Stop Saying PR Stunts: Propaganda Birthed Marketing

Isaac Mashman0:00

The people that are controlling the narrative from behind the scenes are people who understand public relations, reputation management, personal branding, psychology, all of that.

Isaac Mashman1:14

Caleb, man, honored to be here. Great to have this conversation with you. A couple of coffees over here, I'm good to go. Let's get into the conversation. I will try not to poke too much fun at Web3 and NFTs.

Isaac Mashman2:05

Yeah, of course. Well, I've got to promise I won't do the [Dana White] treatment and get up and leave the room here in a couple of seconds. But that was funny. You recently did that on the Howie Mandel podcast. My journey, I want to sum up a couple of years in a very short time, in a couple of minutes. Okay. I'm originally born and raised in Jacksonville, Florida, beautiful area, actually. I suggested you go there [at one point] to see what the city had to offer. I think you stayed over there. I come from a single parent home. I didn't know my biological father until much later in life, [when I] reconnected with him.

But it was a single parent household. My mom worked a lot of lower level jobs, management at fast food, but she was a brilliant lady, way overqualified for the work she was doing. For the large part, I was raised by my grandparents, and you know, I never had that traditional, happy, white picket fence American upbringing, which I think, the more I tell my story over the years, the more I realize a lot of other entrepreneurs share similar stories, and so those pain points become your strength. But also, the more I tell it, the more I realize that yeah, I was a part of it, [it's a] big deal, move on, accept it and grow.

But I was an excellent student, a straight A student pretty much, unlike a lot of other entrepreneurs who share the story about how they were a horrible student. I wasn't in that category. I was literally being groomed to go to college. My mom was like, hey, I'm not paying for college. My grandfather was a carpenter. He's not paying for college. It's like I didn't have some rich uncle that would put me through. So my idea was, in Florida, there's the Bright Futures scholarship, get good grades, get a good SAT and go to college for free. I was literally one SAT test away from getting a [full-ride] scholarship.

I had a 4.44 weighted GPA. I was going through it and doing everything I could to get accepted, and I got accepted to colleges. But I looked at my mom, who also had a master's degree in business at this time, and I love her to death and I say this out of the most humble respect, but I thought to myself, what is the point of going to college if she's not even using the degree that she has access to? Then in addition to that, what would I do, go get a degree in marketing and branding? I don't know what that would necessarily look like. I always found learning information to be quite easy, so I was able to look at something and reverse engineer how a person was able to make that happen.

It's marketing in a similar sense, you know, you look at a successful campaign or a campaign that was unsuccessful and you reverse engineer what happened, what point led to this point, what the brand was like, what tactics they used, etc. You're able to [see] the outcome and what steps worked and what steps didn't work. So long story short, I decided to jump head first into the world of business, started with a clothing line, got involved with network marketing, three different companies, four different times, and left the industry because I wanted more control. Then music, not as an artist, because my talent is not aligned with being a rapper, [nobody wants to] see me on the mic.

But I was managing musical talent when the pandemic happened. When the pandemic happened, I basically, at the time I was building a record label, and one of the artists lost his passion. I'm thinking to myself, okay, I don't know if I want to, I'm not going to go back home, I'm not going to go back to college, I'm not doing any of that stuff, [I didn't go to] college in the first place. But I realized that I had a knack for personal branding. I saw a lot of people working with businesses and doing social media agencies, which there's nothing wrong with that. The fact that you're looking into going into this undiscovered space, this ever-growing space.

I know OpenAI is just unveiling their new Sora AI, which is creating artificial intelligence videos. So I didn't want to do social media work, but I knew that I could work with the business owner and not the business itself. The rest is history. I launched my public relations firm, and here we are.

