EP #03: Impacting Millions Through Social Media with Joseph Nolan
Within social media, there is the potential to reach many people in a short amount of time. However, just like any other professional industry, it comes down to persistence and problem-solving skills. Today’s guest knows all about the hard work that goes into building a business’s social media presence. Joseph Nolan spent over a decade in digital marketing, social media, and brand leadership roles at multi-billion-dollar brands, and in this episode, he describes the great responsibility you have when impacting millions of people each day.
Listen in as Joe explains why his best tip for being successful is to ask for guidance when needed. You will learn the importance of being humble and forthright when building your business and marketing for your company to build trust with your clients or customers. If you are looking to reach and make a difference with more people, this episode is not to be missed!
What You'll Learn In Today's Episode:
The biggest misconceptions around social media.
How social media shaped the business Joe is in.
Why Joe decided to change his career.
What it is like to suddenly have an impact on over 1 million people.
The importance of being humble.
Why one-touch resolutions in customer service are crucial.
Ideas Worth Sharing:
“The people who are humble and are hard workers end up doing the best job, get the best results, and they are the ones that other businesses want to work for them.” - Joseph Nolan
“That is what differentiates the best in the industry from the rest: being able to provide the business with ready to go information consistently over time.” - Joseph Nolan
“What I tell people is treat them the way you want to be treated and help them help you, provide them information, be civil, be kind, and it is amazing how people will treat you back.” - Joseph Nolan
Resources In Today's Episode:
Connect with Joseph Nolan: Website | LinkedIn | Twitter | Instagram
Connect with Bob DePasquale: Website | Twitter | Instagram
Full Episode Transcript:
Do you feel like there are gifts inside of you ready to burst out? Are you feeling unfulfilled and called to make a difference in a more meaningful way?
Welcome to Speaking of Impact with your host Bob DePasquale. Led by his own unique experiences and curiosity, Bob will inspire you to identify and utilize your gifts in ways that will make more of an impact on the world around you.
And now, here's Bob.
Bob DePasquale: Speaking of impact, how is quantitative science related to social media? I've always thought that social media was interesting. You can reach so many people in such a short period of time, but just like any other professional industry, it comes down to hard work and problem solving skills. When you multiply an audience from 100 to 100,000, the success can be great, but so can the failure. Today's impact interview is with Joe Nolan of JONO Marketing. We talk about Joe's journey from growing up in Northern New Jersey, going out to Southern Cal for graduate school, then spending over a decade building multinational billion dollar brands' social media presence, to starting his own business from scratch. His work ethic in a field where it can be considered pretty easy to get things done and communicate is highly evident. Let's check out today's impact interview.
All right, welcome Joe Nolan to the Speaking of Impact podcast. How you doing?
Joe Nolan: Doing really well, man. Thanks for having me. Really excited to join you today.
Bob DePasquale: Yeah, I appreciate you coming on. We've known each other for quite a while but there are some gaps there in years where we didn't really communicate too much, and I know you got some crazy stories, and some traveling, and some work in the social media industry. So we're pretty excited. So I wanted to start with take me back to when you first decided or thought you wanted to get into business and the type of business that you were in and how social media kind of shaped that.
Joe Nolan: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I think to start, it's been 18 years, man, that we've known each other. It's been a long time. I had to do the math before the call today.
Bob DePasquale: We're getting old.
Joe Nolan: Yeah, yeah. I didn't feel any younger when I looked up that stat. Yeah, so I think my career it's certainly been one, I'd say it's a more modern career as far as switching jobs, changing jobs quite a bit. I'm from here by New York City, New Jersey, and I went out to USC in Southern California for graduate school, initially focusing on crisis management, a lot of communications work, and was fortunate enough to work in the auto industry with companies like Lexus, and General Motors, and leading global social media for them. It was right around when social media was popping up around 2007, 2008.
So yeah, I was literally one of the youngest people in the department and into technology in this nebulous thing called social, which it seemed like started professionally with YouTube and Myspace really, and Facebook was maybe third to the game back them. So I got assigned to run social media, and then from there, man, I just made a career of launching social media at billion-dollar brands, just really big multinational corporations.
So from Lexus and General Motors I worked at Symantec on the Norton brand, Men's Wearhouse, StubHub, and then Beachbody, all with very similar roles of building divisions from scratch and launching original content, social media. Everything from customer care, customer support, supporting the different stores and dealerships, all the way through the paid media and online e-commerce. So I'll tell you what, it was a long time, and that was about 13, 14 years working in all those brands. It was a lot of fun, but I learned a ton and met some tremendous people. The experiences, as you mentioned, were many, and there's tons of great stories. So yeah, I mean, certainly what I'm doing today is a little bit different than that, kind of. Is that something you want me to touch on too, kind of that transition?
Bob DePasquale: Yeah, absolutely. I think it's fascinating that you worked in all these big brands that we've all heard of, and there's got to be some mastermind or some group behind the branding that they bring, and like you mentioned, it touches you in so many different places. It's marketing, it's client relationship, it's experience. I mean, yeah.
Joe Nolan: Totally.
Bob DePasquale: Go ahead.
