Neal Schaffer: Influencer Marketing deep dive

Our interview of Neal Schaffer for “The Creative Influencer” podcast is available today for download on iTunes, Spotify, and premier platforms everywhere. Neal is a global keynote speaker, university educator, social media agency owner, social media strategy consultant and the author of “The Age of Influence, the power of influencers to elevate your brand.” This is his fourth book and we take a deep dive into influencer marketing.

‍

______________________________________________________________________________

A transcript of the episode follows:

Jon Pfeiffer:

I am joined today by Neal Schaffer. Welcome to the podcast.

Neal Schaffer:

Hey, thank you very much for having me. It's an honor to be here.

Jon Pfeiffer:

You are a consultant, a speaker, a professor at Rutgers Business School, which I'll come back to, you have a podcast, you have a Twitter account with over 216,000 tweets, which that's a lot. You have a blog on your website. You have an Instagram site with over 2,700 posts. And of course you're on LinkedIn. And by the way, did I mentioned that you've written four books. You are a busy man.

Neal Schaffer:

Let's say the least.

Jon Pfeiffer:

So, tell me about Rutgers, on your LinkedIn account it says you are a social media marketing, mini MBA faculty. What is that?

Neal Schaffer:

So universities have a variety of executive education programs. And we know that there's, for instance schools like UCLA, Pepperdine have MBA programs, and then more recently they have something called an executive MBA program. So executive education is not an executive MBA per se, but they are courses meant for executives where companies basically pay to get them trained. And instead of hiring private trainers, do it using the curriculum of a university that has those programs. So Rutgers University is actually what used to be the center for, I forgot what the name of it was right now. It's under Rutgers Business School, but Rutgers University has actually been one of the most aggressive in creating these types of what they call mini MBA courses for executives to get up to speed on a wide variety of topics, but really they call it a digital marketing MBA.

I teach as part of the social media marketing MBA, I've actually taught part of the digital marketing mini MBA before, I helped them create a social selling in a digital world course, which is more for B2B salespeople. And it is basically a collection of presenters that, I think the social media MBA program is a week long program. So you basically have two modules per day, or in the course of a week, you have 10 different modules. I actually teach two different modules. Other professors they're like Mark Schaffer. Who's also a very well known and respected marketing author. There's actually someone who teaches about social media named Glen Gilmore. Don't know if you've heard about him and he's pretty big in the social media law space, as well as others that teach a variety of subjects around social media marketing for that.

So, yes it's executive MBA. It's in-person. I fly back to New Brunswick, New Jersey twice a year. The fall in the spring, but they also obviously record and they have an online version of it as well. And for the online version, I show up for coaching hours. So it's very much like these courses that a lot of content creators have created. But they have been doing this for several years and it's obviously using the name of the university, their rigorous standards as well as the vetting to make sure they have good educators providing good education.

Jon Pfeiffer:

Totally shifting gears—mentioned it earlier. You're the author of four books. You have a two about LinkedIn, a book called Maximize Your Social and your latest book is The Age of Influence: The Power of Influencers to Elevate Your Brand. I want to come back to this in detail, but I want to kind of set the scene by talking about who you are first, before we get into the book. You're currently located in Irvine, California?

Neal Schaffer:

Correct.

Jon Pfeiffer:

And you are a Southern California boy?

Neal Schaffer:

I am, went to Rolling Hills High School and Rancho Palos Verdes is for those who know the area.

Jon Pfeiffer:

And your father was a teacher.

Neal Schaffer:

He was a teacher.

Jon Pfeiffer:

How did that impact what you do now?

Neal Schaffer:

Well, I think I got off to a head start because my father was a teacher, and actually my father specialized in teaching children with learning disabilities. So he actually first worked at Porterville State Hospital focusing on these children. And then he was hired by a new area of Southern California was opening up. It was called the Palos Verdes Peninsula Unified School District. And he had got a job there in 1959 and moved there a long time ago. So he was involved in the school district as a remedial reading specialist. And it's funny because he also taught evening courses for Pepperdine University when I was a child.

Jon Pfeiffer:

Really?

Neal Schaffer:

Yeah, for teachers, I remember actually going to one of his classes and I was his experimental Guinea pig, but he taught me to read at three or four years old. So when I got into kindergarten, I had a headstart. Now this is something that I think a lot of parents do these days. They don't rely just on the schools for education and they sort of push their kids outside. I was very fortunate, and because my father was an educator, he was also somewhat of an intellect. So, when I was looking and thinking about where I wanted to go for university, and obviously education was very, very important in our household. There was no choice, but to go to university, he thought I should go to a smaller liberal arts college where I'd have more personal interaction with my professor. What have you. So, that all culminated in me going to this liberal art school called Amherst College. And it really prepared me-

Jon Pfeiffer:

For those who don't know that's in Amherst, Massachusetts.

Neal Schaffer:

Correct. It's one of these small liberal arts colleges. There's an in Southern California Pomona College would be closest comparison probably, so on the East Coast is very well known on the West Coast not so well known, but he really prepared me for a culture of education of intellectual curiosity. And really my father is someone that actually served in World War II. And I'll never forget when I said looked at, I want to spend my junior abroad in China because I was an Asian studies major. He said, Neil, if I was 18 today, I would want to jump on a plane and travel the world. So go do what you want to do. So he inspired me and as I began my work and later turned into a consultant speaker author, he really obviously encouraged me and gave me a lot of advice about publishing because he ended up creating his own publishing company, publishing educational materials. So yeah, it's definitely, he was an educator. He was an entrepreneur. And I sort of see both of those threads in my life as well.

