[Audio Length: 0:34:52]

Steve Wershing:       
Welcome to Becoming Referable, the podcast that shows you how to become the kind of advisor people can’t stop talking about. I’m Steve Wershing, and I’m very excited about this episode. We have a guest I’ve been hoping to get on for a long time, David Meerman Scott, who left corporate communications ten years ago to start pioneering in this new idea of social media, a way of circumventing all of the traditional gatekeepers and reaching out directly to your customers and clients. Since starting that, he’s become something of a guru, and is a world-acclaimed speaker, and consultant and strategist in communications and social media. His first book, The New Rules of Marketing and PR, has now sold over 350,000 copies in 28 languages, and since then he has nine more books to his credit.

In this episode, we’re going to go through a lot of information very quickly about some fascinating concepts that can help you promote your business to clients, including things like newsjacking, how to hijack the headlines to get people looking at your business, how to create a worldwide rave for what you do, and we’ll end with his new project, called Sonic Branding, how to create a logo essentially in sound, to become associated with your business.

I think you’ll really enjoy the episode. I enjoyed doing it a lot. There’s a lot of information crammed into this little 30 minutes. So, let’s get right to it. Without further ado, David Meerman Scott. David, thank you so much for joining us here on Becoming Referable.

David Meerman Scott:
Hey, it’s my pleasure. It’s always fun to speak with both of you.

Steve Wershing:
I’ve been a big fan of yours for a long time and really enjoyed listening to you at FPAB a year or two ago. I think so much has changed in the marketing world and that directly affects how advisors can get to meet new people. One of the most interesting concepts of yours is the idea of newsjacking, and how advisors can sort of get noticed by leveraging current events. Could you tell us a little bit about what newsjacking is and how advisors can leverage it?

David Meerman Scott:
Yes. Absolutely. What’s really changed in the world now is that buyers are in charge, and I think advisors know that. They can go to the search engines and search for something they’re interested in, they can ask their friends and colleagues on social network, so the challenge is how can you be in front of them at the moment they’re looking. One of the great ways to do that is this concept I call newsjacking, which is when you look for what’s going on in the news, and then you put your take on that news into the marketplace by doing a video, by doing a blog post, by pushing something out on Twitter or LinkedIn, you know, whatever social network you might be active in.

And then, especially for advisors who work in a certain geography, for example, I happen to live in Boston and my financial advisor is here in the Boston area, if you happen to have a lot of your business come from a certain geography, then you can reach out to the media, as well, in your local area.

So, the way it works is that when a story breaks, that’s important to your business, journalists are looking for somebody to quote in that story. Consumers are perhaps looking for a product or service related to what’s going on in that story. For example, if the US government were to suddenly change some regulatory aspect covering, let’s say, 40lK plans or SEP plans, or IRA plans, that you could then immediately write a blog post or shoot a YouTube video. And I’m talking like, right now, and push that out within moments after the regulatory change, advising people what that change means.

Now, that will do a couple of things. Number 1, it will show your existing clients that you’re on the ball, because you could email your take on that to them. But you can also then, use that, if you push it out through a social network of some kind, like either your own blog or YouTube or LinkedIn or whatever, then you have an opportunity to influence people who are just learning the news and saying, “Oh wow, what does that mean for me?” Same thing, what’s going on right now as we’re doing this recording is that interest rates have been creeping up, so what does that mean? Push your thoughts out into the world when the moment is right, and then the media may want to quote you and you will get noticed. But it’s a technique that most people don’t do and most advisors don’t do, because they’re on a schedule that they plan out ahead of time.

Steve Wershing:
How do you work that into the schedule? For example, if I understand you correctly, let’s say that you wanted to do something about rising interest rates. You wouldn’t just, I mean, you could put an article up about changing interest rates, but if you wanted to jack the news, then you would wait for the Fed to change its—

David Meerman Scott:
It’s the next—correct, you’d wait for the next Fed announcement, where it was clear at this moment, 4 o’clock on a Tuesday or whatever time they released the news, that’s when you push it out, and that’s when you say, “Okay, here’s what’s important. Here’s why that’s important.” And then, I would share that. If you write it up as a blog post I would share that with the reporters at your local newspaper. Let me give you an example of something I did a couple of months ago. Well, as we record this, it was about nine months ago.

