Connect with Matthew O’Brien on LinkedIn:

linkedin.com/in/matthewobrien

For more information visit his website:

MintSocial.com

mintsocial.com/social-media-marketing-blog/

mintsocial.com/category/social-media-marketing/feed

Connect with Russ Johns on LinkedIn:

linkedin.com/in/nextstepnext

For more information visit his websites:

russjohns.com/

thepiratesyndicate.com/

nextstepnext.com/

Russ Johns 0:01
Welcome to the #piratebroadcast, where we interview #interestingpeople doing #interestingthings where you can expand your connections, your community. #Kindnessiscool and #smilesarefree. Let's get this party started.

It's a fantastic day for a #piratebroadcast because it's one of those things that we just have to bring to light and share with people and I got a few stories to tell you, but first I want to introduce Matthew O'Brian. Now Matt is better friend of mine connection and an acquaintance of resource for a few years now. We were talking about live streaming and broadcasting and things like that. I says, let's just get you on the show and produce some conversation that other people can use. Let's not keep it to ourselves. Matt. How are you doing?

Matthew O'Brien 0:53
I'm doing fantastic. It's always a pleasure seeing you. I just love that We've reconnected and we Both run in parallel mission. So we're going to help each other out along the way too.

Russ Johns 1:06
Oh, it's fantastic and I am more excited about how live streaming has been developing and a lot of people are early adopters understand and they kind of appreciate some of the things that go along with bumping your knees on the technology and false starts and you got to push the boundaries a little bit. However, you've been in this business a long time, man social has been around for a while now. Can you kind of give us The Origin Story of MIT social and how you got hooked into this whole social media thing?

Matthew O'Brien 1:44
Yeah, absolutely. It started in 2008. I was in business transition, and myself needing to find a job and I went out looking for a job and when I was talking to him, I was taking a consultative approach. I found that they all needed. What I was thinking at the time was a content marketing and syndication engine. They all were trying to figure out social media, it was brand new. I was like, wow, nobody's really going after it hard. Instead of finding a job, I just said, time to start a business.

I've been working on a, what I call the digital footprint, which was you think of yourself and your brand, as a bunch of as a wine cellar, you're gonna build a bunch of these digital assets and profiles like LinkedIn, Facebook, the more they grow, the more powerful they get it becomes your marketing engine. I mean, socialism as a way to build those digital assets and create a content marketing and syndication engine for brands which would be the brands that we don't hug and then the brands that we really care about. Which is the people in front of the brands and stayed true since then we're just a marketing engine for a company.

Russ Johns 3:09
Yeah. It's amazing how subtle it is. And so necessary. Business owner is out there, they're attempting to get something in place they're trying to grow an audience, they're not really sure what to do, how to do it and what needs to be done first. There's a lot of people that are probably, saying, Oh, yeah, I have a Facebook page, but it's not really working or not being measured. It's kind of not doing them a service at all. It's just kind of a distraction. I think when businesses actually take a distributed model, and SEO and some of these elements and they start measuring them, they can really make difference because they can be measured, they can be monitored, and they can be improved.

Matthew O'Brien 4:05
True, for sure. I am gonna jump in here and ask us yeah, ask you a question. When we first met you, I didn't know your full background, but I knew that you had been in radio and media and you had helped with essentially building channels and stations and getting people visibly noticed and building an audience. Then you were doing some different jobs. Here you are doing the passion that you had found, and you've perfected it over the way and now you're doing what the number you shocked me with was you said there's only a million podcasts online?

I would think that podcast is old school. I remember back when I started mid social in 2008 there was evil Tara who wrote podcasts for dummies and I'm like, I thought it's been around forever. You've morphed your brand into the podcast #Thepiratesyndicate, you have a whole business model. You're a perfect example of someone that has been out there and realigned all of your digital assets to focus on one thing, and it's working.

Russ Johns 5:18
Yeah. Yeah, if you type in #piratebroadcast, just from last October, when I really started using it, it's, it brings up my profiles, and it is starting to build a little traction there. Which is, for me it interesting in the fact that we can take something and just continue to build on it, continue to use it, and consistency over time. It builds a reputation. If you want to be visible, you won't have authority.

