Winfluence with Jason Falls

There’s another “State of the Industry” report out this month. It actually came last week from Linqia, which is one of the enterprise influencer marketing software companies out there. These reports are always useful, so I like to report on them here on the show. 

If you want to read the full report for yourself, which I encourage you to do, you go to their website and sign up and trade your email address for their research. You become a lead in their platform … that’s how B2B marketing often works. But it’s a fair trade and, who knows? Linqia might be just what your company needs. So, go do it. We’ll certainly share the link to do so in our show notes for this episode. 

But Keith Bendes, who is the vice-president of strategy for Linqia is here today to dig into the highlights of the report with us. He is also the co-host of another great podcast, by the way. It’s called Creator Economy Live. So go check that out when you have a moment as well. 

Keith knows the influencer space as well as anyone. And you know what that means … we just turned on the mics and cameras and had a fun conversation I think you’ll enjoy. We hit on plenty of the report insights as well, so you’ll be informed as much as or even more so entertained today on the show. 

Here are some of the nuggets the report surfaces we’re going to touch on:

We dig in more with Keith Bendes from Linqia today on the show.

This episode of Winfluence is presented by CIPIO.ai. We are helping brands transform their digital marketing with user-generated content videos and images at scale. Come see us at CIPIO.ai. If you want me to personally show you the platform and how we can solve your digital marketing performance problems with high-performing UGC, just go to jasonfalls.co/cipio … fill out that form and I’ll personally set up time to chat with you.

Find show notes for this episode at jasonfalls.co/keithbendes.

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.

Depending on where you are at the table in the influencer marketing space, your meal is slightly different. Creators can range from nano-influencers who barely consider themselves influencers or creators at all … to those who achieve true celebrity status and have full production teams they employ to create all that content while they live off their personality and audience connection.

For brands, you can be super nimble with your budget and work with the former of those. You can go big and work with the latter. But most find themselves somewhere in the middle jockeying around a mix of small and medium creator partners with a few big ones popping in from time to time.

That same range is found in the software space. You can find influencer marketing solutions for free or close to free. And you can also sign up for enterprise solutions that run thousands of dollars per month.

Then there’s the talent management segment. You don’t find many who work with creators under around 40-50,000 followers. But there is a huge difference in those who work with that level and those who manage six figure brand deals with the biggest stars on social media. 

Temima Shames falls into that last category. The 24-year-old former child actor started Next Step Talent at age 21. Its employee roster is all people under 30. And they are responsible for amplifying creators to become some of the most followed influencers in the world. Their roster includes a bunch of Gen-Z creators I’ve never heard of, but that’s what makes the next tidbit most impressive. 

That roster has more than six billion YouTube views, one debuted an album at No. 7 on Spotify. Another was TikTok’s biggest POV or point-of-view star. They had talent featured in YouTube’s Black Creator Class of 2023 as well.

I’ll drop a link to their roster page in the show notes so you can go see who they are. I didn’t recognize any of them, but I’m certainly not their target audience. 

Temima knows how to shape content creators into influencers with massive followings. I asked her to come on the show to share some of that knowledge with us, as well as talk about the impending threats to the big influencers businesses as brands recoil from inflated prices and an abundance of UGC.

She’s a smart one, gang. Get ready to learn a thing or two from the queen of influencer talent, Temima Shames today on the show. 

This episode of Winfluence is presented by CIPIO.ai. We are helping brands transform their digital marketing with user-generated content videos and images at scale. Come see us at CIPIO.ai. If you want me to personally show you the platform and how we can solve your digital marketing performance problems with high-performing UGC, just go to jasonfalls.co/cipio … fill out that form and I’ll personally set up time to chat with you.

Find show notes for this episode at jasonfalls.co/temimashames.

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.

What would you do if you didn’t have access to social media for a day? How about a week? What about three and a half months? How would that change your daily habits? How would it change where you turned for information.

How would it affect your business? 

Now, certainly for you social media content creators and brands that rely heavily on social media creators and content to drive customers, I’m sure if could be catastrophic. But really? Are there no other alternatives?

