This week on The Digital Download, we are challenging how brands use social media. For many, it's a simple tool for broadcasting messages, but that strategy is no longer enough to capture attention. To explore a radically different approach, we welcome our special guest, Tom Miner. The author of 'Social First Brands' and former Head of Global Social Media at Crocs , Tom is a strategist who has spent the last decade turning 'scrollers' into 'superfans'.

Whilst the common advice is to simply post more content, Tom will explain why brands need to fundamentally rethink their relationship with social platforms. He will share what it truly means to build a 'Social First' brand and why it is the only viable path to stand out today.

Join us as we discuss questions like:

• What is the fundamental difference between doing social media marketing and being a 'Social First Brand'?

• Why are traditional metrics (likes, followers) irrelevant for a 'Social First Brand'?

• How can a brand find its authentic voice and audience online?

• What is the first step for a business wanting to move from a content strategy to a community strategy?

• Can B2B brands genuinely adopt a 'Social First' approach?

As the former Head of Global Social Media at Crocs, Tom was instrumental in the brand's transformation, helping take it from a 'fashion punchline to a pop culture phenomenon'. Today, as Managing Partner at Gold Miner Media , he crafts bold strategies for a diverse range of clients, from household name consumer brands to tech firms and non-profits. This episode will give you the keys to stop simply talking at your audience and start building with them.

We strive to make The Digital Download an interactive experience. Bring your questions. Bring your insights. Audience participation is keenly encouraged!

This week's Host was -

• Bertrand Godillot, Founder and Managing Partner of Odysseus & Co, a proud DLA Ignite partner

Our guest this week was -

• Tom Miner, author of 'Social First Brands' and former Head of Global Social Media at Crocs.

Panelists included -

• Adam Gray, Co-founder of a DLA Ignite

• Richard Jones, Richard Jones, Director of Qure 8 Ltd

• Tracy Borreson, Founder and CEO of TLB Coaching & Events, a proud partner of DLA Ignite

Transcript of The Digital Download 2025-10-24

Bertrand Godillot [00:00:02]:

Good afternoon, good morning and good day wherever you may be joining us from. Welcome to another edition of the Digital Download, the longest running weekly business Talk show on LinkedIn Live, now globally syndicated on tuning radio through IBGR, the world's number one business talk news and strategy radio network. Today on the Digital Download, we are challenging how brands use social media. For many, it's a simple tool for broadcasting messages, but that strategy is no longer enough to capture attention, to explore a radically different approach. We welcome our special guest, Tom Miner, the author of Social First Brand and former head of global social media at crocs.

Bertrand Godillot [00:00:59]:

Tom is a strategist who has spent the last decade turning scrollers into superfans. But before we bring Tom on, let's go around the set and introduce everyone. While we're doing that, why don't you in the audience reach out to a friend, ping them and have them join us. We strive to make the digital Download an interactive experience and audience participation is highly encouraged. Tracy, do you want to kick us off, please?

Tracy Borreson [00:01:28]:

Yes. Thank you, Bertrand. Good morning, everyone. Morning where I am. Good afternoon, Good day wherever you are. I am Tracy Borison, founder of TLB Coaching and Events, a proud partner of DLA Ignite. And I love this topic because as the resident authentic marketing advisor, there's a lot of things we used to do for marketing that really have no place in the current landscape of business. So I'm excited to hop into the conversation with Tom today.

Bertrand Godillot [00:01:58]:

Sounds that you are aligned with our guest. So, Adam.

Adam Gray [00:02:04]:

And Monsieur. Oops. Wow. No, that's awful. But at least I tried. At least I tried. Hello everybody. I'm Adam Gray.

Adam Gray [00:02:16]:

I'm co founder of DLA Ignite. And I said before we went live to. To Tom that I think we're all singing from the same song sheet here. This will be fascinating to have this conversation, I think. And, and I hope that this is genuinely something that everybody in the audience gets something from because this is the way forward for everyone.

Bertrand Godillot [00:02:38]:

I'm sure they will. And, and we're definitely looking to your participation, dear audience. Richard, good afternoon.

Richard Jones [00:02:46]:

Richard Jones from Curate, partner of DLA Ignite. I'm currently plowing my way through a whole pile of books that I've purchased, purchased off the recommendation of the various guests we've had on this show over the previous months. So yeah, the pile is getting bigger, but my reading is still pretty slow. But looking at what we're about here this afternoon, I think there's going to be another book on the way from Amazon tomorrow. So, so good to be here.

Bertrand Godillot [00:03:19]:

Okay, great. And myself, Bertrand Godilliot. I am the founder and managing partner of Odysseus and Co, a very proud daily Ignite partner. So, as I said this week on the digital download, we'll speak with Tom. Whilst the common advice is to simply post more content, Tom will explain why brands need to fundamentally rethink their relationship with social platforms. He will share what it truly means to build a social first brand and why it is the only viable path to stand out today. Let's bring him on. Tom, good morning and thanks for making the extra effort to wake up and be with us from Denver, Colorado this morning.

Bertrand Godillot [00:04:12]:

So why don't we start with having you tell us a little bit more about yourself, your background and what led you where you are today.

Tom Miner [00:04:20]:

Yeah, definitely. Well, thanks for having me. And yes, it's very early here in Colorado, so my first cup of coffee. So if I seem a little slow today, just bear with me. It's really. But yeah. So as the warm intro already stated, I'm the author of Social First Brands. I used to be the head of global social media, Croc Shoes, as Bertrand mentioned.

Tom Miner [00:04:40]:

Really the work over the last decade or so is kind of put as at a first, kind of front row seat on transformation of social. So very blessed. I get to work with a lot of brands around the world from B2B consumer brands, nonprofits, you name it. We really help them as kind of a partner into how to connect with consumers in the modern landscape on social.

