How to create 100s of Social Assets for Everyday Business Owners (GaryVee’s Model)

Adam Vazquez 00:06
Mickey cloud is the executive director of the Sasha group, which is a Vayner x company that provides education, consulting and marketing services to entrepreneurs, growing businesses and mid market companies. Previous to spinning out the Sasha group, he was SVP at Vayner media where he helped shave a young, scrappy agency into the media behemoth it is today plus, he opened veiners first non coastal office in Chattanooga, Tennessee. He’s also my former boss, which is a lot of fun to talk about and reconnect on the show today. During our conversation we discussed the process Mickey and his team used to help small businesses develop creative that drives revenue. We also discuss how marketers should approach new platforms like Tick Tock with an open mind and of course we sprinkle in some very important hoops talk I thoroughly enjoyed this conversation of course and I do believe you will as well let’s dive into today’s episode with Mickey cloud from the Sasha group.

Adam Vazquez 01:23
Alright welcome into content is for closers where each episode we talk with business owners marketers and entrepreneurs alike about how they use content to close more business Carlton How is my intro this week right at one to 10 please

Carlton Riffel 01:35
I’m gonna probably go with the seven just because he had to try it again.

Adam Vazquez 01:39
I did I got I got excited about the welcome part and I was so focused on that I forgot what what gets said afterwards so that’s that’s

Carlton Riffel 01:47
that’s actually you know, he just points off for that Bob

Adam Vazquez 01:51
always hits the second shot.

Carlton Riffel 01:52
Did I say that right? I don’t even know golf terminology. I was just

Adam Vazquez 01:56
no you didn’t bogey. I just let it go. If If par is four on a hole, bogey is one more than that. So okay, you.

Carlton Riffel 02:08
My goal is to offend one group of people every well

Adam Vazquez 02:12
Mickey Our guest today. Mickey cloud is a big golfer. So he’ll he’ll take note. Yeah, I think we use him as a Malian

Carlton Riffel 02:18
Mulligan. Yes. How could I forget them all again.

Adam Vazquez 02:21
It’s alright. It’s okay. For lack of introduction because we haven’t done at this point. I’m your host Adam Vasquez. He’s Carlton riffle and we’re here with for Episode Four as I mentioned Mickey cloud from the Sasha group is going to be joining us we had a really good interview but before we get to that let’s play let’s play the blame game what’s what do you got for us this week Carlson

Carlton Riffel 02:40
you know this interviews pretty gigs we’re talking about Tick Tock Adams favorite social media app. And I was trying to think earlier if if if you were to get famous like Tick Tock famous famous on Tick Tock for something Adam What do you think it would be what would be your stick?

Adam Vazquez 02:58
Well I feel I mean if I knew I’d probably do it because I don’t know if you I actually do do like Tick Tock and especially for business purposes as we get into with Mickey But yeah, I don’t know I’d probably do something around like maybe like Trick Shots trick basketball shots in in business clothes or some you know like the business guy who hits Trick Shots some element to the play Yeah, you got it you got to make it interesting. What would you What would you get famous for?

Carlton Riffel 03:28
I just had a baby he’s really cute. Maybe he famous just doing dad things? Dad just trick shots with a child on one hand

Adam Vazquez 03:37
wow a lot of things

Carlton Riffel 03:41
I was gonna visit to see with each of his boys and he changed oh man doing trick shots. No that or else pranks I always like pulling pranks growing up so I could see that for sure that will be fun.

Adam Vazquez 03:53
Yeah, you’re very Dennis the Menace vibe to you. I can see that coming up for sure.

Carlton Riffel 03:58
My other question for you Adam is could you just give me an intro with Gary Vee? Can you set that meeting up for tomorrow?

Adam Vazquez 04:06
We talked about this with with Mickey today Yeah, obviously Mickey works worked and works with with Gary and so we got into a little bit of that. Also just how they do content testing. I think a lot of people are gonna find it interesting. Vayner sort of famous for that. And Mickey got into the kind of some of the weeds of how that happens. And we talked about some some like creative hits that have done really well both for Vayner and at the saucer group and how those came to be so hopefully it’s I really enjoyed the interview from from my perspective, I think a lot of people will in the audience as well. Awesome. Let’s

Carlton Riffel 04:39
jump in. Alright, we’ve

Adam Vazquez 04:40
got Mickey cloud here on content is reclosers. Thanks for joining us, Mickey.

