Developing Strategic Partnerships That Scale With Less Effort
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Simply visit socialmediaexaminer.com slash boss to get all the amazing resources so you can get a yes from your boss. Welcome to the Social Media Marketing Podcast, helping you navigate the social media jungle. And now, here is your host, Michael Stelzner. Hello, hello, hello. Thank you so much for joining me for the Social Media Marketing Podcast.

brought to you by Social Media Examiner. I'm your host, Michael Stelzner, and this is the podcast for marketers and business owners who want to know how to navigate the ever-changing marketing jungle. Today, I'm going to be joined by Pamela Slim, and we're going to talk about how to develop strategic partnerships that can scale without a lot of effort.

If you, when you think of strategic partnerships, are thinking about something that's really big and complex, trust me, that's not what we're talking about today. We're talking about the kinds of partnerships that do not take a lot of effort that can provide mutual benefit to you and to someone else. So if you're looking for something like that, and you're looking for the lift that can come from something like that, you're absolutely going to want to pay attention to today's episode. New

new to the show, follow us on whatever app you're listening to the show on so you don't miss any of our future podcast episodes that are coming out. We've got some great people coming up. Let's transition over to this week's interview with Pamela Slim. Helping you to simplify your social safari. Here is this week's expert guide.

Today, I'm very excited to be joined by Pamela Slim. Pam's agency helps thought leaders build certification programs based on their IP. She's the author of multiple books, including The Widest Net, Unlock, Untap Markets to Discover New Customers Right in Front of You. Her show is The Widest Net Podcast. Her course is Tiny Marketing Actions.

Pam, welcome to the show. How are you doing today? I'm doing great. Thanks for having me. I'm super excited you're here. Today, Pam and I are going to explore how to develop strategic partnerships that scale without a lot of effort, which I'm really excited to explore. Now, before we go there, Pam, I want to know your story. How'd you get into marketing? How'd you get into partnerships?

Tell us the story. Start wherever you want to start. It is definitely a fell backwards into the pool kind of a journey for me. So I was, my last real job was 28 years ago at Barclays Global Investors in San Francisco, was director of training and development. And I quit my job at 30 to start a business, but really didn't look for another job, but I didn't know what I wanted to do. And I kind of fell into consulting as what I thought would be a stop gap. And at

As soon as I started to work independently, I immediately fell in love. I am a maniac martial artist in my youth. So I had been doing corporate by day martial arts at night. Oh, cool. I was volunteer executive director for 11 years for a capoeira group, Afro-Brazilian martial arts.

So it's kind of that realization that I thought, I don't know about running my business, but yet I had been running a whole program for 10 years. So perfect storm. I've spent 10 years as a management consultant in Silicon Valley, primarily like building learning and development programs for large companies. Charles Schwab, HP is so interesting. I love the work.

And toward the end, I was moving to Arizona, got married and was really ready for a switch. And I started to notice that a whole bunch of people, especially those clients who had hired me in order to retain their employees, would pull me aside secretly at the end and be like, how did you do it? How did you escape? So I was like, there's something here.

And in 2005, I started Escape from Cubicle Nation, which was a blog. And the intention was to help people specifically in corporate to know what they needed to do to start a business.

And I think the foundation, when I say I fell backwards into the pool of marketing, is that I really did not have formal training. My training was in international development. I knew corporate well. But as you know, the world of entrepreneurship is very different. It was through the beautiful world of blogging, though, that I discovered it, and especially partnerships. I just started to write articles with a purpose of connecting with coaching clients and

And one night, I have told this story so many times, but I reached out to Guy Kawasaki, many of you know, the chief evangelist of Canva, author of Art of the Start. And at that point, if folks remember,

It was 2006, May of 2006. And he was just a star blogger, I think on TypePad. Oh, yeah. He was a prolific blogger. Yeah, he had a big following. Right. So I was sitting there. I had probably six subscribers, my dad, best friend, and some random person that stumbled across me on Google.

And I wrote this post called an open letter to CEO across the corporate world that basically was my swan song to corporate consulting. And I was saying to all the CEOs I'd worked with, if you do not fundamentally fix these issues, then I am here to take your best employees out into the world of entrepreneurship. And it was one of those like fist in the air kind of writing messages.

