Amber Naslund is a buddy who happens to be one of the smartest marketers and the best B2B content expert I know. I’m certain you will agree.
In this interview, we discuss…
- Boring B2B Content and How to Fix It
- B2B Buying Is an Emotional Process
- Marketing as a System
- Content Marketing Is a Long Game
- A Question from a Real-life Wellspring Digital Client
It’s good stuff, enjoy!
Digital Transcription (Edited for Readability)
Introductions
Jon-Mikel Bailey: You know, I mean, at the end of the day, what’s the point of a fancy intro? We’re just going to get into it and start talking. So, hi, I’m Jon-Mikel Bailey. And welcome to the Wellspring Digital Chat, where we go into our marketing lab, we lay out the marketing expert, we rip off the top of their head, we extract their brain, we pull out all the great, useless, useful knowledge, excuse me, and plug it back in and send that marketer on their way hopefully with limited damage.
So today, we have a friend and marketer, I’ve known this person for 10 something years, she wrote one of my favorite books, the Now Revolution with Jay Baer, and she writes great content for LinkedIn and other platforms, and is just one of my favorite peeps.
Amber, please introduce yourself to these fine, folks.
Amber Naslund: Hi, fine, folks. Clearly, we’re starting with chaos right out of the gate. But Hi, everybody, my name is Amber. I have been on the internet for a really long time. Really long time. And I currently work for LinkedIn, I basically teach our brands that like show up on our platform and advertise with us how to suck less with their content, really isn’t what I do.
But I’ve had a long storied history in marketing, mostly in the tech sector. I’ve done some early stints in nonprofits and stuff like that, and the weird corporate world, but I’ve been in marketing for I think it’s about 22 years now. Just scary to think about. I see all that gray here. That’s, yeah, I’m getting it. I’m getting it right here.
See what you guys get is the distinguished thing. We just like, I just have to spend a bunch of money to go pay somebody to dye this. Because I’m not emotionally ready to do the hair thing. Some women are really good at that. They can do that, I’m not there yet.
Jon-Mikel Bailey: Slowly. Great. Yeah. No, no.
Amber Naslund: Talk to me, like 10 years. Silver fox thing. I’m just I’m not ready.
Jon-Mikel Bailey: In fact, when we do our second interview in 10 years.
Amber Naslund: We took this long to do this one.
Jon-Mikel Bailey: Yeah, right. Why not? I want a full head of hair and had a gray hair.
Amber Naslund: Sweet we’ll be like the, there’s got to be some famous Silver Fox couple. Isn’t there? Like somebody?
Jon-Mikel Bailey: Oh, yeah. I don’t know. Tons of Well, there’s all those really like, attractive older models, you know, that you always see and like the pharma commercials.
Amber Naslund: Yeah, we’re gonna look just like that.
Jon-Mikel Bailey: Oh, totally. Totally.
Amber Naslund: There’s a guy. There’s a guy in Canada who does like Sexy Santa. You’ve got like, I’m not kidding. And he’s like, got gray hair and his gray beard. And he’s totally like, chic. And he’s like, he’s like super famous. But you’re like, that’s not what Santa looks like. Right? It gives me weird like, I don’t know.
Jon-Mikel Bailey: Weird. Santa is supposed to be creepy and smell funny.
Amber Naslund: Yeah. This guy definitely does. Yeah.
Jon-Mikel Bailey: Alright, so we did an interview. I think via email a long, long time ago. And we did this interview about two weeks ago. And it went really really well. But we don’t remember it. Now. Neither one of us remember it and I forgot to record it. So hopefully this one is even better. So anyway, I’m excited to finally record this interview with you and I want to talk content marketing.
I want to talk LinkedIn and see if we can get down to – let me try this joke, again, some brass tack thinking. So let’s jump right in…
Boring B2B Content
Jon-Mikel Bailey: So let’s talk about B2B content marketing. Specifically, why so much of it is boring, is well, to use your word, “sucks.” What would you say to a B2B company right now that is generating boring content? Get on your soapbox. Let them have it.
