Justin Blaney: Will post for profit

Our interview of Justin Blaney for “The Creative Influencer” podcast is available today for download on iTunes, Spotify, and premier platforms everywhere. Justin is an adjunct professor at the University of Washington Michael G. Foster School of Business where he teaches a course on influencer marketing.

Justin is also the bestselling author of 15 books. His latest book is titled “Will post for profit – how brands and influencers are cashing in on social media.” The book provides a great blueprint for influencers to grow their following.

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A transcript of the episode follows:

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Jon Pfeiffer:

I am joined today by Justin Blaney. Welcome to the podcast.

Justin Blaney:

Glad to be here.

Jon Pfeiffer:

You are the best-selling author of 15 books and your latest book, Will Post For Profit: How Brands and Influencers Are Cashing In On Social Media. So, the first question is, how did you conceive the idea for this book?

Justin Blaney:

Oh, well, thanks for asking. I actually teach a class at the University of Washington on influencer marketing. And when I was working with the department to create that class, we were looking around for textbooks and really couldn't find anything in the marketplace that talked about this from a business point of view. There's lots of books that talk about how to become an influencer and how to profit from social media, if you are an influencer, but we could not find a single book that talked about how do you create successful campaigns? How do you find influencers? How do you evaluate them?

And so we saw this as an opportunity to fill a need. And also, we use this now as the textbook in what we believe is one of the only courses on influencer marketing at the college level. And we have that at the masters level as well as the undergrad level.

Jon Pfeiffer:

Oh, really? Do you teach this class by yourself or do you have a co-teacher?

Justin Blaney:

I teach the class by myself, but I often bring in different guests because I love to provide a wide variety of opinions and views. But no, I'm the professor for the class.

Jon Pfeiffer:

In the book, you have a co-author though, correct?

Justin Blaney:

Yes. Yeah. And actually, I met Kate, my coauthor, she was one of my guests in the class a couple of years ago when we first started teaching this. And I was so impressed with her, she went from zero to 100 miles an hour in just such a short time. And she comes from it at a different angle than a lot of other influencers do, and she was able to create a profitable influencer marketing business in a very short time. So, I was so impressed with her that I asked her if she'd be interested in co-authoring this book with me.

Jon Pfeiffer:

So you come up with the idea for the book, you have the class, how did you collect data? Because I've read the book, and we'll go through the book in a second, but how did you collect data? What research did you do?

Justin Blaney:

We did lots of research. I mean, between Kate and I, we know a lot of different influencers, we know a lot of different PR agencies that do influencer work on the business side. So we tapped into our network, which is I think the best way to get information. And then of course, there's just lots of searching. I have access to a lot of academic articles and research through my universities connections, and also just the good old fashioned internet.

Jon Pfeiffer:

Right. Imagine that, Google.

Justin Blaney:

Yeah.

Jon Pfeiffer:

So I going to kind of get into the book. You have a line in the early part of the book that says, "The power of today's form of influencer marketing is built entirely on trust." What do you mean?

Justin Blaney:

Well, there's a really big difference between traditional celebrity endorsements and influencer marketing, and that is trust. With the traditional celebrity endorsement, you gain access to that person's audience. And because they're familiar, you can help entice people to make a decision, make a purchase, or change their point of view on a political idea, because they know this famous person, they've seen their movies, or they watch their football games, or whatever it is.

But there's always an element that you know that they don't necessarily think this, or they don't necessarily use this product. A lot of times you'll see somebody really famous talking about how they love to fly Delta Airlines but you know that they probably fly a private jet. And so it works, but it doesn't work as well as when you have trust involved.

So, with influencer marketing, you have something really special going on, and that is that, it's what I call a unidirectional relationship. You feel is the audience that you know this person, you watch their daily lives. You've seen them talk about adopting a kid and going through that struggle, or cleaning out their closet. And you know more about this person than you probably know about some of your friends with whom you have, what I'd call, a bi-directional relationship, where you both know each other.

