Jason Falls:
I still do the, what is it, semicolon, hyphen, close parentheses.
Adam Kerpelman:
So, you put the nose in there?
Jason Falls:
Yeah, I do. I put the nose in there. The emoji thing, I do it every now and then. I don't look for emoji. I just-
Adam Kerpelman:
Yeah. I've been a colon, little o, parentheses guy for a long time, the little round nose. Hey, everybody, it's the Data-Driven Marketer sponsored by NetWise. I'm Adam.
Mark Richardson:
I'm Mark.
Jason Falls:
And I'm Jason.
Adam Kerpelman:
Welcome back for another hang in the data basement. Thank you for joining us. And special thanks to our guests this week, Jason Falls, who is senior influence strategist at Cornett as well as a podcaster and author.
Jason Falls:
That I am.
Mark Richardson:
[crosstalk 00:00:59]. Welcome.
Adam Kerpelman:
Yeah. I'll just jump into it and throw to you Jason for an intro on how you got to senior influence strategist is for sure a newish title, I would say in the world, marketing.
Jason Falls:
That it is, yeah. I guess, the easy way to describe the path I've taken is I'm a PR guy by trade. And so, I spent 15 years as a PR guy, public relations, media relations in college athletics, which also means you have to run the events and keep the stats for all the ball games and manage the website, and so on and so forth.
Jason Falls:
So, I've always been had my hand in a bunch of different pockets of the communications marketing world from that career. And then, when my son was born 16 years ago now, I decided I didn't want to travel as much. And I needed to make a little bit more money, because one thing that I can tell you about working in the world of college athletics is the only person who gets paid is the head coach.
Jason Falls:
And so, jumped out into mainstream advertising marketing PR at an agency in Louisville, Kentucky. And that happened to be in the early to mid-2000s when companies were saying, "Hey, what are these blogs and social networks? What's going on there, and how can we use them?"
Jason Falls:
And I just happened to be in the right place the right time and was able to say, "Well, here's how you should or I think you should." And that's where I landed. I was the social media guy for a while. And then, because that was early in the brand adoption of social media, I got invited to speak at some conferences, and that led to somebody said, "You should write a book."
Jason Falls:
And so, a friend of mine and I wrote a book about social media strategy, and then another one about email marketing and just rode the wave. And fast forward to, I guess, it's been about four years ago now, so 2017, I landed it at Cornett in Lexington, Kentucky, which is a full-service advertising agency.
Jason Falls:
And I'm doing a lot of hybrid PR social media, which is right in the middle of where influencers fall. And I do a lot of influencer marketing strategies, a lot of PR strategies, and a lot of social media strategies for clients. So, because I'm doing so many different things, we didn't really have a good name for it.
Jason Falls:
So, we came up with senior influence strategist because we're all trying to use these various marketing channels to influence audiences. And we just don't use the R on it, so that is much more broad. So, that's me.
Adam Kerpelman:
It's funny because we make for Mark here occasionally, because he deliberately also picked a made-up title, because it doesn't need people bugging him about certain things. It's like if you try to wedge yourself into the existing models, immediately, sales starts pinging you because they're like [crosstalk 00:03:55].
Mark Richardson:
It's interesting, yeah.
Adam Kerpelman:
Use our influencer platform, those are registries full of like, they have these many followers and so on.
Mark Richardson:
Yeah, I wanted to dive in. You made an interesting point of creating your title finding your niche and capitalizing on a wave of activity around this service. So, I'm curious, is it mostly people coming to you and brands looking to become influencers or to build out an influencer program? Or, are you getting individual creators, influencers who are coming to you as clients looking to broaden their reach or improve their content?
Jason Falls:
It's more of the brand side. When you work at a traditional ad agency, the people you talk to are going to be brand managers and VPs of marketing and whatnot. And Cornett is a full-service ad agency. So, the influencer, PR marketing, SEO, web development social media world that I have partial dominion over with a couple of other leadership team members, it's just one part of a bigger puzzle piece for us.
Jason Falls:
And so, people don't come to Cornett for an influencer marketing strategy, they come to Cornett for marketing or advertising, and or some creative strategy. And then, our influencer recommendations, our social media recommendations, et cetera are baked into an overall plan.
Jason Falls:
So, we work with medium and large brands. We don't do a whole lot of small business stuff. Now, on the flip side of that, because I have a book about influencer marketing. I have a podcast about influencer marketing, I get a lot of people who approached me to say, "Hey, I want a very narrow, specific influencer marketing strategy."
Jason Falls:
Because of my work at cornet, I typically can't do a one-off thing for a small business or a startup. So, I refer those people on to some other partners and some other friends I know that do that work. So, I'm somewhat limited in my day job work. But I'm focused on the overall marketing communication strategy for our clients at Cornett as opposed to just doing influencer or social media.
Jason Falls:
And I prefer it that way. I like being a part of a bigger team. I don't think that I have all the answers. In fact, I know that I don't have all the answers. And so, sitting around the table with a bunch of really smart people is just a better environment for me to be in. So, that's where I am.
Mark Richardson:
That's awesome. I think that's the hardest thing for a lot of marketers to say is that, I don't have the answer, right?
Jason Falls:
Yeah, no doubt.
Mark Richardson:
It's refreshing.
