The experience you create for others is what sculpts your personal brand. The more depth, magic and transformation there is in that experience the more power there is in that brand story.

This week my guest is Phil Mershon, the Director of Experience at Social Media Examiner, the people behind the extraordinary Social Media Marketing World conference.

We talk about experiences, launching smaller events, personal branding and the power of experience in all areas of our business to shape how people feel about us.

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Welcome to Amplify the Personal Brand Entrepreneur Show. Today on the show, Bob is speaking with Phil Michael.

I had a mentor who told me to do this and did it for a year, and then I stopped putting time on the calendar every day for brainstorming, and then to have a method for figuring out what are problems, what are the things that I need to be applying my brain to, and doing it at a time of day when I'm at my freshest in 40 to 60 minutes of focused brainstorming, I can come up with a lot of ideas that help me move the needle forward in ways that I could spend a week spinning my wheels.

Hi there, and welcome back to Amplify the Personal Brand Entrepreneurship, where every week I speak to incredible people who share what makes their business work. If you're new to the show, take a second right now while you still have that device in your hand to subscribe. And if you're listening on Apple podcasts, it's a bit weird. You have to tap on three dots at the bottom right, select Go to Show, hit the plus icon at the top right hand corner of the screen, and strangely, that's how you subscribe. But if you're listening on any other device, it's much simpler. Just hit the subscribe button and welcome to the family. So this week, I am more excited than normal. And I know I say this a lot. I'm very excited about most of my guests, but I had an unforgettable experience recently you, as my listener, are possibly getting tired of hearing. I went to Social Media Marketing World back in March. I am thrilled to welcome the guy who made that experience unforgettable, phil Merson, director of Experience with Social Media Examiner. Welcome to the show. Imagine me as a muppet going mad. It's so exciting to have you here.

I can picture it now. We're both bald headed, but if we both had wigs on, we'd be jumping up and down. I love it. I'm glad to be here, Bob.

So I had a great time at Social Media Marketing World. A lot of people have a great time at Social Media Marketing World, and I am obviously very interested to know what it takes to put something like that on. There are lots of questions I have around events and experience marketing particular, but how long does it take you to pull that off?

Ten years. Well, I mean, I'm joking at one level, but seriously at another level. We've done the event nine times, and this would have been our 10th time if there hadn't been a pandemic. And the things that we did this year, we weren't even thinking about in year one. So I think that's actually really important for anyone who's never done an event. You can't do the first year what you'll be able to do in a few years, but in terms of, like, year to year we start thinking about the next event pretty soon after we finish. Like, we do a debrief and we say, what are the things that we're going to for sure do and not do? Some things get put on pause for a while. And depending on how extensive our planning is and what else we have going on, some members of the team will spend up to nine months getting ready for it. And people get phased in at different places. Like we lock in certain vendors we've known, like what venue will be in for at least a year. Usually. Sometimes we've known it for three years. So it just kind of depends on a lot of factors.

But an event that has anywhere from 20 00 50 00 people, you're spending six months easy getting ready for it. And some of my event planners on the team would like us to spend twelve months. We're a small business and we have other things we're doing and we need things that are bringing in money. And the event doesn't bring in money all year round. So we need to find other things to do during the off season.

So for the listener who doesn't know, paint the picture for me. What is social media marketing world in your eyes? How would you describe it?

And I think when I'm done, I'll let you say what it is unless you've been doing that plenty in other episodes, our target audience is social media marketers. Small business owners, small business marketers agencies who work with small to medium sized businesses. Primarily. We do get large brand marketers coming to the event, but that's not our primary audience. They come because they number one, they want to learn and stay on the cutting edge of what's working in social media. But number two, they've come because they want to connect. They want to meet the experts, they want to meet their peers, they want to have conversations about what's really working in the trenches. So they want to hear from the experts in the classroom, so to speak, what's working. But then they want to go into the hallway, go to lunch, go to the bar, go to dinner, go have an excursion and find out what's working and create friendships that will last all year long. And they wanted to do it in a fun way. San Diego is a great place to do it because it's fun, naturally. But they're able to do things there that they can't do back home, sitting at their desk.