Joe Nolan: Yeah, so it's really interesting. I think people, I was talking with someone else, we chatted a couple weeks ago about this inflection points in your life, and not to be too kind of cognitive about it, right? Or too brainy, or even spiritual, I mean, whatever works for people, but I think when you look back, you say there are these certain inflection points where you make a decision and it sends you down a path for however long, maybe a month, maybe a lifetime. I think that happened with me. I had a great career, I've been fortunate I still own several social media records, my teams and I that I managed, and had a very good career of working at big corporations in this now super popular field that everybody wants to be in.
Then literally what happened is I had a family member, my father got sick, so I moved back here to the East Coast to New Jersey to help my family out and was going to take a year off. Was just going to take a year off and regroup and see if I wanted to stay in this area or move somewhere else, change careers perhaps, get more into technology. I mean, all of these ideas are kind of swirling around in my head for probably two or three months. Then actually I had people, I had friends of mine, close friends, two or three of them, and also people I'd never met before, these chief marketing officers of very big brands, and literally in a one week period they all approached me, five or six people and said, "Why don't you start your own business and do what you've been doing for these big brands but do it for yourself and work for many brands and you'll feel very satisfied by having diversity of clients, and ideas, creativity." The first reaction to this, which I think when you're looking at this from a variety of angles is it's so true. Initially it was a knee-jerk reaction of no way, it's so different from what I normally do, it's risky. I didn't have a big network here in the East Coast where I was living. Everybody was Midwest and West Coast.
So initially it was like, "No way, I don't want to do this." Agency life is very challenging, the rewards are great, but it can be very taxing, right, the lifestyle. So I eventually said ... My friend said, "Look, man, what do you have to lose? Trust us." One of the gentleman owns a billion dollar, he's co-owner of a billion dollar brand and he's in his late 30s. So I figured if all these people, all these smart people that I trust are giving me this guidance, in a way they're right. What do I have to lose? I have no job right now, I have time. I had the financial means, and so I gave it a go. Two years later I'm still here in the New York area. We started JONO Marketing, a small digital ad agency where we're one of the smallest and fastest ever partners to become a Facebook Preferred Marketing Partner among the media side in the world. We have tremendous clients, we work with clients from New Zealand, from China now. We market in 25 countries, and I think when I look back I love what I do now. I love what I do and I never woke up a day in my life where I woke up and I said, "I want to do this."
As I've told people this story, they say, "Man, that is a real dramatic shift." You woke up one day, you tried it, you're successful, and I would say this. The first year, Bobby, was really tough. I started from zero, so it wasn't as if I called these big companies and said, "Hey, I have an agency now. Partner with me." I literally started with zero clients, and we've grown a ton in two years. So I think people see the end result now, but I think some things we might touch on today is what were those two years like, speaking about overcoming adversity and things. What were those first two years of total unknown, just in the red your first year, paying your rent, paying your vendors? It was hard, right?
So made the leap, changed careers, and so far for me it's worked out quite well and I'm very thankful and I feel just very fortunate to be able to have this all happen.
Bob DePasquale: Sure, sure. So taking a step back just to stay as chronological as possible, I wanted you to touch on, if you can, a little bit about what it's like well, first of all, coming out of undergrad and deciding to move out West. Now, we went to college together at Hofstra University in Long Island, which was also actually the second place you went to college, but making-
Joe Nolan: Yeah.
Bob DePasquale: So maybe you could touch on that too, but we spent some time there and then you go out West, and then immediately you're getting internships and jobs with these huge companies, and you're having this impact, speaking of impact, on thousands, millions of people across the world in such a quick short order. What's it like making that leap, or realizing, waking up and saying, "Man, here I am at 25, 26 and I'm having an impact on a million people"?
Joe Nolan: Yeah, that's a good point, and I think the fact I probably skipped over it so much, it's not that I take it for granted, but it's a lot, right? I sort of think in some ways it's like a pro athlete, right? Or a movie star who is in front of all these people all the time, and it's just kind of that's what you do, right? It's the job. So the management part of it mentally is one, I think that's the job and this is what we're here to do and people trust us to do it. I think on the flip side of that is there is a tremendous amount of responsibility, right? What I learned from that was a couple things. I think one is, this might sound a little wild, but sort of like empathy, right? I mean, a lot of the training we do with employees in this space, whether it's on marketing or customer support side, is you're communicating with people through a text medium, right? People don't necessarily leave a video response yelling at your company or even praising your company. So every day it's ups and downs, where you're dealing with people who are thrilled, people who are upset, and at scale.
So like you mentioned, I mean, literally some of these brands might be five to 10,000 unique people per day tweet a complaint to the business, and not just saying like, "I don't like your business." But actually may have a customer support issue. So the volume is substantial, and I think it is really ... There does come a satisfaction when you launch a marketing campaign and you are successful, and you look and you say, there's all these fancy metrics, but you look and you say, "You know what? Five million people in the last two days actually engaged with this program." That's unbelievable, right? I mean, so the scale is I think, one, you learn this factor of empathy, you learn this lesson of responsibility and professionalism, and then I think there is just this phenomenal excitement. There are some hard days, I'm not going to lie. I'm sure I've called you over these years and been like, "Man, it's a hard day today. How is your day?" There are some tough ones for sure, but you wake up every day knowing that what you are doing has an impact and has this impact at a scale that maybe only 200, 300 other people on the planet are working in the same role as you, having this sort of net impact on so many people.