Jason Falls:
When you reach a certain point in your, I guess, professional maturity when you can say, "I don't have all the answers." And when you can honestly look a client in the face and say, "I don't know." That's very hard for a lot of younger people to say because they think, well, I'm supposed to have all the answers. I'm supposed to know how to solve.
Jason Falls:
I'm supposed to be able to say, "Yes, I can do that." And sometimes, you have to be able to say, "You know what, that's really not my strength, but I can find someone who can help." And I think when you reach that point, you've reached this adulthood in your professional life, because you realize saying no to a client isn't going to ruin everything.
Adam Kerpelman:
Well, the funny thing and Mark was riding along as I went through this, in my early career, started out in video production. And as a producer, your job is essentially to not know the answer to anything but know the person who does. So, it's very awkward starting out at a young age in that profession, because you're constantly feeling like talk about feeling insufficient all the time, until you realize that your job is just enough to know who to go to.
Adam Kerpelman:
So, it's this version of professional maturity where you have to live through 15 years of feeling you're supposed to know but you don't and always apologizing until you realize, oh, no, my job is to know... okay, you need the light guy. You need the power guy. You need the whatever, and I got my rolodex people. And I'll call them up and we'll get this thing done.
Jason Falls:
Yeah. And there's, there's enormous power too in just being a connector, right? Early on in my career, I worked with a number of people, and my answer was always, "Yes, I can do that." And then, I would freak out about how I was going to get something done, and then find the right partners to work with, et cetera.
Jason Falls:
But I've gotten to the point now where I will have people call me, especially the smaller businesses, that call me and just because of my work at Cornett, I can't really work with one-off projects like that. And so, I've gotten to the point where I'm really comfortable just being the guy that says, "Hey, let me introduce you to Meredith. Meredith does a great job with influencer marketing stuff, and she's an independent consultant who can work with small business.
Jason Falls:
It's going to be better on your budget. You're going to get personalized service. And you're not going to get lost in the mix of the workflow of a big agency if I handle it. And that's a better solution for that particular need, right? So, becoming just the person who connects the dots is, I think, really powerful. And I've always enjoyed that.
Adam Kerpelman:
Well, and it actually gets the thing we talk about a lot on the podcast in terms of a data driven marketing side, marketing broadly has gotten so complex that things that they used to be able to handle with a smaller team, you really just can't anymore.
Adam Kerpelman:
And so, the emergence of things like SEO and SEM, really create a world where I know that it's my job to go, yeah, that's a completely different type of engineer that we have to add them to the team if we want this to work, rather than, if I pretend that I know what I'm talking about, that fail is going to fall off quickly.
Mark Richardson:
Or even the fact that I've done email. I've worked in email marketing. I've worked in a certain platform, but it may be just through Marketo Salesforce, and the fact that I'm learning HubSpot for the first time, you can't just go in and apply the tools you use to make Marketo Salesforce work to HubSpot.
Mark Richardson:
I mean, we literally have consultants helping us make sense of all of the workflows and ecosystem bells and whistles that a certain platform has. So, it's not just about, yeah, I'm an email marketing expert, I can do everything. No, you need to be an email marketing platform expert as part of your toolkit.
Jason Falls:
It gets really complex and complicated. And when you're working with larger brands, well, I mean, even with small businesses too, I mean, you want to say to them, "Look, in order to do this right, we need a certain amount of resources." And sometimes, the amount of resources you need does not balance with the amount of budget that they have.
Jason Falls:
And that's even a problem when you get to the larger brands, the people who are spending a couple of million dollars a year on marketing, they're like, well, we want email marketing, but they don't think that that should take five people and hundreds of thousands of dollars. They think that that should be 20 grand a year and one person can handle the whole thing.
Jason Falls:
And so, they don't quite understand that, well, yeah, one person can do that for that amount of money over the course of the year. But it's going to be an individual blogger doing it from their basement, as opposed to having a team of people who knows how to copy, and knows how to optimize, knows how to tag everything appropriately, code everything appropriately. That's a different ballgame.
Adam Kerpelman:
And then, you end up working against the marketing of, it's like, HubSpot wants to be out there saying that their platform is easy. And yeah, they have a nice UI. But fundamentally, it's a giant, complex database software that is really confusing. And if you don't know how to think at least a little bit like a database engineer, you end up lost in there.
Adam Kerpelman:
And so, I think a lot of times, an exec or somebody will come to the marketing department and say, "Well, why do you need those five people?" I just saw the ad for HubSpot and they said, it's click, it's push button, it's turnkey. It's easy. Okay, well, you realize that's what they're selling you because they have a marketing department like us, I'll believe there's 100 people in it, working to convince you.
Jason Falls:
No doubt. And the other thing there that I find and I've always found really frustrating, and whatnot is that a software like HubSpot is that complex. And it's so complex that even the people that are using it, well are probably using about 80% of its capabilities. And the majority of people that are using it are using about 5% of its capability.
Jason Falls:
Especially, the smaller businesses because they don't understand or they don't have enough people to figure out, okay, I'm using the email piece. And now, I can also use the social media piece. And then, I can also use the website piece. And then, I can also do the CRM thing. Small businesses, you get two or three of those and they're overwhelmed, right?
