In this episode of Inbound Now, Mitch Joel joins us to share his thoughts on how companies should be bridging the gap between digital and traditional marketing.
Mitch is the president of Twist Image, an avid blogger, podcaster, and author of Six Pixels of Separation.
During the show we chat about:
David: Hey, everybody. Welcome to Episode Number 11 of Inbound Now. Today I have with me a very special guest, Mr. Mitch Joel. Mitch is the President of Twist Image, a full-service digital agency up in Canada. He's a podcaster and an author of a show and book, "Six Pixels of Separation." Dare I say, he is the next Seth Godin. He's a marketing mastermind. Welcome to the show, Mitch.
Mitch: Thanks. Great to be here, and I'll take all compliments like that. That's very kind of you.
David: There you go. No, I think you put out a lot of great stuff and I hope to see you, you've just got to write more books. You've got to write a book every two months like Godin.
Mitch: I'm trying. I can't keep pace. He keeps lapping me.
David: Yeah, exactly. I wanted to get you on the show today to talk a little bit about, you write on your blog and your podcasts about how companies are thinking about bridging the gap between digital and traditional marketing. You talk a lot about it. I wanted to dive deeper into that and your thoughts on that. You're also a content machine, putting out all kinds of great stuff. So your methodologies behind that and some tips that our audience can take away. Then how, you specifically leveraged your podcast to grow your business and personal brand. Sound cool?
Mitch: Sure, yeah, let's do it. I'm excited.
David: All right. Cool, cool. So on your blog and on your podcasts, you often talk about bridging the gap between digital and traditional channels. How do you see traditional channels, like TV, radio, broadcast, playing a role in marketing moving into the future?
Mitch: I think the reason we have multiple marketing channels is fundamentally because they function in different ways, and they attract different audiences at different times and different moments in their lives. We tend to look at digital as this sort of like strange catch-all where it will do everything and solve all the problems and get us away from all the other stuff. But I've got some strong opinions about traditional mass media in terms of its value, and I think it runs a little bit contrary to a lot of my peers.
I think that having a web environment or a social or mobile environment where people can vote things up and comment on them and share them is great. But there's a big majority of people who come home after a long day of work and they want to plop themselves on the couch and be entertained or inspired or given content that intellectually stimulates them that doesn't involve them being proactive. I tend to look at media from more of an interactive versus a proactive versus a reactive platform, and I think that there are places for all of that. I think within in the media we have to also understand that there are multiple ways you can market.
We mistakenly use the word marketing when what we mean is advertising. I think it's a fundamental flaw in many of the sort of professionals I deal with day-to-day. I think that there are tons of things you can do as a marketing professional that add value to an advertising campaign. When I look at the extensions of how TV can play with the Web or mobile plays with radio, I see multiple ways in which you can market and connect. Now, the challenge is obviously, one, tying it into a strategy, one that has real business objectives and real values. The other one is fundamentally believing that what you're doing is adding value to the consumer's life and not just clutter. As you can probably tell, I can go on and on about the topic.
David: Yeah, definitely. So you're really talking about traditional is not dying. There's still that mass appeal there where basically going onto blogs, Twitter, blah, blah, that's all proactive stuff and that's good that brands are there. But there's still that mass of people that still, like you said, plop down and watch TV or what have you. I think tying those two mediums together with a cohesive strategy is where things are moving into the future. Would you agree?
Mitch: I tell, my sort of wave, my one line to sum it up is just by letting people know that everything is with, not instead of. I think we in the digital social field tend to push towards instead of. Instead of TV, you should be blogging. Instead of this, and I don't believe that to be the case. I think there are brands who have had amazing success in advertising in TV, radio, print, that can leverage these amazing new platforms to change and to add more and to do different things and to try different connections with their consumers. I don't see it as a zero sum game. Do I see TV advertising changing because of the fragmentation and new channels that are there? Absolutely. But evolution would happen whether we had social media or not.
David: Right, totally. So, what advice would you have for companies out there that are kind of getting into the digital marketing space, kind of playing around? What kind of low hanging fruit could they be taking advantage of right now that they may not know about?