Isaac Mashman6:30

It is complementary. So public relations is ultimately the relationship with the public. If you were to look at what the words mean, the public is the general populace, and relations, you have the relationship, just like you and I have a friendship, [friend] and [ship]. You have a different relationship with your mom, a different relationship with your dad, a different relationship with your friends, with your business partners, et cetera. So public relations is the conscious manipulation. I say manipulation loosely because it can be received negatively. I figure I should address that. Public relations has traditionally been associated with propaganda, which has its preface with war. You think about World War II, you remember the advertisement of Uncle Sam with the big Americana hat saying, we want you, or the woman, I forgot her name, but I believe the lady actually [passed away] a couple years ago, who was holding up her arm.

Those were war posters, war propaganda. So public relations is oftentimes associated with that negative connotation, when public relations is actually every single thing that you just mentioned. It is a part of marketing. It is a part of branding. It is a part of reputation management, directing a conversation, getting proper outcomes. So I wouldn't say it's greater or less than marketing or branding, but it is something that is complementary, and the outcome of public relations, what PR is, has to do with how a person or business is branded. If you're branding yourself as a luxury item, you have to manage that relationship with the consumer to where there's this gap of distance and the consumer views your company or views your product or views you as that luxury item, that luxury experience.

The same thing with marketing. If you're marketing products, how you want your brand to be perceived will influence the advertisements you run. So for example, I like to use the golf tournaments, the PGA for example. They're not sponsored by Bud Light. They're not sponsored by the beer companies. They're sponsored by Crown Royal or the upscale liquor. They're sponsored by Rolex and Mercedes. During the Super Bowl, you're not watching a bunch of Mercedes commercials. You're seeing Chevy, you're seeing Ford, you're seeing GMC, they're all great, but the consumer that is broadly watching might not be the Mercedes type. Now, out of the millions and millions of people who watched it, obviously some people could afford the Mercedes.

But if you think about that away from the Super Bowl, on a day-to-day basis, you're not going to be running advertisements for a luxury brand like Louis Vuitton on television. That right there is a perfect representation of how the public views the brand. They view it as out of reach. They view it as something that is exclusive. They view it as something that is luxury. Public relations also encompasses articles that you're writing. You're influencing the perception, you're influencing how they view you, you're influencing their buying [decisions]. So PR is like this gigantic umbrella, but it's not greater than and it's not less than any of the sorts.

A lot of people ask, oh, should you start with the brand or should you start with the marketing first? You have to do both simultaneously in order to get an effective image, because how you build the brand determines how you market, and how you want to market determines how you're going to build your brand.

Isaac Mashman10:35

So a PR stunt is basically anything that is consciously done to gain a lot of attention very quickly. So for example, if McDonald's was to do something, and you could argue that this is or isn't a stunt, I would say that it is. You know, a couple years ago they did the meal with Cardi B and Quavo, they've gone to Travis Scott, you know, those are all PR campaigns. Not necessarily a stunt. A stunt is different from a campaign. All stunts are campaigns, not all campaigns are stunts. Alright, man, we're getting into some niche things I've never discussed with another person, [that] I'm aware of.

Of which I've studied, but I've never addressed [with] another person. I love this. So when you think about a PR campaign, you're thinking, okay, you want to either connect with the audience, or a combination of these goals. You want to connect with the audience. You want to make more sales. You want to establish the reputation in a certain direction. Let's say, for example, McDonald's, maybe a lot of people who were middle-aged were buying McDonald's, and they wanted to appeal to the younger market. Okay, you introduce a hot rapper, a hot celebrity to partner with. That is going to attract the younger generation. Think about politics in 2024, you see these presidential candidates teaming up with younger influencers and younger public figures to appeal to a different voter base.

That right there is a part of the PR campaign. The presidency and the presidential campaign and any political campaign has a huge backbone of PR. You have to think about, okay, if this person says this and it's perceived in a negative way, you could lose votes. But let's say somebody else perceives that in a positive light, then that could actually gain votes. So you have this risk management that is introduced. Now, a PR stunt would be something like, I don't know, going and running in a chicken suit and having a bunch of people across the states running in a chicken suit. They're going to be representing Popeyes or [a bunch of Ronald McDonalds].