When Donald Trump was elected President, it was actually an incredibly big surprise, because, as we know, the polls all suggested that Hillary Clinton was going to win, the TV pundits and other media people were all saying that Hillary Clinton was going to win, I mean, the whole vibe felt like Hillary Clinton was going to win. And it has nothing to do with the political aspect, but in my case, I analyze the marketing aspect of US presidential elections, and I have done that since the 2004 election, in the Presidential election cycle. And so, on my blog, I’ve been writing about it for that many years, so I’ve been writing a lot of stories about Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton from the marketing perspective. For example, how Donald Trump uses Twitter was something I talked about early on. So, when it became clear that Trump was going to win, it was like 1 in the morning on election evening, you know, it was like, “Oh my gosh, Trump’s going to win. That’s crazy, what’s going on here?”

So, what I personally did, was I newsjacked that, because I’m a marketing guy, I’ve been analyzing the marketing aspects of the election, and I wrote a blog post. The title of the blog post was The Best Marketer was Elected President. And I wrote that blog post from the time that they called the election in favor of Donald Trump, and I pushed it out on my blog at 4:30 in the morning, immediately following election night, so that it came out literally within a couple of hours of the election being called for Trump.

That did a number of really cool things, because I pushed that out on my blog. Blogs are indexed in real time by Google, so, because of that, anybody who was searching on a story about why did Trump win might see my blog post. Somebody who was searching on Donald Trump marketing might see my blog post. In fact, many reporters did. I ended up getting quoted in about a dozen different media outlets as a result of that story. Forbes Magazine, for example, quoted me, and Marketing Magazine out of Australia quoted me and a bunch of other publications quoted me. And then, what happens is great, because then it leads to new business.

So, I then got an email about two weeks after election day and it was from the Public Affairs Council in Washington, D.C., and the Public Affairs Council said, hey, David, we saw some of the stories that have been written about you and how you talked about Donald Trump’s marketing. We’d like you to come to our annual executive meeting with about 200 people and give a presentation on that. Now, I’m a professional speaker. I earn my living by doing public events, and I charge $25,000 for a presentation, so for me, that was one blog post that yielded $25,000 in business. But the reason I was able to succeed with that, and the only way you can really pull this off is that you have to be quick. You have to push out content in the form of a blog, in the form of a YouTube video, in the form of a tweet, whatever it is, that gets that information into the market immediately.

Julie Littlechild:
So, David, I’m interested, as you talk about that, it sounds like being prepared for that moment is so critical. If you think, from an advisor’s perspective, what are some of the things that they might want to have in place so that when they see those opportunities, they can really jump in and take advantage?

David Meerman Scott:
That’s a great question. So, here’s a few things that you need to be thinking about if this is something you’d like to do. The first one is that make sure you get clearance ahead of time from whatever compliance officers you need to speak with, and it all depends on what kind of organization you work in. But this kind of thing is not a problem at all for financial advisors to do, I mean I’m not a lawyer, I’m not commenting on the actual ins and outs, but this kind of thing is something that typically can be done. But you want to make sure that you get that cleared ahead of time, so when that story does come up that you’ve got pre-approval, in a sense, to push that out, if you’re working within a larger organization. Then the second thing is just be aware that it can happen at any time. It can happen, in my case, at one in the morning. And that was when the story presented itself. And I had to work, spent two hours writing a blog post, and then I pushed it out at 4:30 in the morning. That was the time. It might happen on a weekend. It might happen in the middle of the night. It might happen when you can’t run it by somebody else because everyone’s gone or on vacation or sleeping or something.