Whether they're in Glasgow like you, or they're in Simba or wherever they are, they're coming to have an experience together. And that's the important thing. What we try to do is we try to create an opportunity for them to create memorable moments that will last throughout the year, but that lead to transformational moments. Moments where they make a change in how they do business. They may make a change in their employment that's not our goal, to get people into new jobs, but it happens often. They realise, oh, I could be doing this. We have people who come to us and realise, I'd like to be doing this full time, or whatever. So it becomes a moment, a point in time for people, a Pivot moment, if you will, where people are making big decisions, they get the space. We try to create space, both physically, but also mentally and metaphysically, if you will, where people can have the room to think about bigger ideas, bigger conversations that they can't have when they've got a long to do list and both the boss and maybe a family pressing in on all sides and there's just not time for that.

That's what an event does. It gives you time for things that you can't do. And we try to slow time down to the degree we can so that those conversations can happen, those AHA moments can take place.

And I think those AHA moments for me are probably the most important thing. The reason social media marketing world was on my task list, or I'm going to call it a bucket list, if I'm honest, my professional and personal bucket list was I had heard person after person after person who I respect and look up to in the industry, say social media marketing world was where everything changed. It was that Pivot point, but a Pivot point with a capital P. Not like making a small Pivot in the business, but a giant personal Pivot. And I wanted to experience that for myself and it was real for me. I think one of the things that I find being a content creator, particularly running this podcast, is I know an awful lot of people superficially, but arriving in San Diego with all these superficial connections and deepening them into genuine friendships, genuine connections, was nothing short of life changing. And the way I often described social media marketing world to anybody that's listening is it's almost become the fixed point around which a whole industry or a whole movement orbits. And I hope that's a nice thing for you to hear, because that probably was never the goal, it was just an event.

But it really has become this signal point in the year where the whole industry globally is convening. I don't think there's another event like it. It's not like a big corporate conference. It really is a community which I'm really grateful to have discovered.

Yeah, I don't know that we thought in year one that we'd become an industry event, but that has been an ambition and a desire. We're one of the few companies that has stayed true to our mission, being trail guides in the social media jungle. And so we've been doing that for 1213 years. I think this year will be 13 come October. And so we've not really waiver from that mission too much. We've gotten more focused in certain ways so I think the event is that it is the place where people gather, the people who've known each other for a decade come together as well as new people like yourself, who are new to the community or maybe are making it to the event for the first time, but have been part of the community online for a long time. And we find many people saying that's been a bucket list. To be there, to speak there, to just be able to interact with people that they've known. That's even why we started it in the first year. We didn't start out thinking we'll do in person events, but what we saw happening is we had this enormous Facebook group that had gathered, we're not group, but Page, and these people were clearly wanting to meet each other and we said, well, where else can they do it?

There's other events that talk about social media, but there's none that that is the focus. And so that felt like we were in a place that we could do that. And that's who comes year after year. We've got some who've been there every single year. It's a small handful other than speakers, but it's probably less than 30 people total. Other than yeah, probably 30 even, including some staff who have been there every single year. Then there's a lot of people who have been there anywhere from one to eight years.

So something I'm wondering, and I couldn't think of a better person to ask, but to be people listening all over the world, understanding that experience, marketing, bringing people together as it has for you, put you in the centre of a community. And that community essentially community provides opportunity. Relationships provide opportunity and opportunity to build a business. And there'll be people all over the world thinking, I'd like to do something like that near me. If you were looking at running an event locally to you and it was day one, how would you approach it now?

