 Hey, everybody. Happy New Year. Welcome to 2020, the first PR Tech Wednesdays of the year. I am joined by my old friend, Jay Baer. Eric, how are you? Happy New Year. Hello, everybody out there. Nice to be here on the big Wednesday live chat. You know, I was looking for, there's a photo that I had, I couldn't find it of you and me on a WorldCom panel in Tennessee where we met 20 years ago. Yes, that was my first WorldCom event. Yeah, that was a long time ago. Yep. I remember having barbecue afterwards in the park. Yes, indeed. I miss those days. A lot has happened since then. That seems like about 50 years ago. Damn, a lot has happened. So, you know, you started in PR, but you don't call yourself or you don't call what you do PR anymore. Yeah. So what changed? PR or you? Well, I think both, you know, anybody who has been in PR longer than two years would, I think, agree that that the role of public relations has changed in reaction to or in lockstep with the change in how people worldwide get information, right? I mean, I still get a daily newspaper to a day, in fact. But that is definitely the exception that proves the role. And there are, of course, fewer journalists in the whole notion of traditional media versus digital media and influencers. It's just all quite a bit different. So I got out of kind of traditional public relations, if you will, fairly early in my career. And I was fortunate enough, I guess, to get involved in digital very, very early in 1993, really, before any of this existed. And so over time, sort of became more and more digitally focused in. And so now I primarily work on digital marketing strategy and customer experience strategy. But certainly some of what my team and I offer to our corporate clients touches on the realm of public relations. And we certainly have lots of relationships in the public relations technology industry and whether everybody chooses to call it that anymore or not. So most of the research I've done shows that by the way, everybody, this is our new mascot. This is Ace. So that's the best question today wins the dog. It's an amazing new promotion that we're doing. No, you don't win the dog. The dog is all mine. OK. So OK. So look, you know, so much of what we do in PR these days happens in digital environments. Yet most firms today are still either media relations or digital marketing agencies first, one or the other. Yeah. So so if you're smaller and you can't afford to hire two agencies, is it better to hire a PR agency that can do online marketing or an online marketing agency that can do PR? Well, I mean, I guess I would argue that the remit of online marketing is typically broader today because from a tactical standpoint, that could include things like website, email, messaging, live chat, social content, a bunch of other things, digital analytics, and while there are certainly several many great what we might consider to be communications or PR firms who can do some or all of that work. Generally, your digitally focused organizations are going to have a broader set of services. So I think if you're looking for an end to end solution, somebody like, OK, do all the digital, do all them computer things for me, then probably a digital agency would be the best bet. Now, my I don't know that it works as well the other way around, right? So so let me let me put it to you this way. If you accept the premise that public relations is about influencing publics, right, it's about changing perception and therefore incentivizing behavior change that trails belief change. There are not very many digital firms that are good at that. Now, they may say they are, but they're typically not. So I guess the cleaner way to say this, Eric, would be you probably should have one of both. Like I like, you know, PR firms can be very good at digital. They're just not very good at all digital in my estimation. And digital firms can be kind of good at PR, but they're usually not. So, you know, your your definition of PR is spot on. You know, from from an insider's perspective, sure, from an intellectual insider's perspective. But the truth is, most people, particularly early stage startups and even, you know, VC funded startups are often drawn to PR by the promise of third party endorsements, namely media coverage. Yeah. And that, of course, you know, extends into social media influencers as well. That's right. But but if if what I want is media coverage, do I go to a PR firm? And then what if what I want is online communications, then do I go to a digital marketing firm? Is that how I should think about it? Yeah, I think I think if you kind of go back to the to sort of the Peso model, right of paid, earned, shared and owned, if what you're looking for is truly earned media, therefore, some sort of third party is is bestowing credibility upon you, then then usually what most executives want, that comes from quote unquote, traditional or quasi traditional media. And I find that that public relations practitioners and organizations are usually a better bet on that. Because again, it's still a relationship business, right? There is no there is no end game that or end run, I should say around relationship. So if you if you're talking about ink, right in the in the classic sense, then that I think PR is still the place to go. If you're looking for shared media or or more straight up kind of what we've now considered to be in some cases influencer marketing, then I think maybe you you could look at it a little bit differently. Of course, depending on what you're trying to accomplish. I mean, that's the problem I have with influencer marketing. It's a discipline. People look at it from a campaign standpoint, right? They look at it from a marketing standpoint, not from a public relations standpoint. By my way of thinking and we do a fair amount of B2B influencer marketing that convinced to convert by my way of thinking influencer marketing should be the kind of always on relationships that that really started with public relations. But but in unfortunately what they typically are is transactional relationships today. And I think that's misguided. I see Debbie freeze from top rank marketing. Is listening to us. And, you know, she was with Borrell's loose for 14 years before she joined top rank. Totally top rank, you know, used to be billed as an SEO firm. But now they present themselves more as influencer marketing more and more as content marketers. And so it seems like SEO has sort of evolved into content marketing. But a lot of times smaller