 So Richard Wong is the VP Marketing and Creator Relations at Hashtag Paid. He's a seasoned, classically trained, marketer who came from Procter & Gamble in Johnson & Johnson before joining Google, where he worked on Google's publication for insights, trends, and research and advertising, Think With Google. Richard is the current chair of the Ad Standards Influencer Marketing Steering Committee. He also teaches the digital marketing classes at tech schools, brain station, red academy, and camp tech. Richard's work has been featured in Adweek, Digidae, Media in Canada, the American Marketing Association blog, and DX3. He's going to be talking today about influencing people through marketing's evolution. So without further ado, Richard. Okay. So anyways, thank you guys all for having me. I'm here to talk to you guys about, I guess, influencing people through marketing's crazy evolution. So what I do during my day is working at an influencer marketing company. Show of hands. Who's heard of influencer marketing before? Who here has never heard of influencer marketing before? Okay. So this is a crazy thing that I've hopefully maybe will try to blow your mind. So Hashtag Paid, the company that I work at, we're a Toronto-based company, but we have offices in New York and Toronto. And what we do is we connect brands and represent people who are famous on social media and connect with brands to do brand collaborations itself. So I want to show you guys a little bit of more of a story of like how I came into this, how I got discovered into it. One of the major big moments that I had was working at Google on the YouTube team. And how many of you guys would say you guys watched like YouTube at least once a week? Okay. Nice. A lot more people than who's heard of influencer marketing. So amazing. How many of you guys have like a specific, like they call it a creator that you guys follow, that you are like, every time they post something, you're like, I'm on it. Okay. And how many of you guys have ever gone to YouTube FanFest or heard of YouTube FanFest before? Okay. A few of you guys. So one of the things I worked on when I was at Google, this is probably about three, four years ago, was this thing called YouTube FanFest. And we did a big fan meetup for people who are famous on social media. And this was one of those instances where it was like a free concert meetup for anybody who wanted to meet their favorite YouTube stars. We took over Young and Dundas Square and figured, okay, this is going to be pretty cool, pretty fun. The biggest one that ever run across the world was like 3000 people in Singapore. So we're like, okay, like Young and Dundas Square can fit a lot of people. I think the police told us that it could fit up to like 12,000 people in Young and Dundas Square. Like that was like fire code capacity. So let me show you a clip of one of the different YouTubers when she did this in her behind the scenes. So that was crazy pandemonium. Who here recognizes that person that who's on that list? See one person? Do you want to shout it out? Who is? Okay, you recognize. So her name, her name is she goes by the creator name of LoreDIY. So she's a Toronto based DIY called expert. But what you saw of like every like a lot of those people just like absolutely losing their minds over this isn't for like a boy band pop star. Like when we went this that red carpet when we're going down that road, we did this so like welcome all the different fans and we had like the secret part around YouTube is like it was for a lot of the different advertisers to convince them that the days of TV where people are cheering for like the big bang theory or whatever might be like this is also online. Then YouTube is more than just cat videos. There's a lot of people were creating great content on there. Cat videos are important like those cats riding on a Roomba with a shark costume. A lot of views on that. But it was more than just those types of content and that people realized that when you have people like screaming over there, the create one of the crazy stories we had was this 12 year old girl who pretended to faint. So the security guards like lifted her over the rafters and try to bring her to the first day tent and only for her like stiff arm this like this really big dude. The police officers who are trying to like manage that were like trying to catch her and she just like deep them out and like went up to her favorite like creator and just screamed in her face and we were like, oh my gosh, what are we going to do? And like on the marketing team, we had to go over there and like we had like bear hug rappers like you can't do this. We have to ask you to leave. And that's I think where a lot of people came and said that was essentially the similar as when the Backstreet Boys or NSYNC used to visit during Beatlemania. This is what I call the age of the creator when a DIY star can have and create a huge crowd. People who are a couple guys from Montreal who are probably older frat boys who still haven't lost their touch but want to do a cooking show. But with a lot of alcohol and a lot of fast food and they call them epic mealtimes. Nobody would have greenlit that if you're at the food network to say like, oh yeah, a bunch of guys from Montreal. You want to create some poutine and like drink a lot of Jack Daniels. Great. Here's a bunch of money. Nobody would end up greenlighting that. And that's the power of social media and like our current day and age is the fact that if you have a lot of amazing credible talents, you can take those talents and with the power of social media develop an audience and do that. One of my favorite creators, his name is Casey Neistat. Anyone familiar with Casey Neistat? Okay, a few fans. I have a video that he ended producing that I think really captures it best. Hey, right there. So what this really means for me and the really part that