Jon Pfeiffer:

Now I can't let this drop. You are also fluent in Japanese and Chinese.

Neal Schaffer:

That's correct. I grew up in Rancho Palos Verdes.

Jon Pfeiffer:

I didn't realize you weren't from Asia!

Neal Schaffer:

Well growing up, most of my friends were Asian American. So when I went to college, I said I'm going to learn an Asian language. And it was sort of self discovery, but I took Chinese, did my junior abroad in Beijing. And then I switched gears to Japanese. And when I graduated, I said, I'm going to go out to Japan and I'm going to start working there. So I ended up spending 15 years there, obviously doing business in China as well. And today because my wife is Japanese. I'd say my Japanese is better than my Chinese, but I still do business obviously in Japan and travel there frequently. What have you? So we're all a mixture of a lot of unique dots and threads. And I think you've really tapped into those that really shaped who I am as well as how I view business and marketing and social media and influencers.

Jon Pfeiffer:

And then you did, before you got into your digital work life, you had a pre digital work life, starting with a semiconductor company. Tell me about the journey from pre-digital traditional kind of companies to digital.

Neal Schaffer:

So my role, when I decided to move out to Japan after graduating, I was lucky to get a job at a $3 billion publicly listed semiconductor company, which happened to be headquartered in Kyoto. So I had the joy of starting my career in Kyoto, Japan of all places. And originally I was actually in finance, believe it or not because the finance director took a liking to me, but I really wanted to get into sales and marketing. And they allowed me to do that. And I helped them launch their China sales operations, basically.

Jon Pfeiffer:

I got to stop you there. How did you get in the finance department if your undergrad was in Asian studies?

Neal Schaffer:

So funny story, first of all, it all started because Amherst college has a sister in Japan called Doshisha University in Kyoto. And it turns out that in our career center, there were a few Japanese magazines. Now these magazines were geared towards Japanese studying in the United States and going back to Japan. But as I was looking through it, there were about 10 companies that had advertisements in English. So I sent off my resume to all 10. And to be honest with you, it was more of, I didn't know what I wanted to do yet, but I knew where I wanted to do it, which was Japan. So I was very open. I wanted to do something outward facing sales, marketing, but I was open to ideas. And so in parallel to doing that, I also said, Hey, I'm going to go out my roommate in Beijing, in China, my junior was actually Japanese.

So I said, I'm actually going to go out to Japan Christmas break. And I'd love to have a chance to interview at your company if you're interested in hiring me. So I sort of put that out there in parallel. My first semester, senior year, I'm thinking liberal arts college doesn't really have a lot of business classes, but I wanted to take something that might be a foundational business class. And they just happened to start an accounting class, believe it or not with a visiting professor from the university of Massachusetts at Amherst, which is a huge state university right next door.

So I took that and it's something that I put on my resume as one of my economics, obviously I took accounting and what have you. And it just happened of those 10 companies, one of them, there is one in Kyoto, the director of finance had just come back from a five year stint at the American subsidiary, which happened to be located in Irvine of all places. And at the time Japan was really growing and they were starting to shift their manufacturing overseas, and they were launching sales offices overseas, but they didn't have any financial visibility into them.

He also thought at the time there's a term called “quo si qua” that Japan needs to become more international. So the thought of having an American in his finance department that would help him gain visibility into these, overseas sales subsidiaries, while also helping his staff learn better English at a beginner salary, entry salary was a quite compelling proposition. And we met, I flew out to Japan. He said, Hey, if you're going to go to Tokyo, we'll pay for your bullet train ticket to Kyoto. And we interviewed, and one week later after I got back to the United States, I'll never forget coming back from a college party on a Saturday night at 2:00 AM. And there was the message on my answering machine offered me the job. So it's quite a story actually.

Jon Pfeiffer:

And then you worked for, from a semiconductor company, you then went on to Proctor & Gamble-

Neal Schaffer:

Well, I never went on to Proctor & Gamble. I went from semiconductor to embedded software company called Wind River. In between there was a job offer from Proctor & Gamble which I never took.

Jon Pfeiffer:

That'll teach me to do my research late at night.

Neal Schaffer:

No worries.

Jon Pfeiffer:

And then you eventually started down the digital path. What drew you to the digital?

Neal Schaffer:

So when I came back, I guess coming back to the United States is what naturally drew me. So I built a career in Asia, 15 years, get married there. We have a child, decide we want to raise our child in the United States, make the move. At this time, I was regional vice president of Asia Pacific sales for a software startup out of Ottawa, Canada. So great relationship with the executive team—"Neal, as long as you live near an international airport and you can invest, two weeks out of every two months, 25% of your time to traveling to Asia, meeting with clients, managing people there, as well as flying to Ottawa and helping the executive team better understand Asia, we're going to support you.” So even though I moved back to the United States, I was still working for that company, doing the same thing I was doing before. But after a while my wife had baby number two coming along. She's not a fluent English speaker. She's far away because we speak Japanese as our first language in our house. She's far away from her parents.

Jon Pfeiffer:

Got to stop you: boys, or girls or one of each?