So that is something where I think the best people at that that I've met over the years are the ones who approach it very humbly with a work ethic, right? Where they are not taking that for granted, it's not this pretentiousness of hey, I'm at this brand, this is what I do. Because honestly there are people like that, but the ones who I have found who approach it with that sense of responsibility and wanting to do the right thing with messaging, or treating a customer, giving them the right information very quickly, making it easy for people, things like that. The people who are humble and the hard workers I feel they end up doing the best job, they get the best results, and they're the ones that other businesses want them to work for them too.
So yeah, I mean, it's dramatic. I wouldn't say anything else. There was certainly not really ever a day where I woke up and was bored. I was never bored for 13 years, not a single day. Not even on the weekend.
Bob DePasquale: Wow, yeah. Social media doesn't shut off on the weekend, it might even be more engaging at that point. I don't know what the numbers are.
Joe Nolan: No, you're right. Yeah, especially if you have big events, right? Or even if you think when you work in auto people go to the dealerships on the weekend, right? And that's the biggest foot traffic. If you're in the hospitality space and travel, right? Tons on the weekends. Yeah, so it's certainly 24/7.
Bob DePasquale: Yeah, that's amazing. So let me ask you a question. How are you measured in that space? I mean, is it just we reached a million people or is it that we got less complaints on Twitter, or how do they say, "Okay, good job, Joe"?
Joe Nolan: Yeah, absolutely. I think it's both, right? I think what we did and a couple things literally a handful of us initially pioneered in the world of social, and I think this is important for really anyone listening. If they're looking at their personal brand, or their small business, or their big corporation is making sure that the measurement of performance is tethered to the business objective. What we mean by that is you mentioned customer support, right? So if we are doing a better job, what are customer support metrics we should be interested in? They have something called a first touch resolution. So if a customer asks a question, we don't simply say back to them on Twitter, "Thank you for asking the question. How can I help you?" Or like, "Here's our website, go look in the FAQ documents." We would literally provide them with the answer, right? So our rep takes the time, engages the user and sends them on the first touch, here is the solution to what you're looking for. So we would actually be measured on that, first touch resolution. How quickly we engage with people in customer support.
On the marketing side we look at our current performance. How many people do we reach on Instagram, or Facebook, or Pinterest every day, right? So we launch a marketing campaign, and the whole point of those campaigns is to do better than what we do every day. So we may have goals against that. Say we need to reach 20% more people than we do every day, right? So that might bring us from 100,000 to 120,000, but we want engagement, right? I mean, I think a big ... What would I call it? I don't want to say mistake, but maybe like a misperception around social is reach and impressions. A lot of people talk about how many people did you reach, how many times did they see your content, but really what it comes down to is engagement. The networks, all of them, social networks, they really weight in their algorithm engagement very heavily because that means someone saw your content, and not only watched your video, but they were so moved by it that they wanted to leave a comment or they wanted to share it with their community because it was powerful enough to them to do that.
So those are ultimate indicators of success in a marketing campaign, right? I think if you take a TV advertiser, they wish someone could hit a little like button on their TV ad and get that feedback. I mean, that's what social provides, is these different types of engagement, quality of engagement, right? A comment and a share versus a like or a video view. So that's how we would be measured on the marketing campaigns, is different types of performance above our average benchmark indicators.
Bob DePasquale: Okay, cool. Now, all that stuff is fascinating to me, and I never thought about it like that. A traditional advertisement getting response is probably, maybe you give away a code or some kind of call to action or something, but whereas with social you can track so many more metrics.
Joe Nolan: Yeah, it's fascinating. I think when people are new to this space you open up the Facebook dashboard. I mean, someone might fact check me here, but there was a point where I think there were maybe about 140 different unique metrics you could track on Facebook for a campaign. Now times that by Google, right? So you have your paid search, you have your Pinterest campaign, your Twitter campaign. So even if you're managing a small brand, a big challenge for people in this space, and again, if you're a business owner too, is how do you make sense of all this. What should you actually be tracking, and how do you synthesize it to a way where, what we call actionable insights? So that's what we call our reporting program is, whoever it is, anyone from the entry level coordinator, to the manager, to the CEO, right? They just need to know what they need to know to get their job done. So how do you provide them in that first touch, how do you provide them exactly what they need to be successful at their job? So that I think is also something that differentiates the best in the industry from the rest, is being able to provide the business with ready to go information consistently over time.
Bob DePasquale: Cool. You mentioned first touch resolutions with customers. I might be the worst digital customer. I don't think I've ever experienced, it's not the companies, I don't think I've ever experienced a first touch resolution. It's at least three or four of me trying to explain whatever I'm trying to say.
Joe Nolan: What I always tell people, I mentioned empathy for a reason, right? Is everybody is a consumer and everybody is human. I think what you see more than ever now, as more people are being very digital and there are these lack of human factors, is a lack of empathy and understanding that you're dealing with a person, right? And that person's job is to help you, the customer, satisfy your need, right? Answer your question, get to a refund, put you in touch with a sales person, whatever it is. I think when people ... And it's something these people listening should try it, right? You contact another human when you're very, very upset. Sure, the support rep is trained to deal with this, but they're dealing with this all day and they're human, right? It's very hard job that they have, very hard. It's hard, it's emotionally, right? It's tough, it's emotionally draining. I personally worked in customer support for over a year answering telephones, so I understand it firsthand.