I love about my job is the fact that I got to make a lot of this happen. So that's what I do in my role at hashtag paid and like in the world of influencer marketing. But I think this is really a part of an overall story that's even bigger than just people who are famous on social media who want to get a bunch of likes and continue doing crazy videos like that. It's really substantial of what tech represents. So even for everyone in this room, the fact that we can all develop these types of skills and develop those and be able to create just incredible experiences, I think it's the most exciting time to work in this type of field. One of the big parts around when I was working at Google, we end up having this whole part where we call art and copy. If you think about the Mad Men era, Mad Men, you know, was the era when you had the art department meeting the copy department like finally, oh, you can talk now and now you can create really cool advertisements. This is the new era where we call art copy and code because you've now added a third dimension. You've now added people who can code. You have now added an element where it's not just watching TV or like display ads on a website or it's not just, you know, like bus stop station ads or whatever it might be. People can make it reactive. You can create an entire experiences through code, through the art department and through the copy department. And it's just about kind of bringing the right type of people to the playing field and making it happen. So the part that I love about this is it's the true democratization of creative talent. And I say creative talent in a way that's not in creative in the most traditional sense of you're good at art, you're good at photography, you can create videos, but creative talent can just mean what you think about the experiences who like, can you order a, could you imagine trying to order a cab over there and you had to use to call? Well now maybe the creative talent part of that is being able to call from your phone. And just like those different unique experiences you can drive can change the way that we end up operating. And I think that's really fundamentally changed where we think about a lot of what we develop. And so this is part of the lessons that we end up teaching at hashtag paid. CMO of GE, Linda Boff captured I think it really well. For people who are working in marketing, you can't try to sell people on content anymore. How many of us use ad block all the time? So like, and I think that's systemic, not because we like, there's a lot of reasons why we do ad block, but part of the reason is because we don't want to just be sent and sold messages all the time. It's not that we don't like buying brands and it's not like we don't want to spend money. We probably do spend a lot more money than we do before, especially on prime day and stuff like that. But it's about content that tries to help you. And if the content that tries to help you and actually add value to your overall experience itself, changes the entire game itself. And so that's when I think about how we start to shop. It's the way we consume media's also changed the way we shop. And so Casey and Jesse, that video that you end up seeing, a personal example that I'll share is there were the, you know, those segues that have those two wheels and people started doing that. I thought those were the stupidest thing. I still think they're one of the stupidest things. But one of those out of the entire category of like moving smart vehicle devices, the part that you like got me the most interested was, you see Casey featuring his boosted board a lot, which is an electric skateboard that makes you kind of look like the silver surfer. Or if you dress this up like Jesse did, you can look like a lad in and he goes to New York all the time. He lives in New York and he can get to around New York so quickly. And for anyone who's been in New York, just trying to get around the city absolutely sucks. And so for me, I actually considered like, as soon as I saw that video, it was like, Oh my gosh, that's so cool. I need to figure out where this is. And so I looked, there's only one retailer in all of the Toronto, like all of Toronto that actually has that I checked it out at test joke. I actually don't know how to ride a skateboard at all. So this was a terrible decision and terrible idea. So I like, after I test drove it, I was like, nah, I'm actually, I'm good. I can't even ride a normal, like non motorized skateboard. So I'm going to be okay with not riding that. But at least I considered that. And that's the part where we think about, well, if you're the boosted board type of company, you're not just advertising, Hey, check out all of these different types of skateboards. It goes this fast. This is how much horsepower. No, it's about creating experiences that people enjoy and adding value into their lives. So in terms of like overall thinking about this, and this is for I think a lot of you guys, how many of you guys would say you guys are like freelancers or agencies? And there, how many of you guys are not and say work internally at like a brand or something like that? Awesome. Cool. So this is to help convince the rest of your other team members who don't understand a lot of the stuff. So if we think about a lot of like what's changed, we see like the e-marketer stat around the average time of time spent. And I think a lot of people are ingrained in that side where if I think back to my old brand days when I worked on like Procter & Gamble and Johnson & Johnson, I was managing like Band-Aids brand, the cute kid jingles. You have like the vising brand and Covergirl Cosmetics and like a lot of our money got dumped into TV and print. And that was like very much of the old guard system and the way you think about that. And you thought about it made sense because back in something like 2010, that was