This is a transcript of Erica Mills Barnhart’s interview with Dana Van Nest on the Marketing for Good podcast. You can listen to the episode here and listen to more episodes on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you enjoy listening to podcasts. Enjoy!

SUMMARY KEYWORDS

people, writing, write, marketing, communications, organization, words, content strategy, listeners, world, content, read, clients, writer, plan, messages, book, nonprofit, nonprofits

Erica Mills Barnhart  00:13

All right with me today is writer and communications strategist Dana Van Nest. Before opening her consulting practice, she was Associate Director of Marketing Communications and Public Relations at Henry Art Gallery, where she was responsible for planning and executing the museum’s marketing, communications and public relations plans. She also worked as marketing director at Collins Group, a fundraising consulting firm, where she provided strategic direction for the firm’s business development and marketing communications initiatives. In 2010, oh since 2010 (not in since 2010), Dana has been a member of the Association for Women in Communications Seattle professional chapter. In 2016. She received the Georgina McDougal Davis Founders Award. This award is given annually to a Seattle chapter member who consistently exhibits the highest ethics of professional excellence and personal commitment in everything she does. In 2003, her original co-written screenplays…wait for it…this is so flippin cool…screenplay ‘Turn Right by the Yellow Dog’ was produced by the Danish Film Institute and debuted at the San Jose Film Festival. Dana holds a BA in English from the University of Washington and an MFA in creative writing from Emerson College. Dana Van Nest, welcome to the show.

Dana Van Nest  01:26

Thank you. So I’m happy to be here this morning.

Erica Mills Barnhart  01:29

Yay. So I just read your professional bio. And clearly, there are some themes in your career writing, words principal among them.

Dana Van Nest  01:42

Mm hmm.

Erica Mills Barnhart  01:42

But I want to start by having you tell listeners just a bit more about you and how you got to where you are today.

Dana Van Nest  01:50

Okay. Yeah, the theme of writing definitely goes back to my young young days. And that’s because I’m a reader first. Anytime that I have the chance, that’s what I’m doing. I’m reading a book. That is my preferred method of relaxation, of learning, of being both in with the world and in a different place in the world. And so when I was young, probably in elementary school, I started figuring out that I could write those stories too. And that I was pretty good at it. And I was encouraged to do it. So I started identifying as a writer when I was a little girl. And it was a place to escape and to practice sentences, to practice words, to practice building whole world, in my own head, and then pushing those out on paper. And as I grew older, I started realizing that that could be a career…

Erica Mills Barnhart  02:49

Like a thing like a thing in the world.

Dana Van Nest  02:51

It was a thing in the world. It wasn’t necessarily super supported by my parents at first because they were worried about the economics of being a writer. I tried journalism. But journalism is true stories, great for journalists, I love reading journalism totally support our local papers and our national papers right now. But I like to make things up. I think that’s a lot more fun. So, when I was in college, I went into creative writing. So my degree, as you said, is English with a fair writing, emphasis. And then a couple of years later, after I graduated college, I went to Boston to get my MFA in creative writing, which was a wonderful experience. And where I got introduced to screenwriting and screenwriting, is, you know, dialogue on paper, is the way I looked at it. And dialogue is something that I was good at. And as those years passed, I kind of honed my skills in writing dialogue and writing short stories. I kind of assumed I would always get to a novel, but I never did then and I haven’t now and at this point in time, that’s not really where my interests lie. After I wrote that screenplay ‘Turn Right by the Yellow Dog’, which was not my original name, it means something, something in Danish that I can’t adequately transcribe because I don’t actually speak Danish. I wrote it in English and it was translated into Danish though some of the some of the nuance got lost in places here and there. It was a really excellent experience writing that screenplay. But what I found is that screen play writing isn’t as much of a collaborative sport as it may seem. People buy your screenplay, and then they do what they want with it. You get credit, and you get some money, and that’s nice, but that’s no longer yours.And that was something I didn’t want.

Erica Mills Barnhart  04:52

I want to go back to this idea about writing being a team sport, and marketing being a team sport, which is something we talk about on the show. But I have a question for you: do you think there’s such a thing as someone who’s just a natural writer? Or is it a skill that anyone can learn?

Dana Van Nest  05:10

I think some people have more of a way with words than other people. But you have to hone that skill. If you don’t hone that skill and pay attention, you won’t be a good writer. It’s the same with doing a sport. It really is. You may have a natural athletic ability. But if you don’t practice, and you don’t get out there every day and try to hone your talent, you won’t get better. Writing is the same way.

Erica Mills Barnhart  05:35

That’s a great analogy. Great analogy! Okay, about the team sport thing. I want to talk about content strategy and marketing strategy and these things. But I think people think about writing as a very solitary activity. So can you talk to us a bit about how to think about writing in the context of marketing and how those things become a team sport?

Dana Van Nest  06:04

Writing is and isn’t a solitary activity. You may do the actual work by yourself. But all of the words that you put out there on the page will be assessed and judged and critiqued. And applauded or not, by whoever you are writing the words for. It took me a long time as a younger person to get my own ego out of the way.

Erica Mills Barnhart  06:30

Yeah, it’s hard. It’s hard.

Dana Van Nest  06:31

It was really hard because I had been praised for being a good writer. And I really took that to heart It became my identity. Yeah. And so when someone later would say, “yeah, this is good, but or, and…”, I could get really upset about it. It took it took me putting my ego aside and saying, okay, here’s the deal. I’ve been hired–at this point in time in the work I do–I’ve been hired to write this piece for a specific person or organization. And for this reason, so I’m going to write them the best draft that I can. And we’re going to go over it together because it’s theirs. It’s not mine. This writing does not belong to me. And when you’re writing for marketing purposes or fundraising communications, it doesn’t belong to you. It belongs to the organization and it has to hit the audience’s that they are trying to reach. You’re always having to look at a different perspective. And there is pride in getting it right the first time, but it almost never happened.

Erica Mills Barnhart  07:27

Well, but I also think it’s important to make the distinction between pride and ego.

Dana Van Nest  07:31

Yeah, yeah.

Erica Mills Barnhart  07:32

You can be, I mean, it’s sort of like kids, right? You can be proud of them. But you know, they’re their own humans and they’re meant to be out in the world and, you know, with the writing, it’s like, you can be proud of it. But to your point,  it’s not yours necessarily. Yeah. Okay, I’m hoping you’re gonna be able to clear something up for listeners. What is the difference…o you do writing and content strategy…what is the difference between content strategy and marketing strategy in your mind?

Dana Van Nest  08:06

An organization should have marketing goals and strategies that map back to whatever their strategic plan is, or their business plan, and how their marketing communications plan is going to augment their greater business goals. But the content itself, you’re drilling down a little bit further, and actually looking at what is going to go in each of these platforms in each of these places this week, so it’s much more about the actual words than the audience… that’s not quite right. It’s more about the words than the outcome almost.

Erica Mills Barnhart  08:47

 Oh, that’s interesting.

Dana Van Nest  08:49

Yeah. Well, what I mean is..

Erica Mills Barnhart  08:50

So, like words is tactical instruments?

Dana Van Nest  08:54

Well, that’s an interesting way to put it.

Erica Mills Barnhart  08:55

Well, thanks! I just thought of it. It just popped out of my mouth!

Dana Van Nest  08:58

I like that because that makes sense. That’s why you spend 10 minutes writing a Twitter post, sometimes every word and every, every placement of that word count. It is tactical.

Erica Mills Barnhart  09:10

“It is written you a shorter letter, but I didn’t have the time.” When I teach. And it doesn’t matter if I’m teaching my marketing class or any of my classes, I always have them do a 280 character weekly reflection.

Dana Van Nest  09:26

Ooooh!

Erica Mills Barnhart  09:27

I know. And it’s actually usually, it’s a pretty decent chunk of their grade because it is hard and they have to do the reflection. And it’s not a summary. I’m not looking for them to summarize. I believe deeply in personalized learning, and so I want them to personalize the contents. So, you know, so what I asked them is like, take your key takeaways, and then also they have to then connect it to an outside resource we have not covered in class. So it’s actually a multi layer personalization approach to learning sort of scaffolding many different types. And students are really shocked at how challenging it is. And also the consistent feedback I get at the end, not the beginning, by the way, when they’re like,” Oh my goodness, really?!” But at the end, people are like, “That was really hard. And it really helped me learn better.” And it gets back to that idea of like, what’s the essence and what else can fall away?

Dana Van Nest  10:21

Mm hmm. That’s why I like short stories. Short stories are really hard to write. writing something that is a whole world and 35 pages, oh, my goodness, much more challenging than a novel.

Erica Mills Barnhart  10:33

Okay, so…I can’t even imagine by the way…all the writing I’ve done I can’t imagine that maybe maybe a decade or two from now. So, let’s see, in the Marketing for Good philosophy, we say that you have organizational goals and marketing objectives, okay. So sort of goals up here and objectives down here because marketing is in service to the organization or the company. The company’s goals.

Dana Van Nest  11:02

Absolutely.

Erica Mills Barnhart  11:04

So I was just curious, I mean, some people are like, “Oh, you’re just mincing words around the goals and objective”, but I feel like it’s a really important distinction. And when you talk about content strategy and the marketing plan, it feels like that’s, you know, a different rung on the ladder, the content, which then supports the marketing objectives, which then support the organizational goals.

Dana Van Nest  11:26

I would say it is, because you have an objective, whatever that is, you want to reach a certain target audience this week and have you know, 20 people comment on your Facebook post? That’s great. That’s a great objective. Now, how are you going to do it? What the language you’re going to use? Who are those people? Exactly. And where else are they going? And how can you find out what is going to entice them into staying with you into paying attention? I like the tactical and the practical aspects of writing.

Erica Mills Barnhart  11:58

Plus it rhymes: tactical and practical.

Dana Van Nest  12:04

I’m kind of a practical dreamer. I have big dreams, but I’m very practical about how I live my life. I’m not a ‘head in the clouds’ kind of person. And that’s how I approach my writing. Also, I remember getting feedback from a professor in grad school where he liked so much of my story, but these things needed to be fixed. I’m like, great. So I went home that weekend, I fixed every single one. And it came back like, boom, let’s go and he’s like, Oh. That’s what I thought I was supposed to do

Erica Mills Barnhart  12:33

Fix ’em all.

Dana Van Nest  12:34

Fix it.

Erica Mills Barnhart  12:36

Okay, here’s a here’s an unrelated question. Just a generic question. Are you somebody who if you if you have done something that wasn’t on your to do list, but then you do it, do you write it on the to do list and then cross it off?

Dana Van Nest  12:51

Yes, I 100% totally do that!

Erica Mills Barnhart  12:55

Right? I want credit for the thing. You know, like, it feels good to cross things up.

Dana Van Nest  12:58

It feels really good.

Erica Mills Barnhart  13:00

Okay, so one of your superpowers is clearly writing and then also developing content strategy. Can you give listeners some examples of what is a content strategy look like, what’s included?

Dana Van Nest  13:15

So one of the things that I really enjoy doing is working with organizations to do a communications audit to find out…what they usually hire me to do, because they know they aren’t where they need to be. Or they know they need to be doing communications, they need to have content strategy, and they don’t really want to do it. And that’s fine. That’s why you hire somebody to come in for a while as a consultant to help you out and put a plan in place. So in that situation, what I’m looking for is do you have communications messages already? Or are you winging it all the time? You know, do you have a mission or values for your organization? What are we working with here, and then we figure out what those messages are. And I think it’s fine to have, you know, three to five communications messages. Three is great, because you can remember three pretty easily. We break it down: here are the three things, the three messages, that the world needs to know, your audiences or the world, however big your organization is, about you. And everything we do from there is filtered through those three messages. Every blog post that we plan out every e-news that is planned out, all your social media channels, as well as the content in those channels is filtered through those three messages. We stay on brand, we stay on task. And that can be very easy then to build out a framework for a year saying, here’s our messaging. Here’s how this fulfills our marketing objectives, which fulfill our business goals.

Erica Mills Barnhart  14:48

So when you say communications message does that mean, are they like themes? Or is it actually the message or is it the message and a theme? Because you said then you write different things to support that. So tweets and Facebook posts in LinkedIn.

Dana Van Nest  15:07

Themes is probably the best way to put that then. Because then you have some some leeway because the world changes, your organization changes. And so your communications has to be responsive quickly. And you don’t have to be dogmatic about it, “These are messages. And that’s it.” Well, that’s your messages. We empower women and girls in low and middle income countries. Okay, that is clear, but there’s some room around that about how we’re going to talk about those.

Erica Mills Barnhart  15:44

Okay. Okay. That’s great. Um, so you do some, I think that you do ghostwriting? Is this true?

Dana Van Nest  15:53

Yeah, I do.

Erica Mills Barnhart  15:55

I’m not sure all listeners will be familiar with that term. So will you help us understand what it means? And then also how you actually how you in particular actually do it because different people goes right in different ways. And I’m just curious how you approach it.

Dana Van Nest  16:12

So ghostwriting is when you are the primary author of a piece, but it is not your name on the piece, it is your client’s name on that piece. And people hire those writers because they have something to say. And they either don’t have the tools to say it themselves or the time or the desire to write it all out. And those are things that I very much enjoy. So in this particular time, I’m mostly doing ghostwriting for blogs,

Erica Mills Barnhart  16:40

Okay, for clients.

Dana Van Nest  16:44

Exactly. So we have worked out with one of my clients, we made a plan for the year. I like to break it down by quarter. You can have ideas throughout the year, but once again, the world changes quickly and when you’re in a nonprofit or an NGO, or in some kind of organization where you need to responsive how the world’s changing that schedule needs to be able to be flexible. So I look more at a quarter at a time to say this is what we’re going to be doing in April, May and June. Here’s the plan. We can do now to July, if necessary, and move this in. And then I suggest to my client, here’s what I think we should be talking about. And she says, “That sounds good. I’m not ready for that yet. Let’s move this over here because I can connect it to an event here.” We reschedule and then I write out an outline. Okay, we talked…well, actually, before the outline, we usually have a long conversation. I just take a whole lot of notes. Because then I get her language. I get how she wants to talk about it. I can ask questions about where she’s going. And as she says, I’m thinking about how I’m going to connect this to other pieces that we’ve written and then I write it all out for her to read and edit.

Erica Mills Barnhart  18:01

Got it. So they can personalize.

Dana Van Nest  18:06

Exactly.

Erica Mills Barnhart  18:07

So there’s the words then and then there’s the tone, like that person sounds.

Dana Van Nest  18:15

Yeah.

Erica Mills Barnhart  18:16

So I did ghostwriting this a long time ago, I want to say for both Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer at nominally the same era, and it was just, it was it was…I find ghost writing fairly existential. I can do it, I don’t think I’m fabulous at it like you are. But that is the starkest example I have of, you know, kind of similar content in some ways, because of the work we were doing with them. But they just talked so differently. And so how do you help your clients to find their brand personality, if they don’t have that, or are you just listening for the types of words that they use and then you extract from that?

Dana Van Nest  19:01

I’m listening to the types of words they use, phrases that are common that they use over and over again. The cadence of their voice, because you want their written communications to echo their verbal communications, not exactly because it is written so it shouldn’t be word for word, it shouldn’t be too many and’s or too many dot, dot, dots. It’s not a transcript. But you want to imbue the piece with their personality. So people will keep coming back because they also want to not just read the content, but they want to read their content.

Erica Mills Barnhart  19:35

Yeah, yeah.

Dana Van Nest  19:36

What is it that this person is uniquely bringing to the world? That is something that you have to focus on too? At times have to pull out my own thing, like I had put in a little Literary Reference in one that my client was like, “Yeah, I wouldn’t say that.” I’m like, Alright,

Erica Mills Barnhart  19:58

Well, one of the things I find so exceptional and endearing about you is your book log? Are willing to share with listeners about it?

Dana Van Nest  20:09

I keep a handwritten log of every book that I’ve written that I’ve read. And I write down the date, and the author and the date that I finished it. And I’ve been doing that since 1996.

Erica Mills Barnhart  20:21

That blows away. I am not that disciplined with my reading. I’m like, I dunno, I’m reading the book. I don’t know. It’s good. It’s not good. I finally read the “Time Traveler’s Wife” recently and I did fall in love with that book for sure.

Dana Van Nest  20:33

Good. I mean, that came out what 2011 so you know…

Erica Mills Barnhart  20:38

Well when you say it that way! Actually, the reason I came upon it, it was the day that the libraries were closing. So we’re recording this sheltered in place during COVID-19. So we’re never sure quite when the podcast will air. And it was the, they had announced like on a Thursday that all the public libraries were closing on the Friday. So I was one of those people who went and it was, you know, we’re just pulling off of the shelves. It was a it was like mayhem at the library. So I had the stack, you know, that’s like this. Is it quality? I don’t know. But they were books and they were available.

Dana Van Nest  21:17

And thank god they’re with you.

Erica Mills Barnhart  21:18

It was slim pickins Let me tell you, it was. I was just psyched to get that book.

Dana Van Nest  21:24

My pile of books, other than my pile of books from the library, is all about World War Two for some reason. I don’t know how that happened. That’s cheery reading for shelter in place.

Erica Mills Barnhart  21:36

Maybe you’re trying to extrapolate lessons?

Dana Van Nest  21:39

Sure. Okay.

Erica Mills Barnhart  21:40

Um, you have mentioned this, but I want to come back to it, which is how quickly things change in the world. I mean, obviously we’re seeing that play out minute by minute, hour by hour, day to day right now. So it’s accelerated and amplified right now. I’m just curious what trends you’re seeing and, you know, the thing with with crises is everything feels equally important. And that’s totally overwhelming. So, if you were a listener or for our listeners, what trends would you be really paying attention to because you think that they will serve them on the other side of COVID-19 are sort of long term?

Dana Van Nest  22:23

I think right now your audience wants to feel that you are there for them. But they don’t necessarily want to talk to you every day. There is so much content coming at everyone all the time, that I think that people are kind of weary right now. Yeah, we can only take in so much before our heart starts to beat just a little bit faster. And I do not want to add to the chaos at all. I wrote a blog post in mid March about that and saying But I don’t think people should over communicate at this time, which is going against what many other people are saying. And that’s because if they can’t hear you, they can’t hear you, if too much is coming at them, if you don’t have anything relevant to say, don’t say anything right now. And that blog post, got some great hits, and I was thrilled about that. And then AWC National, the association for many communications, a national group posted it about two weeks ago, and I was really happy about that, but I could also tell the content was already out of date.

Erica Mills Barnhart  23:37

I’ve been really quiet in terms of content, you know, focus mainly on this podcast and, you know, being something that will serve sort of regardless of Coronavirus, and I felt very conflicted about it, as I really haven’t done much but I, I genuinely felt like don’t have anything to add that will help people in any way during this time and, you know, I’m not a crisis communications person, I’m much more of a messaging strategist, teacher. Yeah, but it’s like a dialogue in my head for sure. And I know you know, every all my clients, past clients, folks in the community, you’re just not quite sure what to do. Right? Nothing feels quite right. And that’s, that’s a tough spot to be in.

Dana Van Nest  24:24

I think all the communications you send out right now must have a tone to them that lets your audience know that you are you understand the crisis situation that we’re in. It doesn’t need to directly reference it. You don’t have to hashtag COVID-19 all over the place. If you don’t have anything to say, then I’m really pushing people not to say anything. I had that same problem myself the other day, I looked ahead and had note on my calendar, I needed to draft my May blog post. And I thought, “Do I have anything to say that’s going to be additive? That’s going to be helpful?” And at that time, I couldn’t think of anything. So I’m not going to write until it’s something that will actually help people in this particular moment in a different point in time. I could have written about anything. But now it just seems superfluous. Or navel gazing.

Erica Mills Barnhart  25:39

Yeah. Sounding tone deaf cat. Yeah, for sure. I want to make sure that we have time to hear your thoughts and wisdom about internal alignment, communications and sort of managing internally. You have come a couple times to talk to me to students in my marketing classes at the University of Washington. And one of the things that they are, like, blown away by is your advice about both the complexities and the nuances of being somebody doing marketing internally. And what that means. Because one of the principles of the marketing for good philosophy is that it has to be good external engagement, but also good for everyone involved internally, with that idea of  alignment being really important. So will you share your experience doing that?

Dana Van Nest  26:35

Happy to! So I think people forget quite a lot that your internal team, your internal stakeholders, if you want to use that kind of language. They are your best ambassadors. And everybody needs to feel that they are part of the team. They need to feel like they have enough knowledge to be able to go forward and support whatever your goals are. And I understand that different people at different levels get different information. That being said, the more transparent you can be about where you are internally, the more engaged all your staff is going to be and feel like they actually have a stake in what’s happening. I think you’re going to see that even more now because everybody is all hyped up because you have a job, you really want to keep that job. And the more that CEOs and executive directors can say, here’s where I’m, here’s where we think we’re going. The more people say, “Okay, I understand that you don’t know yet. But thanks for letting me in. And letting me see that you feel vulnerable right now too. And that we’re in this together.” What I talked about with your class quite a bit to is managing up. And understanding that in order to be successful in your organization, you need to see what your boss needs. What are their goals? How do you help meet their goals because they are turning around and taking that up to the next level, whether it’s to the ED or to the board. And they will be able to come back to you and say, “Oh, the idea that you had, or the clarification that you helped me figure out about this project that we’re working on. I took that to the big boss and let her know that that we are actually in a good spot that we have a plan and thank you for helping me get there.” I had a boss early on who told me quite boldly, “Your job is to make me look good. Yeah, so I get that both. I understand that. But really, if you help your boss be the best person they can be at that level. It will both help your career and there and you are learning how to manage people. Yes, being a manager doesn’t mean that you manage people under you necessarily. You can manage and lead from wherever you are in your organization. You can be a mid level person, but if you’re someone that has the trust of your boss and the trust of your peers, you are a leader and people will come to you and projects will start coming your way.

Erica Mills Barnhart  29:24

Yeah, you can lead without being a leader capital L and manage without being manager, capital M.

Dana Van Nest  29:31

Exactly. Yeah, exactly. And I see that in organizations all the time, where in the last place, I worked, there’s a woman on the frontline staff, and she’s the manager. But there’s two levels above her but the ED, she didn’t do anything without checking back with that manager. Because that manager knew what was happening on the frontline and she’s very smart and she had a perspective that no one else did. And she shared it. She shared it very well and in a way that made sure that everyone was included, but also was very clear. Like, you know, we over here doing this particular kind of work, you should pay attention.

Erica Mills Barnhart  30:15

Yeah, see us, see us.

Dana Van Nest  30:16

Yes, see us. Pay attention.

Erica Mills Barnhart  30:18

Yeah. You have this…I think of it as the the sandwich approach to making recommendations or when you’re presenting options. Will you share that?

Dana Van Nest  30:32

Yes. So I’ll tell you story. I had been asked to do some research. And my boss said, “Do the research, present the best option.” I said, fantastic. So I did all the research, I presented the best option, and my boss is like, “Oh, okay, well, what else you got?” I didn’t have anything because he said to give him the best option. So here’s the best option, And, ah, it’s on a platter for you. And that wasn’t enough. They wanted to see more. And that’s when I realized you always have to give somebody three options. You know what the best option is because you decided. So the next time I was told, bring me the best option, I brought three options ,brought the best option, I brought the ok option, and then I brought the other one. Right, the one that was best, the one that I could totally live with, and then the one that was no good, but that just made them no good one makes the best one look even better.

Erica Mills Barnhart  31:38

Mm hmm.

Dana Van Nest  31:41

And it’s also how you present it. You have to, if you can push them across the table that’s even best. You’re sitting there all together and you say, “Okay, well, here’s option one. This option is okay. Yeah, this could do it. It’s totally, it’s fine. Here’s option B. That’s an option. And then and by the way, so here’s option C. Take a look at option C. Now that we looked at A and B, I’m very interested to see what you think about C.

Erica Mills Barnhart  32:15

I love the tone of voice!

Dana Van Nest  32:17

It’s got to be in the tone of voice. You do. You have to show them with your voice, in your body, that this is the right option. But of course, it is all up to you, big boss. I am laying out the options. Just as you said, you have questions, I can answer your questions.

Erica Mills Barnhart  32:31

I love it. I love that. Okay, at the end of every interview, I ask same two questions, which is what inspires you and what keeps you motivated to do this work? Because if you’re going to do marketing for good, we need the motivation which is for the mind and inspiration which is for the heart. So what what inspires you and what keeps you motivated to do the work?

Dana Van Nest  32:59

I’ll start with what motivates me. One of the things I realized when I started working for myself is that I really loved working with a variety of clients. And there’s personal gratification there too, I get to learn a ton from all the different kinds of clients that I work with. And I really enjoy learning. So that was fun. I have a great curiosity for these different aspects of the industry. So maybe that’s what inspires me is that I have the privilege of working with all these interesting, smart people who are out there every day, working hard and doing good. And what motivates me is that in my little part, I’m making a difference in these different worlds. My name is nowhere and I don’t need it to be anywhere. But the words that I write under someone else’s name or under this organization, and banner, it contributes to solutions. So I am not actually in the vaccine delivery process, but the work I do to help get information out about that makes a difference. It advances the cause, and that I find highly motivating.

Erica Mills Barnhart  34:23

Well, you do a wonderful job of giving voice to so many causes and people and all the rest of it. I want to thank you for making time for being here with us on Marketing for Good podcast today.

Dana Van Nest  34:39

Thank you. It’s been my pleasure.

