Unleashing the Power of Unleashing the Power of Social Media Recommendations: The Ultimate Guide to Content Marketing Success!

Transcript:

Once we went to recommendation engines, which is what TikTok is, TikTok is largely a recommendation engine, which means you will see more content that you like that’s engaging. Now, flip that around. What does it mean as the marketers? Yeah, it’s great to build the social following of your platforms to subscribes to your YouTube channel, the likes to your Facebook page or whatever.

But what’s even more important is to create addictive, engaging, thematic content. For your audience. So as social media has evolved, I would argue we’re all content marketers now. It’s all about content on social platforms and increasingly, and TikTok is kinda like the tail wagging the dog. It is transforming the entire social media universe by really putting this in.

So now we have a new world. Content’s king. Content creators are king, right? Which is a little different and people are becoming more passive in how they consume social content.

Hi, and welcome to the 91 Day Success Podcast. I am really excited today I’ve got the opportunity to interview someone that you may or may not know, but Jason McDonald, who is an author, a consultant. A professor and an expert witness among other things. And today we’re gonna delve into kind of Jason’s story and let Jason share some amazing nuggets with us about the things that he teaches and the things that he consults on and testifies on.

And Jason, I just want to thank you for taking the time today to join us. And if we can just as quick kickoff, can you give everybody the elevator pitch, uh, 32nd overview of who is Jason McDonald? All right. Thank you for having me. It’s always a great honor to to be on any of these podcasts and I’d like to just network and meet people.

So I really thank you for the opportunity, first of all. So my personal story is a lot of zigs and zags. So I have a PhD from University of California, Berkeley, and I’m very proud that I didn’t really have a real job till I was 30. And then when I was 30 I was like, Crap, I need to get a real job. This was like in 1998, was gonna be a professor, like a total academia type of dude.

And then I went to a job interview at Princeton and it was one of those lucky things in life where it went terribly and I hated it. And they hated the job interview and no shade to Princeton. I hated Princeton and I flew back to California. I’m like, this sucks. I’m not doing this. And I think I. Found my entrepreneurial spirit.

So I finished my PhD and everyone at Berkeley thought I was insane and they thought I had no job skills and I wanted to stay in the Bay Area. And so I started working in the media and this was right at the beginning of the internet. So I started working 93, 94, right as the internet was starting. And I was really fortunate I worked.

At a media company in San Jose, and that’s how I got the media bug and the internet bug. And I started a tech company in 94. And so I’ve been lucky to be around like the birth of the internet and the birth of the media and the birth of marketing. So that’s my, the nugget of how I got into this. And. I actually find that a lot of things I learned in academia have been very helpful to me in terms of understanding the way the world works.

So that’s that the story. And then from there, I started doing consulting in like two thousand eight thousand nine. When the economy went south, started teaching classes, I realized, Hey, I know how to write books cuz I have an academic background. I know how to explain things. I’ve learned a lot at Berkeley from like structural ideas.

So I started teaching. I teach and offer Stanford continuing studies. I write books and I do consulting, and I have my hand in quite a few little cookie jars. So that’s how I got into it. And I really love marketing, media philosophy, persuasion. I love how irrational people are. I often say, I don’t wanna work in a profession, which there’s just one right answer.

I like the fact that there are no right answers in marketing. I like the fuzziness and the weirdness in. The craziness of the human person in psychology. So that’s how I got into it, and I do lots of practical things, but yeah, I have a, I have a very deep academic background actually. I love it. Thanks for sharing that, that I brings everyone at speed.

I know I’ve really enjoyed reading some of your books and getting to know your things, reading your blog and all that. I know just recently you released your 2023 social media marketing workbook and that has some great things in it. But to introduce people to that, if you would, Jason, talk to me a little bit about the difference between traditional social media platforms, you know, the classic Facebook and LinkedIn and that and the rise of what, and you think this is the word you use when we did our pre-talk, but recommendation engines like TikTok and how social media is really changing the direction of how it, it’s worked there.

