Mel Carson is Founder, CEO & Principal Strategy Consultant at Delightful Communications, a Seattle-based social-media-strategy, digital-PR and personal-branding consulting firm. He is co-author of Pioneers of Digital and speaks about digital marketing and communications at conferences globally. He relishes his work as US Brand Ambassador for Majestic SEO, evangelizing the largest publicly available link intelligence database & tool set on the planet to marketers and advertising professionals all over America.
ML: To begin with, can you introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about what you do?
MC: My name is Mel Carson, and I am the founder of Delightful Communications. We’re a modern marketing, branding and digital PR firm based out of Seattle, Washington in the US. I worked at Microsoft for seven years as their digital marketing evangelist and have about sixteen years’ worth of experience in the digital marketing space, starting at companies like LookSmart, which was a search engine way back in the day. Now, our company focuses on channels that are pretty niche: things like influencer marketing, personal branding, and employee advocacy. Our mantra is that we’re all about people and not just pixels.
ML: Before we dive into more about Delightful Communications and what it does, I’m curious about the role of digital marketing evangelist at Microsoft. What does an evangelist do?
MC: My role at Microsoft really kicked off back in 2006. I was one of the original people to set up Microsoft adCenter, which is now Bing Ads, a PPC engine rival to Google Ads. This was before social media and I was asked to be a community manager, so I wrote blog posts, answered questions in forums and really got involved with social media before it became what it is today. I spent seven years doing that, but also spearheading a lot of the work that Microsoft was doing in the social media space. Experimenting with new platforms, tactics and strategies to help make the Microsoft brand, and adCenter and Bing, become more discoverable, shareable and memorable.
ML: After working at Bing and Microsoft, are you a Bing user or a Google user?
MC: Bing is the default search engine in my browser, but because I help individuals and companies with discoverability, I use both. Bing has come such a long way, leaps and bounds, and it’s still increasing in market share. They’re now a client at Delightful Communications, but I wouldn’t use them if I wasn’t getting great results and usage from them.
ML: One of the areas that you help companies with is influence in marketing. Can you tell us a little more about what influence in marketing is and how organizations can go about doing it well?
MC: Influencer marketing is really part and parcel of our approach to what we call digital PR. Traditional PR agencies, to me, have been less about public relations and more about press relations. I butted heads with PR companies during my time at Microsoft because they didn’t really understand the notion that there was a lot more to amplifying and creating an engaging brand than simply getting a mention in the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal.
What we came up with, for one of our earlier clients, was the notion of influence. This was four years ago, and we’re now seeing more talk about influencer marketing as it’s starting to become more and more mainstream. I have this innate understanding of what makes humans tick and that humans, as people, are your best assets. If there are people in your industry, operating in whatever niche or area that you are in, that have a social digital footprint and an audience, then why not reach out to them? Tell them about your product and bring them into the fold?
We don’t involve ourselves with paying influencers for sharing content on Instagram, or writing blog posts, or anything like that. What we’re about is finding similar minds, in whatever industry our clients are operating in. What I’m talking about is reaching out and making people feel part of the process of that company’s evolution and knowledge sharing. At the end of the day, what tends to happen is that those people become advocates for the brand, and start sharing and talking about your company in a positive light.
What we look for is more people who are doers, and for influencers who have a track record. People follow and know people who have experience, wisdom, and a successful track record at what they’re doing. It’s people who speak at conferences or do webinars. It’s people who write or are asked to contribute to interviews. Those audiences and those channels that they have due to their wisdom and their expertise means that they build a social following. Really we’re about helping clients discover new channels to tell their stories, but also making sure that they have feedback from influencers to help make their products bigger and better.
ML: Is there a case study that you can take us through, an actual example of how you’ve done this with one of your clients?
MC: The way that we do it is by understanding the goals of the client. What are the stories that they’re trying to tell, what are the products and services that they’re trying to get out there? Then we do quantitative and qualitative research, so we use a number of tools things like Traackr and Buzzsumo.
