influencer pay scales and the differences between creators of various audience sizes and more.

I invited William to come on the show to tell us more about Stack Influence, but to also hold him to the task of answering some of the trending questions in the space. We talk about pay, performance-based compensation, programmatic versus high touch and more.

And I happened to stumble upon a huge missed opportunity for Stack Influence. It has something to do with its name and how the company got started. Listen closely for that in the conversation.

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You can probably hear the contrarian tone coming out in my voice here. But there’s a reason I’m pointing those folks out. It’s not that I don’t like the online course pushers or even consultant types who seem more style and less substance. In fact, my opinion on them aligns with my opinion on the long-standing debate over whether or not someone is a social media expert. 

If that person’s clients learn from them, are happy with the work they are doing for them, then for the client, he or she is an expert and our opinion doesn’t matter. 

I’ve always wanted to have an online course, frankly. I’ve started and stopped building one over the years. It can be overwhelming. It turns out there’s help out there for folks like me who struggle with that. Or you content creators or subject matter experts listening who might also be thinking of starting an online course. 

Rocky Buckley is the creator of Platinum Path and The Power Persona Project. He helps experts, thought leaders and influencers “Go Platinum” by reinventing their brand, strategy and even business model. One of the primary ways he does this is through online course, masterminds and other virtual products that serve a direct audience for a subscription fee or similar revenue stream. 

I asked Rocky to come on the show and illustrate to us how one can not only tap into these types of information products to build a community of paying customers around them, but take that to a next level and build that community into raving fans of your content, too.

This episode of Winfluence is presented by Tagger, the complete influencer marketing software platform. Sign up for a free demo today at jasonfalls.co/tagger.

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But it’s more than just understanding where they live, how much money they make, their gender, age and ethnicity. To be really good at persuading an audience to take action, you also have to understand their behavior, their psychology and as much as you can, get in their heads.

Nancy Harhut studies human behavior. Her background is in the advertising world. She spent time at Mullen and Hill Holiday in Boston. She’s been a creative director which may sound nothing like studying human behavior. But the best creatives put that topic at the front of their mind to better inform their ideas.

Nancy has a new book out called Using Behavioral Science in Marketing. It’s actually refreshing to see a book about understanding consumer’s brains coming from someone other than a researcher or scientist, though I love me some Roger Dooley and Martin Lindstrom.  

I asked Nancy to join us to talk about human behavior through the eyes of a marketing creative person, to uncover how those insights can help creators, agencies and brands in the influence space and beyond. 

This episode of Winfluence is presented by Tagger, the complete influencer marketing software platform. Sign up for a free demo today at jasonfalls.co/tagger.

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And of the people who listen each week, they average hearing eight podcasts. 

All that information is from The Infinite Dial. It is the annual social media and audio listening habits research provided by Edison Research. I mark my calendar each March to get the latest download. 

It’s easy to be bullish about podcasting when you are a podcaster. But if 74 million people listen each week, that means over 200 million people in the U.S. alone do not. So there’s room to grow, not just in listenership, but in understanding of why podcasts matter.

They matter to businesses and content creators because they are an easy platform to build authority and trust upon. And you don’t have to start a podcast to build it … you can simply be a guest on one.

Spencer Carpenter saw the advantages and opportunities for businesses and creators at the onset of the pandemic. He spent 15 years in the music business but saw podcasts as an opportunity to communicate in a world where communication was changing. He founded Outlier Audio to help businesses and brands, including content creators, take advantage of podcasts.

Outlier Audio can not only pitch you to be a guest on relevant podcasts that help build your brand and trust in the community, but they’ll also help you build of podcast of your own, if that suits you better. 

Spencer joined me recently to talk about the challenges some businesses have with understanding the power of podcasts, the opportunity and advantages they bring and who is right and maybe not right for podcasting. We’ll hear from him and learn more to help you with the pods today on Winfluence. 

This episode of Winfluence is presented by Tagger, the complete influencer marketing software platform. Sign up for a free demo today at jasonfalls.co/tagger.

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I do talk about podcasting a lot, but it’s not because I love podcasts and podcasting. It’s because podcasters are influencers. And understanding them and their world, which is a little different than a regular social media content creator, is good for those of you who are brand or agency side professionals. It’s also hopefully inspiring and helpful for the creators among us who are trying to build something out of their online presence.

The challenge for many people with podcasting is that there’s so much technical know how perceived to be needed to start, it’s intimidating. You have to have software to record and edit. A place to host. Maybe software to make it sound better than you can muster in Garage Band. Do you have a website for it? How do you get it to post on all the podcast apps …

It can be a challenge. The less technically inclined someone is, the bigger the challenge.

Zencastr recently made some holistic changes to its software platform to make all that technical challenge go away. By way of disclosure, I am a paying customer of Zencastr and use it for my interviews here on the show. Zencastr is also a recent sponsor of Winfluence and its Creator Network has placed advertisements on the Marketing Podcast Network. Neither of those things have anything to do with my guest being invited on today.

Josh Nielsen is the co-founder and CEO of Zencastr. When you have the opportunity to interview a big shot, you take it. Sponsorship or not. 

Josh and team unleashed a new beast on the podcast industry in late August. Zencastr now is far more than a place to record your web-based interviews for podcasting. It now has full production and editing capabilities for shows, hosting, transcripts, the Creator Network which matches shows with advertisers for monetization. It’s a whole new animal. 

Josh visited with me to talk about the new features there to help make your owned content easier to manage. But we also talked about the industry as a whole, why podcast apps are terrible at search and discovery and more.

This episode of Winfluence is presented by Tagger, the complete influencer marketing software platform. Sign up for a free demo today at jasonfalls.co/tagger.

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Most of your influencer marketing platforms have that verbiage in their marketing literature because marketing decision makers like you respond to it. Data means more insights, more predictive decision making, better chance of success without us humans mucking it up. But to understand the data of any marketing channel is a level of expertise few have. That's why we rely on the software platforms and engineers to come up with metrics and formulas and dashboards. Then we look to thought leaders in and around our industry to know which of the metrics and formulas and dashboards really matter.

In our evolution as marketers, we decide which we care about from our experiences. When a campaign is successful, we look to the metrics to decide which may have been the predictor or indicator of success. We personally get more expertise and start to make those data analysis decisions on our own. Just in case we miss something along the way or need a fresh perspective on the data we use every day, there are people like Bill Hildebolt.

He's the CEO and co-founder of Gen.Video, an influencer marketing platform that focuses on video and social commerce. Bill is an analytics guy and loves to talk through and think through measurement and data analysis problems. A few months ago, he started an ambitious blog series at GenVideo's website at gen.video, it's called The Math and Science of Influencer Marketing. At this recording, it's 20 articles long and dives deep into various ways to use math and science techniques to understand influencer marketing better. I invited Bill to come on the show and talk turkey about the turkey. If you will. We get deep into the great ROI debate.

We went into metrics that matter beyond reach. Bill has a great point about segmenting analytics along content topics and verticals, that's really smart. In essence, today's episode is a couple of data nerds nerding out, and I think you'll enjoy listening in as I think we make some points that might make you smarter about your influence marketing efforts.

This episode of Winfluence is presented by Tagger, a complete influence marketing software solution. Check them out for a demo today at jason.online/tagger.

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HubSpot published two reports over the last couple of months specific to Instagram. One was its 2022 Instagram Engagement Report. The other was a report specific to shopping on the platform. Both reports offered up reminders that not only do consumers still prefer Instagram over TikTok and other platforms, but so do marketers. 

But … research reports come out weeks and sometimes months after the surveys and data analysis is done. And social media often changes by the day. So are HubSpot’s Instagram reports even still valid?

Well, the short answer is yes. Consumer trends often take months to shift. Instagram is still bigger and used by more people than TikTok, though that gap is closing. And the perception of Instagram’s waffling wasn’t helped when its CEO came out recently and said, “Make more vertical video,” in an obvious attempt to compete with TikTok-like content.

But I wanted to dig in deeper to the information and question it a bit. When I do that I like to go to the source. I invited my old pal Kipp Bodnar, who is now the chief marketing officer at HubSpot, to sit in with me and talk Instagram, TikTok and more.

I asked him if he was concerned at all the survey data might be old the day it was published, if Instagram is still relevant and a lot more. We also dug into the shopping report a bit to talk about how marketers are leveraging those features to turn Instagram into a frictionless, shopping app, while also being a fun social network.

This episode of Winfluence is presented by Tagger, a complete influence marketing software solution. Check them out for a demo today at jason.online/tagger.

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Then there are managed services that will do all or part of the full process for you.

But then there are derivations of all that that only do one platform, like TikTok or Instagram, but nothing else. Then some that do millions of influencers. Others that have a database of just hand-picked creators. Others that are only micro-influencers.

Then those can be broken down by network or feature.

It’s maddening.  

One such derivative of influence marketing software that I’ve never really been a fan of is marketplaces. This is where a brand can go post their influence or creative need like they would on Craig’s List. Wanted: Online content creators with X numbers of followers to post about this brand for Y dollars. Creators plugged into that marketplace can apply. You don’t normally get big audience, or even highly relevant creators, but you can go grab a bunch of willing participants if you like.

Tinashe Chopanda runs a marketplace, of sorts, but certainly knows the influencer space well. He is a former creator and influencer in his own right. He built a nice YouTube following with Okay Tinashe … which was a reaction channel to K-Pop videos and such. Funny, engaging stuff. You can go look that up if you like.

But he got into optimizing videos and digital ad campaigns. He started pitching brands to be on his channel as sponsors. Then he realized being behind the camera and development of brand deals and partnerships was where his passion really laid. 

Today, he’s the man behind Sosani, and influence marketing agency that connects content creators with brands to tell stories and create great content. Part of Sosani is a bit of an influencer marketplace so I pushed on him a bit to convince me marketplaces are worth my time. We talked about his process and thoughts around building better influence campaigns and content. And I asked him if he had to do it all over again with Okay Tinashe, what would he do differently.

Good stuff from a former big shot YouTuber turned influence marketing strategist and agency owner Tinashe Chopanda, on today's episode of Winfluence.

This episode of Winfluence is presented by Tagger, a complete influence marketing software solution. Check them out for a demo today at jason.online/tagger.

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The world of social media and content is changing … again. It does that every so often. Unfortunately. more often than we probably care for it do so. Where Instagram, then Instagram Stories were the content du jour for influencers and, thus brands, a year or so ago, now our focus is on snack-able, vertical video.

Thanks TikTok.

Actually, platforms like TikTok, Instagram Reels and YouTube Shorts are just a continuation of the evolution of what consumers consume. Now, we can get into a chicken-and-egg discussion about what caused this. Did the social networks prioritize vertical video content that forced people to consume it? Or are people really so dumb they can’t turn their phone 90-degrees and watch a video the way it was meant to be viewed … horizontally?

The cause doesn’t matter. The effect is in full force. TikTok is currently the dominant social content channel and mechanism consumers are spending time with. Instagram has responded with algorithm changes and outright guidance that short-form video is its priority. 

That presents an interesting challenge for brands and agencies whose creative departments are art school grads and cinematographers. That also created the space influencers and online content creators needed to emerge as highly relevant and useful partners for those brands and agencies.

Where traditional creatives have perhaps been slow to adjust to creating short-form, snack-able and vertical content, TikTok-ers and Instagrammers have jumped in. 

Lena Katz and the team at Ampersand recently announced an interesting solution and approach to that agency creative gap for this content demand. Lena is the content and creator strategy lead at Ampersand. It is a production company that works on video and film production from big budget commercial shoots to TikTok-like snack-able videos. 

A few weeks ago, Ampersand announced an offering for its clients called creator integrated services. They pull online content creators in at any and all steps of the marketing creative process to deliver better social video content, and underlying marketing campaigns, for the brands and agencies it works with.

Lena also happens to have served a short stint at TikTok, so he had a look-see behind the curtain of the explosion that is that social network. I asked her to come on the show and tell us more about how Ampersand is solving the creative gap issue, how to overcome client objections to creator programs and a lot more. 

Pay attention here folks, Lena’s thoughts on the industry and how to tackle certain issues is smart stuff. And it’s coming up on Winfluence. 

This episode of Winfluence is presented by Tagger, a complete influence marketing software solution. Check them out for a demo today at jason.online/tagger.

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In addition to the diversity of topics the world of content creation offers is the diversity of business models, sizes and scopes of a creator’s per view. What I mean by that is some creators focus on one channel or another and do the occasional brand deal to monetize their content there. That’s the standard expectation for an influencer I think.

Still others see their content creation as a business, not a hobby with an income. They may see each of their channels as a revenue stream and optimize their content and sales acumen accordingly. 

Take that a step further and a content creator has the mind of a publisher. They’re a media channel and reach audiences in multiple ways. They have blogs and social networks for publishing written content. They have those social networks and YouTube to run their own television network. They have podcasts to have a radio network and so on. 

Michiel Perry is one such creator. It’s no surprise she sees her Black Southern Belle channels as a media empire of sorts. She spent several years in the “real world” as a public policy communications professional. She worked for the U.S. State Department and Google, among other places. So she came into this content creator world knowing a thing or two about the business. 

I wanted to talk to Michiel for a couple of reasons. I knew she was a successful content creator, but one who had expanded beyond that label to running a media company in the social-first world we live in. She’s also unique in that her social channels are very much about the community around Black Southern Bell, not just her perspective. 

That’s old school social media. And I like it.

But, as I’m also want to do, I saw an opportunity to talk to her about race and its impact on her world that maybe we who don’t live in the world of the disenfranchised understand. 

And as I culled back through her content to prepare for the conversation, one post caught my eye that I knew I had to talk to her about. I think you’ll appreciate that part of the conversation, too.

This episode of Winfluence is presented by Tagger, a complete influence marketing software solution. Check them out for a demo today at jason.online/tagger.

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He’s a smart content marketing guy who, as his show’s title might imply, focuses on storytelling for brands and businesses. I was going through his old episodes and found a really good one I thought you should hear, so I reached out and we agreed to each air an episode of each other’s shows to our respective audiences. 

His and my hope is that if you like his show you hear today, you’ll jump over and subscribe so you don’t miss a future episode of The Business Storytelling Podcast, too. It’s worth adding that to your feed, for sure.

Now, the episode I wanted you to hear is actually a couple of years old, but it’s with Rachel Miller of SAP. She is a brand-side innovator and thought leader in the influencer marketing space. Christoph and Rachel talk about influencer marketing overall, but then get into the ins and outs of B2B influencers, big brand influencer programs and beyond.

It’s a useful listen, so we’ll drop that in on today’s show. 

Folks if you haven’t heard, well you haven’t been listening. But Tagger is one fine influencer marketing platform. They are our presenting sponsor and man, does Tagger come in handy for me. I actually sat out to find creators in a very odd and specific niche last week, but instead of going straight to Tagger’s discovery tab and searching for a keyword or topic, I went to its Signals feature.

This is where you can drop that keyword or set of keywords and see how much chatter about that brand or topic is out there on the web, then identify the influential voices talking about it. That gives you a head start on finding the more right influencers for your brand or project.

I could go on, but you know I use Tagger every day for the influence strategies I work on for my clients. You should at least check it out. Do a free demo at jason.online/tagger today. No commitment or anything, just see how it works. 

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It’s the accumulation of those different perspectives that I feel makes me, and I suppose, you, smarter. We’re better at our jobs because we listen to someone else’s perspective, even if it’s about something we fell comfortable that we know well.

I had the great pleasure of being a guest on Lara Schmoisman’s podcast, Coffee No. 5, a few months ago. I didn’t know Lara before we did the interview, but as I prepared and then chatted with her, I realized … here’s someone with a world of different perspectives I need to know more from.

Lara is a luxury marketing specialist which is a category I definitely want to know more about. She’s also a global marketing expert. She works with clients around the world and can bring the experiences of working in different countries, cultures and languages to the table, too. Lara is based in L.A., but is originally from Argentina.

Her take on marketing and branding has created a nice following for her in the industry, not just on her podcast, but through her work at her agency, The Darl. I invited Lara to come on the show and talk to us about all those things and give us a little different perspective.

Today's episode is brought to you by Zencastr and Basecamp. I'm excited to tell you more about them, because I use them both. All the interviews I record for this show are captured with Zencastr. I've used it for years to capture high-quality audio over the web. It does high-quality video, too.

Zencastr records each guest locally … the file is saved to their computer … then it uploads the crystal clear audio and video right into a cloud folder and the Zencastr suite so you have high-quality raw materials to work with.

Get 30% off a pro account at zen.ai/winfluence.

And if you’re wondering how I keep all my work organized for this podcast and all the influence marketing strategies I’m working on for clients out there? That’s easy. Basecamp. I’ve been using it for project management and team communications for almost two decades.

Basecamp is all about simplicity. It’s designed to give you and your team the tools you need to get work done. Messages, to-dos, file storage, chat, calendar and more. Bring all-in-one project management to your business. There’s a 30-day free trial. You do not need a credit card to try it.

Go to jason.online/basecamp.

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In 2003 Farha was on the verge of elimination from the World Series of Poker Texas Hold ‘Em Main Event … the one you typically see on ESPN. In fact the 2003 tournament, and Sam Farha’s role in it, helped make televised Texas Hold ‘Em tournaments a ratings boon for the network.

Farha found himself down early after losing a big hand and almost dropped out voluntarily. Friends encouraged him to keep playing. He was a fairly accomplished player, mind you. And he did. And he won hand after hand.

Farha reached the final table and meticulously worked his hands until only one man stood between him and his first-ever World Series of Poker title. That one man was a newcomer to the sport. The odds were certainly stacked in Farha’s favor.

But that one man was observant. He watched Farha for hours on that final table, looking for a tell. That is what poker players call some action a player takes or a reaction they have that indicates they either have a great hand. Or they have crap. 

You see, the art of playing poker is the art of keeping your opponents guessing. Do you have a good hand when you place a big bet, so they should fold? Or are you bluffing, so they should call or raise to put the pressure back on you to stay in and not lose any money. 

The newcomer standing between Farha and his first World Series of Poker bracelet was Chris Moneymaker. He studied Farha for hours playing at that final table and noticed he did something different when he was bluffing versus when he had a strong hand.

He tapped his cigarette on the table. 

At a crucial point in the match, Farha went all-in with a pair of jacks and was bluffing. But he tapped his cigarette. Moneymaker called. He had two pair. They survived the final turn of the card to make the unknown accountant from Tennessee, the 2003 World Series of Poker Main Event Champion. 

Did you know that influencers and content creators have tells too? Today on Winfluence, I’ll share the five tells that reveal insights about an influencer that throw up red flags and often make me choose someone different. 

Today's episode is brought to you by Zencastr and Basecamp. I'm excited to tell you more about them, because I use them both. All the interviews I record for this show are captured with Zencastr. I've used it for years to capture high-quality audio over the web. It does high-quality video, too.

Zencastr records each guest locally … the file is saved to their computer … then it uploads the crystal clear audio and video right into a cloud folder and the Zencastr suite so you have high-quality raw materials to work with.

Get 30% off a pro account at zen.ai/winfluence.

And if you’re wondering how I keep all my work organized for this podcast and all the influence marketing strategies I’m working on for clients out there? That’s easy. Basecamp. I’ve been using it for project management and team communications for almost two decades.

Basecamp is all about simplicity. It’s designed to give you and your team the tools you need to get work done. Messages, to-dos, file storage, chat, calendar and more. Bring all-in-one project management to your business. There’s a 30-day free trial. You do not need a credit card to try it.

Go to jason.online/basecamp.

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Podcasts, however, are content creations of content creators who leverage those mechanisms to build audiences and influence. And so they fall squarely in the crosshairs of what we need to know and explore on the show. I’ve said before owned content mechanisms like blogs and podcasts, email newsletters and the like are an important category of creation influencers everywhere need to pay attention to.

In this episode, we’re going to hammer that home a bit. 

One of the podcasts about podcasting I listen to is The Business of Podcasting. Christopher Hines, or The Coach Chris as he is known online, offers up short, informal but informational riffs on how to leverage podcasts to make money, drive value for your business and more. He mixes in an occasional guest and is just useful for new and emerging podcasters.

Chris is also the man behind the Personal Branding Playbook. Both shows are on the Marketing Podcast Network, which I run and Winfluence is a part of as well. Being exposed to Chris’s wisdom and straightforward coaching ideas compelled me to have him come on the show and share a bit of his knowledge with you, too.

Today we’ll talk about why you content creators need to consider podcast. Who may not need to. And then we’ll dive into the ways you can make money from your podcast.

Welcome to two new sponsors to Winfluence this month! Today's episode is brought to you by Zencastr and Basecamp. I'm excited to tell you more about them, because I use them both. All the interviews I record for this show are captured with Zencastr. I've used it for years to capture high-quality audio over the web. It does high-quality video, too.

Zencastr records each guest locally … the file is saved to their computer … then it uploads the crystal clear audio and video right into a cloud folder and the Zencastr suite so you have high-quality raw materials to work with.

Get 30% off a pro account at zen.ai/winfluence.

And if you’re wondering how I keep all my work organized for this podcast and all the influence marketing strategies I’m working on for clients out there? That’s easy. Basecamp. I’ve been using it for project management and team communications for almost two decades.

Basecamp is all about simplicity. It’s designed to give you and your team the tools you need to get work done. Messages, to-dos, file storage, chat, calendar and more. Bring all-in-one project management to your business. There’s a 30-day free trial. You do not need a credit card to try it.  

Go to jason.online/basecamp.

