Communicating Through Digital Divides with Anthony Shop
About This Episode
How do you define power in your brand’s social media? In this climate of mis- and disinformation, navigating a brand's path across the internet means facing difficult conversations head-on. How do you forge ahead, craft an image and perspective that is authentic to the culture of your team, and place it online in a way that aligns with your values?
Our guest this week is Anthony Shop. Anthony is co-founder and Chief Strategy officer of Social Driver, an agency dedicated to building brand image online for their clients. He's also Chairman of the National Digital Roundtable, a DC-based group whose mission is to educate and inform professionals about the technology, trends, and tactics that are transforming how society interacts with the world around them. In short, Anthony Shop knows of what he speaks on this subject.
This is a conversation about trends, but not the trends defining what we're wearing or listening to. We're talking about the choices brands are making as they choose how to show up online, to live their values on digital channels, navigating the heated rhetoric that dominated so many spaces this election year. Are brands stepping back, or digging deeper into their social strategies?
Anthony's answer may surprise you. It all starts with people. "If CNN calls, you can't send your logo, you have to send a person! More companies are embracing using their people," he says. "Social media policies used to be about what not to do. Now, companies are helping leaders to build their presence," as individuals.
Agencies are carrying heavy baggage right now. Shaking free of white-dominant norms and toxicity can go a long way toward allowing more individuals the freedom to share new ideas for their clients, but our field has a long way to go. Taking Social Driver as an example gives us a light, a model that Anthony and team have created together of an intentional culture built on values and partnership inside the agency and beyond it. We're so grateful Anthony is here to teach us today.
Links & Notes
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Carrie Fox:
Hi there and welcome to Mission Forward podcast, where each week we bring you a thought provoking and perspective shifting conversation on the power of communications. I'm Carrie Fox, your host and CEO of Mission Partners, a social impact communications firm and certified B corporation.
This season, we are talking with an impressive mix of nonprofit and foundation leaders, along with some of my favorite communications consultants about some of the most common challenge points and barriers to moving missions forward. Today's guest is an expert in social media.
And I swear, I think we could do an entire season with this guest today on the benefits and pitfalls of digital media based on how many questions we get from you all, from our nonprofit clients and our foundation clients and folks who are in this network at Mission Forward about how we show up, how we engage, and quite honestly, even when to walk away from digital and social media.
To help us make sense of some of those trends we have got with us today Anthony Shop, Co-Founder and Chief Strategy Officer of Social Driver and Chairman of the National Digital Roundtable. Anthony, thank you for being here today.
Anthony Shop:
Oh, I'm thrilled. Thanks for having me, Carrie.
Carrie Fox:
I want to set up a quick bit of background and see if I can jog your memory before we get into the conversation. I am thinking, Anthony, you and I first crossed paths maybe 2010 or pretty close to it, because we shared a client that was in the STEM education space. And I remember thinking and literally saying to one of my colleagues who was sitting next to me, "I love how this guy's brain works." And I could tell that we were so aligned on how we come into business with a deep sense of purpose.
I've now watched you work for so many years, and I love Anthony on so many levels the depth at which you invest in your projects, how much you give back in that process, how you think about your impact. It's so nice to be here with you knowing that we've got a little time now to be reflective and think about what you've learned since we first met so many years ago.
Anthony Shop:
Yeah, so nice of you to say, I felt the same way when I met you. We were just simpatico. It's been really amazing to see what you've done too. I love the podcast. It's such a great way to get great information out to more people, especially in times like this. Thanks for doing it.
Carrie Fox:
Thank you. Tell us a little bit more about you and what brought you to start Social Driver with your partner Thomas Sanchez.
Anthony Shop:
Yeah. Thomas and I, we're very different people. We're a married couple that owns a business. A lot of people want to know how we can possibly do that, but it works great for us. I think each of us was inspired by the way we could take lessons of how technology was transforming industries and the way people connect with one another and how we could apply that to help others. Something that we kind of did for fun with friends and it turned into a business.
Thomas has a great story you can ask him about sometime where he learned to make Thanksgiving dinner through YouTube in the very early ages of YouTube. It inspired him to bring a solution to work in the healthcare field that ended up becoming the largest social network in the healthcare world. Taking one solution and moving it over. One of my inspirations was actually one of my childhood favorite movies was The Goonies.