almost half of your time entirely spent on just watching TV. That's how you're consuming media. So you dump all your money into that. But what you started seeing is a big shift and back like I said 2014, that's when the tables actually turned where the majority of your time is actually spent on digital. You're no longer just watching your your favorite shows or if your favorite piece of media on a television screen, you're watching them on your laptops. You're watching those on a Chromecast, maybe a smart TV. That entire thing sides shifted and that's continuing to grow. And that's the part that I think a lot of people have to sort of think about it is that like we as humans are so slow to react and try to change our mindsets that we have to start looking at trusting statistics and like okay our actual time is spent on TV. The craziest part that I end up having was like the majority of our budgets back then like we're all on TV and then we had like a quick straw poll of like the people in the rooms like okay how many of you guys actually have a TV, a cable subscription and like maybe half the group had one and I was like okay now we're arguing about Facebook. How many of you guys have a Facebook account? Everyone raised their hands like and we're not advertising on Facebook like isn't that crazy? But like well show me the case study, show me the proof point that happened and that was like the craziest thing for us and that's when I end up joining Google and figured out I can try to shift minds at Google because they have a lot more power and money that way. Glad to see a lot of you guys are maybe enjoying ad block but that's continuing to grow every single year and that's continuing to grow so a lot of you guys who are creating websites as well if you're thinking about monetizing your sites you also have to think about what are other ways and how you can start to monetize your sites. One of the biggest areas that people are finding is the fact that well display ad revenue, those boxes in there they're going to contribute to some of it but if you look at the top publishers who are creating content you look at the vices, the buzzfeeds of the world, the ones that are grabbing huge amounts of eyeballs, they're co-creating content and they're doing sponsored content, the global mail is doing a lot of that side in order to create added value. It's more about how can they tell their story with the different type of brands and then making that come to life and so that's about kind of changing how you influence and decide and change people's opinions in this new market economy. But the other part of it in terms of reasons why a lot of us block ads in general it's I dislike large ads because the pop-up covers the entire web page which really sucks the ads you know are make the web pages low too slow it's just in general you just suck at making good digital experiences and I think that's where I turn to you guys as everyone who are working on this stuff let's make it better let's give great experiences that we can be really proud of and in terms of influencer marketing the crazy part about this is over 84 percent of marketers are employing some sort of influencer marketing campaign within the next year and 70 percent of those are increasing or maintaining their spend and so it's a good time to be in my industry I guess is the short answer it's fun we get really busy but that's the side where influencer marketing isn't just paying like Casey Neistat to create a crazy video where he's cruising around the city but it could even be as simple as you get a lot of different type of those content creators to shoot content shoot video shoot photos they're creating all this entire production stuff in house and this is a big part of the new game future of work so I want to talk about like how open source changed the game a little bit how many of you guys have ever heard of the Mary Meeker report it she produces an annual report called internet trends for a lot of us who work in I guess the total startup tech Silicon Valley area it's like the main almanac that you look every single year everyone like looks forward to seeing that being published the latest one that she ended posting she left off the last part of in terms of the world of technology it's change opportunity and responsibility we're living in a period of unprecedented change and unprecedented opportunity especially for the people in this room unprecedented need for responsibility so I call this the uncle bend it's the with great power comes great responsibility and so it's up to each of us to be able to decide how we embrace this new technology and do this in a smart way so employee motivations one of the things that within her report showcased is the fact that a lot of us now are craving flexibility and work life balance so aside from a lot of the the different monetary sides people care about the flexibility and schedules they don't want to have to come in specifically at 9 a.m. and like leaving at 5 p.m. they want that flexibility they want to be able to decide whether they work from home and from the brief conversation I've had with a few of you guys it sounds like a lot of you guys are currently embracing that so that's great to see we're also seeing that freelancers are driving our industry forward they're the ones that they're easier to find now there the freelance workforce is going three times faster than the total workforce itself and a lot of companies that aren't embracing this they're going to be slowed to the punch and they're going to be hard to either find roles to be able to get projects out of the door or be able to hone in on people who are actually true specialists and so for all you freelancers in there this is the stat that I always tell all my freelancers like send the stat to people and tell them if you're not embracing this you're falling behind freelancers the future and