How Community Commerce Marketing Can Help You Grow Your Business

Hey, it's Mark Podolski, Land geek with your favorite niche real estate website website, vallandgeek.com and on this week's Art of Passive Income podcast, I have an amazing guest. You are going to feel smarter, especially when it comes to your marketing. My guest today is Jason Falls who is on a mission to help brands grow through community commerce marketing. We're going to learn all about what that means. He leads marketing at Scipio AI, the leading community consumer consumer community commerce marketing platform that empowers brands to ignite influence from their own community of customers, fans, followers, employees and ambassadors. He arrived at CPO IO at AI AI after establishing himself as an international foundation thought leader in the influence marketing space. His best selling book, winfluence. Reframing influencer Influencer marketing to ignite your brand and supporting podcasts. Winfluence, the influence marketing podcasts have set new definitions and a broader focus for the industry, namely that of community commerce marketing. He has spoken about digital marketing on four continents, authored three books, and is the executive producer of the marketing podcast network. Jason Falls, welcome.

Thanks, mom. That was a great introduction.

Oh, you're welcome, son. It's so good to see you. I just don't know why you, you haven't called as much.

Yeah, it's, you know, when you, when you make me sound good to start off now, I'm like, oh, we've got nowhere to go but down from here. So I hope I can deliver some good, good insights for your audience today.

Well, I know you will, but let's just start with you and let's just rewind the tape. And what made you interested in influencer marketing? Marketing in general?

Sure.

And how do you think about marketing?

Okay, well, I grew up, my mom was the editor of the local newspaper in a small town in eastern Kentucky. And so I was always around the communications world. And when I was 14 years old, in the summertime before my freshman year in high school, she gave me a list of chores to do every day and I said, I don't want to do this. And she said, well, if you're not going to do it, you're going to have to get a job. So I marched into the local radio station and said, I want to be a dj, and they were foolish enough to hire me. So I've been in and around communications and marketing and broadcasting and the media since I was a teenager and my fast forward in through college and whatnot. I was a sports journalist and radio producer right out of college and then I kind of morphed into a public relations role in the world of college athletics. I was what they called a sports information director. I did that for colleges and universities for about 15 years. And then early 2000s, mid 2000s, my son was born. He's now a senior in high school. And I didn't want to travel as much. I wanted to be home. I wanted to be more focused on my family. And so I got out of the college athletics world and into mainstream marketing, advertising, and pr. And because I'm a PR guy, I was working with media and I was entering this world of new media, and there were bloggers coming to the forefront at that point. And the world of PR was trying to figure out what all this social media stuff was, and I was using it just on the side as a consumer. I had a little goofy blog where I wrote, you know, stupid stories and things like that.

And.

And so I kind of looked around and said, well, you know, I know a little bit about this, so I'll start helping my clients figure that out. And it just so happened that they were really thirsty to understand blogs and social networks, and I was in the right place at the right time and didn't screw it up. And so I happened to be working with some interesting brands at the time. Jim Beam and Makers Mark Bourbon were two of those. Because I was in the regulated industry space, and nobody in the regulated industry space was doing that. In 2005, 2006, I started getting invited to conferences that led to someone approaching me and saying, you need to write a book. And it just kind of snowballed from there. And so I've been in. I was kind of at the. At the confluence of jumping into a new career and this new thing of social media marketing, not necessarily social media, been around for a while, but brands using it was new in the mid 2000s, and I was just in the right place to give them some advice and I didn't mess it up. And, you know, kind of stuff snowballed from there, and my career has evolved ever since, so.

Interesting. So when you think about marketing, what do you think of. How do you define marketing?

