Reframing Influence: Beyond Instagram and YouTube

Chapters

• 0:00 Introduction to Jason Falls
• 2:39 Reframing Influencer to Influence Marketing
• 9:07 Influence vs. Popularity: Key Differences
• 18:01 Strategic Influence: Beyond Social Media
• 24:52 Manufacturing Reviews Effectively
• 32:59 SEO Optimization Strategies
• 37:54 Marketing a Book with Influence Strategy

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:01

Welcome to the Scott Townsend Show brought to you by Dietzelman Productions.

Speaker 2: 0:13

Okay, no worries.

Speaker 3: 0:17

That's the first time that's happened, but okay, it won't be the last.

Speaker 2: 0:21

It won't be the last either, oh my God. At least we didn't get 30 minutes into it, and you realized it.

Speaker 3: 0:31

What a horror story. Oh my gosh Okay.

Speaker 2: 0:36

This is cake, man. This is no big deal. We were only two minutes into this thing, you're good.

Speaker 3: 0:40

Okay, it's recording, so here we go.

Speaker 2: 0:42

Okay.

Speaker 3: 0:43

Hey, this is Scott Townsend. You're watching and listening to the Scott Townsend Show and today I have with me a special guest, jason Falls. He's the author of the new book coming out. What did you say? February, february 23rd? February 23rd, that's Winfluence Reframing, influencer Marketing to Rignite your Brand. And Jason has been in the social media marketing space forever. He's been in every publication and TV show that you can think of NPR, forbes, wall Street Journal, usa Today, business Week, the list of ESPNs outside the lines.

Speaker 2: 1:27

Yeah. I was on that once upon a time that was fun.

Speaker 3: 1:30

And so you've also written a couple of books here before Winfluence, and that is the let me get this right no Bullshit Social Media, the All-Business No-Hype Guide to Social Media Marketing. That's a Jason Falls title, if I ever heard one, and I like to say that book title because it's the only time I get to say bullshit on the podcast. And the second book was the Rebel's Guide to Email Marketing, co-authored with DJ Waldo. So today it's all about Jason, you, your new book, wind Fluence and whatever else you want to talk about. Welcome to the show.

Speaker 2: 2:08

Thanks for having me, Scott. We've been connected an awful long time, so it's nice to spend a little bit more time together. This is fun.

Speaker 3: 2:13

Yeah, I'm glad to have you on the show. Thanks for taking the time. What's the problem we're trying to solve here with this book? Wind Fluence why did you feel compelled to kind of flesh out influencers? We'll go into all that here in just a minute, but just Winfluence in general. What problem are we trying to solve here?

Speaker 2: 2:39

Sure. So in my work, you know, in building influence marketing strategies for the clients at Cornette, the agency where I work, and watching other people do influence marketing for the last you know, umpteen years, because in my mind, influence marketing is not something that's new, it's something that we've done, we've called it different things for decades, and I'm a PR guy by trade, so, in a sense, public relations, media relations, is influencer marketing. You were just, you know, 20 years ago, you were working with different types of influencers and different mechanisms, and so I had noticed that both clients, prospective clients and other people that I talked to in the industry who were thinking about influence marketing had sort of fallen victim to. I think mainstream media had painted us into, has painted us into a corner of thinking that influencers and influencer marketing is all about Instagram and YouTube. It's people who are throwing up peace signs and duck lips and taking pictures of their lunch, and it's very superficial, and brands are, for some reason, paying these people to hold their product and do their peace sign and duck lips, are, for some reason, paying these people to hold their product and do their peace sign and duck lips and if you pay attention, if you're not in marketing and you pay attention to the mainstream media and how they portray influence marketing. That's kind of what you the vision of, what you get.

