Minter Dialogue with Neal Schaffer

In this episode, I host Neal Schaffer, a digital marketing expert and author of “Digital Threads: The Small Business and Entrepreneur Playbook for Digital Marketing.” Neal shares his journey from Southern California to becoming a global influencer, educator, and consultant. He discusses his extensive experience in Japan, where he lived for 15 years, and how it shaped his approach to social media and digital marketing. Neal emphasises the importance of a results-driven, experimental mindset in marketing, inspired by the PDCA (Plan, Do, Check, Act) methodology. He also highlights the value of long-term relationships and a holistic perspective in business. Neal’s latest book aims to democratise digital marketing strategies for small businesses and entrepreneurs, helping them make meaningful connections and achieve sustainable growth.

Please send me your questions — as an audio file if you’d like — to nminterdial@gmail.com. Otherwise, below, you’ll find the show notes and, of course, you are invited to comment. If you liked the podcast, please take a moment to rate it here.

To connect with Neal Schaffer:

• You can find Neal on X/Twitter: @NealSchaffer
• Neal Schaffer on Linkedin
• Check out Neal’s own podcast, Maximise Your Social Influence
• Check out Neal’s eponymous site here
• Get a free preview of Neal Schaffer’s book, “Digital Threads,” here

Other mentions/sites:

• Prior episode with Neal Schaffer on The Age of Influence (MDE380); and in 2018: Using social media and crafting the best strategy to drive your business (MDE273)

Further resources for the Minter Dialogue podcast:

Meanwhile, you can find my other interviews on the Minter Dialogue Show in this podcast tab, on Megaphone or via Apple Podcasts. If you like the show, please go over to rate this podcast via RateThisPodcast! And for the francophones reading this, if you want to get more podcasts, you can also find my radio show en français over at: MinterDial.fr, on Megaphone or in iTunes. Music credit: The jingle at the beginning of the show is courtesy of my friend, Pierre Journel, author of the Guitar Channel. And, the new sign-off music is “A Convinced Man,” a song I co-wrote and recorded with Stephanie Singer back in the late 1980s (please excuse the quality of the sound!).

Transcription courtesy of Flowsend.ai, an AI full-service for podcasters

Minter Dial: Neal Schaffer, back in business. You have just produced your fifth book, digital threads, the small business and entrepreneur playbook for digital marketing. But before we get into that, let’s go. We’ll start with a little bit of who is Neal?

Neal Schaffer: Well, hey, Minter. The last time we met up it was in a London coffee shop. So, always good to see you again, although it’s virtual. So, my name is Neal Schaffer. I, as you can tell by my accent, am an Americana based in Southern California. I am a digital content influencer, social media marketing, author, consultant, speaker, university educator. I teach at Rutgers Business School in New Jersey, at the UCLA extension in Los Angeles. I used to go to the Irish Management Institute every year to teach there as part of a digital business program. I’ve taught at the University of Yavaskala in Finland. So, the educator side, speaker side, I’ve spoken at over a dozen countries for hundreds of events over the last decade plus. Consultant side I am what you would call a fractional CMO, which is a very, very popular term, but basically a marketing leader who works on a fractional basis with multiple companies that lack that deep marketing expertise. Or instead of hiring an agency or a one off consultant, they want someone that’s going to be part of the team where they retain the IP. And I’m also an author, so I’ve written two books on LinkedIn. My third book, maximize your social on social media marketing strategy. My fourth book, the Age of Influence on influencer marketing, and my most recent book, Digital Threads, which is really a, some of my reviewers have called it a modern marketing playbook, but it’s really looking at, through all of my work, all of a lot of strategies that have worked in a lot of industries and for a lot of companies, but really democratizing that information so that every small business, every entrepreneur can really take advantage of it. So, I think at the heart of everything I do, minter, it sounds really crazy, but you know, I am an educator and the greatest gift we can give to the world is contribute to society on a daily basis. So, if I can help the entrepreneurs, the businesses, make better connections with customers, with employees through marketing, and be able to profit from that and invest that money and hiring more people and donating to nonprofits, then I will have fulfilled my purpose in this world. So, super.

Minter Dial: Well, I do want to circle back to one thing, because obviously you are quite influential in Japan of all places, which has a whole different social media ecosystem and totally different culture, as I understand it. You speak Japanese, you are a drummer in a band tell us about your experience in Japan.

