In this episode, Aaron talks with Jacob Yang, the Founder and CEO of Amp Your Story.

After realizing there was no central hub for clean energy marketers, Jacob launched Amp Your Story to unite the global community.

He is on a mission to bridge the gap between technical expertise and world-class storytelling, and already has members on four continents.

Connect with Jacob on LinkedIn here.

Listen to this episode on:

* YouTube

* Apple Podcasts

* Spotify

Expect to learn:

* How the clean energy industry’s “branding problem” (being 90% focused on technology and only 10% on brand) is hurting us, where it came from, and how we fix it.

* Why Jacob took a leap of faith to create a global community for clean energy marketers.

* Jacob’s “LinkedIn Hierarchy of Value” anyone can use to build an exponentially growing, targeted network.

Quotes from the episode:

“We don’t need to be good at everything, but we need a place to have support for the strengths that we don’t have.” — Jacob Yang

“How do we take the best of the best in the world and incorporate that into our industry so we work better as an entire sector together?” — Jacob Yang

Transcript:

Aaron Nichols: Jacob, why do you feel called to unite clean energy marketers?

Jacob Yang: I really wanted to be part of a group that did exactly that and when I did my due diligence and went online, looked for the opportunities. There just wasn’t anything out there that really aligned with what I was looking for. And so I put the feelers out. I asked my own community: “If I put this group together, what would you think?” and the amount of responses that were positive were overwhelming. And so I took a leap of faith and I created Amp Your Story to provide clean energy marketers with tools, resources, and community at a global scale to help them out.

Aaron Nichols: So it was one of those cases of just what you wanted didn’t exist so you made it.

Jacob Yang: 100%. Yeah.

Aaron Nichols: That’s—yeah. And I mean I can attest to the awesomeness of it. I’ve been to a couple coffee chats and a couple speaker series now and it’s a wonderful group. And you’re really curating some awesomeness there.

Jacob Yang: I appreciate that. Thanks. Yeah.

Aaron Nichols: So would you like to introduce yourself and talk a bit about Amp Your Story?

Jacob Yang: Absolutely. So I am the founder and CEO of Amp Your Story. Again, it’s the online global clean energy marketing community. Currently, we have 74 members across four continents, and we have a committee as well with 10 individuals—11 including myself.

We really focus on two main verticals. So you think on the left hand, you’ve got clean energy facets of solar, wind, and BEST (Battery Energy Storage Systems) which are very common and predominant in the industry, but you also think about geothermal, nuclear, and other facets. And then on the right hand is all the functions of marketing.

And so going back to the committee, one of the reasons I realized I needed one was because I have some strong strengths in marketing, but as you know, none of us could do it all. And so I needed people from public relations and comms, design, content marketing, and event activation to help bridge that gap. So when people come to the community, they feel like they have a source of truth that they can rely on. And it’s not even that we always have the answer, but we’re willing to go that extra step to help people find the sources they’re looking for.

And that ranges from everything from revenue attribution tools, which is a constant struggle in marketing, to “how do I elevate my conversations to people who are constant blockers,” like the Chief Financial Officer or the Chief Operating Officer. That’s a constant struggle, I think, on the marketing side—to flip the script from a cost center to a “must-have” and a revenue generator.

And then in clean energy, you know, there’s people that come in who have great marketing skills—they might have been on the oil and gas side and then felt like “this doesn’t really align with what I’m trying to do long-term”—or it just might be that they want to get into clean energy as a whole, or they just are a bit newer to the concept. So they might be three weeks into their role, three months in, and they need something to guide them more than just the marketing tasks they do on a daily basis.

Aaron Nichols: Well, for anyone who’s listening, welcome back to This Week in Solar. As always, I’m your host, Aaron Nichols, the Research and Policy Specialist here at Exact Solar in Newtown, Pennsylvania. Our guest today is Jacob Yang; as he mentioned, he’s the founder and CEO of Amp Your Story. He’s also blowing up on LinkedIn right now, and he’s doing a great job of just unifying clean energy marketers, which I think is awesome. As you mentioned in your answer before, none of us can do it all. For example, I am one of the world’s most incompetent graphic designers. Very bad at it. I’m interested, what is the thing that isn’t in your marketing skill set?

Jacob Yang: You know, as many compliments as I’ve gotten on the logo and the branding of Amp Your Story, I will say I had a little support. I reached out to a contractor and I said, “Hey look, I’m creating something that has to be world-class. I’ll pay you that top dollar, I just want it to be the best possible experience.” So when I go into the experts who do this for a living, they can be like, “Oh, this is legit. I like this. I resonate with this.”