Mitch: Yeah, I don't know if there's a sort of platform that they may not know about that they should be running after, and I say that half jokingly only because I think that, unless you're driven by a real strategy, understanding why you're doing this and why you're engaging in it, there's no point to it. You're just running after tactics of the latest and greatest shiny bright object. I see value in brands starting off with a fundamental strategy, and to me, that strategy needs to tie into their business objectives and all those nice ROI things that we keep hearing about in the world. But, really, brands know what they want to do, whether it's acquiring customers, whether it's a cost per acquisition strategy, whether they're looking to create brand affinity or awareness, whether they want to build a loyalty and retention program.
When you look at those business objectives, you can then look towards the social channels as ways in which you can engage. At its core, though, what I tell people is the misconception of social media is that it's about a conversation or engagement. I think that that's part of what you get out of social. But what actually makes a media social to me is simply two things. One is that everything you do is sharable. You're opened up so that people can share your content and you can share along with them. Two is being findable. By being in these social spaces, whether it's a Twitter, Facebook, Quora, whatever it might be, you're making your brand and the people who represent your brand as findable as possible. So you're not missing opportunities within that.
We hop right away to the conversation. Conversation is a pretty tough thing to get. You have to people who care. You have to have people who are coming frequently, people who want to talk to you, want to have a back and forth beyond a simple engagement. Looking at it from a perspective of making your brand as sharable and as findable as possible is probably the best advice I could give someone just starting out of the blocks.
David: Right, and having a face on your brand is important, and social is playing an increasing role in SEO and what have you. So, I think it's more important every single day. Cool. In a recent interview you did with Jonathan Baskin, you had an analogy where basically back in the day amps started to become cheaper and cheaper. Everyone started buying an amp, and you equated it to social media where the barrier to entry is basically non-existent for companies to get into this. All these people are buying amps, but then all of a sudden, hey, you have all these people that can't play guitar, right? I thought that was really cool. Where should these companies learn to play guitar, i.e. start using social media for their businesses? What resources would say would be good to start out learning some of these things?
Mitch: Yeah, it's sort of the mindset of just because everybody can blog or have a blog doesn't mean you've got a lot of people who are great at blogging. I think part of it is understanding your skill sets and where you come from and what you're trying to accomplish with all of these things. I mean, fundamentally, what we're talking is a shift away from being a marketer and a shift more towards thinking like a publisher. That, in and of itself, is really challenging. Now, it would only be challenging if you had one way to publish text or images or video. It becomes increasingly more challenging when suddenly it's about text, images, audio, video, instantly and pretty much for free to the world.
For me, it's developing an appreciation for the type of content that you as a brand feel most comfortable and being able to present to the world. Also, really thinking through what does it mean to be a publisher. We look at some of the core things that make a magazine great or a TV show great, and it happens to be things like consistency and frequency and how often you publish. The relevancy, the context of it, how it plays out to your audience, understanding their reactions, the pulse. These are all things that fall very much outside of the marketer's traditional toolbox. So we have to be able to break the change and stop calling it social media or social marketing, but look at it as a sense of, if we're trying to make connections, the ways in which we are fundamentally making those connections is by providing this level of valuable content. This level of valuable content has to be created by somebody real and authentic, and it has to really have value to the people who are reading it. Just putting out constant reworks of your brochure or retweets of how you say things doesn't necessarily create that level of confidence from the consumers.
My blog has been around since 2003, 2004, I don't shill for Twist Image, the agency that I own. I don't talk about the services we offer. In fact, a lot of people are like this guy has . . . they think it's just me. They're shocked that I have two offices and hundreds of employees and stuff like that. Part of it is because I believe that the best clients we can get here as a digital marketing agency are the ones who are walking on the lot because they read something that inspired them to think differently about their marketing and communications.
The actual angle by which we approach our advertising and how we're looking at it is very, very different than our competitors and peers.
David: Right. So you're becoming the content producer. Every company should be thinking about what content can we publish to basically help solve our target market's problems and what have you. Pull them in via organic search, social media, etc., and then they kind of see, oh, yeah, you run an agency, you have all these different services. Right? So, it's really like. . .
Mitch: Yeah, and you have to look at it beyond that. Because the way you're saying, we have to publish content. That's the whole amp analogy. Anyone can buy an amp and anyone can publish content. The question is how are you going to become the next Jimi Hendrix? How are you going to really rethink what it is you're doing? The thing there is that might be overwhelming to people. I wrote a blog post a while back on why you should write a book, and the net answer to the question that I wrote in 600 words, I'll sum it up in one sentence was, you should write a book because nobody else can write a book like you. I think we tend to forget that. Right? It's the sort of human perspective that we bring to it that makes it really of value.
