Winfluence with Jason Falls

There’s no doubt that the environment around influencer marketing and race, culture and diversity has undergone an incredible amount of change in the last two years. While the issues of pay gaps and brands ignoring influencers of color have always been present in the industry, the combination of social unrest in the United States and other countries, the Black Lives Matter movement, and a more vocal and present conversation around closing the racial pay gap have amplified the issues.

In the course of my work with brands and content creators in the last two years, I’ve tried to be very intentional about listening, learning and advocating to ensure that at least my little corner of the influencer marketing world moves forward with more intention. In that work, I ran across Johanna Voss, a talent manager who represents an unusually high number of influencers of color in her work.

In fact, Johanna has a client that I have engaged for one of our clients at Cornett. So, we actively work together on a brand campaign right now. It’s that up-close and personal interaction that beckoned me to invite her on the show to talk about influencers and race.

Now, you should know, Johanna is not a person of color. So, ironically, this conversation about race is going to be between two people who do not have the first-hand experience of being a person of color. But our conversation is quite revealing I think about how brands think of influencers of color, the disparities in brand and agency approaches when looking to them versus those creators who are white, and the nuances of managing influencers and influence programs in the Hispanic or LatinX community.

Needless to say, we as brands, agencies, talent managers and creators still have a long way to go. My hope is this conversation continues our communal learning and wisdom to one day find ourselves in a place where race and culture are embraced and celebrated by all, not separated or singled out with different priorities in budget and beyond.

And there are some glimmers of hope in here, too. There have been some interesting steps of progress made thanks to the always on nature of activism and awareness of the issues. Do listen closely for those, too. 

This is an important conversation. Because Johanna’s roster of talent features a much higher number of Latina influencers, we focus a bit more of the Hispanic version of people of color and not as exclusively on the Black community. We’ll continue to have those conversations here with those who bring more depth in their perspective, I assure you. 

But this segment of the greater conversation we’re having about influencers and race on Winfluence is one I think you’ll find enlightening. regardless of your race, background or perspective.

We have a new sponsor to the show. I’ve been testing TrendHERO for the last week. It’s a new but advanced influencer marketing software platform specific to Instagram. TrendHERO can help you search and discover Instagrammers based on a wide range of filters, from nano influencers, all the way to celebrities. There are over 90 million profiles in their database. 

The feature I like most is its advanced fake followers check. They also have an algorithm that tells you how real the comments are on a given Instagrammer’s content. So if you’re in a vertical that might be susceptible to comment pods and fake followers, TrendHERO can help you suss out which Instagrammers are worth it and which aren’t.

The great thing about TrendHERO is they’re giving you a 14-day free trial just for listening to Winfluence! And if you decide you want to use the platform after that, the lite plan is just $15.99 per month. 

Sign up for that free trial now at trendhero.io/falls.

Hosted by Jason Falls, Winfluence is a production of Falls+Partners. Explore the ideas and get help putting them into practice at fallspartners.com. Winfluence is a proud member of MPN – The Marketing Podcast Network.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

For those of you who listen regularly, have read my book or follow me on social channels, you know the difference between influence marketing and influencer marketing. One is focused on the noun. When we say “influencer” marketing, your brain is conditioned to think about Instagram, YouTube or TikTok.

The other, is focused on what you’re trying to accomplish. The verb. You wish to influence. You don’t wish to influencer. That makes no sense. 

Still, most brands and agencies are conditioned by the R to be very tunnel visioned on leveraging those who have large or relevant social media audiences. They look at follower counts. Some smarter one also look at engagement rates. The good ones also look at content and brand alignment. 

But even those good ones are often still seeing the opportunity with blinders on.

I can help you remove those blinders and really focus on influencing, not just influencers.  

I’ll explain how in today’s commentary.

Today, I welcome a new sponsor to the show. I’ve been testing TrendHERO for the last week. It’s a new but advanced influencer marketing software platform specific to Instagram. TrendHERO can help you search and discover Instagrammers based on a wide range of filters, from nano influencers, all the way to celebrities. There are over 90 million profiles in their database. 

