Think alpha consumers, not micro influencers - with Golin EVP, Executive Director Jim Lin

Episode 1 of the Influencer Marketing Lab - a weekly podcast tracking the growth spurts and growing pains of influencer marketing.

This podcast is sponsored by Tagger the data-driven influencer marketing platform and social listening tool.

After an influencer marketing news round-up Scott Guthrie speaks with Golin Dallas' EVP, Executive Director, Digital, Jim Lin about the state of the industry.

The conversation covers:

• why micro influencers might be better reclassified as alpha consumers
• why finding the most appropriate influencers to work with is the toughest part of the influencer marketing workflow
• why not all influencer marketing best practice is beneficial to the industry (it's about the spreadsheetification, apparently) 
• why we are going to see more social media influencers swaying the US electorate in the presidential election

For more information visit influencermarketinglab.com

👍Check out the Influencer Marketing Lab for full show notes, related useful links and a transcript.

🆕 Don't forget to sign up for the companion newsletter The Creator Briefing ( https://www.creatorbriefing.com/ ) - the weekly newsletter from Scott Guthrie which provides a breakdown of all the major news from the creator marketing industry alongside his insight and analysis.

Transcript

Scott Guthrie: 0:00

Hello, I'm Scott Guthrie and welcome to Episode One of the influencer marketing lab, our weekly podcast tracking the growth spurts and growing pains of influencer marketing. later in the show, I talked with Jim Lin, Executive Vice President and Executive Director digital of golden Dallas. In our interview we cover micro influencers and why Jim believes they should be called alpha consumers. We talked about why not all influencer marketing best practice is beneficial to the industry. And Jim shares his thoughts on why we're going to see more social media influences swaying the US electric in the presidential campaign. The influencer marketing lab has been made possible through exclusive sponsorship by Tiger Tiger is the number one data driven influencer marketing platform and social listening tool. It's an all in one SAS platform that helps users succeed in every step of the influencer marketing workflow. With it you can discover the perfect influences, research your target market, activate campaigns and measure influencer success all in one intuitive platform. If you want to see how targets can work with you go to Tiger media.com slash request hyphen Devo. So, welcome to the influencer marketing lab. And before we get into the interview with garlands Jim Lim Let's kick off with some industry news. To that end, we should probably start with the most overly reported running story of the last few weeks Tick Tock last December when I was gazing ahead into 2020. In my trends report, I foresaw that President Donald Trump would seek to term tik tok the short form video app into a political football as part of a US trade war he was waging with AWS about two ways with China, Twitter, Microsoft, Oracle, Walmart now upstart triller Why are so many companies throwing their hat into the ring to acquire tik tok. Professor Scott Galloway of NYU has a theory which seems to be playing out. Every time a company announces that they're in talks to buy Tick Tock that companies Share Value lifts by 5%. Though Microsoft and Walmart team up is interesting. For Walmart, it's about access to Gen Z data to drive e commerce and to get that advertising power to that key demographic, and also to pair up in their battle with Amazon. Meanwhile, the UK Government is reportedly looking to implement restrictions on Tick Tock due to data gathering and sharing concerns. As reported by Bloomberg, a review led by the Prime Minister's Chief of Staff Eddie Lister is likely to find the app doesn't pose as big a security risk as Huawei, but it may still recommend the government stopped the company from moving users data out of the country. moving from one of the most overtly reported running stories to one of the least reported stories, at least in the Northern Hemisphere. Google Australia is pitting youtubers against traditional media in reaction to a new draft news media bartering code. What's this? The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission recently published the draft news media bargaining code law, which is intended to force Google and Facebook to pay media groups in exchange for carrying their content. YouTube went on the offensive writing on the Google Australia blog, the head of YouTube, APAC said the new code could have significant negative impact on the creative economy. He said that YouTube might not be able to invest in programmes to help these creators develop audiences in Australia and around the world. Google could be using Australia as a test case remember, Australia is comparatively well educated, affluent population makes it a good proxy for American consumers. And lastly, according to the LA Times, Spotify is ramping up as podcast deals with influencers Courtney hold Spotify as head of studios and video tell the newspaper social media influencers is a great place for us to be looking for new, emerging, established and diverse talent. This is a good deal for influencers too, because podcasts offer an alternative distribution channel a way to become platform agnostic and to diversify away from the volatility of social media platforms that can change based on algorithms or executive orders it seems. I'm particularly excited to welcome Jim Lim as my first ever guest on the show. I've known Jim for over four years now but his expertise in digital marketing, public relations and business development stretched back over two decades. Kim is provided by strategic counsel and strategic planning for clients including Adobe, Lego 711, Wendy's, IBM and Frito Lay. But my first question, Jim, is what do you actually do?