Speaker 2: 3:54

And so for small businesses and business owners and other people who don't spend most of their time talking about and thinking about marketing, they see influence marketing as a fad, as superficial as not effective, and so I wanted to kind of take a step back and take through people, through that idea and really help the industry reframe the way we think about it. Instead of thinking about influencer marketing and using the R on the end of that word, the book is really about calling it influence marketing, because that opens up your strategic opportunities to use it in a much different way, because if you're talking about the action, the verb influence that's your goal, that's what you're trying to accomplish, and not the channel or the person, the influencer. Now, all of a sudden, you ask yourself different questions. You say, okay, it's not about which influencer should I use, it's about who am I trying to persuade to do what? And then how can I find a channel that can do that and that opens up your opportunities to do a lot different things other than just Instagram and YouTube.

Speaker 3: 5:01

So that's one of the questions. When I was reading the book, the one thing that I stumbled over was the difference between an influencer and the person of influence, and I was like, isn't that the same? Thing, but then when you dissect both of those and I think I've got it now, so can you can you go over that one more time? What's the difference between an influencer and a person of influence?

Speaker 2: 5:32

Sure.

Speaker 2: 5:32

So an influencer in the context of the book and sort of the argument of reframing influence influencer marketing to be influence marketing an influencer is someone who has a lot of followers on a social network and their mechanism of influence is to post things on social media sites.

Speaker 2: 5:51

A person of influence is anyone who can persuade an audience to take action or think differently or act differently. And if you think about influence from that perspective, from a person of influence rather than an online influencer, then you're looking at the president of your local PTA club is very influential amongst a certain population of people. The president of the urban league is very influential amongst a certain group of people. A dentist is very influential amongst a community, a certain group of people. When you look at it that way and you realize that influence marketing can happen online but it can happen offline, it can happen globally, it can happen locally. Now, all of a sudden, when you think I need to build an influence marketing campaign or a marketing campaign that will influence an audience to do something, now all of a sudden you're looking at influence in a very different light and you're not limiting yourself to the person with the social network thing.

Speaker 3: 6:47

Right. So instead of focusing on who's going to hold the can of Coke, you need to focus on who are we wanting to drink the Coke and then who has sway over that?

Speaker 2: 7:01

Yeah, who can persuade them to drink the Coke, and it might be that, and it's almost like word of mouth marketing strategy. If you look at word of mouth marketing as a discipline, the way that people like Ted Wright at Fizz and other people talk about word of mouth marketing, it's kind of the underlying foundation of everything you do. And so, if you think of it in that context, influence marketing. In that context, I'm trying to influence an audience to take action. That might mean that I use influencers, but it might mean that I use direct mail, it might mean that I use television, it might mean that I use PR and media relations in a traditional sense.

Speaker 2: 7:35

So influence happens in a bunch of different avenues. It's just about pulling back a little bit, looking at it more strategically and saying, okay, instead of focusing in on Instagram and YouTube and people who have big followings there, let's look at the audience and decide okay, what do we want them to do and who impacts them? These influencers may, in fact, impact them, but so might their community members, their fellow soccer moms, their you know fellow bourbon aficionados right, it could be a lot of people that don't necessarily have big online audiences. So that kind of prescribes a different path to accomplish that goal.

Speaker 3: 8:12

From a marketing perspective. A lot of times we think about you know, using social media and it's like you know, having a hammer and treating every problem as if it's a nail. But that's not necessarily what you should do. You should take step back, like you said, and take a look and see which channel is the best, which tool is the best to use in this situation.

Speaker 2: 8:31

That's true, I've had a couple of clients on that point. I've had a couple of clients who have come to me over the course of the last. It's probably 10, 15 years. I'm not talking about current clients necessarily, but I've had people come to me before and say I want to use social media and I want to use social media to drive foot traffic in my retail store and drive X amount of sales by the end of the month, and I typically am like well, that's not a great way. Social media is not a great way to accomplish that. There are other channels and other mechanisms that can make that happen faster. So let go of your obsession with social media for that purpose. If you want to use social media for that purpose, we can design something that will do that, but it's going to take more time than the end of the month, right?

Speaker 3: 9:12

You talked about in the book Winfluence. Why choose someone of influence over someone of popularity?

Speaker 2: 9:21

Well, because you know people who are popular, and I use an example in the book of a young lady named uh ari who is a style, fashion, lifestyle influencer, and she had over 200 000 followers on instagram and she had been creating content consistently on instagram for a couple years and had a nice following.