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I keep track, but it’s easier to just search for the guest or topic on my website or even the podcast apps than have to remember numbers. Thanks to mobile phones, who has brain capacity to remember numbers anymore. 

But I call out episode 178 today because this episode is the first with a repeat guest. Gary Arndt joined us in January of 2021 to talk about becoming influential via a podcast. He’s the host of Everything Everywhere Daily. That daily dose of history and trivia launched when the pandemic wiped out Gary’s other business. He was a travel and tourism blogger, photographer and podcaster. His industry shut down thanks to COVID. 

Gary was out of a job and out of income. He didn’t have anything to do so he threw himself into starting a podcast, but running it like a business. He very quickly went from in the red to in the black.

When we last spoke, Gary was hitting around 60,000 downloads per month. That was about six or eight months into his new venture. He is now more than 10 times that in terms of monthly downloads. By the end of this year, he’ll likely hit one million monthly downloads.

And Gary is one man researching and writing one show per day from his basement. He’s an independent podcaster. Us indy folks don’t typically hit one million downloads in a year, much less a month. 

In this episode we revisit Gary Arndt, who tells us the lessons he’s learned from trying everything, testing, iterating and climbing his way from zero to hero in the podcasting space. He shares the best methods to grow and a little of where his show has taken him, that he didn’t expect.

A lot of the advice Gary has for us correlates to growing your influence on social networks. But if you’re keenly interested in podcasting and getting specific advice on how to go big or go home, get ready to take some notes.  

Welcome to two new sponsors to Winfluence this month! Today's episode is brought to you by Zencastr and Basecamp. I'm excited to tell you more about them, because I use them both. All the interviews I record for this show are captured with Zencastr. I've used it for years to capture high-quality audio over the web. It does high-quality video, too.

Zencastr records each guest locally … the file is saved to their computer … then it uploads the crystal clear audio and video right into a cloud folder and the Zencastr suite so you have high-quality raw materials to work with.

Get 30% off a pro account at zen.ai/winfluence.

And if you’re wondering how I keep all my work organized for this podcast and all the influence marketing strategies I’m working on for clients out there? That’s easy. Basecamp. I’ve been using it for project management and team communications for almost two decades.

Basecamp is all about simplicity. It’s designed to give you and your team the tools you need to get work done. Messages, to-dos, file storage, chat, calendar and more. Bring all-in-one project management to your business. There’s a 30-day free trial. You do not need a credit card to try it.  

Go to jason.online/basecamp.

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I also have people in the industry reach out about trends and problems they’re seeing. When one piques my interest, that topic becomes a show as well. Today’s is one of those.

Sam Mendel and Saranga Pagadala are two young whippersnappers who have dreamed up a different take on an influencer marketing platform, but one that is informed and inspired by what they see as an industry issue. They reached out and said talent agents and managed services are taking too much of an influencer’s earnings. 

As you can imagine, that raised an eyebrow on this face. I work with talent agents all the time. They provide a valuable service to their clients, the end creators, so they can focus on creating. But when Sam and Saranga said they’ve seen up to 40% commission rates, I asked them to tell me more.

We spent some time going through the issue and touched on CashU which is their new entry into the influencer marketing space. You can find it at textcashu.com. As you can probably guess, it’s an influencer marketplace and discovery platform that operates mostly as a text platform. Worth checking out if you’re a creator or company looking to engage micro- and nano-influencers. 

They had some interesting things to say. I’d be interested to hear if your experiences align with theirs and what you think after you listen today.

We have two new sponsors to welcome to Winfluence this week. Today's episode is brought to you by Zencastr and Basecamp. I'm excited to tell you more about them, because I use them both. All the interviews I record for this show are captured with Zencastr. I've used it for years to capture high-quality audio over the web. It does high-quality video, too.

Zencastr records each guest locally … the file is saved to their computer … then it uploads the crystal clear audio and video right into a cloud folder and the Zencastr suite so you have high-quality raw materials to work with.

Get 30% off a pro account at zen.ai/winfluence.

And if you’re wondering how I keep all my work organized for this podcast and all the influence marketing strategies I’m working on for clients out there? That’s easy. Basecamp. I’ve been using it for project management and team communications for almost two decades.

Basecamp is all about simplicity. It’s designed to give you and your team the tools you need to get work done. Messages, to-dos, file storage, chat, calendar and more. Bring all-in-one project management to your business. There’s a 30-day free trial. You do not need a credit card to try it.  

Go to jason.online/basecamp.

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Instagram is now outwardly saying video is better. They’re prioritizing it over the their heritage approach of photography. They’re also testing features that are much like TikTok. This is largely because TikTok is beating them at the game of creating stickier user experiences. Instagram can’t continue to dominate the social media platform usage among a certain population if the Joneses have built a better mousetrap. So they have to keep up.

And these changes change the way influencers and creators have to approach their roles. It also changes the way brands need to think about influencers. 

Katie Stoller has been watching the algorithm changes, and Kylie Jenner’s reaction, along with the rest of us in the space. She’s an influencer marketing and public relations consultant and pro. I invited her to come on the show to talk about the layered complexities of the influencer space, how to design the right solutions for brands and clients when its hard to know what size influencer, what type of creator, what type of content and such will work.

But I invited her to do that the week the Kylie Jenner re-post of a meme begging Instagram to let Instagram be Instagram, so our conversation had to include both. 

Katie is of like mind. She’s a public relations pro by trade, even worked at some of the major PR firms over the years. She’s currently handling influencer marketing for Fiat Growth, a Silicon Valley based investment and growth company largely in the FinTech space. 

Our conversation will be very useful for those of you on the brand and agency side to better understand the complexities of building smart influence approaches, but then we’ll also get into this Instagram UX and algorithm discussion. Katie was the guest, but she asked me a few questions and I jumped out of character a bit to wag my finger at some folks.

An entertaining discussion is here for you today.

This episode of Winfluence is presented by Tagger, a complete influence marketing software solution. Check them out for a demo today at jason.online/tagger.

A full show transcript is available at https://jason.online/katiestoller.

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First, they’re anxious to mention their platform to you since they know the people who listen to WInfluence are interested in and often shopping for solutions to problems with influencer marketing. That makes this group of people easy interviews. 

My goal in having them on the show is to certainly talk about their platform so you might have a good idea of something else out there, but then I try to dive deeper into their worldview, at least as it pertains to influencer marketing. We discuss and debate issues and such. That gives you more than just a veiled ad for their thing and helps us push the thinking.

By the way – no one pays to be interviewed on this show. The editorial part of it is just me deciding that person has something worth sharing and talking about. Sure, I’ve interviewed Pete Kennedy from Tagger, who is our show sponsor, and some folks from companies that sponsor the Marketing Podcast Network, of which Winfluence is a member, but being interviewed on Winfluence is not part of any ad buy for them. Just so you know.

Austin Rosenthal actually caught my attention recently by saying he didn’t agree with my conclusion from an earlier conversation. If you’ll remember back a few episodes we talked to Aaron Bruce of Posse.io. His platform allows brands to tap into an influencer’s audience by targeting advertising to them with the creator’s permission, but for a CPM payout to the influencer and no need for content creation. 

My headline / conclusion on that episode was “Are we doing influencer marketing all wrong.” So Austin took issue.

It’s no surprise. Austin Rosenthal is the chief operating officer at Lionize.ai. It is an influencer marketing software platform in the traditional sense. You use Lionize.ai to search and discover, then engage and manage influencer campaigns. So I could see why he would object to me inferring that we might be doing influencer marketing wrong by not focusing on just ad buys against influencer audiences.

I welcomed the pushback and knowledge about Lionize.ai, but only if Austin would come on the show and explain both. So, a new tool and a little fun discussion is in order today on Winfluence. 

This episode of Winfluence is presented by Tagger, a complete influencer marketing management solution. Try a free demo at jason.online/tagger today.

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Now, I have been to Denver a few times in my life, as well as Salt Lake City. I even drove from there to Logan, Utah once. So I’ve seen the Rocky Mountains up close before, but I had never really gotten off the main roads and explored. 

Last Monday, the kids and I spent the morning in Boulder, walking up and down Pearl Street. After lunch we headed west out of town up into the Rockies. If you’ve never done so, you should. The majesty of these enormous formations is humbling. 

About halfway up the first mountain, we pulled off to hike up to Boulder Falls. Now, for those of you who are familiar, I realize the word “hike” is relative. It’s only about a 200-yard walk on a gravel path down off the road, then up the side of the valley so you can peak around the bend and see the waterfall full on. 

But for those of you who aren’t familiar with me, let’s just say I’m not a hiker. In fact, I had back surgery a month ago, so even the task of walking up the rocks 200 yards was risky. I’m admittedly not active … and horrifically out of shape. But I wanted to do this for and with my kids, so I jumped out of my comfort zone and made the trek.

It might have been the most important thing I’ve done in years.

Standing there on the side of a Rocky Mountain valley, admiring the natural beauty of powerful rushing water that carved out an escape out of the hills to the babbling brook below, feeling the cool mountain wind on my slightly sunburned face, and watching the wonder and joy in my children’s eyes as they, too saw this amazing little slice of heaven, I felt an overwhelming sense of both gratitude and disappointment.

I was grateful I chose to step outside my comfort zone. I was disappointed I had waited so long to do so.

The rest of our trip I spent contemplating the opportunities I’d passed up just wanting to not be uncomfortable. And from a physical health standpoint, how the 49 years of wanting to be comfortable has made me just the opposite. I joke about my weight and laugh it off in masterful self-effacement. But I’m now uncomfortable being me. 

It’s time to get out of my comfort zone in other ways. 

Today on Winfluence, I’m going to share with you what getting out of your comfort zone can mean for you. Whether you’re a business owner hoping to leverage influence marketing, an agency or service provider helping other businesses do the same, or a creator or influencer yourself. 

We’re going to instigate some change. We’re going to make ourselves uncomfortable. But trust me, when you do so … it’s worth it.

This episode of Winfluence is presented by Tagger, a complete influence marketing software solution. Check them out for a demo today at jason.online/tagger.

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Case in point, I reached out to a talent agency last week – you know, one that manages talent, like celebrities and influencers. But I made the mistake of using the term “talent management” in my email. I was quickly lectured on the fact they do not provide management services. They provide talent services. 

When you actually narrow down a category of providers in the space … lets say influencer marketing agencies … the water doesn’t get much clearer. There are agencies that build out influencer campaigns and hire and manage talent. Then there are agencies that only manage talent and mislabel themselves as agencies. Some agencies also have software which confuses everyone.

I suppose part of my job on this podcast is to help better define who is what and what is right for various challenges. Which brings me to today’s guest, who has solved quite a number of problems for a lot of brands over the years.

Aliza Freud is the CEO of SheSpeaks. It bills itself as a community of women, not an agency. So that means you can go there to find creators who might partner with your brand. But it started as a consumer insights or research firm where brands could find a focus group of women consumers to inform their marketing and product decisions. It has kept that part of its DNA.

So SheSpeaks is a community of creators and consumers you can tap into for insights to help your brands’ marketing and product decisions, but also to leverage those research panel participants, and others, to turn around and share your brand with their audiences. 

Aliza and I talked about the nuances of SheSpeaks and how both creators and brands can benefit from the community, then we jumped into a really interesting and useful discussion about building influencer marketing strategies overall. You’ll get a lot out of today’s conversation with Aliza Freud.

Find Aliza's podcast, She Speaks: How She Does It wherever you get your podcasts.

This episode of Winfluence is presented by Tagger, a complete influence marketing software solution. Check them out for a demo today at jason.online/tagger.

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The soup-to-nuts platforms are expensive. Or at least they are for small businesses. When you’re spending millions of dollars on marketing and hundreds of thousands on influencer marketing, $2-3 grand per month for software isn’t concerning. So the “expensive” label is relative.

But small business marketers have the same problems the enterprise does. They need a tool to help with discovery. They need the ability to manage campaigns. They want to measure their influencer marketing efforts. And doing it all manually, or in a spreadsheet makes it far more time and labor intensive. Which deters a lot of small businesses from even trying.

Even if you get past that problem as a small business, then you have to worry about what influencers charge if you work with them. So the path many small businesses take is working with nano- and mico-influencers. But how do you find them? And how do you manage and measure working with folks who don’t have talent managers and sophisticated software packages themselves to solve those problems?

When the big software companies don’t provide solution for the little guy, that creates a gap. And gaps create opportunities for other software companies to thrive.

Reach Influencers is one of those software companies. It is an influencer marketing platform and marketplace that includes almost all of the feature sets of the big, fancy, enterprise solutions. It’s built around small businesses and using micro- and nano-influencers. And it costs less than $100 per month on the annual subscription.

The first case study Nick Wise from Reach Influencers told me about was a small business in Hardinsburg, Kentucky of all places. 

I tell you that for two reasons. First, you know I’m from Kentucky, so a little humble brag is in order. Reach Influencers is also based in Kentucky, so there’s that, too. But the main reason I tell you that is if a small, local business in a town of less than 3,000 people can increase their revenue and exposure using influencer marketing, then you can, too.

Nick and I sat down to talk last week. We focused on the use of nano-influencers and how your own customers can be the smartest influence partners you work with. We talked about how a small business in a town of 3,000 people can effectively find influencers that are relevant to them and their location. And we touch on the software, too.

Smart ideas for businesses small and large were had. And today, we’ll hear them from Nick Wise of Reach Influencers.

This episode of Winfluence is presented by Tagger, a complete influence marketing software solution. Check them out for a demo today at jason.online/tagger.

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Not enough businesses invest in consumer research. Not enough agencies sell it through the way they should. 

What replaces it for those who don’t invest in consumer research is typically generic, broad statistical analysis … hardly qualifying as research … proliferated by software companies as linkbait content on their websites. 

The reason few brands actually invest in consumer research is that good, sound consumer research is cost prohibitive. It’s tens, if not hundreds of thousands of dollars to commission a research instrument. They also take months to complete. So they’re pricey and slow.

But where there is a gap in the marketplace, there will be someone who tries to fill it. Matt Miller is the founder of Raadz, a tool to collect consumer insights in a matter of hours, not months. And for investments of hundreds to low thousands of dollars, not hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Raadz allows brands to ramp up short question, and short duration, surveys for consumers in minutes. They’re gamified to drive participation and reward those participating. The questions are structured in a way that eliminates false answers and false positives from participants. 

Brands can use the survey instrument for their own private list of participants, like customers or newsletter subscribers. Or they can build open surveys and promote them to their social media followers and other groups.

So what does this have to do with influence marketing? Raadz is actually going to market with the idea that brands can use Raadz to solicit feedback directly from the audience of the influencers they partner with. And there’s money in it for the content creator or influencer as well.

Matt and I caught up recently to allow him to dive into deeper explanations of all that here on the show. I am so gung-ho about this tool, I’m discussing a more connected partnership with Raadz moving forward. I want my clients to use it. I think your clients or brand should too. I think you’ll agree after hearing my conversation with Matt today on Winfluence. 

This episode of Winfluence is presented by Tagger, a complete influence marketing software solution. Check them out for a demo today at jason.online/tagger.

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Which is to say the spectrum of the relationship can be strong. Or not so strong. 

I have an affinity for bourbon. But I also have an affinity for Hanson’s 1997 album Middle of Nowhere. I can live without one of those, so the affinity is different.

And that is the underlying factor a good influence marketing strategist needs to keep in mind, about using affinity as a filter for influencer prioritization. If you’re not familiar with affinity and how that applies to influencer marketing, get out your notebooks. Today on Winflunce, we’ll take a quick look at affinity. What it means in the context of influence marketing and how you can use it to produce more successful influence marketing campaigns. 

A lot of the inspiration and learning I’ve been doing about affinity that you’ll hear in today’s episode comes by way of my use of and relationship with Tagger. It is a complete influencer marketing software platform that allows you to find, engage, book, collaborate, pay and measure influencers. Tagger is also the presenting sponsor of this podcast and the platform I use in my day-to-day work at Cornett to manage the influence marketing efforts of our clients.

In fact, Tagger has some proprietary affinity algorithms that do a lot of the discovery and connections for you in the tool. I’m going to talk about how they all happen today so you can know what to look for without it. But why wouldn’t you explore doing all this work with a platform that can help, like Tagger. 

I highly recommend you give Tagger a look-see. Go to jason.online/tagger and sign up for a free demo today. It might just be the influence marketing management solution you’re looking for.

And the influencers and brands I use as examples in this episode for visual reference are:

• Jackson Krecioch
• Caesaar Chukwuma, Esq.
• Manssion
• Gordon Glenister
• BourbonSipper
• USAA
• Craig

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Now, for some of you who want to build a following online or offline and have true influence. Perhaps you want to be content creator that does brand deals and gets paid to create on social media channels. Or maybe you have political aspirations. Or you just see the value in growing your audience or network that you have an impact upon.

Others of you probably see the value in growing the influence your business has. Perhaps over prospective customers. But more specific to what we talk about on this show, maybe you want to grow your influence over the influencers in your space.

When you remove the guardrails of influencer marketing and stop focusing solely on follower counts and social networks online, you start to see true influence. That is often built offline. Face-to-face. At events. Think of it networking, not social networking which now seems to imply online.

When I happen to stumble upon a person, brand, case study or resource that can help me explain and emphasize the offline part of influence marketing, without the R, I latch on to it. And I recently found one such resource.

Nick Gray is an entrepreneur that you could say was an original influencer. He started a website and company on the side in the mid-2000s called Museum Hack. He did what he calls “renegade tours” of the Met and similar museums in New York City. The content exploded and Museum Hack became a full-fledged business with 50 employees. He sold it in 2019.

Nick’s climb to the top of the entrepreneurial success ladder, however, sprouted from a socially awkward kid who moved to New York City in his early 20s. The way he networked and grew his influence inspired a now five-year-long project that resulted in a book. It’s called The 2-Hour Cocktail Party: How to Build Big Relationships with Small Gatherings.

Nick and I caught up recently to talk about his book, the idea of hosting cocktail parties to grow your local and community influence and how the ideas in the book can help content creators and brands alike become more influential. Not just leverage influence or influencers.

Today's episode is presented by Tagger, the complete influencer marketing platform. Get a demo to see if Tagger is right for you at jason.online/tagger.

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Sure, I have a perspective on the practice and industry I think is unique and expands your thinking about it. I believe that’s why you listen. And I thank you for that. 

But some of the people that I share ideas with behind the scenes are some awfully smart folks, too. And I would be doing you a disservice if I didn’t elevate those voices and perspectives as well.

Sarah Panus is steep in experience working with big brands and influence marketing. She’s worked with Sleep Number, Starbucks, Nestle … among others. Her experience led her to develop her own categorizations of influencers and a smart way of thinking about and executing influence marketing campaigns.

Sarah also happens to be the host of a mighty fine podcast called Marketing With Empathy. It is one of our sister shows on the Marketing Podcast Network. As one might assume from the title, Marketing With Empathy is about far more than influence marketing. But because influencers are top of mind for brand managers that listen to her, and because approaching them with empathy is just plain smart, the topic pops up on the show from time to time.

Sarah recently did a series of episodes about her six categories of influencers. These are stakeholders or pools of people one might turn to for an influence marketing campaign. Celebrities is one. Current customers is another, and so on.

Today on Winfluence, I’m going to share an excerpt from her episode on CSR and PR contacts that can serve as influence conduits for your brand. That’s right … tapping into corporate social responsibility contacts and media and public relations relationships to further your influence campaigns.

Sarah will certainly give you more to chew on about how to think of it as influence marketing rather than influencer marketing on this episode.

Don’t forget to drop Winfluence a rating or review on your favorite podcast app. Also, if you’d like a deep dive on an influencer marketing topic every so often, subscribe to my email newsletter at jason.online/subscribe. I send it every 4-6 weeks and go deep on a topic to make your influence marketing smarter.

Want to make a future episode of Winfluence awesome? Ask your question about influence or influence marketing that you want my answer to or take on. Send me an email to jason@jasonfalls.com. If you’re feeling adventurous, record a voice memo on your phone and email me that file. I’ll let you ask the question right here on the show using the recording. Regardless of how you ask it, I may use your comment on a future episode or your question to inspire a show topic. If I do, I’ll send you a signed copy of Winfluence the book as a thank you!

Today's episode is presented by Tagger, the complete influencer marketing platform. Get a demo to see if Tagger is right for you at jason.online/tagger.

And don't forget to claim your $100 advertising credit on LinkedIn by going to LinkedIn.com/winfluence.

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So I typical recommend content creators consider starting a podcast. It’s a great way to have a deeper, more personal and long-form connection with your audience. It’s also a great way to network with other creators and grow your audience by having them on as guests, assuming they’ll promote their episode to their followers. Most people do. 

But I also make that recommendation with a caveat: You have to really want to do it to make it work. If you are hesitant at all, hosting your own podcast isn’t a good idea. But you can still leverage other people’s podcasts by being a guest. Share your insights and opinions with other people’s audiences in hopes they’ll come over and become a member of your following, too.

Brittany Brown and Rob Winters were so frustrated finding great guests for their agency’s podcast, they started what is essentially a dating app for podcast hosts and potential guests. It’s called PodOps. It’s an app. You download it to your phone. If you host a podcast you set up a host profile. If you want to promote yourself as a guest, you set up a guest profile.

The app then matches interests and subject matters in a dating app style connection. The hosts find guests they’re interested in. The guests find relevant podcasts to be on and spread their message. 

I invited Brittany and Rob to come on the show and talk about the ins and outs of the app and who it benefits the most. But we also talked about the explosion of podcasting in general. Why your business or brand, whether it’s as a creator or a more traditional company, should start a podcast and a lot more.

