Why Visibility Matters: Brand Strategy and Online Omnipresence

Isaac Mashman3:53

You're still here now? Yeah, I'm in Arkansas right now, Little Rock specifically.

Isaac Mashman4:39

You can get a $400,000 house here that anywhere else in the States would probably be $800,000. And if you want to spend a lot of money and get an $800,000 house, that is like a two million dollar house in Jacksonville or anywhere else, depending on where you go. Land is also really cheap too. So you could buy literally a hundred acres for like a million or less, have your own creek, your own pond, your own river. It's cool. And plus, the income taxes have dropped too, so the governor came in and dropped the income tax on a personal and corporate level. So it's like the economy is taking off, people are moving in, it's nice, man. I mean, I'm looking at the river over here to my right, and so, you know, [it] has a skyline, like this is one.

Isaac Mashman6:57

I think the best way I could describe that experience and the reason why is frankly trauma, but not in a victimhood mentality kind of way, but trauma in terms of, mom not having the money to get her teeth fixed, mom not having the money to buy the nice clothes, going to Walmart, going to thrift stores, mom not having the money for insurance. Mom not having the time to spend with me because she was working. Growing up, I saw a lot about what the lack of money would do to a person, and it ultimately led to my grandfather's death. They basically had to sell their house because the roof was caving in, and [they didn't have the money to fix it].

Ultimately, it [was] blue tarps on the roof. That's a major code violation, $250 fine every day. How could somebody on disability possibly pay that? Now we could have a conversation about the bureaucracy side of things and about how messed up that system can be politically. But getting involved with business was my solution. It was honestly probably the most difficult path that I could have chosen. When you think about my experience in school, I was a straight A student. I had a 4.44 weighted GPA by the time I graduated, top 10 in my class, very book smart. I never needed to cheat, but when I got into the older grades, I was like, AP chemistry, I don't even know why I signed up for this, I hate this.

But then I had this idea in my mind, okay, I'm going to go to college. My mom went back and got her master's in business, didn't use it, didn't apply herself. So I'm going to go for a marketing degree or a public relations degree or a degree in business. What am I going to do with that? I'm going to have to spend two years of my life taking these prerequisites, taking biology, taking algebra, none of the things that would actually matter in the actual world and the grand scope of things. I stumbled into the industry of network marketing early on, and I saw these younger guys that I thought were making good money.

Now, how much of that was smoke and how much of that was mirrors? That's up for debate, considering a lot of them are pieces of crap now today. But I saw it as a way to get that mentorship that I lacked growing up in terms of finances, in terms of personal development. Nobody in my life put on the Tony Robbins tapes, and I didn't have a parent who was encouraging me to listen to audios or take mentorship. Now, I had that through Boy Scouts, through church, and yes, I was an avid reader, but it wasn't the same. There's a difference between having that church, theological personal development and [saying], let's go ahead and dive in and think about things from a strategic point of view, or studying Bob Proctor and Earl Nightingale.

Network marketing was ultimately that thing that kind of exposed me. My first business trip was to Minneapolis, Minnesota, and I had dinner with the vice president of the network marketing company, because he was so impressed with the 70 hours of travel time that I was going out of my way to do in order to be at that event. From that industry, I left it, rejoined the company like a year later, and did three different network marketing companies four different times, then went into music management and podcast management. Then ultimately I realized that I kind of have a knack for personal branding. When you have enough people coming to you and asking you for advice, maybe that's an indicator that you have, I don't want to go as far as saying a God-given gift, but you have an ability to think or strategize or, I suppose, forecast strategies and steps that could be taken in order to achieve that optimal goal.

Whether that means the person wants to become famous for vanity, wants to make money for the financial benefit, or wants to very simply be purpose driven and reach and impact more people, today I'm really blessed to have all of that experience and be able to have some really good people in my network. That's a really quick summation, I suppose.

