Transcript
Ash Jones:
I’m Ash, and I started my career in marketing, at a company called Social Chain, which is based here in Manchester. I’m sure a lot of people at this event are aware of the company. And I now run a company of my own, well, I say company, it’s just me, called Great Influence. And these are some of the people that over the past couple of years that I’ve worked with in terms of personal branding. So that’s how I help people, is helping them to build a personal brand online.
Ash Jones:
So Steve Bartlett at Social Chain, Social Chain’s a global social media agency. He’s, I’d say, he’s the UK’s most influential marketer at the minute, and he’s got over a million followers across social platforms. Umar Kemani, also based in Manchester with Pretty Little Thing. He’s the CEO there. I worked on that whilst I was at Social Chain, and they’re the UK’s number one fast fashion brand, and he’s got over 500,000 followers across social platforms.
Ash Jones:
And more recently at Great Influence, I’ve been working with a range of people, but most notably Julian Hearn, who’s the founder of Huel, which is a meal supplement company. And they’re one of the UK’s fastest growing companies, currently valued at about 220 mil and will probably breach the one bil valuation within the next three years. And if anyone in Manchester knows Sasha Lord runs Warehouse Projects and Park Life and is also the nighttime economy advisor for Manchester City Council.
Ash Jones:
And I can say my journey started at Social Chain in 2014. And this is an over view Social Chain if anyone’s not aware of the company. So it kind of went from a few people back in 2014 to now in 2019 where there’s, I think, there are probably near 300 staff now across Manchester, London, New York, Berlin. They’re an investor backed group and they’re currently planning an IPO and they work with a lot of the world’s biggest brands. So if you’ve not heard of Social Chain, I won’t go too much into the story, but it’s definitely one worth checking out if you’ve got the time.
Ash Jones:
And my part at Social Chain really came down to working alongside the CEO, a good friend of mine, Steve Bartlett in the … when we started Social Chain, we had quite a lot of difficulty in getting our name out there. We thought we had a great story and the … the average age of the company was 21. The office kind of looked like Google’s office. There’s puppies, a slide, all this kind of thing. And we were able at the time, the kind of hook that we had in terms of PR was that we could make anything trend online in a very fast way. And we thought that was a very cool story, something that PR would latch onto. But we struggled in that first year to get any traditional PR, or media to take interest in us.
Ash Jones:
And one of the ways that really worked in 2014-15 for Social Chain to build an awareness came through Steve doing events exactly like this, marketing events, tech events, social media events, conferences. He’d go out and he’d tell this amazing story of his journey through entrepreneurship and how that’s led into Social Chain and all the great work Social Chain does in about 12 to 15 minutes. And it was a very captivating story that really intrigued a lot of people. And in turn it helped to raise a huge amount of awareness for Social Chain whenever he went and did this activity.
Ash Jones:
So what we thought was how can we essentially scale the impact that that has where Steve was going on stages and telling a story, so how can we scale storytelling? And the answer was really clear to us from looking at people like Gary Vaynerchuk in 2015 who was really going mainstream at the time. And that being a content creator and storyteller online as an entrepreneur was a very good idea for us to do at the time.
Ash Jones:
And we also felt that there was no one at the time in 2015 in terms of the UK that had really owned that persona in the way that Gary Vaynerchuk did in the US. And over the space of a few years we built Steve into a social influencer. These numbers are a little outdated, but he’s got way over a million followers across platforms now and he’s constantly daily putting out content across different platforms and the impact that that has hard on Social Chain has been quite remarkable in helping build the awareness for the business and drive a lot of new biz and a lot of good hires, PR. It’s been great for the investment all these kinds of things. It’s touched every area of the business in a positive sense.
