Nathan Pettijohn's Blog

This article was originally published on  my Forbes column here .

On June 30, 2017, the New Jersey rapper Tay-K (born Taymor McIntyre and also known as Tay-K 47) uploaded a music video called “The Race” to YouTube. Wanted for murder in connection to a crime committed when he was just 16 years old, Tay-K had been on the lam since escaping house arrest three months earlier. The music video shows him waving a gun and making it clear that he had no intention of going to trial.

Both the song and the video have a raw authenticity that helped them go viral. Tay-K was rapping about his own truth and wasn’t simply another posturing artist fronting a facade. Today, “The Race” has 168 million views on YouTube. Tay-K wasn’t so lucky: Working off tips that streamed in on the heels of the video, U.S. Marshals arrested him later that day.

Tay-K’s story paints a clear picture of the absurdity of “self-snitching,” a phenomenon in which people post evidence of their crimes on social media. Most high-profile cases of self-snitching come from the rap world: For example, both Chicago rapper Chief Keef and New York rapper Tekashi 69 have run afoul of the law thanks to videos posted online.

However, self-snitching is just one symptom of a broader cultural phenomenon. We are living in a time when young people literally fall off buildings while looking for a perfect Instagram shot. Desperate for the dopamine hit that comes with social media likes and shares, people are going to increasingly extreme measures to get immediate notification gratification. As a result, many people post first and ask questions later—only to find that their choices come back to haunt them. They’re accidental self-snitchers, and this might be their moment.

Rise of the self-snitchers

Social media hasn’t just made it more tempting to self-snitch on purpose. By multiplying the number of platforms available for online sharing and removing any friction from the posting process, social media has also made it much easier to self-snitch by accident. With the click of a button on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook or any number of other apps, an inattentive user can ruin his or her reputation and possibly their career. Rather than a quest for likes, this kind of self-snitching usually arises from simple stupidity.

The poster boy for this kind of self-snitching is Anthony Weiner, who infamously tweeted a lewd picture of himself because he didn’t understand how to send a direct message. Ted Cruz—or the staffer who ran his social media—could be a runner up for the title. In 2017, Cruz’s official Twitter account liked a pornographic tweet, setting off a flurry of speculation about the sexual habits of the conservative senator, who previously defended Texas’ ban on sex toys.

But while rappers seem to end up in prison or worse for their crimes, the political class rarely seems to suffer for their own self-snitching. In this case, at least, what Donald Trump said seems true: He really could shoot a man in the middle of Fifth Avenue and get away with it, by virtue of being a politician—at least, if the evidence was posted online.

On a recent episode of “Last Week Tonight with John Oliver,” the bespectacled host described numerous offensive posts and tweets by Australian politicians who were somehow still able to run for office. The posts included anti-Muslim, homophobic and anti-Semitic comments, as well as a rape joke and “a plethora of lewd photos” one candidate posted to his personal Facebook.

Closer to home, the former governor of Virginia’s poor judgment was exposed when the public discovered his medical school yearbook, which included photos of him in blackface and Klansman attire. Even Weiner had a real chance to resurrect his career after his first offense. (It was a later incident involving sexting a minor that finally put him in prison.)

We can only imagine what would have happened if Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh had access to social media in high school, when he allegedly raped a classmate. But experience suggests that even if damning evidence of his misdeeds had been posted online, the end result might have been the same. Politicians—particularly white, male politicians—have long self-snitched online without real repercussions.

Soon, however, that might change. As investor Mark Cuban pointed out in a recent Inc. interview, software can already predict your purchase habits and product preferences based on which posts you like and who you follow on social media. Someday, that same data could be used to predict other actions, including your likelihood of committing crimes. It sounds like something out of the sci-fi world of Minority Report, but it’s not far from reality today. All of us—including white, male aspiring politicians—would be foolish not to prepare for it.

Think twice before posting

The takeaway is simple: People should curate what they post online and stop posting stupid stuff. If posting something seems questionable, then you shouldn’t post it. In our social media-obsessed universe, too many people believe that the more likes they get, the happier they will be. If wild and crazy content earns more attention, that public approval must make it okay to post.

But the truth is that most people will be just as happy with 14 likes on a post as they would be with 80,000. Social media “success” will never bring enough happiness to justify centering your life around your uploads—let alone risking your reputation. In addition, around 70% of hiring managers screen candidates’ social media before deciding to hire them. If nothing else, people should understand that their posts impact their potential career success.

If you’re struggling to stick to a social media diet, just repeat this mantra: Not everyone needs to know every single thing about your day. Up until the last decade or two, our species survived just fine without posting every thought they had, so your day won’t be ruined if you don’t know the shape of the heart in Karen’s latte. Even if it doesn’t seem like it now, in our constant rush of 21st-century technological innovation, your life on social media is much less important than your real life—and more people should remember that. At some point, the best answer may be to just unplug.

The post Snitches Get Stitches: Why You Should Think Twice Before You Post appeared first on Cordurouy.

This week we launched a new CBD dog treat company called Gus and Boogie. After years of Cordurouy working on marketing and branding projects for other brands, I finally wanted to incubate a brand of my own. Patrick McMahon, the founder of one of the first vertically integrated cannabis companies in California, and I connected about this idea a few years ago, and after a few other projects working together, we decided it was time to give it a try.

We named the company after Patrick’s chihuahuas, in memory of the late Boogie and in honor of his current dog Gus. As a dog with anxiety, Patrick had started giving Gus CBD and saw an immediate improvement in Gus being social and happy to explore. Whereas before he may be hesitant and nervous at a dog park, with CBD now Gus was happy to go explore and meet new dogs and people.

The science behind CBD for humans or animals is in the early stages of research, so it is exciting to be involved at the forefront with this new venture. Among our goals are to partner with veterinarians and universities to help collect data that can be beneficial to developing new products that are designed with scientific backing to help improve the lives of our pets. 

CBD, or cannabidiol, is one of over 80 cannabinoid extracts found in the cannabis plant, it non-psychoactive and produces no “high” or euphoria. It may be beneficial for pain, inflammation, anxiety, nausea, and seizures. Our first two products are: a bacon-flavored tincture that you can put in your dog’s food or directly in their mouth, and a CBD soft chew dog treat that is vegan and free of corn, soy, dairy, and wheat. 

The post Why We Started A CBD Dog Treat Brand appeared first on Cordurouy.

This article was originally published on my Forbes column here.

In 2017, Sarah Solomon woke up in a hostel in San Juan del Sur, Nicaragua. Days earlier, she’d left her life as a high-flying New York publicist to travel the world. Now, she was on the greatest adventure of her life, using freelance PR work to make ends meet as she roamed the globe with her boyfriend, another digital nomad who’d quit his job at a lucrative consulting firm.

Solomon’s radical break from the office grind might seem like an extreme lifestyle choice—but it’s actually one more people should emulate. In 2019, most people suffer from some form of technology addiction. In fact, Americans check their phones an average of 52 times per day, including keeping tabs on work during personal hours. But that’s just an average; some admit to checking their phone 100 times per day or more. We’re spending our lives glued to screens while the real world passes us by.