I always wished I could have seen it in a theater, but I never could because it was already out on video. When I got a little older, I created this side business. It was really a hobby turned business where I would use text messaging and social media in the early days to tell people to come out to happy hours in Kansas City where I lived at the time.
I grew a following of hundreds of people by using technology and my seminal sort of celebration was when I had such a big crowd, I was able to get a movie theater to screen my favorite movie The Goonies and get hundreds of people there to watch it.
Carrie Fox:
Oh, Anthony, dream come true.
Anthony Shop:
Dream come true. And I realized, you know, there's some power in how we can use technology to connect people in ways that used to be unimaginable. That kind of led us to say, I think we can help other companies do this, so we launched Social Driver back in 2011.
Carrie Fox:
Well, power. That's the name of the game today. That is the word that we're focused in on this season. But as you know, it's where we live, right, at Mission Forward is thinking about that inherent power of communications that we have, right? As communicators, how many levers we can pull that I think a lot of people don't realize how much power sits in that communication seat.
And that in a lot of ways, there is a lot of good it that can be done with that power, but there's also opportunities we need to be mindful of, right? Of reinforcing stereotypes or perpetuating narratives that we might not want to be. That's where we're going to go with this conversation, like we always do, and thinking about how you've now started to see and explore and understand that power of communications now, what, since 2011.
2022, your past your 10 year mark, what you're seeing what's sticking with you?
Anthony Shop:
I mean, the first thing is where does this power come from, right? In the traditional world of marketing and communications, it was very much, I'm going to tell a story, and I'm going to distribute that through TV, through billboards, right? I'm going to push that message out. Years ago, I worked as an intern at a TV station and the meteorologist asked us this question. He showed us lightning striking and he said, "Where does that energy come from?"
And we all said, "I don't know, the sky or the clouds." I think one Smart Alec said Zeus. And he said, "No. It's not up here. It's down below." That mass of energy, the charge of energy is actually in the earth, and lightning unleashes the energy. It's bottom up." I kind of think that's a perfect analogy for where the power is today, Carrie. We sometimes get smart aren't people around a conference room and we try to launch like a new hashtag campaign or a viral video or recreate the Ice Bucket Challenge.
And guess what? Most of those campaigns don't work. The best kept secret is figuring out how to switch your mindset and ask the question, where is there already energy? What can we do to tap into that energy that's already there and harness and channel it to unleash that energy? The first thing we have to do with power is figure out, where is that energy? How can we align with it? How can we harness it and how can we focus it to unleash it?
I bet your favorite nonprofit or political campaigns or even the ones you don't like so much have probably done that pretty well. That's a common theme I see in today's world.
Carrie Fox:
I really love that way of thinking about it, because you're right. We talk about that a lot here around how much power already exists. I think sometimes folks forget to see it, right? It's that hidden in plain sight concept. If you all think about what you've done over the last 10 years, you've been working hand in hand, side by side with so many nonprofits and foundations who have been trying to move these messages forward.
What has stuck with you about that approach? Because you all have a really powerful approach, and maybe I'll tee you up here to talk a little bit about that digital strategy approach you take. Clearly it's working. Because if I look at the impact you're having, it's pretty remarkable.
Anthony Shop:
Well, thanks. I love the opportunity to help people shift their mindset. And one of the ways we do that is I kind of told that lightning story already, but we'll look at how we used to break up a marketing campaign and we'd use that acronym PESO that most marketing people know. It stands for paid media, earned media, shared media, owned media. That can be great to do an audit of what you're already doing, but what's left out? People.
Just saying paid, I'm going to do a paid campaign, well, there's a lot of different ways that you can use paid media. Just putting it all in one bucket without thinking about people's behaviors and what motivates them doesn't get you very far. What we've come up with is this approach we call the three dimensions of digital strategy. And rather than organized by channel, we want to put people at the center and we want to ask... There's three categories we look at.
The first is, how do we get people's attention in this really busy, dynamic world? That's anything that we do from the brand out to people. It could be targeted ads, but it could be building an email list of your 50 most important and people at the nonprofit and doing a mail merge from a real person so that they actually open it instead of letting it go to their promotions tab and unsubscribing or never clicking on it, right?