Amber Naslund: Yeah, boy. Um, well, I could do this for days. So I’m gonna try. I’ll try to be concise. Okay. I think the problem with – and I’ve been a B2B marketer for most of my career all my career actually, so, you know, I’m yelling at me as much as anybody else. So I’m like I’m in the tribe.
But we get so navel-gazing about the idea that we are in this business-to-business like we’ve loaded the term business with suits and ties and button-up shirts. And, you know, cufflinks. I mean, I do want a good pair of cufflinks.
But like, yeah, I’m just saying, we get so formal about the idea that we must be business, too. And we have to talk in business terms that we load everything with jargon that nobody can understand. And we think that we have to talk in terms of value propositions and key messages and all of these, like architectural marketing things that realistically, the market doesn’t care about.
The people who are actually buying stuff from businesses are still humans, who are messy, complicated multitasking people. So even while they’re in the mindset of making a business decision, they are simultaneously in the back of their head thinking about their kid’s piano recital, and you know, they’re out of Pringles at home, and they better stop at the store. We do those things simultaneously.
But we somehow as marketers think that people take their hats off and are like, “okay, I am in business buyer mode now.” It doesn’t work that way. And there’s actually data to back me up. This is not just me ranting, there was some really good research that Gartner did a couple of years ago, around the role of emotion in B2B branding.
And it’s astonishing when you start talking to people who are our decision-makers that we’re always after talking about what motivates them to work with a particular brand or to have an affinity for a particular brand, and it’s a lot of really squishy stuff like “this brand makes me feel good about working with them. This brand helps me be the professional I want to be.”
And you’re like, “we’re so uncomfortable with this emotional side of branding.” But branding has always been that way. And we somehow decoupled that in the B2B world thinking it doesn’t matter, because we’re all about, you know, spreadsheets and analytics. And that’s just not the way it is a business is not just a left-brain endeavor.
And so much content that comes out of the B2B world only focuses on that side of the intellectual side of business decisions. But there’s an emotional side that we need to appeal to. And we just don’t.
B2B Buying Is an Emotional Process
Jon-Mikel Bailey: Yeah, I mean, in a line from your newsletter, the B2B Content Lab, which is on LinkedIn, and I highly recommend it, you say, buying even in a business context is an emotional process. So I mean, that’s it right there. I mean, people just, they’re not thinking that. And I think they’re, you know, they’re missing it.
Amber Naslund: But if you think about the way, especially if you’re making a lot of B2B decisions – I work in tech, so a lot of our decisions, like the sales cycle for a software decision, let’s say, is six months at a minimum, sometimes longer, you know, 12, 18, 24 months, even – we do not want to screw that up.
As a professional, our reputation is being staked on some of the decisions we make, and then the vendors and the partners we choose to work with. We want something that makes our lives easier, our jobs easier, that makes us look good professionally, that helps us bring out our best so that we can offload some of the things that we don’t do particularly well.
And we want technology to step in and take the reins on that. So there are emotional components to those decisions that we tend to ignore. Because we think about, you know, cost-benefit analysis and ROI and all these things that are so mechanical. But the people who are making those choices are making decisions based on emotional impressions they’ve had with that brand in the past.
One of my favorite, favorite definitions of brand ever comes from an eccentric whose name is Ze Frank, if you don’t know whose Ze Frank is you got to go look him up, because it’s like, I don’t even know how to describe him. He’s kind of like an eccentric idea guy. And he has a lot of really cool stuff out there. But he talks about brand as the emotional aftertaste that you get after interacting with a company.
Jon-Mikel Bailey: Oh, that’s good.
Amber Naslund: That’s so good, right? Like, that’s exactly it. It’s like what? Like, what does that leave with me? And that still happens in a business context. Just because it happens to be at work doesn’t mean we divorce ourselves from that emotional response. We can’t cognitively, we can’t do that.
So it’s really important to appeal to that side of us. And our early impressions of brands are very emotional, they’re nostalgic, they’re aspirational. They’re, you know, interesting and curiosity evoking, we care about the rational shit later, when we’re actually close to giving somebody our money.