Neal Schaffer:

I have one of each. My oldest is a girl. Youngest is a boy. And at that time for the first time in my career, I realized that I needed to pull the plug on my career. I needed to sort of step back and really support my wife and growing family, because I'd done so much travel, right? So I did that and the company allowed me to consult with them for a while. But after a year I said, it's time for me to get back out in the job market. What I realized was I needed to reinvent myself, because who is going to hire an American living in California to manage Asia sales when they could hire someone on the ground in Asia.

Jon Pfeiffer:

How old were you at this time?

Neal Schaffer:

How old was I? I was, let me see here. Let me do the math.

Jon Pfeiffer:

Backwards math.

Neal Schaffer:

I was actually 41 at the time.

Jon Pfeiffer:

Okay.

Neal Schaffer:

So that's where I was still looking for a job, but I didn't have a local network. And I knew that the key to finding a job was having a network. My network was in Asia, my high school friends. I went to Berkeley. They're on the Bay Area. I'm in Orange County where I pretty much didn't know many people. So that's where I went digital. That's where I started with LinkedIn. And I realized that back in 2008, Twitter was in its infancy. Facebook was still primarily for college students. There was no Instagram, obviously. And I realized that LinkedIn, as I began using it and began connecting with people, I realized that was a powerful tool that very few people thought of at the time, that you could connect with people you didn't know, you might be able to network and create relationships what have you. So I got very deeply involved in that and I mentioned it because I saw LinkedIn is a great networking vehicle, because even though I ended up getting my job, I still was wanted to keep networking on LinkedIn because I knew it would help my sales in Asia, but as well as my career in the future, I thought of it as sort of career insurance.

So I actually started a blog the day I got an acceptance letter for the job. I wanted to get all this information out there. And even though I couldn't be as active on LinkedIn, I wanted to create a networking vehicle for myself. Well, it turns out three and a half months later, we have the Lehman Brothers crash. This company's trying to sell themselves off and they decided to pull the plug on international sales. So that to me, this is the first time that that had ever happened to me. And I realized I had to create something that no one can take away from me. And that's my personal brand. And so I got more heavier into blogging and it was very hard in 2009 to find a job, as you can imagine, especially in a niche like I was looking for.

And there were opportunities that came and went there. My wife sort of threw out the idea, Neil, you should consider writing a book and I never thought I'd do it. But I said, you know what, if I don't end up getting a job first, I will write the book. And lo and behold, I wrote, I wrote the book and this is back in 2009 about LinkedIn and my experiences. And I wasn't doing social media for a living. Then it was more of a online networking, how to use LinkedIn type of book. But it led to speaking opportunities which then led to, will you buy copies of my book for a speaker's honorarium? And everyone was like, yes. And in January 2010 in the course of two weeks there were four opportunities that came my way of companies that didn't know what to do with social media, but they wanted help.

They didn't know what they didn't know, but they wanted someone to come in and help them. And that's where, I don't have an agency background, but I realized that what companies needed there was strategy and education. So I created what I called at the time of social media strategy consultancy. And funny enough, I got a job offer at the same time, literally, as I was establishing my LLC. And this is, the proverbial fork in the road that the powers that be, Neal which way you're going to go. And I just saw so much upside with social media and digital media. That's the route I took and I really haven't looked back. So all those things I do, the books, the podcast, it's all building... it's unique because when you become a content creator and hopefully those listening will agree. Every piece of content you create that gets out there, it's PR it also showcases your work. It also leads to opportunities. So I've really done my best to when I don't have client time to try to maximize that time, to build this constant flow of content that keeps my name out there, and keeps people thinking about me top of mind that eventually leads to business.

Jon Pfeiffer:

Which now is the perfect transition to the podcast. Your podcast is called Maximize Your Social Influence.

Neal Schaffer:

Correct.

Jon Pfeiffer:

And you recently had an episode where you said you consider podcasters be influencers.

Neal Schaffer:

Absolutely.

Jon Pfeiffer:

Why is that?

Neal Schaffer:

So let me give you a real life example, and I want to look at it from the other end. I think a lot of podcasts are start podcasting, and I don't think they understand the influence that they hold. So I'm an author coming out with a new book. I actually came out two days before California went on lockdown, March 17th, 2020. It's about influencer marketing. My publisher is one of the biggest-

Jon Pfeiffer:

We’re going to do a deep dive into that in a second.

Neal Schaffer:

But really the story is not about the book, but the process of promoting the book. And the role of influencers and podcasters. So I talk to my publisher, one of the biggest book publishers, if not the biggest book publisher in the world, how should I go about promoting my book? What do you advise, do you think I should do traditional media outreach?

And they actually said, it really doesn't work anymore. It's going to cost a lot of money. You might get some coverage, but they recommended to me that I should be reaching out to podcasts or some blockers. So I took a step back. I said, okay, if I went to... I write in my book that influencer marketing is all about inciting word of mouth, about businesses, or about brands, getting people talking about you and social media. So I said, okay, how do I get people to talk about my book? And therefore I divide, and this is the exact same thing I do with my clients. If you want to yield more influence. There's four major digital content mediums. You have photo, you have video, you have texts, you have audio. So the photo route is, my book is not a photogenic book.

I can't see an Instagram or taking a photo of the book and going viral. The photo is not the right place for it. So I thought that Instagram wouldn't be the right place. Video, maybe. Right. But how many YouTube shows or YouTube channels on there that are just based on interviewing authors? Very few. And I think the most popular YouTube ones with a very entertaining, or they're more like how to stuff. So I didn't think that was the proper medium. Let's look at blogging text, blogging is huge, right? They said, I should look after bloggers, but there aren't that many blogs that do a lot of interviews or that do book reviews. Very few actually. And the ones I reached out to, they reviewed books like a year ago. It's like, well think about it when we do our next revision next year. I wasn't going to make any impact.

