Thought Leadership Hype | Michael F. Schein

Peter Winick

Creating hype and fame for your thought leadership.

An interview with Michael F. Schein about micro fame, hype instead of marketing, and his newest book.

Today’s guest is Michael F. Schein, the author of The Hype Handbook, founder and CEO of MicroFame Media a company that turns consultants into celebrities.

Very few people ever become world famous, but is that really what you need to widely recognized in your field? Michael shares why micro fame is a better goal to seek when you are selling ideas.

Michael and Peter discuss how hype is can be more effective than traditional marketing by relying on centuries-old psychological principles you can create a highly emotional reaction that will allow you to move people and create a sense of loyalty to your brand or idea.

Finally, we wrap up by talking about Michael’s recently launched book The Hype Handbook. He reveals how the book connects to the business and the effects upon it. Also, Michael explains what Charles Mason and Warren Buffet have in common!

If you’ve been struggling to conquer your little corner of the universe, this episode has some great advice for hyping your content!

Three Key Takeaways from the Interview

Thought Leaders seeking to be known by everyone need to refocus on only being known by those who would be interested in your ideas.
Using hype to work your followers into a frenzy can be a more effective tactic than traditional thought leadership marketing.
If you thought leadership agrees with everyone else in your field, you need to rethink what you are bringing to the conversation.

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, 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 Michael F Shine. Michael is the author of The Hype Handbook 12 Indispensable Success Secrets from the World’s Greatest Propagandist Self Promoters, Cult Leaders, Mischief Makers and Boundary Breakers, which many of those description sounds like. A lot of the folks that we’ve worked with over the years. Michael’s also the founder and the president of a marketing agency called Microfilm Media. And welcome aboard. Come on. So how are you, Michael?

Michael F. Schein I’m doing well. It’s really good to be here, Peter. It’s good to talk to you.

Peter Winick Thank you. So I love the concept of micro fame. So tell me sort of the concept and why it’s so sort of on point in terms of where the world is today and attention spans and media and all that sort of fun stuff.

Michael F. Schein So on a surface level, a lot of what you do and what I and we do have some similarities, but if you dig a little deeper, it’s quite different. So my whole when I started the agency, my whole sort of observation was that. The days of needing to be famous for the whole world. You know, being Oprah famous. That was always hard to do. But those days are over. There are very few people who become worldwide famous now at the same time.

Peter Winick Sure. But stay there. A. You’re preaching to the choir to some extent, to the work we do with clients. It’s like, and I’m launching this book and I want to be able to take on.

Michael F. Schein That’s right.

Peter Winick The Today Show used to do three authors a week. I don’t do three a month anymore. And this concept of swinging for the fences when we live in the age of the long tail is the wrong tactic. My advice on that.

Michael F. Schein Would be that’s exactly it. So and it’s in the name of our company, Micro Fein Media, because in the age of the Internet and in the age of the long tail, you need to be a known entity if you’re selling ideas. That’s very important. People are looking for information for you, but you don’t need to be known to everyone. You need to be a micro celebrity. So you need to find this one corner of the universe to stand out to, to become the most, you know, well-recognized person in that need. But, you know, there’s a woman named Mariah Kaiser who the way she started out, she’s a big seller of online courses, really successful. And she started out by becoming the premier online expert for vintage trailer restoration.

Peter Winick Got it. So, no, but that’s but that’s exactly the point. So one of the things and I think you’re coming at this from a different angle, but we’re solving sort of the same problem. Yeah. You know, a client will come to us and say, I’ve got you know, I’m a leadership expert. I’m like, great. The world doesn’t need another leadership expert. Who exactly who is this written for? And give me not a demographic, you know. All leaders in Fortune 1000. No, that’s wrong. Right. No. Is it a it’s a newly minted leader in IT. That was an individual contributor up until this point in their life. Like now I’m getting it. It’s not just, you know, demographics are easy and lazy. It’s the psychographics layer. That’s it.

Michael F. Schein That’s it. Now the question then becomes, and this is where it ties into that long book title that you just read, it becomes 111 macro.

Peter Winick Title two micro. Yeah.