Ash Jones:
We couldn’t get PR at the start of Social Chain and in building Steve as an influencer, traditional media started to come to us. So we were able to get more exposure in the press for Social Chain. Steve was able to tell about Social Chain’s story on a global stage. And the audiences got bigger and bigger and bigger and now like I’ve seen him do talks in arenas, which is insane. Steve himself started to become commercially attractive to brands, which again is like a revenue arm for Social Chain and always good, good exposure. And he started to break into television as well. He’s actually on a Channel 4 this Thursday. There’s a show called, is it The Secret Teacher? Something like that. It’s Channel 4, 9:00 PM on this Thursday if you’re free, check it out. He’s on TV.
Ash Jones:
And one of the things I think was really important for me in that whole project was the fact that he was voted by E-Consultancy is the most influential person in market. This was at the back end, the start of 2018, and it’s voted for by the top hundred agencies in the country. So it’s kind of like when Players’ Player of The Year. And when we talk about trying to build awareness for Social Chain, this is a really great way of doing that. So Social Chain’s name is always touched to Steve Butler’s name and that really is the benefit of it for the company.
Ash Jones:
And as I said, I don’t want to touch too much on on that. I’ll take questions on it if anyone has any after. But there was a few things that I really learned from it. Initially with Steve we made content that we didn’t feel was self-serving. So you didn’t have to know who Steve Bartlett was or what Social Chain do to be engaged in the content that you’re watching online. And we did that over and over until Steve started to establish a bit of another identity and his recognition was therefore established after that.
Ash Jones:
Steve’s thing was always a real big focus on high value positioning. So everything that he was doing, he always tried to position it so that it makes Social Chain look in a really positive, very big fast growth kind of light. Even down to tiny aspects that he’d obsess over in that when he’d do an event like this, he’d scout out the room beforehand and say to whoever was filming or doing photos, if you just stand over there, you’re going to get the perfect angle that makes the room look the fullest. So it’s this real obsession of very high value positioning for across the whole story of Social Chain, which I think was really important.
Ash Jones:
And then deeply understanding audience, attention, culture and distribution, which I’ll come onto later because I think it’s like the real key of personal branding. And then also not being afraid to try. So I can think of the first few months that we started doing content with Steve, some of the stuff that got published would never in a million years pass now. But that’s because things were put out, we’d learn, we understood what works. We weren’t afraid to really try and figure out what people wanted to hear.
Ash Jones:
So I kind of want to move on from that Social Chain, Steve side and go into personal branding as a topic in general. And I think some of the reasons why you should build a personal brand, if anyone is thinking about it, really lie in these four things, which firstly you can control the narrative of your business. And this is something that I say with clients a lot in that what you do these days on social as a business, or as a leader of a business, or what you don’t do on social can make up people’s mind in terms of their perception of what you do and how you offer value. I had a conversation with someone where we were talking about even down to not being active on LinkedIn these days. If you’ve got the little grayed out profile picture on LinkedIn, I personally find that a bit weird and I don’t trust people that have it. So it’s really important that you essentially figure out what the narrative of your business is and what you want people to know you for and always make sure that, that is being positively reinforced through what you’re putting out on social. And that it’s always pulling back to that narrative so that nobody is making it a narrative up for you. You’re telling them exactly what you stand for and why you stand for it and how you can add value to people.
Ash Jones:
The second one, building support and trust with stakeholders. So stakeholders is everyone that’s really got a connection to the business from clients, customers, staff, investors, the wider industry. Using platforms like LinkedIn especially, you can really easily build support from people. People on LinkedIn are just so nice in terms of willing to support what people are doing. And if you just put yourself out there, people will be more than willing to support you along the way. And it also, if you’re smart with it, you can build a lot of trust with people. If you’ve positioned yourself correctly in the content then it should come across with a degree of professionalism.
Ash Jones:
And then the third one you can unlock a lot of opportunities across all areas of a business. So I know this personally, so I’ve had a couple of clients that have come from LinkedIn, stuff that I’ve on LinkedIn. And [inaudible 00:10:47] Social Chain there we were able to get new business. Hire certain people that we might not have been able to hire if we didn’t give that open box view into the Social Chain world through Steve’s vlogs. It can really have a big impact in creating opportunities for you all across the board.