We have to figure out, what can we do to cut through the noise. There are some simple things we can do to do that. The second is what we call intention, and this is totally different. This is how do we intercept people when they're already on a journey and help them complete it. If somebody's searching on YouTube or on Google, are we there? They may never have heard of our brand, but they may find us because they're looking for, in your case, maybe they're looking for a B corp.
That's a really unique facet or identifier of a business. Well, they may not have heard of your business yet, but they're looking for B Corps. They say, "Oh my gosh, you share my values," right? You've intercepted them. And then the third is what we call mention. Mention is the idea that sometimes it's better for other people to talk about us than for us to talk about ourselves. What can we do to unleash that energy of our customers or our donors or our partners, so that they're telling the story.
I think there's some really amazing examples of how nonprofits and foundations in particular are shifting their mindset to do this, to put people at the center of their strategy and break it into those three dimensions.
Carrie Fox:
Yeah, that's really digestible and makes a lot of sense to think about it along that trajectory. Are you familiar with the name Antionette Carroll at Creative Reaction Lab?
Anthony Shop:
No, I'm not.
Carrie Fox:
She is such an incredible inspiration and has been to me. I feel like I've learned so much from her over the last several years, but she has this process where she asks questions about where the power sits and she does it through a very specific design lens. But I think it's really appropriate across a lot of different communications functions. But she asks the question, who holds the pen in the organization? Literally, who is writing the strategy, right, and thinking about that?
When that strategy is written, it's often written from a certain perspective, from certain experiences, that the person or the team that's writing it has a certain perspective coming into the work, right? That's expected in everything we do. But she challenges organizations to think about putting the pen in someone else's hand, the person who doesn't typically hold the pen, and seeing what the outcome might be.
And that more times than not, what you're are speaking about, that's where the Ice Bucket Challenges show up because it's almost the unexpected author of the strategy will bring new fresh ideas, new ways of looking at the same problem.
Anthony Shop:
Yeah.
Carrie Fox:
Is there anything that you all have found that you've changed about your strategy in terms of how you think about the teams that you work on? How you create a team or how you work with a nonprofit? Is there anything that you've changed or that you clearly are seeing is working, and so you've continued to do it?
Anthony Shop:
Well, I love what you just shared about who holds the pen and putting it in someone else's hand, because I just want to mention that I've seen some really good examples. We helped to create GED Grad Day, which is a virtual celebration for people who get their GEDs. They usually don't have the same type of milestones in their journey as somebody who might have completed a traditional high school diploma.
And part of what that day was about was moving that power to thousands and thousands of not only GED grads, but also the adult educators who were alongside them and giving them permission, honestly, to talk about something that many of them were a little bit sheepish to talk about. Because if you got your GED, sometimes people don't really feel confident in that.
We saw that that was a major mindset shift for the organization to do that, but it was so much more successful than a stock photo on a bus ad or something that feels inauthentic. There's lots of examples of that I can think of, but that's one in particular that I really liked, that I found racial. And just seeing a comment on social media saying, "I used to be afraid to tell people I got my GED, and now I realize it's worth the blood, sweat, and tears. Don't give up."
I mean, that's going to always be so much more motivational for someone else who is in that same person's shoes from before than a corporate message that comes from a brand.
Carrie Fox:
Right. Right. Yeah.
Anthony Shop:
In terms of our... Oh, go ahead. Sorry.
Carrie Fox:
No, go ahead.
Anthony Shop:
Well, you asked by our company and one of the things that we did early on, we had a team retreat when we were, gosh, just five or six people probably. We identified what we thought our values were as an organization, and it was this very collaborative exercise. We actually went out to museums and took picture. There was this whole facilitated process around it. And then we ended up summarizing it down and coming up with five.
I won't say all. They're on our website, but things like put people before everything else and feel good at the end of the day. I found myself in situations over the years with teammates where I don't have the answer to every problem, of course, but I just think, let's go back to the values. What do you think the best thing to do is if we keep these in mind? And that provides a lot of clarity. One of the things we've tried to do is to remind people what those values are.