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not here to advocate for a social media shut down, but someone did it recently and lived to tell. Meg Casebolt is a B2B SEO consultant. For a long time, she followed the crowds to social media, leveraged it for her business and her clients and did what we all do. 

Now, SEO is a different discipline from social media. But it still requires creating content, promoting that content and staying relevant in the online world. That can imply staying connected on social media, too.

But the perfect storm of social media fatigue, mental health concern and simply being too busy running all the other aspects of her business led Meg to do something amazing. She took a 100-day detox from social media. Cold turkey. No Facebook. No Instagram. No Twitter. No TikTok. No LinkedIn.

And guess what? Her business not only survived, but thrived. Her mental health issues subsided. She was happier. She reconnected with previous clients, worked referrals, grew her business. 

She created the Social Slowdown Podcast from all she learned. There, she leads business conversations around the reality of not using social media as a primary tool. Business does go on without it.

Meg took a lot of the conversations from that podcast and has now shaped it all into a book called The Social Shutdown as well. It documents her experiment to leave social media for 100 days and not show a negative impact on her business. 

She’s here today to share those insights with us and talk about the reality of social media, where it fits and how we all … creators included … can perhaps look at social content and channels in a more healthy light for us and our audiences.

I know you’re skeptical, but trust me. This conversation is worth hearing.

This episode of Winfluence is presented by CIPIO.ai. We are helping brands transform their digital marketing with user-generated content videos and images at scale. Come see us at CIPIO.ai. If you want me to personally show you the platform and how we can solve your digital marketing performance problems with high-performing UGC, just go to jasonfalls.co/cipio … fill out that form and I’ll personally set up time to chat with you.

Find show notes for this episode at jasonfalls.co/megcasebolt.

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’ve been paying attention to the goings on in the influencer marketing world, you know by now that there was a major acquisition announced recently. Sprout Social, long known as one of the top social media management solutions in the space, acquired Tagger Media. Its main product, Tagger, is one of the leading influencer marketing software solutions on the market. It was once a regular sponsor of this program as well.

Tagger was actually also responsible for bringing me to the Influencer Marketing Show a couple of years ago. Pete Kennedy, its founder and I became friends with a shared vision and passion for the space. We had him on the show back in March of 2022. You can find that episode in our show notes at jasonfalls.com. 

I loved what Tagger’s software could do. I used it exclusively for a couple of years. I still do for certain strategy and research projects, though CIPIO.ai and other tools are a part of my strategy arsenal as well.

When the announcement came down that Tagger had been acquired, it was a personal celebration of sorts. My friends there reached the end game of the original goal of a startup business. It was sold for a reported $140 million in cash. So I have a couple of contacts who are a considerable amount wealthier now. That’s always a good thing to celebrate. 

But the news and the move also leave a lot of questions. 

So I reached out to Pete Kennedy and asked him to come answer them. We caught up last week and ironed out the what-ifs and what-nows of the big move, dug into the issues of the day in the influencer space, and I got Pete’s take on how AI factors into the influence space moving forward.

We’ll dig into the news of the day and get one smart man’s perspective on other things, too. Pete Kennedy is coming up on Winfluence. 

This episode of Winfluence is presented by CIPIO.ai. We are helping brands transform their digital marketing with user-generated content videos and images at scale. Come see us at CIPIO.ai. If you want me to personally show you the platform and how we can solve your digital marketing performance problems with high-performing UGC, just go to jasonfalls.co/cipio … fill out that form and I’ll personally set up time to chat with you.

Find show notes for this episode at jasonfalls.co/petekennedy2

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.

Marketing automation is a topic that most people dig into when they’re in the enterprise or B2B space. It’s an approach to marketing that allows you to set up triggers and events using software to drive leads, then work those leads down your funnel to conversion. 

When you think marketing automation, you almost always think of email. Set up sequences of emails for people who fill out a form on your website or register for an event. They get an initial thank you email, then you automate one that sends them an offer or interesting reason to reengage on your website a few days later and so on until they buy.

Marketing automation almost always leads people to think about businesses, usually larger, complex ones, where automation can save thousands if not millions of dollars and hours in labor. But marketing automation is far more accessible and an untapped opportunity for even small businesses. Including content creators. 