Well, it's a really good question. I'm actually talking to some different groups in the faith based world because I'm a former pastor and that's a place that I've got interest in talking to them. And I think the first place you have to start is who am I trying to attract and why will they want to come together? You got to know your why. So importantly, like, what are you trying to affect? Just going and having event is not a great business idea unless you know your why. Events are hard to run profitably. I'll be upfront about that. Online events, it's a little easier to do it profitably. In person events are tough because unless you're doing a corporate event where you know exactly how many people are coming, but if you're trying to attract an audience, it's very unpredictable how many people will come. And the cost of doing physical events, especially in a world where supply chains are causing issues, it's tough to do. So you got to know your why. Who am I trying to attract? Why do they want to come? What's my role? Why do I want to hold this event?

So I would want to get clear on that why and my intention of what I'm trying to create and why I want to do it before I ever start thinking about venues and dates and speakers and activities and all the things that go into creating event.

A lot of people will try when they're looking at running an event, fall into the trap of as many people as possible. And I think this question of who will come, why will they come? Is so important when you're looking at the why will they come? From a social media marketing perspective, obviously you're there as the director of experience and that would suggest you're designing that experience very carefully, and in particular around the choice of the speakers and the topics that you choose. So what I'm curious to know is, when you're choosing speakers, one of the things that I definitely noticed is you're not just picking the big names for the sake of having the big names to attract people. I don't know why you're picking the people you pick. And that's essentially what I've wanted to pick your brains about, is what goes into picking the speakers that you choose, because I think the way you've done it was very elegant, very smart and it was very diverse and I think that's something that a lot of people could learn from because I don't see that in very many other places.

So some of what you want to know is secret sauce, so I can't share it, but here's what I can say. And this is self, obviously, from studying our line up year over year, we are intentional about seeking diversity. So we're constantly looking for a diverse array of speakers. And this was the most diverse lineup we've ever had. Maybe not in terms of skin colour, as much as we would have wanted, and that's because we had some people back out that couldn't do it last minute. Covet created all kinds of problems, but for the first time ever, we had more women speak than men. So that's taken years to get there, but that's intentional. But for us, it all starts with research. So I think back to the why. The why is what do customers really want to learn about? And our research tells us the answer to that. That research is multi pronged. We're studying an industry report we do once or twice a year. We're studying the way that people are consuming our content, we're looking at what other people are saying in the world. We're not just relying on our own data.

And that tells us, what do people want to learn about? And then we say, well, who are the experts? And that may or may not be someone who has spoken to us in the past that may or may not be someone who is famous and recognisable. Not everyone comes because they've got all these people speaking. People are coming because I want to learn how to do this with TikTok or how to do that with Instagram. And so they see that those things are being covered and they're like, Okay, I'm in, I'm gained. They find out when they get there who these people are in some cases. Like, we had a speaker this year who's spoken every year, I won't say the name. And this speaker was surprised how few people in the room knew their name, knew who they were. That was like a shock to them because they've written multiple books and have spoken and been a keynote, and yet there were a number of people in the room and it was a surprise to us as well. Not that they didn't recognise the speaker, but that we had a lot more young people at the event this year than we've had ever before.

And young people, not just in A, there are younger than me and I've gotten ten years older since we've been doing this. Not that alone, that's true, but also in just like, average age of attendees went down this year. And we're not sure why that is, but it happened. I was like, well, that's interesting.

I think you know who you're talking about.

Yeah, well, it doesn't matter, really, but I don't want to shame him, but data is so important. That's really what my point was. There is data, guides, decisions, and I think if you don't have data, you're guessing, and data is only a guide. Like, in our case, we thought we were attracting Audience A and we ended up attracting a younger audience, and that may be that audience a didn't show up because there were a number of people who didn't travel due to COVID, and if they had shown up, it would have been more what we expected. I don't know. That's a hypothesis. There's really no way to know for sure.

