Spectacular Communications Requires Audacious Communicators - with Mark Schaefer

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Daniel Nestle: Welcome, or welcome back to the trending communicator. I'm your host, Dan Nestle. You know, if nothing else, this show is about the future. But first, we have to understand the now. And I'm sure you all agree, the now is a jungle. It's chaotic, it's hard to navigate, nearly impossible to make sense of, especially when you're the person walking through it. What we need is a good spot of high ground where we can get a view of the whole and see which paths and which points might be the right ones to aim at and to take. What we should be thinking about as trending communicators is getting a hold of as much of the now as we can, so that when we find that higher ground, we know what we're looking at. If only we had a guide to help us figure all this out.

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Daniel Nestle: Well, folks, have I got news for you. Friends of the Pod have heard me talk about a certain author, speaker, community builder, mentor, thinker, convener, futurist. Yes, indeed, futurist and dear friend who has helped me find my way and continues to do so. A marketing maven who I believe in his heart of hearts, is really a true communicator, one of the best that I know. He's known. He's a rebel. He's a groundbreaking blogger and a podcaster. He's eminently curious and supremely kind. I promised him I wouldn't gush too much, and clearly I failed. But, hey, what can I say other than please join me in welcoming the guy who always has my back but helps me see what's right in front of me. My dear friend, the one and only, here it is. It's happening. Mark Schafer. Mark, how you doing, my man?

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Mark Schaefer: I'm speechless. I'd like to thank the academy.

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Daniel Nestle: I was thinking back to a year or so ago, well, just over a year ago, when you did the keynote at the page society, and some of my listeners might remember that, and I was tasked with introducing you. And I. I did a mediocre, middling job, good enough for the crowd and for the crew. But I thought about that as I was thinking about what I was going to say today, and I absolutely did not want to let you down at all. But I also wanted to be faithful and true to what I know and what I feel and who I know and what a lot of people out there might not know, which is.

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Mark Schaefer: I appreciate that.

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Daniel Nestle: Yeah. Which is that you're the guy, man. And there's so much happening right now. And initially I thought, okay, what if we just make this podcast? Okay, Mark, what's on your mind? But that could take us all over the place.

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Mark Schaefer: I want to say I'm really glad that I'm on the show because I've been, like, coveting a position on.

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Daniel Nestle: We can stop right there.

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Mark Schaefer: Since it started. And I thought everybody heard that. Invite me on Wednesday and invite me on to the show. So here we are. This is great. And I love how you've pivoted. I love, I think your audience is like my audience. I'm passionate, you know, about the future, about our survival in this world. And. Yeah, so this is going to be fun.

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Daniel Nestle: It totally is. You know, normally I ask my guests, like, okay, so can you tell every. Tell our listeners a little bit about yourself? For those of you who might not, those who might not know you, let's just skip it.

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Mark Schaefer: Let's just skip it.

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Daniel Nestle: I feel like, I feel like that's not a question here today. So let's just go right in because, you know, even just said it, you know, just understanding the future. And believe me, I'm very flattered that you say my audience is your audience. It is. We are. They are. You are everybody out there and thinking of them and thinking of the people who are in communications and marketing, really. And I'm leaning a little towards more people who are in the comm side of things. But we have a whole range of folks who are listening, and I think I want to get your take initially on. Okay, let's set some kind of, not ground rules, but some definitional kind of talk here about marketing and communications. Why do people make a big deal making a difference between those two things?

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Daniel Nestle: Because when we think about the future, I think we're all concerned with pretty much the same stuff. It's just a matter of method, maybe. I know.

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Mark Schaefer: Right. Well, and you and I have talked a little bit about this before.

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Daniel Nestle: Yeah.

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Mark Schaefer: I mean, I think in this day and age, almost everybody's in marketing, everybody in your company that influences your conversation with your customer, your reputation with your customer. So, I mean, I had, one of the great honors of my life was studying for three years under Peter Drucker. And Peter Drucker is a very simple definition, marketing. It says marketing is creating customers and really retaining customers. So that involves new product development. It talks about having the right employees to take care of your customers. You've got to have the right systems in place. You've got to have the right it, the right infrastructure, the right approach to AI. You've got to have an excellent public relations team. So I don't get caught up on silos. Companies make different decisions. And, I mean, I think there's lots of different successful reporting relationships.

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Mark Schaefer: But I do think that we can't lose sight of the fact that today everybody's in marketing, everybody touches that customer journey in some way.

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Daniel Nestle: It's interesting because communicators might say, I have brains and comms, because we're talking about reaching out to audiences and creating that market, creating a market either for your goods or for your ideas or for your message and all the above. Some people say, well, the communications part of that is supportive of that or expansive of that, but derivative of it. But whatever, you cut it. I often say, and have spoken to lots of people about this, I think the line is ridiculous and I think it shouldn't be.

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Mark Schaefer: I don't even, I don't get caught up in that anymore.

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Daniel Nestle: I just want to kind of prevent any guff I might get from people who are saying, what, marketing? It's trending. Communicator, why are you talking to marketer? Well, the fact is people out there, everybody, I think, who listens and who knows me and who knows you, of course, just the things that we need to do when we look at that jungle, when we look at AI, when we look at community, when we look at divisive politics, when we look at the geopolitical situation around the world. Neuralink, anything out there, right? There's so many items, so many things that we all need to make the same sense out of and either learn how to leverage or kind of adapt to for our purposes, or accept, or maybe those are both the same things, but accept them and wield them to the best of our ability.

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Daniel Nestle: But no matter what way you cut it, you can't hide yourself under a rock. And it doesn't matter what your business card or your title says. We need to grasp or grapple with these changes that are affecting us as creators. And we're all creators, right? One thing I love about your blog, and you blog, is it every day, Mark, that you're blogging once a week? Once a week?