The feature I like most is its advanced fake followers check. They also have an algorithm that tells you how real the comments are on a given Instagrammer’s content. So if you’re in a vertical that might be susceptible to comment pods and fake followers, TrendHERO can help you suss out which Instagrammers are worth it and which aren’t.

The great thing about TrendHERO is they’re giving you a 14-day free trial just for listening to Winfluence! And if you decide you want to use the platform after that, the lite plan is just $15.99 per month. 

Sign up for that free trial now at trendhero.io/falls.

Hosted by Jason Falls, Winfluence is a production of Falls+Partners. Explore the ideas and get help putting them into practice at fallspartners.com. Winfluence is a proud member of MPN – The Marketing Podcast Network.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Influencer marketing software is, in many ways, the backbone of our industry. Sure, you can feasibly find influencers manually by browsing social networks, snooping around hashtags or doing some Google searches for link-bait posts about the top influencers in one category or another, but that’s time consuming and laborious. 

Influencer marketing software platforms like IZEA, Mavrck, CreatorIQ, Onalytica, Aspire, Julius, and certainly Tagger, our official platform and sponsor of this show … they are our engines that run our programs. We use them to search and discover relevant influencers, analyze and prioritize the list and in some cases connect, contract, coordinate and even compensate the creators we work with.

Now, as much as I love Tagger, I also loved using Julius before. I’ve also enjoyed using IZEA in the past as well. Not to mention the dozens of smaller players who might only focus on one social network or have some other niche application. Each platform has strengths and weaknesses but all of them can work for you in some capacity.

But we are about to enter a phase where the competition for users gets heated. There’s a new need coming for the industry … for influencers and brands alike … that these software companies are going to have to solve for.

It will be a race to the finish line for the true winner of this next software battle to be determined. Well, I know which software company is going to win the race and emerge as the new influencer marketing software of choice for most brands. 

I’ll tell you who in today’s commentary.

Today's episode is sponsored by Tagger. It is a complete influencer marketing solution. You can find out more for yourself at jason.online/tagger. 

Today we visit with T.J. Ferrara from Bubs Naturals, a health supplement company, about how they use Tagger. 

To start building your own experiences with my influencer marketing software of choice, go to jason.online/tagger today.

Hosted by Jason Falls, Winfluence is a production of Falls+Partners. Explore the ideas and get help putting them into practice at fallspartners.com. Winfluence is a proud member of MPN – The Marketing Podcast Network.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

The stereotypical influencer is someone who has a topic, industry or talent. They create content around that and create an audience to build a platform. If they’re lucky, they monetize it in a way that supports them. If they’re real lucky they become famous and sign entertainment deals and such to spin off into more traditional show business or media roles.

But there are different paths for influencers. John Chamberlin started a blog in Pittsburgh about 10 years ago. The original intent was to give local businesses and events a pathway to reach audiences in the Three Rivers region. But with the stories and news, events and promotions that the mainstream media outlets often passed on. The website and blog was called YaJagoff.com. Accompanying social media channels like Facebook and Twitter helped establish the site and John as an influencer.

Eventually, he added a podcast. That helped him see more opportunities to do live video and audio episodes at local businesses. As things grew, Rachael Rennebeck joined John as a partner in YaJagoff Media. The business grew into more than just a typical influencer platform. They now do PR, marketing and event consulting. And work with companies beyond the geographic confines of Western Pennsylvania.

I asked John and Rachael to come on the show and tell us how they built YaJagoff Media, what types of content and channels work for local content, how the local media intertwines with their efforts and a lot more. John has a great insight about listening to your audience in the middle of this discussion that alone is worth paying attention. They gave me, and now you, an interesting perspective on how else to become a successful influencer. Or influence platform.