Can you share some insights there and maybe how that relates with your new book that came out, Jason? For sure. So. One of the great things about teaching is it puts you on the spot and you have to explain things to people. And I teach these classes for Stanford every other quarter basically, and I update my books every year and I always, when I’m doing it, I always feel like this is insanity.

Why did I sign up for this? Because think dangerous and all this kind of jazz. With that said, I try to give people a framework to understanding how like social media actually works, and I try to make it very practical. So the big framework of the book is that social media is a party, and you as the marketer are the party thrower and you’re throwing a party for people on TikTok, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, bill, and the blank network.

Okay. Now within that framework, right? I like to use a lot of metaphors, like to help people understand like, what the heck is going on? Okay. What is traditional social media? Traditional social media, Facebook, 1.0, right? Facebook, when it created the newsfeed is, I’m your friend, you’re my friend. We have a brand request.

We connect to each other. When you post to your timeline, it shows up in my newsfeed because we are connected to each other. That tells the algorithm show content between these two people, but that content really doesn’t surface. Unless we’re connected. That’s the essence of a friend request on Facebook.

So traditional social media required that you be connected to a person that you follow a person on Twitter, for instance. That’s traditional social media. Now, flip that around. As a marketer, what does that mean? That means I need to build my connections for my Facebook page, my Twitter account, my Instagram account, et cetera.

I need to get people to follow me. To do that. Okay? As social media matured, the algorithms became smarter. Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, whatever. And they started to realize if you’re a dog person and you like dog content and your dog friend posts a dog video, you should see that. And if you’re a dog person, you’re connected to a cat person.

No shade to cats. You’re not that interested. So even though you’re friends with Susan and she’s a cat person and she posts her cat video, don’t show the video to him because he’s not that interested. Cat’s engagement. Okay. Absolutely. What, what, so there’s two things going on here. One, you have to be connected to the person, and two, you have to be engaged in the content.

What TikTok did, which destabilized the entire social media, the universe, and made all the people at Facebook and Google and YouTube and all this stuff, either panties is TikTok turned this upside down and said, you know what’s really important is what kind of content people like, and so dog people like dog content.

We’re gonna show them dog content even from people that they are not connected to. So the recommendation engine, the ai, I don’t know if you’ve heard of ai. It’s kind of a best Oh yeah. Nice. Artificial intelligence, right? Just remember, what is it that Genesis is Skynet. So once. We went to recommendation engines, which is what TikTok is.

TikTok is largely a recommendation engine, which means you will see more content that you like that’s engaging. Now, flip that around. What does it mean as the marketers? Yeah, it’s great to build the social following of your platforms that subscribes to your YouTube channel of a likes to your Facebook page or whatever.

But what’s even more important is to create addictive, engaging, thematic content. For your audience. So as social media has evolved, I would argue we’re all content marketers now. It’s all about content on social platforms and increasingly, and TikTok is kinda like the tail wagging the dog. It is transforming the entire social media universe by really putting this in.

So now we have a new world. Content’s king, content creators are king. Right. Which is a little different and people are becoming more passive in how they consume social content. Mm-hmm. There’s a lot of changes going on right now, largely because TikTok has revolutionized this in, in there. So that’s like a quick little elevator pitch about what’s going on in, in social today.

And it, it very much connects to AI as well. No, and I think that’s really important. I’ve seen that. It appears that Facebook in particular when there’s obviously a YouTube and others as well, but that they’re beginning to follow TikTok s plans. Of course, there’s always a delayed reaction, and I’ve noticed, especially on Facebook reels, Instagram reel and YouTube shorts, I’m getting a lot of content from people I’ve never connected with.

They’ve followed before. Don’t know, but are again, topically related. Are you seeing the same thing happening, Jason ab? Absolutely. Everyone is seeing this. People are noticing it. And that is having a big impact. And that means that your strategy for marketing needs to be content first, engagement first, addictive over the top content.

So we’re all kind of on a content wrap race a bit. Maybe race to the bottom, maybe not so much. Absolutely. But that’s the, that’s like what’s going on in. The world of social media. Now that is interesting because that creates some new opportunities and this is where I love TikTok. You talk about TikTok in particular, but one of the cool things about TikTok is that a, an individual TikTok can go absolutely viral and they count that is supporting it isn’t that important.