This phenomenon is best described as the “attention economy,” in which dangerously addictive digital stimuli vie for our limited attention, leaving us frazzled, burned-out and less creative than ever.

As a result, today’s entrepreneurs don’t necessarily dream of a $100 million exit. Most people would rather blog about making pasta in Italy than burn the midnight oil for a corporate overlord. After all, why work more and produce less for companies laying off employees left and right when you can launch what marketer Drew Sanocki calls a “lifestyle business”? Instead of making lots of money to spend on more expensive gadgets, people are realizing that investing in experiences leads to a more fulfilling life.Today In: Leadership

While taking a step back at work might seem counterintuitive, it might be the only cure for our widespread technology addiction—and the only way we’ll actually have time to enjoy life.

People are always plugged in—and their work isn’t better for it

Today, people lead busy lives that seem built on constantly being plugged in. At work, emails, text messages and social notifications continuously pile up—all at the same time. People pride themselves on their hustle, their drive and, most of all, their ability to multitask.

However, studies show the idea of multitasking is a myth. Multitasking means simply jumping from to-do-list item to to-do-list item, never diving deeply enough into anything to come up with new creative ideas. No wonder science found that this constant hurried pace dulls your IQ as much as skipping an entire night of sleep.

It’s also no wonder that more than half of employees report feeling overworked, citing longer than 40-hour work weeks necessary just to stay afloat in a job market with faster turnaround times and lower job security. In an environment that seems to demand more and more of workers and bosses alike, burnout has become epidemic. A recent viral article summed up the experience of modern adulthood this way: “‘To adult’ is to complete your to-do list—but everything goes on the list, and the list never ends.”

The biggest problem? Despite the fact that today’s employees do more, they produce less. Or in the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ terms, despite this rise in hours worked, productivity is growing at the slowest rate ever.

Luckily, there’s a middle ground between being constantly plugged in and being professionally unplugged.

Focus on what’s truly important and let go of the rest

You don’t need to renounce your smartphone to access the benefits of unplugging. Instead, you have to be aware of how tech companies manipulate our attention and take steps to reclaim your ability to unplug.

Tristan Harris spent three years as a design ethicist at Google. He knows firsthand that, in the race to monopolize our attention, tech companies design interfaces that pit our psychological vulnerabilities against us. Apps purposely interrupt us, prey on our fear of missing out and disguise the real breadth of choices available. Now that Harris isn’t working for Google, he urges people to regain control of their attention by recognizing and resisting these mechanisms.

Another example of this is what author Greg McKeown calls “Essentialism,” or the practice of making space and time for only the most important things and exporting all the rest. In his book of the same name, McKeown argues that Essentialism is “not a business phenomenon, but a human phenomenon” that can yield better work-life balance.

Essentialism isn’t simply walking away from it all to go live in a shack with no cell reception or Wi-Fi, though that could certainly be your answer. It actually comes when you balance the activities you love with work you love. So, if you stop pretending to multitask and actually focus for a few hours on a single project, clients will be happier with the work, and you’ll have extra time to travel around the world.

Think you couldn’t possibly make the time?

Exhibit A: Marc Benioff. As the CEO of Salesforce, he’s a busy guy. He also recently bought Time Magazine and even took on helping provide funding for the homeless in San Francisco.

And while the stock market had its worst year in the last 10 in 2018, Salesforce stock grew 34%.

Why? Because after a two-week vacation where Benioff completely unplugged, he realized he was too busy and named a co-CEO, so the two could “divide and conquer.” As a result, he has time to do the things he cares about.

It’s true, though, not everyone is a billionaire who can export half the work of their lives to a co-CEO. How can you take the same lessons of Essentialism to help you focus on what matters while still doing great work before taking off to Thailand or Timbuktu?

Use automation to its full potential

In choosing where we spend our attention, technology doesn’t always have to be a negative force. Automation technology can free us from constantly monitoring work on our devices.

It might seem like it takes a special touch to pick the right Instagram story filter or email subject line. However, social media, email and other admin duties are some of the easiest tasks to outsource, delegate or automate, freeing up time to spend on more important things in life.

There are plenty of ways to test this approach on your own workflow, from adopting the Fortune 500 CEO mindset of using virtual admins to streamline the day to using software tools to automate posts across various channels, creating the consistency necessary for growing a following.

While it’s not as glamorous as becoming a travel blogger or Instagram influencer, it’s an easy and practical way to do better work and not just work more.

Less is more

Today, technology is designed to keep us constantly plugged in, yet never fully satisfied. Instead of renewing our energy or enhancing our connections, technology leaves us feeling drained by the constant barrage of notifications that prevent us from truly living.

It’s not always easy, but taking a step back is the best way to open up the creative space necessary in today’s business world. Tomorrow’s economy is knowledge-based, which means deeper thinking, innovation and creativity aren’t just nice-to-have skills; they are need-to-have competitive advantages. While it might feel good to check small administrative tasks off your to-do list, every minute spent handling work someone else could do is a minute not devoted to the next big idea.

There’s a balance between strategic unplugging, delegation and automation—and within it, there can be more time for the things that matter but also more results for the clients that matter, too. Sometimes it’s true that less is more: More time, more focus and more business.

The post Why You Will Be Happier If You Unplug appeared first on Cordurouy.

This article was originally published on my Forbes column here.

Picture yourself preparing for a vacation to Sedona, Arizona. As you search for the best tips on where to eat, hike or spend a day at the spa, you’ll probably find yourself flipping the pages of a travel magazine or scrolling through articles online. Sure enough, you find the suggestions you’re looking for and start booking your vacation.

You might guess the article you’re reading appears in Travel + Leisure or Condé Nast Traveler. But you’re actually reading Airbnbmag, a branded magazine partnership that pairs Airbnb’s travel insights with the power of Hearst’s world-class magazine production.

Airbnbmag is an example of how branded content is transforming the way brands engage their audiences. When the publication was launched in 2017, Airbnb was valued at approximately $30 billion—but its execs knew that simply competing in the hospitality space is no longer enough to ensure long-term success.

To foster loyal brand advocates, Airbnb needed to enhance its image as a premium lifestyle brand—a challenge Hearst Magazines had already mastered for 25 national magazines with more than 300 global editions. The partnership proved lucrative for Hearst and opened new opportunities for Airbnb to compete with legacy travel brands in media.

Today, successful brands think of themselves as media companies by investing in premium content that performs well on multiple platforms, cuts through audience fragmentation, and engages customers in real dialogue

Cross-platform content will replace single channel brands

Businesses that rely solely on a website and traditional advertising to hold their audience’s attention will soon fall behind. Today’s media landscape demands a cross-platform approach with multiple touchpoints for connecting with consumers.

Brands today compete in a flattened media landscape. When people consume content online, in print, on podcasts or through videos, they’re more likely to care about the quality of the content than who created it or even where it appears.