The best way to do is create content that's seen across multiple platforms on a consistent basis and once in a while you'll get those unicorns where there'll be a really great article that will take off and blow your channel up a little bit. However, that's not necessarily it's not necessarily requirement for building a business you're not based on your success of having a viral post or not. I think consistency is gonna be much more effective than then hoping for that one out of the park post that goes viral.

Matthew O'Brien 6:31
It's the cadence of it been consistent and I have to go back because you said doing content but what you're doing is great content. Maybe not this episode, we'll see how it works out. You're really have it you've stepped it up. It's very professionally done. In fact, you do that this is what you do. You create shows for people you do this whole personal branding program and I hats off to you, I love it. I'm looking forward to what we're going to work on together. I think that's fantastic.

Russ Johns 7:01
Yeah. To your point, I think it's really important for people to understand that you don't have to be overwhelmed by the, by the content, you don't have to be overwhelmed by the process. You don't have to be overwhelmed by the technology. There are people like Matt and I that enjoy working in it. We enjoy what we do we enjoy looking at these things and helping other people out. It's one of those things that you don't learn it overnight. It's not like a book, and you're just done with it, because it's always changing. It's evolving. You have to test it, evaluate some of the situations you're in.

I love what you're doing with the distribution engine, because that to me, is really going to be something that's going to allow people to actually pour a little Google juice in there, and their online presence and make a little bigger impact, I think, and I don't know that we have to To go over everything today, but maybe if you could just kind of like, give us a snapshot of how it all comes together, because I think it's important for people to understand.

Matthew O'Brien 8:09
Sure. Well, let's take this podcast show. This is going to go through a process. We're going to get a transcript. First thing we're going to do is, and I know you're already doing this.

Russ Johns 8:19
Yeah.

Matthew O'Brien 8:20
Then you, you look at it from a content standpoint, and you're doing relevancy to what your business is. Keywords and maybe it's not, I look at LinkedIn. As there's three metal Brian's there's a metal Brian that says SEO and social. There's Matt O'Brien that likes to be community outreach and help nonprofits. Then there's just me as a person, human and LinkedIn is a little less than that. Those are the things that we're going to look at. What one of those are all of them are you going to tell the story about usually its business and then we're going to look at the content that matches the things that you wanted? Drive relevance people that are searching. I just say start with your passion.

Don't try to be getting traffic for something that you don't care about the story of why you can help someone out is more interesting than you getting ranked for it. It's going to be the reason why I respond to it. We take the story transcript, we have a video, we can do an audio so we can put on a podcast, we can put it on YouTube, we can create a PDF of the transcript or give a download some goodies that someone we're going to probably have some goodies as a result of this, get this download here. We'll make sure that we do that. There's photos screenshots of us, what doing what we do cool branding around the way and then we're looking at 50 or 60 different places that we can now publish video, audio, podcasts, a blog post a press release if we want to do a press release, and then we have all of the social media.

We'll treat this one event as a campaign, that's going to be at least three months. We have all of these different ways to publish the content. What we're really doing is we're linking and attributing back to what is the one story the one place we want everyone to go. Usually, I want my YouTube video ranked really well and epic. I want the blog post or the article that I'm going to write about this, that tells the story, and it's a very engaging interactive, we got the downloads and stuff. You're going to do that on your website. I'm going to do that on mine. Then we're going to create a little ecosystem around that. That's what you do with a piece of content. It takes a lot of work to do that. If you don't do that, it just becomes a piece of content that nobody gets to see or hear or you don't get to help anybody.

Russ Johns 10:54
Yeah. That's the concept that I wanted to really present for the syndicate. If you have a syndicate of individuals, even if their businesses are not the same, or even if they're collaborative businesses businesses that might be able to collaborate together, versus office machinery some of these complementing things, you could go around, you could do a show around this idea that you're interviewing the person on your left, so to speak. Realistically, you could get a lot of content created in a very short period of time, that you could use to grow for months and months and months some of the articles that really bring up and I don't know, I know you know, this and maybe getting a something from a medical journal or a highly published in location. That really makes a lot of difference in our Publishing Engine viewed should be long term websites. They've been up for a longTime

Matthew O'Brien 12:01
Big time.

