Winfluence - The Influence Marketing Podcast

As we enter 2024, I told you we were going to dial in our pursuit of changing the mindset in the influence marketing industry to help brands and agencies focus on influence, not just influencers. So we're going to have a lot of conversations with a lot of different people along the way to make that happen. 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 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

It's been a minute. If you haven't noticed, Winfluence has been on a bit of a holiday hiatus. Honestly, its a good thing for me … client work ramped up toward the end of the year and I simply didn't have enough time to fit in the weekly interviews and production to give you an episode worth listening to. 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/winfluencereset Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

When someone says they run an influencer marketing agency, what comes to mind? I've asked a few brand-side folks I know that question in the last week or two and have received a number of different responses. 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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We've had a couple of episodes and conversations in the past that talk about gamers. The online video game industry is worth billions of dollars. Its content creators have some of the most captive audiences in any medium. Twitch is one of the biggest and most impactful social networks and it is dominated by video gamers who live stream themselves playing video games. 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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Do you know what this show is about? If you said “influencer marketing,” you're close, but not necessarily wrong. If you said “influence marketing” you're more right. And if you said, the exploration of how brands can apply influence in all its shapes and forms, to aide it their marketing, you're spot-on. 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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We've been talking to some talent managers of late. They play an important role for many creators, managing the business of their influencer status while the creator, well creates. Many of them add another perspective to the creative process, contribute ideas to shape partnerships into something more than they would be otherwise and are valuable to the brands and agencies in the equation as well. 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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Those of you who have watched or listened to Winfluence for a while know that I got my professional start in radio. I marched myself into the local radio station at 14-years-old and said, “I wanna be a deejay!” And for some reason they said, “Okay. You start Friday.” 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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The evolution of a content creator is something brands and agencies see, but don't watch. Bear with me on this for a moment. It's like the difference in hearing something, and actually listening with the intent of understanding. 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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

There's another “State of the Industry” report out this month. It actually came last week from Linqia, which is one of the enterprise influencer marketing software companies out there. These reports are always useful, so I like to report on them here on the show.  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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Depending on where you are at the table in the influencer marketing space, your meal is slightly different. Creators can range from nano-influencers who barely consider themselves influencers or creators at all … to those who achieve true celebrity status and have full production teams they employ to create all that content while they live off their personality and audience connection. 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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What would you do if you didn't have access to social media for a day? How about a week? What about three and a half months? How would that change your daily habits? How would it change where you turned for information. 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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

If you've been paying attention to the goings on in the influencer marketing world, you know by now that there was a major acquisition announced recently. Sprout Social, long known as one of the top social media management solutions in the space, acquired Tagger Media. Its main product, Tagger, is one of the leading influencer marketing software solutions on the market. It was once a regular sponsor of this program as well. Tagger was actually also responsible for bringing me to the Influencer Marketing Show a couple of years ago. Pete Kennedy, its CEO 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 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Marketing automation is a topic that most people dig into when they're in the enterprise or B2B space. It's an approach to marketing that allows you to set up triggers and events using software to drive leads, then work those leads down your funnel to conversion.  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 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The influencer marketing landscape is changing. Now, that's not a statement many people would find alarming. It's always changing. But when you watch the industry like I do and for as long as I have, you see the tea leaves. And when they perk up a certain way, you sense a change is a brewin'.  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

What are your goals? More importantly, do you write them down? How often do you refer to them?  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 many ways to slice an apple. Or peel an orange. Or for that matter, there are many ways to get from your house to the office or grocery store … and just as many to get back.  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

From time to time people find out in conversation that I'm a published author. It's a monicker and fact that sits in my social media bios and certainly something I say proudly on my website and such, but it's not something that typically comes up on conversation. When it does, I get asked a lot of questions about it. 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

Some of you may know I spent the first half of my professional career as a public relations professional in the world of college athletics. Back then we called the job being a sports information director, or SID. The industry evolved to labeling the role something like athletic media relations or athletic communications or similar, but our job was to publicize the teams, coaches and student-athletes. 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