Neal Schaffer: Well, I grew up in a part of Southern California, and there’s many of these parts of Southern California today, but when I grew up in high school, most of my friends were Asian American, and I would go to birthday parties where I was the only Caucasian Chinese American, Korean American, Japanese American, Vietnamese, Americana. And I thought to myself, what is the connection here? So, when I went off to university, I was committed to learning a foreign language and doing a junior year abroad. And at the time, Japanese was actually more popular than Chinese, believe it or not, because of the bubble economy there. But I decided that Chinese looks like the hardest one. I looked at Arabic as well, which would have been a lot of fun. I looked at Russian, but I thought Chinese, just being able to understand and speak Chinese characters would be a very, very cool skill to have. So, I took Chinese. I did my junior year abroad in China, and most of the foreign students in China that were my classmates were Japanese. And so, after we had the Tiananmen demonstration in Beijing that year, so I wasn’t going to be able to get a job in China. But Japan was booming. My roommate was from, you know, Kawasaki outside Tokyo. So, I went to visit him on my way back to the United States, and I said, you know what? I’m going to learn Japanese senior year, and I’m going to start my career in Japan with the intention of going back to China in a few years when things settle down. So, obviously, the net net is I ended up working for a semiconductor manufacturer based in Kyoto, Japan. So, that was a truly amazing experience. Lived there 15 years, learned the language, the culture, you know, learned to play the drums. I was in a Japanese, what we would call pop funk, like Jamiroquai influenced with a female pop vocalist, and I was a drummer. Learned how to scuba dive, learn how to ski, learn how to enjoy beer, because it tasted a lot better there than in my United States. And, yeah, I met my wife there. And when our baby was six months old, that’s when we came back here to the United States. So, you know, like anyone else who has a global footprint, I always knew that. And when I came back to the United States, I was still in this b, two b sales, b, two b marketing, high tech industry. I was in what’s called embedded software for set top boxes and other things. But I always knew that I wanted to keep my foot in the door there. So, when social media started happening, I started writing books. We went back to visit family, and I would always, like, network or find ways to network, go to meetups and meet people. And I started with LinkedIn, and it’s like, okay, who’s in Tokyo? If I type in social media in Tokyo, who pops up? And lo and behold, it was a gentleman who went to the same college that I went to called Amherst College, which only has a population of 1600. So, pretty amazing to find someone not just in Tokyo for my college, but that also an interest in social media. So, from there, I just met more people. And the one thing, though, minter, is that of the four books that I’ve published, I’ve published in, you know, in Chinese, Arabic, Vietnamese, Bulgarian, or Arabic, but I’ve never had a deal in Japan. So, I actually was in Japan last month for digital threads, and I’m currently negotiating a Japanese version of that. And to me, that would be the ultimate of being able to have my thoughts out there in Japanese, in the Japanese market. But that’s the culmination of 15 years of networking, really, and doing speeches, getting to know people, helping people that result in those sort of efforts.

Minter Dial: Anyway, brilliant. As you know, I know a little bit about Japan, and I’m wondering to what extent that those 15 years formed, structured, changed the way you approach social media or digital marketing, because, I mean, between the language, you know, the ridicule of 140 characters compared to us line, the different media, social media and everything, what kind of influence has it had on you as a business person and in your job?

Neal Schaffer: Well, if you’re listening to this podcast, you can’t see me nodding while minter is talking. So, I definitely have this very Japanese body language, I’d say my fashion short hair is not as common in Japan for men as it is in the United States. Men have been using cosmetic accessories, skin moisturizers, and hair creams way more. And maybe from your background, minter, you might know about that. It is a very, very different culture. And because I lived there since I was between the ages of 22 and 37, those really formative years when you were a young adult, they were extremely influential. I think what it’s given me is because I’ve had the deal when I was in China, I actually ended up going back to China for the semiconductor manufacturer and heading up their China sales for some startups. I was VP of Asia sales, so I had to do business in Korea, China, Japan, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore. And you understand that you need a very, very holistic perspective on business to be able to deal with so many different types of people. And it’s not just currencies and different contract issues, but different ways of doing business. I mean, I don’t smoke cigarettes, but in China I smoke cigarettes because that was a common thing you do in between a meeting when everybody else in the room was smoking, right. As a way of building rapport. So, obviously, you know, I don’t, I don’t smoke cigarettes anymore. But just to give you an example, I think as far as business goes, it’s given me a very, very rational perspective. Part of that also is because I’m from B two B sales. And when I started with social media marketing, digital marketing, it was LinkedIn, right? And a lot of people just saw this a waste of time. They didn’t see it as a tool and they didn’t have a results driven approach like I did in sales, where every quarter I had to report back, you know, I had to report back on my pipeline. You’re only as good as your last quarter of sales, basically, when you’re. And even then, it all resets the first day of the new quarter. So, that’s given me when I started doing more with social media marketing and digital marketing, a very, very results driven approach. And I think when social media just started, there was a lot of PR people that were very famous and influencers, and PR still held a lot of the social media, the budget per se, but for me, it was less about fluff. But how do we measure, how do we monetize, how do we look at the impact that this has when we start leveraging it as a tool? So, I believe that that rational perspective has led me, and we talked about this before we started. The name of my company is called PDCA Social. It’s because I learned about PDCA, also called the Deming Circle. For those of you that have ever studied quality control, you’ve heard of Professor Edwards Deming, and he was revered as a superhero in Japan because it was his learnings that actually influenced the Toyota manufacturing, Panasonic manufacturing, and he’s absolutely revered there. So, at this Japanese semiconductor manufacturer, on your five-year anniversary of working there, you go through this training. And part of the training was learning about the Deming Circle, and how do you apply that to your everyday job? So, when I started consulting with companies in social media marketing, I went back to that and said, well, you know, nobody, people aren’t creating strategies around this yet. How do you, what should be the framework here? And I immediately thought of that PDCA, that if we treat this all as an experiment, we plan it out, we do according to plan, we check, and then we act upon that, right? And it’s a never-ending circle of Kaizen. So, when I launched an agency, which I don’t have anymore, but I actually launched my agency to help Japanese clients with their North American and Eeuropean, their English digital marketing, I immediately named my company PDCA Social, because the PDCA is very much aligned with what Japanese companies want, this data driven approach, and then social, because before digital, I really focused on social media marketing. So, that’s the story, and it still influences me. Just the value of long-term relationships. There’s a term called nemo washi. Nemoashi basically means you want to get everyone to approve of something beforehand before you actually propose it. So, it’s behind the doors meetings, it’s going out at night and having a beer, and it’s this process of not like, forcing people onto something, but literally, I won’t say beating around the bush. I remember a Japanese executive on an airplane out, the Tokyo one, said, I’ll give you some advice on Japanese. He says, between an American potential client and you as a salesperson, it’s a direct line. If it’s a European customer, you need to go a little bit around, but if it’s a Japanese customer, you really need to go. It’s just a very, very different way of operating, a very less direct way of communicating like you have in the United States. So, all of that advice has just, you know, helped me better understand. And I still mentor to this day, I still just have this extremely holistic perspective on all of this. Right. And that’s why when I started writing digital threads, I realized that some things in digital marketing lack this holistic perspective, even to today. And people just do things because they’ve always been done that way when maybe they don’t need to do things that way, or maybe there’s a better reason for doing it that way that can give them more intent with their activities. So, I think it infuses everything I do and who I am.