organizations that don't have the budget maybe to hire an agency to handle their pay per click and their SEO or and their content marketing will go one way or the other. Any thoughts on how to choose? I mean, is it better to hire a PPC firm that can also do natural search optimization organic search optimization? Or is it better to hire an organic search optimization firm that can also do your pay per click? Well, look, I mean, if you can just have one. Yeah. I think increasingly, you know, paid searches is a is a media buy, right? And so organic search is not organic search is content marketing in every way, shape and form. And consequently, even though we think of those as kind of two sides of the same coin, we say it all the time in the same sentence. Organic search. And even for that matter, Eric organic and paid social. But but paid social and paid search is a media buy, right? With with rich analytics and a lot of bid management and and you know, multi part ad creation and dynamic content insertion and all the things that that happen with with AI and machine learning to optimize your ad campaigns, whereas organic search and organic social is not that at all. At least it's not very much that. So I think if you if you are looking to to accomplish your business objectives by spending money, then you should work with a company that really focuses on spending money wisely and effectively. If you're looking to accomplish your business objectives by creating content, then you should work with a company that really focuses on spending money wisely and effectively. If you're looking to accomplish your business objectives by creating content, which is another way of spending money, I understand that. But but not so much an ad, then you should focus on resources that really do that well now that of course there are companies that do both sides well, but but you know this idea that paid and organic are very close together is really not true. You know, you you have sort of grown two businesses in parallel, I think more, but the two that I'm aware of, obviously is the convincing convert media empire that you built with these, you know, shows that are huge now. And you also do strategic consulting. What have you learned about how media appetites have changed in the length of time that you've been producing all these all these trade oriented programs. I mean, we're 11 years into it at Convince and Convert started off is just me writing. It's actually not dissimilar from from least journey at top rank, speaking of Debbie but but you know started off as just me writing blog posts four times a week and then became bigger and bigger and a lot more editors and writers and contributors and I would say the biggest change that I would identify instantaneously is that, you know, the blog was the engine of everything that we did. And, and there was a real community around that blog and now that's not really the way most of the internet works. And so now, while the blog is still important and we publish new content every week, we focus on other forms of what would consider to be thought leadership I guess, whether it's our network of podcasts or video series or long form reports or research studies. The modalities that work are different now than they were a decade ago and that I guess shouldn't be a surprise but it has been definitely important every quarter and certainly every year for my team and I to say okay. How do our audience which are primarily marketing professionals with an emphasis in digital. How do they want to educate themselves and what can we give them to satiate that desire. When you think about you know the scale between long form and short form content. Are there any generalizations you can draw or any lessons learned from what works where Well, I think one of the, we preach this all the time that that that really is two sides of the same coin right that if you want to have good short form content. The best way to do that is to start with long form content right this atomization of content which was a term pioneered when he was at shift communications still rings true. You know, creating something that has some real intellectual value to it whether it's a report or study or research and top rank does that a lot with interviewing influencers for for trend pieces etc. We take that long form piece and then break it up into a panoply of short pieces that then lead back to the longer piece and encourage a download and lead Jen and then lead nurture etc, especially on the B2B side I think that is by far the best approach that the the biggest challenge that we see today Eric with our clients and to some degree ourselves is this random acts of content right that we see everywhere both in social media and in other forms of digital communication. When when you know people are just sort of well I guess I'm going to post something because I feel like something happened that is worth mentioning. And you're never going to build an audience for that right I imagine you turn on discover channel and like every night it's like a random show that's only going to show up once. You know you would never have an audience or imagine you know you you you subscribe to a magazine like sports illustrated, but one week it is about sports and the next week it's about like jewelry making. You know you'd be like wow this is the weirdest magazine ever I'm not sure I want to stick this out. And a lot of people are actually doing that in social and digital content today it's it is truly random acts of content. And so we are big believers in more episodic style communication. And so do you steer your clients away from talking about sort of off topic things on their social channels that might allow them to connect with audiences. Yeah, general interest stuff. No, no issues with off topic, especially in this is going to sound crazy if it's if it's off topic. That is part of an episodic right so one of the people who is really really good at this is Pat Flynn from smart passive income and the other products that he has in the market. His new book super fans goes into great detail on this point it's really really well done my estimation. This idea of giving your fans a peek behind the curtain. And so one of the things that that I'm actually trying to do a better job of in my own content, especially in my new podcast which is called standing ovation it's for professional speakers is to is to give the audience more of an opportunity to kind of get a sense for what's happening behind the scenes to