if you think about this as well on-demand workers are also adding to the workforce dynamic and so this is a US stat but whether you're embracing things like five or up work freelancer and my shameless plug about hashtag paid to get content itself from a lot of their different creators these people who are on-demand workers are sometimes for a lot of the majority of portions of it the majority of people who are part of our platform they have a full-time job they are you know they work in oil and gas some of them are flight attendants but happen to also be like a low-key like incredible pastry chef and she collects a bunch of different type of items all around the world uh from her travels as a flight attendant to say like oh yeah I was in Spain last week and I picked up this this is this really cool pastry that I learned how to do there and that entire side of this is this wouldn't have been a thing like called 25 years ago so I think that part of embracing and thinking about people are creating content people are doing incredible things with the world of social media and this is the new form of the workforce that we have to embrace on-demand jobs are also a huge area so people want to have those other jobs like every I feel like everyone especially has like some sort of side hustle that they're doing if they're not necessarily like for myself like if I'm not working at my normal day job I'm teaching digital marketing teaching Google Analytics and Google Adwords and how to run a social media content calendar on on the side of a couple of the different local tech schools everyone has some sort of other type of on-demand type of job like that and that's continuing to grow year-over-year and a lot of people do this for a bunch of different reasons so part of it is that extra income people want to either like run their own business or they use multiple type of platforms they just want to be able to embrace that but a lot of other people also just want this for professional development how many of you guys started I guess working in Drupal as like a side hustle and you just started picking stuff like this on the side a few of you guys yeah so and now you're at a conference for this what's that okay cool number um but yeah that's that's an incredible part where like you can turn your side hustles into incredible new things and I think that's a great thing to do I want to chat with you guys for anyone who is thinking about maybe employing influencer marketing again a show of hands how many of you guys have ever used uh employed an influencer marketing campaign in the past okay more than I thought amazing um do you mind what did you do uh we've done a few different things but just having relationships with some influencers to just share some of the content so we do some work with the ymca and using some influencers with targeted audiences that appeal to youth and they do immigrant services as well using them to post basically both programs on their instagram mostly it's mostly instagram I get them posting on and their facebook twitter not so much uh yeah and that's kind of basically cool so um your name cliff cliff so cliff uh did a campaign with the ymca uh to be able to post on instagram a lot of the different initiatives that you guys end up producing so that's amazing anyone else have another example I'd love to just hear like real life examples someone over there yeah um yeah we also just keep uh type relationships with various influencers we're more in the youtube area um specifically because our core audience is also a bit more tech savvy so working with tech influencers uh keeping great relationships with them great working on equations awesome cool thank you so tech influencers specifically on youtube on type focused accounts and yourself we paid bloggers in particular every you know that they had to take social followers following and we paid them to write articles for our site in an area that they were experts in and that they would also then promote to sort of create awareness of the new site that we have yeah so that's also another great way is getting people who are bloggers to create content for your own existing site and then as well as their linking and promoting your site through their own channels that also helps you from an SEO standpoint as well so um also you guys already have like the influencer marketing 101 for the rest of you guys check out a couple of things so one of the key lessons um and this is even I promise I did not queue this up the two like some of the primary influencer channels that we're seeing to create content we're seeing is instagram and youtube are the two primaries um snapchat for like very niche audiences especially if you're targeting like a generation z type of audience but those are the go-to destinations for discovery for advice if you're looking to you know learn how to cook or you want to be able to do something from a technical perspective you're probably turning to youtube you can probably learn a lot of things off of going to youtube you're probably going to instagram to drive a lot of inspiration for where you want to travel next what shows you want to see what the cool new restaurants are in the city those are a lot of really great things that you see on those primary channels and then what we're seeing is for facebook and twitter those are two of those other networks that are primarily used for amplification so for facebook for the most part um you're seeing this as people who you use to casually keep in touch with your acquaintances um you know wedding updates uh babies updates where you're traveling to things like that and loosely keeping in touch with people but that's usually not the primary place where you look for for information from a lot of your top different type of bloggers and then we're seeing on twitter uh twitter while there's a really active conversation it's much more of a