Erica Mills Barnhart  34:40

Yeah, it’s been fun. If you, listeners, would like to learn more about Dana please visit DanaVanNest.com on her website. The best place to find her is on LinkedIn. And yes, her name has three Ns and three As. Da. Na. Van Nest.  If you’d like to do marketing differently, so you can get better results with less stress and more joy, all while making our world a better place, I recommend you start by taking the quiz at ClaxonMarketing.com/quiz. Alright listeners. That’s it for today. I’m wishing you a wonderful day!

The post Ep 10: Dana Van Nest: Using Words as Tactical Instruments appeared first on Claxon Communication.

This is a transcript of Erica Mills Barnhart’s interview with Chris Dickey on the Marketing for Good podcast. You can listen to the episode here and listen to more episodes on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you enjoy listening to podcasts. Enjoy!

KEYWORDS

people, search, nonprofit, PR, visibility, consumers, brand, website, keywords, search engine, clients

Erica Mills Barnhart 

Chris, welcome to the show. Super excited to have you joining us to talk about marketing for good and all the cool stuff that you’re up to. And you are joining us from Jackson Hole, Wyoming?

Chris Dickey 

That’s correct. Yeah.

Erica Mills Barnhart 

And from there you actually manage two companies Purple Orange Brand Communications and now Visibly.

Chris Dickey 

Right, yeah. So, Purple Orange is a PR agency. We deal in active lifestyle and outdoor consumer brands is for the most part. So stuff that you would play with. Being based in Jackson Hole, it kind of makes sense. It’s like the stuff that you would put on your body to stay warm or go skiing with or go running and all those kind of active lifestyle brands you might find at REI. Those are a lot of our clients. And then Visibly kind of morphed more recently out of out of Purple Orange and so Visibly is a response, it’s a software platform. It’s available for everyone. It’s currently free, so there’s no there’s no subscription. Visibly was the idea of how do we do we do a better job identifying, tracking and improving our brand and product visibility and search. And a couple years ago, as a PR agency owner, I started realizing the most valuable PR hits that we were acquiring for our clients were the ones that were showing up at the top of search for popular keywords. And it was it wasn’t really there wasn’t a strategy behind it at the time. It was every once in a while one of our PR, you know, one of our PR heads would just kind of like magically appear at the top of search results, and it would just have this massive impact on our clients. And it was it was pretty awesome. And I also had another kind of anecdote that kind of drove me in that direction. And that was, we work in the outdoor industry and we had we had acquired a large award for one of our clients. And it was it was a gear of the year from Outside Magazine which is the kind of the pinnacle outdoor publication in the outdoor space. And it was, we got the best sleeping bag award of the year you know, and they give one of these out once a year. Yeah, big deal to big audience, a big online audience, a big print audience, they give you a full page spread. I mean, it’s everything that you want from, you know, from a PR placement. And we, we circle back with the clients a couple months after we landed this and you know, and they were still a client of ours, and we work in multiple different campaigns. And I said, you know, tell me about that sleeping bag. How’s that doing? How’d that how’d that work out for you guys? And they said, you know, we’ve sold like, some small amount, like very small amount. It just it didn’t really needle.

Erica Mills Barnhart 

Really?

Chris Dickey 

Yeah, I know. Right? Like that was my response is like, how, how can you win the pinnacle award, you know, in the pinnacle publication for a product and it really isn’t, wasn’t moving the needle from a sales perspective. And it was at that point we were like, I was really scratching my head and feeling kind of down in the dumps about PR. I’m like, Oh my god, like we really have to figure this out. And, and so I just I kind of went online and I typed in best sleeping bags 2017 that was the year this happened. And that particular endorsement for Outside Magazine was on the second page of search for that non branded keyword, best best sleeping bag of the year. And I realized at that moment that winning a PR placement, no matter what, like how many key messages that you might win or how amazing the photography that went along with it was or the publication got that you know, your choice publication, if it didn’t live beyond the flicker of the moment that it was published, it would have very limited value for our clients. And you know, I think I think print is a fantastic medium but it’s not a great medium to sell stuff.

Erica Mills Barnhart 

What is it a fantastic medium for?

Chris Dickey 

It’s a fantastic medium for like, you know, you sit down with a print publication and there’s a visceral quality to it, right? And you’re not there to buy, you’re, you’re there to consume, you’re there to read stories. And you don’t want to be, you don’t necessarily want to be sold. This is my opinion. I actually was a circulation director for a publication many years ago. And so, you know, I, I still think print has like, a good future, but it’s a different future than it maybe was 10 years ago. But anyways, so really, when you need to find this ROI, I found that I felt like there was a huge opportunity to search. And when you step back and think about what search is and that is, like I’m speaking about search engines here is it’s a massive product discovery zone. It’s where people ask questions and the search engine returns answers, and there’s actually around four to five billion people, or billion questions being asked to search every single day. That’s like 60 to 70,000 every second. And what’s even more interesting about that, so it’s obviously a central piece of our lives. We asked, you know, whether it’s our phones or our desktop computer, we’re asking all sorts of questions and we need answers. Turns out that over 70% of all the, all the traffic, all the answers will be consumed in the first five organic results on a page.

Erica Mills Barnhart 

Yeah, right.

Chris Dickey 

And, effectively, if you don’t find what you’re looking for there, you just move on, you just you just change your keyword, search query, you don’t you don’t go deeper. And there’s this there’s this crazy curve that I could show you that’s, that shows you like, you know how people click and it’s, it does, it’s like so consistent month to month, year to year across different categories. But the very first organic result on a search query gets around 30% of all the traffic and then it drops down to like 18 and then drops down to like 14 or 12. And it’s just this logarithmic curve that just just drops off exponentially toward the bottom of the page, the 10th, or the or the typically there’s around 10 organic results at any given search page, the final result on the first page of search results are only around 1% of the traffic.

Erica Mills Barnhart 

Oh.

Chris Dickey 

I know, right? So it’s not enough to even be on the first page of search, you need to be at the top of the first page of search. And that needs, when you step back and think about it is an Olympic level podium position. Especially for a popular keyword. And one that you know when talking about a popular keyword is you know let’s step back and talk about like top of funnel marketing for a minute, like how do people find you that’s the that’s the kind of constant kind of marketers dilemma.

Erica Mills Barnhart 

Yes, it is.

Chris Dickey 

How do people know that we exist, or even an option for a thing that you need or how we can help you and, you know, I think, so search allows you to get in front of people who need your product or service, but don’t know you exist. And so say you’re looking, in our case for like a new tennis racket and you don’t know where to start. You don’t know who to like, who makes a good tennis racket, so you just type in best tennis racket. That is exactly the kind of customer that if you make tennis rackets you want to get in front of right, because it’s like, here’s somebody who has a high intent to buy is very interested in the subject matter and is not brand loyal,  by definition, the fact that they’re not searching for a specific brand. And the thing about search, is that you can you know, exactly or pretty precisely how many people a month are searching for that keyword. There’s your customer base, you know exactly where they’re clicking on the page. So then where the challenge becomes is how do you get in front of them? How do you get your brand within that top of the page and that, that’s effectively what the SEO industry is right? Like in, in SEO, it’s great if you can do it well, but you really don’t have a lot of power around it. Because fundamentally SEO is about how to get your own website ranking better. And I think as a PR practitioner, and as somebody who leverages third party endorsements for a living, we are like, it’s not about your, your own website, it’s about your brand. How do you get your brand in front of that person. And when you step outside of the box from talking about, oh, just my own property, my own website and just thinking about, it doesn’t matter how somebody finds you so long as they find you. Then you think about PR placements, you think about your e-commerce partners, you think about all these other channels that might show up in those top five positions in a search page, where you can create product discovery or create a point in the direction. And that’s and that kind of comes back to what Visibly is so Visibly is the idea of it’s a it’s a term that I call search engine visibility. And it’s what is the likelihood that somebody is going to discover or find your brand in search? And it’s not the likelihood someone’s going to discover your website, let’s just talking about the likelihood that someone’s going to discover your brand.

Erica Mills Barnhart 

Yeah, that’s an important distinction, I think. Yeah, and I think, you know, it’s when you think about just focusing on your website, it’s just a very narrow you know, thing and at the end of the day, getting your website in that top five position for a popular keyword like the best tennis racket. It’s almost impossible. I hate to say that it’s, it’s it’s kind of defeatist but honestly, like, it’s just not gonna happen. And if you talk to an SEO expert, they’ll quickly agree, they’ll say you’re never gonna get there because you have to, you have to outfit Amazon and you’re gonna have to outfit like any of these massive media organizations that have written reviews about the best tennis rackets, and Google assigns kind of a page authority or like a domain authority to every single website out there. And it’s like this kind of complex algorithm nobody really knows the secret sauce to, but it generally, they’re looking at how many incoming links do you have from other important websites coming to your own website, that’s the idea of a backlink. They’re looking at your overall traffic, how many people like how popular is your website, you know, in the scheme of things, and they’re looking at a variety of other factors as well. But when you’re literally up against sites like Amazon, or say the New York Times or something, I mean, you literally- That’s a high bar.

Chris Dickey 

Yeah, yeah. So I think my point is like, why don’t you work with those brands, those publishers to find ways to introduce your product on their pages. So like, for instance, with Amazon, Amazon does a fantastic job with organic search. And they show up very frequently for non branded keywords, especially ones of commercial intent. And what if you’re selling through Amazon, they’ll have a landing page that will, you’ll click on and it’ll recommend the best tennis rackets for the space. And the question then becomes is not how do I get a better ranking than Amazon? How do I get my product on that landing page? Right?

Erica Mills Barnhart 

Yeah, that’s a very different goal.

Chris Dickey 

Totally. It’s a totally relevant goal. You know, it’s like again, like if you if you’re looking to get in front of the customer and the other thing about Amazon from marketing perspective is that there’s there’s just a lot of trust with that website because almost everybody has an account there and there’s they make it very easy to sell and they make it very easy to get refunds and it’s a familiar property, and that familiarity actually increases the likelihood that you’re going to click there, psychologically speaking. So there’s a lot of reasons why you would want to work with Amazon rather than try to like beat them at their own game.

Erica Mills Barnhart 

Yeah, that seems, seems almost impossible, especially if you’re small to mid size or anything like that. I feel like people a lot of people have such a love hate relationship with Amazon. They’re like, Oh, there’s like, you know, this huge empire and, but when push comes to shove, if I need a new tennis racket-

Chris Dickey 

They’re the devil you know, right?

Erica Mills Barnhart 

Yeah. Yes, I confess to having that moment frequently where I’m like, okay, well, like books I definitely I have my biggest tension from a brand perspective around books because and now I will go to local bookstore in order that way because it feels so important. Yeah, but they have made it like, every, you know, this idea of friction, and they’ve just removed all of it. And so so I think I, you know, values thing. They make it really easy for sure.

Chris Dickey 

Right?

Erica Mills Barnhart 

So I love this the specificity of the tennis racket example. And a lot of our listeners actually are working for nonprofits. So I was hoping you could talk a little bit about Climate Neutral, which is a relatively new nonprofit that believes companies plus consumers can help climate change, which is very pithy and catchy and I love it. And was named the 2020 world changing idea by Fast Company magazine, will you talk a little bit about, I mean, stay a little bit more about what it is, and then also how you’ve helped them and maybe, if you can use it as an example of this new way of thinking about search engine, that’d be fantastic.

Chris Dickey 

I’ll do my best. So with Climate Neutral, climateneautral.org. And they are a new nonprofit 501c3, they’re a client of ours at Purple Orange and they recognize that there’s no corporate standard for measuring and then ultimately giving companies a path toward climate neutrality or carbon neutrality, if you will. And I think there’s there’s a lot of pros and cons, you could say to the like carbon offsets. And so, but I think we need to do what anyone needs to do, who has a who has a negative opinion of, of a climate of carbon offsets is recognize that none of us, not any of us can eliminate our carbon footprint to zero. We just can’t do it. You couldn’t go to the grocery store and buy vegetables if you want to have a zero carbon footprint. You couldn’t I mean, how would you heat your home you know, there’s there’s all these kind of, you know, external factors that especially for manufacturers, and anybody producing any kind of goods, a lot of the production of those goods, they’re not doing themselves. They’re outsourcing they have, they have factories overseas, they have farmers that they buy those things from. But all of those products, all those, every single piece in that supply chain has a smaller carbon footprint, right? Like from the time that you harvest a vegetable or the time you manufacture or textile and you ship it wherever it needs to go. And that’s ultimately that the complexity of that of that supply chain has been a major barrier for companies to measure their own carbon footprints. And what Climate Neutral is trying to do is simplify how you measure the footprint and take the pain out of it because before you’d have to hire a third party consultancy, it would take them weeks if not months, with a team of people charging very high rates per hour. And it would it just to understand, like, what how much carbon your your company was responsible for was a very painful process. And it was it was a barrier to getting more companies to do it. And I was hit a lot of these are interested genuinely in trying to be better at this, but it was just so challenging and so expensive that it just made it really hard. So Climate Neutral was like how can we streamline that process A) and then B) how can we provide a way for them to if they can’t reduce down to zero, how can we provide like a verified offset program to at least remove those carbon emissions elsewhere in the atmosphere so you have a carbon neutral business. And then lastly, once you do all those kind of rigorous checkpoints and Climate Neutral verifies you’ve done it, you get a label. And it’s very similar to like USDA Organic or non GMO verified. It’s the idea that here’s a third party independent auditor who has verified that you have accurately measured offset and reduced as much of your footprint as possible and that you have a net zero impact on the on the, on the climate. And the idea is that we want both consumers and companies to step up to the plate here, you know, and consumers can vote with every single purchase that they make-

Erica Mills Barnhart 

Yeah they can, and do.

Chris Dickey 

Yeah, they do. Absolutely. I mean, you know, I mean, I can tell you I’ve worked in the organic food industry. That’s actually one of the kind of tertiary areas that that Purple Orange Agency works in. And organic labeling has revolutionized the natural food space in this even really kind of a big deal in conventional grocery store. It’s now. And it’s been a really, really positive impact. And I can tell you that there’s a couple different organic labels in by far and away the USDA Organic label has the most consumer trust and in drives the best point of purchase stealthier. And so labels have like this really powerful effect on the consumer at point of purchase. And we felt that if we could label the carbon footprint, in the same way that people would, if they had a choice between two products, they would pick the one that was the less harmful environment.

Erica Mills Barnhart 

Right. And there’s a lot of research to support that, you know, in different in different ways, right, all things being equal consumers would like or I think they’re 82% more likely to purchase from something that has some sort of feel good or do good component to it. And it has to be all things being equal.

Chris Dickey 

Yeah, yeah. Yeah.

Erica Mills Barnhart 

They are not really willing to take a hit for, like in this case carbon neutrality, they still want the quality of the products still has to be there.

Chris Dickey 

Entirely. Yeah, and that’s that’s actually an excellent point. I think a lot of people, especially entrepreneurs, like well, under will lead with their environmental message. And I and I, environmental messages, look, I’m actually in a rural studies major in my undergrad. And that was what got me into this outdoor industry because I looked at this industry that was so what I thought was progressive at the time when it came to the environment. These companies like like Patagonia and whatnot, like stepping up and doing things very proactively, but you have to have a good product, your product has to stand up, you know, if you don’t, if you’re not leading with your product, you you have the wrong idea. They product has just gotta be there and then you figure out how can you make it the best way possible and how can you deliver to the customer in the best way possible?

Erica Mills Barnhart 

Yeah, this is such an important point in terms of messaging and sequencing of messaging. So I hope people are hearing that. Because like, you know, and when you’re living and breathing it, and frankly, when maybe you care most about the environmental impact component of the product, you’re sort of projecting into what you want consumers to care about, as opposed to being sensitive and responsive to like, how our minds buy, like the buying process and all of that.

Chris Dickey 

Yeah, at the end of the day, it’s got to work for you. You know, it’s like,  I have a good example years ago. And this is in the outdoor industry. One of our clients was a ski manufacturer was making these new ski boots out of like some recycled environmental plastic. Great, great idea. But guess what the ski boots just didn’t work. I mean, it was it was, it honestly was like almost greenwashing in a certain way because it was like having this this product that didn’t really do what it was meant to do just to have this environmental story behind it and then to have that environmental story kind of somehow play out across the rest of the organization that had no environmental story. So it just it was just it ended up to me as a PR person is a very inauthentic way of trying to tell, I don’t know, it just felt like, like a marketing ploy. You know, it was absolutely and then of course, the boot didn’t succeed, you know. So-

Erica Mills Barnhart 

That’s a tough market. I don’t want boots made out of like sunflower seeds. You need your ski boots to do their job. At some point, you got to draw a line. But recycled plastic bottles, I could get behind all of that, but anyways.

Chris Dickey 

I think there’s a truism to some of the most environmentally friendly products are the ones that just last the longest, and that you’re not replacing them.

Erica Mills Barnhart 

Right I mean, so that’s just about good quality products. As opposed to-

Chris Dickey 

I mean, well, it’s about consuming less.

Erica Mills Barnhart 

Yeah. Yeah.

Chris Dickey 

Ultimately, it’s like I think, you know, recycling is a fantastic idea on paper, but it actually has a fairly heavy carbon footprint. And I think that if you can just consume less, and that is have stuff that you wear over and over again and works forever works for a long time. Ultimately, that has the lowest footprint.

Erica Mills Barnhart 

It does. I mean, there are some, I think implications that we have to call out around income and equality and the ability to purchase the, you know, the highest quality products and that that’s not how a lot of people are able to make their purchases. So there’s some definitely some work to do around sort of bringing into alignment this this over time, and I mean, I’ve spent some time in Europe but I’m always so struck by whatever country I’m in like that, that really does tend to be more of a the way that things are made because because of longtime consumer demand, so yeah, people did. I don’t know who did a good job around marketing of recycling, maybe that’s a podcast for another day. Because it is intriguing, right? Like, we’re like, oh, look at me recycling all my stuff. But then we don’t think of it like that. It’s it’s a huge carbon footprint to actually do it.

Chris Dickey 

No, you know, and I don’t know if this I think this happens less now than it used to. But I know in years past when recycling was in its infancy, they would literally ship bottles to Asia to get them recycled. Yeah, I mean, you would recycle something in Cincinnati, Ohio, and it would be trucked across the United States dumped into a you know, a cargo container shipped across the Pacific Ocean and then recycled in a plant you know, at a place of using all coal burning energy.

Erica Mills Barnhart 

Yeah. Okay, so now that we’ve made listeners feel badly about recycling-

Chris Dickey 

I still recycle, I do, I absolutely.

Erica Mills Barnhart 

Keep recycling everybody and compost away.

Chris Dickey 

I just want to say, you know, we can we can always just do a better job. You know, it’s good to poke at ourselves.

Erica Mills Barnhart 

Yes, it is. Okay, so can we come back to Climate Neutral, the organization and will you share with us a little bit about how you used all of these tools that you have to I mean, ultimately, they were named 2020 world changing idea by Fast Company. Again, that’s a pretty like Olympic level ninja level placement, especially for a nonprofit.

Chris Dickey 

Thank you. Yeah, that was. Yeah, that was a big win. And we’ve, we’ve had a couple others like that as well for them. It’s a fantastic idea. So I don’t want to too much credit for it. But at the end of the day, the thing about Climate Neutral  is that you really have to understand that there’s two there’s two distinct audiences for their company and their brand. They have, their ultimately who they sell to are other business executives. They have to, even though they are in some ways, a B2C company and they have this label that we hope can change the world a lot of ways. They need the buy in from the highest levels of any business to say, well, we’re going to go down this path that is more expensive and more and more costly to have the label. And and so we recognize that, you know, companies like or outlets like Fast Company are really speaking to that corporate executive and helping tell that story to them as well. There is a very much a bifurcated kind of marketing plan there. With when it comes to search engines, we we did a big, deep dive with them. And we realized that I don’t think a lot of people search for climate related stuff. And in so I even though we did all of this work around, I think that Visibly and the idea of search engine visibility works very, very well, for product discovery. I’m not sure how many people use it for nonprofit discovery, if you will. But, But what I can tell you is that we’ve done, is that the PR that we’ve produced, almost completely dominates search results for climate neutrality or like Climate Neutral. And so we not only is climateneatural.org in one year gone from non existence to the very first organic search result for that term Climate Neutral. But all the media around climate neutrality is I’d say 50% of it relates to the organization you know, what the work that the organization is doing. So anybody who’s interested in the concept of climate neutral, they will find what the organization is doing.

Erica Mills Barnhart 

So I’m guessing listeners at this point are like, I want to be number one a search engine. How did you do it? What did you do?

Chris Dickey 

A lot of things. So being the one-

Erica Mills Barnhart 

I have an assumption, actually, which is that you, I mean the name of the organization is Climate Neutral. And that was also the search term. So which is the chicken and which is the egg?

Chris Dickey 

Well, absolutely. Absolutely recognize that like Climate Neutral, and the term climate neutrality was something that we wanted to capitalize on. We didn’t come up with that term. It already existed for us. We did spend the money to buy the URL Climate Neutral. So that’s very helpful. Number two, we needed to develop high quality backlinks and so that’s where PR comes in and we start getting we start telling that story-

Erica Mills Barnhart 

Will you explain what backlinks are?

Chris Dickey 

A backlink is anytime another website links to your site.

Erica Mills Barnhart 

Thank you.

Chris Dickey 

It’s it’s, there’s literally in SEO world, they call it link juice. And it’s this, it’s this conception of like going from you have you have the, the domain authority of one site, and they’re sending a little bit of their juice over your site by saying, hey, we recognize these guys are an important voice in the space. We’re gonna link to them and tell people and that link is seen as a vote by Google, that you are a reliable source for this particular subject matter. And particularly, I think, something that, you know, a very, very small thing that I would say, is overlooked by a lot of marketing organizations, or nonprofits is the more creative and unique you are with your name, the harder it is to rank in search. Because people search for very broad terms and they, when they don’t know what they’re looking for they start with the broadest term possible. And if you can optimize around those words, those very broad words like Climate Neutral for instance, I have another company that we work for, in the, in the consumer packaged goods space, and they made bags, and they named their very first bag, the everyday messenger bag and they and they killed it. And everyone looking for an everyday messenger bag, finds this bag.

Erica Mills Barnhart 

Wow. So what’s your advice to organizations that already have their name? They’re probably not going to rename because it’s a big hairy deal. So what the next? Where do they go from there?

Chris Dickey 

What’s the next nugget? Yeah, the next nugget, is they, I would, gosh, I think it’s really like you have to look at every single organization in its own light and kind of what they’re doing. But if they have a program or a certification, or what is the what is the core service that they’re providing the community that in and of itself could be seen as a product, and you can name that something that is very commonly known, you know, and I think as a marketer, you want to be really catchy and clever and unfortunately, that doesn’t always help you unless you’re a name brand to begin with. If you’re if you’re fighting for shared voice in a very crowded space, being descriptive in your name and people understanding what the name means is actually to your benefit, especially in search.

Erica Mills Barnhart 

Yeah, it is it is a tricky business because a lot of the descriptive names are taken. So that’s it was interesting to hear that Climate Neutral bought the URL, that can be a pretty significant investment in terms of that process, if you’re either picking your name out of the gate or renaming.

Chris Dickey 

They had a lot of corporate sponsors that were that wanted to put them off on the right foot, which I think was smart.

Erica Mills Barnhart 

Yeah. Oh, yeah. I mean, if you can pull it off, it’s fantastic. But oftentimes, especially nonprofits or small businesses, you know, B Corps, just don’t, that can be a very expensive investment. So one of the some of the work that I do is around research I do is around brain novelty and what our brains do when they when it gets, you know, and anything that’s novel, actually, our brains aren’t super sophisticated about it. They’re like a new text message. That’s neat. Look at me. Oh, someone’s a jet TikTok great, um, anything sort of novel. And so you know, when I work with organizations, I focus on this idea of sort of the art and science of integrating novel words that aren’t that are not overused. So a lot of you know, words are extremely overused within different spaces with these really straightforward words both from from the search engine perspective but also from just readability you know, reading ease perspective and those types of things. Um, so what I’m hearing you say, which is interesting is if you are a company or organization where being found on search is important to you, let me say, I’m saying if because what is true for the social impact spaces, that word of mouth marketing is still it’s still the big driver, actually, but but I just feel like we’ve transitioned and I would say, you know, COVID, actually is this is one of the impacts it’s going to have is like, we’re, we’re just more reliant on everything technological. So even our connection with cause is really being called into question. Not only question a little bit, but more so how are we going to connect? How are we going to connect?

Chris Dickey 

In Jackson Hole, Wyoming, there’s a ton of nonprofits, and they’re all trying to figure out how to make money this year, because like, they’re all their traditional ways of capturing, you know, development is all is all person to person. Yeah, so all these tools have to evolve.

Erica Mills Barnhart 

All of them have to evolve and that’s super overwhelming. Right? So that’s why I was asking kind of like, alright, so if your name is off the table, where do you go next?

Chris Dickey 

Well, content, absolutely. 100%. I know you cover content on the show quite a bit. But content is super critical, you know, and, you know, we named the software project that I’m working on called Visibly, Visibly is a nonsensical name. And I realized quickly that it’s a plan of words, we were trying to go for visibility, and it’s a simple URL. I think it’s a good one. But ultimately currently because we’re so new and we’re brand new, we just released our beta last week.

Erica Mills Barnhart 

Oh, wow.

Chris Dickey 

Yeah, that new, new, new new. It’s been around for, you know, it’s been around for a year. It’s but we were kind of it was a closed beta for a long time so now it’s an open beta. It’s just another step forward. But anyways, nobody, only people who look who who search for V I S E B L Y is someone who’s misspelling the word.