Speaker 2: 9:42

She decided to launch a fashion brand, launch her own products, her own shirts and clothing line, and she launched this to her Instagram audience on some such date a couple of years ago, and then, a couple of days later, went on Instagram and complained that she'd only sold 26 units of this new brand and she had failed in influencing her audience to buy her own product.

Speaker 2: 10:10

And so I actually use a chapter of the book to sort of diagnose all of the different things she could have done to build actual influence with her audience, as opposed to just collecting followers, because what she had was popularity. She did not have the persuasive power or influence over that audience that she built. And so a lot of times, from a strategic perspective, now what we try to do is delineate, okay, which influencers that we're going to use for this program, be they online or offline, which do we know, can we validate, really have persuasive power and can motivate people to do things. So it's very important to understand the difference between influence and popularity, because if you go out and pay a bunch of people who are popular but they're not influential, you're not going to be happy.

Speaker 3: 11:31

So at first blush you would think that would work. I mean, ari, you would think, hey, I've got 200,000 followers. I should start selling some shirts here and get these people to buy some shirts. So what should she have done to start over?

Speaker 2: 11:50

There's several things she should have done. Probably the biggest thing that she should have done is she should have developed a pattern of behavior with her content and her audience to motivate them to do things. Up until that point, she had really only posted pictures of herself posing in her clothes. She'd never asked her audience to like a post. She never asked them to go to a website. She'd never conditioned them to do things and tested to make sure they would. So she had no earthly idea if they would respond to a call to action to go purchase. They would. So she had no earthly idea if they would respond to a call to action to go purchase something. So if she had, you know, backed up from that launch date maybe a year, maybe two years and said, hey, I really like this blouse that this designer has and you can get it at Target, and here's a link and started to establish a pattern of behavior where her audience gets used to her recommending products and they go buy them. And then the experience is, oh, I like that product too, so I trust her recommendation. So I'm going to continue to follow her and continue to follow her influence, and when she says, go do this, I'm going to go do it because I trust her for those recommendations.

Speaker 2: 12:56

If she had established that behavior from her audience over time she would have sold a lot more than 26 units of whatever she sold. And so there's other things that she could have done. She could have built a lot more credibility and a lot of her posts were those sort of peace sign, duck lips, superficial things that didn't have a whole lot of meat to their content. So people were used to seeing pretty pictures of her but there wasn't much substance there. So maybe she could have provided much more thought leadership, much more substantive content behind those pictures. That would have attracted a different or a better audience that would respond more to calls to action. So the chapter in the book goes through Robert Cialdini's elements of persuasion and says here are the six things that he says you could do to persuade an audience. Let's take Ari through this exercise and see what she could have done.

Speaker 3: 13:46

So for a while there, it sounds like her call to action was just enjoy my pictures. Exactly, it was look at me.

Speaker 2: 13:52

That's all it was, and so everybody was conditioned to enjoy the pictures. And she had an audience that was perfectly happy to thumb through and see her picture and go, oh, that's cool and maybe like it and maybe not, but that's all they were conditioned to do.

Speaker 3: 14:07

What is WinFluence?

Speaker 2: 14:10

So WinFluence is this concept of using influence marketing strategically and wisely to persuade an audience to take action. So Winfluence is kind of this broader definition of influence marketing to say I'm not going to focus on social networks, I'm not going to focus on people who have big audiences on Instagram and YouTube. I'm going to focus on the action of persuading people to to do something, to change the way they think about something, to buy or try a product, to consider a product, etc. It's looking at influence as a strategic, you know, execution and function of your brand and it's really about driving people to take that action, not focusing on the person who is telling them to take that action. So it's again, again, just the element of reframing influencer marketing to look at it in terms of influence marketing.

Speaker 3: 15:06

A long time ago, back when there was only three channels in PBS, you know they would use, you know it was. Wouldn't you agree that it was more celebrity-generated, you know, like Bing Crosby with Orange Juice, or I'm going way back now. Remember what was her name? Anita Bryant with the Orange Juice commercials? Yep, well, even Bill Cosby was pushing all kinds of stuff there for a while, mr Jell-O yeah.