We do research and analysis, and cherry pick a small subset of people that we can introduce the client to, making sure that the specific goals for doing so are not just necessarily a transaction, but that there’s a kind of discovery where the influencer finds out more about the brand or the company, and understands why they’re being approached and vice versa. We do the research from a constitutive point of view. Are they going to have a certain amount of reach, but also a qualitative point of view? A lot of these tools can mask what I think is very inauthentic behavior where people are inflating their Twitter followers by using various tools which, for example, un-follow people if you don’t follow them back.
We take a look at say, someone might have 100,000 followers, but he might also be following 102,000 people. Is that the kind of person we want this brand associated with? Can we measure their actual reach, how far people actually share their content and what kind of engagement they get versus somebody who has only 10,000 followers, but is following just 90 people?
We do the research, we do the outreach and introduce them to the brand. We manage whatever the goals are, whether sharing content or bringing people somewhere for face-to-face meetings. Then, we try to foster long-term relationships that aren’t just transactional but also have some usefulness for both parties going forward.
ML: How do you measure things like influence in markets if the organization is just getting started? What should be the KPIs or the measuring aspects for them to keep in mind?
MC: I think the first thing to keep in mind is not to take a scatter gun approach by thinking that you’ve got to get a massive amount of people on board. Our recommendation is certainly to start small, test, see what feedback you get, then change the message.
It’s a bit like PR outreach. You’ll never find us sending out BCC’d emails to two hundred journalists, because we can’t be bothered to tailor each email pitch to a journalist. With each influencer, we tailor outreach to them. We pick a small subset and then move forward with that.
There are all sorts of KPI’s, such as whether they open the email and respond, or whether the initial contact is favorable. Also, what kind of meeting we have, whether it’s a conference call or meeting face to face. Then, how easy are they to work with? Did they take the brief or whatever you were trying to share and tear it to shreds, or were they helpful to you in augmenting whatever message you were trying to get out there?
Beyond that, it’s engagement rates and how often they engage with the brand. How often do they engage with the client and the content? What kind of reach and engagement do they get when they share content? Even tracking links to see how much traffic is being driven back to whatever it is that you’re trying to get them to share, whether it’s a video, new product or a service on your website.
I really caution clients to start off slowly and carefully, to make sure that they don’t take the wrong approach and end up with someone with a big social footprint tweeting out or sharing something on Instagram or social media that could potentially be damaging to the brand.
ML: You’ve mentioned a couple of tools that you personally use. Are there any that you find especially helpful which you can recommend to our audience?
MC: Traackr is an influence discovery management tool. You can search for keywords or discover people in different industries that operate across different social channels. You can then set up literal trackers, to track what they’re saying, how often they’re saying it, and what kind of reach they’re getting. It has very good data visualizations.
Buzzsumo is a brilliant tool for understanding what content is being shared by influencers, what’s trending across the social networks and KPIs with Twitter and Facebook, and what’s being shared on LinkedIn and across Pulse and such.
I am brand ambassador for a brand called Majestic, and Majestic.com, which is a privately-owned search engine which knows who links to who. We use that when approaching influence to see how many people are actually linking. This shows that they’re not just writing about stuff, but that people actually think their content is so good that other people are linking to them.
Followerwonk is another good one for doing a quick search on Twitter to see who’s talking about what and who’s influential in different spaces.
ML: I want to ask you about personal branding, another topic you consult and write about. Over time, I’ve heard different opinions about personal branding. Some people say it’s extremely important. Others say that people should focus on doing something that matters instead of trying to figure out what they mean to outsiders. I am curious about your opinion on personal brand.
MC: Personal branding is hugely important. I completely stumbled upon it when I left Microsoft in 2012. In my book, Introduction to Personal Branding, which was just published, I start off by telling the story of how I actually got laid off by Microsoft in 2012. There were several thousand people who got laid off at the same time, and I wrote a blog post about getting laid off. I was fine, but I was now open on the job market and there was a return of comments from people all over the world. I would say about sixty to seventy percent of these very supportive comments were from people that I had no idea who they are. I had never engaged with them, I’d never met them, but over seven years building up my brand at Microsoft, they knew me. They had been following me, reading my stuff, watching my videos, and seeing me speak at conferences. That is when I realized that I had done something right with my own personal brand in order to build this kind of audience.