It's a really good question. I mean, I've always thought of marketing as just the ability or the practice of educating consumers so that they can make good buying decisions. Now, that's a very broad philosophical definition of marketing, because marketing for a company is more specifically, hey, let's educate the marketplace and persuade them to buy our product. But I think the world of social media and that sort of explosion of the consumer coming first that happened with the social media and the social web sort of changed the definition of marketing a little bit to not let's persuade the audience to buy our product, to more of let's, you know, form a relationship with the audience so that they know, like and trust us. Because what they're telling us is, is they want to buy from companies they know, like and trust. They don't necessarily just want to, you know, look at an ad and be convinced to buy a product. Consumers were rejecting pop up ads, they were rejecting, you know, radio ads. With the advent of Sirius XM satellite radio, they were, you know, floating away from, you know, television and all that kind of stuff. So the do not call list came out, the can spam act, all happened there in the early 2000s and consumers were screaming at brands saying, stop yelling at us and start listening to us. And I think that's what social media marketing did for the world. And so I think now it's really the definition of marketing for me is, you know, educating the marketplace, educating consumers so that they can make a smart buying decision. And hopefully if you're educating them well and you have a good product and service, they'll buy from you.

That's a great definition. I think it's so true. Today the best brands are having that relationship with the consumer. So I'm really excited to hear more about immunity, commerce marketing, Incipio AI and empowering brands to ignite influence from their own community of customers and fans and followers, employees and even ambassadors. What does all that mean?

JASON FALLS so the best way, I mean, I think over the last probably four or five years, people understand what influencer marketing is, right? It's finding people with large social networks who you can pay or collaborate with to post something about your, your product or service and then all their fans and followers become fans or followers of yours. That's a very rudimentary, elementary, simple way of explaining influencer marketing. So if you take that idea and say, you know what, instead of going out and spending a lot of money on someone who has a lot of followers on Instagram or TikTok, someone who may not know my brand, who you know, it's a paid placement almost, it's not as genuine as someone who's already a customer, already knows us, or is already enthusiastic about our brand, instead of doing that, why don't we plug into our brand community? Let's look at our customers and see which customers have social media followings. And it doesn't have to be tens of thousands of people. It can Just be a couple thousand. It could be a couple of hundred. Because if you're empowering someone who's already a customer, or maybe they're an employee, or maybe they are a social media follower of yours, which might indicate they're a customer, but it doesn't really prove they're a customer. Somebody within your brand's footprint. If you can find someone who knows you already and they like you already and they trust you already, then if you empower them to turn and talk to either their social network followers or their friends or their family, or all of the above, that is a much more highly qualified referral and recommendation than going to someone with 500,000 followers on YouTube and having them say, hey, the next time you're in the market for, you know, this supplement to make your muscles big, buy this one because they sponsored my show or I like them or whatever. It's just that word of mouth recommendation from a trusted family member or friend or someone that you are connected with on social networks is far more trustworthy and far more effective than traditional ads and even traditional influencer marketing. So what community commerce marketing is is just that. It's the concept of influence marketing without the R. You're trying to influence people and empower them to share about you, but you're not looking outward, you're looking inward. You're looking at your fans, you're looking at your followers, you're looking at your customers, you're looking at your employees, you're looking at maybe even vendor partners, other people who are connected to you, people who might mention you online. You don't know if they're a customer or not, but if they mention you in some form or fashion, you should see that and know that. And so what Scipio AI does is it plugs brands into their community in a way that they can surface the influential voices in their own community. People who are already connected with them to basically give them the opportunity to fuel influence on their behalf.

So what are some examples then of empowering these? Call them evangelists.

Sure.

And fans in your community that actually do have somewhat of a following. They don't have to be Kim Kardashian. They could just have a hundred people.