And then I got the podcast, right? Podcasting is a medium just like today, this podcast that we're recording based on an interview of all those four mediums, the one where interviews are the mainstream, the main way of approaching the content is podcasting. So I thought to myself and I started... there are tools, the best tool that I recommend is a tool called chartable.com. If you're a podcaster you should be using it, if you're not a podcaster, you can go into chartable.com and it shows you the rankings of top podcasts in all the different genres in any country in the world. So, okay. I have a podcast who are my biggest listeners got United States, United Kingdom, Australia, Canada, no surprises. Right? So I go into Charitable, who are the top marketing podcasts, and as I went through them and there was one podcast that I was on, where the gentleman, he wasn't marketing, he was business, he was talking about getting 10,000 downloads per episode.

And I was a guest. I thought to myself, I have a blog. I have a domain authority of 55, which isn't bad. I get a tremendous amount of traffic from Google what have you. There's no blog posts where I get a guaranteed 10,000 views. And people read a blog post, spend two, three, four, five minutes. People listening to podcast could be 15, 30, 45 minutes an hour listening. They're glued. So when I thought about it, that way, when the light went on and I thought podcasts is compelling, even my own podcast, which now I know if you hit that top 250, you're probably getting 500, 600, 700 downloads per episode. And that's tremendous. There's so many small businesses that would love to have 500, 600, 700 views every week when they publish a new blog posts.

And that's where I realized the podcasters truly are influencers. They can influence thousands, tens of thousands of people. Instagram, we can say, and probably some people listening to this are going, yeah, I get a few 100, I get a few 1000 likes on an Instagram photo, but it's a like, it may not compel them to action.

It's a split second in many instances, whereas a podcast is a download and a listen, you really can't compare the two. So when I saw those numbers and realize that, podcasting pretty much like the early days of Instagram, it's probably a supply and demand. There's just way too much demand for very little supply, compared to the number of YouTube video channels or Instagram accounts or blogs, there just aren't that many podcasts, right? So it's still an area where you can make impact.

So I said, in all honesty and I published my own podcast episode about this. I said, okay, I'm going to try to get onto a hundred top marketing podcasts. And if I can be interviewed on 100 different top marketing podcasts, that's a great KPI or sort of an objective. And I will have felt that I would have left no stone unturned if I'm able to do that. So, funny thing is I'm at 67 now. Right? But that's where I think that podcasters have tremendous influence, because I have a two year waiting list to get on my own podcast. I do a solo episode and an interview episode, meaning I only interviewed 26 people a year. I have 60 people that want to be on the podcast. I have tried to get another people's podcasts where they're starting to say, Hey, it's $750 or $1000.

So now you begin to think. We think about blogging and sponsored content. We think about Instagram and TikTok and YouTube and sponsoring content. There's a play for sponsored content and podcasts as well. It becomes a pretty... I'm working with another author right now, and we're looking at where to create a platform and she wants to be able to interview all these amazing CEOs and what have you. I said, podcasts is a natural, because people want to be on podcasts. They want to be interviewed. So it's just a very, very different medium that I think once content creators realize it, that they begin to see a lot of opportunities.

And plus it is a very, very repurposable type of content, right? An Instagram photo cannot be repurposed, a YouTube video could be, but it's really easy to create a podcast, create a transcript, publish it as an episode. If you do an interview and you have a video, you can splice and dice that into video content. I can't think of any other content that's as repurposable as podcasts in any way either. So when you think about it that way, that also has inherent digital influence because of the content you can create.

Jon Pfeiffer:

If we do, it appears in iTunes or Apple podcasts, and then all the other white guest networks have it on YouTube, have it on the blog as a transcript, also have the podcast on the blog. So you get a lot of bang for the buck.

Neal Schaffer:

It really is and I'll be honest that I'm a digital marketer. So I started a podcast back in 2013 as just a content marketing. I have a blog, I need to have a podcast. It's just like so many people you probably see, try to start YouTube channels that just don't make sense, or businesses start to create Instagram accounts that just don't match with Instagram, because they're not a true consumer of the content in that platform. And I was the same. I only became an avid podcast listener about a year ago. And I had taken a few year break from my podcasts. I'm like, Holy smokes, I've been doing it wrong this whole time. So that started me investing more time into podcasting. And it's the first thing I do every week. It's the thing I love to do now. And my blog becomes more of an SEO activity. My podcast really becomes the place where I share all of my unique content. And frankly, I think my best content.

Jon Pfeiffer:

Frankly, it's fun because you get to talk to people you ordinarily wouldn't get to talk to. And I kind of embraced the Zoom interviews I had a rule for since we started the podcast that I would only do in-person interviews. But COVID has changed that.

Neal Schaffer:

Indeed.

Jon Pfeiffer:

So I want to transition now to the main topic, which is your new book, “The Age of Influence.” It is in four parts: Part One, “Why influencer marketing;” Part Two, “Understanding influencers and the way you can engage with them;” Part Three, “how to work with influencers to generate massive results;” and then Part Four, “Becoming an influencer yourself.” So, so as I read it, the first three parts are more, if you are a business working with influencers.

Neal Schaffer:

Correct.

