Becoming a Credible Spokesperson for Your Business with Peter Murphy Lewis, Strategic Pete: Show Notes & Transcript

Post | Mar 18, 2025

Welcome back to Strategic Counsel by ForthRight Business! Looking for Marketing Smarts? You’re in the right place. After almost 4 years of helping to make you savvier marketers, we decided to broaden this podcast to include more business-oriented topics that will make you savvier business leaders.

In this episode of Strategic Counsel by ForthRight Business, we’re talking how to become a credible voice for your business with Peter Murphy Lewis. Listen to the episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and your other favorite podcast spots – follow and leave a 5-star review!

Episode Summary & Player
Show Notes
Strategic Counsel Summary
Transcript

Becoming a Credible Spokesperson for Your Business with Peter Murphy Lewis, Strategic Pete

Traditionally, being a spokesperson meant you were the person fronted for interviews with media. This is still the case, but the definition has broadened as the media channels have broadened. They are approached differently as the conversation is usually one-way, but should be intentionally curated all the same. How do you become a credible voice for your business when communicating across channels? We wanted you to learn from a brilliant mind in the space, so we welcomed on Peter Murphy Lewis, the Founder & CEO of Strategic Pete. They help CEOs turn marketing chaos into reliable growth. Here’s a small sample of what you will hear in this episode:

What platforms are great for leaders to ease into?
How to help people get over the fear of personal branding?
Why is it important to be a credible spokesperson?
Should you use external people as spokespeople?
How to maintain authenticity while staying strategic for the business?

And as always, if you need help in building your Strategic Counsel, don’t hesitate to reach out to us at: ForthRight-People.com.

Check out the episode, show notes, and transcript below:

Show Notes

Becoming a Credible Spokesperson for Your Business with Peter Murphy Lewis, Strategic Pete
- [0:29] Welcome to Strategic Counsel by ForthRight Business
- [3:22] Introducing Peter Murphy Lewis!
- [5:50] Why is it important to be a credible spokesperson?
- [9:50] Growing trust through people instead of legacy media
- [11:42] How to help people get over the fear of personal branding?
- [18:00] Anne’s key to overcoming fear of visibility & Peter’s reaction
- [21:21] What are some other examples of pushback and how Peter helps leader work through that?
- [26:46] How much do you want to hold on to control?
- [30:50] What platforms are great for leaders to ease into?
- [34:33] How to comment with value?
- [35:13] Should you use external people as spokespeople? And how to find influencers?
- [40:33] The hybrid space of personal brand and reaching other people’s audience
- [42:03] How to maintain authenticity while staying strategic for the business
- [49:28] Know who you’re speaking to and what value you want to add to them
- [52:50] You don’t need to know everything!
- Quick-Fire Questions
- [54:37] What’s Peter’s favorite animal to watch and why?
- [55:10] If Peter could rewrite history, what would he rewrite?
- [55:59] What is Peter reading right now?
- [57:00] Find Peter on Linkedin!
- [57:41] Make sure to follow Strategic Counsel on your favorite podcast spot and leave us a 5-star review on Apple Podcasts
- [57:48] Learn more at ForthRight-People.com and connect with us on Facebook, Instagram, and Linke dIn

What is Strategic Counsel?

Thanks for listening Strategic Counsel. Get in touch here to become more strategic.

Transcript

Please note: This transcript is not 100% accurate.

00:03
Welcome to the Strategic Counsel by Forthright Business Podcast. If you’re looking for honest, direct and unconventional conversations on how to successfully lead and operate in business, you are in the right place. In our discussions, we push on the status quo and traditional modes of thinking to reveal a fresh perspective. This unlocks opportunity for you, your team and your business. Now let’s get to it. Welcome to the Strategic Counsel Podcast. I am Anne Candido.

00:32
And I am April Martini. And today we’re going to talk about becoming a credible spokesperson for your business. So traditionally being a spokesperson meant you were the person fronted for interviews with media. And this is still the case, but this definition has really broadened as the media channels have broadened. So media now includes not only your traditional press, it can include channels like podcasting, live streamed webinars, wherever you’re basically fronting yourself.

01:01
You can even include social media channels as well. Now, we approach the conversation generally through these channels in a one-way format, but you should intentionally curate it all the same, which means that even if you’re in events or pitches and meetings, you’re really trying to be very, very intentional in order to make sure that how you’re coming off is building the credibility and the reputation that you attend for yourself and for your business.