For those that don’t know Pittsburgh well, YaJagoff is a regional term there that can be an insult, “You cut me off YaJagoff!” but it can also be a term of endearment. “How ya been, YaJagoff!” Pittsburgh has its own language to a degree. We get into that a bit in the conversation today as well.

Today's episode is sponsored by Tagger. It is a complete influencer marketing solution. You can find out more for yourself at jason.online/tagger. 

We’ve been talking recently to Meredith Jacobson, an independent influencer marketing consultant who was on a past episode of the show, to tell you about how she uses Tagger with We are Boosters. 

Hear more about how she uses Tagger on today's episode.

To start building your own experiences with my influencer marketing software of choice, go to jason.online/tagger today.

NOTE: Cover Photo by Elan Mizrahi

Hosted by Jason Falls, Winfluence is a production of Falls+Partners. Explore the ideas and get help putting them into practice at fallspartners.com. Winfluence is a proud member of MPN – The Marketing Podcast Network.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

There’s always been an unspoken attitude in the world of social media and now in influence marketing that advertising, or at least its philosophies and priorities, does nothing but muck everything up. Social media, and it’s immediate by-product of influencers and thus influence marketing, was, in essence, a way for consumers to push back against advertising. We were tired of brands just yelling their messages at us all the time and not listening, as well.

Markets are conversations, said the Cluetrain.

So forgive me for the soap box, but that kind of biases a lot of us to think that someone with that advertising background is out of place in the world of influencer marketing. At least so the stereotype would tell you.

But Justin Kline is not a stereotypical anything. He started out managing ads for the Drudge Report, then managing the placement of ads for the sharing app Add This. So he sees the world of advertising form multiple perspectives.

Nowadays, Justin runs Markerly, an influencer marketing agency that takes his experiences in the advertising world to advise and deploy attention-getting campaigns for clients.

Markerly and Justin came to my attention when they ran the Meow Mix Remix campaign for the cat food brand and engaged pet influencers on TikTok and other channels to help re-think how Meow Mix is thought of by consumers.

I asked him to join us to take us through the irony of an ad guy now running a firm on the influencer side of things, what it's like to work with pet influencers and much more. I love bringing different perspectives to the table for our discussions and this is certainly one of them.

Today's episode is sponsored by Tagger. It is a complete influencer marketing solution. You can find out more for yourself at jason.online/tagger. 

We’ve been talking recently to Meredith Jacobson, an independent influencer marketing consultant who was on a past episode of the show, to tell you about how she uses Tagger with We are Boosters. 

Hear more about how she uses Tagger on today's episode.

To start building your own experiences with my influencer marketing software of choice, go to jason.online/tagger today.

Hosted by Jason Falls, Winfluence is a production of Falls+Partners. Explore the ideas and get help putting them into practice at fallspartners.com. Winfluence is a proud member of MPN – The Marketing Podcast Network.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

One of the industry resources I lean on to keep up with what is happening in the influencer marketing space is the Fourth Floor Newsletter, an email newsletter from an influencer marketing firm based in the United Kingdom. 

I came about it because it’s authored by Scott Guthrie, a counterpart of mine, of sorts, in England, who has a finger on the pulse of the industry there and around the globe. I listen to Scott’s podcast and know he’s incredibly knowledgeable about the space, so a newsletter offered by him is a no-brainer. 

But the newsletter is unique in that it’s not Scott’s newsletter. It belongs to Fourth Floor, the agency. They are an influencer marketing firm practicing influencer marketing. They’ve engaged an influencer in the niche to produce content on their behalf. And their marketing is better for it.

Rich Keith is the CEO of Fourth Floor. It was his vision and relationship with Scott that led to the partnership. He happens to also be a thought leader in the space and has built a successful firm around creating great content and connecting brands with influencers with innovative and interesting executions.

I caught up with Rich and we just talked about the industry. We touched on what influencers and brands may be doing wrong … or at least missing … today, the difference between an average influencer’s content and an exceptional influencer’s content and a lot more. Rich has interesting insights about TikTok’s pluses and minuses that are very helpful for your thinking.