Jason Falls:
So, the full power of HubSpot, quite frankly, the full power and potential of any SaaS product and marketing right now, I would venture to say that the vast majority of software's that are used out there are used at about a 35%, 45% of their capacity of what they can do for that business. And because it's too complex, the business just... they can't get their head wrapped around the rest of it.
Adam Kerpelman:
Or can't hire enough people.
Jason Falls:
Exactly.
Adam Kerpelman:
Or can't staff up a big enough team to say that, well, that's the customer success part of it so we need CS engineers essentially to understand the moving part there.
Mark Richardson:
And then, births the cottage industry, the platform expert, you know what I mean, like Salesforce is the same way. It's like they're not providing the managed support, you got to go outside to a Salesforce licensed expert. So, we've got this cottage industry of folks which is great.
Mark Richardson:
It's awesome that there's these skills you can become super well versed in Salesforce and delivering value to small businesses that way. It's something I would have never imagined would even be a job like Kurt was saying, my title is senior program manager, because it's just bland and vague enough to cover enough all the things that I'm might be required to do to make this ship fly.
Jason Falls:
Yeah. I've always been-
Mark Richardson:
And it gets me less InMail cold calls.
Jason Falls:
That's good. I've seen your influence strategist, apparently, still a junk mail magnet. I'm still not having any less inbox penetration.
Adam Kerpelman:
Well, that's actually, I mean, probably a perfect segue to the next thing. I'm just going to pivot back to talking about the influencer stuff. It is a buzz term now, right? People understand the idea of the influencer. And it's the thing that I certainly lived through the emergence of that as a marketer or wasn't a thing and then it was.
Adam Kerpelman:
And so, I mean, maybe the place to start is from your perspective, what is an influencer in the modern parlance of, I think, maybe people go to a place of, oh, somebody with a lot of Twitter followers. But it's obviously more complex than that, and also chase philosophically [crosstalk 00:15:05].
Jason Falls:
Yeah. I'm definitely glad that you framed it that way because that is the default. A lot of people think influencers and they think Instagrammers and YouTubers or maybe, I guess now, Tik Tokers. And that's a very limited tunnel vision way of looking at the world of influence.
Jason Falls:
Because if you take the art off the end of that word, now all of a sudden, you your blinders go off and you realize, oh, it's about trying to accomplish something strategic, well, that paints a very different picture. And so, my definition of an influencer is anyone who can motivate an audience to take action.
Jason Falls:
And that action might be that they buy your product, they try your product. It might be that they think differently about your product or become more aware of your product. So, I paint a very broad definition of that because I think we're tunnel visioning our way into not leveraging the concept of influence marketing well these days.
Jason Falls:
And when I hear the mainstream media talk about influencers, they typically talk about them in a negative light. And they talk about the worst-case scenarios of influencers faking the life that they have, and buying followers and airbrushing clouds into their pictures.
Jason Falls:
And they like to take stock and rubberneck on the train wrecks that happen out there in the influence marketing space. And they avoid talking about the great successes that businesses and brands are having, leveraging influencers online and offline because there is a such thing as offline influence.
Jason Falls:
And that's one of the reasons why I wrote the book is because I want all these medium and small business owners out there that don't have time to sit in the marketing bubble and talk about this stuff all day like I do. They don't understand the full potential that an influencer might bring to the table.
Jason Falls:
But to get back to your question. In the book, I write about the earliest known documented version of what I would call modern influencer marketing, goes back to the 1700s. And Josiah Wedgwood, who made something called, the Queen's pottery. He got Queen Charlotte, who was the wife of King George III, for those of you who are Hamilton fans, the comedic foil in Hamilton.
Jason Falls:
His wife loved Josiah Wedgwood's pottery. And Josiah Wedgwood got her to allow him to say that this was the Queen's China or whatever, and he marketed it that way. So, he leveraged the influence of a third-party to say you should buy this product.
Jason Falls:
And so, that's the what I point to as the earliest example of what I would call modern influencer or influence marketing. Now, you could go back and say the first caveman to say, "Look, fire, you should do this" that's influence too, but it's not necessarily marketing if you're talking about selling a product.
Jason Falls:
So, we're talking about something that dates back literally hundreds of years. And when you think about marketing and advertising from abroad perspective, all of it revolves around influence, right? So, at a meta level, everything we do in the marketing world.
Jason Falls:
The way it evolved over the years, though, with social media, as social media came to the table, and more and more people had the opportunity to publish. Unfortunately, a lot of people took the opportunity to publish when they shouldn't have.
Jason Falls:
But everybody became a publisher. Social media democratized publishing. And what came out of that were people who had distinct voices, or interesting content or some talent, and they were able to build audiences. Now, back in 2003, 2004 we called them mavens maybe. Or, we just called them [crosstalk 00:18:53].
Jason Falls:
Yup, [Smeeze 00:18:54]. We call them bloggers or influential bloggers, maybe not influential bloggers. I remember the word maven being tossed around. But when we were talking about doing what we now call influence marketing, back then, it was called blogger relations.
Jason Falls:
And there was this great debate as to whether it should be PR doing this or whether it should be marketing doing this or whatever. And then, the tools like [IZEA 00:19:20] started to come out. And they had the sponsored posts where you could go to a blogger and say, "I'll pay you money if you write about a product."
