Latest / Exit Algorithms / Communications Strategy and Brand Building for Business Owners with Joshua Altman (#68)
Transcript
- Pete Vera, Exit Algorithms: Welcome to Exit Algorithms, the podcast where we decode what it really takes to unlock growth, streamline operations, and prepare your business for a high value exit. I'm your host, Pete Vera, and today Joshua Altman is in the building. He's the managing director of Beltway Media, a Washington DC area media and communications firm he's been building since 2014, specializing in strategic communications, media, and brand. Joshua, super excited to have you here. Welcome to the podcast. Joshua: Thank you for having me. Pete Vera, Exit Algorithms: Absolutely. Yeah, we were talking a bit about this on the pre-show. ⁓ Hate to have you repeat yourself, but can you please share a bit about your background? It's very unique and non-linear. listeners will find that really interesting. Joshua: There was no plan to end up here doing what I'm doing. I started out as a journalist. I went to journalism school in DC. I did my master's also in DC at the same time while I was working as a journalist. That was in something called communication culture and technology. I thought I would be a journalist for my career. While I was doing that, I thought I needed a break from the newsroom. I'd be a freelance reporter, go back to the newsroom after a few years. didn't happen, ended up not going back to a newsroom. While I was looking for the freelance reporting jobs, I also found that there were these corporate jobs with small and medium businesses who were looking for the same skills. They were looking for someone who had video skills, especially. And I had been a video multimedia producer. They were looking for someone who had the web skills, who had content creation, who had writing and strategy and storytelling, all without paying a $50,000 a month retainer to a large agency. But they also didn't need it full time. They just needed projects. They needed a few hours a week. And we started filling that gap for them. Over time, it was not an overnight thing. Over time, it became the Fractional Chief Communications Officer that we do now. Pete Vera, Exit Algorithms: Yeah, that's awesome. a unique story. Were there any skills from journalism or the newsroom that have transfer that you still use in your business today? Joshua: all the time and writing is a huge one. Content creation, storytelling, the production skills, the video, the digital production, how you put together multimedia pieces. Those are what you're doing every day if you're making Instagram videos and TikToks and graphics. It's very much the same skills. You're using them in a different way for corporate communications instead of journalism and news gathering. type of sense, but it's news. You hear a lot now about corporate newsrooms and corporate editorial. It's using those same skills that you would find in newsrooms and that journalists have. And it was just bringing it to a different environment. Pete Vera, Exit Algorithms: Yeah, makes a ton of sense. What were some of the ⁓ challenges you experienced building your communications firm? Joshua: What we have now especially is the chief communications officer is not the best known role. People are much more familiar with say a chief marketing officer, which you see as businesses of all sizes. But the chief communications officer is a role that's really growing. And a lot of what we're doing now is educating people on what that is and why you need one. and why it's different from say a chief marketing officer and a chief branding officer. Because marketing and branding are all parts of communications. They all fall under this same big umbrella, which is why you're seeing Fortune 500s, top universities, major league sports franchises, MLB, NBA, similar leagues worldwide, adding this role and having it be a direct line to the CEO. Because... It is really integrating your marketing, your branding, your internal communications, investor relations, advertising, social media, digital, all of that, which could be fragmented all over the place, especially with companies that are larger, where it's kind of just grown over time. When they think we need to restructure, we need to think about how to make sense of this, bringing in this chief communications officer is one way to do it. And smaller businesses benefit from it. in the same way, because it's one person leading that team who is now taking ownership of a lot of functions that might be distributed among many different people, including from the leadership perspective, your CTO might be owning the website still, even though that's not the CTO's job, but that was the person who could build it when you started. And now they just sort of got stuck with it. years later and they don't want it. They want to be doing the technology development for the company. You might have the CEO personally doing a lot of the communication stuff because that was just who was doing it before. They never found a new person to take on these duties. Pete Vera, Exit Algorithms: Yeah, definitely. I