You may have noticed I've been mixing in more content here recently focused on content creators. It's not that you brand and agency folks aren't the primary focus of the show. You are. But if you're reading between the lines, the advice that some of our guests have had recently about helping creators build and grow their business … well, it applies to you, too.  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

There's a growing problem in the influencer marketing space with content creators. We've talked about it on this show before. But there never seems to be any great push to solve for this particular problem.  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

We've been talking a lot about brand lately on the show. Recent episodes featuring Patrick Hanlon and Rick Ray have centered all of us, brands and creators, agencies and vendors alike … we've become centered on telling a brand story. But we can't leave it at that. We have to put that brand story into action. 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

We spent some time recently with Patrick Hanlon talking about Primal Branding. Having that deep assessment of who you are as a brand can inform and even drive everything you do. I think we reached the conclusion that spending time to deeply understand and define your brand is important, whether you are a content creator or have products and services to sell. 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 influencer marketing landscape is big and ever-changing. You have huge agencies that with with big brands for big budgets. You have boutique firms and consultants that mix and match influencer approaches. You have niche players in the agency and software space that focus on micro and nano influencers. And at each of those tiers, you have speciality shops that are more like Hollywood entertainment production houses, video-only tools … Honestly, it's a big mess. 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

If you follow the conventional wisdom around an influencer's lifespan, you know they start living their best life, then define a strong content niche and build an engaged audience. Then they do lots of brand collabs and make a fair amount of money. Then they diversify and get into creating their own products, services or even a full on media platform. 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

There's an argument to be made that influencers are the “IT” channel in marketing. That trusted, third-party recommendation or referral is extremely powerful and often far more effective at communicating big ideas and marketing messages to consumers.  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

Whether you are a creator or represent a company, agency or other stakeholder in the influencer marketing space, you have a brand. It may or may not be a good one. Or at least one that is well-defined, clearly communicated and the like, but you have a brand.  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

I threw out one of my Winfluence tips a few weeks back. For those who aren't aware, I'll record little one-minute tips and ideas from time to time and post them as Instagram Reels or YouTube Shorts … sometimes on LinkedIn, too.  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

Without question the last 2-3 years have lit a fire under businesses, brands, governments and individuals with regard to how to think of and interact with diversity. In fact, the acronym of the early 2020s has to be D-E-I … Diversity, Equity and Inclusivity.  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

We're going to do something a little different today. I've always been fascinated with the origin stories and journey to content creator or influencers of those that I meet along the way. I've met and interviewed dozens who sat out be social media famous and monetize their content. I've talked to many who fell into by accident.  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

There's been a shift in the trade winds across the advertising industry in the last few years and the gusts are starting to come into our shores at an alarming rate now. Tighter economies lead to tighter waistlines, at least in the budget metaphor and what was once standard operation procedure goes out with a new way of thinking. 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

TikTok may be in trouble in the United States. Our Congress has no fewer than four pieces of legislation in motion right now that in some form or fashion could ban the use of the platform in America. Most constitutional law experts are skeptical such a ban could survive scrutiny of the courts because it's a clear violation of freedom of speech, a first-amendment right in this country.  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

If you haven't been smacked in the face with a conversation about AI or artificial intelligence in the last month, and you're in the marketing space, you're not getting out much. The algorithms and machine learning robots have gotten awfully good and at an awfully lot of things, including written content, graphic and image generation and all sorts of other tasks.  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

Most of you know I spent the last five years or so at Cornett, a very good advertising agency in Lexington, Kentucky. Being an influencer marketing strategist at an agency is both fun and challenging. When you're at an agency, you get work with a variety of clients, so you don't get lulled into the same ole, same ole if you're just working on one brand.  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

We've got a special episode this week. You may recall a couple of weeks ago, I shared an episode of The Rise – The Community Commerce Marketing Show in which I talked to author and marketing thought-leader Jay Baer about his Time to Win research. This week, I share another episode of The Rise for similar reasons. 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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