interact with me and our guests in the real world those kind of things. It is very effective, but I prefer to do that. That kind of hey here's my real life as part of a regularly scheduled program as opposed to a random. Hey, here's me at Whole Foods. I think I have a good guest for you for that great standing ovation killer speaker, who teaches speaking. My name is Matt Church. Yeah, I don't know Matt but I know of Matt that'd be great thanks. Yeah he's a friend I'm happy to make the introduction. Thank you. So now you advise coins and marketing strategy, but you call yourselves counselors rather than an agency. What's the difference. We don't do a lot of execution work at convincing convert although we are doing a little bit more than ever. For example we talked earlier about public relations we talked about paid search we talked about organic search, you know, all of those require a significant amount of day to day week to week month to month. You know, paying attention and twiddling dials. We're just not set up like that I mean we don't have a very large team of people whose job it is to execute tactical campaigns. We have an all senior team that is really responsible for providing strategic plans to clients and so we like to say that we write a lot of recipes. We don't cook for many meals but that's a very conscious business decision on my part. I have done the other side of it I've built full service agencies from scratch and for a number of reasons decided to not do that again. And that was off Madison right. So my firm, I had a couple of firms before that but yeah off Madison was the firm that purchased my firm. And so I became part of their ecosystem and that was G's way back in 2005, I think. And they're and they're Arizona right which is why many of the folks on your team are Arizona based. Yeah we still have one, two, three, three or four people on our team in Arizona. Now you also say that convince and convert which is one of your businesses focuses on strategy and operations rather than tactics and execution. But aren't operations made up of tactics and execution? For sure yeah so exactly but what we do is we provide strategic plans and operations plans. So we do a lot of playbook development for clients. So we'll tell you all right what you need to do is this, this, this and this like exactly. We just won't do it for them. So so it's a level of granular council which we which we call operations council that a lot of strategy firms won't do. But we don't want to say hey give me you know give us your passwords and we'll log in and create your Google ads like that's just not a thing that we want to offer to the market. You know one hot area now and there was a lot of discussion about it at DreamWorks this year is this area of revenue operations. And if you haven't heard about it if you're listening it doesn't have to do with accounting or anything like that. It's basically about taking the ops people that support sales the ops people that support marketing and the ops people that support customer success and bringing them together. So you have one sort of ops team to align all those three departments who may be using disparate software and you want to aggregate all the data together so you can follow what's happening from from lead to revenue. I was going somewhere with that. I mean it's amazing how much people are how much attention people are actually paying to final stages and nurture and and an attribution and I've had so many phone calls in the last six months on operations I remember attribution. Thanks for covering me. Thanks for covering me. So hey, would you guys would you guys ever get into the operational side of setting up workflows or sequences inside of maybe like you know an outbound sequencing tool like outbound or maybe get involved with CRM infrastructure development. Not so much doing the work but setting up the systems because that's what you're doing right and you get it off saying this is the sequence of events and then they I guess have to map it into their software. Would you ever consider actually mapping it out for them on the software side in the software to the login software typically not we do a lot of that a lot of funnel activation and nurture sequence design. We do a lot of higher ed work now and there's lots of nurtures and touches and so we design a lot of those sequences. And so we'll say okay email three says this does this and then after two more days email for says this does this but generally speaking we wouldn't log in and actually build that email we just don't have the. We're just not staffed to do that kind of work and and ultimately we feel like unless you're set up to do that work on behalf of the client over the long haul by not forcing the client to do it in some ways you're actually doing them a disservice we don't want them to. To have to rely on us because all it's going to do is slow them down eventually. So I'm reading this book now blitz scaling by read Hoffman with. Chris yay was a New York Times writer. It's a fantastic book yeah I've heard that I haven't read it yet but I've heard great things about it. Really a deep book and in his book read Hoffman quotes Greylock venture capitalist Josh Elman who said quote the best growth teams identify the core insights that get users from curious to activated habitual users. Which is squarely what you're doing right now. So what does it take to get someone from curious to a habitually activated user. Well, a couple things one and the one that gets overlooked so often is understanding what questions have to be successfully answered in the mind of the curious to become habitual. What I find I do a lot of startup advising and investing as as you do Eric is is a lot of early stage companies and even in even established companies who have a new product or service. They feel like well if somebody is curious right if they if they do a demo or or trial or or you know taste that piece of sausage on offer at Sam's Club, then instantly and and inexorably they will become a habitual user because geez you know they sat into the demo. It's like yeah but just because you you tried something doesn't mean you're ready to use it in your day to day existence and so there's a big psychological chasm between trial and habit and and most organizations don't spend enough time thinking about what those psychological. Needs are and saying how can we overcome those objections even if they're not objections or satiate those needs. In the mind of the potential customers so we