Jason Falls:
And hence, the snowball started rolling down the hill. And now, we have this massive multibillion dollar industry called influencer marketing. I argue that it should be called Influence marketing, but the industry hasn't quite started listening to me yet.
Jason Falls:
But yeah, that's how it all emerged. We have third-party people away from your brand that have the ability to persuade an audience to take action. And if you then reach out to that third-party and say, "Hey, let's figure out a way to work together so that you can influence your audience to take the action that I want them to take" that's what you're practicing is influence marketing.
Mark Richardson:
I love that you draw a distinction between, what I would call, the trust based. We were talking about this yesterday in the data basement. And Brian, our guest is a [Rand 00:20:16] from Moz. And we were talking about the difference between making a decision based on fear versus trust and it's the old school.
Mark Richardson:
You're not cool, if you don't have this car, right? You're not cool, if you don't have these shoes. You're not cool, if you're not drinking Coke, that all triggers this fear based at which, then now the modern permutation of that would be fire festival, right?
Mark Richardson:
People leveraging these influencers for total coolness, total façade, total narcissism, and of course, it's all fraud. So, when you talk about the train wreck, that's where my mind goes versus my type of influence is, I was telling Brian and Rand, I'm trying to learn how to up level in chess, so I want to get a better ELO rating.
Mark Richardson:
So, I'm going to these experts on YouTube to learn how to up my chess game. And I have to trust that they know... I have to watch a whole video to understand, all right, he's beating people. Obviously, the strategy works. And so, it's the difference between the flash and pizzazz type of influence.
Mark Richardson:
Okay, you're going to look good, you're going to feel good. Lose 20 pounds in a week thing, whatever. This is the impossible guarantees versus actually delivering some value.
Adam Kerpelman:
That perfectly, I think, gets back to the data piece a little bit. Because Jason, when you talk through the emergence of this stuff, you have all these different things that, I think, terms people would recognize, right, thought leaders, PR, authors, whatever they were, politicians.
Adam Kerpelman:
There's this idea of who were the celebrities of the time. And you can track through the history of human society and it was politicians, and then it was socialites, and then it was, whatever. And then, with the emergence of technology, you end up with what you just described.
Adam Kerpelman:
And when tech hits it, the data starts appearing. And you start having this thing of now you need to consider that that's a new tool, but maybe that's not the right thing to pay attention to. And so, chess is a bridge into that, because I'd imagine the chess influencers have fewer followers than Kim Kardashian, probably more influence in their space, because they're talking about a different niche.
Adam Kerpelman:
And so, you end up with this thing of needing to understand that the relative note... like influencers, followers, or engagement as a metric, it only works if you understand its relative value to the niche you're trying to reach, or the message you're trying to deliver, or any of that stuff, right?
Adam Kerpelman:
So, it's one of those like the great power that is we can suddenly quantify influence, both creates this trash side of it where we're going, oh, they have 20 million followers. Okay, those can't all be real people. And also, do the people even respond? Whereas, maybe somebody with 10,000 is actually the one to target for a relationship if you're talking about a very specific niche topic.
Jason Falls:
Yeah, that's very true. And I think when business owners and marketers get interested in influencer marketing, of course, the superficial way of looking at it is, well, I want someone with a lot of followers but you're absolutely right. The engagement rate is, I think, a more important metric.
Jason Falls:
Now, they both go hand in hand because you don't want someone who has an engagement rate of 25% but they have 100 followers if you're spending real money that at some point, you take someone with a lower engagement rate, but with a lot more followers, because you want to reach as many people effectively as you could.
Jason Falls:
So, the key thing for people to remember from a data perspective, when you're talking about influencer marketing, and what I look at when I'm looking at which influencers, I want to recommend to my clients is, I'm looking for this interesting balance of reach, number of people that they're going to get their content in front of.
Jason Falls:
That's not necessarily the number of followers they have, it's actually the number of times their content is presented to another account on a social network. And then, multiply that by the engagement rate that you can find an influencer marketing software and whatnot.
Jason Falls:
And what you get there as you get a real number of potential people. So, I'm terrible with math off the top of my head. So, if I screw the math up here, forgive me. But if I have an influencer that has a million followers and they have a 1% engagement rate.
Jason Falls:
So, 1% of a million is 10,000, is that right? I think that's right. So, that means that I'm potentially going to get in front of 10,000 people, not a million people, 10,000 people. So, if I then have someone who has 100,000 followers, but they have a 24% engagement rate, now I've got someone with 1/10, the number of followers, but more than twice the number of actual engaged people in the content.
Jason Falls:
So, I'm looking for a combination of engagement rate times reach so that I can understand the real, the actual reach of my message. Then beyond that, that's not the only thing I look at. I also then look at the actual types of engagements that these influencers have.
Jason Falls:
And this is more qualified data than quantified data. And I'm going to look and say, "Are the comments or are the engagements here just a bunch of emojis?" Or, are there people actually going back and forth and having a conversation? Is this genuine engagement? Or, is this just people saying, high five, thumbs up, love the post, whatever.
Jason Falls:
Because that often indicates that that might be a bot or some fake engagement that you can actually go out and pay for, which is crappy, but people do it. And so, those are the three main things I look at. And then, certainly there's deeper levels to understand how engaging is their content within the given niche and vertical that you're going after versus broad, et cetera. But that's where I start.
