June 18, 2025 • 43 mins
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to the Scott Townsend Show brought to you by
Dietzelman Productions.
Speaker 2 (00:13):
Okay, no worries.
Speaker 3 (00:17):
That's the first time that's happened, but okay, it
won't be the last.
Speaker 2 (00:21):
It won't be the last either, oh my God.
At least we didn't get 30minutes into it, and you
realized it.
Speaker 3 (00:31):
What a horror story.
Oh my gosh Okay.
Speaker 2 (00:36):
This is cake, man.
This is no big deal.
We were only two minutes intothis thing, you're good.
Speaker 3 (00:40):
Okay, it's recording, so here we go.
Speaker 2 (00:42):
Okay.
Speaker 3 (00:43):
Hey, this is Scott Townsend.
You're watching and listeningto the Scott Townsend Show and
today I have with me a specialguest, jason Falls.
He's the author of the new bookcoming out.
What did you say?
February, february 23rd?
February 23rd, that'sWinfluence Reframing, influencer
Marketing to Rignite your Brand.
And Jason has been in thesocial media marketing space
(01:08):
forever.
He's been in every publicationand TV show that you can think
of NPR, forbes, wall StreetJournal, usa Today, business
Week, the list of ESPNs outsidethe lines.
Speaker 2 (01:27):
Yeah.
I was on that once upon a timethat was fun.
Speaker 3 (01:30):
And so you've also written a couple of books here
before Winfluence, and that isthe let me get this right no
Bullshit Social Media, theAll-Business No-Hype Guide to
Social Media Marketing.
That's a Jason Falls title, ifI ever heard one, and I like to
say that book title because it'sthe only time I get to say
(01:51):
bullshit on the podcast.
And the second book was theRebel's Guide to Email Marketing
, co-authored with DJ Waldo.
So today it's all about Jason,you, your new book, wind Fluence
and whatever else you want totalk about.
Welcome to the show.
Speaker 2 (02:08):
Thanks for having me, Scott.
We've been connected an awfullong time, so it's nice to spend
a little bit more time together.
This is fun.
Speaker 3 (02:13):
Yeah, I'm glad to have you on the show.
Thanks for taking the time.
What's the problem we're tryingto solve here with this book?
Wind Fluence why did you feelcompelled to kind of flesh out
influencers?
We'll go into all that here injust a minute, but just
(02:35):
Winfluence in general.
What problem are we trying tosolve here?
Speaker 2 (02:39):
Sure.
So in my work, you know, inbuilding influence marketing
strategies for the clients atCornette, the agency where I
work, and watching other peopledo influence marketing for the
last you know, umpteen years,because in my mind, influence
marketing is not somethingthat's new, it's something that
we've done, we've called itdifferent things for decades,
and I'm a PR guy by trade, so,in a sense, public relations,
(03:01):
media relations, is influencermarketing.
You were just, you know, 20years ago, you were working with
different types of influencersand different mechanisms, and so
I had noticed that both clients, prospective clients and other
people that I talked to in theindustry who were thinking about
influence marketing had sort offallen victim to.
(03:22):
I think mainstream media hadpainted us into, has painted us
into a corner of thinking thatinfluencers and influencer
marketing is all about Instagramand YouTube.
It's people who are throwing uppeace signs and duck lips and
taking pictures of their lunch,and it's very superficial, and
brands are, for some reason,paying these people to hold
their product and do their peacesign and duck lips, are, for
(03:44):
some reason, paying these peopleto hold their product and do
their peace sign and duck lipsand if you pay attention, if
you're not in marketing and youpay attention to the mainstream
media and how they portrayinfluence marketing.
That's kind of what you thevision of, what you get.
And so for small businesses andbusiness owners and other people
who don't spend most of theirtime talking about and thinking
about marketing, they seeinfluence marketing as a fad, as
(04:05):
superficial as not effective,and so I wanted to kind of take
a step back and take throughpeople, through that idea and
really help the industry reframethe way we think about it.
Instead of thinking aboutinfluencer marketing and using
the R on the end of that word,the book is really about calling
(04:26):
it influence marketing, becausethat opens up your strategic
opportunities to use it in amuch different way, because if
you're talking about the action,the verb influence that's your
goal, that's what you're tryingto accomplish, and not the
channel or the person, theinfluencer.
Now, all of a sudden, you askyourself different questions.
You say, okay, it's not aboutwhich influencer should I use,
(04:49):
it's about who am I trying topersuade to do what?
And then how can I find achannel that can do that and
that opens up your opportunitiesto do a lot different things
other than just Instagram andYouTube.
Speaker 3 (05:01):
So that's one of the questions.
When I was reading the book,the one thing that I stumbled
over was the difference betweenan influencer and the person of
influence, and I was like, isn'tthat the same?
Thing, but then when youdissect both of those and I
(05:24):
think I've got it now, so canyou can you go over that one
more time?
What's the difference betweenan influencer and a person of
influence?
Speaker 2 (05:32):
Sure.
So an influencer in the contextof the book and sort of the
argument of reframing influenceinfluencer marketing to be
influence marketing aninfluencer is someone who has a
lot of followers on a socialnetwork and their mechanism of
influence is to post things onsocial media sites.
A person of influence is anyonewho can persuade an audience to
(05:54):
take action or think differentlyor act differently.
And if you think aboutinfluence from that perspective,
from a person of influencerather than an online influencer
, then you're looking at thepresident of your local PTA club
is very influential amongst acertain population of people.
The president of the urbanleague is very influential
amongst a certain group ofpeople.
(06:15):
A dentist is very influentialamongst a community, a certain
group of people.
When you look at it that wayand you realize that influence
marketing can happen online butit can happen offline, it can
happen globally, it can happenlocally.
Now, all of a sudden, when youthink I need to build an
influence marketing campaign ora marketing campaign that will
(06:36):
influence an audience to dosomething, now all of a sudden
you're looking at influence in avery different light and you're
not limiting yourself to theperson with the social network
thing.
Speaker 3 (06:47):
Right.
So instead of focusing on who'sgoing to hold the can of Coke,
you need to focus on who are wewanting to drink the Coke and
then who has sway over that?
Speaker 2 (07:01):
Yeah, who can persuade them to drink the Coke,
and it might be that, and it'salmost like word of mouth
marketing strategy.
If you look at word of mouthmarketing as a discipline, the
way that people like Ted Wrightat Fizz and other people talk
about word of mouth marketing,it's kind of the underlying
foundation of everything you do.
And so, if you think of it inthat context, influence
(07:22):
marketing.
In that context, I'm trying toinfluence an audience to take
action.
That might mean that I useinfluencers, but it might mean
that I use direct mail, it mightmean that I use television, it
might mean that I use PR andmedia relations in a traditional
sense.
So influence happens in a bunchof different avenues.
It's just about pulling back alittle bit, looking at it more
strategically and saying, okay,instead of focusing in on
(07:46):
Instagram and YouTube and peoplewho have big followings there,
let's look at the audience anddecide okay, what do we want
them to do and who impacts them?
These influencers may, in fact,impact them, but so might their
community members, their fellowsoccer moms, their you know
fellow bourbon aficionados right, it could be a lot of people
that don't necessarily have bigonline audiences.
(08:07):
So that kind of prescribes adifferent path to accomplish
that goal.
Speaker 3 (08:12):
From a marketing perspective.
A lot of times we think aboutyou know, using social media and
it's like you know, having ahammer and treating every
problem as if it's a nail.
But that's not necessarily whatyou should do.
You should take step back, likeyou said, and take a look and
see which channel is the best,which tool is the best to use in
this situation.
Speaker 2 (08:31):
That's true, I've had a couple of clients on that
point.
I've had a couple of clientswho have come to me over the
course of the last.
It's probably 10, 15 years.
I'm not talking about currentclients necessarily, but I've
had people come to me before andsay I want to use social media
and I want to use social mediato drive foot traffic in my
(08:52):
retail store and drive X amountof sales by the end of the month
, and I typically am like well,that's not a great way.
Social media is not a great wayto accomplish that.
There are other channels andother mechanisms that can make
that happen faster.
So let go of your obsessionwith social media for that
purpose.
If you want to use social mediafor that purpose, we can design
something that will do that,but it's going to take more time
than the end of the month,right?
Speaker 3 (09:12):
You talked about in the book Winfluence.
Why choose someone of influenceover someone of popularity?
Speaker 2 (09:21):
Well, because you know people who are popular, and
I use an example in the book ofa young lady named uh ari who
is a style, fashion, lifestyleinfluencer, and she had over 200
000 followers on instagram andshe had been creating content
consistently on instagram for acouple years and had a nice
(09:41):
following.
She decided to launch a fashionbrand, launch her own products,
her own shirts and clothing line, and she launched this to her
Instagram audience on some suchdate a couple of years ago, and
then, a couple of days later,went on Instagram and complained
that she'd only sold 26 unitsof this new brand and she had
(10:06):
failed in influencing heraudience to buy her own product.