conversational type of area versus an area that you're discovering and consuming long form pieces of content and so those are just some of the areas that we're seeing from social networks itself another big part of this is a complying with mandatory disclosures so there's the ftc in the us ad standards in canada the asa and advertising standards bureau in both australia and the uk and that's the part where you have to disclose if you're paying influencers and one of the crazy cases was um microsoft xbox had to settle with the fdc like tens of millions of dollars because they were paying creators to post um and didn't want them to specifically say that they were getting paid to post that's lying deceitful that's not cool because you're lying to consumers that's part of what we end up doing um in my role as chair of the ad standards influencer marketing committee is trying to do this in a great way and it doesn't have to be done in a in a weird way you can do this in a very natural way so if someone wants to be able to say like excited to be part of brand x um on their new campaign or thrilled to announce it i've been working with like x brand as a judge for their brand hashtag underscore like hashtag contest um there's a way in how you can do this versus just having like a big hashtag ad like right in front of there um you can do this in a much more natural way it's just about clearly communicating this so that anybody who's viewing it on the other side of it understands that this is a paid side of this for those of you guys who are paying your creators to be able to create content um one of the biggest common question that we typically get is how much do i charge how much do i pay how like how do i know if i'm actually paying the right amount am i lowballing or am i giving them way too much money and they're just going to take my money and run um here's some overall standards that we end up using um a good cpe so don't pay people based on their followers pay them based off of the engagements that they end up getting um in the whole world of fake followers and people creating various different quality of contents you want to be able to find people who are paying people for like actually creating really good content and rewarding the people who are creating really good content based on the quality and their engagements and so usually what you do is you'll take a lot of their different type of posts for the past call instagram they're past 30 different type of posts figure out what their average engagements are and then add those up average them and then be able to pay them uh approximately if you're getting a good price it's about less than a dollar if it's a great price it's less than 70 less than 70 cents and for an excellent one it's 50 cents and so using approximate mental math skills right now if you have say 100 000 followers and you have an engagement rate of say five percent you're averaging on average 5000 engagements uh if you're getting a great price you'll probably price them anywhere from 2500 to 5000 dollars per post which sounds crazy from like that side but remember they have a hundred thousand like a hundred dozen followers and they're actively getting engaged and they're driving a ton of traffic overall to your site and so that's the the approximation side of how much like a lot of these people are earning a lot of people are making us their full-time jobs now in terms of program metrics so other things to also track when you're running an influencer marketing campaign um the gold standard again is that cost per engagement but you also want to be able to track different things like what's their engagement rate like um is the engagement rate of that specific post that you posted about if that's completely like i'll give you an example we worked with a software company uh and they wanted to partner up with a bunch of like naturals type of foodies and the software company i wouldn't call as a naturals type of natural fit uh and we had we had like this this creator had an average engagement of about like 10 percent like she was like the main go-to person for like naturals and organics and stuff like that and this particular drink was like organic but it wasn't probably the brand itself wasn't very deemed as that and her engagement rate like after a day was like one percent we also ran like sentiment analyses and she had like such negative sentiment analysis on this so like people just hated her for working on with this particular brand and she came and like called up the the people who are managing this they're like bawling her eyes they're just crying she's like oh my gosh what's happening this is horrible my engagement it's down the brand's like starting to notice a couple of things a couple days later and we said okay she has a couple more posts going to be posted out there cancel those cut that like clearly not a great fit and that's something that you can start to track based on the engagement rates that you're already seeing if you're a full-time creator this is something you're going to be tracking on an ongoing basis but that entire side of like sentiment analysis and being able to track all these different type of metrics are going to be great signals for whether the brand and the creators are a good fit and a good match overall does that type of brand fit with the natural type of audience that people care about and so other type of metrics that are also really important on top of like video views you can track the click through through like geolocations link and bios you can do swipe ups on instagram there's a lot of other things you can end up measuring from that side so another big part of this is an increase in fake followers so there was a great new york times piece earlier on this year called the fake follower factory which detailed out the crazy dark world of like traditional celebrities or even like politicians