Adam Kerpelman:
Well, that all gets to the place that we... that I think is interesting here as much as we can date it up and say we can run numbers on it like engagement and number of followers and all that stuff. There's still that subjective human element because, ultimately, we're talking about marketing, right?
Adam Kerpelman:
So, it doesn't matter how many even engaged followers you have if the personality of the influencer you're talking about isn't a good match for your product. And I mean, I won't throw anyone specific under the bus, but I can think of some pretty massive influencers who I would not want my brand associated with, because they're problematic-
Jason Falls:
Oh, yeah. Straight up. No doubt. And I think we hear about those a lot. I mean, the biggest podcast in the world is Joe Rogan. And he's been in a lot of hot water lately because of some of the things that he's done and talked about in terms of vaccinations and all that good stuff, which is not a discussion I think anybody's interested in getting into, but-
Mark Richardson:
But it's part of the zeitgeist now, yeah, exactly.
Jason Falls:
It is. And when he steps in it, his sponsors, the people who consider him an influencer or want to pay money to advertise on his show are going to feel some heat for that. Another I think more specific or more relevant example to specific influencer marketing, I was working with a brand not too long ago.
Jason Falls:
I'm actually working with a brand right now. And we're trying to find the right combination of reach and frequency and whatnot within an influencer set. But this particular brand is a large corporation, they're very corporate. They're very conservative.
Jason Falls:
The product though has relevance to the cannabis space. And so, they want to be very careful as to who they pick. So, this particular brand wants to have an influencer to work with him on a project and they obviously want to keep it within the geographic footprint of where cannabis is legal, and they don't want to violate any laws or encourage other people to do so.
Jason Falls:
But they also want to make sure that they're not using someone who is a cannabis influencer because they just love getting high. Because that doesn't align with what this corporation this brand is all about. They want someone who's talking about the responsible use of cannabis for cooking, for medical reasons, for recreation certainly, but recreation in a responsible legal way.
Jason Falls:
They're not going to partner with someone whose Instagram feed is full of them doing bong hits, it just doesn't make sense, right? It's the difference between someone, an influencer who makes perfect sense for fireball but doesn't make perfect sense for, let's say, a brandy, right, or a cognac, right, because those are two completely different worlds. So, you have to make sure that content aligns too.
Mark Richardson:
Absolutely, man. That that brings back memories from [VaperNation 00:29:37]. Man, I used to work for a vaporizer e-cig distributor.
Adam Kerpelman:
Yeah. I wasn't sure if you wanted to call that out or not. I was going to mention-
Mark Richardson:
Well-
Adam Kerpelman:
I guess, there's a bunch of idiots out there reviewing hardware.
Jason Falls:
There you go.
Mark Richardson:
Yeah. was. I was the first guy to not wear a balaclava when reviewing e-cigs and vaporizers. It was very sketchy back in 2010, 2011. So, I hear your client's concerns loud and clear, it's still wild west even as far as we've come.
Jason Falls:
That's true.
Adam Kerpelman:
Also, I think what you're talking about there, it collides with one of my obsessions which is where this stuff transitions into the emergent role of community manager and the idea of communities for this stuff. And I wonder just your thoughts on where's that transition point between if you want to get weird and philosophical with it, it's like, at what point does a thought leader become a religious leader almost [crosstalk 00:30:38], right?
Adam Kerpelman:
Somebody where it's like, well, we so believe in what this person talks about that we actually talk amongst ourselves about it. And now, there's this coherent thing that isn't just necessarily a follower base as indicated by followers on Twitter. It's actually a [crosstalk 00:30:56] that I think we would call a community, right?
Mark Richardson:
And the thing about that community too, now we have... and I love just the cottage industry lens to throw on because now we have sentiment analysis, Jason, you're talking about. The need to be attuned to how people are responding to not just the product, but it's every post.
Mark Richardson:
And if there's backlash, there are brands don't want to be associated with backlash. Oh, my gosh, there's people are... they're saying all this nasty stuff, is our message really getting through? Thankfully, Jacob Wedgwood didn't have to deal with comment trolls. He was rolling out his product.
Jason Falls:
Yeah. There were they were comment trolls but they were gathered around the tea parties at home, not broadcasting it to the lower moving, where everybody can see it is much easier to manage back then. You know, you're right. The sentiment thing... and I'll, really quickly, for any brand people out there.
Jason Falls:
I can tell you prior to my stint at Cornett, I had actually started a conversation research company that was trying to take, basically, social media monitoring and listening and turn it into a research product. So, I've got some specialty experience in the space.
Jason Falls:
And one thing I will tell you is that the negativity, the comment trolls and things like that, if it's more than 10% of the total conversation about you, I would be shocked. The vast majority of conversation out there is either positive or neutral. So, if you're responding to negative criticism online with very few exceptions, you're responding to a very small portion of what's out there. So, don't let it throw you into a panic too often.
Mark Richardson:
This is what Kirk goes. Yeah, I have talks about this. We had a brief flare up on LinkedIn. And Adam's like, "This is such a small percentage of our" but it looks like the whole, you know what I mean? It's this tiny percentage but it looks like it's this big thing because they're using [crosstalk 00:32:57].