And so I actually use a chapterof the book to sort of diagnose
all of the different things shecould have done to build actual
influence with her audience, asopposed to just collecting
followers, because what she hadwas popularity.
She did not have the persuasivepower or influence over that
(10:27):
audience that she built.
And so a lot of times, from astrategic perspective, now what
we try to do is delineate, okay,which influencers that we're
going to use for this program,be they online or offline, which
do we know, can we validate,really have persuasive power and
can motivate people to dothings.
So it's very important tounderstand the difference
between influence and popularity, because if you go out and pay
(10:50):
a bunch of people who arepopular but they're not
influential, you're not going tobe happy.
Speaker 3 (10:55):
So at first blush you would think that would work.
I mean, ari, you would think,hey, I've got 200,000 followers.
I should start selling someshirts here and get these people
to buy some shirts.
So what should she have done tostart over?
Speaker 2 (11:15):
There's several things she should have done.
Probably the biggest thing thatshe should have done is she
should have developed a patternof behavior with her content and
her audience to motivate themto do things.
Up until that point, she hadreally only posted pictures of
herself posing in her clothes.
She'd never asked her audienceto like a post.
(11:35):
She never asked them to go to awebsite.
She'd never conditioned them todo things and tested to make
sure they would.
So she had no earthly idea ifthey would respond to a call to
action to go purchase.
They would.
So she had no earthly idea ifthey would respond to a call to
action to go purchase something.
So if she had, you know, backedup from that launch date maybe
a year, maybe two years and said, hey, I really like this blouse
(11:56):
that this designer has and youcan get it at Target, and here's
a link and started to establisha pattern of behavior where her
audience gets used to herrecommending products and they
go buy them.
And then the experience is, oh,I like that product too, so I
trust her recommendation.
So I'm going to continue tofollow her and continue to
follow her influence, and whenshe says, go do this, I'm going
(12:17):
to go do it because I trust herfor those recommendations.
If she had established thatbehavior from her audience over
time she would have sold a lotmore than 26 units of whatever
she sold.
And so there's other thingsthat she could have done.
She could have built a lot morecredibility and a lot of her
posts were those sort of peacesign, duck lips, superficial
things that didn't have a wholelot of meat to their content.
So people were used to seeingpretty pictures of her but there
(12:42):
wasn't much substance there.
So maybe she could haveprovided much more thought
leadership, much moresubstantive content behind those
pictures.
That would have attracted adifferent or a better audience
that would respond more to callsto action.
So the chapter in the book goesthrough Robert Cialdini's
elements of persuasion and sayshere are the six things that he
(13:04):
says you could do to persuade anaudience.
Let's take Ari through thisexercise and see what she could
have done.
Speaker 3 (13:10):
So for a while there, it sounds like her call to
action was just enjoy mypictures.
Exactly, it was look at me.
Speaker 2 (13:16):
That's all it was, and so everybody was conditioned
to enjoy the pictures.
And she had an audience thatwas perfectly happy to thumb
through and see her picture andgo, oh, that's cool and maybe
like it and maybe not, butthat's all they were conditioned
to do.
Speaker 3 (13:32):
What is WinFluence?
Speaker 2 (13:34):
So WinFluence is this concept of using influence
marketing strategically andwisely to persuade an audience
to take action.
So Winfluence is kind of thisbroader definition of influence
marketing to say I'm not goingto focus on social networks, I'm
(13:56):
not going to focus on peoplewho have big audiences on
Instagram and YouTube.
I'm going to focus on theaction of persuading people to
to do something, to change theway they think about something,
to buy or try a product, toconsider a product, etc.
It's looking at influence as astrategic, you know, execution
and function of your brand andit's really about driving people
(14:19):
to take that action, notfocusing on the person who is
telling them to take that action.
So it's again, again, just theelement of reframing influencer
marketing to look at it in termsof influence marketing.
Speaker 3 (14:30):
A long time ago, back when there was only three
channels in PBS, you know theywould use, you know it was.
Wouldn't you agree that it wasmore celebrity-generated, you
know, like Bing Crosby withOrange Juice, or I'm going way
back now.
Remember what was her name?
(14:52):
Anita Bryant with the OrangeJuice commercials?
Yep, well, even Bill Cosby waspushing all kinds of stuff there
for a while, mr Jell-O yeah.
Speaker 2 (15:03):
The old days when you had a limited array of
entertainment channels,entertainment selections first
of all.
The media landscape has changedso much, I mean, even since I
was a child.
I was born in the early 1970sand back then we had three or
four channels on television.
We had a couple of radiostations, maybe a couple of
(15:23):
newspapers, maybe a couple ofmagazines, and in order to get
in those as a contributor, apublisher, a person on
television, you had to go toschool and you had to be trained
and you had to learn ethics andyou had to be a journalist or
you had to be an actor or asinger, you know, someone with
exceptional talent, and so thelimit that you were very limited
(15:44):
in the number of people whowere influential upon you as a
consumer.
Social media democratizedpublishing so that any random
person with an internetconnection could write, they
could take pictures, they couldpublish videos, they could
record audio.
Unfortunately, what that meantis everybody did that, and now
(16:06):
we have this huge sea of noiseof everybody trying to be a
content, a knack for creatingengagement, have personalities
that kind of come out thatpeople gravitate to, and these
(16:36):
people didn't go to journalismschool.
They're not necessarily actorsor singers or have talent that
we would typically elevate tothat stage, but they have the
ability to publish and attractan audience.
And so you have a differenttype of media social media,
influential people, influencersthan you had in 1973 when you
had, you know, actors, trainedjournalists, et cetera.
(16:57):
And so that has made the medialandscape, the tactics for
marketing and using thosechannels to persuade audiences
to do things very different.
And today you're starting tosee those signals from the noise
.
Online influencers stand out ashey, if I want to get in front
of a bunch of people who love tocamp and love to hunt and love
(17:20):
to grill outdoors Derek Wolfe atOver the Fire Cooking's got
over a million followers onInstagram.
He's a great media channel nowto go through, not just an
individual.
Speaker 3 (17:29):
A media channel to go through, yeah you wouldn't want
to use Kim Kardashian for that.
Speaker 2 (17:33):
No, no, no, she would definitely be the wrong
influencer for that kind ofaudience.
But what's cool about the coolthing about this is, even though
you have someone who has amillion followers not 50 million
viewers, like the nightly newson NBC or CBS or ABC or Fox or
whatever but you have a millionpeople who are very concentrated
into the type of people thatyou want to try to sell to.
(17:55):
So if I'm Buffalo Trace Bourbonand they're a client of ours at
Cornette, we reached out acouple of years ago to Derek
Wolfin over the fire cooking andsaid we think there's a lot of
overlap between our audience andat Cornette.
We reached out a couple yearsago to Derek Wolfe at Over the
Fire Cooking and said we thinkthere's a lot of overlap between
our audience and your audience.
Let's collaborate, let's dosomething cool together.
So we worked on a couple ofposts just Instagram posts and
(18:17):
whatnot where he used BuffaloTrace bourbon in a glaze or
something like that, and it wasa sponsored post.
It was an influencer engagement.
The response from his audiencetoward the brand was so good
that we came back and said let'sdo something bigger.
And so we developed a fourepisode sort of web TV show over
the fire cooking, you know,presented by Buffalo Trace, and
(18:38):
we sort of told a story throughthese four episodes longer form
videos than his audience wasused to and we brought other
influencers in as guests.
So the first episode wasDanielle Pruitt from Wild and
Whole.
She's also a contributor toMeatEater TV.
She hunts wild game and so wehad an episode where we talked
about hunting the meat, findingthe animal that you're going to
(19:00):
cook.
And then the next episode was abutcher in Nashville that had a
nice online following thattalked about how to, you know,
humanely, you know, in all ofthe practices that butchers do,
you know, have respect for theanimal, break it down, you know,
use it for what it's supposedto be used for.
Then the next episode, we had ablacksmith who was an
(19:20):
influencer in that world create,you know, a knife and blades to
actually use in the cutlery.
And in the fourth episode webrought everybody back to the
distillery in Harlan Wheatley,the master distiller at Buffalo
Trace.
They cooked with Derek and hada big dinner at the distillery.
So that's the kind ofinfluencer partnership that
we've developed at Cornette.
That is a way of saying this isa media channel.
(19:43):
Derek Wolf over the fire.
Cooking is a media channel thatwe feel like our audience will
respond to.
From a Buffalo Traceperspective, let's put the two
of them together and create somereally interesting content that
people will consume andhopefully respond well to, and
it's worked very well.
We still work with Derek onprojects from time to time as
well.
Speaker 3 (20:01):
When it works, it's really cool.
Yeah it is when I'm lookingdown.
I'm just looking at myquestions here.
Don't think I'm beingdisrespectful, no worry.
You talk about in your bookreviews and you said there's one
(20:21):
thing I was hoping you couldclarify and that is what's the
right way and wrong way tomanufacture reviews.
And what did you mean bymanufacture?
Speaker 2 (20:31):
Sure.
So the manufacturing reviews isbasically simply soliciting
reviews from your audience.
