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(continued...)

So I recommended show #18, where we interviewed Avinash Kaushik from Google, the Analytics expert, to Joy. And on that show Avinash explains how to use this amazing Analytics product, how it works and more about it. That sort of fills in the back-story from Mark Mitchell’s question. Now let’s have a little bit of fun with Larry Port and the Joke of The Week.

LARRY: This is Larry Port from www.rocketmatter.com with the Joke of The Week. A woman gets on a bus with her baby. The bus driver says, “That’s the ugliest baby I’ve ever seen.”  The woman goes to the rear of the bus and sits down, fuming. She says to a man next to her, “The driver just insulted me.” The man says, “You go right up there and tell him off. Go ahead, I’ll hold your monkey for you.” This is Larry Port from www.rocketmatter.com with the Joke of The Week.

JAY: (Laughing) Okay Larry. That’s Larry Port from RocketMatter. I’m playing the joke live so I get to enjoy it with you. That one came off quick. Okay, so now let’s award the Blog or Podcast of The Week.

DRUMROLL

JAY: Long-time listeners of the show know that Mitch Joel from TwistImage was instrumental in helping us start this podcast. His podcast, THE SIX PIXELS OF SEPARATION, recently celebrated show #100. I called in to congratulate Mitch and here’s the audio.

Hi Mitch, it’s Jay Berkowitz calling and I wanted to congratulate you on show #101. Why 101? There’s an amazing story in Sports Illustrated. Dale Webster is a surfer who has surfed every single day for the last 32 years. A couple of years ago he hit a Guinness Book of World Record, number 10,000. The media was there and a bunch of surfers were there with him. And the next day he got up and he went surfing. And he’s now surfed 1,919 consecutive days. Great story in Sports Illustrated and it reminded me of you. You’re the Dale Webster of podcasting. Every week you get the shows out. They’re amazing, the quality is great. Congratulations on show 101.

MITCH JOEL: All right man. Well here it is, this is show #101 of SIX PIXELS OF SEPARATION, the TwistImage podcast. I couldn’t be happier, as I hit the button the Montreal Canadians, or as we call them here the Haves, just scored a goal. They’re still one behind on Philadelphia. But for someone that doesn’t watch hockey or care too much about sports, that’s pretty significant. Maybe I should hit the record button a little bit more often. So let’s go. Episode 101 for April 27th, 2008, this is SIX PIXELS OF SEPARATION.

MUSIC - SIX PIXELS OF SEPARATION INTRO

MITCH: Well hey there and how’s it going? I’m so excited to be here today. I hope you’re doing great. I’m doing really well. Hello from beautiful Montreal. What’s not to be excited about? We’ve got playoffs and hockey. We’ve got no snow on the ground. We’ve got some great travel coming up, some great stories, some great connections and amazing changes happening in the online digital marketing and personal branding world, which is what we’re here to talk about. So welcome to the show. Never before have I felt more passionate about building this up and getting excited about it. Not because I’ve passed episode #100. In fact, I’ll tell you a quick little story about this whole thing. Here’s the thing. Here’s the reason why I’m having so much problems with this. One-hundred in podcasting shouldn’t be anything because in theory, I could record a show every day. I could record four shows a day. I could record a show every month. I don’t know, I’m thinking maybe it’s more about anniversaries, or like, numbers are so weird. I think Jay said it best at the front of the show, by the way that was Jay Berkowitz from 10 Golden Rules, he’s absolutely right. I’m going to keep going.

JAY: Okay, so there’s a little sample from Mitch Joel’s amazing SIX PIXELS OF SEPARATION. This guy does it, like I said in my intro, in my call-in to his show, he does a podcast every single week. He did one from the beach. He did one on a camping trip. He did one on a plane. I wouldn’t have wanted to be the person sitting next to him. Actually, I would have, because he has great content and he has great interviews. For example, show #103 I just listened to at the pool yesterday, he has an interview with the amazing author of the book PRESENTATION ZEN, a gentleman named Garr Reynolds.  If you do any presenting for business, or you want to get better at PowerPoint presentations, you’ve got to listen to show #103 and get the book PRESENTATION ZEN. Mitch is a good friend, congratulations on #100 and #101. You are 10 Golden Rules’ Podcast of The Week.

MUSIC BREAK

JAY: Okay, we’re about 20 minutes in and next up is our feature interview with Rohit Bhargava. He’s the amazing blogger at The Influential Marketing Blog. He just launched his book called PERSONALITY NOT INCLUDED. We spent almost an hour on the phone and I had to edit it down because we were covering such a wide range of topics. I wanted to stay focused and get this nice and tight for the show.  He’s as knowledgeable and philosophical about social media as anyone I know. So let’s get to my conversation Rohit.

JAY: …why companies lose their authenticity and how great brands get it back. I should have let you do that, right Rohit?

ROHIT: (Laughing) I probably would have screwed it up.