Media companies and traditional businesses are adjusting their idea of where, how and why content is created and published. Platforms like Instagram, Twitter and YouTube are designed to make branded content feel as relevant and accessible as content from a friend or a media company. In fact, the distinction between branded and non-branded content is so subtle that the Federal Trade Commission developed new guidelines that crack down on brands that disguise the promotional purpose behind their content.

To cope with this shift, brands are increasingly embracing a cross-platform approach. Instead of creating a branded blog or Instagram profile, smart businesses repurpose their content and optimize assets for multiple platforms. A successful brand is instantly recognizable, no matter where its content appears.

For example, Marriott invests heavily in a global brand studio that nimbly crafts content to engage millions of people around the world. By hiring media professionals, Marriott uses creativity and storytelling to create memorable premium content that engages its audience.

In 2015, Marriott produced a 24-minute short film called French Kiss about an American business traveler who’s staying at a Paris Marriott only to be drawn into a romantic cat-and-mouse chase with a playful French woman.

In a single channel approach, Marriott might have posted French Kiss on its website and waited for people to discover it. Instead, the film was released on YouTube, where it has attracted more than 6.2 million views. French Kiss was also screened at a gala hosted at Los Angeles’ Marina del Rey Marriott, ran in movie theaters, and became an in-room entertainment option on Marriott’s televisions and website. By starting with one content asset, Marriott launched a cross-platform campaign that reached its audience through a wide variety of channels online and in person.

Any company that invests in premium content should maximize its initial investment by taking a cross-platform approach.

Content needs to reach fragmented audiences

Today, people consume more content on a wider range of platforms than ever before. According to Nielsen, American adults spend up to 11 hours consuming media each day, including up to six hours of video content split between streaming platforms, mobile apps, traditional television and websites. As the recent wave of layoffs across the media industry shows, this fragmentation presents serious challenges for content producers.

Traditional targeted advertising still plays an important role in content creation. Before brands invest in content like Marriott’s short film, they should audit audience data that informs them where content should be targeted and what should be created in the first place. While Marriott’s business travelers might enjoy its short film, other businesses might attract an audience that wants to curl up with a magazine or listen to a podcast at the gym.

Content should be published on and optimized for platforms where your audience naturally congregates, directly engaging the people who are most likely to share it.

For example, Panera Bread, the popular sandwich and pastry chain, recently launched a new labeling system to help customers understand how its food supports a healthy diet. Panera Bread used this seemingly mundane administrative shift as the catalyst behind Food Interrupted, a new six-episode digital video series that published content weekly.

In addition to publishing the episodes on a mini website dedicated to the project, Panera Bread embraced the fact that food content is a mainstay on Instagram, which features more than 319 million posts with the hashtag “food.”

For its Food Interrupted campaign, Panera Bread repurposed video clips from the series as Instagram posts for its 477,000 followers, using a branded hashtag. The strategy worked: One Instagram video of a recipe for baking whole grain bread attracted nearly 17,000 views. The video was shot in the same style as BuzzFeed’s popular Tasty series, showing easy-to-follow instructions paired with an overhead shot of a person’s hands going through each step.

Panera Bread’s savvy content strategy leveraged its audience’s existing presence on Instagram to craft content optimized for the platform. Although viewers still flocked to the Food Interrupted website to watch full episodes featuring celebrities like Marcus Samuelsson and Rainn Wilson, those who didn’t migrate from Instagram still had the opportunity to directly engage with optimized versions of the video content in platform.

Content should spark authentic dialogue with audiences

Brands should use content to directly engage their audiences, incorporating readers’ and viewers’ feedback to enrich the content itself.

Most newspapers and magazines feature a Letters to the Editor section that invites readers to share their own opinions and insights. Similarly, brands can leverage user-generated content to enter a public dialogue with loyal fans.

Vans provides a smart example of how user-generated social media content can enhance an e-commerce website. The California-based shoe company sells customized shoes and backpacks, allowing customers to select colors and materials and even upload their own designs. The e-commerce pages selling these products prominently feature user-generated Instagram posts of custom designs.

By inviting fans to post images of their custom products and rewarding them with a spot on the company’s website, Vans uses content to prove it not only talks to customers but also listens to them and values their contributions.

Brands can even engage in dialogue with each other to catch fans’ attention. On Twitter, brands including MoonPie, Wendy’s and Denny’s have all mastered the witty banter that tends to go viral on the platform. The brands’ social media exchanges regularly receive media coverage and thousands of shares and likes from fans. The Twitter content these brands post is genuinely clever and engaging, and some posts are memorable enough to spark conversation that lasts for hours or even days, such as MoonPie’s response to a picture of a “Mooncake” on NASA’s official Twitter.

Content doesn’t require an explicit sales goal if it improves customers’ overall awareness of and experience with a brand. As online platforms encourage direct engagement between brands and followers, content should serve as an opportunity for authentic dialogue.

Investing in content pays dividends

To win new customers and earn greater loyalty from existing ones, brands should invest in high-quality content.

Companies are increasingly partnering with media outlets to produce branded video series, editorially rigorous magazines and ambitious audio shows. These partnerships yield content that’s subtly branded and highly creative, achieving the same level of quality audiences expect from non-branded content.

For companies that lack the budget to embark on a premium content partnership, there are still plenty of ways to create content like a media company. Online brand partnerships with influencers can tap into new audiences in an age of growing fragmentation, and all companies can repurpose their content for multiple channels to maximize the value of each asset they create.

To stand out in today’s media landscape, companies need to embrace the reality that “content is king” and start investing in high-quality media that uses audience insights and brand advocates to inform, entertain and inspire customer loyalty.

The post Why Every Company Is A Media Company appeared first on Cordurouy.

This article was originally published on  my Forbes column here .

Technology makes it easy to automate or delegate certain tasks in your life. Some people start their mornings by cueing Alexa to turn on the lights and make a pot of coffee. Others set their bills to autopay or outsource and automate email, calendars and other rote tasks. These workarounds clear time from our schedules and also bring joy to our lives: Studies show that buying more time can actually make us happier.

Out of all the distractions of modern life, social media is one of the biggest destroyers of our time. The purpose of technology should be to make our lives easier, not more cluttered or complicated. Yet how often do you find yourself scrolling through never-ending feeds of baby photos and political tweets instead of being present with your surroundings? Probably even more than you think: The average American adult spends more than 11 hours a day interacting with media.

Yet, few people think to automate their social media the way they would automate the making of their morning coffee. That might be because so many online marketing or social media professionals stress that you should “be authentic” on your social media accounts. Honestly though, in today’s society, what really constitutes authenticity anymore? When Bill Maher described “Avatar America,” he observed that our carefully curated online personas were already by definition inauthentic.

Why spend more time managing your less authentic—and therefore less interesting—online self than you have to? Instead, use modern technology to automate that lamer version of yourself as much as possible, so you can spend more of your time being present with family and friends or pursuing value-generating activities.

Set up, optimize and link your profiles

If you’re a founder or CEO, curating your online persona and positioning yourself as a thought leader is about more than just vanity metrics—what comes up when your name is Googled can also impact your company or even your career.

A recent CareerBuilder survey indicates that around 70% of employers look at job candidates’ social media during the hiring process. Yet, while it’s important to put some level of thought into what to share online, your screen shouldn’t consume all your time.