Exactly. So I'll give you an example. And this, this is an example that I worked with in an agency that I worked at a couple of years ago. This isn't technically a Scipio example, but it, I think it paints the portrait of what we're trying to do here in a really interesting way. I built out a strategy with an agency that I used to work at Cornet with the University of Kentucky healthcare system. So you were talking about an academic institution's hospital and medical footprint. So there are hospital and healthcare system in central Kentucky. And we had developed an advertising campaign for them that started it kicked off with what I would call a two minute brand film. It was kind of a sizzle reel kind of film about the campaign and what the hospital means to the community. And it was supposed to, you know, sort of drive enthusiasm around the brand as they entered this new campaign. But who wants to watch a two minute commercial about a hospital? Right, right. And so we came up with a plan to say, hey, we're gonna, we're gonna use this concept of influence marketing. Not influencers necessarily, although they're part of it because they can influence their audience. So what we did is we had this brand film and it was gonna debut on Facebook because that's where a lot of, you know, the brand's audience that they're trying to reach was. And we had a date and time that we were going to have this thing go. And so we said, well, let's, let's look at influencers. Let's find people who have a good footprint on social media in the Central Kentucky area and let's engage them to come to the content, watch the film, comment on it, like it, and then share it with their network with their own story of their experiences with UK healthcare. And so this was a way to kind of manufacture some social media activity and engagement around this content, hopefully elevating it organically in the Facebook algorithm and all that good stuff. That would be influencer marketing. But we said, wait a minute, let's, let's look at this community commerce angle of looking within. And so the day before we debuted the video, the brand team debuted the video to the 10,000 University of Kentucky Healthcare employees and told them, tomorrow we're going to debut this publicly. And we want each of you to go to the video comment, like, share it. Because we were tapping into their social footprint using our own employees community as part of an extension of this campaign. Then we also turned to what I would call people of influence. Not influencers, but people of influence. So we reached out to the president of the Urban League, we reached out to a local real estate agent, we got the mayor of Lexington, Kentucky involved. We reached out to a dentist. We reached out to all these people who had impact on the community, who were influential people. We didn't care how many followers they had because we knew if someone saw this video rising organically in their Facebook feed. And they saw that the music director at the local Presbyterian church had commented on it and had shared their UK healthcare story. And that was gonna encourage more involvement from random people who saw it. So within the first 24 hours on this two minute commercial for a hospital, we had, I think it was 40,000 views in the first 24 hours. We ended up at the end of a four week period with 800,000 views of the video. Lexington, Kentucky only has 320,000 people in it. So we were almost 3x the population in people who saw this piece of content. And so that's the power of looking into your community. Because if you think of the people associated with your brand as concentric circles out from your brand, you know your brand's in the middle and the next layer out is probably your employees, and then the next layer out is probably their family and friends. And then maybe the next layer out is vendors, people you work with who are not competitive. And then the next layer out might be, I don't know if the next layer out would probably be your social media followers, people who are aware of you. They may not belong to those other internal concentric circles, but your social media followers. Then there's sort of the general community consumer. Then, you know, you go out and out until you get to like celebrities and whatnot on the outskirts of that. So your path to influence is exponentially larger when you work from the inside out from those concentric circles. Because while each of those internal circle of people, each of those individuals don't have as many fans and followers as the big time Instagrammer or YouTuber in aggregate, they have a lot more than that one YouTuber. So empower the people who already know you to talk about your brand and you're going to probably see much more effective success and more cost efficient success too.

So when we talk about cost efficient success, do you think it's a better strategy to monetize or I guess monetize is really the right word, or just pay for the people in your sphere of brand community to influence in some way? So could you give me examples of, of practical ways to empower them where it doesn't feel like you're bribing them, if you will?