think you're 100 % right. A lot of businesses we talk to, I don't think really have a communication strategy really at all. And if anything, it's lumped together with their marketing. What are some of the things that you find and you implement commonly with some of the businesses you work with? Joshua: We work with businesses, we use two main frameworks. The first is story, narrative, and brand. A lot of people call us at the brand stage. The story is kind how you tell your friends at a bar what happened. It's the elements. It's the beginning, the middle, and the present. It's all the major beats. It's the things that happened. Another is narrative that comes next. It's what answers questions. It connects the dots. It tells people what to think about the elements of your story and then brand, which is what a lot of people think of and where a lot of people call us because they really hadn't thought about that story and narrative element yet. And that's the swag. That's everything that stakeholders interact with that connects them to your company. So yes, it's the logo and the website and the pens and all that. That's part of your brand. But your AI chatbot is part of the brand. Pete Vera, Exit Algorithms: Hmm. Joshua: the automated email responses, the things that we just use daily, how customers and employees are interacting day to day. That's all part of the brand communications, because it is a way that stakeholders are interacting with the company. The other one we use is something we call our four languages model. We'd see, and experience. And that's basically how people are interacting with your business. your content. People understand read. It's the most intuitive of them. It's what you read. See a lot of that's what you read, but also visuals, graphics, videos. Hear very important things like podcasts, which in some cases you're also seeing. I'm someone who listens to podcasts, someone else will watch. And then experience with yes, it is those big experiential events, it's conferences, it's pop ups, it's all those sorts of things. But What people kind of miss in that is how people experience what they read, and hear. So me, who's listening to a podcast versus someone else who's watching will have very different experiences. we just start, one thing we're starting to do with them at that initial phase is walk them through these. And it's something people can do on their own. Take a piece of paper, divide it into thirds, story, narrative, brand. Take another piece, divide each side into half. Pete Vera, Exit Algorithms: Mm. Joshua: read, see, hear, and experience. Write it down. That will give you a very basic idea of what you have if you haven't really thought out that communication strategy yet. Pete Vera, Exit Algorithms: Yeah, that's a great place to start. think ⁓ any small business can try to implement that. Are there any tools that you recommend for a business trying to level up their game with communications? Joshua: start with those two pieces of paper and I do recommend you use actual pieces of paper not an app because it does help to see all those things together and to see story narrative brand kind of stacked on top of each other as opposed to you're typing it on your phone and you have a little screen and you can only see parts of it at a time. So I really do recommend using actual normal letter size writing paper for this exercise because it does help. We have some things on our website. They're free tools. They're out there to use. They're our quick guides. They have a lot of white space on every page. If you go to the website, you have web versions of them. But if you hit the PDF version, it's laid out with a lot of white space. They're designed, we use them. They're designed in ways that you can scribble all over them and take notes and really document and answer questions that come to you when you're doing it. And then a lot of it's. the things that any business will use. Have a good email system. If you're doing social media, you don't have to do it all at once. Use the scheduling tools that are out there. There are a lot of them. Pick one that works for you and is within your budget. We have some we use, but because we're coming in in a fractional way, we also jump into a lot of the time what's already in place and just pick up whatever they've been using because it's easier. We're not going to reinvent the wheel if it's working. And then just standard note-taking apps is really something common for us because we take a lot of notes and it helps keep it organized. And everyone has those on their phones, on their tablets, on their computers. You don't need a lot of great tools and sometimes having too many of them is where you get lost. You start layering a tool on top of a process, on top of another system, and that's where that breakdown occurs. both internally and externally. Because you might be directing people to the wrong social media account. You might be telling people that it's on your Instagram, but we use stuff hosted on our website. If you just kind of keep it simple, you'll find that that breakdown is far less