Mickey Cloud 04:45
Thanks, Adam. Great to be here.

Adam Vazquez 04:46
So first of all, I feel like I need to start off with an apology when when I work obviously I know you because used to be my boss. And when we work together we used to play basketball in the mornings and i i don’t know if I’ve verbalized it, but Whenever you would stretch, I would always think like, that’s such an old man move. Why are you stretching so much? And like now I’m sitting here for five years later and like I can actively feel my hamstrings just from sitting here. I’m not even doing anything so

Mickey Cloud 05:17
yeah, it’s it’s it’s uh, yeah, welcome to my life. Our age you caught up on our age gap. And now now Yeah, you got to stretch. You got to get sleep the night before you got to drink a lot of water. Like there’s Yeah, a lot of things to get going before before the 6am basketball rolls up.

Adam Vazquez 05:35
Yeah, those are great times I always remember also thinking it was weird how like dudes would opt out as the night went on, like if we didn’t have numbers because other choices and and now definitely feel that, you know?

Mickey Cloud 05:48
Yeah, we were pretty good backward, though of like similar combo guards. You know, I thought like, trying hard on defense, those types of things.

Adam Vazquez 05:55
Yeah, effort was our I think our unfair advantage versus not scale. Some of the teams we played anyway, just need to apologize for that. So we did work together. I was VaynerMedia. At the time, obviously now you are the Sasha group team. But maybe for those who are uninitiated or or just don’t have context. Could you give a little bit of background on Vayner and Sasha, and how they work together?

Mickey Cloud 06:18
Yeah, so the Sasha group is a consultancy kind of meats agency that specifically focuses on entrepreneurs, grow stage companies and challenger brands that are in the mid market. And so we spun the Sasha group out from VaynerMedia. VaynerMedia is a full service advertising agency that works with the biggest brands in the world and has a global kind of presence. And so you know, the processes in the machine that’s built to service Budweiser and GE and Pepsi and brands like that. It’s just it’s a big tanker to support those types of big clients. And, and not only that VaynerMedia is getting bigger and bigger assignments in that world. So they’re now managing $50 million ad budgets, and they’re doing forcible spots in one year, that kind of thing. There’s really big assignments. And so, you know, we were just seeing that we had so much so many prospects, so many people coming to us, where they were saying, you know, our budgets, not $500,000 our budget is $50,000 What can you do for us, and after, you know, a couple of years of saying, I just don’t have anything for you, you know, I mean, some of the folks in Chattanooga office started saying, Well, hey, we can do some consulting for you, we can do some training, we could do a little content shoot, we started playing around with kind of different offerings. And at the same time, we had a group in New York that was doing this was like 20 1718, at the same time, and a group in New York that was doing similar things where it was an offering specific for entrepreneurs or training classes for entrepreneurs, things like that. So finally, at the end of 2018, we decided Alright, let’s spin all of those things out and have just an offering that’s just specific for entrepreneurs grow stage companies and kind of challenger brands and so that was at the beginning of 2019. So now we’re two and a half years later and we’ve doubled in size from a headcount perspective we’ve you know, grown you know 5060 70% from a revenue perspective so it’s you know, there’s certainly you know, the day we launched in Gary Vaynerchuk our CEO Chairman, you know, tweeted out there’s now an offering for entrepreneurs and we had 6000 new business inquiries in the first two days so like, part of the challenge was like alright, how do we go through and like actually vet these folks a little bit and start to build offer offers and products that will match kind of the stage of business they’re at they if they’ve got an in house team if they’ve got if they only want to work with agencies like how do you know all the different things that come up in this in this world and how do we provide value

Adam Vazquez 08:31
right so I yeah, I mean, I think we have a similar heart for small businesses that way and so this is kind of an aside but you also have your educational arm right or your offering or product talk a little bit about that just what that is.

