STOP! Too many social media posts can be bad for business. A Qnary can tell you how much you should

Hello and welcome to this episode of Speak PR. My name is Jim James and I'm your host. This is the podcast for business owners and entrepreneurs who'd like to get the most out of the value of their business by using effective communications. Today I'm joined by Bant Breen, who's an entrepreneur himself, has actually a PhD, and also is the founder and chairman of Cuneri in New York City. But today he's joining us from Spain due to lockdown, and he has founded a business which helps executives to leverage their social media presence. And that's important because people following executives on social media are twice as likely to buy from that company as another company. So let's listen to what Brand has got to say about the impact of an executive's social media on the power of the brand itself.

Hi, Jim, how are you?

Good, thanks very much indeed. Hola, ¿cómo estás?

Hola, muy bien, muy bien, todo está bien.

Terrific. Well, look, thank you for joining us on this podcast, and I'd heard you speak on the Progress Shed and was impressed really at what you're doing on LinkedIn and social marketing for busy executives. So Ben, you've built a company, Canary, to help executives, and you've got a survey with the Center for Global Communications between Emerson College and the Blanquena School of Communications. And what you said here is that the digital reputations of key executives should no longer be seen as mere window dressing, quote unquote. Why is it important now, Van? Tell me about it.

Yeah, I mean, great question, Jim. And in fact, you know, when I started the business 8 years ago, I had a very simple present— a line where I would tell people, I would say, Your online presence matters. It matters to— because it operates as essentially an instant background check for you. It also matters because if you don't have it, you're not aware of all of the digital opportunities, these scaled opportunities that could come from anywhere. Now, I would say, as we live through probably one of the most difficult moments that we'll have in our lifetime, this whole coronavirus and COVID-19 challenge. We— your online presence not only is important, it's everything. You know, it is the way people know you. It is your calling card. When we did the research studies, we do this white paper every year. Our 2020 research study will come out in October. And over the years, you know, some interesting tidbits have come out. 2 things that are very relevant to your question that you just asked are that when an executive, when a professional shares content via LinkedIn or all the other channels, it's 8 times more likely to be engaged with than if it was shared on a brand channel.

Hmm.

I think that that's really important to remember. It's also kind of connected to a very, very obvious but very important insight, which is people like to connect with people, right? We don't— we don't— it's not normal for us to talk to, you know, Ford or Chevy, you know. It's normal for us to talk to people. And so essentially, that's really kind of one of the elements that I'm highlighting here. Second thing is, one of the statistics that came out of actually Asia was that Individuals that follow an executive and a brand are twice as likely to purchase from that company. And so, you know, I'm, you know, you have an excellent LinkedIn score. You know, at Canary, we would focus on not only LinkedIn, we would be looking at your whole online presence, what you look like in search, what you look like across the multitude of social platforms, business platforms, et cetera. So we're, you know, I don't want to overweight one over another, but it certainly matters today. It is how we are doing business, and it potentially really could become, if this COVID thing continues, this is really quite a game-changing moment for all of us, right? So this could be the new way we do business forever.

Yeah, I think, and in a way, because the company is almost too big, isn't it? We're all looking for someone to kind of handhold us through the organization to get what we need. Now tell us about Canary then, and how is it different to a regular agency that someone might go to, or even doing it themselves?

Yeah, absolutely. Well, I come from the world of agencies, and when I started the business 8 years ago, my last roles were running agencies in the IPG family, I'd worked at WPP and Publicis before that. And so I'm very aware of agencies and marketing of all types. And, you know, the great things about agencies is that they're, you know, they're filled with problem solvers, they're filled with creative thinkers, and they're service-oriented. But as I looked forward, you know, 8 years ago, I realized that the challenge with agencies is that they didn't scale. Scale as businesses. They didn't necessarily utilize technology as effectively as they needed to be using them. And so as I set out to build a solution that didn't exist in the agency world, which was Canary, right? Canary is, as you know, Jim, and probably I could just quickly describe, is a technology platform and a solution that works for executives and professionals to optimize their online presence in search as well as in social platforms. It creates thought leadership content for them, whether that be short-form content or long-form content, and then it grows their audience and engages with other key influences or influencers in the topics that they care about. The difference between what we do versus what an agency does is that, you know, our whole solution begins with our technology platform and ends with our technology platform. So all of those things that we do, we're— we have a very kind of a product mindset. It's very different than what happens in an agency, which is really kind of focused on the number of FTEs that you put on a problem. You might have some brilliant thinkers, but it's very hard to scale agencies.