So that creates a lot of new opportunities. You can reach new people that have never heard of you. Before because of this algorithm changed cuz of the structural change. So it’s actually a really exciting time. It’s a lot of marketing, like double-edged sword, yay, content’s king boo. I need to create a lot of content.

Oh crap. Right? So there’s an opportunity now to create engaging content and reach new people through your marketing efforts, but that means we’ve all gotta get good at content, which hashtag content is hard. Video is. Well, and you j you just mentioned AI and I’d love to get your perspective on most of the viewers that are watching the podcast are probably well familiar now cause we’ve talked about J G P T and the other things that are coming up.

How do you see AI playing into this change in content, not only from a consumption site, but especially for as, as business leaders and owners? How do you see that playing in overall for. What we’re doing to create content. Yeah. So there’s a lot of ways you can look at ai, a lot of things you can talk about chat, G B T, blah, blah, blah.

Right? Here’s what I would put out there. Clutter AI is gonna create more clutter than ever because it is becoming easier and easier. So creating crappy content with AI is easier than ever. Mm-hmm. So people are gonna see more AI images more. Blog posts written with Chad, g p t, et cetera. So from the producing pro, just look at it from an economic perspective.

AI has lowered the cost substantially of producing content right now. Written content. Image content, probably video content version has lowered the cost. So what do we as good marketers do whenever something becomes cheaper? We buy a lot of it. We do a lot of it, exactly. So we, we can flood the internet with more low quality, crappy, non-authentic content.

So on the one hand, yeah, AI is good cuz you can create content more efficiently. On the other hand, from a user perspective, more clutter. So what’s the user response gonna be? How do I get more authentic content? How do I get content that I’m interested in? So I think AI is important, but the smart people are going to use AI as like an assistant in creating their content.

But they’re still gonna realize like the basic principles remain, the content needs to be engaging, the content needs to be authentic. The content has to be. Something that your U users wanna watch or engage with or interact with. And AI does not solve that problem. It doesn’t solve that problem, and it isn’t solving that problem.

So that’s this one angle of AI is the radical increase in cluttered. If you ever, there’s a guy who does this marketist. He is marketist.

Do we leave you? Oh, sorry. We just had people show up and I had to tell ’em we were here. So this is why we pre-record, so that we, okay, no worries. We have the van Internet Day link. Oh, wow. You’re good. Sorry. Black Cat walked across the screen twice, so I was freaked out there.

Now I lost my train of thought. So what were we talking about? We talking chat, we talking about ai, the clutter, the need to. Use it as a tool. You didn’t say this, but I was hearing we need to use it as a tool, not just rely on it to create more crappy content. So what’s happening is the people who create authentic content are gonna do better than the people who create a lot of crappy content.

Right. And the users are gonna respond to this by becoming more selective. Oh, now Markis, that’s what I was talking about. So Markis, I can’t think of the guy’s name. He has these hilarious contents and so he has one of these two, two frame. Two friend cartoons. Mm-hmm. And it’s like the marketing meeting.

They say, Hey, really good news that our AI generated content is getting lots of engagement on Twitter and Facebook and Instagram, whatever. And then the next frame is like really bad news. Most of that engagement is becoming from bots. Yes, exactly. Exactly. No, yeah. Nothing is new to this. I think AI is a tool that we can use, but the basic rules of marketing and content.

Still apply. You’ve gotta create content that people like, which is back to the party. Ai. Exactly. Easier to throw a party. If your tacos suck, they suck. I love that analogy. That’s at work, right? So you’ve gotta create good entertainment, good vibe to the party. There’s a lot of istic quo in creating a good party.

And that hasn’t changed. And AI’s just no, that, just the two all makes perfect sense. I, I love the way you say that and you compare that because I think. That’s been one of the big discussions I’ve been having. I love the new AI tools, but again, they’re tools. They’re not, they don’t solve. It’s not an easy button, so to speak.