Mickey Cloud 08:44
Yeah, so we have three kind of core offerings we have education, consulting, and then branding and marketing which kind of bucketed together so the education side is is we started with an in person kind of curriculum It was a full day 10 hour day at Vayner media venorex offices where you got a real look under the hood our philosophies how we think about the world what you know how to approach digital marketing brand building things like that, and you got an hour with Gary where you could ask you know 1015 minutes for the questions to Gary and get one on one time with him once the pandemic has started happening we’ve switched that to be a four hour virtual session so we call this the four DS It stands for digital deep dive and discovery and now you know we’ve had several 100 people go through that that that program now believe it but that’s um you know, I think the virtual ones $4,000 ticket now the in person ones $12,000. Like it’s a high ticket value because it’s small rooms like eight to 10 people in the room and you’re getting real kind of hands on attention. But and and so we also also launched a content membership where it’s a platform called stork and so it’s essentially like think of it as like your access to, you know, some of those forward thinking brand building digital marketing, to the cost of a gym memberships was $25 a month, you’re getting video content that comes out on Monday, you’re getting articles about that topic that come out on Wednesday. And then you’re getting asked me anything kind of q&a session with an expert from our team on Friday. So it’s all built into an email newsletter in a private Facebook group platform where you’re getting this content, you know, where it talks about, you know, writing copy for social or buying ads, or you know, how to manage an internal team that’s creating content, or how to hire like, all the kind of practical tactical things that, you know, entrepreneurs marketers have to go through, when they’re really standing is up at the very beginning. So it’s, I mean, $300, for the year kind of product that really, almost any business should be able to afford, if they’re looking to kind of put in the work.

Adam Vazquez 10:40
Yeah, I love that I didn’t, I didn’t know the pricing behind it. That’s super help. I mean, this is our fifth or sixth episode, I can’t remember how we’re going to be sequencing it. But so if you’ve listened to any of these, and you know, we’ve kind of touched bare bones, what on some of those topics, obviously, $25 a month is is a super low barrier to entry. And I think that’s kind of why I wanted to bring you on to talk specifically about creative because I know you all have a heart for being able to apply the strategies and and and processes or whatever, you know, those things that you have learned from working with these world class brands to small businesses. Before we get to that one quick aside. Yeah. Still, to this day, people ask me because they see VaynerMedia on LinkedIn, like, Oh, can you just intro me to Gary? First of all, I don’t have that type of ratios. And secondly, look at the pricing that it costs to have these types of attention. I don’t understand why people think that’s a thing, but I just wanted to get that out.

Mickey Cloud 11:35
Yeah. I mean, I always try to like it. Yeah. Even with me these days, it’s like, hey, you’re gonna, you’re gonna have to give me a couple bullet points, we’re gonna have to, like I’m gonna have to vet it to like, see, like, how much of this should I put on Gary’s radar. And then sometimes it’s it’s just finding the people in our ecosystem to, like, send them to, if it’s not Gary themselves, but yeah, sometimes the blight mask of like, Can I can I get to Gary, it’s like, that’s not how

Adam Vazquez 12:01
about but just wanted to say that. So

Mickey Cloud 12:02
although, although I will say that, like, you know, the best way to get to Gary, for people that are listening, is just like being as mentioned on Twitter, like the president in his community, and like, he might, you know, he will, he might find the time, like, I mean, he because he interacts with so many people that like, you might be just be one of the 30 people when he’s got 10 minutes to be firing away, you know, Comment, like talking to people on Twitter, so that it’s not that he’s inaccessible? It’s just that it’s No, no, it’s time has a lot of demands on it.

Adam Vazquez 12:28
Yeah. And you putting in a little bit of effort, I feel like goes a long way, rather than just be like, hey, hook me up with Yes. But anyway, so when you come to the, to the, to the, to the process to the meeting, whatever. And it’s time to talk to these companies who, like you said, don’t necessarily have half a million dollars in budget in order to create content, but know it’s important have seen their customers or their prospects or their competitors benefiting from doing this. What What is the process, you all take with some of that context in mind to say, Okay, let’s suss out what you can make? And you know, what is going to be something that’s impactful for your business when it comes to investing and content creation?