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Mark Schaefer: Yeah.

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Daniel Nestle: Well. Cause I see you on rise all the time, so I feel like you're always writing something, but the, you know, Mark's blog you've been going on for since blogging has been a thing.

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Mark Schaefer: I mean, yeah, I'm in my 16th year.

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Daniel Nestle: Yeah, 16 years. Right. You know, consistency, consistency. One thing you've always done is illuminate that path ahead. And also, like, what are the things, like, make sense of all that junk out there? And sometimes you call it junk straight out. And we need to know that. We need to know whether we're dealing with things that are real or that are not going to have any effect whatsoever on our jobs. And it's so hard sometimes to make that distinction when you are in the shit, so to speak, you know what I mean?

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Daniel Nestle: But anyway, where I wanted to go with this really was when we're talking about marketing and communications and people in our world, there are, I don't know, a half a dozen things that we should really be looking at no matter what, like be aware of, and you wrote yesterday or the day before it was posted to LinkedIn, as of the time of this recording, that the marketing world is about to become universally spectacular and to be relevant, you need to go a little crazy and build an unhinged fortress. I love that terminology. Because the bots are coming, those six or seven things. The stuff that we need to make sense of how that goes for comms, too.

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Mark Schaefer: Of course.

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Daniel Nestle: Of course. Yeah, yeah. That's the point, right? The point is that spectacular world that we're going to see is the way that people interact with brands, with creators, with all of us, whether we're marketers, communicators. And to get to that spectacular thing, we got to grapple with a lot. First, we talk a lot about AI. Let's start there. What, in your recent estimation? There's a lot of hype about it. There's a lot of negatives and positives that are coming out. It's been around now for a whole whole three years, almost. November of 2022 was the, November 30, 2022 was the launch of chat, GPT and the world hasn't been the same since, at least to us. Some of us are in the thick of it, and we think that it's really going full on.

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Daniel Nestle: And some of us, and there's a lot of people out there who are still like, what's a prompt?

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Mark Schaefer: So most of them.

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Daniel Nestle: And we don't know that it's Muslim. How do we deal with this thing, man? How do we deal with this in the light of making a spec of grasp, of actually taking advantage of that spectacular world that's ahead?

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Mark Schaefer: Well, I think when I talk about AI to people, that usually people have two words, they said, boy, this is exciting and this is terrifying. I think both reactions are appropriate. I mean, I think the terrifying piece is, and I guess this would get it? Really, there's a lot of things that we could be concerned about. But the number one thing that's close to my heart is that I think it will eliminate a lot of lower level jobs and it'll eliminate, you know, some entry level jobs. And, you know, I started out in pr and communications, and I was a journalism major, got into corporate communications with a big company.

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Mark Schaefer: And boy, I am so grateful that I had bosses who taught me and they encouraged me and they nurtured me, and they had an endless flow of red ink on my copy to help me be a better writer. I mean, I think I'm a really good writer today. I'm an author of books, but I got there because I've been practicing for 50 years and because I had these people who came alongside me and helped. And now I saw an article in the Wall Street Journal about a month ago that said college graduates should be prepared to be at, like, a mid level management position. It's like, well, how's that going to happen? So there's a lot of things to be worried about.

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Mark Schaefer: But that's the number one thing is like, how are we going to continue to bring young people into the field and onboard them? There's not enough conversation going on about that. This is a problem that is nothing in the future. It is happening now. It is happening with current comms grads, business grads, marketing grads. So we could go a lot of places in terms of the fear part, but that's number one for me on the excitement part. It does get into this idea of spectacular one level. I have a friend who is, by her own admission, not a very good writer. And now she's got chat GPT. She said, you know what? For the first time in my life, I feel like I can blog. I almost I feel like maybe I could even write a book.

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Mark Schaefer: So AI gives a voice to the voiceless. It creates a certain competency for writing and creativity, just like the calculator gave a certain competency to math. That is something that we should all be celebrating. Now, in the blog post that you mentioned, I referenced some fan art, and this was a video that was made to celebrate Pink Floyd's 50th anniversary of the dark side of the Moon album. So they had this contest, and the fans of Pink Floyd absolutely went ballistic because the winner of this global contest of this fan video was generated by AI and Pink Floyd. I mean, they didn't care. They just picked the right one, right? And this thing is just absolutely spectacular. So it's like somebody who loves Pink Floyd? And they're sitting in their, you know, on their kitchen table and they're making this video.

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Mark Schaefer: And this is something that's going to be accessible to everyone, all of us. In the next twelve months, you'll be able to make a full length motion picture on your laptop computer, including the script and the, you know, the dialogue and the score and the art and everything you would want. So what, I mean, let's just think this through. What does this mean when all of our comms, all of our blogs, all of our YouTube videos look like an Avengers movie?

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Daniel Nestle: Right?

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Mark Schaefer: And I think, here's my theory. Dan, hit me that when we get to this level, we're going to want the gritty and ugly even more. We are going to just. I mean, you can only take so many Avengers movies, right?

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Daniel Nestle: Yeah.

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Mark Schaefer: Well, no, I take that back. I'd probably watch them every day. But, you know, it's like if you have avengers level content coming from a company, it's going to be sort of like, you know, processed cheese. It looks good, but it doesn't really taste that good, you know, if you eat it every day. I do think that there's this sort of grittiness, this sort of ugliness, this raw humanity that is still really going to be valued. As you know, I'm working on a new book, and one of the people I interviewed in the new book is a fellow named Michael Kravica. Michael is the king of viral video, and he has had the top rated YouTube videos I don't know how many years in a row.

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Mark Schaefer: And what he'll do is he'll create these videos and sort of secretly you find at the end of the video, it's like promoting a movie like Spider man or something like that, but his style, and he taught me a lot. And he gave away all his secrets in this book, by the way, he was very generous. And Michael, by the way, his handle online is, who is the bald guy?