You think about maybe Smile, that movie that came out during the Super Bowl last year or the year before, they had a bunch of people sitting in the Super Bowl smiling, [creepy], wearing the t-shirts. That right there would be a PR stunt. Honestly, it's [technically] a campaign, but it would be a PR stunt. So I know that's a lot to digest, but in terms of the average viewer, the average person listening to this, the entrepreneur who has the startup or the entrepreneur who might have a couple of employees or some independent contractors that they're working with, you don't need to necessarily do a stunt or do an individual campaign.

But you need to understand that every single thing that you're doing, every post you're making, every piece of content that you're creating, every single article you're writing or that you're featured in, or podcasts you're being interviewed on, me right here, having this conversation, is influencing my personal brand, improving or harming my reputation, and is therefore a part of public relations. So it's not just the traditional news media or getting onto an article like a lot of PR guys online will tell you. They'll be like, oh, I'll get you in Forbes and all this other garbage. That right there is just one very shallow view of what public relations is as an industry.

Isaac Mashman14:57

Or let's move away from the idea of calling them a stunt or even a campaign, and talk about the overall, overarching reputation management. Reputation management is as simple as it sounds. It is managing the reputation of an individual or an entity. So when you're launching a startup, you effectively have to give that startup a brand, an image. You have to determine what it stands for, what its associations are, what clientele it's serving, again going to the branding and marketing side. To give you a great example, I'm going to be doing a nonprofit in 2025, or some sort of nonprofit initiative. I might not make it a 501(c)(3), or whatever the actual steps are, because that is something that requires a lot of bandwidth and I'm just not there yet.

But I am doing some nonprofit initiatives and it's called Mashman Global. Now, me mentioning this on the podcast, let's break down how I would perceive this in my own brain when I'm looking at it and working with a client or working with anybody. Me mentioning Mashman Global on a podcast, on [camera], could be perceived as, oh, he's flaunting, he's talking about, oh, this nonprofit is to make him seem better, right? Now he seems Machiavellian, or maybe going and breaking down every, oh, this is a narcissistic viewpoint, which a lot of times, when you think about building out your personal brand, you're like, oh man, that's narcissistic.

No, you're building your brand so you can help those around you. So where the intent lies is a different topic. But Mashman Global, if I was to go ahead and I'm coming up with this pledge, so it's the Mashman Global one-to-one pledge, and the premise here is for every one dollar spent on an international endeavor, an international project, I'm going to be spending one dollar in the United States.

Isaac Mashman16:43

When I'm coming up with the name for the pledge, I'm thinking, do I want to call it a vow? Do I want to call it a pledge? Do I want to call it a promise? Do I want to call it an oath? All these different things have different connotations and they have different meanings. Maybe they're all tied together, but an oath seems a little bit more spiritual, whereas a pledge seems a little bit more practical, whereas a promise seems a little bit more cliché. Every single one, no matter which one I chose, would be influencing the person who hears it for the first time. How would you feel if you heard, oh, Mashman Global's one-to-one oath, versus Mashman Global's one-to-one pledge? [Tell me], between the oath and the pledge, which one, how would you feel if you heard both of those?

Isaac Mashman17:41

Professional, what was that? Professional, okay. But you see how that decision to choose pledge over oath is an aspect of reputation management, because I'm predicting the decision, which is also tying in with building the brand, which is also tied in with how I'm marketing, because that decision is influencing whether you're going to trust the company, trust the nonprofit, or trust the initiative, whether you're going to support the initiative. Or if you think that maybe they're trying too hard versus this is legitimate. See what I'm doing there? Yeah. So PR ties directly in with that. So with every single decision you're making with your startup and with your personal brand, because my focus is personal branding, and public relations has traditionally been reserved for entities and corporations and Hollywood.