Bertrand Godillot [00:05:01]:

Excellent. So Tom, you know the rule. I'm going to start with a foundational question. So here we go. What is the fundamental difference between doing social media marketing and being a social first brand?

Tom Miner [00:05:16]:

Yes. And that's the million dollar question. So I think doing social media, if you will put it in the verb like that, that's, you know, kind of that traditional marketing approach, right? So if you think of like marketing channels going back to the dawn of time, they've all been kind of used more or less the same, right? And that is, hey, we are a company and we're a brand and we have something to sell you. We need to use our channels to broadcast this message to the world, to evangelize our greatness, right? We have the best product, we're the best service, whatever it is, right. It's just taking that message and you just broadcast out there when social came around, it makes sense, right? Usually a new technology, a new venture comes around, it gets used in the same ways the previous iterations did. And so we saw that the first decade or so of social, and it was totally acceptable. Right? As the world is slowly adapting social and getting on there, you could just have a Facebook account and just sell your products all day. It was pretty simple, pretty quiet.

Tom Miner [00:06:10]:

Just a different era of social. And I think today, though, still doing social media, still has its roots in that use of social, which is a broadcast of your message out into the void, if you will, and in hopes to connect to consumers. On the flip side of this, a social first brand, or using really a social first ethos, is all about putting the consumer at the center of it, right? So instead of coming out, maybe sitting around in a boardroom or your office trying to ideate, hey, here's our message. Here's what we want to put out there in the world. You actually start with what the consumer is already talking about, already interested in. So a lot of this is, you know, it's not necessarily, like, revolutionary. It's just. It's hard for people to understand that that small flip and what that means.

Tom Miner [00:06:49]:

Right. So social first brands, when you start to kind of realize, hey, social is not a broadcast channel anymore, how can we use this to effectively connect, spark conversation and connect with consumers? Selling, promoting, that stuff takes a backseat. There's still kind of an art to doing that, but it no longer is the primary use of these channels.

Tracy Borreson [00:07:10]:

Tom, I'd love to jump into, because I think if you asked most brands, they would tell you that they, of course, have the customer at the heart of what they're thinking and doing. So are there some, like, red flags that we can pay attention to that might show us that while we might have this value, maybe the actions we're taking are not in alignment with that?

Tom Miner [00:07:35]:

Yeah, great question. I agree. I think most companies or brands would say they already are doing that, putting the consumer at the center. But really, I think it's. If you're looking for kind of a litmus test on that, you can usually tell pretty quickly just by going to a brand's social channels. I think what happens sometimes is, like, from an outside perspective versus that inside perspective. So things I kind of look forward to see, is this really happening or is this just kind of. You're drinking the Kool Aid there at your own company, thinking that you're really actually putting the consumer there.

Tom Miner [00:08:05]:

It's really seeing where does that, like, your brand message, your campaigns, where does your product come into this? So if I go onto your channels and I see that, hey, actually, you claim this, but 85% of your posts in the past six months have been product centric or you've been promotional, or you're just slapping us in the face with your campaign messaging. I immediately can just factually push back and say you're not. Because consumers do not speak this way. Right. Brands speak this way, companies speak this way. So it's usually a pretty quick check. To be honest, I think that sometimes internally we just don't take that, that filter, that lens to it.

Tracy Borreson [00:08:37]:

Tom, are you saying that no one on social media cares that I'm at boost 386 at this conference?

Tom Miner [00:08:45]:

Exactly. Right. I mean, it's funny that we can laugh at it, but like, you know, there's that level of content that like you said, do people even care about this? Right. 99% of the time. No, they don't. Right. That one person's audience who might, who's at the same event, who already knows, likes and trusts you. Sure, cool.

Tom Miner [00:09:01]:

But. But again, like you could probably reach them and through email marketing or just put on your stories, whatever it is. But I think at the same time though too, it's not just realizing that message that, yes, people aren't going to care, at least the masses, which booth you're at a trade show. It's just not interesting content that we go to social media to consume. Nobody opens Instagram or TikTok today to learn about trade show booths.

Adam Gray [00:09:21]:

So maybe, maybe 10 or 12 years ago, there was a big move in large tech companies acquiring some really smart social media tools. So Vitru was acquired by Oracle, as was Involver and collective intellect. Radian6 was acquired by Salesforce. We had Sprinkler and all of the these different tools, very advanced listening tools. And what happened was that organizations, the clients of the big tech companies that bought those didn't really know what to do with that data because it was so at odds with their existing marketing campaigns and the view of the world that they wanted, which is, I'm going to build an audience. That is a list. I'm going to mail this list when I've got something to sell them and then they're going to respond to that and they're going to buy from that list. So the idea that I would listen to them having conversations and I would draw insights from those conversations was a whole lot of hard work.

Adam Gray [00:10:23]:

And as a result of that, lots of those tools that were required for quite large sums of money, they became sunset products and gradually phased out. Now, it strikes me as that was a huge retrograde step because that is still where people go to learn things and to engage. So how do brands now that none of these tools or not many of these tools still exist, how do brands make intelligent decisions about how to use social without that highly granular and detailed data about who's saying what?

Tom Miner [00:11:01]:

Yeah, this is an interesting topic you bring up in general, I agree. You look back to that era of social, and it was a lot easier for marketers to kind of get in there and get a pulse on that. And some of those tools and the way the APIs were in the past made that a lot simpler. I think it's still going to get more challenging in that regard as we move forward, as things kind of get more siloed and these companies have realized the value of their data. And so I think too, it's like, if you look at it like framing this in a way of, like, how do you get a true pulse on that? I think it's less scalable than it was back in those days. But that's not necessarily a bad thing. Right. I realized that a lot of the work we do with our clients on this very pain point or challenge, it's really, you have to kind of get into the platforms themselves more so than I think you had to back then.