Ash Jones:
And then number four, I feel it helps create a consistent touch point with an audience that keeps you front of mind. And I think this is a really key one as well in the people now personal branding is becoming such a thing, and LinkedIn is becoming such a thing that there’s an argument to start using it really heavily, almost daily, like post, if you’re not posting every day or every couple of days, you’re missing out on something.
Ash Jones:
And I think the real insight is that there’s actually a balance to be had where if you’re an authority on the platform, like Gary Vaynerchuk, you can post every day and that’s fine. Whereas if you’re not an authority and you’re trying to build that authority up, I think there’s a thing of you can be in people’s faces too much. And really the skill in it is finding that balance, which helps just create enough of a consistent touch point so that when people think of you, or think of your topic, whatever you do, your niche, that you’re always the name that springs to mind, at the front of mind. So for me, if someone was talking about personal branding, I want to be enough of a touch point with them on social platforms that if they’re having a conversation and I’m relevant to it, that word of mouth is then forth coming off the back of it.
Ash Jones:
And then I also think it’s PR in its strongest form. PR fundamentally is all about raising awareness, controlling the positioning of a business, the stuff that goes out and presses is very controlled and it’s positioned well and it builds public perception for people. The difference with PR and personal branding I feel is that personal branding can build unbiased public perception. So if I see someone has got pressed, chances are, I know it’s paid for a lot of the time. So and it’s also been planned and positioned and it’s all about relationships. So it kind of comes with a bit of bias that that company or whatever has managed to get press. Whereas personal branding, it feels super organic and authentic. It doesn’t feel forced. It doesn’t feel like you’re being sold to if you can do it right, which really builds that public perception.
Ash Jones:
It also, as I just touched on, it can help drive a lot of word of mouth. And more importantly when you compare it with PR, which can cost thousands of pounds a month, it’s completely free if you want. to do it yourself. I cost, unfortunately.
Ash Jones:
Also a CEO, or a business leader, or if you’re working in a team, the person at the top is really the number one salesperson in any business. They’re essentially selling to their team, their clients, customers, investors, the industry every single day. And therefore it’s my opinion that they’re actually the company’s most valuable marketing channel. So it’s a good idea to take advantage of that marketing channel. I think that personal branding for me, I’ll touch on it later, but I’ll mention it now. It falls very much within a B2B marketing activity. I don’t think personal branding is a individual aspect or ego-driven. It should be very much aligned with what’s going on in terms of the rest of B2B marketing within a company.
Ash Jones:
And then also the fact that leadership is currently changing. It’s not about hierarchy and decisions and because I said so anymore. You’re getting open plan offices are becoming more of a thing now, which is taking away those hierarchical barriers. Leadership now is about accountability, engagement, explanation, discussion and inspiration. And as a leader you must be able to do that brilliantly wherever you are, whether that’s in person or online.
Ash Jones:
And on social, essentially it helps you to do that through reaching a wider community than you can reach in person, which was a lot of the benefit for Steve. It was great that we were able to get him up on stage and he was able to tell this amazing story to one, two, 300 people. But when you can tell bits of that story to 50,000 or 60,000, 70,000 people a month, it becomes a bit of a different ball game.
Ash Jones:
You can deepen relationships that scale. So at networking events we only talk directly one on one with people, and you’ve not got much time. Whereas online you can put something up that every single day, or every week, or every month helps further a relationship with someone. I’ve just seen, literally I was on LinkedIn before and I’ve just seen someone tagged Joe in something and I liked that post. And it just helps bring those relationships and continue them all the time.
Ash Jones:
And then also it’s a very personal approach. Again, this kind of falls into the realm of B2B in that B2B is very bland and dull a lot of the time. But personal branding can help give a company’s story, a very personal approach. I found this stat the other day, which was kind of interesting in that 61% of Fortune 500 CEOs have zero presence on social media. And one of them, I don’t know who. I can’t remember his name, but this was what he said about it. So LinkedIn has always been a recruitment platform to find a job. I don’t need a job.