likely to occur. Pete Vera, Exit Algorithms: Mm. Yeah. Solid advice. Yeah. Very easy to get too many tools and, you know, not just communications, but I think in business in general, there's so much available out there. We'll talk later a little bit about AI and tools available on that end. ⁓ I wanted to get a little further into, you know, what are some of the metrics that you can tie an effective communications program to? Joshua: Yeah. We use, ⁓ we focus on two big things as Chief Communications Officer. The first is shape perception. The second is build and maintain trust, which are two very difficult things to measure in an objective way. Because how do you measure trust? You can do focus groups, you can ask people, you can have surveys on your website, but that won't necessarily capture everything. We use basic things like engagement rates. are people clicking the discounts if they go out in emails. We're looking at the return on ads then we're looking at cost to acquire, we're looking at lifetime value, all those sorts of things as well. But what really comes down to all of those at the end of the day is trust. And the only way you really know if you have it is if you have to test it. And one thing we hope we never have to do is test it. Because that means something's gone wrong. Pete Vera, Exit Algorithms: Mm. Sure. Yeah, how does a company build trust with their customers? Joshua: Honesty, authenticity, authenticity is huge. It comes up in our newsletters almost every week in some form or another because people are really looking for authentic content. One easy thing you can do at any stage of your business is if you're using corporate accounts to communicate, you're on LinkedIn with Acme Corp and they're posting out your updates. You're on Instagram as Acme Corp and you're posting out your updates. Switch to leaders and owners if you're a very small business, founders if you're a startup, use personal accounts. Identify as a person with a person's photo. Have it come from that individual. It is much more real when it does that and people connect with it a lot better and they're much more likely to trust a person. Even if it's a leader of a business and they're speaking in that professional business context, then they are likely to have that same trust in ACME Core. Pete Vera, Exit Algorithms: Yeah, great advice. I think it's especially relevant now with all the AI generated content out there. It's just kind of crazy how much is out there that feels kind of so fake. ⁓ It's absolutely important to be real, like you said, authentic. Joshua: Mm-hmm. And that means there are imperfections in it, and that's okay. We kind of expect that it isn't 100 % polished, that you might have been typing it out on your phone and it doesn't look perfect because that makes it in many ways more authentic. One thing we see with lot of video production is people want it to look Hollywood level, sleek production. And I came from a video background that was something that I really focused on for a long time too. But you don't need that. In fact, having the opposite can actually work to your benefit. Having something that isn't terrible is still good and meets certain criteria, but you don't need the Hollywood level production. And what I mean by certain criteria, the person has to be able to see, your viewer has to see you. You can't be sitting in the dark. You can't be... totally blinded out by light. You have to have lighting. It has to be visible. You do not need perfect studio lighting, but you have to be something that people can see. The other is sound. They have to be able to hear you. You don't need studio microphones. You don't need anything really fancy. I'm wearing a lavalier microphone, one of these clip microphones now for this recording. You don't need that. You could wear earbuds. You see a lot of people doing... recordings with the wired earbuds and they're holding a microphone up or they're a Bluetooth lavalier microphone that would normally be clipped, you can still hear that. And you see a little of that production background that is imperfect. And that does connect with people a lot more than if you had something like hidden microphones everywhere and Hollywood production and a lot of great graphics. If you just say, you know, check the comments, check the description. We have it all there and you have just a little arrow that you could put in quickly pointing down that some of the CapCut can do. Really simple graphics. That can be in many ways more effective. Pete Vera, Exit Algorithms: Hmm. Yeah, yeah, it's kind of backwards from what you, you know, people would think. Do you think that is a new phenomena that's happened recently? ⁓ Like, what is the cause of Joshua: We're seeing it more recently. It's not necessarily new because you had user generated content going back a long time. Hollywood's even taken the approach of having, you know, they don't do this all the time, obviously, having things that look like they were shot differently go back a very long time, Blair Witch project. That was a wildly successful movie. And it looked like it was