What I tell people is treat them the way you want to be treated and help them help you, right? Provide them information, be civil, be kind, and it's amazing how other people will treat you back. I really find that approach tends to work whether it's the electric company you're calling, or company you bought a laptop from or something, whoever, right? I just encourage people when they engage to just be polite and be human, and kind of park the emotions a little bit and really help the rep do their job.
Bob DePasquale: Yeah, and it's easier to communicate with people and understand, at least on the phone maybe you can at least kind of feel their inflection or what they're saying, but on social I would imagine how many times does someone hit the tweet button or something and they didn't read it too well. You don't realize what you're putting out there.
Joe Nolan: Yeah. I mean, it's hard, right? I mean, the reps go through training around, I mean, just think. We typically get ... People in other countries always say, "English is very hard because phrases have so many meanings." Right? Or one word could mean two or three different things. So it's challenging, right? There's oftentimes a big lack of context. So what we call that is social perspective. So we call it a social POV, like a point of view. So when you're reading this, you have to practice transference, right? So you put yourself in the person's shoes. They just wrote X, Y, and Z. They don't know what your company calls a product ID or a SKU, they don't know that, right? They just know that their television is not working. I mean, literally, it's that simple, right? So you have to put yourself in their shoes, translate what they're saying to you into your corporate language and have a great deal of patience. Like I said, it's very taxing to do it online and chat support social publicly and social. There's technologies that are helping. There's AI chat bots and everything. I mean, I'm sure people listening are saying, "What about AI bots on Facebook Messenger?" Totally, right? I mean, there's technology to help people, but I would also say this to your point about making an error.
We simply had a rule that we measured with actually PhDs in quantitative science when I was at one company. So they actually measure this with people who are PhDs and we implemented a new policy for our customer support reps who were handling up to on any given day 30 cases, 30 to 40 cases per day in social. So that's phenomenal, right? That is world-class that they could have that many cases per day. Not tweets, right? So what we said to them was simply this. Every time before you hit a button to send a tweet, you need to read it three times. Read your tweet three times before you hit send. We had a dramatic decrease in errors, in typos, in using the wrong hashtag, in logic and reasoning we would call it. So for instance, not translating something well, like the rep totally thought they were saying the right thing but it was related to a different product, for instance. So nothing out of malice or being haphazard, just simply didn't correlate to what the user was saying. We implemented the three read policy and you're talking 80 to 90% decline in issues of any kind. So kind of check three times, where they say measure three times, I guess cut once.
Bob DePasquale: Yeah, yeah. Well that's probably like podcasting. I can edit out whatever I want, I mean.
Joe Nolan: For everyone listening, this is our 37th take today, but we're going to get it right, we're going to get it.
Bob DePasquale: We've been here for four hours. No, I'm just kidding. So with social there is certainly a reach, like we mentioned before, with so many different places that you can go. So maybe we can get into now what it was like really stepping out of that corporate world and working for a business to your own.
Joe Nolan: Yeah. Super risky, also super exciting. Someone said to me once, "Why do you say super?" I said, "Because I don't know another way to describe it." I've never been on a rocket ship and roller coasters make me wheezy, so that's kind of what it's like. I'd say look, I'm glad I did it. In a way you could always go back to corporate or go back to the startup world, those jobs will be there. So to me it was worth the risk if, again, if financially I could do it. I worked hard to get to a point where financially I was okay, and just turned out that I had the means to give this a try starting from scratch, which is also really not recommended. I mean, this is not tooting my own horn, but I didn't realize the success rate is really low when you do that. If you Google it, it's really low. Good thing I didn't Google that one when I did start. But yeah, I know, and I think a lot of people say to me, "How did you kind of pull it off." And I always say, "I asked for help a lot." You park the ego. I talked to everybody I could talk to. I've made a lot of new friends, I've lost some friends or people that I thought were friends turned out they weren't.
So you have this spectrum of there is the business side, there's the personal side, the relationship side, I say they are intertwined, but also at the same time it's like you're doing the job and I think it's important for people to understand that even though you're an entrepreneur that it's still work. If you're vice president of marketing at a company, you're still putting in a lot of hours, you're still traveling. It's a hard, it's a demanding occupation, but I always tell people, they say, "What's made you most successful?" You can Google things all day, you can sign up for subscriptions, articles and databases, but literally asking people and learning along the way. Certainly I would say I've probably been two out of three with certain things. I would use two people in finance before the third one I found and I really, really like them, or graphic design, right? Things like that.
So it's a constant hustle, it's asking for help, and at the end of the day, I mean, the other thing I just tell people it's a battle of attrition. There's going to be ups and downs and it's just how long you can tolerate it, for better or for worse, right? It doesn't always mean ... I've met people, Bobby, who like their business but their significant other is relocating for another job so they may stop their business and pursue other things, right? So sometimes businesses might discontinue because of a better opportunity even, not necessarily a negative thing. So yeah, that's ... Does that kind of answer what you were thinking?