Jim Lin: 4:45

I'm the Executive Vice President of golden Dallas and Director of Digital there. So my job is twofold. It's one obviously to provide strategic digital oversight to our clients. So really looking at the way we integrate digital strategies, whether that's social engagement content influencer, what have you to make sure they're all working well together, obviously, to ensure that more of our teams are utilising digital strategies. That's one part of it. The other part of it is to really think about golden Dallas is digital department, what we're offering the processes we're using, and just improving digital Dallas's position within digital marketing in general amongst agencies, so really leaning into innovations, efficiencies, products, new services, things like that.

Scott Guthrie: 5:41

You mentioned improving efficiencies, what are the biggest challenges you're facing at the moment? And how are you going about tackling them? Yeah,

Jim Lin: 5:47

I think that the biggest challenge in digital and always has been is the siloing of digital tactics, especially these days. And when I started working in digital, which was more than 20 years ago, kind of unbelievable. It's been 20 plus years, but when I started, digital was so new that whenever anything new came about, it was all kind of integrated, because one thing popped up at a time and the people that were in digital kind of knew everything, because there were so few things to know, nowadays, because digital is so fragmented, and you can go so deep into every element of digital, whether it's influencer, social media, you know, e commerce display, whatever it is, there's so much learn on each one that the folks getting into digital these days are usually specialists in one area or another. So often what happens in client work is it ends up being a little bit siloed, depending on what that person's expertise is. And if there's someone else doing something else digital, they tend to work in their own silos. And I've seen that, you know, for the last decade or so. And my challenge is how do we better integrate everything digital, so that it's one ecosystem. So one thing not only works with another thing, but results from one thing like analytics, for example, and helps inform social content, which then helps inform influencer choices, which then helps inform the brief all the way down to e commerce. And the better you can integrate these things, obviously, the better they work together. So I think that's always been the challenge with digital as it gets more advanced. And there are more parts to any digital strategy.

Scott Guthrie: 7:20

So it sounds like Jim as though you are in pursuit of more t shaped skills. You have many members in the team, who are specialists who have the depth in related skills and expertise in a single failed. But you also need that horizontal bar that the top of the T, who has the ability to collaborate across disciplines, with experts in the joining specialisms? Or maybe you're suggesting that that is your own?

Jim Lin: 7:46

Well, that kind of is and I think that's the role of the digital strategist, right? I think in an ideal world, the digital strategist is the generalists, like the primary care physician over that that digital programme who kind of looks at everything and goes, Okay, we need a little more, a few more experts in influencer, let's describe some influencer, there's a lot of potential there. Or we need a little bit more analytics to really pull this all together, let's put some way analytics in this or you need a sem programme or you look at your SEO for being able to stand above and look at the big picture and say what digital tools and tactics can help help this campaign or help this client get to where they want to be. That is what I feel a digital strategist should be doing. And that is primarily what my role is now it's it's getting harder and harder to find generalists, just because when I said earlier about the specialisation of digital, but who knows that might be a digital strategist today. Maybe in the future, we'll have digital integration specialists whose job is to make sure that all these parts work together and complement each other.