There are numerous resources online about how to optimize your profiles. In short, you should set up and link accounts on all social media platforms. Linking these accounts correctly can have a big impact on search rankings. If a quick search on Google pulls up photos of you drinking at a college party, you can use a service like BrandYourself to help clean up your existing online reputation.

Generate and organize your content

Unlike how VHS tapes once competed for shelf space or how television networks fought for programming slots, today it’s easier than ever to create high quality content with very low overhead, marginal distribution costs and opportunities for high visibility. If you are serious about building your personal brand, you’ll want to produce, program and distribute content with a determined strategy and focus. Start by taking lessons from Gary Vaynerchuck and create “hero” or cornerstone content about you and your business. Then use smaller pieces of this content to disperse on social media. Take an hour to record an interview with another expert in your industry and start a podcast.

Get creative. If you’re an entrepreneur or small-business owner, you can write original articles about topics you are knowledgeable about. You can also create videos of your customers giving short testimonials saying why they work with you. The point is to create original content that will help grow your thought leadership rather than linking to another person’s work.

If you’re short on time, you can hire copywriters and videographers to help generate your content. You can find writers through freelancing sites like Textbroker. At the very least, you can aggregate articles, free stock photos, memes or infographics that you find online. Google Alerts is a great tool to keep on top of certain topics, and an app like Crowdfire can help you source relevant content. The material you create today can be repurposed in the future as top ten lists or “cream of the crop.” Just make sure to only share work that is in line with your brand’s identity and goals.

Another route for creating content is to mine it from other sources. If you are determined, you could set a bot to pore over weekly film reviews and then get it to paraphrase them into new pieces written by a fake film critic. These new reviews could then be shared, linked to and submitted to aggregate sites like Rotten Tomatoes. If a fake Russian art historian can build a fanbase from regurgitated content, you most certainly can also.

One of the most hilarious examples of repurposing content is the Twitter account @horse_ebooks, which was used to auto-tweet random passages from equestrian books back in 2012. Yahoo Sports and Associated Press were some of the first adopters of this type of robot writing, which works by interpreting data sets and then structuring coherent articles.

You can read Part 2 of this article here.

Technology makes it easy to automate or delegate certain tasks in your life. Some people start their mornings by cueing Alexa to turn on the lights and make a pot of coffee. Others set their bills to autopay or outsource and automate email, calendars and other rote tasks. These workarounds clear time from our schedules and also bring joy to our lives: Studies show that buying more time can actually make us happier.

Out of all the distractions of modern life, social media is one of the biggest destroyers of our time. The purpose of technology should be to make our lives easier, not more cluttered or complicated. Yet how often do you find yourself scrolling through never-ending feeds of baby photos and political tweets instead of being present with your surroundings? Probably even more than you think: The average American adult spends more than 11 hours a day interacting with media.

Yet, few people think to automate their social media the way they would automate the making of their morning coffee. That might be because so many online marketing or social media professionals stress that you should “be authentic” on your social media accounts. Honestly though, in today’s society, what really constitutes authenticity anymore? When Bill Maher described “Avatar America,” he observed that our carefully curated online personas were already by definition inauthentic.

Why spend more time managing your less authentic—and therefore less interesting—online self than you have to? Instead, use modern technology to automate that lamer version of yourself as much as possible, so you can spend more of your time being present with family and friends or pursuing value-generating activities.

Set up, optimize and link your profiles

If you’re a founder or CEO, curating your online persona and positioning yourself as a thought leader is about more than just vanity metrics—what comes up when your name is Googled can also impact your company or even your career.

A recent CareerBuilder survey indicates that around 70% of employers look at job candidates’ social media during the hiring process. Yet, while it’s important to put some level of thought into what to share online, your screen shouldn’t consume all your time.

There are numerous resources online about how to optimize your profiles. In short, you should set up and link accounts on all social media platforms. Linking these accounts correctly can have a big impact on search rankings. If a quick search on Google pulls up photos of you drinking at a college party, you can use a service like BrandYourself to help clean up your existing online reputation.

Generate and organize your content

Unlike how VHS tapes once competed for shelf space or how television networks fought for programming slots, today it’s easier than ever to create high quality content with very low overhead, marginal distribution costs and opportunities for high visibility. If you are serious about building your personal brand, you’ll want to produce, program and distribute content with a determined strategy and focus. Start by taking lessons from Gary Vaynerchuck and create “hero” or cornerstone content about you and your business. Then use smaller pieces of this content to disperse on social media. Take an hour to record an interview with another expert in your industry and start a podcast.

Get creative. If you’re an entrepreneur or small-business owner, you can write original articles about topics you are knowledgeable about. You can also create videos of your customers giving short testimonials saying why they work with you. The point is to create original content that will help grow your thought leadership rather than linking to another person’s work.

If you’re short on time, you can hire copywriters and videographers to help generate your content. You can find writers through freelancing sites like Textbroker. At the very least, you can aggregate articles, free stock photos, memes or infographics that you find online. Google Alerts is a great tool to keep on top of certain topics, and an app like Crowdfire can help you source relevant content. The material you create today can be repurposed in the future as top ten lists or “cream of the crop.” Just make sure to only share work that is in line with your brand’s identity and goals.

Another route for creating content is to mine it from other sources. If you are determined, you could set a bot to pore over weekly film reviews and then get it to paraphrase them into new pieces written by a fake film critic. These new reviews could then be shared, linked to and submitted to aggregate sites like Rotten Tomatoes. If a fake Russian art historian can build a fanbase from regurgitated content, you most certainly can also.

One of the most hilarious examples of repurposing content is the Twitter account @horse_ebooks, which was used to auto-tweet random passages from equestrian books back in 2012. Yahoo Sports and Associated Press were some of the first adopters of this type of robot writing, which works by interpreting data sets and then structuring coherent articles.

You can read Part 2 of this article here.

The post Why You Should Automate Your Social Media appeared first on Cordurouy.

This article was originally published on  my Forbes column here .

E-commerce is booming, and one player is leading the charge. Amazon is expected to drive 80% of all e-commerce growth this year. That is tough market domination for anyone to crack.

Enter Google, Amazon’s long-time rival, which has recently begun pouring resources into its alternative e-commerce platform, Google Shopping. And the timing couldn’t be better: according to a survey from Survata, search engines’ share of U.S. consumers’ initial product searches grew from 28% to 36% between 2016 and 2017, while Amazon’s dropped from 55% in 2016 to 49% in 2017.

This isn’t the first time that Google has disrupted an area which Amazon dominates. They recently expanded their Home device range to directly compete with Amazon’s Echo line of devices. The reviews are split, despite Amazon’s long market monopoly; Google launched Google Home in November 2016, a full two years after Amazon debuted the Echo smart speaker and had launched two versions of the smaller Dot. The competition between the device’s voice assistants—Google’s Google Assistant and Amazon’s Alexa—remains just as tight.

And as the two Goliaths fight over e-commerce, small to medium-sized e-commerce companies have an opening.