Ash Jones:
And as we probably all know, LinkedIn is changing. So in 2014 and 15 you’d go on LinkedIn and you’d see people comment on posts saying this isn’t Facebook. Take that over to Facebook. When you post something, it was a very typical thing you’d see back then. Whereas now it is Facebook. It is Instagram. We’re using it in a very similar way and it’s really the first major scale content platform for in in the same vein as Twitter, Snapchat, TikTok, Instagram and Facebook. So that presents a huge opportunity.
Ash Jones:
And leadership is changing if you just look in the country as well. If you look at all the leading faces of agencies and brands that are the innovators in their field that are really starting to break through markets. You’ve got Steve at Social Chain, Ben Francis of Gym Shark who Umar Kemani at Pretty Little Thing, Allen at Grenade and Julian from Huel. These are all people that have a very large online presence, and they understand that leadership and building a brand has to include being on social. And not only that, but telling that story really well. And these are the people that are getting the recognition and that are getting ahead in things.
Ash Jones:
So pulling back to B2B, I find that there’s a problem with B2B marketing at the minute when I talk with clients that’ve got B2B marketing teams and this of thing. And just seeing in general, so this is a typical B2B marketing process. An agency will build a marketing team internally, whether that’s one people, two, three, four, five and then that marketing team has a pressure to execute cause you can’t sit around and do nothing all day. You have to post something a or blog, or the newsletter, or an email or put something on the Instagram or LinkedIn. There has to be something going on nearly every day, which then leads to dual content because an agency or a business hasn’t got enough to say every single day that is really interesting.
Ash Jones:
And as a result of dual content repeated over and over and over and over, attention spans are then killed. So when I’m scrolling through LinkedIn, just off someone’s profile picture, I can tell after about 20 pieces of content that they’ve put out subconsciously, whether I’m going to give them the time of day when I’m scrolling past or not. And I’m sure we all do it. We got people we follow on Instagram who we just slide straight past. And that’s because they’ve posted something a number of times that we’ve not resonated with. So therefore they’ve lost our attention span in that moment and that comes off the back of them not giving us what we want. And that’s what B2B marketing teams will do a lot of the time when they’re posting daily. It just leaves dull content, which kills the attention span, which essentially you’ve lost the person’s interest. Whereas personal branding gets a lot more time because we’ll give a lot more time to people than we will to faceless brands online.
Ash Jones:
And it’s better to be infrequent than irrelevant. That kind of ties in perfectly with the B2B marketing thing. B2B marketing teams succeed and drive much bigger results if they had no pressure to post all the time. If you could go a week with doing nothing and as long as the timing was right when you do something. This quote from someone at Social Chain really resonated with me. A quote, a tweet. He said, “I don’t think I’ve ever read a single top 10 social media tips for article that hasn’t been filled with the most obvious and generic ideas I’ve ever seen.” And I feel like a lot of B2B content falls into this category. But that’s kind of like an overview of personal branding and why to do it.
Ash Jones:
But I saw this quote, which was kind of interesting information and inspiration is worthless without implementation. And I always think when I come to events, if I’ve not left without some actionable stuff, then I’ve just wasted my time. So that kind of leads me into the actual crux of the talk, which is how to build a personal brand in 2019. And I’m going to try to go through some of the ways that you can do it and hopefully give you things that you can implement so that you’ve actually taken something away from the Tarantino length talk of the [inaudible 00:20:28].
Ash Jones:
So firstly, I don’t think that personal branding is one size fits all. And this is a challenge that I had when leaving Social Chain and setting up my own business and talking to people. People, when you use the term personal branding, it almost comes with a perception of what that means and what it looks like in execution. I work across a number of clients at the minute and not a single one of them does the same thing as the other. It just goes to show that there’s really not one way to do things. It just depends entirely on who you are as a person and what’s authentic to you.