Russ Johns 12:02
There's a name for that being attributed to a show.

Matthew O'Brien 12:10
Sure. Uh, but yeah, you're right in those big links are really what we're looking at. What's interesting is we always see that there's a high degree of willingness, I want to help out, I want to promote, and I'll publish this. What happens is, it's just like anything else, it takes extra work. You have to think through this stuff. Quite honestly, people just aren't in that mode of publishing stuff. If we as as partners, and we building this ecosystem can make it so easy that somebody can publish something. Those attribution links that you're talking about can serve a purpose. Now you're building all of that energy and relevancy and you use a bunch of tools. You're aggregating social media and you your nice job with this show. It gave me some ideas, like, here's the post, publish this, go into LinkedIn.

That's just the start of something that if you build on that, and somebody builds on it, any piece of content that they create with somebody else, they're going to get probably two x the return by just doing that, and the earlier that you do it when it comes in, the more powerful it is, because it's like a bottle of wine that there's that link, cielo. They're really good link. It was there right at the beginning and as all of these things, so it's I know we're kind of geeking out, but it really comes out to it has to be stupid, easy, because we just don't have time to do that stuff. Just like producing.

I've always wanted to do a podcast show but I don't have the time or the energy and I would go to someone like you and say, Can I just show up and then all of that other stuff gets done. Content becomes fun, because you have a strategy. I have one other thing that I wanted to share is that when social redid our website, and it was a disaster, we got hacked. It was an old, fight that. What I did is reorganized years of content into a new architecture. It was tough, but it's paying off and I want to give anyone out there that's doing content that's been doing content and thinks that their content isn't good anymore.

You can re architect so with your podcasts, you may find a vein like you know, medical, there's a bunch of people that are talking about this. You pull those segments out and you create a category around that and now you you have a very deep topic. You can you can kind of overnight become a sensation for that term, because you already have great content just sitting there. That's it. What's cool about which is you can go back into the archives and find content and conversations and really go after terms and get ranked pretty powerful.

Russ Johns 15:09
That's really what I was really excited about Matthew is that you are so good at the ability to see where other content and other backlinks and things like that can be repurposed. Again, for its highest value, great word, I'm really good at creating content, I can create a lot of content very short period of time. However, if I haven't always spent the time in deciding and in identifying where it needs to go to make its biggest impact. That's what I'm excited about it, this opportunity, this intersection of it's like our two skill sets are merging into something amazing.

Matthew O'Brien 15:53
I'm excited about that

Russ Johns 15:56
I want to just give a shout out to some of the people in the room here that are here. Angie, good morning pirates. Great to see you all. Awesome. Simon. Good morning Russ and Matthew, how are you today? And then sleep. Good morning, Russ. Kon. Good morning, Russ. Matthew. Good morning Angie Schumann. Oh boy pirates, more people in the and then just like, just like a boss. I'm not going to send out millions of comments but I have lots to say Russ. Hello, Matthew. Yes. You're always awesome. Thank you for being here. Kon always. Good morning, windy. Good morning pirates. And then Wendy starting to comments and Kathy Spooner. Good morning. Andrew, morning.

Thank you so much for being here. I just really I find it fascinating mass, Matthew that we have this evolution and if you You think back when there were 1 million blog posts? What's happened since then? Then you think, okay, there are there are only a million podcasts. They're everywhere. Because you're inside the circle. I'm inside the circle. We're listening to podcasts, right? They seem to show up because we listen to them.

Matthew O'Brien 17:22
Yeah,

Russ Johns 17:22
I think how it works out

Matthew O'Brien 17:24
Totally..

Russ Johns 17:27
That's an exciting time, really, because there's so much upside opportunity to help people get their message out. And it's an easy way to do it.

Matthew O'Brien 17:36
So timeline of you just made me think of something. And this was a shocking headline in Businessweek. 2005 said, if you don't have a blog, on your website, you could potentially be out of business in three years. I looked at that and I'm like, Whoa, that's pretty bold, but it's It probably around the time between those those three years was when there was a million blog posts that were created. That's a long time ago and look at what's happened since. You're in this space that's just going to.