At Delightful Communications, one of the things that we offer is the help to make individuals, their wisdom and their expertise, more discoverable and shareable. Personal branding isn’t about going off and saying “Me, me, me”. Personal branding is about discovering what your professional purpose is. And,by professional purpose, I mean: Why do you get out of bed in the morning, beyond having to pay the mortgage, put the kids through college or pay off your student debts? Why are you doing what you’re doing? What is your professional purpose? We all need something beyond a paycheck to keep us going. Once you’ve figured out what your professional purpose is, then you can start building a career around that.
The way we help clients is threefold. It’s by helping them uncover their professional purpose. We start by understanding what it is about what they do, and what it is about the area of professional focus that makes them tick, and then we help them with their brand identity. What is their personal brand vision? How do they want people to view the world or how do they want to see the world in twenty or thirty years’ time, once they’ve gone through their career? What is their mission? What is their value? Who is their audience? Who are they trying to attract? Are they trying to attract new business prospects or new employees?
Then, we look at their digital infrastructure. What shows up for their name across search engines? Have they optimized their LinkedIn and Twitter profiles for discoverability? There’s research from Nielsen that says 15 percent of people will believe, trust and act upon what a brand says, whereas ninety percent of people will believe, trust and act upon something that a family member, peer or a colleague has said.
With personal branding, if you’ve got a great personal brand, you could well become an influencer in your part of the world. By being an influencer, and let’s say you work for a company, you become an employee advocate. Companies are slowly waking up to the fact that people really are their best assets and that they should be empowering them to be able to express themselves in this new world of work, because people are so much more powerful than brands. They need people to get their message, mission and vision. If you’ve got an army of people who feel that a brand or a company is really invested in their career and wants to see them succeed and be shining stars in whatever niche that they’re in, that’s where personal branding and employee advocacy comes into play.
ML: You’ve mentioned that you discovered and started working on personal branding when you left Microsoft, which was a number of years ago. How has your opinion of personal branding changed over time?
MC:We now have twice as many personal branding clients this year, and it’s August, than we did in all of last year. If you look on Google trends, you’ll see searches for personal branding going up. It’s starting to become part of the vernacular. My only opinion which has changed about it is that we get too many people coming to us that want to be thought leaders.
I’ve had, I kid you not, eighteen-year-old boys who have come to me wanting to be seen as thought leaders in their niche, and who actually create press releases about themselves saying, “So and so is a really great guy. He’s got no experience, but he’s lived in the university of life. You should write an article about it.” For younger people, it’s important to think about your personal brand as your digital footprint. For every job or piece of media that you create, whether it’s a picture or a blog page, think about how that’s going to be received and perceived in five years’ time when you do have a bit of experience behind you, and you are approached by a recruiter for a job, or you want to start a company and a VC is doing research on you. How is that going to show up? What is that going to look like?
From a thought-leadership perspective, which is a bit of a buzzword, I think people should focus more on uncovering their wisdom and expertise. Be very focused and conscious about the direction that they want to go in, and make sure that everything that they do is social by design, but also very thoughtful. I did a talk last week at Expedia and the audience was 14 fifteen to nineteen year old girls.They asked so many smart questions at the end of it, and they were horrified by some of the examples that I gave of people who had done silly things online and ended up getting themselves into trouble and fired from their jobs. One girl actually replied to me. She reached out to me via email and said, “I really loved your talk. Sorry I was on my phone the whole time, but I was furiously deleting old Photobucket accounts that I’d set up during seventh grade.”
Personal branding is really becoming a thing, and to all those naysayers who say companies brand you, it’s really just nomenclature for being very conscious about who you are, where you’re going and how to make your skill set memorable.
ML: In Chapter Three of your book, you talk about analyzing the competition. We often don’t think about people that we are necessarily competing with unless it comes to a specific job. How does one go about identifying the competition and addressing it?
MC: There are a couple things to consider. One, somebody might have a ton of experience and want to reposition themselves for a new job. What we would do is help them identify the people who are in the kind of job they want, as well as the company they’re at, and try to understand their experiences and how they have made themselves more discoverable, shareable and memorable. Just ticking a few boxes and filling out a few extra fields on LinkedIn can help you show up higher in search results on that platform, which is obviously where a lot of recruiters are looking for people.