It doesn’t solve everything that’s there. Like you said, it makes it easier to throw that party, but if the food stinks and the band’s no good, it doesn’t matter that you threw a party. To use another analogy here, and this is in, I have a book on SEO and search engine optimization, and that book has talked about local s, sco, and then my social media book as well.

Now, I moved all of my discussion reviews and everything that’s in my SEO book, but here’s what I wanna say, right? So you have a business owner, They have a lot of problem with Yelp. They have a lot of crappy Yelp reviews. People hate them on Yelp. And what does a business owner say? Oh, I hate Yelp. Yelp’s terrible.

Hold on a second. If you have a consistent flow of bad reviews, you have a business problem, you don’t have a Yelp problem. And the reason I think this is relevant to any discussion of AI is if you create a lot of crappy content that no one wants, You are just creating crappy content and that you don’t have a content machine.

Like how am I using AI problem? You just have a content problem cuz your content sucks, your story sucks. See, if you go to some of these Hollywood movies, sometimes, I dunno if you’ve noticed a couple of Star Wars franchise, maybe Avatar might fit this. If you’re not an Avatar fan, a lot of technical glitz, but the story sucks.

There is no story. Mm-hmm. And so you’re just like, I’m not really engaged with this movie, even though the technical. G Wisdom is awesome, but there’s no story here. There’s no people here, right? So content 1 0 1, right? Technology does not solve the problem of creating authentic, engaging content for your target buyer.

Totally. Uh, that brings up a question. This is not something I’d planned to ask, but you, as I mentioned, I like to be conversational. So one of the things I know that we often talk to people about as far as clients and even our internally as we’re creating content is not to give up too soon. I can’t tell you how many clients over the 15 plus years I’ve been in the business.

You go, I wrote four blog posts and nobody commented on ’em. Nobody did anything. So I stopped because it’s not worth it. Now we also know that, like you said, if we create rotten content, at some point we know our content’s no good because people aren’t watching that. From your perspective, Jason, where does that Crosspoint exist or how do we, as a business owner, as a marketer, how do we determine what’s enough content to validate that we’re out there?

Because again, four blog posts is not enough. At the same point, if I’ve been doing videos every day for three years and I’m still only getting 27 views, it’s probably my content. It’s not because of anything else. Where do you see that inflection point where we can tell it’s the content not the time, or vice versa?

Yeah, so I don’t think there’s a, I wanna look at it that way. I don’t think there’s a hard and pass rule. Okay. About what? Here’s what I would think here. Here’s what I would do, and I do this when I teach classes, I work with people, right? I very much took it. This is one of the reasons I didn’t become academic.

I’m a very common sense down and dirty in the trenches. Let’s actually make this work person, and again, let me throw some shade on the academics. They’re lost in cyberspace on some of this stuff, right? So, mm-hmm. So here’s what I would say. You have to look at the world from the perspective of your customer.

And it’s so obvious, right? Everyone says this, but it’s true. Take your video and look at it completely from the perspective of your target viewer, your target customer, your target prospect. And if you look at that video or that blog post or that tweet and you’re like, this is boring, this sucks, right?

Then of course it’s not going to work. And that’s where I think people. Marketers. I mean, it’s, so some of the stuff I, and sometimes I feel like I really get paid for telling people like obvious things, right? Look at the world from the perspective of your customer, which means they’re busy, which means Google’s cluttered, which means YouTube’s cluttered, which means they’re on YouTube to have fun, to learn something, to watch it trend, whatever.

They’re not really on YouTube to watch. 25 minute thing about your boring product, you, you have to look at it from that perspective. And then you can have a few videos that do really well because you meet all those parameters. You can have a thousand videos that stop because you never meet those parameters.

And that’s where I think you’ve gotta look at it so you know, what do they say when you’re digging a hole? First thing is stop digging. So if you’re producing like. 25 YouTube videos and you’ve only got 12 views, stop producing them. They’re worthless, right? And look at in. But the whole thing is, look at it from that perspective of that customer.