And so, when we know someone and they're providing us information about them, we return that information with trust. And the more information they share with us, the more that we are likely to trust them. And so when they make a recommendation about a product, and really the best practice with influencer marketing is to only recommend products and services that you personally use and enjoy and would, if you weren't being paid.

So when someone makes that recommendation to their audience, it's like your best friend is telling you to try this new makeup. And of course, we're much more likely to listen to a best friend than we are a football player or a model on TV.

And so you're tapping into this simulation of a real relationship, and that is the difference. So if you break that trust, you've lost the primary benefit of influencer marketing and now it's just a celebrity endorsement.

Jon Pfeiffer:

And you had talked about celebrity endorsements versus influencers, when would be the time that you would want a celebrity over an influencer or an influencer over a celebrity? Is there a bright line?

Justin Blaney:

Well, depending on the size of the celebrity, they're often much more expensive and hard to access. So I would say, influencer marketing provides small businesses and new businesses, businesses with a small marketing budget, or medium-sized marketing budget, the opportunity to do something that's a lot like celebrity endorsing, except even better.

And so I would say that, if you don't have that really big budget where you can't go and afford to spend a couple million dollars to get some actor to talk about how great your tequila is, then I think the way to go is with influencer marketing.

Jon Pfeiffer:

Yeah. You can't get George Clooney because he's going to talk about his own tequila.

Justin Blaney:

Which is pretty good tequila, but yeah.

Jon Pfeiffer:

Which is a perfect transition to, you've broken down the different audience size categories for influencers.

Justin Blaney:

Yeah.

Jon Pfeiffer:

The smallest is the nano... Well, let me... Foundational question. How did you come up with the different slices and dices of the size of the influencer?

Justin Blaney:

Well, this is a somewhat standard category. There are some dissensions on like, do you become a micro-influencer at 3000 followers or 10,000. And so we tried to look at what is kind of the most commonly referred to categorizations of these different sizes. And then that's what we put in the book, but there is some subjectivity to it. Some people don't count all of these categories and some people define them slightly differently, but this is a pretty good way to look at it.

Jon Pfeiffer:

So let's look at the nano influencer, which is defined in the book as zero to 3000 versus the micro influencer, which is defined in the book as 3000 to 20,000. Do you have research, or do you have any information on whether the nano influencers are really, in many ways, more influential to those 3000 people, than a micro influencer might be to the 20,000?

Justin Blaney:

Yeah, they absolutely are. And there's statistics that back that up. The smaller your audience, typically, the higher percentage of engagement you have. And that makes sense, because if you carry that down to the logical conclusion, if you have 100 followers, chances are you know every single one of them and they know you. And so, you're going to have a lot higher level of trust with those people, which again, so it goes back to trust.

And as your audience grows, you're getting more and more people who just kind of casually following you, or don't really know you that well. And so, your engagement rates are going to reduce over time. Now, there are some exceptions. At different size categories, some people are just more engaging than other people. But in general, you're right, actually that the nano influencers are, in many cases, the best bang for your buck, because they can actually move some products in ways that larger influencers can struggle to emulate. So I think it is a really great category look at.

Jon Pfeiffer:

So, if you're a brand and you're a small business, you decide you want to dabble in a campaign, what would you expect to have to pay to get on nano influencer versus a micro-influencer?

Justin Blaney:

You may not pay either one of them. In fact, the paradigm now is that people are offering product in exchange for promotion. And in some cases, companies are offering discounts on their products in exchange for promotion. And in still other cases, companies are not offering anything except for a commission of the sale, like in a traditional affiliate program.

And so what some businesses are doing is they're doing a mass influencer campaign or trying to get thousands of small influencers to set up accounts, create affiliate accounts, and start posting content. And maybe they give them a discount code where they say, "Hey, if you buy our product, we're going to give you 30% off, as long as you continue to talk about it and post it. And we're going to give you 5% of every purchase that you send to us."