01:31
This is a lot to try to cover in one podcast episode. So we’re going to do our best, but we’re also gonna offer some nuances where some of the key themes can be generalized to more of these broader spokespeople-esque type of moments. Also through this episode, we’re gonna be more oriented towards the business leaders who speak on behalf of their business, but everyone in some extent is

01:58
going to be a spokesperson. So your audience is just a little bit different. So no matter who you are speaking to, using these moments to promote your business in the right way is an opportunity to drive awareness and advocacy. So there’s no telling where these conversations may lead. Yes. And we’ve seen them lead to literal leads, customers, partnerships, buyouts, investments, talent acquisition. The list kind of goes on.

02:22
And when we say business leaders for the context of this episode, we are talking at all levels and across all situations. So this can be everyone within our audience, freelancers, solopreneurs, startup CEOs, to traditional small to mid-size and even large size businesses. And the last thing I will say is if you’re looking for a complimentary episode to this one on developing thought leadership for your business, check out our Marketing Smarts episode with Joe Zappa.

02:48
Yep. And we have another special guest today who’s going to help us with this topic and that’s Peter Murphy Lewis of Strategic Pete. He’s a fractional CMO who works a lot with small businesses where a lot of times the CEO is the business for a long time. So it’s really imperative they become a credible spokesperson for their business. So Peter, it’s great to have you on. want to introduce yourself and tell everybody a little bit of your story? Yeah, I’m excited to be here. Before I give the bio, I love talking about

03:17
how a personal brand can grow your revenue and to your audience, you’re saying this could be you, but I think the first time me and I chatted and we could talk about it even if it’s not the CEO. And I can think of three instances where the CEO or founder said, I don’t have the time or interest. I don’t actually feel that comfortable and found an executive. So we can get into the weeds. So if you’re listening and you’re not a founder or CEO, or you…

03:46
You are the CEO and founder and you’re like, I don’t want to do this. I can’t speak as well as Ann or I don’t look as beautiful as April or talk as much as Peter. We have a backup plan for you. That’s awesome. Yeah, we’re definitely going to get into that because I think that’s one of those mechanisms of fear that a lot of people have when it comes to being a spokesperson. But before we jump in, give us a little bit of the bio because you have a very interesting one. So give us a little bit of the bio. think everybody’s going to really love to hear about that.

04:14
Well, I’m trying to figure out what I want to do when I grow up. I’m 44 years old and I figure I’ll hit my midlife crisis in the next 15 or 20 years. But for right now, I kind of wear three different hats. So I just recently sold my first business about two months ago. And I started that back when I was 27 years old in South America. But the hats I wear today is, as you mentioned, fractional CMO. So helping two to four bigger companies in a given time.

04:43
I have a marketing agency behind me. So there’s 15 people who work with me and they do most of the retainer and execution work. And then kind of the thing that I enjoy that kind of keeps me motivated is the storytelling part of my business. So I produce, direct and host documentaries, impact stories for branded corporations or associations. Wow. Yeah.

05:08
One of the, think, very interesting thing about you is your non-traditional living environment. Did you want to share a little bit about that? I forgot about that. Yeah, yeah. So I am speaking to you right now from Wichita, Kansas, which is probably the least interesting part of my home. I live inside of a zoo. Right now there are zebras 20 yards behind me and there are cheetahs 50 yards in front of me. And this weekend I camped out right next to my house in between two trees with my eight year old son and we could hear the lions roaring at night.

05:38
Easy. So yeah, I think this is going to be a very interesting conversation as you bring in your wealth of experience. But let’s start with the why. I think that’s always a really good place to start. So why is becoming a credible spokesperson so important? And really, how have you seen it go well for businesses when they’ve had a credible spokesperson? mentioned

06:01
Sometimes it’s not the leader and sometimes it’s not the CEO. And then have you seen it not go so well when they don’t have a credible spokesperson? I guess I’ll start with the why and then get into the negatives maybe. So I think there’s some things that are fluid right now from a marketing point of view that what we say today might be different than a year from now or two years from now. But

06:25
Media is changing, right? Like legacy media, old media, traditional media, whatever word you want to use. It’s struggling for the last 10 years. It’s struggling and new media, new digital is on the rise, whether it be a podcast that no one was necessarily doing 10 years ago or it’s LinkedIn, right? I post on LinkedIn seven days a week and six months ago I wasn’t doing that. So there is a new

06:54
kind of intangible around personal branding that we still don’t know exactly where it’s going to take us. But we do know that people are listening to it more than they were companies and corporates and enterprise just a few years ago. And so I think the short answer to that why is it has a greater impact if done successfully, consistently, effectively, personal brand has a bigger impact.

07:21
across the board and I don’t mean just dollars, right? So if you’re listening to this in your HR or you’re listening to this and you’re in product, it’s not just about money. It helps with recruiting, it helps with retention, it helps with culture. People wanna be around people that they’re inspired by and it’s either be inspired by a person that is a company. Yeah, I I think that’s all so true. We were having a conversation.