Now I, if you go on YouTube, watch this unicorn hoops for porta pot or for the toilet thing, right? Yes. Yes. The Squatty Potty. Squatty Potty. Thank you. Go watch some of these videos or the, your soap sucks from that soap shock thing, right? Some of the YouTube video, commercial infomercial thing that really have massive engagement.

You watch them, they are 99% entertainment and 1% by the product, okay? And we live increasingly in an entertainment driven content ecosystem. So you’ve gotta do, you’ve gotta wrap your head around that and. So I don’t, I hate it when people say, what’s the best time of day to post on Facebook? The answer is, when you’ve got something good to say, that’s the best time.

Great advice. No, great advice. I love that. I really do. I think that’s in, and I appreciate your perspective on sometimes how simple the answer is. It’s putting yourself in the place of the audience. To me, that leads to a next question that you and I talked a little bit about pre-call and that’s a one of those other simple but almost scary, simple skills.

And that’s, if you know the question, you can Google the answer. Yeah. And we were just talking about this with our management team the other day, and I don’t know how this relates, but I’d love your thoughts. One of the things we often look for when we’re hiring isn’t the expertise to have memorized every fact and everything you can do, but we wanna hire people that have the skill to be able to boil down what the issue is and then do the research, which generally means Googling it.

In maybe doing that four or five times to, to get the answer. And I think that’s a skill that, while it’s really simple, I think it’s a skill that a lot of people haven’t honed. Well, and I’d love to get your perspective on that, Jason. Yeah. And so I like speak jokes when I teach classes. So I’ll teach Facebook and I’ll say, okay, you’ve got Facebook business manager, or you have how to pin a post, or you have how.

What is the concept of a check-in on Facebook and how would you use it for marketing? And so you get the quiet in the Zoom call and you say, okay, hold on. I’m gonna show you this incredible website that is really useful for this. I want you to write this down. It’s called Google. Yes. You go to Google and you type in how to pin a post on Facebook.

And you search for it and you will find out that people have created blog posts and YouTube videos and whatnot on how to do this. Once you know there’s a question that you wanna understand, how can I use chat g p t to write a blog post? You can Google the answer, and then I say, there’s this other website.

I want you to bookmark this one. Super useful. It’s called YouTube. Yes. And you go to YouTube and you put in, how do I. Do AB testing on Google Ads or Facebook Ads Manager, and you’re gonna find a bunch of wonderful people who created useful YouTube videos on it. So it’s so important to frame the question and then to be a good Googler, a good YouTuber.

Those are the two best ones to look for the answer. But you have to frame the question. You have to see like what. How do I do a duet on TikTok? What? First you have to realize what is a duet on T? Yes. Then you have to realize, oh, other people are doing this and they’re using it for marketing purposes. And then I can Google whatever how to do a duet or I can look it up on TikTok and then I know now I know what I want to do, how do I learn to do it?

And that is, uh, cuz people come to me and they’re like, I wanna learn every technical skill on Facebook. You’re like, no, you really don’t. You wanna learn how to look at Facebook and understand what you’re trying to accomplish and learn how to do it. So I try to the whole give a man a fish versus teach him be a fisherman type of thing or fisherman for being politically correct.

Yeah, ver very practical though, and relevant, I think, to where people are at right now and the importance of that. Because there’s too much information out there. Yeah, there’s just absolutely much. And they change. The changes are, especially at a technical level, are pretty rapid. So you’ve gotta become a good critic.

I always tell people, it’s like a art class. You’ve gotta become a art critic, and you look at a still life and say, why is the salmon next to the the tomato? And you know that you have to be able to look at what other people are doing, reverse engineer it, ask the questions, learn how to do it yourself.

And that skill is more powerful than any book. Absolutely. I know one of the other books you’ve written has been on SEO and I, or I’m sorry, on on paper. Click on Google Ads. I’d love your perspective. We’ve seen ads ab and flow over the years and lots of things going on. If you can talk to me a little bit about that decline in the rise of ads and the use of what you refer to as.