Scott Guthrie: 8:56

Now listen, before we started recording, we were reminiscing that we've known each other for more than four years. That's a lifetime in terms of influencer marketing. What signs what signals? Are you saying that the industry is maturing? You've mentioned moving from generalist to specialists? Are there any other signs of

Jim Lin: 9:15

maturity in the way that there's not one path to influence a marketing success? You know, it used to be let's, let's say 2016, social media was getting big, but it wasn't at the scale it is now it wasn't as easy for just a regular person to overnight become this viral sensation. And I think platforms like Tick tock, I really made that happen for the younger generation, for example, um, back in 2016, you know, blogs were fading out of relevance. And YouTube and Instagram were really big. And at that time, it was the stars that were really making an impact in the influence of marketing world. I remember personally because I came from the world of blogging. I felt like I was getting Last than influencer marketing because I wasn't following these lifestyle influencers, these fashion influencers, these food influencers that didn't just have blogs, but were

Unknown: 10:09

really active on

Jim Lin: 10:10

social channels. And I think that really has compounded today, there are so many more channels, so many more ways to do content to create that it's just become this huge world, not only for, let's say, the macro top tier influencers, but there's the introduction now of micro influencers of nano influencers of hyper local influencers of professional influencers, meaning executives, right now, executives have gotten on board on the importance of social media, and they're becoming more influential. So there's a whole bunch of different types of influencers coming on the scene. So it's much less linear, as far as you know, what's your reach? Or even, you know, what's your engagement? But what do you specialise in? What can you do that nobody else can't kind of welcome that, right, because you have so many more choices now. And you have to be more strategic. I think it's much harder to be strategic and influence and marketing today than it was back in 2016.

Scott Guthrie: 11:08

For sure, 100%. But one positive takeaway is that in large part, we've ceased lionising reach over every other metric for selecting influences and then measuring the success. So that's got to be a positive or a latch on to the phrase micro influences, and they've been a thing since 2016. But I but I know that you think we've got it all wrong, you think that we should be talking about micro influencers?

Jim Lin: 11:38

Right. So I think the biggest discrepancy in influencer marketing today is the micro influencer, when that concept of the micro influencer first came about the word micro really did express what they were they were smaller influencers, probably, you know, sub 20,000, maybe between 5000 and 20,000 followers, who are specialists in something something a little more niche, their audience could really rally around expertise for example. And because the difference between someone with a small following someone with a big following now can be in the millions I've seen the definition of micro influencer crawl and creep up toward hundred thousand hundred thousand plus, to me that doesn't isn't really fitting for the word micro. But if you compare it to someone that 5 million followers with some tick toppers with 70 million followers, that is pretty micro. So that line has just moved up and up and what we think of as micro influencers or what we thought it was micro influencers back then. Now we've got the nano influencer. And rather than just move numbers up and move standards up, I think one thing I've really been trying to do is be more descriptive, and a term I've really tried to make happen, hasn't really caught on is the term of alpha consumer,

Scott Guthrie: 13:00

more likely to

Jim Lin: 13:01

tell my allegiance to you forever. But I feel like in the beginning days of micro influencer marketing, what we were really tapping into were alpha consumers, these were people, you know, who weren't online to quote unquote, build a following, but they just had a huge fans and family falling because of their expertise and knowing the coolest things to buy or to consume in whatever they were interested in. And, you know, whatever they bought or use, their friends and family would also use it because they were the alpha they determine what was cool in their social group. And I've always loved that term alpha consumer because an influencer implies you know, I want to be influential I want to one day be a YouTube star or a huge lifestyle influencer that commands hundreds of thousands of dollars for a post. And that's not really the case. That's not really the aspiration. I think this alpha consumers happy being the alpha consumer, bringing the coolest person in their friend group that finds the coolest things first. And there's a place for that.