And then, it’s important that you have a channel to publish that content on. I think a blog is the best channel, and the reason I think that is because a blog is your own real estate. In other words, you own your blog. It’s not part of a social network where the social network would own the content. And then, if somebody finds your blog, they’re finding you. They’re not finding Facebook or LinkedIn, they’re finding you. So, I always recommend a blog. But that means that you have to have that blog up and running before the newsjacking opportunity pops up. So, get that blog up and running. Write a few blog posts, and then be watching the news. What I do, I watch Google News on a regular basis, either on my computer or on my iPhone, and I check it out four or five times a day, because I’m constantly looking to see if there’s a story that I might be able to comment on. And then, you just have to be quick. You have to write it out there and push it out there as fast as you can.

Julie Littlechild:
And I guess that would include, also, if you’re going to reach out to the media, I mean it sounds obvious enough as I say this, but just having that list of local media or national, if you’re going that route, you want everything ready to go.

David Meerman Scott:
That’s exactly right. And again, I think, with media, it’s a good idea to establish virtual relationships with them prior to when you have this opportunity. And one of the best ways to create a virtual relationship with a member of the media is to follow them on Twitter, and most reporters now are pretty active on Twitter, as a general rule. So, what that means is that, like, for example, I mentioned earlier, I live in Boston. And I follow most of the Boston reporters for the Boston Globe, the local newspaper here in my town, and I follow those reporters. Scott Kirsner is one of them, for example, follow him on Twitter, and then occasionally I’ll send something to Scott, I’ll retweet one of his stories, and so Scott knows who I am. A couple of times we’ve met at conferences, and, “Oh, sure, David, I know who you are. We follow each other on Twitter.” So, you develop that relationship ahead of time with, for example, the financial reporters or the business reporters or whatever reporter makes sense in your local newspaper or television station, so that they know you before that opportunity arises.

Steve Wershing:
So that you have that credibility.

David Meerman Scott:
Correct.

Steve Wershing:
I think one of the themes that’s sort of coming out of this conversation is that you need to be ready to react as events arise, but at the same time, you need to have things prepared and in place, because you can’t just create this stuff out of thin air. When you posted about Trump’s winning, you already had several articles on your blog about it, and you’d had a blog that you’d maintained consistently for years. So, if an advisor wants to do this, just like you said a few minutes ago, you want to have that platform and be putting content on it. You want to remember that social media is social and so you want to have relationships with those reporters and follow them and retweet them and comment them on things that they’ve done, periodically, so when the event arises and you post something, you’ve got some credibility and you’ve got something to base it on.

David Meerman Scott:
I think that’s exactly right. I think that’s exactly right. And just by getting yourself up and going with this kind of social networking, you’re making yourself part of the community. You’re creating the sort of information that people value, so that when somebody does find your profile on a social network, especially if they’re looking around to find an advisor to work with, they’re going to say, “Wow, this person’s plugged in. They’re active on Twitter, they’ve got a great blog that I can learn about various issues in the financial markets. This is someone that I feel comfortable working with.”

A friend of mine does this. His name is Larry McGuinn, he’s in the insurance business, which is kind of similar in a way, and Larry is constantly posting stories about the insurance business on his blog, but he’s also doing some newsjacking. For example, when there was a really big storm coming through the Boston area, Larry posted information about what you need to do to prepare for the storm, from the perspective of insurance. So, that was valuable information that was being pushed out, and that’s the sort of thing that the media are looking for to write about on the day before a big storm is going to hit.

Steve Wershing:
Sure. And I think that’s very important, that you’re not using it to promote, but you are linking it to things that you do. I think, to bring sort of another concept that you’ve worked with, one of your other books is called World Wide Rave, which I think is brilliant.

David Meerman Scott:
Oh, thank you.

Steve Wershing:
And to take an example from outside of our industry, you talk about how a dentist got started in her practice, or got promoted, by linking dental health, dental hygiene, with sex appeal. So, she wasn’t just promoting the fact that she was a good dentist, but she linked it to something people wanted to hear about. Can you tell us a little bit about that example?