Jon Pfeiffer:

And then the last part is, what about if you're an influencer and my clients are on both sides of the fence, but most of my clients are influencers. So I paid particular attention to the last section, but I want to start with, this is in the introduction you say, and this is a quote. “My focus here is on engaging the voices of influencers ‘leveraging the other,’ as I call it to spread your message.” What do you mean by leveraging the other?

Neal Schaffer:

Well, the idea is that as a brand, you are a single entity among a billion people. So if you're in a room with a billion people, it's going to be hard to be heard. You're a lonely entity, but when you can leverage other people in the room to talk about you, that's where you begin to incite this sort of word of mouth marketing, that everybody thinks social media is all about. So leveraging the other is just more recently. And I think in the book as well, I sort of divide down from a digital marketing perspective. What are the different things we can do as a business, right? So you've got your website, you got your SEO, you got your email marketing, you got your content marketing blogging, and then you have your social media. And none of this talks to the fact that you can also be leveraging the other, leveraging people around you that already have influence in social media to help spread your message.

So I used to call it, leverage the other. Now I just call it influencer marketing. And just I cover things like even employee advocacy and brand advocacy. That so many people are so active on social media now that are building up followings, that would be considered at that nano-influencer level. That there's a lot of people that can help you. So the traditional influencer marketing route of trying to reach out to someone that doesn't know you, that has tremendous influence is one way, but I also want to introduce to people that you can also reach out to people that already know you and already like you and already trust you and still have impactful results. And I do believe the industry is it's sort of moving in this direction as well.

Jon Pfeiffer:

What definitions do you give to the nano-influencer and micro-influencer, what level of following do you ascribe to each?

Neal Schaffer:

I don't have a set rule because I believe those are levels that were set by the influencer marketing industry. So I take a very third-party approach to all this. I tend to be neutral. I don't come from the industry. I consider more of a consultant's perspective on how to best leverage this. So whatever number you want to take for me, the most important number is the 1000 to 10,000 that most say is the nano-influencer level, because this is a level where it's, it's low enough, where there are more and more people that you can collaborate with. So, and I think on the high end, when I look at someone like Charlie from TikTok when you appear on a TV ad, you're no longer a social media influencer, you're a celebrity. And now we talk about traditional celebrity endorsement.

So in between you have lots of different influencers, but let's face it, influencers influence a unique community, and they're able to influence a unique community on unique topics. So that's where the number of following sort of isn't as relevant, if those followers are not relevant to your business. So it all comes down to a top 1%, top 5%, top 10%, whatever approach you want to take. As you start to filter and look through influences, it might be relevant to your business. What is the following of the top 0.1% or top 1%. And that is how I would look at it. But I would also say, Hey, do these people have any brand affinity with me? Are they following my brand? Are they a customer or a brand? Have they ever mentioned my brand? If we commented on a post or sent them a message, do they respond or not?

And if they don't, no matter how much following they have, they may not want to work with you. Or if they do want to work with you, it's going to be a very, very expensive initiative probably. Businesses have a very, very holistic perspective because on the other end, every content creator, every influence from listening to his podcast is unique in the way they operate. It's not like influencers come together and say, let's define micro influencers as this. Or let's define price for Instagram posts as that. And not everybody's in it for the money either they'll work for product or for exclusive experiences. What have you. That's why business need to have a holistic perspective because it's human beings that we're trying to engage with on the other end. And everybody's different.

Jon Pfeiffer:

Now going on in part you say a quote, “brands need to think digital first because their audience and customers already act that way when the heyday of television advertising.” And this is kind of echoing what we were talking about: “A large effort was made to get audiences in front of a message. Now, those eyeballs are increasingly on social media platforms. That's where attention and time is being spent. So that's where the money should be spent.” And I agree with you 100% but now my question is, what do you predict for the next five years? How much more will go into a digital versus traditional?

Neal Schaffer:

Now it's funny because I wrote that primarily back in 2019 before Coronavirus. So how does Coronavirus effect all this? It accelerates it. I think that as consumers we've been primarily digital first for some time, but businesses have always been trying to play catch up. And what always happens is you have businesses that are used to doing things the old way, and it still works, or they still get marginal results. Or the management team just doesn't understand digital and social media marketing and influencers. So, Coronavirus has really changed things. It's made every business have to think digital first in order to engage customers. And I think it's also made consumers even more digital first, especially when it comes to e-commerce for beginners. Getting us even more comfortable using digital technology to consume information, to share information and to buy things.

So I see it only accelerating. And when I think of younger generations, as younger generations become a majority of the workplace, we already have millennials as a majority. These are digital natives. So I believe all of this just accelerates, and we're going to have new innovative digital technologies come out. But if companies today don't have a digital first mindset, I don't know how they're going to survive, and they might survive, but I don't know how they remain relevant to younger generations. They may remain relevant to an older generation, that's going to fade away. So it's of critical importance. And it that's actually the topic of the next book, which I've already started conceptualizing is, is this very same digital first concept? I think it is that critical. And it goes beyond just influencer marketing, but truly tapping into influencers and yielding influence is one of those ingredients that I think companies should have

Jon Pfeiffer:

It may seem like I'm jumping around, but I'm actually following the book.

Neal Schaffer:

No worries. I love it.

Jon Pfeiffer:

Talking about algorithms, you say, so how do you defeat the algorithm? How do you make the news feed work for you? How do you get your brand's message in front of these people? So with YouTube constantly tweaking with the algorithm, how do you keep one step ahead? If you a business or an influencer?