Ash Jones:
So for example, I won’t make videos direct to camera. It’s just not me. It fills me with anxiety. But are kind of, I’m cool with doing events and there being a camera which is filming me and then I cut it up afterwards and put it on my LinkedIn. I’m fine with that because it feels natural to me. I don’t feel like I’m forcing anything. I did a video podcast recently and the same thing there, it’s just sitting down and having a conversation. And it’s just understanding what in terms of images or videos or if you’re just comfortable with texts, like figure out what the media approach you’re going to take to things is and be authentic with it.
Ash Jones:
So with personal branding, I’ve come to find that really there’s two approaches that you can really take. So the one on the left is what I’m going to say is being a niche content creator. This is someone who is creating content that is given an opinion on their niche. So this is someone that I worked with called Tosh and she runs a agency which helps DTC, e-commerce, D to C brands, health and beauty. And she makes a lot of this content on the left. And then on the right is what I would consider storytelling content, which is more about her personally, the journey that she’s on, the business all those kind of things.
Ash Jones:
And really these are the two types of content that you’ll see a lot of people doing in terms of personal branding and what I think is worth spending time on. And I’ll go through some examples of this. This is Kate Ulisen, and if you haven’t seen her on LinkedIn, go check her out. She’s absolutely unreal and she’s really, in terms of personal branding, is for me at the very forefront of things in a very, very quick way. So she only started doing things like maybe nine to 12 months ago and already she’s been able to build a huge profile in terms of how long she’s been doing it, just off really understanding these things.
Ash Jones:
So she has a video podcast and every week she’ll sit down with a bunch of topics that kind of fall within the topics that she wants to touch on in marketing, in social media and these kinds of things. And she just records the whole thing and then they cut it up afterwards and start to create content around it, and this is niche content. And there’s someone that I’m working with called Arnold. He runs a agency that connects the world to China as he says to me. Well, opening the world to China is their mission. They do digital marketing. And again, he’s kind of … he does a video podcast. He does some stuff on his phone. And his whole thing is educating people on what’s happening with China in terms of digital marketing and tech and social media and these things right now for brands, that brands can really gain insight off.
Ash Jones:
And then there’s someone else that I work with called Matt, and he runs a sports marketing agency. And they essentially connect brands to football clubs and he doesn’t actually do anything. He’s not featured in any of the content that we do, which is a very different approach if you’re not comfortable with putting yourself out there. And there’s still a way that you can leverage what’s happening on the internet and steal things, or take things from elsewhere and kind of have an opinion on things.
Ash Jones:
So what we tried to do with him is essentially we want to position the copy of these big moments in football in a commercial sense. So what’s the commercial story behind this thing that’s happening with football right now? So on the left, this was a 60,000 sellout game of women’s football. So he’s trying to do a lot in the women’s game right now in terms of connecting sponsorships there. So when I saw this video on Twitter, it just made complete sense for us to have a say on, on that in terms of the commercial impact that the women’s game is having right now.
Ash Jones:
And then biggest sponsorship deal in football around Madrid. Again, this was just announced on Twitter around Madrid, new shirt deal, fantastic. Take the video, put some nice copy that really fits Matt’s tone of voice and positioning up there. And we just repeat this process over and over and over and really put him at the forefront of all the conversations that are happening in that cross sector between football and commercial. So you don’t have to feature in things. You don’t have to film anything. You don’t have to take photos. You can still kind of figure out a way around it just through looking elsewhere and then storytelling. A couple of great examples there from people that I’ve worked with as well.
Ash Jones:
Julian at Huel, they have this awesome thing in their office. You walk in, it just says don’t be a dick on the wall, which kind of sets the tone. And what we’ll do here is he’ll send me the image and then if you click the see more, it’s a longer post. And the copy really when you’ve got something like this, you’ve got the copy which is the art of the storytell and it’s there that you can really start to get into the aspect behind the image. And also some storytelling and video he famously now gave up his role as CEO and he became the CMO, which is quite an unconventional move for a founder to do. But we leverage both image, text and video to be able to tell that Huel story.