David Meerman Scott:
Yes, sure. So, the dentist wrote an e-book called Healthy Mouth, Healthy Sex. That’s the title of the e-book. And basically, what she was talking about is the relationship between the health of your mouth and your sex life. And, you know, it was very funny, it was clever and interesting, but it’s very unexpected. It’s not what you expect from a dentist. And then she pushed that out on her blog and a bunch of other places that people would link to it. I talked about it, I wrote about it in my book, and so it got quite a bit of notice. But people would pass it on, one to another, on social networks, “Hey, check out what my dentist is doing.” So that leads to referrals. That leads to people who will want to do business with her. “She’s the sort of person I would like to be my dentist,” and then people will come to her and bring their families.

Julie Littlechild:
And then, just to that last point, you’ve got some great shareable content, obviously, of how some of these strategies work, do you recommend something as simple as an email out to all of your clients just to alert them to the fact that perhaps you were featured in the news? Or is there a better way of doing that to make sure they do share it with friends and family?

David Meerman Scott:
I think it really depends on how you’re sharing content with your community to begin with, and always do it in such a way that it’s seen as valuable, and not so much as it’s seen like you’re trying to promote yourself and promote your work. So, I have a rule I use called the Sharing More Than Selling Rule. I actually have set up some percentages to think about with social networks. So, I recommend that 85% of your time, you’re sharing with people, you’re engaging with people, you’re part of the community, you know, you find an interesting story somewhere and you share it out. You reply to someone and mention something that they did or they wrote, whatever it might be. That’s 85% of the time. So that might be commenting on a story that one of the reporters in your local newspaper wrote, and commenting online about that story. Things like that.

Ten percent of the time is you creating original content, so an original blog post, an original YouTube video, whatever it might be. And five percent or less of your engagement should be around something of a promotional nature. But if you do 95% sharing, engaging, original content, you’re seen as valuable to the community, you’re part of an ecosystem, and people will respect that occasionally you want to promote the fact that, hey, I’m giving a seminar at such and such a hotel on this date, please come, please bring your friends. And people will respect that because you’ve built up the trust with them with all the other information you’ve pushed out. And same thing with a media story like you just mentioned, Julie, so hey, there’s a story out and I’m quoted in it, love to have you take a look and feel free to pass on to your friends. That’s cool if you’ve already engaged with people.

Julie Littlechild:
Right. Right. And, sorry, could I just get a point of clarification? Because you mentioned, Steve, The World Wide Rave, but just for everybody listening, can you describe exactly what that is?

David Meerman Scott:
Yes. World Wide Rave is my kind of term for something which goes viral in the marketplace. It just explodes and becomes big. And by the way, if you just Google world wide rave, I have made my book called World Wide Rave completely free on all the electronic book services, so it’s free on Kindle and Kobo and all of those. It’s also free as a PDF download, completely free, no registration or anything required, so anybody wants to grab that book. So, it’s the idea of how can you create something online that people are eager to share with their friends and colleagues and family members, that people find it to be so interesting, either because it’s valuable content, or because it’s funny, or because it’s just amazing, that they want to share that content. And that’s the idea of what World Wide Rave is. So, I provide a whole bunch of different ways that you can create content that is likely to become a world wide rave.

Julie Littlechild:
Great. Thank you.

Steve Wershing:
And that’s such a big challenge that advisors face. I hear that all the time from advisors. Well, two things. One is that they want to put stuff out there and they want to try to get their clients to share it. Well, I mean, that’s what that talks about is sharable content. The reason that clients don’t share a lot more of advisor content is it’s not that shareable, it’s not that interesting.

David Meerman Scott:
Exactly. Yes, exactly right. That’s exactly right.

Steve Wershing:
But the other part of it, that you brought up before, the other question I get a lot is, when am I ever going to make time for all this stuff? And you’ve pointed out that a lot of it is just sharing things that you find interesting. Only 10%, like you were saying, is original content. The vast majority is interesting stuff that you find out there that you share because it would be of interest to your clients.