Speaker 2: 15:39

The old days when you had a limited array of entertainment channels, entertainment selections first of all. The media landscape has changed so much, I mean, even since I was a child. I was born in the early 1970s and back then we had three or four channels on television. We had a couple of radio stations, maybe a couple of newspapers, maybe a couple of magazines, and in order to get in those as a contributor, a publisher, a person on television, you had to go to school and you had to be trained and you had to learn ethics and you had to be a journalist or you had to be an actor or a singer, you know, someone with exceptional talent, and so the limit that you were very limited in the number of people who were influential upon you as a consumer.

Speaker 2: 16:25

Social media democratized publishing so that any random person with an internet connection could write, they could take pictures, they could publish videos, they could record audio.

Speaker 2: 16:38

Unfortunately, what that meant is everybody did that, and now we have this huge sea of noise of everybody trying to be a content, a knack for creating engagement, have personalities that kind of come out that people gravitate to, and these people didn't go to journalism school. They're not necessarily actors or singers or have talent that we would typically elevate to that stage, but they have the ability to publish and attract an audience. And so you have a different type of media social media, influential people, influencers than you had in 1973 when you had, you know, actors, trained journalists, et cetera. And so that has made the media landscape, the tactics for marketing and using those channels to persuade audiences to do things very different. And today you're starting to see those signals from the noise. Online influencers stand out as hey, if I want to get in front of a bunch of people who love to camp and love to hunt and love to grill outdoors Derek Wolfe at Over the Fire Cooking's got over a million followers on Instagram. He's a great media channel now to go through, not just an individual.

Speaker 3: 18:04

A media channel to go through, yeah you wouldn't want to use Kim Kardashian for that.

Speaker 2: 18:09

No, no, no, she would definitely be the wrong influencer for that kind of audience. But what's cool about the cool thing about this is, even though you have someone who has a million followers not 50 million viewers, like the nightly news on NBC or CBS or ABC or Fox or whatever but you have a million people who are very concentrated into the type of people that you want to try to sell to. So if I'm Buffalo Trace Bourbon and they're a client of ours at Cornette, we reached out a couple of years ago to Derek Wolfin over the fire cooking and said we think there's a lot of overlap between our audience and at Cornette. We reached out a couple years ago to Derek Wolfe at Over the Fire Cooking and said we think there's a lot of overlap between our audience and your audience. Let's collaborate, let's do something cool together. So we worked on a couple of posts just Instagram posts and whatnot where he used Buffalo Trace bourbon in a glaze or something like that, and it was a sponsored post. It was an influencer engagement. The response from his audience toward the brand was so good that we came back and said let's do something bigger.

Speaker 2: 19:04

And so we developed a four episode sort of web TV show over the fire cooking, you know, presented by Buffalo Trace, and we sort of told a story through these four episodes longer form videos than his audience was used to and we brought other influencers in as guests. So the first episode was Danielle Pruitt from Wild and Whole. She's also a contributor to MeatEater TV. She hunts wild game and so we had an episode where we talked about hunting the meat, finding the animal that you're going to cook. And then the next episode was a butcher in Nashville that had a nice online following that talked about how to, you know, humanely, you know, in all of the practices that butchers do, you know, have respect for the animal, break it down, you know, use it for what it's supposed to be used for. Then the next episode, we had a blacksmith who was an influencer in that world create, you know, a knife and blades to actually use in the cutlery.

Speaker 2: 20:02

And in the fourth episode we brought everybody back to the distillery in Harlan Wheatley, the master distiller at Buffalo Trace. They cooked with Derek and had a big dinner at the distillery. So that's the kind of influencer partnership that we've developed at Cornette. That is a way of saying this is a media channel. Derek Wolf over the fire. Cooking is a media channel that we feel like our audience will respond to. From a Buffalo Trace perspective, let's put the two of them together and create some really interesting content that people will consume and hopefully respond well to, and it's worked very well. We still work with Derek on projects from time to time as well.