But at first, we want to be emotionally hooked on things. And that happens in a business context too. But so much of the content I see starts midway in that journey, and like toward the end of it and as soon that people have already done the early part. And they haven’t. They haven’t.
Jon-Mikel Bailey: And the early part is where you make that deeper connection, I feel.
Amber Naslund: All the time. Yeah, all the time. But you know, because again, because especially in the B2B world, we decided that, you know, the MQL was the almighty metric that we needed to care about. And so the things that don’t turn out MQLs somehow are not valuable.
And brand is harder to measure. And brand is harder to attribute directly to revenue. But I would argue that that’s not its purpose, you know, brand to revenue is a long-term thing. And it’s an investment that you make over time because you know, that ultimately, the results will be those downstream dollars.
But the investment you make upfront is not always a causal one-to-one relationship, I spend $1 on branding, I get $1 back, it works. And it’s never worked that way. But man, we shot ourselves in the foot with digital stuff, because we’re like, oh, hey, look, we can track this now, and we’ve decapitated the brand from so much of our content, and it’s a crime.
Jon-Mikel Bailey: When in fact, it’s, it almost seems like digital in some ways could make it easier to have those connections and operate on emotion, but…
Amber Naslund: At its best, it does, when you come at it that way, philosophically, and are willing to use those channels as sort of brand cultivation channels, and not just, you know, funnel click metric channels. When you’re willing to use digital to engage and converse and attract and dialogue and establish a community that you want to cultivate over time, it’s magical for that, and digital’s amazing for doing those things.
But because it’s squishy, and it’s hard to measure, and it’s hard to put on a spreadsheet, and it’s hard to turn out a report every 30 days to show the impact of that, people abandon it as “not valuable.” And it is absolutely, I think it’s an abdication of responsibility of marketers when they do that because part of our job is to educate people about why that matters.
And to continue to push for the importance of the brand elements and what we do feeding the downstream results of what we want. But you don’t walk into a bank and go, you know, “someday I’ll give you 10 bucks, but right now I’d like 100.” That’s what we don’t know.
You know, it’s like, we want to reap the rewards, good marketing, but we don’t want to make the investments in good marketing. It’s like when I get on my soapbox about ROI, as a metric. Because ROI, not only is it a single metric that looks at things kind of in a very specific way, but it’s trailing, meaning you can’t know what your return is until you’ve made the investment. So it’s a backward-looking thing.
And I mean, yeah, can you argue that you can model out some potential returns? Okay, sure, fine. But realistically speaking, this idea that we have to walk into everything knowing what we’re going to get out of it in hard concrete terms is such an overly simplistic way to look at a very complex discipline like marketing.
And I will go that’s probably the on my gravestone like “ROI is a trailing indicator.” Here lies Amber – ROI Is A Trailing Indicator.” You know, it’s a sign of a life well-lived, I think.
Jon-Mikel Bailey: And then single focus single shot on one of your friends tear, running.
Amber Naslund: I don’t know, I have a real big party when I kick off because my goal is to go sliding into my grave like worn out, kicking, screaming, and haggard, like, wring it all out, man. So yeah, pour one out for me when at the end of it.
Jon-Mikel Bailey: There you go.
Marketing Is A System
Jon-Mikel Bailey: So also in the newsletter, you say, and this is kind of a continuation of what we’ve already been talking about, you say that “marketing is a system that is only as strong as its weakest element.” So in, you know, in your experience, where do things fall apart? Is it a silo issue? Or are they focusing too much on technology? Are they focusing too much on MQLs or ROI? Or is it impossible to narrow down on one specific thing?
Amber Naslund: It’s all those things. And I think every organization, depending on their culture and structure, struggles with different things to different degrees, I think all of those are factors. Like I said, I think a lot of it comes from the downside of the digital world is that we made this really inaccurate promise to ourselves that digital was going to solve the attribution problem.
We were going to be able to measure every click and tell you, causally, this person did this, and then they did this. That was such a naive way to go about things. And it was just patently wrong from the get go. So, marketers took this very sawed off approach where they only focus on the thing is that they can track.