So that's a way that you can get into influencer marketing with basically zero out of pocket expense, except for the cost and complexities of building that program. As influencers get larger, obviously they're not going to want to participate in that as much, and they're going to expect cash upfront in exchange for their promotions.

Jon Pfeiffer:

Which, on the large... The two categories that you have on the other end of the scale, are the mega influencers with over a million followers, and then the brand worthy influencers. And I was curious at the distinction between the two, other than just number of followers.

Justin Blaney:

I mean, it's number of followers. At this level, we're talking about people that are many celebrities in their own right. The people who know them, some of these people can get 10,000 followers to show up at a live event. And so, they can have a lot of pull with a lot of people and you start to get into... People have agents and some of these influencers can charge millions of dollars to work with them.

And so those are typically out of access for most smaller and mid-sized brands. And so, when we say brand worthy, we're talking about these large brands, like if you're a major makeup brand, if you're Starbucks, then you have access to these really high level influencers, if you want to do that as your campaign. But even large brands might work with much smaller influencers.

Jon Pfeiffer:

Which now, let's shift gears. And I am just getting out of college and I think, "I don't want a traditional 9:00 to 5:00, I want to be an influencer." Or actually, they've done studies, I think, now and some huge percent of middle school kids want to be influencers. But let's say that you decide you want to be an influencer. You've identified several key factors for growth, which is the bread and butter to making this a living. And the first one you identified is authenticity. What did you mean, and why is that so important?

Justin Blaney:

Well, authenticity is the fuel for trust, because again, your audience needs to feel like you're a real friend, a real person. And if you're going to be able to charge for your services, if you're going to be effective at getting people to do something, which is the crown jewel of all marketing, you're trying to get someone to do something, which, any of us who have been in the marketing field know that's a lot easier said than done.

And so, authenticity is essential for building that trust, because people don't want to follow someone who's faking it and they want to feel like they really know you and understand you. And so, this plays itself out in lots of ways. One way is that you should never take a brand deal that isn't something that you would really use on your own. And I actually suggest for a lot of new influencers and smaller influencers that they simply just start talking about the things that they love and they tag those companies and they're not getting paid to do it, but they're showing their audience that, "Hey, I found this great new skirt at Forever 21, and here's a link to it if you want to check it out. But man, I thought it looks great when I went to the beach the other day with my boyfriend." Or whatever.

Jon Pfeiffer:

Assuming Forever 21 gets out of bankruptcy...

Justin Blaney:

Yeah. Maybe they should have done more influencer marketing. So yeah, the authenticity is key to building the trust.

Jon Pfeiffer:

And I'm going to go through all of the factors, there's seven of them, because this is one of the most common questions I'm asked is, "How do I grow my following?" And I think this is just a great roadmap to have. The second one is consistency. What do you find to be the right amount of consistency for engagement?

Justin Blaney:

It's going to vary widely from person to person, and really, even more importantly from network to network. In some cases, really the problem with any of these rules is you always see situations in which people don't follow them. And sometimes someone got somewhere with consistency and then they were so big that they might not post for two months. And their fans are begging for the next video and then they post one and that's working for them because they've already gotten so much momentum.

But in a lot of cases, people would just have short attention spans. So if you're not posting frequently and consistently, they're going to be on to something else. And if you have something every day, some new little videos, a new little tip, whatever it is, then it's about repetition. There's an old adage that you have to see a message 27 times before it takes effect. And I don't know if that's correct or true anymore, but we certainly can agree that being in front of someone again and again and again, is going to make them more likely to remember you and then start to seek you out, which is what we really want.

And the algorithms, also, are gauged to reward influencers who are more consistent and posting more often. And the algorithms of these social networks, maybe some of the listeners don't realize this, that they choose what to show you based on what they think you're going to want to watch or see. And it's not always accurate, but these algorithms decide what content gets viewed and they tend to prioritize, or sometimes they prioritize, creators who are more consistent and more frequent.