And so I think it really comes back to: we don’t need to be good at everything, but we need a place to have support for the strengths that we don’t have. And I think that example resonates because everything above the branding, I gave a lot of thought to. It was like, what are the colors that so many solar EPCs and developers use?

Aaron Nichols: Oh yeah, what’s their branding? It’s like orange. It’s really funny. Because ours are blue and yellow.

Jacob Yang: Yeah, and so it’s these like recurring themes that you see and I want it to be relatable. And it was even like the font, we’re doing Montserrat. I wanted something to feel bold and impressive and really stand against the status quo of “we’ve never had this, we’ve always wanted it, and now it’s here.”

Aaron Nichols: That’s so beautiful man, it’s wonderful to hear that you put that level of thought into it and to understand that that’s what was going on behind the scenes, because obviously I only see the front end and I didn’t know that story till now. I know that you are in the process of becoming a top 1% LinkedIn expert, and you have advised a lot of clean energy companies on how they can do better on LinkedIn. So what’s one glaring thing that you think a lot of clean energy companies miss about LinkedIn as a platform? Where do you think they leave money on the table? Like, what do you walk in day one and say “here’s what you can do better” normally?

Jacob Yang: The beautiful thing about LinkedIn is every touch point in a company—every employee, in some capacity—is most likely using the platform. So, the first thing that I talk about is not even the growth hacks—and I get into those too, you know, like how do you save money and drive half a million ad views from a hundred bucks and all those fun things. But it’s like, if you’re spending every morning on LinkedIn as an executive, what are the functions you do? If you’re scrolling and you’re clicking on these posts and you’re just doing a “like,” that probably has the least amount of weight on the level of engagement you bring to the people in your network.

And so one of the things I walk them through was like, okay, it’s likes and comments, then reposts and original content. And that’s kind of the wheel I use to guide them from least valuable to most valuable. And even small crevices, like the difference between liking a post and finding it insightful, right? You’ve got a post that’s got 10 individuals who have liked it and you only see blue, and you want to stand out to the crowd? You put the yellow and insightful emoji to that as opposed to a like. It’s small details that add up in accumulation over six months where all of a sudden people are like, “Okay, they’re finally seeing my content,” instead of just feeling like “I think I’m doing it right but I’m not really sure.”

Aaron Nichols: That’s about how long it took for me when I started writing on the platform; it was about six months before anyone noticed. So I think that is a very important piece to hit on for anyone who does want to create content on LinkedIn—it’s a slow grind in the beginning but it’s an exponential growth factor a few months or years in. I think it’s beautiful that you hit on that point that everyone in your company is probably already using it as well, because it might be the only platform that’s true of, because everybody puts their resume on at some point. So almost everybody has created an account, and you would really just have to go back through the team and have everybody turn on creator mode, rather than them having to go back and learn how to post on Facebook or create a whole Instagram account. It’s already there. Work history is already there.

Jacob Yang: 100%. And I think it’s just looking at it with a critical eye. Like, there’s no key piece that I can say was what got me to be successful on LinkedIn; it was an accumulation. I audited my entire network. You know, I had, I think, two or 3,000 followers. Not a lot of connections, and I audited them all and with the exceptions of close colleagues and friends, I knew I wanted that space and capacity to be for clean energy marketers. I wanted to make sure—whether it was one person, ten, a hundred or a thousand—that the right people are seeing my content. And so it’s the same when you’re an executive or your marketer or your salesperson and you just get into the industry and you start posting industry content. If you’ve got two clean energy connections and 498 connections have nothing to do with clean energy, you’re almost posting into the void there. And it’s synonymous with when people post on their LinkedIn page and they’re like, “Okay, we’ll just post three times a week and we’re certain that our prospects will see our content.” And unfortunately, that’s not always the case. If you build it, they don’t always come, sadly.

Aaron Nichols: Yeah. Another thing a lot of people don’t realize hurts them is unaccepted connection requests. You have got to go clean those out from time to time because if they just sit there, you start looking more and more needy and unpopular to the algorithm. In a recent LinkedIn post, you made the claim that the clean energy industry as a whole has a branding problem, so I would love to hear you expand on that and explain what you think is needed to get us to where we don’t have a branding problem.

Jacob Yang: That quoted Rob Contrell from Atlantic Energy on the Charge podcast. And what he was saying was that he worked in telecommunications, and when he was in telecoms, they were 90% branding and 10% technology. And when he transitioned to energy, he realized it was the opposite: 10% brand and 90% technology. And so I think what you find, more particularly with some of those companies that maybe just have a bit more traditional processes on their operations to the marketing as well, is that there isn’t a certain level of sophistication that there might be with companies in Silicon Valley or these savvy B2B tech startups that you can get in any sector—they just have to be so agile, they have to be so quick, they have limited resources.