Speaker 3: 20:36

When it works, it's really cool. Yeah it is when I'm looking down. I'm just looking at my questions here. Don't think I'm being disrespectful, no worry. You talk about in your book reviews and you said there's one thing I was hoping you could clarify and that is what's the right way and wrong way to manufacture reviews. And what did you mean by manufacture?

Speaker 2: 21:07

Sure. So the manufacturing reviews is basically simply soliciting reviews from your audience. Okay, or your influencers or some subset of your audience out there that you want to have, go review your product. If you know anything about the various marketplaces out there, like Amazon, amazon products, if you're in a competitive marketplace, amazon products really aren't going to rank well for a search term for that particular product until you have about 50 reviews or so. So you need to solicit reviews to build up that credibility so that you come up in search engines. Also, online reviews on various networks are fundamentally critical to Google search results. So Google goes out and if you're a restaurant, they go to Yelp and all these other places to say what do other people think about this restaurant? Should I elevate them in the search rankings for this particular keyword in this particular city?

Speaker 2: 22:07

Now, one thing, and I talk about in the book how you can use influencers to manufacture and drive ratings and reviews. However, there's a big asterisk here because lots of these websites like Yelp have terms of service that say you cannot solicit reviews, you cannot manufacture reviews here. It has to be organic, it has to be from people just organically volunteering their opinion. I would never recommend anybody violate a website's term of service like that. I don't necessarily agree with Yelp's stance. I think they're a little hypocritical in how they do it. Just because they say you're not allowed to tell people to go review your business, but here's a sticker to put on your door that tells people to go review your business. It seems kind of hypocritical. Anyway, that's a different podcast, probably for a different time. So there are sites out there, however, who allow you to an influencer an influencer to come with FTC disclosure and say, hey, I was sent free product or I was paid to do something for them, but I wanted to file a review here because I've used the product now and I enjoy it. And there are some sites that allow that. As long as you're transparent about it and it's disclosed, they allow that, but even more critically so.

Speaker 2: 23:20

Another thing that factors into the Google search algorithms and your user experience on your website is when you have reviews of your product on your website and you can pay anybody you want to do those, and you, I would always recommend you ask them to review things honestly. You know. Don't pay them for to lie to your audience. That's not going to be cool.

Speaker 2: 23:41

But if you have, there are services out there. There's one that I know of called Apex Drop. Their whole sort of influencer marketing approach is give us 150 products and we'll find 150 micro influencers that you don't have to pay anything more than the product and we'll send it out to them. Ask them to go to review you on various sites so you can manufacture reviews if you need them for you know headcount reviews to make sure that you're up in search rankings, or if you just want to populate really good content on your website with actual consumers using your product, there are services out there that can do that and as long as you're not violating anyone's terms of service and being transparent about the engagement, you can push that button and make that happen.

Speaker 3: 24:25

So I hear a lot of podcasters say you know, help me out, leave a review. And I always wonder does that really help a podcaster? Should I be asking people to review my podcast?

Speaker 2: 24:36

marketing and I have one called Winfluence that is a companion thing for the book. But unless I have a good number of your reviews, a couple dozen reviews, I'm always going to be way down the page when on a phone, when someone's searching for a podcast, if they type in influencer marketing or influencers or something like that. I'm not going to be one, two or three, unless or until I have 50, 60, 70 reviews and most of them are five star. And now I've become, you know, meaningful from third party contributions that say we like this podcast. That serves this term. So yeah, reviews are absolutely critical. The Influencer Marketing Podcast is a very small example. My other live stream podcast that I do for Cornette called Digging Deeper. Robert Plant has a podcast called Dig Deeper and there's a religious podcast called Digging Deeper. So even the name of that show is competing to get some weird stuff.

Speaker 3: 25:44

So we don't come up very high unless or until we get those reviews that just brought. I just I hope I can remember this at the end of the podcast. We're into 30 minutes here. Do you have a little bit more time? Yeah, okay, you showed in the. You showed in the book five ways and when I read this I was so glad that what I think was what you wrote, and that is five ways to optimize your website for search engines. And when I was reading through this I was like I've been saying that all along. I'm not crazy after all. Can you give me some ideas? If someone's listening and they want to help optimize their website to show up in search engines, listening and they want to help optimize their website to show up in search engines, and what are search engines? What other search engines are there besides Google and Bing?