Kyle C. Murphy, practitioner faculty of strategy at Pepperdine Graziadio Business School, knows e-commerce inside out. Here are a few of his insights as to how smaller companies can profit.

The convenience of Google’s Shopping feed

Amazon is the e-commerce incumbent. According to researchers at eMarketer, Amazon is set to take 49.1% of all U.S. e-commerce sales in 2018—that works out to 5% of all retail sales in the country.

Google Shopping is a direct challenge. The goal is to allow users to search and then click “buy now” directly from Google by using Google Express. “Google facilitates the transaction without the need to go a vendor’s website and navigate the purchase process,” says Murphy. “They’re trying bring customers and stores closer together through Google search.”

Google has experimented with its Shopping feature for a few years, but it is just now becoming a game changer for small to medium-sized e-commerce companies. That is in large part because of the convenience that is being built into the product.

“People buy a lot of things on Amazon because it’s easy; you just click a button and it is done,” says Murphy. “People aren’t going for the lowest price, they’re going for convenience. That’s where Amazon dominates. Google’s trying to get in on that.”

A friendlier deal through Google

Amazon’s platform has matured in a direction that makes it difficult for smaller e-commerce companies to stand out. It is very hard to show up in an Amazon search due to stiff competition and a proliferation of knock-offs. Also, while Amazon used to encourage more organic search results, it now practically requires that companies buy ads to show up in searches—most of the time the top three products that are listed are sponsored. In addition, Amazon then takes a cut of the revenue for any purchase.

The numbers are pessimistic. According to a report by e-commerce market intelligence firm PipeCandy, Amazon has over two million sellers worldwide, but only about 100,000 sellers make $100,000 in profit a year. Cumulatively, those 100,000 sellers have paid $30 billion in commission to Amazon—and that doesn’t even include any advertising the sellers paid for.

For the 85% of e-commerce companies that generate less than $1 million in revenue (again according to PipeCandy), Amazon may no longer be an attractive option. However, those smaller companies can gain an advantage by getting listed on Google Shopping.

As Google innovates, it is building an environment friendlier to smaller e-commerce sellers. For example, while Google does require some advertising in order to be seen, companies “don’t have to spend as much to show up in searches if they get their product feed to Google working well,” Murphy says.

Challenges still exist through Google Shopping

There is one small downside to Google Shopping: to get listed, sellers have to jump through a few hoops.

For one, Google pulls all its listings data directly from a seller’s website, and it expects the information on that website to be extremely clean. The company can choose to exclude sellers who do not comply with its strict listing standards. “If you say ‘sale’ or some promotional information headline, it’ll kick it out and won’t accept it,” Murphy says. For wannabe Google Shopping sellers, carefully constructing product content to meet Google’s product data specification guidelines is a must. That means attending to details like the file size of the product image—non-clothing products use an image of at least 100 x 100 pixels, and clothing products use an image of at least 250 x 250 pixels, for example.

In addition, Google asks sellers to update their listings every 30 days, otherwise the product will drop off Google Shopping.

In other words, submitting to the feed management tool can be time-consuming and require a lot of attention to detail. Sellers must check and double-check small details to ensure the product data meets Google’s requirements, like whether the listing is in the right category and if the headline keywords are correct, for example. There are third-party services that optimize and manage listings on the seller’s behalf. These can often smooth the process and can be a smart investment.

Though it may not be quite as simple to use as Amazon, Google gives smaller e-commerce companies a greater opportunity to generate profit. E-commerce sellers simply need to follow Google’s guidelines carefully, and they could reap real rewards.

The post Google And Amazon’s Competition Is A Win For Smaller E-Commerce Companies appeared first on Cordurouy.

This article was originally published on my Forbes column here .

If you are in Birmingham, United Kingdom, you might check Yelp to find a good Argentinian-style restaurant. You might even see a review that Ivan Stravensky wrote about his favorite restaurant, and decide to eat there based on his glowing recommendation.

There’s only one problem: the review is fake, much like Ivan himself.

When buying something new or trying out a new service, many of us head online to check what other customers think. In fact, over 80% of adults in the United States occasionally read online customer reviews before buying something for the first time. But only half of those who read reviews think they give an accurate description of the product, according to the Pew Research Center.

That is because online reviews and ratings can be manipulated. I know firsthand just how easy it is to fake credibility online: in 2017, I created a fake Russian named Ivan Stravensky. Clearly, Ivan has never been to the Argentinian restaurant in Birmingham, but that didn’t stop “him” from writing a five-star review for it. One person even found it “useful.”

All that is needed to create a person out of thin air is a unique name, a few social media accounts and some content—and this can be done repeatedly to create several shell accounts. With new online identities, anyone could easily review CEOs on Glassdoor, products on Amazon, hotels on TripAdvisor and dog grooming services on Yelp.

But blockchain could soon make it more difficult to create convincing fake accounts. The result could be a more trustworthy, reliable and transparent internet.

Radical transparency of online reviews

Last year, a U.S. based car dealership was forced to pay a $3.6 million fine after it was discovered that it had planted fake reviews. You might also remember the guy who managed to manipulate TripAdvisor’s ratings system to turn a shed in his backyard into the top-ranked restaurant in all of London.

But with blockchain, there will be ways to track whether the person leaving a review actually ate dinner at the restaurant they’re reviewing, groomed their dog at the salon they’re rating or purchased the product they’re giving five stars.

Blockchain records quantifiable data and stores it in a block, which is then added together in a chain of similar information blocks. Each block needs to be verified across a network of computers before it can be added to the chain; once it has been verified, it cannot be altered, meaning the data is both transparent and secure.

This system can be used to create a digital map of someone, almost like an online ID; birth records, home addresses and university certificates can all be kept on blockchain.

Blockchain could also track our day-to-day activities. When linked with data generated through the Internet of Things, blockchain can record and verify that an employee was at a certain office location on workdays via location data, or track customers’ shopping habits through their payment data.

In short, blockchain enables us to track and authenticate that we have firsthand knowledge of the products and services that we are reviewing.

Early-stage startups missing the mark?

Reviews are big business—so much so that one man is being sued in the U.S. for a three-star review he left on TripAdvisor. The lawsuit alleges that he did not go on a specific tour that as he claimed he had been on in his review. Using blockchain, the tour operator would be able to quickly verify this information.

Blockchain will be fundamental in the creation of new and radically transparent versions of review sites like Yelp, Glassdoor and TripAdvisor.

Indeed, the system’s radical transparency is already transforming other industries. All Public Art uses blockchain to verify the provenance of works of art. The core principles of blockchain—namely, its ability to authenticate and verify transactions—can easily and quickly guarantee the validity of a previous transaction, thereby confirming the ownership of the artwork.

But startups using blockchain to verify online product reviews, such as Zapit and Revain, are currently focusing on using cryptocurrency to pay users when they post true and accurate reviews. But blockchain is capable of far more than simply offering an “incentive for honesty.” Instead, a review could be immediately authenticated by checking a user’s ID and their transaction and location history on the decentralized database.