do a lot of work along those lines that convinced to convert where we do a lot of rich segmentation studies of clients and prospective clients. And a lot of what we call the five by five by five process where we take your your five personas and your five kind of classic funnel stages and then determine what are the five questions that must be successfully answered for a prospect to go down one level in the funnel and so we try to almost reverse engineer it to say. Alright if somebody is going to become a habitual user what what what they what must they say yes to in their head to be habitual before they get there what must they say yes to before they get there what must they say yes to yes to. And then essentially create content that fulfills all those needs all the way down that kind of shoots and ladders approach so I think that's the biggest problem is that people think that trial equals habit and or you can just say well the ratio of people who who try something who become habitual is four percent therefore our work here is done. And that in the case is there some sort of logical order to the questions. Generally speaking yes they're going to go from the generic to the specific right they're going to go from from from what can this product or service do for me at the top end and then towards the bottom it's okay well what if I believe you're the right solution. What if something happens like what's your service contract or what's your cancellation clause right so there's this sort of. Alright what do you do what do you do versus competitors is this right for me which version of your thing is perfect for me OK now I believe you and now what happens if it all goes to shit like that's sort of the general approach that we see. You know it's funny a lot of that type of work is being done now in this category emerging category called sales enablement. And there are actually these digital asset management tools that are being developed for sales departments. Where you know you put the sales decks in there you put the pitch decks in there you put the case studies in there and then you can actually see which one of those got used and then which one led to successful. Absolutely deals. Yeah we have a lot of a lot of partners in that space like we do a lot of work with Uber flip which is a great content experience platform. There's a lot of that kind of work and also co schedule is one of our partners and they have a very cool digital asset manager package which is really inexpensive and it's growing really quickly because a lot of your dams are really expensive and very. Feature laden it's kind of like you know a nightmare version of Excel where it's like a million things to click on but you're going to use 10% and they've really stripped it down which I think is a smart way to go to market. All right let's have kind of a difficult conversation. Okay I'm ready. We're the guys to do it. We've been around long enough to have this conversation with grown ups. We can do this. All right. All right. So on your website you use being fast fair and easy to work with as a differentiator. Why are so many agencies slow unfair and difficult to work with. Well I guess first we should accept that the premise is true. I believe it is true. I wouldn't have written that copy and I did write that copy. I guess fair is probably the one there that that is probably the least universally true. I guess I shouldn't suggest that that other agencies are not fair although I have certainly seen that from time to time. From a speed perspective. My observation having worked with lots of agencies and been a part of a lot of agencies is they're just typically not tuned. They're just not tuned operationally for speed to be a prime directive right there's there's lots of anecdotes out there of. Of people you know sending an email or contact us form to an agency and it takes them a week to get back then. In all the perspective clients got an acute need it happens all the time and partially it's because the way agencies are set up. In that everybody there has lots and lots of balls in the air and they're working on lots of different things and so prioritization can be difficult so we have tried to take that away. And we really are super responsive when I'm not in an airplane we typically respond on my side within 60 minutes and. All of our clients actually have access to a special email address which is now at convince a convert calm, which goes to every person in the company. It's like a distribution list so our clients know that if they need something immediately they don't have to go to the regular account manager they can send it to now at and it goes to everybody on the team. Whoever is the most appropriate will jump on it and they'll hear back in a minute two minutes, like anything. When you think about about the fair distinction. If you were to apply that across say a portfolio of clients starting at the bottom from an early stage company a startup maybe pre funded, all the way up to maybe a monopoly or an institution of some kind. So that's really in a competitive environment. Do you think that they tend to gravitate to agencies that tend to be their fair or less fair based on the size that they're at. Do people at the bottom get taken advantage of more. Oh, I mean that's probably true. I don't think of it that way very often but yeah that's that. Yeah, I mean, logic would dictate that that's the scenario but when I think about fairness. You know we mentioned this earlier one of the things that I think about from from the perspective of commit to convert versus other professional services firms is sort of like what I was not into earlier like we don't want to hold you hostage like we don't want to give you solutions or circumstances that that mandate or or even significantly handicap you in so far is that you really need to keep working with us like we don't want to set up a scenario for our clients where the switching cost is so high. I'll give an example what once our initial strategic planning work is done, every client we have and every client we've ever had is on a 30 day contract. My role is look if you don't want to if you no longer find value in working with my team and I don't pay us anymore. Like we don't do annual contracts we don't do any of that like it's like look if it's not working it's not working. And that's not the way a lot of the agency world thinks about how they how they do things. Now you work with companies and agencies of 25 employees and up typically at least that's