And on a whim, I decided to share it with Guy. I sent him a message at 10 p.m. and he responded in 10 minutes. It asked me to flesh it out to be 10 points, which is his favorite style. The next day he published it on his blog. And that was my introduction to now what I call a watering hole, which was a place where there were tens of thousands of ideal readers for my blog. So I went from nobody to all of a sudden people.

people from all over the world who were exposed to my work. And he just cracked my world wide open. So that really was the whole, I think, kind of beginning of the journey. And because I didn't really know what I was doing when I started, my approach was always just to approach the smartest people that I knew that had answers to questions my clients had. And that was the way that I began to really frame and build the ecosystem of my business. So

That blog, and especially thanks to Guy, ended up turning into a book deal with his publisher, Penguin Portfolio. I went down the path, and now it's been 18 years or something since I've done that. I've really been sneaking closer to more mid and larger scaled clients, which goes back to that joy zone of work that I did a long time ago, working B2B building programs. That's where the agency came about.

is in really responding and doing that work with expertise. And the widest net, as you said, that really codifies this approach to doing partnerships and community building

very cosmically is totally based in my degree in college, which was community development, is based on work that I did in San Francisco, leading that Capoeira group and building partnerships, was built on work I did as a blogger in that very collaborative world, and then was built on a specific methodology that I used to build an in-person learning lab. And so I really feel like it's the core of my life's work,

But the reason why I think it's so important for business owners, as we'll talk about today, is because it's so much easier than just building an empire of one. I love it. And funny story, I also have intersection with Guy.

He's spoken at my event many times and we've done things together and he's a really fascinating guy. He's absolutely fascinating guy and he is truly a connector, which is absolutely amazing. So what I love about your journey is that you have a lot of pivots along the way, right? And you found like something kind of intriguing and you wrote this book and just tell us kind of what you're doing today, right? Bring us up to like the moment right now where we're at, because you're not just doing this, you're doing some other stuff as well, right?

That's right. So day in and day out, I probably these days spend about 20% of my time as a business coach that just, you know, things I've done forever. I still love to be working with individual creators and thought leaders on growing their overall business. But the rest of the time I run an agency where we're building licensing and certification programs. And it comes from, I think, a lot of the response that we're seeing in the world where, first of all, people are tired of doing everything themselves and

And really the key, I think, to scaling effectively and allowing your great ideas to really flourish in different places is to really go through more of a codification process to productize services. You know, so you're both streamlining what you're working on, but you're also providing tools so other people can be good stewards of your materials.

So I'm back working with Darren Padilla, who I used to work with when I did management consulting, which has really been a joy. We have a broader circle of instructional designers and we just work. I feel like I have the best job in the world because every day we're like bringing ideas to life through programs on amazing bestselling authors and interesting ideas. And I love my work more today than I think I did when I started. And I really loved it when I started. Very cool.

Okay. So we're here today to talk about partnerships. Why should marketers, because there's a lot of marketers listening right now. Not everyone is an entrepreneur or business owner, but I know most everyone identifies in some way as a marketer who listens to this podcast. Why should they care about partnerships? What is it about the right partnership that could potentially be unlocked that maybe people might not be aware of? It's

Fundamentally, we can think about it from the marketing perspective of all the good tools that we have for really raising awareness about individual businesses or individual creators, you know, using SEO, using marketing funnels. There's a lot of tools that we have that, of course, are making us stand out as individuals to our audience. As we know, though.

Things are getting more complex, expensive, harder to navigate and hack as soon as you do, algorithms change, et cetera. And so a way to think about partnerships and really to frame it in a bigger strategic sense is,

is when you think about putting your ideal client in the center of an ecosystem. I know we use that word a lot. I want to define it really specifically. But when you put your ideal client in the middle of an ecosystem, which are places where they're looking in person and online for people who have answers to their questions. So they might look to thought leaders. They might hire people as service providers. They go to events. They listen to podcasts. They use products.

Everybody in that ecosystem is sharing that same customer, just approaching solving their problem from a bit of a different angle. So if I'm going to bet the best use of my time and energy, let's say I want to connect with a company. I just switched my email to kit, right? ConvertKit.

