Own the internet

What's up, everyone? This is Alex, the host of Founders Journal. As you may know, I built Morning Brew from my senior year of college until we sold the business in 2020. And now I'm building a variety of businesses in different spaces and different stages. I'm basically averaging 1 to 2 new businesses per year. And because of that, I have had the opportunity to test a ton of different products and services, ultimately landing on a core software stack that serves as my business operating system whenever I start a new company. I have my go-to banking service. I have my go-to formation service. I have my go-to domain hosting service. But probably the most important of them all is my HR service, Gusto. If you're a longtime Founders Journal listener, you know how much I think about people in the context of business. A business is nothing without its people, which means a platform that helps me manage and take care of my people is invaluable. And that means I've tried every HR platform under the sun, always with the same exact goals in mind. First, I want a product that's intuitive and delightful to use. As a non-HR person, I find the intricacies of payroll, benefits, taxes, compliance, and expenses to be painful. So I just want something that makes my life easier. Second, I want it to be affordable. I'm a bootstrapper at heart. I started Morning Brew with $0 and I started StoryArc with $0 as well, which means I don't have infinite dollars to drop on SaaS products. And third, I want a platform that acts as my one-stop shop for all things people. I want it to handle payroll, benefits, hiring, onboarding, and taxes, all while integrating with all of the other tools in my business stack, whether it be QuickBooks, Slack, or Google Workspace. Well, Gusto hit the trifecta, which is why I am a customer and use it for every single one of my businesses. Yes, this is a paid sponsorship by the amazing team at Gusto, but I would sing their praises even if I wasn't being paid to do so. So if you're looking for a platform that takes the pain out of payroll, benefits, and HR, I highly recommend you check out Gusto. And if you sign up at gusto.com/alex, you will get your first 3 months free. Now on to the episode.

What's up, everyone? This is Alex Lieberman and this is Founders Journal. For those who are longtime Founders Journal listeners, welcome back. For those who are new to the show, here's the deal. Founders Journal is my audio diary made public for the world. My goal is to increase your odds of success as an entrepreneur by sharing the stories, lessons, and tactics that I experience as I build my businesses. You can expect the podcast Monday and Wednesday with episodes that are under 20 minutes in length. And if you want to get notified when a new episode comes out, make sure to subscribe wherever you listen. Today on the podcast, I am talking about running an employee influencer program, how to set it up, how it's doing within one of my businesses, and how you can run yours. Now, before we hop into things, I just wanted to share a little shift in the way that I'm approaching the podcast. I'm still going to be covering, obviously, the topics and things that are going on within my businesses or the conversations I'm having with other entrepreneurs or what I'm learning as a founder. But I felt like my episodes were getting a bit too scripted. I like kind of talking off the cuff, so that's what I'm going to do moving forward. Literally what I have in front of me is 7 bullet points, but otherwise I'm just going to be talking off the dome. I think it's going to be a little bit more authentic. It's going to be a bit more raw. It's going to feel like you're just sitting next to me and we're having a conversation. What it also may mean is some more mess-ups. I may say, um, I may say like, I may stumble over my words, but I think that is an okay price to pay in the effort of being as authentic as humanly possible with this podcast. So I'm going to take it for a test drive. We're going to see how it goes. Let me know what you think in kind of approaching this in a more riffy type way. Shoot me an email to alex@storyarb.com to let me know. But yeah, we're going to run with it. So let's hop into the podcast. Okay. We are talking about employee influencer programs. And before we do that, I wanna give a little bit of a prelude on how we got here. The first thing I wanna talk about is my approach to organic marketing, no matter what business I'm working on. And my mental model for developing a marketing strategy at any company, whether it's Morning Brew, whether it's StoryArc, whether it's Distro, whether it's 10X, whether it's any of my businesses, is something I call the hub and spoke model. And if you're a longtime Founders Journal listener, you've heard of the hub and spoke model. But the gist is this: you have end customers that you want to get in front of, that you want to consume your product, pay you for your product, whatever it may be. Those are what I call spokes. Now, there are digital or physical channels that give you a lot of access, leveraged access to many of these spokes at once, so you don't have to go person by person by person. That is what I call a hub. So an example would be like a hub for Morning Brew were what was a business class in the business school at Michigan, because I could go talk in front of a class and I would get in front of 100 students or spokes that could be readers of Morning Brew. For a business like, let's use the example of StoryArc. A hub could be like me posting on LinkedIn. You know, since I have, let's call it, 180,000 followers on LinkedIn, many of them are CMOs or marketers of high-growth companies, B2B companies. I have access to a lot of the right spokes. And so I would be one hub for StoryArc. So that's the hub and spoke model. And if you get nothing else from this episode, thinking about your growth and your marketing strategy within your business in terms of hubs and spokes and how do you stack hubs and spokes is time well spent. I was working on developing the marketing plan for StoryArc for this quarter, And I knew we had to be really ambitious with it because basically we're planning on growing by one customer per week as a business. And, you know, we feel like we have the ability to do that. We're only going to do it if we believe we can scale quality as we scale the business. But what I knew is if we wanted to hit these numbers, we needed to have a proper marketing program that got us enough traffic, enough pipeline, enough leads to convert enough customers. And