Okay, or your influencers orsome subset of your audience out
there that you want to have, goreview your product.
If you know anything about thevarious marketplaces out there,
(20:52):
like Amazon, amazon products, ifyou're in a competitive
marketplace, amazon productsreally aren't going to rank well
for a search term for thatparticular product until you
have about 50 reviews or so.
So you need to solicit reviewsto build up that credibility so
that you come up in searchengines.
Also, online reviews on variousnetworks are fundamentally
(21:18):
critical to Google searchresults.
So Google goes out and ifyou're a restaurant, they go to
Yelp and all these other placesto say what do other people
think about this restaurant?
Should I elevate them in thesearch rankings for this
particular keyword in thisparticular city?
Now, one thing, and I talk aboutin the book how you can use
influencers to manufacture anddrive ratings and reviews.
(21:40):
However, there's a big asteriskhere because lots of these
websites like Yelp have terms ofservice that say you cannot
solicit reviews, you cannotmanufacture reviews here.
It has to be organic, it has tobe from people just organically
volunteering their opinion.
I would never recommend anybodyviolate a website's term of
(22:01):
service like that.
I don't necessarily agree withYelp's stance.
I think they're a littlehypocritical in how they do it.
Just because they say you'renot allowed to tell people to go
review your business, buthere's a sticker to put on your
door that tells people to goreview your business.
It seems kind of hypocritical.
Anyway, that's a differentpodcast, probably for a
different time.
So there are sites out there,however, who allow you to an
(22:26):
influencer an influencer to comewith FTC disclosure and say,
hey, I was sent free product orI was paid to do something for
them, but I wanted to file areview here because I've used
the product now and I enjoy it.
And there are some sites thatallow that.
As long as you're transparentabout it and it's disclosed,
they allow that, but even morecritically so.
Another thing that factors intothe Google search algorithms and
(22:47):
your user experience on yourwebsite is when you have reviews
of your product on your websiteand you can pay anybody you
want to do those, and you, Iwould always recommend you ask
them to review things honestly.
You know.
Don't pay them for to lie toyour audience.
That's not going to be cool.
But if you have, there areservices out there.
(23:08):
There's one that I know ofcalled Apex Drop.
Their whole sort of influencermarketing approach is give us
150 products and we'll find 150micro influencers that you don't
have to pay anything more thanthe product and we'll send it
out to them.
Ask them to go to review you onvarious sites so you can
manufacture reviews if you needthem for you know headcount
(23:31):
reviews to make sure that you'reup in search rankings, or if
you just want to populate reallygood content on your website
with actual consumers using yourproduct, there are services out
there that can do that and aslong as you're not violating
anyone's terms of service andbeing transparent about the
engagement, you can push thatbutton and make that happen.
Speaker 3 (23:50):
So I hear a lot of podcasters say you know, help me
out, leave a review.
And I always wonder does thatreally help a podcaster?
Should I be asking people toreview my podcast?
Speaker 2 (24:00):
marketing and I have one called Winfluence that is a
companion thing for the book.
But unless I have a good numberof your reviews, a couple dozen
(24:21):
reviews, I'm always going to beway down the page when on a
phone, when someone's searchingfor a podcast, if they type in
influencer marketing orinfluencers or something like
that.
I'm not going to be one, two orthree, unless or until I have
50, 60, 70 reviews and most ofthem are five star.
And now I've become, you know,meaningful from third party
contributions that say we likethis podcast.
That serves this term.
(24:43):
So yeah, reviews are absolutelycritical.
The Influencer MarketingPodcast is a very small example.
My other live stream podcastthat I do for Cornette called
Digging Deeper.
Robert Plant has a podcastcalled Dig Deeper and there's a
religious podcast called DiggingDeeper.
So even the name of that showis competing to get some weird
(25:08):
stuff.
Speaker 3 (25:08):
So we don't come up very high unless or until we get
those reviews that just brought.
I just I hope I can rememberthis at the end of the podcast.
We're into 30 minutes here.
Do you have a little bit moretime?
Yeah, okay, you showed in the.
You showed in the book fiveways and when I read this I was
(25:29):
so glad that what I think waswhat you wrote, and that is five
ways to optimize your websitefor search engines.
And when I was reading throughthis I was like I've been saying
that all along.
I'm not crazy after all.
Can you give me some ideas?
If someone's listening and theywant to help optimize their
(25:51):
website to show up in searchengines, listening and they want
to help optimize their websiteto show up in search engines,
and what are search engines?
What other search engines arethere besides Google and Bing?
Speaker 2 (26:06):
Well, let me answer that part first.
For the intents and purposes ofoptimizing your website for
search, google and Bing arereally the only two you need to
care about.
If you optimize your websitefor those, and primarily just
Google, frankly, because itstill owns about 70%, 75% of the
search marketplace.
If you optimize well for Googleand or Bing, you're probably
(26:28):
going to be optimized well forall the other ones and you
mentioned DuckDuckGo, there'sprobably three or four dozen
search engines.
Yeah, but you know, if Googlebrings a thousand visitors to
your site, all those othersmight bring one right.
So I wouldn't spend a whole lotof time optimizing for
DuckDuckGo or any of the otherones.
No offense to the DuckDuckGopeople, You're doing fine.
(26:49):
But if you optimize for Google,you're probably in pretty good
shape, at least for theforeseeable future.
And optimizing your website forsearches it can be incredibly
complex and there's an entireindustry of search engine
optimization people out therewho can talk to you for days
(27:10):
about stuff you'll neverunderstand.
I have always tried to keep itvery simple for my clients and
for myself, because I don'tconsider myself to be incredibly
smart.
I just am able to look atthings that are complex and kind
of distill them down.
Speaker 3 (27:20):
Hey, I was a part of the class that made the top two
thirds possible, so I feel you.
Speaker 2 (27:27):
So, for search engine optimization, there's, you know
, a handful of things that Ithink are just really simple
things that can help youunderstand it and do it well.
The first thing is one of thethings that Google looks at is
recency.
Their whole job is to give thesearcher the most relevant
search result.
So relevance is the big thing,and something that happened two
(27:50):
minutes ago is more relevantthan something that happened
yesterday because it's newer,fresher, real Right.
And so that means and this iswhy blogs became a big thing in
on the Web and in search engines, you know, 15 years ago because
a blog mechanism, a contentmechanism on your Web site,
(28:11):
allowed you to post somethingnew on a regular basis.
It could have been once a week,it could have been every day,
it could have been 10 times aday, whatever, and the content
engines that put more recentcontent out there were the ones
that started to elevate up inthe search ranking.
So put consistent content onyour website.
Doesn't have to be every day,but do something consistently
that is going to feed newcontent to the search engines to
(28:34):
let them go oh, there'ssomething new here.
So that's the big thing.
The second thing is is makesure that the content that you
have on a given page and it canbe a single blog post or it
could be a landing page or someother informational page on your
website the content on onegiven page.
(28:55):
Optimize that for a primarysort of keyword.
It doesn't have to be an exactphrase, like, for instance, I've
got a page on my website thatI've optimized around the term
influencer marketing with the R,influencer marketing.
But that is a topic and all ofthe keywords under that that
that page is going to rank forinclude influence marketing,
(29:19):
influencers, influentialmarketing all of the different
variations of that are going tofall onto that page on there.
That is evergreen, that I don'thave to change a whole lot.
But then also mixing in contentthat I am updating on a regular
(29:39):
basis so that Google not onlysees I have recent relevant
content, but I have recentrelevant content that's really
highly concentrated on this onekind of cluster of keyword terms
, this one topic, so it becomesauthoritative on my website
about this topic.
Once you've established thatrecency and that authority on
your website, now you've got toget other people to tell Google
(30:02):
that it's authoritative.
That's where backlinking comesin.
Now you don't have to doanything complicated with
backlinking.
What you've got to do ispromote your own content on your
social networks and hopefullypromote it in a way that
encourages your followers andfans to also share it and
promote it.
You've got to link to otherpeople in your recurring content
(30:22):
on a regular basis so that theysee you and you're contributing
to their search health bylinking to them.
Hopefully and you can overtlyask them if you want, but
hopefully they will see yourcontent and go oh, maybe I
should link to them too, and sothere's kind of a give and take
there, right, you help their SEO, they help your SEO.
When you get into backlinkingstrategies, it can get crazy and
(30:45):
whatnot.
There are people SEO people whoget paid for 40 hours a week to
just contact other websites andsay, hey, if we link to you,
will you link to us, and week tojust contact other websites and
say, hey, if we link to you,will you link to us.
And that's all they do andthere's some credibility to that
.
Adding links helps, but at thesame time, adding a bunch of
irrelevant links doesn't doanything.
So the last thing I'll say onthe links is this is where
(31:09):
public relations media relationsreally has a huge impact, and
this is also where influencermarketing can come.
Influence marketing can comeinto play for your SEO as well.
The more authoritative awebsite is in Google's mind that
is pointing to you the moreauthoritative you are.
So the easy way to understandthat is the New York Times.