Bob DePasquale: Yeah, well it's interesting to me, and I've talked to plenty of business owners over the years, and when they step out on their own, it's man, this is such a freeing feeling, I get to make every decision myself, I love it, and then day five they're like, "Oh man, I got to make every decision by myself."
Joe Nolan: Yeah, I think it's a double-edged sword, right? What I've seen it's either or with this, where people either enjoy the accountability or they don't, and I've seen people who don't that run a small mom-and-pop shop all the way to a $100 million funded startup where they're in Forbes magazine, et cetera, and it's driving the CEO crazy that the types of decisions they have to make or if they don't like it, right? So I think the people who succeed in this and surround themselves with the right people are the ones who are comfortable owning the decisions that they make and being accountable.
Bob DePasquale: Accountability for sure too. You have to when you first start you're your own accountability partner, and that can be challenging for some people to, but I found that if you really think about your vision and you keep your thoughts and desires of what you want to get done, and who you want to help and impact, and how you want to change, make change in the world, if you keep that focus, that's really your accountability partner. Then eventually, and I know you got some more people on your team too, maybe you can talk a little bit about your team and what's it like working with people and having people on your own team rather than just working with other employees of a business?
Joe Nolan: Sure, yeah. I mean, focus is paramount, right? I think when ... I mean, you and I we're both in sports at a high level and you speak with sport psychologists, and performance experts and everything, and really what it boils down to, right? Everything from performance anxiety, or riding the highs, riding the lows, getting one more shot off your golf score, whatever it is, right? They actually all boil it back down to an ability to focus, right? If you are focusing, then different distractions, technique problems, fatigue problems are all dramatically lessened. The same way with being an entrepreneur, the focus could be from the next meeting you have, and in my business you could go into one pitch in the morning and maybe it doesn't go well or it goes well, and then next call you're getting on is with a totally different client and you have to be happy and ready to go, right? So you have to be able to switch that on and off and focus all the way to how am I doing this quarter, how am I doing this year, what do I want to do next year?
So I think focus is absolutely critical. That can't be underestimated at all, and I think it helps people overcome a lot of adversity as well, is just understanding what the goal is, what the purpose of what you're doing is.
Yeah, I mean, look, as far as working with a team, I think this is important and this really is the biggest selling point for JONO Marketing. Years and years ago and throughout my career, I don't know who said it, I mean, I think my parents were the first ones who told me, but someone said, "There's no substitute for talent." And that is something that became readily clear to me in my career over time. Certainly hard work is important, commitment is important, creativity, flexibility, right? All these words, but talent and the end of the day, kind of the sum of all those parts is paramount. So I had a real heart-to-heart moment with myself and I said, "Why would anyone work with me?" At the time it was Joe, just that was it, it was just me. Why would anyone work with me versus the agencies that I worked with, who I liked? I picked them because they did good work, I enjoyed it. So that's why we stayed with them, right? So that was my competition. We're very small but we compete against companies that are a billion dollar ad agencies. So why would anyone work with us, right? Our track record, okay, but I don't have a track record, right? I mean, we just started. At that point we didn't even have a name yet for the agency.
What I figured out was I said the only way I think we could get a foothold is if we just go out and make a promise to our partners and say, "We have the best talent that we can find." Not the best talent in the US, not the best talent in North America, just straight up the best talent that we can find. So that's what we did. So we aligned ourselves with individuals, with other partners, with team members that are the best at what they do, and I feel fortunate because I've either worked with them directly or through really one degree of separation, it's how we built out all the people you see on my website. Being at large brands gave me that opportunity to meet these people and have access to the talent, and I'd say to everyone listening, if you don't have that access, then ask people, right? That goes back to my first point about how to be successful, is ask someone, right? Ask for help. It shows maturity, it doesn't show weakness.
So that's what we did, we work. Our team members are quite fascinating. They're people who have invented things, they are people who are former presidents of Fortune 250 brands, SVP at Fortune 100 brands, and that's kind of on our web and lifetime value side. Our what we would call consumer experience group and monetization. Our creative group is world-class. So they work with the top athletic and lifestyle brands in the world. Everyone is either listening to this on the brands they work with, they're wearing the sneakers of the companies they work with, and they've traveled to the destinations they work with.
That's our offering, right? We come to our partners and we say, "Look, we will maintain this. You know you work direct with us, we don't farm out the labor, we do the work." We're highly experienced, but with experience doesn't necessarily come talent. The two I think I would caution everyone to understand that the two are not tethered. There is not a correlation to them at all, I think when people understand that, and maybe that's something we can talk about. I've often lectured about merit and experience. But yeah, so that's JONO. We literally found the best people we could find and that's what we promise brands. We will always have the best talent on your account.
Bob DePasquale: Yeah, that's great. That's a strong promise, but I would imagine it's deep for people. If you're being honest but also forthright about how good you are, then they're going to trust you.