Adam Tuttle is the senior director of customer activation for ActiveCampaign. It is a marketing automation software platform that has over 185,000 customers around the world. Some of them are small businesses. Some are even individuals like thought leaders, speakers and even content creators from the social media space.

Adam’s company, ActiveCampaign, is a sponsor of the Marketing Podcast Network, but I thought it would be useful to have him come on the show and dig into how marketing automation can help content creators treat their influence and content business like other businesses leveraging tools and approaches like it. 

Get ready to learn a few things and get inspired to level up your marketing today on Winfluence. 

As always, this episode of Winfluence is presented by CIPIO.ai. Let us scale your user-generated content needs and deliver authentic, high-performing UGC to fuel your paid, owned and earned content strategies. Learn more at CIPIO.ai.

But today, we want to take a reminder moment to tell you about Adam’s company, Active Campaign. If you looking for a way to grow your business, you need to check them out.  ActiveCampaign is a powerful marketing automation platform that can help you to increase your sales, improve your customer service, and build stronger relationships with your customers.

With ActiveCampaign, you can create and send email campaigns, manage your leads and customers, create landing pages, set up automated workflows, and track your results. All in one approachable platform!

And don’t take my word for it! ActiveCampaign has over 10,000 five-star reviews on G2 from happy users. 

We’ll get into some examples in today’s conversation with Adam Tuttle. But as a sponsor of Winfluence and MPN, and for a limited time, ActiveCampaign is offering our listeners a chance to double your contacts for free. When you sign up at activecampaign.com/activate, if your email list has 10,000 contacts, you only need to pay for 5,000. Or, you can pay for the 10,000 and get an extra 10,000 totally free. 

And if you’ve worked with any CRM or email software out there, you know additional contacts are like gold.  Once you start engaging all contacts in a personalized way at scale, your subscriber numbers will start to grow dramatically. It’s easy to hit those limits. So doubling your contacts is killer. 

Go to activecampaign.com/activate to sign up today. And thanks to ActiveCampaign for their support of the Marketing Podcast Network. You should check them out even if only that they help bring great marketing podcasts like Winfluence to you each week.

Links for this Episode:

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 influencer marketing landscape is changing. Now, that’s not a statement many people would find alarming. It’s always changing. But when you watch the industry like I do and for as long as I have, you see the tea leaves. And when they perk up a certain way, you sense a change is a brewin’. 

Mavrck is out this week with its annual Creator Compensation Report. It’s a yearly survey of several hundred content creators that asks specific questions about how much they make, what type of work fuels that revenue, what kind of brand deals are they working and the like. It’s usually an insightful measuring stick to see where your brand is trending … are you paying well enough or not enough … are you offering the types of value others are and such.

I started telling you about six months ago that the brands I and CIPIO.ai were working with had started to shift what they were asking for. Many were foregoing the traditional ask for influencer marketing collaborations, opting instead for just user-generated content. 

Brands want content to fuel their paid and organic social. That’s good for companies like CIPIO.ai. We go get UGC on scale for brands. But it’s not a great sign for influencers who monetize their audience as much as their content. 

Now, that alone is only one tea leaf if you will. And influencers can still create content for payment and still benefit from UGC-driven campaigns. 

But Mavrck’s new Compensation Report has a few more tea leaves turning up of interest.

Rachael Cihlar is Mavrck’s vice-president for corporate communications and public relations. She is busy getting this handy compensation report out to folks, but took some time to visit with me to go over some of the findings and talk about their implications.

Some things I explore with her include these nuggets, surfaced by the report:

Does this mean brands are starting shift away from sponsored content and brand collaboration deals in favor of more performanced-based compensation? Or are these numbers just a settling of the market? Only time will tell, of course, but the time we have with Rachael today gave me the opportunity to ask how she interprets the data.

She and I do that on this episode.

Links for this Episode:

This episode of Winfluence is presented by CIPIO.ai. We are helping brands transform their digital marketing with user-generated content videos and images at scale. Come see us at CIPIO.ai. If you want me to personally show you the platform and how we can solve your digital marketing performance problems with high-performing UGC, just go to jasonfalls.co/cipio … fill out that form and I’ll personally set up time to chat with you.

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.