We also talked about the next wave of growth for influencers and their audiences in the coming years. That’s well worth taking into consideration. 

Rich comes from a publishing background and he and his team are plugged into the gaming community as well. So we talked a bit about that niche, Twitch and some other topics that helped me get smarter about the space.

Today's episode is sponsored by Tagger. It is a complete influencer marketing solution. You can find out more for yourself at jason.online/tagger. 

We’ve been talking recently to Meredith Jacobson, an independent influencer marketing consultant who was on a past episode of the show, to tell you about how she uses Tagger with We are Boosters. 

Hear more about how she uses Tagger on today's episode.

To start building your own experiences with my influencer marketing software of choice, go to jason.online/tagger today.

Hosted by Jason Falls, Winfluence is a production of Falls+Partners. Explore the ideas and get help putting them into practice at fallspartners.com. Winfluence is a proud member of MPN – The Marketing Podcast Network.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

If you whittled down the biggest questions and problems brand managers are asking about today in influencer marketing, two of the top couple would be, “What’s the deal with TikTok?” and “What does this influencer marketing jazz even get for me?”

The TikTok issue is layered, but one problem area has been related to the other. With no direct access to TikTok’s API, no one can really quantify success there other than knowing how many views a given creator’s video earned.

But some big news hit recently as TikTok finally opened its Creator Marketplace API. Now, marketers can access all that TikTik creator data to more effectively plan, execute and report on TikTok campaigns. One of the software companies that was an Alpha partners for the API development was Captiv8, a soup-to-nuts influencer marketing platform serving enterprise clients. 

Krishna Subramanian is Captiv8’s CEO. He joined me to dig into what the TikTok Creator Marketplace API means for the marketplace. But he also shared with me that for a retailer case study using the API, Captiv8 ran some additional effectiveness measures using consumer surveys that answers a lot of that second question.

For the first time that I know of, we have an example of a specific influence marketing execution that we can accurately report its effect on purchase intent, recommendation intent and beyond. 

Krishna shared details there, told me more about Captiv8 and who the platform is right for, and put on his crystal ball lens to offer an opinion on what we as marketers need to be watching out for in the coming 18- to 24-months.

Today's episode is sponsored by Tagger. It is a complete influencer marketing solution. You can find out more for yourself at jason.online/tagger. 

We’ve been talking recently to Meredith Jacobson, an independent influencer marketing consultant who was on a past episode of the show, to tell you about how she uses Tagger with We are Boosters. 

Hear more about how she uses Tagger on today's episode.

To start building your own experiences with my influencer marketing software of choice, go to jason.online/tagger today.

Hosted by Jason Falls, Winfluence is a production of Falls+Partners. Explore the ideas and get help putting them into practice at fallspartners.com. Winfluence is a proud member of MPN – The Marketing Podcast Network.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

NIL is short for name, image, likeness, and is the short expression that defines an important legislative move by the NCAA and NAIA, the two main college athletic associations in the United States. The maneuvers relax the definition of amateurism in those organizations to finally allow college student-athletes to capitalize on their name, image and likeness.

Until the NAIA passed an NIL move last December, then the NCAA followed this past summer, a student-athlete taking money from a sponsor, even on social media channels that might have nothing to do with their sport, would be a violation of their amateur status and jeopardize their ability to compete. Now, however, college athletes can be paid for public appearances, profit from merchandise sales of their own apparel or accept money from companies to do collaborations and partnerships on social media channels. 

Masai Russell is a four-time first-team All-American in track and field at the University of Kentucky. She has over 150,000 followers on Instagram and over 21,000 on YouTube. While the track and field part plays a role on both, her content is more focused on fashion and style. She hopes to one day own her own line of apparel. 

I wanted to check in with a student-athlete capitalizing on the NIL opportunity to see what, if any, differences there are in how they handle influencer partnerships, and see what impact the NIL is having on their day-to-day. I also wanted to gauge if student-athletes are seeing this as an opportunity to just make some money, or are thinking more strategically about now NIL can be a platform to build something bigger down the road.