(31:30):
A link from them is much moreimportant than a link from Jason
Falls' blog, because JasonFalls' blog has a couple hundred
, couple thousand readers.
The New York Times has a fewmillion and it's an
authoritative.
You know media source.
So that's where good mediarelations comes in.
So if you're doing somethingfor your brand, your product,
you know, if you're promotingsomething, if you can also do
(31:53):
good PR and in those storiesthat are placed out there in the
media, get a link back fromthat media outlet to your
website.
Now, all of a sudden, yourrankings are all going to rise
because you're a more credibleplace for people to find in
search engines.
So that's the simple way tolook at it.
Speaker 3 (32:08):
Yeah.
So as we wrap this up, I wantto.
I just thought of this exercise.
I hope that people will go outand buy WinFluence because of
this podcast Me too.
So if we were to apply theWinFluence approach to this book
(32:44):
, I wrote down video review, soif I, one of the things that I
could do to help is leave avideo review on Amazon or write
one.
I'm amazed at how many peopledon't leave video reviews.
You know a lot of people write.
Many people don't leave videoreviews.
You know a lot of people write,but very few leave video
reviews.
So if you're listening outthere watching, one of the
things that we could do to helppush WinFluence sales is to
(33:05):
leave a review on Amazon orleave a video review on Amazon.
What else could we do?
So?
you know if you're beinginterviewed not by me, but by
the Wall Street Journal aboutthis book.
That would be.
That would be huge.
Speaker 2 (33:24):
It would be huge.
Yeah, I'd take that.
Speaker 3 (33:28):
Yeah, what else from a Winfluence perspective, could
we not just we, but would youlike to see what plan might you
put in place for a book?
And then let's just talk aboutWinfluence, but it could be for
any book.
Speaker 2 (33:45):
Sure.
So the marketing strategy forthe book if I'm using sort of
this funnel of looking at itfrom an influence marketing, a
Winfluence strategy, sort ofthis funnel of looking at it
from an influence marketing, awinfluence strategy I'm going to
find influential people outthere who have audiences that I
think are going to like the bookand who have some persuasive
power over those audiences, andI'm going to reach out to them
(34:08):
and try to contribute to theircontent in some meaningful way
so that they will a look at thebook, read it, see what they
think about it.
If they like it, they'll turnto their audience and say wow, I
read this book, it's reallygood and you guys should go get
it too.
And so what I've done in mystrategy for this book is I've
(34:29):
reached out to people like ScottTownsend.
I've reached out to people likeJay Barrett, the Social Pros
podcast.
I've reached out to people likeAnn Handley and Kerry Gorgone
at Marketing Profs, because theyhave a big audience of
marketers who are going to likethis kind of thing right.
Right.
I'm also branching out intobusiness and entrepreneur
podcasts and websites and thingslike that.
(34:50):
A book is not necessarily, inmy opinion, going to get a whole
lot of traction if I'm focusedon just Instagrammers and
YouTubers, which is the wholepoint of Winfluence.
Right, let's find people whoare influential over the
audience that I'm trying toreach.
Podcasts is going to be big forme.
Traditional media, publicrelations, media relations is
going to be big for me.
(35:11):
So my team at Cornette and Iare kind of triangulating and
trying to figure out okay, wheredo I need to place book reviews
?
Where do I need to, where can Isubmit guest posts and content
that'll get me in front of, youknow, other audiences like
Harvard Business Review andthings like that.
So I'm just trying to find outwhere are people who are
interested in marketingpersuaded to buy books?
(35:31):
And that might be through apodcast like yours, it might be
through a traditional mediaoutlet, and then, of course, I'm
hosting my own podcast, talkinga lot about it there.
So anyone who's interested ininfluencer marketing at a real
sort of granular level isprobably going to listen to my
podcast regularly anyway.
So I'm going to promote itthere as well.
And then there's the speakinggigs at conferences.
(35:52):
Most of them are virtual rightnow, but it's that's how you're
going to get out there andmarket and promote a book like
this, using that sort ofwin-fluence strategy finding the
people who are influential overa marketing audience that would
be interested in this topic.
Speaker 3 (36:07):
That's so cool and so yeah, so I have here.
I didn't get the book, but Igot the PDF.
Speaker 2 (36:16):
Yeah, the book's not out when we're recording this,
so you can't hold it up yet.
Speaker 3 (36:20):
But I'll share the image on the screen here so you
can see it.
That's a good book.
It's a great read.
This influence, winfluence, thewhole word of mouth, approach,
good word of mouth is so awesome.
Just one last question, if Ican what's one of your favorite
word of mouth campaigns from thebook that you wrote?
Speaker 2 (36:43):
about.
Oh, you know, this is top ofmind because I talked to Ted
Wright at Fizz, which is one ofthe most successful word of
mouth marketing agencies outthere.
Ted Wright at Fizz, which isone of the most successful word
of mouth marketing agencies outthere, and I used one of their
case studies in the book andthey will tell you it's a word
of mouth case study.
I will tell you it's aninfluence marketing case study.
I think it really qualifiesunder both.
(37:04):
But essentially they werechallenged by an industry
association in the dairyindustry to help drive more
awareness around chocolate milkand the awareness that they
wanted to drive.
They wanted to sell morechocolate milk, sell more dairy.
That was the tradeassociation's task.
(37:25):
In the research they discoveredthat chocolate milk is actually
really beneficial to drink rightafter you have exercised or
worked out.
It replenishes the nutrientsand minerals you need and your
body helps you recover fasterand stronger, and all that good
stuff.
Well, when they figured thatout, they were like, okay,
that's the insatiable thing,that's the piece of content that
(37:47):
we need to get out there.
How are we going to do it?
So they started out with asingle state focus group in Ohio
and they basically used highschool football coaches as their
quote unquote influencers Right.
And they educated high schoolfootball coaches on the benefits
of post-workout consumption ofchocolate milk.
(38:08):
And this is what it does.
And so those high schoolfootball coaches turned around
and made their teams drinkchocolate milk after they worked
out, and that was carryingforward a concept of don't stop
drinking milk when you're injunior high.
You need to continue to drinkmilk to build strong bones and
all that good stuff.
And here's how it plugs intoyour teenage lifestyle if you're
an athlete.
They also engaged someprofessional and college
(38:30):
athletes to come in and sharethat message with people
professional and collegeathletes to come in and share
that message with people.
And so they I think the numberwas something like they
increased milk sales in thatparticular geography 465% over
the course of a year or two.
That is a great example of aWinfluence campaign, because
it's using offline influencersto accomplish what you might
(38:53):
turn to online influencers to dootherwise.
Speaker 3 (38:56):
That's awesome.
Love that Well, Jason.
Thanks a lot for stopping byand talking about WinFluence,
your new book coming outFebruary, the 23rd February 23rd
.
Speaker 2 (39:06):
That's it.
Speaker 3 (39:07):
So be sure, and get your PDF.
I mean get your book Amazon orwherever you buy your books.
Speaker 2 (39:16):
Yep, the easy place to go is winfluencebookcom.
I've got links on that pagethat'll take you to.
You can buy it directly fromEntrepreneur Press, amazon,
barnes and Noble, and ifsomebody else comes along to
sell it, I'll put it on there soyou can go there.
Speaker 3 (39:30):
So, with this podcast , I'll put this on iTunes and
all the other podcastingplatforms.
I'll post the video on YouTubeman, that sun's really glaring
on my glasses here.
I'll post this to Twitter,facebook, my Facebook page and
LinkedIn.
So, hey, man, I'm doingeverything I can do to help.
(39:51):
So if you're listening,watching, you can do the same
thing.
Once you get the book, read thebook, you can help Jason out
here, and let's all make thisjust a great experience for
Jason and his crew.
So thanks a lot for your time.
Oh, if someone wants to get ahold of you, how do they get a
hold of you?
Speaker 2 (40:12):
I'm really easy to find man.
Jason falls everywhere.
There's a politician in NorthCarolina who hates me because
he's on page five of Google.
I've got the other four.
So yeah, I'm really easy.
I'm at Jason Falls on Twitter,Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram,
all that stuff.
Jasonfallscom is where you canfind information about the book
and the two podcasts that I do,and, Scott, I really appreciate
(40:34):
you having me on man.
This has been a greatdiscussion and I appreciate you
helping me tell people about thebook.
Thank you.
Speaker 3 (40:40):
And you know, if you're a business owner and
you're trying to do somethinghelp in marketing or whatever
this book is really going tohelp you do that.
So be sure and check it out, gofor.
Oh, you know what I should do.
I should also say, if you likethis podcast or YouTube channel,
you should subscribe, click thenotification, write a review.
(41:01):
You can help with that as well.
So for Jason Falls, this isScott Townsend.
Thanks for watching andlistening to the Scott Townsend
Show and we'll talk to you later.
Speaker 1 (41:32):
The Scott Townsend Show is a Deeds O'Man production
.
For more episodes, visit theScott Townsend Show YouTube
channel, listen on ApplePodcasts or wherever you listen
to your favorite shows.