Tom Miner [00:11:45]:

But I like that, though, because what it's done is it's kind of raise the bar into actually understanding platform culture. What I mean by that is like, for example, if you wanted to actually see what people are talking about on a platform, you really have to spend time in that platform itself to understand that. Because each platform is so different. Right. I think like back in that era of the, you know, Radiant six kind of time, every platform is more or less the same. Like, you could go on a Facebook or Twitter or LinkedIn, and for the most part, things were kind of the same. The conversation more or less nowadays, that's really. The platform culture is so unique across all of these.

Tom Miner [00:12:18]:

And so I think really it's, you know, it is a little bit more manual time in there, understanding that of course there's still tools out there where you can kind of get a finger on the pulse. But really, I think spending time in there and then also too looking at, like, your mentions. Right. So I think a lot of brands and companies forget to do this. It's pretty easy. You can do this with manual if you don't have any software at all. You just want to go into the platforms and look up your keyword terms in there. All these platforms have become, as we've heard, a Lot about last few years, a lot more.

Tom Miner [00:12:44]:

Kind of a keyword based platform, right. So we've kind of heard this sort of search engine optimization, this social media optimization of keywords as well. And so same thing. It's kind of a gold mine. I think a lot of people just forget that these things are there. So yes, a little bit more bespoke, a little bit more custom to the platform than it used to, but I personally kind of like it because I think it yields better results.

Adam Gray [00:13:05]:

Well, it definitely does. And I think that one of the things that you know, in the area that we work, we teach organizations that the route for them to get to the customers is through their team. So because at the end of the day, you know, I love you, I don't love your brand. So you can build a, a close digital relationship with somebody. Maybe you share interests and you share a worldview and you share a location or a passion or a hobby or whatever it may be. And that's a great foundation for building some kind of conversation and some sort of trust on which you can deliver the corporate message. Because at the end of the day, every corporate says we've got the best product buy from us. And actually these are all just words and they don't mean anything anymore.

Adam Gray [00:13:50]:

But it creates a problem in that organizations, whether that be in sales or in marketing, they want accountability and scalability and workflows. What they don't want is independent thinkers and people that they have to empower to go off and do this stuff. And that creates all sorts of problems certainly for large organizations, doesn't it?

Tom Miner [00:14:15]:

Definitely, yeah. I think that there's, I don't want to say silos, but I think there's still a lot of friction when it comes to this work in marketing. And to your point, Adam too, of like having that kind of risk factor, people being that independent thinking, going out and doing that can pose some risk. I do think though that true essence of putting that consumer at the center of it, right. Like that's where it starts with more than just like. This isn't like necessarily a social media strategy we're talking about. This is really company culture. It really is the ethos, it's a practice.

Tom Miner [00:14:45]:

And if you're, if your leadership isn't thinking this way, it's going to be damn near impossible to become a social first brand. So it really does start at the top. You have to have leaders that aren't challenged and don't use the risk. But it's this massive opportunity to trust their team to go out and do this to connect and bring back these things. They're going to help the company. Right. So it's all one team. But I think it's that leeway, that trust, and that really starts at a cultural level on top of before it even gets to the level of a marketing strategy.

Bertrand Godillot [00:15:13]:

Yeah, so, so, so on that, a few questions. So if I don't build lists and I don't run automation on campaigns, how can I get leads?

Tom Miner [00:15:25]:

Yeah, so again, I think it's. It's a little bit. This is the part where it gets a little tricky for people who may be squirming the seats for maybe the performance and marketing side of it. There's a lot of trust that goes into this. And so I think too, it's like maybe look at that performance marketing engine. I want to put a message out there, be able to get through attribution, see what that happened. Right. What did that lead do through this full funnel? We kind of treated customers for many years as like lab rats that we could test.

Tom Miner [00:15:50]:

And now we're going to change the color of our button here and our call to action is going to have an ABCD test over here. And it was just. We kind of lost the humanity, to be honest. Um, and so we started viewing almost like lead capture and all these terms. It just sounded kind of aggressive until just these are people on their side. So in a social first world, like, we know that those things still happen. They're part of marketing. So it's not necessarily that, you know, we need to campaign against getting rid of it, but what we do need to realize is leads and getting, you know, brand awareness and growing a following.

Tom Miner [00:16:20]:

All these things take time. Right. So you're not any longer trying to condense this like, marketing funnel that may or may not ever really existed and pushing people through this, this journey you've kind of mapped out, it's now about trust and connection. And as we know, through human relationships, these things take varying time scales. Right. Think about any friendship you have, some friendships you might have made overnight, literally. Sometimes there's like love at first sight equivalent of relationships. Some take years to develop that trust and connection.

Tom Miner [00:16:47]:

And brands are no different because again, as a social first world, we have to operate and think more like that. Human to human connection. So same thing that those leads you mentioned there, Bertrand. Those come through trust with the audience, trust in your content and your strategy will pay off over time. Yes, absolutely. I'll never argue that it's going to be as attributable as performance Marketing is. But over time, when you see your numbers and your KPIs going up, you can attribute back to what changed. Well, hey, we started doing some of these things that started treating our customers a little bit better.

Tom Miner [00:17:17]:

We gave them reasons to care. We tapped into what they're already talking about. Knowing over time we trusted on the back end that we were going to get more leads, more conversions than ever. So again, it's a little bit of a reframe. I know sometimes in a business world it's hard for us to put the cold hard data and KPIs aside for a second. But again, the brands that I think are going through this right now are learning that stuff. There's a lot of value in this of being able to table some of those metrics of old.

Adam Gray [00:17:45]:

I think that it's interesting you say that about performance marketing because, and, and also about getting into the platforms. So I mean I, I, I think that one of the challenges that marketers have is that they're used to things being a particular kind of way. So you know, you post something on social and, and you see that it got 10000 impressions and you go oh fantastic, it got 10000 impressions. But when you consider that an impression is more than one pixel having loaded for more than 1/60 of a second, there's no guarantee that I've even seen it, let alone noticed your brand and read your content. And I think that one of the challenges is, and certainly when I talk to organizations what I see is that they're so invested in the old way of doing things. So how many impressions have you had, how many impacts have you got? What's the dwell time on these things? It's like we sent out a mailing to our database and we got a 47% open rate. You didn't. Nobody ever in the history of the world has got a 47 open rate except for the day that email was invented.

