Leveraging Thought Leadership With Peter Winick – Episode 147 – Rusty Shelton

Peter Winick

Are you connecting with your audience? Do you know how they consume content, and are you putting your material where they’ll see it–every time?

Our guest in this episode is Rusty Shelton, Founder and CEO of Zilker Media, author of “Authority Marketing” and “Mastering the New Media Landscape,” and an expert in media impact. Rusty’s commentary on the changing world of PR and marketing has been featured in Forbes, Inc. Magazine, Wharton, Huff Post and many other top media outlets.

Today, Rusty and Peter discuss building a platform before spending on content, and how knowing your audience helps you make the most of your marketing push. Rusty helps sort out which social media platforms serve thought leaders best, and determines the questions you need to ask before you hire someone to help with your social media. Know your audience!

If you need a strategy to bring your thought leadership to market, Thought Leadership Leverage can assist you! Contact us for more information. In addition, we can help you implement marketing, research, and sales. Let us help you so you can devote yourself to what you do best.

Transcript

Peter Winick And welcome, welcome, this is Peter Winick. I’m the founder and CEO of Thought Leadership Leverage. And you’re joining us on the podcast today which is Leveraging Thought Leadership. Today, my guest is Rusty Shelton. Rusty and I have known each other for a long time, probably maybe eight or 10 years. Rusty is has a long bio here, so I’ll give you the highlights. So he first spoke at Harvard on the changing world of PR when he was 23. He’s the founder and CEO of Zilker Media. He’s co-author with Adam Witte of Authority Marketing, and he is a publisher at Forbes Books, where he’s working with some really, really interesting people there. So we could go on and on about Rusty’s bio, but I’d rather just sort of dive right in. So welcome aboard, Rusty. Thanks for joining us today. Peter, thanks for having me. Glad to be here. Oh, great. So you sit at a really interesting place in terms of seeing lots of different authors and thought leaders and speakers and professionals try to figure out how to use their content to their business advantage, if you will, or to take advantage of business opportunities that are either directly or closely related to their content. So do you want to sort of share with us some of the things that you’re seeing now that are a little bit more Innovative or new and like wow never thought that would work, but I see people doing some of these things and they’re kind of cool

Rusty Shelton I think the biggest thing right now, Peter, in this industry is just the shift to the age of micro media. I mean, for years, if you looked at business authors, executives that were looking to get a message out, the only way to do that was getting an editor at HBR to give you a column or an editor of Forbes to give a column or be interviewed in CNBC, et cetera. Certainly that stuff still moves the needle like crazy. But the bigger shift that I think excites a lot of content creators and business minds is right now, the best thing that they can do is actually push the media out of the way and go directly to their audience at scale, whether that’s through a podcast like this or through a really good assessment and email marketing, et cetera. But your audience, for those people that are listening, your audience is more interested in ever before in connecting directly with you as opposed to getting your content through major media organizations. And so I think for a lot of people, that’s empowering. So let’s talk about

Peter Winick how the power dynamic has shifted from the intermediary. So if we look at it across the continuum on the publishing side, you’re no longer beholden to an editor and a big New York publisher. There’s lots of other ways to get a book out, as you know, right? Advantage being one of them. So that’s one place where you can break the intermediaries and go direct. I love your media examples, because it used to be that everybody had CNN hours. hoped CNN had them on speed dial or something, so that when there was some event that they had no control over, they can call you last minute and say, you know, can you give a comment, etc. And that’s fine, but there’s too much serendipity to, you know, going on there to do that in a predictable way. So tell me about what things people are doing to build that direct relationship and connection because it’s not just about number of followers, right? That’s a piece, but you really got to have a level of connectedness, consistently providing value, et cetera, with your audience, or they’re going to go find something that’s interesting to them somewhere else.

Rusty Shelton You’re exactly right. And I think for your audience, the shift here in the old days, Peter, it was a marketing mindset. And a marketing mind set was, okay, how many impressions can I generate through PR and advertising and all these other ways? And then of those impressions, how may immediate leads did I get? In other words, of all those impressions, how many people raised their hand immediately? And the shift today is actually success is thinking less like a marketer. and more like a media outlet. In other words, your goal today, if you want to build a meaningful platform and leverage for yourself, your goals is not the immediate sale. Although that’s great when it happens. Your goal is how do I extend my interaction with the largest possible percentage of people that I generate impressions with? And as you mentioned, the only way to extend that interaction is not to beat him over the head. with an email marketing sequence, it’s to actually provide content that they look at the same way they look the Wall Street Journal, but the same way they looked at CNBC, which is if you can entertain and inform them on that topic area, they’re going to perceive you out of the gate as less biased, more interesting, more trustworthy than large generic media where they’re increasingly questioning the motives behind who may own that particular outlet.