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Daniel Nestle: Who is the bald guy?

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Mark Schaefer: Who's the bald guy? That's his handle. That's his business. So one of the things Michael talks about is he uses no AI. And he said the key to creating a video that connects on an emotional level is to leave mistakes in. Maybe some of the video is a little blurry, maybe a little of the audio is a little scratchy, but it makes you feel like you're right there.

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Daniel Nestle: Yeah.

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Mark Schaefer: And he said, he said, here are the two biggest mistakes that people make. Number one is he said, never make an ad. Because if you create a video where, I ran into this just the other day, I was doing some consulting with this company, and then they start every video with their logo and they've got their logo on top of the video all day long and they want to make the logo bigger.

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Daniel Nestle: You got the sound coming in, whatever.

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Mark Schaefer: The whole thing, right. Well, as soon as people see that logo, they know it's an ad and they're going to either tune it out or they're going to view it through another filter. Like, okay, this is not really what I want to see. They're going to try to sell me something. So don't make the ad. Make things that people really want to see. That's number one. And then number two, he doesn't use any AI. He keeps some of the mistakes in because he said that grittiness, that authenticity is what people want, that's what makes it real and it connects to them on a human level. And he uses no celebrities, no big special effects, no AI, because his videos, and again, these are the number one videos, you know, on YouTube. Yeah. And you've got to create that emotional connection.

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Daniel Nestle: It's not surprising, you know, even in a related way, you know, even when I do this show and when I do all, we do the sound editing that I do the sound editing, I almost never, ever eliminate speech of any kind. Like, so when there's ums and ahs and all my stuttering and, you know, when I get. I will, you know, I will not eliminate any of it. Sound editing to me is just, you know, obviously there's a big mistake, we cut it out or whatever. But to me it's just balancing and making sure that everything sounds okay in the earphones. Otherwise, I know for me, it drives me nuts when I hear something unnaturally clipped or when I hear something like. Like these kind of strange edits. That's right.

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Mark Schaefer: I think that's the lesson for marketing and comms. He said the biggest mistake his competitors make is making everything edited and polished and so, okay, if it works for him, and this is what drives viral video success, what does that mean for us? I think it does mean something for us. I think there's a powerful lesson there.

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Daniel Nestle: I hope companies and brands get the message on that soon because even as late as a couple of months ago, even with previous experiences that I've had, you're seeing these large expenditures on corporate puff pieces that are so clearly scripted with either stock footage or highly manufactured or engineered scenery and scenes. And everybody's got to be wearing the right stuff. And there's like, you know, the lighting is just so. And I. I started to find it just distasteful almost. And I know that I'm just a focus group of one here, but I don't think I was alone with that. I know I was not alone hearing what you're saying people need to see. So, you know, I want to tell.

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Mark Schaefer: You the best corporate video I ever saw. So I work with this really lovely company in San Antonio, Texas. Or if you're in Texas, it would be San Antonio.

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Daniel Nestle: Right.

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Mark Schaefer: And it's the Kielbasa provision company. Right. Kielbasa. They're actually growing nationally now. And I'm not pitching Kielbasa. The story just came to mind. So I'm working with them. And the president of the company, it's Michael Cabassa. I mean, he's the grandson of the founder, right? So it's smoked meat. So it's already kind of cooked. So for someone who's not a good cook or like a single dad or mom or you're in a hurry to make something. So he makes this video, and he's grilling these sausages in the backyard, and he looks at the camera and he said, hey, you can't screw it up. It was just so human. It was just so natural and fun. And he was just absolutely right. And I just love that their marketing is really based on him as a real human being.

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Daniel Nestle: People really resonate with self deprecation, don't they? Was it Hertz or Avis? I forget which one it was back in the seventies. Avis. We're number two, and we like it.

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Mark Schaefer: Yeah, you know, but you gotta be careful with that. So there's actually an official name for that psychological, whatever you would call it, phenomenon, is called the pratfall effect.

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Daniel Nestle: Oh, right.

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Mark Schaefer: So the pratfall effect, that people can become more relatable, more lovable if they sort of go with their mistakes. And however, it doesn't always work. And the reason it doesn't work is if somebody is already seen as a screw up and they admit another screw up, well, then they're just more of a screw up. Now, this will work for someone like Ryan Reynolds. Yeah. Okay, so everybody loves Ryan Reynolds. He's a good dad. He's a movie star. And if Ryan Reynolds will say, oh, my gosh, you know, I just farted, well, then, you know, he's going to be even more relatable and even more lovable because he has that credibility.

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Mark Schaefer: So you're working with people who have a strong personal brand who are really credible, and then, you know, they make a mistake and you say, look, boy, I mean, this was an embarrassing day for me. This is a day I was really kind of ashamed of. This is what happened. Then you're going to say, oh my gosh, I love this person even more because I believed in this person from the beginning and this shows I can believe in them even more.

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Daniel Nestle: I think the same com's pros really need to keep this in mind when we let perfection be the enemy of all that is good. I think it's highly contagious and prevalent in the corporate communications world, especially where one wrong word will send your stock price down the toilet. Right? So there's this culture of over litigating every move that you make and just going through all these different levels and layers and levels and that works completely against the idea of.

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Mark Schaefer: And again, you're hitting on all these strong points that I'm writing about in my book. And the book is, the name of the book is gonna be audacious.

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Daniel Nestle: Audacious. Mark your calendars, everybody. Audacious.