Jon Pfeiffer:

And the algorithms are getting really pretty good too.

Justin Blaney:

On TikTok, I mean, TikTok has become huge because it has what seems like a magical algorithm that serves up stuff that you want to see. I think on some of the other net... Like Facebook and Instagram struggle more to do that, but they're very good with the advertising. And I think a lot of people have noticed that these networks tend to serve up ads that are very relevant and interesting. Sometimes they get it off and you're like, "Why are they showing me this? What website did I look at?"

Jon Pfeiffer:

What did I just look at?!

Justin Blaney:

"Now they're showing me adult diapers." Or something like that.

Jon Pfeiffer:

Yeah, it's like "oh no!"... The third category is niche, and I know I've talked to... I interviewed one YouTube influencer that, she started out doing makeup tutorials and was not getting traction, and then she said, "But I don't wear makeup. Maybe I should talk about something else." So if you could talk about the importance of niche?

Justin Blaney:

Yeah. There's sort of a time square effect in the world. There's so much noise and clutter, and it's very difficult to stand out if you're not, hyper-focused on something that you're really interested in, that you're really good at, and that people can remember you for. And I think a lot of people are tempted to try to take on too many things. And sometimes it's just because we have ADD, and we love multiple things. I mean, I'm in that category. In fact, I can say with the fact that I have not followed this advice very well myself, and I think that my career has suffered. But the problem is, is I have ADD, and I'm interested in all these things. And so, whenever I switch or I'm talking about three instead of one, it's more than three times harder to get people's attention if you're too widely focused.

Jon Pfeiffer:

Yeah, the shiny objects-

Justin Blaney:

So, the very best success comes to those who can really zero in on a niche that they can own that there's not a lot of other people talking about.

Jon Pfeiffer:

The fourth category is advertising. How do you mean it for advertising for the influencer?

Justin Blaney:

Yeah. So there's a big difference between buying followers and engagement and advertising. Buying followers and engagement is never recommended, I've never heard of anybody that recommends it, except people that sell followers and engagement. It's a bad practice, you're going to get caught probably. And if you don't keep paying, you're not going to get that engagement anymore. And so it's going to be pretty obvious. And there's a lot of examples of people that have been discovered that just look like complete idiots because they got caught buying this stuff.

Now it's a whole nother matter if you have budget to do advertising and a lot of businesses have budget. And if you were to sponsor a post that you found to be highly engaging, maybe you post daily and one of your posts is doing really well. And you have some budget to sponsor that post, what that's doing is it's forcing the algorithm to show it to people. That person who sees it, they must like it, be interested in it, and go to your page and they have an opportunity to find out who you are, and perhaps they might follow you and want to see more of your content.

So that's not unethical, it's just cost money. And it's a way to force your way in front of people. Now, one downside to that is you can spend a lot of money and get nothing in return. You can force your content in front of people. Maybe they follow your account, but you don't ever turn that into profit. So I always want to caution people to make sure that they understand that paradigm and that they're not just throwing money away. But I don't think that there's anything unethical about it, and I think that in some cases it can be a great way to accelerate your growth.

Jon Pfeiffer:

Right, get in front of more eyeballs.

Justin Blaney:

Yeah.

Jon Pfeiffer:

The next category is contests, which kind of speaks for itself, but what I'd like you to talk about what kind of contests have you found to be the most effective?

Justin Blaney:

Well contests, there's a million different ways to do it. And really, this is one of the best ways to create growth. You can also find some partners to do contest with so that you're all promoting it to each other's audiences. And really, for anybody that doesn't know what this is, I'm sure you've seen it. People are saying, "Hey, I'm going to give away..."