Isaac Mashman12:05

Yeah, and I would like to say too, it took me a while to fully step into the consulting realm because there's no shortage [of consultants]. I was just on Instagram and I got an advertisement, and this dude has hoop earrings and a neck tattoo and a backwards hat. He's like, six figure earner, Inc. 5000 company, and I'm like, you buy that? What are you talking about, man? So it took me a long time to feel comfortable even calling myself a consultant. I mean, that's part of the reason why, in 2020, when I was in the music industry, I was managing musical talent right before the pandemic hit, and when the pandemic hit, we decided to cancel one of the concerts.

I was going to fly out to Fort Wayne, Indiana from California, and the artist eventually lost his passion. I came to the realization that the only way to make money in the music industry is number one, by screwing somebody over with an aggressive 360 deal, or number two, you have to take it to a very high degree, because artists don't get paid for their streams. That's not where the bulk of their money comes from. Snoop Dogg was in an interview and he's like, I got paid, I think, 40,000 from Spotify. It's like, that's pennies on the dollar when you compare that to the deals that he gets from advertisements, from sponsorships, from touring, and touring is one of the best ways for an artist to make money.

So I left that industry, and then in 2020, I launched Mashman Ventures, my public relations firm, which I dissolved earlier, well, I say this year, but last year, because it just wasn't working. It didn't feel right. I woke up one day and my fiance said, come on, get up, you're the CEO of Mashman Ventures. I'm like, okay, I didn't feel anything. I knew that was when I needed something to, I suppose, re-spark that and get a clearer vision. Even though I called it a public relations firm, essentially what we were doing was consulting. It was personal brand consulting, but public relations as an industry is so broad.

You can talk about crisis management, writing press releases, corporate communications, executive branding, reputation management, and working with the branding and marketing components of a company to make sure that the image of that business or that person is properly reflected. So public relations has a huge [grand scope], but I was still focusing and targeting on personal branding, and it wasn't any of the pay-to-win press or the let's get you featured in Forbes kind of thing. It was still a holistic, organic approach of how can we go ahead and position you as a public figure and then from there help opportunities come to you rather than you finding those opportunities yourself.

So I dissolved that firm, publicly made the announcement, and then I launched Mashman Consulting Group in July of 2024. My idea for MCG is to build the number one personal brand consultancy worldwide by the year 2035. We have McKinsey and Boston Consulting Group. These are massive business management consulting firms that work with governments. You think about the opioid crisis, a lot of that was due to McKinsey. [They're] the people who are pulling the strings behind the scenes, except I want to be building out my own personal brand to a very high level, while also helping clients and other people. But the thing is, I didn't get started in personal brand consulting.

It wasn't like, let me go ahead and sell a course, teaching you how to sell a course. It was, okay, let me build up my personal brand. What I realized, y'all, is, man, I saw [in the] country, I talk about being from, [and] living in, Arkansas, and I thank y'all in a podcast interview, but.

Isaac Mashman15:14

But one of the big things is really understanding how I could position myself and position MCG as one of a kind, because the personal brand space lacks any certification, lacks any guidance. So Edward Bernays is called the father of public relations. He's the person who worked with the governments. He's the reason why women started smoking. He's the reason why we have the big all-American breakfast with eggs and bacon and everything else. He was the person pulling the strings. One of the criticisms he had of public relations later on in his life was that there wasn't any certification process. So anybody could call themself a professional.

Today in personal branding, we have these people that are like, let me get you in Forbes. Let me go ahead and grow your Instagram account. Let me go ahead and get you this award or that award. All of it lacks character, and it lacks any true credibility. So I'd much rather be the person who can, with an ethical backbone and a moral compass, say, no, this is how you can go from a nobody to a somebody because I did it myself. And then here are the case studies of other people who [I] have helped optimize and get results in their own life.