Neal Schaffer:

And here's the thing. Every social network, they tweak their algorithm probably like daily. Google is the same thing. So everybody just spends so much time trying to dupe the algorithm when they should be spending more time on number one, creating quality content, and number two, really creating a community around that content. If you're a business you're really screwed to pardon my English, because the algorithms favor people over businesses, now it's the same reason why I don't have a business account on Instagram. I switched to a creator account. But clearly we see through Facebook, that business page has just get pretty much zero engagement these days for most companies. So being the fact that it's paid to play that, that's where the algorithm skews towards people, people having the unfair advantage. So if you're an influencer content creator, that's helped you gain influence. And that's why businesses have to tap into influencers.

But I think trying to dupe the algorithm, I don't know if it's worth the time at the end of the day, it's in the best interest of social networks to expose great content to people that are truly engaging with the content. So maybe instead of us spending all this time, trying to read blog posts and trying to dupe it, why don't we spend more time on our content, looking at our analytics, looking at our competitors, and seeing what's performing well with them. And I think from this exercise, you're already going to glean some insight as to what you might want to improve, but it's going to be a never ending battle. And unless you have a, if you have a big enough business and you have one person that can just focus on doing that, that's awesome.

But if you're a content creator, if you're an entrepreneur or what have you, a small business owner, you don't necessarily have that. Like I said, I'd really focus on the content. I'd focus on the analytics of your competitors. And I try not to spread yourself out thin if you try to dupe the algorithm on every single social network. But I think that, and I talk about it in the book as well. There are some common themes as to what algorithms look like, algorithms look for engagement. Why do so many content creators do Instagram pods? Because they're effective. They dupe the algorithm. The latest thing are LinkedIn pods. A lot of people are trying to do the same thing on LinkedIn, and they are effective because the algorithm doesn't know any better. In fact, the algorithm things, this is a second degree connection commenting on this content.

This content must be really good if a second degree connection... So I know people that actually disconnect from each other in order to do pods on LinkedIn. Now, obviously over time, the algorithms will change. And if a brand wants to work with you and you base your whole engagement on that, they can see through that at some point, and there are Instagram analytical tools that say, this person looks like they're engaging in pot. The technology is out there. So you got to be careful, but that's the sort of thing including people in your content so that they will share it, sharing a podcast and tagging the person that was in it and hopes that they share it, tagging people, asking for engagement, having engaging content, generating engagement. These are the main things that are universal for any algorithms.

So if you publish too frequently, you don't give time for people to engage. And then the algorithm starts to show the next content. So you never give the algorithm a chance to play catch up. So there's a lot of things that go into in terms of frequency, time of day, because obviously how frequently, how quickly do people react that might show a sign of our allergy, the algorithms. So it's a lot of common sense stuff. But it's hard to do that on a day to day basis to be really programmed to be able to follow every single thing that I talked about. That's why I think, if you always think of the algorithm being always changing, no matter how many blog posts you read, they're always out of date. So really looking at your own data and looking at your competitors data, I think will give you the best insight as to how you might want to improve it.

Jon Pfeiffer:

In Part Two of the book, understanding influencers and the ways you can engage them, you say “working with an influencer, isn't a one-time deal, as I like to put it. Influencer marketing is a marriage, not a one night stand. A one-time campaign can bring quick results, but the true power of engaging with an influencer on a large-scale return comes when you develop a relationship.” How many in your experience, how many brands actually follow that advice?

Neal Schaffer:

I think traditionally very few, but I do see a lot of people that have read the book that work in the industry. Do you say the industry is slowly changing where they want to have more of an... they put the name brand ambassador program on it, right. And a brand ambassador has this notion that there's more of a longer term. I think in the influencer marketing industry, a longer term is a one year contract with an influencer. So it still is very much short term. But I think as more and more influencers appear, once you start to say nano-influencers or influencers as well, there's more people out there. As more content creators come, brands are always looking to recruit new people as more and more people, new people talk about the brand.

They're like, this is a nano-influencer. And they actually use our product. Let's reach out to them. Right. And so over the course of time, I do believe that they, they begin to think a little bit more long-term. I met a brand that is basically creating a training program for their nano-influencers, training them on how to better take photos, better take videos, become a better like fostering their brand ambassadors so that they become more influential on social media. And this is what I talk about in the book as well. So it's happening very slowly, but you can imagine that if you work with someone long term, the idea is you want to convert them into becoming a brand advocate. And I think if you're an influencer and you have a brand that comes back to you, even if it's once a year after the second or third year, you think very positively about them because you're a person, right.

You're getting repeat business and you may happen to talk about them, even though they never asked you to. And that's the whole idea here. That's how the long-term ROI manifest itself, or maybe the influencer introduces another influencer to the brand that they've never been able to reach out to or what have you. So yeah, I think part of my book is really trying to educate the market because I think a lot of marketers have been misled as to the power and the two business value of leveraging influencers. And I think they can on top it the most when they have that long-term approach to it. So, like I said, I do believe the industry is changing. There weren't many case studies I could find about that long-term approach because I think it's still very, very new, but the more people I talked to, the more I realized that it is... influencer marketing budgets are also being cut on the one hand.