designed to be shot on a handheld camcorder was the look they were giving it. And it connected. It was successful. For that reason. If it was a slick Hollywood production, it wouldn't have been as successful. And that movie's 20-something plus years old now. So it's not new that we're seeing, they don't call it low budget, but more authentic production being successful. We're seeing it being available to more people. Pete Vera, Exit Algorithms: Yeah, ⁓ that makes sense. Yeah, there's even films being filmed on iPhone cameras nowadays. Joshua: Yeah, you see it all the time that independent movies, things like that, they're using what's available to them. Pete Vera, Exit Algorithms: And I think that the general theme of, you've got to come off as real and authentic. think that's, ⁓ yeah, that's something to take away. Do you find that companies you work with are having more success on certain platforms than others? Joshua: depends on the company, everyone's gonna find their success in different places. Some are gonna find it on Pinterest. Some are gonna find it on LinkedIn. Some will find it on TikTok. A lot of it's luck, just kind of where you end up resonating, and some of it's where your audience is. There's a lot of B2B sales, especially with small businesses, two small businesses also, that are on Facebook, on Instagram, on TikTok. A lot of software for those businesses is being sold through those platforms. Most people think, go LinkedIn for that, but the people are everywhere. It can take the old number was seven to 14 touch points for people to get a message. My guess is that was maybe true at some point. I think today it's a lot higher. If for no other reason, then we scroll through a lot more than we ever did. That number might be 21, 28, 30 or more touch Pete Vera, Exit Algorithms: Mm. Joshua: for someone to really internalize and sell, which means you need to get them everywhere. If they're on Facebook, you need to get them on Facebook. If they're in offices, you need to get them in person. You just need to cover as much ground as possible, but you're not going to have huge follower numbers on every platform equally. You can't. Some, even for the biggest brands, they're going to put some resources somewhere. and some somewhere else, and they'll have their bigger platforms and their smaller ones. That's math. That's just how it's going to work. So if you see that maybe TikTok isn't working out for you as much, but you're doing well on Instagram, keep the TikTok going, but maybe put a little more resources into Instagram because that's where your community is. That's where the people engaged are. But you can't hit everything. Pete Vera, Exit Algorithms: Yeah, great advice. Yeah, love your perspective. ⁓ That's the advice I've gotten too is like, you really need to focus on one. There seems to be a little bit of conflict there. You really need to focus on one platform. But like you said, the goal is to be like omnipresent on all of them. ⁓ Joshua: That's a great goal and I guess if you're Taylor Swift or a Kardashian, you could achieve that. And if you have the budgets of those publicity firms, you could achieve that with the staff of the firms that are doing it. You can achieve that. For most businesses and most people, we're not Coca-Cola. We're not McDonald's. We're not the Kardashians. We don't have those resources behind us. We have to pick. And part of that's going to be We're doing really well on say LinkedIn and Instagram. We're doing really well on LinkedIn, Instagram and Substack. The others are kind of a second tier for us. We'll put our focus on this first tier. We'll still publish on the others. But we have to put our focus where it is going to do the most good and get the best return. Pete Vera, Exit Algorithms: Great philosophy. Yeah, and we touched on it a little bit with the tools, but I'd love to hear, know, how are you leveraging AI these days and where do you see it affecting your industry the most? Joshua: We use it, we use it all the time. It's a great tool, but that's all it is. It's a tool. It is not the answer. It doesn't produce final products. It isn't good enough for that. In part because when it does, it comes out very inauthentic. Or it produces something that's incredibly wrong in some cases. It just straight hallucinates at you. But we use it a lot for research. It is very good at that. We had a project we had to say, get information, basic demographic information for roughly 25 cities. And it was stuff you'd find at the State Department of Public Health, City Office of Vital Statistics, basic things like that. ⁓ Demographics based on age and income and race and education, all that sort of stuff. That's a lot of Google searches is really all that is. Well, we've had an AI do it. and gave it very strict parameters. You can only search Office of Vital Records. You can only search public information from government websites. You have to report every source. And it did that and did a good job with minimal errors because we checked it. And it did it much faster than any person could ever do. Then the person was able to use