The downsides of anonymity

User anonymity is central to the spirit and personality of sites like Reddit and niche networks such as Amino apps. Usernames can be basic or creative, and do not need to reference the user’s actual real-world identity, which helps to foster communities where people feel free to express their opinions. At the same time, anonymity also frees individuals to express hateful views and make threatening remarks that, without the internet’s veil of namelessness, they may not make. But when it comes to looking for unbiased information to help make purchasing decisions, anonymity is not helpful to other potential customers: how can they trust the review, when for all they know it could be written an entirely made-up character?

Sites that have systems of verification are more credible. Apps like Uber, Turo and Airbnb are tied to Facebook accounts and credit cards. Face ID, thumbprints and other verification methods give users confidence in the reviews; they also make users care about the reviews they receive as a “guest” or “rider,” because those ratings will follow them around afterwards. Obviously, it would be easy to create accounts on these platforms under a shell account, but these methods—documentation, user data, facial recognition—are solving issues of verification.

Soon, this conversation may take on a higher level of importance, especially now that AI bots are able to write reviews that are strangely convincing. In fact, it will soon be impossible to tell the difference between reviews written by bots and those written by real people.

Therefore, blockchain’s contributions to radical transparency and an increase in trustworthiness on the web is a positive development. It may be the innovation that puts our minds at ease about fake news and fake reviews.

Being realistic about implementation

However, verification and decentralization do not necessarily go hand in hand.

Imagine that Walmart uses blockchain technologies to track apples from the farm to their store to your table. How do you know the apples you bought are actually organic or from a certain farm if Walmart owns every node on the chain? At the beginning of the chain you are trusting that farmer; throughout the rest of the chain, you are trusting Walmart the same as you would without the blockchain.

Verification protocols need to be incorporated with the wealth of data available and a certain amount of decentralization to make any sense. When it comes to creating a more trustworthy world, blockchain holds incredible promise; however, there is still a ways to go.

The post How Blockchain Could Put An End To Fake Online Identities appeared first on Cordurouy.

The following is an edited excerpt from the book,  Zen and the Art of Admin Tasks , by Nic De Castro and Nathan Pettijohn.

“Time is the coin of your life. It is the only coin you have, and only you can determine how it will be spent. Be careful lest you let other people spend it for you.” – Carl Sandburg

Imagine any high-powered, wheeling-and-dealing CEO, and rest assured they have an administrative assistant helping to coordinate all the logistics that go into their busy schedules.

When utilized properly, admins are a crucial part of maintaining a well-operating schedule and flow of communication.

Meanwhile, entrepreneurs who don’t delegate, and instead try handling every aspect of their business themselves, are rarely successful in scaling or managing all of their relationships.

Sooner or later, something will slip between the cracks.

If you are spending 30% of your time on administrative tasks, that’s time you aren’t focused on the big picture. A 2016 study of 1,000 white-collar workers in the United States found that, “We spend an average of 4.1 hours checking our work email each day. That’s 20.5 hours each week, more than 1,000 hours each year, more than 47,000 hours over a career.” On top of that, 79% of those interviewed said they check their work email while on vacation.

We know the power of quick and concise communication. This book is designed to help make communication smoother, not more complicated. Consider the following example.

We recently took a trip to Cuba with a group of our friends. While there, we had infrequent access to internet service, but neither of us set up an out-of-office reply that might give our clients pause. Instead, our admin (yes, we both have the same admin) was responding quickly to emails “as Nic” or “as Nate” and responses were coming in as though both of our businesses were operating as usual.

We were also able to glance at Todoist, our task management app, and see multiple projects being delegated by our admin, with different pieces of work being completed by freelancers according to a structured workflow. Because we know how to delegate and make efficient use of our admin, we were able to take a vacation almost entirely off-grid while our businesses kept running smoothly back home.

Now here’s an example from the other side of the spectrum. One of our friends is a founder of a well-backed startup. He would stress over not having Internet access while we were in Cuba, and as soon as he did get Internet access he would spend an hour frantically responding to emails, and many of his responses were late.

We wrote this short book as a way to empower more people to focus on what’s really important to them, in life and in their businesses. After all, it’s in those moments when you’re not buried in menial tasks that flashes of genius and creativity hit you.

We like to call those moments “whitespace,” and we believe that giving yourself as much whitespace as possible will enable you to have more of these sparks of creativity that will transform your work and life.

We didn’t invent these principles. Fortune 500 CEOs have known the power of the admin for decades. Others, like Tim Ferriss, set the stage for us with his runaway bestseller The 4-Hour Work Week. It is our goal to make the categories of rules and processes in this short book simple enough for a reader to copy and paste them, with minor adjustments in order to make them specific to their own business.

Technology enables us with tools we can use to either make us more or less productive, but they are just tools. It is how we implement and use these tools that really matters.

In his treatise titled On the Equilibrium of Planes, Greek mathematician Archimedes gave an explanation for the principles involved in using a lever. Today, people speak about leverage as though it is a strategy or tactic, but it is not. Leverage is a tool.

“Give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it, and I shall move the world.” – Archimedes

Who Should Consider Outsourcing Admin Work?

You should consider outsourcing your administrative work if:

You own a small business but still manage your own email and scheduling
You run sales for an organization but still personally respond to specific intros and leads and update your own CRM
You are an entrepreneur (or VP or C-level executive) that gets easily distracted by your inbox instead of focusing on the big picture

Our goal is to provide an easy process to copy-and-paste where you can literally download this book, hire a virtual admin off a site like UpWork, and have your inbox and calendar delegated all in one day. You could even do it all in one sitting. This book is meant to be read in the span of an hour and immediately implemented.

Many entrepreneurs we have spoken to about this system immediately resist and push back. They’ll says something like, “It sounds great in theory, but no admin could handle my inbox. I have to do it myself.”

Oh really? Your inbox is more demanding, sensitive, and important than the general counsel for ExxonMobil? Or the CEO of Walmart? Because both of those people leverage admins in the same manner.

We have news for you: your inbox is not a special snowflake that can’t be processed with this system.

Another reaction we hear often is entrepreneurs who say they need someone working with them in person, usually because they have the idea that working in person together is somehow more effective.

Working remotely can be just as, if not more, effective. If you doubt this fact, read the book ReWork by David Heinemeier Hansson and Jason Fried, about how they built and grew Basecamp with a tiny, remote team. The psychological benefits of seeing someone physically working in your office or their being available for you to make them wash your car on a whim or get your groceries or whatever — isn’t worth it. Trust us.

Why does this book cover only your email and calendar? Because your inbox is where a majority of your tasks, projects, and time commitments come into your work queue. While there are always more tasks and processes to delegate, getting you away from managing your own email and calendar is essential if you are going to embrace these principles.

You do not need to pay $3,000 or more per month for a full-time employee to take over your inbox and calendar.

As mentioned above, we share an admin between us, and we each pay her around 8 hours a week at a rate of $16 per hour. Nate also found his data entry person on UpWork. He was able to hire someone with good references who was available to meet in person occasionally — and who only cost $25 per hour.