Adam Gray [00:18:54]:

And you know, actually 47 open, but we've also got 47 unsubscribe rate. Well, actually there's a, there's a correlation between those two because people open the email to unsubscribe from your mailing. And I think that so often marketing is particularly guilty of this. But, but so are the C suite that drive this. You know, we're, we're desperate to find leading indicators for things and we make all sorts of assumptions about these things. You know, you followed my brand, therefore you're going to buy from me. Well, that's a ludicrous leap of faith to make in exactly the same way is that I've got 10,000 impressions on this post, therefore 10,000 people have read my post and our prospects for me, you know, these are polls apart, aren't they?

Tom Miner [00:19:44]:

Oh my God, yeah. Yeah. Polls is a good way to put that, right? I think of like the nature of sales and conversions here, right? Like I understand that every business, every company in the world has something to sell, but the consumer knows that too, right? As soon as they see your logo up on any sort of channel, immediately they break that, communicate so much to them without us having to say anything, right? They know consumers are smart, right? Not the first time they've ever seen an email or a social media post before. They know how this game is played and what the brand is trying to do. You do not need to tell them that you are there to do that. So the challenge of that though becomes, okay, well, if they already know from the second they see our logo pop up, we have something to sell, we have something we want to persuade them to do, now the game becomes how do we actually kind of tear that wall down. There's already friction the moment that post or the email, that message pops up from your company, right? And so that like same level thinking like that email open rates and kind of looking for those leading indicators that people care. Well, those things oftentimes don't because even if you got all the impressions in the world, it doesn't really mean anything if you're not long term building those connections and conversation, right? So some of those things to kind of look out for instead of maybe impressions or email open rates and getting nitty gritty on a B test of what color perform better is starting to see that long term kind of loyalty, right? So are you seeing conversations? Are you seeing people talk about your company and your brand new ways? Again, a lot of the stuff won't be trackable down to the level of an email open rate.

Tom Miner [00:21:12]:

And that's okay, right? I think things that are worth doing are always more challenging and this is one of them, right? If it was that easy where you just push a button and see what was the result of it, marketing would be a very easy game and this would be a five second conversation. But really in the modern world, right, we see that to do this you need to get people to truly care. And care is not a KPI and never will be. And that's where the challenging part comes in. So how do you set that up in your own way? Every company out there is Going to have their own metrics, their own things you're going to look at. For example, if you're a consumer brand, your goal is, hey, we actually want to be more of the cultural fabric. We want to be showing up in TV shows. We want the conventions and kind of these things in songs, and we want to show up in pop culture at large versus maybe a B2B was like, well, we don't need that, of course.

Tom Miner [00:21:54]:

So what are our equivalent in our industry of getting those relevant mentions, getting people talking about us? Because brands that we love pop up organically in conversation. That's the piece that I think we have a hard time understanding is that organic lever. And that is something that the more we try to control, the further we push it away.

Adam Gray [00:22:12]:

So when you pitch this belief system to an organization, how do you find that they respond? Because this is absolutely challenging. Their world map is now, you know, they believe that things happen in a certain way. And you're saying, and despite the fact you have logic on your side, when you tell them this, it's like really pulling the rug from under them. So how do you move them from this being. Oh, my God, this is a terrible shock. Even though there may be some sense in this to, okay, this is something that we need to think about.

Tom Miner [00:22:47]:

Yeah, great question. And baby steps is the answer. So something I've learned over the last few years is that this larger approach to like social first can happen in degrees. Right. There's kind of a lowercase social first and an uppercase. What I mean by that is lowercase to me is a great entry point for companies that maybe are completely back in the old way of doing things, which is that kind of broadcast approach. So, for example, just in the last few months, we were working with a very large multibillion dollar B2B tech company, right. And if you kind of went in there, we started their socials and we saw just a lot of still distributing blog posts, right? Things on social channels that just do not work.

Tom Miner [00:23:25]:

Not only is the algorithm going to cost you reach because you're trying to distribute links off of the platform, but nobody wants to be on LinkedIn. Leave LinkedIn or Instagram anywhere else to go read a blog post on your company's page about a boring product announcement. I'm sorry, people do not use social that way.

Adam Gray [00:23:39]:

And this is a product's different, our products different, because it's really exciting.

Tom Miner [00:23:44]:

Exactly. Right? Yes. Every product announcements the best. Right, Exactly. And I think as people do this, right, it's that lowercase approach Is, hey, let's start there. Let's stop using these channels to distribute your larger communication content and marketing messages and start kind of putting that into a social first way. What you mean by that is, so, for example, let's take the same product announcement. Maybe they're not quite ready to just go full social first yet.

Tom Miner [00:24:12]:

So lowercase social first is how do we take that? Repackage it in a way that's native to the platform at least. So maybe it's through an influencer could announce it on their Instagram and you can do a collab. Maybe you take that and you put into a really interesting carousel that's more educational in nature versus promotional. So there's small baby steps into this where you can at least kind of get out of that old broadcast approach. I think once you start there, you kind of get some of these wins, these data points. Companies tend to see their own data better than like a fellow competitor at other brands. It clicks more when you start to get your own wins. And I think winning changes cultures really quickly.

Tom Miner [00:24:45]:

So my strategy tends to be, let's get in there, get some really quick wins in this and then you can kind of snowball up into those bigger, bigger plays and that bigger ethos of really starting to have that company message and the product take a back seat entirely. So it can happen in waves, iterations, and sometimes it can be a multi year transformation to go from kind of a brand first traditional approach to a social first brand.