Even if you’re just interested in being a guest on podcasts, you should give today’s episode a listen. It’ll help steer you in a good direction. You just might find PodOps is a great way to get booked … or find guests.

Don’t forget to drop Winfluence a rating or review on your favorite podcast app. Also, if you’d like a deep dive on an influencer marketing topic every so often, subscribe to my email newsletter at jason.online/subscribe. I send it every 4-6 weeks and go deep on a topic to make your influence marketing smarter.

Want to make a future episode of Winfluence awesome? Ask your question about influence or influence marketing that you want my answer to or take on. Send me an email to jason@jasonfalls.com. If you’re feeling adventurous, record a voice memo on your phone and email me that file. I’ll let you ask the question right here on the show using the recording. Regardless of how you ask it, I may use your comment on a future episode or your question to inspire a show topic. If I do, I’ll send you a signed copy of Winfluence the book as a thank you!

Today's episode is presented by Tagger, the complete influencer marketing platform. Get a demo to see if Tagger is right for you at jason.online/tagger.

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I’m not throwing this out there as hyperbole. I mean it. What if we have it all wrong?

Let’s deconstruct the construct for a minute. What we’re trying to do is persuade an audience to take action. We want them to buy or try our product, become more aware of what we’re doing or persuade them to think a certain way about one thing or another. 

Where is influencer marketing in that equation? In the middle. They are a channel to get to that audience, assuming we can’t get to them otherwise. Or perhaps it’s an additional way to get to them to compliment the other paths we carve.

The question we raise here on Winfluence frequently is why, then, are we focused on the influencer if what we’re really trying to do is influence? We need to be focused more on the audience.

What if we could target an influencer’s audience, but not have to risk taking anything away from their relationship with their audience, and still compensate them for being able to do so?

One company has taken that approach … reverse engineer the process and focus on getting brand advertisements in front of the most relevant segment of an influencer’s audience … the actual people, not look-a-likes … to compare ad performance against its regular social ad buys. When you find an influencer audience segment that works, you’re more efficient and effective with your spend and succeed faster.

The company is called Posse.io. It’s CEO and founder Aaron Bruce and I caught up recently to blow up everything we’ve thought was the best way to leverage influencers and chart a different path to influence marketing, without disregarding or disrespecting the influencers. In fact, brands using Posse.io’s approach not only compensate the influencer, but help them keep sponsored content from watering down their organic, high-engagement posts. 

Get out your notebooks and open your minds today, kids. We’re going to look at the industry very differently after you hear my chat with Bruce today on the show.

Don’t forget to drop Winfluence a rating or review on your favorite podcast app. Also, if you’d like a deep dive on an influencer marketing topic every so often, subscribe to my email newsletter at jason.online/subscribe. I send it every 4-6 weeks and go deep on a topic to make your influence marketing smarter.

Want to make a future episode of Winfluence awesome? Ask your question about influence or influence marketing that you want my answer to or take on. Send me an email to jason@jasonfalls.com. If you’re feeling adventurous, record a voice memo on your phone and email me that file. I’ll let you ask the question right here on the show using the recording. Regardless of how you ask it, I may use your comment on a future episode or your question to inspire a show topic. If I do, I’ll send you a signed copy of Winfluence the book as a thank you!

Today's episode is presented by Tagger, the complete influencer marketing platform. Get a demo to see if Tagger is right for you at jason.online/tagger.

And don't forget our big offer from LinkedIn! Get $100 in free ad credits just for listening to Winfluence. Go to linkedin.com/winfluence to sign up and get your C-note for LinkedIn advertising.

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But because it was run by search folks, the roster of speakers included a bunch of SEO folks. And one of those was the founder of a little upstart company in Seattle called SEO Moz. Rand Fishkin grew that company into a rebrand to just MOZ. Today, it is one of the most successful SEO and SEM data and services companies in the world. 

I’m a customer. I’ve also taken a lot of their courses. Knowing SEO helps my day-today. I was lucky to have met Rand then and have followed him through the years.

In 2018, he left MOZ, though he’s still on the board, I believe. Now he’s started a new company that is focused on helping brands figure out what influences its prospective customers. SparkToro is a platform that scrapes public profile data from social media accounts, then analyses it to offer consumer insights to its customers. 

It’s part market research. Part data analysis. And part influence marketing platform. 

And yes, I said influence marketing platform. In fact, I even ask Rand during our conversation if SparkToro is the software version of the philosophy we talk about here on Winfluence … that we’re in the business of influence marketing, not influencer marketing. Wait until you hear his answer.

I invited Rand to chat with me over on Digging Deeper, my interview series for Cornett. But the conversation was super relevant for us here on Winfluence, too. So I’ve pulled that out and have it her for you today. 

We talk to Rand Fishkin of SparkToro about what influences people, how to find out and what to do with that information today on Winfluence.

Don’t forget to drop Winfluence a rating or review on your favorite podcast app. Also, if you’d like a deep dive on an influencer marketing topic every so often, subscribe to my email newsletter at jason.online/subscribe. I send it every 4-6 weeks and go deep on a topic to make your influence marketing smarter.

Want to make a future episode of Winfluence awesome? Ask your question about influence or influence marketing that you want my answer to or take on. Send me an email to jason@jasonfalls.com. If you’re feeling adventurous, record a voice memo on your phone and email me that file. I’ll let you ask the question right here on the show using the recording. Regardless of how you ask it, I may use your comment on a future episode or your question to inspire a show topic. If I do, I’ll send you a signed copy of Winfluence the book as a thank you!

Today's episode is presented by Tagger, the complete influencer marketing platform. Get a demo to see if Tagger is right for you at jason.online/tagger.

And don't forget our big offer from LinkedIn! Get $100 in free ad credits just for listening to Winfluence. Go to linkedin.com/winfluence to sign up and get your C-note for LinkedIn advertising.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

And no, my ego isn’t so sensitive that you can’t ask me to not sign it. I’m happy to just send you one not adulterated with my pithy quote and signature, if you like.

But the reason I do that is because this show becomes much more useful to you if I’m answering your questions. 

Well, one of my old social media pals ask me a question about influence marketing of sorts last week on Twitter. Sheila Scarborough and Leslie McLellan run Tourism Currents. It’s a blog and resource, with accompanying social channels, for destination marketers, tourism bloggers and journalists and those who fancy themselves influencers in the travel and tourism space.

I’ve been pals with Sheila and the other founder of the site, Becky McCray, for probably 15 years. I don’t know Leslie as well, but I love the content and advice they all dole out to folks in that niche.

Last week, the tagged me on Twitter to see what I thought about an article they published called, “Ask for these influencer campaign stats.” It was advice for destinations … brands in the tourism industry like convention and visitor’s bureaus, hotels, attractions and such … on what metrics they should ask influencers to provide them for a campaign to judge how effective their content is for your efforts. 

Without having to look at the article, I certainly know Sheila and Leslie well enough to know it’s going to be sound advice. And it was. But it doesn’t just apply to destinations. Their advice is sound for all brands and agencies to hear to know what metrics you should care about from the influence partners and content creators you work with.

On this episode of Winfluence, I’ll share Tourism Current’s list, and add both some list items, and perspective of my own, to help your brand. 

Winfluence is supported by Tagger, the complete influencer marketing software solution. Get a demo to see if Tagger is right for you at jason.online/tagger. Support also comes from LinkedIn Marketing Solutions. Claim your $100 advertising credit at linkedin.com/winfluence today.

Don’t forget to drop Winfluence a rating or review on your favorite podcast app. If you’d like a deep dive on an influencer marketing topic every so often, subscribe to my email newsletter at jason.online/subscribe. Finally, make a future episode of Winfluence awesome! Ask your question about influence or influence marketing that you want my answer to or take on. Send me an email to jason@jasonfalls.com. If you’re feeling adventurous, record a voice memo on your phone and email me that file. I’ll let you ask the question right here on the show using the recording.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Rev Ciancio is a food and hospitality industry influencer. Yep … in the B2B space. He speaks at food and beverage industry conferences. He is a marketing and tech evangelist for the food business. He’s often engaged to consult with restaurants on developing their tech stack and customer acquisition approach. 

But Rev is also quite the b2c influencer as well. He runs the channel @funwithfries on Instagram. It has 334,000 followers. For what is essentially french fry porn. Literally .. pictures of orders of french fries, mostly user-generated content he repurposes. 

Seems frivolous and silly, right? Well he has a long-standing relationship with a french fry wholesaler because of that account. 

His industry credentials give him true influence in a specific niche. His flare for creating engaging content gives him the consumer following. So, Rev has the best of both worlds as an influencer and content creator.

I caught up with him recently to talk about the food industry and its post-pandemic challenges. How he manages influencer marketing for his own local restaurant. What technology and marketing channels and approaches are smart for restaurants to acquire customers and beyond. 

He gives some great insight for both brands an influencers in the first part of the conversation about how to divide your content smartly around various networks. Really good advice here, so pay attention.

Don’t forget to drop Winfluence a rating or review on your favorite podcast app. Also, if you’d like a deep dive on an influencer marketing topic every so often, subscribe to my email newsletter at jason.online/subscribe. I send it every 4-6 weeks and go deep on a topic to make your influence marketing smarter.

Want to make a future episode of Winfluence awesome? Ask your question about influence or influence marketing that you want my answer to or take on. Send me an email to jason@jasonfalls.com. If you’re feeling adventurous, record a voice memo on your phone and email me that file. I’ll let you ask the question right here on the show using the recording. Regardless of how you ask it, I may use your comment on a future episode or your question to inspire a show topic. If I do, I’ll send you a signed copy of Winfluence the book as a thank you!

Today's episode is presented by Tagger, the complete influencer marketing platform. Get a demo to see if Tagger is right for you at jason.online/tagger.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

But the influencer pay gap isn’t as simple as creators should be paid the same fee for the same work. Our world is not that easy.

Yes, all things being equal, equal pay for equal work is right. But no influencer has the same amount of followers, the same level of content creativity, the same audience make up … no two creators or influencers are equal. So fair pay for the same work isn’t easy math.

Still, we have to continue to talk about the issue so we can get closer to fair and equitable pay for all creators, regardless of … but also with respect to … race. 

Latoya Shambo was a media buyer at an agency back in the mid-2010s. She had an idea to create a black blogger network, but at the time when blogs were losing their muster and platforms like Snapchat and Instagram were emerging. 

She founded Black Girl Digital in 2016 and started building a network of influencers of color. It started as black women focused, but expanded to inclusivity involving men, LGBTQ+ creators, Asian influencers and others of color. 

Shambo’s mission is to create opportunities for these creators … I’ll call them minority creators just as a broad label … but to create opportunities for them to monetize their content, build relationships with brands and yes, close that influencer pay gap.

She deals with brands and creators every day. She sees the gap. She fights against brands who don’t pay influencers fairly. And she has some ideas on how we can all work together to rid the industry of this practice. 

Shambo and I caught up recently after a whirlwind media blitz for her. She’s been featured recently on AdWeek, Bloomberg, Marketplace, Jezebel … But she stopped to chat with Winfluence and we’ll be all the better for it today on the show.

This episode of Winfluence is presented by Tagger, a complete influencer marketing software solution. With it, you can find, prioritize, connect and collaborate with, measure and even pay the content creators you use for your influencer programs. Go to jason.online/tagger to get a free demo and see if Tagger is right for you.

Also, LinkedIn has partnered with me to offer you a $100 advertising credit to get your message in front of the right kind of decision makers. Go to LinkedIn.com/winfluence today. 

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

There’s another great show on the Marketing Podcast Network called The Endless Coffee Cup. Matt Bailey of Site Logic is the host of that show. He welcomes expert guests from all around the world on a variety of marketing and business topics.

Matt and I have known each other since an event called Blogger Social back in 2008. He comes from the SEO segment of the marketing space, but he is an agency owner, an entrepreneur and all-around brilliant guy. 

You should definitely subscribe to the Endless Coffee Cup podcast. Matt does a great job of dissecting the expertise of his guests. Which is why I wanted to share a specific episode of Matt’s show.

Back in early February, Endless Coffee Cup featured Rashid Al Awadhi. He is leading the New Media Academy in Dubai. Its mission is to transform the Arabic region through digital skills and developing influencers. But, as Matt points out, it’s not the way most people think of influencers. It’s the way we tend to think of them here on Winfluence … as people with influence.

Al Awadi and his team are working to develop people to change the region in areas of women’s rights, economics, sport, environment and more. 

I was fascinated by the discussion. As you can probably tell, this is my kind of influence discussion. So I wanted to share it with you.

A segment of Matt Bailey’s recent episode of the Endless Coffee Cup with Rashid Al Awadhi is coming up for you today on Winfluence. Of course, if you want to listen to the full episode or subscribe to Matt’s show, I’ll leave links to both in the show notes. Or, you can just search for Endless Coffee Cup on your favorite podcast app.

I also want to touch on two fantastic supporters of Winfluence today. You’ve heard me talk about Tagger quite a bit on this show. That’s because they are our presenting sponsor. Tagger is complete influencer marketing software solution. I spent a couple of days with the Tagger team last week at the Influencer Marketing Show. And not only is it great software, but the team is just amazing to be around. 

Pete Kennedy and his crew really do have the growth and best interests of you in mind when you’re a customer of Tagger. I’m not going to spend more time talking about the features. You know I use it. You should check it out too. It might be right for your brand or agency. Go to jason.online/tagger to get a free demo and see if Tagger is right for you.

And, you may have hear me talking about LinkedIn Marketing Solutions before the show, or maybe during the breaks lately. That’s because LinkedIn has partnered with me to offer you a $100 advertising credit to get your message in front of the right kind of decision makers. I use LinkedIn advertising to target leads based on job description, company, seniority, industry and more. That means I’m not wasting advertising spend getting my message in front of people who aren’t my idea customer. You can do. Get started with a $100 ad credit just for listening to Winfluence. Go to LinkedIn.com/winfluence today.

Don’t forget to drop Winfluece a rating or review on your favorite podcast app. You should pause and do it now so you don’t forget! Unless you’re driving. Then do it later, please. 

Also, if you’d like a deep dive on an influencer marketing topic every so often, subscribe to my email newsletter at jason.online/subscribe. I send it every 4-6 weeks and go deep on a topic to make your influence marketing smarter. 

Want to help make a future episode of Winfluence awesome? Ask your question about influence or influence marketing that you want my answer to or take on. Record a voice memo and send it via email … or just send a regular email … to jason@jasonfalls.com. I may use your comment on a future episode or your question to inspire a show topic. If I do, I’ll send you a signed copy of Winfluence the book as a thank you!

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Gaming is a $250 billion industry. The demographic of a gamer isn’t what you think. The demographic of the gaming audience isn’t what you think, either. 

One of the things about gaming I personally have had a hard time with about gaming is understanding why anyone would want to sit around and watch other people play games. But millions do. Whether they’re watching to learn game tips and secrets to get better, or just watching to be entertained, millions and millions of people do just that. 

Because there’s an audience there, there are influencers. Some play their games for others to watch. Twitch has been built largely on the backs of these types of folks. But others create how-to videos and instruction and entertainment around games. Still others are creating content about the products and services around gaming, like controllers and peripherals.

Gamers are also now teaching people about the Metaverse since virtual reality is second nature to them. Video games have offered VR options for years now. 

There are all kinds of reasons to look to gamers as part of your influence marketing, even if you’re not a tech or gaming product company. 

Jordan Mauriello is the managing partner at More Yellow, a branded content and gaming influencer management firm. He not only has a roster of gamers who create great content, but a team that helps brands navigate partnerships and creative content ideas to leverage relationships with gamers. 

I took another step in my own efforts to educate myself on the gaming segment of our industry with a great chat with Jordan, who opened my eyes to even more nuances of gaming, partnering with gamers, brand success there and beyond. 

I’m sure you’ll learn more as well.  

Speaking of Learning More, if you haven’t downloaded The State of Content Mangement from Storyblok, get that while the getting is good. That free report is available to help you see how businesses just like yours are managing the content mess … creating it, distributing it and the like. Storyblok is a headless content management system and a new sponsor and supporter of this program via the Marketing Podcast Network. The report is a very useful survey of 515 businesses in the U.S. and Europe – companies just like yours – and how they are approaching content distribution through their digital channels in 2022. 

I promise you’ll get some interesting insights and inspiration for your content management plans. That’s The State of Content Management Report from Storyblok. Just go to storyblok.com/winfluence for your free report. 

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On this episode, we have an interesting and rare treat. Molly Tracy is a talent manager who came from the brand and agency side of things only to go out on her own and start VRAI Digital, her own talent management firm. 

Jess Keys is a popular lifestyle blogger and influencer … @JessKeys_ on Instagram. She is also one of Molly Tracy’s clients. I rolled the dice and asked them both to come on the show … together. I wanted to talk to the talent and the talent manager about that relationship, how they collaborate to serve brands and Jess’s audience in authentic ways, what the challenges of being talent in today’s volatile market place are and more.

We had such a fun discussion, I kept pushing a little deeper and even got both of them to answer a hot-button question … what do they think of the influencer marketing software companies and managed services? Those are set up to serve the brands. But are they set up to serve the creators? You might be surprised at their answers. 

Let’s just say the software company folks might want to get out some note pads and pens to take some notes. You might also want some ice packs and band aids. This one might hurt a little.

An honest and revealing discussion about being the talent … and being the talent manager ... is on this episode of Winfluence.

This episode is sponsored by Storyblok and its 2022 State of Content Management Report. It is a very useful survey of 515 businesses in the U.S. and Europe – companies just like yours – and how they are approaching content distribution through their digital channels in 2022. 

You’ll get some interesting insights and inspiration for your content management plans. That’s The State of Content Management Report from Storyblok. Download it for free at storyblok.com/winfluence.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

But when it comes to differentiating between influencers, we have to split hairs. And one category where my hair-splitting axe comes out is the category of celebrities. I think there are two categories of celebrity influencers: Those who are celebrities and also have social media followings. And celebrities who are such because of their social media followings.

Regardless of the differences or similarities, Brittani Kagan works with both kinds. She is the head of talent partnerships and a partner at Portal A. It bills itself as a branded and original content company. What they do specifically is create branded content … so influencer and celebrity campaigns, commercials and even long-form content, for brands. But they also create original content for streaming and media platforms like Netflix, HBO Max and beyond.

They work with celebrities, but also with those I might classify as influencers. If the creator is a good fit for what they’re building, they work with them.

I put my definitions to the test with Brittani when we caught up recently. She shared a lot of insight into how bigger, celebrity-focused branded and original content talent scouts cast their projects, come up with ideas and more.

Our conversation revealed a bit more about what it’s like to create and partner with creators at the highest levels … with the biggest budgets. It was an enlightening conversation and one that should spark a few interesting ideas for us all. 

This episode of Winfluence is presented by Tagger, the complete influencer marketing software solution. You can meet me and Tagger president and founder Pete Kennedy at the Influencer Marketing Show April 27 in New York City. We will be joined on stage by Jenny Heinrich who leads influencer marketing at Ketchum as we discuss the metrics that matter for moving the needle in influencer marketing. Tagger is a great partner for isolating those success metrics and helping me report back to our clients at Cornett how their campaigns are doing at returning the KPIs and ROI they’re seeking. 

Come see us both and hear more at the Influencer Marketing Show. See the full speaker and topic lineup and get your ticket at jason.online/imsfalls. On checkout, use the code FALLS to get a 15 percent discount, just for listening to Winfluence.  

And thanks to Pete Kennedy and the team at Tagger for helping bring Winfluence to you each week.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

I mean, how can you not think of a few. From L’Oreal to Amazon to Disney … some of the biggest brands, and certainly even small businesses, have either been disingenuous supporting efforts like Black Lives Matter or Pride, or gone to far worse extremes like some brands being accused of stealing ideas or designs from minority creators or businesses. 

The problem in these circumstances is the lack of diversity and inclusivity at the decision-making level means white people are making decisions about non-white cultural themes. Not smart. 

While the solution is certainly to drive more diversity and inclusivity at all levels of brands and the agencies that serve them, that won’t happen overnight. There has to be an interim solution to help brands and agencies better understand the communities they’re trying to serve. 

Now there is. 

And it underlines a major theme in our thesis and discussion of influence marketing. 

Joshua DuBois is the CEO of Gauge, a research and insights platform of sorts, that allows agencies and brands to tap into cultural and community leaders to better understand the communities and cultures they represent. Need a focus group of thoughtful African-American thought leaders to gut check your latest ad campaign? You can find that on Gauge.

While that is astonishing and much needed, what’s more interesting to me, however, is the treatment of influence in Gauge’s approach. It’s not an app where you can filter and search for influencers … those with big online social media followings. It’s an app where you can find people who actually influence communities. 

Civic leaders, journalists, academicians, activists … these are the “influencers” DuBois has collected in Gauge.

He joined me to talk more about the platform and the concept of influence versus influencers last week. He should know the difference, for sure. DuBois served as the executive director of the White House’s Office of Faith Based and Neighborhood Partnerships in the Obama Administration. He also authored the best-selling book of President Obama’s devotionals.

More impressively to me, however, DuBois has been recognized by The Root and Ebony magazine as one of the most influential African-American leaders in the country. Needless to say, it is an honor to have him here.

We also tended to my own personal journey of understanding the African-American experience which I think you should hear. My journey has unlocked a lot of growth for me. I hope it can for you, too. 