Erica Mills Barnhart 

So what will you do I mean?

Chris Dickey 

Exactly so what we’ll do is we’ll put forward a fairly well thought out content strategy that focuses on existing keywords that we know have search volumes that we think that we can rank for, and that we can actually make an you know, make an impact for us. So more this is now this is more traditional SEO but a lot of people ask questions to search engines. The fact of the matter is like the more colloquial like you respond to those questions, the more Google likes you. Google doesn’t reward robots, they reward people doing good, good work. And they have some pretty specific algorithms. It’s kind of like sniff out if you’re, if you’re a bot, or if you’re a human. And, and so what I would say is, you know, think about what are the what are the most pressing questions, that, that you’re solving as an organization? And what are the pain points? Or what are the things that people will be asking questions about or curious about? Or points of interest that you guys have points like knowledge on and then formulate a blog post around those questions. Questions are a great way to optimize and search and they’re really underleveraged. In the most part, people try to try to optimize for these non branded keywords like I was talking about the beginning of the conversation and well if you can do that, then you’re in really good position. But questions are the next step. And you see these question boxes are really showing up a lot in search where it’s known as people also ask. And people will extract those from websites and they will populate those right at the top of search. And they’re guessing that if you put in this keyword or this query, you might actually mean you might actually want one of these questions like this like they’re like, they have this really crazy, sophisticated algorithm that tries to determine intent of a search. So they’re like, not only they think that if you put in this keyword based on your past search history, you actually you actually want this and they’re actually pretty good at determining.

Erica Mills Barnhart 

That is so freaky.

Chris Dickey 

I know, I know, it’s kind of scary. Yeah. But yeah.

Erica Mills Barnhart 

So from a content strategy if I’m if I’m thinking through this, you know, and a listener is trying to figure out how to apply this, would you literally sit down and say, what are the top 10 problems that we solve as a company or organization? And then you would develop a content strategy around that?

Chris Dickey 

I would do a couple things. I think that’s I think that’s a great way to do it. I think the other thing that it would it makes sense to do is there’s there’s a, there’s a handful of free keyword research tools out there. And I would just jump in one of those keyword research tools. And you’ll find that little iterations in the way that you talk about something have massive, different audiences. The way that you think about something, if you change it, I’ll give you a little anecdote and this goes back to kind of the outdoor industry is we work for a kayak company. And the difference between calling something a lightweight kayak versus a portable kayak is like 10s of thousands of people a month.

Erica Mills Barnhart 

Which ones more popular?

Chris Dickey 

The lightweight kayak. Yeah. So you might really think that oh, the value proposition here isn’t portable. But in fact, way more people by a magnitude of like five or six X are searching for for lightweight. So it’s like okay, well lightweight and portable or kind of, you know, the same thing. And maybe we really want to pin it around the term lightweight. So you might find that same thing with your organization. Whereas you really think that the value proposition is encapsulated in this one word. But you find once you do this, this like very simple keyword research that a synonym of that word is the one receiving all the traffic so then you pivot around that and you you try to like start building out stuff around that. So there’s a little pieces of insight there. I think the other thing to look at is how  would you somebody find you? I always try to like, step back from yourself and, you know, what would be the points of discovery? Can you reverse engineer how somebody would find your organization? And when you start asking that question, and you ask other people that question that will bring up a lot of little points of like, oh, I can optimize around this idea and this idea and this question. And I think that’s, that’s a really good way to think about it as marketers. You know, what, what’s that customer journey to discovery?

Erica Mills Barnhart 

I think you’re raising an important point, which is to to reverse engineer and I’m a huge I’m going to add, I’m a huge fan of reverse engineering, in general, but definitely for this because oftentimes what what marketers will do and you see this with strategy, so you know, anybody listening who’s done a strategic plan, you start and you look forward, as opposed to saying as opposed to putting yourself in a future point in time, and saying, okay, let’s assume that, you know, this person found us. What did they do and reverse engineering and actually you get the reverse engineering is much more actionable. I think it’s quite challenging for us to sit in present and look future, like monolithic iceberg that is the future. And the other thing that allows you to do is say, like, do we know, you know, do we know our customers? And how do you know how did Steve get here? And how did you know Jane get here and all those things. So I love that I will also give a little anecdote which is around the word nonprofit and search. And I actually, I’m forgetting which one is most popular, but the difference between nonprofit all is one word which by the way, if you work for a nonprofit, most folks will just write nonprofit no hyphen, no space. So there’s a huge difference from a search perspective between nonprofit all one word which is the least sort of popular in terms of search, nonprofit with a hyphen, and I think it is true that the most popular was non space, profit and one is just, you know, again, a little anecdotal example. But it’s also an example of the way that the folks working in an industry think about the words versus the consumer, or the donor, or, you know, whoever you’re really trying to reach, think and search can be really different. You know, and that brings up a little point, what I love about search is that it is because of its like this aggregate of like human experience, and it’s happening on such a rapid scale every single day, you get to see these trends and human behavior and how people see the world. And it might be in alignment with what you think and it might not be. And that’s why this keyword research becomes really interesting to me. Well, I really appreciate all that you shared, I have learned a ton I confess that I mean, I understand how important search engine visibility to use your terminology is, but it’s not something I’ve done a super deep dive on, I do tend to play more in the sphere of upper level messaging and messaging strategy, and not go as deep. So I appreciate both the sort of strategy tips that you’ve given us, but also the very specific, like, you know, go and put in your search-

Chris Dickey 

I can tell you is I also come from that same discipline is like, I’m a messaging guy. I’m a PR guy, I’m a storyteller. I come from like, an industry that is very rich in storytelling that is the outdoor industry. We love telling stories about the outdoors. And what I can tell you, though, is that without, if you don’t put together a powerful distribution strategy, it’s all for naught. And you have to figure out how am I going to get this message out there? And I think we’ve focused on that more and more as an agency over time, especially as the digital tools have progressed, but, you know, to invest in storytelling is great, but if no can hear the story, then that’s where the frustration comes in.

Erica Mills Barnhart 

Yeah, you’re just sitting there in front of the fire all alone, telling your stories, eating your s.mores out there in the woods.

Chris Dickey 

Yeah, totally.

Erica Mills Barnhart 

So, I always end my interviews with the same question. And it has to do with motivation and inspiration. So inspiration, the root of that word means to breathe in. And motivation is about action. So we need both of these things to do what we’re doing. So I’m curious-

Chris Dickey 

I love that.

Erica Mills Barnhart 

Thank you. I do too, actually when I discovered that about inspiring I was like, sort of it like opened my mind in a very different way. What inspires you  and what keeps you motivated to do this work?

Chris Dickey 

Oh, that’s good. Um, I love meaningfully connecting with people. And I think that it has become harder and harder as there’s more people and there’s more static and there’s more options and to find the people that really care about your message, your thing becomes more and more challenging. That goes back to my point of distribution. But it’s also a message you want to you want to curate a message that’s going to resonate, connect. But that that facilitation of meaningful connection is what I find to be most satisfying at this point in my career.

Erica Mills Barnhart 

Yeah, yeah. I love that. Well, thank you, thank you, thank you for making time to, to join me today on the podcast, I really admire how you’re like applying, like tried and true PR tactics and strategies with much more cutting edge search engine, kind of pioneering in that in that space. It’s really fun to hear about that. And that and also all your examples of you know, of marketing for good from a whole bunch of different spaces, which is what we’d like to talk about on this. So thank you, Chris, for being here. And also thanks to our listeners for joining us for this conversation as always do good be well and I’ll see you next time.

The post Ep 17: Chris Dickey: Search Engine Visibility appeared first on Claxon Communication.

This is a transcript of Erica Mills Barnhart’s interview with Maria Ross on the Marketing for Good podcast. You can listen to the episode here and listen to more episodes on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you enjoy listening to podcasts. Enjoy!

KEY WORDS

empathy, people, listening, customers, understand, patience, tagline, curious, clients, questions, employees

Erica Mills Barnhart 

Welcome to the show, Maria.

Maria Ross 

Thanks for having me. I’m excited to be here.

Erica Mills Barnhart 

I am super duper glad you’re here. I feel like empathy is like really having a moment. And so I always look at the etymology of words, and I spend a lot of time doing that one, because I am that way, but also because you know, when you understand the history of word, I feel like you have a different relationship with it. So I learned that etymology comes from Greek and it meant passion or state of emotion, and then we break it down, it means in feeling to be in feeling.

Maria Ross 

Which I thought I’d give you a round of applause for being a good students, because I did a slight thing on that in the book, and I love that you’re talking about this.

Erica Mills Barnhart 

Yeah, well, I mean, we’re all up in our fields these days, because global pandemic, you know, finally facing, you know, roots of racism and how that plays out today and you know, racial equity and, you know, social justice, all of these things are happening. And by the way, we’re sheltered in place. So, so I want to get to empathy and really dig in on that. But I feel like before we go direct to empathy. If you’re open to it, I’d like us to take us back to 2008. So that listeners understand your path here. And in 2008 shortly after launching your business, I understand so dodgy timing. You suffered a ruptured brain aneurysm that almost killed you, and that inspired your memoir. I have a really hard time with that word memoir memoir, I can say it in French, memoir, that’s easy.

Maria Ross 

Because then you just sound pretentious.

Erica Mills Barnhart 

I know, I know, so don’t do that. Anyway, your memoir Rebooting My Brain will you tell us about that experience and the impact it has had on you and how you kind of see the world and walk through the world and how it brought you to empathy as a topic?

Maria Ross 

Absolutely. So yeah, as you said in 2008, I almost died from an unexpected ruptured brain aneurysm I had been healthy and active and was actually lucky enough if you can say that, that I had symptoms for about a month and a half. And, but doctors misdiagnosed me. And luckily, on the day that I collapsed unconscious, my husband had come home from work early that day. So I was very fortunate. But to speed through, I spent about six weeks in the hospital, partially blind, because I had some damage to my retinas from the hemorrhage. And that came back over time, but yeah, that whole experience and then the eventual rehab period, and then, quite frankly, I had a miraculous recovery based on the severity of the hemorrhage that I’d had, I then got back into my business again back into my life again, and had to find a new way to work. But what was monumental about that experience that I bring into the book, The Empathy Edge, is my stay in the hospital was an amazing experience. I was at University of Washington Medical Center in Seattle. And there were all these things that happened that made that a wonderful experience. So wonderful that I later became a patient advisor to be the voice of the patient on their Patient and Family Education Committee. And just the respect that was shown to me the fact that they explained things to me, they called me by name, you know, when you’re in the hospital, it’s one of your most vulnerable times. And what I came to find out later was that those, that experience was not an accident. It was a way that the hospital operationalized empathy for their patients. They subscribe to a philosophy that’s worldwide called patient and family centered care. And it means that you create policies and processes and habits and expectations for your employees. So that you create this empathetic experience where the patient is at the center of the experience.

Erica Mills Barnhart 

So a culture of empathy?

Maria Ross 

Culture of empathy, right, but not just hiring a bunch of really nice people like what they did was create actual processes and policies, you must call patients by name, you must introduce yourself and knock before you walk into a room, you must explain terms and tests and what you’re doing to them before you start poking and prodding. We are going to give them a choice of what they want to eat for lunch on a menu of options. We are not going to have official visiting hours when patients need their family and friends, their family and friends can come. So all of these things were actually policy decisions that ultimately impacted the patient or you know, we’re talking about for profit business, the customer experience, and that’s when I realized the power of this is not just about creating a brand or creating a culture, because you say it’s this thing, it’s about creating the environment and putting the policies in place. So it makes it really easy for people to default to the behavior that you want them to have. In this case, it was empathy for patients. And so that combined with my brand strategy work, working with companies and fast growth companies, over the years, they started to talk more and more about wanting to be seen as an empathetic brand, which I hadn’t heard 10 years prior, you know, it was like, Oh, we want to be seen as innovative and cutting edge and-

Erica Mills Barnhart 

everybody wants to be in innovative, yeah. Everybody wants to be innovative. But, you know, the very, very hardcore technologists would start to talk about yeah, we want to be seen as approachable and empathetic and I was like, what is going on here? Like, I’m all for it. But you know, it’s interesting. And so some of them I had to have difficult conversations with like, well, are you though, are you guys really, really are you really and so that’s where you know, my branding work intersects a lot with the work that you do in marketing is that you have to live it from the inside out, and if you’re going to make the brand or marketing claim, how are you backing that up? Yeah, I think Seth Godin, I think it was Seth Godin said you can’t just schmear marketing or branding on something. Like it’s not cream cheese.

Maria Ross 

Exactly. And I always said, You can’t slap a coat of brand paint on it, right? So just anyway, all these things came together to ultimately lead to the book that I started researching in 2016. But that very personal experience kind of set the spark of this is possible. This is possible for a company to intentionally create an empathetic environment for its patients or its customers or to donors or it’s-

Erica Mills Barnhart 

And not just possible, but actually profitable. Yes, that’s the key. So the wonderful thing about also why I talked about this story at the beginning of the book is that patient and family centered care started as a profit driven exercise. It started because patient readmissions cost hospitals a lot of money, mistakes cost hospitals a lot of money. If you get discharged without the proper instructions, it costs them a lot of money. So even though it’s the right thing to do, of course, to be patient centered as a hospital, it ultimately started from a profitability motive. And that’s fascinating. That’s the crux of the book is that I don’t care how you why you want to adopt empathy as an organization or as a leader, because even if it’s a selfish motive that’s driving you there. It’s sort of like being pregnant. Like it doesn’t really matter how you got pregnant. It’s that you ultimately create an empathetic organization you help your leaders strengthen their own empathy, you create an environment where employees thrive and environment where customers are taken care of and feel seen, heard and understood. And that ultimately does lead to profitability, word of mouth, retaining the best top talent, all of the benefits that befall a empathetic organization or an empathetic brand. So you can become, and this, you know, true of people too, but you believe companies and organizations, even if it’s not naturally or historically in their DNA through operationalizing empathy, they can truly become empathetic. Because I don’t know that that’s true. You know, let’s go back to innovation. Every single clients that I’ve ever worked with over my 15 plus years, you know, we do like brand personality, and they’re like, innovative and I’m like, mmm. You do the same thing, are you? Are you really? And in that case, you can become more innovative, but I think being the work of brand and brand personality and values, is work of excavation. Right, is like what’s already there that we want to elevate. But I’m hearing you say something kind of different. Yeah, absolutely. I think if that’s what you’re, you know, this is how I talk to my brand clients about their aspiring brand, or what’s the brand they aspire to be? Because that’s often the question that I get in brand workshops. Yeah. Are you asking us who we actually are or who we want to be. And I’m like a little bit of both because of if you then put the the foundation in under that to support that claim that you’re making to the market so it’s believable whether it’s, you know, if you if you do want to go out there and say you’re innovative, how are you hiring? What’s your product quality process? What’s your product development process? How are you keeping everyone sharp and at the top of their industry with the latest learnings? You know, those are all things that you can create processes and policies for. So if you’re willing to as a company say, yeah, we want to go big on being seen as an innovative company, you’ve got to do that change management work on the inside the structural work on the building, so that yeah, that’s a believable claim now Yeah, yeah. Okay, that’s interesting. I don’t think we can talk about empathy without referencing Brené Brown. And there’s so many quotes from her about empathy, but the one that struck me just because of where we’re at in terms of Covid and everything, was empathy is communicating that very important feeling of you are not alone. And that, you know, we’re sheltered in place, you know, and yet because of global pandemic and as a, we as a country, excuse me. I mean, I think there’s a sense of like people wanting to come together, and they are physically coming together for better or for worse for various reasons. But fundamentally, we are often both emotionally and physically alone. And so I’m just I’m curious on your thoughts about what role does empathy have in like, all of this that’s going on right now? Well, I think it’s important to understand that there’s, there’s two sides to the empathy coin. And that’s why this conversation is so timely, aside from everything going on in the world. So timely now, because you, you started off talking about the word origins of empathy, right? And the definition of empathy has changed over time. So in the 1500s, it meant something much more akin to sympathy, actually, sympathy meant empathy back then. They were synonyms?

Maria Ross 

Well no, the word sympathy meant empathy. It didn’t mean what we think of. So you could be in sympathy with someone and not because their dog just died. It was just that you were you were understanding where they were coming from you were feeling what they were feeling. But for a long time, it was just the affective empathy, just the I’m feeling what you’re feeling, I’m feeling your feels. But modern psychology has broaden that to say it’s also about cognitive empathy, which is just, I may not feel exactly what you’re feeling, but I understand where you’re coming from, I can see the world through your point of view. And that’s the kind of empathy we’re talking about in the workplace. So for so long, leaders have shied away from empathy in the workplace because of all the feels right, like, oh, but it’s also what I what I propose in the book that is that if we, if we look at it as a method of perspective taking, as a method of gathering information, it doesn’t mean that I have to be balling just as much as you when we’re having a conversation. It just means that I see where you’re coming from. I understand the situation from your point of view. And further, I’m going to take action based on that information. Not that I’m going to do exactly what you want. Because that’s what people often think, oh, if I’m empathetic at work, I’m just people are going to walk all over me. No, no, no. But it’s about how you make your decisions. That’s the difference. You could still be delivering a decision that somebody doesn’t like, but you do it in a way where you’re supportive, where they are seen, heard and understood. Maybe you deliver it differently. Maybe you provide them different resources. Maybe it can impact the decision, the actual decision you’re going to make, who knows but it’s a way of getting to the decision that is enabling people to be seen, heard and understood. So I agree with Brené on the affective empathy component of like you’re not alone. But it doesn’t have to be that in the work context. It can just be I as an empathetic leader understand that this is going to be hard for you Erica to hear. I’m giving you difficult feedback. So the way that I do it is I’m seeing it from your point of view. And I’m asking more questions than delivering more advice. I’m trying to understand the context of, maybe you’ve been late to a lot of meetings, and then I uncover that you are taking care of an aging parent at home. Now, there’s context. Now, it’s not about performance, it’s about, oh, there’s a different problem we need to solve here. You know, so and that you can take that through to any any contentious situation or disagreement that you’re having with someone at work is, if you could go at it by trying to get curious about the other person’s point of view and perspective, it doesn’t mean you have to agree. And it doesn’t mean you have to give up your course of action. It just means now you can have a productive conversation, because now you understand where the other person’s coming from.

Erica Mills Barnhart 

Okay, I’m imagining I’m imagining some listeners at this point who are thinking, okay, but then we get into conflict. Like I get you you get me, but, we don’t agree. So now I’m in conflict and I don’t like conflict, right? We’re like we’re so conflict averse. So how do we, how do you manage both of those things, the sort of operationalizing of empathy and creating space for it, understanding that that might in fact lead to more conflict, but that that’s healthy. I mean, on the other side of conflict is clarity. Right? This is a piece of feedback I always get from my clients, it’s like, you’re very comfortable with conflict. I’m like, I don’t love it any more than the next person. But it’s, to me, it’s actually a positive because on the other side, if you can move through that with compassion, then there’s clarity. So why wouldn’t you? You know, why not? Right? It’s there anyway.

Maria Ross 

Right.

Erica Mills Barnhart 

And either you’re gonna surface it or not.

Maria Ross 

Exactly. And I think that’s where as a leader, you need to strengthen and even as an aspiring leader, as a human right, you strengthen your own empathy so you can go into those conversations not to give in or concede, but just if you need to strip the conflict part of it out of it so we can get to the actual problem solving and a constructive conversation. So you can imagine two people that disagree about a strategic plan in the workplace. Right? And they’re butting heads. I’m pushing my fist together. And it’s because it’s all about I want to come in and tell you why I’m right. And you’re wrong. And you want to come in and tell me why I’m, I’m wrong and you’re right. Empathy requires that both people come to the table and go, I understand we have a different approach to this. So now I’m going to get curious, Erica, about why you think that’s the path to success. I’m going to start asking questions and digging deep and removing the defenses. So you deflate the conflict a little bit. So it’s, it’s now just tell me about your point of view and your perspective. And the amazing thing is curiosity is the number one trait of empathetic people. And here’s why. When you ask people questions, and they give you answers, you know, their point of view, because they’re telling you so you don’t have to guess right and so once you can have that conversation, then the other person can also have that conversation and then you can look at okay, where do we have common ground on this? Oh, our common ground is we both want to hit our quarterly number this year, we both agree that that’s where we’re going. And we don’t, we don’t want our company to go bankrupt. Like, we can both agree on that. It can be the highest level aspect of common ground, but you can start to find it, and then determine okay, well, what is it behind your course of action that appeals to you? Maybe we can find a course of action that’s different from mine or yours that gives us both what we want.

Erica Mills Barnhart 

We start with, so if there’s conflict, then we start with curiosity and getting-

Maria Ross 

Absolutely, absolutely.

Erica Mills Barnhart 

Asking questions. From there, we identify common ground.

Maria Ross 

Mm hmm.

Erica Mills Barnhart 

And then how do you come to a decision from common ground?  Yeah, that’s where you have to just keep the conversation going, like you can get to what someone’s trying to accomplish, you can maybe find three different alternative ways to get it. But if you don’t even have that conversation to begin with, you don’t ask the questions and here’s the key, actually listen to the answers. Not just, I’m gonna wait for you to stop talking. So I can say what I want. But that’s-  And by the way, while you’re talking, I’m not listening. I am preparing my counter argument, my counter points, they will be amazing. You will be blown away by them, right? I mean, we spend so much time quote unquote, listening and not listening. I mean, just being silent doesn’t mean you’re listening.

Maria Ross 

Exactly. Yeah.

Erica Mills Barnhart 

You know, what comes to mind is that Anais Nin quote, that we don’t see things as they are, we see them as we are.

Maria Ross 

Mm hmm. Yeah, the antithisis of empathy.

Erica Mills Barnhart 

Right. Right. And so I think that that’s kind of important to hold. Like, left to our natural devices, that rings fairly true. Although I do feel an opening because of everything that’s happening in the world toward this idea of like, I have to figure out, you know, how you see them. So, so I’m hoping that there’s that openness. I’m hoping that you can help us understand another aspect of this, which is in marketing of course, a lot of what you’re trying to do is very purposely get into the minds and hearts of the people, you know, clients, customers, donors, volunteers, whoever it may be. And so one of the liabilities of of marketing which I taught, you know, when I teach and I talk a lot about this idea of projecting. Right, meaning I like events, everybody will like events, why wouldn’t you like events, right? Assuming that what you like is what others like and so I feel like through empathy and really like the purposeful unleashing of empathy, yet strategic unleashing of empathy, that that might be a really productive bridge to getting into the minds and hearts of your target audience. Yeah, absolutely. In the book, I quote Dan Pink, who wrote the book called, oh my gosh, the name is escaping me, Drive, which was all about the surprising truth of what motivates us. And, you know, he talked all about the fact that not everybody is motivated by the same thing. Even in the workplace, not everybody’s motivated by a higher paycheck, they might want more vacation days, they might want a different job title, they might want more flexible hours, whatever it is, right. And that side note, many studies are showing that employees view flexible workplace policies as empathetic because it’s, oh, you’re understanding that I might need to make changes. You’re not making me work this hour to this hour. You are being empathetic that I might have different needs, right. But to your point, it is that gateway to better understanding what’s going to resonate for people and understanding that your target audience might not be you and so that’s why you have to get out and talk to them, you’ve got to get out of your ivory tower, and find out what life is like for them. With my clients, I always do the exercise of, well, I understand that that’s the way you want to describe your company. But let’s get out and talk to some customers and see how they actually describe you. Why did they sign on with you? And you can get a different answer, you can get a well they want to call themselves this jargony thing, especially in tech right. They call themselves this jargony thing, because that’s what the analysts want them to call their space. But when you actually talk to a customer, they say, well, this is the problem that they solve. And this is why I like them. It is also in problem solution language. Exactly. And it’s and it’s in real language. It’s not just the pretty marketing language that the company wants to say, but it’s like, no, this is how people really talk. This is what the voice in there, I call it the voice in their head, what is the voice in their head actually saying? It’s not saying I need a best of breed solution so I can maximize productivity, like nobody’s saying that, right? They’re saying like, I need a cleaner, simpler way to do X or whatever it is. And that is empathy is letting go of, well, this is how we want to say it in our marketing, to this is the language it’s actually going to resonate and surprise, when they read, when someone reads that language on your website. They’re going to go oh my gosh, that’s exactly the voice in my head. Yeah, they’re reading my mind. And now I’m gonna sign up and learn more. Yeah, yeah. So many things come to mind around that. I was just listening. I’ve been thinking a lot about taglines. Well, I, in general, I feel like one of, that this is a forcing function on marketing language. I think that we’re about to have a really big wake up call where there’s just kind of a zero tolerance policy for blah, blah, blah.  Because our cognitive load is so high. Nobody can you know, we just don’t have the openness, mental openness to process the stuff and I you know, so we’re not going to there’s less than a tolerance for it. Whereas I think, not like and not like people are like, oh, I love that when you talk to me in gobbledygook, said no one ever, I don’t have time for you. So I think that’s really interesting. It’s also why when I work with clients around messaging, I actually start by having us do the spoken elevator pitch and optimizing that first. Because like as a for instance, the term wraparound services.

Maria Ross 

You know, there’s wraparound services.Yeah, no one’s saying that.