You know what's great about podcasts, and this is our business model. We do it all the time. We interview clients, we interview their customers, we get their stories, and that's what we create content from, because that's what people really want to hear. You're just having natural talent to do something that is really the crux of content creation. It really starts with there's a couple geeky SEO terms we'll talk about, if we got time. How much time do we have? Russ?

Russ Johns 18:43
We have about 10 more minutes.

Matthew O'Brien 18:47
Okay,

Russ Johns 18:47
We got time.

Matthew O'Brien 18:48
There's two principles. I want to talk about what you eat, which is your expertise, authority and trust. Then there's, after you eat too much, you might want to take a nap. Which is name, address, phone number. So eat is what is most important right now in anybody that's an author online, you need to have an author page that has your expertise, your authority, and your trust. An author page is the page that attributes all of the posts that you write on. Google is really sticky about it, they call it your money or your life, if you can do something that is going to impact my money, or my life, my health, then you have eat more so than anyone else on the internet. But it's a good principle to have. It's an author page, which links to your LinkedIn and accreditations the university, you went to certificates. It's everything that you need to know about this person.

When you have that page, any article you write that's attributed to that becomes more powerful, and then you do podcasts and videos and you're linking to that and it's like, you become the expert. That's how you become an expert online. After you get the eat, you're thinking about your business and your business is really like a license plate. Google's trying to weed out the internet, especially now of locations that if I'm not on my phone, and I can't, you can't serve up that this business is near you, and it's relevant to what you're looking for. That's name, address and phone number. You need to have the exact name, the exact phone number, the exact address for that location, if you have multiple locations, same thing. What we're working on is taking the eat and the name and the nap and aligning those so that the business is an author, that people are attributed to it or attribute to the business and the author.

Then all of the content that's published from this collective is now it's like a mini. It's like a micro system that can plug into an ecosystem, which is like, Wow, look at this body of content. It's all really architected that's the future of SEO. That's what I see blockchain being attributed to as because you can accredit the content that people and how trusted it is in the system and then and then if there's an SEO juice to that naturally because it's all accredited and and then you can actually monetize it which is the other cool thing about what's coming down with a blockchain. Principle SEO strategy and good content is actually the foundation for monetization of content and people making money from doing stuff like this.

Russ Johns 21:32
Yeah, it's and here's the thing is, the longer I had the conversation I longer I'm out there having conversation with you and other people that are doing similar work. It just seems like we're one conversation away, and that's the thing one post away one post where you're one click away it's realistically just keep going, man. Keep going.

Matthew O'Brien 21:56
Keep going. You're right. At all. Pay us off. It'll be the guy on the fence. It's like, Man, I wish I had stuck to my good. This is the discipline, right? It's that easy to do this stuff, but the good disciplines don't have to be good people, but you gotta have the good discipline that works out. We hope you're good, though.

Russ Johns 22:19
Yeah. Well, I have to tell you a story, man. I recently Father's Day, dad passed away. Like I moved to Arizona to care for mom and dad. Father's Day dad passes away. We figured Okay, we have pandemic, right. I'll tell you the short backstory for this, but I have two sisters that are buried in Utah. We said well, we better put dad there because that's where we want to go. It was his birthday on the 17th which was Friday. We went out there a little gathering a couple people together. Family members social distance, all that kind of stuff. I had him because he was in the military. We went through that.

During that process, my son drove up from Texas. He drove up. We said, Hey, well, let's get out of here. He'd never really spent any time in Utah. I took him to a few places where I was hanging out. We went up this place called Francis peak, where it's basically at the top of this mountain, but it's a road and he has a reg that can travel up that road. Well, we drove up this little hillside here and he goes, could you jump out and take a picture of me coming down? Or take a video of me coming down? It's like, Sure. I jump out of the rig and I go to run down this hill and pretty soon I'm way fast, and then all of a sudden I get airborne. I drop about six feet. and land hard. Oh, landed hard.

Matthew O'Brien 23:59
Oh, man.

Russ Johns 24:02
He pulls the truck down. We didn't get the shot we wanted, but we got the shot that we needed. I'll share that with us later. We decide, okay, Urgent Care better have an X ray, what do we want to do? I mean, we're talking, we're talking 20 miles back country

Matthew O'Brien 24:22
Yeah

Russ Johns 24:22
Rough road. I get in the car, come down. They X ray it. I got a broken hip. I broke my hip.

Matthew O'Brien 24:30
Oh man

Russ Johns 24:33
I break my hip. Then I have surgery on Saturday. Then he needs to get back to Texas. I thought, well, I could fly home. I could drive home. I drove up with mom and my sister. However, the one of the challenge I had is like, if I fell. I would never be able to get back up again. So it's like, so I had him dropped me off. It's like this whole menagerie of things that could go wrong. In the back of my head, I'm going, this is great content.

Matthew O'Brien 25:09
The real question is what what were you supposed to learn from all that? There's got?

Russ Johns 25:14
No, I have no idea what the lesson is. But there better be a damn good lesson in this because, it's like I'm I'm buggered up and I'm

Matthew O'Brien 25:24
How are you feeling now.

Russ Johns 25:26
As long as they don't move, I'm okay.

Matthew O'Brien 25:30
That is quite something. Bro. God's got a plan. He's probably talking to you. I just don't know what he's saying.

Russ Johns 25:38
Well, he wanted me to have this show today with you. I got back. I that tried to do a show on the road yesterday and it just didn't work out. I mean, I didn't have a good enough connection. I'm not sure what wires were crossed on the on the guest either. I had to tell that story and I thought it was totally appropriate that I tell it with Matt because you know my story, all my broken bones and everything else.

Matthew O'Brien 26:07
Hold up to it, man. That's crazy.

Russ Johns 26:10
Well in and guess what?

Matthew O'Brien 26:14
Yeah

Russ Johns 26:15
We're still here doing the show.

Matthew O'Brien 26:16
We're still here doing the show. You see my sign in the back there right? Other than think Keep calm trust God.

Russ Johns 26:26
Yes, keep calm and What?

Matthew O'Brien 26:28
Trust God and that is the original think my father worked for IBM so that's keep on thinking well that's a that's that makes us even more special you're a resilient guy you know there's there's not anything that can put you down. You're here to make a difference. That's what's beautiful about you

Russ Johns 26:57
That's what's amazing about you Matthew is the fact that We could come together and do this thing. Matthew great info love this info is completely in sync with what I'm working on both of my real estate online social media expert presence. All right here.

Matthew O'Brien 27:13
Oh

Russ Johns 27:13
Yeah, she's been in social media author page. Need to get one of those. Here's my light bulb moment for the show.

Matthew O'Brien 27:20
All right, good to hear.

Russ Johns 27:23
I gotta get knowledge. I try to bring a nugget of knowledge during every episode. Right? Cool. It's usually not by me, though. So keep going. Olivia says, Russ. Do it solid for at least a year. I totally agree with you. Then Oh, no. Hope you're well and healed. Well, no. Not healed yet, but I will get there.

Matthew O'Brien 27:48
You will get there.

Russ Johns 27:49
Yeah. Good morning pirates. Gabriel. Thank you so much for being here. Well, Matthew, I know we could talk about this all night long and all day long. I'm excited about the future. I'm excited about some of the things that are going on. I think I can announce it, I think I am producing some shows for another organization.

Matthew O'Brien 28:14
Yeah

Russ Johns 28:15
Oh gee gn network. So we're going to be doing some broadcast monthly broadcasts for the oil and gas industry. That'll be kind of an exciting, fun kind of shift on focus. It's an industry that had their challenges and had their moments. Let's get out there and help them out and make sure that they have what they need and in the term in the way of content and communications, so that's, that's fantastic. Then I know we got some follow up calls a real Ruby making and putting some things in place to help some people out there in the Phoenix market as well.

Matthew O'Brien 28:49
Indeed, with a company that's building a biofuels plant for aviation fuel,

Russ Johns 28:57
That would be cool.

Matthew O'Brien 28:58
Using forest fuel.

Russ Johns 29:01
Pretty cool. That'd be, that would be very cool. That'd be. That'd be great to build a campaign around that one.