Sure. Well, and you have to remember too, when you're talking about traditional creator, content creators and influencers, you're talking about people who this could be their livelihood. So the concept of paying someone to post about you online or giving them some sort of incentive to do that is something that we should all consider, because if you're talking about someone who has, let's say, 15, 20, 30, 40,000 followers and they are trying to support their family with their content creation, remember that as a brand, you're paying these people for three things. You're paying them for access to their audience. You're paying them for their time to create content and whatnot, and you're paying them for the content. And sometimes brands forget that. You can say, hey, will you post about us? But can we use your picture? Can we use your video? Can we pull those assets into our library so that we can use those, too? So you're paying for three things. And if you had to access any of those three things from other sources. So if you hired a freelancer to take pictures for you, you would pay them for the pictures. If you, you know, bought ad space somewhere to access someone's audience, you would pay for the right to do that. If you hired a consultant for 10 hours a week, you would pay them for the 10 hours a week. So we have to kind of, as brand and marketing people, we have to flush out this notion that influencers should work for free or will work for free because we need to pay them for their time. It's just disrespectful not to. But you can also tap into sort of this large community of people, like for instance, your employees, who may have influential footprints on social media, but may certainly have influence within their family and friends, that if you are incentivizing them in certain ways, they might be like, yeah, I'd be happy to tell people about our new product launch or whatever. Right? Some of them won't. And I think it's probably a best practice for your employees to make it optional. But if they want to and they want and you incentivize them enough, maybe it's with additional pay or bonuses, or maybe it's with additional time off or, you know, other perks and benefits. Whatever it is, if you incentivize them, then you're going to get much more enthusiastic participation and potentially larger participation in terms of number of people doing it. Same thing with your customers. If someone is already a customer of yours, they're already paying you, they're already buying stuff from you. You're already in the black on this transaction. The lifetime value is accumulating, so why not say to them, hey, you know what? You already shopped from us. If you'll do this, we'll give you a 50% rebate on what you just bought, or we'll give you a 20% discount the next time you buy, or something of that nature. If someone, though, in that customer set already buys from you, they're enthusiastic about your brand and they have a considerable number of followers, there comes a point when you probably need to think of them as an influencer in the more traditional realm and say, hey, we'd like, you know, for you to do this. And we recognize you have, you know, a considerable audience, 25,000 people or whatever, so we'd like to offer you free product and $200 or something like that, right. So you don't have to jump in the deep end of 2,500 bucks a post. You know, you can work through who that person is and who that audience is and come up with incentives that maybe are not cash out of pocket. Maybe they're discounts, coupons, incentives. Maybe it's just free product. Some influencers and people will work for just free product because everybody has their own goals and objectives with what they're doing. And a lot of people on the micro nano level who have a few hundred or a few thousand followers, they don't even consider themselves influencers. So they're probably not even conditioned to ask for anything. So if you say, hey, we'll give you a free pair of tennis shoes, if you'll take pictures of you in your new shoes and tell people how comfortable they are, you're going to a lot of people be like, heck, yeah, free shoes. Why not?

Yeah, absolutely. So will this work? Obviously, this is going to work great for a big brand and a big company that might have 10,000 employees and a million customers. But will it work for a small, let's say, Nichi Land company that has no employees, has customers, but works with virtual assistants?

Well, it certainly can. And really it's about doing the work of identifying first of all the audience you want to reach and who impacts or influences them. And so if it's a bunch of virtual assistants, then you're going to look for virtual assistants. But what I would do is I would look for virtual assistants who potentially have some sort of social media footprint, right, who are going to talk about being a VA on LinkedIn or wherever. Right. So that you can amplify what, or they will amplify the message for you. And then you've got to come up with something that is going to make it worth their while. And if it's free service, or if it's a gift basket, or if it's a coupon, or if it's Amazon gift card, or if it's 200 bucks. Whatever you find that works with those individual creators, if it benefits you for them to advocate on your behalf, then you can always find that value exchange. It doesn't always have to be cash, but you definitely need to think of, you're getting something out of this, so what's the cost? You need to have a value exchange the other way so that they get something out of it too.

Absolutely. So what are some of the biggest mistakes you see brands or businesses make when they start engaging in community commerce marketing?

