Funnel Reboot

Social media platforms can serve as both vibrant marketplaces and spaces for genuine social interaction, where consumers feel valued, while businesses boost engagement and sales.

This picture may not look anything like the reality of social media that you see, but our guest will remind you that things haven’t always been this way.  

A short glance back of the Internet shows that in the year 2000 the Internet’s governing body actually had looked at using a citizen model to allow individuals who use the internet to kind of come together as a social contract and to decide how they would be able to vote on changes to the internet – and at their peak  158,000 people were on the voting rolls. This was a radical global experiment in direct democracy. 

That model didn’t take off, partly because to be a voting member, Internet users everywhere would have to (at least temporarily) upload some Identification – and most weren’t willing to share that kind of data.  

What happened instead was the rise of social networks owned by a handful of companies, who conditioned us sellers to post promoted content with attention-grabbing messages because that could be used by the algorithms to keep buyers on the platforms. And I’ve got to call out how , as buyers, we’re also complicit because we now give those platforms way more data than the Internet governing body ever asked for. How ironic. 

But our guest maintains that  it’s in our ability to regain our equilibrium. While we’re all collectively responsible for how we communicate, marketers can be an ideal catalyst of change.  We can make content that prioritizes authentic interaction over consumerism, be it on the current platforms or ones yet to exist. We should remember the saying of the American philosopher Thomas Paine: “We have it in our power to begin the world over again.”

My guest has been leveraging social media to grow audiences and income since MySpace was around. In that 20 year timespan, she has leveraged her social media knowledge both by working for sports organizations and corporations like AT&T, iHeart Radio and DirecTV to running the agency Next Step Social that does this for health and wellness brands. She’s also a speaker and a podcaster. 

She lives in Colorado with her husband and daughters. Let’s go now to speak with Katie Brinkley

Chapters/Timestamps
00:00 Introduction
03:01 Meet Katie Brinkley
04:01 What Community Means
06:03 Attention Economy Shift
08:58 Audio Beats AI
10:40 Discovery On Rented Land
11:48 Four Post Strategy
16:10 Platform Culture Matters
17:35 Metrics True Fans
19:47 Beyond Consumption Mindset
23:35 Katie Origin Story
28:03 Burnout And Conversation
32:16 Audit Your Feed
33:29 Where To Find Katie
34:00 Closing Thoughts

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People and products referred to in this episode

Katie on Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/katiebrinkley 

Katie on YouTube: https://youtube.com/@marketingtrendsnow?si=3Ns9bu9RgiODDkLz

Katie on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/iamkatiebrinkley/

Thomas Paine

Metrocool

Agorqapulse

Susie Wargin

Kevin Kelly’s 1,000 True Fans article

ICANN: https://www.icann.org/en/announcements/details/icann-at-large-membership-registration-exceeds-158000-internet-users-worldwide-31-7-2000-en

You may also be interested in https://funnelreboot.com/episode-105-death-of-content-as-king-with-jon-hinderliter/

Episode 228

To enjoy the wondrous technologies we have today, we first had to grasp the science behind them. Science is built on good data—but did you know that bad data delayed one of the most significant inventions of the last 150 years? The engine at the heart of every plane, train, and automobile was held up for decades simply because of how records were kept.

For millennia, we’ve known that combusting fossil fuels releases immense power. By the 1700s, scholars realized that if the gases trapped within those fuels could be ignited predictably in a chamber, they could create an internal combustion engine. To do that, however, you’d need to know the exact nature of every gas—the fuel composition, the air-to-fuel ratio, and the necessary heat resistance. Without those specifics, an engine stays on the drawing board.

That didn’t stop scholars from trying. They studied gases under various pressures and charted their results in massive tables. Robert Boyle recorded values when temperature was constant; Jacques Charles did the same for volume. But despite all this data, we weren’t getting closer to a functional engine. Using tables to capture every possible variable was inefficient—we needed a universal rule.