I think something that might be feeding into this as well as I think covet and the virtualisation of large parts of the economy has led to people taking social seriously in ways that they haven't before. And a lot of people have been introduced into new roles that didn't exist before from other parts of organisations. I know in this country we have lots of what they call digital apprentices. These are jobs that never existed before. And I think what we're seeing now is that larger organisations are taking social media seriously in a way that they didn't before. Because I was speaking to a lot of people and there were a lot of young people at the conference who were very new to the workplace, let alone social media. Well, probably not social media, to be.

Honest, but using social media for business use, that most likely, yeah.

So again. Another thing I think a lot of people can learn from is the feedback that you get about your own event. And I'm curious to know what people have reported A as their biggest win, because I know you pull your customers, your visitors, attendees, but also I'm wondering if you'll share with me what was the most common complaint, if there was one, because that is something that I'm curious to know if people do complain because it's awesome, and if they do, what about if you can tell me?

I appreciate that I can't share everything, but I think what they love is the same thing that they always love. Actually, this was a surprise. This year, the ratings on our content went up significantly. So in the last couple of years, the average score for speaker sessions out of five was 4.31 to 4.33. In that range, this year is a 4.52. Statistically, that is a significant improvement. So that's great. People love the content and for the most part, they love the connecting. I think if there was a complaint, the State of California opened things up like a week or two before we opened the doors for the conference. So we made plans, assuming a certain approach to covet that we didn't have time to adjust. So there are things that maybe if we would have known how it was going to be, we would have done differently. This is funny, but maybe the biggest complaint that I saw was the line at Starbucks was too long, so they want their coffee and they didn't like the convention centre coffee that we had. So there you go.

If that was the biggest complaint, you're doing all right, because I didn't even go to Starbucks.

Yeah, I don't know if that's the biggest, but that's one, that was in the feedback and people were standing in line for lengthy periods of time and missed sessions as a result. And it's like, you know what? You chose to do that, but it is something for us to learn from.

So one of the things that you're working on at the moment is a book around personal branding and experience. Can you tell me a little bit about what is in that book? Because I know you're not quite done with it yet. You don't have to give to me chapter and verse because you're going to come back when it's ready for other people to buy. But I'm curious to know what is your perspective on the question of personal Brandon and what direction you're taking in that book?

Yeah, well, the working title is Unforgettable the Art and Science Making Memorable Experiences. So I'm looking at what makes something memorable, what makes something meaningful, and what is the role of moments within that? So those are like the three M instead of the goal. I want something that's memorable, meaningful and full of moments. And I think if you have enough moments, it's going to create momentum. So that's kind of the goal of the book. But then the art and science part is I'm looking at the imagery of a baker and you think about a baker, and I spoke with a baker last week, a master baker, and talked to him about how he goes about literally designing, creating unique breads for the different customers that he has. And he primarily serves restaurants and cafes and places like that who have a unique bread that they want for whatever their application and the process that he goes through, the questions that he asks them of what you want the spread to taste like, feel like when you touch it, when it's in your mouth, how should it absorb the materials you're putting on it? If it's a sandwich or using it for like, a soup bowl or something like that, what's it going to smell like?

All these kinds of things affect what ingredients he's going to put into it and it affects how does he choose to bake it, what kind of oven does he use, how much yeast does he use, how long does he let it rise or not rise? All these different factors that go into it. It's pretty much the same thing for an event. If we're talking, Bob, about creating an event for you or for one of your listeners, I would want to have a detailed conversation and let's try to describe that as best we can by looking at analogies of other places. What are other breads that you've had that are like what you want? What did you like about it, what didn't you like about it? And try to get as much language around that as we can, because we know not all breads are created equally, not all events are created equally, and not the event that I produced at Social Media Marketing World is not the right fit, perhaps, for the event that you want to create in Scotland. There's things that should be different, there's things that should be the same and so understanding what those things are.