Peter Winick Well, the other piece with the large generic media, other than their motives and who owns them, et cetera, is they go broad, they don’t go deep, right? So when you think about this in the context of thought leadership, it’s more than a sound bite. The sound bite may be what makes it to the large media, but if you are the expert in whatever your content space is, there’s a level of depth and gravitas and expertise that creates this flywheel effect of trust. and wanting more and wanting more, right?

Rusty Shelton Yes. Yeah, that’s exactly right. They go broad. And as a result of that, their audience gets a fractional return on their investment of time. If you give NPR an hour, maybe you get a couple of segments that you’re interested in versus listening to a podcast on a topic that you are over the top interested in and you’re getting an hour return on an hour invested. And so that’s the value for your audience. The other big thing though, Peter, that I think for your, audience is another level excitement to this is when you are the media, the worst thing that you can do is essentially only share your own content. In other words, you don’t wanna be a newspaper full of op-eds, you wanna use your channels as an excuse to build relationships with other people, to curate content that both give your audience value and tee you up for some nice relationships.

Peter Winick So let’s segue for a moment into, if you’re doing all those things, and I would suggest that you listen to Rusty, he knows what he’s talking about here. What I didn’t hear is in the old days of media, right, or even many of the current days, there’s an ad-sponsored model, right? In the age of thought leadership that we’re living in, that’s not really the issue. So the question becomes, What is that balance and you touched on it between sort of, you know, pull back on the email marketing funnel stuff, but what’s the balance of give, give, give, create great content, curate great content really be of service to the audience to ask? Because at some point you may, and it is more than appropriate to ask something of them, whether that’s by my book, whether it’s, you know, take a look at my programs, et cetera. How do you balance that out in a way that doesn’t turn off your audience?

Rusty Shelton Yeah. Well, I think the big thing there, Peter, is if we’re looking at this as kind of a timeline, the first step is build the audience, as you, as, you know, so build them without any expectation of a key next step. And then over time, when you move them from attention to affinity, you’re going to start to have an audience that is asking you for ways to go deeper on your content. In other words, they’re, they are asking for a mastermind group or they’re asking for one-on-one consulting, or they’re asking for coaching. And so— You and I for years have kind of seen the model around kind of building a triangle or a pyramid, if you will, where you’ve got the cheapest, broadest product at the bottom, which is typically a book. Right after that, for many people, it’s e-learning and you just kind of work your way up. And so one of the big questions I would encourage your audience to kind of think about is, for some people, main stage speaking is it, they love that. That’s what they want to drive. And there’s a slightly different strategy for that versus mastermind and one-on-one coaching. But, but over time, what I find Peter is that the best shift to go from give, give, give on value to, all right, let’s start to offer some things is when you’ve got an audience that is loyal enough, that has enough affinity for you, that they are asking you for ways to go deeper.

Peter Winick So if they’re asking, so I love that, but if they are asking, I think a lot of folks that are thought leaders and content creators don’t have the systems or the mechanisms or the processes in place to actually really listen, because I believe that the market will tell you what you want, but I also believe that you have to help shape them a little bit, right? Like they’re not going to stay up late at night trying to figure out how to put more money in your pocket. You have to sort of, there’s a little of a balancing act there, so how do you really listen and how do sort of shape them with some suggestions around how you could be helpful to them in the form of additional products, offerings, or services.

Rusty Shelton Yeah, I think for a lot of people that are creating content, oftentimes it starts with the one-to-one stuff. So whether it’s one-on-one training sessions for corporate clients, or whether it is one-one coaching, where most people are focused on getting, that both of us are working with, is the one to many opportunities, whether that’s one to me on the e-learning side. I do think right now, Peter, we’re at a time where the e learning opportunity is MASSIVE. right now, but I think people jump to it too quickly. In other words, I see a lot of people right out of the gate that don’t have an audience yet that are jumping right to the e-learning stuff and they just don’t a curated group to push that into just yet. One of the big things that I would encourage people to think a little bit about is if e-Learning is the main lever that you’re going to pull to try to sell into an audience that you’re looking to create. What I find oftentimes is that that is more likely the second or third or fourth thing to offer up after you’ve built a good audience. So I think it’s important for people not to get that backwards.

Peter Winick Got it. So is there an example of a good example of how to do that versus a

Rusty Shelton So I mean, I think to me, Sally Hogshead is one of the best examples in this space of somebody who focused first on really building her authority, building a big audience, and then she created, you know, the, the fascination advantage assessment that you’re familiar with. That became just an unbelievable backend sale for her to take, you know, what was non-scalable time on stage and turn it into something that was much more scalable for her. So I think she is a very good example of somebody that has done it really well. You also have a lot of people that do memberships really well, and I’ve seen, and you could speak much more eloquently on that model than even I can, but I think that’s another side of it that as you build an audience is really effective. What I see in some cases, Peter, is somebody who has spent 30 years in a Fortune 500 company that’s jumping out, that’s writing a book. and creating a brand as a consultant and oftentimes will dump 70% of their budget into creating an e-learning program and then not have much left over to actually build an audience. My encouragement to people would be to, it’s not that I don’t want you to create the e-Learning program, but understand with complete clarity that you’re going to need an audience to sell that into before that matters.