Speaker 2: 26:42

Well, let me answer that part first. For the intents and purposes of optimizing your website for search, google and Bing are really the only two you need to care about. If you optimize your website for those, and primarily just Google, frankly, because it still owns about 70%, 75% of the search marketplace. If you optimize well for Google and or Bing, you're probably going to be optimized well for all the other ones and you mentioned DuckDuckGo, there's probably three or four dozen search engines.

Speaker 2: 27:10

Yeah, but you know, if Google brings a thousand visitors to your site, all those others might bring one right. So I wouldn't spend a whole lot of time optimizing for DuckDuckGo or any of the other ones. No offense to the DuckDuckGo people, You're doing fine. But if you optimize for Google, you're probably in pretty good shape, at least for the foreseeable future. And optimizing your website for searches it can be incredibly complex and there's an entire industry of search engine optimization people out there who can talk to you for days about stuff you'll never understand. I have always tried to keep it very simple for my clients and for myself, because I don't consider myself to be incredibly smart. I just am able to look at things that are complex and kind of distill them down.

Speaker 3: 27:55

Hey, I was a part of the class that made the top two thirds possible, so I feel you.

Speaker 2: 28:03

So, for search engine optimization, there's, you know, a handful of things that I think are just really simple things that can help you understand it and do it well. The first thing is one of the things that Google looks at is recency. Their whole job is to give the searcher the most relevant search result. So relevance is the big thing, and something that happened two minutes ago is more relevant than something that happened yesterday because it's newer, fresher, real Right. And so that means and this is why blogs became a big thing in on the Web and in search engines, you know, 15 years ago because a blog mechanism, a content mechanism on your Web site, allowed you to post something new on a regular basis. It could have been once a week, it could have been every day, it could have been 10 times a day, whatever, and the content engines that put more recent content out there were the ones that started to elevate up in the search ranking. So put consistent content on your website. Doesn't have to be every day, but do something consistently that is going to feed new content to the search engines to let them go oh, there's something new here. So that's the big thing. The second thing is is make sure that the content that you have on a given page and it can be a single blog post or it could be a landing page or some other informational page on your website the content on one given page. Optimize that for a primary sort of keyword. It doesn't have to be an exact phrase, like, for instance, I've got a page on my website that I've optimized around the term influencer marketing with the R, influencer marketing. But that is a topic and all of the keywords under that that that page is going to rank for include influence marketing, influencers, influential marketing all of the different variations of that are going to fall onto that page on there. That is evergreen, that I don't have to change a whole lot. But then also mixing in content that I am updating on a regular basis so that Google not only sees I have recent relevant content, but I have recent relevant content that's really highly concentrated on this one kind of cluster of keyword terms, this one topic, so it becomes authoritative on my website about this topic.

Speaker 2: 30:31

Once you've established that recency and that authority on your website, now you've got to get other people to tell Google that it's authoritative. That's where backlinking comes in. Now you don't have to do anything complicated with backlinking. What you've got to do is promote your own content on your social networks and hopefully promote it in a way that encourages your followers and fans to also share it and promote it. You've got to link to other people in your recurring content on a regular basis so that they see you and you're contributing to their search health by linking to them. Hopefully and you can overtly ask them if you want, but hopefully they will see your content and go oh, maybe I should link to them too, and so there's kind of a give and take there, right, you help their SEO, they help your SEO.

Speaker 2: 31:17

When you get into backlinking strategies, it can get crazy and whatnot. There are people SEO people who get paid for 40 hours a week to just contact other websites and say, hey, if we link to you, will you link to us, and week to just contact other websites and say, hey, if we link to you, will you link to us. And that's all they do and there's some credibility to that. Adding links helps, but at the same time, adding a bunch of irrelevant links doesn't do anything. So the last thing I'll say on the links is this is where public relations media relations really has a huge impact, and this is also where influencer marketing can come.