So this is going to walk through what I look at is the primary ingredients that are included in making this event. So that's going to be things like your content. That's going to be things like the role of community and connecting. That's going to be things like the crew, the staff, the people that you put the event on with. It's going to include things like all the choices that you're making about things like audio visual, the colours and graphics that you use. The way that you lay the facility out includes thinking about the oven. In the case of an event, it's the venue. Where are you holding it? How much control do you have over that venue? Can you choose your own venue? Because the venue is going to say a lot about what you do. I like to say if you're going to hold at a big top tent. It's going to be very different than if you do it in a concert hall or a movie theatre or a convention centre. All those say something about your event without you saying anything. And so helping you understand all these different factors that go in.

And then the way that you put those things together produces the culture of your event. And those are all just the basic ingredients. Then there's secret sauce stuff that you can do that sets it apart. Like if you think back to bread, if I put raisins in the bread, I don't have to put raisins in bread, but raisins makes it different. I might put cranberries instead of raisins and that's going to change it. Those are secret sauce ingredients. And events have the same thing. Like, for us, this we do live music as much as we can. Hardly any marketing events in the world use live music. They're either using a DJ or they're just using canned music. So that sets us apart. It's secret sauce. Is it essential? No, but it makes us what we are. And not everyone loves it, but they know that's what makes us unique is we're doing something. Live music is part of it. It's part of the DNA of who we are. And we're going to do that as long as we possibly can and can afford it and make something happen with it. Does that give you enough context of where I'm trying to go?

It does, absolutely. And actually, I noticed on Instagram recently you've been quite enthusiastic about the Savannah bananas.

Yes, I have.

For a lot of my listeners, it's a baseball team. Google it.

Better yet, go watch them on YouTube, TikTok or Instagram. Go watch some of their videos and then follow jesse Colder founder on LinkedIn, because he talks about what they're doing and he's very thoughtful about the way he's doing what he's doing.

Well, I first came across them in Mike Mccallowitz's book Profit First, where they were one of the case studies that he used.

I did that.

Yeah.

Cool.

And I think it was the story of when they originally bought that baseball team, it wasn't doing very well, and everything that we see now was in order to turn that around. But it worked so well, they just went into it even further, I believe. Anyway.

They'Re getting so much press, they just were in the New York Times. They are doing a six week documentary series on ESPN this summer. HBO just featured them two weeks ago on their weekly show. They've exploded on social media from 700,000 followers a year ago, and now they're at 3.4 million followers.

See, I know nothing about them and I'm following them in Instagram now. I have no interest in baseball whatsoever. What you were talking about in terms of most of what they do, has nothing to do with baseball. They could easily do what every other baseball team does and cut out 80% of what they do. But these are the things that make the difference. These are the game changer. These are the secret sauce. And trust me, that secret sauce is working. And again, at Social Media Marketing World, you have ridiculously enthusiastic people in Social Media Marketing World saying hi to everyone. There's surf branding everywhere you go. There's all kinds of stuff happening that you don't need to do. And I think in our personal brands, what you were describing there in terms of designing moments, being memorable, meaningful in order to achieve momentum, on the one hand, we've got authenticity. On the other hand, the other hand we've got being intentional. Authenticity doesn't happen by accident, but a lot of the time when it does happen, it's one dimensional, it follows the line of least resistance. And I think a lot of people in their marketing, as organisations and also as personal brands, we follow the marketing line of least resistance.

We're not very intentional about all the things that you described and it's that intentionality that really sets any brand apart. And it is the things that you don't have to do that will make the difference. I don't have to take selfies every other day, but I do it because it's work and it's what I need to do to connect. I like the way that you presented that. It makes a lot of sense.