But now in 2024, the accessibility has been lowered. So everybody has PR at their fingertips. Anybody can submit a press release for free. There are literal places, like if you were running a startup and you want to get at least a couple backlinks established, go to PRLog.com, OpenPR.com, PR.com, and you're able to submit a press release for absolutely free. PRLog and OpenPR allow dofollow backlinks, which is [a type of PR], but regardless, sending a press release is an aspect of, one of those small tactics, the small strategies that 50 years ago you would have had a team in place just to submit a fucking press release. Now you're able to do it free.

Isaac Mashman19:33

Yeah, I'm actually working on Mashman Ventures. We recently did a little bit of a restructuring, did away with the retainer, focusing 100%, not 100%, but focusing on consulting rather than the retainer services. But another aspect of the business is we're building out a training platform. Now, we're not some course company, we're not going to, this is not it. We're building this off of the backbone of a consultancy and off of the public relations firm, but we do have the training by Mashman Ventures platform, which is going to be launched very, very soon. We already have it in place, [we're] relaunching it. So you can access that at mashmanventures.training and we have various resources.

Like we have 17 steps to strengthen your personal brand available for free and [a host of] things. So yeah, I'm super excited to share more about that. Maybe by the time this is out, that'll be 100% up and going. Then other resources would be up on my personal channels. I'm always talking about things like this. Doing some longer form content on my YouTube. I don't really get into niche specifics like, for example, public relations steps and strategies. You might know me as the PR guy, but I'm not wanting to solely be known for that. I'm wanting to be known as Isaac Mashman.

Isaac Mashman21:35

Yeah, that's a multifaceted question. We love it. I'll approach it with the philosophical approach, as well as the practical, timeline kind of approach. Now, to answer the second question first, talking about when you should consider it, you don't view it as something that is separate. You view it as something that ties all in. Again, viewing it as something that every action you take is building and taking away from your reputation. So even if you don't have a solidified product or anything else, every interaction you're having, every single person you're talking to is perceiving you or your business in a specific light. So you are engaging in reputation management without even realizing it.

So you have to go from being this unconscious incompetence, where you don't even know that you're doing these things that are actually helping you or [hurting you] every single moment of every single day. The employee at the mall that you're going to, Bath & Body Works [or Kindle], that interaction you're having, that person could actually be an artist who could be a client of yours, but because you're not talking to them, you don't know what they're doing. So how would you know? But that right there, asking those questions and getting that information, you're able to add more information, and the more information you have, the better your results are going to be, because you know different options that are available to you.

Now, viewing that as something that you're going to be starting at the ground floor with and saying, all right, I understand I might not have all the products in place, I might not have all the answers, but I'm still going to put myself out there. And this is common knowledge, Gary's talked about this for years, Gary Vaynerchuk, all of this stuff, he's been talking about this forever, literally, just start. Well, if you just start, just realize that it's okay to pivot and address concerns [one] at a time. So you could say, hey, I know that you guys have been following the company for this, just like you pivoted the show from Web3 Talks to now Web Talks, you're introducing a slight pivot and changing a little bit of the direction of the narrative associated with you.

So you're directing your own personal reputation to show [the] brand, okay? So it's not something that you need to do at a specific time, it's not going to be [a] green light, now start building your reputation. No, understand your reputation is being built or hurt with every action you're taking today.

Isaac Mashman23:49

Good. For the first question, answered second, the history of PR, there are two different ways to approach this. The philosophical approach, which I talk about a little bit, shameless plug, in my book, Personal Branding: A Manifesto on Fame and Influence, which I'm working on a second edition of. It's a short read, about 55 pages, you've read it. I talk about how personal branding has existed from the beginning of mankind. Personal branding is not PR, but every personal brand has a reputation. So PR does matter. Adam and Eve had personal brands, think about Eve, ate the forbidden fruit, and then led to the downfall of man because Adam gave in and everything else.

So it's a biblical approach, a logical approach, but they had a personal brand. The pharaohs, the chieftains, Genghis Khan, the emperors of China, every single person throughout history had a personal brand, okay? But in recent years, it's become common knowledge that every single person has access to this. The kings in England used this divine right to maintain control, if you know, God sent us here to be rulers, and the common man, the blacksmith, said okay, I'm with this, the baker said I'm with this, the peasant, right, okay, cool. This is my king, some kings were loved, some kings were hated, the kings that stayed in power the longest learned how to manage the narrative, learned how to manage the personal brand.