David Meerman Scott:

Exactly. Right, so we’re now recording a podcast, it’s interesting stuff, and somebody will share this. I might share this, and then I’ll share this with my network, and you’ll end up with people listening to the podcast who had never heard of you before, maybe they’ll subscribe. And just continuing that kind of—I mean, it’s called social networking for a reason. Creating that kind of network, the larger your network becomes, the more power you have, and the easier it is to generate new business, because you’ve got this powerful network around you.

Steve Wershing:
Now, you’ve talked about sharing interesting information, and you’ve talked in the past about communicating visually. Everybody who’s listening to this needs to go read David’s blog post called Who the Hell are These People? And then go look at your own site, because you’ve got all that visual gobbledygook on it. But now you’re starting to work in a new area of sound branding. Can you tell us a little bit about the sonic branding idea?

David Meerman Scott:
Yes, of course. I founded a company, beginning of 2017, with a professional touring musician and composer named Juanito Pascual, and what we do is we create sonic branding. Sonic branding is two components. One is what we call sonic logo, which is between four and approximately 12 notes that’s a highly recognizable set of notes, like for example, the NBC chimes, is a sonic logo, or the Intel Inside, is a sonic logo, or the Skype ringtone is a sonic logo. These are all examples of very recognizable, several different notes, that people can relate to a certain brand. The other thing we do is create original music, so we create an original song that people use. This is a really wide open area of branding, which is used very, very little today. That’s surprising to me, because it’s incredibly easy to do, it’s cost effective.

So, what my little company does is we have meetings with you to understand what your brand is, what brand attributes you have, what kind of organization you are, and then we compose an original song and/or sonic logo. Now, some of the places that people use these sonic branding assets are, for example, we’re recording a podcast. Maybe it’s their podcast intro music. Maybe it’s their YouTube background music. Maybe it’s the music they play on hold when somebody has called into the office. Perhaps that music is used on the trade show booth when people are visiting the trade show. If you’re doing television advertising and radio advertising, music can be used there as well. It can be used on websites in certain ways. So, there’s lots of uses when you have custom music created, and it does a great job to brand your organization because that music is created exactly for you, and then you own that. Own it completely, and own it outright, so that the only people who can use that music is you, and it’s a really incredible way to brand.

Julie Littlechild:
It’s so interesting. When you think of individual advisors and smaller businesses, all those things that you mentioned, all of those opportunities, which do you think would be most pertinent for this industry and these advisors?

David Meerman Scott:
Do you mean from the sonic branding perspective?

Julie Littlechild:
Yeah.

David Meerman Scott:
Well, I think tying them all together with an original song is really interesting. Because the music on hold in most organizations is just some default music. It doesn’t mean anything, or it’s music that’s stolen from a famous recording artist. Neither of those are really good options. Some boring, stale muzak kind of thing, or music that you don’t have proper license for. In this case, it’s licensed especially for you, and then, if you have videos or podcasts or other things that you’re doing in the social networking world, that same music that people would hear on hold if they called you is also what they hear if they log onto your content. So, these sorts of things are really interesting ways to tie together an organization, and I know especially for listeners out there who are music fans, being able to work with a composer to create your own song is really fun. We just got finished creating a song for a solar energy company, and the founder and CEO of the company is really into reggae music, so we ended up creating a reggae-infused song that feels light, and bright, and airy, because it’s a solar energy company, and looking towards the future, and the future is bright, with a reggae vibe. So that’s sort of fun to be able to create something like that, that then you have exclusive ownership over.

Julie Littlechild:
So, I can finally have my own theme song. This is something I’ve been wanting my whole life. This is awesome.

Steve Wershing:
I think you need to have one.

David Meerman Scott:
Absolutely. And you think of the amount of money on other forms of branding. People are spending a huge amount of money to get themselves noticed in various ways, and this is just one that very few people understand yet.

Steve Wershing:
That’s fascinating. One of the things that I hear a lot, I’m sure you’ve heard it too, when I go out and speak and talk about the ideas that I talk about is how exactly do I do this, and then they go home and try to do it, and they’re a little disconnected from the material at that point. But you now have a way for people to get some coaching, or some instruction on how to do this, that would be available to them. Can you tell us a little bit about that?