Michael F. Schein It’s like Borat, as I like to say, makes Glorious Nation of Stars expand, you know? But you got to then think, okay, well, once you figured out what your corner of the universe is, your niche, your industry, whatever that thing is, how do you become the most well known kind of individual or company in that niche? And what most people would say is, it’s obvious marketing. Do landing pages, do a, B, testing, do Instagram. And my sort of assumption is those are all the tools. That’s like saying, I want to build the Empire State Building, use hammers, use nails, use chainsaws, use whatever miter saws. And my idea is that what’s helped me maybe have a career is that. There are psychologies of masks. There are there are principles of mass psychology that have been around forever. We’re wired to in groups, have transcendent experiences to get carried away and follow certain types of messaging. And what you want to do is figure out those age old principles, which I call hype. I don’t even call it marketing. I tried to take back that word because it’s something more fundamental. It’s how do you get people worked up into a frenzy, highly emotional, and then move them wherever you want.

Peter Winick And by the way, and I don’t want to get. Yeah, but whether it’s Trump, whether it’s it’s the rise of Hitler, whether it’s, you know, Nancy Reagan with don’t just say no to drugs. It’s all we’re building. We didn’t you didn’t invent this stuff. It’s now it’s just a different way to deploy it when you have Twitter and TikTok. And, you know.

Michael F. Schein I did the opposite of invented. I’m saying the opposite. I’m saying that there have been people all the way back to the ancient Romans and beyond who have played on these same psychological principles. So whether you have Twitter or. An ancient epic poem. The things that get people, it might be a faster speed than it used to be, but the things that get people highly emotional in crowds, whether they’re digital crowds or in-person crowds, are universal and they can be reversed.

Peter Winick So give me an example of that. So you sort of the first piece of this is getting laser focused on the hoop. Yeah. You know, once you cut like I can the where like when the where. Well that’s better.

Michael F. Schein An actual read it room. Look what happened with GameStop. There was this one Reddit room where if you knew about that room, you could affect the entire market. And sometimes we don’t think about that.

Peter Winick Well, but I think there’s a mindset shift. So it took me a while and to realize that 99.99% of the world couldn’t care less that I exist. That’s right. And then at some point you said, but, but, but that’s depressing. I’m like, no, this is this is a huge relief. That’s because now I can spend all my energy finding that point 1% of the world that we could be helpful to as a company. Exactly. Are highly relevant to and all this other, you know, the noise you move away from. And I think that’s the question people need to ask themselves. Yes. Will there be some folks that are Cardassian Feynman’s famous. Sure. It’s not me.

Michael F. Schein It’s not. But there are celebrities. They’re in entertainment. That’s exactly it. You don’t it depends what your goals are. If you’re trying to be famous just to be famous, fine, You know, more power to you. But if you’re trying to make a really good living. Getting people to pay money for your ideas. You really only need I mean, Gary Vaynerchuk, my mother doesn’t know who Gary Vaynerchuk is and words.

Peter Winick She doesn’t have a hoodie and he.

Michael F. Schein Doesn’t have a hoodie.

Peter Winick No, no, no. Mother Day’s Mother’s Day, maybe.

Michael F. Schein Yeah. No, I mean, the point being, this guy is a celebrity in our world. But for 99% of people, even that guy is not known and he.

Peter Winick Is off the charts. And it’s 3% of the world. He’s somewhat relevant, too. Right?

Michael F. Schein Right. Exactly.

Peter Winick It’s not your mom.

Michael F. Schein So it starts with the who and to a lesser extent, the where.

Peter Winick So I want to push on your business model because I love the concept. It’s it’s baked into how we work as an organization. And we say the same thing. Sometimes we use different words. Yeah. So you’ve got an agency business, right? So I would imagine the methodology, the thinking that that is baked into the book is sort of baked into the IP and the way the agency operates. So give me an example of sort of an ideal client situation and how you’re sort of contrarian because there is a bit of contrarian thinking of, no, you don’t want to be famous, want to be micro famous, like, but micro some small.

Michael F. Schein Right, Yeah, exactly. And you want to use height, you don’t want to use marketing. And people say, well, hype is a bad thing. Right? So I mean, I’ll give you an example. So there is a principle that I talk about in the book then that I talk about in general called I call it Make War, Not Love. And what it basically means is that human beings are, for various reasons that we don’t have time to go into. I don’t think wired to be attracted to adversarial and contrarian sort of dynamics, meaning, you know, said in English, we like to be against things more than we like to be for things. And you may say to yourself, no, not me, that’s not true. And that can manifest itself very badly, right? Like the Nazis used that dynamic. They, they, they bound people together by being against our common enemy or some groups. And, you know. Right.