Joe Nolan: Yeah, and it's all about trust, right? I mean, that's a great point, and it's not easy, right? I think we're very fortunate that the people that we work with on our side of the business, we enjoy working together. We've been working together now, some of us for five years, others two years. So yeah, I mean, it's not easy, right? When we're trying to deal with the 1% of the 1%. At the same time though, we're all very aligned, right? There are very common denominators between all of us, even though the three pillars of JONO, the media and marketing strategy, the creative side, the lifetime value monetization side, are all very different. I mean, and certainly there's a synergy across them, right? That's why we're aligned that way, but the type of work and the type of people are all completely different. I mean, we are all very different individuals, but we are all very driven. We are all very passionate about the work we do. We're all very focused and I think we maintain that sense of professionalism, right? So there's fun projects, there's challenging projects, there are small projects, big projects, right?
So I am fortunate to have met all of these people and been able to bring them together and I see that as every day and that's my job, right? That's a task for me every day, is to maintain this team of these individuals who, not by accident because we sought these people, we said to people, "Who is the best you know at this?" And we talked to them, and engaged them to see if they really were. So I'm fortunate, I think the caliber of the individuals that are on our team that people work with make it easier for all of us to get along and get the job done, which to me that I feel most fortunate for. Absolutely is something every day I wake up and I don't take that for granted for a minute.
Bob DePasquale: Interesting. I get a question a lot, people ask me, "Bob, how can I reach more people or how can I make a greater impact?" And sometimes I think, and correct me if I'm wrong, but in the social media world with such large reach and scale and amount of numbers, I think sometimes people think that's the most important thing, like how many followers. Like you said before, it's not necessarily about the followers, it's the engagement, and I kind of liken that on a smaller scale to people who are in service industries or businesses where maybe they feel like they're not quite making the impact or reaching a large amount of people, but you may be really, really touching or changing the lives of people that you serve, or maybe even the people that you work with. I mean, you talk about your team. If you guys are all highly functioning individuals but at the same time I would imagine without each other you all wouldn't have the same impact if you weren't working together.
Joe Nolan: Yeah, absolutely. I think that's where ... First, I think it comes back to enjoying what you do, and I think people would, right? I think people do enjoy what they do when they ask themselves, how can I make more of an impact? Keeping it to the lens of what I do with marketing and this idea of digital. On the negative side, digital is very challenging, right? So I think everybody starts nodding their head like, "Thank god you didn't say this was easy to do." The whole audience just was like, "Oh, shoot. Okay, good, he's not one of these people that just says post and everybody will show up."
Bob DePasquale: No one fell off the treadmill.
Joe Nolan: So yeah, we're keeping the listeners here. It's super competitive, right? One thing to keep in mind, you're competing against everyone else. You're not competing with the other pizzeria down the block, you're not competing with Nike, Apple, Amazon. You're competing with every advertiser for those people in their feed, whether it's paid media or organic posts, unpaid posts.
So when you think of it that way you have to really, I think it forces people to actually focus, focus in, we say, and figure out how to actually be successful in a space, right? I think there's kind of two pieces to it. I mean, over the years I've said there's four, there's five. I think it comes down to two things, right? Do you have at least average content to talk about? Content can be text, it could be video, it could be photos, whatever. So just content in general needs to be at least average, and that's subjective, right? I mean, that's certainly subjective, but it also matters maybe even more the technique with how you utilize social media channels, right? So how you post the content, what time of day? Why that time of day? When you post your next piece of content? Understanding that it does take time and that the algorithms bake in historical performance, right? So you got to do certain things for four days, right?
So if anyone is listening, quick tip. You need to post Instagram, Facebook, even Twitter, you need to post very well at a right time of day, four days in a row, sometimes seven days now, before you start to see an increase in likes, and comments, and reach and engagement, right? So you have to do that. It's very rare that you will get better performance if you don't post the right way every day. Then you have the types of post, right? Or another tip, sometimes we talk about a lot, that I talked about on my blog, is stacking posts, right? A lot of people think just post a lot of content. If I post five things, Bob, you'll see it, right? Because you came into the store the other day and you post two, three times a day, right? That's actually called stacking and the social networks treat that as spam, and they don't want you to spam users, so they'll suppress your content because they don't want you to do that. That's not a good experience for their users, so you then get penalized.
Bob DePasquale: The way I look at it is that's like you walking into a public place, or a store, whatever it is, you're just screaming like, "Hey, look at me. Look at my product."
Joe Nolan: I'm going to use that in all my presentations, man. That's a great way to put it. Yeah, yeah. That's a phenomenal way to put it. You know no one likes that, right? So the digital form of that is an algorithm that simply just says no. You're not allowed to do that. You could have ... What I tell people, a lot of people it seems focus on the content, and you could have the best content in the world, and what I just tell people is, "If you have the best content in the world and no one sees it, it's bad content." Because the goal here is not that content, the goal is to get engagement and build a brand, build a relationship with a user. That is the goal.
Certainly that could happen with super cool well produced content, and oftentimes we say to people they don't even know if it's good content or not because no one saw it. They say, "Oh, look at this. I had this guy down the block shot it, his college kid edited it. It looks super cool." You know what? It does, it looks like a million bucks. It looks like it came out of Warner Brothers and 34 people saw it and it got one like, right? And I just say to him like, "You don't know if that was good or bad. We don't know if one out of 34 is great or if it's atrocious, right? And it should be one out of seven, right?" So without any of that, without any of that knowledge, we don't know, right? So you have to get, what I say, you have to get more people to the party, right? Then when you have more people at the party, then that's when you can make your impact. What I would say to people is it takes time, it takes that investment, it's like a snowball. You have to invest in the beginning, you build up the snowball and then once it gets rolling it's a phenomenal thing and you reach and engage people.