Speaker 2: 31:51

Influence marketing can come into play for your SEO as well. The more authoritative a website is in Google's mind that is pointing to you the more authoritative you are. So the easy way to understand that is the New York Times. A link from them is much more important than a link from Jason Falls' blog, because Jason Falls' blog has a couple hundred, couple thousand readers. The New York Times has a few million and it's an authoritative. You know media source. So that's where good media relations comes in. So if you're doing something for your brand, your product, you know, if you're promoting something, if you can also do good PR and in those stories that are placed out there in the media, get a link back from that media outlet to your website. Now, all of a sudden, your rankings are all going to rise because you're a more credible place for people to find in search engines. So that's the simple way to look at it.

Speaker 3: 32:44

Yeah. So as we wrap this up, I want to. I just thought of this exercise. I hope that people will go out and buy WinFluence because of this podcast Me too. So if we were to apply the WinFluence approach to this book, I wrote down video review, so if I, one of the things that I could do to help is leave a video review on Amazon or write one. I'm amazed at how many people don't leave video reviews. You know a lot of people write. Many people don't leave video reviews. You know a lot of people write, but very few leave video reviews. So if you're listening out there watching, one of the things that we could do to help push WinFluence sales is to leave a review on Amazon or leave a video review on Amazon. What else could we do? So?

Speaker 3: 33:51

you know if you're being interviewed not by me, but by the Wall Street Journal about this book. That would be. That would be huge.

Speaker 2: 34:00

It would be huge. Yeah, I'd take that.

Speaker 3: 34:03

Yeah, what else from a Winfluence perspective, could we not just we, but would you like to see what plan might you put in place for a book? And then let's just talk about Winfluence, but it could be for any book.

Speaker 2: 34:21

Sure. So the marketing strategy for the book if I'm using sort of this funnel of looking at it from an influence marketing, a Winfluence strategy, sort of this funnel of looking at it from an influence marketing, a winfluence strategy I'm going to find influential people out there who have audiences that I think are going to like the book and who have some persuasive power over those audiences, and I'm going to reach out to them and try to contribute to their content in some meaningful way so that they will a look at the book, read it, see what they think about it. If they like it, they'll turn to their audience and say wow, I read this book, it's really good and you guys should go get it too. And so what I've done in my strategy for this book is I've reached out to people like Scott Townsend. I've reached out to people like Jay Barrett, the Social Pros podcast. I've reached out to people like Ann Handley and Kerry Gorgone at Marketing Profs, because they have a big audience of marketers who are going to like this kind of thing right. Right.

Speaker 2: 35:20

I'm also branching out into business and entrepreneur podcasts and websites and things like that. A book is not necessarily, in my opinion, going to get a whole lot of traction if I'm focused on just Instagrammers and YouTubers, which is the whole point of Winfluence. Right, let's find people who are influential over the audience that I'm trying to reach. Podcasts is going to be big for me. Traditional media, public relations, media relations is going to be big for me. So my team at Cornette and I are kind of triangulating and trying to figure out okay, where do I need to place book reviews? Where do I need to, where can I submit guest posts and content that'll get me in front of, you know, other audiences like Harvard Business Review and things like that.

Speaker 2: 36:01

So I'm just trying to find out where are people who are interested in marketing persuaded to buy books? And that might be through a podcast like yours, it might be through a traditional media outlet, and then, of course, I'm hosting my own podcast, talking a lot about it there. So anyone who's interested in influencer marketing at a real sort of granular level is probably going to listen to my podcast regularly anyway. So I'm going to promote it there as well. And then there's the speaking gigs at conferences. Most of them are virtual right now, but it's that's how you're going to get out there and market and promote a book like this, using that sort of win-fluence strategy finding the people who are influential over a marketing audience that would be interested in this topic.

Speaker 3: 36:43

That's so cool and so yeah, so I have here. I didn't get the book, but I got the PDF.

Speaker 2: 36:52

Yeah, the book's not out when we're recording this, so you can't hold it up yet.