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Michael F. Schein But you can also be against an idea and do that very benignly. So I’ll use an example instead of one of our clients, I’ll use an example that everyone maybe in this audience or a lot of people know. So base camp, the project management tool right there, very simple, streamlined project management tool. And that’s a very, I guess on the surface, boring corner of the universe, right? How could they possibly be contrarian? Well, the guys who started that company, you know, they said, look, all these other project management software, software platforms are highly complex because whenever their clients say add a feature, they add the feature. And their thinking is that, well, everyone else would love to have that feature too. And so what the base camp guys say is, no, that actually makes the thing more difficult to use. Instead of going around saying, Hey, we have a wonderful software, it’s simple. It’s this. They didn’t do that. They went around and they actually wrote books and articles and blog posts about against the very nature of modern work. So they have this book rework where they talk about how you should you should fire your workaholics. Yep. If things are too complex, then that means there’s a problem in your organization. ET cetera, etc., etc.. And so as a result, base camp, the product only becomes a tool to execute on this contrarian us against the World Vision of Work. And if you talk to people who use Basecamp, it’s like a religion. It’s a smaller group, but they’re like into it. They’re like a tribe where if you talk to people who use Salesforce, even though they’re a successful company, they use it because it’s a good software product, you know what I mean? And it was and it was on the cloud. It was the first.

Peter Winick One on the.

Michael F. Schein Cloud, you know.

Peter Winick Where it was imposed on them or, you know, everybody uses it and. Right, right, right. And it doesn’t represent technological.

Michael F. Schein Yeah, it does. It and people aren’t passionate about that Salesforce in that same way. They’re not a tribe. And that’s you know, they didn’t place themselves against the human being anything like that. They place themselves against a mindset. So the first thing we ever do with clients is we force them to get very clear about two questions. We say, What is a point of view in your industry or corner of the universe that is almost accepted as gospel, but that you really think is wrong, that you’re that you’re really against?

Peter Winick Because if you stay there for a minute. But I think the key to that and maybe it was implied, is not to be contrarian for the sake of a judgment, to be a jerk like everybody loves kale. I hate kill. That’s it. But there’s some thoughtfulness underneath that. Let me call B.S. on this and let me give you three reasons why I think it’s because you don’t have to agree with me. That’s cool. But at least. It shows whether I agree with you or not. That, Well, he thinks about it. Never thought of it that way. That’s interesting. Right.

Michael F. Schein If you’re in business and you can’t figure out why other organizations and people in your industry have a point of view that you don’t agree with, then you shouldn’t be in business or you need to change your product. In other words, people talk about competition and it’s not about destroying your competition. It’s about I’ve made the decision to enter the marketplace because the way other people are doing things, there’s a better way to do it.

Peter Winick So take that from a thought leadership perspective. If everything out there in your domain leadership, management, negotiations, creative, whatever it is, was perfect. Right? And it was the sun, the moon, the stars to you. You wouldn’t go through the effort of why would you do it if you have nothing else to say other than go read Tom Peters or go read this. Good.

Michael F. Schein And if and if you’re writing a book, Peter, if you’re writing a book, then you’re writing it to be a business card. If I’ve seen books like that, you know the book that people don’t really have a strong belief and they just write a book as they think they should have a book. And those books don’t succeed.

Peter Winick They don’t really put them on. Those books are regurgitation. So what.

Michael F. Schein Exactly? Help other ideas? Yeah.

Peter Winick Yeah. I think you have to believe that your mousetrap is better. Doesn’t mean that you have to say that everybody that came before you in leadership or management or whatever was wrong. It’s not at all. Here’s what I think about it. Right.

Michael F. Schein So what in the world has changed? Or there needs to be a new layering or there what got you there won’t get you, you know.

Peter Winick Well, even the world.

Michael F. Schein Got you here. Won’t get you there. Yeah, because.

Peter Winick We’ve, you know, we know that organizational culture is important and a critical factor in performance. And then we had this lovely thing called Covid that gave us an AB test that said, What if we had a world where we don’t see each other anymore? Yeah. And then we know that and culture is important. How do want to maintain it in this in this new world, you know, and you know, management by walking and all these principles might still apply. But I can’t just walk into your office right now know.

Michael F. Schein So you need to draw lines in the sand, though in other words. Yeah, yeah. On one hand, you can be gentle about it. And I’m not saying to troll people this doesn’t mean insulting people’s looks and bashing the company or whatever, although that can work, but I just don’t advocate that. But believe it or not, that.