what it says on your website is that is that true. Yeah, that's true. Although, you know, as a as a matter of course at this juncture, you know, generally speaking we're working with with organizations that are in the, you know, 250 million dollar a year and up range and many of our clients now are Fortune 50 clients. We, I think where we work best now is is doing specific things for very large companies, we're not big enough nor we want to do, you know, huge enterprise things for huge enterprise companies we, we, although we sometimes say, sort of jokingly that we're McKinsey but fun, we don't have the, we don't have the bandwidth or the personnel to do McKinsey style projects where we're going to go out and, you know, figure out how to do your insurance billing globally for the next seven years. You know, we can't operate on that big of a canvas, but but I think our best projects are are very specific acute marketing or customer experience oriented needs for for big companies who understand the value of solving those problems. So so that's where your focus now, but I'm fortunate enough to have you on this call with me right now. So for the purposes of this webinar, yes, if I was at an early stage startup, and I needed help with a go to market strategy and a go to media strategy. What questions would you ask me? Well, we'd ask you first and foremost. Let's role play it ask. Yeah, so we'd say we're doing this I'm at the Euro stage startup I came to you. Yeah, what do I do? It's funny to say that we just had a client kickoff today we're not an early stage startup but but definitely more of an entrepreneurial venture and so the things that we want to know are how do you actually make money right so we need to have a really deep understanding of the path to revenue and and all the current stages to get somebody there. We'll want to look at as much information as you currently have about your target audiences and how they differ. And frankly Eric this won't come as a surprise. I think that's the place that most early stage startups have a huge hole, because all of their quote unquote insights about their audiences is purely anecdotal, or based in intuition. And so what I always want to do in that kind of circumstance we're working with startups is to say, man, what we really need here is some legitimate audience research now sometimes they don't, they can't fund it or don't want to fund it or whatever the circumstances are but that's oftentimes what they need, because they're just, you know, somebody sat in a conference room with pizza and said oh here's what our customers want, based on nothing based on the gut feel of the founder, which is not a super great way to run most businesses. And then we also do a real deep scan on all anything that's happening already so you know of course all the different analytics in all the different places will look at current media coverage social listening, you know, web analytics, email analytics, social analytics, all the different things and then we'll do a lot of interviews of company personnel so we do a lot of stakeholder interviews inside the organization, and then especially, especially, especially for early stage companies will do a lot of customer and prospective customer interviews as well, because we want to hear it from their side. It's fascinating when when you ask the marketing director of an early stage company what the company stands for, where their position to the market, what prospective customers would find value in and then you ask a customer the same questions. Sometimes you get very different answers and that in and of itself can be very telling and frankly very useful for the company. Any generalizations with respect to early stage companies and the peso model are some media formats, a better fit. Do you find like when they start should they just be sharing or should they go great straight to paid I mean you look at like Russell, you know the quick funnel guy. And he's out there promoting paid for people who are just starting out. And then some people would say on now don't do paid until you have a product market fit you know start with shared. Yeah, are there any generalizations you could draw about which media channel works best for a company based on their stage in development. That's a good question I don't know that I could that I could classify that by stage I might. I might make some I might think about that by company type and what and what they're selling and also and also path to purchase right this is where this is where price and value of product and service really comes into play like I was on a client call today and they're they're in the medical world and they were bemoaning the fact that they had spent some time and effort in paid social and hadn't seen a return to which I said well okay but given what it is that you sell. Like is there any likelihood on the planet that somebody is going to see a Facebook ad for that and be like yeah put me in coach like it's it just not how people make decisions now as as an assisted conversion right as was paid social as another. Another touch point that helps your sales and marketing and direct mail and everything else work better for sure, but but I think sometimes people don't understand that it really is a marketing mix right so I actually take a little bit of issue with the question. It's it's not about paid versus owned or earned versus shared. It's about what are the relative percentages of each because the answer is, you need all of them eventually. Right. Hey, I've just been sort of playing with a little model here. Let me see if I can put it on the screen. And I'd like to talk it through with you. I just did it up. Can you screen share on there. Yeah, I'm gonna I'm gonna give it a try. Let's see if I can hear. I like this tool. I haven't used this one. I really like it. Okay, that's not it. I'm just trying to figure out how to change it. Thanks. My buddy Bob Cooney, who is a virtual reality advisor uses it for a weekly conference call that weekly webinar that he does hunt seems like it's, it's bugging out on me. I don't know if I'm going to be able to do it now. I know he picked it because he wanted to be able to do live video and presentations. I don't think I'm going to be able to get it up. Hold on. Let me just try. I don't want to take it down. But now, okay, share your screen and then it's not doesn't seem to be working. Oh, well, let me just look at it here. So, so I sort of broke it down. I broke down the different stages of a company