just the number of fake followers like most politicians buy like a crazy amount of fake followers just because you don't want to be the only person at the meeting with like less than 50 000 followers than like what type of influence do you end up having so that people are buying fake followers which is crazy to be able to think you see some of these like link farms that are in mostly in china and they have like like thousands of phones up on a wall and they have like literary machines like pushing and clicking and punching in these buttons it's insane look up some videos it's bananas so you have to watch out for that and there's ways and how you can determine whether there's like fake followers or anything like that and that's primarily one don't pay people based on the follower count pay people based off of the engagements that they actually drive and the second part of this as well is there's a whole bunch of different technology that you can do to vet people one of the ones that I always like to plug is social blade because it's free you can go there put anybody's handle in there and be able to see their growth and if there's weird anomalies like a growth rate is usually like linear and if you see like randomly oh you just happen to double your audience and like gain 3000 followers in one day but the next day you lost like half of them like there's something fishy going around there and so there's ways and how you can start to detect this in a in a great way on a more positive note the one thing that's also about like about working with a lot of the different creators is give the influencers creative freedom and make sure to approve all posts before they go live the probably the smartest thing I learned when I worked on like the brand marketing side was trust your agency trust whoever you're working with because that clearly they have a job for a reason and if they're saying something and like if you're working with influencers they know what resonates with their audience the best and so give them the creative freedom give them like the sandbox that they have to play in but then also make sure you approve some of those posts before they go live so that's just one of those things where you still want to let them be able to have that creative freedom then also just like double check that worked before before it goes live because once it goes live the rest is history and you never know there's a crazy story of like Scott Disick who's like another instagram person I think he works with like the Kardashians or whatnot and he ended up like copy and pasting from like this PR agency is like please post this at 12th like like 9 p.m and like copy that entire caption posted that before it went live and that's like exactly what you're not supposed to be doing so what one of the ways in how we would do this is like approving content before it goes live is through a content approval tool so we do like a mock-up of like here's exactly what the image looks like here's the exact caption and then you end up saying okay like post this here's the posting date approve the post before it goes live and then scheduling that you can use technology like this or you can just like simply email this back and forth and tell people like hey here's the post here's the caption what does this look like make sure you post this before again it goes live another great way to be able to do this is having just a hashtag or a call to action so you see a lot of these different posts that go live and so you see like a ymca post that goes out but what's the do you want to start a discussion do you want to create a dialogue do you want to be able to drive a call to action do you want them to go to the main website do you want to have a discussion around if you've gone to the ymca before what did it mean to you these are ways in how you can start to extend that and a lot of the different influencers who have hundreds of thousands of followers can end up being able to curate and create a discussion and a community and drive a movement that you might want to be able to do and that's a really another great powerful way to really stretch those campaigns to the full extent another big portion of this as well is owning the rights and reposting this on your feed so having a discussion with those creators to be able to say if you're creating content can i have the rights to be able to one repost on our own feed but maybe repurpose this in a whole bunch of different ways um an example that i want to share with you guys is some work that we end up doing with arctic zone so the like lunchbox coolers that you end up having um so they've been working with us for the past four years i want to say um and we end up helping them a lot with their their feed um here's an example of what on the before side what happened so you usually have somebody who's like on your marketing team and they're like uh these are lunchboxes great we're going to put the lunchbox on a picnic table take a picture post it they like go to the cottage lunchbox take a picture post it and i wouldn't say like people aren't necessary naturally gravitating towards going to like a lunchbox instagram account is like oh that's a lunchbox oh the lunchbox is over here um it just wasn't really inspiring um which i'm assuming a lot of you guys work with people who think that it's going to be like engaging content um so we said hey let's take a pause on what your guys are doing there let's work with you guys on developing some actual creative talent with like some of the creators and maybe we want to turn this brand into meaning something much more which is this lunchbox allows you to take like your meal on the go and you can discover really cool things uh and so what's happened from there is that we've driven like three times the amount of engagement just by having natural stories having those creators tell those stories and linking