Peter Winick Doesn’t really work.

Michael F. Schein I mean, I work for the president, you know, I mean, you know, I mean, he and one thing you got to say about that guy, he’s an awesome hype artist. Whatever else he is, you know, it can work. You can also get yourself in a lot of promise.

Peter Winick To know who to take that approach is a pretty high risk.

Michael F. Schein And very, very high rate. Very high rate like that. Yeah, it can work, but it’s very, very, very high risk. And it’s also a horrible way to live your life, you know. But, but I don’t want to, you know, but, but, but I guess what I’m saying is that you do need to be bold. I mean, I would say it’s not enough to just sort of always speak in shades of gray. I think saying drawing a line in the sand and saying, listen, the old way of working seven days a week is not only bad life work balance, it’s bad business. Like that’s a bold statement that they made. You know what I mean?

Peter Winick Well, let me play that. I think there are folks that I’ve seen out there, clients and others that have been. Totally radical in their thinking. And then there’s some that have been sort of micro bolt. It’s a little slice of that. So that working seven days a week thing, right? Yeah. If that was the way your industry worked or you’re in, you know, whatever a top law firm or Goldman Sachs or something. And that’s just been the culture to be the outlier there. But you can also come out and say, listen, work life balance is the best, is best for you. Whether you believe that people should go and watch their kids play soccer at five in the afternoon on a Tuesday or not. It doesn’t matter. Let’s look at the data and see what this actually looks. Yeah. For your people, it’s just maybe you don’t care about people. Maybe you’re Mr. Scrooge and you’re heartless and whatever, but actually, this is just better. This is a better.

Michael F. Schein But that’s a line in the sand as well. So, gosh, I wish I could remember this. This guy’s name. There was a guy who writes book. It’s so horrible to cite someone and not talk about their name. I’ll get it for you. But he writes books about the integration of work and life in a very real way, because when his kid, he’s a professor at Penn, when his kid was born, he realized he wanted to be successful but also be a good father. And he said, Am I going to have to sacrifice one for the other? And he basically did a bunch of research and realized that working in the different domains of your life reinforce each other, that the people who do it in a certain way, where they draw from their family life, draw from their hobbies, draw from.

Peter Winick Their the total life.

Michael F. Schein Total leadership through freedom. And that’s exactly what.

Peter Winick Was the client years ago. Yeah, that’s.

Michael F. Schein Exactly what I’m talking about. Yeah. And I think.

Peter Winick That we just won the Nerd Olympics. Hold on. Ring the bell.

Michael F. Schein Yeah, that’s exactly who it is. So that was very good. I’m glad you did it. So I didn’t have to do the research, but.

Peter Winick And you just want to. Chevy. There you have me.

Michael F. Schein You know? I mean, that was bold. He didn’t just say, Hey, it would be really nice to see your children. And so you should have what he said. You’re actually going to here’s a matrix that shows you that you’re harming yourself by the way, you’re working around the clock.

Peter Winick But what was bold about that is today, that’s bold with a lowercase be when that book came out, Total leadership. And I want to say, 0506 and he was working on it for year before. So let’s say he was conceptualizing that 20 years ago. That was closer to radical than bold, I think.

Michael F. Schein I think it was. I think I think that’s why Stu Friedman is a thought leader. A real thought leader, you know? Yeah.

Peter Winick Exactly. Cool. So what else now you know, your books been out a couple of months now you’ve been on this journey because now you go from being the agency guy, making others micro famous to sort of eating your own dog food or reading your own book or whichever taste. Yeah. So, so now, you know, whatever, 60, 90 days, whatever. It’s been a little bit more than that. Since the book’s out. What have you realized about thought Leadership? You know yourself as a thought leader. And I know I called you that. You didn’t call you that. So but yourself as a thought leader and how this has achieved your goals or helped you achieve your goals or not, What’s it look like 90 days on the other side of the book?

Michael F. Schein Well, one thing, and I’m going to pat myself on the back, I realized that I’m really good at what I do because, you know, you can get caught up in that the client stuff. But I had to do it for myself and the book’s getting a lot of buzz. So all of the techniques that we’ve used for clients, you know, we’ve used for.

Peter Winick So you became your me.

Michael F. Schein Right? I became my own client and it worked Interesting.

Peter Winick And it works. He has a testimonial.

Michael F. Schein That’s.

Peter Winick About your home page. Yeah.