And be sure to download the great resource Storyblok has published to make you smarter. It’s a new report called The State of Content Management and is a very useful survey of 515 businesses in the U.S. and Europe and how they are approaching content distribution through their digital channels in 2022. 

Managing content is more complex today than ever. Get insights and ideas on how companies like yours are tackling the content challenge with The State of Content Management Report from Storyblok. Just go to storyblok.com/winfluence for your free report. 

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Chris is known as one of the world’s foremost skincare experts. He published a book in 2004 called Acne Free in 3 Days. He went on a multiple-year media tour and became well known before YouTube, Instagram or TikTok existed.

Then in 2018, he started paying more attention to YouTube and has since migrated his traditional media and website following to an active online and social media one. His experience of ups and downs being a content creator are a treasure trove of knowledge that we will mine today.

This episode of Winfluence is going to be a little different than my normal interviews, thought. It turns out Chris had so much to say that I just stayed quiet and let him go. So I’ve edited things with more of a narrative approach to tie all the finer points together for you. 

But let me assure you, there’s a lot here for you content creators to learn. And all of it is extremely useful for brand and agencies to understand, too. 

Before we get to those insights, I want to share something our friends at Storyblok have to make you smarter. It’s a new report called the State of Content Management and is a very useful survey of 515 businesses in the U.S. and Europe – companies just like yours – and how they are approaching content distribution through their digital channels in 2022. 

Think about it … you have to provide content for your website. Maybe a mobile app. Then there’s e-commerce platforms. Voice-activated speakers … Managing content is more complex today than ever. Get insights and ideas on how companies like yours are tackling the content challenge with The State of Content Management Report from Storyblok. Just go to storyblok.com/winfluence for your free report. 

Storyblok is a headless content management system, rated as the #1 CMS for 2022 by G2. It is also a new partner of the Marketing Podcast Network.

Also, join me in New York City on April 27 for the Influencer Marketing Show. Go to jason.online/imsfalls and use the code FALLS for 15% off your ticket, just for listening to Winfluence.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

For some time now, I’ve been demo-ing, testing and using influencer marketing software. As you know, I use Tagger. They are the presenting sponsor of Winfluence. It’s a soup-to-nuts influencer marketing solution, very powerful and you’ve heard a lot about it here.

That said, I can count on one hand how many times I’ve been able to talk the CEO, president or owner of one of any of those platforms in a really candid conversation about the software space, their software and the industry in general. It’s not for lack of trying. But SaaS product executives are often protected by PR firms and beholden to shareholders first, so podcasters and industry influencers, if you will, are not primarily important. 

Well today, I’m getting closer to not being able to count those I’ve had deep conversations with on one hand. That’s because Pete Kennedy, the president and co-founder of the aforementioned Tagger, a sponsor of this program. But Pete is here today to chat. And without handlers or PR monitors looking over anyone’s shoulder. 

We dive into why there’s no real good, reasonable priced influencer marketing tools out there; whether or not these platforms are in an adversarial relationship with the social networks because of brand collaborations and payments of influencers; what should be on the roadmap for social influencer platforms, the trends in the industry and a lot more.

And coincidentally, Pete Kennedy and I will be on stage together at the Influencer Marketing Show in New York City on April 27. I have a discount code for you to get tickets to join me there.  

The Influencer Marketing Show is being held in North America for the first time. It’s a one day event in New York City, just off Broadway at the New World Stages on West 50th. It will be Wednesday, April 27, 2022 … coming up in just a few short weeks. I will be chairing one of the stages as well as moderating a panel featuring Pete Kennedy, who you’ll hear from today, and Jenny Heinrich, who leads influencer marketing strategy for Ketchum, one of the Omnicom companies. She’s just brilliant. 

 Go see the full speaker and topic lineup and get your ticket at jason.online/imsfalls. When you check out, use the code FALLS and get a 15 percent discount, just for listening to Winfluence. 

Before we get to the break, I want to share something our friends at Storyblok have to make you smarter. It’s a new report called the State of Content Management and is a very useful survey of 515 businesses in the U.S. and Europe – companies just like yours – and how they are approaching content distribution through their digital channels in 2022. 

Think about it: You have to provide content for your website. Maybe a mobile app. Then there’s ecommerce platforms. Voice-activated speakers … Managing content is more complex today than ever. Get insights and ideas on how companies like yours are tackling the content challenge with The State of Content Management Report from Storyblok. Just go to storyblok.com/winfluence for your free report. 

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What may come as a surprise to you is Christy Hiler, the owner at Cornett, is very rare in the ad business. And by that, I mean less than one percent of all advertising agency owners are women. Read that one more time.

Yeah ... I know?!

Today, Christy is launching an industry change agent movement called Own It. The effort is calling on women who own all or most of ad agencies to come together to join a community of leaders to discuss, dissect and defeat the problem. Interested women or non-binary owners can sign up to be a part of conversations, mentorship and more, at UntilYouOwnIt.com.

Participants may also be invited to help discuss solutions to the problem on Christy's new podcast, also called Own It. Today on a special edition of Winfluence, we present a mini-version of the premier episode of the show. The 10-minute edit features Hiler interviewing Jean Freeman, the principal and owner at Zambezi, the largest female-owned advertising agency in the U.S.

And for those of you who are interest in knowing, I produce the show for Christy. It is also the newest entry in the Marketing Podcast Network.

This episode of Winfluence is still presented by Tagger, but we're foregoing the sponsor talk today so you can hear the debut of Own It from Christy Hiler.

Be sure to subscribe to Own It at UntilYouOwnIt.com or by searching for Own It wherever you get your podcasts.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Then you have crypto currency, which my best explanation of is the coins and virtual currencies you might be used to earning in video games, only they’re tied to a real market value and actual financial markets and exchanges which gives them real world value. Crypto can be exchanged for actual dollars.

When we talk crypto we’re talking about Bitcoin or Ethereum … those are two the largest cryptocurrencies. But, there are hundreds. You can even sign up for your own personalized cryptocurrency and dole it out to people as a reward. Yes, it costs real money to have some crypto money. But the volatility of the crypto market means you could see the value of, say $100 in crypto one day, suddenly be several hundred the next day.

There’s no guarantee, of course. And that value can also go the other way, too. For the record, I have invested exactly $50 in cryptocurrency to date. It is currently valued at about $28. So I’m not convinced.

And then there’s NFTs. Just the thought of that gives me a headache. And I’m not the only one.

Which is exactly why Joseph Jaffe is here today. Frankly, it’s why Joseph Jaffe exists. He is a forward-thinker. An innovator. A change agent. He wrote a book called Join the Conversation before brands were echoing that mantra about social media. 

And he’s at it again. Jaffe has pulled together a collection of Web 3.0 thinkers into a new premium community called the Alpha Collective. It’s a limited-capacity, paid membership community that will feature weekly lectures to help members wrap their heads around succeeding in Web 3.0 business and technology.

But each member will have direct access to each of the speakers and other experts in the community for networking Q&A, potential consulting and the like. 

The name Alpha Collective implies you’ll get to see things before anyone else. And that’s the point. If you or your business wants to be on the forefront of Web 3.0 success, whether you’re a brand or an influencer, you should pay close attention today. 

On a side note, I’m speaking at the Influencer Marketing Show in New York City on April 27 and I have a discount code for you to get tickets to join me there. IMS has been held in London the last few years. I’ve been honored to be an emcee and moderator for the last two as they were virtual events. Now IMS is not only back to IRL, but it’s here in the U.S. for the first time. 

It’s a one day event in New York City, just off Broadway at the New World Stages on West 50th. It will be Wednesday, April 27, 2022 … coming up in just a few short weeks. I will be chairing one of the stages as well as moderating a panel for my friends at Tagger. They’re the presenting sponsor of this podcast, by the way.

Go see the full speaker and topic lineup and get your ticket at jason.online/imsfalls. When you check out, use the code FALLS and get a 15 percent discount, just for listening to Winfluence. 

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

But she and a couple of her friends had fallen into the slime craze and wanted to make it.

A similar thing happened to Angelina Ly maybe a year to earlier than that. She was 14-years-old at the time. She started making slime and posting pictures and recipes on social media channels and became quite popular as a slime influencer.

So she started making slime recipes, packaging them and selling them on Etsy. Then migrated over to her own website and Shopify account. Late last year, she sold her 15,000th order.

And all this was happening while she was in high school and her first year of college.

Angelina Ly is the influencer and entrepreneur behind Firefly Slime. She is a mega influencer in the space, has done brand partnerships and all the things that go along with being an influencer. But she also walked that interesting entrepreneurial balance of also selling products and driving revenue for her own brand.

She has been so successful doing it, her parents finally let go of the obsession with telling her to be a doctor or a lawyer. 

Angelina and I caught up recently to chat so we could learn more about her balancing act of being an online business owners and an influencer. All around slime.

This episode is sponsored by Tagger, the complete influencer marketing solution. It has recently released a new product feature called Signals, which provides creator listening for its customers. Tagger president and founder Pete Kennedy joins Jason Falls to explain more about Signals.

To see it for yourself and get a demo of Tagger, visit jason.online/tagger today.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

I have 3-4 games I have on my phone to pass time waiting at a doctor’s office, or to watch while I sit with my family watching a show I’m either not into or can listen to rather than watch. That makes me a gamer.

The demographics and statistics on gamers are actually quite surprising. According to Statistia, 38% of gamers are 18-34 years old, but 35% are 35-64. The female segment has always been far higher than one might expect. Statistia says 45% of gamers are female. Our guest today has data that says the majority of gamers are women.

But gaming as an avenue for influence marketing seems a bit of an enigma. My perception of that is a someone on Twitch playing Halo wearing my brand’s logo on their T-shirt. But millions of people watch video gamers play games just like mainstream consumers watch sports, go to concerts and more.

Irina Shames says people just appreciate the artistry at play with gamers. And those huge audiences present opportunities for brands. 

Irina is the executive vice-president of revenue and strategy for 3BlackDot, a digital entertainment studio that connects brands to audience-driven creators. So a version of influencer marketing. She joined me to chat about the somewhat mysterious world … at least to me … of gamers as influencers.

There’s a lot of great insights in this discussion, folks. The gaming world relies heavily on the concept of community, with influential gamers having their own and a very genuine relationship with them. Brands coming to the table with them need to be community focused, which is not the standard operating procedure for most brands. 

This episode is sponsored by Tagger, the complete influencer marketing solution. It has recently released a new product feature called Signals, which provides creator listening for its customers. Tagger president and founder Pete Kennedy joins Jason Falls to explain more about Signals.

To see it for yourself and get a demo of Tagger, visit jason.online/tagger today.

And here are links to the Creator Camp my pal T. Adeola is leading in Dayton, Ohio:

• Cohort Scarlett - March 21-26
• Cohort Gray - March 28-April 2

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

I said no and Tanner Campbell, a podcast consultant who has his own show called Podcasting Sucks, disagreed and fired off an episode about me. And I responded with my tongue in cheek finger wagging. You can check that episode out at a link in the show notes for this episode, of course. 

In that back and forth, Tanner and I got to know each other a bit more and discovered we were kindred spirits in a lot of ways. So we thought a more friendly fire discussion about podcasting was in order.

What evolved in our discussion was really interesting and fun. The first half of our conversation turned out to be Tanner asking me a bunch of questions. When I realized he was taking over my show, I flipped the conversation and got to know him a bit more.

We talk about the history and recent explosion of podcasts, how both of us got started, our opinion of repurposing video content as audio podcasts … and on and on and on. We also spent a lot of time talking about the ability to grow and monetize podcasts in this era of mainstream media companies dominating the landscape. Super useful conversation. 

There’s even some good nuggets in there on my history as a radio deejay. 

Honestly, we could have kept talking for hours, but we’ll leave the marathon podcast to the wingnuts of the world out there. Today’s episode is probably the first of more to come as we just sat and picked each other’s brains. What resulted was what I think is a pretty damn useful listen for those of you interested in podcasts to build your influence as an influencer, or as a brand.

This episode is sponsored by Tagger, the complete influencer marketing solution. It has recently released a new product feature called Signals, which provides creator listening for its customers. Tagger president and founder Pete Kennedy joins Jason Falls to explain more about Signals.

To see it for yourself and get a demo of Tagger, visit jason.online/tagger today.

More links we referred to in this episode:

• Tanner Campbell’s calling out of Jason on Podcasting Sucks
• The previous episode of Winfluence where Jason responds
• The book Jason couldn’t remember the name of was Stiff: The Curious Life of Human Cadavers by Mary Roach.
• Tanner’s main website (TannerHelps.com)
• Tanner on Twitter
• Stoicismpod.com - Tanner’s stoicism podcast
• Retoldthepodcast.com - Tanner’s mythology & folklore podcast

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I bought cassette tapes of Dennis Miller, Bobcat Goldthwait and more. And, of course, anyone who grew up in the 1980s and loved stand-up comedy, had Eddie Murphy’s Delirious and Raw memorized. 

I love stand-up. And stand-up comedians. So I was quite aware of the plight of them during the pandemic. Clubs couldn’t open safely. Many closed for good. And the comedians themselves? They had to turn to alternative ways to earn a living. 

One of those comedians used the challenge of the pandemic to turn his colleagues from the club circuit into content creators for brands. Richie Redding spent 19 years as a club comedian. The last 13 of those that was his full-time job. When he reached the point of pandemic panic, not knowing how he was going to pay the bills, he got a call from an ad agency that needed a funny video. 

The ask to be a content creator lit a fire under him and Redding started a comedy consulting firm. Funnier Than You Are offers brands the opportunity to tap into professional comedians for comedy content. Redding forms a writer’s room and matches the writer friends with the brand’s target audience. The content they’re producing is making a dent, helping brands churn out far better content than they would otherwise, even from their agencies … and I’m an agency guy!

But beyond that, Redding is expanding the concept to help build individual influence and influencer status for his roster of comedy writer’s too. 

This episode is sponsored by Tagger, the complete influencer marketing solution. It has recently released a new product feature called Signals, which provides creator listening for its customers. Tagger president and founder Pete Kennedy joins Jason Falls to explain more about Signals.

To see it for yourself and get a demo of Tagger, visit jason.online/tagger today.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

So my nature is simply the antithesis of 15-second videos and 10-second story frames. When I stop to consume content … and apparently create it … I want to read an article. Or watch an in-depth video interview or documentary. Or listen to a podcast, which depending on the topic, could last 15 minutes like my Monday commentaries. 30-minutes or so like these interview episodes, or even a lot longer if the subject of the interview or the topic of conversation is really interesting. 

But, I’m creeping up on 50. The trendy audiences most marketers covet are half my age. And alas, have less than half my attention span. 

All joking aside, all of us marketers, regardless of age or content preference, have to recognize, understand and implement strategies and tactics that feature short-form content.

Ashwath Narayanan is the CEO and founder of Social Currant. It is a, “next generation youth-powered emerging media agency,” according to its website at SocialCurrant.co. It also has a companion influencer marketing search engine to help you identify content creators.

But Social Currant specializes in that hot, trendy short-form content. So, I asked Narayanan to swing by and chat with us about why it is so imperative for marketers to embrace it, how to create good short-form content and his take on influence marketing in general.

I turned a nice phrase in this episode that bakes in a nice reminder of how to mix short form content with long-form, so keep an ear out for that. I’m hoping it catches on.  

This episode is sponsored by Tagger. It is a complete influencer marketing solution. You can find out more for yourself at jason.online/tagger. 

In this episode, we visit with T.J. Ferrara from Bubs Naturals, a health supplement company, about how they use Tagger. 

To start building your own experiences with my influencer marketing software of choice, go to jason.online/tagger today.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In the world of sales and marketing, the term Influence gets thrown around, but it often harkens people back to the seminal book on persuasion from Dr. Robert Cialdini called Influence. It was published in 1984 and is still selling today. In fact, the most recent update actually amended his six principles of persuasion. There are now seven which my guest and I get into today on the show.

That guest is Brian Ahearn. He is a Cialdini disciple. So much so that he’s even been certified as a Cialdini instructor and teaches techniques in influence and persuasion to corporate sales teams, marketing departments and beyond for a living. I chatted with Brian on Digging Deeper, Cornett’s podcast a few months back. He told me then he was working on a new book. 

That new book is out. It’s called The Influencer. And he’s here today to talk about it, but also to walk us through the principles of influence he teaches and how they can apply to our own credibility and influence, but also in practical manifestations like choosing the right influencers to use for your influence marketing efforts. 

The book, by the way, is a story of fiction … a business allegory if you will … about a character named John Andrews, and his path to learning to become influential. I loved the book. It reminded me of a similar parable approach to business principles which is probably my favorite business book ever called Happy Work, by my pal Chris Reimer. 

Brian will tell you more about it and influence in today’s episode, which is presented by Tagger. It is a complete influencer marketing solution. You can find out more for yourself at jason.online/tagger. 

In this episode, we visit with Meredith Jacobson from We Are Boosters, about how she uses Tagger. 

To start building your own experiences with my influencer marketing software of choice, go to jason.online/tagger today.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

B2B brands sell software, equipment or services to businesses, sometimes for price tags far too high for an individual purchase. So think of complex IT systems, office equipment, construction machinery or even professional services like legal, accounting, human resources or even marketing agencies. B2B sales cycles are longer … sometimes in excess of 12- to 18-months. So there’s a lot more for a brand to do to attract prospects, build relationships and trust, educate the prospect about the product and ultimately get them to commit sometimes significant corporate dollars to pay for it. 

That relationship building and trust is key. And for many B2B brands, that’s where influencers come in. But not Instagrammers and TikTok-ers, per say. B2B influencers are those that have deep knowledge and trust in very specific communities. They’re often academics, industry analysts, executives, researchers and more. Often, their influence can’t be measured by their number of online followers. As such, B2B influencer marketing is often more difficult. 

Justin Levy is the director of social media and influencer marketing for Demandbase. It is a company that provides software to manage the account-based experience. So think of CRM software that also ties your content marketing into the sales process. It keeps your database of prospective customers, a record of all the times and ways you’ve communicated with them, where they are in the sales process, and what content you should serve them next to move them along to purchase.

Justin spent several years at Citrix managing the GoToMeeting and GoToWebinar social and influencer connections, so he has a lot of experience building B2B influencer relations.

We caught up with Justin to talk about how he finds influencers for his B2B efforts, what kind of engagements he and the Demandbase team engage them for, and then how his company uses content in an innovative approach to meet the prospect and other stakeholders where they are in the process. 

He gives us good insight into how a B2B brand works and thinks of influencers. I’m sure the conversation will inform and inspire you, even if your focus is more B2C.

This episode of Winfluence is presented by Tagger. It is a complete influencer marketing solution. You can find out more for yourself at jason.online/tagger. 

In this episode, we visit with Alexandra Walsh from 3 Day Blinds, a premium window treatment brand, about how she uses Tagger. 

To start building your own experiences with my influencer marketing software of choice, go to jason.online/tagger today.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Be sure to go back and listen to that episode as it makes a case for the owned content overall.

This week, we’re going to dig into the concept of owning both your channel and your audience a bit deeper with P.J. Leimgruber. He is the co-founder of the Clash App … no, not an app that allows you to listen to London Calling and Rock the Casbah. Clash App is an owned content app that allows video creators to not only engage with their core fans and subscribers, but allows those subscriber to post Drops … these are cash payments … tips if you will … to those creators for their content. 

The discussion made me think of the old blogger tip jars, but with a more defined purpose and a community of people conditioned to send them. 

So today we’re hearing more about whether or not fan-funded content creators can go beyond just a subscription model. How does that future stack up from a creator monetization standpoint? And is Clash App a method you as an influencer can generate income. Do these platforms hold any relevance for brands as well? Sure … if the influencer has a big audience there.

But we get into that and how the creator economy payment structure is flawed with P.J. I think you’ll appreciate is expertise and perspective. 

This episode is presented by Tagger, the complete influencer marketing solution. Find out more and sign up for a demo to see if Tigger is right for you by visiting jason.online/tagger today. 

In this episode, we chat with influencer marketing consultant Meredith Jacobson of We Are Boosters about how she uses Tagger. 

To start building your own experiences with my influencer marketing software of choice, go to jason.online/tagger today.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Content creators face potential problems when they put all their content and audience eggs in someone else’s basket. If the Instagram servers go berserk one day, some content creators will take a hit in revenue. If the rules on TikTok or YouTube suddenly change, we’ll … influencers may S-O-L.

Brands are also starting to value creators and influencers that have stronger relationships with, and thus influence over, their audience. What that means is an influencer with a big email marketing list, or captive on a podcast, is more valuable than someone who just has a social media following that may or may not see a sponsored post fly by in their streams.

Subscription platforms offer content creators both a way to connect directly with their audience, building a following tied to email addresses and more rich contact information, but also to derive direct revenue from their fans. 

Instead of following your favorite Instagrammer there, you pay a subscription fee of, let’s say $5 a month on a subscription platform, and you get exclusive access to the influencer’s content and maybe the influencer. 

The most well-known of these platform is OnlyFans. But it is most well known for being a popular subscription platform used by adult content creators, so there is bit of a stigma there. Fortunately, there are other options. One of them is FanBase.

Its chief technology officer Ramiro Cánovas, joined me recently to talk about the future of the creator economy. The challenged posed to creators by the existing social networks and influencer ecosystem, and the opportunity for content creators to create more direct revenue streams and genuine connections with their fans. 

As you can imagine, I geeked out with Ramiro a bit. It didn’t help that he’s also a former professional soccer player, so we started off talking about some connections we have through the beautiful game. 