Peter Winick And yeah, and that requires budget. So I agree with you. I’ve seen a lot of people invest heavily in amazing killer e-learning. That’s just mind blowing. And you’re like, okay, what’s the marketing budget? And you get this, oh, there’s 50 bucks left for that. Well, good luck with that. It’s the same as a book, right? You put all your heart and soul and resources into creating a great book, but you don’t leave anything left on the table for marketing and PR, you’re gonna be in trouble. Let’s touch on a little bit. How folks… can decide the markets that support them best and what i mean by that is you know often times someone’s got content right and they’re a great thought leader and you know they don’t come at it from the business development the marketing the sales side that you know you and i have to have the expertise in so then they’re trying to determine how do i take this to market and they struggle and you, know it’s well there’s so many people that i can to help with this. Give us your thinking around how you can test the markets to go that is, these are the two or three that can support me best and I can have an impact and they can afford me and all those sorts of things.

Rusty Shelton Yeah. Well, I think the first step on that, Peter, for many people is doing almost a relationship audit. In other words, you’re really going through and looking at, you know, we’ve got a model that we work from that’s kind of broken down into two global categories. One is your direct audience. Direct audience is everybody, you now, as we’re sitting here today that has an existing relationship with you. Indirect is target audience that has no idea who you are. Within that direct audience, what I encourage people to really look at there is subcategories around. What journalists do you have relationships with, what influencers, what organizations, and in many cases, you’ve got a specific niche where you’ve got a concentration of relationships that at the same time, if it supports from an actual market size. In other words, the lead flow and the size of the deals are to a point where they can pay the kind of fees that you would want to go in there. Sure. I always love going super niche first and then expanding from there. I mean, I think that’s absolutely the roadmap, but I often, you know, encourage people to start with that relationship audit.

Peter Winick Right, so it’s the relationship audit and the niche piece. And even when you’re going niche, you’re not recreating content from scratch. I would call that more sort of a custom packaging to the core essence of it. How do you increase the relevance to a specific target population? It’s not changing the model or the template or whatever. It’s that customization around the edges, if you will, because that’s a more efficient way to do it. Yep, that’s exactly right. So let me ask you, because you’ve got a lot to say about this, as I would imagine. when we look at social media and it moves quickly and it changes rapidly and you’ve got people that really know what they’re doing there and then you have people that sort of dabble and are overwhelmed and confused, how, at a broad level, what are the questions you would suggest people ask themselves to figure out where to invest in social? Meaning, based on your content, et cetera, do you go heavy on Instagram? Do you have Facebook? What are the core questions they should be thinking about and asking because sometimes people just. dive into a platform, but they haven’t asked the thoughtful marketing strategic questions.

Rusty Shelton Yeah, I think one of the things is just to understand that social media lives on a spectrum. At one end of the spectrum, you’ve got relationship sustaining channels. In other words, places where it’s a great place to be once people know to look for you. And Facebook, as you know, is at that end of this spectrum. The other side is relationship building channels. In other word, where the etiquette is such that we’re there to have conversations with people we may or may not know about topics of shared interest. and Twitter. lives on that end. LinkedIn used to live over with Facebook and has done a really nice job of moving towards Twitter. And then I would put Instagram right between Twitter and LinkedIn on that spectrum down towards the relationship building side. So well-known brands, well- known individuals, Facebook’s a great place to spend a lot of time. In particular, if you’ve got a target audience, it’s middle-aged to older. On the way up, Peter, what I find if you got Somebody that. know, is selling into a business audience that doesn’t have much of a brand or much of an audience yet. Where I will typically encourage them to spend the bulk of their time is LinkedIn and Twitter. And Twitter, for me, is a platform that a lot of people have written off. A lot of people have, you know, kind of bad first impressions of based on many of the headlines not being positive ones coming off of Twitter. Twitter is actually counter-intuitively the single best platform. to build intentional relationships with journalists, with influencers, and with groups, organizations, associations, hands.

Peter Winick So go deeper on that, because that sounds incredibly counterintuitive when you say deeper relationships and Twitter, which is, you know, the home of the short-form burst.