Erica Mills Barnhart 

No client ever has been like, well, I’m really hoping for some wraparound services and a spa, maybe at a spa. Wrap the kale around me, I don’t know. But it’s stuff like that, where and that’s why I do it kind of in reverse order of a lot of others. And at first people are like, that’s kind of weird. And then you understand that it’s so easy to elevate the spoken word, but in the other direction feels like demoting you’re very beautiful marketing ease. So but about taglines. I’m very curious to see what will happen because you know, like, like every piece of, you know, the marketing mix. They have trends happen and I feel like we’re coming off a trend of kind of aspirational taglines. So like, you know, all together one. That’s one I just saw it, I was like-

Maria Ross 

Explore. Discover. Connect.

Erica Mills Barnhart 

Exactly, exactly. Which can be perfectly fine. I’m not saying any of that was good or bad. But I am starting to see a little bit and I’m curious if this is gonna be a blip or a trend towards like, let’s use your example. You know, dry cleaning, fast, easy, cheap. I mean, whatever it’s gonna be. I, you know, I’m just I’m curious about that. That’s, I think, and I think that that approach, in many ways is more empathetic. Yeah, and I think that’s really interesting. It’s not something I had noticed I, I’ve always been the person that with clients, I go if you if we have to force a tagline, you don’t need one, like unless it pops out naturally from the messaging that it’s like, you Yeah, that’s it. That’s, you know, just do it. Yes. But if you are sitting there racking your brain trying to figure out a tagline, you probably don’t need one right now. Right? That’s not going to be the end all be all of why someone’s going to come buy from you or not. And you know, like you it’s that’s just one marketing tactic one marketing tool in the in the communication toolkit that they have. And so it’s like, you know, oh, do I have to have a tagline? You don’t have to. If some, if one is perfect, then yes, but don’t have one just to have one. And like you said, have it say nothing at all. Yeah. Now, do you feel the same way when the company or organization has like a completely made up word as their name? I still feel the same way because I think in the end, no one’s just buying a product by their the name of the company alone. They’re looking into what that company actually does, right? So if someone’s making a buying decision based on the name of the company, and the tagline, I don’t know that that’s an ideal buyer. Do they understand what their needs are? I don’t know. I don’t see I don’t see the job of the name or the tag line as a as a door closer I see it or as a deal closer I see it as a door opener. Mm hmm. Yes. It’s really intriguing for sure to be intriguing. But sometimes- Just like, that’s what I want. I want fast, dry cleaning, I don’t know why I’m so stuck on that example, but- Google never had a tagline. But it’s an intriguing enough name that you’re like, what is what do they do? You know what I mean? So you don’t always have to, if you’ve got that made up name, you don’t always have to have the tagline. But, but I think that’s a really interesting trend based on what you’re seeing. I hadn’t thought of it actually. And it probably is exactly what you said is that the cognitive load is too much right now. Like we just want to cut to the chase. We don’t want to have to think about things this hard. And no one you know, to your point no one ever did before. We had, you still only have like 10 seconds for people to like look at your homepage and understand what you do. So but I think people’s tolerances, if it could get any shorter is gonna be a little shorter. So, that’s a really astute observation. Thank you. This is what happens when you obsess about, you know, certain things sometimes good observations. You are probably familiar with Karla McLaren’s work on empathy. She wrote the book The Language of Emotions, which is how I came to know her. I mean, that book is like custom made for me, I feel like it’s about language and it’s about emotions. Okay. She also wrote a book called The Art of Empathy: a complete guide to life’s most essential skill. So, you know, she, and I think that came out like 25 or six years ago. So and she’s researched a ton on empathy like she’s you go to your website, you’re like, you have gotten deep on this on emotions and empathy, so this is an aside but I just found it so fascinating, is that societally some emotions we consider to be negative and others positive, like, you know, joy or happiness. And so like we’re in this quest to always be joyful and happy and light. And yet, what she points out is that all emotions are neutral. And it’s how we how we socialize them, where they take on positives or negatives so like there’s so much wisdom in anger, in sadness in all of those, I mean, tears are our teachers. Right? And so I just I think her approach is super interesting and this gal’s gone deep, so part of what she also says is that everyone is an empath. Meaning somebody who you know, feels all everybody’s feels a lot and I don’t know to your point if she means only affective or also cognitive. But in that she says the trick is to kind of get in touch with your inner empath. I thought that was really kind of controversial, very curious on your thoughts.

Maria Ross 

Yeah. It’s so funny because she’s basically it’s the premise of Inside Out, right, the movie inside out the animated movie, which was all about the fact that you have to have sadness and anger to balance joy and the other emotions as children develop, right? But here’s the thing, I always, I always call BS on people that say, well, I’m just I can’t be an empathetic leader because I’m just not naturally empathetic, right? First of all, we are all hardwired as humans in our DNA science has shown to be empathetic from studies on young animals on young baby humans, we, we would not have survived as a species if we didn’t have the ability to empathize and collaborate with each other. My theory is kind of similar to her is that it for some people, that muscle has just atrophied. Maybe they grew up in a family where it wasn’t fostered, modeled or rewarded. Maybe they’ve been in a workplace so long where it’s sort of been beat out of them. That that’s not how you get ahead in that work right by right empathizing with other people’s emotions you get ahead at that workplace by take no prisoners, look after yourself, be competitive, hold things close to the vest, don’t care what anyone else is thinking or feeling. And so this idea that this excuse that people make of I can’t I can’t embrace being an empathetic leader for my people because A) I’m not naturally good at it or I don’t have time for it, thats the other good one I get a lot-

Erica Mills Barnhart 

Or do you get often I’ll look weak?

Maria Ross 

Yes, but putting that aside the whole excuse of like, oh, it’s, it’s just not a skill I have or I just can’t. You absolutely can. That’s like saying you can never have six pack abs or you can never run a mile because you just haven’t been to the gym in a long time and you haven’t been to the empathy gym in a while. So it’s all about, you know, you have to do some that that’s why I included actionable habits in the book because they’re gonna feel forced and unnatural at first if you haven’t done it in a while, but the point is so does your first trip back to the gym after being gone for 10 years, it feels painful. You’re sore.

Erica Mills Barnhart 

Well, and the older you get, by the way, you’re like, wow, that hurts.

Maria Ross 

Exactly, exactly. So you know, you just have to be practicing it more and more and more so it becomes part of your standard operating procedure. So it becomes a default. So it becomes muscle memory, if you will. And this is exactly what psychology has shown working with very severely autistic children who do not get in touch with their empathy. They are given wrote lists of checklists of how to interact with someone. And they’re told do these things, right? Not because it’s coming from them. They do these things and what happens is it changes their feedback from the world. It changes the how the interaction goes. And so it starts to create something where like, oh, I want more of this. The more they do it, the more they can stop thinking about doing it. It moves out of there. prefrontal cortex, that is who they are. And I interviewed psychologists for the book as well. So that’s what has to happen with empathy at whatever age you are, is try some of the habits and try them on a daily basis.

Erica Mills Barnhart 

Can you give us some examples?

Maria Ross 

Yeah. And the number one I start with is practicing presence. And that is about whatever that means to you. If it’s meditation, if it’s taking a few deep breaths before a big meeting, if it’s sitting with your phone and laptop off with your latte, if it’s going for a run or a walk, you have to be grounded and outside of your own head before you can make room to take someone else’s perspective or point of view. If I’m to hamster wheel, this is what I have to say I’m, I’m scared, I’m nervous. Like I’m all about where I am in my head, I can’t make the space to actually hear you and listen to you because I’m too concerned with my own protection. So you absolutely have to be grounded before you go into situations where you’re you’re dealing with someone else, if you’re going into a performance review, or you’re going into a contentious negotiation, meeting, whatever it is, you have to practice presence. So you can actually come from a place of being centered, and be able to do this and be able to ask the questions and not get defensive.

Erica Mills Barnhart 

I’m a big fan of belly breaths, three deep belly breaths. I feel like honestly, if we all took time, multiple times a day just to do that our world would be a better place. It would for sure, and that- There’s science behind it. It’s not just like-

Maria Ross 

There is science behind it. Yeah. I mean, there’s totally science behind mindfulness. And that’s why the Dalai Lama loves working with scientists to prove that mindfulness is actually at a biological chemical level. Um, but you know that and then as we talked about, is is learning to ask more questions. So if you go to these situations, maybe before you go in, think of three questions you can ask based on what you think that person is going to say. But also listen to what they’re saying, and ask the follow up questions. Tell me more about that. Erica, tell me why you think that ideas going to work? Tell me why you think it’s not gonna work?

Erica Mills Barnhart 

Do you have tips for folks who are listening and they’re like, I know I’m a bad listener. I’m a person who is preparing my defense. Yeah, I mean, I have had to really work at it. For sure. And you know, sometimes I do better than other times. But one of the, so one of the tips that somebody gave me, which I pass along to folks is to actually have like, either like a pen, or you can do with your finger, it doesn’t really matter what it is your fingers are always there for you, but that you have a specific spot that you touch. And it’s always the same spot or the or the same pen or pencil and you hold it in the same way. So that that’s somatic act, get like is your way of saying stay here. Stay present. Be listening. It’s like your reminder to listen rather than going you know, start preparing your, you know, 16 ways that you’re going to take them down. Do you have any other because I think listening is really hard.

Maria Ross 

It is hard for sure.

Erica Mills Barnhart 

True listening is really hard.

Maria Ross 

Yeah. And I, you know, I, I talk about the fact that I’m constantly working on this because I get excited I get like, I want to jump in and be part of it. You know, I also, you know, quite honestly, I had a brain injury, like I have problems with my short term memory. And so I do a lot of note-taking while someone is talking so that if something comes to mind that I know I want to say I just say hold on one second, and I write it down so I can continue listening to them and remember what, remember what I was going to say. So the other thing is, I call it my internal shusher. And I talked about it in the book of just be here. Let her finish. Let him finish what he’s saying. You will get your opportunity you will get your five minutes of debate back, but sometimes it has to be a conscious thing like you said. I had never I’ve never heard of the tapping thing but you know I have heard of like just for presence, you know, if you have a rubber band that you can snap and bring you back to the moment that works for people too, but-

Erica Mills Barnhart 

That sounds painful.

Maria Ross 

It is, But I find that a lot of times when people stop listening, it’s also because at least for me, it’s, I’m afraid, I’m going to forget the point I want or what I want to react to and what the person is going to say, or what the person is saying. So I will try to, you know, and I often ask people, is it okay, if I take notes, but sometimes you might just have to be comfortable with going. Okay, hold that thought for one second, I just thought of something and I want to write it down before I forget and then I want you to continue talking so I can stay focused on you and not try to keep my question in my head.

Erica Mills Barnhart 

And that that last little bit that you just said, which is I want to stay focused on you. I was thinking, you know, when you make them, this is the I versus you statement stuff. But you know, when it’s I want to remember it, I think maybe more empathetic way of saying that could be something like you’re making a really good point and I don’t want to lose it.

Maria Ross 

Yeah, absolutely.

Erica Mills Barnhart 

Just so the person’s like oh, I was on a roll. Yeah, you know, I don’t know that I’m gonna get back on my roll.

Maria Ross 

Yeah, yeah.

Erica Mills Barnhart 

The listening is hard. And yet I’m you know, curiosity and listening are so inextricably linked. So, yeah. So you did you, you mentioned the research that you did for this book, The Empathy Edge, and I’m curious, well, what was one of the most surprising things that you learned when you were researching that?

Maria Ross 

Um, there were a lot of little surprises. I’m trying to think offhand of one thing. Oh, actually, one of the biggest things that I was surprised about is that empathy is the number one trait of successful salespeople. But surprised but also it makes sense. Because it’s not it’s not extraversion. It’s not. It’s not even. What’s the word they used? Drive and ambition, although there is a study from USC that shows that a successful salesperson has equal parts empathy, and drive and ambition. Because if you just have empathy and you don’t have drive and ambition, you’re not making a lot of sales calls, right?

Erica Mills Barnhart 

You’re just sitting around feeling everybody’s feels.

Maria Ross 

Exactly they did studies that correlated the most successful salespeople as having both right. But empathy is about listening to someone and hearing what their challenges are, and then figuring out how to pivot your discussion to address their needs in the moment, the best salespeople I’ve ever worked with and I worked with enterprise sales teams for a really long time, are the people that have the, what I call the empathetic fluency in the moment, the situational fluency of because I’m actually listening to you I’m, I’m actually going to throw away my sales pitch and we’re going to talk about this and we’re going to talk about how our solution, how our product gives you the solution that you’re craving because I’ve heard what you’ve said, right. And that’s very different than yeah, yeah, okay, you just told me all your challenges now let me give you my pre prepared pitch that had no input from you and what you’ve just said to me before we had this conversation. Yeah. So that was that was quite surprising. I think the other thing that was quite surprising is just the the bottom line dollar data attached to empathetic companies. There’s there’s all kinds of data that shows empathetic leaders and empathetic organizations can improve their stock price, boost innovation, boost, employee engagement, boost customer word of mouth. There’s the data and the research is all out there. And I just wanted to curate it into the case for the book that if you think this is soft, it’s not and companies that have done complete turnarounds like I said, maybe for selfish reasons. There’s a great quote in the book from Ryanair CEO Ryanair is a discount airline in Europe. And they implemented a program in 2015 I think it was called always getting better. And it was sort of like Southwest like they did away with all the nuisances of travel for customers, you know, no baggage fees, no allocated seating, no this no that based on the customer’s flying experience, and their net profit grew 43%, the year after that was implemented. And the CEO famously said, if I’d known being nice was so profitable, I would have done it years ago. Right? But this is what I mean about if you’re doing things and for whatever motives, that company decided to put them, maybe they did decide just because we want to increase our profitability, but the fact that they knew that that would increase profitability to me, you still create this amazing experience for the customer. And when customers are happy employees are happy and when employees are happy, customers are happy. So it’s, it’s good for everybody, no matter for what reason they implemented that program.

Erica Mills Barnhart 

Yeah. What that example makes me think of is how often like where does the feedback loop start? So it’s a it’s a dynamic between company and customer or client. But I think oftentimes we take this into sight out approach and to a certain extent that makes some sense, you know, you want to, you know, be centered on your values and these types of things. But it’s such an interesting is sort of like a no duh point, which is go to like, what are your, what are the people who are going to be coughing up cash, really want and build it that way as opposed to let’s think about how we can accommodate ourselves like, as a company, what’s gonna work best for us? Well, it’s gonna be allocating these seats or whatever, it’s gonna be. That’s really that’s sort of a forehead. slapper.

Maria Ross 

I know it is. And if you want to hear a great inside out example, we could talk about REI. So they’re wildly successful opt outside campaign where they close their stores on Black Friday. So how that started, I spoke to the Vice President of customer connection, customer care, I can’t remember the exact title, his exact title from REI. He told me how that came about. And it was from an employee meeting about what the holidays meant to them and to the brand of REI and everyone said, well, you know, our mission and this is why it’s so important to be aligned on mission internally and and aligned on mission between you and your customers, is your mission, something your customers care about, too, right? But they started talking about it and saying, you know, like, the holidays have just become so commercial and our whole mission is about getting people to enjoy the outdoors and here we are getting them to take part in this ridiculousness where they’re in a mall, or they’re in a store all day. They’re standing in lines, like they’re not spending any time with their family and as employees, it sucks to work on Black Friday, like it’s just mayhem. And so some, an employee just said, what if we closed on Black Friday? And they said, but we could never do that. And they were like, I don’t know, could we? And they started figuring out what that could look like and the amazing thing that Ben Steele the EVP shared with me was, it wasn’t actually as hard of a sell as you would think, to the higher ups even though I mean retail closing on Black Friday, right? Because the company was so aligned on mission and because the company was so aligned with their customers like that was the mission, that was why their customers were customers of theirs and members of their co-op was to support that same mission. So that when they decided to do this, it blew up, like in a good way, like, yeah, the social media hashtag, they actually it resulted over the years it’s resulted in millions of new members and millions of new dollars in revenue and free press galore. Right.

Erica Mills Barnhart 

I love that example.

Maria Ross 

Right. And that’s what I mean by you know, the whole book, I have a whole chapter in the book about the empathy veneer, what we were talking about earlier, and this is why why that’s different is that it wasn’t someone just like a bunch of people in a boardroom going like how can we get more word of mouth and like make us look really different and did it that’s calculated, right. And again, to go back to what I said before, I don’t care if that’s how they get there. But but that’s what we mean by genuine empathy coming from the inside out is this was this sprouted from the employees having a conversation about the holidays, under brand. Not some calculated thing of like, how can we create a viral campaign to get us new customers?

Erica Mills Barnhart 

Yeah. And that’s, I think the difference. We have we are coming out of a phase of being very much a culture of a and, you know, either or but, and I feel like we are sort of coming into more of a, you know, an and.

Maria Ross 

Yes. Yeah. We’re embracing improv. And it’s yes and.

Erica Mills Barnhart 

Yes, and yes.Yeah, but I love that example. The REI example was fantastic. Yeah. Um, okay. I think everybody needs to read your book. I think that has become very clear, The Empathy Edge. What is your preferred place that they would go to get that?

Maria Ross 

 They can go to Amazon, it’s in some bookstores, bookstores can order it. So if you want to support your local independent bookstore and have them place an order for you and get it to to your house, you can do that too. But you can also get it off Amazon. And it’s like you said it’s called The Empathy Edge. And yeah, it’s available in Kindle and it’s available in paperback and also audiobook now.

Erica Mills Barnhart 

Alright, so I end every interview by asking my guests the same question. So the root of inspiration that means to breathe in. And then motivation is about taking action. So we need both of these things. What inspires you and what motivates you to keep doing this work?

Maria Ross 

I think over the years, it’s evolved and I really, it’s evolved, but it hasn’t in a way that I always had this master plan of wanting to build a platform to do good. And what I learned and got inspired by many years ago was the fact that you didn’t necessarily have to join the Peace Corps, be in health care or whatever, you take whatever platform you enjoy, and make it a force for good. And that’s what I try to talk about in terms of people’s brand message and their brand story is, you can use that voice to amplify for good, you can help people live healthier lives, you can speak out against social injustice, you can protect the environment, you can protect marginalized people. It doesn’t matter what you do, but what can you do within the construct of your platform to do good in the world and have your business contribute to being a force for good in the world.

Erica Mills Barnhart 

 Yeah, amen to that. Thank you, Maria, for being here for sharing your wisdom and your knowledge and for like skilling us all up when it comes to empathy, it is having a moment and I’m grateful to people like you who have done the research in advance so that we can take advantage of it. Listeners, I hope you got as much out of this as I sure did, and that you’ll experiment with empathy and getting in touch with your inner empath now that we know that that’s accessible to all of us. Because the world right now needs all the empathy we can muster. That’s for darn sure. So do good, be well and we will see you next time.

The post Ep 18: Maria Ross: The Empathy Edge appeared first on Claxon Communication.

This is a transcript of Erica Mills Barnhart’s interview with Deborrah Ashley on the Marketing for Good podcast. You can listen to the episode here and listen to more episodes on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you enjoy listening to podcasts. Enjoy!

KEY WORDS

LinkedIn, profile, people, marketing, company, volunteers, nonprofit

Erica Mills Barnhart  00:08

Have you ever had the experience where you think that you’re like decently good at something and then you learn maybe not not so much actually. I have that experience in this interview when Deborrah told me the metric for whether or not you are like a power user for LinkedIn. Now Deborrah is the LinkedIn blackbelt. Deborrah knows so much about LinkedIn, it’s absolutely incredible and she is so generous with what she shares about it and her advice is both strategic and also ultra, ultra practical. She was kind enough to create a LinkedIn sheet for marketing for good listeners. So definitely go get that. Don’t worry, you don’t need to do all of it. Pick a few, work through the list over time. I did want to share one thing because it happened after we stopped recording. But I noticed that Deborrah lives in Tampa, but in her LinkedIn profile, it said New York City and I was like, that’s interesting. So I asked her about it. And she said, you know, you don’t need to put your physical location you want to use every single scrap of real estate in LinkedIn strategically. So for her, her target audience is mainly leaders and CEOs. So New York City has per capita, the most leaders and CEOs in the country. So she put New York knowing that she would show up and way more search results, just by nature of how many there are in New York versus, you know, even where I am in Seattle. I was like, that’s genius. That’s the type of goodness you’re gonna get throughout this whole episode. She has really excellent tips for organizations in general, nonprofits in particular, little tidbit about how to make your volunteers into ambassadors on LinkedIn that I really loved. And then at the end, she gets into how to make LinkedIn and your LinkedIn profiles, both personally and then also for your organizations and companies more inclusive so to really bring in our commitment to diversity, equity and inclusion on LinkedIn. I hope you enjoy this as much as I did. I learned so much and I was just super energized by the whole conversation. So here you go, my interview with the LinkedIn black belt, Deborrah Ashley. Welcome to the show. Deborrah, I am very excited to have you here to talk to us about LinkedIn and inclusion and lots of other things today. So thanks for being here.

Deborrah Ashley  03:14

Well, thanks for having me on, Erica. I am super excited too.

Erica Mills Barnhart  03:19

So you’re tagged, I’m gonna call it a tagline. But when I was looking at your LinkedIn profile, I don’t know if you consider it a tagline, but it says humanizing brands, connecting people. And I feel like there’s a story behind that tagline, maybe. But can you share with us how you know how you ended up on that tagline? And being the LinkedIn blackbelt, and kind of, you know, how’d you get here?

Deborrah Ashley  03:43

Absolutely. Well, you know, I came from a 20 year corporate marketing background. So about for around 45 I decided that I’m kind of bored with what I’m doing and I decided to explore what else there was out there for me. So I have you know, I had quite a good amount of success in the corporate world. And of course, it was helping the companies to build brand awareness, but I wanted to do it on a different level. So I discovered this entire world online of business owners who are brilliant at what they do, but they’re just not that great at marketing what they do. So of course, I came online, I had all the different things that happen when you first come into a space that’s unknown to you imposter syndrome, all of that other stuff. And I started to share from a point of what I’m used to, which is that corporate speak, right? So you know, people were enjoying my content, but it didn’t hit me what I was doing until one day, someone said, well, you’re in line now you can take up your pearls.

Erica Mills Barnhart  04:41

Oh, that’s so good.

Deborrah Ashley  04:43

Yeah. I’ve never necessarily worn pearls, but I got it. So it has-

Erica Mills Barnhart  04:50

That’s a little bit genius right there. Yeah, your pearls.

Deborrah Ashley  04:53

Exactly. It’s not even about you know, this whole formal way of approaching people. It’s about being that friend and having conversations like you would with your friends, because naturally people gravitate towards people they find a connection with, right? That’s how you humanize your brand and obviously connecting people that way. It’s done that way too. So this LinkedIn blackbelt title was assigned to me because if we think about, like, I mentioned imposter syndrome, all of that stuff hit me. I just know that I’m sharing what I know and and how things work. But I don’t necessarily, at least in the past, I didn’t necessarily see myself as an expert. So I would hear people say different things like you are the queen of LinkedIn with the content I was sharing. And you’re the LinkedIn black belt, like you have this black belt on LinkedIn. And I was like that actually, I like that it sticks. I think everyone should, especially when we think about LinkedIn, everyone should have this little aspect that they, you know, like a tagline or a name that people remind them from because it’s easier to relate that way.

Erica Mills Barnhart  05:58

Yeah, we’ll get into this more, but when when somebody searches for you, like your profile URL is linkedin.com/thelinkedblackbelt.

Deborrah Ashley  06:11

Right.

Erica Mills Barnhart  06:12

Yes, so post your name?

Deborrah Ashley  06:13

Exactly. There’s a slight shift, though, because LinkedIn doesn’t allow you to use their intellectual property, which makes sense, so it’s the linked blackbelt. But if someone searches hashtag the LinkedIn blackbelt anywhere, Google through anything, they’re going to find me.

Erica Mills Barnhart  06:29

Wow. Okay. So good. And you have your MBA. So you have like a very businessy background, have this corporate career snd then how long ago was it that you transitioned to being the LinkedIn blackbelt?

Deborrah Ashley  06:43

About six years ago.

Erica Mills Barnhart  06:43

Six years ago?

Deborrah Ashley  06:45

Yes, about a year to figure out that although I was connecting with people they wanted to know more about me versus my content.

Erica Mills Barnhart  06:55

Because then you took off the pearls.

Deborrah Ashley  06:57

I took off the pearls. I took off all the pearls after someone told me to take off the pearls. And it’s, it’s been good since then.

Erica Mills Barnhart  07:07

Was there a sense for you that you wanted to take off your pearls? But something was holding you back from doing that? Or was it more like this is a strategy you knew was this very corporate speak? I’m just I’m curious if there was anything holding you back and that that person kind of gave you permission? Or if you just hadn’t seen it that way?

Deborrah Ashley  07:24

Right. It’s interesting, right? Yeah, I almost didn’t even see it that way. I was just stepping into what I was used to, because this is like, you know, this is the new version of my nine to five. So as I’m having conversations with business people, this is how we talk about things. But these are still just, you know, you’re regular everyday people, not necessarily, you know, your corporate business people. So I think in a way it gave me permission, but like I said, I didn’t know that I was doing that. And I didn’t realize that because everyone’s always, especially as a speaker, so I you know, I’ll tell you the story too, of how I started speaking and they always tell you there, you can’t say, um, and you can’t say certain things. So I just thought they were, it was an unwritten language that you couldn’t use online. So yeah, that was my permission.