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Mark Schaefer: The subtitle is going to be a rebels guide to disruptive marketing, but it also goes for communications. So, you know, first of all, you know, I love the legal department. The legal department, they all do keep us out of jail. And look, in general, I've had very good experiences with legal department. I mean, they usually really want, they understand and they want to help us. But there is one of the issues in the corporate world is that there's this infrastructure in place that makes us boring. There's this fear. It's the fear of, just like you said, dad saying something wrong, there's this fear of going through a lengthy approval process with legal. So we'll just take the easy route and do what we've always done.

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Mark Schaefer: And the thing we need to think about is that if you're writing that sort of bland content, you're going to lose it to AI.

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Daniel Nestle: Yeah.

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Mark Schaefer: You know that you're doing it any. If you're writing content that's easily approved by legal, you're going to be gone. You've got to start reaching into more communications that can't be ignored, that cannot be commoditized. AI is going to be very capable. That's also going to unleash this pandemic of dull. And every communicator out there is going to be fighting against this pandemic of dull. And to do it, you can't keep being dull. You can't keep being ignorable. You're just going to become part of the glue of Aih. No one's going to see it. It's just going to become part of content that's going to be rolled into something out for something else, for chat. GPT it's this immortal. Our content is the immortal glue of AI. If you want to be lost in the immortal glue, then just keep being boring.

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Daniel Nestle: I keep writing.

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Mark Schaefer: You've just got, and I know this is hard because there's organizational issues, there's cultural issues, there's professional issues. And I'm not saying being reckless, I'm just saying do something bold, do something a little crazy. AI is going to take over a lot of our skill sets, but humans still own crazy. Humans still own that sort of bold, audacious creativity, and we've got to unleash it. We really do, or you're going to become a commodity.

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Daniel Nestle: So allow me here to connect a couple of dots I keep hearing, and I want to take us back a little bit to that early part of our conversation. We were talking about lower level jobs being eliminated, et cetera. There's a lot of change happening, and this disruption is going to be going to, it's happening, but it's going to continue to get bigger and bigger. Now, bear with me because I'm putting this together as I'm talking to you, and I definitely want to hear what you're thinking.

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Mark Schaefer: Sounds dangerous. Yeah, sounds audacious.

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Daniel Nestle: It could be audacious. It could be.

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Mark Schaefer: Do it.

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Daniel Nestle: Do I need to?

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Mark Schaefer: Connecting the thoughts is audacious.

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Daniel Nestle: Should this be the audacious communicator rather than the trending one? I don't know.

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Mark Schaefer: Eventually work yourself into it.

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Daniel Nestle: After the book is out, I'll do it with your permission.

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Mark Schaefer: You'll read the book and you'll say, fine, he's got it.

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Daniel Nestle: Audacious. That's it. Well, so audacious, right? If we're thinking about people who can be gritty, people who aren't worn down by the whose souls aren't destroyed by the bland, we always have to choose the word that isn't going to get us a lawsuit crowd, if that is, you know, if young folks or newcomers to this world of ours aren't bogged down by all that stuff, don't you think? Or do you think that opens up a whole new category for that so called entry level or that lower level of employee, and there's more to it. So think about that for just a second. Because it's those people with the fresh faces who've been on TikTok and Instagram for 20 years who understand gritty and understand authentic. That's part one. Part two is something I had a conversation with recently.

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Daniel Nestle: I was talking with a CEO of a PR firm and then doubled down a little bit later with Ethan McCarty, your friend and mine. You know, and I know that, I know you love Ethan, but Ethan and I were talking about this, that he has an employee. Ethan has an employee who is like, whatever, a couple years in, I don't know. She's young, and she has taken her own initiative to just create this kind of ecosystem of tools and actions, et cetera, around her so that she's basically almost, you know, almost similar to what Ashley Gross was talking about.

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Daniel Nestle: We just came from a conversation with Ashley Gross, by the way, but similar to what Ashley was talking about earlier, which is just finding ways to create these processes and do the jobs for me easier so that I can focus on what I want to do. And as the vendors and agencies go away, you have to figure out how to get all this stuff done, whether you're by yourself or you're in a corporation. Anyway, so this employee, this young lady, she has built this ecosystem so she can do content creation, operations, email management, bookkeeping, whatever it is, all in a bubble around her. And she's entry level by most respects. She can write. She's a good writer. So being a good writer doesn't mean you have to be writing for 50 years. You can have that capability.

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Daniel Nestle: You know, you don't have the wisdom yet to know what's going to hit and resonate, but at least you have the basics down. So you can take that and mold it if you're given enough room to run. And if the order is, hey, look, we got these tools to, you know, we're going to take care of press releases and all this other nonsense, you know, basic ad copy, whatever with AI. So what we need you to do is tap into that sphere, that ecosystem that you have, and be gritty, like what you've seen and what, you know, be real, and then we'll come back later and edit it and fix it. But if need be. But is that the place for the new entry level, that it's almost like a marriage in some ways?

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Mark Schaefer: Let me add one more dot to your line of dots. So I was talking to a creative director, and she said boring is even institutionalized in the hiring process because when you submit a resume, it goes through some AI evaluation thing. And it looks for certain keywords. And what are those keywords? The keywords are going to be SEO, problem solving, HubSpot, or whatever. Right?

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Daniel Nestle: Yeah.

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Mark Schaefer: So basically, creativity and audacity is being filtered out in the hiring process. So now, to get back to your question, I think a lot of that innovation is going to come with the small to medium sized companies. I mean, yeah, the big companies, they're so the more successful they are, the more conservative and protective of the brand that they're going to be. So I think the disruptor brands, smaller brands, the challenger brands, they have no choice. They don't have the budgets. They can't do what everybody else is gonna do. And I think when you unleash these young people who have, you know, look, how did I cut my teeth in the business world with comms? AP style book, right?

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Daniel Nestle: Yeah.

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Mark Schaefer: Well, look, there's a new style book today, and it's called, you know, gritty, crazy, audacious. The stuff that you're seeing on Instagram and TikTok, let's say, and Gen Z, they're not babies. They're running companies now.