So there's this rationalization, this is maturity going on in the market. But on the other hand, businesses are looking at, and now we have influencer marketing tools that say, this is what they help foster. I know one tool that, one of the leading tools now, their whole thing is we help you build a team of brand ambassadors. Instead of we help you reach out to social media influencers they've completely changed their messaging. So it's definitely happening.

Jon Pfeiffer:

When you are a brand, how much would you recommend they do on them by themselves to reach out to influencers versus to work through an agency, a traditional agency?

Neal Schaffer:

So when I started doing social media strategy consulting back in 2010, I would have companies say, well, my agency wrote me a strategy, why do I need your help. I'd say, well, an agency is going to write a strategy, which is going to basically help them sell services. It is a conflict of interest for lack of a better word. So you want to have a third party writing the strategy. And one of my clients early on was a business book author. I've worked with fortune 50 companies as well, but I've also worked with, solo producers and content creators. And he was working with an agency for his, at the time, Facebook and Twitter. And all of a sudden the agencies started saying, you got to do influencer marketing. Now this is a well-respected business book author. Who's quite a thought leader whose target market are CEOs, executives and global enterprises. And this agency based here in LA was pushing Snapchat at the time, and sort of lifestyle content creators in their 20s.

And I'm not saying that those people aren't influencers. Now, I'm not saying they don't bring value, but it was a complete mismatch to my client's target audience. So we actually veered away from that. And this is the thing is that when you work with a talent agency and don't get me wrong, I'm sure there's some great agencies out there. Their only interest is in monetizing the influence of the talent that they have.

So obviously they're going to say how influential they are. Obviously they're going to say, well, here's the ROI what you get, but I do think you need to have a third party objective analysis in doing so. And the hard part about influencer marketing is the only way to have an objective analysis of that data. And the only way to have data is to actually have done it, to actually reach out to influencers, and understand what the market prices are at different levels of influence.

So if you wanted to work with an agency to get to that level, knowing that in the future, you're going to do it yourself, but you have an understanding of how the process works and what the costs are. That's a great use case scenario for working with an agency. If you find an agency that just does everything a lot quicker than you can, there's obviously the amount of money and time saved and the greater efficiency of working with an agency, that gets that time to market and the expertise they have. That's another reason to work with an agency. But I think if you want to make a long-term investment, a long-term impact, I think over time, you're probably going to take more of these things in house. And I think we've already seen this trend as well. Of more companies subscribing to tools to help them find influencers more efficiently, the same that agencies use, by the way, learning how to collaborate.

And once you begin to reach out to people that already know, like, and trust your brand, it just becomes a lot easier. It's less of a pitch and more saying, Hey, we know you're a customer. We started this brand ambassador program when you would like to be part of it. So, things are changing quite rapidly. And the infrastructure now, I think is quite there for more and more companies to be able to do this on their own, but it is time consuming. It's more PR than marketing. It's, one-to-one individual personalized outreach. And for companies that don't have the resources, they're going to continue to work with agencies. So agencies have their value, don't get me wrong. But it's going to come down to how much companies want to invest in influencer marketing, and where they are in terms of that maturity of how much experience they have.

Jon Pfeiffer:

And you just mentioned ROI, which is return on investment. You devoted an entire chapter to measuring your influencer marketing ROI. How has that changed? Where do you see it going on? How you can actually tell if the influencer is following through, is having the influence that you hope they have is having the engagement you hope they have.

Neal Schaffer:

Well tools have become quite sophisticated. This is something that you can manually do as well, but obviously, when the influencer publishes, hopefully they notify you. If they don't notify you, you're checking their feeds. If it's purely social media, you can obviously track the amounts of engagement I think-

Jon Pfeiffer:

Most of the influencer contracts now require you to provide reports.

Neal Schaffer:

Yeah, I would assume so. I think that from there, that's sort of the front side, what about the backside? And this is where I think companies are getting a lot savvier in the early days it was just about likes and views. And what have you now it's more about clicks or it's more about, you're going to promote our product and here's a discount code and it's tracking via the code. So link and code are the key ways in which companies are really tracking a lot of this. It could be traffic as well. But a big area that's appeared since I published the book and it was already starting to appear back then. But over the course of the last six months, just more and more companies leveraging influencers, not necessarily for content amplification, but for their content creator capabilities. And that's where there's tremendous ROI because companies spend a lot of money creating content that underperforms, where they could be working with the content creators, listen to this podcast to probably create it more effectively, it's going to convert better.

And it's probably going to be lesser expensive than working with some big agency to create that. And that's been a compelling shift over the last six months that, if I was to revise one chapter of my book, I would probably have a dedicated chapter on that role of not just user generated content, but really collaborating with influencers to create that content, and the compelling ROI that that content has.

Jon Pfeiffer:

And then the last section in your book is about becoming an influencer yourself. And you say that one of the first things you should do is create a strategy. And you write, “as with most parts of influencer marketing, it begins offline, becoming more influential, starts with developing a strategy.’ How many influencers have you found actually start with a strategy as opposed to start with a webcam, and just start entertaining themselves?

Neal Schaffer:

Very few. And I think that times are different. It's the supply and demand. It was just a lot easier if you're early on a network, it's a lot easier to get a lot of impression to gain traction, today it's obviously a lot harder. Everyone wants to be an influencer. Very few will succeed. If you want to become an influencer, you're trying to generate income. So you need to have a business plan. It's really, from my perspective, the same approach, because you can just put up a cam and start doing it. But if you're not doing it with some sort of intent or direction, you don't know how well you're doing. You don't know how to measure it. You don't know how to optimize it. Even if you're already doing this, if you were to take a step back and try to strategize what you're doing, I think you're going to be a lot more successful, at least a lot more effective in your efforts. And hopefully your success comes a lot sooner.