Erica Mills Barnhart  08:10

Love it. Okay, so in 2019, we’re recording this in 2020. You did LinkedIn assessments for over 800 executives and founders, and what you found was, and I’m quoting directly from your LinkedIn profile, is that they see value in LinkedIn, but they don’t know how to optimize it to unlock opportunities. So to my ear, that sounds sort of like a classic, know do gap like k n o w, like, you know something, but you can’t or aren’t, maybe because you need a permission slip, to do something. So you are doing everything there is to do on LinkedIn, because you were ranked in the top 1% of LinkedIn users. So I do want to dive into like the specifics of how to optimize it but I’m curious one why do you think that know do gap exists, like folks can see it and know that there are opportunities, what’s holding them back?

Deborrah Ashley  09:04

Well, I think it’s more about similar to what I had. I was speaking with this CMO this morning. And, you know, although they want to build their personal brand, and they know it’s important, they don’t want to be too casual. So when I said to her users will connect with you with your content when you’re taking it from a casual standpoint, I think her definition of casual was a lot different than what I see as casual. So then she pointed out someone who is what we consider an influencer in her market. I always say, you know, we have influencers all over social media. It’s not necessarily about who you think is an influencer for you, but who does your audience see as an influencer? So she pointed that out to me today and she said, well, if you look at her content is more formal. She’s also former president of a very large fortune 500 company. So she has a lot of pull. So we went through her content and I said actually, she is very casual. You can see, there’s three main concepts that she speaks about. And it’s about helping young women see that you can have opportunities and you know, no matter what, nothing will hold you back from the opportunities you desire. Another thing that we saw about this person who she thought was more formal that she’s definitely a feminist, she shares books that she’s written and had the word feminist in the title. So, you know, to me, that’s casual. I’m having conversations with my friends this is the latest book I’m reading and this is a reason why I liked the book. So she was able to relax a little bit because she said, okay, it is something that I discuss every day with friends, but I didn’t know I could use it on LinkedIn. So it’s like you said, it’s more of a permission base.

Erica Mills Barnhart  10:39

Yeah, well, and you use the word relaxed, which is, you know, you can sort of see people go like, oh, I can do this. That’s not that’s not so scary. That’s, that’s easier, right? That’s like more of a path of least resistance. I think there’s a tendency to build up things on social media because so many folks are doing it in a way that’s like kind of highly produced and everything’s perfect. And there’s a little bit of tension, you know, between this idea of highly produced, everything was perfect and like people want you to actually be human. And particularly for executives and executives, you know, a certain age, I think the the Zoomers, and millennials get this a bit more intuitively. And I’m Gen Xer. I think we struggle a bit more with that.

Deborrah Ashley  11:25

Absolutely.

Erica Mills Barnhart  11:26

Yeah. Because there used to be those brighter lines between personal and professional. And I think it’s part of the reason I find LinkedIn really interesting, which is it does sort of call, call you to think about how you want to show up, and what it means to be professional yet human, and how are you going to balance all those things? So how is LinkedIn different, help us think about like and understand how is LinkedIn different than other social media platforms?

Deborrah Ashley  11:51

Well, when you think about LinkedIn, how it was designed and why it was designed, obviously, it’s no longer just about resumes and recruiters but it is designed to be an online platform for networking. So that’s all that is done. When you when you go to Facebook, yes, there’s aspects of Facebook that you’re using for business, but most people who are using Facebook, you know, they connected for people to people for a reason. So they connected to them to see maybe let’s see how the kids are doing and, and you got married it, we can see some wedding photos, you know, things like that. But when we go on to LinkedIn, it’s very specific to this is where I’m going to go to not only share my thought leadership, but to connect with the people who are looking for the type of business that I have. An aspect of that too, when we kind of like think about LinkedIn, obviously, it’s not necessarily about showing pictures of your kids. But now with a pandemic, things have changed. So, you know, we have people who are graduating, they’ve spent like, you know, whether years in medical school or parents with their kids with, you know, four years in college, and they can’t celebrate. So now it’s kind of cool that they can share with their colleagues at work through LinkedIn that look at what my my child has achieved. And they get a ton of engagement from that.

Erica Mills Barnhart  13:08

Oh, that’s interesting.

Deborrah Ashley  13:10

Yeah, it gives me the chills just talking about it. Because I can’t imagine being a parent that you’ve worked that hard to, like, put your kids through school and they can’t even have a graduation ceremony, like a traditional one, you know?

Erica Mills Barnhart  13:20

Yeah. Oh, I know, I, I’m a teaching professor at the University of Washington. And so I teach undergrad, but I teach a course for a second year students, their Capstone, so I get to know them deeply because it’s a six month deal. And, you know, they didn’t get to walk and you know, the Evans School, which is where I work, did a wonderful job with an online version of that, but it’s still, it’s not the same.

Deborrah Ashley  13:45

Yeah.

Erica Mills Barnhart  13:46

Especially for first generation students like oh, gosh, just to not have that moment was heartbreaking.

Deborrah Ashley  13:55

 Yeah, who knows what’s going to happen in the future, right? We don’t know. But this is like, this was their moment, so.

Erica Mills Barnhart  14:01

Yes, this was their moment. Yeah, yeah. Well, one thing now that we know is that we don’t know. So if ever there was a question mark about that, I think now there is no more question mark about that. Right. Right. So you’ve touched on this a little bit. But I’m curious if you can give us a little more insight into what holds people back? So specific to thought leadership, which is one way to use LinkedIn, what holds people back from sharing their thought leadership on LinkedIn? Maybe in general, what holds people back? If you have opinions about that, and then specifically on LinkedIn, what holds people back?

Deborrah Ashley  14:32

Yeah, definitely, it’s the fear of saying or doing the wrong things. Right. And you know, and it depends, there’s a piece of it, you’re doing it for your own personal brand, and then you’re also doing it to stand out within your company. So if you’re, when we think about whether the nonprofit or for profit, there are certain things in certain industries that you just cannot say, so what if you mess up? What if that audience member that’s been watching you for a while that you’re connected with doesn’t necessarily agree with everything that you share? So I think those are the main things that will stop people from doing it because they just don’t want to mess up. Specifically on LinkedIn, now it’s about that brand voice. What voice do I want for LinkedIn? Like who? And to me, it’s like, it’s your voice. It’s who you are naturally. But that’s the biggest question I get. And I, you know-

Erica Mills Barnhart  15:23

Oh interesting.

Deborrah Ashley  15:25

Yeah, it’s the biggest question I get that I don’t know how to share my voice on LinkedIn. And so it’s the whole preconceived notion of what LinkedIn is.

Erica Mills Barnhart  15:34

Are these people who are comfortable or are sharing their, their thought leadership on other platforms, and then they like get stuck when they’re trying to transition?

Deborrah Ashley  15:45

On Twitter, they have no problem. And two weeks ago, I spoke to at least 20 executives between the executive, founders, different people, someone from Facebook, so of from Indeed, different companies, just for my own research, something I was doing. And they told me they have no problem sharing their thoughts on Twitter, they almost don’t feel tied to their organization through Twitter, but on LinkedIn, they do.

Erica Mills Barnhart  16:14

Okay. So I want to make sure I’m understanding this because from a psychology perspective, this is fascinating, which is, there’s something about Twitter that feels like kind of more their own, and like, they won’t mess up on behalf of the company. Whereas in the environment of LinkedIn, that feels very tied to their company or organization, and therefore they’re worried about messing up.

Deborrah Ashley  16:35

Exactly.

Erica Mills Barnhart  16:36

Oh, wow.

Deborrah Ashley  16:38

Almost, they didn’t mention this, but I almost wonder maybe because they have more colleagues who are on LinkedIn, because Twitter is also Twitter’s very complicated. I used that in the beginning of my online career, but it’s complicated so people stay away but LinkedIn once you get into it, it’s a fluff.

Erica Mills Barnhart  16:54

Yeah, Twitter’s noisy.

Deborrah Ashley  16:56

Yeah. It’s noisy and it’s fast and yeah, so that is it’s fascinating. I love human psychology and it’s an interesting thing to even think about.

Erica Mills Barnhart  17:07

Yes. Okay, so you have an amazing LinkedIn profile clearly, do you mind if we walk through your LinkedIn profile and you can like explain to us what’s going on? I like I kind of fancy myself and you know, a decently good LinkedIn user, clearly not a black belt, and I was like, I wonder why she does that. I wonder why she does that. So, okay, can we take a look, I’m going to share my screen for folks who are watching on video. Here we are. And again, calling attention to the fact that I put in your name and then it takes me to this, the linked blackbelt.

Deborrah Ashley  17:42

Right. So the very first thing if we want to start with the URL, when you first join LinkedIn, what’s going to happen, it does linkedin.com slash i n and it has your like, if your first and last name, it has a dash in between and then a whole bunch of numbers after that, in order to kind of personalize you’re brand new, you want to switch that to something specific, but it’s something that you pretty much use throughout social media. So it can be your first and last name. But something that’s very unique to you. If your name is a pretty popular name, like Christian Smith or something like that, then you may have to find something else, but you don’t want people to search for you and then they find about 30 different people with the same name because now you’ve lost them. Right? So that’s where to start. Now, I can tell you about two weeks ago, I had a different completely different banner image. But that but the banner image was more about it was words, it’s different words that I do. So it was, you know, gain your competitive advantage, LinkedIn training. This time, I decided because I want to focus more on doing virtual trading at this point, but virtual trading and speaking engagements. So the image pretty much, this is exactly what I do, and I’ve done it for others in the past. That’s your social proof. So if you have something that you’ve done in the past, and you want to position yourself as an expert in that space, let that banner image be the place you put it because you have about three seconds for someone when they come to your profile to make a decision whether they want to go further or not.

Erica Mills Barnhart  19:12

Okay, three seconds, thats a high bar. One thing I okay, so that even your name, Deborah Ashley, MBA, and then in parentheses, elevate and scale, most paren for our podcast listeners, and then dash marketing strategy. So not just your name, like you were packing a lot into this sort of title area.

Deborrah Ashley  19:36

Right. So what’s going to happen, part of the reason when you think about LinkedIn and itself, just like Google is a search engine. LinkedIn is a search engine. So at any given point, someone’s going to notice that they’ll search for marketing strategist or marketing strategy, New York, anything else and you want to make sure that your name comes up on top so you’re put in that not everyone has to do it this way, but you want to at least put that what you do in your headline and your about section. But let’s go into the how I set up my name. So when we click on that pencil, that’s pretty much how to update your name. I have my first and last name in my first name column. And I have marketing strategy in my last name column. So when I engage in content when I’m in other people’s, when I think about networking event, when I start having conversations, and I enter a conversation that’s already taking place, in someone else’s feed, people will automatically see what I do. They don’t have to guess just by my name. And they may get curious. And then that’s when the whole goal is to lead people back to your profile. Your profile is like the funnel.

Erica Mills Barnhart  20:47

And so I’m hearing two things just in the name section. One is to help with search engine optimization. And then also to like take away any uncertainty somebody might have about what you want to be known for.

Deborrah Ashley  20:59

Right. Yeah.

Erica Mills Barnhart  21:01

Okay. And then underneath it you have helping leaders and brands stand out as industry experts to win new business. And then this very kind of groovy forward arrow linked in marketing strategist, consultant and trainer, another groovy arrow, and then 20 plus years brand building. I’ve never seen a groovy arrow.

Deborrah Ashley  21:22

It’s on there. You just do arrow character, and you can find it on you know, Google on any of those.  You can do like a podcast mic.

Erica Mills Barnhart  21:32

Oh, yes, I could.

Deborrah Ashley  21:33

Yeah. Yeah. So you can do mic emoji and then you’ll find it in Google. So with the headline area, it’s really about same thing when you’re engaging in someone else’s feed. Because more than anything, you’re going to get connected to more people when you engage with others. Yeah, typically what they see first of all, is helping leaders and brands stand out. Everything else will be cut up, cut off when I’m engaging on someone’s post. So what’s going to happen now they’re going to get curious again, because human nature makes people get curious. And the way to do it is to make sure that you’ll leave in very relevant remarks. You see people say cool, and thank you on the post. It doesn’t make you stand out. But if you share something that’s very relevant, then it’s going to make you really stand out.

Erica Mills Barnhart  22:22

So I just scrolled down to see your activity. Just so the folks have a little example of that one.

Deborrah Ashley  22:28

Yeah, I think the one with 100 videos will be a good one to share. Because we started having conversation if you click on Yeah.

Erica Mills Barnhart  22:35

Oh, what I learned from posting 100 LinkedIn videos, okay. And this is a Dr. Brian Harmon.

Deborrah Ashley  22:40

So go down to my comment it hopefully it’s right on top. Yeah. So if you notice the, you see right underneath my name, yep.

Erica Mills Barnhart  22:51

Okay, great. Yeah. Yeah. So what folks are seeing is Deborah Ashley MBA and then helping leaders and brands stand out as Industry experts to win new bus…, right? So really six to six to seven words.

Deborrah Ashley  23:08

If that’s their goal, they will take a look at my profile. Plus, I also engage the person who  hear the comment by asking him a question. And I’m sure other people had that question they just didn’t ask.

Erica Mills Barnhart  23:21

So your question was, you said amazing accomplishment, Dr. Brian Harman. What app did you use to make this? He said canva. You said thank you, I should have known that. So there’s, it’s a conversation. It’s human.

Deborrah Ashley  23:31

Right. I’m at a networking event online and we’re having a conversation.

Erica Mills Barnhart  23:35

Yeah. Oh, that’s a great way to think about it. Mm hmm. Okay, let’s go back to your amazing profile. Here we are. So there’s some stuff that is put in there. Okay. Let’s talk about your about section.

Deborrah Ashley  23:50

Sure. So your goal, especially with the very first line of your about section because we at this point have an attention of a nat or a mosquito, the whole goal of that very first line, because before you open this, you’re only able to see the first two lines. The goal is to get other people to read the next line and doing that they have to open it. So now you’re going to call attention to something very specific that they’re either concerned about or that they have a question about,

Erica Mills Barnhart  24:19

So asking a question, because our brains are hardwired to want to answer questions is probably a good way. But it sounds like the job of this first sentence is to get people to click the more button and then read the rest of it.

Deborrah Ashley  24:32

Absolutely. Okay. Now, I’m almost telling them that this is the reason you’re going to want to listen to me. And people are always going to be intrigued by the fact that I have done all of those LinkedIn assessments. They want to know what it would mean to them and what what can they do to fix their own profile? Because that’s kind of like where it starts.

Erica Mills Barnhart  24:52

Yeah, yeah. And then you go through. I mean, you make it easy, right as a consultant, here’s all these things, as a trainer, here’s all these things, right? My expertise is your secret weapon, proof points, my 25 plus years of experience include crafting innovative campaigns for brands and steering, marketing development for startups across a broad range of industries. Right, and then next steps so I’ve never seen this before. Talk to us about this. This is your fourth bullet. Next steps.

Deborrah Ashley  25:23

So next steps, I just want them to self select. Some people may not need the full consulting with me, they just want their profile to be overhauled. And when we think about see that CEOs or executives, they don’t necessarily use LinkedIn, but their profile has not been changed in 10 years. Right. So they’re, you know, their teams may say, okay, if she and I’m pretty much letting them know specifically this is exactly what I do, right. And then this is how you can you know, you can connect with me.

Erica Mills Barnhart  25:51

So for listeners under next steps it says, I focus on a holistic approach to marketing born from a place of client obsession, which is like you’re like, well, I want her to obsess about me that sounds fantastic authenticity and integrity. If this is you, let’s chat. And then you have three calls to action. So they can kind of choose their own adventure inquiry for consulting, contact information, LinkedIn profile overhaul, contact information, and speaking and training requests.

Deborrah Ashley  26:17

Right? I shared that information about this is who I want to work with, this is who I don’t want to work with so you get to self select. If you’re the type of organization or the type of business that everything’s about sale sale sale, as soon as we connect, you want to pitch me in your inbox, then I can’t help you. Because that’s not what I do. So I want to be very clear about the type of people like I help because I’ve made the mistake earlier on on taking on the wrong clients, and they ended up being like that.

Erica Mills Barnhart  26:47

Yeah, because I’ve been consulting for so long, I get questions, right, from folks who are just getting into the field. I’m sure you do too. And my biggest piece of advice is to just remind yourself that your no’s are as important as you’re, probably more important than your yeses, your early yeses because because for a lot of people is going to be referral and word of mouth. And so if you take on a project and this makes total sense, especially now we’re all a bit worried. So you’ll take on work that isn’t necessarily there it’s work you can do but it’s not the work you want to do. Well then if you do a great job, then you’re getting referred for work that you don’t actually want to do. So as hard as those early no’s are, they are so important. And you will get you will get the projects you want faster if you can, like be brave enough to say no, absolutely. Oh, that’s tough though. Okay. And then they have a feature stuff which is automatic. Now if we go under experience, one the name of your company, which we haven’t mentioned, next is Thrivoo Marketing. Did I say that right?

Deborrah Ashley  27:45

You did. So that’s great. Most people say something different, I’m amazed. Thank you.

Erica Mills Barnhart  27:51

Thrivoo Marketing. I like the way it looks. I like the way it sounds. I was like, oh, that’s fun. And then under this also, again, just so you have this it’s like, yet again, I know exactly what you are offering. LinkedIn strategy consulting, employee profile overhaul, strategic partnerships.

Deborrah Ashley  28:11

All keywords and what I’m doing there. I’m just doing I’m putting keywords in.

Erica Mills Barnhart  28:15

Okay. Okay. Yeah. And then you have is this based on not some sort of timeline, but you have these these sub bullets underneath Thrivoo.

Deborrah Ashley  28:27

Right. So this is I typically share this in my workshops. If you are looking to position yourself as a speaker, you should have a specific separate, almost like a job experience area that just says you’re a speaker. Then you’re going to outline what you speak about, where you spoken before, even links to if you’ve been on podcasts. So when someone searches for a speaker, your keywords will now come out.

Erica Mills Barnhart  28:54

Okay, that’s exactly what you’ve done here. Of course. LinkedIn speaker, corporate speaker, corporate trainer, and those are all keywords, I’m guessing that they would search.

Deborrah Ashley  29:06

If you want to go up a few bumps, I’m going to show you something that well, you may not see it on your end, actually, you won’t. Right. You’ll see it on your profile. You know where it says the number of searches this past week is really the past seven days, that’s where typically you want that number to be over 500 that means your profile is fully optimized.

Erica Mills Barnhart  29:28

Okay. Yeah. 500?

Deborrah Ashley  29:31

Yeah. So I can tell you, let me check on my phone. I have a little over 1000 searches based on my skill set this past week. So if you click that area, you can see what company those people are working at that did the search what their titles were and what specific keywords they searched for to find you.

Erica Mills Barnhart  29:51

Right. Yeah. Okay. I think in general, I show up and like maybe 100. So, clearly, I have a long ways to go, lots of opportunity for improvement.

Deborrah Ashley  30:04

Exactly. Yeah.

Erica Mills Barnhart  30:06

All right. That’s a great, but what a great benchmarking thing. Okay. So listeners, if you’re listening, when you look at your LinkedIn profile and you’re logged in as you, if you’re looking at it, it would be kind of it would be over here on the side on the left hand side and it’s going to tell you how many searches you showed up in that, for so you said per week, we want to be aiming for 500 that means we’re fully optimized.

Deborrah Ashley  30:29

At least 500 so it’s gonna say your private dashboard, typically right underneath the feature area, okay, the private dashboard, and all you have to do is click it and sometimes like initially, when I first started doing this, it would have so many random keywords like fitness and coach and I said to myself, no, that’s not me showing up. So you just have to play around with it. You know, marketing is all about testing what works and tweaking and then moving forward with it.

Erica Mills Barnhart  30:57

Experiment, experiment, experiment. Okay, anything else that you want to draw attention to that the neophytes among us may not know that you have done on your profile?

Deborrah Ashley  31:08

one thing that’s going to be super important your testimonial area that’s right at the very bottom, you want to make sure that you have at least two new or relevant testimonials within the past six months. People care about that a lot more than they care about the skills area because anyone can check off your skills. Right? Those are people that you’ve either worked with or you’ve either impacted to leave you a specific testimonial. And when I always you know, share about testimonials are not Oh, Erica is an amazing person. She did a great job. I love her podcast. It’s more about before I found Erica online, this is where I was now that I have listened to her podcast and I’ve gained their insight this is what the result of what has happened based on our work together.

Erica Mills Barnhart  31:56

So the transformation that has occurred. You don’t have to answer this necessarily, but if you want to, I’m curious. Do you write a proposed testimonial and then then have folks edit? Or do you just let them freeform?

Deborrah Ashley  32:10

So yeah, two options, so what I’ll say and I share this anyway, I will initially it depends on who the person is, I will initially say, like, for example, hey, Michelle, I’d love for you to write a testimonial about the workshop that you attended, you know, that I hosted specifically, I’d love for you to share, you know, where you were in the process before, what you’re doing now, and what result has happened since our work together.

Erica Mills Barnhart  32:36

Got it. Okay, so a little like leading the horse to the water.

Deborrah Ashley  32:40

Absolutely. If I don’t hear from them in three days, I will then reach out and say, and you know, people get busy. So maybe there’s something else going on. I said, hey, you know, if you’re busy, if you want, I can kind of share something that someone else has written and you can take from that and insert what you need.

Erica Mills Barnhart  32:59

Oh, Okay, all right, like a double down strategy. But yeah, initially just like, hey, this is generally what I would like, and then helping them move towards something with more specifics in the follow up, right?

Deborrah Ashley  33:13

Because a lot of times, I mean, when you think about it, it’s not even that they don’t want to write you a profile. Now, it’s always about what if I say the wrong, I don’t want to mess up, or I don’t even know how to put into words, especially if we, you know, I have a lot of people who have very analytical backgrounds, your engineers and your attorneys. Well, not, well, yeah and they and they make it very formal versus very personal. So that’s why I kind of have to coach him a little bit and it’s so it’s completely okay.

Erica Mills Barnhart  33:41

Yeah, back to that theme of being human.

Deborrah Ashley  33:44

Yes. Yeah.

Erica Mills Barnhart  33:46

Okay, I’m gonna stop sharing my screen.

Deborrah Ashley  33:49

Okay. All right. That was fun, a mini classes in between.

Erica Mills Barnhart  33:52

It was like a mini class. I loved it. Thank you. I learned a ton as I knew I would. Um, so we’ve talked a lot about LinkedIn from personal perspectives like my, you know, a personal LinkedIn profile. Right? I want to transition so that you can share with listeners and viewers kind of how to think about it from, like a company or organization perspective.

Deborrah Ashley  34:14

Yeah. Wonderful. So okay, obviously, let’s focus kind of on the non profit area, I identified a few people who are doing it excellently.

Erica Mills Barnhart  34:24

Oh, good.

Deborrah Ashley  34:25

I identify those people who are doing a great job. Obviously, we already know the, you know, American Heart Association of the world. They have a team that’s going to do they want, they’re going to do an amazing way, but I want to share what’s making it amazing for them. Another group, the ICF, International Coach Federation.

Erica Mills Barnhart  34:44

Oh, okay.

Deborrah Ashley  34:45

Yeah, they also have obviously a great base on LinkedIn. So I’m surprised I didn’t realize they were on LinkedIn too, but I can identify some of the things that they’re doing very well. So when we think about the content that they’re putting out, you want to use your company page. But you also want to use the personal page and build brand ambassadors. So your brand ambassadors could be your volunteers. They could be your current employees, and they can be, you know, potentially your members. Obviously, it has to be someone who, who’s already on LinkedIn. So if we are using brand ambassadors, the first thing that we want to focus on is making sure that their LinkedIn profile is optimized. Because no matter what, even if they now share content from the company page where a lot of the content should originate, they’re sharing it to their feed, people will get interested in what they’re saying, and they will go right back to their profile. The profile doesn’t necessarily have to speak to like, for example, the American Heart Association. It doesn’t have to speak to their vision and mission, but it should at least align if they call themselves volunteers.

Erica Mills Barnhart  35:51

So are you just just to make sure I’m tracking like the Heart Association might reach out to their volunteers, which I would guess they have a lot and say do like, do they give them tips like, hey, here are three things you could do to really help us spread the word like three changes on your LinkedIn profile or something like that?

Deborrah Ashley  36:11

Yeah, they could do that, um, see, I would more say because their profile has to be done already. So yeah, whether someone internally on their team would do it, or help them with it with like a guided booklet. It’s not going to be necessarily about the American Heart Association, but it’s going to be about their love of giving back and charities and interest because you have that section on your profile that has interest in any one of the interest should be American Heart Association.

Erica Mills Barnhart  36:39

Okay, that’s a good specific tip.

Deborrah Ashley  36:42

Oh, yeah, very specific. Yeah. But the ways that the American Heart Association, for example, or any nonprofit can get their volunteers to share. We can do like a volunteer of the week, or volunteer of the month that’s highlighted on the company page. And this now is going to kind of go into I know, you know, there’s a little inclusive marketing is going to be very important, especially with nonprofits. Now we want to make sure that we’re highlighting everyone within the organization. So whether they’re volunteers, whether they’re members, anything else, because if you’re looking to recruit more volunteers or you’re looking to fundraise, or you’re looking to bring in more people with diverse audience, you want to make sure that you’re showing that diversity that’s already going on within your organization and you do that through your content.

Erica Mills Barnhart  37:29

Okay. You know, where my mind goes is so many organizations, nonprofits, do a newsletter, electronic or print, whatever. And there’s sort of a spotlight section. So it sounds like a pretty easy thing to do would be to just take that if you’re doing that and bring that onto LinkedIn as well.

