Winfluence with Jason Falls

C.C. Chapman knows a thing or two about influence and influence marketing. He was a pioneer of podcasting back in its first wave in the early to mid-2000s with a show called Managing the Grey. He had the advantage of being in the middle of the social media and tech boom in Boston then, and became a noted blogger, photographer and content creator.

Chapman first came to national and international prominence speaking at events about intellectual property rights and online media. He became an influencer in the marketing and technology space. But he also worked for brands as a marketer and leveraged bloggers, podcasters and new media creators much the way brands do today under the label of influencer marketing. 

He is the co-author of one of the benchmark books about content marketing -- Content Rules which he wrote with Ann Handley of MarketingProfs. It has inspired many a brand and many an influencer to create great content and influence their audiences.

Chapman is now a full-time professor at Wheaton College near Boston, teaching business and marketing to college students. Many of them flock to him to want to know how to be an influencer. He has some sage advice for them.

C.C. and I talk about his evolution, what advice he has for influencers and those wishing to become them today and his thoughts on how brands might explore platforms like TikTok, which he says is -- quote -- pointless. Listen to hear the rest of the explanation and why he thinks TikTok stands out as different than the other social networks.

This is a conversation you'll want to enjoy and share with others. Happy Holidays everyone!

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.

Several of our recent episodes have focused on business to business, or B2B influence marketing. The last couple of conversations we’ve had -- one with Carter Hostelley and another with Mel Carson -- talked about the concept of creating influencers from a company’s executives. 

In this episode of Winfluence, we focus on building influence for a company -- the company itself. Marc Meyer created a beautiful case study of such activity at one of his former companies. I loved it so much I wrote about in Winfluence, the book, which is due out in February. So you get a bit of a sneak peek of that part of the book today on the show.

But our conversation was far more than just the case study. Marc and I talk about the challenges of building content that works in B2B industries, often time one that aren’t super sexy in terms of what kind of topics are relevant. Marc discusses how he tries to separate his content as signal from the noise. And we spend a fair amount of the conversation talking about Twitter and TikTok, one that is a strong B2B channel. The other one that might be? 

Dive in and give it a listen, you’ll get some fun inspiration and a great case study from Marc and a useful discussion about building B2B influence for a company.

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.

Online influencers have evolved in the short 15-20 years that social media sites have been around. When I got into the industry in the mid-2000s, the notable people online were people who had authority and followers as bloggers, or were vote-jockeys on content promotion sites like Reddit and Digg. 

One of the first influential people in that world I made friends with was Tamar Weinberg. She had a popular social media and technology blog at Techipedia. Which is still active, by the way. She was one of the top 50 influencers on Digg.com, which meant if she posted a link to your content, you got a flood of website traffic and credibility. 

While social media influence has evolved to be very social network focused, success still comes to those who can create content. Monetization comes to those who can creatively intertwine branded content in with their own in ways relevant to the community. Blogging is no different, even if the cool kids today aren’t doing it, and Tamar knows long-form written content better than anyone.

As if that angle weren’t enough to want to learn more from her on the podcast, Tamar’s struggle with postpartum depression and motherhood led her down a very interesting path to launch a product -- a fragrance -- appropriately named Tamar. We talk about how that came about and this interesting new direction for her -- I’m sure she’ll be identifying influencers for it as the business grows -- but we also dive into the evolution of what online influencer was versus what it is.

Listen, like and share!

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 really no question that the more personal the relationship, the more powerful it is. In the business world, the big trend for everything from email marketing to e-commerce websites is personalization.

In the influence marketing world agencies and brands hope to break through the inbox clutter and get influencers or media members to respond to their pitch. Personalization here is almost required because few media or influencers are going to respond to an email blast. You have to make that connection.

But it works for the influencers too. For those who want to drive revenue from their community of followers, or those who just have a genuine interest in engaging and valuing the people who do follow them, one-to-one communications goes a long way.

Matt Barnett is the CEO of Bonjoro, one of a number of video email platforms out there. You pay a subscription fee and have a certain number of video emails you can record on our computer or phone each month. A new customer transacts on your website? Hit them with a personal video thank you. It’ll blow their minds.

Matt joined me from his home in Australia to talk about the opportunity for both brands and agencies, but also influencers themselves. Give the talk a listen and then go sign up and try it. You can start impressing people today with a free trial.

Connect with Barnett on LinkedIn. Find more about Bonjoro, learn more at Bonjor.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.

The world of influencer marketing in the context we typically think of it today dates back about 15 years or so to the emergence of blogs. Jeremy Wright co-founded and was the first CEO of B5 Media, one of the original blog networks that eventually sold for millions of dollars. He sees parallels and has advice for today's influencers based on his own experiences, but has also spent his professional time since leaving B5 Media on the agency side of things.

Wright transitioned from influencer-blogger to publishing platform CEO and then to agency strategist. He sees influence marketing from a high level and with an eye for driving business and growth. We dug into the conversation of the philosophy of influence marketing -- transactional versus relational -- and how big companies and brands may still not quite "get" social.