So yeah, you're absolutely right. I can't see all these people strategizing before they started. But also recognizing that probably people reading the book already are on social media already have some influence. Some of them might be nano-influencers and with just some tweaks of how they think they might be able to get where they're going a lot faster, it's really just reverse engineering. My advice for brands in the book, if you re reverse engineer, what brands look for in content creators, it gives you a lot of clues, what you should be doing.

Jon Pfeiffer:

It's great advice because, generally it's only the manager that will help them, help the influence or create a strategy, which there's a lot of time could've been saved. Had you thought this through in the beginning.

Neal Schaffer:

Absolutely.

Jon Pfeiffer:

Shifting gears for a second. How do you consume your content? What's your favorite social media platform?

Neal Schaffer:

Well, I consume my content in a variety of ways. The deepest consumption I do is via podcasting. I subscribed to 10 podcasts at a time. I vet them. I listened to the very first five episodes and if I liked them, I continue listening and I play catch up. And I live in Southern California where there's traditionally a lot of driving to do, so I traditionally listened to in the car. So, that's my number one to get deep sort of consumption. The other area is because I'm very, very active on Twitter. Share a lot of content there because Twitter generates more website traffic for me.

So I tend to use Twitter as my experimental lab to understand what content resonates with my followers. And I look at my analytics that sort of determines what I put in my monthly newsletters and what have you. So in order to post on Twitter, I aggregate RSS feeds from many of the leading blogs. I use keywords to filter. So every morning I'm looking at this social media tool, that's aggregating the RSS feeds and show me, these are the top posts published about content marketing, about Instagram, about influence marketing. And that's where I get my number one. So it's Twitter related, but it's also blogs. So combining this with podcasts, that's more of like the timely stuff what's going on. It's like, LinkedIn now allows company pages to get more visibly on their visibility on their followers or Twitter is going to add auto captions to tweets or videos on Twitter, stuff like that.

That's a sort of thing that yes, I find out about, or when there's a new, I think it was social insider. We investigated 78 million Instagram photos and we found that carousel posts that had 10 photos performed best. These are some of the things, or recently the Volvo lawsuit about Volvo leveraging user generated content, and being sued for sharing a story that they were tagged in. And that's how I keep tabs.

And I recommend anybody just to go find websites that have good information, aggregate them in a feed. I use a tool called Inoreader. I. N. O. R. E. A. D. E. R, and you can then do a keyword filter search and create specific RSS feeds based on keywords that appear in titles. And then I bring those into my social media tool. I don't share everything that goes in there, but I find the few posts. I read them and then I share them. So that process works well, but I don't go deep like in podcasts. A blog is scammed one or two minutes. The podcasts I generally listen to entire episodes.

Jon Pfeiffer:

So I want you to put your prediction hat on, get out your crystal ball. What do you see as the next big thing?

Neal Schaffer:

That's a great question. And I'm always someone that says there's so much we can be doing with what we have now. And so few businesses leverage it.

Jon Pfeiffer:

I use what you have.

Neal Schaffer:

Yes. I do think that we say it every year. People talk about video and they talk about podcasts every year. I do think there's going to be a shift. I think social media is just such a transient medium, but podcasts, YouTube videos. There's also a search engine component. There's search engine in Instagram as well for hash tags. But I do think just the long-term value of video and of a podcast. When someone subscribes, they may start listening to episode one like me, and then they download 146 different episodes, what have you. I do think from a supply and demand, there's just so much attention on Instagram and TikTok right now.

Blogging is still out there. Most companies are doing the blogging, so it's very hard to compete. I have to compete against HubSpot. I have to compete against all these big brands to get seen. But podcasting is somewhere where you can still make impact. And I would argue the same for YouTube in certain areas. YouTube is really popular, but when I look at my own kids and I see what content they consume, it's YouTube. They can watch it on TV. My daughter, she loves Chloe Ting. She does her workouts on TV. This is something that you're not going to be watching Instagram on TV, or TikTok on TV. Personally, that's why I'm doing more podcasts and I'm in the midst of creating a YouTube strategy so I can start my own channel and I want to do it right. Which is why I'm spending the time to strategize. I'm drinking my own medicine.

So I think if I'm a content creator, now those are the two areas that I would seriously consider. I don't know if you consider it risk mitigation. But I think if you can leverage one or both of those platforms, it's really going to help you gain more and more influence rather than just sticking to one Instagram or one TikTok where everybody's focusing on it. You have algorithms that are really aggressive, and the content tends to have a shorter life span than on these other networks.

Jon Pfeiffer:

So I have one last question, where can people find you on the internet?

Neal Schaffer:

So my name is Neal Schaffer and I am Neal Schaffer everywhere on pretty much any social media network. And it's also the name of my website, www.nealschaffer.com. I am the real Neal. So don't become the Starbucks barista that spells it. K. N. I. E. L, it's N. E. A. L and Schaffer is S. C. H. A. F. F. E. R, I also have a podcast called the Maximize Your Social Influence Podcast. If you're interested more about influencer marketing and digital marketing, and I have a book called The Age of Influence, which you can find on Amazon or wherever fine books are sold.

Jon Pfeiffer:

Thank you. I'll come back to you in just a second.

‍