Mickey Cloud 13:09
Yep, yeah, so there’s a couple different things. First, is there’s some like philosophies that we want to share with them to kind of start grounding them in how to think about creating content. So the first is that every company in the world is a media company, every company in the world is a publisher, so and what that means that when you’re a media company or a publisher, you’re thinking about content that brings value to the audience, not necessarily just content that’s about your business. And what you can do, it’s not about advertising what you can do, it’s about creating content that brings value to that end consumer. And that could be a prospect, you know, that could be, you know, someone who’s actually could buy something from you. It could be, you know, whatever that whatever that looks like. And then when you think about what content brings value to that audience, it’s about entertainment, right? It’s about education, or it’s about solving a problem for that audience. So if you think, you know, you think about the, the landscaping company, right, that’s out there, it’s what type of content is going to bring value to someone who is thinking about landscape landscaping, you know, immediately started thinking about landscaping, but are thinking about, they just bought a home? And so you can think about like, what are the what are the, what are the things you can do by yourself, where you never need to hire a landscaping service? service, right? And so like, that is a bit of a mind twist for people to think around. Like, I’m going to put out content that tells people how not to use my service. It’s like, Yeah, because it’s you being transparent. It’s you being authentic, is you showing off that you actually know what you’re talking about. It shows off thought leadership. And so it’s this, you know, for a lawyer, the 10 things you need to know before you call an attorney. After you get in, you know, whatever legal matter you might be looking up information about or for a real estate agent, right? Like, when people are in the market to buy a home. They’re thinking about that they’re thinking about what neighborhood do I want to live in? So why are you not the person that is reviewing all the elements that make up a neighborhood, the Schools you’re interviewing the people on the school board, the teachers, the, you know, you’re looking at the food and dining, the coffee shops, the restaurants, the bars, the activity, what are people looking for? You’re looking at, like the family stuff like, review the parks, rank the best parks in your in your town, you’re never like, there’s so much content that is valuable to people. But you’ve got to put it, you have to put them first. Yeah. And then think about how your business works under that.

Adam Vazquez 15:24
Yeah, I feel like the landscaping company, we keep using it in every episodes. Maybe we need to start something around that. But yeah, the idea being like, no one cares about seed variants, right? Or, like, no one really cares if their lawns actually healthy, or very few people care about that. It’s much more about like, do my neighbors who live in this nice neighborhood, like the way that my lawn looks in relation to theirs are things right, right? So or if

Mickey Cloud 15:49
there’s if there’s DUI things where it’s like, are you just helpful, like maybe there, maybe people do care about sea variance. And so you can tell them the differences between, like, the ones that are good for the environment, the ones that are bad for the environment, the ones that like you can make at home with your X, Y, and Z things you find in your kitchen. Like there’s, there’s still even content around sea variance that could bring value to someone who wants to dive in there and really learn about it.

Adam Vazquez 16:09
Cool. So you start off by obviously putting the customer first at the center of your your ideation session, or whatever that looks like, what about when it comes to I know, something we did when we when I was working with you all was we would take ideas and put them into the market and some sort of like Bake Off or something like this? And what’s the scaled down version of that? how can how can small businesses test these ideas to see what’s what’s resonating?