What are your goals? More importantly, do you write them down? How often do you refer to them? 

Or are you like me and have vague ideas of what you want to accomplish in your head, but they kind of morph and change depending on the day?

Certainly, we’re more disciplined about business goals. They typically have to be articulated in strategies and presentations, discussed in meetings and conference calls, probably ad nauseum. But they’re important to have, to revisit frequently and to refer to when making strategic decisions for your business. 

Debra Eckerling is a goals strategist. She helps entrepreneurs, executives and employees identify and make a plan for personal and professional goals. She’s even got a clever methodology … the DEB Method … that is spelled out in her book Your Goal Guide.

I’m familiar with Deb because her weekly live stream show and podcast, called The DEB Show, is a sister podcast of this one on the Marketing Podcast Network. I’ve had the pleasure of sitting in on her weekly themed discussion. It’s well worth the subscription, the links to which we’ll post in the show notes. 

But Debra is also an influencer away from the marketing space, too. She’s a foodie writer and podcaster, too. Her show Taste Buds with Deb digs into her culinary side with guests to discuss and debate various food-related topics. It’s distributed by the Jewish Journal where she has been a contributor for a while.

Whether you’re a brand or agency marketer, a service provider in the influencer space or a content creator, you could certainly use a refresher on goal setting and goal getting. So I asked Deb to join us this week to talk about goals, the DEB Method and her experiences as a foodie creator. 

We’ll probably get hungry and set a goal of satiating that need on today’s show.

Links for this episode:

This episode of Winfluence is presented by CIPIO.ai. We are helping brands transform their digital marketing with user-generated content videos and images at scale. Come see us at CIPIO.ai. If you want me to personally show you the platform and how we can solve your digital marketing performance problems with high-performing UGC, just go to jasonfalls.co/cipio … fill out that form and I’ll personally set up time to chat with you.

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 are many ways to slice an apple. Or peel an orange. Or for that matter, there are many ways to get from your house to the office or grocery store … and just as many to get back. 

There are also many ways to approach influence marketing. If you’ve been listening and following along with Winflunce for any amount of time you know that we focus on influence marketing, without the R. While social media celebrities with big followings are one way to slice the influence apple, there are many other ways to ultimately persuade an audience to take action. 

Sam Katz knows this. He is an influence marketing strategist and consultant. His history of work includes stints with Edelman and Publicis One. He and I happened to share the stage at the Influencer Marketing Show in New York last month. He led a panel discussion on creators and owning their own content in the world of unstable social networks. 

We got to talking backstage about a few topics and I thought his take on how businesses and brands can approach influence from a bunch of different angles would make for a good conversation. He told me one thing he sees from clients a lot these days is they don’t know what they don’t know. And that is typically that there are many ways to go from start to finish with influence marketing.

I asked Sam to join us today to talk about that topic along with a few others. He also has a current top-of-mind set of advice for brands and creators about content usage rights we’ll get into as well. He’s a smart one. And we’ll dig into more with Sam today on the show. 

Links for this episode:

This episode of Winfluence is presented by CIPIO.ai. We are helping brands transform their digital marketing with user-generated content videos and images at scale. Come see us at CIPIO.ai. If you want me to personally show you the platform and how we can solve your digital marketing performance problems with high-performing UGC, just go to jasonfalls.co/cipio … fill out that form and I’ll personally set up time to chat with you.

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.

From time to time people find out in conversation that I’m a published author. It’s a monicker and fact that sits in my social media bios and certainly something I say proudly on my website and such, but it’s not something that typically comes up on conversation. When it does, I get asked a lot of questions about it.

Writing a book certainly had a big impact on my professional credibility and personal brand. Though anyone with an idea and the Internet, and maybe a little bit of money, can self-publish, all three of my books have been with legit, business publishing houses. For Winfluence, I even had an agent to help me shop the book around.

As an aside, I love the sound of saying, “My agent will get back to you,” and having one sounds like a big deal. I love ya, Gary, but in reality, it’s not as big of a deal as you might think. It’s like having a real estate agent for your ideas.

Nonetheless, people are curious about writing books. Content creators should be. For the influencer types out there, writing a book takes you to a new level of legitimacy and credibility. If you’re not an influencer but still want to write a book, the hard truth is you’re going to need an audience to market it to if you want a publisher to pay attention to your idea. 