Jason Falls:
Well, when you show them the pie chart of the conversations online and there's any read at all, it throws people into a panic. And then, when you isolate the negative and it's all negative, and your pie chart is 100% red, then it's going to make somebody have a stroke.
Jason Falls:
But you also have to remember that we live in a world where trolls will be trolls, and there's always going to be one. I was actually at an event not too long ago. And it was the first time the event had ever happened. And the doors had been open for three hours.
Jason Falls:
And there was a lengthy negative review posted online about them. And they asked me what I thought and I just looked at him and said, "Frigging ignore it." I mean, you've been open for three hours, this person just came here with the intent of pissing someone off. So, you just got to shrug your shoulders at that, that's dumb.
Adam Kerpelman:
Don't feed the trolls?
Jason Falls:
Yeah. We live in that world where people are just going to be negative. So, you're going to have to shrug that off.
Adam Kerpelman:
I actually own trollrepellent.com. It was an idea for an app that was some, I don't know, blocking or muting or whatever. But it never went anywhere. But I still own the domain if anyone-
Jason Falls:
I like the idea.
Adam Kerpelman:
Yeah. Well, and it's funny by platform, right? And this, I guess, even relates the influencer conversation because you have different influencers who are successful on different platforms, and all of those platforms have different interactions. And there's funny like I'd almost rather have the trolls on Twitter that just shout nonsense at you.
Adam Kerpelman:
And it's easier to dismiss than the trolls on LinkedIn who are way more virtue signally and way more professional about it, basically. And then, the trolls on Twitter or LinkedIn, they're for sure trolling but it feels way more like they're scolding you for your professional behavior. And so, it's way easier for marketing or management to look at that and go, oh, yeah, they're right, that that might be [crosstalk 00:35:12]. Well, and-
Mark Richardson:
They got the [crosstalk 00:35:16] on me now, yeah, if somebody said something.
Jason Falls:
If you think about it, though, too, there's another reason behind that though. LinkedIn, people are who they are. They're tied to their actual real name and profile and job, and all that good stuff. Twitter can be anonymous. It can be random people who are posing as others. And I'm sure you could pose to someone on LinkedIn too, but there's a little bit of a different context there. And LinkedIn obviously, is a community of more of those business minded people.
Jason Falls:
So, I think if I were in charge of community management for a company, I would be much more concerned about trolling and complaints and negativity on LinkedIn than I would anywhere else, just because it's probably going to be a hell of a lot more relevant. And the audience is probably going to hell a lot more qualified, even if they are trolling you.
Mark Richardson:
Yeah, that was the tricky balance we're trying to strike. So, knowing, this is probably a small percentage of people who were triggered by this, but.
Adam Kerpelman:
So, I think as we start to wrap this up a bit, I'd love to ask you about in the space of influence marketing and stuff like that, what are your favorite tools out there right now? This is one of my favorite questions to ask because it's data-driven marketing so aligns with what digital tools exist.
Adam Kerpelman:
And you already mentioned one of my favorite ones from early on, there have been sentiment analysis projects trying to do that stuff for 10 years. And we were really excited about it 10 years ago, and it still continues to be one of the things that I am most disappointed, doesn't really work the way we want to. It turns out it's really hard. Maybe AI is just starting to catch up to be able to do it, but.
Jason Falls:
Well, and I would be doubtful of AI, as well, when it comes to sentiment analysis, and I've tried this experiment before. If you take a sheet of paragraph, two or three sentences that says, let's say, the sentence says, I love Ford trucks but I drive a Toyota Tundra.
Jason Falls:
And if you took that piece of paper, and you pass it out to 100 people, and you said, "Okay, I want you to score this for sentiment for Ford trucks." And then, I want you to score this sentiment for Toyota. At best, you're only going to get about eight out of 10 people who will agree on the sentiment, that's human beings, right?
Jason Falls:
So, is it positive for Ford? Yes. Because they say, I love Ford trucks. So, generally, everybody's going to get that right, you're going to get agreement there, but I drive a Toyota Tundra. Well, is that positive? They drive one, they bought it. They're a customer. Is it negative?
Jason Falls:
They love Ford trucks but in comparison to their other car. Or is it neutral? Because they're not really telling you whether or not they like Toyota Tundras, they're just telling you they drive one. So, when you look at that, and you know that human beings can't even agree on this stuff, how in the world can we code it into a computer to make it accurate, right?
Jason Falls:
So, I would be skeptical if anyone ever says, our sentiment machine can offer up an 85% positive effectiveness or whatever, that's complete horse crap. There's no way they can. 65% is probably the best I've ever seen and that was massive computers.
Adam Kerpelman:
But at this point, there are tools that do work, though, for things like you were talking about engagement rates and stuff like that, right? Like what your favorites in terms of how you dig in on that stuff these days?
Jason Falls:
Yeah. To give back to the original question, sorry, I got sidetracked with sentiment analysis. I can geek out about that stuff.
Adam Kerpelman:
Mostly here for the sidetrack, so.
Jason Falls:
Right. So, the influencer space has a lot of great tools. And I mean, most of them are six-and one-half dozen or the other. It's what user interface you like, because most of the full-service tools do the same stuff. A couple of years, I used a tool called Julius which was very good.