We recognize people at our victory lap celebration on our Friday team meeting, which we call recharge, who've lived up to the values that week, and just really decentralizing decision-making in that way. Of course, there are certain things where decisions are made in a hierarchical way in an organization, but there are other things that an individual is in a meeting and they have to respond to someone and they have to be thinking about these things and just making those second nature.
The folks who've done that, it's been really powerful to watch how they've used that to grow and evolve in their careers.
Carrie Fox:
This is where you and I or your company and mine has a lot in common where we think about how we upskill in any given day and how we knowledge transfer in any given day. We've started to really think about Mission Partners as a teaching hospital for communicators and how we can create the process by which any individual coming into the company at any level of their career can gain knowledge and skills at a pace that they wouldn't be able to do at another agency.
Our hope is they stay for years and years, but that when they go, they are so positioned for wherever they go next. But it starts first with that mindset, right, that we're talking about of how instead of holding the power and holding the knowledge at top, that there is so much value in sharing it freely and openly with our colleagues, but then also with our clients too. Maybe this is like the natural opening.
We'll come back to a couple of the questions for National Digital Roundtable, which feels like that's such an important part of where you're going too.
Anthony Shop:
Yeah. I've really enjoyed over the last four years chairing the National Digital Roundtable. One of the reasons that a bunch of other folks I know in this industry and I got together and created this was we decided we need more professional development, but we also need more settings where people can learn from peers, from one another. Sometimes direct peers that do the same thing, but sometimes people who work in different spaces, because the answers are not always in our direct industry, right?
Sometimes a different industry brings a great solution. We do small roundtables, and then we do large public events and trainings. I've just always believed, both through that work, but also for Social Driver, we developed consulting frameworks. We don't hold those and keep those secret. We use those to help solve problems together.
We find that when you do that with a client, when you do that with a team member, everybody achieves more when you work together in that way and people feel much more engaged in the process. I think that's another thing about kind of deciding who has the pen, right, and thinking about who can be part of that process. Absolutely. I just am such a big believer in professional development. The world's changed so fast. We all have to run to keep up with all of these changes.
Carrie Fox:
World changing fast, so is digital media. It's probably the fastest. What we can always count on to be changing, right, is digital platforms. What are you seeing if you look out across the digital landscape today, 2022, coming into an election year, thinking about where we've been the last couple years, that's sticking with you on some trends?
Anthony Shop:
Whether we're talking about cutting edge brand stuff and how TikTok is growing fast, or whether we just look at what a lot of normal people and organizations are doing in a platform like LinkedIn, I think we can see this trend across all of them that we really have to focus on the brands of people versus just the corporate brands. It's amazing how a number of organizations are so focused on their corporate brand. I was meeting with somebody, one of their executives.
I mean, they have like a blank LinkedIn profile with three connections and no picture. I mean, you wouldn't even know that this was a real person. The question is, well, what do we do to make sure that we can help elevate those individuals? And if CNN calls, you don't get to send your logo. You've got to send a person, and you have to have that person be ready and prepared. It's the same thing when it comes to a platform like LinkedIn.
We have to make sure that individuals are prepared and folks say, "Gosh, but what if I build up this person's profile and they leave?" And it's like, well, what's the cost if you don't build up the profile and they stay? We have to always be thinking about how do we position ourselves through our leaders, all across the organization. Maybe you're recruiting.
People who are looking at your company are going to be seeing what other employees are saying, what they're talking about, if they have a presence, and it's going to make a big difference. People focused digital marketing and communications I think is really important right now. I think it's exciting that so many people are waking up to it and they're realizing that. They're using that to build their skills and invest in the skills of their teams.
Carrie Fox:
I know every organization's going to be different, so there's no blanket easy answer to this, but do you find that you're often suggesting to folks that they do prioritize their people strategy, how they're building the people profiles over the corporate or company file, or is it kind of balanced on how people are spending their time and investments?
Anthony Shop:
That's such a great question. I'd say lately I am pushing the people side more because it's where they're under investing. If an organization didn't have a website or they didn't have acclaimed basic social media accounts, that might be a different story. I'd say also if you're a consumer brand, the way consumers are going to search for your business and look for you, you want to show up where they are, and so having YouTube presence, maybe it's an Instagram presence, having a website.