JAY: You wrote it. I first found out about Rohit, I think three times within about two weeks, I found a post on his blog, it’s called The Influential Marketing Blog. One post I found with a Google search, another one I found on another blog and then someone on my team sent me a third post. I believe in the rule of twos or the rule of threes. A lot of times you’ll see something once and it doesn’t really seem like it’s worth going and checking it out. But since I found out about this incredible blog three times within two weeks, I’m like, there’s something really neat going on there. There‘s something really amazing. They’re intellectual. They’re often very timely answering a question or addressing something that’s really relevant at that time for me in my business or life. They’re often very, very actionable. So I most highly recommend the blog. Then I had this neat opportunity where a journalist called me from the Wall Street Journal and asked me to recommend my top books. I pushed him a little bit and I said, “Really in our space, blogs and podcasts are equally important to books. Can I include some of the top blogs and podcasts?” And the journalist was open to that. So Rohit’s blog as well as Seth Godin’s blog and a number of podcasts were on my list. So I guess we first met after I connected you with the Wall Street Journal. http://www.tengoldenrules.com/wall-street-journal.htm

ROHIT: Yeah, that was great. I appreciated that. That was a fantastic hit. Working in a PR agency, that shines a lot of light because that’s essentially what a lot of people here try and do for their clients. So it was a great--

JAY: That was a lot of fun for me and I was so happy to include you. Let’s start with a little bit about your background and your role at Ogilvy, professional life as well.

ROHIT: Okay, my role right now is part of a team called The 360 Digital Influence Team. Essentially what our group does is helps clients figure out what to do with social media, comes from an interactive group and we’re actually a practice group within Ogilvy Public Relations. We’re very focused on word of mouth, as a discipline, and integrating that with social media. Word of mouth is a lot easier to explain to people because when you talk about word of mouth you say what we want to do is get the people who are buying our stuff to tell other people about it and enjoy it and become vocal enthusiasts about it. People get that. That’s not that difficult to describe. You’re not talking about what’s a blog, what’s a wiki, what’s an rss feed. You stay away from all that stuff and you basically say, what we’re trying to do is have a conversation with these people. If you love something, we want you to tell other people about it. That’s what marketing is trying to achieve. If we can explain it that way, then you can go down the funnel, if you will, and say okay, here are all the different tools to do that.

JAY: I know you go way deeper than just blogger outreach or media outreach. You’ve spoken in the past about influencers. Influencers are highly connected people who set trends; they recommend sales of products and services. Seth Godin’s talked about them; Malcolm Gladwell’s talked about them. But there’s recently been some debate about the role of influencers and there’s been some studies examining social media sites showing that social influence is coming from a really wide range of people instead of a core group of influencers. Do you still believe in this model and what do you think about those studies?

ROHIT: That’s actually a really good question because I think you’re right, people are starting to question. I think it’s because a lot of people have taken the idea of influencers and interpreted it incorrectly. What I mean by that is, a lot of people have said, “Okay we want to reach influencers and the influencers are, these people.” And that’s not actually the case because while I may be an influencer for someone when it comes to something that I’m passionate about, say luggage, for example, because I travel a lot and I like luggage and I did look at a lot of different kinds and that’s just me--

JAY: You definitely influence all of us in the social media space. You have an expertise in that online space.

ROHIT: We all have these niches that we’re experts in. But that doesn’t make me an influencer to tell somebody what kind of car to drive, right? I think that’s where the perception in difference comes in, which is we are all influencers in the right spaces for us. And that’s the concept that a lot of people start talking about, “Influencers don’t matter and a-listers don’t matter.” Well okay, if you’re talking about an a-lister that talks about a certain topic, like in gadget, for example talks about consumer gadgets, well, they matter in that space. Do they matter to tell you what kind of coats to wear? Maybe not. So I think that that’s where we need to get a little bit smarter about the…The idea of influence is very real. The idea that there are influencers, that are influential across everything, is wrong. I think that that’s what we need to get away from. But that doesn’t mean that there’s no influencers, because there’s always influencers.

JAY: Absolutely. So how does that touch your professional life? Are influencers a big part of your discussions and your role for your clients?

ROHIT: I think it is because really what social media has allowed these influencers to do is…if you believe what I just said about there always being influencers, then the idea of social media is that the people who are most vocal and believe and have some expertise in something, now have the tools to reach a lot more than just their family and friends. Social media makes some of these influencers have a larger soapbox, or a larger platform to stand on. So now they can influence a couple of hundred people instead of 20 or 30 people. Or, even if it’s 1,000 people, then the challenge is if we’re cracking social media strategy, how do we find the influencers that can influence those larger pools of people? Because that’s what a good campaign will do.

JAY: There was an interesting, I wish I could quote the source, there was an expert on podcasting, and they said that everyone is an expert in something and that’s your passion area. You should follow your passion area and that’s where you can be a great podcaster or blogger or writer or Facebook converser.

ROHIT: Yeah, I think that’s the tagline for Seth Godin’s Squidoo site - everybody’s an expert in something. It’s true, everybody knows about something.

JAY: It might be Seth. And certainly you can never go wrong just quoting Seth, he probably covered it in some way. Let’s talk a little bit specifically about the blog. It’s been rated in the top ten marketing blogs, even in the top five. And the ratings are generally based on the number of other blogs and websites that link to your blog. So that’s really the ultimate credibility that other experts in the space are linking to your blog. Tell me about how you’ve built up the blog. Have you consciously done marketing activities to try to build the blog? Or is it based on the great content?

ROHIT: I think a lot of it is based on content. I want to talk about one thing that you said which is a lot of the ratings do come from other blogs, that link to your blog. But the thing that I love to see more than anything when it comes to metrics, that I sometimes talk about, is when I look at the referring sites that traffic comes to my blog, there’s a certain type of link that I can’t follow. It’s the link that comes when somebody has emailed the link for a blog post of mine to someone else, because I obviously can’t follow it back into their email program. I love to see those because that means that somebody found something so useful that they took the link, they cut and pasted it into an email, they sent it to someone else. That means it’s going from person to person.

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