It wasn't called personal branding, but that's effectively what they were doing. The term personal branding was coined by Tom Peters in the '90s. Tom Peters was a massive consultant. He wrote an article, I believe [The Brand Called You], I think that's the name, or something, available for free with one quick Google search. But he used the term personal branding and talked about some of the things I'm mentioning, about how a CEO, what they're doing in their free time, that is effectively their personal brand. Now public relations, the actual term, the practical approach here, was coined by a man named Edward Bernays in the early 1900s.

So I've made a few different videos on this lately because it's so fascinating. He was the nephew of Sigmund Freud, and so if you think about the people who are making decisions, who have always influenced society, you may or may not know them.

Isaac Mashman26:13

The people that are controlling the narrative from behind the scenes are people who understand public relations, reputation management, personal branding, psychology, all of that. So it's no coincidence that the nephew of Sigmund Freud was the person who decided to really understand the consequences of actions and have different campaigns. So most notably, women in the early 1900s were not smoking cigarettes. It was considered not ladylike. So what Edward Bernays did when he was hired by a tobacco company was he did a campaign. Again, campaign, not a stunt. Stunts are often gimmicky. Campaigns are thought out. He had a bunch of female celebrities at the time in Hollywood, those early days, go to a gala event, have photographers, he had people from the paper, and all of these women were smoking cigarettes.

So now the average person, the woman at home, the housewife, saw that and they said, oh, maybe this isn't just a masculine product. You think about those John Wayne, Western characters, it would be the men smoking cigarettes, [not] the women. So once it became common that women could also smoke, it became a fad, it became this thing. So that right there influenced the decision. Or another one, I mean, one other example. Think about the American breakfast. You go to Denny's, you go to Waffle House, you're like, I want the All-Star. They're going to load it up with bread, they're going to load it up with bacon and eggs and sausage and hash browns and everything else.

That's not healthy. Not at all. Even if you made it at home, it wouldn't be healthy. Prior to Edward Bernays's campaign, Americans would oftentimes have a cup of coffee, they would have a bagel, a roll, something very small, something light. But he was hired by a company named the Beech-Nut company, it was a meat packing company. The goal of this campaign was to make more money, to sell more meat. So he had the endorsements of a thousand doctors across the United States basically saying having a hearty breakfast is good. Think about how that has influenced everybody, this was from the 1920s, long time ago, maybe a little bit before.

Think about how that influenced now, today, American obesity, the idea that you have to eat a big breakfast. Being raised, I remember people coming to me and saying, you need to have breakfast, it's the most important meal of the day, all these other things. But because of this one man's campaign that resulted in [more] profits, our entire society has shifted. That's public relations. So back in the day, the barrier to entry was more difficult, more expensive, and higher because the forms of media, the vehicles to the masses, were different. In 2024, we don't have to lay the radio wires and the telegraph lines and TV lines and the satellites and everything else to communicate with one another.

We're able to log into the internet that we're paying for dirt cheap and we're able to have this conversation. I'm not in Virginia right now, but I'm talking to you. A hundred years ago, you would have had to run a telephone line from where I'm at to where you're at, so you can have a conversation. So the vehicles have changed.

Isaac Mashman30:23

Really quick, [he] worked with the presidency at the time and with World War One and everything. He was a massive part of that, he advised multiple presidents. He's considered the father of public relations, so it's interesting you say marketing, but public relations again being tied in with that. But then you mentioned the '60s, around Vietnam, and you think about all the conversations there.