Anyone either of us hires has to sign a very specific NDA. Our clients are made aware of the organizational chart changes and have visibility into what we are doing. Some big corporations may not allow delegating your admin work to outside resources, so check with your boss or clients if you’re unsure.

This book is not for everyone. You decide how valuable your time is, and whether doing 5–20 hours per week of admin work is an effective use of your time. We’re betting it’s not. Instead, document, delegate and automate as much as you can, and then you can start enjoying that whitespace that encourages breakthroughs.

What To Expect In Zen and the Art of Admin Tasks

If you’re still reading this, it means you’re serious about taking your ideas, your business, and your time to the next level. You’re ready to become truly productive, and do away once and for all with the repetition and exhaustion of time-consuming administrative tasks. It’s time for the admin-automation revolution, and you want to be at the head of the curve.

In this book, we’ll take you step by step through the processes that we’ve adopted to make our businesses run smoothly, optimizing our day-to-day for maximum effectiveness, maximum creativity, and minimum administrative fuss.

Zen and the Art of Admin Tasks is a no-nonsense, straightforward tactical guide. The processes you read about here will be actionable today, and you’ll see concrete improvements in your workflow tomorrow. By setting up these systems, your business will be able to pass even the “hit-by-a-bus” resilience test. Your inbox, schedule, and client database will all continue to function as usual, even if you are suddenly indisposed (whether due to a bus crash or not).

Quality administrative work is a foundation for business success, but it is not where true, exponential value is added. It’s hygiene. When you free yourself from admin tasks, you free yourself to pursue real value and growth.

For specific strategies on how to outsource your administrative work, check out  Zen and the Art of Admin Tasks  by Nic De Castro and Nathan Pettijohn.

The post Why You Need To Outsource Your Administrative Work appeared first on Cordurouy.

Recently I was invited for an evening smoke at an upscale, private cigar lounge, and the owner told me with pride how adverse he is to anything digital. He has a flip phone. No email, no social, no frills, no nonsense. Can’t even find him online, he says. Just the flip phone. You can call him or send basic texts if you happen to know his number. The business seems to be doing more than okay just on personal referrals, why should he bother?

But I looked for his business online and there is an obsolete website, an abandoned Facebook page with about 100 fans – the last post from 2012, some good and bad Yelp reviews and found several articles about them. Took me about ten minutes to see a much different perspective. If I’d read these reviews and been looking for a cigar shop on my own, I probably wouldn’t have gone inside. In fact, a couple of the Yelp reviews say the shop has closed down and moved, which I know isn’t true.

Tl;dr: A cigar shop owner that is doing just fine today on word of mouth referrals won’t maintain much long-term credibility if he doesn’t ever Google himself.

In time, if he doesn’t keep track of what others are saying about him, he will lose all control of his company’s narrative. He probably hasn’t ever heard of Yelp, and definitely hasn’t ever heard of apps like Where to Smoke. If you know that people are complaining in reviews you can either start treating customers differently and address the issues, or start encouraging your happier customers to write better reviews of their own. Perceptions matter, and I can pull a pretty decent audit of anyone and any company within 30 minutes just with their name, Google search and some screenshots.

1.   Seriously, How Do I Google Myself?

Open an incognito window (I’m on the Chrome browser, though on Safari it will say “new private window”) then go to Google.com

By doing your search in private or incognito mode you’ll avoid seeing personalized searches based on your cookies, log in, and so forth. Your IP address will still affect local search results if your company is a neighborhood pizza shop, but you should still do your searching in incognito mode. If you’re feeling crazy you can check other search engines like Bing or DuckDuckGo while you’re browsing privately.

Screenshot the results and save them in a folder or email them to yourself for posterity. It’s good to track this progress over time, as it all takes time. You can also track your rankings over time with services like RankScanner.

If you haven’t already, you should log in to Google and set some alerts for your name and business name so you’ll get an email when anything new is published. There are sites like BrightLocal that help you track all your reviews for as low as $5 a month. If you’re focused on your business and need help crafting keyword phrases for articles and content, you can use sites like SpyFu to track competitors and sites like HitTail to suggest keyword phrases for your own content. (* I’m not an affiliate for any of these sites.)

2.   I Prefer to Be Low Key

Many people will just say, “I’m kind of like the cigar shop owner. I prefer to keep my private life private and not be all over the Internet.” Fair enough, but if you are a public figure or business executive and there’s going to be press about you either way, it may be good to at least know what other people see when they search for you. I’m not saying you have to make your Facebook and Instagram public. This isn’t “all or nothing.”

If there’s a Wikipedia page about you and/or your company, then that will almost always be the first thing people click on to read. Wikipedia can be edited by anyone and revised whenever new press comes out that can be linked to – a perfect example for a common missed opportunity to help control your digital narrative. If you don’t have a Wiki but there is enough press online to prove you’re notable, you should create a page, with an infobox, photos and internal linking to other Wiki pages.

If you don’t proactively think about this, someone else will and who knows what their intentions will be. If you don’t believe me: I’ve made many Wikipedia pages that weren’t paying clients of mine. I just wanted to. My friends and colleagues are all at risk. Chris Denson and Robert Lawrence both have Wikis now, not because they thought they needed one or asked me to create them – but because I decided they needed Wikis, and I wrote the two above on my own volition, among others. Same thing with domain names and user handles: tell me this doesn’t apply to you, and I may go buy yourname.com just to make a point. You prefer to be low key? Maybe that isn’t entirely up to you.

3.   Steps You Can Take

Even if your goal isn’t to raise your profile, this stuff matters. See an article you don’t like when you Google yourself? It may be difficult to convince the site owner to remove the content just because you disagree with it. For instance, I had a client in 2011 ask Corduroy for help with a negative article on him from a prominent newspaper. We couldn’t actually remove the article or move it down, but with linking and sharing other relevant articles for the same keywords, we were able to move everything else around that one article up. I just Googled the same keywords today and I don’t find the article now until the third page of results. When I did find the article today, I did not click on it. If you do, you’re telling Google that the result you just clicked on was relevant for your search phrase, and you’re making that link even more powerful.

It is never too early or late to start caring about this. Until recently, I had neglected my own personal brand for some time. You don’t have to have an entire site dedicated to you. Just put in nathanpettijohn.com and you’ll get redirected to my biography on my company site. I have a fairly unique name, but Nathan Pettijohn the musician has the benefit of music and media showing up higher in search results. If I want to even compete for my own name online, I have to care enough to work at it with purpose.

I am consistently one of the top results if you search for “product placement companies”. This is not because my company does a ton of product placement, it is because I wrote one decent article about it that some people linked to and shared.

For the client I mentioned above from 2011, this was a long-term strategy that didn’t solve his problem around the negative article immediately, but did within several months and is an even more successful example now after all these years. Essentially, everything you see on the first page of results when you Google this person now was chosen and curated ahead of time with a long-term strategy. So how did we do that? As far as bumping the other positive sites and articles up, I’ve covered broad strokes on linking for search before.