Anchor content with ads via superfans. Can you share a little bit about that from your perspective, from the ads side of thing, Jason? Yeah, so I do a lot of ads. I don’t teach a class in ads because ads are boring, and the Google Ads interface is teaching someone how to use TurboTax. Kill me now. It’s a horrible garbage, difficult, rotten.

Product until you read, until you start to use Facebook Ads Manager, and then you’re like, wow, Google Ads is really easy. Yes. So the great thing about Facebook is it sucks so badly that it makes you really appreciate how well run Google is as a company. So with that caveat, right, a couple things I would say here, first and foremost, when you’re talking about ads, right?

All of the providers, Facebook, Google, TikTok, they all have a massive. Vested interest in getting you to spend more money. So all of the interfaces, whatever the question is, the answer is spend more money. That’s the answer in the platform. Okay. So you’ve gotta go into those ads with a certain degree of cynicism about how the ad platforms were okay now within that perspective to just talk about strategies.

If you, and I do this for some of my clients, if you, you could create a thousand YouTube videos. You could try do organic, good for you, but sometimes you have a video that’s really more of an app that’s really more of a hard hit and buy my stuff. Yeah, it needs to be funny. Yeah, it needs to be engaging. It needs to be hit, of course, needs to be good content, but a better strategy is often create some content, put some ad dollars behind it on YouTube.

For instance, right? Which is run by Google, obviously. Try to get it to have some organic legs, right? Make it engaging. So your super fans, the people who love your brand, who love your corporation, who eat your Chipotle beef burrito every day for lunch, right? They’re gonna not only see the ad, but they’re gonna share a comment and like it insert to their friends.

So some anchor pieces of content with some ad dollars behind them. Can often do better than a ton of attempts at organic reach. So I am not anti AD at all. I love ads. Ads are very much part of my tool book toolbox, but you can be strategic in how you use ads on all of the platforms and they should be part of the mix.

Sunny saying, with marketing and social, people are often very resistant to spending money on the app, and I will have clients who are like, God, I just. Oh my God. We’re spending $400 a month on ads and I’m like, okay, hold on a second. It’s $400. Have you been to the grocery store lately? Yes. $400 is nothing.

Right. And so to me, one of the things on ads is you have to break through the resistance with your management that everything should be free cuz that’s not how this works. And here’s a, here’s another. First shattering revelation. Time is money. So if you have to spend a thousand hours creating organic content or you can spend a hundred hours creating ad-based content or Oh wow, be super smart synergy between ads and organic, you’re way better off.

So I don’t just shoot the baby as it’s out of the bath water and not do ads. So I think ads have their placed, I think ads are. Very important part in using a little ad dollar behind some organic can really help you. And then back to Super Fans, that comes from Pat Fly. You wanna really read a really good book?

Go to Amazon and look for super fans by Pat Fly. Excellent author, excellent speaker. Way smarter than I am. He really makes you see that you have super fans. Those are the people that absolutely love your brand and you wanna cuddle and coddle and love those people because you can really work with him to push your brand message.

So superfans very important, ads important, and capitalism, they’re making money. So be a cynical. But yeah, tremendous advice and really appreciate your perspective on remembering and going in with a bit of cynicism that. Yes, Google’s there to help you. Facebook’s there to help you, but their ultimate goal is to get you to spend more money.

And so that’s an important caveat to understand when you head down that road and also know that if the paybacks there, it’s great. Let me just interrupt you for second. So I am a Berkeley graduate, so I a Berkeley PhD, right? So hashtag World Communist Revolution, right? Sign me up. I, and I’m saying this, and I teach for Stanford.

Stanford’s like Moneybag University. You ever been to the Bay Area? Like contrast Palo Alto Ink, and we’re looking at our Teslas and Berkeley, which is insane. And there’s a protest tomorrow and there’s, the tires are burning on telegraph, but. What is amazing to me about how the world changed is when I was in school, corporations were evil.