Isaac Mashman17:22

So that taught me something entirely different. You don't go to school and they don't teach you about having articles of organization or any agreements or operating agreements or getting an EIN number. All of that is the detailed aspects of business that you don't get taught. So you kind of have to shuffle through and figure it out. It was a major shift for sure, but it gave me a huge sense of relief because I felt like I had this dread. It came out of a horror story with a client who just ended up harassing me and everybody in my life. I'm telling you, the past couple of years have really taught me so much about how I'm shaping myself and how I'm presenting myself.

For example, Sean shot me over the questions and I'm like, I don't want to know the questions. I [want] to go free for all because that's where I thrive. But without those experiences and without all of those struggles or hardships or client horror stories, so to speak, I wouldn't be where I am today with the guidance, well, I don't want to use the word guidance, but with the vision that I have laid out in front of me. And I've been having a lot of introspection lately about why am I even doing this? Because I'm not one of those people who wake up in the morning and feel inspired.

I have to force myself out of bed. I'm not one of those people that's like, I love life. Frankly, I find life boring. So I'm finding all of these reasons for why I'm building the business that are giving me something to work for and work towards, because, you know, idle hands do the devil's work. I mean, we've all heard that phrase, and I feel like business is the way for me to have fun. And so business is even less about scaling something big and more about the emotions and the feelings that I'm getting from scaling that thing. And so whenever Mashman Ventures wasn't having any fun, it felt more like a burden. Those were really some indicative moments that something else needed to happen in order for me to get back on the bandwagon.

Isaac Mashman21:05

Some of it's not. Well, frankly, a lot of it too came down to optimization. Look at my business, what is my business? My business is helping people with their personal brand and optimizing it, whether that be for visibility, securing the same social media handles, and taking that macroscopic view about, okay, how you appear is going to influence first impressions. Then you have to think about visibility, SEO, artificial engine optimization. There are so many aspects that go into personal branding, so I'm able to literally sit down and change a person's life. If I was to sit down with you, Lee, or sit down with you, Sean, and say, all right, well, why don't you go ahead and change your marketing message?

That marketing message, somewhere down the line, lands you one client. You've instantly paid for the ROI of working with me, on top of landing a new podcast interview, a press feature, a speaking opportunity, and publishing your book and having it improve your own perception, and now you're a published author. So there are a lot of nuances about what I do to where I'm really helping somebody completely change their life and the trajectory of their career. I suppose part of the reason why I increased my rates lately is people don't necessarily understand what I'm even offering in terms of the potential ROI. Because you could work with somebody, hire a marketing agency, and think about how much businesses and owners spend on social media agencies.

They can spend $12,000, but if their marketing message isn't optimized, if they don't have a good profile, if they can't even be found on Google or with a search, you're paying 12,000 or five figures a month for an agency to market you, and your conversions are going to suck. Then you look like everybody else online. But now imagine if we take one of these gurus or one of these people, and now all of a sudden you Google their name, they have a knowledge panel, they show up, they dominate the search, they have press that is legitimate. They've written articles, they have a website, they have all of their testimonials, and there are so many other things that we could do to really help position somebody.

Now, they don't have to struggle through all of the objections that they would get or be called a guru or be called a scammer. It's like, no, my track record speaks for myself and your track record should do the same exact thing. Just like if you go and find a restaurant to eat at, you're going to look up the reviews first before you ever walk in the door. Or the same thing with getting an endorsement and having somebody talk about, hey, Isaac is the number one guy in personal branding, or hey, Brad is the number one social media agency owner, or the number one water feature expert.

I spoke at a water feature event in October. Those endorsements and edification are the things that lift you up above the rest. Everybody else online who's creating content, what's separating you from them? It's very hyper-competitive. Now I believe that more and more people are going to try to become influencers and creatives. We have fit grandmothers making protein recipes on the internet. You have this young guy who's starting out as a model or starting out as a fitness trainer competing with all of these people from all of these different demographics and age groups. Really, I think the master key, if we're talking about Charles [Haanel's] Master Key System or like Napoleon Hill's secret of success.