Minter Dial: So just to be clear, PDCA stands for plan.

Neal Schaffer: Do check, act nice.

Minter Dial: And what I retain from that is this idea of keeping an experimental mindset like a scientist. You’re going to do an experiment. What are we going to do? What are we trying to achieve? And then if it works, if it doesn’t work, then reset. Learn from your failure, if it didn’t, and apply that to business. And I think that’s a very powerful statement.

Neal Schaffer: I’d say, yeah, I’d say that’s one of three important things, this experimental mindset. Number two is this thought of Kaizen that you’re always in experimental mode, because the landscape is always shifting. The other important part is this results driven process. So, I actually started my career. I left out one important piece of story before I got into b. Two b sales and biz dev and marketing. I actually started out in the accounting department. And this is a really famous company in Japan that in the nineties saw a boom in their stock price and they began to do national tv commercials and they became very big. But one of the reasons they got very big was the finance department I was in. If you wanted to buy something for the company that was valued at over $2,000 in current us dollars terms, you had to actually fill out a form that had to get stamped by ten different people throughout the company. And this is part of this. We had about 2500 people at headquarters at that time. This is part of the Nemewashi. Everyone needed to have their stamp on it. But you also had to calculate the ROI of that $2,000 plus investment. And it did not matter what department you were from. Right? So, that sort of mindset whenever, and we would have budget hearings every year. And the budget hearings weren’t, well, compared to last year, we’re only going to ask for 2% more. They were zero. Reset. Why do we have this line item here? What is the Roi of this? So, if you were to look at all of your. I mean, we don’t want to look at people expenses in that way, but there are things that we spend a lot of money on, especially in marketing. Well, what is, what is the value? Right? And I think that those are three takeaways from the PDCA, are those three things. And I think each one of them is extremely powerful in its own way.

Minter Dial: I definitely had my experience with Nemeshi, where it really felt like lobbying, diplomacy, getting everything done before the meeting, and so that everyone could say yes at the time of the meeting. And it was very much a confusing thing. The other thing I’m picking up on is this holistic idea. And my experience when I was working in Asia would be about how they look at things like health more holistically than the specific ailment. They might think about the bigger picture. And when you ask them to describe, what’s that on your wall there, Neal, for those who can’t see it, it’s a poster. And someone will say, what do you see in it? An extraterrestrial spaceship? And words I want to believe, but a Japanese person might say, well, I see a room with a person in the middle beside a door, and there’s a poster on the wall and the wall is cream, whereas the typical North American approach seems to be much more detail oriented within as opposed to the context and the holistic approach. Is that a fair recap?

Neal Schaffer: Yeah, we had a little internal battle yesterday. I bought some new, I’m usually a speed stick guy, but I bought body spray for the first time. Dove is the brand, and I sprayed up before I went out. And my wife claims that she had her headache because of the scent of the spray. And I’m just thinking that in America, people would think of other reasons why they have a headache. They would not think that a scent can cause that. Right? For example, and by the way, she has her headache again today. And I didn’t use a spray, so it wasn’t a spray. But it’s a great example of. I see that a lot when it comes to health. You know, instead of thinking of these artificial sweeteners, you know, eat more vegetables, eat more fruit, eat more fish, instead of taking medicine. Are there any? So, yeah, I do believe it is very holistic. I mean, we have, like, Chinese herbal medicine is its own sort of thing. And I think in Europe, I would tend to believe, because you have so many different cultures there and languages, that it requires a holistic way of doing business as well. So, I’ve always thought that Europe, depending on the country, was closer to Japan in many ways than the United States.