Jason Falls:
I like the platform a lot. I'm currently using a platform called Tagger, which is at taggermedia.com. I'm actually looking at a Tagger report right now because I just sent one to a client before we got on the call here today. And I just like Tagger because everything in the reporting is very convenient.
Jason Falls:
It breaks all the content that it's pulled in from my influencers down by all of the different metrics that I need to look at. I can prioritize it by creator. I can prioritize it by social network. I can prioritize it by my calendar so that I can see the ebbs and flows of things.
Jason Falls:
It presents the content. And I can drill into a piece of content and say, this Instagram story got 347 views and 25 reactions, and all that stuff. And most of the full-service platforms like Tagger and Julius and Maverick and Isaiah, I mean, we could name them all day.
Jason Falls:
Most of the full-service ones do literally everything. They allow you to search for, prioritize, reach out to communicate with, engage. And actually, some of them even allow you to pay the influencer right inside the platform. So, I use Tagger. Tagger sponsors my podcast, I love tagger. I'll say that with all those disclosures.
Adam Kerpelman:
You're marketing.
Jason Falls:
But I will also say that you owe it to yourself to go out there and see a bunch of different ones to figure out what user interface do I like? What's simple for me? What outputs the day that I want it to output? How much heavy lifting am I going to have to do, to do monthly reports? Or, can I just hit a button and it zaps the thing out. And so, that's another reason I like Tagger so much is because I can send my main clients that I'm doing campaigns with a report.
Jason Falls:
They can call me at any time and say, send me a report and it'll be updated to the minute and I can hit export as a PDF, sent and it's done. And I love that because I don't want to spend a whole lot of time prepping a report to send it to a client. I think that's a waste of my time.
Mark Richardson:
We love saving time.
Jason Falls:
Heck yeah.
Adam Kerpelman:
Heck yeah, for sure. Yeah. So, one last before we get to my wrap up question about what the future of this stuff. And I guess, the last thing I want to talk about is a segue into that anyway. What do you think we're looking at with the new NCAA stuff?
Adam Kerpelman:
This is one that you mentioned the sports background, I was an athlete in college as well, so I was watching that. And actually, had an interaction along the line where somebody wanted to pay me for something and I had to ask a lawyer, and they were like, "Oh, you're going to lose your eligibility." And now, that's out the window-
Mark Richardson:
Now, it's naming image and likeness, you can-
Adam Kerpelman:
Yeah. So, I'm already seeing emergent platforms to let these athletes that are maybe local famous because they're good enough that everybody in the town knows who they are, actually get involved with a local car dealership, or whatever, I guess.
Jason Falls:
Yeah. I mean, the NIL passage by the NCAA this past summer. And for those of you who know anything about college athletics, the NIAI passed it in December of 2020. So, they were about six months ahead of time. But the two main college athletic associations NIAI and NCAA both now allow it.
Jason Falls:
And for the first time, really, in the history of amateurism most college student athlete can go out and monetize their name, image or likeness, which means they can be paid for their social media content. And many of them are jumping on that now. From a college athletics perspective, I was an administrator there for 15 years.
Jason Falls:
I think it's fantastic, because I have known, literally, hundreds of student athletes over the years who... because of the handcuffs put on them by the amateurism rules of the NCAA and the taxation of having to go to practice and having to go to conditioning and having to go to study hall and all of the thing, and traveling all of the things that student athletes do, they couldn't hold down a part-time job.
Jason Falls:
They couldn't actually go out and make a little bit of money to go to the movies on an off night or something like that. I've known several of them who lived in poverty other than the perks that they got from being a student athlete because they had to eat at the cafeteria, they couldn't go out.
Jason Falls:
They didn't have a car, et cetera, I've known hundreds of those. So, I love the fact that this has passed. What it means from a brand perspective now is that particularly as you mentioned, on a local level, especially in college towns, small businesses can very easily access someone who's incredibly influential to the audience you're trying to reach.
Jason Falls:
Cornett is in Lexington, Kentucky, which is where the University of Kentucky is. And there's obviously plenty of football and men's basketball players who now a local restaurant can partner with come in and do a signing or pay them to post on their social media that, hey, I like eating lunch at this place every week.
Jason Falls:
But it goes beyond that because there's a track and field athlete at University Kentucky, Masai Russell, who prior to when she was in high school, started building an Instagram following around her style and fashion sense. Then, she got to college and she couldn't monetize the fact that she has 150,000 Instagram followers and 300,000 or 400,000 TikTok followers now.
Jason Falls:
She couldn't make any money off that which is unfair. And so, track and field comes into play in her content, but it's really more about her other interests in building her brand and her career beyond athletics. So, this is a great opportunity for student athletes and other sports to be able to make money and offset the expenses that they have in college.
Jason Falls:
For brands, it's really an opportunity to jump into an avid following people who are rabid about these influencers, if you will, and capitalize on that at a local level. But then, also, with the larger headline getting football and basketball stars, you can do that on the national level too.
Jason Falls:
The one thing that I think I talked to Ahin Thomas from Tastes of Chicago, which is an e-commerce strict consumer Chicago style pizza brand on my podcast last week. And one thing he pointed out that a lot of these contracts that we need to watch out for is brands.