Deborrah Ashley  37:47

Absolutely. Bring that onto LinkedIn. Something else that I’ve seen that’s, you know, it’s relatable. They do mini interviews with them too. So clearly, just like we’re doing an interview, it’s from the comfort of your own home, but they do Like a 90 second spot with them almost like why did you volunteer? What are you getting out of it? So it depends on your goals. So the biggest thing is to figure out what are your goals, for your organization? And how can you now use LinkedIn as a tool to make it happen?

Erica Mills Barnhart  38:19

Yeah. So when I teach marketing, I have the super simple methods. The Claxon method, which starts with what a success look like? Um, so what are your goals? And then and then who’s the target audience? And then LinkedIn would be a how. So then it’s how are you going to reach them? Do you think I mean, what’s your opinion? Obviously, you’re predisposed to being a fan of LinkedIn. But I’m curious, are there are there companies or organizations for whom like, this just wouldn’t be a fit, like their audience isn’t there? And so why bother optimizing?

Deborrah Ashley  38:49

I can well, it’s hard to name the company, I would say go to where your audience hangs out. So if you understand who your client your potential clients are your audience, then you’re going to you know, you’re going to focus on whether it’s LinkedIn or Instagram or Twitter. So I can’t think of one right off the bat. But yeah, that’s that’s probably several.

Erica Mills Barnhart  39:09

So I am sort of smirking because so I teach and, you know, most of my students are a bit younger. So more in the millennials, some Zoomers now. And whenever I talk about LinkedIn, they’re like, oh, like, there’s not a lot of enthusiasm. I’m like, here’s the deal. Like the people that who are gonna think about hiring you, you may not love LinkedIn, but they’re using it. So you kind of have to be there. Right. So I think LinkedIn is a bit unique in that way. It’s like that that overlap between personal professional, you know, in other instances, like if you don’t like Facebook, don’t be on Facebook. If you don’t like Twitter, don’t you know, don’t be on Twitter, like nobody’s forcing you to do these things. But there is a piece about LinkedIn, which is like if your target audience is somebody who’s going to be hiring you then you need to be on LinkedIn. And then you need to listen to Deborah who’s going to tell you how to optimize.

Deborrah Ashley  40:05

Absolutely. Yeah, they have. So why are they why do they groan about it just because it’s too boring for them?

Erica Mills Barnhart  40:11

 Yeah it is for old people. Oh, yeah, totally. They’re like, Oh, but you know, because it’s not where they naturally convene online.

Deborrah Ashley  40:20

Absolutely. Yeah.

Erica Mills Barnhart  40:21

You know, they’re on Insta, they’re in snap. Right? You know, they’re on Tiktok.

Deborrah Ashley  40:26

They don’t realize though, they could make it fun. So they could go on LinkedIn and they can, they can share just from a place of this is how I use TikTok. This is how you can use TikTok, so they can go on there and they can now position themselves as like an expert on TikTok, and then an organization. I mean, maybe they’re not even going to school for that, but who knows an organization could pay them $100,000 a year just to tell them how to use TikTok.

Erica Mills Barnhart  40:54

So, so true, and so I have a son who’s 12. And he definitely is a pretty active TikTok user but increasingly what he what he’s using the force to find like to experiment with recipes.

Deborrah Ashley  41:07

Nice.

Erica Mills Barnhart  41:08

Right and so I think this is fantastic, of course. I love cooking and like just as I guess I mentioned that because people think of TikTok is like, kind of patently silly. Like, this is such a generational stereotypical thing in Gen Xers and older like Tik what, you know, kind of like what why would you be that? But there is this you know, and I really appreciate you pointing out like where these things can converge in a really cool way because I was a little resistent about TikTok, you know, like really spend your time doing TikTok videos, this is how okay, but one it’s kind of cute. I also have a almost 16 year old daughter and so they’ll make and she’s a dancer. So make TikTok videos together but he is becoming a good little cook because of TikTok. Right. So that’s a silly example. But I really loved this idea that you offered to you thinking of college age and whatever, yeah, to like, establish yourself and if you had a specific area of expertise, you could blend the two so if you’re interested in environmental, you know issues climate change or whatever, you could actually look for videos on Tiktok about that and then bring that in. Oh, that’s that’s fun.

Deborrah Ashley  42:22

And your son even now let’s get him to make money your son could now work with some food, you know, we have that food as medicine type of companies. And they send like, this is for me, I you know, when I was younger, I said, I wanted to be a food critic. So I can I can get free meals to write about, but so they could start to sponsor him and they could send him food in order to do TikTok videos about you know, different there’s different things that you can do with it.

Erica Mills Barnhart  42:49

So many different things.

Deborrah Ashley  42:51

Yeah, but then he would meet them either on Instagram or LinkedIn. So he would meet those people there and then they would bring him in as an influencer, depending on how you know large is account is.

Erica Mills Barnhart  43:01

 Totally going to talk to him about this. He doesn’t post as much. He’s more of like a consumer, as opposed to a producer. I will say though our family is pretty well known for our chocolate chip cookies. We make very good chocolate chip cookies. And the evolution of that happened over the weekend because of TikTok. Which it turns out, you can put your cookie dough into the waffle maker.

Deborrah Ashley  43:23

I didn’t know that but you’re right.

Erica Mills Barnhart  43:25

Oh, it’s delicious. Ice cream on top, on cheat day. Oh, it was I was like this is the best thing ever. So that gives you a lot of insight into our weekend.

Deborrah Ashley  43:38

I’m excited about that. I never thought about it. But yeah, waffle maker.

Erica Mills Barnhart  43:41

Waffle maker. Hmm. And anyway, it’s faster. There was a lot of perks to the waffle maker approach. We touched on this, but I want to make sure that we come back to it and we’re actually we’re talking about it a little bit here, which is this idea of inclusion. We were just talking about it sort of in terms of age. But you know, how can companies and organizations be more inclusive in their marketing in genera and then in LinkedIn in particular.

Deborrah Ashley  44:04

Yeah, I think the big thing and you know, obviously with everything going on with a bigger focus now on diversity and inclusion, because it was always there, but it’s really urgent for companies now. I think the importance is, and this can be all around the LinkedIn profile and your presence, you know, there’s a difference between and I’ve seen this on Instagram, which makes me cringe a little bit. It’s not necessarily put in my face on one of your LinkedIn or Instagram posts when you don’t necessarily know me, and it’s not relevant. But it’s about having a conversation about why it’s important to you and maybe even admitting that in the past, this wasn’t something that you thought about, and yes, I’ve messed up and we overlooked it. But this is how we are working at this point in order to make sure that things change. You know, it’s going to be important, especially if we think about nonprofits and recruiting the right board members, other organizations and recruiting VPs. Because if now they go to your profile, your just your social media presence in general, or LinkedIn or anywhere else, and they don’t see anything that speaks to them, or they don’t see people that look like them, then either when they get in that interview, they will be hammering you with questions, or they may not want to even, you know, be associated at all.

Erica Mills Barnhart  45:20

Yeah, it’s not gonna feel authentic. No, like, you can’t just write an, you know, diversity equity inclusion statement, put it on your website, and then say like, look, we have it there.

Deborrah Ashley  45:33

We have it there. Yeah.

Erica Mills Barnhart  45:34

I really appreciate your point about boards of directors. Yeah, definitely. But also, I hope that listeners and viewers will really hear your point about owning the messing up that may have happened in the past, right? We can’t, revisionist history isn’t going to serve us going forward. And this loops back to a theme that’s been kind of coming up and what you’re saying around being human, and humans fail.

Deborrah Ashley  46:00

Absolutely.

Erica Mills Barnhart  46:01

And that’s super scary. And yet if we’re going to move forward and you’re truly going to be inclusive, you know, that’s a bit of bravery that has to happen.

Deborrah Ashley  46:12

Right? And it’s almost like a sales and marketing call when we think about sales and a sales call. They maybe they’re probably thinking about it already. You’ve never talked about this in the past. How do I know this is something different? So why not address it right now? So now, any objections they possibly have, you’re just putting out on the table and people appreciate that.

Erica Mills Barnhart  46:31

They do. Yeah. And it’s scary. Get it? I mean, all you know, speaking as a white woman, yes, I have messed up a lot. Also, when it comes to marketing, and there’s been a couple other podcasts about this, just being so mindful of the implicit bias that you bring, right? And if you’re not aware of it, and you can’t name it, then just the way that that marketing the like behemoth machine of marketing is structured right now you really risk perpetuating dominant paradigms.

Deborrah Ashley  47:04

Absolutely.

Erica Mills Barnhart  47:04

So you have to be so proactive about it, but it’s really doable. And but it is that intentionality out of the gate and that owning the stuff like, I’ve talked about this on other podcasts, but I, you know, I teach this graduate marketing course. And a couple years ago, one of my students, God bless her, said, hey, I know that you really care about diversity. I can feel that and have you looked at the authors on the reading list?

Deborrah Ashley  47:27

Oh, wow.

Erica Mills Barnhart  47:28

All white.

Deborrah Ashley  47:30

Yes.

Erica Mills Barnhart  47:31

I get like, choked up every time I tell that story, because it was it was a moment and I had to say, no, I didn’t see it.

Deborrah Ashley  47:39

But I’m so glad that you are a person that they completely trust that they could come to you with that.

Erica Mills Barnhart  47:44

Oh, such a blessing. Oh, my students are blessings in every way. I had this,  so speaking of inclusion, I want to be mindful of time and your time and listeners time, viewers time, but quickly, pronouns.I wasn’t intending to go here. But I think it’s really really feels related to me. Which is we’re having, like, you know, an evolution of, you know, with they being a singular pronoun. And that actually, that’s more inclusive than the, you know, it used to be you had to pick he she them. And then there was the s/he  kind of middle ground like that I happened for a while. And I as a writer, I’m like, Oh my gosh, they is finally a singular pronoun. It’s like, yay, but it’s little things like that and I’m thinking about like on LinkedIn profiles, just that attentiveness to the pronouns that you’re using can also speak to like, I’m trying, I get it. I’m trying.

Deborrah Ashley  48:42

Yeah. And this, and as you said before, it should be authentic. So don’t do it if it doesn’t feel authentic to you.

Erica Mills Barnhart  48:50

Thank you, Deborah.

Deborrah Ashley  48:51

Yeah.

Erica Mills Barnhart  48:52

There are people for a variety of reasons if we just stick with the pronoun example. They’re like, I can’t do it. They is plural. It’s never going to be singular for me. But what made me think about that is I just student a couple years ago, all my students are such gifts I learned so much from them. And she was just, she was so lovely and gracious about, you know, she’d come up after class and be like, that was great. You know, I learned a lot about this. I just thought I’d flag for you. There was a lot of gendered, you know, language today and here’s an example. And here’s how the future you might change that.

Deborrah Ashley  49:25

That’s amazing.

Erica Mills Barnhart  49:26

But it’s amazing that you took the time. Right? And she was willing. Oh, amazing. So I’m super blessed that way that I have my students who like-

Deborrah Ashley  49:34

Absolutely, but yeah, but like I said, that speaks volumes about who you are too that they feel comfortable doing that.

Erica Mills Barnhart  49:40

Thank you. I appreciate that. All right. We’ve talked about a lot of different things. So what’s one action, one action that you would recommend that people take.

Deborrah Ashley  49:52

If you still have that blue default banner on your LinkedIn profile, change it today.

Erica Mills Barnhart  50:00

Yeah that is so true.

Deborrah Ashley  50:04

Yeah. And if not, if you’re already past the second step, then just this week work on optimizing or just, you know, making your LinkedIn profile more of a reflection of who you are and where you’re going.

Erica Mills Barnhart  50:17

Yeah, a little bit of bravery. Yeah, we need human now more than ever. We need human right?

Deborrah Ashley  50:23

Absolutely.

Erica Mills Barnhart  50:24

So I close every single interview with the same question, which is about inspiration and motivation. So the roots, the etymology of the word inspiration means to give breath. And then motivation is about action. So we need inspiration to take action. So Deborrah, what inspires you and what motivates you to keep doing this work?

Deborrah Ashley  50:43

What inspires me and I never thought about it this way before but what inspires me are people who are ready to give up that we may not have even met before but something that we say or something that we do, specifically on the online space creates this different world for them where they want to try again. So that inspires me. And what motivates me daily is, I don’t know. I just love what I do. I just love what I do. The feedback that I get from people, the lives that and I never, I never necessarily think I’m changing lives, but the worlds that I’m changing and the conversations that are changing based on what I put out there.

Erica Mills Barnhart  51:25 Yeah. And the perspectives that are changing. Yeah. And the access that you create and the connection so you create. Yeah, I think that that’s, I think that’s world changing according to me. Thank you, Deborrah, so much for being here. Deborrah, aka the LinkedIn blackbelt. Folks, of course, you can find her on LinkedIn for sure. I so appreciate you being here today. I learned a ton. So thank you. It was like a mini mini masterclass for all of us. So I so appreciate you being here, appreciate what you’re doing and what you’re sharing. You were very generous with your knowledge with all of us. Thank you. And of course listeners and viewers, thank you for being here. And, as always, do good, be well and we will see you next time.

The post Ep 19: Deborrah Ashley: How to Become a LinkedIn Blackbelt appeared first on Claxon Communication.

This is a transcript of Erica Mills Barnhart and Leslie Zane on the Marketing for Good podcast. You can listen to the episode here and listen to more episodes on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you enjoy listening to podcasts. Enjoy!

SUMMARY KEY WORDS

brand, connectome, people, marketing, brain, positive associations, marketers, associations, organization, feel, subconscious, conscious, company, listeners, tree

Erica Barnhart  00:31

Hey there, in this episode, you’re going to hear the word brand about 3971 times, I am approximate being there. But it’s a lot. And I realized that we haven’t taken a deep dive or really talked a lot period about brand on the on this podcast. So I promise you that soon. But in the meantime, I wanted to make sure that you had context or framing or whatever word you want to use for this episode so you can glean maximum goodness from it, because there there’s a lot. My guest is Leslie Zane, she just has such interesting work and very interesting research and she has this idea about the brand connectome. And so like, in order to understand that, and really get the most out of it, I feel like we have talked about brand here for a second. So there’s so many different definitions of brand. And sometimes marketers use the word brand interchangeably with organization or company and like, they’ll just prefer the brand and imply that it’s your organization. I’m not a fan of this approach, because I feel like it, like muddies the waters organizations are at you know, can be more than a brand. So for clarity, let’s say brand is all the things, images, words, experiences that someone associates with your organization. I mean, this is another thing is that brand is the associations that other people hold. The organization itself, you will try to nurture the relationship that somebody has with your brand, but fundamentally brands, you know, what the like real estate, the mental real estate that somebody has, as it relates to your organization or your cause. So things like your logo and your messaging, customer support, I just can I give a shout out here. I’ve used MG Tech for my email for like, years and years and years. And I remember and they were wonderful, like when I reach out to them, and they’re small, you know, relatively small company, one they get back to you like in a flash, they are so nice. And I remember talking to their CEO once and he said, I tell all of my customer support people to act as if it is their mom, or their grandma or grandpa or somebody who they love, right and may not be totally technologically hip, although some are I don’t want to generalize, but like pretend like that’s who you’re talking to and treat them accordingly. This is a great example, very concrete example, which I you know, have benefited from over the years of, I mean, now I have that association with MG Technology Group, that’s part of my mental real estate, and therefore for me part of their brand. Other examples, the magazines that you may have in your lobby, if you have a lobby, whether there’s free parking, you know, etc, etc, etc. And it’s the cumulative of all of these things taken together that live in mainland our subconscious minds. So when someone refers to a strong brand, what does that mean? What they’re saying is an organization that has clear and consistent mind share. So for instance, let’s just take a very common example, but I am from Seattle, or in Seattle, so somebody referred to Starbucks, we probably you and I would probably have some very common generic association around like coffee or lattes, or whatever your preference, your choice is. That’s really consistent, now, how I feel about Starbucks and how you feel about Starbucks and how other people feel about Starbucks, that’s where there’s divergence. And that’s because our lived experiences have been different. I’ve lived in Seattle for 20 ish years now, often I’m more than that, but most recently for 20 years. So for me, honestly, you know, locally, there’s, you know, there’s like higher quality coffee, that happens, I don’t even drink a lot of coffee. So and if I am, it’s gonna be a latte and I want it to be like, amazing. Plus, I want to support local businesses. So I’m going to go local, but I’m here to tell you when I’m traveling, especially like in a in an airport, when I see Starbucks, it’s like a beacon of light and hope. Right? So it’s, you know, not always utterly consistent. It is contextual. Right, so so there’s just there’s a lot of layers to brand. I’m hoping I’m bringing more clarity than confusion. But again, I promise to do a follow up episode on this. But that’s sort of the idea. If I said Girl Scouts, you’d probably say cookies. What I love about that example is you know, the cookies are a means to an end. They’re very delicious means to an end, but Girl Scouts is about empowering young girls and the way one of the ways that they do that is through the sale of cookies. So lots of layers. Okay, I want to talk also because I see I’m just just trying to think through like what are the pieces that you will benefit from understanding before you hear this conversation with Leslie? Another is this idea of brands affinity, which is and shout out to Wistia, for this definition, “the most enduring and valuable level of a relationship between a company and a consumer or a nonprofit” and a donor, my addition, “based on the mutual belief that you have shared values” based on the mutual belief that they have, or that you have shared values, okay? This is why it’s super important to articulate and share your values widely and live them. They shouldn’t be some like mamby pamby thing that a committee jots down at some point, I don’t know. And then they’re distributed and then forgotten. They are core to the success of your organization because of this idea of brand and brand affinity, right. So they truly should be the principles that guide your work. It makes it easier, I mean, there’s an efficiency play here as well, like, the clearer you are about this, the easier you make it for, you know, whether it’s clients, customers, donors, whatever it is, volunteers, the clearer that is, the more easily they can decide if they share those values, if they have an affinity for for the same things, you have an affinity for around values. Brands are associated mainly, you know, with an organizational structure. But the same associations we have with certain brands, the ones that live in our subconscious again, this whole conversation with Leslie is about subconscious marketing and instinctive marketing, which is totally counter to how marketing has been shaped and how most people talk and think of doing marketing. So very different. Those associations aren’t entirely unique to one organization, because our values apply to everything, right or, I mean, at least they should apply to everything if we’re living into them and living in integrity with them. So our values, stick with me here, are largely decided, in our subconscious mind. Yes, we use our conscious mind to articulate those to give them language, but they live in our shaped and our subconscious mind over time based on our lived experience. So we can dig deep to figure out what those are, but actually, and you can, and you can do this experiment on yourself, like think about what are your core values? And then say, Why do I hold that value? Where did that come from? Right? So you might just take a minute to think of one core value and then do that sequence of questioning, like, Where did that really truly come from? Why do I like this thing, or not? And then you’ll have a little bit of experience with what Leslie is recommending that marketers do, which is tap into the subconscious, rather than trying to tap into the conscious. So for context, you know, there’s a little bit of disparity, but for the most part, what you’ll read is that your your conscious mind is consist of 5% percent of your decision making, subconscious 95% of the decision making action happens there. Right. And again, there’s a little bit of a bandwidth, but let’s just leave it like the vast majority of decision making gonna happen in your subconscious mind. So how can we tap into that, and that’s what Leslie talks about. One last seed, I’m on a plan here, which is marketing for good isn’t just about individual organizations, or companies or businesses, right? It is bigger than that. And we can also use the techniques and strategies that Leslie talks about to shift societal norms, norms, some of which I talked about in Episode 30. So for sure, go back and listen to that if you haven’t already around like body image and beauty and consumerism. And I mean, the list is long, and I think you get the point. So I’m well aware that this intro has become a mini lesson in brand. And that makes this episode on the long side because the conversation with Leslie was juicy and far reaching. So we have a lot to cover. However, I felt I felt pretty strongly clearly that it was important to lay some foundation before diving in because I really want you to get the most out of this episode. And if you’re still feeling befuddled, pause right here and reach out to me all my contact information is in the show notes. And let’s like get your head screwed on straight around what brand and branding is it can be really confusing. It can also be incredibly powerful. So I want to put that out there and again one last time promise that I’m going to do soon I will do a full episode on this. And now finally at long last, let’s dive in. Shall we? I am ready. Are you ready to hear from Leslie Zane? Welcome listeners. I am super excited to have with me today Leslie Zane. So Leslie is known in the industry for her expertise in applying brain science to branding. Fortune 500 Chief Marketing Officers rely on Leslie to help them achieve what had previously been near impossible and still to my ear sounds a little impossible, which is to accelerate revenue and share growth at the same level of marketing spend. So of course this begs the question about how does she do this? So she figured out the secret to changing instinctive brand behavior by tapping into the brand choices that people make on autopilot, so we’re going to be talking about that. Leslie’s credentials are rather impressive and stellar. She is a Yale University and Harvard Business School graduate. And she began her career at top marketing and top companies being P&G and Johnson and Johnson. I was surprised I find this so interesting, because those are such big companies, you would think they would have this figured out, but she was surprised by the hit or miss nature of marketing initiatives. So Leslie maintained that what consumers say is unreliable, which for any listeners who are working for nonprofits, this is also true of donors, and that indirect cues were more effective than superlative claims in driving conversion. But like many unconventional thinkers, her ideas were often dismissed in the early days. So more than 16 years before Daniel Kahneman popularized behavioral economics, Leslie founded the company Triggers, on the premise that instinct rather than conscious thought guided brand decisions and our company has been delivering superior results ever since. Triggers was also the first brand consultancy founded by a woman. Amazing. Leslie is a TEDx speaker. She has been published in Harvard Business Review, Knowledge at Wharton, MIT Sloan Review, Forbes, cmo.com, Barron’s, Newsweek, Media Posts, Scientific American, and more. I am glad and grateful to have you here on the show today. Leslie, thank you so much for being here.

Leslie Zane  11:33

And thank you so much for having me, Erica, I love this podcast. And I think it’s so perfect for these times.

Erica Barnhart  11:41

Thank you. Thank you. So I think listeners just got like a little flavor of how interesting your path to where you are today has been. But in your own words, could you describe what you do? And how you got into that line of work? And was there like any epiphany moment that brought you to this work?

Leslie Zane  12:02

Sure, I’d love to tell you a little bit about me as a little girl. I was always and I have a feeling that a lot of the listeners probably can share this personality type, I had a little bit of a creative streak and I had a little bit of an analytical businessy streak. And I was always trying to find the harmony of those two things. When I was at Yale, I actually double majored in art history and economics. So a little bit of both. And I found that marketing was sort of the perfect career for me, because it really did bring together both of those, both of those disciplines, both of those parts of the brain, so to speak. And so early on, that was what I was trying to do. As time went on, I did work in brand management for those, you know, name companies that you mentioned. And I was kind of shocked, because I thought that, you know, here at P&G, I would learn marketing from the best and don’t get me wrong, I learned a ton. But I also learned the limits of what they didn’t know, what they didn’t know, back then. And actually, to some extent, what we still don’t know about marketing. And so I had a very specific goal, which was to find the keys to unlocking instinctive decision making. I don’t know if I called it that back then. But I just felt that there was something much more going on. And in terms of epiphany’s, I guess, one of the the, the moments that kind of stands out in my early career was that I did work for a top baby care company, which you just mentioned, and I was on a campaign to put the first father in a baby care commercial. And back then, this is the early 90s, that was considered revolutionary. I got lots of pushback. You know, it’s women who buy these products. It’s still women who mostly do the shopping. And still mainly women who do the baby care, but men were definitely getting more involved in child rearing and times really were changing. And I knew that and I was seeing that and I saw research about that. And I encountered a tremendous amount of resistance. But I guess the big moment early, early on was a performance review I had where I was told that Leslie it said this in black and white, you know, I swear it. Leslie is too passionate about putting fathers in advertising and this is an executional concern, not a strategic one. So this was like a knife in my heart because if anything, I thought of myself as being strategic, I had been told in earlier you know, performance reviews that I was highly strategic. I had worked at Bain, which was a strategy consulting firm. And I kind of defined my identity that way. So I was extremely insulted and very upset. But it didn’t stop me. I felt in my bones that there was something that went on, when a woman saw a father taking care of a baby and washing a baby’s hair, I could see that something special was going on that they couldn’t be put into words that didn’t show up in research that didn’t show up and brand trackers. And I was convinced that if we would leverage that, that it would make a difference. So to cut to the, to the end of the story, we did put the first father in a baby care commercial, baby shampoo commercial. And lo and behold, it was the highest scoring commercial in the company’s history and product started flying off the shelves. So stick to your guns, stick to your guns.

Erica Barnhart  15:57

Well, and this is gonna be a theme throughout our conversation, trust your gut. That’s been so like poopoo like, Well, I mean, it’s just my gut, that’s telling me this. And it’s like, well, your gut actually holds millennia of data points for you. So probably not a bad idea. But we’re but our, but culturally, I feel like that has become so unpopular. This idea of trusting your gut.

Leslie Zane  16:24

Well, I think what was going on for me in that moment, was that I had an epiphany based on good instincts. You know, I always had good consumer instincts. But it turned out that years later, the science proved me, right. So I don’t use the term gut anymore, I actually just show the science around what was actually going on in that moment, what was actually going on, was that we had found a cue, the cue being a father taking care of a baby, that particular cue was an image cue that was packed with positive associations that worked at a subconscious level, to add positive associations to the brand very, very rapidly. And those positive associations were, you know, modern, carrying an empathetic husband, he’s pretty cute, I wouldn’t mind having him as a husband and taking him home. You know, there were just a whole host of very positive associations that again, don’t show up in research, but were packed into that tiny little, you know, queue in in an ad or you know, whether it was a print ad, or a digital ad, or, or a TV ad, that what was his what was operating, it really was people’s instinctive connection to that image that made all the difference, and then drove sales. So there’s a direct connection between what happens in our subconscious, and sales and marketplace results and that’s really the big opportunity for marketers of all kinds, whether you’re a nonprofit marketer, or you’re a for profit marketer, you have to drive business of some kind, and this whole world is, is we know a lot more about it, but it’s really untapped. And it actually enables you to get a competitive advantage if you don’t have as much money to spend as big a budget to spend as the other guy.