so as I was working on the marketing plan for StoryArc, there was this kind of ongoing thought in the back of my head, which is that I deeply believe in the power of influencer work. There are so many companies that have grown rapidly because of their influencer program, and I would argue that it's mostly been done on the B2C or consumer side of things, right? Like I think of like Gymshark is one of the classic examples of a consumer business. You know, they're a UK apparel business that grew rapidly because of their work with Instagram influencers. Or I think about like AG1 used to be called Athletic Greens, which has scaled rapidly. You know, they do hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue because they have this really attractive influencer program and they've worked with tons of influencers. And I always had the thought that B2B companies have been kind of late to marketing strategies and marketing trends in general. And influencer programs was one of those marketing strategies that B2B companies were not picking up fast enough. And so an overall thought I've had is that like influencer programs are primed to be leveraged in B2B companies and they're not being done nearly enough. Now, another thought I had, because, you know, StoryArb is a relatively new business and we don't necessarily have the budget to spend on influencers, is that, well, our employees could be our best influencers, right? We have a team of, let's call it, 18 to 20 people at StoryArb. We have amazing writers, content strategists, ops people, account managers. And these people all have deep insights and subject matter expertise in the areas of work that they do. And, you know, like, I'm not the first person to think about employees as influencers, right? This idea of employee advocacy has been around for a long time, but I've always felt like it's kind of fallen flat or it hasn't gotten enough momentum or hasn't had enough staying power because companies that try and employee advocacy programs don't have the right culture or set of incentives to unlock employees as influencers. I also think the fact that it was called employee advocacy was probably half the battle of why it didn't work. So basically all this to say that I saw employees as influencers as this really interesting tactic to try within our business. It would be leveraging the hub and spoke model because every employee within our business has audience on the internet of different sizes where they are a hub speaking to the right spokes. And so I thought it could be something really valuable for not only Story of as a business, but for our employees to find their voice online, for them to be considered subject matter experts on the internet. And also, I think it could be really culturally for our company. And so basically, I created this employee influencer program, and I'm going to literally take you through the slides. Like, I had slides in our recent all-hands taking our entire company through this program, and I'm going to take you through it just as I took our team through it. So let's— you're not going to see the slides, but you'll get the gist. So I started by saying I believe the future of marketing involves brands doing things to, quote unquote, own the internet, which means giving off the feeling that your company is everywhere all the time. And there are a few ways to accomplish this, this notion of owning the internet. One way is through what I call drop-style marketing. It's something that Beehive does really well, where as a software business, business or just any business, you have a product roadmap and you basically have your marketing org and your product org move in lockstep where kind of every week or every 2 weeks you have a new product announcement. And with that product announcement, you pair that with kind of a marketing blitz package that you do online. And again, Beehive does this really well. Another way to own the internet is through a company-wide employee and executive social effort that leads to your company owning the internet. And the cool thing as I think about this is I don't think any companies have really pulled this off. So we as StoryArb can literally be the first company to prove the value of cross-company personal social. And I also think just like we are using our own product of StoryArb, our own content flywheel as part of our own marketing strategy, taking a cross-company employee social approach is a great way of dogfooding something that we preach to our clients every day. So here's how it's going to go. If you take part in Own the Internet, and that's the name of this competition, it is a 10-week-long competition where the entire StoryArc team battles it out for the most LinkedIn impressions to win it all, to win the competition. And if you take part in owning the internet, not only are you playing for bragging rights and the personal benefit of growing your audience on social, but you're also playing for something big that I'm going to share in a second. And I wanted to create a little bit of anticipation by not sharing what the ultimate prize was yet. Now, the next slide basically talks about the logistics of, of this program, which I think is really important for you to keep in mind as you think about creating an employee influencer program within your business. When does Own the Internet start? Right now. How do you join the competition? You just start posting as much or as little as you'd like. And there are 4 final ground rules that I want to share. First ground rule, we ask that at least 50% of the content that you create on LinkedIn relates to the work that you do at StoryArb, meaning it fits into one of the pillars that is listed on the next slide. And for context, the pillars listed on the next slide include editorial newsletters, long-form content, connecting content to pipeline, executive social, company social, brand marketing, B2B marketing, AI in marketing, writing/editing, content ops, or anything else related to the work that you do. Ground rule number 2. Yes, this is a competition, but we are also a team. This company-wide social blitz only works if we help cross-promote each other's content online. As you're posting, please feel free to share your posts in the Social Juice channel, and let's do all that we can as a company to help each other grow our own audiences on LinkedIn. Abby and I— Abby's my co-founder for StoryArc— we will be boosting everyone from the ARBs' posts on social constantly. Ground rule number 3, if you want to, you can link to your Arb ambassador link in your posts to drive