directly back into something like Arctic Zone but they end up even repurposing a lot of their a lot of the content that we end up taking if you guys go to their website or see them in store um they've taken a lot of the content and actually use them across their websites across their in-store packaging um across the whole bunch of the different gambits so that was just really leveraging a lot more than taking your phone out and posting a picture of like the lunchbox on a picnic table so um in closing i want to just uh let's let you know i think uh influencer marketing is definitely like one of the representatives of revolutionizing marketing as we see fit the ways and how we think about creating content um and even distributing content has rapidly changed when it comes to the world of social media um that's just i think a crazy thing you see like a diy star having people who are absolutely screaming interface on the red carpet i think that's something that's pretty unique especially when it comes to influence marketing but social media as a whole but also by leveraging the power of open source to disrupt the traditional methods of creating and distributing content um if i think about when it was like call it 10 years ago uh working on coverable cosmetics we partnered up with like next top model and we had to go to a studio to shoot all the different content after the shoot we go to the colorizing department we have to cut it we have to do this and it like takes like a month in order to produce like a 30 second ad which is crazy and it's going to cost us like hundreds of thousands of dollars a lot of these creators are creating these type of videos for just a couple thousand dollars and then open sources networks are powerful but as you also saw with you know watch out slight fake followers or just watching out for metrics and like brand fits they're not without difficulties and complexities i imagine very similar to working with Drupal or any other type of open source type of networks itself so my main my main i guess leaving words are like embrace this community um share knowledge i think this is an incredible opportunity thank you guys for hell having me around here so be able to share knowledge stay in touch seek advice around this thanks for having me and if you guys want to follow me or my company you can check us out at hashtag paid and i'll take any questions so thank you guys okay questions so uh question is as far as um kind of like a standard operating procedure for approvals uh how do you how do you undertake that in regards to you know uh just even approving the polls like what kind of systematic way do that yeah so like you can use this like a sophisticated platform like like we're a tech company so like we built a techie type of platform for that but if you're not doing that it's as simple as like hey can you email me the photos and like what you want to post as a caption before it goes live and like just give me the post and like build it within like a contract um that hey here's the contract here's the schedule of like when i want content submitted take that content and then follow up with them and say hey if it's an example is we worked with Budweiser's like the non-alcoholic beer example yeah it's so one of our creators was posting about that and was like amazing non-alcoholic beer like i can take on our road trips they're like no don't endorse any drinking and road trips at all like say if they're always like but it's non-alcoholic it's like even still like ignore that stop doing that because the brand just didn't want to have any of that association what we do is we say hey no ads like now drinking and driving is all right no that's definitely not cool would probably violate a lot of like ad standards like issues around that but it's just saying like okay like a week before we end up posting like here's the post date that we want you to post on give us the content a week three days whatever might be beforehand so that we can review it and my thought was kind of in regards just the accountability at peace right is ensuring that the who's who's accountable for if things go sideways yeah so a post like that goes out you know how that's tracked yeah um so the question was around accountability so say something goes wrong they post let's say the wrong caption they don't use hashtag ad or any like it's hashtag ad hashtag like sponsored you can use hashtag paid you can also use other things like hashtag brain underscore like ambassador but if you say there's a mix up around that it's really kind of on the brand side or the agency who's helping to manage a lot of that in order to double check with them now if the person's like to straight up not delivering then you cut them you say like hey like I'm we have to work out a new deal like either you fix this and make do it like a make good or you are cut from all of the future workings with us for something like the if like FTC for example if they're going after them for not necessarily disclosing it's actually every single person involved is like up for it which is I think how they're trying to enforce everybody using this is like they may go after the brand they may go after the agencies they may go after the influencers but for the sometimes like if it's like a 16 year old kid who's like making videos out of his mom's basement probably doesn't have a lot of money to go after so they're probably going after the big brands aka microsoft so there's there's those types of nuances around that but it's definitely yeah tread carefully but there's a huge amount of power associated with that so you mentioned you have to be wary of accounts that maybe have fake followers just there's similar problems with fake engagements and is there ways to kind of so the question was there's fake followers but aren't there also fake engagements and yeah absolutely there's fake engagements and you have