Actually, I remember, it was about 10 years ago. One of the first examples of this I saw. Some marketing firm, had the idea to give away 10 MacBook Pros. And I think you had to follow their Twitter account and retweet the program in order to qualify. And it blew up and it was huge. And they got, I don't know the numbers, but they got many, many, many followers more than they could have ever hoped for. And it was because it was this novel idea. People are like, "Oh my gosh, I can win a MacBook Pro, all I got to do is follow a Twitter account and retweet this thing."

And so ever since then, and even before that, that was one of the earlier examples, people have been trying to use this same system to gain followers. And you can do it in many different ways. But the basic idea is that you're offering something for free and you're expecting something in return, "Leave a comment, share it with a friend, subscribed to our email list." Whatever you want it to be. And a lot of people want to get a chance to win something.

I have some friends that said that they do every single contest that they come across because why not? And they've won a couple of things. So it's a really... It can be fun, it's engaging, and it's quite effective.

Jon Pfeiffer:

And then the last two categories kind of are the same, but they're different. One is collabs, and the second is cross-promotions. What distinction between collabs and cross-promotions do you draw?

Justin Blaney:

Yeah, it is a little bit of a fine line here, or a blurred line, I might say. But what we're talking about here is partnering with people, finding other people that might have a similar audience or a complimentary audience, or maybe you're friends, you like each other, you like their style, they like your style. And so you, you find ways to do things together.

And it's one of these scenarios where the sum is greater than the sum of the parts, or the... I'm stumbling over the phrase, stumbling over the old cliche, but we all know it, and the idea that you combine two people together and you get three instead of two, and you just build more momentum. You could come on my podcast and I could promote you and I could go on your podcast and you promote me and then both of our audience get to hear about each other. And if they like what they hear from this other guest or this other person, maybe they go follow. So it's a service. And then also you're getting to leverage that trust factor where, I'm recommending this person, I'm telling my audience, "Hey, this is a great person." So that's kind of a cross promo.

And a collaboration is more like, "We're going to work with Alaska Airlines to go on a flight. We got three or four different influencers, and we're all going to go together and we're going to have like a guys trip to Las Vegas on an Alaska Air flight. And each of us is bringing a different piece to it." So that's, again, a little bit of a blurred line, but both of these things are pretty fun. It's just finding ways to work with other people to gain access to each other's audiences, really.

Jon Pfeiffer:

That has been one of the impacts of COVID is, I'm seeing a lot fewer of the destination collaborations.

Justin Blaney:

Yeah.

Jon Pfeiffer:

Okay.

Justin Blaney:

Hopefully that comes back.

Jon Pfeiffer:

Yeah, I agree. So, I've now built up my following. I'm now ready to work for a brand. A hypothetical coffee company comes to me and we enter into a deal. How do we measure how effective my campaign was?

Justin Blaney:

Yeah. This is really one of my biggest topics that I care about because, I'm a marketer and an advertiser, and I believe that you can't improve what you don't measure. You can't even understand what you don't measure. You don't know if it's working, you don't know if it's not working, you don't know if you threw money away, you don't know if it was fantastic.

And so, it's really, really important to build in ways to measure what success is. And in order to do that, you have to define success. And my favorite way to define success is cost of acquisition, which is, "How much does it cost to acquire a customer?" So if I have a campaign that costs $1,000 and as a result, I was able to track, and I got 1,000 customers from that, then the cost of acquisition would be $1 per customer.

And now I can look at the lifetime value of a customer and I can say, "This customer on average purchases two and a half times from me over the following 12 months, which is worth $12 in profit." And I can compare that cost of acquisition of $1 to the $12 of profit on average that I earned from those customers and I have a 12x ROI. And so, that is the perfect way to evaluate a program.

Unfortunately, you can't always do that because of various reasons. It can be hard to track where those customers came from, and it can be hard to estimate the lifetime value of a customer. And so, there are things that can make that more difficult, but I think you should try to get as close to that as possible. In some cases, the goal might be engagement, and so simply, you can look at the cost and you can divide it into engagement maybe that's the number of comments that take place as a result of the campaign. That's better than nothing, but engagement doesn't pay the bills.