So if I want a place where I can get one to many, a community that Nathan Berry and his team have already put energy into creating, I can jump in there, show up and one to many, if I'm doing some kind of partnership with that company, reach a whole bunch of ideal clients. That is so much more effective, especially where I'm coming in with a warm introduction from somebody and

rather than trying to do everything from a tactical perspective of cutting through the noise with content and ads and all of that. I think the pieces work together. But when you have a good sense about strategic partnerships, and you and I'll go into lots of detail about different kinds of

It is the quickest way to me to begin to get scale and get access, just like I did when Guy Kawasaki introduced my work to his world. It literally changed everything and opened the door with really friendly, vetted, trusted credibility that came with that introduction. Yeah, and maybe to help differentiate between

an influencer and a partner? Because I would bet you in some people's minds, they kind of mix these things up, right? Someone who has influence, everybody wants a piece of them, but there's something different about a partnership, right? Do you want to kind of maybe identify what we mean by partnerships before we kind of get into how to build it? Yes. And so from the widest net perspective, I talk about ecosystem partnerships in the broadest sense that can include things like

relationships, friendships with somebody who is an influencer, but also can be a business person. We look at Guy, right? Different times and iterations of his career. I've done partnerships when he was doing work with Mercedes or Motorola, you know, things like that, where there were like shared client connections that were based on a human relationship, right? That we have a friendship and

where we really are sharing an audience. So there can be like ways that you know people who sometimes can open doors or whatever it is that they're working on, they can be bringing you in in more of a casual way, right? You might be invited to events, you might have access to opportunities.

There are other kinds of opportunities. One kind would be what I call a PB&J partnership, peanut butter and jelly partnership, where there would be another service provider that has a highly complimentary but non-competitive service to you. So for me as a business coach, right, in my world, for example,

Every client I'm working with, they need an accountant. They often need a graphic designer, a web designer, a copywriter, an IP attorney. And so I have these PB&J partnerships that for some of them, we have gotten very specific to be doing the sole referral once we trust each other's work.

And so one to many, I have these channels of working with partners where they're introducing me to their clients, most of whom have no idea who I am and vice versa. So that's more of a referral partner. And then there have been lots of cases in the past of brand partnerships where I might do it. You know, I've done content partnerships back in the day with they were Citrix. I forget what their log me in or something, whatever their name is now.

But, you know, I did specific year-long content partnerships where I would be creating content, delivering webinars on topics related to their products. So, you know, go-to training or go-to meeting. So those are some examples of different types of partnerships that you can have. I love that because some people, when they think of partnerships, they think of a formal contractual relationship. And we're not necessarily talking about that, which is liberating for a lot of people as we go through this. So

It could quite simply be as informal as two people helping each other out. And it could be as sophisticated as a referral thing where you actually earn some sort of money in exchange for doing something, right? And there's everything in between. So what I'd love to do now is talk about...

kind of the first phase or the first step that we need to be thinking about when we're building out partnerships? Where do we start? So there's a foundational piece at first. And as much as I love partnerships, live and breathe community, majored in it, ran a center.

I am the first to tell you tread lightly. So because humans are humans. And when you have built a reputation as a professional consultant, internal person, whatever it is,

that whenever you share a referral with someone else, you are putting your own reputation on the line. And so you really want to take things slow. And the way that you can evaluate partnerships and know who you're looking for and also for them to know who you are is establishing the foundation, being really clear. Why are you in business? Do you care about it? Do you have a point of view? Do you have thought leadership?

Are you creating something that's really worth selling? And is it meaningful in the world? What are your values? What are your anchors for morals, ethics? What will you do? What will you not do? This is the area, honestly, where most people get in trouble, either with a formal like business venture partnership, or even with collaboration with other people. As you realize down the road, you approach things differently from a values perspective.

The other piece that's super important is around audience definition. So we talk about audience sometimes as marketers or avatars in terms of demographic characteristics. How much money do they make? What industry are they in? Their age, et cetera. What do they drive?

When really, in order for this ecosystem model to work, you use the definition my friend Susan Beyer from Audience Audit uses, which is define your audience by problem, challenge, or aspiration. So if, for example, I work with people in the agency that really are excited to scale their business through IP, that's a broad problem. You know, they're excited to scale, but they specifically want to use their intellectual property to

in order to solve that problem, if I define them that way, all of a sudden, I'm going to find all the other people and partners that also want to help them solve that problem. If I define them saying, my ideal customer is somebody who works in manufacturing in Dallas, Texas, who's 55 years old, then

then that will say nothing to my other partners. So this is a really critical step is to dial into this methodology so that you're really defining your client by problem, challenge, or aspiration. And then you want to think about their overall journey. Everybody takes a transformational journey when they're working with you usually, right? As a service provider, they want to go from no leads to an

totally abundant business with leads coming in all the time. - Real quick, when you say they, are you talking about the partner or are you talking about your customer, just so I understand who they is? - Thank you for clarifying. I mean your customer. - Okay. - So when we're thinking about the customer journey, it is you and your partner where you're serving the same person. That person wants to make a transformational journey, right? They wanna go from their finances messed up to flourishing financially, no visibility to being on stage at TED, right?

So when you're thinking about that through their own eyes, what are everything that they need to do in order to accomplish that?

And you personally, even if you're amazing at what you do, are unlikely to be able to provide every single step of that process. So understanding that journey is where you can decide, where do I want to play? Where are the gaps where I want to start to look for partners? I would love to ideate with you on the fly here, just because I think it might be helpful for everyone who's listening.

If I think about what my mission is at my company, my mission is to help small business marketers compete with the biggest players in their industry through strategy and intelligent marketing, you know, and sometimes that includes AI. Sometimes that includes social marketing and my audience really loves to learn and they're looking for a competitive edge and they are typically working in a business that they do not own as a marketer, typically a small business, a hundred employees or less and,

And the journey that they're on is really a survival journey, you know, because like there's change happening and they're just trying to keep up with this ever changing world. And they desire to really be the champion inside the company for all the new things that are happening. I know that I preach it internally all the time. So with that kind of, you know, knowledge, how does that help me set a foundation upon which

I can build a partnership just so I can wrap my brain around that. Yeah. Tell me a few of the things that, you know, having worked and served these folks for so long, like what do they have to do? What obstacles do they have to overcome? What do they have to learn? What do they have to do? Okay. Yeah. We don't have to go down that path, but that's really good. So the obstacles that they have to learn is how to deal with algorithms that are constantly changing, right?

how to embrace AI because it's the next big thing, how to deal with declining return on investment for their time. You know, these are the kind of things that they deal with all the time, right? So then we take something like that and we try to find someone else

also who has the same audience and is dealing with the same struggles? Is that kind of where we go with this foundation? It goes to the exact kind of threads that you laid out. So for me, when I'm thinking, you know, we always put ourselves through the eyes of that customer who you want to serve. So the person in this right smaller agency, they're trying to make things happen, have a big impact, but they're competing against some huge, you know, competitors. So in each of those areas where they're like,

trying to understand the algorithm or they're trying to really dial in and figure out pricing or they're navigating the world of AI, I always think about ecosystem partners as if you were to bring in the Justice League or the Avengers, depending if you're DC or Marvel, who would be the very best people who are the experts in those areas who both have knowledge, skills, or information, but often also have following.

Those are the places where you want to go to build partnerships because you want to show up, Michael. Let's say you're at the best AI conference ever that has all the best thought leaders within the slice and the lens of marketers. You want to be the weirdo in the room, right, who's coming in with your expertise to be in that area because all of a sudden, everybody else might be in the space of AI and you're coming in as somebody who has that unique lens to it.

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We're into phase two right now. So the phase one is the foundation. And we talked about the foundation as like, hey, you got to have a clear mission. You got to know what your values are, which we didn't even talk about very much. And you have to know who that customer is and what that journey is that they're on. And part of that involves their problems, challenges and aspirations. Right. A lot of marketers should know that. Right. But if you don't know that, dial that in. So the second part of the process here, this phase two, you mentioned it already, is this ecosystem thing.

Talk to us a little bit more about that, because I just wanted to kind of like pause and and reflect back before we get too deep into this next phase. Yes. So I will describe it through my words and then I'll make sure in your notes I have a visual of it. So for folks who are listening while walking or driving, don't worry, stop after run to the show notes because.

Because just visualize what I was describing before, when you have this ecosystem wheel, so you imagine there's an ideal customer in the center, and there are actually 10 spokes to this ecosystem wheel. And these are all the places in person and online where you can have an ecosystem wheel.

where that client is looking for answers to solve their overall problem. So we imagine in your example that you have this person working in an agency who ends up just being the superstar, they nail it, they end up really building a huge book of business.

They're winning awards. They're doing the best craft in their work. They're the most dialed in to how it is that their own individual skills and expertise are there. And they're really smart on the business model side. And they're killer at managing their finances, which we know is always a really challenging thing to do in an agency.

So from that perspective, they are already looking for places in person and online for access to resources and support. I won't go through every single wedge of the ecosystem wheel, but it can include associations. Associations are a rich area. So maybe you do find that your ideal clients, if, you know, let's say you're an agency, you're trying to grow your business, but your ideal clients, you know, tend to come from maybe financial services and legal clients.

There are associations, I guarantee you many of them that have both local chapters, national chapters that once you begin to dial in and have a super effective, you know, maybe a webinar or some kind of presentation, you can go one to many. I've known people who spent like decades.

time with one association for years at a time where they were a well-known entity. Again, think about yourself being the weirdo in the room that is the only person of your kind that's in a group of people who are ideal clients for you. Well, that happens at conferences too, right? I don't even know if that's in your wheel, but that's the same thing where maybe you're a regular speaker at a conference like

You and I were at one of Joe Polizzi's event recently and you were speaking there and I was speaking there. So that I mean, that's an example. Right. Also, that's the perfect example. So that's an events is another one. Right. That's a specific that is the gold star of all watering holes, because you have sponsors that can be your partners of companies that serve the same audience.

You have fellow speakers who can be these peanut butter and jelly referral partners. If you're a good conference designer, you are actually, and a podcaster by the way, right? If you're doing your job right, you're already bringing in those ecosystem partners. You're bringing in experts to talk about all the things that people need to know.

And then you have the audience, many of whom can actually be ideal partners. So I always have the story of when I was at – I used to go to South by Southwest every year for many years –

One year, I specifically went to the event with the purpose of making connections with brand partners. And so I didn't go all the places where everybody knew me already. I just hung out in the bloggers lounge very specifically. That was actually the place where I met Citrix. I knew somebody there who introduced me to the folks there.

And it was the perfect example of the conditions where everybody is friendly, you're sharing, and that's a really good watering hole. So there are all these places that people are either looking for inspiration, for direct tools, other service providers.

Having done a lot of local work, there can also be things like your local government. Here in Mesa, Arizona, believe it or not, we have huge initiatives. I was so involved in all kinds of entrepreneur ecosystem development. There are nonprofits, grants, all of those things. So as you're really looking at your opportunity for partnerships through the lens of the ecosystem wheel, at first you might look at it. This is the widest net, if you will, all the possibilities there.

which can be, of course, overwhelming for a second, right? You're like, oh my God, there's actually customers everywhere. I didn't, I thought that it was hard to find them.

So it's very critical part of the process is when you first look wide, now you want to zero in and you want to say, usually what are the one or two different spokes of the ecosystem wheel where you really could dial it in. So for a lot of people that might be like other service provider, peanut butter and jelly partnerships, you know, get your referrals going and speaking.

So if you maybe speak once a month, you're in the right place, you're building those relationships, that can be enough to get things going. For other people, they might take a different approach where they're guesting on podcasts or they're doing brand partnerships, collaborations as content creators with other people.

So the key is, which is so important never to forget, is that in the center of that ecosystem is your client and all of your jobs are to make them solve their problem as quickly and effectively as possible.

And when you're doing that, it means you create better content. You have a better perspective. And I find a lot of ways that we create partnerships, which is just like, hey, Michael, you got a bunch of money. You got a bunch of clients. You know, I do like let's make a bunch of money together. And I love money. Money is great. Nothing wrong with it. But it is an outcome.

for an enduring business of focusing in the right area, which is on your customers. Okay, I got a couple of questions. There's so many things going through my mind. Let's see if I can articulate this. So if we're talking about trying to get the widest net here, right, which is kind of the concept that we're talking about here, we really want to form, it seems, some sort of a relationship with

organizations, entities, people that have their audience overlapping with our audience, right? So we talked about conferences and that's a no brainer. Like, you know, I've been going to all sorts of different conferences throughout my career, depending on what I was interested in. When I was in a web three, I went to all the web three conferences to get to know all the players and

And then I got them on my podcast and then I had an event and I invited them to speak. So that worked for me. But other times partnerships could even potentially mean maybe, I don't know, this is crazy, but what about a small group or a mastermind or something like that where you're regularly meeting with people that are complimentary to you and you support each other? I mean, is that something you could also consider or is that something not necessarily within the realms of possibility here? Oh,

Oh, it's totally within the realms of possibility. So strategically, what you do when you begin to dial in and really, you know, first understand the totality of opportunities in the market is you narrow and you dial it in to a specific mix of activities that you do on a regular cadence.

And so there can be some things, like we said, for speaking where, you know, you're investing either in bumping up your profile. It's always best if you're paid to speak. So you're not paying to be there. You get the exposure. You build the relationships. But even if you're choosing to go places that are really good for business development and speaking, that would be an example of a track. You could look at other cases. And I'll say for a mastermind partnership, there can be many different reasons to do it and a purpose behind it.

So as a business owner, you can get good support, you know, business advice and feedback from just really smart peers. And the network effect too is pretty powerful. Exactly. If you're really wanting to dial it in from the business partnership perspective, that would be where you're really looking for a mastermind that very deliberately chooses people that first might share, you know, an audience and a purpose and do it in non-competitive and highly complimentary ways. Right.

because that's the way where you can, I just was sharing on LinkedIn when I switched over to Kit from Keep where I'm the most loyal person in the world. I've known all the founders there. Clayt, I love you. You know, it took me years. I kind of knew I wanted to shift software systems, but I'm so loyal. It was hard to move, but I went to a mastermind. You know, Nathan Berry was there. We had this long conversation. He was talking about the vision of the company and,

And it was through that that, you know, I like the tool anyway, but it's also really in looking at through that personal relationship, who are all the different creators. I mean, he happens to be a founder of a big company and has a lot of connections, but

depending on your business and what you need to activate. Maybe for you, it's somebody who is super dialed in that just is the wealth manager of the top eight people in Dallas. And therefore, when you're connected with them, they're the person who's going to really refer you, you know, to who you need to work with. So,

a very important part. And, you know, as marketers, we have to have a book idea that's a bit provocative. First of all, to me, the widest net is actually a safety net. It's thinking about like the net underneath your customers so they cannot fail so that they're totally supported. But I believe in niche. I believe in strategy and focus.

Where I think we fall down is either we just run to tactics like, I'm going to do an ad campaign or, you know, everybody's doing a LinkedIn newsletter. So it's just looking at the tactic without really thinking about the relational connection. Once you do your analysis is where you start to zero in on, you know, the relationships you want to build, the activities, what I call the tiny marketing actions that you take.

So that slowly through time, you are consistently either sharing content and resources, making connections, speaking with people, or building partnerships that allow you to really be flourishing. It honestly is usually a much smaller amount of activities. But to get to that very strategic place, you have to, I think, be a little bit more creative in how you get to it, which is why I created the methodology because I find, again, we just jump to tactics.

My clients will ask me, you know, should I do a newsletter or should I advertise on Facebook? And I am just always like, we need to find a bunch of other things first. So that's how one step builds into the next and then how you can start to make strategic choices. I want to talk about the tiny marketing actions and the beacon stuff that we had mentioned when we were prepping this. But before I go there, I just want to like rattle off some different things that I've seen people do with me.

I've been invited to exclusive events, as I know you have, Pam, sometimes because I'm speaking at an event, other times because they might know who I am and I'm attending an event. And that's a great way to get to know people because obviously once you get to know the person, it increases the likelihood that you might actually be able to work with that person. I have done interviews, like in the early days, I would strategically try to interview people on location at events that were speakers.

And I had a cameraman with me and I tried to give them free exposure. Now I do these all on the internet, but I spend time before and after with each one of my guests to get to know them a little bit and try to understand what their goals are so that I can, in my mind, see if there's some way that I can assist them. And I feel like there's like these kinds of ideas times a thousand, right? Like it seems like a lot of this stuff really does come down to non-scalable human action that we need to take if we want to have a partnership.