Welcome to the Scott Townsend Show brought to you by
Dietzelman Productions.
Speaker 2 (00:13):
Okay, no worries.
Speaker 3 (00:17):
That's the first time that's happened, but okay, it
won't be the last.
Speaker 2 (00:21):
It won't be the last either, oh my God.
At least we didn't get 30minutes into it, and you
realized it.
Speaker 3 (00:31):
What a horror story.
Oh my gosh Okay.
Speaker 2 (00:36):
This is cake, man.
This is no big deal.
We were only two minutes intothis thing, you're good.
Speaker 3 (00:40):
Okay, it's recording, so here we go.
Speaker 2 (00:42):
Okay.
Speaker 3 (00:43):
Hey, this is Scott Townsend.
You're watching and listeningto the Scott Townsend Show and
today I have with me a specialguest, jason Falls.
He's the author of the new bookcoming out.
What did you say?
February, february 23rd?
February 23rd, that'sWinfluence Reframing, influencer
Marketing to Rignite your Brand.
And Jason has been in thesocial media marketing space
(01:08):
forever.
He's been in every publicationand TV show that you can think
of NPR, forbes, wall StreetJournal, usa Today, business
Week, the list of ESPNs outsidethe lines.
Speaker 2 (01:27):
Yeah.
I was on that once upon a timethat was fun.
Speaker 3 (01:30):
And so you've also written a couple of books here
before Winfluence, and that isthe let me get this right no
Bullshit Social Media, theAll-Business No-Hype Guide to
Social Media Marketing.
That's a Jason Falls title, ifI ever heard one, and I like to
say that book title because it'sthe only time I get to say
(01:51):
bullshit on the podcast.
And the second book was theRebel's Guide to Email Marketing
, co-authored with DJ Waldo.
So today it's all about Jason,you, your new book, wind Fluence
and whatever else you want totalk about.
Welcome to the show.
Speaker 2 (02:08):
Thanks for having me, Scott.
We've been connected an awfullong time, so it's nice to spend
a little bit more time together.
This is fun.
Speaker 3 (02:13):
Yeah, I'm glad to have you on the show.
Thanks for taking the time.
What's the problem we're tryingto solve here with this book?
Wind Fluence why did you feelcompelled to kind of flesh out
influencers?
We'll go into all that here injust a minute, but just
(02:35):
Winfluence in general.
What problem are we trying tosolve here?
Speaker 2 (02:39):
Sure.
So in my work, you know, inbuilding influence marketing
strategies for the clients atCornette, the agency where I
work, and watching other peopledo influence marketing for the
last you know, umpteen years,because in my mind, influence
marketing is not somethingthat's new, it's something that
we've done, we've called itdifferent things for decades,
and I'm a PR guy by trade, so,in a sense, public relations,
(03:01):
media relations, is influencermarketing.
You were just, you know, 20years ago, you were working with
different types of influencersand different mechanisms, and so
I had noticed that both clients, prospective clients and other
people that I talked to in theindustry who were thinking about
influence marketing had sort offallen victim to.
(03:22):
I think mainstream media hadpainted us into, has painted us
into a corner of thinking thatinfluencers and influencer
marketing is all about Instagramand YouTube.
It's people who are throwing uppeace signs and duck lips and
taking pictures of their lunch,and it's very superficial, and
brands are, for some reason,paying these people to hold
their product and do their peacesign and duck lips, are, for
(03:44):
some reason, paying these peopleto hold their product and do
their peace sign and duck lipsand if you pay attention, if
you're not in marketing and youpay attention to the mainstream
media and how they portrayinfluence marketing.
That's kind of what you thevision of, what you get.
And so for small businesses andbusiness owners and other people
who don't spend most of theirtime talking about and thinking
about marketing, they seeinfluence marketing as a fad, as
(04:05):
superficial as not effective,and so I wanted to kind of take
a step back and take throughpeople, through that idea and
really help the industry reframethe way we think about it.
Instead of thinking aboutinfluencer marketing and using
the R on the end of that word,the book is really about calling
(04:26):
it influence marketing, becausethat opens up your strategic
opportunities to use it in amuch different way, because if
you're talking about the action,the verb influence that's your
goal, that's what you're tryingto accomplish, and not the
channel or the person, theinfluencer.
Now, all of a sudden, you askyourself different questions.
You say, okay, it's not aboutwhich influencer should I use,
(04:49):
it's about who am I trying topersuade to do what?
And then how can I find achannel that can do that and
that opens up your opportunitiesto do a lot different things
other than just Instagram andYouTube.
Speaker 3 (05:01):
So that's one of the questions.
When I was reading the book,the one thing that I stumbled
over was the difference betweenan influencer and the person of
influence, and I was like, isn'tthat the same?
Thing, but then when youdissect both of those and I
(05:24):
think I've got it now, so canyou can you go over that one
more time?
What's the difference betweenan influencer and a person of
influence?
Speaker 2 (05:32):
Sure.
So an influencer in the contextof the book and sort of the
argument of reframing influenceinfluencer marketing to be
influence marketing aninfluencer is someone who has a
lot of followers on a socialnetwork and their mechanism of
influence is to post things onsocial media sites.
A person of influence is anyonewho can persuade an audience to
(05:54):
take action or think differentlyor act differently.
And if you think aboutinfluence from that perspective,
from a person of influencerather than an online influencer
, then you're looking at thepresident of your local PTA club
is very influential amongst acertain population of people.
The president of the urbanleague is very influential
amongst a certain group ofpeople.
(06:15):
A dentist is very influentialamongst a community, a certain
group of people.
When you look at it that wayand you realize that influence
marketing can happen online butit can happen offline, it can
happen globally, it can happenlocally.
Now, all of a sudden, when youthink I need to build an
influence marketing campaign ora marketing campaign that will
(06:36):
influence an audience to dosomething, now all of a sudden
you're looking at influence in avery different light and you're
not limiting yourself to theperson with the social network
thing.
Speaker 3 (06:47):
Right.
So instead of focusing on who'sgoing to hold the can of Coke,
you need to focus on who are wewanting to drink the Coke and
then who has sway over that?
Speaker 2 (07:01):
Yeah, who can persuade them to drink the Coke,
and it might be that, and it'salmost like word of mouth
marketing strategy.
If you look at word of mouthmarketing as a discipline, the
way that people like Ted Wrightat Fizz and other people talk
about word of mouth marketing,it's kind of the underlying
foundation of everything you do.
And so, if you think of it inthat context, influence
(07:22):
marketing.
In that context, I'm trying toinfluence an audience to take
action.
That might mean that I useinfluencers, but it might mean
that I use direct mail, it mightmean that I use television, it
might mean that I use PR andmedia relations in a traditional
sense.
So influence happens in a bunchof different avenues.
It's just about pulling back alittle bit, looking at it more
strategically and saying, okay,instead of focusing in on
(07:46):
Instagram and YouTube and peoplewho have big followings there,
let's look at the audience anddecide okay, what do we want
them to do and who impacts them?
These influencers may, in fact,impact them, but so might their
community members, their fellowsoccer moms, their you know
fellow bourbon aficionados right, it could be a lot of people
that don't necessarily have bigonline audiences.
(08:07):
So that kind of prescribes adifferent path to accomplish
that goal.
Speaker 3 (08:12):
From a marketing perspective.
A lot of times we think aboutyou know, using social media and
it's like you know, having ahammer and treating every
problem as if it's a nail.
But that's not necessarily whatyou should do.
You should take step back, likeyou said, and take a look and
see which channel is the best,which tool is the best to use in
this situation.
Speaker 2 (08:31):
That's true, I've had a couple of clients on that
point.
I've had a couple of clientswho have come to me over the
course of the last.
It's probably 10, 15 years.
I'm not talking about currentclients necessarily, but I've
had people come to me before andsay I want to use social media
and I want to use social mediato drive foot traffic in my
(08:52):
retail store and drive X amountof sales by the end of the month
, and I typically am like well,that's not a great way.
Social media is not a great wayto accomplish that.
There are other channels andother mechanisms that can make
that happen faster.
So let go of your obsessionwith social media for that
purpose.
If you want to use social mediafor that purpose, we can design
something that will do that,but it's going to take more time
than the end of the month,right?
Speaker 3 (09:12):
You talked about in the book Winfluence.
Why choose someone of influenceover someone of popularity?
Speaker 2 (09:21):
Well, because you know people who are popular, and
I use an example in the book ofa young lady named uh ari who
is a style, fashion, lifestyleinfluencer, and she had over 200
000 followers on instagram andshe had been creating content
consistently on instagram for acouple years and had a nice
(09:41):
following.
She decided to launch a fashionbrand, launch her own products,
her own shirts and clothing line, and she launched this to her
Instagram audience on some suchdate a couple of years ago, and
then, a couple of days later,went on Instagram and complained
that she'd only sold 26 unitsof this new brand and she had
(10:06):
failed in influencing heraudience to buy her own product.