07:47
recently about some of the fatigue even that’s associated with all of the channels. And okay, we had COVID where we had to be remote, then we kind of swung back the other direction and everybody’s trying to find their way, right? But I think the one thing that has really come back in speeds is the idea that people want to feel connected to other people. And so I think your point is really well taken around this idea that it’s not necessarily hearing from the company.

08:16
but it’s putting the right people in the right position to be the spokesperson or person so that you can feel that authentic connection with whatever the business is, the offering, the relationship, whatever that looks like, yeah? Yeah, and I mean, at the B2C level, I do almost all of my research today, either from a friend or on YouTube. It’s not a company who’s pitching to me. They might be doing it through an influencer, but they’re doing it a roundabout way. And at the B2B level, every single, as a marketer,

08:44
I would guarantee that every single demo that I’ve had in the last six months has come from somebody on LinkedIn or Slack channel. And it’s just, it’s just changing. And if as a company or an executive CEO, you can think about that, that allows for you to talk on so many different channels across your leadership team. You know, your product team could be in some discord channel.

09:09
Your head of customer success could be in a Slack channel, your marketer could be on LinkedIn, and it’s going to have a much bigger reach than your LinkedIn profile or even your website today with what’s happening with Google algorithms and SEO. Yeah, I think this is such an important point because I truly believe leveraging people in order to grow a business is a differentiating factor because there is such a lack of trust. I mean,

09:37
call it wherever you want to call it from wherever it’s come from. But especially as April mentioned from a COVID standpoint, there has been a significant lack of trust in media channels, right? We feel like we’ve been gaslit a little bit. We feel like we’ve been brainwashed a little bit. Then you add like, you know, the political nature of things that have come on. And then there’s always been kind of a healthy skepticism when it comes to brands anyway, and what are you trying to sell me?

10:07
Is it really gonna be good for me? And is this really what I need? So, you know, there’s all this skepticism and there’s all this just kind of like angst around like, what is really true? What can I really believe? I believe that people and growing trust in people becomes the pathway through. Because that is to the extent like the personal brand, it’s something that you can relate to. It’s something that becomes a little bit more familiar. And as you mentioned,

10:33
it’s easier to grow a personal brand because it’s inherently who you are versus a brand from the ground up or a business from the ground up. it has, makes a lot of sense that if you’re going to try to, and you want to differentiate and grow your business that you are leveraging specific people who can speak on behalf of the business. Now that all being said, and as you mentioned before,

11:01
there is an inherent fear about this. I I came from the PR world and just trying to train somebody to be a spokesperson, especially an external spokesperson, but even getting up in front of group in a meeting environment can be very stressful for people. And people naturally feel like they’re either good at this or they’re not. mean, and even right away when me and April Star are burning a marketing projects, we get the list and it’s like,

11:26
So and so will talk, so and so says don’t even ask them. I mean, so we kind of get like that, that elicit seems like one of the very first things that people ask us. So kind of address if you could this fear and like, and really kind of help us understand like, where does this come from? How do you help people really get over it? How do you find then the ways around? Because we know having that essential trust factor in through human beings is so important.

11:55
I think I would take a step back and think of the approach to this kind of personal branding in a non-digital world. I’ll take you to a story of how I kind of discovered this space outside of marketing. So I did a cool kind of pre-podcast interview about two or three years ago when I was working in…

12:21
the healthcare space and I asked an odd question preparing for the podcast, similar to way that I prepared with you all. And I asked this executive director, she was out of Denver, Colorado. I said, what’s the most unique way that you are improving your lead generation at your nursing home? She just opened a nursing home, it was big, she was in a saturated market, she didn’t know how she, and she said to me, you know what it is, Peter, we’re full. She said,

12:49
once a month I do a talk at like a city hall gym or a municipality and I teach 45 year olds to 55 year olds how to eat better and how that can help their memory in the long term. And I said, what? And she said, yeah, there’s this, everyone is thinking of Alzheimer’s, everyone’s thinking of dementia, everyone knows before the age of 50 that you can do certain things that’ll improve it. And I said, how does that help your nursing home? She said,

13:17
those are the people who are going to be sending their parents to a nursing home. And I said, this is absolutely insane. And I said, your nursing home is full. And she said, yeah. And I said, why don’t you do this on YouTube or LinkedIn or something like this? No, I don’t feel comfortable in public. said, so you can talk to 30 people in a gymnasium and this fills up your nursing home. She said, yeah. So I think the lesson that I took away from this is this doesn’t have to be on a streaming.