So Masai and I caught up this week to talk NIL and her brand.

Today's episode is sponsored by Tagger. It is a complete influencer marketing solution. You can find out more for yourself at jason.online/tagger. 

We’ve been talking recently to Meredith Jacobson, an independent influencer marketing consultant who was on a past episode of the show, to tell you about how she uses Tagger with We are Boosters. 

Hear more about how she uses Tagger on today's episode.

To start building your own experiences with my influencer marketing software of choice, go to jason.online/tagger today.

Hosted by Jason Falls, Winfluence is a production of Falls+Partners. Explore the ideas and get help putting them into practice at fallspartners.com. Winfluence is a proud member of MPN – The Marketing Podcast Network.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

The first thing many brand marketers do when they’re trying to find the right influencers for their upcoming campaigns is the first thing many of us do when trying to find something. They search. As in Google.

Naturally, the query they often start with “top influencers in” whatever the industry is. And there they find listicles. Blog posts with a list of the top 10 influencers for this or the top 25 influencers for that. 

The inexperienced marketer might even stop there and say, ‘Here are my top 10 targets.” Those that do fail before they ever get started. 

Top Influencer Lists are not only useless, they're misleading. We need to stop relying on them and even follow the lead of a few software companies out there and think about how we categorize influencers in all new ways.

I explain why in today’s commentary. 

This episode of Winfluence - The Influence Marketing Podcast is brought to you by Tagger. It is the influence marketing software I’m using Cornett. They sponsor the show and provide us with their fantastic software to use.

In today's episode, Meredith Jacobson from We Are Boosters explains her favorite feature of Tagger. Give the episode a listen and see how Tagger helps her consultancy get to the right list of the right influencers.

Learn more about the software at jason.online/tagger. Tagger is the new influencer marketing campaign software of choice for me. I hope it will be for you, too.

My influencer marketing podcast recommendation this week is The Influencer Marketing Lab with Scott Guthrie. His weekly show is dedicated to the growth spurts and growing pains of our industry. And being located in Great Britain, where he is super connected to brand and agency players in the space, Scott brings the European perspective on the industry to the table, we can all learn from. Just search for Influencer Marketing Lab wherever you get your podcasts or go to influencermarketinglab.com.

Hosted by Jason Falls, Winfluence is a production of Falls+Partners. Explore the ideas and get help putting them into practice at fallspartners.com. Winfluence is a proud member of MPN – The Marketing Podcast Network.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Most of you know I am from and live and work in Kentucky in the United States. And if you know anything about that state, especially the eastern part of Kentucky where I grew up, you know it has spent the better part of the last three or four decades trying to figure out how to overcome the economic void left by the downsizing of the coal industry.

Both automation and regulation have forced coal mines to lay off workers who never knew another profession. The downturn in jobs meant high unemployment, higher incident rates for poverty and beyond. 

What does that have to do with influencer marketing? I've been asked to contribute to Kentucky to the World, a group hoping to reshape the way the world sees my home state. In thinking about how I can contribute, I stumbled across an idea that hit me like a brick in the face.

I’m going to tell you more and how influencer marketing relates in today’s commentary.

This episode of Winfluence - The Influence Marketing Podcast is brought to you by Tagger. It is the influence marketing software I’m using Cornett. They sponsor the show and provide us with their fantastic software to use.

In today's episode, Meredith Jacobson from We Are Boosters explains her favorite feature of Tagger. Give the episode a listen and see how Tagger helps her consultancy get to the right list of the right influencers.

Learn more about the software at jason.online/tagger. Tagger is the new influencer marketing campaign software of choice for me. I hope it will be for you, too.

Hosted by Jason Falls, Winfluence is a production of Falls+Partners. Explore the ideas and get help putting them into practice at fallspartners.com. Winfluence is a proud member of MPN – The Marketing Podcast Network.

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.