Tracy Borreson [00:25:07]:

I would guess too, Tom, that there are brands that do really like, they, they do really care about their customer and they haven't really noticed that their behavior, marketing and sales behavior isn't really aligned with that. And so then when somebody presents them the option to say, hey, you could just like change this, this and this and you could be well on your way to becoming a social first brand that. There's also an opportunity for people to be like, oh yes, please, I would like to do that. Because I think, I mean, I'm a marketer myself and in the state we've got to in marketing where there's just like so much information online that is negligibly, if at all, helpful, there's a lot of distraction that people have and they're doing things because someone told them that they should. They're tracking impressions and they're tracking this. And then somebody stands in front of them and you're like, are you looking for impressions or are you looking for meaningful relationships with customers? Oh, you're looking for meaningful relationships with customers. Maybe we could use your social platforms to actually create those instead of impressions. Are you interested? And people are like, yes, what does that look like? Because there's just like, I feel like we've been programmed into, like, you just have.

Tracy Borreson [00:26:26]:

You have to blog. You have to have a profile on every single social platform. You have to post once a day. You have to, have to, have to. And then pretty soon all of our marketing coordinators are so busy doing stuff that nobody is thinking about it anymore.

Adam Gray [00:26:41]:

I think there's a huge amount of. A huge amount of lack of understanding here. So you said something really profound, Tom, which was, when you're on LinkedIn or Instagram or whatever, you do not want to follow a link to come onto my website to read about my product announcement. However, the marketers, and not you, Tracy, but generally the marketers, as an amorphous group, the marketers and the C suite know that the most important thing is to build your own audience, not on rented property, but on your own property. So you need to build a mailing list. Now, I know that's old thinking because we all sign up for three mailing lists a week, and we unsubscribe from four mailing lists a week because we realized it seemed like a good idea at the time or we wanted that free thing or that access to that thing. And now we're receiving all of this garbage from you, which is you centric. And so.

Adam Gray [00:27:35]:

So it's a huge mind shift, isn't it, to say to people, if I have engaged with your brand on Instagram, that tells you that I want to engage with your brand on Instagram. For you to assume that I want to come to your website and sign up for your email list is like saying you expect me to come to you the next exhibition that you do or come to your office to have a conversation, because I don't. I'm not interested. So. So that's a, That's a huge mind shift for people that are running the. The organization and setting the strategy, though, isn't it?

Tom Miner [00:28:10]:

Absolutely. I mean, it's. It's kind of funny too. Like, if you look at, like this, this approaches. You said you centric a second ago, Adam, which I really like that. Right? So this idea of your messages. And Tracy, you go back to your point too, of like, that thinking. We were told for so many years we had to have a blog.

Tom Miner [00:28:25]:

We had to be on every platform, we had to open this. This all we're thinking about when we do this is what we want to say to the World, right? I mean, how selfish is that? I think we kind of forget this sometimes. Like, it's all about just like, how loud the microphone. We're going to grab a microphone here, the microphone there, we're going to talk to them. And like, never once we stop to think about who are we talking to and what are they interested in, and then what do we want this relationship to be, right? In a year from now, three years from now, et cetera. So really, it's some of the simple kind of like human empathy a little bit here, to be honest, as part of it. But then the flip side of it, too. It's like, so some of those best practices and things were told for so many years is fine and dandy.

Tom Miner [00:28:59]:

I don't care how many brand accounts you have. Right? Go for it. But really, we're missing a larger point here. I've seen some data that shows that 96% of company mentions happen off the brand's own channels, right? So you're this tiny little bubble in the corner, right? But we think we put all of our resources into this 1 little 4% bubble, and we're not putting no time and effort into the 96% out there of people already talking about us, about things that are organically surfacing in real lives out there. So how do we stop our little 4% obsession and go to the 96% where the conversation is actually happening and meet people there again, it seems so simple when you think about it that way. But that's the part where I think the blinders come out of the business world. We get so obsessed with about what we want to say that we kind of just forget to stop and listen to our own. Our own customers and fans.

Richard Jones [00:29:47]:

Tom, we have. Do you think that sort of what I would describe as perhaps legacy companies, those who've kind of existed prior to the sort of emergence of social struggle more than those that perhaps have kind of been set up in the last couple of years where social is very much to the fore in their thinking? Or are they kind of sort of back into the ways of the past simply because they're taking on or use, you know, employing people who have a sort of a legacy way of thinking?

Tom Miner [00:30:20]:

I just need to apologize. I got distracted by a question that popped up. Could you just reframe that question one more time for me, Richard?

Richard Jones [00:30:26]:

Yeah, no, I was. I was talking about, you know, sort of what I would describe as perhaps legacy organization. So organizations who've sort of, you know, been established prior to social coming to the forefront and you know, do they struggle more than perhaps, you know, sort of organizations have been established in the last couple of years where social is very much sort of, you know, front and center or do they get kind of sort of drawn back into the ways of the past simply by taking on people who purport to have the right experience but it's, it's somewhat outmoded by today's standards.

Tom Miner [00:31:02]:

I love that question. That's actually, I never had heard that one phrase like that. But yeah, to answer your question, I do think that it goes both ways. Right. So some of those like legacy brands you mentioned, that one's been around way before Social. I don't necessarily see them having more challenges than the new brands. It really depends to me like again leadership and what's the thinking at the very top of the company? If you have a young startup that's led by somebody that is obsessed with best practices of old says hey this, all the companies who forced to this, we should do this too. They're going to have a harder time than the legacy brand with, with fresh thinking.