Ash Jones:
Some more examples there in terms of the storytelling of Huel. This is Chris. Chris runs a luxury marketing agency. So they work with clients in terms of like travel, hospitality and fashion. Any clients that fall within luxury brands within those sectors. And he’s real big on using his channel to tell the story and growth of Verb, and also how important culture is to Verb. And interestingly enough, I’ve been working with him for almost a year now and when I met him he said, “I’m never ever going to do video.” And then this was like the other week. So over time through doing things where he wasn’t in the content, we did that well that it kind of easily kind of pushed him into being the face of the content. And we’re starting to do a bit more video content now, which is going really well.
Ash Jones:
So niche content, I kind of want to touch on the importance of things and, and the insight behind it that I feel. So these are the four things that I’ll touch on, being agile and innovative, understanding attention, culture and distribution, valuable content wins and authenticity. So the first one is down to the platforms. So on LinkedIn when something new comes along, like you might have seen recently, a lot of people are doing these slide gallery things and they’re really good for engagement at the minute. So people are taking advantage of that. And then there’s video as well where you get the text along, text strip along the top, and sometimes along the bottom. These are things that LinkedIn is massively rewarding in terms of engagement. So being at the forefront of what is happening on these platforms and understanding it so you can take advantage is really important.
Ash Jones:
And moving where the opportunity lies as well. It was something that Social Chain was in this first year people would say, “What are you going to do when Twitter dies?” Because we were heavily focused around that one platform. And it really taught us in that first year to be agile and wherever there was an opportunity in terms of a platform to explore it and see where the opportunities were and not be romantic about sticking to one platform. LinkedIn is great right now, but if something comes along tomorrow which is 10 times better, you should 100% explore that.
Ash Jones:
Understanding attention. This is a big one again. Again, I touched on it earlier in terms of we all have attention spans on platforms and they’re usually about half a second for those of us that probably browse Instagram and the likes far too much every day. And understanding how to really make people stop in half a second is one of the biggest things that I took away from Social Chain. And a lot of it comes down to I work with people now and they’ll send me a nine minute video to put on LinkedIn and it’s too long. But also really no one’s going to watch the video or unless you kind of pull them in first. So that’s why when you see on LinkedIn people have the text strip along the top of the video. That initial thing is like your two second window. You’ve got that half second to grab someone with that little bit of copy. If it’s really intriguing and you can take the most valuable thing from the video and translate that into four or five words that then will help make people stop and then the content that they’re watching has got to be good after that.
Ash Jones:
So the video is actually the second step in terms of the process of getting anyone to even watch it in the first place. And it’s something that Katie Ulissen, if I pull it back, she does so well. What she does really well, these are insanely good headlines. They draw people in. It’s like Game of Thrones mistake costs Starbucks billions. So if anyone saw the Starbucks cup on Game of Thrones that went viral. I sent it to like three different WhatsApp group charts on the morning and then by the end of the week Katie had done this video and that headline is a very intriguing headline that draws people in. And the same with the Bird Box and how Netflix got everyone talking about that was very viral at the time. And a lot of what she does in terms of success, I think, really plays into this half a second of capturing people’s attention. Obviously her content’s amazing, but I think that is really key to getting people to kind of engage to this level, like 4,000 likes. That can be the difference between four likes and 4,000 likes. I really believe that. And it’s something that at Social Chain was drilled into us and it’s one of the biggest assets that I’ve probably taken away from marketing is understanding that skill.
Ash Jones:
So yeah, understanding culture, as I just mentioned there’s things happening in mainstream news and media and pop culture and all these kinds of things every single day that can be tucked into. And if you do it well, they call it NPR. It’s like news jacking. If you can do it well, you can ride the wave of conversation at any given moment and it’s an opportunity for people to engage with you. Because there I was currently discussing this thing, this Starbucks thing, when I saw the video with someone I was speaking about on WhatsApp and the video came up, and so of course I’m going to watch it.