My side of social media, or I don't even know if I consider "Six Pixels of Separation," the book, a social media book. I think it was actually just a modern marketing book to be honest. Because I don't talk just about the social sphere, I talk about the changing landscape that's affecting marketers and businesses as we know it. It just so happens, obviously, that the social implications of it play a major role in how this shift has taken place. But brands have to really be able to understand that it's not the cold callous marketing blather that you see everywhere. It's their ability to deliver their message in a unique way that resonates with an audience. Anyone can write a song. We all have the same seven chords or however many chords there are. It takes a lot to get to Lennon-McCartney though.
David: Right. So it's really playing to your strengths and producing content that would actually resonate with your audience and that you're actually good at doing. Because, like you said, just putting something out there just to put it out, you're just shouting. Everyone's shouting into Twitter right now, but you need to stand out is what you're saying.
Mitch: Yeah, and don't not do it because you're not John Lennon or you're not Paul McCartney. That's not the reason to sort of be afraid of it either. You just have to recognize that it is the people who bring that unique perspective and that they bring their own style and they're not afraid to put their art out there that really win in these channels.
It's true. If you look at a brand even like, my friend Scott Monty over at Ford and what they've done with that brand and the optics we now have on that brand, social media for sure changed the brand, but the brand in and of itself then becomes a part of this interesting ecosystem where it can play in different spaces because it has that permission. It's created that value within certain segments and then on the overall sort of halo effect of the brand that have literally transitioned the company to think differently about how they see themselves. I think that people forget that.
When I'm blogging, I don't have a formula. It's not a simple sort of cookie cutter thing. Every day something inspires me, usually three or four things. Then I'm sort of editing down to one thing. Then even as I have the germ of an idea in my head and I'm putting my art out there in words and writing it out, that creates its own manifestation where a lot of times I'll end the blog post and I'm like wow, that wasn't even really where I started with the first idea, but I sort of like where it went.
What I'm trying to say is brands, individuals can give themselves the freedom to try and explore different ways to connect with people that don't necessarily involve the direct sort of 20% off, 40% more whiter, brighter, faster, whatever.
David: Right. So yeah, speaking of your blog, where do you source ideas? Where do you pull inspiration from to create some of the great posts that you crank out on a daily basis?
Mitch: I was the Vice-Chair of the National Conference for the Canadian Marketing Association, which is like the American Marketing Association, only it's Canadian which means it's smaller and we're more intimidated than Americans. There are no guns, it's crazy. We were talking. We actually had Seth Godin come up to speak. Actually, I invited him up and he was speaking. Someone in the audience said, "Hey, Seth, where do you come up with your blog ideas?" The truth of the matter is it's very much, I'll give you his answer because it's very much my answer, which is, one, I'm interested. So, I pay attention to a lot of the news and channels and feeds whether it's Twitter and blogs and Facebook stuff and things like that. Truth of the matter is I've also created a bit of an audience for myself, so people send me a lot of really cool stuff that's interesting. I've got 130 peers right here in my office who share great content across different channels that's fascinating to me.
But ultimately that's not where it comes from. Where it comes from is, as Seth says, it's a secret sauce. I don't know. We just don't know. I really, honestly don't know. Something inspires me the same way when you're in the shower and you remember, oh, yeah, I have to do this. I get inspiration and ideas from that. I'll see something very odd and peculiar that will inspire me to think about something.
Just the other day I wrote a post about five or six brand new business books that I haven't read yet but I thought were really interesting, that I thought other people should know about because we're in a world where people are talking about Seth's new book and Gary Vaynerchuk's next book and Guy Kawasaki's next book. All of them are either out or coming out this week. I was just literally like glancing over at the books that I have here on my left, and I was like, wow, there's like six books that look amazing that no one's really talking about. There was inspiration.
I think what it comes down to though, the real sort of secret to the secret sauce, is in our ability to be open to noticing things. That's a really strange thing to say, but it's really powerful. I won't read a newspaper and go, wow, that was a good consumption tactic. I'll actually read a newspaper and see an article even on Libya or Egypt that will inspire me to think about a business problem I have. I don't know if that's me putting ideas together in ways in which the average person doesn't or everyone else does. I don't consider myself below average, that's why I say average.