Michael F. Schein So that’s been good. You know, I think the other thing that I realized, I mean, it’s doing all of the things you would expect, which are great. I’m getting leads from it, I’m getting opportunities, speaking things, and that’s all wonderful and that’s all really exciting. At the same time, you know, I think there was a deeper reason I wrote this book beyond just being a sort of thought leadership lead magnet kind of thing.

Peter Winick And it’s not that it was Covid And you ran out of Netflix.

Michael F. Schein No, it isn’t. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Weirdly enough, the book was mostly written before then. I wish I had had the time. I think that gave me. No, you know, I, I see a lot of people who are really good at these strategies that I call hype, and most of them are in this subtitle and a lot of them are really nefarious characters. You know, certain political leaders, certain business people who are selling Garmin.

Peter Winick Models on the Internet and. Yeah, yeah.

Michael F. Schein But some of them, I mean, some of those are okay, But I’m talking about some like really nefarious people selling garbage, you know, are really good at this. So I asked myself the question and at the same time, in my line of work, I’ll often run across idea driven businesses. Idea based businesses are so good, you know, their stuff is the possibility to change the world and they’re so reluctant to quote unquote hype themselves up. And I ask myself, is this stuff, this psychological stuff that I’ve tapped into, Is it inherently negative? It’s inherently malicious and manipulative because if it is, I don’t want anything to do with it. I didn’t quit my corporate job to become a professional scumbag.

Peter Winick Can you use the force for good? Yeah.

Michael F. Schein And what I realized was a lot of times the reason so many bad people, quote unquote, are better at this than the rest of us is because they don’t they see the world the way it really is. They don’t let their emotions get in the way. But the strategies themselves are completely amoral. They can be used for good or evil. Sure. So I guess it became really important to me because good ideas are so important to me to take these hands out of these tools, out of the hands of the more nefarious individuals and get a lot of really good people with good ideas buying into it and using it.

Peter Winick And I ask you this, is it harder I mean, based on what you said earlier, is it harder to, quote, hype, in your words, good than evil or bad or nefarious or.

Michael F. Schein I don’t think so. You know, there have been some experiments done where they looked at people with antisocial personality disorder, which is a broad range of disorders that include extremely malignant. Narcissism and sociopathy, psychopathy and thing. And when those people get into a stressful interpersonal situation, they’ve had certain circumstances where they’ve been able to simulate that their heartbeat doesn’t go up at all. So the point is they have a certain detachment that allows them to see the world as a chessboard and see other people.

Peter Winick You know, at a physiological level. Right.

Michael F. Schein At a physiological level. So I often joke that if I could do all of the strategies that I figured out in this book because they were done through research, I would be worth $1 billion, you know, But my emotions get in the way. You know, I.

Peter Winick Yeah. What do you do with $1 billion? That would just complicate your life?

Michael F. Schein I’d enjoy it. I don’t know if I could figure out a few things. So? So I guess. I guess my point is no. I think the strategies themselves and just to prove this, I use examples of really good people who use the exact same strategies. I mean, Martin Luther King, Richard Branson. Charles Manson and Warren Buffett used the exact same underlying hype strategies to make what they wanted to happen. But with extremely different content. So, you know, to say the least.

Peter Winick So I don’t know. It has a swastika tattooed on his forehead if.

Michael F. Schein I don’t think he does know. Yeah. So, no, the point being, I think it’s our emotions that get in the way and our viewpoint that gets in the way and these examples of Charles Manson to get in the way. But I think there’s a way to reframe it and use it for good. And I guess that’s become really important to me. So, you know, I’m doing my first workshop around these ideas. I’m doing some impact work groups, so I guess my goal is to or I’m not my goal. The thing I’m really focused on now is beyond the agency work, which I like. I want to get this to a larger swath of people and kind of arm a wider, larger swath of people to use this stuff.

Peter Winick Fantastic. Well, this has been great. Michael, I appreciate your time. Thank you for joining us today and appreciate it. When this episode comes out, I’m going to depend on you to hype it.

Michael F. Schein I will do that.

Peter Winick My challenge to you to hype.

Michael F. Schein I will do that for my own sinister aim selfish, sinister aims and industrious, nefarious aims. Yeah.

Peter Winick Well, anyway, great. Great to chat with you. Thank you so much for coming on today, Michael.

Michael F. Schein Thanks, Peter. This was a blast.

Peter Winick To learn more about Thought Leadership Leverage, please visit our website at Thought Leadership Leverage dot 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.