All those nuances of writing books, or at least business books, stuck in Josh Bernoff’s crawl, as they say where I’m from. Josh has three published titles to his name including the groundbreaking book Groundswell he co-authored with Charlene Li. But he’s collaborated on, ghost written or been involved with 45 non-fiction book projects. 

His latest is a new how-to guide that cuts through the fantasy and makes writing a book a very practical thing. It’s called Build a Better Business Book: How to Plan, Write and Promote a Book That Matters.

Sounds a little like the advice we got from Jay Acunzo recently on the show, right?

Josh is here today to share his comprehensive guide for authors to help you write a better book. Or write your first one in a better way. We’re going to dig into whether or not you should be an author, how to be a good one and where books fall into the schema of influence success for creators and brands. 

This episode of Winfluence is presented by CIPIO.ai. We are helping brands transform their digital marketing with user-generated content videos and images at scale. Come see us at CIPIO.ai. If you want me to personally show you the platform and how we can solve your digital marketing performance problems with high-performing UGC, just go to jasonfalls.co/cipio … fill out that form and I’ll personally set up time to chat with you.

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.

Some of you may know I spent the first half of my professional career as a public relations professional in the world of college athletics. Back then we called the job being a sports information director, or SID. The industry evolved to labeling the role something like athletic media relations or athletic communications or similar, but our job was to publicize the teams, coaches and student-athletes.

The first sport I was ever placed in charge of as a student assistant at Morehead State University was the Eagle volleyball team. I hadn’t ever seen volleyball in person before going to college, but was trained to keep statistics at matches by hand … now they do it on computers. I designed the team’s media guide, wrote press releases, pitched ideas to newspaper reporters and TV journalists. 

While volleyball wasn’t the only the sport I worked, it was always my favorite. It was fast, the young women playing were always super athletic, jumping high and crushing the ball into the opponent’s court. I never worked at a school that sponsored men’s volleyball, but I’m kind of glad for that. It helped me appreciate how strong and dominant women can be on the playing courts and fields. 

Last fall I had the opportunity to speak to a public relations class at the University of Louisville. Dr. Karen Freberg is a professor there. She and I have shared the stage at conferences and traveled along side one another a few times. She’s kind of a social media pioneer in the academic circles, building out curricula for the new world of PR thanks to social media, influencers and the like. She has me speak to her class each year, which I always enjoy doing.

Low and behold one of Dr. Freberg’s students last fall was Aiko Jones. She is a star blocker for the Cardinals and was instrumental in the team’s run to the Final Four and National Runners-Up finish. UofL was 31-3 overall with an amazing 17-1 record in the ACC. 

For those of you who don’t know sports, Aiko was one of the dominant players on one of the most dominant teams in the entire country at the college level last year. 

She’s back for her senior year in 2023 and will no doubt make a run at racking up another string of honors. She was Final Four All-Tournament Team and All-Louisville Regional Team in the NCAA Tournament. First Team All-ACC, First Team All-Region.

In layman’s terms, she’s one of the best college volleyball players in the country. 

Which means, she’s well versed in Name Image Likeness benefits and parlaying her athletic prowess into brand deals and collaborations. So, I asked my pal Aiko to come on the show to share some of those experiences with all of us. We’ll learn about NIL from the student-athlete perspective today on Winfluence.  

As always, this episode of Winfluence is presented by CIPIO.ai. Let us scale your user-generated content needs and deliver authentic, high-performing UGC to fuel your paid, owned and earned content strategies. Learn more at CIPIO.ai.

But we want to take a moment to tell you about a new sponsor of the Marketing Podcast Network. Support for all the shows on MPN, including Winfluence, is provided by ActiveCampaign.

If you looking for a way to grow your business, you need to check out ActiveCampaign. It is a powerful marketing automation platform that can help you to increase your sales, improve your customer service, and build stronger relationships with your customers.

With ActiveCampaign, you can create and send email campaigns, manage your leads and customers, create landing pages, set up automated workflows, and track your results. All in one approachable platform! Go to activecampaign.com/activate to sign up 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.