Sure.

Our whole process is very much baked around the technology.

Yeah, I'm running an agency myself for 25 years across multiple, you know, countries. I know that the issue of content creation at scale and maintaining the quality across all the clients is really hard. So how does it work? Does someone rent your platform, put their own content in, or is it an AI-assisted content generation? I saw you've also got some nice handheld or some mobile apps for approvals of content, which is really nice. I like that. So just how does it work from a practical point of view?

Yeah. So we actually produce content. We actually generate more content, digital content than the New York Times at this point for clients. We're generating content across 36 different business verticals. We have a team of creators that we've recruited that work within our platform. Platform. They're vetted, they're experts in specific topics, and they utilize our tools to generate the content. Some of that content is pre-structured, pre-formed using some kind of machine learning tools that we apply, but it then is formed into final pieces of content through the creator network that we have. That then is sent to an internal team of editors that we have.

Right.

These editors review it. Once the editors give it the green light, it goes to a CSM, a customer success manager, which is assigned to the executives. And it is, it is then kind of reviewed one last time before it goes out. The technology also is monitoring whether the client makes any changes in it. So if, if you, let's say, get something and you change a sentence or a word or a word choice or a structure, the technology learns that and says, oh, well, Jim, Jim doesn't like the word like, so don't use that word, you know. And so it learns, it learns your tone of voice, it learns your structure, and that then gets fed back into rules that are seen by the creators.

Okay.

Going forward.

And that's very—

does that make sense?

That does. So it's a combination of some technology and some human intervention.

Absolutely. And, you know, yeah, and Jim, I mean, I, you know, I don't know if you— how much of my background you know about, but, you know, I do have a PhD in artificial intelligence and marketing. And so, you know, my take on AI is that it's an incredibly beautiful— there are incredibly useful ways to utilize it so that it can support us in the jobs that we do. Right. And so I think that that's really kind of what we believe in at Canary. There's never going to be just a tech solution that works or just a person solution. The best way is to bring the two together.

That's interesting because there are some solutions now that I'm seeing out there that really are creating content from, for example, a key sentence. And are then creating 4 or 5, you know, sort of new sentences and bodies of content around that origination sentence. And on the one hand, it's very exciting, but on the other hand, you can also see how that can really go very wrong too.

Yeah, I mean, we have a— we look at all of those products. OpenAI, a company on the West Coast, is doing a lot of the leading work in that space.

Yeah, so there may be a danger of just creating so much volume that there's little value. Then we'll get into more than the need for filtering. So do you create— if you're working across, say, Twitter, Pinterest, Insta, and all these other platforms, are you consolidating this into a dashboard in some way for either the agency or the executive? Because accountability is also a really big part of this game, isn't it?

Yeah, it is. And, and I mean, I probably have a couple of things to say. I mean, so our interaction with our clients is that The Canary has a mobile application, and that mobile app operates as a place where a client will receive notifications on various optimizations. They'll also receive their content there. They'll also receive notifications saying, hey, here's a Here's a post by an influencer in your space. You should engage. Here are some potential ways you could engage with that. So it operates as kind of like your media hub, your media agent. And there is, there are some basic metrics there. There's kind of a dashboard there in the app. Um, but, uh, on a monthly basis, the, uh, customers, the Canary customer success manager sends over a measurement, uh, report and walks through that with the client. And that will look at, that will look at a lot of things that we think are important, which is, are you findable? Are you connecting with the topics that you— are you connected with the topics that matter to you as a business executive?

Mm-hmm.

Are you connecting with the influencers in your particular field? Are you growing your audience? Are people engaging with you? Right? So we track all of those metrics and we share that with our clients on a monthly basis.

And then, and then, Ben, are you giving sort of prescriptions as well in terms of, are you saying, okay, now we've got, for example, this many followers, here are some groups within Facebook or LinkedIn or otherwise that you could be participating in? Because that's the other way is to go into new networks and Russell Brunson talks about, you know, going to the places where your potential customers are rather than waiting for them, you know, to come to you. How are you handling that?