This episode is presented by Tagger, the complete influencer marketing solution. Find out more and sign up for a demo to see if Tigger is right for you by visiting jason.online/tagger today. 

In this episode, we visit with Alexandra Walsh from 3 Day Blinds, a premium window treatment brand, about how she uses Tagger. 

To start building your own experiences with my influencer marketing software of choice, go to jason.online/tagger today.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

For those who may not recall our episode from December 2nd of 2021, I have launched a network for marketing podcasts that serves two purposes: Allow like-topic podcasts an easy way to support and promote one another, and give advertisers wishing to reach marketers … an audience like you … an easier way to get to them. 

I actually explained the Marketing Podcast Network in more depth a few weeks ago on Nick Westergaard’s outstanding show On Brand. Yes, it is an MPN podcast. Nick interviews all the important people in the world of branding and marketing, so his show is more broadly focused than mine. But he drills into podcasting or influence marketing and other topics, too.

In our conversation, Nick and I talked about podcasting, but a lot more. In fact, he asked my thoughts on the Metaverse … our next horizon to conquer on the Internet. And, pardon the indulgence, but I offered up some thinking brand folks should hear.

So, today on Winfluence, I’m going to share with you an episode of On Brand with Nick Westergaard, with me as the guest. I think you’ll find his show to be well-done and worth the subscription, but also the conversation we had to be quite useful.

Winfluence is presented by Tagger. It is a complete influencer marketing solution. You can find out more for yourself at jason.online/tagger. 

In this episode, we visit with T.J. Ferrara from Bubs Naturals, a health supplement company, about how they use Tagger. 

To start building your own experiences with my influencer marketing software of choice, go to jason.online/tagger today.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

So, when we talk influence marketing, we have to talk about podcasts, too.

Trevor Oldham latched onto the podcast wave a few years ago with not just his own, but freelancing to help people who wanted to do it, but didn’t have all the experience and technical skill to make it happen. Then, he stumbled upon a gap in the marketplace that has turned out to be a lucrative business for him.

Trevor heads a company called Podcasting You. It’s main focus is to get its clients booked to be guests on podcasts. Think of it as a PR firm for those who want to get interviewed on this red hot medium. So, instead of starting a podcast, you can just position yourself or someone in your company’s leadership, to be a great podcast guest and earn that media versus paying for it.

I caught up with Trevor to chat about what he sees in the podcast marketplace for brands and influencers themselves. He actually has a surprising answer to whether or not social media influencers should leverage podcasts to build their followings. 

The clever thing about Trevor being on Winfluence … his team pitched him as they would a client. And the way they did it, well … it obviously worked. We talked about that, too. 

Some good tips on how to leverage podcasts as an influence channel for your business or brand … and some salient ideas for you influencers are on today’s show.

This episode is sponsored by Tagger. It is a complete influencer marketing solution. You can find out more for yourself at jason.online/tagger. 

In this episode, we visit with T.J. Ferrara from Bubs Naturals, a health supplement company, about how they use Tagger. 

To start building your own experiences with my influencer marketing software of choice, go to jason.online/tagger today.

And today's influence marketing podcast recommendation is the Onalytica podcast. Subscribe at Onalytica.com.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Scott consults, but he also is a frequent host of the Influencer Marketing Show, also a Talking Influence production and is frequently quoted and interviewed on the industry, mostly in Europe and the United Kingdom, but also around the world, including by media outlets here in the U.S. He also authors the Fourth Floor Weekly Email Newsletter which I’ve bragged about before as probably the best industry news resource for influencer marketing out there.

The long and short of it is that Scott is probably the most knowledgeable person on the planet about influencer marketing. His background is in the PR and comms world. He spent quite a bit of time at Ketchum, but is an MBA and business consultant going back to the early days of social media.

Recently, Scott launched the Influencer Marketing Trade Body in the UK with six big-name agency and company sponsors. That body is looking to become the trade association for influencer marketing there and unify other bodies around the world like the American Influencer Council, to put forth a unified set of standards for ethics and such globally. The idea is a much needed one in the business and the IMTB is certainly in good hands with Scott at the helm.

Scott and I had a great discussion about a number of topics including the IMTB, the trend of influencers becoming creative directors, the influencer pay gap and a lot more. If you are looking for what the top thinkers in the industry are thinking about things … you’ve come to the right place today. Scott Guthrie is one of them and he’s here.

This episode is sponsored by Tagger. It is a complete influencer marketing solution. You can find out more for yourself at jason.online/tagger. 

In this episode, we visit with T.J. Ferrara from Bubs Naturals, a health supplement company, about how they use Tagger. 

To start building your own experiences with my influencer marketing software of choice, go to jason.online/tagger today.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

It just so happened that Lindsey Gamble reacted to and commented on the social content about that Johanna Voss episode. He is the influencer marketing and innovation manager at Mavrck, which is one of the top enterprise influencer marketing platforms and service providers out there. So we hopped on a call and chatted a bit, then I extended an invitation for him to come help us carry the conversation forward.

Gamble actually sees the influencer marketing space from a few angles. You know I like guests who have that varied perspective on things. He started out in the social media world as a hip-hop blogger. He built one of the more influential platforms for that topic in the Boston area after graduating from Bryant University where he played football.

Because he knew the content creation and social media space well, he wound up in roles at companies that wanted him to create content or connect with those who do. He landed at Mavrck in 2018 and managed a set of client strategies. He’s now in a senior role where he gets to advise across clients on innovating in the space. Which sounds like my dream job in a lot of ways.

We talk about all that, but also get into the thicker conversation about race and influencer marketing. What impact did the social unrest and issues in 2020 have on the conversation? Is that swell of attention gone or are brands still pursuing making strides in that area. Is there a way to solve the pay gap issues between white creators and creators of color.

For someone who works at a software and services vendor in the space, but knows the creator side as well, Lindsey brings an interesting perspective to the conversation.

This episode is sponsored by Tagger. It is a complete influencer marketing solution. You can find out more for yourself at jason.online/tagger. 

In this episode, we visit with T.J. Ferrara from Bubs Naturals, a health supplement company, about how they use Tagger. 

To start building your own experiences with my influencer marketing software of choice, go to jason.online/tagger today.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Fabian Fernando Guevara Juarez, who goes by Fabian Guevara for a shorter version of his name, reached out to me recently to trade best practices and ideas. I simply hit record because I knew the conversation would be fascinating.

He is a content strategist and influence marketing campaign creator for Media House in Mexico City. His group works on influence campaigns for Coca-Cola. He also has experience working with Mattel and other brands.

Fabian shared with me his approach to influence marketing which he folds into a larger, 360-degree view of the consumer. A lot of what he told me he, Media House and Coca-Cola practice in Latin America was spot-on smart thinking. 

But he also shared that influencer marketing software and tools are looked upon with a large degree of skepticism in the Latin world. That surprised me, so we dove into that topic so I could better understand more. 

The conversation was fascinating for me and I know it will be for you, too. I’m really grateful to Fabian for reaching out and sharing his experience and insights with us.

Today's episode is sponsored by Tagger. It is a complete influencer marketing solution. You can find out more for yourself at jason.online/tagger. 

Today we visit with T.J. Ferrara from Bubs Naturals, a health supplement company, about how they use Tagger. 

To start building your own experiences with my influencer marketing software of choice, go to jason.online/tagger today.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Once I read the blogs and websites I know and trust, I have a folder of feeds that are essentially Google Alerts for certain topics I want to keep a finger on the pulse of so I can see the information about that topic from sites I may not know or subscribe to. One of the topics in that folder is influencer marketing.

So there I am, scrolling through the headlines looking for an interesting article to read and I see one that catches my eye. It reads, “Why top influencers are buying Instagram followers.” It was from a site called TechBullion.com and written by a person named Kristel Staci.

I thought to myself, “Well I sure do want to know the reasons.” Buying followers, after all, is one of the most pronounced black eyes on our industry. That fraudulent practice alone is amplified enough that it discourages many brands from investing in influence marketing at all.

So I start to read. And I get uncomfortable. And then I see that the entire article is not telling me why top influencers buy Instagram followers. It’s recommending the practice to others. 

I’ll rant my way through the near stroke I had reading the article in today’s commentary. 

Today's episode is presented by TrendHERO. It’s a new but advanced influencer marketing software platform specific to Instagram. So, for those of you who focus all your influencer energies on that platform, TrendHERO can help you search and discover Instagrammers based on a wide range of filters, from nano influencers, all the way to celebrities. There are over 90 million profiles in their database. 

The feature I like most about TrendHERO is a big fat yellow highlighter to the topic of today’s commentary. It has advanced fake followers check. So you can detect if an influencer followed the advice in the article I’m about to rip apart in today’s episode. 

TrendHERO also has an algorithm that tells you the chances a given posts’s comments are real or fake. So if you’re in a vertical that might be susceptible to comment pods and fake followers … a vertical that might consider this article I’m about to talk about as reliable information, TrendHERO can help you suss out which Instagrammers are worth it and which aren’t.

TrendHERO also has a nice database of sponsored posts so you can quickly see how an Instagrammers content performs when they have to disclose a paid relationship. Or you can use two clicks to search for similar influencers and identify good targets quickly.

The great thing about TrendHERO is they’re giving you a 14-day free trial just for listening to Winfluence! And if you decide you want to use the platform after that, the lite plan is just $15.99 per month. 

Sign up for that free trial now at trendhero.io/falls.

The full script of today's episode is posted on the show notes page at http://jason.online/buyingfollowers

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Larry Beaman has a couple of perspectives at play on the topic, too. He’s currently the chief growth officer at Gen.Video, an influencer marketing platform with some neat path to purchase sales technology … so he’s on the software and vendor side of the aisle. Once upon a time he worked for IZEA one of the grandfather SaaS solutions in the industry. And he spent a bit of time at Edelman, one of the largest public relations firms in the world. So he has the agency side of the aisle covered, too.

Larry’s expertise is vast, but his specialty, if he has one, is building measurement programs for influencer marketing efforts. So we started the conversation there and ran through a gamut of industry topics in our conversation. He even took a swipe at what we’re going to be talking about in 2022 across the industry. Will it be all about the Metaverse?

We’ll find out.

I’ve been testing and talking to you about TrendHERO for the last two weeks. It’s a new but advanced influencer marketing software platform specific to Instagram. TrendHERO can help you search and discover Instagrammers based on a wide range of filters, from nano influencers, all the way to celebrities. There are over 90 million profiles in their database. 

The feature I like most is its advanced fake followers check. They also have an algorithm that tells you how real the comments are on a given Instagrammer’s content. So if you’re in a vertical that might be susceptible to comment pods and fake followers, TrendHERO can help you suss out which Instagrammers are worth it and which aren’t.

The great thing about TrendHERO is they’re giving you a 14-day free trial just for listening to Winfluence! And if you decide you want to use the platform after that, the lite plan is just $15.99 per month. 

Sign up for that free trial now at trendhero.io/falls.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Markets are conversations, said the Cluetrain.

So forgive me for the soap box, but that kind of biases a lot of us to think that someone with that advertising background is out of place in the world of influencer marketing. At least so the stereotype would tell you.

But Justin Kline is not a stereotypical anything. He started out managing ads for the Drudge Report, then managing the placement of ads for the sharing app Add This. So he sees the world of advertising form multiple perspectives.

Nowadays, Justin runs Markerly, an influencer marketing agency that takes his experiences in the advertising world to advise and deploy attention-getting campaigns for clients.

Markerly and Justin came to my attention when they ran the Meow Mix Remix campaign for the cat food brand and engaged pet influencers on TikTok and other channels to help re-think how Meow Mix is thought of by consumers.

I asked him to join us to take us through the irony of an ad guy now running a firm on the influencer side of things, what it's like to work with pet influencers and much more. I love bringing different perspectives to the table for our discussions and this is certainly one of them.

Today's episode is sponsored by Tagger. It is a complete influencer marketing solution. You can find out more for yourself at jason.online/tagger. 

We’ve been talking recently to Meredith Jacobson, an independent influencer marketing consultant who was on a past episode of the show, to tell you about how she uses Tagger with We are Boosters. 

Hear more about how she uses Tagger on today's episode.

To start building your own experiences with my influencer marketing software of choice, go to jason.online/tagger today.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

I came about it because it’s authored by Scott Guthrie, a counterpart of mine, of sorts, in England, who has a finger on the pulse of the industry there and around the globe. I listen to Scott’s podcast and know he’s incredibly knowledgeable about the space, so a newsletter offered by him is a no-brainer. 

But the newsletter is unique in that it’s not Scott’s newsletter. It belongs to Fourth Floor, the agency. They are an influencer marketing firm practicing influencer marketing. They’ve engaged an influencer in the niche to produce content on their behalf. And their marketing is better for it.

Rich Keith is the CEO of Fourth Floor. It was his vision and relationship with Scott that led to the partnership. He happens to also be a thought leader in the space and has built a successful firm around creating great content and connecting brands with influencers with innovative and interesting executions.

I caught up with Rich and we just talked about the industry. We touched on what influencers and brands may be doing wrong … or at least missing … today, the difference between an average influencer’s content and an exceptional influencer’s content and a lot more. Rich has interesting insights about TikTok’s pluses and minuses that are very helpful for your thinking.

We also talked about the next wave of growth for influencers and their audiences in the coming years. That’s well worth taking into consideration. 

Rich comes from a publishing background and he and his team are plugged into the gaming community as well. So we talked a bit about that niche, Twitch and some other topics that helped me get smarter about the space.

Today's episode is sponsored by Tagger. It is a complete influencer marketing solution. You can find out more for yourself at jason.online/tagger. 

We’ve been talking recently to Meredith Jacobson, an independent influencer marketing consultant who was on a past episode of the show, to tell you about how she uses Tagger with We are Boosters. 

Hear more about how she uses Tagger on today's episode.

To start building your own experiences with my influencer marketing software of choice, go to jason.online/tagger today.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The TikTok issue is layered, but one problem area has been related to the other. With no direct access to TikTok’s API, no one can really quantify success there other than knowing how many views a given creator’s video earned.

But some big news hit recently as TikTok finally opened its Creator Marketplace API. Now, marketers can access all that TikTik creator data to more effectively plan, execute and report on TikTok campaigns. One of the software companies that was an Alpha partners for the API development was Captiv8, a soup-to-nuts influencer marketing platform serving enterprise clients. 

Krishna Subramanian is Captiv8’s CEO. He joined me to dig into what the TikTok Creator Marketplace API means for the marketplace. But he also shared with me that for a retailer case study using the API, Captiv8 ran some additional effectiveness measures using consumer surveys that answers a lot of that second question.

For the first time that I know of, we have an example of a specific influence marketing execution that we can accurately report its effect on purchase intent, recommendation intent and beyond. 

Krishna shared details there, told me more about Captiv8 and who the platform is right for, and put on his crystal ball lens to offer an opinion on what we as marketers need to be watching out for in the coming 18- to 24-months.

Today's episode is sponsored by Tagger. It is a complete influencer marketing solution. You can find out more for yourself at jason.online/tagger. 

We’ve been talking recently to Meredith Jacobson, an independent influencer marketing consultant who was on a past episode of the show, to tell you about how she uses Tagger with We are Boosters. 

Hear more about how she uses Tagger on today's episode.

To start building your own experiences with my influencer marketing software of choice, go to jason.online/tagger today.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Until the NAIA passed an NIL move last December, then the NCAA followed this past summer, a student-athlete taking money from a sponsor, even on social media channels that might have nothing to do with their sport, would be a violation of their amateur status and jeopardize their ability to compete. Now, however, college athletes can be paid for public appearances, profit from merchandise sales of their own apparel or accept money from companies to do collaborations and partnerships on social media channels. 

Masai Russell is a four-time first-team All-American in track and field at the University of Kentucky. She has over 150,000 followers on Instagram and over 21,000 on YouTube. While the track and field part plays a role on both, her content is more focused on fashion and style. She hopes to one day own her own line of apparel. 

I wanted to check in with a student-athlete capitalizing on the NIL opportunity to see what, if any, differences there are in how they handle influencer partnerships, and see what impact the NIL is having on their day-to-day. I also wanted to gauge if student-athletes are seeing this as an opportunity to just make some money, or are thinking more strategically about now NIL can be a platform to build something bigger down the road.

So Masai and I caught up this week to talk NIL and her brand.

Today's episode is sponsored by Tagger. It is a complete influencer marketing solution. You can find out more for yourself at jason.online/tagger. 

We’ve been talking recently to Meredith Jacobson, an independent influencer marketing consultant who was on a past episode of the show, to tell you about how she uses Tagger with We are Boosters. 

Hear more about how she uses Tagger on today's episode.

To start building your own experiences with my influencer marketing software of choice, go to jason.online/tagger today.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

One perspective is you might be able to, but you shouldn’t. You are, after all, getting not just access to someone’s audience, but also their talent in creating content, plus the content you can then negotiate to use. All three of those elements are worth money you would have to invest otherwise to get the same output. So why disrespect the creator by asking them to post for just product.

But then there are creators, mostly micro- and nano-influencers, who might be happy to just receive free product in exchange for a post. Those just starting out want to appear to be successful and big enough to warrant brands approaching them. Plus, they can also use the product-only content to prove their audience is responsive or content is successful enough to convert customers. That leads to them making more real dollar collaborations down the road.

The answer to most question in the marketing world applies here. Can you gain traction or be successful with influencer marketing without paying the influencers? It depends. 

One person who can illustrate how to do it successfully is Taylor Lagace. He’s one of the co-founders of a company and application called Kynship. They are focused on product seeding to drive organic influencer placements. That’s right! Seed product with influencers, no payments on top of that, and they post everything from unboxing videos to honest reviews and endorsements of your brand.

If you’re a regular listener to this show or an influencer/creator advocate, that approach on the surface is probably going to irritate you. My stance has always been that you’re asking for an influencer’s time, creative talents and access to their audience. You should pay them. 

But give Taylor and Kynship’s philosophy here a listen. They simply ask content creators if they’d be interested in receiving the product. For those that say “yes” they ship them the product. And that’s all they ask for … their approach is no strings attached. There’s no requirement for the recipient to post anything. They only do so if they wish to do so.

And the results Kynship’s customers are seeing are quite impressive.

I tried to shoot some holes in the philosophy with our conversation, but quickly realized Taylor and his team have emerged as the reason “it depends” is often the answer to marketing questions. Paying influencers to post isn’t a black or white issue. I think when you hear what he has to say, you’ll agree.

I also think for you brand or agency folks out there listening, you’ll very quickly lose your skepticism that just sending product out without asking for something in return is a bad idea. 

Today's episode is sponsored by Tagger. It is a complete influencer marketing solution. You can find out more for yourself at jason.online/tagger. 

We’ve been talking recently to Meredith Jacobson, an independent influencer marketing consultant who was on a past episode of the show, to tell you about how she uses Tagger with We are Boosters. 

Hear more about how she uses Tagger on today's episode.

To start building your own experiences with my influencer marketing software of choice, go to jason.online/tagger today.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

YouTube is the first avenue I think it’s worth diving deeper into. Not only is video far more engaging for consumers, but YouTube is the second largest search engine in the world behind Google, which owns it. So a YouTube influencer posting something relevant about your brand can solve problems in awareness, search rankings, conversions and beyond. 

And, unlike other nascent social network features, YouTube videos typically stay online forever. So one investment can benefit your brand for far longer than other influencer content. 

But YouTube can be a bit of a puzzle for some marketers. Video work is more expensive and takes more lead time that other types of content. YouTube is a noisy platform so you may not know how the influencer is going to get eyeballs against all that other content out there. 

Fortunately, we know a few folks. One of those is Hilary Thompson. She is the digital PR lead at Portent, which evolved from and SEO firm into a performance-driven digital agency based in Seattle. Hilary has been running YouTube influencer campaigns for a couple of years now. She started with a low five-digit monthly spend for a client two years ago. She now manages a monthly spend in the low six-figures.

She gets results. 

I caught up with Hilary to chat about her approach to influencers on YouTube. She has great tips and advice for reaching out to influencers, negotiating pricing with influencers, measuring success and how to manage campaigns to optimize results. She also shares a couple of nuances about working with YouTube influencers you wouldn’t know if you didn’t do it all the time.

This episode of Winfluence - The Influence Marketing Podcast is brought to you by Tagger. It is the influence marketing software I’m using Cornett. They sponsor the show and provide us with their fantastic software to use.

In today's episode, Meredith Jacobson from We Are Boosters talks more about Tagger's deep search and discovery features. Give the episode a listen and see how Tagger helps her consultancy get to the right list of the right influencers.

Learn more about the software at jason.online/tagger. Tagger is the new influencer marketing campaign software of choice for me. I hope it will be for you, too.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

I am one who geeks out about offline examples of influence marketing, but there are variations of the theme online, too. And you find those examples sometimes in the most unexpected places.

Travis Huff cut his teeth in the digital marketing space with local businesses in Northern California. Instead of listening to the social media talking heads about how to do all this, he experimented, tried things, learned and developed his own approach to influence marketing.

He tried to forge partnerships from business to business. So one brand, let’s say a car dealership, would create a partnership with, let’s say, a bank offering car loans. Each would leverage one another’s social accounts and audiences to increase the reach of their offers and messaging.

Travis was an old TV station sales guy, so building creative advertising solutions came natural to him. He’s coordinated a number of brand-to-brand influence relationships over the years, but also manages social media and what we call regular influencer marketing campaigns, using online influencers rather than brands, with his firm Realtime Outsource. 