Tom Miner [00:31:33]:

Leadership understands this and wants to embrace the modern landscape. So again, it really does depend, it's nuance into like that leadership and what's the thinking at the top of the company. But I do think that there is a little bit of advantage to companies that are just starting today because they're going to start to have, let's just say in the past five years or so they're going to be new fresh case studies of social first brands and other companies that think similar ways to give them a different pathway. I think for so long there was just like this marketing playbook that was just kind of all the same. And so it led to just like every brand looking the same, sounding the same, doing the same things as Tracy said, being open to every account because we were told we had to. So I do think that as we move forward there's going to be a little bit of advantage to, to new players here. I think we're already seeing, look at some of these brands that are, you know, blown up in just a couple of years using social like a liquid death. Right.

Tom Miner [00:32:21]:

Or back when I was a crocs, how quick that turnaround happened. So I do think the companies that are maybe younger in that journey are going to move a little bit faster. But it really does depend. I don't necessarily see a pro or con to being a legacy brand or a new brand when it comes to going social first.

Bertrand Godillot [00:32:38]:

And that was the comment from Mark. So we are lucky to have Mark with us today. Hi Mark. And Mark is commenting on ba frequent flyer program I suppose move moving towards more community than, than anything else. So and, and I kind of want to want to comment what you just said Tom because I've got countless examples of very young startups who behave just like, you know, good old monsters. So it is definitely a cultural issue I think too.

Tracy Borreson [00:33:16]:

Like just on this concept I just want to also like share the legacy on or the concept on legacy, not legacy on concept is that like brands that have existed for a while have been through more than one pivot likely in terms of marketing and the marketing channels and how marketing channels work. And even when you look at brands like Disney introducing Disney plus and all these different things like these are, these big legacy companies are also used to looking at the market and making changes in their organization to follow the lead of the customer. Whereas a new brand maybe isn't necessarily have that much practice in that skill. So I think there's also that opportunity that you might have as a legacy brand to be like yeah, we know how to evolve this. And someone who hasn't been through an evolution yet, it doesn't necessarily have that.

Adam Gray [00:34:13]:

But, but it's, it's interesting that you, you said about that Tom, because if, if one wants to become a truly social first brand. Yeah that is led by the leadership because that gives permission to everybody within the organization to behave that way. So you can watch what I do rather than just hear what I say. But it requires a complete re plumbing of how the organization works, doesn't it? And often the old way of doing things is completely at odds with what the expectation of the new way of doing things is even down to if I'm a customer or a prospect. And I have a question, you know, I want to speak to Tom. I don't want to speak to Richard or Bertrand. And traditionally, you know, you have to. You've got a customer service department which is set up to answer questions in a very specific way.

Adam Gray [00:35:12]:

So you know this when you've got a problem with your mobile phone and you go online to try to resolve the problem and you have to go through the route they want you to go through, not the route you want to go through. So it requires some fairly fundamental remapping of how an organization works, doesn't it? And that's a big commitment.

Tom Miner [00:35:30]:

Definitely. Yeah, I mean it really does. Again, it's almost like a lot of times it's kind of bottoms up stuff we're talking about here too, which is really challenging for companies. And I totally understand that. Right. So if you think about a really great social first brand, it's wild if you study them how many of these times where the spark really comes from, like some of the junior level staff people that are really kind of young and emerging don't have maybe the cachet or they're not as high on the, on the hierarchy at the company to really change culture. They're the ones that maybe sometimes closer to the customer here. Right.

Tom Miner [00:36:00]:

So they're hearing these things first. They're seeing it every single day. But they have the hardest time making changes because they're just, it's just how politics work at companies, unfortunately. Right. So I totally agree. Right. A lot of that times this stuff is kind of happening in the front lines of a company and leadership is not on the front lines. Right.

Tom Miner [00:36:15]:

That's where they're, they have their sergeants and their lower staff go do that for them. So I think that's part of the issue is just the stuff doesn't always make its way up there in a way that's understandable or it gets translated. And again, that's where that power of leadership really comes in. Because the brands that get it and they're led by leaders that either either inherently get it or they, hey, I don't really understand this, but I trust my team that they know what they're talking about. And those are two really hard things sometimes trust and kind of getting out of the way. Right. For leaders to do so. It is kind of wild that a lot of the stuff comes back into just the fundamentals, the basics of leadership and company culture.

Tom Miner [00:36:50]:

And again, those are challenges that are outside of a marketing scope even.

Adam Gray [00:36:54]:

So what companies, what large companies are there that you think embody this? Because I can't. I mean, one of the challenges that I have is that I don't see examples of excellence. I see pockets of excellence within organizations on occasion, but I don't see excellent organization. And, and the other thing is that, you know, you spoke about putting the customer at the very center of what you do as you reason for being a company. I see no company anywhere that does that. Every company pays, pays lip service to it. Every company says we are our customers are the most important thing to us, but actually they're not. Their profits are the most important thing.

Adam Gray [00:37:38]:

And you see that played out time and time again based on how they treat customers when the customer doesn't fall into one of the particular Personas or pockets that they have.

Tom Miner [00:37:50]:

Yeah, great questions. So I Think a couple examples that come to mind. A, I'm biased, I'll be the first to admit it, but Crocs is a company that really does put that fan in the center. They're led by a fantastic Social first leader though in Terrence Riley, who's also the kind of mastermind behind the Stanley Tumblr craze a couple years ago and he's the president there. So it's kind of interesting we look at leadership at a company like that that can really kind of walk the talk. Ultimately, yes, even Social first brands have something to sell. Profits are important. Absolutely.

Tom Miner [00:38:19]:

You can't, you can't serve the customer without making money. Right. So there's definitely a connection between the two things. And I think on the kind of B2B side of things too, look at like just this is a very recent example, but what Ramp did, was it just last week. Again, they are in a B2B SaaS space. One of the probably unsexiest, boringest niches I've ever seen on social where everybody sounds the same, everybody looks the same. And what they did with, you know, pulling in kind of a cultural LED piece there, putting Kevin from the US version of the office into a glass box for a day just to show him kind of trying to do manual receipts versus their software. And they kind of pulled in, you know, other notable people from, you know, Internet celebrities, influencers, et cetera, into this activation.