Isaac Mashman31:49

Interestingly enough, in Edward Bernays's, I don't have a paper copy [handy], in his book, Propaganda, he mentions. He starts out very early on in the book and he says, basically, that society is controlled by the invisible puppet masters. This book was [written in the late '20s], '28 or '29, and he's talking back then about how all of the decisions, and how this groupthink, this [group mind], he mentioned groupthink, and this is different than Napoleon Hill's, you know, the mastermind. This is specifically how you get a bunch of people together and you can yell fire in a theater, everybody's going to think the same, [that] they're going to be a fire. Maybe you just wanted the theater to yourself. They're right there, there is a form, you're controlling the [crowd].

Isaac Mashman32:44

I wish I could. A second edition will be something entirely different. This is 55 pages, the new one, I'm going to lay out every single thing, just like what 48 Laws of Power is to the idea of manipulation and relationships. This will be the personal brand [version]. It's very philosophical. [Pull it off, however he is pronouncing that word], but it'll be very good. I'm excited for it. Yeah, when is that coming out roughly? Later this year, fall, later this year, 2024. I've got quite a bit of groundwork to lay, but that'll be coming out in the fall, and I'm actually working on a fishing book as well. So I'll have two books coming up this year.

Isaac Mashman33:25

I'm everywhere at Isaac Mashman, and also my website, of course, isaacmashman.com. I also recently rolled out, well, really, websites for all of my different endeavors, but I have mashman.org, which you can go to, and that's for my other businesses, and you can find all the links there too.

Isaac Mashman35:11

It aligns with his brand. I think that, man, it worked. It not only went viral on Twitter, it went viral on social media, because people were like, look at what this guy did. Some people had a negative view, some people had a positive view, but Kanye's never been about controlling what people think about him. It's just Kanye, there's an aura about him that is mysterious, that people like to [watch]. He could be wearing a mask in public, be fully dressed, and people know exactly who that is, because it's Kanye. So ultimately, it was a success, not only because it went viral, but because it cost $7 million, and at the time, I believe within 24 hours, they made 18 million dollars.

That's a 100% increase, over 100%. So it obviously worked, not including lasting customers and everything else. So man, I love it. I think if anything, it probably made a positive change with this brand because of a lot of those controversies. Now people are just going to forget about it, because when I was younger at school and everybody was wearing Yeezy shoes and dropping 500 bucks, nobody cared, it was just Kanye West's branding. This was Yeezy, this was luxury, this was nice.

Isaac Mashman39:04

What is this? But you know why that worked? Because it had an emotional attachment to everybody's childhood. So again, it's emotions. If it was just face value, and there wasn't any other backstory or backdrop to that, it wouldn't have been effective. But because it had that emotional attachment, I mean, sales is 80% emotion, 20% logic. So if you think about that, that's why that campaign worked. Remind me where we were going with that, though. I'm thinking about the campaign and I want to check that out.

Isaac Mashman39:37

Yeah, okay, so talking about authenticity. [I hate] the word authenticity, because everybody just uses it, nobody [defines] it. I think authenticity, trying to be authentic means you're going to be inauthentic. Ultimately, I think that if you're thinking about authenticity, you're avoiding it. So you just need to do whatever the fuck you want to do. Just like I cussed right there, because if I didn't cuss, I'd be pulling back, therefore I'd be inauthentic. I didn't think about it, I just did it. You can leave it out of the [edit]. So every single time you're making those decisions, you're basically saying, I'm going to be offensive before I'm going to be inauthentic, but not many people are programmed like that.

Isaac Mashman41:29

I think that if the average person is wanting to be authentic with their brand, they don't need to think about that at all.

Isaac Mashman42:23

It had 130 million views on Twitter.

Isaac Mashman42:42

That would be considered a PR stunt. That would be a representation of managing the [reputation] of Twitter, rather. So he's managing X, or whatever you want to call it. Right there is more branding or [reputation], but I mean, the decision to rebrand from Twitter to X affected the reputation, because everybody knows it as Twitter. I mean, I was watching a movie the other day. They mentioned, oh, this is a tweet, this is off Twitter. Now every single time moving forward that you hear that, it's going to be like, oh, that was off Twitter, doesn't exist. I mean, kids a decade from now are probably like, no, that's what it was, it was a thing, they're like, oh, this is X.