Mickey Cloud 16:35
Yeah, so there’s a couple of things because one, you have to think about that one of the next questions will typically ask someone is like, what’s their capacity for creating content? Like, who’s doing it right now? What type of skill sets do they have? And and, and try to debunk like that it’s difficult to make content, right? There’s a lot of ways to scale content creation. And so there’s some things like tools, like what are the tools you need to do to like need to have on hand in order to create content, right, so Canva, you know, for image templates, and and using that kind of scale, so that not that not only the graphic designer can be the person that’s creating content, or pixel cut is another app where it’s essentially like, no skill, photo editing. And so there’s, there’s finding ways to kind of scale content creation. So I’ll ask about those capabilities. Once I get a sense of like, Who’s creating content? What’s going on? How can they, you know, put out more? Because that’s ultimately what you’re asking is like, if, when we did it at what VaynerMedia does for Budweiser is they put out hundreds of pieces of content a week, right? And, and and let the market kind of help dictate that, well, how do you start creating 10s of content per week, you know, like, how and so some of it starts with like, the capabilities, the tools. And then the other part is like, can we build a framework that allows for scalable for allows for you to create more content? And so one of the frameworks and it’s it’s what we’re doing right now, it’s the it’s, we kind of the show model, right? So it’s what’s a recurring piece of pillar content that can be long form, it could be a video podcast, could be an interview, it could be just a like those, the real estate thing I was talking about, we go around and review all the different businesses in the neighborhood. So you’ve got something that is episodic, potentially, it is something that is familiar, you come back to the well a couple times, and then you sweat those assets, right? Like what are the what’s the 37 second rant that someone goes on in that show that could go viral on LinkedIn, or on tik tok? And you make sure you cut that out? And that’s one piece of content what are the other two to 10 clips that are from that interview that are gonna be really insightful, interesting, valuable to that end consumer? What are the five to 15 social image assets, you know, that that could that could be used as quote cards? Or is just good pieces of content? How do you transcribe that conversation and turn it into a blog post so literally trying to squeeze as much content out of that one filming that you did that one production of one hero piece of content and and then you’ve gone from Alright, we made we did one thing to now we’ve got 40 pieces of content just from that one thing? And so what are the the frameworks and mechanisms that allow you to create more content? So once the content is then created, then it’s a matter of like, letting the market tell you what’s working right so like, let’s leverage the platforms that are giving you organic distribution right now. In the b2b world and business side that’s LinkedIn. Although it can be more for b2c and things like that. It’s Tick tock, which has, you know, relevance across both b2c and b2b I would argue there’s amazing landscapers on Tick Tock right now they’re just showing people with video how to trim your hedges, how to, you know, put down a new sidewalk, like all the different things that if you want to learn how to cook a great recipe, like Tick Tock is a great place to go right now to do that. And so you you see what’s kind of naturally getting organic engagement, you can see put out a video on LinkedIn or tik tok. You can see did I get 25 comments from that? 1000 views on that or did I get two comments on that and 100 views on that and so you can start to see like oh, when I post about this topic, It’s getting more organic distribution on those two specific platforms right now you’re not gonna get a lot of organic distribution on Instagram right now on Twitter on some of these other platforms you will in like Facebook groups but not if you’re just posting from your Facebook profile and so how do you leverage the platforms that are giving you organic distribution to see what’s doing well and then you double down and make more content on the things that are working

Adam Vazquez 20:22
Yeah, I’m glad you I’m really glad you use those specific numbers although I know you’re just talking about hypotheticals but I think sometimes people get so caught up in in like oh I didn’t get 1000s of views on this first one or I didn’t get because they’ve heard that that’s what happens when when content goes viral But to your point Tick Tock is giving away views right now yeah, so if you if you see it go to 25 and your other pieces are doing 10 like there’s there’s a signal there for you to be able to pay attention to and I’m also glad you called out Tick Tock in I think because maybe if the customers that would be interested in working with you probably some of them are more open when I bring up to the the people that we talk to everyone lasts and there’s like moves on to the next topic I’m being serious like though there’s three views going out there right it’s it’s amazing

Mickey Cloud 21:08
we lost a piece of business at the saucer group last week big brands I won’t name the brand big brand though that you would that just was one of these it’s like an orphan brand that one of the bigger like bigger holding company CPG companies right and it’s their brief was literally like we don’t have money for paid media we just want to create content on social and so we built an entire strategy around the way to do that right now is on Tick Tock and here are all the ways we’re going to show you how to do that. And then procurement caught us back and was like yeah you know the brand team just is a little like nervous about Tick Tock and it’s like literally that was your brief It was like how do I get with no paid media How do I get in front of more people and become relevant Yeah, you do that on Tick Tock It is literally where culture is starting on the internet right now. And it’s like you’re not the right fit for us is that’s gonna be if you’re if you’re scared of Tick Tock like it’s not like we were recommending only fans like we recommend Tick Tock like it’s the number one downloaded app on the internet right now. It’s more downloaded right now than Facebook like and so it’s it’s mind blowing to me that people still have it’s, you know, Summer 2021 and fall 21 and it’s and people are still like, Oh, that’s that thing that my 13 year old niece. Yeah.

Adam Vazquez 22:18
And that’s the that’s the argument is like no, no, it’s that there’s no buyers there. But you know if, if there’s a guy on tik tok who reprises 80 songs and has a mullet and is just killing it with moms for obvious reasons right now he’s like 18 or 20 or something yeah, that is successful then that’s the that’s the same demo that you Brand X are trying to sell as the moms own so that’s it and

Mickey Cloud 22:41
back to the landscaping example like there are I know for a fact I don’t have to look up right now because I’ve done it for so many industries look up there are people on on like there’s there’s people teaching financial literacy on Tick Tock right now, like the most boring subject and most average people banks would never touch Tick Tock because it’s so it’s, it’s it’s so early that it up but like if your credit union, if your if your local bank, like there are there are craters on there who are teaching like, basic, what’s the difference between, you know, x financial product, and why financial product like they’re, they’re doing basic financial literacy. And if you don’t want to take inspiration from that and create content like that, you could partner up with them, you could find ways that, you know, to, to leverage what’s going on on culture there, even if you’re not going to create content for the platform, even though you should?