Minter Dial: Well, we could talk about that, I think. I mean, to start, maybe I’m off. Well, Japan is generally a far more homogenous country than a lot of other countries are. And despite being huge and very different from the north to the south and everything, but the notion of your wife’s nose reminds me of my days formulating fragrances specifically for the floral. I can’t remember what it was. It had to go as combination of. And it was always floral, the fragrances we would have to do. So, talking about digital threads, I mean, digital marketing, for me, if I have to sort of go back, I feel like it’s changed, but not changed in some regards. It seems still very messy. There’s obviously been pay to play is now de facto the model. The idea of freebies and maybe doing things like you were saying before, where you didn’t know what the ROI was more common at the beginning in the experimental fashion, because you couldn’t possibly predict whether a blog post would get a million views or 24, because that’s just the nature of the game. Sometimes you have the right link, you get someone links back to you, and then Oprah speaks about you and holy smokes, but you can’t predict that kind of stuff. So, what made you write digital threads? And maybe to what extent was Covid-19 an instigator for it?

Neal Schaffer: Yeah. So, Covid-19 definitely influenced the work. And I think we all agree that Covid really accelerated what we call the digital transformation. It’s funny, in the 2010s, it always was connected with it, and digital transformation almost meant the IT industry. And I always thought of marketing, digital transformation as well as consumers become digital first. And that’s why the subtitle digital first marketing on the digital threads book. So, I think Covid accelerated things. And also, for me personally, I just come out with a book on influencer marketing called the Age of Influence. And during COVID I had some of the best financial years because I had companies that were okay hiring people remotely. And because of a book, I had a lot of opportunities to work and I didn’t have to travel any. So, my expenses were very low, working from home. But what I saw was that companies had this frame of mind that said, well, we need to do influencer marketing. And they really weren’t looking at their business holistically in terms of, well, do you really need to do it? Are there more effective ways of doing it? Or if you do it, do you understand that because you only have 100 followers on Instagram and you want to leverage influencers on Instagram when they tag you, what is that going to say about your brand? And you sort of lose credibility. So, it isn’t as effective as it can be. So, you know, a lot of the pieces, I call them threads, obviously have been in place, but sometimes companies don’t do them in the right order. Sometimes they look at each one of them and I talk about marketing containers, but sometimes I look at each one of them silos, like, oh, if we just do influence marketing or we just do Google Ads or. But actually they’re all interrelated is, I think, one really, really important concept. I think the other thing, Minter, a lot of my friends who are other marketing authors, they understand all these concepts, but 99% of small businesses don’t. Or I’m sure that there are concepts that they don’t understand. Or maybe with SEO, they’re used to paying an agency $10,000 a month thinking that they’re getting good results, but, you know, and basing that on the reports that they get from the agency without their own holistic understanding of that value. I mean, I’ve worked with clients wherever, you know, they were spending $5,000 a month on Google Ads and zero ROI right, when there are better ways of doing it. So, you know, my parents grew up in the recession in New York City, and I think that, that, you know, when I, when I was growing up, I could only buy clothing if it was on the bargain bin, had to be on sale. We were always proud of how much discount we got off something when we bought something. And that, I think, is also that childhood has infused the way I work with companies like don’t. I don’t want you to waste your money, right, if there’s alternatives. And that’s also how I prove the ROI of my own worth, is saying, not only you’re investing in me, but I’m going to help you save that money in addition to everything else you’re going to get out of that relationship. So, I just hate seeing companies waste money when they don’t need to. And I’m hoping that digital threads provides them more of a guide to help them really question what they’re doing, even though it’s been around for a while and even though they’ve been doing the same things. And maybe it’s working, but maybe there’s a more effective way to do it with less money.

Minter Dial: One gets the feeling that certainly larger businesses that you just anniversary or what we’ve been doing, that’s how we do things nowadays. But if you were to speak to a small business owner or an entrepreneur, what would be one practical tip or thought that they probably haven’t got in their wheelhouse today that they should be, and possibly, as they listen to this tomorrow morning, get up and put this into place, what kind of advice might you provide for them that they’re not thinking about today?