Scott Guthrie: 14:03

But I just haven't seen that catch on because everyone looks at the influencer marketing world as this aspirational thing where you go from step one to step two, step three to YouTube startup. There are a couple of points here in terms of aspiration. I think it depends on the platform you're posting Absolutely. Instagram for sure remains the king of the aspirational content. Tick tock, however, isn't necessarily designed for its aspirational content. So it depends on where you're playing, where you're posting that content. But I love the term alpha consumer as a descriptor. I think it works very well influencer as a term is kind of no longer really fit for purpose. The mainstream media has made a derogatory term. And it doesn't really work as a descriptor influence is an outcome. It's not an output. It's like calling yourself a thought leader or or even Well, it's not up to you to self describe yourself. In these terms, the gift is it lies in somewhere and somewhere else. I think in order for our industry to mature and to professionalise, we need to develop a community of practice. And the first rung on the ladder on that ladder to do that is to agree a terms of reference to agree, a set of glossary of terms. And I know for example, Jim, you've even got beef with the term influence of mark

Jim Lin: 15:24

right? This was actually something I discussed with my director at my previous job, so not all credit goes to me. But in the world of influence today, you can be influenced by so many things. And it's not necessarily a quote unquote influencer, that influences you or changes your mind or perception on something, it could be something as simple as an executive you follow. It could be a CMO from a medium, small company that you really admire. I wouldn't call that cmo an influencer, but they're definitely influencing you. So it's how do you how do you get to the result of influence through many different pathways, whether it's through someone who's a traditional, quote unquote influencer, or whether it's through someone you admire or someone with credibility a lot, you know, a lot of healthcare companies use healthcare experts, for example, they're not necessarily influencers, in the sense of the command a huge audience get a whole bunch of likes, but they're a subject matter expert. And I've seen more and more clients or companies using subject matter experts, not because of their influence in a number sense, but their influence in the fact that they have authority or expertise in the topic. And when they speak on that they are influencing the audience due to their smarts not due to their ability to make compelling content or get likes. And I think that's an important way to think about influencer marketing versus just influence.

Scott Guthrie: 16:57

This podcast has been made possible through exclusive sponsorship by tiger. I particularly like Tigers discovery tool, because it lets you apply hundreds of different filters to the huge database so you can find exactly the influences you want that perfectly match your campaign. I've seen agencies and brands discover high value influences in less than court for an hour Tigers affinity tool takes discovery a step further by showing you an influencers brand affinity. What does this mean? It means you're able to partner with influencers who are most likely to enjoy your brand or product, Tiger focuses on their customer success. When you sign up to the platform, you'll give it a dedicated customer success manager. They guide you through everything, from onboarding, to training, to just checking in and making sure you're finding success with the platform. When you're running an influencer campaign. Sometimes it can be difficult to measure your success, but it's easy to report your campaign data with tiger. Their modular Report Builder lets you pull accurate real time data directly from social media platforms. You could also choose which metrics matter most to you and your clients, meaning you can customise the data that you show in your report. Something that can be overlooked when you're choosing an influencer marketing platform is the quality of the data. Tiger has direct API access to all major social media platforms. This gives tagger users 100% accurate real time data that's gathered responsibly, he can't plan a good strategy if you're not looking at good quality data. If you're looking to scale your influencer marketing efforts, Tiger is a truly global solution. His availability in over 10 languages and the ability to make multi currency payments directly on platform gives brands a huge advantage when running multinational multilingual influencer campaigns. If you want to see how to get to work for you go to Tiger media.com slash request hyphen demo. I want to turn now and talk a little bit about COVID-19 as an accelerant of change. I think one unforeseen positive effect of COVID-19 has been the legitimization of influencer marketing, as a communications channel. Social media influencers have shown their skills as conduits and communicating info information to sections of society who no longer read newspapers, they no longer listen to the radio, they no longer watch the news on the television. And we've seen these influences and influencer marketing agencies working with the World Health Organisation and with the United Nations, for example, and influences they've tapped into influence of skill at relaying public service, because information about the importance of social distancing or washing your hands effectively. That's a positive out of out of a terrible pandemic. But what are the use cases? Are you seeing an influence of marketing? It's not all I've tried to demonstrate that it's not just about selling product or service. Are you seeing any other use case? Well,