Mm-hmm. And we didn’t believe them. We were like, capitalism bad, don’t believe Bank of America not that bad. And nowadays people will naively be like,

Yes, mark Zuckerberg truly wants success for me. No, he doesn’t. He’s trying to make money. So to me, you have some cynicism and go capitalism. I love capitalism. I’m actually not a communist, but have some cynicism and it is amazing to me for all you little millennials and Gen Zs out there. It is amazing to me how naive the young generation is about.

Corporations in general. I thought they were all evil. I still think they’re all evil. So be cynical about that as a marketer. Facebook, Google, they’re all really designed to get you to advertise though. Don’t throw the baby out with a bathwater, right? And think that ads are horrible. But just be cognizant of the infrastructure that you’re working in and that it is a mind blowing thing as you get older is like what?

How the world can change in unexpected ways. If you told me in 1992 that people would think that corporations are good, that’s never gonna happen. Truth and Jason, great segue into to one other question I want to ask you about, and I’m gonna take a bit of a turn here. But we were talking in the pre-call a little bit about expert witnessing.

And in my mind, that kind of fits in with bad corporate, bad whomever, because obviously we’re talking courtrooms. And I know it’s not always bad though. Sometimes it’s just disagreement, but. Well, I don’t want you to share any, any secrets. Tell us a little bit about what is it like to be a specialty witness in this area of marketing and search and ads, because that’s not something most of it’s even considered, and I think it’s very intriguing.

It is very intriguing. So several things here. One thing I say is a business, and I saw this in reference to Steve Jobs one time, and his point was, Your customers or the people that you’re interacting with may see a business opportunity that you don’t foresee. So little history here. So when the Apple PCs came out with a, they came out with their first Macintosh computer.

Mm-hmm. They did not actually know that printing and desktop printing and the whole like graphical user interface and Adobe and all that would be their sweet spot. They did not know that at Apple. They created the product and then they realized all of these people are using it. This is the desktop publishing revolution.

And that came outta nowhere. And then they said, wow, people are using our stuff for this. That’s great. Let’s grow that part of our business that we did not anticipate in advance. Now, the reason I say that is I never thought I would be an expert witness. I never thought that. And then I got a call out of the blue one day and they were like, we’re having a trademark dispute.

Two companies arguing over a trademark and we need someone who can explain how ads work on Google. And I was like, I can do that. Mm-hmm. And then, okay. And then you just learn the row. So I have a lot of inquiries now to trademarks number one. Company A, company B, they’re arguing over trademarks and they need a technical expert to explain how the ads work on Google or Facebook or whatever, or maybe organic, right?

So I thought pulled into that business. I love it cuz it’s very fact-based and I’m a very fact-based expert witness. I really look at the facts and I’m not just a chief, you can buy me type of person and mm-hmm. You really have to look at the facts and understand the facts, and then you have to be able to explain those facts to a judge, a jury.

It’s he, it’s a lot like marketing, right? So like persuade. Absolutely. And I’m not saying make things up, you have to be good. But to explain something needs to really know the facts and then to be able to explain how those work in the real world. It can be a very lucrative side gig. If you’re a business owner.

If you’re a plumber, you could have a side gig as being an expert witness plumber, and you can make very good money doing it. So it’s a good side gig for people who have an expertise in something and there’s some marketing involved in how to get going in it. So that’s really good in in it. And the other thing that’s really good about it is because I’ve been in a lot of litigation at this point, I’ve seen a lot of massive projects that I would never have seen before.

Interesting. And that’s a lot of, I’ve seen a lot of tray wrecks. I bet that was dumb. It’s okay. So I learn a lot from it. And another thing I like is think about habit stacking or skill stacking. So if you have a skill in one thing, online advertising, and then you get a skill in another thing, extra weakness and you get a skill in another thing, book publishing, you ha start to have a lot of two x three x multiplication in those.

So, Extra witness is a good gig. If you have a technical skill, I highly recommend it. It’s an excellent way to make money and it’s super interesting. Very cool. I appreciate you sharing that. I think that’s so interesting and something fun to learn about. Jason, as we talked up front, obviously the name of our podcast is The 91 Day Success podcast, and I love talking to marketers and business leaders like yourself and asking them a simple question.