One of the things that the Sabana Bananas do that I think is on point to what you're just saying is they've got a culture of experimentation. So Jesse Cole is the founder and he challenges his team to come up with five new experiments every game that have never been done on a baseball field before. And it's okay if some of them fail because they're learning. They're learning their audience, they're learning what works. And they're doing five experiments a game instead of one because they want to learn that much faster than their competition. But what the experiments are about, I think, is the instructive thing for people thinking about their brand. So what they're doing is they're taking those moments that are either like the assumed we always do this at baseball games and they're saying, well, why? What if we didn't do that way? What would change? And their philosophy is fans first. So just to give you one quick example, at most baseball games you go to, you pay to get into the stadium, you pay for parking, you're paying for your taxes. You get into the stadium, you're paying for your food and your drinks, and you're getting nickel and dime the whole way through.

And if you take a family of four to a game, your tickets might have cost $20 a piece. But by the time you leave, you've been spending probably $40 a piece or more. Well, at a Savannah Bananas game, it's $20 a piece, period. Like your primary food is covered, your parking is covered. Your taxes are covered. There are no extra costs. Now you can buy extra stuff. It's not included. But drinks, popcorn, hamburgers, hot dogs, chicken sandwiches, french fries, free, all free. They cooked, like, £2000, I think he said, of meat the night that I was there for $4,000. And I saw them, they were, like, taking trays of food up to these parties, and they were just going, taking it and taking it, taking it. People were eating way more than they needed to because it's free. But that was an assumption, and you might look at that and Profit First probably did too, and saying, well, that's kind of stupid. You're giving money away that's $20 a person you could have been making. And he said, what? I'm willing to sacrifice that because a family of four, knowing that they've invested $80 to go to the game, and that's what they walked away having spent.

They're going to be way happier, and they're going to tell their friends, man, it was amazing. And they're going to be much more focused on the fun they're having. Instead of dad looking at every charge that goes through, every time he's handing his credit card over or his wallet opens up, he's starting to get stressed. Man, this is a lot more expensive than I thought it was going to be. I don't think we can do this very often. And now he's like, Oh, this is great. And so what's happened is what I said earlier, the explosion of fans. They've got 3 million new fans practically in the last year. Their merchandise sales have gone up ten fold in the last year. So they are making up in merchandise sales what they were, quote unquote, losing in person sales, because now they've got this enormous global audience, people who love them, who are fans everywhere. I wear Savannah banana shirts here in Wichita, and people will stop me and say, I love them. I saw them. I saw them on YouTube. What's it like? I've been I've had ten conversations in the last week just because I wore a hat or a shirt of people who stopped me and say that.

And I feel like I've become a little evangelist for them. And that was never my intent. I didn't know what I was going for. I'm not a baseball fan. It's funny. I was at a group meeting last night, and one of the guys there is a former professional baseball player, and I happen to let it slip that I really don't like baseball, but I like the banana bananas because of the experience they're creating. And I think with personal branding, if you understand the experience that you're trying to create, you're going to get people talking about you long after the events over, just like Bob you're doing about social media marketing. I did not know that you had the kind of experience that you did, so I'm thrilled to hear it, and I'm thrilled to hear that you have been telling that story over and over. And that's what happens when you create a great experience. People become evangelist naturally. They're telling people about your brand and you didn't have to do anything more because you put the effort into making sure they had an awesome time and let the experience become the marketing.

So if we maybe look at the personal brand for a moment, we have the Savannah Bananas as a corporation, as a great role model there occasionally you will see somebody like GaryVee, for example. He is the personal brand unicorn. He's actually not a great role model for most people, but he typifies the kind of process you described them. He creates moments that are memorable and meaningful. And here's Mr. Momentum. I guess what I would like to ask is how can you ori be much more intentional about the way that we approach creating those fan moments in our own personal brands? You see the likes of the Savannah Bananas doing it. They have a lot of resources, they have a lot of people as individuals. How can we create that fan worthy personal brand ourselves?