Neal Schaffer: In the book, I talk about the SES framework and I think for every one of the letters in that framework, I can give a little bit of advice. So, the SES framework stands for search, email, social specifically, in that order. And really everything that you can do in digital marketing, we can compartmentalize into one of those letters. So, for each one of these, the search, you need content for digital marketing. And when you have content, you have a lot of advantages in being able to repurpose that content, be able to be found in search engine, use that content for a lot of things. But I think that, oh, we’ll just put up Instagram profile and get lots of influencers to talk about us. That’s one side of the story. But really, in order to have all of your digital bases covered, you need to have content, lots of it. But it needs to be done in certain ways depending on your objective. So, I talk about this building of a library of content, but I think a lot of small business owners and entrepreneurs really devalue that value of content, which you’re going to need. And it’s not just for blogs or SEO, it’s really throughout your digital marketing. So, for the s search, that would be the number one thing that I don’t think small businesses and entrepreneurs really value as much as they need to. The second one is just the value of email minder. And maybe it’s because social media is just so sexy, but nobody talks about email yet. It is the only channel that you own and time after time it has the highest Roi per dollar. It helps you build relationships in a way that other channels can’t because you do have that one-to-one relationship. It can be automated. Not placing enough value on building and really cultivating relationships through email, I think is another really big missing item from a lot of small businesses then this is especially in Japan, where they devalue email even more. And there were some marketing automation companies like HubSpot that went into Japan and some companies evangelized them and didn’t really teach them the right way to do it. So, all of a sudden everyone’s getting spammed by all these marketing automation emails and now it has a bad connotation there. But anyway, we’re going to try to change that. And then the social side, I think I have a pretty passionate chapter about user generated content. The fact that you should be creating all of your own content for social media, I think is not the right way to think about social media. And I know a lot of people think I’m crazy, but really, social media is about communication. It’s about meeting people and people don’t want to be sold to. So, how do we lean into that? And that to me is incentivizing, is getting people around you, whether they’re employees or customers, in some way, to start getting them to talk about you in social media in an authentic way. And I talk about several strategies in the book of how to do that. But I do think that that is a big missing piece because normally small businesses were like, okay, we have an intern or a younger who understands social media. We’re going to start creating content. Let’s post every day. And it just goes into the abyss of the algorithms not liking it, people not liking it. It looks like it comes from a business. It really is not. Social media was made for people not for business is something I’ve been saying for more than a decade. And I think we need a new approach. So, I think with each one of these, we need a new approach. And hopefully those three things will help the small business owner entrepreneur listening. Obviously digital threads goes into much more depth, but hopefully that gives you a feel for my position on these things.

Minter Dial: Yeah. The idea is to give a little teaser here. You said that email is the only channel you own. I would have thought you could say you own your website, you own your website.

Neal Schaffer: But the fact of the matter is that most traffic comes, most traffic on the Internet comes from search engines. So, you will have your passionate customers who bookmark your website, who go back to your website, but most traffic is generated from search. Right? So, in that aspect, yes, you own your website, you own the traffic that you can directly get to your website, but you do not own what results are in search results. And therefore, that organic traffic, which I think if you want to reach out to people that don’t know about you passively, that is obviously a very, very strategic thing to do. So, yeah, I mean, if you look at that owned media, earn media, paid media, these traditional ways of looking at it, you do. But I would say from a digital marketing perspective, email is the only one, is the only communication channel, let’s put it that way, that you own, that guarantees that you’re going to be heard. People will not come to your website. They may not come to your website, right? They may not find you in search results, they may not follow you on social media, even if they follow you on social media, they may not see your content. But if you have an email relationship with them, then you can rest assured that when you have something important to say, you can at least let that other person know about it. And that is a very, very powerful thing compared to those other channels.

Minter Dial: I want to get back to email in a moment, but just to talk about websites a second. I read in your book you talk about domain authority, which I thought had died an ugly death when Google stopped doing PageRank. Domain authority still is relevant. What is domain authority, first of all? And is it still relevant? Should we still be worrying about it?

Neal Schaffer: Well, I think the number is not that important. So, Google used up page rank, which they don’t, and every SEO tool, I don’t need to name names, but there’s three or four pretty famous SEO tools that basically rank on a one to 100 scale the quote unquote authority, domain authority. There’s different domain ranking, there’s different names for them. But I asked the question in digital threads, if you were a search engine and you had ten pieces of identical content, or pretty close content for a search query, how would you rank that results for that search query? Obviously, Google is always testing, and I’m using Google as an example, but they’re not the only search engine. They’re always testing their seeing, you know, click through rate on search results they’re seeing when someone goes to the page, how long do they stay on the page? Most websites have Google Analytics installed, so it’s very convenient for them to get this data and, you know, they pretty much understand what content performs. But in many situations, right, if I have one piece of content that has 100 different websites linking to it, and I have another piece of content where there’s no websites linking to it, it’s just like on Amazon, if you see a book with 100 reviews or no reviews, right? There is a impression that because other websites have linked to this piece of content that somehow they are an authority on the subject matter. So, I think this backlinking is one thing. I think the other aspect of authority that I talk about with relation to the library or content is, okay, well, this, I’m comparing two different blogs. They’re both talking about influencer marketing and I use this as an example in the book. One of them is a social media marketing tool that 1% of their blog posts are about influencer marketing. Here is a influencer marketing author and 10% of his blog posts are about influencer marketing. Looking at it that way, the more content you have about a subject, or the greater ratio of content you have about a subject, I do believe this also is something that Google looks into. If you were to create a word cloud about all your titles, what would that say about your company? That’s the only way Google can understand what your website, what your business is about by the language you give them. And the blog can be used for that as well. So, that’s why it’s really important to build up. You know, I talk about authority in many different ways, but this idea of a library of content, of blogging and publishing content around your niche, of building up this authority with air quotes in the search engine eyes, that you’re an expert on something, right? And I think that’s another really, really important aspect. These are two different chapters, you know, one on backlinks and one on your library of content, but those are two equally important things. So, I do think, I mean, if you’re a search engine, you have to take that into consideration. Do they take it into consideration every time, sometimes on certain search results. Who the heck knows, right? It’s a lottery. No SEO expert can give you any answer, especially after the most recent updates. But needless to say, these are still important concepts. And it’s funny, Minter, I’ve been attending some webinars on generative AI SEO. So, how do we now get our content to appear in generative AI search results, in chat GPT search results, in cloud search results? And it comes down to the same thing we’ve been talking about, right? It comes down to this notion of domain authority or how many people are mentioning your brand on the Internet or on social media, that somehow these things are also playing into this measurement of authority because a lot of people are talking about you. So, I think what is old is new again in many ways. And I challenge anyone to go out there and look at some of the blog posts on the, on how to optimize your website for generative AI, for chat, GPT and stuff. And it’s the same advice because these are search engines and there’s only a set number of things they can look for that are important in deciding what content to rank.