Rusty Shelton Yeah. So Twitter, the way I encourage people to look at it, it’s the world’s biggest cocktail party. All right. So, and if you can imagine Peter walking in the door at a massive cocktail party, the white noise is just a roar of noise, which is like Twitter. A lot of people look at Twitter and think it’s just the noisiest platform. And it is because most people are just wandering aimlessly through this cocktail party or in many cases, talking to the wall with their And so, the magic on Twitter is… to identify in the same way at a cocktail party, you’ve got people circled up talking about, everything from college football to politics to emotional intelligence. What I want your listeners to do is to build lists within Twitter, a journalist list, a influencer’s list and a target customer list. And the way I want them to think about that is when you create a list, you essentially mute the entirety of that cocktail party, except for the 17 journalists that you’re trying to build a relationship with this year.

Peter Winick So now you basically went to a cocktail party of journalists versus going to Grand Central Station and just, you know, at five o’clock on a Friday and it just being crowds and crowds and crowds. You’ve filtered it to the peeps you want to connect with at, you know, a level that’s manageable.

Rusty Shelton And on the flip side of that too, Peter, that journalist at The New York Times who just got 1,500 email pitches from PR people today, if you send them a thoughtful tweet, they just got a push notification on their phone with that there. And so the other thing I want to mention on Twitter to be super clear, the results on Twitter, don’t worry about the number of followers that you have. Don’t worry about. those sorts of things. What we’re trying to do on Twitter is generate a conversion that happens off of Twitter from a conversation that starts there. Exactly.

Peter Winick Well, and I would say the same thing holds true for LinkedIn a lot. Like you can create a connection in a community and whatever LinkedIn and reach out to folks, but ultimately it’s great to take that off the platform to the old world of, Hey, would you like to do a call and see how we can help you, whatever the framing is of that. But you don’t always want to just keep it there. There’s only so deep.

Rusty Shelton No question. Yeah, no question. And LinkedIn, you know, what’s going to be really interesting over the next couple of months is when they flip their, their live video platform live for everybody. We’ve got a couple of people on it right now, but when they flip that lie, that is going to an absolute game changer. I mean, think about the opportunity that that puts in place for content creators, many of which Peter, as you know the first time you talk with somebody who is getting ready to start down this journey of becoming an authority or thought leader. the only base that they have are those 1200 people on LinkedIn. And so it really creates an interesting opportunity there. Fantastic.

Peter Winick As we start to wrap up, let me just ask you, as someone that’s been in this space for a long time, if someone’s out there and they’re considering bringing on some help on the social media side, right, and what I find really frustrating there is you get really good people, really smart people looking for experts in an area that they don’t have the expertise in, and more often than not, because they’re not doing, asking the things up front. Add the calendar that three months six months later it’s an incredibly disappointing experience for them which damages that space for everybody else if you’re thinking about hiring a social media to give me two or three key things to ask.

Rusty Shelton Yeah. So I think, you know, number one is, uh, who have they, who have, they worked with in your space that, you know, that, that they’re willing to let you talk to. And a lot of people gloss over that or they’ve got a couple of quotes on their website, always, always do that. And, and there’s people.

Peter Winick should be similar to your profile right if you’re a thought leader in the fact that they’ve been great with orthodontic maybe not so good.

Rusty Shelton Correct. And the other big thing, Peter, is just to have crystal clarity that if you’re spending money on social media or you’re spending money on PR or you are spending money on advertising or spending money on any of that stuff before you have your brand right and before you have a good lead magnet, you are essentially setting money on fire. In other words, you’re in a hamster wheel of misery because the exposure you get is not going to actually lead to results. And so. Very quickly, Peter, one of the things I want to encourage your audience members to do, your brand is your name. Yep. Your brand is not your book title. It’s not your company name. Your brand as your name, if you do not own your name firstnamelastname.com, grab that as soon as we finish this podcast, first name, middle, initial, last name if it’s taken, that needs to be a home-based website owned media that you own. The second thing, Peter that you and I I know hammer people on is, you have got to have a lead magnet on that website that gives a better offer than sign up for my newsletter. And so we’ve seen quiz marketing assessment marketing work really well there or some kind of a download works less well but is better than the newsletter call to action. So until you’ve got those two foundational things in place my encouragement to your audience is actually not to deploy resources on anything else until they’ve got two things in the place.

Peter Winick Yeah, great stuff. Well, this has been awesome. I want to thank you for spending the time with us today and sharing with us because you’ve got a lot to share. All good stuff. So thanks so much, my friend. Peter, thanks for having me. Thank you. Yeah, man. Always a good time. I sure appreciate it. To learn more about thought leadership leverage, please visit our website at thoughtleadershipleverage.com. To reach me directly, feel free to email me at peter at thoughtleadershipleverage.com and please subscribe to Leveraging Thought Leadership on iTunes or your favorite podcast app to get your weekly episode automatically.