You know, I think the biggest one is they, they don't trust that their own community will advocate on their behalf. They're used to going out and buying ads. Right. Or they're used to going out and, and, you know, maybe doing some content here or there. They're not used to working from the inside out. They start outside and are promoting outward from there. If you start inside, it might behoove you to have some of those internal conversations first so you get a really good feel for, here's what my employees, or here's what my customers think of me. Because if your customers buy from you because it's convenient or they have to, or you're cheap and they're not necessarily passionate about you, then maybe it's not good to start with them. But if you start having those internal conversations and you really find those people who love you for whatever reason and then grab hold of what that reason is and say, okay, let's amplify that. Let's figure out a way for you to tell more people why you love us and why they should potentially love us too. So I think the first mistake is people start outward and with influencer marketing and other types of advertising and whatnot, and they don't trust that their own customers, their own employees, their own community has power. Probably the second mistake that I think people make is they go at it from a very transactional perspective. And so they're literally saying, how much can I pay you to post about me? Well, I mean, just. Just hearing me say it that way, you're probably like, oh, that's creepy, right?

Yeah, yeah, it's.

You really need to kind of approach people with, hey, we have a relationship, you're a part of our community, you follow us on social media or you've purchased from us before. We really appreciate you. We also know a few things about you because we see that you have followers on social networks or, you know, we know that you are, you know, if you have the data and you understand who they are, from an employee perspective, we know that you lead the bowling group that goes out every Thursday night or whatever. So we know you have some sort of influence or impact over people that we would want to reach start that relationship, right? It's not how much can we pay you to post on our behalf, it's how can we provide more value to you in our relationship so that maybe you can also provide more value to us in spreading the good word. And so it goes back to the same types of how do you design an employee loyalty program? How do you design a customer loyalty program? How do you look at ambassador programs? Community commerce marketing is kind of all these things coming together. It's how can we design really smart influencer marketing? How can we design really good, you know, sort of word of mouth marketing? How can we design really good employee advocacy programs or customer advocacy programs? If you put all those together and you're trying to sort of sync the messaging and the strategy throughout those different stakeholder groups within your community, then you're a community commerce marketing practitioner.

So how does Cipio AI help brands?

So it's a software as a service like any other software platform out there. And you basically sign up and you plug in, okay, let's connect our social networks so that Scipio can see our followers. Let's connect our customer database so that Scipio can see who our customers are and maybe map a social footprint to them. Pardon me, let's connect an employee or let's upload a spreadsheet of employees. The more social data you're able to provide, like if you have their Instagram handle, for instance, for all your customers, or that's part of the fields you capture on your forms and whatnot, the better. And if you don't have that information, then, okay, let's figure out a way to capture that information. Let's incentivize our fans, followers, customers to share that social information for us. Because what Scipio does is it basically will map your community. We even actually have a visual view, you know, kind of a bubble in the middle of your brand. And then you've got these offshoots of here's your customer group, here's your fan and follower group, here's your affinity brands that are brands like you, but not competitors. Here's competitor followers on social media. You plug all this information in to establish your ecosystem. And Cipo helps you see where you have influential people within your own community footprint. You can also then say, well, I want to add social media influencers to my community footprint as well. So let's look for people who post content that's like this because that's the kind of content that we like to post and or partner with. And so now all of a sudden you have this more full picture of the different stakeholder groups and pathways to influence that your brand has.

I love it. I love it. Well, this has been just so educational. Jason Falls, your mentorship has been phenomenal.

Well, thank you.

Now we're at that point in the podcast where I'm going to ask you for your tip of the week. A website, a resource, a book, something else actionable for the auto passive income listeners to go improve their businesses, improve their lives. But before you do that, I have to give a shout out to our sponsor which is Flight School. Learn how the next 16 weeks can transform your life by acquiring raw land, making it cash flow so you have no renters, no rehabs, no rodents, no renters. Headache free. Go up that mountain land investing quickly, safely, efficiently with Scott Todd Azure Sherpa. He's done it thousands of times. Oh yeah, and that flight school investment ain't going to cost you nothing. Guaranteed you make back that money 180 days or less. Learn more go to thelandgeek.com forward slash training the land geek.com forward slash training Jason Falls, what is your tip of the week?