Minter Dial: So, I’m wondering if you could level set me. I have probably two to three requests every day for somebody proposing some guest blog post with a link back to their blog, as if I’m going to say yes. I don’t know what earth or, you know, moon they live on. I don’t know who pays these people? Are these people doing the right thing to do this sort of a, you know, give me a backlink. I love you. I’m going to pay you $50. I mean, because my opinion is if I, if I take on board those random requests for $50, well, what does that do to my brand? What am I actually saying? I’m like just a slut for business?

Neal Schaffer: Yeah, no, absolutely. And I’ve seen a lot of blogs become that. So, guest blogging is an interesting thing. And this notion of link swaps, I talk about this in the chapter, backlink is an interesting thing. So, I have a very different view on guest blogging because I started my blog. My first book was called Windmill Networking, Understanding, leveraging and maximizing LinkedIn. So, I started blogging 2008, and in 2009 I had a request from a nonprofit marketer in St. Louis, Missouri, who said, Neal, I’d love to contribute to your blog. I love what you’re talking about. I talk about nonprofit marketing. Would you consider my application? I’m like, you know what? That’d be great to offer different perspectives because my readers want to know everything, not just from me, but, but what they need to learn about digital marketing. And I ended up converting that into a blog called maximize Social Business where I had at 1.20 contributors that were contributing on a monthly basis. And I had some pretty influential people there. And what’s interesting is that I want to say about 2013 or 14, and I started that back in 2011, 2013 or 14, I started getting requests and I would still accept them. But then I realized that when I did a search for them, they didn’t exist online, but they wrote a lot of blog posts and they often use@gmail.com and the language in their blog post is usually different from the language in their email. So, at some point I started realizing that there’s an industry, it’s called the content marketing industry or the SEO industry, where there are companies that are just paying agencies to try to get x backlinks per month because they know it’s important for SEO based on what I talked about. So, you have an army of people and they may use different email addresses of random people that are constantly, hey, you have a broken link, you may want to link to our article or hey, this is a great resource, you should really link to it or can I guest blog? And so I always, you know, I have this separate free ebook on guest blogging. Maybe we can share the link in the show notes. But my thing is I have an editorial calendar. These are the topics I’m building my library content. I want to cover these topics. Some topics like generative AI marketing, LinkedIn influencer marketing, some things I do not let guest bloggers talk about. But if it’s, you know, recently I had a director of marketing from Getresponse. He submitted a blog post about email marketing and SMS and how to use them both together. Brilliant article and a brilliant guy. So, when I find guest bloggers that I have vetted them, they work at real companies, they have real expertise and they help me fill out that editorial calendar. Like I might have time to get to that email and SMS marketing blog post. But if I can get a two expert in that helps accelerate my editorial calendar and it helps, you know, it’s one less piece of content I need to create. And it helps me now to develop a deeper relationship with this company, get response and who knows what, what future that might hold. In fact, I’m going to have on my podcast now to talk about this subject because this is another area I don’t talk about in digital threads. But SMS marketing is also a very untapped area outside of email marketing. So, I think that there is a strategic way to leverage guest bloggers. But I think you need to be very careful. Now, you also have the people saying, hey, do you want to participate in a link exchange? And I’ll be very honest, I have had a very, very famous, probably the most famous company in digital marketing reach out to me and we have strategically exchanged links because we both want to help support each other’s content. So, I know that this takes place and I know that there’s a lot of shady characters, but I also know that businesses are paying agencies to have this done and then the agencies are contacting you. And the link requests that I see from agencies are from very, very well known, respected brands, both B two C brands and B two b brands. So, it is a reality. Do you want to take part in that? You need to be strategic. So, the guest blog post has to come from an expert. It has to be relevant to what my audience is interested in. Right? Like already on my editorial calendar in the sphere of influence that I want to have with my readers for the links. My whole theory is if it is a completely irrelevant company, it’s one thing. But I give the example in the book that I used to blog about LinkedIn for like job search and career and stuff, and I had a friend in Orange County, California who did the same and I would often go out of my way to link to his blog posts. In fact, when I use a tool, I will often go out of my way to link to them as well. Because as you blog, you often mention statistics, you often mention different perspectives and you want to give the source. And in fact, Google likes when you link out because now you’re helping that ecosystem, backlinks improve. So, you know, if I get a request from a company where I’m already using their product, or I think they’re reputable enough that I could use any link, why not use their link? I think this is part of human nature and human emotion. And I think when you look at it that way, there is some value if you’re very selective and it does not devaluate your brand in any way and you begin to develop a relationship and you never know where that’s going to go. So, it’s, it’s a deep, it’s a very, it’s a gray area and it requires a deep thought about it. But if you open your eyes and you strategically feel like you’re in control and it won’t damage your brand or reputation, it’s something to be considered.