And so I actually use a chapterof the book to sort of diagnose
all of the different things shecould have done to build actual
influence with her audience, asopposed to just collecting
followers, because what she hadwas popularity.
She did not have the persuasivepower or influence over that
(10:27):
audience that she built.
And so a lot of times, from astrategic perspective, now what
we try to do is delineate, okay,which influencers that we're
going to use for this program,be they online or offline, which
do we know, can we validate,really have persuasive power and
can motivate people to dothings.
So it's very important tounderstand the difference
between influence and popularity, because if you go out and pay
(10:50):
a bunch of people who arepopular but they're not
influential, you're not going tobe happy.
Speaker 3 (10:55):
So at first blush you would think that would work.
I mean, ari, you would think,hey, I've got 200,000 followers.
I should start selling someshirts here and get these people
to buy some shirts.
So what should she have done tostart over?
Speaker 2 (11:15):
There's several things she should have done.
Probably the biggest thing thatshe should have done is she
should have developed a patternof behavior with her content and
her audience to motivate themto do things.
Up until that point, she hadreally only posted pictures of
herself posing in her clothes.
She'd never asked her audienceto like a post.
(11:35):
She never asked them to go to awebsite.
She'd never conditioned them todo things and tested to make
sure they would.
So she had no earthly idea ifthey would respond to a call to
action to go purchase.
They would.
So she had no earthly idea ifthey would respond to a call to
action to go purchase something.
So if she had, you know, backedup from that launch date maybe
a year, maybe two years and said, hey, I really like this blouse
(11:56):
that this designer has and youcan get it at Target, and here's
a link and started to establisha pattern of behavior where her
audience gets used to herrecommending products and they
go buy them.
And then the experience is, oh,I like that product too, so I
trust her recommendation.
So I'm going to continue tofollow her and continue to
follow her influence, and whenshe says, go do this, I'm going
(12:17):
to go do it because I trust herfor those recommendations.
If she had established thatbehavior from her audience over
time she would have sold a lotmore than 26 units of whatever
she sold.
And so there's other thingsthat she could have done.
She could have built a lot morecredibility and a lot of her
posts were those sort of peacesign, duck lips, superficial
things that didn't have a wholelot of meat to their content.
So people were used to seeingpretty pictures of her but there
(12:42):
wasn't much substance there.
So maybe she could haveprovided much more thought
leadership, much moresubstantive content behind those
pictures.
That would have attracted adifferent or a better audience
that would respond more to callsto action.
So the chapter in the book goesthrough Robert Cialdini's
elements of persuasion and sayshere are the six things that he
(13:04):
says you could do to persuade anaudience.
Let's take Ari through thisexercise and see what she could
have done.
Speaker 3 (13:10):
So for a while there, it sounds like her call to
action was just enjoy mypictures.
Exactly, it was look at me.
Speaker 2 (13:16):
That's all it was, and so everybody was conditioned
to enjoy the pictures.
And she had an audience thatwas perfectly happy to thumb
through and see her picture andgo, oh, that's cool and maybe
like it and maybe not, butthat's all they were conditioned
to do.
Speaker 3 (13:32):
What is WinFluence?
Speaker 2 (13:34):
So WinFluence is this concept of using influence
marketing strategically andwisely to persuade an audience
to take action.
So Winfluence is kind of thisbroader definition of influence
marketing to say I'm not goingto focus on social networks, I'm
(13:56):
not going to focus on peoplewho have big audiences on
Instagram and YouTube.
I'm going to focus on theaction of persuading people to
to do something, to change theway they think about something,
to buy or try a product, toconsider a product, etc.
It's looking at influence as astrategic, you know, execution
and function of your brand andit's really about driving people
(14:19):
to take that action, notfocusing on the person who is
telling them to take that action.
So it's again, again, just theelement of reframing influencer
marketing to look at it in termsof influence marketing.
Speaker 3 (14:30):
A long time ago, back when there was only three
channels in PBS, you know theywould use, you know it was.
Wouldn't you agree that it wasmore celebrity-generated, you
know, like Bing Crosby withOrange Juice, or I'm going way
back now.
Remember what was her name?
(14:52):
Anita Bryant with the OrangeJuice commercials?
Yep, well, even Bill Cosby waspushing all kinds of stuff there
for a while, mr Jell-O yeah.
Speaker 2 (15:03):
The old days when you had a limited array of
entertainment channels,entertainment selections first
of all.
The media landscape has changedso much, I mean, even since I
was a child.
I was born in the early 1970sand back then we had three or
four channels on television.
We had a couple of radiostations, maybe a couple of
(15:23):
newspapers, maybe a couple ofmagazines, and in order to get
in those as a contributor, apublisher, a person on
television, you had to go toschool and you had to be trained
and you had to learn ethics andyou had to be a journalist or
you had to be an actor or asinger, you know, someone with
exceptional talent, and so thelimit that you were very limited
(15:44):
in the number of people whowere influential upon you as a
consumer.
Social media democratizedpublishing so that any random
person with an internetconnection could write, they
could take pictures, they couldpublish videos, they could
record audio.
Unfortunately, what that meantis everybody did that, and now
(16:06):
we have this huge sea of noiseof everybody trying to be a
content, a knack for creatingengagement, have personalities
that kind of come out thatpeople gravitate to, and these
(16:36):
people didn't go to journalismschool.
They're not necessarily actorsor singers or have talent that
we would typically elevate tothat stage, but they have the
ability to publish and attractan audience.
And so you have a differenttype of media social media,
influential people, influencersthan you had in 1973 when you
had, you know, actors, trainedjournalists, et cetera.
(16:57):
And so that has made the medialandscape, the tactics for
marketing and using thosechannels to persuade audiences
to do things very different.
And today you're starting tosee those signals from the noise
.
Online influencers stand out ashey, if I want to get in front
of a bunch of people who love tocamp and love to hunt and love
(17:20):
to grill outdoors Derek Wolfe atOver the Fire Cooking's got
over a million followers onInstagram.
He's a great media channel nowto go through, not just an
individual.
Speaker 3 (17:29):
A media channel to go through, yeah you wouldn't want
to use Kim Kardashian for that.
Speaker 2 (17:33):
No, no, no, she would definitely be the wrong
influencer for that kind ofaudience.
But what's cool about the coolthing about this is, even though
you have someone who has amillion followers not 50 million
viewers, like the nightly newson NBC or CBS or ABC or Fox or
whatever but you have a millionpeople who are very concentrated
into the type of people thatyou want to try to sell to.
(17:55):
So if I'm Buffalo Trace Bourbonand they're a client of ours at
Cornette, we reached out acouple of years ago to Derek
Wolfin over the fire cooking andsaid we think there's a lot of
overlap between our audience andat Cornette.
We reached out a couple yearsago to Derek Wolfe at Over the
Fire Cooking and said we thinkthere's a lot of overlap between
our audience and your audience.
Let's collaborate, let's dosomething cool together.
So we worked on a couple ofposts just Instagram posts and
(18:17):
whatnot where he used BuffaloTrace bourbon in a glaze or
something like that, and it wasa sponsored post.
It was an influencer engagement.
The response from his audiencetoward the brand was so good
that we came back and said let'sdo something bigger.
And so we developed a fourepisode sort of web TV show over
the fire cooking, you know,presented by Buffalo Trace, and
(18:38):
we sort of told a story throughthese four episodes longer form
videos than his audience wasused to and we brought other
influencers in as guests.
So the first episode wasDanielle Pruitt from Wild and
Whole.
She's also a contributor toMeatEater TV.
She hunts wild game and so wehad an episode where we talked
about hunting the meat, findingthe animal that you're going to
(19:00):
cook.
And then the next episode was abutcher in Nashville that had a
nice online following thattalked about how to, you know,
humanely, you know, in all ofthe practices that butchers do,
you know, have respect for theanimal, break it down, you know,
use it for what it's supposedto be used for.
Then the next episode, we had ablacksmith who was an
(19:20):
influencer in that world create,you know, a knife and blades to
actually use in the cutlery.
And in the fourth episode webrought everybody back to the
distillery in Harlan Wheatley,the master distiller at Buffalo
Trace.
They cooked with Derek and hada big dinner at the distillery.
So that's the kind ofinfluencer partnership that
we've developed at Cornette.
That is a way of saying this isa media channel.
(19:43):
Derek Wolf over the fire.
Cooking is a media channel thatwe feel like our audience will
respond to.
From a Buffalo Traceperspective, let's put the two
of them together and create somereally interesting content that
people will consume andhopefully respond well to, and
it's worked very well.
We still work with Derek onprojects from time to time as
well.
Speaker 3 (20:01):
When it works, it's really cool.
Yeah it is when I'm lookingdown.
I'm just looking at myquestions here.
Don't think I'm beingdisrespectful, no worry.
You talk about in your bookreviews and you said there's one
(20:21):
thing I was hoping you couldclarify and that is what's the
right way and wrong way tomanufacture reviews.
And what did you mean bymanufacture?
Speaker 2 (20:31):
Sure.
So the manufacturing reviews isbasically simply soliciting
reviews from your audience.