or even an individual's entrepreneurial consulting this whatever self published author could be anything to these stages, you know, you're sort of in the startup phase. And when you're in the startup phase, you know, it's all about working capital. It's all about sales and pitch decks. It's about outbound cell sequences. And it's about an MVP, you know, a minimum viable product. And, you know, once that's under wraps, then you're looking for a product market fit, as you were just saying, you know, do I really have something that the market wants? What does the market want? What do I think they want? How do I sort of close the gap there? And so I said, you know, you go from startup to the sort of change up mode or as others have called it the pivot mode. And, you know, if you make it through there, then you try to scale up. And that's growth. That's the growth mode. And at that point, you're into conversion optimization. And you got a customer success team to, you know, circumvent churn. And maybe you're even doing some, you know, CXPR customer experience, public relations. And then of course, if you go past there to the next stage, you become a grown up, and you're into profitability. And at that point, you're, you know, you're looking at data science, you're looking at, you know, aligning sales marketing customer service. And you're looking at internal communications to make sure people are happy, your employees are happy. So startup, change up, scale up, grown up. If you think about those four stages, I would I'm trying to get to a sort of hierarchy of strategic communications needs based on those four stages. So are there any generalizations you could say from a strategic communications standpoint of like what you need from a stratcom standpoint at the startup phase versus the change up, scale up, grown up phase? Maybe I guess I haven't, I haven't thought about that exact question in a while. So this is real time consulting, which is the worst kind of consulting to do. But I think you said in the last one, the grown up phase, I think you said internal comms. And, and by my way of thinking, I would almost, I would almost go with concentric circles inside out that when you think about strategic communications, the first thing you need to do is to make sure that everybody who who carries your business card is totally aligned to the mission, the values, the storytelling of the organization. And then the next concentric circle is your early stage customers. And the next customer is the next stage of customers and then eventually the circle gets bigger. So, so instead of a kind of a stair step model or a ladder or quadrant that you had thought of, I almost might think of a, of a, of a target, right, where, where you, where you get communications right to the people who are closest to the company first. And then as the company expands to communications alignment can expand as well so almost like a ripples and a pond metaphor if that makes sense. Again, that's off the top of my head so that could be ridiculous. That's cool. I like that. Hey, for early stage companies and pre VC funded startups, when they're sort of shopping for help. Yeah. And let's say they want third party endorsements, media relations and Influencer relations. Yeah. And they're talking to agencies and they're talking to soul practitioners and big agencies, small agencies boutiques mid sized large. Are there any red flags you think they should be looking for when they're evaluating PR agencies to hire. Well look this is the this is a story as old as as newspapers like I don't think you ever want to be somebody smallest client. Because you're not going to get their best people, it's just, you know, it's real truth right I mean that's the way the agency business works and, and when agencies lose clients. It's usually for two reasons right, either they believe that another big firm can provide better more creative solutions, or the client believes that they're getting the C team within the agency and they're sick of getting the C team right and so if I'm a small company and I, as you know, I'm invested in probably 30 small tech startups so I get this question all that time. You don't want to be the small fish in the big pond, especially as an early stage company because you're just not going to get the best and brightest of that agency and So I always want to write size, the company to the professional services being provided. Beyond the size of the company and the the are there any sort of, you know, red flags that when you're hearing the pitch yeah looking for yeah for sure I I'm a little. So a lot of tech companies only want to work with tech PR firms or they only want to work with somebody who does SAS because they're SAS or whatever the circumstances are and and I totally understand that and I don't think it's a bad idea. But what the question I would always ask and I would ask it this way is, we are a B2B SAS company. It appears as though many of your clients are also B2B SAS companies. What processes do you use inside your agency to ensure that the recommendations that you provide are specifically oriented to the needs of my company. Because what you don't want is is an agency that's like well this is our B2B SAS playbook, and it's the same playbook that we use for every single company regardless of what they do. But you just don't want that kind of paint by numbers approach and I think you can tell a lot about an agency by how they answer that one question. If if you were to prioritize the the different factors on which one might rank an agency. What would be more important sector experience relationships with media in that sector, or experience with companies at that stage in their corporate development. That's an interesting query. I think I would, well I would opt for door number four which is demonstrated results would be and and and independent testimonials would be really what I would look for but given the three that you gave me I think sector experience would be number one. Number two would would be sort of companies like mine and and in relationships. I would put that third only because it's very, very difficult to verify that every agency is going to say that they have relationships but how you can't really put that to the tests very easily. So I wouldn't put a ton of stock in that. What about average length of the agencies retain a relationship. You think that's a good metric. It's a good question. I think it's certainly worth asking about as as a data point for sure. I mean