But again, managing that reputation, managing the noise and what's going on. So Elon saying, we're not going to censor it, is actually improving the reputation of X to the large majority of people because he's living up to the promises.

Isaac Mashman43:53

Yeah, a PR stunt would be something that is a single or short lived action that results in a lot of impressions and a lot of press very quickly. So for example, if you were to be at the Super Bowl and run, maybe not, you could argue and say, like, an ad that is a one-time deal that's never going to be run again, it might be considered a little, again, for example, last year during the Super Bowl, they had the screen, I believe it was [Tubi], maybe Peacock, where it almost seemed like you clicked off the Super Bowl and it was just scrolling for like 15 seconds.

Then it opened up something and had a loading screen. That was a PR stunt. You could say that would be a PR stunt because it was a creative form of marketing that was a one-time deal that created a lot of buzz. I don't think they ever played it again. Versus an advertisement, or the Coinbase thing, for example, that would be a PR stunt as well, because it appeals to the emotions with the thing it's [used] to get. So a PR stunt is a PR campaign, but not all PR campaigns are PR stunts. That's the thing, there's so much uneducation when it comes to PR, when it comes to the internet space, because you have a lot of these entrepreneurs that give me a bad name, because they're like, oh, we can get you in Forbes.

We can get you in Entrepreneur. We can get you in 300 outlets. What these people are doing is they're writing a press release and getting it distributed to CBS 47 out of Alaska and Fox 33 out of New York, Chattanooga, Tennessee, when anybody can do a newswire. So it's not really resulting in anything except a bunch of quick low level backlinks. It's not even contributing to reputation in a positive light. Then people are saying we can even get you in Forbes, Entrepreneur, et cetera. It's unethical because it goes directly against the terms of use. So now you're technically doing something that is legal, but nobody knows that.

So you're [playing] on ignorance again. So even though the barrier of entry is so low, you have to have some kind of ethics. Some kind of backbone where you're not just going to do something because you can. You can buy a thousand followers or a hundred thousand followers on Instagram for [five thousand]. Does that mean that's the right thing to do?

Isaac Mashman47:15

Yeah, well, let me share a quick story, [Caleb], here, a couple of years ago, before I even launched Mashman Ventures, I remember I was trying to figure out what it was I wanted to do. I was talking to somebody who was in the social media space, and he had like 70,000 followers on Instagram. He was talking to me and he's like, Isaac, you're at a bar and you have an account with 100 followers. You share that with the girl, versus if you have a 100,000 followers and you share it with the girl, who's going home?

Isaac Mashman48:05

I'm thinking about that because that is manufactured success, manufactured results. So where does the line sit, of necessarily the avoidance of information? Where is that line? Where's the line between unethical and ethical, with what do you share and what don't you share? So you could be bankrupt, but you don't necessarily go online and you don't talk about that. But if you're building out your brand, does that necessarily make you unethical because you're not sharing the whole story? Or are you only sharing what looks good? Or aspects that are bad but still controlled? So the control of information, control of tactics, where is that line? So you can run advertisements and you could [grow] your following.

Or you could pay for a placement, but if you have to pay for a placement, does that mean you're actually credible? Or does that just mean you have money and access to be perceived as credible? But then if you have the money, then clearly you had to do something to make the money initially. So does that give you a degree of credibility and trust there? So this is a very multi-layered, multi-faceted conversation that very few people are willing to go down, because then it makes them feel exposed. So the time that I was going and restructuring Mashman Ventures, and we're not performing and we're not doing great, I might not be on social media talking about that.

But I'm willing to talk about it and [earn] your respect and be like, man, there were some difficult times. That's a part of the story which I can turn into a strength, because now I can talk about those times and be like, well, it led me to where we are now. But where is that ethical line of where you're withholding information and where you're sharing, or what you're doing versus what you're not doing?