I do a lot of work in the B2B space, as I know you do is well. Whether you're a corporate executive that's working in that B2B space or a nonprofit or an association or a think tank, all of those types of organizations too, I think where they're under investing is the people side. And that's where we really need to ramp up. Because often to get to our goals, we don't need a million more people to know about us.
We need to engage with a small number of the right people, and that's a perfect goal to have for a people centered strategy.
Carrie Fox:
I don't want to think of how many times that we've had to talk about this, the difference between broadcasting a message and narrowcasting a message. The benefit really comes when you narrowcast, like you're saying, narrowcast that message, right? Know who your audience is, engage with them personally, build relationships rather than blasting the content and thinking, "Okay, great. We've done what we said we're going to do," but there's no engagement or interaction coming on the other side, right?
That value of those personal relationships can never be supplemented without personal connection there.
Anthony Shop:
Absolutely. I'd say I like the broadcast and narrowcast is such a good way of thinking about it. Another kind of even element that pulls in what you just said about that interaction is how can we go from storytelling to story driving? If you tell a great story, you write a great book, you put it on the shelf and nobody reads it, I would say that's not marketing or a business. That's art, right? It's wonderful that you've done that to create that artwork, but there's no business or marketing aspect because nobody else has read that.
How do we get that out? Well, in today's world, we want to drive the story. We have to think about, number one, who else is part of this story? What other people or organizations maybe I can mention, I can acknowledge, I can make it their story too, so that they have a reason to share it as well? If you're in a photo with others and you tag the others, right? Okay, they're going to see it. Maybe they comment on it. They look good, maybe they're going to share it.
Secondly, what are the topics or conversations or search terms that people are paying attention to? On social media, of course, we use hashtags as kind of the mechanism to categorize content in that way. But if you're telling a story and it's during the, I don't know if I'm allowed to say, the big football game and you use the hashtag related to that, that's something where you're going to show up in those conversations when people are searching.
We have to learn the lingo. How do the algorithms work? How does the artificial intelligence work? How do I make sure that I'm doing just some basic things like the right hashtags, the right mentions? Those are so important if we want to go from just telling a story to actually driving the story and making sure that it reaches people and they interact with us.
Carrie Fox:
All right. We are coming to the end, and I've got to ask you this one, because I mentioned it at the top, there is one question that seems to be coming up over and over again and I would love to get your take on it. It's back to actually what you had set up at the top when you were talking about the three dimensions of your strategy and that centerpiece intention. I'm finding a lot of folks of, organizations and leaders inside those organizations, are questioning if they should be on a certain platform?
Because a certain platform maybe is not values aligned with who they are as an organization, but they know that's where the audience is. It's that constant struggle of, do I join a platform that I know has big reach and my audience is there, but it would be going against a lot of what I stand for if I put money into that platform? Do you find that you're getting that kind of question? How are you coaching or counseling folks through how to answer that?
Anthony Shop:
Yeah, it's a great question. I think it's such a complex issue, because I guess it was not too long ago that there was a boycott against some social media platforms and some companies paused their advertising. Some of the clients I worked with paused their advertising. Some of the difficult questions, frankly, that came up around that were, okay, well, it's great if we want to pause it. What criteria do we need to meet to unpause it?
It was somewhat arbitrary. It didn't seem like, okay, great. We're going to pause it for a month. Turn it back on. Well, what does that do? I think the thing that we have to understand in marketing is like, where is our audience and where do they spend time? How can I engage with them in a meaningful way? Sometimes the places where we might have concerns, it may not be the most important place for us to be anyway.
But the other thing is if we shift our mindset from where are we going to be pushing, pushing, pushing content to, how can I get others to do that for me? An organic campaign like GED Grad Day was successful on many different platforms, even platforms where the GED didn't have an active presence. They hadn't invested a lot, but their people were there.
You can also be successful when somebody gets something that's really interesting and they send it on a text message to somebody they know, or they post it on Nextdoor or something. I think we should be thinking about what can we do to unleash that energy of our people and where are our people. Now, when it comes to platforms that, look, have grown so big, that some argue are necessary. I mean, they're almost like a utility, right?