If you had. Virtually everything you have today, you got your house, your health, your knowledge, but you lost your network and the only thing you had monetarily was a thousand dollars to your name and you were gonna go out and start a business. What would you do in the first 91 days to try to make that business a success?

I would take my phone and I would become a TikTok influencer. Ooh, I love it. I would become a TikTok influencer, and I mean that kind of short form video, informative video, the synergies between a good TikTok presence and a book publishing business. A good TikTok presence in a paid training business. A good TikTok presence in marketing and advertising, right.

Good TikTok business and becoming the next president of the United States. If you’re that crazy, right? This sort of video algorithmic growth of things is the future of content. And I would go to my desert island for 20 days and I would really master the art of short form video. Didn’t do it. And again, back to my expert, witness this stuff, I have seen people.

Who have the absolute dumbest content, make zillions of dollars, selling merchandise, selling hoodies, selling just mm-hmm. Big crap. And it’s because they have this publicity engine in their personal brand. So that’s the, I think that short form video, personal branding. The AI-based algorithm that this is the future of where we are and that’s where I think there’s a tremendous opportunity there for for brands.

The other thing about it is funny. It’s also there for understanding like philosophy. So I am Christian person. I watch a lot of theology. I like philosophy. There’s a whole YouTube TikTok culture. The great conversations, the great a yes. Is there a God? Is there not a good idea? Is there good? Is there not a good, all this kind of thing on these platforms?

So if you didn’t, you don’t have to make money. But if you wanted to be a philosopher king, you could do it on TikTok today. Hmm. And it would’ve be a monetary thing, but you would have a very engaged audience. There’s a lot of people on YouTube who are very engaged with. Sort of basic philosophy questions and you go, damn, that I’ve learned so much from YouTube philosophy.

I learned more than, than, than from Berkeley and a lot of that stuff. So I think there’s opportunity there, a lot of opportunity in in, in a lot of different ways. So a lot of cool stuff. I love that insight. I think that’s great. And I think it’s so timely with where we’re at with AI and short form video and people’s attention spans and being somewhat shorter than an at.

I think all of that fits in so well. Jason, obviously we’re gonna link out to your website and, and that if people are interested in learning more about you as a consultant and how you can help ’em or your books, what’s the best way, let’s assume they’re driving down the road right now so they don’t necessarily see the links we’re gonna put up.

What’s the best way for them to go ahead and reach out to you, Jason? Super easy. So you can just Google my name, Google Jason McDonald, and I’m at the top of Google for my name. You can go to Amazon and put in seo, you can put in social media, you can put in Google Ads on Amazon, you’ll find my books. So I am a search marketer and I rank really high for really obvious search terms, including my name, and there’s a baseball player and he is got six pack outs and stuff.

But you know what? Revenge of the nerds. I outrank him. So just Google, Jason McDonald or go to Amazon and look up social media and you’ll see my books there. And then you can, and I have questions from my books all day long. So I’m, I do questions and I send to out free review copy. So you are watching this podcast and you say, Hey, I want a free review copy.

I will send you one. I give out books like candy. That’s part of my marketing strategy. Great idea. Let me tell you, if you’re serious about social media and in gaining a better understanding, Jason’s new workbook is fantastic on social media. I encourage you to go out and pick that up and do ’em a favor.

If you’re not gonna review it, buy it. It’s not expensive. It’s a fantastic book, great resources, and well worth the few dollars that it costs. A personal recommendation for that. It’s a great book. And Jason, I just wanna thank you for your time today for joining us for the tremendous knowledge that you’ve shared.

Just really amazing and for taking the time again to be with us today. I know my audience appreciates it, and I’m very thankful for just your contributions. Thank you so much. Oh, thank you for having me. It’s always fun. Enjoyed doing it. So I’m honored. Well, again, thank you. If you’ve been watching, we want to thank you as well for joining us here for this, this podcast.

As you know, we love to tell stories and ask questions of successful business people and leaders. If you know someone that should be interviewed on the podcast, feel free to recommend them. We’d love to reach out and ask them to join us as well and hear their story. With that, make it a great day, everyone.