Isaac Mashman53:04

Well, every piece of content that you're producing is [actively] influencing your reputation. Okay, so let me preface this by saying that content could do one of four things, or a combination of all four, a combination of two of these, or whatever. It can educate you, it can entertain you, it can motivate or inspire, and it can connect. So every piece of content that I'm producing, I want to at least do two things. So I could do a piece of content on Edward Bernays, which is educational and it is also, indeed, motivational. If I'm talking about the accessibility we have in 2020, compared to this time, that could also be perceived as educational.

If I'm doing a piece of content on coffee and sharing a brewing method, which does effectively associate with my personal brand because I'm a coffee addict, that not only is educating them on how to brew a cup of coffee, it's connecting them with my own personal life, what I'm doing behind the scenes. The same reason why when you see a behind the scenes breakdown of your favorite entrepreneur, Jeff Bezos, you're like, oh my God, wow, because you're seeing a side of them you don't always see. So again, taking that little bit of a mysterious aura and applying it to your own personal brand doesn't mean you want to withhold a bunch of information and only talk about business.

You need at least, for every, I have what I call [Skyline] strategy. I'm trying to rush here a little bit because I know we [are coming up on time]. For every two pieces of content that are business related, you do one piece of content that is personal. So if it is affecting your reputation and your specific career, your profession, the way that you make money, that goes underneath the two to one business category. Then you do one piece of content that can be a story, anecdotal, a tutorial, something personal about you. Now the reason you see a bunch of shorts lately is because short form video is performing better than ever.

People do have a short attention span. That is common. There is still a great need for long form video content, but I mean something great that people aren't taking advantage of. I don't even want to share this, man. I want to keep this to myself. But if you have a long form YouTube video, you can go directly in YouTube and hit remix and take 15 to 60 second clips from a long form video directly into short form, and it automatically uploads on YouTube. You don't even have to go out and clip it yourself. So yeah, you're able to go on a YouTube long form video, hit remix and bam.

I did that to some of my videos, they got thousands of views. I literally [grew] more than a thousand X to my channel in terms of everything. I was looking at the dashboard, up 999%, up 999%. This is crazy. [It] doubled my channel because of views. Now, it's the same thing with every social media platform. You are really wanting to be as visible as possible. You want to get, again, eyeballs. So if you're already taking the time to produce a piece of content, what you want is to max out distribution. So you would take that same video. You would do TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, et cetera.

This isn't new stuff. It's just people still don't do it. People oftentimes haven't done it in the past because it takes time and money to make videos. So what you can do now is you can leverage artificial intelligence, which I'm an advocate for to a degree. I'm not looking forward to when Terminator takes over the world. [Sarah Connor], but one day. But until then, I want to use AI to go ahead and help me help my brand, and the people who can learn how to understand and use AI are going to replace the people who are actually doing those tasks at the beginning. So the person who knows how to edit a video with AI will be more important than the video editor itself.

So using tools like Captions AI or other places, you're able to get automatic captioning, [improving] the quality of your content, which also improves how long people watch your video, hence affecting your retention rate and affecting how much the algorithm is going to promote you. All algorithms have one common goal, to keep you on the platform. So I would say that if you're looking to create content, leverage a lot of short video, mix it up between business and personal. Understand what people are looking to get from that video, what is the intent behind that, and not intent as in, like, he's sharing my attention here? No, your intention is to get a result in a certain category.

Isaac Mashman57:48

You can go to mashmanventures.com, with the S H and the man, like Mashman. I'm there, and that's for our public relations firm. You'll be able to see a little bit of a breakdown about what we offer. Again, if you want to work with us, we offer consultation. So it's kind of [a la carte], depending on how much work you think you need. You can order three consultations at a time. You have up to two years to redeem those, and you can either work with me directly or another consultant at the firm. We also have a training platform by Mashman Ventures. I have a bunch of other things that we haven't had the time to talk about, like Mashman Investments or Mashman Properties or anything else that I'm working on building over the next 24 months, man. So I really enjoyed the conversation.