Otherwise we created a search-friendly website with content and blog posts that now shows up first for his name, and made a Twitter and LinkedIn page that also show up near the top, and promoted media so photos and a YouTube video would all be on first page of results. A LinkedIn page matters, a Google+ page matters. Once again: these things are not a passing fad. Don’t use Yelp? If there’s a review on there that says your shop closed down six months ago – there’s no way I’m going to drive over to check for myself.

The post How Do I Google Myself appeared first on Cordurouy.

Wendell Berry once wrote that, “It is, in fact, the nature of the electronic media to blur and finally destroy all distinctions between public and community.” I’ve written numerous times over the years about why brands shouldn’t treat social media as a passing fad; that brands should move away from thirty second spots and move into creating original content. Wendell’s concerns about the loss of “community” are at the heart of what brands and agencies sometimes misunderstand about digital marketing: that community and social shouldn’t be afterthoughts – they’re all that matter.

Influencer marketing is hardly the only important element in digital marketing strategies. We generally consider a recipe of: creative + audience + talent. With the recent election it is interesting to compare that between Facebook and Twitter, Donald Trump currently has over 46 million followers compared to Hillary Clinton’s 23 million. I believe when I checked Trump’s reach in November it was 33 million, meaning he’s gained 13mm followers in the past in the past 4 months!? That isn’t to say that reach is all that matters in order to get votes (or orders, or downloads, etc). But it does certainly matter some, and it begs an explanation for the difference between “celebrity” or “star” or “influencer.”

What Is An Influencer?

A mentor and one of the smartest people I’ve met, Aaron Ray, explains the difference between influencer and celebrity this way (I am paraphrasing him): “Tom Cruise. What does he stand for? Who does he represent? What does he own? He does not have a fan-base. His projects do or don’t, but Top Gun would make a better show with a different cast. An influencer is not hired to do a job. They set a path and it becomes a job. The purpose of influence is to drive awareness through the noise, give credibility and curate a lifestyle so well that people ask you to tell them what and how.”

Aaron is one of those guys who always seems to see around corners and is equally effective in the most intense corporate boardroom situations as he is at an inner city basketball park. We were discussing a very high level, but problematic, project when something he said really resonated with me (still paraphrasing): “The idea of influence is nothing new. You didn’t pay $20 million to Tom Cruise because he had real influence. You paid them because they had influence in a specifically controlled and highly protected business. But in reality, there are no “movie stars” anymore.

“Psy, PewDieDie and The Rock are global businesses. Tom Cruise can’t drive passion nor do you know what he stands for. On the other hand, Maverick should have done a deal with RedBullTV flying a stealth jet with Elon Musk and opened a “need for speed” themed high end sports bar chain. HE has fans. Top Gun is a lifestyle. No one is going to be fanatical after just 90 mins of a movie anymore. You need to be on point – all the time.”

Endorsement marketing is nothing new. Paying bloggers for sponsored posts was one of the earliest forms of online influencer marketing and is still cited as one of the most trusted forms of online recommendation along with customer reviews. We’ve come a long way since YouTube was founded in 2005 and the multichannel networks followed. Everyone is their own media company now. Everyone wants to be a thought leader and build their own personal brand.

Today there are dozens of bots to choose from that will increase your followers on Instagram by setting it to like or comment on all photos with certain hashtags. A service like this wouldn’t be something I would suggest to one of my clients, but if you weren’t on the “suggested users to follow” list when a new platform launched and you don’t have other notable press or a large media budget, it can be a tough road to get to influencer status on certain sites. On LinkedIn there are less than 500 people in the world with the influencer badge. The most effective way to build a following is by generating quality original content and promoting it strategically. Another great way to build an audience is to leverage an already existing one with complementary themes. You make a video with Paula Abdul’s stylist and you may be able to tap into Paula’s audience.

Finding the Right Influencers:

Identifying and curating influencer suggestions for a brand or campaign is where most influencer marketing companies fit in right now. Some claim to use data, while some have other rationale for how they suggest talent for branded campaigns. At the end of the day, coming up with the list of suggested talent for a specific campaign is the biggest part of this process. Reaching out to influencers and contracting them once a brand has signed off is not overly complicated or proprietary. That said, reviewing their content and having it posted on time is a managed service that certainly provides value.

My point is that many companies will just have a handful of young interns pulling lists of influencers or doing searches on their phone, while others can pitch that IBM’s Watson is doing all the heavy lifting to ensure that your hashtag is trending during halftime at the Superbowl. I’ve even seen agencies ask one influencer company for a list, and then take that list to another influencer company to execute the campaign.

Like many companies in this space, Corduroy subscribes to a platform called SocialEdge, which is where I took the screenshots of Trump and Clinton’s reach and engagement rates at the top of this article. As far as a CRM and easy interface to generate sales sheets and campaign wrap-up reports, I haven’t seen anything better. Engagement is something many people don’t really consider when looking at someone’s page, but if they have a million followers and no one is commenting, something might be off.

Another platform we use for influencer discovery is called Intelligence Machine. This lets us pull the top earned videos for any brand and also find the topics and creators who upload the best performing video content for that brand. This means we can search for Pepsi and be able to see who the top dozen influencers are in the United States for videos with “Pepsi” in the tags (in terms of reach and engagement). This sort of data is more geared toward large brands, bigger influencers and wider reach and focused on YouTube and Facebook.

Strategies

Sometimes influencers with a smaller reach are better for long-term engagements. A high-end fashion brand with narrow audience would be better suited to a small influencer with a niche audience rather than going for mass promotion. Paying a Kardashian for a tweet may make some on your team feel relevant, but the click-through rate is probably going to be horrible. Smaller to medium size influencers arguably have more loyal fans who are more likely to engage with recommendations or integrations.

Ultimately, you want to be able to marry an influencer to a brand, like Nike did with Michael Jordan. This way they are as invested in the success of your product as you are. If you focus on a one-time promotion and your app gets some downloads, there’s nothing to retain them as monthly active users. But if you get Miley Cyrus to use the app exclusively for “x” purpose and she’s promoting it somehow on an ongoing basis, more people are likely to continue using it as well. To this end, some even say that the line between brand and influencer is blurring already.

An example influencer campaign I worked on was for a gaming console leading up to the product launch. The first phase of integrations was for a dozen or so of the top technology reviewers and unboxers on YouTube. This got the search algorithms to rank the videos of sponsored product reviews higher in search before the product was even launched. After the product launched we then had integrations with broader channels with bigger audiences and just had them mention using the console without making their entire videos about it. This helped on the awareness side of the funnel, which sent people searching online to do their own research and find the product reviews from phase one of our campaign.

On Public Opinion:

Of course likes don’t always equal sales, but if I hear one person tell me a new movie is good and I should go to the theater and see it, I’ll consider it. But if a dozen people I respect all tell me within the span of a few days that I should go see it, I’m much more likely to be convinced.

It could be argued that ours is simply a culture of immediate gratification and narcissism, and that we are just further enabling that by rewarding social media stars for posting selfies. It could also be argued that social media is often the cause of more distraction than progress, and as Wendell Berry said, it will “destroy all distinctions between public and community” if it hasn’t already.

The post Intro to Influencer Marketing appeared first on Cordurouy.