So I always want to caution businesses to get as close to actual hard profit as possible in terms of how they measure things, because you might buy a million... And actually this company that did this MacBook Pro is a perfect example. They got, let's say, a million followers from this, but they didn't know how to monetize those followers now because they were a marketing company, now they're like, "Wow, we got all these followers, but what do we do with this?"

And so, that can easily happen to companies. They think... Especially because people don't understand that. So usually the younger people are in the marketing team and they go to the older people who are running the company and they say, "Hey, we got 10,000 comments on this post and cost $1,000, and man, that sounds exciting." But nobody stops and says, "Well, did anything happen after that? Did anybody buy anything? Did anybody..."

So I think it's really important to do that. You can do that with a number of ways. You can have tracking codes, you can have, "Hey, who referred you?" You can have special links that track that. None of these are perfect, but they can give you a better estimation than nothing.

Jon Pfeiffer:

So, we're going to shift gears and, well, I want you to break out your crystal ball.

Justin Blaney:

I got one right here, actually.

Jon Pfeiffer:

Okay. Here you go. First question, what will happen to TikTok? Who will buy it?

Justin Blaney:

I mean, it seems like they don't want to be bought and I wouldn't if I was them. Instagram, if I remember correctly, got bought by for a billion dollars, which sounds fantastic, except today it's probably worth 50 billion or more. And so, Facebook probably got the deal of the century for that. And really, for a lot of younger people, Facebook became irrelevant and everybody switched Instagram. So they really saved their bacon too, because they might've just completely seen their business model blow up as people were shifting to these new networks. So I know Facebook would absolutely jump at the chance, I would believe, at buying TikTok, but I think TikTok doesn't want to sell. So my crystal ball, I look in and I say, they're not going to sell.

Jon Pfeiffer:

Do you think Biden will reverse Trump's position on this?

Justin Blaney:

I don't know. It's an interesting situation with national security implications that's probably above my pay grade, but the problem is, really it's like, the ship has already sailed on all of this privacy stuff. We all sold out a long time ago for the convenience.

Jon Pfeiffer:

Yes, we did.

Justin Blaney:

So whether TikTok has the data or Facebook or Oracle, people have our data. And as far as I'm concerned, I don't know, is it that big of a deal that a Chinese company knows what kind of chocolate I like? Is it any bigger a deal that they do than that Google does? I don't know if I can answer that, and I don't think I know whether... I don't know enough on Biden's position to know how he would stand on that, honestly.

Jon Pfeiffer:

Yeah. And this is always the question everybody's chasing. What's the next big thing?

Justin Blaney:

Well, I mean, we're in the midst of seeing this TikTok blow up and I think that that's extremely significant because the industry has been quite stagnant for some time. And it's really a detriment to consumers and it's cost because of the massiveness of the companies that run everything. And you see it with Facebook, which I do a lot with Facebook and I think that they have really effective ways to advertise to consumers, but I really do not like their business practices and the way that they either buy a company or they copy them. They're just constantly trying to squelch competition and innovation, I think.

And it's what happens with companies, they get big and they want to protect their turf. And so, sometimes that means not allowing things that might benefit consumers or just executing poorly on them. And they've tried to copy TikTok with Reels, I think it's called. And so, I know some people that are...

In fact, I was talking to a friend about how I was planning to start doing some TikTok videos myself, and she wasn't on and a lot of people I know aren't. And she said, "Well, I'll join. If you're going to start putting content out, but I just use Reels because it's on Instagram." And they can rely on that because they have so many users, they can come out with a feature, whether or not it feels tacked on, and they always do. It's like, "How many different things is Instagram trying to be now with all of these..." Everybody comes out with different ideas and then they'd just copy all of them, which I just don't... I wish that they could stick to what they were good at and what they were great at, what attracted people to them.