Yeah, yeah. So I mean, the, the, the solution when we're kind of growing and engaging on your behalf, we certainly are applying a variety of tactics to do that. Some of those things may be some of the things that you're mentioning there. The ongoing kind of interaction when you get the— when the client receives a report offers that opportunity to discuss what types of additional moves that would be recommended by our team. So we have a kind of a growth and engagement technology platform baked into our technology, but we have also a team of experts and they support that process of providing like, hey, you should be— we We would like to consider X, Y, or Z for you. Are you interested? You know, interestingly enough, Jim, you know, not only am I the founder of the company, but I'm also, I'm also a user of Canary. And, and what— yeah, and so I have my own CSM, and, you know, one of the things that, you know, a piece of advice I got recently was She said to me in my monthly review, she said, post less. And I, you know, and I think that for me, who is, you know, I'm probably one of these hyper-social people, I want to be posting all the time, but they took me through the math of kind of like the diminishing margin of returns. So, you know, there, there, it's, it's, this is not about trying to post a million times a day on every channel. Right, everybody has their own kind of optimal number, basically.

Well, that'll be useful to get to, and I'm looking forward to reviewing my own Canary Score with Michael Lee next week. Now, in terms of, from a practical point, Ben, who's using the platform? And let's talk about what it costs. Is it something that's like much more than an agency or cheaper than an agency? We've got a couple of minutes left.

Just tell us about your business model. Yeah, okay, I'll hustle through that. So our clients are a wide mix. We work with now about 600 different enterprises and thousands of individuals. The enterprises that we work with could be as big as Fortune 100 companies. I don't want to name names of the companies we work with, but we do work with some of the largest companies in the world. And we'll work with them across kind of their experts in specific areas, kind of their brand ambassadors on various topics or their analysts or their sales teams or their marketing teams. It really varies depending on the, on the company. But we also work with small companies, early-stage businesses where the senior executives, the founders are truly the flag carriers of their businesses. And so their online presence is extremely important because it is the business. In terms of how much it costs, we have simplified our pricing. It's a monthly subscription model. It's $950 a month. And you get all of the things that we're talking about. You're getting short-form content for all various different business channels, Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook Business. Longer form pieces like blogs written for you for Medium as well as other business channels. You're getting growth and engagement baked into that. You're getting access to the technology and then you're getting the optimization of all of your social platforms and that could be, you know, many, many, many different platforms. So, and that, yeah, so that is, it's just the kind of one standard fee and it covers all of those things because we've realized that when people do one of those things but not the other, it doesn't work. So we really believe that it has to be this holistic solution. In terms of pricing comparison to agencies, you know, agencies charge for what we do quite a bit of money. I, you know, Jim, you may know that. I mean, large agencies that we've worked with have charged as much as $40,000 dollars a month for what we do. The most common contract is a 6-month contract with an automatic renewal. So that's the general contract. We do have clients that sign up for annual contracts, but it's— I would say the fastest, the one that sells the most, is the 6-month with the automatic renewal. And we're very confident with that. You know, we have very high retention rates with our clients. This is probably where my agency world background comes into play. You know, we do want to make sure that clients are happy and that they're getting— they're growing and they're succeeding. And so we make sure that that happens.

Ben, Canary, where can people find out about you and the business?

Go to our website, canary.com. That's Canary with— it's probably better to spell it out, www.qnary.com. And you'll see everything there. And in fact, actually on the website, you can sign up for an online analysis of your online presence. And one of our analysts will call you and take you through what they would recommend that you should do. And so it's actually quite a useful process. And it's a nice way to start the engagement.

Ben, thank you so much for joining us. Bant Breen, the founder and chairman of Cunary. I keep saying Cunary, sorry, Canary.

That's fine. You know, that's fine, Jim. One thing that you learn with it when you have a company, you know, I don't call it Cunary. Cunary sounds very technologically advanced. We'll go with that as well.

It's my Italian, because you're in Barcelona. We're gonna say Cunary tonight. So with that, I'd like to— thanks, Ant, for joining us on the mic today. And I'll obviously include this information in the show notes. And in the meantime, we wish everybody the, the best of health, a profitable business, and that you keep on communicating, especially on social media.