That's the truth of it. I just keep myself open to it. I guess the best other sort of reason is they say great journalists have a nose for news. Maybe because I'm so passionate about this space, I have a nose for that space. I'm not trying to pat myself on the back, but I'm genuinely curious and interested. I'm not afraid to ask questions.
David: Right. I think you do a really good job of taking a story then playing off of it. Basically putting your own perspective on top of it instead of just regurgitating what everyone else is saying. I think that helps out a lot. Then the other thing that I kind of noticed, you post really fantastic headlines that someone might even consider link bait, kind of in a good way, though. What's kind of your tip on coming up with really great headlines, because that's what people see on Twitter or Facebook and that's what grabs their attention to pull them into your blog, right?
Mitch: I really appreciate that, because I actually think that that's where I'm weakest is in my headlines, believe it or not. I use to publish a magazine, magazines, multiple magazines actually. So, even prior to the digital channels being around, and I've been a journalist since I was about 17 years old, professionally, being paid as a journalist. I think when you work with editors and you see so many different types of magazines and newspapers and things like that, you get a sort of feeling for like, okay, if this is the topic, these are ways I can play off of it.
The real sort of funny thing I've done is I'll go into magazine stores and just look at the covers and the titles of articles. You could go from like men's health to like a parenting magazine to like a rock music magazine and it's always the same, right. It's the things like the ten best guitar heroes of all time, five ways to get a flat belly for summer, the six things you must know about losing weight. It's like the classic, and I always say magazine covers have the best link bait on them. I've actually focused a lot in the past couple of years on trying to shy away a little bit from that. Not because I think it's a saturated thing or it's sort of like a trick or anything like that. I've just been thinking a lot about elevating the content, because my whole thing, especially if you listen to my audio podcast, is I don't want it to sound like a radio show.
I don't want my blog to look like a magazine article or a newspaper article. I want my blog to have content that is different for blogging. When it comes audio, the best way I can explain it is almost like my podcast, where I look at it as experiments in audio. That's literally what I do. I've gone from like conversations with people to blabbing while walking on the beach. Like I try and go through different ways in which I can experiment with this, because otherwise it is, it's just radio. Not that there's anything wrong with radio. It's just there's radio. I can do a radio show then.
I'm trying to create new things, whether it's with text or audio, that engenders people to think differently about how you can publish in this modern age.
David: Right, cool. So, I want to switch gears a little bit and talk about your podcasts. You got in kind of on the ground floor of podcasting, like nearly five years ago. You have over 200 or around 250 episodes under your belt. What have you learned on this journey, and how has podcasting helped your business?
Mitch: It's funny, when I started podcasting, I remember there being this holy trinity of "Jaffe Juice," Joe Jaffe's show, "For Immediate Release" with Shel and Neville, and "Inside PR" at the time it was David Jones and Terry Fallis, and I remember thinking to myself, really seriously like, oh, I totally missed boat on this podcasting thing. I literally went to the first PodCamp in Boston which is where I met C.C. Chapman in person for the first time. We'd already been friends online. Chris Brogan, and we all became fast buddies from then for sure. But it was really interesting, I remember going to that event thinking like, oh, I totally missed the boat on this podcasting thing.
It's funny you say that. I think it sort of goes back to what I was saying earlier. It's just a great way to share content. I look at the B2B aspects of it as well, where like you could use podcasting as an inside channel to keep your company together. You could interview the latest people in the marketing department or HR and connect with.
What I've actually learned is that, if you're willing to try to do things that are different, if you're willing to try and press on and have real valuable conversations with people, capturing them in audio and sharing them with the world is a very powerful idea actually. That's been my thing. As my audience builds and I have access to people, like I've had Steve Wozniak and Seth Godin and people like that, what I'm realizing is it's also that journalism guy in me where it's like I suddenly have this ability to take people who we all admire and like and ask them the questions all of us would love to ask them. I use that as a platform to do that. I really will ask them questions that I think you might want to know or even me, because I'm my own fan boy in all of this as well.
Has it grown the business? The answer is yes and no. It hasn't in the sense of nobody's called us in and said we're hiring you because, man, you're good, you have a great podcast. No, that has not happened. But I think what happens is when people do an audit of who Twist Image is, and they see the blog, they see the podcast, they see the articles, they see the speaking and the book and they see the quality of the work and the teams that we have and the way it all comes together, I think they develop an understanding that clearly, hopefully, these people understand how to use the channel. They're not just talking about it. They're actually living it and breathing it.
So, I think, in that instance, it's been a tremendous motivator for people to want to work with us. I don't think any of our clients, and we have a lot of clients, have spent all that much time listening to every single episode and downloading it every Sunday it comes out. But I think they have a cognizance, awareness of the fact that this agency has a passion and desire to not only help themselves grow but help the industry grow and that they are walking the talk essentially.
David: Right. Yeah, I think it has, you know, it helped your company kind of with that thought leadership basically behind these people obviously know what they're talking about and they eat their own dog food. I think that's a good point to kind of transition into my next question which would be let's pretend that we're setting up the ultimate marketing education MBA program. What would be some of the marketing books that you would say would be required reading?
Mitch: Wow, put me on the spot. I'm a big fan of the stuff that Seth does, obviously. I think David Armano when my book, said, "How do you feel about being compared to Seth Godin?" I said, "Wow, I'm good. I'm really good." Because I admire his work and I admire the stuff he's done, I've known him for well over a decade at this point too. The stuff he does I think it's just very, very consumable. I think he takes very complex ideas and simplifies them in a way in which you can read it. When you're done reading it, literally whack yourself on the head and go, "Why don't I do this again?" I think that's a very powerful gift he has, and I really think it's a powerful gift. The stuff he's done in books like "Linch Pin" and the stuff he's done, in obviously, "Permission Marketing" and "Unleashing the Virus" I think is great. But even if you're an entrepreneur, he's got an earlier book called "Survival Is Not Enough" that I think is paramount to any business. I think that area is great.
I'm a huge fan of Avinash Kaushik. Avinash is the analytics evangelist at Google. "Web Analytics: An Hour a Day." His other book is called "Web Analytics 2.0." It sounds, oh, god, web analytics, but I mean the way he writes and the way he explains what we measure and what we can use these channels for is absolutely astounding.
I'm a big fan of Tom Peters. I thought that the book "Reimagine" really gave me the ability to reimagine what business could be like. People will probably roll their eyes because he's a close friend, but Joe Jaffe, I think has done some great stuff especially, for me really that first book of his, "Life After the 30-Second Spot" really, I thought, set a course for advertising and thinking about it differently. "Flip the Funnel," his latest is great. He's done great stuff there.
I would be lying if I didn't say that "The Cluetrain Manifesto" is essentially one of the bibles. It's one of those books where I could pick out any page, read it, and be like, wow, that's just so fresh. Ten plus years on, it's amazing that that book is over a decade old.
I'm a huge fan of the Eisenberg brothers, Bryan Eisenberg. He's a great friend. But his book, "Call to Action," he and his brother wrote this book a long time ago. It's probably the bible for online marketing. He's got a great book on conversion called "Waiting for Your Cat to Bark" that I also love a lot.
If I look over to my bookcase, what else do I see?
David: "The Cluetrain Manifesto" it came out close to 11 years ago now. You wrote a blog post kind of recapping that. I don't if was too recently, but has anything really changed, or is it still kind of dead on in the methodologies that he was laying out?
Mitch: It's dead on. It's scary dead on. In fact, I recount a story that I was in Europe, I think last week, and I was sent this tenth anniversary edition of the book and what was really funny, there was a testimonial on the back from the Montreal Gazette. I realized, oh my god, I was the guy who wrote that testimonial. I guess I had written about the book and they put it on. It was kind of weird for me.
What happened was, I came back from Europe and I was severely jet lagged and the book was just near my night table. As I was rolling in and out of sleep, like you know when you're jet lagged there are these weird deep sleeps but then you're super awake. I started reading the book, and I got so into it because there were like these epiphany moments. They wrote the book long before Twitter ever existed, but there's this section that basically explains Twitter. I sort of felt like I was in this weird like half asleep, half awake world of like the DaVinci Code where I had uncovered, like in this book, it sounds like a crazy drug rant, but it's true. I was literally looking at the book saying to myself, "You know, I bet if I even dig in deeper, there's probably some inklings of what the next Twitter will be like literally." So while they don't talk about Twitter or necessarily blogging or anything like that, the foundations of the strategy, thinking how consumers think, what has changed is not only spot on, it's fresh as daisy.