In the early 1800s, physicist Émile Clapeyron compiled these century-old tables with recent findings from Amedeo Avogadro. By consolidating these scattered sources, he realized they all pointed to a single law governing gas behavior that had been buried in the noise. This was the Ideal Gas Law. With it, engineers could finally calculate exactly what an engine needed, moving from theory to the rapid production of the vehicles we use today.

Your marketing and sales data is likely in the same shape as those old tables. It may contain breakthrough ideas for growth, but they will remain hidden as long as your data is disorganized. Just as it worked for the scientists of the industrial revolution, once your data is in order, the insights will follow.

Today’s guest will convince you that your data must be in a scientific state. She is a recognized expert in data classification, cleaning, and transformation. Known as the Classification Guru, her blogs, books, and talks have earned her over 43,000 followers on LinkedIn. We’re discussing her 2026 book, Optimizing Sales and Marketing Data.

Let’s go to Guildford, England, to talk with Susan Walsh.

 

Chapter Timestamps

00:00 Intro

02:34 Meet Susan Walsh

03:31 Why Clean Data

04:27 Blunders And Backlash

06:32 Ethics And Accountability

09:30 Hidden Costs ROI

12:49 Duplicates Fraud Waste

14:29 Segmentation People Problems

18:21 Taxonomy And Standards

21:25 Master Lists Automation

23:23 Data Code Framework

25:56 Spot Checks Pivot Tables

27:17 Excel Cleanup Toolkit

30:20 Revenue Advantage AI

33:12 Where to get a hold of Susan/her book

 

 

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Shownotes

Susan’s company ClassificationGuru

Susan’s packaged offering Samification

Susan on Instagram, X,  YouTube, LinkedIn

Book on Goodreads: Optimizing Sales and Marketing Data: Strategies for Accuracy and Efficiency

Has a song written about her services (I’d chatted before with the songwriter)

Samification Song – Tiankai Feng

Visokio Online – Omniscope tool

Also see Tools for wrangling marketing data with JD Prater

Episode 226

Positioning is an element that’s so foundational to  Marketing, it’s taught in every introductory class alongside the “Four Ps” of marketing. Positioning is meant to describe the choices a brand makes to maximize how the market sees it. Positioning is very powerful because it can set perceptions that drive customer loyalty, strong demand, and the willingness to pay a premium price.

 

But if all this is true, then why is the landscape littered with examples of where brands have flopped—cases where brand positioning actually caused a product to fail?

 

Take Microsoft Zune: Because how people thought of MP3 players had already been set by Apple 

Colgate Frozen Entrees: Sure, both food and toothpaste enter our mouths, but other TV dinner brands don’t plant the taste of toothpaste in your head.

Harley-Davidson’s “Legendary” Cologne: People buy a fragrance for the impression they want to leave, not one whose name evokes burned rubber and gasoline.

Cosmopolitan Yogurt: There are plenty of brands in the dairy aisle. People didn’t think a fashion brand belonged there

Frito-Lay Lemonade: Marketing a salty snack and chasing it with a  “Thirst-quenching drink” strikes people as a cynical cash grab

The reason these brands flopped is they tried positioning themselves on a competitor’s turf. The correct way to position yourself is to start with customer needs and work outward from there. To do this right, we’ve got to flip the traditional concept on its head. Instead of positioning, the author we’re talking with today says we must deposition our brands. 

 

He is the founder and chief strategy officer of brand strategy firm Fazer. Over three decades, he has led strategy for Fortune 500 companies as well as venture-backed disruptors. His work has been featured in the New York times Forbes and MIT technology review. 

 

Let’s go now to New York City to speak with Todd Irwin.

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Chapter/Timestamps

00:00 What’s Wrong with Market Positioning

01:47 Introduction to Depositioning 

02:46 Concepts and Framework

08:02 Real-World Examples of Depositioning

14:58 Integration and Coherence in Branding

26:48 Conclusion and Where to Find More

People/Products/Concepts Mentioned in Show

De-Positioning, the book

Creativity, Inc. Book 

Fazer Agency

Todd on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/toddirwin/