This is going to be an exciting episode!

In the past episodes, we've talked a little bit about the silk road and some of the foundations of branding. But today, we have the opportunity to talk about social media and how social media has impacted brands.

What a beautiful day.

This is an exciting.

Because we have the opportunity to talk about social media and how

social media has impacted brands.

We've talked a little bit about the silk road.

We've talked about, some of the foundations of branding.

And so we get to talk about the thing today that has

totally turned it on its head.

And so today Amin is going to be leading the conversation.

Social media.

It's the love, hate relationship.

Everybody wants the effects and the end results of social media, and

they don't want to put in the effort, but it has had a huge impact on

business and how branding is viewed.

So there's three big areas that I want to talk about today.

One is social proof.

The other is the ability to be everywhere.

And the last is a little story.

I want to tell you now, starting off with social proof.

Heather, have you heard that term before?

Social proof.

Oh, yeah, for sure.

From you guys know that's, it's, something that people talk about.

Yeah, social proof is, you know, the kind words you get from a friend or

a family in the old days, when you would go to the Tavern and somebody

would say, Hey, you know, who's making your horseshoes, something like that.

And you can say, Hey, Bob, over there is making it right and make a referral.

Yes.

As a social proof.

And the modern day is reviews and ratings.

Now social proof is so important that Amazon relies on it.

And there's a big, I would say even like a underground, you know, so-called

black market around fake reviews because that's what gets people to buy things.

If I'm looking for an item, let's say I'm looking for a new webcam.

The first thing I do is I do a search for different webcams.

And then I start looking at the number of stars and ratings and reviews.

And then I do some further research from there.

Social media has made this super easy because if you want to know something

about a company, you go onto their.

Instagram account and right away, you can see they have a million

followers or they have 16 followers.

And that right there says a lot about branding.

It doesn't mean that the company's good or bad.

It just means that we judge companies and brands based on

what other people think of them.

I was just going to ask Amin if that's similar to what we do in

websites, like in website design a whole bunch of logos so that people

will see where you've been featured.

That's exactly what it is.

Right.

If you say, you know, featured on Forbes, featured in Ted and those sorts of

things, it's, you're relying on somebody else's decision to help you make yours.

So if Forbes thinks you're good enough, well, then you

probably are good enough for me.

Second one is the ability to be everywhere.

Social media has allowed us to connect with brands and other

people in so many different formats.

And what I mean by formats is you have audio with podcasts.

You have.

Pictures, maybe Instagram or Pinterest.

And then you've got video, which is like YouTube and also Instagram as well.

If a brand wants to be everywhere, they could start with creating video and then

take that and repurpose it into pictures, repurpose it into audio or even quotes.

And they essentially are on all the platforms.

At the same time.

I remember a story once our coach, a business coach, a while back, he was

telling us that he does a podcast and he records it and he records a video

and he puts it on YouTube and he started getting all these leads and he was

like, well, they didn't come from audio.

They didn't come from my podcast nor did they come from YouTube.

And he, again, he asked them, well, where is it coming from?

And he realized that they were listening to him on SoundCloud.

So not necessarily his podcast, but audio clips on SoundCloud.

And it was something that he did just for the sake of doing, but it actually.

Being really beneficial for him.

So social media has allowed brands to be everywhere.

Now, the last point I want to make here is the fact that social

media has allowed small companies to normalize the playing field.

And what I mean by that is that you no longer have to worry about

competing with the big guys, because as a small and nimble company, you

can make changes really quickly.

Instagram, for example, changes all the time.

And when they came out with reels, which is their version of tick-tock big

companies may have scrambled and thought, well, how am I going to create this real?

I don't know what to do.

Or a small companies were already publishing, you know, a hundred

dozens if not hundreds of reels.

So it's the story of David and Goliath, right?

You don't have to be the big giant company.

Social media allows the little guy, Justin Bieber, the.

I can't remember the name of the girl who sang that song, dreams that David Guetta,

licensed and it, you know, blew up.

Right?

So that's the ability of social media to take smaller companies to the next.

That's so exciting.

I love seeing our clients being able to be like David and Goliath,

you know, like to go with the big dogs or come up against the big dogs

and be able to make a difference.

So it's really exciting when you can implement some of those tactics

and blow something up for yourself.

I couldn't agree more and tomorrow we'll be talking about how to build

a brand and we'll be giving you a success story of one of our clients.

So you can take everything we've learned in the last couple of episodes.

And we're going to wrap it up with our success story episode tomorrow.