to some degree. It can be a false positive because of how they choose to structure their own contracts and and certainly for agencies that focus on early stage companies. I'm not certain it's a great success metric only because ultimately look if if you're if you're the type of PR firm or communication shop or really any professional services could be a counting firm that specializes in in early stage growth companies, and you do your job that company is going to grow and eventually they're going to outgrow you that's just the way it works and so you know at some level I could argue the opposite right like if they've got short relationships because they're successful growing the companies fast enough that they then you know get to the point where they need somebody bigger. Maybe so in the so like the old the old the old debate Eric where people say well you know how important is time on the website. Well one hand you say you know it's great because people are spending a lot of time on another hand is maybe they can't find it so they're looking around right so you know you don't know. Yeah boy with all this data out there you know reading the tea leaves is becoming tougher and tougher and I think we are surrounded by data. It's becoming easier and easier to pull the wrong conclusions from data. So in this book again that I mentioned earlier with scaling. He talks about the different stages of development. And here's his hierarchy family, tribe, village, city, state and nation. That's the trajectory. When you think about those different monikers in a hierarchy to define a client and in their development arc. Are there any any sort of broad ideas that come to mind of who needs what from a strategic communication standpoint like does the family and the tribe need something completely different from the village in the city or the state in the nation. If you if you assume that that family are sort of employees and tribe are kind of early stage customers or advocates on behalf of the organization and maybe village our business partners or other disproportionate stakeholders absolutely right I mean I think you have to think of that as a segmented marketing communications approach that that's why internal comms is different from external comms that's why partner marketing exists as a discipline. So all of those are true. You know once you get to sort of large scale status I think those differences become, at least to the external audiences less important. But yeah, I mean, and I'll tell you, we've written a lot of books about this, like one of the biggest mistakes we see marketers make is focusing so much on external audiences and not enough on internal audiences right it like, you know, I've said this a million times like if your employees aren't your biggest advocates, you got to start there, like, why are you worrying about, you know, creating an influencer marketing program if your employees aren't bought in. You really have to, you have to start with family first. Let's talk for a moment about the different media outlets that you have at convincing convert. Yeah, let's talk about social pros. So social pros has been around for how long now. January 2012 was our first episode of that podcast. Yesterday recorded episode 409 I think. Okay, and so what from an advertisers perspective. Who does that show help me reach as an advertiser. Enterprise social media managers and digital marketers in medium sized and in large companies worldwide with an emphasis in North America. Something like 75% of the social pros in the audience according to our recent survey have purchasing authority for for SAS software so if you're a more tech organization who's trying to reach people who do digital and social it's a it's a good place to to be. And, and, and how does it work like if I want to advertise on the show how do I. So, you know, generally speaking, because we have a lot of a lot of thought leadership in in content assets that convinced to convert it's pretty rare that somebody would come to us and say I just want to be part of social pros usually. There's a number of things that we would do with them a convinced to convert which might include sponsorship of the podcast it might include. sponsorship of our email products that might include a webinar or a webinar videos or reports or blogs so you know usually 95% of the time. It's a real cross section of things. So, so that like any other form of marketing or advertising, you know, sort of doing one thing a handful of times typically doesn't work that well. So usually when we layer different components into a program it works much better but but for social pros or really all of our podcasts it's pretty easy. We always do host reads. So, in the show, the beginning of the show sponsors mentioned early in the show I do a library and I write them all myself I do among myself and acknowledge the sponsor and talk about why I like the sponsor and how we use them it convinced to convert for our clients and then we mentioned them again at the end and then their reference on the website and all that kind of stuff but that's it's pretty pretty typical. And as an ad in a podcast forever, or do you dynamically shift them out. The way we do it for now is it is forever. So it actually for sponsors who were with us in the early days they've got a tremendous amount of off book value as the show continues to succeed. After all these years is of course technology to dynamically insert the ads ex post facto we we have not utilized that technology yet. It convinced to convert but it's certainly something we're thinking about for this year. If you were to look at the podcast part of your business standalone, not in not in in, you know, in a package of things that you sell to advertisers is would it be profitable just by itself. Oh, sure. Yeah, of course. We don't do anything that's not profitable by itself. Life's too short and the team's too small. How you can't really measure it because you know you're it's sort of a cumulative sale. Yeah, but we know this and the other but we know when we do a program for a client. We say we're going to do this this this and this together but they're all line items so we know we know what the value is or the value that's been put upon the podcast sponsorship versus other assets. So yeah we know we know we know what that we know exactly what revenue podcast sponsorship springs to the organization each year. When you look at when you compare that to the video program that you do talk triggers. Yeah, talk triggers