that information the way a person can to create the story we needed to. But we had to be very specific, not only with the sources that it could check, but also with the locations. If we said we needed the data for Rome, it doesn't know if we need Rome, Georgia, Rome, New York, or Rome, Italy. It just knows we need Rome. Pete Vera, Exit Algorithms: Mm. Joshua: And that would be a problem for it. So you have to be very specific of what you give it in terms of the constraints and parameters. We also use it for automations. It's really good for that, especially automations for research. What's trending for a client in their industry today? We might do one in the morning, one in the mid afternoon, depending on the project. What are the top tweets or Instagram posts? Do we want to engage with them? It gives us reports. on a regular basis. It's really good for that. We have another one that we built that it will not only give us that, but you could, if you reply to the email that has that information, it will then do the post for you. Pete Vera, Exit Algorithms: Nice. Nice. Joshua: which is a great time saver if you don't have to go to another app and log in. We just created the workflow that it comes to emails as here's a post that you might want to respond to. Here's a response to one of your posts. You could ignore it. Or if you write back, it'll then post that for your account. It's great for that. We use it for outlines because it can do that well. We do not use it to write content. Pete Vera, Exit Algorithms: Yeah. Joshua: because it doesn't fill in those blanks well. And we all know what AI feels like when we see it now. We don't want it to look like that, which is why it can do an outline for us. But that's it. A person is still doing the actual creation. Pete Vera, Exit Algorithms: Mm-hmm. Yeah, great. Thank you for sharing. Those are ⁓ really unique, I guess, or ⁓ insightful use cases, especially in an industry where it's so clear when someone's using AI to generate content. Joshua: Yeah. And some of these are things that are open source that we use. A lot of them are things that we've built using AI agents and workflow tools because some of the off-the-shelf ones came close but weren't exactly what we needed or didn't properly interface with the existing work. and we needed them to do certain things, so we built them. And one of great things about these AI tools is it makes that much easier than it would be otherwise. It is not necessarily easy because it doesn't always do what you want it to do. It requires a lot of testing. They require training in these things. But... it is easier than writing out the program to do it by hand. Pete Vera, Exit Algorithms: Yeah, and you do the work one time and then it can repeat that same output, right? Joshua: Yeah, and a lot of these things we use on ourselves first, especially if they're not commercial products or known open source products, if it's something we dev ourselves, we'll dev it and test it on our own accounts. We have one right now that will completely optimize websites. And we dev it on ourselves first before we were willing to actually use it on someone else, because we had to make sure something like this especially that we built, works. And even then it doesn't commit changes. It can make things, it can suggest them, but you have to go through and say, yes, yes, yes, no, make this edit. It is still a very human involved process. Pete Vera, Exit Algorithms: Yeah, I appreciate it. That's a really good perspective, I think, for business owners listening. ⁓ Using AI properly takes work and you have to install the correct guardrails, still train it exactly. Joshua: Don't ever test something new on something that's already alive. Pete Vera, Exit Algorithms: Yeah, another good tip. ⁓ awesome. Yeah, this has been a ⁓ great conversation today, Joshua. I really appreciate it. Towards the end of the show, I always ask guests to consolidate the lesson from the show into one practical tip that business owners listening today can implement. In your case, I think ⁓ what's one tip that... they can implement that would build a stronger communications and media presence right now. Joshua: Be the signal, not the noise. And what we mean by that is everything you're doing, provide value, make it useful, both to your end user, the consumer, tell that story, tell that narrative, communicate that brand. But if you're doing it and you're being signaled, you're not blending in, you're not doing something that's gonna waste money for you, you're not distracting your audience. So it's always important to focus on being the signal, be something that provides. Pete Vera, Exit Algorithms: Well said. Yeah, great way to finish this show. Where can listeners find you ⁓ in Beltway Media? Joshua: You can find us online, website, beltway.media.com. You can email me directly, jaltment at beltway.media.com. You can also find me on LinkedIn, linkedin.com slash in slash Joshua I. ⁓ Pete Vera, Exit Algorithms: I'll leave that in the show notes. Great talking to you today Joshua. I appreciate having you on. Joshua: Thank you for having me.