Well, I'm going to just start with Savannah Bananas. They started with a very small team. It was the owner, his wife and their president. And I think they had an intern there first year. So it doesn't require a big team. What it requires is a vision of what's possible and a willingness and the dogged determination to keep pursuing it and not be discouraged. So for them, they picked a name and a motto or a motif with Bananas that the city of Savannah hated. Like they had a lot more haters, they still have a lot of haters. People who think they're ruining the game of baseball, but they had to overcome a lot of perceptions. It was that vision. I think that's what it is for us as entrepreneurs, as people with personal brands, is we have a vision for what we're trying to create. We know something's possible that others might not buy into. I encounter this frequently with event planners who may not understand why I'm doing what I'm doing. I'll give you a perfect example with live music. It would make sense if I just 100% found musicians who live in San Diego who are willing to do it on the cheap and come perform at our event.

That would make sense from a financial perspective, wouldn't it?

Yes, it would.

But what doesn't make sense is bringing people in who have no connection to the community. So I prefer to find people who are part of the community, some of whom will perform for free because they're part of the community and others who we hire. But it's all because we're trying to create an experience together. So I'm looking for people who get it, who are co labourers, if you will, or collaborators who are trying to create this experience with me. And so I prefer to look for those people. And so I found this past year, I think it was around January, we had our Facebook group that we'd started, and we talked about having a choir at the event. And a lady pops in and says, Oh, I should probably join that. I am in the music industry. That could mean a lot of things. So I said, well, what do you mean you're in the music industry? And while she's answering, I would go look her up and find out she's got nearly 8000 followers on YouTube. You're not just in the music industry, you're legit. And then I went and listened to her and said, man, you're really good.

Would you be interested in performing already, coming to the event? She's like, Absolutely. And she killed it. She's part of the community. She wanted to be at the event. She shared something that helped make us better. And so I forget where I was going with that. In terms of the answer to your question, I think the vision of what you're trying what the vision is. So my vision is I'm trying to create live music, but it's from the community. That's the vision. This is we are creating a community that lives long beyond the event. If I go hire a musician who comes, performs a few songs and leaves, and we never hear from them again, that creates a moment, but it doesn't create momentum. This girl who I hire, I didn't even hire her. She's part of the community. Tara, she is now a fan because she became much deeper entrenched in the community and giving to others as much as she's giving back, that is going to extend the life of this community. I think knowing whatever your vision is and being willing to communicate, I've had to communicate it over and over to the team, hey, it's not just about saving money or finding someone who's local, but it's about this bigger vision that we have.

And then once they understand the vision, like, Oh, I'm on board. But you have to be, as the owner, willing to go to bat and keep reminding people and not letting yourself get frustrated when they don't get it. And that's hard because I get frustrated when people don't get it. I just let me do my thing, stop questions. But that's not it. I've got to sell the vision as much as I have to remind myself, hey, this vision is worth fighting for. And it's possible and it may take years. Jesse bought the team in 2015. 1st games were in 2016. Here we are in 2022. So it's taken seven years. The first couple of years, they sold out, but it was just another team. It's only been in the last year that they've really exploded. And so I think with personal brand, it may be the same. Like, you have to play the long game and hold true to your vision and values.

I think what you described there is profoundly important and I just want to reinforce this. I think a lot of people, when they start out on this journey of being called it a content creator, personal brand, being an entrepreneur of any kind, really. And even if you're working internally, doing social media, your first job is to get to the point where you're surviving, where you're just getting the job done. And I think the mistake a lot of people make is they get trapped there and they're in almost survival mode. And survival mode is just okay. It takes that kind of vision in order for you to climb out of survival mode and to do something that's directed by vision rather than survival. But once you get there, and I think this is what I see in social media marketing world, and I see it in certain other places, it's elevated from survival to almost something graceful. It's in a slightly different reality. But you're right, it does take a determination and it doesn't happen by accident. It has to be intentional and you have to push out of a place of comfort into a place of discomfort.

And it's going to take a while before that becomes comfortable. I really feel that applies to so many people in their personal brands because they take the line of least resistance. Once the panic is over and the dust is settled and the fear is gone, people are on autopilot. By that time, it's already become a set of unconscious processes. To make it conscious again with a clear vision is so important.