One of the things I love about Travis is you get the feel he doesn’t worry about fancy strategies or consultants or big software packages. He just rolls up his sleeves and figures it out. You can learn a lot from someone like that. He even shares an astonishingly simple, but apparently effective tactic on the show today that flies in the face of what the “experts” say. Listen close for that. I was kind of stunned.

Travis and I caught up to talk about his own path to figuring out influence marketing and what works for the businesses he works with.

This episode of Winfluence - The Influence Marketing Podcast is brought to you by Tagger. It is the influence marketing software I’m using Cornett. They sponsor the show and provide us with their fantastic software to use.

I've told you how easy it was for me to kick out some campaign reports for the influence efforts I’m managing. The drag-and-drop data options allowed me to build the report my client wanted and finds useful in a matter of minutes. You can have that too if you switch to Tagger.

You can see more at jason.online/tagger. Tagger is the new influencer marketing campaign software of choice for me. I hope it will be for you, too.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

That’s why I was excited to get to know our guest today. Meredith Jacobson is an independent consultant, but one that has gone a step further to provide the industry with something unique and incredibly useful. Her experience at big agencies like Digitas and influencer marketing firms like Studio71 and Branded Entertainment Network helped her see the gaps in the ecosystem.

So, she started a community … a network of sorts … of independent influencer marketing consultants, each who owns their own business, but Meredith has brought them together to be a connected web of providers businesses of all sizes can leverage.

Smart. 

We talked about her community and why there was such a need for it, but more importantly we dove into her perspective on what brands and agencies are doing right and wrong, the shift I’ve perceived in brands attitudes toward influence marketing as a practice and much more. 

Meredith has a really smart perspective about the practice, the industry and is grounded in a great philosophical position around what we do. You’ll enjoy hearing what she has to say today.

This episode of Winfluence - The Influence Marketing Podcast is brought to you by Tagger. It is the influence marketing software I’m using Cornett. They sponsor the show and provide us with their fantastic software to use.

I've told you how easy it was for me to kick out some campaign reports for the influence efforts I’m managing. The drag-and-drop data options allowed me to build the report my client wanted and finds useful in a matter of minutes. You can have that too if you switch to Tagger.

You can see more at jason.online/tagger. Tagger is the new influencer marketing campaign software of choice for me. I hope it will be for you, too.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

One of the things I like to do on the show is gut-check my own thinking with other experienced influence marketers. It gives you an opportunity to hear someone else validate those thoughts, or for someone to bring a new perspective to the table and even call B.S. on my take, which is perfectly in-bounds here.

Jeanette Okwu is one of those people in the industry I respect a lot who I’ve wanted to have on the show for a while now to bounce ideas off, vet perspectives with and so on. She’s the founder of Beyond One, an influencer marketing agency and network based in Berlin. Prior to that she was the co-founder and CEO of 1nfluencersmarketing, a technology platform used to drive influencer campaigns based on data-driven insights. 

Her work over the years led her to be named on of Talking Influence’s Top 50 most influential people in the industry. She is also a founding member and advisor to the American Influencer Council.

Jeanette and I connected to talk about the influencer industry. It’s size and potential. How influencers and creators collaborate with brands and vice-versa. I think you’ll find it very interesting that the perspective of influencers isn’t different from the U.S. to Europe and the perspectives we often discuss here are right in line with what she sees halfway around the world.

We get granular, too. Jeanette shares how she finds the right influencers, what she looks for and how she approaches building strategies for brands. 

She’s one of the most well-networked and influential people among the influencer industry, so having her on the show to learn from is a big deal, and a big thrill.

This episode of Winfluence - The Influence Marketing Podcast is brought to you by Tagger. It is the influence marketing software I’m using Cornett. They sponsor the show and provide us with their fantastic software to use.

I've told you how easy it was for me to kick out some campaign reports for the influence efforts I’m managing. Here’s all the information I have on the campaign report … and remember … I built this in five minutes using Tagger’s drag and drop report builder. But here’s all the things the client sees in either a webpage version of the report or a PDF I can kick out on a daily basis if needed:

The first page has the overall campaign performance in a succinct chart broken down by platform. So I see that this particular campaign currently has a reach of 2.4 million people and 102,000 total impressions. I see my total engagement, engagement rate and the organic lift for the content. But I see that broken down by Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and so on.

I then have a timeline chart so the brand team can see how the volume of content has hit over the last couple of months.

Page two breaks it all down by creator. So I get to see all those performance metrics by influencer. This makes it super easy to see who is performing well for us and who might need some help, paid spend to supplement their post and so on.

Next I have a list of the top Instagram posts for the campaign and their corresponding metrics, then Facebook. Then YouTube … you get the picture.

The drag-and-drop data options allowed me to build the report my client wanted and finds useful in a matter of minutes. You can have that too if you switch to Tagger.

You can see more at jason.online/tagger. Tagger is the new influencer marketing campaign software of choice for me. I hope it will be for you, too.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

There are few venues that underline the necessity of that approach than healthcare marketing. The short-term conversion approach to that audience is tacky. People who need healthcare now are in need of urgent care. Marketing to them then is, frankly, horrible. You have to influence people who don’t need you now to choose you someday, when they do.

That’s very different than trying to drive 1,000 sales of your thing over the weekend.

In a way, healthcare marketing is all about that long-term influence. Building a brand and ensuring people are not just aware but predisposed to choose you is an effort in influencing the way they think, not just the decisions they make.

And that is not accomplished with Instagrammers and TikTokers. 

Colin Jeffries is not just a healthcare marketer, but one who knows and understands influence marketing … not influencer marketing. And he leverages influence through people who are influential in the communities and with the patients and customers he serves in very interesting ways. 

Colin’s day job is as vice-president of marketing for Brightview, a comprehensive addiction treatment provider across several states in the Mid-Atlantic and Mid-West. He’s also the co-host of the Rethink Marketing Podcast. 

We dove into the concept of influence marketing (without the R) and the very specific challenges in healthcare marketing that force that segment of the marketing world to have to think about people with influence, not just influencers. He threw out some brilliant concepts and ways to think about influence marketing that might just inspire you to raise your own bar.

Today's episode is sponsored by my friends at Tagger. They reached out to me recently and asked me to give their influencer marketing platform a try. I set up a campaign with a client project and kicked the tires. I wasn’t sure an influencer marketing platform could really impress me much anymore, but boy was I wrong.

I was so impressed, I’ve switched to using Tagger for client projects.

Here’s what got me: I didn’t do a demo or training session. I just jumped in and tried to hunt and peck my way to figure it out. Within an hour, I had a campaign set up for a client, a campaign brief loaded, five influencers invited to authorize into the platform for automatic reporting, including Instagram Stories by the way, and two customized reports for my client. One for assessing influencers, the other for measuring the campaign’s success.

The client saw that report and said, “This is what I need to show to senior leadership!” I call that a win-win!

The drag and drop customizable reports took me about five minutes each to set up. And I can either create new ones for each client campaign, or I saved the first two as templates I can plug any client into. 

We’ll be talking a lot more about Tagger in the weeks to come here on Winfluence. They’ve just built a better mousetrap. So I’m in.

You can see more at jason.online/tagger.

Tagger is the new influence marketing campaign software of choice for me. I hope it will be for you, too. Jason.online/tagger.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

But we’re not above poking a little fun at our world, too. Erik Deckers pointed his sarcastic pen at our little world last week. He’s the co-author (with me) of No Bullshit Social Media, but he’s also a syndicated humor columnist. And the title of his tome last week was, “Influencer Marketers, Just Stop Asking for Free Stuff.”

I grabbed him by the collar and drug him to the playground of this podcast so we could roll up our sleeves and have a good, old fashioned fistfight about it … or something like that … today on the show. 

Before we get to the fisticuffs, let take a moment to tell you about a new project I’ve launched with my pals Ryan Foland and Kim Garst, along with our friends at Get.Online, the .online domain name provider. We have produced three online courses that combined, form the .Online Business Academy. 

It’s a series of easy to follow online courses built to help you start your own business, make a business plan, build a website for your business and start driving revenue for that thing you’ve always wanted to launch. Ryan starts off the academy’s curriculum with a course on how to come up with a business idea that doesn’t suck. The course from Kim is how to write an online business plan you will actually use. And then my course is how to set up and launch your business website to attract customers.

The .Online Business Academy is FREE! The lessons are broken up into short videos and activities, so you can do a little at a time. Or, of course you can dive in and complete the entire academy lessons all in one day.

So if you’ve been thinking about starting your own business or you or someone you know needs help to take that idea to the next level, The dot-Online Business Academy is live and waiting for you. Visit jason.online/academy right now. 

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Julianne Fraser is someone who believes steadfastly in the value of brand alignment. She started out building influencer campaigns and executions way back in 2013 in the hospitality industry. She then launched her own influencer marketing firm called Dialogue New York and now boasts a stable of amazing fashion, style and beauty influencers and campaigns.

I invited Julianne to come on the show so we could dig into that concept of brand alignment. We got into a deep discussion about that and several other topics. And Julianne had a quick answer to my rant on the last episode of Winfluence. I claimed in that show that affiliate marketing and influencers will not work. Julianne explained how she layers that in with other ideas to prove me wrong.

Which is fine. I’m used to that.

But pay attention and take notes on this episode. Julianne and I have a delightful conversation about influencers, alignment, driving ROI and more.

This episode of Winfluence, the podcast, is less sponsored by someone and more just presented by a new thing I’ve built I want you to know about. My friends at Get.Online, the domain name provider, along with my pals Ryan Foland and Kim Garst have produced three online courses that combined, form the .Online Business Academy. 

It’s a series of easy to follow online courses built to help you start your own business, make a business plan, build a website for your business and start driving revenue for that thing you’ve always wanted to launch. Ryan starts off the academy’s curriculum with a course on how to come up with a business idea that doesn’t suck. The course from Kim is how to write an online business plan you will actually use. And then my course is how to set up and launch your business website to attract customers.

The .Online Business Academy is FREE! The lessons are broken up into short videos and activities, so you can do a little at a time. Or, of course you can dive in and complete the entire academy lessons all in one day.

So if you’ve been thinking about starting your own business or you or someone you know needs help to take that idea to the next level, The dot-Online Business Academy is live and waiting for you. Visit jason.online/academy right now. 

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Lots of brands love micro-influencers because they can be cheaper and less hassle to deal with. No offense to our mega-influencer friends, but let’s be honest, once you get someone whose primary income is through influencer marketing activity, or content creation for brands, and certainly when you mix in a management person, well … brand people see layers of costs, people to deal with, paper work and so on.

That’s not to say that micro-influencers shouldn’t be paid. And certainly, anyone who is creating content for your brand, regardless of how few followers they might have, deserves to be compensated for their craftsmanship. But micro-influencers bring certain advantages to the table for businesses who want to leverage influencers or scale the number of influencers they use, without always having to find more money in the marketing budget. 

David Morneau leads a Canadian firm called Inbeat Agency which specializes in helping brands build campaigns with micro-influencers. And they’re quite good at it. I invited him to sit and chat with us about the advantages of going micro-, some of which you might find surprising.

David’s background and the seed that became Inbeat Agency, was work in SEO -- Search engine optimization. Those two disciplines don’t often overlap. 

We sat down this week to talk about micro-influencers, how they can impact a brands’ SEO, reputation and bottom line. I think you’ll enjoy the discussion as we make an argument for going small with your influence marketing.  

Instead of a traditional sponsor for this episode of Winfluence, I want to take a moment to tell you about a new project I’ve launched with Ryan Foland, Kim Garst and our friends at Get.Online … the dot-online domain name provider. Ryan, Kim and I have produced three online courses that combined form the .Online Business Academy. 

This series of easy to follow online courses is built to help you start your own business, make a business plan, build a website for your business and start driving revenue for whatever it is you’re passionate about. Ryan starts off the academy’s curriculum with a course on how to come up with a business idea that doesn’t suck. The course from Kim is how to write an online business plan you will actually use. And then my course is how to set up and launch your business website to attract customers.

The .Online Business Academy is FREE! You heard that right. FREE. The lessons are broken up into short videos and activities, so you can do a little at a time. Or, of course you can dive in and complete the entire academy lessons in about four hours.

So if you’ve been thinking about starting your own business or you or someone you know needs help to take that idea to the next level, The .Online Business Academy is live and waiting for you. Visit jason.online/academy right now.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

A few months ago, I interviewed one such content creator for my other podcast, Digging Deeper, which is a live video show turned into an audio podcast. That influencer was Malvika Sheth. She is an up and coming fashion and style influencer with an engaging blog, Instagram and YouTube feed. She’s a smart, enterprising young woman who had already scored brand collaborations with Dove, Reebok and others. 

We talked about how she came to be an influencer and why, what her experience has been collaborating with brands and she gave some sound advice for those out there looking to build their own influencer platforms. 

I thought that interview would be good to share with you here on Winfluence, so that’s what this episode is -- a replay of the original Digging Deeper interview. I think you’ll find it supremely insightful and useful, regardless of your place in the influencer ecosystem. 

This episode of Winfluence is sponsored by MarcomGather. There is nothing worse than wasting countless hours looking for digital files on your intranet, shared drive, desktop, cloud storage, or excel files. Say goodbye to the days of overflowing, unorganized file storage, and hello to finding files with speed and clarity. MarcomGather, is my new favorite digital asset management solution, it helps me stay organized, so I can get back to the parts of managing these podcasts I enjoy … like making sure they sound good. With MarcomGather I quickly centralize assets, eliminate unorganized file storage, and best of all - I don’t lose track of my files again. Experience MarcomGather free for 30 days at jason.online/marcom.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

When you look at the world of influencer marketing software platforms out there through that filter, one company emerges as a clear “it-getter” in focusing on true influence versus just ranking influencers. That company is the UK-based Onalytica.

I spend a good deal of time in the book sharing cases studies from Onalytica. There are great ones in there from facilities management brand Mitee, USB and Marie Curie—the hospice organization in Britain named after the famous scientist. And I do that because Onalytica’s approach is more aligned with how I think influence marketing (without the R) should work.

Tim Williams is the CEO of Onalytica. I’ve long wanted to have him on the show and finally found a window on his schedule to chat. We sat down so I can pick apart Onalytica’s position and approach and why it is different. My interpretation of Onalytica is they are better suited for public relations and comms than, say, for an advertising approach. And, as a result, they are far more relevant for B2B companies than B2C. I asked Tim to gut-check that observation.

We also talked about my hypothesis that British PR and comms professionals have a little something more than their United States counterparts. And we dove into his observation that employee advocacy is becoming a fruitful avenue for at least B2B companies to building their own influence within their respective spaces.

There are only a handful of people in the influencer marketing space I think are truly driving conversation and innovation that greatly advances the practice and Tim Williams is one of them. You’ll learn a lot from him in this episode.

This episode of Winfluence is sponsored by MarcomGather. There is nothing worse than wasting countless hours looking for digital files on your intranet, shared drive, desktop, cloud storage, or excel files. Say goodbye to the days of overflowing, unorganized file storage, and hello to finding files with speed and clarity. MarcomGather, is my new favorite digital asset management solution, it helps me stay organized, so I can get back to the parts of managing these podcasts I enjoy … like making sure they sound good. With MarcomGather I quickly centralize assets, eliminate unorganized file storage, and best of all - I don’t lose track of my files again. Experience MarcomGather free for 30 days at jason.online/marcom.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

So answering the question of the ROI on influencer marketing is hard. 

One company trying to solve for that is gen.video. The platform is built working from measurement and attribution backwards, rather than where most other software companies started … on the front end with influencer discovery. It’s a platform built from web video technology, but allows a brand to partner with influencers and measure how much traffic goes to purchase points, either direct to consumer or through retail platforms like Amazon, Target and Wal-Mart, then measure conversions and sometimes complete shopping cart activity on those retail end points.

Jessica Thorpe worked her way up through the original iteration of the company and is now president and co-founder and Gen Video. She also happens to be the newly donned president of the Influencer Marketing Association. We talk about how gen.video helps brands and influencers better connect the dots to the age-old question of What is the ROI? I also talk to her about the state of things in influencer marketing, particularly around the fact that everyone seems to be desperate for industry leadership and organization, but no one is truly stepping into that role.

It’s a good discussion with some great learnings and ideas.   

This episode of Winfluence is sponsored by MarcomGather. There is nothing worse than wasting countless hours looking for digital files on your intranet, shared drive, desktop, cloud storage, or excel files. Say goodbye to the days of overflowing, unorganized file storage, and hello to finding files with speed and clarity. MarcomGather, is my new favorite digital asset management solution, it helps me stay organized, so I can get back to the parts of managing these podcasts I enjoy … like making sure they sound good. With MarcomGather I quickly centralize assets, eliminate unorganized file storage, and best of all - I don’t lose track of my files again. Experience MarcomGather free for 30 days at jason.online/marcom.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

One topic of discussion in the influencer and influence marketing space that has extended into the realm of software solutions and other attempts at making the industry better is the focus on understanding fairness in influencer pay. What should influencers charge? Is that fair compared to other mediums? How much should one with 10,000 followers charge versus 100,000 followers or is there a difference?

Cynthia Ruff has a unique perspective on the problem of pay scales and influencer marketing. She comes from a finance background in which she managed compensation recommendations for clients. So she’s intimately familiar with HR systems and research around fairness in compensation.

But on the side as she worked in that world of compensation speciality, she was also building quite a strong platform of her own at Darling Down South where she is a lifestyle influencer. As the issues she faced along with those tackled every day by influencers, small and large, she saw the need arise for an arbiter in the influencer payment space. Enter Compfident.

That’s the name of Cynthia’s new company. It’s a mashup of Compensation and Confident. The platform what’s influencers to be confident in the compensation they ask for and brands to be confident in the compensation they pay. The site is built on data collected from users, but also from inputs across the spectrum of the influencer marketing space. Brands are giving Compfident input about their budget and fees. Influencers are giving Compfident their campaign information and the platform is connected with many others thanks to Cynthia’s previous relationships.

The platform is new, but Cynthia has a nice roadmap of the kind of resource if can be for the whole industry, not just influencers and not just brands. We dove in and talked about it today on the show. 

Speaking of resources, there is nothing worse than wasting countless hours looking for digital files on your intranet, shared drive, desktop, cloud storage, or excel files. Say goodbye to the days of overflowing, unorganized file storage, and hello to finding files with speed and clarity. MarcomGather, is my new favorite digital asset management solution, it helps me stay organized, so I can get back to the parts of managing these podcasts I enjoy … like making sure they sound good. With MarcomGather I quickly centralize assets, eliminate unorganized file storage, and best of all - I don’t lose track of my files again. Experience MarcomGather free for 30 days at jason.online/marcom.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Imagine my intrigue when hosting the Influencer Marketing Show earlier this year when Ian Randolph of Tailify talked about mining influencer content to map their values to that of a brand. It is his company's process of helping companies identify better influence partners. Randolph is a cognitive scientist. Tailify's mission is to help brands more accurately predict influencer marketing success by more perfectly matching the brand’s values to those of the influencer.

How do they do that? Deep social listening and analysis. 

This is a fascinating next-level concept of identifying the right influencer for your brand. And it’s not just a concept. Tailify has clients like Rosetta Stone who have mapped their company values, identified language education influencers with similar values and the engagements are producing better results across the board.

The conversation is an intriguing one to say the least. The algorithms Ian has worked with were the predecessors of those that became the one Cambridge Analytica used in the 2015 and 2016 elections. Ian wasn’t involved and had left the parent company there at that point. But his efforts since have be fueled by a desire to help people use data mining from social media conversations for good, not bad.

We dive into how on this episode.

This episode of Winfluence, the podcast, is sponsored by Julius. I mention that software more than others in my book because it’s the platform I’ve been using for a few years now to find influencers, engage with them and manage campaigns. 

Julius has powerful filters that let me drill down find outdoors influencers who also love jazz music. Or the content creators who are dermatologists in Chicago. But it certainly also gives me the mega influencers and celebrity influencers I might need to help launch a product or campaign around any type of product.

And in most cases, it has contact information so I don’t have to go fishing to reach them.

All the elements of campaign management are in the software, too. I love the fact I can assign a purchase price or value to every single social deliverable that is a part of campaign, automatically track it based on when the influencer says they’ll post, and get an ROI report for each element. 

You know I wouldn’t say this if it wasn’t true -- You owe it to your brand or agency to do a demo of Julius today. Go to jason.online/julius and request one.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

At one point in time I actually wrote the following on a sheet of paper that I stuck on my office bulletin board: Twitter Strategy -- Share good shit. The more I could become a trustworthy curator of content, the more people would trust me. It worked.

Back then, however, social media was different. Short form, snackable content platforms like Instagram, Snapchat and TikTok didn’t exist. Building influence back then involved writing blog posts and sharing content on Twitter. There were also social bookmarking sites that allowed you to save your favorite links to great content in one place. For a content curator, these were a godsend. Unfortunately, social media consumer behavior shifted to those aforementioned shorter-form platforms.

When blogs and articles aren’t the same level of currency, social bookmarking and curation becomes less interesting. Even I slowed and sometimes for periods stopped sharing good shit.

And then a few weeks ago I received an email from the PR representative for a new startup called Bookshlf. That’s the word bookshelf without the “e” and it’s a .com. So bookshlf.com (just remove the e.)

Almost instantly, I was transported back to the time when bookmarking other sites was a big deal. This was a lot like my favorite social bookmarking site from back then -- deli.cio.us. I can save and share links to great content, organized on a virtual shelf, hence bookshelf, and I can then share that shelf. 