David Meerman Scott:
Absolutely, I’d be happy to. I speak at a lot of events, I mentioned that earlier. And one of the events that I’ve spoken at now about four or five times a year, for I think I’m on my fourth year now, is I speak at all of Tony Robbins’ Business Mastery events. So, if anyone is a fan of Tony Robbins, you know what I’m talking about. Or if you’re not, you may have heard of Tony Robbins, he’s a great sort of coach/mentor to a lot of people. So, I speak at Tony Robbins’ Business Mastery events, there’s about 1,500 people in the room, and I have a two-hour time slot where I talk about things like newsjacking and things like content creation and social networking and how do you create a Twitter profile and all these sorts of things.

And all these interesting people in the room, and then for the first three years that I did that, I just left people on their own and said, thank you very much, now it’s up to you to go out and execute on all these ideas I shared. And Tony Robbins himself and members of his team said to me, David, we’ve got to create a way to make it easy for people to implement. So, Tony and I worked together on creating what’s called New Marketing Mastery, and New Marketing Mastery is an online program, adult education, a self-learning program that includes a comprehensive workbook of 50 pages, it includes 65 videos where I explain each of the concepts that are part of the lessons. There’s five lessons. One of the lessons, by the way, is newsjacking, so one of the five lessons is what we spoke about earlier in the call. And then, there’s also 25 infographics, which I go into detail on each of the areas. And that’s called New Marketing Mastery.

And you can either get there through my site, DavidMeermanScott.com, and there’s a courses tab, or you can go to NewMarketingMastery.com to find that. But people really like the idea that they can learn these concepts using a method that’s easy to learn, using this program.

Steve Wershing:
We will link to all these in the show notes, but just for people who are listening to this as they’re driving around and what not, if you want to find more about David, you can find it at DavidMeermanScott.com, and that’s M-E-E-R-M-A-N, in the middle there. And you know, David, I could spend all day talking with you about these, because there’s so many great ideas. But I know we’re up against our time. Before we sign off, is there anything else that you’d like to encourage our audience to do to help them get better noticed?

David Meerman Scott:
Yes, one more thing. And thank you, this is always fun. I really appreciate speaking with both of you. So, the final thing I’d like to leave you with is that marketing is fun. Marketing is exciting. Marketing can be a really great part of your day, of your work week. So many people dread the idea of marketing. I know that’s especially true of advisors, because most advisors, when they think of marketing, think of dreadful things like you know, creating brochures or making email marketing campaigns, and things that don’t really sound like fun. But, creating content on the Web that people will find and people will share is really cool. And networking with real live humans out there using social networks like Twitter or LinkedIn is a great way to build business. And newsjacking, when you create some content around the news, is a really fun way to push your stuff out there. So, I would encourage people to change their idea about marketing as not being sort of a dreadful thing that you have to do, but rather something that you can do that’s fun, especially if you’re ending up doing it in ways that we’ve been talking about over the last half hour.

Steve Wershing:
I couldn’t agree more, and you know, these days, marketing, being that it’s more social and more interactive, and you’re generating content for people, it’s an opportunity to really evangelize what you do. It doesn’t have to be this stale kind of description of features and benefits, but you actually get to give people examples of how to apply these ideas, how they can make themselves better off. And I think once advisors sort of get into that idea, marketing does become a lot more fun.

David Meerman Scott:
Exactly. That’s exactly right.

Steve Wershing:
Well, David, thank you so much for joining us, and we love having you on and hope to get more of your ideas out there. And we appreciate your visiting with us.

David Meerman Scott:
Well, thanks very much. I appreciate it. Good luck to everybody listening, and I wish you all the best success.

Julie Littlechild:
Thanks so much.

Hi, it’s Julie again. It was great to have you with us on Becoming Referable. If you like what you’ve been hearing, please, do us a favor and rate us on iTunes. It really does help. You can get all the links, show notes, and other tidbits from these episodes at BecomingReferable.com. You can also get our free report, Three Referral Myths that Limit Your Growth, and connect with our blogs and other resources. Thanks so much for joining us.