Jim Lin: 20:02

for the most part, I wouldn't say they're the trend is that they're still directly selling. I think one trend that I've seen is that influencer marketing is used to grow aspiration to show the potential of something, their ability to use something to create something else, showing the possibilities, rather than here's product a lot more, here's how I'm using my creativity to create something with product A, and creating that aspiration that I think is so important, making products aspirational versus just direct selling. I think that's actually a brilliant use of influencer marketing, because influencers at the end of the day they're admired. There's a reason why they have an audience, people admire them, whether they admire them because they relate to them, or admire because they aspire to be them. There's an element of admiration, and trust, and credibility. And one of the best ways to tap into that admiration is for them to become an aspirational role model or what have you. And let their audience believe, look, I can do this too. If I learn these skills, if I try to learn this tool, if I get this product, and kind of study it for a while, but it gives them the what ifs and I think influencers are great at what else and on the same token, using them. And really tapping into them during the pandemic to you know, remind people to wash their hands or to keep their distance or wear their masks is effective because their audience trust them, their audience listens to them, their audience admires them to see someone you admire doing something, obviously want to emulate them, it's much easier than going directly as a brand or organisation where you haven't built that relationship with that listener or that follower, to really take advantage of the fact that you know, they're going to listen to what you say, because you haven't earned that trust, whereas influencers have and I think that's a very good way to use influencers to shape public opinion on an issue, for example, I think that's, that's definitely going to be used much more in the future after this pandemics over

Scott Guthrie: 22:16

Thanks, Jim, the the next question I wanted to ask was about influencer marketing being utilised by presidential hopefuls. We've seen Michael Bloomberg in his short lived race for the for the White House, Michael Bloomberg worked with the influence of generated content. We've seen Joe Biden tap into Instagram creators too. Do you think we'll see more influencer marketing spend being directed towards utilising influencer marketing to sway or to influence the I think

Jim Lin: 22:44

politics is the place where influencers influence matters most. And because influencers are at the forefront of, you know, our marketing tactics today? there will definitely be a shift toward that. Again, like I said earlier, influencers one of their greatest strengths is changing perception, or, you know, building enthusiasm or a lot of these intangibles that aren't as simple as clicking through and buying a widget. And I think it's inevitable that in the political sphere, people will start recognising and saying if I need to sway a whole bunch of voters my way, and they are this specific demographic or psychographic, going after, or tapping into influencers who reach that psychographic or demographic, not only reach them, but have their trust, and I've earned their credibility. I think you're gonna see a lot more of that the only thing that I see that's a little tricky, is if they're going to do it, right. And I hope they do. There's disclosure rules. And does that, you know, hashtag add, effect, something as personal as politics, which I think it would be a little bit of a clash to see like, I love, you know, political candidate, a hashtag ad. That kind of takes away the authenticity and the power of the influencer for things like politics or issues, because right now, they're not being paid for the most part. But influencers are really stepping into that issues realm, the politics realm, and because their followers trust them so much. And because it's from the heart and organic, it's very effective. But what happens when you throw the disclosure in there? I think you lose a lot of that effectiveness because of that.

Scott Guthrie: 24:32

I think that as consumers, we don't mind so much about the hashtag ad. But on three provisos, one that we're not faced with ad after ad after ad after ad, you know that the Creator has to have a decent ratio of organic to paid for content. And I think secondly, and we've touched on this already, not in this chat, but the content is going to provide us with some value. It's going to be education. or entertaining or inspiration or aspiration, we've got to derive some value from that as well. And thirdly, the content that's going to be honest and transparent, if it's an ad is going to be obviously identifiable as an ad, for example. Yeah. I'd like to turn now momentarily to the selection process, specifically to vetting and get your take on the pros and cons of data versus human insight.