I will say this, in my career some of the most satisfying things I've ever done have been around customer support. When we reach a lot of people, have been around philanthropic causes. So I think when you can reach and make a difference with a lot of people, now more than ever before social actually impacts people, right? It's not just a like or a share, right? People are on this all day long. This is how they consume their lives. So if you want to make more of an impact, don't discredit the likes, shares, comments. Figure out how you can get 1,000 comments, then 5,000 comments, right? What is going to take it to the next level so that you can have that impact with your business or your cause?
Bob DePasquale: Yeah, that's great advice. That's great advice. I'm all about action and things you can do to start moving in the right direction. So what's your advice for, because you're kind of touching on some advice already, some tips and I appreciate it, but what's your advice for someone who is kind of in that stage of life where they're thinking, "Man, I do want to make a little bit more of an impact"? Whatever their message is, whether it's a professional, or maybe it is philanthropic, what's the first one or two things that they should do to start moving in the right direction?
Joe Nolan: Yeah, I think first is, and maybe this is one A, right, is understand what truly do you care about, and have that very defined. So I think once someone does that okay, then how do you do it? I'd say what I call it is called mirroring to win. This is oftentimes the Burger King versus McDonald's right? McDonald's is everywhere, Burger King went across the street and put a restaurant right across of every McDonald's. So look at okay, what the heck does that mean for impact? Look at the two things. One, and we typically call it like a two by two, right? So look at two other brands or people that are in the space that you're in, right?
So say if you were working for a charity of some kind, whatever it might be, that's what you want to do at night, right? That's what you want to do at night and weekends outside of work is to help this charity. Look at other people who are helping that charity. Look at other Instagram handles who are helping that charity, see what they're doing. What are they talking about? What are the topics? What does the content look like? Is it just raw footage shot on their iPhone? Is it pictures of people out in an event? What is it, right? Are they sharing articles from other industry organizations? So find two of them and follow them, and really study them and see what they're doing.
Hey, and look, maybe that takes a couple days, right? This isn't something that takes forever. Then the two pieces we typically say, find two other brands that aren't related to your space at all. I typically say to people, find the brands that you love, that you like to follow. Sometimes find one that has ... These should have virtually nothing to do with your space. You look at those brands and you then try to relate what they're doing to your cause, and their hashtag campaign is, and how their content looks. You need to say, "Wow, okay. That might be for a pair of running shoes, but actually look at how well people engage. If we turn this into this phrase, that might be great for the charitable foundation." What I found by using this two by two methodology is you get a really great sense of what works in your space and then you immediately bring in new ideas. So you have essentially new ideas by default from looking in these other industries, any industry. I'm looking at a Logitech mouse. Okay, go look at them. By the way, they have great social media. But that might have anything to do with your foundation, right? But you can translate that, you immediately have new ideas, and then as you're going through it, it really helps kickstart your creative process as well.
So I think that two by two process, if you complete that, that actually unlocks a whole world of answers in a little amount of time, right? Three or four nights after work sit down, sit on your couch, do this, engage your friends and family with it if you want, and you will literally, take notes, and you could literally begin to lay out your plan of action for several months even. Two, three months of content and how you're going to do it, and why you're going to do it, and who can help you get content, things like that.
So look, we do that with big brands, right? All the brands I mention, people go to my LinkedIn, that is done at every one of those brands, and sometimes it's even done quarterly because it's such an effective way of growth, and creativity, and keeping your account very current and up to speed with the latest and greatest.
Bob DePasquale: That's cool. That's cool. So you mentioned we've known each other for 18 years, and you live up in the Northeast, and you did mention to me that you're considering moving down to a warmer weather down here at some point. The home of Speaking of Impact is down here near Fort Lauderdale. So my secret or the thing I want to tell you is I actually started playing the drums.
Joe Nolan: No way.
Bob DePasquale: Right? Can you picture me playing? Okay. On another episode we're going to tell some stories from college. That's another completely different, that's a different topic. But anyway, so I picked up the drums, ironically probably about almost two years ago now, so right around the time that JONO Marketing was probably starting. You mentioned about opening up or getting over that first hurdle or doing those first couple of things and then suddenly seeing a bunch of more questions or ideas. I kind of liken it to practicing the drums. When I first started it was I have no musical talent, my voice is terrible, other than maybe talking, hopefully you can understand it on the recording, but my singing voice is terrible. I can't play any instruments. I have very, very limited talent when it comes to music. I couldn't hear a note to save my life, but I have a little bit of rhythm. But when you pick up the drums and you got four different limbs trying to go, it's very, very humbling.
There was a point that it may have been a month, a couple months in, or there was a certain point I'll never forget, you can ask my family, and I told them, "All of a sudden it clicked. I got this baseline, now I can actually practice and learn the drums because I got some basic skills down." And that just totally reminded me of what you were saying there because if you can just get a ... Sometimes it's that first little hump that you got to get over, and then all of a sudden the creative juices start flowing.