I do think there is such a thing as accidental discoveries and success, but that's not repeatable. What is important is if you have one of those, and I think live music is one of those things. For us at our conference, we did it because I'm a musician. I'll be honest, we did it because I'm a musician and I was looking for an outlet. But over time we've realised it's one of our secret sauces and we've had to study it. This is where I think the important lesson is we've studied and said, what about it is important? Like, we've shifted. In the early years, we only played jazz because that's what I love to play. And we realised, well, actually, the audience doesn't love jazz as much as you do, Phil. They like kind of music. And so we've shifted and we've moved away from being pure jazz. We still do a little bit, but it's primarily more pop, mainstream kind of music that we know the person who's coming to the event is likely to enjoy. And so we understand that there is still an important role of it. But the way we do it has changed.

And the intentionality with which we do it has changed. And I think that's important too, because you may see as a business, you've had something that's done well, but you can't just assume it's going to keep doing well. You have to understand, well, why did it do well? Because there might be a variable that changes next year and it doesn't do as well. But that may not mean that what you did was wrong. It's just there's one element of it that you have control over changing that allows you to keep leaning into what your community really loves about you.

Yeah, I think you're right to be led by the vision and not by the tactic, not by whatever seems to be working and always be testing. I think it's a great way of looking at it. Phil, I'm looking at the time. I know you have other things to do today.

Bizarrely, imagine that.

But if people want to connect with you, and particularly if they want to book, there's no worry about the book because you're going to come back and we're going to promote the ass off it. But if people want to connect with you, where can they do that? Where's your favourite place to be connected?

LinkedIn is great. Facebook is great. Those are probably the two best. You can follow me on Instagram and Twitter. These are the four platforms I live on.

And Social Media Marketing World is open for tickets right now for March next year.

It is?

Yes. I've got mine already. If you are listening and you want to go next year and you want to catch up with me, I had a funny story. I had so many people that I didn't know I knew who wanted to suddenly have dinner with me, social Media Marketing World, that I ended up saying no to so many people. So next year I'm having my own meetup. So if you're going and you're listening to the show and you would like to hang out, let me know. Obviously, I will see you there. Phil, thank you so much for being a great guest. I need to ask you one question. What's one thing you do now that you wish it started five years ago?

So I wish that I would have kept doing this starting 30 years ago. When I first got out of school, I had a mentor who told me to do this and I did it for a year and then I stopped. And that is putting time on the calendar every day for brainstorming and then to have a method for figuring out what are problems, what are the things that I need to be applying my brain to, and doing it at a time of day when I'm at my freshest and I find that in 40 to 60 minutes of focused brainstorming, I can come up with a lot of ideas that help me move the needle forward in ways that I could spend a week spinning my wheels. So that's a practise. That funny enough. Jesse Cole talked about it on a post he did on LinkedIn. How he and his director of entertainment sit down every day, and they take a problem and they brainstorm. What are ten things that we could do to solve this? And that's essentially what I do now. And it's about 30 years ago, a mentor said, phil, you are so creative.

You need to put time on the calendar, and you have my permission to do this to brainstorm every day. And I stopped doing it after I left that job. And I wish that I kept that going, because I probably would have had a million ideas by now.

Well, that's a really interesting answer. It's not one I've had before, but it's extremely powerful. It reminds me of something from the book called Choose Yourself by James Altitude, and he has an exercise in that book called Ten Ideas a Day, which is for cultivating creativity. And this is very similar to that, but it's a very powerful thing, which I'm not going to spend time talking about right now, because I've taken enough of your time. Phil, you have been an awesome guest. I'm really grateful for your time, and I really look forward to your book coming out, and I look forward to you coming back and telling us all about it for now. Thank you so much for your time. All right.

Thanks, Bob. You.