a bunch of people who are talking about like buying likes on their sponsored content and that's exactly why like I'll even point again to something like a social blade which is a free tool you can see all the average engagements on a per day basis and very rarely will somebody buy like the same amount of like approximate engagements for every single post they do and so you'll see typically anomalies and they'll see some of those posts will gain a crazy amount some of them won't those are like very surface level like high level metrics but then if you have any of the more sophisticated technology platforms they'll go into like of all those people who liked it let's check all their accounts are they legit accounts do they follow other people do they have followers themselves are they actually posting content or they just random click farms that are going around that so there's there are ways in order to do this you can do it manually I think it's a lot easier just to do this with technology to get yourself an aggregated like dataset cool you mentioned like with respect to display ads and traditional television and radio marketing that like we're all getting kind of seen that and we're turning on our ad blockers and ignoring it how do we like at US social influence your marketing people how do you avoid that same scenario in the world of social influence in life yeah so this side of like okay you're tired of display you're tired of radio when are you going to get tired of social media advertising hopefully not soon but the part that we end up trying to advocate and at least part of the reason why we do a lot of work with a lot of the other groups that are in our space is to make sure that we create good standards I think people naturally get really sick and tired of like if you think about the late 90s of people hated display like digital ads because it was usually like a pop-up banner that happened like behind your window and started screaming random things but like buy this buy that and people hated that what you do you create standards around this you try to create overall enforcements and I think marketing has evolved to be more than just like really terrible experiences but for something like social media it's about embedding the right type of creators with the right type of brands themselves and be able to craft a story that actually makes sense because if we think about these these are the type of content creators that we've chosen to specifically allow into our lives we get cluttered with so many different type of messages every single day and it's a matter of we have to choose the creators that one they have to use their own proper editorial control to determine are they like are they producing too much sponsored content if they're producing too much sponsored content they're going to lose followers and they're going to lose subscribers and so they have to be a good judge but also the brands that end up working with them also be a good judge to determine is this the right type of group and you're seeing there's good actors and those bad actors and the whole hope around evolving this entire ecosystem is with a lot of the different bad actors who are just taking a lot of money and doing that they're losing followers they're dropping off brands are stopped working with them because they're not performing as well and so that's going to eventually persist and hopefully evolve the entire ecosystem itself. A lot of the examples of influencer marketing seem to be with you know B2C brands and super products and things like that is there is there any recommendations you have for maybe B2B businesses using influencer marketers or a place for that or is it just maybe not yeah yeah so B2C a lot of those examples were B2C but there's also what about B2B one of the examples that I'll share is we worked with RBCs like their B2B businesses for like business loans and so how can you find people who are small business owners or say business owners themselves and be able to craft their stories and tell them in that certain way I think the part that we have to realize is while yes we are I guess here during the day so we're technically businesses you guys are also consumers you guys are also people and so talking to people in that natural type of way I think it's a great way if you think about like some of my favorite podcasts they're mostly advertising MailChimp or they're advertising like other things like that so much that I wanted to get like the serial mail kimp type of sweater that they end up having if anyone was a serial washer there's a ton of different opportunities I think from a B2B play so still integrate advertising in a smart way I think B2B you just have to be a bit more clever in terms of how you end up doing an activation and finding out who's the natural natural fit around that you see Squarespace you see Wix embracing this when it comes to a lot of social media influencers there's nothing stopping a lot of other tech companies or other B2B services from doing the same cool awesome well I think that's pretty close to time so again do you want to do your influencer selfie shot of the crowd we I'm definitely not as popular as Laura DIY we do always do a group shot so I'm hoping that we can keep everybody in the room and get everybody from outside to come in and we can all do a group shot sounds good let's do that awesome does anybody have any other follow-up questions before we do that cool sweet thank you guys really appreciate it we're gonna try and get everybody in the shot Zach I might need you to maybe take the picture if that's cool with you he's not listening can you maybe take the picture of like we have a camera but can you take it from the stage we'll get everybody to kind of pile in now we can get a good group shot of us does that work everybody if you want to try and gather towards the middle maybe I guess I also might have