A friend of mine reached out recently and asked me if influencer marketing was possible for B2B businesses. Keep in mind this friend isn't in the bubble of marketing and doesn't follow along with the same type of topics you or I do. He also probably didn't give it much thought before asking. 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

We've got a special episode today for a couple of reasons. First, my pal Jay Baer has new research out on the Time to Win. It's a fascinating study on how responsiveness in all its variations really can be the difference between getting new business and not … and keeping business and not. 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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

If you haven't been thinking about user-generated content and how your brand can leverage it lately, well, you're late to the party. UGC has become one of those three-letter abbreviations that everyone instantly understands. At least in the marketing world.  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

I want to know more about you. Actually, I need to know more about you. The more I know about you, the better I can make this show. The better the show, the happier you are being a listener. 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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

I've been using and reviewing social technology software for almost 20 years now. One of the most frequent categories of software I'm either pitched or someone recommends I try is in the social media management category. These are platforms like HootSuite or Sprout Social where you're able to plug in all your social media channels, manage your comments and message from each in one place, publish and set up calendars to pre-load content and such.  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 want to talk to you about leveraging podcasts for your marketing. No, this isn't a pitch to get you to start a podcast, though I can certainly spell out dozens of reasons you should. I'm not here today to wax poetic about Winfluence, the podcast, nor the Marketing Podcast Network which I run. 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

Before we get into the show today a reminder for those of you listening on the podcast that Winfluence is now available in amazing technicolor. If you'd like to see the magic as well as hear it, just pop over to the YouTube channel and subscribe. The easy way to get there is jasonfalls.co/youtube. Of course, you can also search for Jason Falls Winfluence or just Winfluence on YouTube and find it. 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

In a now exclusive audio commentary episode, Jason Falls takes on the sudden irrational reaction to the trend of #deinfluencing on TikTok and other channels. It has inspired many a creator to poke fun at the influencer marketing space. Some of them are poking fun at creators who do a lot of sponsored content. Others are making fun of brands who pay those creators.  It's causing a stir in industry conversations.  But it shouldn't. Jason explains why on this commentary episode of Winfluence Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Before we jump into this episode, a note for the listeners: Winfluence is now available as a video show. If you'd like to see the magic as well as hear it, just pop over to the YouTube channel and subscribe. The easy way to get there is jasonfalls.co/youtube. Of course, you can also search for Jason Falls Winfluence or just Winfluence on YouTube and find it. 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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Live streaming is becoming more and more popular for both creators and brands today. The ability to not only deploy video content to engage an audience, but do it live, in real-time, tears down almost all the barriers social networks present to get to and engage an audience.  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. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Those of us on the agency or services side of the influence marketing industry covet one thing really: Insights from brand-side marketers, particularly those who are the decision-makers in the business. I would imagine talent managers and some creators also covet that since the brand's investments in any of us is what makes the industry tick. 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

We all like killing to birds with one stone, right? Metaphorically, of course. I don't actually kill birds. Neither do you, I hope.  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

If you don't know the importance of acquiring and leveraging first party data in marketing yet, let me give you a quick recap. Consumers generally do not want companies like ours capturing and using their data without their explicit permission. Regulatory guidance like GDPR in Europe, and consumer-focused policy trends like not allowing 3rd party cookies to scrape data from website users are responding.  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

I want to be painfully honest with you today, gang. What we do in the influence marketing space, or the marketing space overall, often seems to me to be superfluous. Will the world survive if marketing died? Sure it would. Heck, some people would even say it might be a better place.  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

We can talk about influence marketing or even influencers … or for that matter just social media marketing all day and it still doesn't necessarily mean the C-level folks in your business are going to understand and approve what we want to do. 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

You already know we focus our attention here on influence marketing. That encompasses what many traditionally think of as influencer marketing (with the R) where a brand finds a social media content creator with a large audience to post about their product or service. We expand that conversation to include anyone with influence … social media followers be damned … to help communicate your message.  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

We've got a little holiday feed drop you today. I know many of you may not pick up the podcast player during this yule tide season or even on until the New Year, but if you're like me you get through the festiveness and overeating and need a little alone time with a good podcast. 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.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices