Hello and welcome. This is Samantha Hartley of the Profitable Joyful Consulting podcast. And today I am welcoming a very special guest who is actually partially responsible for the fact that I have a video podcast at all. If you read my newsletter, you'll know that she said two words almost exactly a year ago from the stage of an event where she was keynote speaking video podcasts and the rest is history. So, I would love for you to help me welcome Mari Smith, often referred to as the Queen of Facebook, Mari Smith is widely known as the premier Facebook marketing expert and a top social media thought leader. Mari is a top keynote speaker, corporate social media strategist and brand ambassador for numerous leading organizations. She's also an expert webinar leader, live webcast host, author of the new relationship marketing and coauthor of Facebook Marketing An Hour a Day.

Welcome, Mari.

Thank you. Thank you so much, Samantha. It's a joy to be here, and I'm so looking forward to this as you know, I'm such a fan of your podcast, and I love that you're bringing guests on this particular season.

Yes, we have discussed this and in chats on Instagram, the idea of that. So, the way I love to open is with you sharing a story. So, rather than me saying, what do you do? And you saying, what do you do? How about telling us the story of a client that you've worked with and what kind of process they went through and what wonderful result they got as a result of that?

Oh, ok well goodness! I am going to share a story of a brand ambassador client. So, really I got on Facebook in 2007. Prior to that, since ‘99, ‘98 even I was doing online marketing, I've always been fascinated with online marketing. I love people and I love tech and so social media is like my job since 2007. But for the past year, from 2007 through about 2016, my bread and butter was courses, training courses, online courses and then there was just this whole world of influencer marketing and brand ambassador work that started to really grow and I had a lot of brands come to me and then I found I had a lot of similar companies so one in particular was called Wave.video and at the time, I was working with a number of other video companies, one called Animoto, love them great video platform, Adobe actually helped launch Adobe Spark suite of products and the online video creation and video creation through apps, mobile apps. And then Wave headhunted me and they showed me, I always remember I was at Social Media Marketing World, a big conference here in San Diego, pre-COVID of course, and I could see all the different companies I was working with in there, in my line of sight of the different booths and then the team from Waverly, hey we want to show you what we're working on and I was just like so excited, I loved their interface and that's number one for me is I have to be passionate to be able to work with a brand, obviously it has to be you know, a great product my audience would resonate with but most importantly it has to be aligned with me, my values and I have to love the product enough to use it and so, long story short I started working with Wave as well and then we shifted to our long-term relationship for two years I was there exclusively, went exclusive and I was their exclusive brand ambassador for a couple years and drove thousands actually close to seven over 7000 accounts over time. And one moment in particular, I was keynoting traffic and conversion and I love to very naturally weave in a mansion and non sales and they had a booth down the stairs at the convention center and I'm saying you know, showing a case study, they closed about 30 percent of the audience by me just mentioning them and they had this big lineup at their booth.

It's amazing I love it, I love it and so, explain what a brand ambassador does.

Yes there's a variety of things a brand ambassador is very similar to an influencer, a spokesperson, little bit different than affiliate marketer and affiliate marketers like, hey, click my link and I'll get paid when you sign up. A brand ambassador is kind of like the mouthpiece or the voice in the face of a particular brand, is driving awareness, the top of the funnel driving awareness. What I found over the years of being a brand ambassador for so many different corporations and brands is that they're more a little bit more results driven in wanting like they're always having to re educate them. They want to just do one campaign that is going to drive, you know, enormous amounts of sales and like how am I going to warm everybody up and we've got to make sure they understand what the problem is and then this is the solution, be some educational training and it's over a series of educational, you know, lives and post and whatnot so, there's different ways to structure it.

Sure. What I think is really interesting is that you're having to teach the clients who are coming to you to do this thing. What actually realistic expectations are. So, in this case, you have to be more knowledgeable about the thing that they think they're hiring you for than they are.

That is spot on and then what happens is just, you know, to kind of get we all of us, we just we know what we know, we don't know what we don't know and so, someone goes well this is how it works, we pay you this money and we want to just see how it goes for like this one campaign or one month. And I'm like, no, I have a six-month minimum and this is how it works. And these are the results and this is what we call the Mari bump by Kennedy, the Mari bump with one tweet. Right, I mean, that's amazing. What I really like about it is I think all of my listeners who are consultants as well, what I want them to hear is to have the courage to educate your client when they have unrealistic expectations and really speak up as an advocate for yourself as you're modeling there. One thing I want, I mean I heard you speak, I think it was over 10 years ago, very early in social media, in general in my awareness of social media. And I'm a very private person and so, when social media first came out, I was like, I don't really feel the need to share anything on social media and it was a big learning curve for me and one of the things that you said at your keynote that was so impactful for me was the difference between personal and private. What I'd love for you to do is unpack that as it relates to consultants building their business brand on social media. I love this, building your business brand I mean, no matter what, everybody has a brand if you're a solopreneur, I mean, the brand is you, even if it's called a different name but if it's your voice, it's your face, we're often on video these days. So, everything you do online is pertaining to your brand, it's a component of it. And so, that distinction that I made all those years ago, I say these three categories of life experience, public, private and personal. So for example, Facebook is called a personal profile and they want us to share personal updates, and it's usually around family, kids, pets, hobbies, travel. Those are the top five that people love to see in their news feeds . Who doesn't like a cat video? No vacation pictures but where the line gets drawn for me is I have this three-part filter like I had before I ever hit that publish or that update or that sand or that share button used, including for text, for emails, for private messages. I say to my staff; would I be comfortable with this found in a Google search in years to come? Would I be comfortable with this blown up in major font on Billboard? And would I be proud for my own mom to see this? And if I can’t answer a resounding yes to all three doesn't go anywhere and I like you, Samantha, there are aspects of my life I'm very private about and nobody knows about them because they're private. And I just don't talk like relationships, private, personal life. I did got divorced in 2009 and after this was when I decided that I wrote a big blog post about it, I saw people kept asking me and I was traveling around an RV at the time and they feel like, where are you guys now? I know oh, I haven't seen him in six months. This is like I want to be responsible and having people understand what I was going through. But other than that, I was single for six years and nobody ever knew. Nobody knew whether I was dating anyone, in a relationship, married, or whatever and so that's just private to me and I think that you have permission you don't have to live in a glass bowl and share everything because I think what happens is some people don't even understand, like the etiquette, if you will, the best practices, if you like, overshare and even if it's to friends only and people don't know you that well and they see that posts and it's out of context and so now they're making opinions about you and they were maybe thinking about referring you to someone, but then they change your mind as they see this weird post.

Yes, I've seen it a lot, I've seen things on people's pages and definitely things on social media, and you and I share the same beliefs around politics and religion. There's no place for that on social media from a professional standpoint. Well, there is a place for it, if that's part of your brand. So, I think that's an important distinction to make. It's important though, for individual brands to share a little bit of personal stuff right that is very endearing to people. It builds affinity for the brand so, you kind of listed the areas that are acceptable. Help people to figure out what kind of things those can be.

Sure so, I like to think of a ratio so my personal profile, I'm going to share about 80 percent personal and 20 percent business. On my business page, I flip the ratio, 80 percent business, 20 percent personal but really, probably my business page, my fan page is like a hundred percent business. I don't really share a lot, but I fused my personality and my quirkiness or my humor or whatever it might be, especially when I'm doing my lives and I always integrate my values. No matter what I'm doing, no matter what I'm sharing, I'm very inclusive, I show empathy for my audience members, I try to be fair and focus on relationships. But when it comes to your personal profile, I'm always strategic too I’m always reminding myself of something I don't know a decade ago, someone had someone who was analyzing my tweets on Twitter, and I've been on Twitter almost as long and they're like, Mari figured out your ratio, I was looking through all your tweets and whatever the ratio is like, you're like 52 percent personal and 48 business, whatever this ratio and I'm like, I know you got it wrong, because here's the thing that's so important for your listeners to know, Samantha, that I am always a 100 percent business, even when I'm sharing that 80 percent personal on my personal profile, because I have chosen to have my personal Facebook profile open to public. Practically everything I publish is public and have over 300,000 followers, all who see my public posts anyways or could see them and so everything I post, even if it's the other day, a picture of my pomegranate, a beautiful sunset or whatever it is, because I know I've got my friends on there, people went to school with my mom, my sisters, clients, past clients, new clients, people who might refer to me. It's such a mix and I try not to kind of alienate my friends and family that all is talking about. Here's my next Facebook course and flip it around, I try not to get too, you know, here's whatever just something that other people might not find that interesting. So, I just think little snippets of what your hobbies are always a great thing to share about family if you're comfortable Pets, nature, travel, as I mentioned. Yeah, I love that and, you know, I think you and I reconnected because you saw my foraging posts, because I do a lot of walking around nature, Me and wild berries apparently, what I think I hear that is so important is being intentional about it, no matter what you're doing. And I would say the opposite of intentional is accidental so, I'm never accidentally posting something and I love your filters for, you know if my mom sees this, google search finds it. That to me is this intentionally building the brand and you know there's a certain artifice in that, but I feel like it is more authentic to intentionally build your brand, than it is to accidentally build your brand.

Well, you're actually right, the thing is I think what people don't realize is that your brand is the experience that people have when they come in contact with your branding. And your branding is things like your font, logo, colors, and of course, website, your social post and all that stuff but it is experiencing and I want it to always reflect my values so that people know they feel uplifted whenever they see anything, my stories, my lives or my emails and they get a little burst of sunshine, there's Mari she's got my back, there's some crazy thing that happened on Facebook she's going to break it down for me and help me understand it. And so, likewise, aspects of what I do on Instagram, I tend to share a little bit more stories. I originate them from Instagram and then I just cross post them to my business page. Invariably, they're probably a little more suited for my personal profile, but that's a big part. I just realized, of course, that the ratio I was talking to you about was 80-20, the personal posts came through the store. I don't really put them on my wall, but I will look like just what I'm up to, mount for a walk by the lake or here's my fruit, my garden or some just thoughts I like to just pamper a little bit, I like Joe dispenses work or something from the Dalai Lama or Sadhguru and I'd put those out. Just my little tidbits of spiritual or upbeat palsies, motivational things will come out through my stories.

And it's beautiful. I think that's part of what I really enjoy. You know, I watch it both as a fan of yours and follower, and also as someone who is studying the process. Now, one thing I wanted to ask you about, Mari, is that I feel because consultants are so much more on LinkedIn than they are on Facebook, I know that there's a lot of people who are leaving Facebook and are conflicted about just doing anything that's associated with Facebook. And as somebody whose brand is like queen of Facebook, how have you dealt with the kind of the allegations around them and all of the brouhaha around them in general?

Well, the volume is getting louder right now there is no question. I study the news as it pertains to Facebook on a pretty much daily basis. I'm looking to see what's being talked about. What are the new features? Where is there a change that directly impacts the business owner? That's my filter always. And I have to dig deep these days to find a way to get past all of the political stuff and of just Zuckerberg’s approach to how Facebook is run you know and I think it's gotten a little more challenging. However, for me, the most important thing always is integrity, integrities is my number one value, personal and business. So, I'm going to be honest with myself and that is that I am focused on what is here in this vehicle, this platform called Facebook, that is useful for the business person to reach their audience, whether consumers or businesses and how can I help them? Everything else outside of that is just noise and I don't mean to downplay all of the shenanigans, as I call them, and even like with the anti-trust and will they get broken up, regulation I'm sure that regulation is coming just like television got regulated right newspapers, eventually social media will have some pretty strong regulations. Facebook might be broken up. WhatsApp and Instagram, they might be forced to break them off we'll see but for the time being, I just stay true to myself and true to my values that I'm here to help you make the most of what Facebook offers businesses, everything else I would literally just before our interview here I was doing a Facebook live and I saw in the comments that somebody was asking me to make a comment, what do you think about this? What do you think about that? I can't, I won't, I brought it up, I said to them, I am not going to answer your question. I have thoughts and opinions on it privately. Not going to share them. When we had our chat the other day, we were talking about this interview. The one thing I thought was interesting that popped up around this particular topic here was that for years and years and years, people have always thought that if Facebook went away tomorrow, Mari would be out of a job. And I think that looking forward to the future, I have full intention of continuing to build and capitalize on what I've built for 13 years. At the same time, there's so much more to what I can do and do offer my clients. We'll say more about that, because I think it'd be super interesting for our audience to hear you're a consultant as well, like what all do you offer? Well, relationship marketing is my jam, that's what I do probably till the cows come home and so, the platform is almost like it's secondary or even tertiary.

So, relationship marketing has been around forever, as a term that was coined, I think around the 70s and popularized in the 90s. I wrote the book on it a decade ago and so, it's about people building relationships with people. And I don't often use the acronyms B2B to B2C because to me, it's all P2Ps, people to people or some H2H, human to human. And you get to choose the vehicle for you, if it's linkedin, if it's podcast, if it’s blogging, if it’s public speaking, as you get to choose your medium through which you reach people, for me it just happens to be Facebook, but it's also, I will always talk about the whole Facebook family of apps, WhatsApp, Messenger and Instagram as well. But more importantly, it's like this cohesive strategy and I think people have sought over the years, if you just press a few buttons, then Facebook’s like an ATM machine and this gives you all this money. It’s a journey so, sometimes, in consulting, myself and my partner Christopher do is that we almost have to start with the basics, like defining the avatar and getting clear in the goals ,and helping them understand what their cost of customer acquisition is, they thought about these numbers or cost per leese or lifetime value to a client, people have no idea and so, helping them those basic skills have nothing to do with Facebook.

They transcend the social medium well, that's what I've always thought as you speak in terms of principles. That should be applicable to whatever social medium and as all of us have always said, you better not rely on any social medium. You always want to bring them back to something you own, a property that you own or else some regulation comes or someone who knows what happens and you're out of a business so besides I know you do brand ambassador things and you teach a lot through Facebook. So, what exactly are the revenue streams in your business?

I have four and they sometimes change up a bit over the years in terms of what's, you know, first, second or third. Public speaking absolutely love, love, love to speak, I do keynotes all over the world, breakout sessions, workshops and have been doing that for 20 years I mean, obviously only 13 with Facebook as a subject. But now, because of COVID I've really found the demand is actually doing even more virtual and I'm loving the creativity with some of these major brands are bringing in whole walls of zoom faces or are doing a broadcast from a studio but still, the whole thing is virtual with the audience. So, speaking for sure, my brand ambassador work, which we talked about earlier, training courses, which used to be like the number one source of income, is probably about number three, two or three isolates and then actual consulting, I’m very, very, very particular about my consulting, because I don't enjoy a one on one with a small business owner as much as my partner does. That's his sweet spot so, we offer it but he fulfills, I love one to many, I love teaching and so, when I do consulting, it will be with a corporate team, I do a lot for instance, in the direct sales industry, I do a lot in insurance, in banking, in finance arenas a lot with saas companies and so helping with their overall strategy. So, that's my four speaking brand ambassador training courses and consulting.

I love it that's awesome and I really love that you know, your joy and genius zone, your partners joy and genius zone and that you're able to as a company, you're able to offer something that fits various audiences, but you don't have to fulfill the things that you don't love to do and he gets to. So, how do your clients find you?

Well, I would say Facebook. Facebook for sure, twitter a little bit, LinkedIn definitely, Instagram, my email list, word of mouth speaking engagements and what's interesting, for example, Samantha, we just had a speaking inquiry come through my website he filled out the form and I could tell that the guy followed up my assistant replied with our usual reply and my rates and he followed her with a voicemail and he totally pronounced my name wrong, he tried two times, called me Mary and then Marie they didn’t knew it was I'm probably pronouncing it wrong. So, this is somebody who's from a bureau some of it comes through a bureau some of it doesn't direct. But I thought it was really fun. I thought wow so, here's a brand new person he's obviously not familiar with me, he doesn't follow me anywhere but he found my website or somebody referred him to me or just did a Google search, so I always think that's interesting so I never assume, for instance your question, how do people find me? Huge variety of ways, social being the top and yet when people do come to me, I don't always assume that they've been following me for years and know who I am or what I do. Equally, I'm not getting people in my email lists for three years, two to four years and then they see a course that I'm offering they're like, Mari, I’ve finally decided to buy one of your courses.

Yeah, I've had that happen, it's why I think I'm such an advocate for email marketing, because it's like divine timing it's like when the time is right, they will do it. People have sat on my list for years and then suddenly one day and I'll be like, wow, that is really interesting because they signed up when my brand was very different. So, it's taken a while and no, but one of my favorite things that you do are the trends and predictions and things that you share and obviously, the video podcast was one from last year. What I loved about that one was it was combining two things that I'd been avoiding. I thought I could put them together and make the most of it but I did really have an epiphany when you shared that and you are so on top of the things that are happening in this field. What kind of things do you see really as like in a fairly near to mid-term?

Fairly near to mid-term, video really is still top of my list and I'll tell you why. Numerous times in the Facebook earnings calls, Mark Zuckerberg has directly called out YouTube as his biggest competitor when it comes to videos. So, not a competing social network, YouTube is Google, they've just never quite managed to get the social network part down. But certainly, when you think about how you learn how to do a subject, the number one place people go to is YouTube, filled with so many videos and have great search courses because it's baked into Google, whereas Google bought YouTube however long ago.The main thing I want to say with Facebook video in the future, near and to long term, is that Mark Zuckerberg is absolutely determined to be the next generation digital streaming television. Right up there, competing with Apple TV plus, Amazon Prime TV, Netflix, certainly YouTube. So, there's mass money to be made in the new TV ads, which is digital streaming. Some subscriptions some not and so, you can see with Facebook on their watch platform, they've struggled to like really, really make it grow. They have, I believe the last I saw that a billion people are watching videos through the watch platform and they have shows like red table talk shows, Jada Pinkett Smith and their mother and her daughter, they just launched the franchise, Latina ex version is Gloria Estefan, I think it's her niece and her daughter so, red table talk, four for Latinos.

So, coupled with the portal, which is Facebook in home, video chat device, which you can also hook up to your TV and you can stream and you can get with friends and watch things. They also want us to do series. That's a big aspect of it, is to create seasons like you do with your podcasts and to create episodes or they call them series. So, video, no question, if you're not doing video on Facebook in 2021, you're going to need to double down on video. Shopping, I want to mention too, in terms of trends and predictions, is that shopping while live is coming so, think QVC, HSN meets Facebook live streaming. So that's got me so cool, I've seen it tested, it was tested three years ago and then that team kind of went by the wayside but it's coming back soon. So, imagine streaming desktop, our phone, Instagram or Facebook, and you've got your shop set up. This is primarily for products, for e-commerce but they're also working on service-based businesses and information products. And so, your viewers watching this experience and the picture floating player will continue to play while they're selecting the size, color, shape, how many, check out, buy, make the purchase, all the while it's like just watching TV and making the purchase so cool.

And then the third one is really groups and Facebook has been doubling down on groups for the longest time, has had a bunch of new features rolled out for groups, which is pretty, pretty exciting. They're making public groups even more public; they're going to be sharing posts as an experiment. If you're in a public group or you run a public group, your post could show up in a Google search, for example, and in the feed. That's crazy, that seems very, very unexpected, that's public anyway. Yeah, you will see I was just posting the other day on my page about any public groups and I'm going to go through and vet my own groups to see if I want to leave some public groups.

Yeah, well, I remember one time I posted in a group that I didn't realize was public and friends like that post and I was like, I don't know that I wanted that to be public. So, it's also probably why I won't have any of those devices that you're talking about in the home at portal. It's a little big but I think the shopping is a great idea for Facebook lives and info products and I know people have been selling training that way for a long time. But inelegantly, you know, kind of like in the chat and so what you're talking about sounds is very, very exciting. Mari in your group, Social Scoop group, so would that be the best place for people to go to learn more about you?

Yeah because you know, I was thinking about this, I do have courses I'm kind of in between, I'm working on a new mastermind. So that's the first place I do my announcements is my social skip group and when they join that, they'll also go ahead and they have the option to pop their email in there and be on my social email newsletter as well.

Oh, fabulous they definitely should. So, I love your group, it's super active. I love that you have your participants asking questions in your Facebook lives. You know, one of the things I really encourage people to do is watch your Facebook lives because you're so comfortable on them, which, of course, you are. But what I really admire is there's this - you'll be quiet for a little while, you're reading a chat and you will teach something and say something and then you respond to people. I really think you're modeling for us just a kind of peaceful energy with a Facebook live. I think I'm used to a lot of times for people who are like hyping it up and charging up that energy and being a little crazy when they're doing a Facebook live. And I just really like the energy of yours because we're learning there's this sense of engagement of people involved in it, but it's not crazy so it's a very beneficial group I am already learning a lot and both in terms of what you are teaching and also how you are modeling, how you are being.

Thank you. I appreciate you saying that very much. There is an energy transfer that happens and usually the camera actually dials the energy down and I know like you'll see public speakers do this on stage where you have to really amp up your energy and that is a good thing - to amp up your energy on stage or in front of the camera. But it's also okay to be undoing a little bit, be comfortable being you, you know, and it takes practice. I was incredibly shy as a child. I grew up so shy, couldn't stand speaking in front of the class, practice, practice, practice, right? Yes, definitely I can even believe it, no you're very natural and it's and you're very cheerful and I am the follower of cheerful brands, optimistic brands you know, things can be good, yes, yes, yes.

Awesome, Mari, thank you so much for your time and wisdom and sharing all that you've shared with us. I really, really appreciate your honesty around things like Facebook, it really helps. I think all of us who are struggling on a day to day basis put our brands out there, to be associated with brands and to grow our business using this very public medium. Thank you, it's a pleasure.