David: Cool. So switching back to podcasting for a second, for businesses thinking about getting into podcasting, do you have any tips for them getting started? Thinking about content, different channels to kind of distribute through?
Mitch: Yeah, my general advice is always, actually, do an internal podcast. Start internally. Use it for your team. This way you can used to the gear. You can used to the editing, you can used to the publishing. You can really think about things differently. I believe that doing it internally is a really, really powerful way to do it. Also, believe it or not, people don't realize this, but YouTube is the number two search engine in the world after Google. People don't know it. They think it's Bing or Yahoo. It's actually YouTube.
YouTube has so much amazing video content on how to produce a podcast that it's staggering. I actually switched from PC to Mac not too long ago, and I was really nervous about my audio software. One, because the software I used on PC was not at all like audio editing. It was basically you record live, and off you go. It was very sort of dead easy. Software didn't exist for Mac, and I realized I've got to learn how to audio edit. I had a friend come over and show me Audacity, which people would probably laugh at because I had to actually have someone show it to me. That's how sort of naive I was with it. But after they left, I was like, oh, maybe I won't remember everything. I went onto YouTube and there were these amazing video tutorials about it that just totally give you great skills.
So if you're really curious, hop onto You Tube and type in podcast, podcast creation, how do I podcast and just sit back and enjoy the video. It's great.
David: It's really easy to get set up. I would recommend getting a decent mike, because audio is definitely important. But yeah, the barrier to entry is really low. Just get up there and start creating that content. The audience will give you feedback on where to go from there, right?
Mitch: Yeah. My whole thing is, again, if you know that you're good at audio or you're good at text or you're good at video or you're good at shooting pictures, start there. Start in the media you're most comfortable with. Again, my background was in writing. It was in journalism. So blogging and Twitter were really natural and intuitive for me. I'd done some college radio, and again, I was a profession journalist for like 16 years, so I was doing four to five interviews a day. So I knew that I could have conversations with people. I didn't necessarily know the technology or how to make it work as a podcast, but I understood the sort of mechanics of getting an interview done.
You don't hear me doing ums and uhs a lot. You won't hear me interrupting you when you ask me question, because I know that if I had to transcribe this after, which I usually had to do, it was really annoying to listen back to audio and hear yourself going um, uh, uh-huh over someone who's talking. So there are some really powerful interview skill sets too, and I would recommend that part of the process, especially if you're interested in audio or podcasting, would be to read books on how to create great interviews, how to give interviews, how to conduct interviews, and even how to tell a story.
One of the big things with social media even on the Web is it's about telling great stories. There are amazing books out there on how to tell great stories. So check them out and find the ones you like and off you go.
David: Totally. Awesome tip. So, Mitch, where can people find you online?
Mitch: Hey, I've heard that line before. Do we all do that at the end of a podcast?
David: I don't know. I should start doing like . . . so you start out your show, who are you and what do you do?
Mitch: Funny story with that, somebody was like, "What are you, Robert Scovill?" I was like, "What do you mean?" Apparently, Robert Scovill starts off all his interviews with who are you and what do you do. I'm like I didn't even know that. So yeah, we all steal from each other.
David: I think it easier. I usually stumble through the intro. So I should just be like, "Hey, who are you and what are you doing on my show?"
Mitch: The problem with it is a lot of people don't want to self . . . they feel uncomfortable saying, "Well, I'm known as the . . ." Sometimes you have to reinforce it after. People can always find me at www.TwistImage.com/blog or just do a search for Mitch Joel. The book, blog, and podcast are called "Six Pixels of Separation." You even doing a search for Six Pixels will help you find me.
David: Cool. Well, thanks for coming on the show, Mitch, I really appreciate it, and I'm a big fan of your show, "Six Pixels of Separation" and I definitely recommend everyone checking it out.
Mitch: Well, it's a mutual admiration society. I love HubSpot.
David: Hey, there you go. All right, cool. Well, thanks for coming on the show.
Mitch: Cheers.