Part of it with the branding is speed—like, how quickly can I elevate my branding—but also, am I pulling in outside resources? So I would love to say that every marketer I’ve learned from is in clean energy, but the truth is very much so the opposite. Like, I find a lot of resources and I try and portray that into our community. A great example is there’s this book by this individual who understands how to build like an unforgettable logo. He breaks down the actual process of building a logo. And I read his book and he actually lives 30 minutes from my place. He’s an incredible guy and I hope to meet him someday. But I never knew that; I never met anyone in the industry who knew that. And so I think part of this community is: how do we take the best of the best in the world and incorporate that into our industry so we start better as an entire sector together?

Aaron Nichols: Sure. I think historically, it hasn’t been a need as well. I mean, energy is undergoing a revolution right now, obviously. But the standard for marketing and branding was set by utilities for the longest time. And they were regional monopolies. You had to have their product. You didn’t have any choice if you bought from them or not, so they had no need for branding. But now, energy is in an arms race, and there are people making choices between forms of energy, so branding and storytelling matter a lot more. When you imagine Amp Your Story, let’s say five or ten years from now, what’s your dream scenario?

Jacob Yang: I’m going to preface with: I don’t like to over-promise and under-deliver as a person, but I would love to reach every clean energy marketer in the world, and I will say there’s a lot of them. Like, everyone thinks we’re not that big. I am telling you, the list that I keep working through keeps growing and I can’t keep up with the same pace. I would love to have an event for clean energy marketers in every continent every year. That would be my dream—to meet people from all over the world and do what I’m doing just in an in-person capacity.

Aaron Nichols: That’s a beautiful vision. I’m really excited for the African one. That’s the only continent I haven’t been on yet—I mean, other than Antarctica—and so I would love to go. To bring it home, Jacob, I ask everyone who comes on to the show the same closing question. And it has to do with the fact that a few months ago, I spoke at my grandma’s 80th birthday party, which was a huge honor for me. And in the course of writing that speech and then writing a post about it afterwards, I realized that if she’s 80 years old, she was born into a world where what we now think of as clean energy didn’t exist.

She was born, I think, 12 years after the Rural Electrification Act, so her region in Missouri where she was born had just gotten electricity for the first time ever. The only way we knew how to generate electricity was to go find things, dig them up, burn them, and send the electricity out. Solar PV wasn’t even invented until 1954. And then, you know, the technology wasn’t iterated on for a while—I mean, when Jimmy Carter put solar panels on the White House in 1979, that was solar thermal. And then you have the turn of the millennium, and the price of solar and batteries just falls and falls and falls until now it’s the cheapest form of energy. All of that happened within her 80-year lifetime.

So, if you’re just going to moonshot and make a wild prediction—and don’t worry, no one can hold us to it, we’ll both be dead—we’re talking about 80 years from now. What do you think clean energy looks like in 80 years?

Jacob Yang: A functional cohabitat with the environment. I think one of the biggest fears is that we lean heavily on the technology—and there’s great companies that pull in the environment aspect as well—but I think that’s not always the case with the rapidly deploying technology where there’s a lot of opportunity in business. So I think it’s important to acknowledge solar and wind, but also continue to advocate for the blue economy, blue tech, offshore wind. Ideally, I would hope that the wildlife and the level of species has increased, as opposed to the opposite.

Aaron Nichols: I would too. I mean, that’s one of my biggest issues with solar technology—that utility-scale installations do take up a large amount of space. There’s really no way around that right now. And if I had my way, we would cover every parking lot and every warehouse we’ve ever built with solar panels before we ever put it on natural space. But, you know, I’m not completely in charge.

Jacob Yang: Yeah, no worries. And you know, I also advocate for people who are leaning into floatable photovoltaics—I think of D3 Energy, I think they’re on the forefront of that in the US—and also people who are looking at Brownfield redevelopment, taking a site that would essentially be useless. Does it bring any value to wildlife or humans? If not, let’s turn it into what they call “Pride Fields.” So that resonated with me quite a bit. It’s like, okay, if this is useless anyway, let’s turn it into something valuable.

Aaron Nichols: I fully agree. So Jacob, where can you be found if you do indeed want to be found? How can people get in touch with you?

Jacob Yang: Yeah, they can find me on my LinkedIn. It’s probably the best way. I do a weekly job roundup for clean energy marketing roles on Mondays normally. And it’s Jacob Won Carlos Yang—so if we haven’t met, feel free to say hi.

Aaron Nichols: Thanks so much for coming on today, Jacob.

Jacob Yang: Yeah, I appreciate it.

Aaron Nichols: And for everyone listening, that’s been This Week in Solar and we will talk to you next week.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit exactsolar.substack.com