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Daniel Nestle: Yeah.

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Mark Schaefer: You know, we had a Gen Z person get elected to Congress. So, I mean, Gen Z, they're here, and that is their expectation for comms and. And marketing. And most businesses are not acknowledging it. They're not changing. I'm afraid many big companies won't be able to do it. So I think just to add one more dot to your line of dots, it's going to be the size of the company, the culture of the company, and I think that is going to favor small to medium sized businesses who are hungry, who are flexible, who, you know, they've got nothing to lose. So let's create something that's never been done before.

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Daniel Nestle: They also see the immediate benefit of not spending money on content. I mean, they see it that they can spend $20 a month and get the basics down.

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Mark Schaefer: Yeah.

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Daniel Nestle: Get the basic stuff taken care of without running through 400 different legal hoops that a larger company would have to deal with and the larger company, there's a distance between. Maybe this is part of it, too. And I wonder if there's a distance theory out there about this, but I know there's one. When it comes to, in neuroscience, leadership, distance, when you are further away from the leader, you behave in different ways depending on what your culture is. Right. So, for example, in the west, and I'm generalizing very broadly, but in the west, distance isn't as important. People are still able, in many cases, in most cases to be open and honest or at least blunt with their superiors.

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Daniel Nestle: But in the east, especially places like Japan, great distance between senior leaders and I, junior employees, where, you know, they have so many rituals and politeness levels to kind of deal with. So there's this distance theory. But what I was thinking is the distance from the people doing the work to the leadership, the greater that distance is, the less likely perhaps, we're going to see that aih innovation happening, or we're going to see if it's even, not even forget AI, I mean, just innovation, experimentation, et cetera. I think it's a rare company that says, no, we have a culture of innovation, experimentation, or maybe it's a lot of companies that say that, but a rare company that actually does that. I don't know what the truth is there.

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Mark Schaefer: So, I mean, there's no such thing as a grassroots cultural change. So if you're a young person and you're saying, oh, look, I just got a job at Exxon, and boy, they have all this opportunity to really show the world how to do things differently, well, it's not going to work. The culture is the culture, and the culture starts at the top. And even at the top of the company, it's still very hard, glacially slow, to change a company culture. So I'm not very optimistic about the ability of large companies to adjust to this world. Some of the best run companies, Nike, McDonald's, Coca Cola, I think maybe they're, you know, their market brand marketing is really over in a way. I mean, it's about responding to cultural moments. There was an article, this is like, got my attention about six years ago.

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Mark Schaefer: There was an interview of the Pepsi CMO, and he said, you know, the era of the big brand bonfire is over now. It's just like a lot of sparks, a lot of little campfires. What do you know? So I thought, what does that mean? How's that going to show up? And what that means is that today, I mean, look what's happening on TikTok. You have one day to be relevant, one day. Content. There's no such thing as corporate content on TikTok. Content on TikTok is co created. It's mashed up and mangled and twisted and combined in other ways. It's a whole new culture of content. Now. How is at and t going to adjust to that? I'm not picking on any brands. I don't have any bone to pick with any brand. So I'm just pulling names out of the air here.

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Mark Schaefer: But how's Verizon going to connect to cultural moments? How are they going to get that approved through legal in a day? But that's where the world is right now. And that's going to carry over to everything. The hurdles, the expectations being created on TikTok and Instagram. That is the new culture. And it's going to be changing again now that we have Gen Alpha coming up. And, you know, most companies are stuck in this legalistic hierarchy, you know, following the AP style book, and it's just going to become irrelevant.

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Daniel Nestle: I can add another dot to that. I think even there's so many dots, Mark.

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Mark Schaefer: Keep going, man.

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Daniel Nestle: Well, like when we're talking about these mega companies that claim to have innovative cultures, and even if it is top down, as soon as it gets down to the middle, you have the middle layer who is very unwilling to change horses that quickly because they're going to get punished for it and unlikely to get rewarded for anything good. So look at those younger, newer kind of, or even if they're older, the innovative employees, the employees who really do want to push the envelope and be innovative, et cetera, and how they have room to run in their little milieu, right in their own world, these large companies or large brands that don't get it, the cultures that don't allow it, they create these little pockets of pilots. Oh, yeah, you want to pilot something cool? Let's pilot it.

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Mark Schaefer: Let's create a pilot, a whole career on pilots.

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Daniel Nestle: That's great, right? Look, nothing against it. And look, all power to the people running a pilot that say, you know what, this is the thing, we're going to get this through. And then they got to go through sort of process to convince 1000 different people that this is the way to go. And if they get there. Good for them. But the vast majority of these pilots, you get a couple of grand to spend some money, whether it's advertising, communications, whatever, and it ends up just going nowhere because they don't last long enough to see through business cycles that will really show the real results. And when you have a bigger company, that not always, but when you have a bigger company, if the company is not in a growth mode, then those innovation, those, what do you call them?

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Daniel Nestle: Skunk yard projects, is that what they call them? You know, skunk works. Skunk works, yeah, sorry, Dave Armano, I got that wrong. But skunk works, right? These, they're just going to disappear and then what happens? Right here's where the dot is. We're talking about not being able to get young employees or whether these where kind of new employees are not going to be interested in these companies or where there's no need for them because of AI. They're going to lose the good employees that they have who have learned something really interesting in these pilots and they're going to say, you know what I got? I think I can do this and I'm going to find a greener. The grass is always greener. So it's really coming at them from both ends. Did that make sense?