Actually identifying or researching people you might not know about, but who are already doing what you want to do, can be done on LinkedIn. You can search for “practical basket-weaving and needlework expert” on Google, see who ranks number one, and see: “Oh, that person has a YouTube channel, and they’ve got a Twitter account where they’re sharing some really interesting stuff.” One of the things we encourage people to do is develop their own website, under their own name, simply because I hate the thought of entrusting my personal brand, wisdom and expertise to LinkedIn, Facebook, or a third-party platform. If I have my own website, which I do at MelCarson.com, then I can control what comes up, right at the top, when anyone Googles or Bings me.
At the very tippy-top corporate level, we look at executives and CEOs and say, “Who are your three biggest competitors in the corporate space? Which companies does your company compete with the most?” Then, we try to identify the person at the same level and see how that person stacks up across social channel and search results. Do they have a PR machine behind them? Do they have people writing bylines, or are they writing stuff themselves? Do they have their own blog? How many mentions have they had recently on news sites? What’s come up about them specifically on Google or Bing in the last year?
By doing that, as in any branding exercise, you’re able to discover how other people are operating and what is making them tick. Make some assumptions of what their mission is. It’s kind of the same as we would do with any company, but with individuals it’s almost easier to do the research and find these things out, because there are obviously going to be less searches or mentions of individuals than companies.
We recommend this because it also gives people that element of competition and that element of FOMO, fear of missing out, of needing to up their game because they know that so-and-so and such-and-such company is doing a better job at getting themselves out there. The other thing that we always tell people is to work on the content and stuff that you can create. People only have a finite amount of time that they can spend on social media and their devices on any waking day. The more engaging you are, and the more time people are spending with you, your brand and your content, the less time they’re going to be spending with other people.
ML: With that in mind, if someone reads this and discovers the idea of personal branding for the first time, what would you suggest this person do?
MC: I would suggest getting a copy of my personal branding book, simply because it’s a primer. It was just reviewed on the LinkedIn marketing blog, and they asked me why I did it. I said because most of our clients don’t have a lot of time. They don’t have time to read a four-hundred-page book and go through all these exercises. They just need some inspiration to go, “Oh my gosh, I’ve neglected this for so long. I need to get on with it.” It’s fourteen pages and takes fifteen minutes to read.
Another thing, from a professional perspective, is to get your LinkedIn page in order. Ninety percent of the people I research don’t have a summary. That is the perfect place to start telling your story about your mission, your audience, the value you bring, and to showcase a profile of discoverable keywords.
Some people say, “Oh, you know, I’m not looking for a new job,” but there are bloggers, there are influencers, there are PR people, there are journalists. There are all sorts of people looking for people like you, for inspiration and content, or just networking. LinkedIn has come leaps and bounds over the last few years as a proper networking site and source of professional goodness. Get a LinkedIn profile set up properly with a professional photo and a summary, and pad out all of your experience with detail.
One thing I heard the other day from some recruiters at Starbucks was to really think beyond just your experience, but to your culture, as in your work culture, and think about how you come across to other people. Also, whether you do things like volunteer experience can be important. LinkedIn says that recruiters typically tick a positive box about someone if that person has demonstrated that they have volunteer experience or, essentially, that they have a life outside work. At the end of the day, people are people. They want to work with people. They don’t want to work with robots.
Ensure that your digital footprint shows you in the very best light, not just professionally but also personally. Show that you have work-life balance and that you have other interests. When you do meet people, very often, those are the kinds of things that are going to be the ice-breakers which lead into bigger and better conversations.
ML: Are there any other resources that you would like to highlight or share?
MC: My friend Lee Odden, at TopRank Marketing, does a lot of great presentations and slide shows on influencing marketing as well. The LinkedIn marketing blog is very good on content marketing, and so is the LinkedIn blog itself. They have a bunch of career evangelists who are always giving away really good tips and tricks about how to optimize LinkedIn for discoverability.
The other thing is to sign up for alerts, such as Google alert or something like that, for articles that people are writing about influence in marketing and personal branding.
Resources
You can find Mel Carson on Twitter @MelCarson or check out his website to learn more about his book, speaking events and blog.