Minter Dial: Well, you did mention brand. I want to get to that in a moment. But I wonder, for example, Google Analytics will look at how many outgoing versus incoming links and to what extent do you worry about doing a no ref HTML tag on your links going out? Do you think that you should curb, you might give the link out, but you don’t have a ref, you don’t want it to be recognized or referenced by Google. Is that something that you think about or do you recommend?

Neal Schaffer: I don’t. I recommend if you’re going to link out, you link out and you, it’s a follow link, it’s a standard link. You are, you are adding to the ecosystem that says I validate that this link is worth value. Ideally you want to validate that link is a value. And in fact, you know, when I get these requests, I will often go to Ahrefs has a domain authority number, it’s a free tool and I have a cutoff. And if it is a number below that, I will not link to it. And a lot of startups and companies that aren’t well at the SEO have very, very low numbers. And I do think that that might take down my reputation if I am linking externally to content that is not established. So, I only link to established players. And that’s another thing. One SEO expert, I’m trying to remember his name, but he speaks at conferences and he told me in a podcast interview early on that the links that you link out to also give Google a feel for like what, who’s your company? Who do you hang out with, right? Who’s in your network? Who’s in your posse? So, that’s another thing to remember when thinking about this. So, I think, you know, withholding that information from search engines or somehow devaluing, I don’t think it has any value whatsoever. And I have listed where I will say the top 15 Instagram marketing tools and I’ll link out the 15. So, for me, it’s less about minimizing external links, the more about I need to increase my internal link. So, I actually have a process where I have a minimum of five internal links per blog post so that I take advantage of introducing my content to relevant content, to the readers as well as to the search engines, and make connections and connect the dots between the content.

Minter Dial: I have to ask questions, Neal. The first is you mentioned brand. And of course that’s a topic near to my heart, but I would submit that brand is something that small business owners and entrepreneurs don’t really get a grip on. And to the extent that you don’t have a good grip on your brand, then it becomes hard to have a proper voice. To know that this is content I want or I don’t want it fits with or doesn’t fit with my brand. How do you wrap that around when you’re dealing with digital marketing?

Neal Schaffer: Yeah, branding is something, in all honesty, Minter, I let the experts like you take my thought process, and the thought process of branding, I think are very different in many ways. So, mine is this more tactical, practical, results oriented, where a brand is an asset, I mean, content is an asset as well, as I talk about in the book. But a brand is even a bigger asset that is hard to value. But we know that once a company has a well-established brand, it is the ultimate in customer loyalty and ROI. So, I think that I talk about voice in the book and I do use the word brand, but I think at the beginning, it’s funny you ask, because a future book I’m working on is actually a personal branding one. I’m teaching a new course at UCLA extension called personal branding, how to become an influencer. And I talk about professional branding on LinkedIn as well as this sort of content creator economy branding from a personal perspective. But I think if you look at it from the business perspective, taking those same elements, it does come down to why are you in business? And I use the example of like, you know, Patagonia, where we’re here to help save planet Earth, and that really defines everything they do. Now, how do you define that visually or textually? You obviously need to work a little bit more on, but I think if every company, from my perspective, if I was to make this a practical exercise for smaller businesses, why are you in business? Who are you there to help? Why are you different from everyone else and really start to articulate that into a one sentence bio and have that define everything you do as a company. I think that can be something really, really powerful, not easy to do, but you can use that then whenever you’re building your library content or your email, that can impact the language that you use when you are on an Instagram, that can impact the visuals. It can also impact working with influencers or generating user generating content. In terms of, well, if we really want to help save Planet Earth, we’re going to have our brand ambassadors and our employees together do a highway cleanup. I don’t know, but it really affects, it becomes part of your DNA and should affect everything you do, every specific marketing activity you have to live and breathe it. That would be my, my holistic perspective on branding.

Minter Dial: Well, beautiful. You can imagine I agree with that last zone of question, Neal. It’s been really helpful. I really enjoy your practical approach to all this is with regard to artificial intelligence. You have a chapter on it. It is everywhere. AI and marketing I recently did a podcast with Lucy McCarraher who talked about you can’t use AI to write a book, or at least you shouldn’t use it to write copy in a book and such. Fortunately, there’s ethics somewhere. But AI in marketing, the whole idea of automating everything and making it machine led, I mean, it sounds so sexy. It sounds great for eliminating the messy thing of dealing with people and getting more content out that repurposed automatically because your AI is super smart, loaded up with your personal brand or your personal voice. Where are we in AI and marketing and what should we be thinking about in the future?