And what I mean by that is it's not going to be done over email. It's not going to be done over LinkedIn DMs, right? The initial start might start there, but there has to be some sort of actual human to human communication layer here. And I think we probably even want to avoid the word partnership. I don't know. What's your thoughts on that? Because it feels very formal, you know? Yeah. And, you know, I'm very like a nerd around language sometimes because I think when I think of partnership,

That really, when you're looking at the essence of that word, which is somebody who has your back, you know, who you're working together through strength. To me, it has a good connotation, but I like the precision of it. Like for each of you, you know, as you're listening and for you, Michael, the way that you think about it, the language that you use is really important because you want to make sure it's something that's accurate, you know, reflecting. But this is a relational model for sure.

And I like to think of when you're doing a strategic orientation, you're clear about your activities. You're kind of zeroing in on where you want to spend your time. First of all, you could say, oh, my God, for me, it's always John Legend. I always want to work with John Legend. I've written about him. I speak about him in every talk, my TEDx talk. I've almost met him literally like five times. And so to me, he's always the gold standard. Love him, everything about him.

Just because I want to meet him and work with him doesn't mean that he is ready to meet me or to like go through all the layers of the world, right, to reach him. It's become kind of a game right now for me, right, that eventually I'll, you know, kind of break through. But you have to do the work of really building that true relationship, having that, you know, human reciprocity, the discernment that you have.

You know, like you and I first met, I mean, like I've known of you forever. And I thought, God, surely we have met before because we've run around these internet streets for so many decades, but we had never really met. We saw each other in the airport, you know, after the event. And we had, you know, you were so generous. You, you know, invited us to lunch with other people. And so it's like through these little things, there were little dings for both of us that said, Ooh, you know, Michael is as cool as he appears online. Check. Check.

you know, which is not always the case, you know, and you're like, okay, Pam's interesting. Don't really know her, you know, then you go back and dig and it's little ways on the human side that we're actually building this relationship. So there is a really human side, the art of it and the part that is,

Like it's hard and honestly, it can break your heart. Break your heart is you're dealing with real people. Sometimes you have long time partners, people you've worked with who you love.

who end up going a different direction. You know, let's say it's a brand you've worked with forever and then they end up switching and working with somebody else or you've had, you know, a referral partner or somebody you really admired and something happens that fractures the relationship. So that's the side of it where I'm saying, like, you want to take things slow. You kind of want to do the work. It's really relational. But again, I just always come back to the part that keeps me straight, the part that like slaps me upside the head is

If I get too emotional about a heartbreak of like maybe losing good partners or something, thankfully it doesn't happen very often. But what I should be focused on is the well-being of my clients. Even if let's say you have a longtime client that you have done great work for and they love you and you love them. And for good reasons for them, they decide to go another direction. The mature thing to do is to want their success, whether or not you are in it.

And so that's the way that like, yes, it is relational. It is about humans, but it's not just a popularity game or, you know, just kind of collecting friends for favors. Right.

There's a very different feel to that. And I found especially the more famous or a little bit more unreachable people are, they will feel that in two seconds. If you're just, you know, kind of like, hey, Michael, how you doing? When really what you can sense I want to do is get something out of you or get you something for me.

Okay, let's quickly address tiny marketing actions and beacons just so that we can talk about what that means. For sure. So after you have your foundation set, right, you know who you are, why you're in business, how you're going to operate. Then we've talked about key thing, ecosystem analysis. So like, what are all the possibility of places you could go? You zero in on your specific path. I'm going to do these specific things to this cadence throughout the year.

I love the science of habits. So either James Clear's Atomic Habits, BJ Fogg's Tiny Habits. There is science that says if we make it from James's book, if we make a 1% change each day in a habit, doing tiny outreach to people, at the end of one year, we will have 37 times the result, not 37%, 37 times the result.

So, for example, let's say you're wanting to get closer to, you know, association that you know is really a good fit, but you have no relationship yet. You're going to be breaking down and deconstructing the way to build a relationship there in little ways where you might say, let me first reach out and do just a LinkedIn introduction saying, you know, love the work you all are doing. Then spend some time connecting with people, answering comments, etc.

then the line sometimes between stalking and very strategic follow-up is a very fine line. But where you know there are people you want to meet, you figure out where are they presenting, you know, and how can you very conveniently end up being right by their table, you know, at a time where you can meet them.

And it makes a difference where you've had a little banter, you've connected on LinkedIn, all of a sudden, oh my God, that's you. Like, oh, it's so nice to meet you. And you slowly work through that process with these tiny marketing actions. And I define them as just these small actions that you take on a daily basis that are almost insultingly small. You should be pissed at yourself. Like I should be doing more, but you're very deliberate, you know, every day, at least every business day to be doing these actions.

And the purpose is to actually follow the pace of how we build human relationships. We do our big launches too. That's part of it, but that's a really critical piece. And then the beacon is that other part of your marketing foundation where everything I've been talking about is like me going places where somebody else amazing has already built the community, right? I show up and I get all the advantages of meeting everybody else.

We have to have our own beacon, which is the thing you own, podcast, email, newsletter in general, where you are sharing your thought leadership, your perspective on how to solve the problem or challenge that people have. Because when you're meeting with partners, you're

they are probably going to research you and they want to find out what you're about. And they're going to go to those places to really find out, you know, they're a funny guy, Kawasaki story, you know, a couple of years after he broke me open to the internet and,

We did a panel at South by Southwest. It was blog to book because that was kind of my journey. My publisher found me through my blog and someone in the audience said, you know, how do you get the attention of really busy influencers? And he said, you know, everybody may think that I have the Midas touch, that whatever I touch turns to gold. He said, they're wrong. I only touch gold. So that concept is really,

really important. A lot of people get this weird like imposter syndrome of like, who am I to connect with somebody else more famous or with more visibility? They need you as much as you need them. We need other people creating great content that's really relevant or implementing the ideas from another thought leader. So that's where you got to do your own thing and you have to show people what you're about through great content.

Okay, we start with a really solid foundation, which has to do with this mission, values, transformational journey. And then we get into this ecosystem analysis where we're analyzing what kind of partners, where are they hanging out? We talked about tiny actions, tiny marketing actions and beacons. And then the final phase of your process is...

is growth, right? Strategic growth. So talk to us a few minutes about what this looks like or how this works when we get to this point. - Yeah, so a lot of it, especially as you're setting things up and testing it, is usually based on you doing your own work. So you, the human, building those relationships. When we start to then dial in and look at scaling is where you can begin to bring other people into the process. You can have VAs, assistants, other team members,

you really begin to have in the evolution of a company for entrepreneurs, you have the evolution of your brand, which is really more about your methodology, who you are, as opposed to just you as the individual. And then you can be using well-orchestrated tools of automation, things like

email automation and, you know, good tools that just help you to get things out there. And that can also include sometimes a good partner who is, you know, really amazing at understanding how to help research your market. I just spoke in San Diego a couple of weeks ago and there was a woman there. I was so enamored of her work and I'm forgetting her name now. So sorry about that.

But she was sitting at my table and she had like a speaker agency, but it was a little bit more research. And she filled this gap that I thought was so important where she actually had a lot of understanding of things like association. She essentially could take a speaker, know who their audience was. She would do all that ecosystem research to find out who were all the places where the person could speak.

Then her team reaches out and actually begins to create opportunities where she's bringing speaking opportunities to that person for like a fixed fee. And then if the person just wanted to close their own contract, they could. If they wanted her to do it, they could.

But that to me is an example of if somebody does that well, what a great investment of your resources. So you're not there Googling, you know, what are the best associations, but you lock in a partner that can be doing that for you.

Very cool. Pamela Slim, author of The Widest Net. I'm sure we've just scratched the surface of some of the concepts that are inside your book, and I would imagine they can get that book anywhere that you want to get books. That's right. But there might be some people who are interested in discovering more about the services that you have to offer, whether it be on the IP side of things.

or even related to what we've been talking about today. So first question is preferred platform for people to connect with you on. And then if they wanted to work with you, where do they want to go? For sure. So these days I'm really more LinkedIn person. So feel free to reach out there and say you heard me on the show, which is always fun where we can chat that way. Pamela slim.com is the central source of everything. So that's where you can learn about what we do and just connect through the contact form. Pam, thank you so much for sharing your insights with us today. Thanks for having me.

Hey, if you missed anything, we took all the notes over at socialmediaexaminer.com slash 641.

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This brings us to the end of the Social Media Marketing Podcast. I am your host, Michael Stelzner. I'll be back with you next week. I hope you make the best out of your day and may your marketing keep evolving. Catch you next time. The Social Media Marketing Podcast is a production of Social Media Examiner. Make 2025 your best year ever. Grab your discount tickets to Social Media Marketing World right now by visiting socialmediamarketingworld.info.