When I found out they were rolling out a way for someone’s curated content to be monetized, meaning we could make money for not creating original content, but finding good content elsewhere and sharing it? I knew I had to know more.

Co-founder Mike Abend and I sat down last week to talk all about social bookmarking, how bookshlf works and what the future holds. Will people actually subscribe to or tip good content curators? Listen to find out.

This episode of Winfluence, the podcast, is sponsored by Julius. I mention that software more than others in my book because it’s the platform I’ve been using for a few years now to find influencers, engage with them and manage campaigns. 

Julius has powerful filters that let me drill down find outdoors influencers who also love jazz music. Or the content creators who are dermatologists in Chicago. But it certainly also gives me the mega influencers and celebrity influencers I might need to help launch a product or campaign around any type of product.

And in most cases, it has contact information so I don’t have to go fishing to reach them.

All the elements of campaign management are in the software, too. I love the fact I can assign a purchase price or value to every single social deliverable that is a part of campaign, automatically track it based on when the influencer says they’ll post, and get an ROI report for each element. 

You know I wouldn’t say this if it wasn’t true -- You owe it to your brand or agency to do a demo of Julius today. Go to jason.online/julius and request one. That’s jason.online/julius.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Henry Langer is one of those people. He’s the vice-president of customer success at Julius, my influencer marketing platform of choice. You’ve heard about them because they sponsor the show and I use their platform. But one of the reasons I like them so are the brilliant people there, like Henry, who I can chew the fat with on the industry.

We synced up last week to have one of those chat sessions and hit record so he could share some insight into what he’s doing and seeing with the variety of clients he solves problems for every day. Henry and his team work with Julius’s clients and help them vet influencers, develop processes to manage and measure influencer campaigns and beyond.

When you’re hands-on, solving brand problems all day every day, you get really smart about influence marketing real fast. And those kind of folks are the ones I value chatting with the most. You’ll see why on today’s episode. Get ready to take some notes.

And yes … this episode is also sponsored by Julius. But we’re going to talk about some of its features and reasons I use them during the chat, so we’ll forego the talking points and just share Henry’s smarts about the space and practice of influence marketing. But do go do a demo of Julius. You owe it to your brand or agency to do so! Get straight to it at jason.online/julius.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

But what switch needs to be flipped for you to see podcasting as a powerful trigger for your own influence?

Phil Pelucha specializes in helping businesses use podcasts for three primary outcomes: More publicity, greater marketshare and funding introductions. Podcasting suddenly seems more interesting, right? 

Phil and his team at Billionaires in Boxers have been doing this with businesses ranging from large financial institutions to small businesses for quite some time. And they’re pretty good at it.

Phil came on Winfluence to talk specifically about how and why influencers should look to podcasting to raise the bar on the type of content they create, but we dove into a treasure trove of discussion about how agencies, brands and services professionals can leverage this medium, too.

We even get into the interesting perspective that sometimes, your podcast can be valuable to you without even considering the size of your audience. And we had some fun riffing on the topic in an inside-look kind of way you'll find amusing as well.

Phil mentions the Billionaires in Boxers Starter Package on the show, so you can find that link here.

This episode of Winfluence, the podcast, is sponsored by Julius. I mention that software more than others in my book because it’s the platform I’ve been using for a few years now to find influencers, engage with them and manage campaigns. 

Julius has powerful filters that let me drill down find just the food and beverage influencers in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Or the men’s fashion voices that most impact Vancouver. But it certainly also gives me the mega influencers and celebrity influencers I might need to help launch a beauty, tech or automotive product.

And in most cases, it has contact information so I don’t have to go fishing to reach them.

All the elements of campaign management are in the software, too. I love the fact I can assign a purchase price or value to every single social deliverable that is a part of campaign, automatically track it based on when the influencer says they’ll post, and get an ROI report for each element. 

You know I wouldn’t say this if it wasn’t true -- You owe it to your brand or agency to do a demo of Julius today. Go to jason.online/julius and request one. That’s jason.online/julius.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Jessy Grossman knows the power of networking. She comes from the talent agent world where who you know is probably as important as anything. As she migrated into the actors and actresses becoming more online content creators and influencers, she saw a void in the influencer marketing space she quickly filled.

Jessy started Women in Influencer Marketing -- a professional networking community focused on the women in the industry, mainly those who hire and support influencers in what they do. So, talent managers, agency representatives, brand-side marketers. The group has been growing now for five years and has now become a key source of not just networking, but education and resources for women in the industry.

Curious about the group, I invited Jessy to come on the show and tell us about it. Though I played the dumb guy and asked why an industry that is decidedly populated by women would need a gender focused organization, I also asked an important question: What issues that face women in the industry can be better addressed if men become part of the solution? So the conversation turned in a more solution-oriented direction, I think.

We had a great discussion and got into not only the details of gender issues within influencer marketing and the benefits WIIM brings to the table for its members, but also what Jessy sees as the important issues facing influencer marketing today. Which actually inspired Monday’s commentary post to a degree.

This episode of Winfluence, the podcast, is sponsored by Julius. I mention that software more than others in my book because it’s the platform I’ve been using for a few years now to find influencers, engage with them and manage campaigns. 

Julius has powerful filters that let me drill down find just the food and beverage influencers in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Or the men’s fashion voices that most impact Vancouver. But it certainly also gives me the mega influencers and celebrity influencers I might need to help launch a beauty, tech or automotive product.

And in most cases, it has contact information so I don’t have to go fishing to reach them.

All the elements of campaign management are in the software, too. I love the fact I can assign a purchase price or value to every single social deliverable that is a part of campaign, automatically track it based on when the influencer says they’ll post, and get an ROI report for each element. 

You know I wouldn’t say this if it wasn’t true -- You owe it to your brand or agency to do a demo of Julius today. Go to jason.online/julius and request one. That’s jason.online/julius.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Marissa Cundiff is the vice-president of marketing for Kenmark Eyewear, a manufacturer that supplies some of the most recognizable sunglass and eyeglass collections in the world. Vera Wang. Lilly Pulitzer. Gemma Styles and the list goes on. They do both their own brands and collaborations like all of those. They have a direct to consumer play in Baxter & Bonnie, but mostly sell through eyeglass retailers.

That sets them up to have an interesting approach to influencer marketing. Yes, they have the big celebrity product lines, so that’s one segment. They gift eyewear to micro and nano influencers which is another. They also participate in some paid partnerships with mid-tier and mega influencers which is a third.

But since they primarily sell via channels—they’re mainly a B2B brand—they use the influencer content to supply their retail partners with inspiration, as well as to create awareness that might lead to sales.

Marisssa and I caught up recently to dive into her and Kenmark’s experiences, learnings and approach to influencer marketing. They seem to have carved out their own pathway to leverage influencers in effective ways for them, rather than following the industry trends and hype. And it’s working for them.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Patrick Janelle is a lifestyle influencer and also the chairman of the board of the American Influencer Council -- a trade association, not a union, for influencers. He sees SAG-AFTRA’s move both from the individual perspective, but also from that of an industry leader looking out for the good of all influencers.

He joined me to talk about where SAG-AFTRA comes up short and what’s really needed for such an effort to be more inclusive of all creators, not just ones that are either already SAG-AFTRA members, or celebrity influencers who can afford the investment.

To qualify for the benefits, you pay dues and surrender a percentage of your income to the union, so it’s not just something you sign up for. It’s an investment.

But I wasn’t going to led Patrick out without diving into much much more. Janelle is the influencer behind @aguynamedpatrick. He has almost 450,000 followers on Instagram posting about life in New York City, style, restaurants, travel and my favorite … cocktails. He also owns an influencer talent agency called Untitled Secret. 

We talked about his journey from graphic designer to influencer, how he migrated from accepting gifts from brands to getting paid. And we spent some time breaking down all that goes into an influencer’s creative output. You brand and agency folks need to take note. I use a brilliant collaboration he and one of his agency’s clients did with Q-Mixers as an example and we discuss the work and investment that went into that. It will help you see what you’re paying for when you engage the good ones. You influencers should take note, too. The collaboration is a brilliant example of how to do a collaboration with a brand.

As a related piece of content, I wrote my own recap of the SAG-AFTRA agreement, including comments from Janelle and others, on Entrepreneur last week.

This episode of Winfluence, the podcast, is sponsored by Julius. If you’ve read my book, you know I’ve depended on Julius for influencer discovery and campaign management for some time now. When I’m looking for the right influencer for my clients, Julius allows me to search across Instagram, YouTube, Facebook, TikTok, Twitch, Twitter, Pinterest, Blogs and more. When I click into an influencer’s profile, I can see their audience demographics, what other networks they have reach through and quickly scan their recent posts to decide if they’re a right influencer for my brand. All the pieces of campaign management are there, too. Julius allows you to reach out, document contracts, share and approve influencer content and, of course, measure the ROI of each campaign, influencer or post. You owe it to your brand or agency to do a demo of Julius today. Go to jason.online/julius and request one. That’s jason.online/julius.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

So words matter.

If you see a headline that says “more than half of instagram influencers engaged in fraud” you probably don’t have the time or interest to read the story. You assume the resource posting that is not posting a lie or a misstatement of the truth and you assume the majority of influencers are fraudulent.

That headline was real. It was posted by Campaign U.S., a popular resource for the advertising industry. It was quoted to me last week by a well-respected public relations professional considered a thought leader and expert in his field. 

But the assertion he made based on believing a poorly worded headline is 100 percent false. Words matter.

I’ll explain in today’s commentary. 

This episode of Winfluence, the podcast, is sponsored by Julius. If you’ve read my book, you know I’ve depended on Julius for influencer discovery and campaign management for some time now. When I’m looking for the right influencer for my clients, Julius allows me to search across Instagram, YouTube, Facebook, TikTok, Twitch, Twitter, Pinterest, Blogs and more. When I click into an influencer’s profile, I can see their audience demographics, what other networks they have reach through and quickly scan their recent posts to decide if they’re a right influencer for my brand. All the pieces of campaign management are there, too. Julius allows you to reach out, document contracts, share and approve influencer content and, of course, measure the ROI of each campaign, influencer or post. You owe it to your brand or agency to do a demo of Julius today. Go to jason.online/julius and request one. That’s jason.online/julius.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In case you didn't know, I host a live stream interview show more broadly focused on marketing and creative practitioners with my team at Cornett on Tuesday mornings at 11 a.m. Eastern time across Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and YouTube. The show is Digging Deeper and you should subscribe to its audio podcast, too, by the way. But I also sometime host Clubhouse chats, Amazon Live's for my book and more.

Gregarious Narain, who has always been someone with a finger on the pulse of what’s next and the bleeding edge in social technology, is banking on live becoming the new way we create most of our social content. His new startup Zealous is built to allow content creators, influencers if you will, organize their live streams and content, whether that’s broadcasts on social networks, Clubhouse, Twitch, YouTube and more, charge premiums for all or part of that content and capture data about your fans and audience to more effectively market your content to them.

Gregarious and I chatted recently about the movement to live-first, how Zealous empowers influencers and content creators—including live streamers and podcasters—to take all these disparate places where we create live content, and bring them together in a controlled community where you can engage your most ardent fans more frequently and effectively, while monetizing your content better than ever before.

We also got philosophical, as we’re apt to do when chatting, about social audio and other topics. The conversation is a fascinating stroll through two social nerds geeking out. But in a way you can follow along and learn some good ideas to build your social presence in new and interesting ways.

This episode of Winfluence, the podcast, is sponsored by Julius. If you’ve read my book, you know I’ve depended on Julius for influencer discovery and campaign management for some time now. When I’m looking for the right influencer for my clients, Julius allows me to search across Instagram, YouTube, Facebook, TikTok, Twitch, Twitter, Pinterest, Blogs and more. When I click into an influencer’s profile, I can see their audience demographics, what other networks they have reach through and quickly scan their recent posts to decide if they’re a right influencer for my brand. All the pieces of campaign management are there, too. Julius allows you to reach out, document contracts, share and approve influencer content and, of course, measure the ROI of each campaign, influencer or post. You owe it to your brand or agency to do a demo of Julius today. Go to jason.online/julius and request one. That’s jason.online/julius.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Sam Malone has figured out how to do that. He is the founder and CEO of Guru Club. It started out as an exclusive, invite only influencer marketing network. A marketplace of sorts. But Sam and his team quickly figured out that traditional celebrity and celebrity wanna be influencers were both riddled with fraudulent followers, but also over-saturated with brand deals.

What Guru Club’s customers really wanted were actual customers posting about them to spark word of mouth about the brand.

So Sam and Guru Club pivoted. 

Now the app tells people who are already buying your product that if they post an Instagram story and tag your brand, they’ll get a rebate of sorts -- an instant refund of a portion of their purchase price. 

Let that sink in. You already have their money. You offer a 10 or 20 percent refund or rebate if they tag you in an Instagram story. Their friends and followers see they’ve purchased your product in a snackable medium that is highly engaging and relevant. You get exposure and third party validation without having to pay for it. Guru Club make sure the person is real, their engagement is real, the story stays live for 24 hours and then a rebate is triggered and returned to the person’s credit card. 

You’ve made money, earned third party endorsement of your product to the customer’s friends, sparking word of mouth for your brand, the customer is happy they feel valued and given an extra financial break for simply sharing about their purchase. Oh … and you get the customer’s social connection to see if you might have a real influencer with a large audience on your hands. 

Guru Club is currently only available as a Shopify add-on, but is coming soon to non-Shopify customers with a new feature Sam actually announces during the interview for the first time. We sat down last week -- literally … he came by my office -- to chat about Guru Club and what being an influence marketer without the need for influencers in the traditional sense, looks like. 

By way of disclosure, after our conversation, I was asked to serve on an advisory board for Guru Club. I gladly accepted. So I have some modest formal involvement with the company. But I didn’t know that when we talked, so I think the conversation is still very relevant. And I think you’ll agree, this is a clever approach to spreading the word about your brand in an efficient way.

This episode of Winfluence, the podcast, is sponsored by Julius. If you’ve read my book, you know I’ve depended on Julius for influencer discovery and campaign management for some time now. When I’m looking for the right influencer for my clients, Julius allows me to search across Instagram, YouTube, Facebook, TikTok, Twitch, Twitter, Pinterest, Blogs and more. When I click into an influencer’s profile, I can see their audience demographics, what other networks they have reach through and quickly scan their recent posts to decide if they’re a right influencer for my brand. All the pieces of campaign management are there, too. Julius allows you to reach out, document contracts, share and approve influencer content and, of course, measure the ROI of each campaign, influencer or post. You owe it to your brand or agency to do a demo of Julius today. Go to jason.online/julius and request one. That’s jason.online/julius.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The thought process here is to share my perspective occasionally so the podcast is more than just an interview series. I’ve had some feedback from a few of you that this kind of observation might be appreciated. So here’s my first offering in this new commentary episode I’m just calling my commentary for now. If you have a good idea for a catchy title to distinguish these types of episodes, let me know. 

Today, I’d like to share some of my own thoughts on the fallacy of achieving influence. We live in a get-rich-quick world where everyone is in search of the easy button. Thanks Staples. That’s the reason we have bots that automatically generate thousands of followers and tons of engagement on social channels. Someone knows there are dreamers and schemers out there who will pay for the perception a social media account is worth more than it really is. 

That’s the reason that high school kids today are setting their life goal of being an influencer. They see the posers on Instagram living their best life, oblivious to the fact that either that best life is staged or it takes a hell of a lot of work to reach, then maintain the kind of lifestyle that looks fab online, so they think … I just want to reach influencer status and then life will be easy.

Well, I’ve got news for you. Influence is not and end goal of a journey. It’s not a college degree that you work hard for over a period of time, then you always have it. 

Influence is not static. I’ll explain why in today’s commentary.

This episode of Winfluence, the podcast, is sponsored by Julius. If you’ve read my book, you know I’ve depended on Julius for influencer discovery and campaign management for some time now. When I’m looking for the right influencer for my clients, Julius allows me to search across Instagram, YouTube, Facebook, TikTok, Twitch, Twitter, Pinterest, Blogs and more. When I click into an influencer’s profile, I can see their audience demographics, what other networks they have reach through and quickly scan their recent posts to decide if they’re a right influencer for my brand. All the pieces of campaign management are there, too. Julius allows you to reach out, document contracts, share and approve influencer content and, of course, measure the ROI of each campaign, influencer or post. You owe it to your brand or agency to do a demo of Julius today. Go to jason.online/julius and request one. That’s jason.online/julius.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

She’s the person behind Her Kentucky. Yeah, I asked Heather to come on the show because she’s in my neck of the woods as we say around here, so she’s top of mind. We’ve collaborated a couple of times for some brands here in bluegrass … heck, it turns out after a conversation or two, we realized we crossed paths back in high school, even.

But there’s a whole lot of relevance for influencers and brands everywhere in this conversation. Heather’s audience is, shall I say, middle-aged and older women. Her primary influence mechanism is a blog and longer-form writing, not TikTok videos or Instagram stories. Yes, she’s influential and active on the social channels that are relevant to that audience -- Facebook and Instagram. But the wisdom of knowing your audience and what engages them is something she gives sound advice about.

Heather also brings the perspective of a geographic influence to the table. For those of you who run or work with local or regional businesses, someone with a bazillion followers on Instagram isn’t going to do you a lot of good. You have to find the Heather Watsons in your world to reach a higher percentage of a relevant audience to make influence marketing work smarter for you.

It was quite interesting to chat with Heather about the nuances of being a local and regional influencer, the story of HerKentucky’s evolution and how she’s monetized her content over the years. Pay close attention to the brands she mentions for partnerships, especially you influencers out there. She’s very smartly gone after very specific companies that her audience would find appealing, and who want to reach that older, discretionary income-friendly female consumer.

This episode of Winfluence, the podcast, is sponsored by Julius. If you’ve read my book, you know I’ve depended on Julius for influencer discovery and campaign management for some time now. When I’m looking for the right influencer for my clients, Julius allows me to search across Instagram, YouTube, Facebook, TikTok, Twitch, Twitter, Pinterest, Blogs and more. When I click into an influencer’s profile, I can see their audience demographics, what other networks they have reach through and quickly scan their recent posts to decide if they’re a right influencer for my brand. All the pieces of campaign management are there, too. Julius allows you to reach out, document contracts, share and approve influencer content and, of course, measure the ROI of each campaign, influencer or post. You owe it to your brand or agency to do a demo of Julius today. Go to jason.online/julius and request one. That’s jason.online/julius.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In case you aren’t aware, there is an emerging niche within influencer marketing of literally fake influencers … avatars. CGI-manufactured versions of what appear to be people. I’m not talking deep-fakes, though I’m sure that will come into play soon, too. I’m talking about photo and video realistic, computer generated people. Who companies … mostly the graphics and CGI companies themselves … build social media accounts for. 

These fictional influencers, though, carry with them non-fictional influence. A survey from a company called Fullscreen in 2019 found that over half of those surveyed, in consumers ranging from 13 to 34, over half … had purchased a product, researched a product, attended an event or followed a brand on social media thanks to the recommendation and influence of what amounts to a modern day cartoon. 

CGI influencers are a thing. LilMiquela on Instagram is a computer avatar Photoshopped into seemingly real world adventures just like a real influencer would be placed. She has over 3 million followers. The company that created her is also responsible for LilMiquela’s pal … or rival … there’s apparently a storyline I didn’t have time to suss out … but Bermuda at @bermudaisbae has 291,000 followers. 

Brandon Brown is not a CGI influencer. He is the CEO and co-founder of influencer marketing platform Grin. He and I sat down recently to talk through the idea of CGI influencers. What are the risks, the fears, the dos and don’ts? Is there a place for them? Should they be considered a part of influencer marketing for strictly entertainment or branded content?

We also talked about several other things, including Brandon’s company. Grin is different from a lot of the other influencer marketing platforms in that it’s built for a direct-to-consumer business. They integrate with e-commerce partners to allow revenue attribution and ROI to be more easily mapped for influencer programs. Ironically enough, their e-commerce and D2C focus comes from a CEO whose philosophy is that influencer marketing is focused on building trust. 

We’ve talked before about the continuum of influencer marketing philosophies and how it runs from Transactional … e-commerce … to relational … more trust focused and relationship based. Grin seems to have a nice mix of both.

Lots of interesting conversation here, but the headline of this episode is going to be our fun banter back and forth. What in the world is up with CGI influencers?

This episode of Winfluence, the podcast, is sponsored by Julius. If you’ve read my book, you know I’ve depended on Julius for influencer discovery and campaign management for some time now. When I’m looking for the right influencer for my clients, Julius allows me to search across Instagram, YouTube, Facebook, TikTok, Twitch, Twitter, Pinterest, Blogs and more. When I click into an influencer’s profile, I can see their audience demographics, what other networks they have reach through and quickly scan their recent posts to decide if they’re a right influencer for my brand. All the pieces of campaign management are there, too. Julius allows you to reach out, document contracts, share and approve influencer content and, of course, measure the ROI of each campaign, influencer or post. You owe it to your brand or agency to do a demo of Julius today. Go to jason.online/julius and request one. That’s jason.online/julius.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

When I asked Caroline Duong, the founder and CEO of Zine about fighting influencer fraud, she was surprisingly candid about it. The fact is, fighting influencer fraud is hard work. And it doesn’t stop. She told me there are probably more new ways to cheat the system being created every day than there are influencer marketing platforms. And that’s saying something.