So, I don't know what's next after TikTok. I think if we were to look at some of the trends in virtual reality and augmented reality, that that is going to be playing a role in our future. And also, integrating the shopping experience more with the social media. So, I don't know what the network is going to be called that does this, but the better that people integrate the social media with the purchase, if you could do a one-click purchase, and have that thing show up at your door two hours later by drone, that's going to be very a compelling business model.

Jon Pfeiffer:

I had a recent guest speculate that the next big thing was Amazon with Twitch in, exactly what you were saying, the one touch buy.

Justin Blaney:

Yeah. And I don't know if Amazon... They haven't proven to be too able to create new, but they could partner with like a TikTok and do something like that with them. But yeah, no, I think that, that's... Actually one thing that people are seeing is WhatsApp. They're considering WhatsApp a social network. And I didn't really understand what people meant by that, but I finally think I get it. And I'm involved in a lot of these big text groups and it's almost like a private social network with you and 20 friends.

And everybody's posting stuff all the time. Almost every time I open my phone, there's a couple more posts and people are sharing things. And this is actually one of the ways that a lot of misinformation gets shared because people form isolated, tiny little social networks with people that all think the same and they all share the same stuff with each other. So that is essentially a form of a micro social network. So I could see that-

Jon Pfeiffer:

Kind of a poor man's Slack.

Justin Blaney:

... increasing somehow. A poor man's Slack. Yeah. An international Slack. Exactly.

Jon Pfeiffer:

Yes, there you go. So, how do you keep up with what's going on in the industry?

Justin Blaney:

Well, if you're not involved in it every day, you're going to miss things. And I think I miss things myself, even though I teach on it and I'm talking to podcasters like yourself all the time about it and write books on it. Because there is just too much happening to keep track of. And, actually, I have kids who are in the 20 to 17 range and sometimes I'm embarrassed I got to have them show me how to use a new feature. And it's like, if you're not doing it every day and you're not active in it, and even if you are, something can come out and you might miss it.

So I think it's just about staying as engaged as possible. And I really believe that all of the opportunity... The greatest opportunities for growth happen when things are the newest, the earliest adopters. And so, it pays off to be on that cutting edge. So if you're a company, what I actually do in my company is we hire the youngest people that we can find that we can hire. And they are my advisors and they're telling me what's happening with their friends and what people are using and how. Because, I think, once you get even into your 20s, it happens really young. I have friends who are 25 who feel like they've been left behind by social media.

Jon Pfeiffer:

Isn't that astounding?

Justin Blaney:

Yeah. It really is. So don't feel bad if you're listening and you feel like you don't get this sometimes because 25 year olds feel that, feel the same thing. And so it just happens to all of us. So, the only way to combat that is to stay really engaged, especially with young people, which is another reason why I love teaching the class because I get another, a group of 20 year olds, every term. And I ask them, what are they seeing? What are they doing? And it's a way that I can learn in reverse.

Jon Pfeiffer:

No, I teach a media law class at Pepperdine and that is one of the best things about it, is keeping up and keeping the pulse on what, for my class it's 20 and 21 year olds, what they're doing.

Justin Blaney:

Mm-hmm (affirmative). Yeah, exactly.

Jon Pfeiffer:

So one last question is where can people find you on the internet?

Justin Blaney:

Well, they can find me pretty easily just by searching for my name, Justin Blaney. And I'm on most social networks @JustinBlaney. And of course, we have this book available on Amazon, which we'd love to get in people's hands, because I think it's a really good guide for making the most of social media and eliminating some of the mistakes that I think people can make. So, I would love to meet anybody that's listening and say, “Hi.” Stop by and say, “Hi.” And tell me where you've heard me and we can have a little chat.

Jon Pfeiffer:

In a socially distant, six foot with mask on.

Justin Blaney:

Yes, with a Mac between us.

Jon Pfeiffer:

Thank you.