Jim Lin: 25:28

I think that's the trickiest part of influencer marketing today, is the vetting. Because there's a lot of tools out there to give you the information that you need on the top line, you know, reach engagement, where their audience is the audience, demographic, interests, things like that. But it's those manual elements of vetting that can make or break an influencer selection. That's so difficult. I mean, I've encountered times where, like, upon vetting influences seemed fine. But in 2015, you know, they did one tweet that was just completely out of line with the brand's values. And we had to scrap them. And sometimes it's not always us that finds it right. It could be the client that finds that. And it's because you're looking sometimes for a needle in a haystack. And you can't just search terms, right? Because you could say anything and mess it up. It's almost luck that you happened upon this one tweet. I mean, at the same time, you know, because you worked so hard to find it and couldn't, what are the chances of a consumer going back and finding it not big, but all it takes is one, because it's the Internet, and it could blow up in your face. I think that's the hardest part of Influencer Marketing. Today. It's the necessity for that manual vet, and how random it can be,

Scott Guthrie: 26:51

there are a tonne of you know, really good tools that you can use to do the heavy lifting as part of the process, but you really need the contextual intelligence of the practitioner to be able to sense check in and do a manual search and sort of work out on the softer side of the softer skills of that of that vetting process. You also have to take a you know, a commercial view on how far to scroll back. And you're saying, you know, a tweet from five years ago, that might be what the brand calls for, you have to take a value value lead decision on how far you go back. Because there are you know, that there, there's always that one person that takes a delight and scrolling back through through old fees to see to try and look for an incident. Yeah, well, yeah. It's called a fence archaeology, which is a great term, but yeah, they take the light and digging into the, the digital past or have someone to try and find that something that they can, yeah, as you say, to go or hire and, and to prove that they that they haven't always been the honest broker they profess to be turning out to professionalism. How can we accelerate the rate of change and how we professionalise the channel?

Jim Lin: 28:04

My opinion on that is it's not absolutely a good thing, that it's moving toward professionalism. And the reason why I say that is because the uniqueness of influencer marketing is because it's so wild west. You know, it allows for some smart strategic people to find ways in that haven't been done before for using influencers that don't fit your typical mould of an influencer, but just work perfectly. And I think the more professional that gets, you know, with not just betting but with rates with databases, it just becomes this sea of sameness. You know, that every other marketing tactic has and takes away what's I think unique and special about influencer marketing. I think there are some things that need to be professionalised. You know, but for the most part, at least for now, I enjoy the Wild West nature of it. It allows people who think differently to do some really cool things as an influencer, but also as an influencer marketer. It's on both sides of that coin, and the more professional it gets, the more sameness we're going to see. And it just becomes a game of numbers, like so many things in marketing, and it takes away what I feel are the soft skills of marketing, right, that secret sauce that you or I might have, when we're thinking about an influencer marketing programme or writing a brief things like that, that make our programme stand out versus someone else and the more automated and professionalising standardised gets, I think the less we're going to see that so there are some definite benefits professionalisation as far as standards go But I hope it doesn't completely professionalise, if that makes sense.

Scott Guthrie: 30:04

Well, that's a fascinating position to take. So I then saying that in the pursuit of best practice, agencies and brands are mimicking each other. And a negative outcome of that is a sort of a copycat Beijing over have content.

Jim Lin: 30:22

In the early days, when I was doing influencer marketing, we'd look at so many other factors. Oh, you know, back then, when I knew everyone in the parent blogging University, I'd be like, Oh, so and so loves this. Their kid just did this last week, they'd be perfect for this, you know, and I'd use those kind of qualitative elements to choose influencers, and to give them a brief that really fit what they did. And what I'm seeing now much more is spreadsheets. Right? And back in the day, the spreadsheet was the last piece of the puzzle. Now it's the end all be all right. And so the more the spreadsheet if occation of influencer marketing will destroy that's a great soundbite that, Jim. So

Scott Guthrie: 31:11

if that made into a T shirt. So I think you're saying that we've gone through one end of the spectrum to the other, we've gone from having no data and all be on gut feel, to all about data and no gut feel is that is that kind of what you're saying?

