Social Capital Lori Highby

Meet Jim HeinignerJim Heininger is The Rebrand Man. He leads the efforts of The Rebranding Experts, which he founded in 2017, after 30 years of business and brand strategy experience for P&G, McDonald’s, Anheuser-Busch and others.
Rebranding Experts was purposefully designed to be the only agency with the comprehensive services necessary to rebrand organizations. It starts from a fundamentally different viewpoint than traditional branding firms that see rebranding as a marketing strategy. His team believes rebranding should be a strategic growth accelerator, creating a forward-facing organization ready to grasp new opportunities. It’s a jetpack to your success.
Jim has designed the methodology used by the firm and merged the many disciplines necessary for successful rebranding, including research, brand strategy and planning, creative naming, design/identity, corporate and leadership communications, change
management, employee engagement and internal marketing, customer experience design and marketing/public relations.
Jim coaches CEOs through the rebranding process, aligning their executive team, and helping to execute complete name changes and new customer promises. He regularly speaks at national conferences and is a frequent contributor to Forbes.com on the topic of rebranding.
Highlights
00:00 Welcome to the Social Capital Podcast
01:21 Introducing Today's Guest: Jim Heininger, The Rebrand Man
02:23 The Art and Strategy of Rebranding
05:05 Current Trends in Rebranding
08:03 Learning from Twitter's Rebranding to X
10:44 Personal and Professional Growth Advice
14:07 Engaging in Professional Networks for Success
14:53 How to Connect with Jim and Closing Thoughts

Connect with Jim!
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Rebranding Experts
jim@rebrandingexperts.com

Meet Bobbi BaehneBobbi Baehne is the founder and CEO of Think Big Go Local, a digital marketing agency that helps small businesses succeed in their local communities by leveraging the power of online marketing. With over 15 years of experience in entrepreneurship, marketing, and small business development, Bobbi has a passion for helping small businesses grow and thrive, and has worked with hundreds of clients to develop successful marketing strategies. In her current role, Bobbi leads a team of digital marketing experts who provide personalized support to small businesses. She has done a TedX talk, has been featured in Inc. Magazine, Huffington Post, and more, and is a regular speaker at conferences and events, sharing her expertise and insights with audiences around the country.
What are the top three trends that small business owners should consider integrating into their marketing mix right now? 
So there are so many things and so many trends we could talk about, but there are a few that I think are top of the list.
So first is something we're hearing so much about, and that's artificial intelligence, right? How to use AI effectively. That that is definitely one of the things small businesses need to keep top of mind, because one of the challenges I hear so frequently from my customers is the bandwidth to do all the things that need to be done in their business.
And as a small business owner, sometimes you don't have a team built yet. And so figuring out how to make the most effective use of your time so that you can run your business and market it effectively is kind of top of the list for me. 
The second thing, which has been a thing for a while, but it's just not going away is video. For a while, we were all talking a lot about short-form video, reels, TikTok, and those are so relevant. But I also think business owners need to step back and notice a couple of things. 
There's still so many small businesses not leveraging the power of YouTube. And we're finding that a lot of people we talk to are using YouTube in such different ways that you have such a larger opportunity to leverage that. I can go to YouTube and get the small sound bites for the things I want to know and that I'm looking to learn so quickly, and it's opened up an entire new market for YouTube content. 
For a while there, we were talking about really short videos. So a TikTok video, eight to 15 seconds, right? These platforms are starting to incentivize creators to do longer videos, a minute or more. So in 2024, we're going to start to see the length of those shorter vertical videos start to shift a little more. Small business owners should be paying attention to those kinds of changes so they can kind of get in the favor of those algorithms, and just be putting out more content that the platforms wanna show to more people.
And then finally, a place that many small businesses aren't leveraging, and that's paid promotion. It is so difficult for a small business that doesn't have a ton of name recognition or brand recognition yet to get their content seen. Facebook doesn't show anything on a business page to anybody if they can help it. They're in the game of wanting a business to pay for that type of attention.
And yet so many business owners either aren't doing it or they're not doing it right because they've only extended their knowledge base to how to hit that blue button and boost a post versus getting into ad manager and learning to develop a variety of different types of campaigns, leverage different types of audiences and all the tools that Meta is offering.

What social media platform do you plan on using more right now? 
So, I have never been a big fan of LinkedIn. When it came out, I'd been doing this digital marketing thing for quite a while and it just was no fun. That was just the way it was....

Meet Eugene MarshallEugene Marshall is the Founder and CEO of Magnolia Tax Services. He is an Enrolled Agent (EA). Eugene is federally authorized to represent taxpayers before the IRS and, like CPAs and attorneys, has unlimited representation rights. He specializes in advanced tax strategies to reduce his client’s tax liability through effective tax planning. Eugene has several years of tax experience, including preparing taxes for individuals and small businesses.
Eugene is also an avid real estate investor. He owns a real estate investing company that acquires multi-family properties within the inner city of Chicago and has recently expanded to the Milwaukee market. Eugene believes owning real estate and having a small business is the cornerstone of building wealth.
What sets Magnolia Tax Services apart from other tax firms? 
Magnolia Tax Services is a tax advisory practice that ultimately specializes in tax planning, tax preparation, tax debt resolution for individuals or small businesses that need assistance with solving a tax problem, and accounting and bookkeeping. What separates us from the average tax practices is that we're actively meeting with our clients periodically throughout the year and most of our client book is all small businesses.
I want to say maybe 90 to 95 percent is all small businesses. We do have some individuals that don't own a business, but have the desire to pick up some rental properties. We do bring them on as clients.
And we also assist and consult them on how to analyze deals, source those deals as well and get the capital to fund those deals, and it creates an opportunity for us to also educate our clients on how to be strategic in markets like today, where the interest rates are higher than they have been.
Fortunately, we're starting to see things climb down a bit. Still, we do introduce other topics such as seller financing, subject to a contract with the seller, wrap-around mortgages, and all these other creative ways to acquire properties that could ultimately benefit our client's tax position. So what separates us apart in short, is that we are actively looking at our client's financial position, and coming up with strategies to ultimately assist them with minimizing their tax bill.
This gives us the opportunities for that business owner to reinvest those savings either back into the business, back into themselves or personal professional development and or into their future.

Can you explain what the difference is between an enrolled agent and a certified public accountant?
Absolutely. So when we look at the tax space, the tax industry as a whole, there's four types of people. You have your tax preparers that do not have to be licensed at all. This could be someone who just understands how to file taxes using a particular software. Don't need a license, do not need a degree, just need to be able to file taxes.
And then we have tax attorneys. And then we have certified public accounts. And then after certified public accounts, we have folks like myself, which are enrolled agents. And so the primary difference between an enrolled agent and a certified public accountant is our specialty is tax. And we get our designation directly from the department of treasury, which houses the Internal Revenue Service. Certified public accountants that get their designation, their license from state boards.
And we actually partner with a ton of certified public accountants because they don't have an interest in tax. And some of them don't know tax. And many of them, their focus is on the accounting portion. And a lot of folks stay co associate accounting with taxes when accounting is nothing more, nothing less, but understanding and being able to read and produce financial statements. 
P and L's, balance sheets, cashflow projections, not more so taxes. Now there are

Meet Lisa ApolinskiLisa Apolinski, CMC is the CEO of 3 Dog Write. She is a content coach, teaching business owners how to use their content to attract more right-fit clients so that they experience the positive ROI on marketing and business development investments.
She has written several books, including Persuade With A Digital Content Story, named one of the top content marketing books in the world and most recently as a co-author on The Most Amazing Marketing Book Ever, an Amazon #1 new release.
She has been featured in Forbes and The New York Times for her expertise on digital storytelling and has been dubbed “America’s Digital Content Futurist”.
What do you think are the biggest mistakes you see businesses make with their content when they're trying to focus on that trust factor? 
I actually had a conversation with a client today about this some feedback she was getting from her mentor who is heavily into sales. And I'm not saying that sales is bad. They're simply different ways of being.
He was pushing her to put all sorts of call to actions and you don't have a call to action in your posts on social media. And I said, well, hold on a second. What are you creating your content for if you don't have clarity around what it is that you are hoping your content will do besides drive revenue?
Because we all know the content really should be helping you to make more money, but how do you get there is the question. If you're constantly pushing calls to action or take this next step or sign up now or click on this link. It feels very sell-y and it feels very icky.   
People know how social media posts work. People know how websites work. People know how the internet works. It can be a lot more subtle, where people are engaging with you through your content and learning about you, and then from there, allowing them to decide how they want to take the next step.
Do they visit your website? Do they do a Google search on you? Do they attend a webinar you're in or a podcast? Do they sign up for your newsletter? Let them decide. Don't shove call to actions in their face where it's unnecessary. You can certainly guide them. 
Mark Schaefer talked about this. The customer is the marketer now. The customer is deciding the path. And if you think you're in charge of their digital path, that thought process and that ability has absolutely gone by the wayside because there are so many ways for people to engage with you and your content.
So if I would drill it down into one big issue that I see people making now as a mistake is trying to control the digital journey versus allowing your audience, who's very savvy to discover you in a way that's right for them. And that allowance of letting them have control that absolutely builds that trust factor that we talked about.

What is one thing that businesses can work on in their content today to help improve these relationships with prospects? 
Add in stories. People are hardwired for stories.
I don't know if you noticed, but I've told you three stories so far. They don't have to be long, but it helps to share information. Show how it's relevant. Because people are hardwired for stories, they absorb that information a lot faster and they hold onto it a lot longer. So if you have information that you need to provide on how the journey would be to work with you, put it in a story format. Talk about a former customer or client who is similar in their journey and how they made it to the finish line.
And in my “Persuade With A Digital Content Story,” I actually give you a six-step formula to create persuasive stories within your content. You're not selling, you're not pushing features and benefits, and you're making it relevant to your audience. Again, it has value to your audience because it's the information that they want, not the...

Meet Frank KingI am a Suicide Prevention Speaker and Comedian, was a writer for The Tonight Show for 20 years, a full-time speaker and comedian for 37. I’ve worked with Jeff Foxworthy, Jerry Seinfeld, Jon Stewart, Steve Harvey, Rosie, Ellen, The Beach Boys, Neil Sedaka, Randy Travis, and Lou Rawls. I’ve fought a lifetime battle with Depression and Chronic Suicidality, turning that long dark journey of the soul into 11 TEDx Talks, one SPEAK Event, and sharing my lifesaving insights on Mental Health with colleges, corporations and associations. I’ve survived 2 aortic valve replacements, a double bypass, a heart attack, 3 stents, losing to a puppet on the Original Star Search and lived to joke about all of it.
A comedian who speaks on depression and suicide. How does that work? 
Well, depression and suicide run in my family. It's called generational depression and suicide. My grandmother died by suicide. My mom found her. Nine years later, my great aunt died by suicide. My mom and I found her. I was four years old. I screamed for days. In 2010, after filing a Chapter Seven bankruptcy in April, I came very close to suicide. Close enough, I can tell you what the barrel of my gun tastes like. Spoiler alert. I did not pull the trigger. A friend of mine came up at a keynote recently. He goes, “Hey man, how come you didn't pull the trigger?”
I go, “Hey, man, could you try to sound slightly less disappointed?” So that's where the humor is in the topic. It's not jokes. It's just funny, personal anecdotes.  That's why. And I myself live with two mental illnesses, major depressive disorder and chronic suicidal ideation, major depressive disorder, relatively common. Chronic suicidal ideation, far more rare. It means for people in my tribe, the option of suicide's always on the menu as a solution for problems large and small. And when I say small, my car broke down a couple years ago. I had three thoughts unbidden. One, get it fixed, two buy new, and three, I could just kill myself.
That's chronic suicidal ideation. 

You have 11 Tedx Talks. How did you land all of those? 
Well, the only person who had five was the guy in England. He passed away. That's the most I've been able to find anybody else has gotten.  In 2014, I applied. It was a Tedx in British Columbia. And I got it on my first try, which is unusual. And then two TEDx events reached out to me after that said, do you have any more mental health ideas to talk about? And I did. So I did two more at their request. 
The next seven I applied for and got. And I've got a really big social media footprint on LinkedIn. And an event in India, in the state of Assam, reached out and said, we like your take on mental health. Would you be willing to do a TEDx force virtually? I said, absolutely. 
So I got invited to as well. So, it's just a matter of applying, it's a bit of a numbers game.  I got my first one on the first try, but the other ones took 20, 30, 40 applications before I got the audition and got asked to do it.

Connect with Frank!
LinkedIn
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thementalhealthcomedian.com  

Meet Alane BoydAlane Boyd is the Co-Founder of BGBO Co., an operations and growth strategy agency utilizing AI and automation to improve efficiency for their clients. In 2022, her company launched Arvo, an AI-powered visual documentation software for creating standard operating procedures, training documents, and company knowledge. Alane has been written and featured in Entrepreneur, HuffPost, South by Southwest (SXSW), PBS, FemFounder, and many more.
How do you start positioning yourself as an expert or a credible resource in your industry? 
I really struggled with this for a long time because I was looking at the work we were doing. We are doing such amazing things and our customers love us. I finally realized we weren't telling anybody about it. Even when we would do these big case studies, we weren't sending them out in a bite sized piece.
No one's gonna know that you're an expert unless you're telling them, and you're not gonna be credible just because you say you know how to do something. You have to tell stories and do them short, where people's attention span can still follow along with it.And also very clear. 
You can do that so easily now with social media. And I have found that has really turned a 180 for me. I was just going, Hey, I'm an expert. I'm over here. People are coming to me because they see me as an expert.

I would love to hear more about your AI software. 
We launched that for companies to create internal process stocks, SOPs, training manuals for their team, and it's all digital.
We were looking at it from a perspective of stuff out there, a lot of platforms, they look like glorified text documents. We just thought nobody wants to learn like that.  Everything is meant to suck you in longer and also for short attention span.
So that's why we built Arvo, to be really digitally appealing. And then we added AI earlier this year and we've got a couple of new AI features coming out too. We thought, what a great use of AI to help write processes. If you could have AI write 90% of a process for you, and then you tweak it for your business, that could be saving you hours of work. We've got some things coming down the line that I'm really excited about with AI too.

Connect with Alane!
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