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Mark Schaefer: I don't know if that makes sense. Again, it gets sort of down to, I think, a leadership issue. So look, if you're, I mean, I've worked with some great leaders. These are leaders you would follow into battle. And so great leaders are open to new ideas. They're open to change because they're responsible for the bottom line. They don't want to be caught unaware and be toasted by some new trend or some new, something happened in the consumer world. And so in marketing and comms, I mean, it's your job to bring those ideas, bring those trends to leadership. And what I was able to do, I didn't really even know I was doing it at the time. But when I look back, literally my entire career has been built on just experiments, just pushing it here, pushing it there.

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Mark Schaefer: I grew up in a company run by engineers and accountants. These were very conservative, data oriented people. But if you say, look, and especially in the digital world, it costs almost nothing to do a pilot. And here's the other thing. Here's another exciting thing about AI. AI is going to stop almost everybody from saying no because you can create almost anything on AI. You can experiment with almost anything for, let's call it $20 a month. So, I mean, AI is going to reduce a lot of barriers. It's going to reduce a lot of no's because you're going to be able to create, you're going to be able to pilot very quickly. You're going to be able to test very quickly. And my strategy always was, you go and say, look, we're going to create this pilot. It's going to cost a couple of $1,000.

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Mark Schaefer: It's going to last six months. And what you have to do, the key thing that a lot of people miss is you have to build in quick wins. It's not cheating to create a goal that you know you can make. If you create some goals, some hurdles that you know you can make with this pilot, then you have a positive story to tell the leaders, and they feel good about sponsoring you and they feel good about letting it go a little longer. And now you've got the time it takes to really prove the business case. And I was able to create really revolutionary change in my company by getting the sponsors, the people that own the strategy and the budget to just change a little at a time, experiment a little each year, and then move the company forward eventually in bigger ways.

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Daniel Nestle: It takes the right kind of leadership for that. Like, as you said earlier, without the right.

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Mark Schaefer: I guess maybe I was lucky. But look, if you're working for a company, I mean, with great leaders, they have to be open to new ideas. Why would you just block out new ideas if you're a great leader? And it might be trouble getting on their agenda, it might be trouble getting on, getting attention, but then start at a lower level. And it's been a great strategy for me.

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Daniel Nestle: Trey, I keep thinking to another area that you've really pushed the envelope in. Mark. Everything's all connected now anyway. And even within a company, or if you're on your own or starting a podcast or whatever, it's the concept of personal brand. And I didn't want a conversation with you to go by without talking about personal brand. And for those who are so important, it is critically important. And I feel like I'm becoming a testament to that. But there's people I know who. Who have really benefited from known especially, and I dropped that in the intro, and it's a play on words, but the fact is that known is a terrific book, a great guide to building your own personal brand. But I didn't want to necessarily pitch the book. What I wanted to say is that it's a personal brand. Okay.

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Mark Schaefer: No, I didn't interrupt.

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Daniel Nestle: K n o w n. Go get it. Amazon right now. Thank you. Anybody, any employee, any person anywhere should be building their own personal brand. And I think people are confused. They think, oh, that means I want to be solo and be on my own. Not necessarily, but if somebody is in a company and doesn't have the influence, they don't have a personal brand. They need a personal brand inside the company in order to gain influence and talk with, be able to pick up the phone or walk over to the CEO's office, they have to have that. Some people say, oh, it's trust. Well, trust is a part of it. I can trust you. But if I think you don't know anything about AI, I'm not going to ask you about AI. I mean, it's like, it's simple as that. That personal brand part.

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Daniel Nestle: Yeah.

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Mark Schaefer: So this was an area. So the, so first of all, the book was written in 2017. But I mean, I did two years of research and the book still works. I mean, I nailed it in terms of the ideas and the flow and the process. There isn't anything I would change about the book, but I am. But in a couple years, it will be like the 10th anniversary of the book and I'll probably do a new version. And one of the things that I really sort of undervalued was the internal personal brand. And here's a fun fact. Since that book came out, a lot of my workshops have been for big companies who say we want our employees to create internal personal brands. Not just external, but internal, because they've got to know, they've got to pick up the ball.

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Mark Schaefer: They have got to be an internal expert. They have to be known inside this company because that's how you're going to get promoted. That's how you're going to be asked to be on the next breakthrough team. You just can't sit there like a bump on a log. So I thought, well, okay, I'll go with that. So in this process, I've learned a lot about this idea of creating a personal brand inside a company and that certainly I'm going to highlight more in the next edition of the book.

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Daniel Nestle: Yeah, well, it ties so many things together for me. The last episode of this show was with Ethan McCarthy, and I mentioned that earlier, but Ethan is, he's an amazing guy.

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Mark Schaefer: God, I certainly love Ethan.

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Daniel Nestle: Yeah. He said something very well. He says a lot of wise things, but it's very interesting that I hadn't heard put this way before. He said, employees are a public. Employees are a public. And if employees are a public, you should be marketing to them, communicating to them, following the same principles that you would follow for a customer audience, for a stakeholder audience of some kind, you know, because they are a stakeholder fundamentally. But it's interesting to see companies waking up to this. And personal brand makes perfect sense in that because you are, you know, it maybe it's not a billion people, it may be 10,000 or 3000 or 400 people, but that's a public, that's an audience. And you have to be known among that audience to maintain relevance and survive.

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Mark Schaefer: Yeah.

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Daniel Nestle: Yeah.

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Mark Schaefer: Well, and so there's a lot of layers there to thinking about personal brand on a corporate strategy, on an organizational strategy. But I just want to mention also in the context of AI.

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Daniel Nestle: Yeah.

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Mark Schaefer: So, you know, a story that I tell often in my speeches, whether it's AI or I have a speech called, you know, new marketing realities, where I talk about how the world really works these days. We just can't keep doing the same old stuff, because the consumers, when consumers have the accumulated knowledge of the human race in the palm of their hand, they demand something different from marketing and comms. They don't want to be manipulated. They don't want to be talked down to. They want us to come alongside them at their point of need. And one of these ideas, I tell this story that when Chat JPT came out, I pinged a friend of mine, Shelley Palmer. Shelly is a big tech analyst in New York, and said, shelly, what do you think about this?