Jim Lin: 31:27

Right. And the ideal is to take the best elements of both right and not standardised. It's so much that the gut feel doesn't mean anything. And you know, an example of that is digital display advertising. When I started in digital display advertising, back in 1998, which was forever ago, a lot of my media buying decisions were based on Oh, I know this website, it's great. They do content like this, and that when you had to handpick websites to advertise your clients on, I remember I was quoted in a business 2.0 article, remember that magazine? I was quoted business 2.0, I think in 1999. And I said, this really bold thing at times, he said, We don't look at demographics, I don't look at demographics. When I do an advertising planning, you know, I look at what someone's mindset is when they're on that website. And I still have that magazine. So I'm so proud of that, because I kind of went against that tidal wave of Oh, look at media buying can be automated and demographics and all that. And I was like, I'm not into demographics. I want to know this person's state of mind run this, but they're on this website versus the next website, because just as you can sell a CD, like a music CD to someone who's, you know, 25 with this income, when they're on a car site, they're probably not musically minded, but if they're on a music site, they're musically minded, they're reading music reviews, I'm gonna go with that one, even though the music review site probably isn't exact fits the demographic of the car site. And I said, I don't do demographics. And I've kind of had that mindset in digital. my entire career. It's like, yeah, demographics are great. But taking action on a piece of marketing material isn't because of who I am. It's what I'm doing. And if what I'm doing is relevant to what's being shown to me, that's what I'm going to react and I think influencer marketing is becoming or is in danger of becoming what display advertising on digital has been, it's been I don't even pick the websites anymore, right? God this ad, and the system will optimise it for me. And sure there's, it's great, but it's as an old school or I just kind of feel if it's so automated, then, you know, you don't need people who think differently or strategically to do this. You need a robot.

Scott Guthrie: 33:43

It's a fast moving industry. We've said that right at the top of the conversation, we said that you needed a lot of detailed subject matter expertise. How do you continue to learn in order to stay on top of things in euro

Jim Lin: 33:59

it's, you know, one part of it is just doing it more day in day out with my clients. I mean, I'm no longer the expert from a kind of qualitative standpoint on a lot of these influencers we're working with these days back in the day I was I was there every day interacting with influencers now, you know, when we're talking about lifestyle influencers or fashion influencers? Luckily, there are a lot of people you know, at my firm that follow these people just on a personal basis and no that world and the more I work with them, the more I understand who's who and what's what, on the other side of things, even things that I am interested in the trick to being a good influencer marketer is to be on all the platforms to follow the people who have made a name so you can see what they're doing, what the trends are, you know, who's coming on board. What's happening, I mean, because I have a personal interest now surprisingly, in tik tok because my 10 year old daughter was on And I joined it just to keep tabs on her, you know, the algorithm found me and now is feeding me content that I like. But in doing so, everyone, so while they're feeding, like the big influencers to me, so I can see what they're doing differently, who they are, what kinds of topics or how they do their content, the size of their following the types of engagement, we're seeing all these things, and it's just being in it. And being an active participant in the social or whatever platforms, the influencers are on, is so important, because once you get disconnected from it, you know, you truly don't get it. You may understand it, but you don't get it. The key to being good versus great is getting

Scott Guthrie: 35:38

perfect. And that seems a very neat place to close. Jim Lynn, thank you very much for being my guest today. Where can people follow you online?

Jim Lin: 35:48

LinkedIn, if you want to see my professional stuff, so it's my vanity URL is Jim Lin. ft W. My personal social media is and is interesting from a work perspective, but I'm always going to plug my fishing and bourbon Instagrams. I'm gonna do that now bourbon and bass on Instagram. If you like fishing and bourbon, go there.

Scott Guthrie: 36:18

Well, that's it. Episode One. Done. Thank you for listening to the influencer marketing lab with me Scott Guthrie. The podcast is sponsored by tiger. Please subscribe on iTunes, Spotify, or wherever you enjoy your podcasts. For more information, visit influencer marketing lab.com. And if you want to see how tagger can work for you, go to tag a media.com slash request iphon demo