Matthew O'Brien 29:08
Yeah, maybe we can talk about on the show. What's happening is that that you need you need an ecosystem there's just not enough of this type of fuel to be created even run. That's like a true partnership outside of the box. But that's funny.

Russ Johns 29:21
Yeah.

Matthew O'Brien 29:22
Well, we do have more business to talk to I'm, I am just getting this week to get our plan together. So I will look forward to seeing this, but I really look forward to connecting with you and working with you because I love you, brother.

Russ Johns 29:38
Thank you, Matthew. I love you too, man. Let's all work together. Share a little kindness, help each other out. When you see people doing things that you can actually offer assistance, free information is not taking anything away from your business. It's just adding value to the to the equation, it's adding value to the community. Matthews always been one to create value. You've done a lot of volunteer work, you've done a lot of great work you've helped. You've inspired me many times. I wanted to bring you on here, Matt, and share some of the things you got going on. Some of the things that are really exciting to me. What's the rest of your week look like? You got any kind of large epiphany for us that we want to walk away from?

Matthew O'Brien 30:34
The Epiphany is that I'll tease it a little bit what we're building and you're, you're obviously part of it. So we'll, we'll give the real big picture, which is a podcast is the predecessor to it's that it's how you build your personal brand. It's how you start your story. It's kind of the training wheels to get the story. foundation of what you want to say. In your one minute elevator pitch and how you focus yourself and your business, then if you're good at that, you go into doing webinars, so you're going to train with PowerPoints and you're going to record yourself and you're going to be a teacher and you're going to give something away for free.

As in if that content is really good, we are going to convert that into an E learning course, where just like your program, you take a person who's an expert subject matter expert, you drop them into the Russ, john, #piratebroadcast show. We tell their story. They got really good content. In fact, they want to share something, we put them into the PowerPoint. We create a mini webinar campaign around it. And then if everyone loves it, you create an equal, you get an ebook, e learning, you get monetization of your course. That's what we're building. That's what you're working on with us because you're the artist. bit. That's what that's passion, want to work with companies that are purpose driven, you know, spiritually focused, doing good for the community. That's the ecosystem that I want to build.

Russ Johns 32:14
Perfect. Well, Matthew, thank you so much for being here. I know that we're going to come back and we're going to drop some other knowledge bombs in the future. But right now, we're just gonna go ahead and wrap this one up. I just want to remind people that if you found value in this episode, you can always go to our YouTube channel and subscribe. Click on the bell get notified. I just received a text from somebody says, hey, I've been looking for your podcast. I know you podcast every day. I can't find it. Matthew, I don't know what algorithm is going south on me today. I can't find it is not not the answer. I want to hear it. a text message is like Like, I'm on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, and you can't find me.

Matthew O'Brien 33:07
You got to know what to look for.

Russ Johns 33:11
It's all good.

Matthew O'Brien 33:12
It's all good.

Russ Johns 33:15
Well, thank you, everyone. I really appreciate you and thank you for being part of the #piratebroadcast in part of the community. I love the interaction that everybody gets from each other in the community. I love that you're growing and expanding. Also, if you're not connected to Matthew met, connect with Matthew is a amazing resource and individual. Love the guy. Make sure that you reach out and let him know that you're part of #thepiratecommunity

Matthew O'Brien 33:44
Arr matey!

Russ Johns 33:46
Arr Matey Alright kids off to another day. Now that I got my broken hip, otter got a really cool cane.

Matthew O'Brien 33:57
They're healing your way. They're coming.

Russ Johns 34:01
Alright dude take care.

Matthew O'Brien 34:03
Thanks man

Russ Johns 34:04
Bye.

Thank you for joining the #piratebroadcast. If you found this content valuable, please like, comment and share it across your social media channels. I would love the opportunity to help others grow in their business. #Thepiratesyndicate is a platform where you show up we produce the show. It's that easy. If you want to be seen, be heard and be talked about. Join #thepiratesyndicate today.



Historically, pirate broadcasting is a term used for any type of broadcasting without a broadcast license. With the internet, creating your own way of connecting has evolved.  

Join the next Pirate on your favorite Social Channel