Jason Falls:
A lot of these contracts that are pre-written that a brand might pull off the internet and throw in front of a student athlete. A lot of them have perpetual image rights and licensing baked into them. And so, not only do student athletes and their representatives need to watch out for that because in perpetuity means forever.
Jason Falls:
So, you may not want to be signing that contract. But we as brands and as marketers, as good stewards of the opportunity to work with student athletes who may not know better, we need to watch out for that too. And he made a good point, Taste of Chicago obviously is a mail order or direct to consumer pizza brand.
Jason Falls:
What if he signed up a student athlete as a freshman in college and who was from Chicago and was talking about how he wanted to order Taste of Chicago, so he doesn't miss home as much, and shares that with his social networks, and he signs a licensing in perpetuity thing.
Jason Falls:
And then, four years from now, he's a first round NBA draft pick and Papa John's comes calling for a big contract. And they look at his previous thing with Taste Chicago and go, "Oh, they can use your image in perpetuity that hurts our brand. We're not going to sign you. We're not going to give you that money."
Jason Falls:
Now, all of a sudden, you've not helped that student athlete as much as you've hurt them. So, it's still the wild west a little bit. There's still some speed bumps and some, some polish we've got to put on this NIL thing. But I think it's a boon for student athletes. I think it's a boon for marketers. I think it's a boon for brands. And I think it's going to be a big deal moving forward.
Adam Kerpelman:
My favorite version of that clause is the one that includes throughout the universe, because they're like, maybe we're broadcasting on the moon someday and we want to make sure that we also cover. It's like in perpetuity throughout the universe.
Mark Richardson:
What about the multiverse? What does Rick Sanchez have to say about that?
Adam Kerpelman:
Well, okay, so that's actually perfect. That's a perfect tee up for the last question, which is what do you think the future of this stuff is? As technology evolves and I think you already gave an example of when you unlock those athletes being able to do it, you've just granularize this, like we were saying, the niche becomes a fear in Blacksburg, Virginia.
Adam Kerpelman:
Everyone there is obsessed with Virginia Tech. And for sure, there are going to be people there on the swim team that could be doing ads for that local Honda dealership or something.
Jason Falls:
Yeah. The future of this, I think it's only going to get bigger. And because of the data, it's going to get more refined. And we still have a lot of brands who are operating ad hoc, roughshod, they're not using software. They're not really using influence marketing from a strategic perspective.
Jason Falls:
They're just saying, "Oh, that person has got a lot of followers. Let's get them to hold our product while they post something on Instagram." And that's going to stop working. If it works at all, it's not going to work very long, because both content creators/influencers and brands who are leveraging them are getting much more sophisticated with this.
Jason Falls:
They're using the software out there. They're analyzing the data. They're understanding which influencers are actually influential, as opposed to they have a lot of followers but they really don't have much engagement, or they can't really motivate their audiences to do things.
Jason Falls:
So, I think you're always going to see a layer of that superficial influencer out there that maybe has a lot of followers, maybe has a lot of buzz, maybe has a lot of attention but they can't really motivate their audience to do anything. I write about one very specifically in my book and use it as an example.
Jason Falls:
There's always going to be a layer of those. But you're going to start to see the really effective ones, the ones who are smart business people in their content creation and they understand the only way they can make a living doing this is if they can connect their audience to brands in a realistic way that makes them want to buy that product.
Jason Falls:
And those are going to emerge as true influencers, true influential people and brands are going to gravitate to them. You are also I think going to see layers of that on the micro and nano level where in a situation with college athletes or even local bloggers or Instagrammers, who focus on a geographic footprint.
Jason Falls:
You're going to see it at a smaller level where, hey, I know that the Kentucky Taste Buds who are two young ladies who review businesses and restaurants and whatnot in Lexington in Central Kentucky. I know they drive business because I see their posts and then I go eat there because they said it was good.
Jason Falls:
So, I'm going to partner with them because I know they're good, and you're going to see those... I was on the UK dance team, no offense to the UK Dance team. I was on the UK dance team and I look good in all these outfits. And so, I'm an influencer but they're not actually going to be able to motivate people to go buy that outfit. So, there's always going to be that dichotomy. Hopefully, there'll be less of the latter and more of the former.
Adam Kerpelman:
Awesome. Well, unfortunately, we're out of time. I feel I have three or four more notes for things we can talk about.
Mark Richardson:
I know. I got to-
Adam Kerpelman:
Thanks so much for joining us.
Mark Richardson:
I'm going to buy this book. This is awesome.
Adam Kerpelman:
Yeah. Where can people find you? Where's the-
Jason Falls:
Yeah. I'm super easy, jasonfalls.com is where you can find the book, the podcast, my previous books, my blog, all that good stuff. I'm also Jason Falls on all the social networks. So, I'd love to connect with folks. And if you happen to know the other Jason Falls, the politician in North Carolina, please tell him I said neener, neener, neener.
Adam Kerpelman:
Awesome. Well-
Mark Richardson:
I'm super active on Twitter, I'll hit you up. I'll find that guy too. But I'll follow you.
Adam Kerpelman:
Sounds good. Awesome. Well, yeah. Thanks for joining us and thanks to everybody for listening to another episode of the Data-Driven Marketer. I'm Adam.
Mark Richardson:
I'm Mark.
Jason Falls:
Falls.
Mark Richardson:
See you next time.