Okay, or your influencers orsome subset of your audience out
there that you want to have, goreview your product.
If you know anything about thevarious marketplaces out there,
(20:52):
like Amazon, amazon products, ifyou're in a competitive
marketplace, amazon productsreally aren't going to rank well
for a search term for thatparticular product until you
have about 50 reviews or so.
So you need to solicit reviewsto build up that credibility so
that you come up in searchengines.
Also, online reviews on variousnetworks are fundamentally
(21:18):
critical to Google searchresults.
So Google goes out and ifyou're a restaurant, they go to
Yelp and all these other placesto say what do other people
think about this restaurant?
Should I elevate them in thesearch rankings for this
particular keyword in thisparticular city?
Now, one thing, and I talk aboutin the book how you can use
influencers to manufacture anddrive ratings and reviews.
(21:40):
However, there's a big asteriskhere because lots of these
websites like Yelp have terms ofservice that say you cannot
solicit reviews, you cannotmanufacture reviews here.
It has to be organic, it has tobe from people just organically
volunteering their opinion.
I would never recommend anybodyviolate a website's term of
(22:01):
service like that.
I don't necessarily agree withYelp's stance.
I think they're a littlehypocritical in how they do it.
Just because they say you'renot allowed to tell people to go
review your business, buthere's a sticker to put on your
door that tells people to goreview your business.
It seems kind of hypocritical.
Anyway, that's a differentpodcast, probably for a
different time.
So there are sites out there,however, who allow you to an
(22:26):
influencer an influencer to comewith FTC disclosure and say,
hey, I was sent free product orI was paid to do something for
them, but I wanted to file areview here because I've used
the product now and I enjoy it.
And there are some sites thatallow that.
As long as you're transparentabout it and it's disclosed,
they allow that, but even morecritically so.
Another thing that factors intothe Google search algorithms and
(22:47):
your user experience on yourwebsite is when you have reviews
of your product on your websiteand you can pay anybody you
want to do those, and you, Iwould always recommend you ask
them to review things honestly.
You know.
Don't pay them for to lie toyour audience.
That's not going to be cool.
But if you have, there areservices out there.
(23:08):
There's one that I know ofcalled Apex Drop.
Their whole sort of influencermarketing approach is give us
150 products and we'll find 150micro influencers that you don't
have to pay anything more thanthe product and we'll send it
out to them.
Ask them to go to review you onvarious sites so you can
manufacture reviews if you needthem for you know headcount
(23:31):
reviews to make sure that you'reup in search rankings, or if
you just want to populate reallygood content on your website
with actual consumers using yourproduct, there are services out
there that can do that and aslong as you're not violating
anyone's terms of service andbeing transparent about the
engagement, you can push thatbutton and make that happen.
Speaker 3 (23:50):
So I hear a lot of podcasters say you know, help me
out, leave a review.
And I always wonder does thatreally help a podcaster?
Should I be asking people toreview my podcast?
Speaker 2 (24:00):
marketing and I have one called Winfluence that is a
companion thing for the book.
But unless I have a good numberof your reviews, a couple dozen
(24:21):
reviews, I'm always going to beway down the page when on a
phone, when someone's searchingfor a podcast, if they type in
influencer marketing orinfluencers or something like
that.
I'm not going to be one, two orthree, unless or until I have
50, 60, 70 reviews and most ofthem are five star.
And now I've become, you know,meaningful from third party
contributions that say we likethis podcast.
That serves this term.
(24:43):
So yeah, reviews are absolutelycritical.
The Influencer MarketingPodcast is a very small example.
My other live stream podcastthat I do for Cornette called
Digging Deeper.
Robert Plant has a podcastcalled Dig Deeper and there's a
religious podcast called DiggingDeeper.
So even the name of that showis competing to get some weird
(25:08):
stuff.
Speaker 3 (25:08):
So we don't come up very high unless or until we get
those reviews that just brought.
I just I hope I can rememberthis at the end of the podcast.
We're into 30 minutes here.
Do you have a little bit moretime?
Yeah, okay, you showed in the.
You showed in the book fiveways and when I read this I was
(25:29):
so glad that what I think waswhat you wrote, and that is five
ways to optimize your websitefor search engines.
And when I was reading throughthis I was like I've been saying
that all along.
I'm not crazy after all.
Can you give me some ideas?
If someone's listening and theywant to help optimize their
(25:51):
website to show up in searchengines, listening and they want
to help optimize their websiteto show up in search engines,
and what are search engines?
What other search engines arethere besides Google and Bing?
Speaker 2 (26:06):
Well, let me answer that part first.
For the intents and purposes ofoptimizing your website for
search, google and Bing arereally the only two you need to
care about.
If you optimize your websitefor those, and primarily just
Google, frankly, because itstill owns about 70%, 75% of the
search marketplace.
If you optimize well for Googleand or Bing, you're probably
(26:28):
going to be optimized well forall the other ones and you
mentioned DuckDuckGo, there'sprobably three or four dozen
search engines.
Yeah, but you know, if Googlebrings a thousand visitors to
your site, all those othersmight bring one right.
So I wouldn't spend a whole lotof time optimizing for
DuckDuckGo or any of the otherones.
No offense to the DuckDuckGopeople, You're doing fine.
(26:49):
But if you optimize for Google,you're probably in pretty good
shape, at least for theforeseeable future.
And optimizing your website forsearches it can be incredibly
complex and there's an entireindustry of search engine
optimization people out therewho can talk to you for days
(27:10):
about stuff you'll neverunderstand.
I have always tried to keep itvery simple for my clients and
for myself, because I don'tconsider myself to be incredibly
smart.
I just am able to look atthings that are complex and kind
of distill them down.
Speaker 3 (27:20):
Hey, I was a part of the class that made the top two
thirds possible, so I feel you.
Speaker 2 (27:27):
So, for search engine optimization, there's, you know
, a handful of things that Ithink are just really simple
things that can help youunderstand it and do it well.
The first thing is one of thethings that Google looks at is
recency.
Their whole job is to give thesearcher the most relevant
search result.
So relevance is the big thing,and something that happened two
(27:50):
minutes ago is more relevantthan something that happened
yesterday because it's newer,fresher, real Right.
And so that means and this iswhy blogs became a big thing in
on the Web and in search engines, you know, 15 years ago because
a blog mechanism, a contentmechanism on your Web site,
(28:11):
allowed you to post somethingnew on a regular basis.
It could have been once a week,it could have been every day,
it could have been 10 times aday, whatever, and the content
engines that put more recentcontent out there were the ones
that started to elevate up inthe search ranking.
So put consistent content onyour website.
Doesn't have to be every day,but do something consistently
that is going to feed newcontent to the search engines to
(28:34):
let them go oh, there'ssomething new here.
So that's the big thing.
The second thing is is makesure that the content that you
have on a given page and it canbe a single blog post or it
could be a landing page or someother informational page on your
website the content on onegiven page.
(28:55):
Optimize that for a primarysort of keyword.
It doesn't have to be an exactphrase, like, for instance, I've
got a page on my website thatI've optimized around the term
influencer marketing with the R,influencer marketing.
But that is a topic and all ofthe keywords under that that
that page is going to rank forinclude influence marketing,
(29:19):
influencers, influentialmarketing all of the different
variations of that are going tofall onto that page on there.
That is evergreen, that I don'thave to change a whole lot.
But then also mixing in contentthat I am updating on a regular
(29:39):
basis so that Google not onlysees I have recent relevant
content, but I have recentrelevant content that's really
highly concentrated on this onekind of cluster of keyword terms
, this one topic, so it becomesauthoritative on my website
about this topic.
Once you've established thatrecency and that authority on
your website, now you've got toget other people to tell Google
(30:02):
that it's authoritative.
That's where backlinking comesin.
Now you don't have to doanything complicated with
backlinking.
What you've got to do ispromote your own content on your
social networks and hopefullypromote it in a way that
encourages your followers andfans to also share it and
promote it.
You've got to link to otherpeople in your recurring content
(30:22):
on a regular basis so that theysee you and you're contributing
to their search health bylinking to them.
Hopefully and you can overtlyask them if you want, but
hopefully they will see yourcontent and go oh, maybe I
should link to them too, and sothere's kind of a give and take
there, right, you help their SEO, they help your SEO.
When you get into backlinkingstrategies, it can get crazy and
(30:45):
whatnot.
There are people SEO people whoget paid for 40 hours a week to
just contact other websites andsay, hey, if we link to you,
will you link to us, and week tojust contact other websites and
say, hey, if we link to you,will you link to us.
And that's all they do andthere's some credibility to that
.
Adding links helps, but at thesame time, adding a bunch of
irrelevant links doesn't doanything.
So the last thing I'll say onthe links is this is where
(31:09):
public relations media relationsreally has a huge impact, and
this is also where influencermarketing can come.
Influence marketing can comeinto play for your SEO as well.
The more authoritative awebsite is in Google's mind that
is pointing to you the moreauthoritative you are.
So the easy way to understandthat is the New York Times.