Well, besides going to that website. Holy crap. My I want to share something completely out of left field for you guys and gals out there. I have for the last seven and a half years practiced meditation and if for those of you who have not tried it, I would invite you to go to headspace.com I'm not affiliated with Headspace at all and if you want to try a different one, there's one called Calm as well. So go try a meditation app and just do the free trial for a week and follow the instructions and give it a try. It's does it's not tied to a religion. It's nothing crazy. It's just meditation is a way for you to calm your mind and de stress and if you practice it and get into a habit of doing it, it will absolutely change your life. I've been doing it for about seven years now. I've gone through two or three different trainings on different types of meditation and it absolutely keeps me not stress free but it helps me manage the stress and have a much more positive outlook on life. And I would recommend it to anyone religious or not.

Religious or not. I've been a long term meditator over 10 years now and I love Headspace. I started with Headspace and Andy's very calm, soothing voice.

Absolutely.

And then I moved on to. You should check out Waking up, the Waking up app. Have you checked it out, Sam Harris?

I haven't checked that one out. I've heard of it, but I haven't checked it out yet. So I'll definitely give that a shot too.

You'll love it. He's got a whole thing going on there. It's, it's really very different. But the meditation I was listening to this morning was the levels of awareness. And when you start meditating, you might just be aware of your breath and thoughts and feelings. And it works all the way up to. Everything's just emptiness. And pretty soon you, you, you, you can't find the thinker, you can't find the feeler. And there is no difference between subject and object. It's just. Everything's just the stream of consciousness.

Yeah.

Which.

And I've gone, I've gone a step further. And when you get to that point and you get rid of the thoughts and you're just sort of in yourself. Right. I went a step further and said, okay, well, I want to know what Transcendental Meditation is. I want to learn that. And so I've gone through the process to learn TM as well. And basically what TM is, is it's getting to that point and then kind of diving deeper into your, your conscious and your subconscious so that you're, you kind of sort of, you're totally awake and you're totally aware of what's going on. But that's where the stress just leaves your body and it just calms your spirit. And, you know, you can do it twice a day and it changes your life.

I love it. Do you have a TM practice that you recommend?

I think you just go to tm.com I mean, you have. TM has teachers and representatives in offices around the country. And so you want to find one local to you so you can have that sort of hands on. There is an app that comes with it once you go through the process, but they do much more in person hands on training because there's certain rituals to it and whatnot that you have to learn and sort of be, you know, taught by someone who can, who can train you appropriately. So just look up, it's tm.com or maybe it's tm.org the transcendental meditations official website, and they can put you in touch with your local person. Yeah.

Ray Dalio, the billionaire, is a huge fan of tm.

Yeah.

And talks about it all the time. Well, those are really good tips, Jason, but they're not going to make anyone any money. So my tip of the week is learn more about Jason Falls at the aptly named Jason Falls.com Jason Falls.com he has the articles and winfluence and is the digital strategies everything you're going to want to know. It's all there. Jason falls.com Jason, are we good?

We're good man. This is great. Thank you for having me.

Thank you for being here. I want to thank the listeners. Remind them the only way, the only way I'm going to be able to get the quality guests like Jason falls from Jason Falls.com is if you do three little favors. Follow Rate Review the podcast. Send us a screenshot of that review to support@thelandgeek.com I'm going to send you for free a signed copy of Dirt Rich. And after you listen to this podcast, if you want to be a brand ambassador, email me directly mark@thelangic.com because after this podcast I am going to pepper Jason and probably send him a big check to learn how to use ambassador marketing to grow our geeky community so that everyone can get out of solo economic dependency. So please do it. All right, Jason doesn't know I'm doing this, but 1, 2, 3. Let freedom ring. Thanks everybody.

Thanks for listening to the Art of Passive Income Income podcast. Are you ready to learn how you can start building a passive income without renters, rehabs, renovations or rodents? Schedule a free consultation@thelandgeek.com forward slash training. Let Freedom Ring.