Tom Miner [00:39:01]:

It gave people a reason to care about a pretty boring product, to be honest, in a way that could engage them for eight hours on a live stream and they turn it into countless content afterwards too. That's a great example of somebody putting that customer or the fan at the center of things and realizing, hey, we can't come out with just showing people using our product to, you know, process receipts. Nobody wants to watch that in a million years. But again, it seems so simple. But think how many of the competitors right now are probably doing that very thing. Hey, we need new content, we need YouTube video showing people crunching their receipts. This is what people want to see, right? Look how great our product is versus just taking that out. And like, you know, we're actually a short product.

Tom Miner [00:39:36]:

We're going to show the implications of the use cases. But we have to do in a way that's going to give people a reason to stop and care and even watch an eight hour live stream. And that's again a very boring space. So I think there are examples out there and it really depends like which aspect of marketing we're looking for, right? So some I could say, hey, they're really good on the community side. They truly kind of walk that talk. Kind of a younger brand that I always point to is actually a beauty brand called Topicals. And they're amazing just because of that true fan centricity where instead of sending like, you know, paid influencers on trips, which we're starting to see now in the business world, they're sending their own customers on trips, really paying money to their own people who are spending money on their product to send them places. So I do think that, you know, it depends kind of what examples you're looking for, but I think they're out there.

Tom Miner [00:40:22]:

I think too that each one of these cases though is led by leadership of somebody that understands, hey, we have to put the fan at the center. Yes, we know we have to make money from them too. This is still business, but really that's secondary to just serving them and showing up day in, day out with their interests at the core of this.

Tracy Borreson [00:40:39]:

Would you say then, Tom, that maybe a lot of the brands that do this well aren't because they're focused on doing this well? They aren't as in your face. Like maybe they're not as noticeable as some of. I mean there's the big brands that we all know, right? And they're kind of operating in a world of their own. But like most businesses are small and medium sized businesses. There's so many businesses, like even if I drive around my city, right. Like I, like I never even heard of this company before. Right. And I think there's actually a lot of those companies who are doing a really good job of just like doing what their customers need and serving them what, what they like from a marketing point of view.

Tracy Borreson [00:41:22]:

But I'm not their customer, so I don't really know that they exist. And like, I feel like that's okay from a marketing point of view, but I'd love to hear your thoughts on that.

Tom Miner [00:41:31]:

Yeah, so it's actually, I love that you bring this up. Some of my favorite examples of social first brands are very small players. Like some of my favorite accounts to follow are local like real estate agents and companies mom and pops. It is not these big, large conglomerates necessarily the big sexy brands we always talk about, but it's the smaller players. I do think that they're actually sometimes the most entertaining, the ones that kind of get this the most. And yeah, they don't need to be Disney, they don't need to be a Netflix. Right. They just get to be serve their customer and they're in their area and absolutely there's countless examples of that.

Tom Miner [00:42:02]:

So I think some of these smaller players out there, yeah, they'll never get the notoriety of a big player. They're still, they're actually really good examples of being social first or maybe sometimes it's taking a founder led story. Right. And having the founder be the face of a company that's really going through his or her story versus going through a brand channel. So yeah, there's plenty of smaller kind of emerging companies and local mom and pops even that are great practitioners and examples of social first.

Richard Jones [00:42:31]:

I think the thing is those tend to be far more authentic and they've got a proper story to tell. You know, you get the impression that some of the bigger organizations are really just trying too hard. You know, they're trying to manufacture some sort of social presence and authenticity that really, really doesn't exist. And it kind of sort of looks a bit clunky.

Tom Miner [00:42:50]:

I agree. I think some of those small ones just have like, it's almost like the original use of social media. Right. They're on there just to kind of, you know, truly be themselves and connect and put their, their life out there, which in this case is their business, but doing in a way that's actually fun to watch and consume and gives you reason to care and kind of fall in love with them over time. I totally agree. There's a little bit more inherent authenticity kind of just baked into that.

Bertrand Godillot [00:43:16]:

So Tom, we know that most organizations are always looking for shortcuts. So are influencers and paid contributions or collaborations a way to build a social first brand?

Tom Miner [00:43:36]:

Yeah, great question. So there's still obviously a huge place for paid collaborations and influencers and creators to be part of. That's not the fast track anymore. It's not a shortcut, you know, it's by now at this stage in influencer marketing, we now know kind of see it as the next level of ads. Right. So the first few years for sure, I think it was a shortcut and it was pretty easy to just slap, you know, a paid post out there and get pretty good traction. Um, but again, just like anything else in marketing, when we see it's a best practice and it's working for everybody else, everybody else rushes in to do it and becomes the new practice. And now consumers just see it and we see that hashtag ad or sponsored and then immediately just want to scroll by and skip it.

Tom Miner [00:44:17]:

It's just become a modern ad is all it has. With that said, though, if there's still a great pathway into forming a partnership that's going to be beneficial and be real, be genuine. I think again, you should start those before the dollars are involved there. So like finding those. People already know you, like you have some sort of relationship whether they're using your product yet. Ideally, yes. But if not, they at least like kind of know your brand. They understand they have some existing relationship and it's not just transactional.

Tom Miner [00:44:44]:

Hey, we're going to give you money to post about us. That's just not going to move the needle. Right. We know that that's a surface level tactic. So again, if you can find those ones that are more real, that will come through and consumers will see that as well.

Tracy Borreson [00:44:59]:

Okay, Tom, I know we're running up to the end of our time here together, but I feel like we would be remiss to not talk about AI because I think when a lot of people, and especially like big business or people who are trying to do volume business are looking at what they're doing on social, that there's a lot of quote unquote solutions that involve AI outsourcing this type of contact with our potential customers. So where do you see AI playing a role for a social first brand as opposed to what is happening in AI out there right now?