Speaker 3: 36:56

But I'll share the image on the screen here so you can see it. That's a good book. It's a great read. This influence, winfluence, the whole word of mouth, approach, good word of mouth is so awesome. Just one last question, if I can what's one of your favorite word of mouth campaigns from the book that you wrote?

Speaker 2: 37:19

about. Oh, you know, this is top of mind because I talked to Ted Wright at Fizz, which is one of the most successful word of mouth marketing agencies out there. Ted Wright at Fizz, which is one of the most successful word of mouth marketing agencies out there, and I used one of their case studies in the book and they will tell you it's a word of mouth case study. I will tell you it's an influence marketing case study. I think it really qualifies under both. But essentially they were challenged by an industry association in the dairy industry to help drive more awareness around chocolate milk and the awareness that they wanted to drive. They wanted to sell more chocolate milk, sell more dairy. That was the trade association's task.

Speaker 2: 38:01

In the research they discovered that chocolate milk is actually really beneficial to drink right after you have exercised or worked out. It replenishes the nutrients and minerals you need and your body helps you recover faster and stronger, and all that good stuff. Well, when they figured that out, they were like, okay, that's the insatiable thing, that's the piece of content that we need to get out there. How are we going to do it? So they started out with a single state focus group in Ohio and they basically used high school football coaches as their quote unquote influencers Right. And they educated high school football coaches on the benefits of post-workout consumption of chocolate milk. And this is what it does.

Speaker 2: 38:45

And so those high school football coaches turned around and made their teams drink chocolate milk after they worked out, and that was carrying forward a concept of don't stop drinking milk when you're in junior high. You need to continue to drink milk to build strong bones and all that good stuff. And here's how it plugs into your teenage lifestyle if you're an athlete. They also engaged some professional and college athletes to come in and share that message with people professional and college athletes to come in and share that message with people. And so they I think the number was something like they increased milk sales in that particular geography 465% over the course of a year or two. That is a great example of a Winfluence campaign, because it's using offline influencers to accomplish what you might turn to online influencers to do otherwise.

Speaker 3: 39:32

That's awesome. Love that Well, Jason. Thanks a lot for stopping by and talking about WinFluence, your new book coming out February, the 23rd February 23rd.

Speaker 2: 39:41

That's it.

Speaker 3: 39:43

So be sure, and get your PDF. I mean get your book Amazon or wherever you buy your books.

Speaker 2: 39:51

Yep, the easy place to go is winfluencebookcom. I've got links on that page that'll take you to. You can buy it directly from Entrepreneur Press, amazon, barnes and Noble, and if somebody else comes along to sell it, I'll put it on there so you can go there.

Speaker 3: 40:05

So, with this podcast, I'll put this on iTunes and all the other podcasting platforms. I'll post the video on YouTube man, that sun's really glaring on my glasses here. I'll post this to Twitter, facebook, my Facebook page and LinkedIn. So, hey, man, I'm doing everything I can do to help. So if you're listening, watching, you can do the same thing. Once you get the book, read the book, you can help Jason out here, and let's all make this just a great experience for Jason and his crew. So thanks a lot for your time. Oh, if someone wants to get a hold of you, how do they get a hold of you?

Speaker 2: 40:48

I'm really easy to find man. Jason falls everywhere. There's a politician in North Carolina who hates me because he's on page five of Google. I've got the other four. So yeah, I'm really easy. I'm at Jason Falls on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, all that stuff. Jasonfallscom is where you can find information about the book and the two podcasts that I do, and, Scott, I really appreciate you having me on man. This has been a great discussion and I appreciate you helping me tell people about the book. Thank you.

Speaker 3: 41:16

And you know, if you're a business owner and you're trying to do something help in marketing or whatever this book is really going to help you do that. So be sure and check it out, go for. Oh, you know what I should do. I should also say, if you like this podcast or YouTube channel, you should subscribe, click the notification, write a review. You can help with that as well. So for Jason Falls, this is Scott Townsend. Thanks for watching and listening to the Scott Townsend Show and we'll talk to you later.

Speaker 1: 42:08

The Scott Townsend Show is a Deeds O'Man production. For more episodes, visit the Scott Townsend Show YouTube channel, listen on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.