Caroline and I chatted recently about how Zine deals with that issue, but also discussed how the company got started, what all features and services it provides and beyond. Caroline hinted at some interesting changes to come for the industry and steered me away from a rabbit hole around the recent regulatory statement by the Advertising Standards Authority, which is sort of the Federal Trade Commission in the United Kingdom, saying it’s not cool for beauty influencers to use photo filters. Seemed like overstepping to me, but she course corrected my thinking, which was nice.

Zine started in 2015 and began with a focus on bloggers and providing content creators with demographic information about their audiences. In fact, to this day if you sign up as a content creator with Zine, they give you the pleasantly perfect gift of an automated media kit. You connect your channels, answer a few questions and you get a nifty PDF you can share with potential collaborator brands to show off your audience.

Caroline and Zine are great resources for influencers and brands alike. We had a great conversation I know you’ll enjoy. 

This episode of Winfluence, the podcast, is sponsored by Julius. If you’ve read my book, you know I’ve depended on Julius for influencer discovery and campaign management for some time now. When I’m looking for the right influencer for my clients, Julius allows me to search across Instagram, YouTube, Facebook, TikTok, Twitch, Twitter, Pinterest, Blogs and more. When I click into an influencer’s profile, I can see their audience demographics, what other networks they have reach through and quickly scan their recent posts to decide if they’re a right influencer for my brand. All the pieces of campaign management are there, too. Julius allows you to reach out, document contracts, share and approve influencer content and, of course, measure the ROI of each campaign, influencer or post. You owe it to your brand or agency to do a demo of Julius today. Go to jason.online/julius and request one. That’s jason.online/julius.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Gordon Glenister has thrown his offering into the mix, now too. His book is called Influencer Marketing Strategy and in it, he sources perspectives on the topic from myself as well as other interviewees in a useful and refreshing take on the topic. The book is a very practical, how-to guide for influencer marketing strategy and execution and is well worth the read.

I invited Gordon to come on the podcast to talk about the book, but also to really dig in to talk philosophically about the industry. Gordon comes from the background of association management in the United Kingdom. He was actually the head of the British Promotional Merchandise Association when he started connecting the dots to influencer marketing.

You’ll hear some familiar themes here. He and I think alike on influencer marketing’s connection to word of mouth marketing, that it goes beyond online influencers and there’s a different in influencers and people with actual influence. 

The diagnosis he gives of the mistakes brands often make with influence marketing is spot-on. And the topic of influencer fraud surfaces as well. I ask him how much of the industry is actually committing fraudulent behavior. Good discussion around that topic, too.

Perhaps the best part of what Gordon brings to the table is his research and exploration of influencer marketing around the world. He connects those dots for us.

This episode of Winfluence - The Influencer Marketing Podcast, is sponsored by Julius. If you’ve read my book, you know I’ve depended on Julius for influencer discovery and campaign management for some time now. When I’m looking for the right influencer for my clients, Julius allows me to search across Instagram, YouTube, Facebook, TikTok, Twitch, Twitter, Pinterest, Blogs and more. When I click into an influencer’s profile, I can see their audience demographics, what other networks they have reach through and quickly scan their recent posts to decide if they’re a right influencer for my brand. All the pieces of campaign management are there, too. Julius allows you to reach out, document contracts, share and approve influencer content and, of course, measure the ROI of each campaign, influencer or post. You owe it to your brand or agency to do a demo of Julius today. Go to jason.online/julius and request one. That’s jason.online/julius.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

It was that perspective of a successful Hollywood actress that begged me to ask her what she thought of the fame-monger, wanna-be influencers—the kind that buy followers and engagement just to get free stuff. Her response was powerful. And unexpected. It was one of many points in the discussion I found exhilarating.

Kelsey and I talked about Tagger, of course, but then dove deep into philosophical discussions around why most influencer marketing companies don't use influence marketing themselves, her place as an advocate for mental health issues, how her screenwriting experience helped her reverse engineer acting to land on personal branding and influence. It was one of those delightful conversations that will make you think, surprise. you and leave you thinking differently about the space.

This episode of Winfluence, the podcast, is sponsored by Winfluence, the book! Get a special discount by clicking the button below, buying on the Entrepreneur Press bookstore and using the discount code FALLS20. That earns you 20% off the retail price, just for being a Winfluence (the podcast) listener. Read and learn why we've been backed into a corner to think influencer marketing means Instagram and YouTube and how reframing it to be "influence" marketing makes us smarter marketers.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Enter Lindsey Lee, a former model and workwear fashion influencer who was fed up up with brands undervaluing the contribution of influencers and content creators. She started a new site in late December called F*** You Pay Me. She calls it like a Glassdoor for influencers.

FYPM, as she refers to it for polite conversation, is an effort in transparency. Influencers review the brands they've collaborated with, including how much they were paid, what they were asked to do and how the brand was to work with. They also give their demographic information. Brand report cards then show up that reveal how they pay and behave.

Lee has safeguards built in so no influencer is outed—all reviews posted are anonymous—and no brand is unfairly railroaded. A brand's report card doesn't get unlocked until it has at least 10 reviews on the site.

The app is brand new … its minimum viable product launched in late December … it eclipsed 500 brand reviews in late February. 

Lee joined me on Winfluence to talk about the reasons behind it, who it benefits beyond just influencers and, of course, the controversial name. I even asked her if the abrasiveness of it concerned her as she thought about ways to monetize the site and potentially partner with brands.

We also talked about her insistence on having site users share their demographic data so FYPM could be a tool to help close the influencer pay gap.

This episode of Winfluence, the podcast, is sponsored by Winfluence, the book! Get a special discount by clicking the button below, buying on the Entrepreneur Press bookstore and using the discount code FALLS20. That earns you 20% off the retail price, just for being a Winfluence (the podcast) listener. Read and learn why we've been backed into a corner to think influencer marketing means Instagram and YouTube and how reframing it to be "influence" marketing makes us smarter marketers.

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Sarah Panus is a veteran brand and social media marketer. She spent years on the digital team at Sleep Number and not long ago spun off on her own to start Kindred Speak, a brand storytelling and content marketing strategy firm. She also hosts the Marketing with Empathy podcast. 

Influence marketing is a big part of what Sarah does and we get into the nitty gritty about how brand storytelling frameworks can extend out from the brand to influencers and influence marketing. She explains how empathy can drive business metrics and results in marketing, content, influencers and … get this … even SEO. 

We also talked about the highly competitive space of mattress and bedding since she has experience in that space.

You brand and agency folks out there should take notes. Sarah has some brilliant ideas you can borrow from to build more empathetic brand content and activations. For you influencers out there, put yourself in the position of being a brand and listen to Sarah as well. She’s about to help you better define who you are and what you want out of your life as an influence.

This episode of Winfluence, the podcast, is sponsored by Winfluence, the book! Get a special discount by clicking the button below, buying on the Entrepreneur Press bookstore and using the discount code FALLS20. That earns you 20% off the retail price, just for being a Winfluence (the podcast) listener. Read and learn why we've been backed into a corner to think influencer marketing means Instagram and YouTube and how reframing it to be "influence" marketing makes us smarter marketers.

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Kelly Olexa brings more than a couple of perspectives to the table. She is probably best known for starting Fitfluential, the first real network of fitness influencers. So in that role she was both a fitness influencer, but also a talent manager of sorts, connecting brands and agencies to the influencers in her network. She also has experience on the agency side where she was before Fitfluential, then again as an agency entrepreneur with Socially Fit services.

Now Kelly heads up sales and business development for Lumanu, an influencer marketing software company that helps influencers and the brands they partner with white list the influencer’s account with the brand. This enables the brand to put paid spend behind the influencer’s content which turns the influencer marketing channel for the brand into a paid social channel complete with targeting, look a like audiences and beyond.

We talk about the opportunity and challenges with Lumanu, her perspective on the influencer marketing space and a whole lot more.

This episode of Winfluence, the podcast, is sponsored by Winfluence, the book! Get a special discount by clicking the button below, buying on the Entrepreneur Press bookstore and using the discount code FALLS20. That earns you 20% off the retail price, just for being a Winfluence (the podcast) listener. Read and learn why we've been backed into a corner to think influencer marketing means Instagram and YouTube and how reframing it to be "influence" marketing makes us smarter marketers.

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But then Jim shared a case study and his philosophy on hyper-local influence. Now this is really fascinating stuff because it takes influence marketing down to the street level, beyond the nano-influencer, even. Jim actually got super granular to tap into people whose primary influence is over their family and friends … and he did it in such a way that it was successful and even scaled, at least within a local market.

And listen closely to how he triangulated the influencers he used. It’s kind of amazing.

Jim’s work goes to another point I underline in the book—everyone has influence. When we’re building strategies to influence, not just those that involve influencers, the offline is as important than the online.

He also dives into his definition of an Alpha consumer, which is kind of the holy grail of influencers to partner with.  

This episode of Winfluence, the podcast, is sponsored by Winfluence, the book! Get a special discount by clicking the button below, buying on the Entrepreneur Press bookstore and using the discount code FALLS20. That earns you 20% off the retail price, just for being a Winfluence (the podcast) listener. Read and learn why we’ve been backed into a corner to think influencer marketing means Instagram and YouTube and how reframing it to be “influence” marketing makes us smarter marketers.

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CEO Edward East joins Winfluence to explain why his firm is so open about what CPMs and the like it pays broken down by race. We also discuss how gender might play into the pay gap issue and what other firms might do to emulate the leadership of Billion Dollar Boy in the practice. We also discuss influencer fraud and how to combat it.

East also explains what Billion Dollar Boy is and does to distinguish it from other influencer marketing solutions.

This episode of Winfluence, the podcast, is sponsored by Winfluence, the book! Get a special discount by clicking the button below, buying on the Entrepreneur Press bookstore and using the discount code FALLS20. That earns you 20% off the retail price, just for being a Winfluence (the podcast) listener. Read and learn why we’ve been backed into a corner to think influencer marketing means Instagram and YouTube and how reframing it to be “influence” marketing makes us smarter marketers.

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In the book we talk about the circles of influence where I illustrate you can build influence strategies through your employees, you vendor partners and your customers.

AdoreMe.com uses customers as its influencers, intentionally turning influencer marketing on its head. Its creators community welcomes in passionate brand fans and rewards them with gift cards for more product purchases when they post about the brand to their social followings. 

You can have 10 followers and be an AdoreMe.com influencer.

Ranjan Roy is AdoreMe’s VP of Strategy. He joined me recently to explain the customer loyalist as influencer approach the company takes, why it evolved from experiments with larger audience influencers they didn’t find particularly effective and he answers the question of whether or not that kind of influencer strategy would work in other verticals.

We also dig into the really cool purpose-led brand that is AdoreMe, which is not the only unique thing about the company. Instead of finding ambassador or CRM software to fuel this Creator network, Ranjan and team built the software that fuels their program internally. So we talk about the challenge and opportunity of building your own mousetrap.

Give it a listen and then please, share it with someone who may enjoy the episode as well.

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One of those platforms where people create content and build an audience is podcasts. The current wave of podcast explosion which includes the emergence of the one you’re listening to, is actually the second generation of podcasts if you will. The medium had its first wave in the early to mid-2000s. 

In 2007, an aspiring science fiction writer was turned down by publisher after publisher. And then he read an article about podcasting. After some investigation, he decided to start recording the first part of his book as episodes of a podcast. Fast forward a couple years and his audience of 50,000 listeners suddenly looked appealing to St. Marten’s Press, a well-known publisher.

That author was J.C. Hutchins. The novel was 7th Son: Descent. He was a new media publisher who built an audience in a self-publishing medium and became an influencer. And that led him to the opportunity to sell his work through a traditional publishing medium. Some might call that being “legit” but it’s probably now becoming more aligned with “old fashioned.”

Hutchins went on to self-publish the second and third book in the series. He’s continued his writing for television shows and other side projects, but also leads the content efforts for a content marketing firm. 

J.C. joined me on the show to talk about his episodic life through self- and traditional publishing, becoming influential and putting that into perspective with age. We both share some back and forth of our experience in publishing, so for those of you interested in writing a book or self-publishing something, this episode will be particularly interesting. 

He also says if he had it all to do over again, he would do a few things differently.

This episode of Winfluence, the podcast, is sponsored by Winfluence, the book! Get a special discount by clicking the button below, buying on the Entrepreneur Press bookstore and using the discount code FALLS20. That earns you 20% off the retail price, just for being a Winfluence (the podcast) listener. Read and learn why we’ve been backed into a corner to think influencer marketing means Instagram and YouTube and how reframing it to be “influence” marketing makes us smarter marketers.

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To catch those of you up who haven’t yet read her story in the book, Tiffany is Tifforelie online. Her Instagram account has over 200,000 followers. She’s a lifestyle influencer, photographer and artist who has passionate, loyal fans, primarily because she is so very vulnerable with the ups and downs of her life. 

The motorcycle accident I write more about in the book was controversial because the photographs she chose to share in its aftermath were very good. Too good. Professional. And in one, there was a SmartWater bottle conspicuously placed. Social media, then the traditional media exploded with claims she staged it, it was all a sponsorship play and so on. 

It wasn’t staged. It also wasn’t sponsored. And the incident was one of several beacons in the influencer space in 2019 the mainstream media grabbed hold of to declare influencer marketing dead. And Tiffany's opportunities dried up for a year afterward. 

But, Tiffany is still Tifforelie and still providing outstanding content, engaging her audience and she got back to occasionally partnering with brands and sharing partner content as well. To celebrate the launch of the book, Tiffany agreed to come on the show, rehash a little of the story one more time, but also dive into how she approaches brand partnerships, creating content and the risks of being out there. 

She’s very candid in her advice for aspiring influencers and offers up interesting insights into the content creator’s mindset that brands and agency types alike will learn from.

This episode of Winfluence - The Influence Marketing Podcast is presented by Winfluence - Reframing Influencer Marketing to Ignite Your Brand, my new book from Entrepreneur Press. You can find it in bookstores everywhere.

Winfluence, the book, is not just a strategic blueprint to help you employ smart influence marketing strategies for your business or clients, but it explains why our common perception of influencer marketing is all wrong. I take you through how to re-think and reframe the concepts to turn influencer marketing into influence marketing … broaden the perspective and open new avenues of leveraging influential people -- online and offline -- to grow your business.

Winfluence (the podcast) listeners get a special 20% off code. Go to http://jason.online/buywinfluence and on checkout, use the code FALLS20 for 20% off the retail price.

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He is the co-author of Talk Triggers - The Complete Guide to Creating Customers with Word of Mouth, written with Jay Baer. We talked about word of mouth on the last episode with Ted Wright and he comes up in the conversation here, too. But Daniel and I chatted while I was writing the book because I use some research he and Jay Baer conducted that was relevant to influencers. But I needed clarification as to whether or not an online influencer might qualify as an “expert” in terms of a source for product recommendations and research.

For the conversation today, we start there, but get a little deeper in what role influencers play in ratings and reviews and Daniel’s main area of focus which is online reputation management or ORM. He explains what that is for those of you who may not know, but it’s essentially a combination of the disciplines of SEO, social media, content, public relations, corporate comms and beyond, to ensure a company’s online presence is protected. 

Daniel recently joined the team at Edelman, one of the world’s largest PR firms, to head a team devoted to ORM. You can find him online at DanielLemin.com or on Twitter or LinkedIn.

This episode of Winfluence - The Influence Marketing Podcast is presented by Winfluence - Reframing Influencer Marketing to Ignite Your Brand, my new book from Entrepreneur Press. You can find it in bookstores everywhere.

Winfluence, the book, is not just a strategic blueprint to help you employ smart influence marketing strategies for your business or clients, but it explains why our common perception of influencer marketing is all wrong. I take you through how to re-think and reframe the concepts to turn influencer marketing into influence marketing … broaden the perspective and open new avenues of leveraging influential people -- online and offline -- to grow your business.

Winfluence (the podcast) listeners get a special 20% off code. Go to http://jason.online/buywinfluence and on checkout, use the code FALLS20 for 20% off the retail price.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

But Word of Mouth is still a bit of an enigma to many brands. The output isn’t an ad. Or a website. Or a piece of collateral. The outcomes … at least of those of successful programs … is often incredible lift for the brand over time. But over time is complicated. Was it this magic sauce word-of-mouth that you don’t actually see or was it all the other marketing things we were doing?

Ted Wright has authored probably half of the top 10 most successful word of mouth marketing programs. He is perhaps known most for reigniting the Pabst Blue Ribbon brand 20 years ago. A good portion of Chapter 14 of Winfluence - Reframing Influencer Marketing to Ignite Your Brand is pieces of my interview for the book.

But I wanted to go deeper with him on some of his experience and ideas about word of mouth to see if influence marketing and even online influencers are just a variation of the theme. In some ways, I feel like what we do as influence marketers is build word of mouth programs. But I know better than to outright claim that because folks like Ted tend to take exception to people hitching onto their wagon without at least running it by them first.

In the spirit of my interviews of late, I suppose, we get a little vocal toward the end as Ted builds an argument that influencers aren't effective. But that's what happens me Ted and I get together. We enjoy the disagreements and are never disagreeable with one another.

Enjoy this one. Ted Wright is always fun to talk to.

You can find Ted on LinkedIn and Fizz at FizzCorp.com.

This episode of Winfluence - The Influence Marketing Podcast is presented by Winfluence - Reframing Influencer Marketing to Ignite Your Brand, my new book from Entrepreneur Press. You can find it in bookstores everywhere.

Winfluence, the book, is not just a strategic blueprint to help you employ smart influence marketing strategies for your business or clients, but it explains why our common perception of influencer marketing is all wrong. I take you through how to re-think and reframe the concepts to turn influencer marketing into influence marketing … broaden the perspective and open new avenues of leveraging influential people -- online and offline -- to grow your business.

Winfluence (the podcast) listeners get a special 20% off code. Go to http://jason.online/buywinfluence and on checkout, use the code FALLS20 for 20% off the retail price.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Bilton joined me on Winfluence to have a little intellectual sparring match over the issues I had with the show. The discussion was, frankly, an amazing back and forth and exploration of some of the problems with influence marketing we both agree are problems and should be addressed. Bilton's overall point in making the film aligns with a notion I think we can all get behind—social media's impact on society needs a good cleaning up.

But he sees influencers as being overrun with the peace sign, duck lips, selfie-addicts who do buy followers and engagement. I see that segment as a problem, but not nearly the majority of what's out there. The back and forth was healthy and fun. I applaud Bilton, who is a seasoned journalist who writes for Vanity Fair and formerly wrote about technology and politics for the New York Times from 2013-16, for agreeing to an interview he had to know would potentially be combative.

It was, but in a very respectful, friendly discussion. Yes, I believe the film misses the boat on the full spectrum of influencers. Nick doesn't. And that's fine.

The movie is well made and written and is certainly worth watching. You can find it on HBO and HBO Max. Just keep in mind there's some disagreement on whether or not his portrayal of influencers is representative of them all.

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The talent manager, however, presents a bit of perception issue. Many agency strategists and even brand-side marketing managers hear “talent manager” and think, ‘Oh, great. There’s another 25% in cost just to use that particular influencer.” That’s not a fair perception, really, but a talent manager’s job is to look out for the influencer, make sure their value is well represented and respected and their likeness, rights and such are protected.

Kyle Hjelmeseth is the founder of G&B Digital Management, a talent management firm that represents influencers and content creators. It started when his wife, Stephanie needed representation. She is an influencer in the style and beauty space … she’s @honeynsilk on Instagram.

Kyle came on the show to talk about his firm and their interesting and unique, value-based position. In fact, G&B is made up of a roster of almost intentionally diverse influencers. Kyle and his wife are both people of color, though Kyle admits his mixed-race makeup isn’t obvious. 

So we talk about the diversity topic and 2020’s impact on that. But I also dig in and ask him all the questions about that cost misperception, what a manager’s goals are for the clients and how agencies and brands can work best with them. I also asked him when an influencer knows it’s time to seek representation. 

This episode of Winfluence is made possible by Podchaser Pro, a media database that is solely focused on podcasts. Find and prioritize podcasts for media planning, public relations or influencer outreach and discover each podcast's audience size and demographics. It's about time podcasts -- which reach over 100 million Americans each month -- had proper media planning information available to brands and agencies. Now they do. Go to PodchaserPro.com/falls to sign up and reach more and more relevant customers through podcast sponsorships and outreach. Be sure to go to the URL PodchaserPro.com/falls so they know you heard about PodChaserPro here.

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Today’s sneak peek guest is Lisa Joy Rosner, the senior vice-president for brand and digital at Oracle. She was the chief marketing officer at NetBase in 2009 when I was building Social Media Explorer, my old blog, and writing a lot about social technology. She reached out to me as an influencer in that segment despite the fact I was some random PR guy in Kentucky—not a big shot in Silicon Valley. 

The story of why she chose me and what happened after I wrote about NetBase is a great lesson I share in the book. We start off the episode talking about it as well. But we then dive into Lisa Joy’s deep experience in leading marketing teams for large, enterprise, B2B software companies. I ask her if influencers are imperative in the B2B space and how she has used them over the years. We then spent some time exploring the new challenge she faces at Oracle.

Lisa Joy has spent 30 years as a marketing leader in Silicon Valley and was leveraging influencer marketing before there were websites. She gave me examples of how she has used influencers over the years to both change perceptions of the company she was working for, or to educate her target audiences to open more opportunities for future sales.

This episode is made possible by PodchaserPro, where media planners, pubic relations and influence marketing professionals go to find audience and demographic information about podcasts. Build better media and PR plans by choosing the right podcasts based on data. Sign up for PodchaserPro today at PodchaserPro.com/falls.

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