Adam Vazquez 23:29
Yeah, it’s a great point. So all of that kind of being a foundation, keep your customer at the center of what you’re doing fine. Find cost efficient ways to create sweat the assets. And by the way, I can cut this out entirely, but is there any companies who you all have worked with that you feel like you could point to and say like, hey, yeah, you’re trying to figure it out? Go look at that. Yeah, they’re doing a good Yeah,

Mickey Cloud 23:50
absolutely. There’s a company called young nails, which is a they started so there, they were our first client, we I mentioned consulting as one of our offerings. We have a, we have some short term consulting projects that are 15 $30,000 kind of projects. And then we have multi year consulting projects where we literally become almost a partner in the business, you know, but we have a financial upside in that as well. Young nails is one of those companies when we started with them, they sold nail salon products direct to nail salons. And so one of the first things we told them was, wait, you could also be a BD, you could do that b2b business and you could also be a b2c business and go direct consumer with e commerce. And the way you do that is by becoming a media company, they’re now the end so they’ve got they went all in on hiring the right talent that they had in terms of content creators and people who could manage these platforms platform strategist, things like that. The entrepreneurs the head of the company is charismatic on film, he does a show kind of about the the nail salon business and crushes it on LinkedIn and crushes it on tik tok on Twitter. He was like one of the first beauty brands on tik tok. He’s one it’s young males is like one of the most followed beauty brands on Talk about right now two years plus late two plus years later on that platform where he’s selling Yeah, nail polish and nail solutions and all these sort of things, but it’s also it’s so his b2c business is growing, but it’s also helping his b2b

Adam Vazquez 25:13
business. Yeah, because no brand Yeah, these salons want to work with probably are getting 1,000%

Mickey Cloud 25:17
Yeah, 1,000% he the market is coming to him. Now he did you know, he was one of the first companies to go through this three year program that we do we call mentors, that meribel your friend meribel leads up and in the three years, he went from a $10 million revenue business to a $20 million revenue business by the time

Adam Vazquez 25:35
that three years Wow, awesome. So make sure you check them out. We’ll link that below as a great example of someone who’s who’s doing exactly what Mickey’s talking about. Right? Now, my last question for you, Mickey is a little bit different. Or it’s a little bit of a bridge to really our next episode. So so this is the last episode in the tactics of creating. And then next week, we’re having Kenneth Burke, you know him from texture quest, on to talk about how to how to create a culture that helps create continuously, so you’re not just relying on one hit wonders are these from personal experience in working with you that this is a gift that you have as an individual and as a company, but I’ve told this story many times Vayner, when I was working at Vayner, I was in the account side of things, I had an idea for a piece of creative, and you know, you and the whole team was very supportive of the idea we did it, it went really well. And that’s not normal, especially from an agency point to like lead account person do that. So it’s just one example on it. So it’s personal for me, but how do you think about establishing that culture within within Sasha, that helps your team cultivate creativity on a continual basis?

Mickey Cloud 26:46
Yeah, I mean, culture has got to be its religion. And to us like it’s a comes from the top. So it comes straight from Gary, where like, ideas can come from anywhere was one of the first thing you know, first, things he said about this company that we were going to be setting out to build ideas can come from anywhere. And so you got to live up to that, meaning you got to get people at bats and shots, regardless of where, you know, the, you know, what, whether working in accounting, or whether working on the count side, or on the creative team, that ideas can come from anywhere. And that’s got to be true, and you got to live that as a truth. So some of it is just like principles that you will not waver from. And then the other side is giving people allowing them to take time to do that. And, and whether that is on a specific project where you can hit assign, hey, if you want to take like you did on that one project, we literally had a project where you took that bat to like write, write the script, right. And so we made sure that yeah, whatever 10% of your time was gonna be taken off account stuff to go work on that project for whatever that was two weeks, three weeks, four weeks, five weeks, whatever that was. The other side is and maybe and I’d love to hear can this kind of take on this is that you know, that the marketing team, in whatever organization you have, whether you’re an agency, or whether it’s a landscaping company, like whoever’s responsible for marketing can’t be the only content creators or you can, but you’re going to limit the amount of content they can put out. Therefore, there’s a limit about the opportunity that you’re going to get from creating content. And so there’s a, we did a project with the Chinese Chamber of Commerce here, where I’m on the executive board, and we do some inkind work for them and things like that as part of kind of a sponsorship package. And one of the projects we did two started two years ago, because of just again, how awesome LinkedIn organic distribution is right now, is we evaluated kind of everyone, we did an audit assessment of everyone that was on the board at the time, and the kind of key and all the employees at the Chamber of Commerce, and we just saw who naturally posts the most on LinkedIn. And so then we created a pilot group. So we invited eight people to be part of this pilot group where we said, we saw, hey, you already post a lot on LinkedIn, or a lot, maybe once a week. But you know, a general good amount, we’re gonna set up a program where we’re going to give you stories, we’re going to give you links to content, we’re gonna give you images, we’re going to give you copy, we’re going to set up infrastructure so that you can be posting more, and you’re sharing great stories about Chattanooga. And so you know, multiple times a week, they’ll show up in our LinkedIn messages saying like, Hey, here’s some content that you can be posting on LinkedIn right now. And it’s really easy just copy and paste and go and post. And so it’s a program that we kind of piloted it that way of eight board members slash I think it was five, six board members and two employees from the chamber. And then now it’s like, cool, how do we scale this to where it’s a requirement now you’re gonna be on the board, you’re going to get content access this content and you need to be posting whatever makes sense is that once a week is it once a month, whatever that makes sense, but being a part of board is gonna be sharing good stories about Chattanooga for economic development for talent, you know, attraction, talent retention, you know, the strides we’re making an education like whatever that might be, to take advantage of LinkedIn organic distribution. I’ve heard other companies call that like, looking at your own company and think about who can be the LinkedIn evangelists of your company. and allowing them to like, yeah, build their personal brand, but also train them and give them content and help them like GIVE IT infrastructure that’s gonna allow it to be easy to post content to take advantage of that organic distribution.

Adam Vazquez 30:11
I love that. And it goes back to what you were talking about earlier, when you’re talking about Canva. And these other tools, and that, I mean, that specific example, requires almost no real talent aside from I mean, you know, you have to write something, but you’re you or whoever this team is, is providing the assets to the board members, right? So it’s a great way to engage and find and then that also allows everyone has their own unique experiences in their own little twist on and how they came to Chattanooga or how they interact with the right with the chamber. So be allowing them to add that flavor as well, as opposed to just having Mickey board member just you know, the Marketing Board members say right from your Yep, exactly. Yeah, I love that. Okay, this

Mickey Cloud 30:49
is way more powerful. When it says CEO, a company that is a board member that is posting, you know, like it, then if they know Yeah, oh, he’s the vice chair of marketing. Yeah, that’s why he’s posting. Right. Right,

Adam Vazquez 30:59
right. No, that’s really that’s really good. That’s, that’s a great example. Well, thank you so much for coming on and sharing some of these super tactical ideas. I know you have a show that where you kind of do this on a regular basis for social groups, where can people follow along with that? And tell us about

Mickey Cloud 31:14
Yeah, so that podcast is called Building offline, where we interview entrepreneurs, just about the highs and lows of entrepreneurship and what they’re learning and so it’s it’s not always focused on marketing. It’s, it’s focused more on kind of the business building side of things, but also we get into marketing we get into, you know, training team members, all things like that. But you know, the, it’s, it’s something that my co host, Katie hankinson, and I, we each interview someone and then we do a little bit of like a postgame rehab recap together. So it’s been I think we’re through 2526 30 episodes on that right now.

Adam Vazquez 31:44
Yep. And the last episode had a lot of hoops talk in it. So if you’re, if you’re, you know, accustomed to that, you should definitely check. Yeah. Well, thanks so much for joining me. Appreciate it. Thanks. Alright, thanks so much to Mickey for, for coming on. And just jamming a little bit. I really enjoyed that interview. Personally, Carlton, what was one of the big takeaways

Carlton Riffel 32:03
I kept thinking about when he mentioned it was really that story at the end with the city and trying to equip the people that maybe wouldn’t be normal content creators, to make it as easy as possible for them to share content. People know how to log in to their social profiles, but a lot of times they don’t share because there’s so many decisions around what it is they have to share how they have to say it, what filters or effects they have to do. And then on top of that, you know, there’s, it’s that time that it takes to create that, but then they actually like aggregating that and making it ready to share is a big hassle too. So if you can do all of that legwork for your team, or for people that are related to your team, or like your team, even people who might not work for your team, but are just supporters or fans, they will be such more willing, they’ll be much more willing to share that than they were if if you just expected them to create things on their own, or to notice the one thing and share it. So if you if you ask them, here’s everything. Can you please share this? You’ll be surprised how many people will will jump on board?

Adam Vazquez 33:08
Yeah, I really appreciate that as well. What’s cool is one of the people who is a part of that program. KENNETH Burke is the Director of Marketing text request, we actually have coming on next week. So we got a chance to ask him a little bit. You know, how that worked. And being on the other side of it, how much he appreciated it. So yeah, I really I enjoyed that as well. I think I just and you know, I got to work with Mickey and a lot of people the thing that I’m going to talk about is the humility that it takes to make a creative or to make creative that impacts and that word gets thrown around a lot, especially in our space. And sometimes people will look at someone like Gary and say like, oh, humility, yeah, how’s he you know, but I think I think it’s an intellectual humility. It’s not about necessarily, you know, being the most miq or obviously, Gary and VaynerMedia get their name out there quite a bit. But they truly do If so, whoever has a good idea or wherever consumer attention is just black and white, they’re willing to go there. And so many times people get caught up whether it be Tick Tock whether it be LinkedIn for someone like me, who doesn’t like that platform on on our own likes or dislikes. And I think it takes that intellectual humility to just put that aside and execute where where the audience is. So I really appreciate that about Mickey and his whole team.

Carlton Riffel 34:26
Yeah, absolutely letting the best content went out so it’s like content meritocracy, when you just put stuff out there and then let let kind of figure out what the best content is by by how people respond and, and doing that legwork is a lot of times the hard part.

Adam Vazquez 34:41
Well appreciate Mickey, you coming on Carlton before we let the people go. We need to give them something that we’ve heard this week that we think will help or entertain or educate them. So you go first, what have you. What have you heard this week?

Carlton Riffel 34:53
Have you heard of the app, a poet that so it’s I haven’t done now. So pretty cool. It actually is quite simple. What it does is it just takes a link from Twitter. And then it stylizes it with a few options and lets you share it as an image. So it’s just an easy way to get the look and the feel of your tweet. And whether you want to post it to Instagram or somewhere else, and lets you download that image to share. So

Adam Vazquez 35:24
this is a simple text, it takes your copy from the tweet you wrote.

Carlton Riffel 35:28
Yeah, and your profile and gives you a Twitter branding, but then does it on like a cool background and gives you some options for the format, like landscape square, vertical. And then just you can change a couple of things like text size, and background color and stuff. So but yeah, great idea.

Adam Vazquez 35:48
Yeah, very cool to check that out. Mine is sticking with the tick tock theme. We have a mutual friend Thomas Ginsburg, who talked about becoming Tick Tock famous, this guy, I don’t even I can’t remember how many. I mean, he’s got hundreds of 1000s of followers on Tiktok. And I think his username is V total. Total Tom, but it’s th o m, I was gonna say thumb, and it’s all about BFD, all the farms out there, but farms, it’s all about owning, maintaining, selling, buying using old older BMW and Mercedes car so it’s like super niche, and it’s awesome. He does such a great job with it. We’ll have to have him on at some point. That’s a good idea to talk about that. But yeah, I will link that if you if you haven’t checked out Tick Tock and you’re like, you know cuz I think a lot of times the question is, how can I use this for my for my weird niche or my weird business? Like, if he can, then then you can so check out what he’s doing? And hopefully that’ll that’ll provide some education there. Cool. All right. Well, I think that’s it for this week. We will be back next week with Kenneth Burke, VP of Marketing from text requests. Listen, we don’t ask for anything here. We give free shout outs to everyone basically, that we come across in in Have you heard if you have not given us a five star review specifically on Apple podcasts when I was concerned with other platforms to be honest, please go and do so or subscribe to the YouTube. We’re pumping out the videos there every week, and until then, we’ll see you next time.