is not one that sponsored and that was intentional. And so talk triggers talk triggers doesn't take any advertising at all. Right. Yeah, for a couple of reasons one is really was much more about customer experience in word of mouth and kind of tied into the new book that I wrote with Daniel lemon so it was much more of a position and thought leadership exercise. For me and for the organization and so we also were doing a little bit differently from a modality standpoint with the show that was more native to YouTube. So we just didn't want to get into the whole sponsorship side of it for that one. But you're still invested in that show that's show still live. So it's not it's live but we're not making new shows so so that was a 20 episode run and run as concluded and so now standing ovation is the new show and so the thing that we're doing a lot of now is is sort of planned obsolescence and say okay, we're going to do 20 episodes or 40 episodes or 50 episodes or however many episodes make sense in this format and then we feel like we've said the things we want to say, we're going to, we're going to then move on to the next thing and do that and I really like that approach I think it's wise it's something that we were a lot of our clients on as well. And, and I'm sure we'll have a couple of new things at some point this year we just don't have them off the ground yet. So try to keep that sort of content feature oriented so it has a longer shelf life. Yeah, do you like consciously stay away from news. Yeah, so we always have I mean even social pros is not a new show I mean we we we talk about social media strategy and social media tactics with with big company social media practitioners and and in so far as you know we weren't talking about tick to The show is certainly of the moment but it's not a new show it's it's not a podcast which is here's what's happening in social media right now that's not what it's about. In fact, neither is our blog like we don't write news posts we just never have like the the the mission I've always given our team from an editorial standpoint is we are in the and therefore business. And what I mean by that is there's lots of people out there who are in the news business. Facebook did this Twitter did that YouTube did this, you know, email did that. Great, please cover that knock yourselves out. People come to us to say this happened. And therefore, we must now dot dot dot. Our role is to be in the and therefore business that's that's how we try and handle. Like I said, you know, I love your your Midwestern clarity, you know, rather than my mother was an English teacher, it helps a lot. Yeah. Well, Jay bear, thank you so much for taking the time I know how busy you are. Everything to catch up and so it's really nice of you to take the time to do this. I really appreciate it to see a love love what you're doing here really cool and always nice to spend some time with you my friend. Likewise. Join us next week. I know you actually have on the current episode. So good. Did you read it? Yeah. Oh, yeah. The whole thing. I just got it. I just started it and it's gripping it's so well written. And I'm I'm I'm into it. And so next week, guys, David Merman Scott actually wrote kind of the first book. New Rules and Parking new rules of marketing and PR, which was really, I mean, it's it's he was the first guy to write sort of the book about how social and the internet would change the business of PR. And so I'm really grateful to have him. We'll have him next week. So hope to see you there. You can ask him questions there. And if you want to hear about it now hop on over to social prose podcast. The current episode is up. I know I'm going to listen to it. Thanks. I'm ready for my interview with with David Merman Scott next week. Thanks. Yeah, we actually did something different on that episode. We went through the book. Like my co host and I pulled out a bunch of poll quotes. So it's a really great poll quotes book. And then we use the poll quotes to structure the episode and ask David, okay, you said this and just respond to it. It's just really fun. And then one of David's super fans is a little bit more story than you care about, but one of David's super fans happens to be the guy who runs the yard service. Which takes care of my yard. And so he was talking to my wife and he said, does Jane know David Merman Scott? She's like, yeah, he knows David Merman Scott. In fact, he's going to be on Jay's podcast. He's like, he is. And so one of the things that David talks about in that book is also kind of like Pat Flynn letting your fans in on the action. And so I had the yard guy who owns the yard guy company on the podcast as well. So he got to listen in right here in the office right next to me and ask David questions on the podcast. It was really cool. That's awesome. Yeah, it was really neat. Yeah, it was fun. Cool. What are you working on another book? Not yet. I'm working on a brand new keynote called coveted customer experience, which will launch February 1st. So the way I operate is I start with a keynote and I deliver that keynote a few dozen times around the world and get it to the point where I really like it. And then if I feel like there's market need and market fit, then I'll turn it into a book. So we're sort of at step one of what may become a book. Interesting. So for you, the keynote is sort of the testing ground. Absolutely. Yeah. Because I'm doing it on the feedback and everything. It gives you a chance to perfect the stories and the narrative flow. And actually it makes it right in the book a lot easier because you already have the 60 or 90 minute kind of arc of the keynote and then just sort of flesh it into a book. You just sort of add stories and add structure. I really like that approach. It's worked for me. And ultimately, you know, I'm going to do one keynote a week. I'm not going to write one book a week. So it's, you know, just from a practice standpoint, it's easier for me to work it out on stage than to work it out on the page. And where will the debut keynote be? It's actually not going to be a public debut. We're going to kind of launch it in social and through content with some blog posts and social media assets that kind of talk about the premise of the keynote and things like that. So there isn't like a physical launch in an auditorium, at least not yet. Great. Well, hey, thanks so much for taking the time and hope to catch up with you again soon. But yeah, let's do it again anytime. See you later. Take care.