prospects to our pricing page. This is an additional way to earn as you post on social, because if you drive a new customer for the Arb, you will earn a referral bonus. So this is another thing we layered into our employee influencer program is not only was this a time-bound competition that has prizes at the end, but we also have StoryArb's referral program. And if StoryYard employees use their referral link and end up driving customers to Yarb, they get paid out on that as well. And then the 4th ground rule: each week, Valentina will just ask you for a screenshot of your LinkedIn impressions for the last 7 days so that she can keep track of the competition and so that a weekly leaderboard can be shared in all hands. Just a quick amendment to this. Since we started the competition, we actually partnered with Shield, which is a LinkedIn analytics company. And so now we actually automatically have a view on impressions, followers, engagements, like all of the LinkedIn stats for everyone across the entire org. But you can also filter person by person. So now we don't have to do this manually. And so that was basically the, the shtick of Own the Internet. And then I finished by saying basically what the prize is. So the final slide was the person with the most social impressions on LinkedIn after 10 weeks will win $5,000. Second and third place will also get rewarded with $1,000 and $500 respectively. So this is the gist of Own the Internet. Basically, the idea was how do we create a culture where there's healthy competition, but also everyone is also cross-promoting each other's posts where like team come first, competition comes second. There are 3 prizes at the end. So even if you are not the number one in impressions, you still have a chance to win. And the big goal here also was how do we help people unlock their creativity on the internet? This is why We require only 50% of your content to be around StoryArb or your professional pillars, because we want enough of your content to be around the expertise you have as a professional, such that your connection to StoryArb is understood and it's natural and it's authentic. But also, we didn't want to force you into a box where you had to talk about work stuff all the time. So that is the plan for Own the Internet. Now, Own the Internet has been around for a week and a half, and I just want to share, after the first week of doing Own the Internet, what sort of results we saw in week 1. We had 61 total posts from the StoryArb team. We had a total of 650,000 impressions on LinkedIn. We saw a 52% increase in site traffic week over week, and we saw 500 pricing page visits to StoryArb's pricing page. So obviously it is crazy, kind of like the impact we saw after 7 days of this competition. One other thing I wanted to share that I think is really important is before starting this competition, we had all of our employees optimize their LinkedIn profiles so that there was a standardized brand for StoryArb employees. And the call to action for people to go to StoryArb site was very clear. So we did basically 3 things. We had people add their job title and StoryArb to kind of like their LinkedIn headline. So now if you see a post from them, it says like mine says co-founder at StoryArb. A writer would say writer at Storyarb, and you see that kind of at the top of any post they make. The second thing we did is we had people add a visit my website button to their LinkedIn profile and link to their referral link to Storyarb. So now, as an example, if you see any person from Storyarb's LinkedIn post, at the top of that post, what you'll see is their name. You'll see the headline of their job title at Storyarb, and then you'll see a visit my website button. And then finally, We created for everyone a LinkedIn profile picture and banner photo that is standardized. And so the idea is like you will very clearly know, even if you don't recognize the person's name or their connection to StoryArc, you know what a StoryArc profile picture and banner photo looks like now. So that is Own the Internet in a nutshell. We're seeing really positive early signs. Just to kind of to round things out, the number one thing I'm thinking about now is this is a 10-week competition. It is a marathon. And I'm thinking about how do we keep momentum with this program so people don't burn out after posting a lot in week 1, or people start getting discouraged because they feel like they're falling way out of first, second, or third place in this competition. And so my current thinking around this is basically I want to provide a golden nugget for the team each week. Like I want one golden nugget, and that golden nugget could either be a tool or a resource that will help every member of the team to create more and better content online, a tool or resource they didn't have before. or even like a minigame where there is a, there's a smaller prize. It's not $5,000 or $1,000, but it is something that entices people to kind of win like the weekly game. So even if you feel like there's no chance that you finish in first, second, or third of OTI, you still have incentive to perform on a week-by-week basis. And just as an example of this, something I'm likely going to work on is basically creating a customized list of prompts for every employee at StoryArb based on what their content zone of genius is, what their role is, what they like talking about. So imagine just like a list of customized questions so that as people on the team try to think about what am I going to talk about today, they can go to this custom list of questions. And if they just ask themselves one of these questions and then attempt to answer it with a social post, it will likely get kind of the juices flowing if they don't know yet what they want to post about online. And so that is the gist of Own the Internet. What our employee influencer program looks like, how it is just one application of the hub and spoke model, and how we are seeing very strong early signs. That's it for today's Founders Journal. First of all, if you have any thoughts on kind of this approach to me just riffing about a topic where I have a few bullets and then I'm talking from the dome, it may be a little less refined, but hopefully it feels more like you and I are just having a conversation at a coffee shop. Let me know what you think about it. Shoot me an email to alex@storyarb.com. And if you have any questions about own the internet or how to run an employee influencer program, shoot me an email as well. Thank you so much for listening, and I'll catch you next episode.