It's like everybody uses this particular platform. Then I think what we have to do is what can we do to raise our voice, not just with the tiny decisions that we make, but how can we let it be known how we use that platform, what expectations we expect for that platform, et cetera. And that's a whole other thing. That becomes more like advocacy. But look, if you like the phone company, I don't think the answer is like don't ever use the telephone.
I think that that's probably going to be shooting ourselves in the foot. I think we have to figure out a bigger way maybe to make a difference there.
Carrie Fox:
Yeah, I love that. I love that, because I think it touches on a couple things that are really important, especially for this audience of this show, is that if you're on a platform, maybe start by asking yourself why. What's the point of being there? If there's a values misalignment, to your point, maybe there's a way to still engage with that audience, maybe not directly. But maybe by indirectly engaging, you actually could start to build an audience someplace else, someplace that's more values aligned. But you're right. There's never a simple answer to that question, and I think that's why so many folks feel flummoxed by it right now.
Anthony Shop:
Yeah. We all care so much more these days about not just what a brand sells, but what a brand stands for. We go in the grocery store. I know you and I both care about the world and people and the planet. When we make buying to, we keep that in mind. That might impact whether we support a product or what we're looking for on a particular product. And at the same time, that's really complicated because supply chains are complicated and products are complicated.
It's hard to know who buys what. We have to sort of choose our priorities. Otherwise, I think we can get really paralyzed and we have to understand what is the good that we're doing in the world that's going to make a difference and what responsible decisions can we do to advance that good. And look, if you're a great organization achieving great work, but you say, "Oh, I don't want to use the internet," I think it's going to be hard to be successful.
There's lots of things that we can point at with the way that the internet works, different companies that dominate the internet, the elements that are in our smartphone devices. But I think that can be a distraction sometimes from what's the impact we're trying to achieve.
Carrie Fox:
I mentioned to you before we started that I love doing this podcast because I get to learn so much in the process, and I really appreciated how much I got to learn from you in this short conversation. As we wrap up, my last question for you, Anthony is what is exciting you right now about what you are learning?
Anthony Shop:
Yeah. Gosh, it's so important, isn't it, to just pay attention to different things and listen to smart people and learn. This is one of the reasons I love that you have this podcast, Carrie. I read a lot of nonfiction and things that aren't necessarily about marketing. I'm just reading right now The Book of Hope, which is by Jane Goodall and Douglas Abrams. It's a really great read because Jane Goodall has been somebody that we have all know her important work.
She brings an element of hope to the world that I wouldn't have expected knowing how close she is to the environmental changes that we're seeing. That's been really inspirational and this kind of helped me stay optimistic. I'd also say, yeah, I just saw a piece in The Wall Street Journal that was really fun to read and to talk about. It was about YETI, the brand that makes coolers and great mugs and stuff. It was about their approach to unvarnished marketing, really authentic.
They're not using big celebrity influencers. A lot of photos that you can almost barely even see their product in it because they're so unvarnished. I did a little poll on LinkedIn and asked and about a hundred people responded and 70% of them thought that unvarnished type marketing does work better than that really polished glossy content. I love reading about these trends and seeing stuff, but it's even better I think when you can take it out to people to see what they think about it.
It's fun how you can do something as simple as a LinkedIn poll to start conversations with your network and get different opinions on these things. That's kind of one of the things I try to do at least because one reporter isn't necessarily going to be the end all, be all expert. For me, I kind of want to like expand it to my network and see what people think.
Carrie Fox:
Well, we will add links to those great resources. We'll also add links for folks to follow you and engage on some of those polls that you do on LinkedIn. Anthony, as we wrap up, thank you so much for this awesome conversation, for joining us for this season. I really look forward to continuing to watch your work and impact grow and especially as the National Digital Roundtable is growing too. Congratulations on everything.
Anthony Shop:
Thank you so much. Thanks for having me.
Carrie Fox:
Mission Forward is produced with the support of Nimra Haroon and the Mission Partners team in association with TruStory FM. Engineering by Pete Wright. Music this week is by Josh Leek. If your podcast app allows ratings and reviews, I hope you will consider doing just that for this show. But the best thing you can do to support Mission Forward is simply to share the show with a friend or a colleague. Thanks to your support and we'll see you next time.