(31:30):
A link from them is much moreimportant than a link from Jason
Falls' blog, because JasonFalls' blog has a couple hundred
, couple thousand readers.
The New York Times has a fewmillion and it's an
authoritative.
You know media source.
So that's where good mediarelations comes in.
So if you're doing somethingfor your brand, your product,
you know, if you're promotingsomething, if you can also do
(31:53):
good PR and in those storiesthat are placed out there in the
media, get a link back fromthat media outlet to your
website.
Now, all of a sudden, yourrankings are all going to rise
because you're a more credibleplace for people to find in
search engines.
So that's the simple way tolook at it.
Speaker 3 (32:08):
Yeah.
So as we wrap this up, I wantto.
I just thought of this exercise.
I hope that people will go outand buy WinFluence because of
this podcast Me too.
So if we were to apply theWinFluence approach to this book
(32:44):
, I wrote down video review, soif I, one of the things that I
could do to help is leave avideo review on Amazon or write
one.
I'm amazed at how many peopledon't leave video reviews.
You know a lot of people write.
Many people don't leave videoreviews.
You know a lot of people write,but very few leave video
reviews.
So if you're listening outthere watching, one of the
things that we could do to helppush WinFluence sales is to
(33:05):
leave a review on Amazon orleave a video review on Amazon.
What else could we do?
So?
you know if you're beinginterviewed not by me, but by
the Wall Street Journal aboutthis book.
That would be.
That would be huge.
Speaker 2 (33:24):
It would be huge.
Yeah, I'd take that.
Speaker 3 (33:28):
Yeah, what else from a Winfluence perspective, could
we not just we, but would youlike to see what plan might you
put in place for a book?
And then let's just talk aboutWinfluence, but it could be for
any book.
Speaker 2 (33:45):
Sure.
So the marketing strategy forthe book if I'm using sort of
this funnel of looking at itfrom an influence marketing, a
Winfluence strategy, sort ofthis funnel of looking at it
from an influence marketing, awinfluence strategy I'm going to
find influential people outthere who have audiences that I
think are going to like the bookand who have some persuasive
power over those audiences, andI'm going to reach out to them
(34:08):
and try to contribute to theircontent in some meaningful way
so that they will a look at thebook, read it, see what they
think about it.
If they like it, they'll turnto their audience and say wow, I
read this book, it's reallygood and you guys should go get
it too.
And so what I've done in mystrategy for this book is I've
(34:29):
reached out to people like ScottTownsend.
I've reached out to people likeJay Barrett, the Social Pros
podcast.
I've reached out to people likeAnn Handley and Kerry Gorgone
at Marketing Profs, because theyhave a big audience of
marketers who are going to likethis kind of thing right.
Right.
I'm also branching out intobusiness and entrepreneur
podcasts and websites and thingslike that.
(34:50):
A book is not necessarily, inmy opinion, going to get a whole
lot of traction if I'm focusedon just Instagrammers and
YouTubers, which is the wholepoint of Winfluence.
Right, let's find people whoare influential over the
audience that I'm trying toreach.
Podcasts is going to be big forme.
Traditional media, publicrelations, media relations is
going to be big for me.
(35:11):
So my team at Cornette and Iare kind of triangulating and
trying to figure out okay, wheredo I need to place book reviews
?
Where do I need to, where can Isubmit guest posts and content
that'll get me in front of, youknow, other audiences like
Harvard Business Review andthings like that.
So I'm just trying to find outwhere are people who are
interested in marketingpersuaded to buy books?
(35:31):
And that might be through apodcast like yours, it might be
through a traditional mediaoutlet, and then, of course, I'm
hosting my own podcast, talkinga lot about it there.
So anyone who's interested ininfluencer marketing at a real
sort of granular level isprobably going to listen to my
podcast regularly anyway.
So I'm going to promote itthere as well.
And then there's the speakinggigs at conferences.
(35:52):
Most of them are virtual rightnow, but it's that's how you're
going to get out there andmarket and promote a book like
this, using that sort ofwin-fluence strategy finding the
people who are influential overa marketing audience that would
be interested in this topic.
Speaker 3 (36:07):
That's so cool and so yeah, so I have here.
I didn't get the book, but Igot the PDF.
Speaker 2 (36:16):
Yeah, the book's not out when we're recording this,
so you can't hold it up yet.
Speaker 3 (36:20):
But I'll share the image on the screen here so you
can see it.
That's a good book.
It's a great read.
This influence, winfluence, thewhole word of mouth, approach,
good word of mouth is so awesome.
Just one last question, if Ican what's one of your favorite
word of mouth campaigns from thebook that you wrote?
Speaker 2 (36:43):
about.
Oh, you know, this is top ofmind because I talked to Ted
Wright at Fizz, which is one ofthe most successful word of
mouth marketing agencies outthere.
Ted Wright at Fizz, which isone of the most successful word
of mouth marketing agencies outthere, and I used one of their
case studies in the book andthey will tell you it's a word
of mouth case study.
I will tell you it's aninfluence marketing case study.
I think it really qualifiesunder both.
(37:04):
But essentially they werechallenged by an industry
association in the dairyindustry to help drive more
awareness around chocolate milkand the awareness that they
wanted to drive.
They wanted to sell morechocolate milk, sell more dairy.
That was the tradeassociation's task.
(37:25):
In the research they discoveredthat chocolate milk is actually
really beneficial to drink rightafter you have exercised or
worked out.
It replenishes the nutrientsand minerals you need and your
body helps you recover fasterand stronger, and all that good
stuff.
Well, when they figured thatout, they were like, okay,
that's the insatiable thing,that's the piece of content that
(37:47):
we need to get out there.
How are we going to do it?
So they started out with asingle state focus group in Ohio
and they basically used highschool football coaches as their
quote unquote influencers Right.
And they educated high schoolfootball coaches on the benefits
of post-workout consumption ofchocolate milk.
(38:08):
And this is what it does.
And so those high schoolfootball coaches turned around
and made their teams drinkchocolate milk after they worked
out, and that was carryingforward a concept of don't stop
drinking milk when you're injunior high.
You need to continue to drinkmilk to build strong bones and
all that good stuff.
And here's how it plugs intoyour teenage lifestyle if you're
an athlete.
They also engaged someprofessional and college
(38:30):
athletes to come in and sharethat message with people
professional and collegeathletes to come in and share
that message with people.
And so they I think the numberwas something like they
increased milk sales in thatparticular geography 465% over
the course of a year or two.
That is a great example of aWinfluence campaign, because
it's using offline influencersto accomplish what you might
(38:53):
turn to online influencers to dootherwise.
Speaker 3 (38:56):
That's awesome.
Love that Well, Jason.
Thanks a lot for stopping byand talking about WinFluence,
your new book coming outFebruary, the 23rd February 23rd
.
Speaker 2 (39:06):
That's it.
Speaker 3 (39:07):
So be sure, and get your PDF.
I mean get your book Amazon orwherever you buy your books.
Speaker 2 (39:16):
Yep, the easy place to go is winfluencebookcom.
I've got links on that pagethat'll take you to.
You can buy it directly fromEntrepreneur Press, amazon,
barnes and Noble, and ifsomebody else comes along to
sell it, I'll put it on there soyou can go there.
Speaker 3 (39:30):
So, with this podcast , I'll put this on iTunes and
all the other podcastingplatforms.
I'll post the video on YouTubeman, that sun's really glaring
on my glasses here.
I'll post this to Twitter,facebook, my Facebook page and
LinkedIn.
So, hey, man, I'm doingeverything I can do to help.
(39:51):
So if you're listening,watching, you can do the same
thing.
Once you get the book, read thebook, you can help Jason out
here, and let's all make thisjust a great experience for
Jason and his crew.
So thanks a lot for your time.
Oh, if someone wants to get ahold of you, how do they get a
hold of you?
Speaker 2 (40:12):
I'm really easy to find man.
Jason falls everywhere.
There's a politician in NorthCarolina who hates me because
he's on page five of Google.
I've got the other four.
So yeah, I'm really easy.
I'm at Jason Falls on Twitter,Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram,
all that stuff.
Jasonfallscom is where you canfind information about the book
and the two podcasts that I do,and, Scott, I really appreciate
(40:34):
you having me on man.
This has been a greatdiscussion and I appreciate you
helping me tell people about thebook.
Thank you.
Speaker 3 (40:40):
And you know, if you're a business owner and
you're trying to do somethinghelp in marketing or whatever
this book is really going tohelp you do that.
So be sure and check it out, gofor.
Oh, you know what I should do.
I should also say, if you likethis podcast or YouTube channel,
you should subscribe, click thenotification, write a review.
(41:01):
You can help with that as well.
So for Jason Falls, this isScott Townsend.
Thanks for watching andlistening to the Scott Townsend
Show and we'll talk to you later.
Speaker 1 (41:32):
The Scott Townsend Show is a Deeds O'Man production
.
For more episodes, visit theScott Townsend Show YouTube
channel, listen on ApplePodcasts or wherever you listen
to your favorite shows.
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