Ash Jones:
So a lot of what I do with clients at the minute is, Matt House for example, is a great example of it. I’m always on Twitter looking at what’s happening in the football world. My foot … my feed is just filled with football content pages so that the minute something happens I put it over to him. We get something out immediately and we get the reactive payoff. So a lot of the time the best engagement that you’ll get or reach will be on things that are just happening right now or reactive content. So understanding in terms of your world, what is the culture of that world like, what’s happening in mainstream conversation that you could pull in. All these kinds of things is really important.
Ash Jones:
And then distribution as well. What’s the most optimal way to deliver your message on that platform? And this format with the video in the text box at the top and the subtitles is one of the most optimal ways to distribute a message on LinkedIn at this moment in time. So that’s kind of what I mean by understanding distribution is understanding the platform and then understanding valuable content, what do people care about and your niche? what do people want to know? And this just comes from testing over and over again and trying things out and then tracking the performance of things and it starts to become really clear when you’re looking at the data of all the posts in terms of what people are resonating with.
Ash Jones:
And then authenticity is a big one at the minute. I think as a result of at the start of the year when they had that Fyre Festival documentary thing, I don’t think influencer marketing has been the same since in that now there’s a bit of a backlash happening where the filtered lives and all this kind of thing is slowly going downhill. And people are now starting to resonate with a more [inaudible 00:33:41] look into people’s lives and and raw and authentic look. And especially if a company is, this is something that Steve touches on in his talks as well when he’s giving advice to to other agencies and businesses and brands. It’s that the more that you’re you or the business that you’re in or the brand that you were on or the company can be comb like a transparent box. The more impact that it can have in terms of people will support people that are completely open and very honest about what they’re doing.
Ash Jones:
And then in terms of storytelling, I think it’s really simple. You’re essentially your own PR agency. This probably saved us a lot of time if we knew this is the start Social Chain. We spent a lot of time trying to get PR when really we were the best PR channel that we could have and always shouting about any success that you have is really important. And then looking for the stories within a business it’s so easy to kind of pass up on any great opportunities within a business. I see it with client stuff every now and then something happens within the business and they don’t even think that it will translate well onto social. They don’t even think that that could have been a thing that they could have done content around. But always looking for the stories within a business really help and focusing on what makes you unique.
Ash Jones:
So saw this quote from a guy called Steve Hill and he said that due to the amount of branded content that currently exists now our bullshit meters have never been higher. So the way to get around that is to go deeper. And what he meant by that is what can you say that nobody else can say? So, for example, me, I can talk on personal branding through the eyes of what I’ve done that nobody else can say. Or like the work that I do with Julian, no one else has still not work. So only I can give up perspective. So I can talk on storytelling through my own perspective of what I’ve done. Story telling is a very broad topic, but I can add something completely unique to the conversation by giving it through my own kind of a [inaudible 00:35:45].
Ash Jones:
And then I think again, I kind of touched on it earlier the, I don’t think this game is about quantity output. And I feel like it’s moving into a moment where people are focusing on over sharing. I think it’s right if you have authority, so if you’ve got huge audience, you’ve got a lot more time. They’ll give you a lot more time. But if you’re just starting out and you’re trying to build an authority in the first place, I think it’s more important to have a very well controlled, perceived reputation. So that just comes from doing the right thing consistently over time, rather than trying to just get in front of people all the time for the sake of reach and engagement and these things.
Ash Jones:
And personal branding is essentially, it’s all about the perceived reputation. It’s what someone will say about you when you’re not in the room. And managing that reputation immensely is like the overarching focus of personal branding. For me comes to mind that a client had a Twitter page and a YouTube channel that they weren’t using. They were just reposting what happened elsewhere and it was just like a link, like this post has gone up on Facebook. And the whole Twitter feed, they had like 3,000 followers and it was just spam after spam after spam relink post. And it just looks really bad if someone goes online and searches for that person that there’s this shitty Twitter feed. So making sure that every single touch point that you create on social reflects what you’re trying to do.
Ash Jones:
And yeah, I think that’s the end of my talk. Yeah cheers. Thank you.