So despite, you know, a platform, like Facebook, tells you, you should care about likes and clicks. So that’s what we measure because that’s what the platforms allow us to measure number one, and that’s what we can easily put on our report and say, “look, we’re doing something…”
Jon-Mikel Bailey: By the way, like this video, and please subscribe.
Amber Naslund: Mash that like button, whatever. Um, so we’ve done this to ourselves in a lot of ways. And we have, like I said, before we decapitated the entire idea that marketing, in some of its more esoteric fashion still has merit and value even if it’s harder to attribute dollar for dollar. But it’s always been that way. And attribution is not a new problem.
Marketing attribution has always been a problem. But not only is marketing a system within itself, meaning demand gen depends on brand to be effective. And all of brand marketing, like if you give nobody anything to do at the end of that, that’s sort of pointless too. So any of those things kind of decoupled from the system isn’t helpful.
But also, we tend to forget that marketing is part of a system in business. So marketing has dependencies on products and services that don’t suck, on salespeople who can actually, you know, do a bang-up job with the roles and responsibilities they have, with customer success teams taking the post-sale experience and making that something people want to invest in and repeat.
So we are part of an engine too that has component parts marketing is not, as I’m fond of saying, marketing isn’t the Savior, I can’t come in and fix your broken product, I can’t fix your broken sales process, I can only try my best to accelerate and optimize for the things that marketing does well. But it’s not the only component.
So when we start thinking of marketing in a vacuum, is when we get in a lot of trouble. And marketing departments do that to themselves because they silo the paying people away from the organic content people away from the brand people away from the comms people. And so they’re all cannibalizing each other’s work, or not talking to one another. And figuring out how each of their roles and responsibilities impacts the other.
And so we get these fractured, fragmented marketing strategies that are not strategic at all. And so we’re constantly trying and which is why you get people hyper-optimizing tactics, like I said, “should the button be blue or green?” Like, you know, if you’re trying to eke out that .002%, lift and click rate. I mean, I guess you can care about that stuff. And there are people who do that, and I’m not denigrating that work.
But oftentimes, we’re looking for a tactical solution to a strategic problem, where the holes are really in the way we’re going about marketing, not in the levers and dials that are so far down the screen. But those are the things we can control. So those are the things that we want to tinker with all the time.
Jon-Mikel Bailey: I’ve been exploring a phrase and in my head lately that digital marketing is a conversation. I think that’s one of the better ways to think about it is you don’t want to speak past somebody or down to somebody you want to speak with them.
Amber Naslund: It always should have been that way. There’s an interesting article that just came out in the New York Times, I want to say a couple days ago. And it was about sciency stuff. But the upshot was, scientists use too much jargon, in their academic work, and even other scientists don’t want to read it because they get lost in the language.
And we’ve done that to marketing, especially in B2B. We’ve loaded it up with our own vocabulary and our own jargon and the words we think sound sexy are the ones we paid an agency to tell us we should use in our branding. So like if we’re calling our brand “effervescent,” and that doesn’t show up in our copy, we’re doing it wrong.
But people want conversational stuff that they can relate to, that they can engage with. So if your only value prop to me is your hyper-optimized, super leveraged suite of innovative disruptive tools, that means nothing to me, I turn my brain off and move on. I’m not interested in being part of that.
And that’s what we do. And I swear half my days are simplifying language that comes out of B2B marketers because they’re not trying to foster dialogue. They’re trying to talk at people. And it shows in their engagement rates.
Content Marketing Is a Long Game
Jon-Mikel Bailey: So another problem that we see, and it’s in the same post, you argue that marketing is a long game. And I love that. And I could not agree more. What would you say to the marketing director who, you know, is trying to make this point to the powers that be and all the powers that be seem to care about is “we want more leads, we want to improve the bottom line, blah, blah, blah?”
Amber Naslund: Ah, yeah, welcome to my life. Leads are a result, they’re not a goal. Leads are something that happened when you make the investments in the overall marketing architecture that fosters them. So you can’t just like put a thing out. And it’s not like a vending machine where you put out a white paper and you get a lead.
Which is what we do all the time, like, hear have this piece of content, give me your email address. Now you’re a lead. Well, first of all, we can have a whole discussion about what actually is a lead, like an email is not a lead an email is an email. And you know, contact information is not the same as somebody who is ready for a buying motion with your company. So that’s one part.
The second part is there are short-term, tactical things that you can do to garner a certain amount of activity. The problem is when we create activity in marketing, a webinar, let’s say so we put out a webinar, we get a bunch of people to sign up, and now we have their contact information.
That activity, we tend to classify that as lead generation, when in reality, all we’ve managed to do is get a contact capture. What we do around that is every bit as important as the maneuver of actually capturing that piece of information. So what do we do with it once we have it? How did we earn it, to begin with?
And how do we have the scaffolding and the support system of an overall brand experience that makes that person wants to stick around, which is a much harder conversation, right? It has a lot of component parts, it has a lot of, you know, things we could do. But when people look at leads as sort of the almighty metric for success, what you realize is, the lead is something that you earn by doing all of the other things ahead of time.
And if you end up with just a bunch of contact information that is not supported by an infrastructure of a fully complete marketing strategy, what you end up with is a bunch of email addresses from people who only wanted your white paper, they’ll give you a fake email address or not.
Which is why sales complains about the MQLs that they get that aren’t sales-ready, is because we’ve somehow like just like, put the idea of a lead in a box. And then like, “our job is just to get you the email address, good luck with that.”
And we forget that our job is not just to capture an email address, our job is to ready a market to acquaint them with our products and services in a way that helps them see how that solves their problems. So that they not only want to buy from us but stay with us. That’s a much longer sentence than “get me some leads.”
And that kind of sawed-off, truncated marketing process is the bane of all marketing existence right now. It’s the stuff that is job security for me. But it’s the reason that so many people are like, “marketing is expensive, and marketing doesn’t work, and blah, blah.”
And why we have this glut of like, demand Gen and growth marketing. Marketing has always been about growth. Why the hell do we need a “growth marketing something?” Like that’s what marketing is for? Isn’t it?
Jon-Mikel Bailey: Slap a name on it.
Amber Naslund: But see, we keep pulling this off, as if like, we can just optimize our way to fame. And it’s just it’s such a mistake. It’s like it’s the stuff that keeps me up at night. It makes me drink.
Jon-Mikel Bailey: I’m sorry, I’m so sorry.
Amber Naslund: It’s all right. Like I said job security.
Jon-Mikel Bailey: So yeah, yeah. I mean, well, and the thing is that, you know, I talk to marketing directors all day long and it’s the same story, “my boss wants more, my boss wants more, my boss wants more” and I’m like, “okay, but what does that mean? You know, what does that translate into in the long term?”
Amber Naslund: There’s another problem with this that doesn’t get talked about very often but like I to work with a lot of mid-level, director-level marketing folks. Um, if you sit and talk to the CMO, the CMO is not asking for leads. The CMO is asking for market share.
So the CMO understands a CMO’s jobs are to look in longer time horizons. So they’re looking 24 months out, plus, trying to figure out how they capture more of a market that exists and/or defines new categories and markets that do not currently exist. But how they break into those things. The CMO is not asking for a lead.
What’s happening is that the marketing teams beneath the CMO and the sales teams with sideways pressure are saying that leads are the defining characteristic of gaining market share, driving revenue, all of those things. And we’ve sort of made the lead the proxy for those things. And that’s not necessarily the way that it works.
Do we need to get more people in market that are ready to buy from us? Yes. Is that just about lead capture? Hell to the No, it is not. And again, ask any salesperson who’s gotten a bunch of crappy leads from their marketing team. And tell me why the almighty gated content lead capture is going to solve that problem.
A buying-ready prospect comes from the investment that we’ve made in them in the market, which is the part of marketing that we often forget about is like the market the economy behind demand for products and services. We have to make an investment in that market and pay attention to that market.
And that involves everything from market research and customer segmentation, and all of the mechanics of old-school marketing that somehow got lost in the world of digital, but those things still matter. Because that’s how we generate demand. It’s not just putting a white paper behind a form and calling it today.
Jon-Mikel Bailey: Amen.
A Question from a Real-life Wellspring Digital Client
Jon-Mikel Bailey: Well, my last question is a long one. You know, cuz that’s how I roll. But it’s from a client. And so because you’re with LinkedIn, and you’ve been focusing a lot lately on B2B, I thought I would get one of our B2B tech clients to ask you a question.
So this question is from Ray Steen, who is the Chief Strategy Officer with a company called MainSpring, which is an MSP here in the DC area. And Ray asks, “LinkedIn is often characterized as a place for one: find a new job, or recruit a new employee and two: a clearinghouse for salespeople, sales content by salespeople that affect your content strategy when working with clients.”
Amber Naslund: Oh, boy, okay, um, first how to be concise about this?
Jon-Mikel Bailey: Hey, let him have it.
Amber Naslund: First of all, you have to ignore the bad actors. They exist on every platform. And if there’s a bunch of crummy salespeople who do crummy things, because they don’t know how to use LinkedIn in a meaningful way, you just sort of have to pretend, put blinders on and pretend that that’s not part of the ecosystem. Because if you cater to that situation, you just feed it.
So I just blocked those people and move on with my life. But the second part that you asked about LinkedIn being this kind of jobs and careers platform, it’s a very legacy take on what LinkedIn started as which is legit, I mean, that we started as kind of a jobs and careers platform and the digital resume, if you will. But it’s so much more than that now.
I mean, when we do research about our own users, and why they come to LinkedIn, and sure, it’s jobs and careers, but also education and understanding what the news in the industry is happening, because we’re such a business and industry-focused platform, that the caliber and quality of the content that comes out is so much higher in general.
And you can get news, you can get industry insights, you can get some really great thinking on trends or where things are going. There’s a good positive thought leadership component that goes on on LinkedIn. And there are great communities of peers and networks of peers and influencers together learning from one another. People come to LinkedIn specifically for that.
And they tell us that so they’re looking for content from brands, they’re looking for smart content from industry leaders, they’re looking for conversations and interaction with people, not just jobs and careers. So honestly, I feel like I know I’m biased. But if you’re in the B2B world, and you’re not developing content for LinkedIn, you are absolutely missing one of the bellwether places on the web right now that really caters to that audience.
And it’s like if you advertise on LinkedIn, you know, it can be more expensive dollar for dollar than putting that same media on something like Facebook. But again, the quality and the caliber of the audience and their readiness for that kind of content, people are way less allergic to advertising on our platform. So you pay more to reach them.
But these are the right people, and they’re in the right frame of mind. You know, we’ve done some interesting research that shows that people who come to LinkedIn take content in the same mindset that they would on top to your like, mass media publications, like the New York Times, they come to LinkedIn for the same caliber of information that they would HBR or New York Times.
And it’s cool to see but it also, so don’t look at LinkedIn is just this, like, “oh, if I’m not advertising for a job, I don’t need to be there.” It’s why you totally do and our audience is looking for you. So part of the fun for me in my role is turning that light bulb on for people and then getting to watch them start to develop thoughtful content for the platform, and then just watch what happens, which is what keeps me coming to work every day.
So open your mind to what LinkedIn can be.
Jon-Mikel Bailey: Well, I mean, it’s true, though, because just from my own personal experience, if I go to Facebook, and basically waste a little bit of time because let’s face it, that’s what you’re doing on Facebook, right? You know, I don’t, quote-unquote, walk away from that feeling empowered, or, you know, better for having done it.
If I go to LinkedIn and spend some time there. You know, there’s some really heartwarming stuff on there. There’s inspirational stuff on there. And there’s some really educational, you know, “do better in the world” kind of stuff on there, too.
And so, yeah, and in the interest of full disclosure, I slept on LinkedIn for the longest time. I mean, I had an account, and I kind of posted there. But you know, it wasn’t really until the pandemic when the face-to-face sort of just disappeared, where I actually started turning to LinkedIn to make those connections. And, yep, been awesome.
Amber Naslund: Well, you’re not alone, in that. We’ve seen engagement and participation on the platform skyrocket. Since we are locked out and stuff started last year, I think people are looking for that proxy of a lot of in-person stuff. And that’s why you know, LinkedIn events and live and things like that have gone gangbusters because you’re looking for that replacement in a lot of ways.
But just generally speaking, it’s every social platform sort of gets its cliche things like, you know, Twitter is the toxic dumpster fire for your high school friends that you didn’t really want to ever see or talk to you again, anyway. And LinkedIn is like smarmy salespeople. And like I said, there are bad actors on every platform.
And there are going to be people who will try to game the system because the system exists. But if you come to LinkedIn, as intentionally as our members do, and create content intentionally and thoughtfully, you will attract the right sorts of people. Because the smarmy salespeople need a soft mark for that to work. Eventually, they’re gonna if you just ignore them, they go away.
And so I get a fair bit of that in my own stuff. And I just like blocked, delete, whatever. But don’t play to the lowest common denominator, it’s not worth it. There are such high caliber, high quality, discerning people that come to our platform. Those are the people you should create for.
And they’re looking for really great content, they come to our platform intentionally they spend time there intentionally. And you’ll be rewarded if you make the investments.
Jon-Mikel Bailey: By the way, speaking of Twitter, toxic dumpster fire, so I have my on my desktop, I have a little Twitter feed, you know, kind of off to the side, and your face is constantly up… “Oh, hey Amber!” It’s awesome, your tweets are great!
Amber Naslund: So I get called out yet, you know, I’m OG Twitter user. I’ve been there for such a long time. Yeah. And it still it through all of its like, dysfunction. It is still, Twitter and LinkedIn are the only places I spend much time anymore. Like occasionally I’m on Facebook because my mom is on Facebook.
But my meaningful time and Twitter is my place where I pop off a lot. I’m very sweary. So fair warning, if you come follow me on Twitter, it’s definitely NSFW. My LinkedIn is way more professional. But it is by far one of my favorite social networks and yeah, even for its dysfunction, which it has plenty. Um, I love it there.
Jon-Mikel Bailey: There you have it. Twitter has value.
Amber Naslund: It does. Listen, I’ve actually gotten jobs through Twitter. I’ve worked freelance through Twitter, I’ve gotten speaking gigs through Twitter. I’ve made amazing friends through Twitter. I have dated people from Twitter. I have it’s reaped way more rewards than downside.
Jon-Mikel Bailey: So, I don’t know if I’d recommend the dating people from Twitter, but the rest of it.
Amber Naslund: Well, yeah, it’s a slippery slope. There are gems. There are gems, but they’re also like “I did that, why?” Yeah, it’s been. It’s been an adventure. But I will also say that some of my dearest and most wonderful internet friends like you, I think originally came from Twitter. So I mean, how can I…
Jon-Mikel Bailey: That’s how I met you. That’s how I met Gini (Dietrich). That’s how I met some other people. Yeah, absolutely.
Amber Naslund: Funny Gini story is that I’ve known Gini before all y’all knew Gini. Like Gini was my PR person at a firm I worked with before social media was even a thing. So she and I are like legacy buddies. It’s funny.
Jon-Mikel Bailey: One of you guys is gonna have to tell me that story at some point, because…
Amber Naslund: Oh, there are stories like the one of me throwing my Blackberry on the floor.
Jon-Mikel Bailey: That one that’s the…
Amber Naslund: Margaritas do funny things to people.
Jon-Mikel Bailey: Well, Amber, I think I can definitively say that this interview was much better than the one we did before.
Amber Naslund: Are you sure, because I…
Jon-Mikel Bailey: I can’t really guarantee that because, and I don’t think you can either, because neither one of us have a very good memory, apparently. But we’re gonna go with that.
Jon-Mikel Bailey: So, for all you out there, this is for you. The second time around, get the benefit. So there you go. So Amber, thank you so much. This was a blast.
Amber Naslund: Anytime my friend. Thank you so much.
Jon-Mikel Bailey: Yes, yes. And I’m going to end it and I’m going to wave.
Amber Naslund: Zoom wave.
Jon-Mikel Bailey: And then, and then we stop.