Neal Schaffer: Yeah, it’s a great question. I’m actually trying to pull up an article that I just read today from marketingcharts.com and they are a respectable source of data. And this article, and I just throw it out here, whether you agree or disagree, this is the reality. Let me find it real quickly here. Oh, I must have already published it. 1 second here. I think this will be definitely worth the wait.

Minter Dial: We’ll put the link in the show. Note in any event, yes.

Neal Schaffer: Companies around the world will use generative artificial intelligence to produce almost half, 48% of their social media marketing content on average by 2026. That’s a really powerful number. Now, is that image? Is it text? Is it video? We don’t know. But I will say you should never use AI to write content. But AI is really good at looking at content you have and giving you different perspectives. I think we all know that. Or for ideation. So, I’ve been thinking a lot about this Minter, and I think that I was in this personal branding class, one of my students who unfortunately failed the class because he didn’t turn in his final exam, but a really brilliant kid. You know, I was talking about positioning and the concept of position. I brought up the book positioning I started, and he goes, Professor Schaffer, isn’t that a lot like packaging? And I thought that’s a really, really interesting perspective. And it’s something that’s really, I think a lot about it stuck with me because I think of like a YouTube video. It’s about the package of the YouTube thumbnail that sells that video, right? How many times have you seen a thumbnail, you go to the video, it’s completely different. But you’re still, because that thumbnail, you’re still in it. Obviously in consumer-packaged goods, the packaging can influence many ways you think about the brand and the product, what have you. But I think that, you know, packaging, when you start using AI a lot like Chachi BT, there’s so many different ways of saying the same thing and some are more effective than others. But I think at some point, obviously you want to be human, but we’re going to get to a point where the language becomes part of that packaging in the same way that YouTube thumbnail becomes part of that packaging. How is the best way to get your message across? And I think Minter, there is so much AI generated content, it really gets hard to determine whether something is AI or human. And there are best-selling authors now that have said in public this was 100% written by AI. They’ve won awards. I would never use that to write a book myself, but, you know, needless to say. But I do think that there are certain industries, certain use case scenarios where it makes better sense than others. But I would never tell someone to be afraid of AIH. I would always tell them to experiment, understand what you can do with it. For instance, there is a tool called Jasper and I’m not aligned with any specific tool, but they are known as the leader in generative AI marketing. I attend their webinars. They had one webinar. How does our SEO team use our own generative AI tool? I’m like, it’s interesting. I’m going to join it the two different ways which they use it. Number one is a content brief. You want to target a keyword phrase, you want to write about a subject. What are the things that you should include? Please look at the top 20 search results and you can actually like put the links in. I add links one by one and give it some instructions and it will come out with a really, really good content brief that you can base your blogging or if you outsource to a writer on. And I thought that was a brilliant use case scenario because it’s looking outside of the information you already know the other one is in revising content. Here is my current blog post. Here are the top ten blog posts on Google comparing my blog post to theirs. What am I missing? And what’s really great about generative AI? It’s always going to try to give you an answer. So, I’m not going to take what it gives me as I’m not going to ask it. Oh, then can you please write the blog post? But in terms of ideation, you’re tapping into human intelligence. So, to not tap into it, I think, is a waste of our human intelligence, right? I almost think, you know, minter, going back to my days as a drummer, I’m riffing with AI, just like I riff in a studio with a bassist and a guitarist, and we create music. I’m riffing with chat, GPT, getting ideas, and it’s helping improve my thought processes, my content. So, if we look at it as that copilot that Microsoft and others have labeled it, I think you see a lot more use case scenarios of it. I think that let the people who are going to generate AI generator, let them do that. You don’t need to compete with them because people are going to be able to read through it at some point. What remains is the human, the human voice, the human emotions, the human connections, the stories that AI cannot do. And that, I think, is really, you know, my final solution is, you know, you can be part AI on the inside for ideation and research, stuff like that, but 100% human on the outside. And when you just publish AI generated content, it’s 100% AI on the outside, and it’s going to lack those elements that are really going to help connect with people. And that’s the whole purpose that the content should have. So, you know, in my chapter on leveraging generative AI for digital first marketing, I talk about what is your current content creation process, and then what are the areas in which this technology might or might not help you? And that’s really the best holistic way to look at it. But hopefully those examples gave you some. These are ideas that are really fresh in my mind, but hopefully they, they spark some ideas to our listeners.

Minter Dial: Superlative. Last question. Kabuki or Beach Boys?

Neal Schaffer: Neither.

Minter Dial: All right, listen, Neal, how can people get you in touch with you, follow you, get your books? What’s that? Give me? Give us something. Thanks.

Neal Schaffer: On that note, I was actually, and sorry for not letting you know Minter, but I was actually in London recently and I went to see spirited away with my wife, and that was a brilliant production. So, if you have a chance to see it in London while it’s still there, you should definitely do it. So, I am Neal Schaffer. Neal spelled the real Neal. N E A L. Schaffer is schaffer.com. everything is there. The name of my book is digital threads. It is coming out on October 1. If you go to my website at the very top of the menu there is, or on the mobile menu there’s a digital threads item, and if you go to that, you can download a free preview of this upcoming book.

Minter Dial: Put those in the show notes Neal many, many thanks. Arigato Gozaimashita.