Category: Books

Episode 240

When I ask how someone forms their perception of a brand, what comes to mind? It might be they hear about it by word of mouth, or on an email thread or private message. In a nutshell, what’s said about our company when we’re not in the room, when we’re not in control of the message.
Now try the same experiment with our personal brand. Is our immediate thought how to look as good as possible? Is it how to curate the results that pop up when they search our name? Truth is, our personal brand has already been formed, we just weren’t in on those conversations.
Being active on our social media accounts can help, but we can also send the wrong brand message, shooting ourselves in the foot. When I first got onto Facebook and X, I feared that posting too much content would make me look distracted. When I did post, I felt a certain portion of them should be about my company or at least something generic. If I did have an opinion, it had to be watered down.My thinking was I should talk how my employer wanted me to talk. Turns out that is the complete opposite of how I should have been branding myself.
It wasn’t until I hung out my own shingle, that I realized being a generic-sounding consultant made me a commodity. That meant my rates were set by the market – I had to be a price-taker. But employees who act generically are also treated as commodities who must take whatever salary is offered. So regardless of where you sit, you’re better off with a good personal brand.
Am I saying employees should kiss ass on social, posting about how much they love their work? No. They can post thoughtful criticisms about the industry, they can post solutions to problems they and their peers face. Content like this boosts a person’s brand without offending employers. They know you won’t always be working for them; they’ll bask in your halo while they can get it.
But before you put out content you have to get introspective on what your brand stands for. It’s hard for us to stare at a sheet of paper and figure this out, we get better results using a framework. And this is where our guest can help.
Since getting her MBA from Moscow International Higher Business School, she has managed some of Europe’s largest brands, from Stollwerck, to Nestlé and Shell. She is also a visual artist, marketing consultant and coach. Her 2026 book deals with this very issue.
Let’s go now to the French seaside resort town of Cannes to speak with the author of “The Personal Branding Book”, Daria Dmitrieva.

Chapter Timestamps
00:00 Intro
02:27 Meet Daria Dmitrieva
03:12 Brand As A Compass
05:55 Premium Brand Parallels
08:56 Authenticity Over Packaging
13:33 Fear And The Shadow Gift
19:04 Become A Magnet
22:26 CEO Dreamer Critic Roles
26:33 Body Cues And Intuition
28:39 Celebrate Progress
32:02 Daria Origin Story
35:35 Where To Find The Book

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People, products mentioned in this episode

The Personal Branding Book

Daria’s Instagram profile

Daria’s LinkedIn profile

Daria’s website

Dante’s Inferno

Episode 238

Talk of Content marketing started appearing online around 2007. One of the few people who  started talking about it was former Funnel Reboot guest Joe Pulizzi. It wasn’t until 2014 I became aware of marketers who were staking their career on the profession of creating content. I found the idea of giving-away-expertise a bit unsettling.  Maybe it was because for a dozen years prior to that, I’d mainly communicated with audiences through paid ads. Gradually, Content marketing won out – we simply expect content on social media brings marketing results. 

Only one problem, our guest says most of us aren’t doing content marketing right. One of her main critiques is that we’re making too much of it..

I’ll use myself as an example. Let’s look across the various accounts I’ve had on twitter/x; that have a combined 40,927 posts. Of those, analytics says only about 200, or 0.5% of them were home runs. If I’d known how our guest turns less into more; my marketing results could have been very different. I would also have been less stressed and would have slept better.

Our guest is founder of Globia Content Marketing agency. After earning two Bachelor’s degrees, from the University of Puget Sound and Boise State University, and completing her Master’s at the University of Colorado Boulder, our guest spent two decades as an in-house B2B marketer. Wanting to improve how content marketing’s done, she started posting on LinkedIn and built a sizable following and hung out her shingle in 2023. In 2025, she published her book Content Simplified. 

Let’s go to Boise Idaho to speak with Lee Densmer

 

Chapter/Timestamps
00:00 Intro
01:34 Meet Lee Densmer
02:46 Why Content Fails
04:08 Quantity Trap
05:47 Three by Five Framework
07:27 Set Three Goals
09:23 Burnout Social Example
10:48 Pick Three Buyers
15:14 Choose Three Themes
17:09 Mission Statement Focus
19:29 Stay In Your Lane
21:08 Avoid Endless Debates
22:28 AI Limits And Guardrails
25:54 SME Interview System
28:30 Chatbot Announcement
28:59 CEO Approval Bottleneck
30:59 Channels Promotion Repurpose
33:48 Metrics That Matter
36:29 Proving ROI And Budgets
37:21 Book details & Wrap Up 

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People, products, concepts mentioned in the show: 

Lee’s book: https://leedensmer.com/book

Lee on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/leedensmer/

Goodreads page for book: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/243764645-content-simplified

Lee’s email lee@globiacontent.com

If you want to catch Ashley Faus’ episode, click here.  

Episode 236

Everyone makes content now. But having content doesn’t automatically mean anyone will actually consume it. There are brands with long-running programs and audiences that carve out time for their content, while other brands’ programs fade because it became a thankless chore. What’s different between content that’s adored and content that dies in obscurity?  

The brands that win make content that audiences don’t see as branded content. Where the work they made was so genuinely useful, or surprising, or true — that instead of feeling exploited, the recipients felt like they were being favored.

A gift doesn’t need your logo on it. Your fingerprints are already there.

Our guest knows how to do this. His early career was working in production at AOL and several TV and radio networks. Then in 2014 he launched Pacific Content, an agency he built into the one brands trusted when they wanted to stop making noise and start building audiences. It was acquired by one of the country’s largest media companies in 2023. What he learned doing that became the book Earn It, which came out in 2026.

Let’s go to this talk with Steve Pratt.

Chapter Timestamps:
00:00 Why Content Gets Ignored
01:00 Meet Steve Pratt
02:12 Attention Is Finite
04:38 Be The Party Host
06:52 Marketing As A Gift
08:23 From You Not About You
09:55 Bravery And Commitment
12:46 Promote The Gift
15:03 Podcast Case Studies
21:07 Measuring Time And Trust
24:04 Fewer Things Better
25:35 Expertise Over Platform
27:04 Pacific Content And Wrap Up 

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Shownotes: People/Products/Concepts Mentioned in Show

Steve on LinkedIn

The Creativity Business

Earn It book

Steve’s substack

Steve’s midlife field guide

Michael Dell

Walter Isaacson

Joe Pulizzi

Malcolm Gladwell

Seth Godin

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