As Wright and I are apt to do with just chatting about the industry, we invented a new marketing analytic -- the P-GAFF -- you'll want to listen for in this episode. (This is where the explicit warning comes from. Heh.)

There are some interesting similarities to 2005 we both see today. The insights Wright shares are always worth hearing. Give it a listen! And then share the episode with someone who will as well.

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.

AspireIQ is about to unleash a new version of its software that is an evolution with the market. The enterprise level software has been one of the great campaign management solutions out there that enables and agency or brand to discover, engage, manage and measure influencer partnerships. Its new version shifts the mindset from online influencers to anyone who can influence your audience. With plugins to e-commerce platforms like Shopify and customer databases, now you can manage content and engagement with influencers, but also impactful customers and other audiences you have transactions with.

Magda Houalla is AspireIQ’s Director of Marketing Strategy. I caught up with her recently to understand more about the software evolution there, but also to talk more broadly about what she and her colleagues are seeing from the marketplace, brand and influencers alike. We talked about the difference in viewing influencers as, well, influencers versus creators, the misconception of influencers being just people on Instagram and YouTube, the philosophy of discovering influencers and beyond.

An interesting discussion about the industry and a peek inside the newest software evolution at AspireIQ are here for the taking. Listen and share!

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 been an evolution in business-to-business (B2B) influence marketing lately. Both software companies and agencies are pushing the idea of brands creating influencers out of company executives. Mel Carson was an early company-based influencer, long before we were talking about all this. He was a digital evangelist at Microsoft in the mid-2000s whose whole job was to become known in the marketing and technology circles as a company spokesperson of sorts. 

Carson moved on from Microsoft to create his own agency that builds influence for its clients in a variety of ways, including executive thought leadership and personal branding. But it’s more than just the CEO, it’s building influencers within a company throughout leadership and management positions. 

He is creating this newly defined category of company-based influencer after having been one of the first of that kind. 

Carson joined Winfluence recently to talk about his journey from that evangelist role at one of the world’s largest companies to creating positions of influence for other leaders in the B2B space. We also talked about the perspective that B2B influence marketing is more sophisticated than most B2C approaches. Mel even explains he doesn’t typically pay influencers for the programs he develops, either, thanks to the long-term relationship building with value exchange at the core. 

Lots of great ideas and inspiration in today’s episode. Do give it a listen and share it with someone you know who might find it useful as well.

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 landscape of influencer marketing tools is wide and varied. We’ve talked to some of the software company executives here on the show. The IZEAs, Onalyticas and Mavrcks of the worlds are large databases with a high-touch managed services that sit on top of them. I’ve used several of them and they’re great. There are others, like ApexDrop, that are more about product distribution and micro-influencer engagement. Still more are just do-it-yourself databases like HypeAudtior that help you find, but you do a lot of the work. And that’s just scratching the surface.

Trend is a relatively new entry into the space and it’s a bit of a hybrid of an influencer marketing discovery platform and a creator marketplace. But it has a slightly different spin than most of the others. It’s an application and invite only platform of highly curated influencers.

Jay Desai is the head of growth at Trend. He joined me to explain a little more about what distinguishes the platform, what they vet influencers for to ensure it’s a strong offering and Trend-specific topics. But more broadly we talk about the current state of the influencer space, the different philosophies in approach, both for brands and for software companies, and more. 

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.

Aaron Anastasi has one of those faces you think is very familiar, but you can’t quite place it. Until you do. He’s a working actor who has played parts on shows like Bosch, 9-1-1 on Fox and others. But if you have ever searched YouTube for singing lessons, you definitely know him.

Aaron is the creator of the Superior Singing Method, a training program and YouTube channel with almost half a million subscribers. That channel funnels people into a subscription program that has now taught almost 100,000 people how to sing better. 

He is also the author of two books to help others find their path to success: “The Voice of Your Dreams” and “The Propserous Mind.”

Aaron joined me to talk about his failures and successes in building influence online, how he balances that, his acting career and his personal life. I asked him very pointedly what influencers out there listening should look for when you don’t feel successful and need to pivot, what his elements of a marketing funnel are, and how he manages a multi-million dollar business of passive income.

Influencers and brands alike can take a page for his superior influence success.

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.

Influencing people isn't just creativity and content mixed together. It's the by-product of the way our brains function. As we experience that content or creativity, hormones release into our system that make us feel safe, happy, sad, angry or any of the other range of emotions. People are subject to their own brain chemistry and cognitive reactions to their environments.

When marketers and influencers understand how that works in their fellow humans, they can influence and persuade more effectively. That's why Tim Ash, a computer and cognitive scientist with years of experience building digital experiences for brands, wrote his new book. Unleash Your Primal Brain - Demystifying How We Think and Why We Act. The book explains everything from the evolution of us as a species to the happiness hormones and what triggers them.

Tim and I talked about the book, how cognitive science can inform marketers about working with influencers and vice-versa. He also broke down the brain science behind influence in the first place. This episode is heady ... because that's what we're talking about. Give it a listen and share it with someone you know who will find it as interesting as you do.

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.