The secret of success in terms of personal branding is how you position yourself. If you position yourself as a public figure to where, hey, The Strat Show is the number one show for business people to listen to, to get strategies, detailed strategic value. Not just value (you could be motivated and get value), but I'm talking strategic value. That helps you position yourself to where now somebody comes back and listens because they're getting something in return, and then we're talking about the deliverables, because just like a business has deliverables, your personal brand [does too].

Isaac Mashman28:01

Frankly, artificial intelligence is, I would say, a weapon, actually, in a good way. It's kind of one of those things where I don't really think that artificial intelligence will ever result in some Terminator, Skynet kind of scenario where the AI turns on us. Now, I saw this great video on Instagram, and the guy was using ChatGPT to program this robotic pressurized gun. It was like a fake gun. I was like, that's a scary use of AI, but the military already has that to search and attack people. You think about the ballistic missiles that they had in World War II or heading into Vietnam and everything.

It's like those missiles would follow the heat signature and track through. Earl Nightingale in the 60s mentioned that in one of his video or audio trainings. But I think artificial intelligence is creating a lot of false confidence because now people think they can do anything just by having ChatGPT on their side and getting advice. So it's like, I contributed to an article earlier this year. My quote was used in Forbes, talking about, will AI replace consultants? I don't think so, because the one thing about consultancy and being that person who they can go to and ask questions is you have that emotional human touch, and you could see the broader scope.

So now, if a consultant is able to integrate artificial intelligence and has this super machine, this quantum computer, virtually in their pockets and in their hands, they can become vastly more efficient. So for example, several years ago, I would try to come up with a marketing message for a person, and we'd go through a list of synonyms on Google and say, which one do you want to describe you the most? Which one do you like? Now I'm able to pull up ChatGPT, and we're on a live consulting call, and I'm able to say, give me synonyms for this. Okay, what phrases could we incorporate that might invoke this particular feeling?

Now it's able to pull an entire list of things together, and I'm able to say, all right, what do you think about this? Okay, and then it's up to me to take that piece of information that it generated and apply it to the broader marketing message and to the overall strategy. Then we're talking about artificial engine optimization. That's something that I think a lot of people are going to talk about. You have SEO, search engine optimization. But what about artificial engine optimization? So for example, you should be able to hear this. Let me give you guys a real example here. Alexa, who is Isaac Mashman?

Isaac Mashman30:22

Okay, so that is an example of using AI to enhance my search. It's the same thing with ChatGPT or any of the other AI systems and models. You're able to search me up. Then the other thing is, if you were to go to ChatGPT and you're doing your own research, doing your own papers, or maybe you're wanting to make a buying or hiring decision, you search up top personal branding experts, and if you can pop up on ChatGPT's list of top 100 or top 50 or top 10 experts in a particular field, you've made it. Because now, you don't know how many queries people are searching every single day for that specific thing.

So I think AI is, number one, providing a lot of optimization in terms of efficiency and having the exact steps. I think it's also opening up an entire spectrum of really taking things to a new level. If you could use ChatGPT, you could probably go into ChatGPT right now and you could have it reverse engineer my own personal brand and take those steps and apply it to your own, and you'd be able to see results. I started as a copywriter.

Isaac Mashman32:33

We're not even talking about other use cases for AI. We were talking about language models, but we're not talking about podcast editing software that can automatically change the frequency, change the pitch, get the sound denoised, all of that. We're not talking about video editing software that's able to pull images from Google or create an image, and then put that into the video. Or I mean, Captions AI is the software that I use for most all of my short form vertical videos. It's able to edit and transcribe with a 99% accuracy rate from what I've seen. Then it's able to pull and put images in there.

Then it's able to do focus zooms and all of these other things to where, a couple years ago, I would have had to pay a video editor to edit all of my videos. It would have taken them hours to do compared to 30 seconds to generate. Then we're talking about web design. GoDaddy has an AI tool, Squarespace has an AI tool, where you're able to input some pieces of information, and yeah, might it lack that unique flair? Yes, but then that's where another web developer is able to use that to do the heavy lifting of changing the heading and moving all of the buttons and the things that are very tedious in web design.