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Mark Schaefer: He said, oh, I just tried chat GPT, and it's terrifying. He said, I've written a blog almost every day for the last 15 years. I asked chat GPT to write this blog post in the voice of Shelley Palmer, and he created a perfect three point blog post. He said, I am 80% replaced. Now, on the surface, that is terrifying. But the more important thing is, what's that? And the 20% is his personal brand. And I have news for everyone listening. Shelley Palmer has nothing to worry about, because he has a strong personal brand. He's known, he's beloved, he's trusted. And that is the most important personal asset or corporate asset you will ever have. Because here's the biggest question on all of the minds of our customers, consumers or the public. Here it is from this point on. Dan, is this real?

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Mark Schaefer: Yeah, that's the question everyone is going to be asking for everything they see in the world. I couldn't sleep the other night. I was scrolling through Instagram, as one does, and I saw this picture of this beautiful, iridescent butterfly from Madagascar, and I looked at this beautiful butterfly, and the first thing that went through my mind was, is this real? I mean, I don't know, did someone just do this on mid journey? And so scale that to everything in the world of deepfakes and misinformation, at scale, people want to know, who can I turn to? Who can I trust? Who will give me the right answer? And this kind of goes full circle to the beginning of our discussion, when we talked about the authenticity and grit in a land of spectacular. It's the same thing.

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Mark Schaefer: It's also this authenticity and grit in the land of the deep fake. So on my blog now, I've put a badge on every blog post that says 100% human content. I want to acknowledge that this is me. It's always going to be me every time. And if you want to hear from me, this is me. And if you want to call me, it's going to be me. And if you leave a comment, I'm going to be the one that answers. And that power of the personal brand on, just as you said, on any level in any company, not just a solopreneur, that's going to be critically important going forward. How's that soapbox?

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Daniel Nestle: That is a killer soapbox. I'm just nodding my head because it's like I am, well, you know, I'm there, but I've been building my own personal brand and the trending communicator is a huge part of that. And it's funny because I'm completely on board with acknowledging when you're using your own content and when you're using AI and all this stuff. In fact, our friend Gaye Flashman has come up with a really interesting way to do that for her agency, where, you know, it's every piece, every paragraph, every line of a document is like certified as human or AI and all put together in a kind of grading score. It's pretty interesting in my case, like with, you know, with my podcast, clearly. Well, I should say clearly, although with things like eleven labs, you never know if you're hearing the right voice.

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Daniel Nestle: I know you've had some experience with that. But the voice, this show is me. This is authentic. When people ask me, so how do I learn more about you? I'm like, take half hour, listen to three minutes from ten different episodes of my show. I don't know. It's the easiest thing to do if you're going to take that much time. But that's authentically me. What about if I read the notes? No, no, don't read the notes, because my notes, and I state it very clearly, are a combination of me and AI, because frankly, it's a time saver and I'm using my notes area, my show notes, et cetera, as ways for me to experiment, workflows and get AI moving.

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Daniel Nestle: I also kind of want to practice what I preach, which is AI is supposed to be used like we should, as Ethan Malik says, co create with AI. It's our, it's our partner. So I'm co creating with it. I'm trying different things. But I always say this was created by, you know, with my little friends at flow. Send AI or wherever. And, you know, there's. There's so many tools and so many things. And, you know, I try to do that a lot.

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Mark Schaefer: As you were speaking, I was, yeah, I was thumbing through some LinkedIn posts because a friend of mine, a wonderful communicator, by the way, Anne Dieter Gallagher from, she had a PR firm in Harrisburg, a great thought leader in central Pennsylvania. She posted something on LinkedIn, and she wanted my opinion on this. So there's these tools and hacks to figure out if something is real or if something is AI or something is human. And I think. So I gave her answer on the post, and I think it was answer probably she didn't expect. So, like, this is a tool to help figure out, is this AI or is this human? So this was my answer, and it might surprise you, too. This might be a mildly interesting exercise for 2024, but probably not. Beyond that.

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Mark Schaefer: AI writing will continue to get better and will exceed human capabilities in many cases. This is like trying to figure out, did a calculator do that math? For most business writing, who cares? Yeah, right. I mean, AI is not going away. It's only going to get better month by month. It will be part of our lives, especially in comms, like the air that we breathe. There will always be a place for human craft. We appreciate novels, poems, letters written by humans. They have always been our most cherished possessions. And this gets back to what we've been talking about. We've got to seek authenticity and thought leadership and the best Internet content.

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Mark Schaefer: But if AI writes press releases or a company newsletter story, in the long run, not many people will care unless you make them care, unless you create something that is so distinctive that AI can't duplicate it.

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Daniel Nestle: Imagine you wake up one day, go, oh, I love that company's press releases. I love getting those. I've never heard one person in the history. Yeah, but imagine somebody could do that in this disruptive way and say, oh, these guys write credible credits. I'm sure some people, I bet you somebody out there who does, interesting ones, but especially now, you need to stand out when you're sending these things out anyway. Who knows where they go? I don't know. I always thought it was an effort in, this is just a wasted effort, except to have your own content on your page. But anyway, I see we're coming up on it.

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Daniel Nestle: Mark and I could just keep going with this, but we have come full circle in many ways here, getting back to the point of audacity of disruption, essentially through your personal brand in many ways being extremely relevant so that you can be spectacular. And, you know, I'm pretty sure that we're going to need a specific book that's called audacity with the temporary subtitle, potential subtitle of, oh, gosh, forgive me, I have so many notes here. Audacity. That's audacity. I was thinking of. I was by President Obama there. Sorry, you're in good company.