Erica Barnhart  18:26

So let’s dive into some definitions. Because, you know, when when we use term marketing, I think now, thanks to you know, your work, and other people who are doing this work, really quickly get to a place where you’re like marketing, you know, if we just lump it all together, that’s very loosey goosey. And it actually behooves us to parse that out into many different ways. But at a minimum, for the sake of our conversation, to parse it out by what is subconscious marketing, and how does that differ from conscious marketing. And, and I think most of us have been trained, and we think about conscious marketing and have kind of been marketed the idea that conscious marketing is the way to go, what I hear you saying is actually the bigger opportunity and the higher ROI or return on investment is in subconscious marketing. So that was a whole bunch of questions. And I forgot. So let me go back to like, let’s just define that. Will, you define subconscious marketing, and juxtapose that to conscious marketing. And then we will deconstruct

Leslie Zane  19:27

Love it. So we have different parts of our brain and the old part of our brain, the reptilian complex, processes, tons and tons of data very, very rapidly. That is the instinctive part of our brain and it works, you know, again, automatically without your realizing it. The conscious part of the brain is the neocortex, and that’s the newer part of the brain and we are aware of it and it turns on and off it goes, we wake up, we go to sleep. It’s either on or off and it processes information much more slowly. So most of the efforts in marketing today are still aimed at the conscious brain. Because what we’re trying to do is marketers are trying to persuade, to incentivize, they’re trying to, I kind of think of it as they’re almost throttling the the buyer, the consumer, or you know, a contributor, whoever, whatever it is the business that you’re in, you’re trying to kind of force them to buy something that we’re selling. And that is a really tough way to go because the conscious brain sees you coming, it’s aware, it’s skeptical, it’s resistant to change, and it pushes you away, it says, I can see what’s going on here, you’re trying to sell me, don’t you try to sell me I’m smarter than you. And it pushes the seller, the marketer away. Now, let’s contrast that to the subconscious brain. The subconscious brain, or the instinctive brain is actually where brand decisions and purchase decisions get made. Because brands form in our subconscious, all they really are brands are cumulative memories that have gotten stuck and glued to the brand over time to form this gigantic ecosystem, which we can talk about later. But what is going on there is that that is where you are making decisions, and you’re really not making your decisions, you think you only think you’re making your decisions, what’s really happening is that there is a brand, and a whole bunch of brands that are living in your subconscious that are telling you what to do. They’re stored in your memory. And so if you influence that, you’re not, people are not awaret that those brand entities are being influenced. And more importantly, even by leveraging things that already exist in the brain in people’s memories, you can piggyback on those anchors, and your message gets in there more quickly, more easily and without the conscious brain being aware, they just kind of seep in. And it’s mainly done through cues. So I can tell people a lot of things, I can make superlative claims, I could say this brand is the best this, this brand beats this other brand ten to one, I can make all those kinds of typical marketing claims. But they typically encounter resistance. Whereas if I go through the subconscious brain, I piggyback on those familiar anchors, and the conscious brain doesn’t see it coming, and there’s an estimate. Scientists disagree on what the exact percentages are, but essentially, it is absolutely agreed to among, across the scientific community, that the vast majority of brand and purchase decisions are made by the subconscious by the instinctive brain, and that we just kind of rationalize those decisions afterwards with the with the rational brain.

Erica Barnhart  23:09

I mean, the number that you see that I’ve seen most consistently is 95%.

Leslie Zane  23:13

Yeah, sure, there’s some range.

Erica Barnhart  23:15

But that’s I mean, it let’s pause on that for a second. Because for listeners who are new to this idea of subconscious marketing, and just just how powerful our subconscious mind and by the way, this isn’t only doesn’t only relate to brand and marketing, like your subconscious mind is really making the decisions in life, which can, which is sort of tough to wrap your mind around, in some ways, because we’re so trained to think it’s our conscious mind and we’re very good rational decision makers.

Leslie Zane  23:42

Yeah. And just to bring that you know, to light for everybody in terms of an example that everybody will be familiar with when you go to the supermarket and let’s say you’re in the orange juice aisle, and you’re looking for your orange juice brand you just reach you don’t sit there and contemplate and look at all the different brands on the shelf. Let me see should I buy Minute Made or Florida Gold, or, chances are you don’t even know what the other brands are on the shelf, you just reach you are on autopilot. And the reason that you are on autopilot is because you have a network of associations with a particular brand, let’s say it’s Tropicana in this case, and you just reach, it’s almost like there’s a little halo a little highlight like a spotlight over the brand’s saying pick me, pick me, pick me, it doesn’t and you just block everything else out.

Erica Barnhart  24:37

This I think resolves the question about why some people are Coke drinkers and some are Pepsi drinkers. And there’s like a little bit of difference in taste, but you know, sharing with you before like if I’m going to have a soda, which is not super often, but if I’m craving one, it is gonna be a diet coke 100% like and to your point like I’m not gonna walk up to the aisle and be like, I don’t know, maybe and I’m definitely it’s just no offense to Pepsi into Pepsi drinkers. But for me, but that’s because I grew up and my mom drank Diet Coke. We were, you know, like that that identity connection piece to what goes on our subconscious is so interesting.

Leslie Zane  25:17

Yeah, it’s very, very powerful. It absolutely is dictating your choices.

Erica Barnhart  25:22

Yeah. So let’s get into because I’m sure people are like, well, if it’s so powerful, how do we unleash it? So you’ve written Knowledge at Wharton and Harvard Business Review and many other places, as we mentioned about this idea of the brand connectome. I love the word connectome. I like the way it looks. I like the way it sounds like the whole thing. And I know you were sort of taking that from another area. But I just have to say as a word nerd, like it’s just connectome. Okay, so what is, what is this this brand connectome idea? And why is it so important?

Leslie Zane  25:57

Okay. Oh, my God, that’s my favorite question.

Erica Barnhart  26:01

What’s so I mean, I’m trying really hard not to skip in my head. But we got it, we have to go step by step. I think on this because the power of the work that you do is profound, you know, it really is revolutionary. So I’m so grateful that you’re here and that listeners are gonna get in on the action.

Leslie Zane  26:19

Thank you. Well, I definitely want to share it so that everybody can be empowered to really, you know, reach their dreams, in terms of their business, work and their causes. So yeah, so the brand connectome is an ecosystem of associations positive and negative, that get formed cumulatively over time connected to your brand. So think about almost I almost think of it like the celestial world in our brain. And the brands actually have physicality. They’re not these wispy things rolling around in there, thoughts are not, you know, intangible. They actually have physicality. So over time, every brands kind of stakes out an ecosystem of these associations that glue to it, that get glue to it over time, and they’re fighting it out. These brand connectomes are fighting it out, you have one for Coke, and you have one for Pepsi, and you have one for whatever other sodas you’ve heard of, and you have one for Tropicana, and one for a Minute Made and the other orange juice is that you have you’ve heard of, and so competition actually doesn’t take place on the marketplace shelves, it takes place in people’s subconscious. And if marketers can wrap their heads around that, they’re going to be much more effective. Because you can’t win in marketing just by throwing money at something, you actually need to influence the health of that brand connectome. The brand connectome is the most important barometer of the health of a brand. Now, today, in marketing, most research is spent on what we call brand trackers, and equity studies. And these are based on conscious answers that people make to questionnaires and surveys. And they tend to get very superficial conscious responses, you know, it’s good quality, it gives good service, it’s a good tasting beverage, it doesn’t get to the to the true associations that actually influence brands, the drivers and the barriers, those are actually living in our subconscious. And you surface, when you look into the brand, connectome, all of these associations that you see just just are not coming up in any of the, you know, quantitative research that companies are doing, any of these trackers.

Erica Barnhart  28:57

Is it, is it true, Leslie, my understanding of those studies is that they that because they’re tapping into the conscious mind, like those are the those are ways that we rationalize a decision that’s already been made by the subconscious mind. So in fact, the information the researchers get through brand tracking and those types of questionnaires is the rationalization but to use your words, not the driver, not the decision making driver.

Leslie Zane  29:20

That’s exactly right. And look, I’m not saying that companies shouldn’t conduct that kind of research, because it’s a great way, it’s a great way to compare yourself to the competition and you can you can tend to see some not big movements, but tiny, you know, little movements do happen over time. But what they don’t tell you is what you’re really up against what the true mental barriers that are holding somebody back from buying your brand, and the true drivers that are required for them to come over and be part of your franchise. So you know, one of the best ways to think about the brand connectome is a metaphor. And that is the metaphor of a tree. So if you think about a brand as a seed, you plant the seed, and you have to feed it good nutrients. So what are the nutrients in this case, it’s positive associations, because the soil, the water and the sun, in this case, the positive associations, they make the the seedlings sprout new branches to hold those associations. And every time you add more associations, the seedling has to sprout more branches. And little by little by little by little, this tree grows up out of that seedling. And the moment your tree, your the canopy of your tree is larger and more positive and more robust, then the tree of your competitors brand, the consumer will jump over to your brand. And that is how you get you know, a switch, which is what we’re all after trying to gain market share or move somebody and maybe in the case of the nonprofit’s from contributing from one cause to one another.

Erica Barnhart  31:14

Mhmm. Can you give an example of like, ways to create positive association?

Leslie Zane  31:19

Yeah, so So through cues, so through imagery through language, the brain needs something to hold on to. So like a good example would be an ad in the Superbowl. This this past this past year, the last few months, there were there were a lot of ads that were very insight based, but they were just purely emotional and they didn’t have distinctive brand assets and they didn’t have very own-able cues, or distinctive visual approaches that set them apart. They talked about an emotion, they talked about empathy, they had empathy in them. But those kinds of ads kind of go in one ear and out the other because there’s nothing really to hold on to that’s connected to the brand. In contrast, an ad that dimensionalizes the benefit, or dramatizes the benefit that the product has or the service has, that is actually going to stick that’s going to have much more stickiness. An example of that would be the Doritos 3D crunch snack that featured Matthew McConaughey, he starts out as a flat piece of paper, he has a you know, a product, he talks about having a problem and he’s been not feeling right the last few weeks, he gets sucked up by a vacuum, he can’t be seen from the side when he’s in his place, getting his coffee shop getting a coffee, and he’s just he’s flat. And then suddenly he slips into a vending machine. He eats one of the Doritos crunch 3D crunches, and poof, his body, you know, you know, explodes into a three dimensional being. And of course, he gets trapped in the in the vending machine.

Erica Barnhart  33:13

Sure, as you would if you were one dimmensinal and then became 3D.

Leslie Zane  33:18

But the point is that what it was dimensionalizing what it was dramatizing was the three dimensionality of the taste, of the texture, of the flavor. You know, it’s this big, big, big, big taste.

Erica Barnhart  33:29

So very specific to that product?

Leslie Zane  33:33

Correct, correct. So it’s dramatizing the benefit.

Erica Barnhart  33:37

As opposed to like, a like a made up, I’m going to make up an ad, some other chip company that I felt like a lot of the ads recently, and you mentioned this in your most recent Harvard Business Review article about platitudes. A lot of it was like I feel you we’re on uncertain uncertain times. Like you could you could see like some people sitting on the couch and like sharing chips, like sort of commiserating over the chips in some way. And that that wouldn’t, that wouldn’t, you know, grow the tree, because there’s nothing specific to the chip, am I tracking?

Leslie Zane  34:11

you are 100% track and that’s exactly right. I talked about that a lot. I said, advertisers please skip the platitudes because consumers, they know, they can smell it. The idea of being empathetic is obviously wonderful. And we all need to have tremendous empathy for everybody in these times. But to go out and create an ad that is all about that we’re in this together. You know, don’t worry, we’ll be together soon. It is unrelated to the brand. And because it is unrelated specifically to the brand’s expertise, it tends to go in one ear and out the other. It does not stick.

Erica Barnhart  34:54

Can you combo meal it? Because there was some research about you know, people want to know that it brand gets them or company gets them, an organization gets them. But I feel like it’s this hovering on it like that’s the only message is that we’re in this together. And I think what I’m hearing you say is like, Sure you can acknowledge that and then move into growing these specific positive associations with your whatever, whatever your-

Leslie Zane  35:19

Yeah. Well, I’ll go even further. What we know from our research is that the brands that did do effective advertising during the, you know, the the worst of the COVID period in 2020 were companies that communicated deeds that they did. So you know, deeds, not discussions, where the deed was closely tied to the brand’s expertise. So a great example of this is Absolut making hand sanitizer during COVID with its formula. That, that stuck, that stuck-

Erica Barnhart  35:57

Absolut Vodka?

Leslie Zane  35:58

Yeah, Absolut Vodka, because the, the ethanol is used to create hand sanitizer. Yeah. So using your expertise, and converting that to something really needed and useful and valuable during COVID, that makes sense for the brand to talk about, it’s authentic to the brand, and the consumer, their perceptions of the brand are elevated, because they did something that doesn’t seem superfluous, that doesn’t seem extraneous, it actually is directly tied to the brand’s expertise. So the best way to be empathetic is to be empathetic with with real deeds, that that are tied to your your business tied to your core competency. Another great example is Federal Express has a wonderful ad that ran in the last few weeks. And I we can put it in your your show notes later. It shows the world moving backward, children running backward, not into school. But yeah, not out of school man into school. But you know what I mean, running backward. Birds, flying backward, people instead of going into the train going, you know, in the wrong direction. And then the next scene is Federal Express planes, bringing vaccines, delivering vaccines to where they’re needed, and then cut to those same scenes that we just saw on the first half of the ad, now everybody’s moving in the right direction, children are going into making progress with their work. And so the the message there is that Federal Express is actually doing something super useful to help people during the pandemic, they’re applying what they do, which is fly planes, and fly and get things to places fast that they’re using their core competency, and telling people how they’re helping the world, but but it fits with who they are.

Erica Barnhart  38:03

Right. I mean, it’s also explains a lot for, you know, there’s a fair amount around cause related marketing and it provides many examples of it working well, which I would say, you know, your FedEx example, actually, both of those were great examples of that. But when we, you know, when it’s coupled with another organization, it can be very powerful, and it can totally backfire. And if you’d like this is, I think, explaining why when it’s a mismatch, when there’s organization was like, and we donate it to this, you know, a company for profit company donates to an organization that has like, nothing to do with anything that people are like, okay, I mean, I guess so. But that didn’t make me feel better about you that made me feel like you were disingenuous.

Leslie Zane  38:46

That’s exactly right.

Erica Barnhart  38:47

You can’t just schmear some cause on it.

Leslie Zane  38:49

One of the terms I use is cause competency.

Erica Barnhart  38:53

Oh, yeah, I saw that. And one of your, yeah, yeah, talk about that a little bit.

Leslie Zane  38:57

Well, just connect the cause that you are going to advocate for or give money to, to your core competency. So let’s say you’re, you know, Miracle Gro, you know, a great brand. And you tell people that you’re going to help children’s literacy, you know, is that going to really stick? Is that going to really help your your business? Probably not, but if Miracle Gro starts creating, you know, healthy gardens, in urban centers where they don’t have a lot of healthy fruits and vegetables, suddenly that relates to what they do. So I’m a big advocate of doing that.

Erica Barnhart  39:42

Fantastic. Yeah. Well, the other thing is for those who are on the nonprofit side of that, I think it also gives insight into the if you were to proactively be seeking out corporate partnerships, which is a strategy that every organization nonprofit should use, but it does make sense for some and then you could also you know, go the other direction. And say we were proactively going to seek out, you know, so for an organization that’s, you know, growing food in a food desert, ah, you know, something like Miracle Gro or some other thing would be who we want to go after. And some organizations are great about that. But I think, you know, anyway, it’s a, it’s a, it’s territory, that quickly gets kind of muddied. I want to make sure that we talked about the COVID connectome, which you recently discovered, because this is like, very specific to the time that we’re living in and it could be that somebody will listen to this way down the road. But for right now, we are emerging, we are emerging out of the COVID cloud or cocoon. But you found something very interesting about what works and what the what the connectome is.

Leslie Zane  40:45

Yeah. So as we were talking before, we said that brands have connectomes. But what we didn’t touch on is that so does everything else. And COVID, has a giant connectome of branches and associations that live on those branches connected to COVID. And what we learned about the COVID connectome is that it is it’s like a tree, but the tree has two very large clusters. So it branches off into these, it’s like a trunk that branches off into two very large branches. One is an all around preservation and that’s what we all felt, you know, a lot of certainly at the very beginning, we wanted to have our families close our children, you know, very connected to us all at home, kind of running, going under the covers. And that was all driven by our self preservation and our survival instinct. So there was a giant web around that which included cooking at home and not getting dressed, wearing yoga pants and all and buying toilet paper, and, and a whole bunch of behaviors and a whole bunch of rituals and routines related to preservation. But then we also found that there was another cluster that was equally important, but not as well developed back then. And that was the perseverance part of the COVID connectome. And that’s driven by our desire for something that’s also very important, which is to make progress. And what we saw was that during the time of the worst of COVID, the the preservation part of the connectome was incredibly dominant over the perseverance. And in many ways, it is the underpinning of what’s going on with the Consumer Confidence Index, because the Consumer Confidence Index all during that period was really, you know, in the basement, and it’s in the basement because of those kinds of instincts that that we are having. And in order for us to have a full recovery, that the preservation part of the connectome must dominate. And so the more that companies can, can build associations, build positive associations, in their messaging, and in their customer experiences, to build out and give everybody confidence about moving forward, that’s going to be a tremendous service to to everybody and to the economy, for jobs, and and for all of us to make progress and move forward.

Erica Barnhart  43:29

Did you find anything? I mean, was the research US focused?

Leslie Zane  43:35

That was US focused, yes.

Erica Barnhart  43:36

And so I’m wondering if there would be some some sensitivity that organizations would need to have if they were regionally focused? Because I think so I’m in the northwest, you’re in the northeast, you know, there’s South there’s California, like each region went through I mean, we all experienced COVID, each region handled it kind of differently. I’m just curious, you got any insight on regional implications of the COVID connectome?

Leslie Zane  44:02

I mean, I think that’s a great question. There are always little nuances that differ from from place to place. And I think this COVID, you know, handling the management of COVID is, has been a little bit different, as you say, but we generally find that the universal drivers and the universal, the patterns of things that drive people are much more they have much more in common than they are different.

Erica Barnhart  44:31

That makes sense. Yeah, I suppose I mean, that those universal, the universal attributes and you know, that sort of big five personality traits and like there’s, there’s so much that makes us each unique and there’s so much that is consistent.

Leslie Zane  44:48

I think we human beings are far more similar than we are different. We have a lot that is convergent, we don’t spend enough time talking about that. But that’s what we found in our in our work. It’s certainly true in the world of brands.

Erica Barnhart  45:05

Yeah, yeah. I want to go back to one thing because it occurs to me so so humans do like to make progress. So it makes sense that perseverance would be bubbling up in this COVID connectome. But we kind of were wired to make progress to survive.

Leslie Zane  45:21

Yeah, that’s a great point. So what we learned is that people have to feel safe.

Erica Barnhart  45:27

Okay, so its a Maslow’s Hierarchy here.

Leslie Zane  45:32

Yeah, 100%. You have to make people feel safe. We’re recommending that companies hire a chief safety and health officer now, you have to really do the things that are going to make that preservation side feel comfortable. And then they’re going to start moving forward. But it’s, it’s it’s a two part, it’s a two part equation, you have to do both.

Erica Barnhart  45:55

And there is there’s somewhat newly emerging critiques of Maslow’s hierarchy, which I interpret is kind of a differently defining what safety means, because I am, what the critics are saying is, Maslow was like, you know, shelter, food, so like physical safety. And as things progress, we’re also talking about psychological safety. So like, all the types of safety, physical safety, psychological safety. So all of that kind of needs to be met, is what I hear you saying, and then we can we can look towards what’s next.

Leslie Zane  46:31

100%.

Erica Barnhart  46:32

Yeah. It’s so interesting. All of this is so interesting. Now, I understand that you have some new rules for marketers to follow. I mean, anybody who’s been listening in this conversation is like, I bet she does have some new rules. I feel like it’s I feel like there’s an overarching new rule, which is, like, we really have to start paying more attention to the subconscious. And I’m gonna guess that listeners would appreciate hearing like you’ve mentioned, sort of the positive association by way of images and words. How do you figure that out? I mean, without like, sharing your secret sauce, and I want to get to the five new rules, and maybe there were later but I don’t want to leave the connectome space, the brand connectome space without offering some like concrete examples of like, how do you figure that out?

Leslie Zane  47:20

It’s really about what we call memory elicitation. Because I said earlier, that all a brand is is a compilation of cumulative memories that have formed over time. And so you kind of go fishing, you go on a fishing expedition. And we what we do is we inventory people’s memories related to a brand, and to the competitive brands. And we’re able to get very, very deep, but you know, all the way back to their very first memory and all the positive and negative associations over time.

Erica Barnhart  47:52

How do you know what’s a first memory? Like, I feel like we’re quite daft in terms of being able to tap into the subconscious. So is it like, do people know that it’s earliest? Or again, this is their conscious mind being like, I think it was my earliest, it feels like I was.

Leslie Zane  48:06

Yeah, I mean, we we do a lot of projective exercises. So we really don’t rely, we certainly don’t rely exclusively on what people say, because that’s literally the opposite of what we believe, we believe that what people say really can’t be trusted. And that the key is really to, to dig into what is attached to the brand in people’s subconscious. And we just kind of go keep going through the layers till we sort of get them to get back to those very, very first ones.

Erica Barnhart  48:40

 And you were saying, which I found fascinating, because of course, I you know, I live both, so I have my consulting firm and then I also have an academic, you know, I’m in that world as faculty at the University of Washington. And so you know, in the academic world is sort of the traditional capital, our research world, what you’re looking for is, breadth, like, you want to be able to replicate a study again and again and again. And that’s what you know, what makes it knowledge. But if I’m reading correctly, what you shared is like he actually for for the approach that you take, you can get to the information you need, with a kind of a small number of people because the stuff becomes so obvious that you don’t need like a gajillion people. So you’re not interviewing hundreds and hundreds of people on behalf of a client. It’s like much more targeted and deep.

Leslie Zane  49:29

So we do both. We both go very, very deep and then we also quantify with much larger numbers, but to go to really what you’re asking, which is how much convergence is there. I can tell you that by like the sixth or seventh person we have 65-70% overlap on the same themes, same metaphors, same imagery, the same symbols, it is really uncanny. And I don’t know if that’s true in other areas, I can only say that in the world of brands are incredibly convergent among the people who use the brand as one universe and then the people who don’t use that brand, the people who are using a competitive brand, those two those two groups, those two targets are incredibly convergent within themselves. And that’s, it’s, it’s really, it’s really quite fascinating.

Erica Barnhart  50:37

It’s very, very fascinating. Okay, thank you being willing to just go a little deeper on that, that this may also come up. But I also want to go back to for folks who are still stuck back on the idea that thoughts of physicality. I do want to go back to that, because for some listeners, they may be like, I’m sorry, what I thought the thoughts were, I think you said ephemeral. And I think what you’re saying is, thoughts take on shape by way of neural pathways and other things in our brain and the more that those are reinforced, the bigger like the pathway becomes like a little line and then like a trough. But the good news is, so that’s our thoughts take on physicality.

Leslie Zane  51:15

That’s exactly right. You explained it perfectly. I couldn’t do it better.

Erica Barnhart  51:19

Oh, that’s great. I just, you know, I think that that’s such a powerful thought. And I guess the reason I want to mention it, because I think there could be folks who are like, Oh, my gosh, like, what if we, what if we’re not okay, I want to do this, but what if we’re not Oh, what if, like, what if our associations aren’t where they need to be. And so I guess I just want to offer a little bit of hope that our brains are very malleable. I mean, plasticity is like a thing.

Leslie Zane  51:46

Oh, my God. So I can’t even tell you, I can’t I feel so strongly about this. Because I really do find that a lot of marketers play into what their brand is today, thinking that they can escape some of those negative associations or baggage. And what we find is that in a matter of weeks, you can change those associations, I mean, my favorite thing to talk about, and it also happens to be a rule, an old rule and a new rule. So we can jump into that here. The old rule was that brands have life cycles, where they have, they kind of start off young and full of energy, and they are growing fast. And eventually, they kind of as they get more and more and more and more consumers and they reach a mass state, then they kind of flatten out and eventually they need to kind of stagnate and decline and eventually go to you know, the funeral home. So what we know is that that is not true at all. Brands do not have built in life cycles, a brand could last for hundreds of years. And actually many of the brands in you know in the world have been around over 100 years. And you can create a new wave of growth. What is holding back the brands during those, quote, mature stages, is that they’re just accumulating negative association.

Erica Barnhart  53:11

Oh, so they get a little lazy?

Leslie Zane  53:14

Yeah, you have to constantly prune the negative associations, they weigh the brand down. And so it only looks like the growth is declining, the growth really is declining, but it’s not declining because it’s old, declining because it’s got negative associations that have to be removed.