I built my websites years ago, so I know what it's like. Then now you're able to work off of the work that it's already done. Now you've saved yourself a bunch of time and you could possibly present an even better result because you used AI to set the backbone, and then it's up to you to optimize and make the tweaks. So really what we're talking about is integrating AI to where now we can optimize every single thing about our business and every single thing about our life. Bryan Johnson, the founder of Blueprint, the guy who's trying to live to 100, people don't live to 100, but he's trying not to die.

Don't die. People talk crap about him, but they don't realize that he is basically hacking, not biohacking, but he's hacking life because he has an algorithm that makes decisions for him. So he's able to input all of this information, all of this data, and make decisions without having the emotional crutch that makes us human, because of emotions. For example, eating a pack of Oreos or a bag of Doritos, we're not driven by logic when we open up that bag of Doritos or Oreos. We are driven by emotion, hunger, those primal instincts, and primal instincts can prevent us from getting hit by a car or getting shot or walking off a cliff, but it's also the thing that leads us to make very bad decisions.

So now if you can incorporate AI to do that logical decision making for you, it's really fascinating to think about how much our society will rely on AI over the next two decades.

Isaac Mashman35:56

I am really easy to find. You can go to Google and find me on any social media platform. You could also go to my website, MashmanCG.com, or my personal website, isaacmashman.com. There's a really cool chatbot that you're able to click on, answer a few questions, and it'll take you to an exclusive overview presentation for Mashman Consulting Group. If I could leave everybody with, I suppose, one word of really specific strategic [advice for] The Strat Show, it would be to perform a personal brand audit. Whenever you're performing a personal brand audit for yourself, you're looking for three things. You're looking for number one, omnipresence, which is how you show up, where you show up, being able to be found everywhere.

Omnipresence is typically referred to when we're talking about God. God is everywhere all the time. Well, your personal brand, in the least sacrilegious way possible, needs to be everywhere all the time to where people can find you, because you're thinking about your personal brand as a separate entity. When you're asleep, you still have a personal brand that is working for you. People are able to find you. Whenever you wake up and check your email and see somebody hitting you up for business, somebody inviting you to go on their podcast or requesting a quote, that is effectively your own strategist, your own publicist walking with you side by side your entire life.

So number one is omnipresence. Number two is visibility. Making sure that you're showing up in multitudes of places. The third and final thing is having a seamless brand. So that looks a couple of different ways. Number one, having a unique marketing message. So, addicted to coffee and [standards], I help emerging and established public figures optimize and scale their personal brands. That is my marketing message. It has a personal hook and a professional punchline. So creating your own unique marketing message, or, hey, I design kick-ass websites for X, Y, and Z, or I am the premier go-to for X, Y, and Z, whatever it might be, and having some personal aspect.

Whether that's being addicted to coffee, being a major nerd, being a Star Wars fan, I don't care what it is, having something personal that can build rapport with your audience, because people do want to connect with the person. The other thing is making sure that you secure the same [name], so securing the same social media handle, having the same domain, having the same way that you show up, and on your book. So for example, if you go to Google and type in Isaac Mashman, it's only me. I have @isaacmashman on every social media handle. I have isaacmashman.com. On my book, it is Isaac Mashman. But if you do not have the unique name that I have, you might want to incorporate your middle name.

So, for example, you don't want to go by John Doe, but you could go by John Zachariah Doe. Now you start showing up, or John Z. Doe. So these are really simple steps that you can take to get an idea of where your personal brand stands today, and then what steps you can take. Even the slightest changes to your social media can help you position yourself. Then you use content as your marketing vehicle to where now you can reach the masses and potentially billions of people over the next couple of years, couple of months, however long you want to play this game. But your personal brand is something that is never destroyed. You have it until you die, and then even after you're dead.