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Mark Schaefer: Might be a better title, but audacious.

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Daniel Nestle: You know, a rebel guide to disruptive. A rebels guide to disruptive marketing. Audacious, a rebels guide to disruptive marketing.

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Mark Schaefer: Which is coming out sometimes coming out in January. I think that's January.

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Daniel Nestle: Okay. As soon as January. I have a feeling that people are going to need, really need that book to understand any of what we've talked about today. But I hope they buy it. I mean, really, it's, I'll be reading it and discussing it with you, hopefully again soon. But I, again, beyond any expectations I ever have. When I enter into a conversation with you, Mark, it's always just, there's so many great ideas, so much learning, getting a good picture of some of the things that are happening in the future. I did want touch on what should we be doing right now? What is the main things that people should be doing in this minute? But I think we can gather some of that from what we talked about, and we'll just save that for another conversation.

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Daniel Nestle: So right now, before I give you a little platform for your last words, I just want to tell everybody out there, go to businessesgrow.com to subscribe to Mark's blog. And I do recommend subscribing to it rather than waiting for it to come out on LinkedIn, because you'll get it ahead of time. Come straight to your inbox. And we all know, as our friend Robbie, oh, gosh.

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Mark Schaefer: Fitzwater.

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Daniel Nestle: Robbie Fitzwater. As our friend Robbie Fitzwater says, email marketing is the cockroach of marketing. It will not die. So go sign up for Mark's email businessesgrow.com dot. You'll get, not only will you get the blog, you also get the scoop on the very long running and incredibly good and tight marketing companion podcast, which has gone out, without fail every couple weeks for eleven years. Twelve years, Mark. How long?

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Mark Schaefer: Yeah, we're in our 12th year.

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Daniel Nestle: Twelve years with incredible guests every time. And go look for markbusinessgrow.com comma archwchafer. And it's S c H A E F E R, not to be confused with any other version of Schaefer out there because there's a few. But at Mark W. Schaefer on Twitter, are you on the X, the Twixter much, Mark, at all these days?

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Mark Schaefer: A little bit, yeah. I'm more of a consumer than a poster.

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Daniel Nestle: Okay. Well, but occasionally you might see an interesting poster, Mark, on the Twixter.

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Mark Schaefer: I don't take a lot of strong opinions on Twitter.

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Daniel Nestle: Yeah, yeah. Well, we've had conversations about that. In rise. You also find, speaking of rise, you'll find Mark in the rise community and the rise community. I've spoken about it on the show before. I've had members from the rise community. Valentina, Aaron, a bunch of people have been on the show. Show. Mark, do you want to take like. Well, let me just ask you in.

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Mark Schaefer: Your final, let me take a second, because it is something that I think important and extremely relevant to what we've talked about. So trending communicator, right? So what's one of the most important things we need to be thinking about for a trending communicator is you've got to keep up with the trends. Here is what I've learned in the last few years. I can't do it myself. I cannot. There's too much, it's too fast. And I cannot be relevant without a community behind me in our rise community. I mean, I'm not trying to be salesy. I'm trying to be helpful because the rise community, we have people from all around the world helping each other, nurturing each other, talking about, this works. This doesn't, I tried this, use this. This is the best move here. What's going to be next?

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Mark Schaefer: We've had pop up conversations about universal basic income. We've had conversations on, we bring in people from the outside who are forward thinking and help us get there, too. So you can't do it on your own if you want to be a trending communicator. And if it's not rise, find a community where you fit and where you thrive to get others to help you do it.

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Daniel Nestle: Yeah, I would say there are other communities, but I don't know them because I'm on rise all the time. But, I mean, listeners will know. I've spoken about rise before. I can with 1000% certainty say that my understanding of AI and my joy of it is absolutely due to my involvement with the rise community and just that whole process of helping to build that community and being part of it. And I'm so grateful to all my good friends there. And to you, Mark, for putting that together. But yeah, I didn't want to let us wrap up without talking about rise. But just back to the final summation. Here I am, businessesgrow.com, comma twixter at Mark W. Schaefer LinkedIn. Mark is very active on LinkedIn. Just look up Mark Schaeffer on LinkedIn and you'll know he's the, you'll know it's the right one.

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Daniel Nestle: You'll see the books. Right. Just, you know, if you go to Mark Schaefer and there's no belong to the brand marketing rebellion, social media 2.0, known, et cetera, if there's none of that's there, you're the wrong Mark Schaefer. So, so Mark Schaeffer on LinkedIn, and also he's connected to me. So that's another way to double check, just to be sure. Mark, I am just also, as always, overflowing with gratitude for you and for your presence here and just for being my friend. Any last words for you?

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Mark Schaefer: Well, I'll wrap it up and say that the subtitle of a previous book I wrote, marketing Rebellion, is the most human company wins. And I think that subtitle was rather prescient. That was written before AI, before, you know, the public accessibility of chat GPT. Anyway, and I think, again, in this era of the spectacle, I do believe still the most human company will win.

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Daniel Nestle: And what does it take to be a human company? It takes humans. We all need to be centered in our humanity. Grit.

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Mark Schaefer: Grit, a little crazy and a lot of audacity.

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Daniel Nestle: Audacious audacity. I suppose we should coin that. Mark, thank you so very much.

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Mark Schaefer: Thanks for having me.

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Daniel Nestle: I'll see you on rice.

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Mark Schaefer: Lots of fun.

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Daniel Nestle: You got it. Thanks for taking the time to listen in on today's conversation. If you enjoyed it, please be sure to subscribe through the podcast player of your choice. Share with your friends and colleagues and leave me a review. Five stars would be preferred, but it's up to you. Do you have ideas for future guests or you want to be on the show? Let me know@danndingcommunicator.com. Thanks again for listening to the trending communicator.