Joe Nolan: Yeah, and I think if people have the right perspective going into it, which is this is not going to be easy. I equate two things to it kind of every day. One is that Winston Churchill saying, right? "If you find yourself going through hell, keep going." Then it doesn't have to be a negative, right? Learning the drums certainly is not a traumatic experience, right?
I guess depends who is listening, right?
Bob DePasquale: It's the good thing that one of the parts of playing the drums is hitting things.
Joe Nolan: Yeah, yeah.
Bob DePasquale: Frustrated.
Joe Nolan: Yeah, I think that's one part, right? Is keep going, right? You have to keep trying it, you have to keep doing it, right? I mean, like we just mentioned, you have to post four to seven days on a row before you begin to do better than what you're doing right now when it comes to social media, right? Those are facts, those are things we see with clients when we're measuring everything, and that's over years of doing it.
The other thing, there is a show on Amazon, kind of like a spy thriller I think called The American, and at the very end of the movie they asked him like, "Why were you doing these things, this operative and why did you keep going?" And he said, "Once you go halfway, all you need to do is go one more step and then it becomes inefficient for you to turn around and go back, and it's not rational to do that." I certainly always say to people like, "Be prudent and you don't want to keep going down the wrong path." Right? Obviously, but I think that's something that when I saw it two years ago, that quote resonated with me just in general.
Even in day-to-day life was you've come this far or you've invested this much, okay, now this is a point, do we decide to go forward? If yes, why? If no, then why not? Virtually with anything. It doesn't have to be positive or negative. I was looking to try and buy new kitchen cutlery. I mean, this might sound like a crazy example, but I was like, "Man, I might be moving. There might be sales for the holiday week." All these things, so I said, "You know what? Okay, I've been looking but I'm going to pause on my purchase right now." And so you could equate that to this quote from the movie. Yeah, I just think it's a matter of keep going, right? That doesn't mean in the same direction, right? I think that's where a lot of people get caught up with, that phrase is like oh, keep going. No, it's like you just keep moving forward, moving in a direction, and typically positive things happen. Not always, but you're more likely I think to be successful by doing than by not doing.
Bob DePasquale: That's cool. That's cool. All right, so as we wrap up maybe you can tell me kind of what's next or what's on the horizon for you and JONO Marketing. What's coming up soon?
Joe Nolan: Yeah, look, we're really excited. I think the current events a lot of people are moving into the digital space more, and certainly that's unfortunate, the reason for that obviously is very unfortunate, but at the same time a lot of people need help migrating their businesses into the digital space, of all sizes. So I think we're really well positioned to capitalize on that demand for digital moving forward. We've had a good string of wins. We signed some new clients here in the US, some overseas. So we're continuing to grow in 2020, and I think that's it. We do a lot of app marketing work now. We're getting very great recognition for the creative talent that we work with, which I mentioned is just world-class. They've won several international awards in the past two years. Yeah, I mean, it almost feels like the sky is the limit, but being prudent about how we grow and making sure, as you mention, it's a really heavy brand promise, and what we definitely don't want to do is dilute that brand promise. So we feel good about where we are now, but we feel very fortunate that our hard work has paid off and we've brought onboard these new clients here in the last 30 to 45 days.
Bob DePasquale: Awesome, man. Well, I appreciate you coming on and sharing some wisdom. I know there's a whole lot more information up there that we can probably talk about on a future conversation. Why don't you let people know where they can find you, get ahold of you out on social?
Joe Nolan: Yeah, absolutely. For anyone that's checking out the site it's jonomarketing.com. JONO is J-O-N-O and then marketing.com, and you can feel free to hit me up on social. My Instagram handle is @josephjnolan on Instagram. That would probably be the easiest way. I haven't posted in a little while, so I've been busy, but trust me, all of my clients are following the advice that I gave to you all today.
Bob DePasquale: All the clients are posting, you're not.
Joe Nolan: Yeah, the clients are posting, yeah. We're focused on helping others, right? But yeah, no, it would be great. Feel free to reach out. It's great to connect with people. And speaking of impact, I mean, when you brought this opportunity to my attention, I think I was super jazzed about it because the ability to share experiences that I've had with others, that to me is invaluable, and as I mentioned, that's how I learned, right? I mean, I asked for help. I sought out other people and I'm just trying to pay that forward because that's why where I am today, without a doubt.
Bob DePasquale: Awesome, man. Well, appreciate it. Thanks for coming on Speaking of Impact and we'll talk soon.
Joe Nolan: Thank you.
Bob DePasquale: Wow, social is crazy. I had no idea social media can touch on that many aspects of a business, branding, marketing, customer service. So let me get this straight. Twitter is like a customer helpline. First response resolution, ha, I think not. So how can we use social media to make an impact on the world? Do you have a message for everyone to hear? I'd start with social. If you do, I'd love to hear about it. Hit me up on my Instagram direct messages, @bdepa or head over to BobDePasquale.com to connect and pick up your free initiatives for impact. I really want to hear what's going on in the world of impact and what ideas are out there. Thanks for listening to the show, you won't want to miss the episodes coming up either. Be smart out there and talk to you next time. See you.
Thanks for listening today. If you'd like to connect with Bob, visit bobdepasquale.com. Tune in next time for more inspiring stories and remember to like and subscribe so you don't miss an episode.