Tom Miner [00:45:41]:

Yeah, so I mean to me, AI, my kind of thesis on it is obviously it's gonna, it already is changing the world in a lot of ways. But it comes to kind of marketing social first, it's just kind of the next thing that there's a lot of hype, a lot of hoopla over people are going to want to use it to automate and scale organic social and their, their brand building efforts. And you know, I think that there's small places where we'll fit in. But the bigger story here, that bigger human connection, that's something that I don't know if AI will ever get there. Maybe it will get that advanced. Right. But we're literally talking about humans here. Right.

Tom Miner [00:46:13]:

And this is a certain part here that, that humanity piece, maybe I'm romanticizing it, I don't know, we'll see. But I think that's a part that's going to be really hard to go away. So even if you're using AI tools to help you maybe, you know, fine tune your content a little bit or you know, wordsmith a little bit for you. Fantastic. Right. Or maybe it's, you know, helping you with customer service, things that come kind of roll in on that, you know, more transactional basis, if you will. There's certainly some things there. But how do you actually get people to care about a brand and over time to tell their friends and their family about you? There's not really a role in there right now for AI to do that.

Tom Miner [00:46:46]:

So there's still that level of thinking from a brand side. And as kind of leaders of these businesses, that's much deeper. And so, again, if you're looking for a short, Bertram said a couple months ago, looking for the shortcuts, sure, AI is going to be able to provide that in a lot of ways. But this work here is like, I think, the final frontier of great marketing, because the stuff there is. There's never going to be a shortcut, right? We're talking about building super fans and actual, like, almost talk about love here, right? And so that's the kind of stuff that's so human and so deep that, you know, it just won't be going away anytime soon.

Tracy Borreson [00:47:17]:

I think it's interesting even, like, thinking about the concept of a shortcut, right? Because when we're. We use, like, dating and romantic relationships as a comparison a lot on this show. And like, if you're gonna find the person you're gonna spend the rest of your life with, are you looking for a bunch of shortcuts or are you looking for, like, specific feelings, specific connection? And if we extrapolate that to the relationships like you said, love that we would love. I would love for my customers to love me. And this is why I also think there's a lot of, like, smaller brands who are doing this very well because they're like, I don't. I'm not here for volume, right? I don't need to help a million people. I need to help 20 people go on a personal transformation journey this year, right? Like, I don't. I don't need that.

Tracy Borreson [00:48:06]:

I can just be lovable with this group of people. And we're not by nature lovable to everyone. Not everyone loves a teddy bear, right? Even though a teddy bear is theoretically super lovable or puppies.

Adam Gray [00:48:20]:

Every. Everybody loves a Tracy, though.

Bertrand Godillot [00:48:25]:

At least.

Tracy Borreson [00:48:25]:

On this show, which is where you find your peeps, right? But like, but that's also kind of the point, right? Is where I think we get caught up in this. Like, oh, I need someone's out there tell shouting me, I need to get to more volume. And like, yes, I'll now I need to get to more volume. So now I need to find a shortcut to get to more volume because I'm doing this and this is not scalable, this like human relationship thing. And that's why I need, I need more so I need to get shortcuts. And then pretty soon we just get distracted from the point which is I'm here to help these specific people do these specific things. Just not all people. It is not all things.

Tracy Borreson [00:49:01]:

And so like the more I get distracted by the muchness of the doing, I get like more disconnected from who I am trying to help. And I think this is what I'm loving most about this conversation is if we can just like take our, our focus back to okay, like what were we actually here to do and like give ourselves permission to have made mistakes like, oh, I got caught up in that fad or that platform and I forgot that I was here to do this for my customers. How do I do that on that platform? Then that's where all the power comes. So let's, let's just not take ourselves too seriously to the point where we have to be like, oh, I was doing this and now I have to prove that it works. Like, no, that's not going to do what you're trying to do. Let it go and redirect.

Tom Miner [00:49:55]:

Yeah, I totally agree. I think that that's not too serious is a big part of this. It's, it's funny too. It's just like, I think that like brainwashing, but like just that best practice indoctrination that happens at so many companies. We just kind of forget the basics sometime. And I have, I have a deep belief that, right. Most businesses out there could just pause all their marketing for a month, spend time, actually go back to this, figure out what people actually care about. Turning off the machine, as you mentioned, just scaling mediocrity, what's the point of that? And kind of rebuilding things that actually be better for in the long run.

Tom Miner [00:50:28]:

But again, a lot of times it's short term thinking I have to hit my October metrics, right. Or hey, thinking quarterly increments. So I think it's just some of those larger business pressures prevent us from taking a step back and yeah, maybe not taking ourselves so seriously and just kind of chilling out for a few weeks to kind of get back to the heart of like, what do our customers really care about?

Bertrand Godillot [00:50:47]:

Tom, we could have, I'm sure we could have, you know, talked about certainly another hour about this, but this has been really great. So where can we find you? Where can we learn more?

Tom Miner [00:51:03]:

Yeah. So as much as I have to be on social media for, for clients and helping them, I kind of stay off it personally as much as I can. So really just a LinkedIn is the only place you'll be able to find me that are on my website as well. GoldMinerMedia.com has some more info as well.

Bertrand Godillot [00:51:19]:

Okay excellent. So before we we close this I just like to broadcast this from Mark. Mark has a charity he wants to talk about and and you will find the details. So yeah good stuff Mark. And you will find the detail on the event on LinkedIn where there's a link that you can follow. And before we close guess what we now have a newsletter so you know, don't miss an episode. Get the show highlights beyond the show, insights from our guests and reminders for upcoming episodes. You may scan the QR code on screen or visit us at digitaldownload.live/newsletter.

Bertrand Godillot [00:52:06]:

On behalf of the panelists and to you, Tom, thank you so much for being there today and thanks to the audience as well for your participation. See you next time. Thank you. Bye bye.

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