Erica Barnhart  53:32

So erroneous correlation to life cycle.

Leslie Zane  53:38

It’s completely erroneous correlation pruning lifecycle. It is a question of pruning the negative associations and constantly adding new associations that evolve the brand, and keep it fresh and keep it young. And we’ve been incredibly successful at taking a brand that was already going down on that other part of the lifecycle, and helping it achieve a whole new wave of growth simply by removing positive or negative associations and adding new positive ones.

Erica Barnhart  54:09

That’s super inspiring and interesting, because there I mean, there’s so much to that organizational development lifecycle the storming, forming norming dying, I don’t know what the last one is. So that’s very inspiring. Okay, so that’s, that’s number one.

Leslie Zane  54:25

Another, I mean, I have 20 of them, which we don’t know we have time for 5.

Erica Barnhart  54:30

But if you people interested, where is the best way to get all 20?

Leslie Zane  54:34

Well, I work with them.

Erica Barnhart  54:36

I though there were 5 new rules for brain based marketing, where’s the 20 coming from Leslie?

Leslie Zane  54:40

I’ll give you I’ll give you I can give you five I’ll give you one more right now though. We have been taught as marketers that uniqueness is everything, differentiate or die, be the purple cow, stand out, you know, create your next you know, new product and make it look like it came from Mars. But that actually doesn’t work. Because in the era of brain science and behavioral science, we know that people connect with the familiar, not with the unique. And so we’ve been working killing ourselves to be so unique and stand out. But it’s the opposite of how the brain works. And now the next thing can say as well, but the familiar than is going to be generic because everybody’s going to look the same. And that’s a fair criticism. So what we say is, familiarity is better than uniqueness. But distinctiveness is best of all, with distinctiveness, you get to sort of put a creative twist on the familiar and make it your own make it distinctive to your brand. And a great example of this is, you know, if you think about the snow cap mountain, in the bottled water category, you know, it is one of the most important cues because it stands for purity and a whole bunch of positive associations. But Aquafina has this very beautiful, abstract, distinctive snow capped mountain with a little sunset near it. And so it’s done its distinctive version of a snow capped mountain. So as long as you pursue distinctiveness over uniqueness, you’ll be leveraging the familiar cue that people already know. But you’re serving it up in your own distinctive way.

Erica Barnhart  56:24

Yeah, and we talked a little bit about, so my research on language is sort of an extension or builds on the idea that our brains like novelty, because it releases chemicals that, you know, make us pay attention to something. And again, this goes back to survival, so much this goes back to survival instinct, we want to think we’re so evolved, and yet, pretty fundamentally, we’re just kinda out to survive and thrive periodically. So, you know, these two things can sound at odds, but what I’m hearing you saying we’ve chatted about is like, actually, it’s the combo meal that is the most powerful, so understanding what purpose each serves. So understanding that we really like familiarity, because that makes us feel safe. And our race also, like on occasion, novelty. Because it activates, you know, our brains in ways that are probably towards that progression volition, so that that combination, which is where the art I think comes together with the science.

Leslie Zane  57:20

I think that’s, that’s exactly right. It is it is most definitely the combination, the familiarity is so important, because it’s what drives engagement. I already have a snow capped mountain in my memory, I know what that is. And there’s a lot of meaning attached to that snowcap mountain. So I want to leverage that. I don’t want to throw that away. But I need a little twist, a little creative twist to make it my own for my brand. And also to make it stand out from the other snowcapped mountains that are all over the bottled water category. And so I think the combination of what we’re saying is exactly right.

Erica Barnhart  57:56

Yeah. Okay, what are the rules do you have for us? I feel like we’re it’s like combination of marketing for good meets Mythbusters right in this moment.

Leslie Zane  58:06

Alright, just one more, one more. Um, so the last one I’ll do is that we have been taught as marketers, and you’re taught this, when you become an assistant brand manager at P&G and it was you’re taught this at Harvard Business School also. And I know because I went I was at both places, they teach you that you can only stand for one thing as a brand. Stakeout your territory and stand for one thing. So if your Volvo equals safety, if you’re Tropicana equal, you know stand for freshness. But I just told you that the way the brand connectome works is that you need to have a tree, you can’t just have one branch, if you have one branch, you are literally going to be invisible in the brain, you’re going to have no salience at all. And so the the new rule is, the more associations your brand has, the better. And that fly’s completely in the face of what we have been taught as marketers.

Erica Barnhart  59:09

So I wonder if there is a because that does find, and of course, Volvo and safety is such a great example. You know, when I’m working with clients and teaching, I think about mental file folders, and we talk a lot about mental file folders, right? Because our brains are, there’s a reason that we have file folders, and there’s a big file folder, and then there’s sub file folders, right? And so I really encourage folks to think about like, what’s your big file folder? And then what are all the small file folders? So to continue with the tree metaphor, so like, what type of tree is it? And then what makes sense to go with the tree. So I think that’s what you’re saying that like, it’s not totally random. Like you’re not throwing, you know, Legos at your, at your tree and hoping it’ll grow. You’re actually very mindfully pruning and adding in a way that grows the same, like it’s still a tree, it’s not like all of a sudden you’re going something different.

Leslie Zane  1:00:04

100%, they still need to be related. There’s an overarching brand narrative, there’s an overarching brand purpose, there’s an overarching brand benefit, brand promise. But there needs to be multiple themes that are drivers. You know, even even in the case of Volvo, you know, great, the Volvo stands for safety. But if it isn’t also advanced, and also innovative, and also comfortable, and also nice looking, you know, and attractive, it is not going to do very well, you can survive on one driver, most often, we’ve found that there’s multiple drivers that need to be used to build any business.

Erica Barnhart  1:00:47

Yeah, I mean, I feel like right now, in particular, as we again emerge from our COVID, cocoon, it, that’s a really important point to make. I mean, I guess I’m mindful of how overwhelmed our brains are, how overwhelmed all of our circuitry is we’re just super tired and depleted, our brains are. So now is really such a great time and opportunity to be having these conversations, we talk a lot on the show about, you know, for me, when I work with organizations, like I’m all about internal alignment first. So that you can have excellent external execution, like, if your internal alignment isn’t there, it will show like, you just you can’t, you can only hide that for so long. Also, also, if you don’t take advantage of I mean, your biggest marketing force is your staff. Right? And then, and then from there, from there, and from there. So I think this conversation is so I mean, it’s evergreen, but also so timely, for people who, who think about these and I know, a lot of folks who listen to this might not necessarily think of themselves as marketers, and yet, you know, marketing is a team sport. So regardless of your title, you’re probably doing some marketing by virtue of caring about, you know, the organization you’re working for, and with, we’ve covered a lot of territory, but your work covers a lot of territory. Anything else that you want to share with listeners that we haven’t, we haven’t talked about yet?

Leslie Zane  1:02:11

I would just say that, um, you know, my overall message to anybody who has a brand or a cause that they’re trying to build is that, you know, think about it as a brand. And every brand has untapped potential. Really, the sky’s the limit. And I will also say that people are forming new relationships at this time, during COVID. More than in any other time, probably in the recent past. 70% of people tried a new brand in 2020.

Erica Barnhart  1:02:42

Oh, wow, that is interesting.

Leslie Zane  1:02:42

That’s a lot.

Erica Barnhart  1:02:44

That’s a lot a lot.

Leslie Zane  1:02:45

That’s a lot. And it’s really times of major disruption that people create and look for new relationships. So this is a great time for the number eight brand to the come, the number six, or the number four to move up to number two, but watch out if you’re number one, because you can also move down. So I just want everybody to know that that really every brand really does have tremendous untapped potential. And you just need to build those positive associations and grow your tree.

Erica Barnhart  1:03:15

Well, and also, I feel like some of this is is internal work first, right is really letting go of this idea that we have a lot of control over our decision making, and our own lives and kind of like there’s this piece of kind of making peace with that, because it’s it that also flies in the face of how we’re trained to think about ourselves, our very rational selves. And of course, there’s a whole bunch of fun research or reading out there about the fact that we are we are predictably irrational. For sure. Yeah. So just an offering to listeners that are like, I don’t know that I can get there. You know, just think about it first internally, and then and then see how you might externalize it. Alright, I end every conversation with guests by asking the first question, which is about inspiration and motivation. When we look at the root of the word inspiration, it means to breathe in. And motivation means to take action. So we need both. So again, your work is so full, it is so rich. But I mentioned the experiment of both inspiration and motivation. What keeps you inspired to the work you do and what keeps you motivated?

Leslie Zane  1:04:20

Look, I think certainly during these times, what keeps me inspired is seeing all the amazing people that have put their work first, the essential workers have just been amazing. They they inspire me every single day. From a business standpoint, I think I probably get most both inspired and motivated by people who don’t allow anybody to say no to them. They just keep fighting and pushing and particularly, I guess I identify with people who are pushing a particular approach or cause that is maybe counterintuitive or, or different, or you know, not the conventional wisdom. And when those people make strides, it’s very, you know, it’s that’s very exciting to me. And that’s what keeps me motivated because I really do feel like I am championing a new way of thinking to make things better for people and easier, and make even, you know, small companies that don’t have large resources, be able to make great strides. So that’s that’s what motivates me, seeing people who have been able to make those strides in spite of all the odds.

Erica Barnhart  1:05:36

Love it. Thank you, Leslie, for your work and for taking time to share all of your insights today with the Marketing for Good community. And thank you listeners for continuing to find ways to make marketing a force for good in the world. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. I hope that you got some practical tips and deep inspiration from what’s possible if we’re willing to allow ourselves to understand the degree to which our subconscious minds are really in charge and that that’s okay. That’s actually okay. Do good, be well, and I look very forward to catching up with you next time.

The post Ep 32: Leslie Zane on Breaking the Rules with Subconscious Marketing appeared first on Claxon Communication.

This is a transcript of Erica Mills Barnhart’s first interview in a three part series with Guy Kawasaki on the Marketing for Good podcast. You can listen to the episode here and listen to more episodes on Apple Podcasts, or wherever you enjoy listening to podcasts. Enjoy!

SUMMARY KEY WORDS

people, personal brand, hear, thinking, marketing, canva, extraversion, followers, influencer, extrovert, evangelize, visionary, attention,

Erica Mills Barnhart  00:36

When you host a podcast, you have a hit parade of dream guests. When you host a podcast on marketing Guy Kawasaki is 100% going to be on that list. As you’ll hear in this episode, he doesn’t like terms like guru, visionary or anything like that. But you know what, that’s what Guy is when it comes to marketing. He’s always a few steps ahead of everyone else, he doesn’t try to get to a higher, better place on the curve that everyone else is playing on. He jumps to a whole new one. So initially, I reached out to guy to see if he talked about personal brand as a force for good. And we ended up talking about that as you’ll hear, but also we just talked about so many things that it ended up kind of sort of being a masterclass on modern day marketing with Guy Kawasaki. It wasn’t the intention, but that’s how it turned out. So rather than one long episode, I decided this conversation would be more digestible as a three part mini-series. So part one, I’m still going to call personal brand as a force for good, or not. Part Two, technology as force for good, or not. And then Part Three is about democratizing marketing and shaping narratives. So when I asked Guy to come on the podcast, it was to talk about personal brand as a force for good. We didn’t talk so much about that because Guy has some specific and strong opinions about personal brand. But have your ear tuned into how he thinks about or defines personal brand. Basically, he thinks it’s bs to build up and here I’m air quoting “personal brands”, if you have nothing of value to offer the world and I 100% agree with that. However, if you do have something to offer as many listeners, if not all listeners of the show do, I think it’s worth thinking through how you want to show up in person and online. So your message is heard in a way that feels authentic to you. And really, that’s what Guy goes on to describe. So we may have conflicting opinions about personal brand, that boil down to how you define it. But it’s really interesting to hear from someone like him about how he makes choices about how to show up particularly online, which is how most of us experience him. He doesn’t hold punches and Guy you know, he throws a lot of curveballs, also just a note, there’s some swearing in this episode so if you have little ones around, maybe listen to this on headphones, so they don’t hear that. I hope you enjoyed this wild ride of a conversation as much as I did. Let’s dig in. My guest today, tell me if this is accurate is chief evangelist for Canva,  creator and host of the Remarkable People podcast, executive fellow of the Hoss School of Business at UC Berkeley, adjunct professor of the University of New South Wales, was past tense, chief evangelist of Apple, and trustee of Wikimedia Foundation.

Guy Kawasaki  03:35

 True.

Erica Mills Barnhart  03:36

He has written, holy crow, Wise Guy: The Art of Start, The Art of Start 2.0, The Art of Social Media, Enchantment ,that’s one of my favorites, and 11 other books, we could spend all of this just going over that.

Guy Kawasaki  03:50

True.

Erica Mills Barnhart  03:51

Okay, back to present tense has 1.4 million Twitter followers, 93,600 Instagram followers, more than 3 million followers on LinkedIn and more than 423,000 followers on Facebook.

Guy Kawasaki  04:06

All that’s true, although I don’t know what it means, probably half of whom are Russian bots.

Erica Mills Barnhart  04:13

Yeah, they could be Guy, but I don’t think so. I was first introduced to your special brand of magic 20 years ago.

Guy Kawasaki  04:22

Geez.

Erica Mills Barnhart  04:24

Uh huh. Yes. This  conversation, unbeknownst to you, has been for me 20 years in the making. When I saw you speak at the social enterprise alliance in San Francisco.

Guy Kawasaki  04:34

I’ve no idea what that was.

Erica Mills Barnhart  04:36

You were great. You were so great. So great. Okay, now we’re gonna talk about personal brand which means adjectives because adjectives describe nouns and you’re a human and therefore you’re a noun. I would describe you, my guest, as confident yet humble, techie yet human, curious yet respectful, and super nice while definitely never being somebodies doormat.

Guy Kawasaki  05:01

Okay, oh, I’ll take that.

Erica Mills Barnhart  05:03

Okay, we’re gonna come back to it, you’re gonna be able to edit and offer input. Okay, let’s talk about these fans and followers. Because it’s just a lot and I have a specific question, which is, do you manage all of these social media accounts?

Guy Kawasaki  05:14

Yes and no. Someone else also posts for me, and I post too. I post the bulk of it. In fact, when you see a post that is highly political, highly opinionated, that’s probably me. When you see something about productivity, entrepreneurship, marketing and sales, that’s probably Peg Fitzpatrick,

Erica Mills Barnhart  05:35

Got it. Because it is a ton of content.

Guy Kawasaki  05:38

It is a ton of content.

Erica Mills Barnhart  05:40

And when I reached out to you, I said, will, you want to talk about using personal brand as a force for good because I literally was sitting here thinking, every single listener manages a personal brand. For some, they were just like, I don’t even want to think about it. And yet, here we are. So you do. So I was thinking, like, who has been at this, you know, and can really offer some wisdom? And you came to mind immediately. And you’re kind and gracious enough to say, sure, I’ll come on and talk about it. Let’s do that.

Guy Kawasaki  06:08

Well, okay. You may want to end the interview right now, if you ask me what my opinion is of the concept of building a personal brand.

Erica Mills Barnhart  06:17

I won’t want to end the interview, I want to hear it.

Guy Kawasaki  06:20

So I think that you should not even be thinking about your “personal brand”, that you should just do whatever you do very well. And your personal brand will naturally fall from that, fall out from that. And it’s the people who say, I need to enhance my personal brand. Maybe I should write a book, maybe I should write a white paper, I need to position myself as a guru, as an expert, as an influencer. I think that’s bullshit. And so if you want to take the extreme example, I don’t think that Steve Jobs woke up one day in his life thinking, How do I enhance my personal brand? Steve Jobs woke up thinking, How do I build the world’s greatest computer or phone or tablet or store or app store? I don’t think he woke up thinking about how do I enhance the personal brand of Steve Jobs. And he did those things so well, that the personal brand of Steve Jobs was great. So, long and the short of it is I don’t worry about my personal brand, per se. There are times where, you know, I would not support some causes such as, I don’t know, carbon based fuels or tobacco, or republicans not necessarily in that order. So I worry about my brand in that sense, but I’m not sitting around thinking, Oh, I gotta make people think I’m smart and effective and blah, blah, blah.

Erica Mills Barnhart  07:58

Okay. If I’m playing devil’s advocate, though, I hear your point, by the way, but if I’m playing devil’s advocate, I can hear a listener saying that’s right Guy, because you don’t have to because you’re Guy Kawasaki.

Guy Kawasaki  08:09

Yeah, well, the way I got to be Guy Kawasaki is not wasting my time writing friggin white papers and you know, I never wrote the book The Guy Way published by Guy press. Okay. So-

Erica Mills Barnhart  08:24

When somebody asks you, what do you do, what do you say? I mean, you’re a multi hyphenate extraordinare. What do you say?

Guy Kawasaki  08:31

I say I am the chief evangelist of Canva. And the creator of the Remarkable People podcast.

Erica Mills Barnhart  08:37

Okay. Leave it there and overtime that evolves. And so is it fair to say, based on what you’ve just said, you wake up in the morning, and you think how can I best evangelize for Canva? And how can I make Remarkable People as remarkable as possible?

Guy Kawasaki  08:50

Basically, yes, yes. But I’m also a public speaker. So I have to worry about you know, how do I get gigs and fulfill people’s expectations of my speaking?

Erica Mills Barnhart  09:02

So where does that fit in?

Guy Kawasaki  09:06

In the sense of where does it fit in in my life? My financial situation.

Erica Mills Barnhart  09:13

Well I am not gonna ask about your finances. No, just in terms of like, if we’re sticking with this idea of like, don’t worry about your personal brand, worry about being as good as you can be, as great as you can be, at what you’re doing, is public speaking a third thing? Do you think about that as much as evangelizing for Canva?

Guy Kawasaki  09:36

Public speaking for me, is a means to an end. And the end is the ability to give my family the lifestyle that they are expecting. So it’s a means to an end. I don’t speak publicly to position myself as a thought leader. At all. I mean, if I never spoke again in public again, because I didn’t need the money, I would be perfectly happy with that, I am completely okay with that. I don’t need the attention. I don’t need to think about and it’s not because I don’t need to do it because I don’t need it anymore. I just, I don’t have a psychological need for people to think I’m a guru or thought leader or visionary. Not at all. I don’t give a shit.

Erica Mills Barnhart  10:37

Um, fair? That’s fair. I mean, you know, I think for a lot of people, you can go either way, public speaking can be an ego, you know, stroking activity?

Guy Kawasaki  10:53

I’ll Okay, I’ll answer it a slightly different way than may shed more light upon the subject. I think that you should speak publicly and I also think that you should write a book, when you have something to say. And so it’s not about what you want to communicate. It’s about what people want to hear. And if you have something to say, then speak and write a book. But if it’s just because you want to position yourself as a guru, thought leader, influencer visionary, it’s total bullshit.

Erica Mills Barnhart  11:27

But you’re vapid and don’t have content. So you’re just creating content. You’re anti that in the same way, to the same extent that you’re pro getting vaccines.

Guy Kawasaki  11:39

That’s a leap but yeah, absolutely yes.

Erica Mills Barnhart  11:43

Do you identify as an introvert, an extrovert, or an ambivert,

Guy Kawasaki  11:47

I identify as an external extrovert, who’s forced into that role, but fundamentally, I’m an introvert, I don’t need the attention. I don’t like to be in crowds. I’m also deaf on my right side so that makes it a pain in the ass to be in public situations because people talking to me on my right, I wouldn’t ever even hear and they, they think I’m ignoring them. So if, you know if I, if I never went to another cocktail party dinner or reception, I would be perfectly happy. The next big event in my life could be my funeral, I would be, that would be fine.

Erica Mills Barnhart  12:27

I bet people are surprised to hear that. I mean, I am exactly the same way primarily introverted. And after I do speaking, things people often say, right, but it’s easy for you because you’re an extrovert. And I’m like, oh no I am not. But to your point, I am so passionate about people understanding the power of words, and how they can use them to lead more awesome lives and to make the world a better place. I’ll stand up there and talk about that all day, every day, as long as anybody will let me. And then I’m going to go back and I’m gonna be really quiet for a really long time. My husband knows this. He’s awesome.

Guy Kawasaki  13:01

I could build the case, I don’t know the exact definition of extraversion, but you can be on a stage in front of 10,000 people and not be, you know,  not be trying to make 10,000 friends.

Erica Mills Barnhart  13:27

So the technical definition of is extraversion is where you get your energy from, and if it’s interacting with folks or not, but actually, I think that that supports your point, which is, the bigger the crowd, the less there’s actually connection in some ways, sometimes, right? So you’re not getting energy.

Guy Kawasaki  13:46

I’m a complicated guy. Listen. So if I were speaking to 50 people versus 10,000, I can honestly tell you that I find it more thrilling to speak to 10,000 than 50, don’t get me wrong. I think it’s it’s a greater challenge.

Erica Mills Barnhart  14:01

Do you think it’s greater? Why do you think it’s greater?

Guy Kawasaki  14:04

Because well, first of all, so many people will be totally intimidated by 10,000 people. My sweet spot is about 1000. From 1000, you know, under 1000 is okay, but 1000 plus is where it gets interesting. And I just like the challenge of it.

Erica Mills Barnhart  14:24

Yeah. Well, you know, people say to me all the time, it seems like you’d love to teach and I say it’s nothing I love to teach, I love seeing people learn.

Guy Kawasaki  14:33

Hmm, there’s a difference.

Erica Mills Barnhart  14:34

Yeah. And so for me, it’s like if I can’t, you know, if it’s big enough that the lights are down andI can’t see who I’m communicating with, and I’m in conversation with, it loses a little magic. I feel like a big crowd. Don’t get me wrong, but again, because the more people who understand like verbs are where it’s at, he happier I am, the better the world is gonna be.

Guy Kawasaki  14:55

Okay.

Erica Mills Barnhart  14:55

Okay, so let’s not use the term personal brand. I don’t want to give you like an eye tic every time I say it, that’s not my goal. Let’s say though, I mean, again, from my perspective, one of the reasons I reached out is, you know, there are folks who I think it’s very, you know, obvious Angelina Jolie, you know, is an ambassador, like a UN ambassador. So there’s like, you know, folks who are really, you know, specific to a nonprofit, I think is sort of the classic like, oh, they’re using, they’re using their influence their powers of enchantment, for good in the world. I feel like yours is more nuanced yet intentional, like to me, Canva, that’s democratizing design, 100%, a force for good. But like you said, you’re a complicated guy so maybe this is par for the course, but how do you make those choice about what about what you’re going to be associated with, and evangelize and to be an ambassador for either formally or informally?

Guy Kawasaki  15:53

First of all, I have to love what they do. So, could I be a brand evangelists for Lincoln, Mercury? No. Matthew McConaughey can do it. But deep down inside, do you truly believe if you went to Matthew McConaughey’s house, that he’s driving Lincoln’s? Do you really believe that? I don’t. So I have to love the thing. I am not doing it for free. So there is some financial reward.

Erica Mills Barnhart  16:29

Well, but you’ve been you’ve been vocal about your feelings about vaccinations or not and I assume Pfizer or whoever is not paying you for your opinions.

Guy Kawasaki  16:40

Yeah, no, no, that is just, well, I think it’s just, it’s a moral responsibility. And, I will tell you that there are very few “influencers” and professional speakers, etc, etc. who have come out as strong anti Trump, pro vaccination, pro science, pro voter rights, and pro immigration, most people won’t touch that because they’re afraid that I don’t know the NRA was gonna select Guy as a keynote speaker, but then he found out that he’s pro gun control, so they won’t invite him and that’s gonna cost him money, I could give a shit. I would rather, I do not want to go to my grave thinking, Oh, I I helped the NRA and I helped the tobacco company and I helped you know, these people make the world a worse place and there’s a lot of people that say, well, Guy, you know, you take a strong stand, and you’re antagonizing 50% of your followers and that is simply not true, because my followers have self selected and so I doubt that there are very many evangelical QAnon people who are my Twitter followers. And you know what, I know that some people think this is overly dramatic. But I really think that for a while, it was like 1930 Germany in America. And we could have turned into a fascist state. I think we’re closer than most people realize. And so a lot of people said, well, Guy, you know, how come you’re so anti Trump? Aren’t you afraid of losing followers? LinkedIn and social media shouldn’t be used for politics. It’s about professional development and connections and blah, blah, blah. And my response to that is I don’t want to look back and say, Oh, so you know, I didn’t resist Trump because I didn’t want to lose followers, that is freaking pathetic, that is pathetic. And I didn’t want to, I didn’t want to antagonize people who might have hired me for a speaking gig, because I was anti Trump, pro science, pro vaccination, pro voter rights, pro LGBTQ rights, you know, I mean. Now, again, as you point out, some people might say, well, Guy, it’s okay for you because you’re relatively you’ve made it you don’t have to worry about your next paycheck. Which is kind of true but that’s not why I copped this attitude. I copped this attitude because I believe I have a moral obligation to resist this. I don’t want my grandchildren to ask my kids did grandpa resist when America almost became a fascist state? I don’t want them to have to ask that question. I want them to know.

Erica Mills Barnhart  19:59 So now you have a sense for the one and only Guy Kawasaki. In the next episode part two of this mini-series, we turn our attention to technology. Guy is a techie through and through and I always appreciate hearing what he’s paying attention to, what he sees on the horizon and of course, what’s complete and utter bs that we shouldn’t be giving any attention to. All that and more awaits you in part two of the series. I’m so excited for you to hear it. I will see you there.

The post Ep 38: Guy Kawasaki on Personal Brand (or not) – Part One of Three appeared first on Claxon Communication.