13:43
Right? Your personal branding is what you stand for, what your mission, what makes you tick, what makes you passionate. Even when you’re at your parent teachers conference, if you’re helping out with your your girl scouts or if you’re your local church or synagogue, right? So you don’t have to think of three, three kind of PR people talking on a podcast. You can start with baby steps in a small town. from a small town of 2000 and this person was from Denver. So that’s how I think that I would say.

14:11
If you’re nervous, slow down and think about where do you feel comfortable? Where can you make an impact? What are you particularly helpful at? And the way that I get to the question, and sorry for the long winded answer and I’ll shut up after this is I always say, when you go to a trade show and it’s coffee break time and you go out in the hallway and you have five of your peers come up, what is the one thing all of them would ask you and know that you could deliver them value?

14:40
and you’re just having a coffee before you go back in the trade show. Think about that. Now pick the one channel where you can get to more than five people and share that value and leave it evergreen. Yeah, I love the idea of, you know, reminds me of the whole, it’s not what you say, it’s how you say it, right? That adage of showing up authentically is kind of the way I’ve always thought about that. And I love the advice and we take a similar approach.

15:06
with our one-on-one coaching clients because this is always a big topic we have, right? We work with executives who are typically trying to ladder up or have just gotten into more of a senior leadership role. And this whole idea of how do I build my personal brand and my presence through that in a way that is going to allow me to feel, well, a lack of imposter syndrome in a lot of cases, but like I can do this bigger job or I can aspire to this bigger job.

15:34
but I’m still showing up the way that I want to. so similarly, we take that approach as well of like finding where can you best show up and it doesn’t have to be because I think there’s often so many preconceived notions of what that looks like, right? So you said the three PR people on the podcast point taken there and I chuckled, but it doesn’t have to be on a stage in front of 400 people, right? Or for me personally, when I was coming up,

16:01
I used to have a really big problem of being put on camera. Like I would just come across as a bumbling idiot when you would press the record button. Yet I could stand up in front of a room full of hundreds of people and talk about the branding work we were doing. And so I think hopefully people are hearing the idea that yes, there’s some homework to be done around this, but it’s not a one size fits all approach. And it’s really about being intentional in all the ways you show up. Because the other thing we talk a lot about with coaching is it’s about how you show up.

16:30
in total, not just at work. And so I love what you said about it’s the parent teacher conference too. It’s the Girl Scout troop. It’s all the ways. And you can also be practicing when it’s less risk in some of those situations where you inherently feel more comfortable in order to be like, well, okay, that didn’t go exactly how I wanted. And so when I show up in front of the boss, I need to make these tweaks before you ever have to get into those high pressure situations. You know, given another example of, I guess, kind of two things that made me think about that April is

16:59
One is most people don’t feel comfortable speaking in public, so they can’t do what you did, but they can speak in an intimate setting kind of like on this podcast. And that allows you to not only speak to many, speak to masses, right? So you can speak to thousands, hundreds, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, depending on the platform. And the other example that I thought of is I’m on the board of a bank and their marketing budget is probably less than

17:29
what actually I spend at my marketing agency. And this is a big bank. Where they spend their money is teaching all of their employees to participate in local community activities. And all they’re doing, those people are using their personal brand, which is, know, Peter goes to a local march or, you know, passes out candy or joins in the parade. And then that personal brand of me being there helps that bank grow. I love that. And I want to go back to one thing you said, I’m going to

17:58
bridge off of it. And that’s the value piece. I think that is such an important thing for people to hear because to me in all of the training that April and I have done too is the key to getting people to overcome a little bit of their fear when they feel like they’re adding value to the situation and they’re feeling like what they are putting out there, whether it’s in a meeting with five people and coffee before you’re going back out into the session or if it’s in a meeting

18:28
with 30 people or it’s on a stage is when people feel like they have value to impart, it becomes bigger, in the moment becomes bigger than their personal sense of fear or awkwardness or whatever is kind of going on with them when it comes to speaking in small or large venues. Like you said, some people feel more confident and they’re able to speak more coherently in a podcast because

18:56
it’s recorded and they can redo it and it’s more of a familiar, more intimate setting versus a live thing where once you say it, it’s out there, right? So I think I wanna really emphasize the value part. I also wanna emphasize the visibility part. And the visibility can mean a lot of things. Like you said, it can be out in the community, it can be out in this format, this channel, in podcasting, it can be out in your social media channels. Like you said, you do LinkedIn every day.

19:26
it’s an element of visibility and those two things together really help build your credibility is having something that’s important or relevant or interest to say, as well as being visible and saying it, whatever that looks like. What do you have to say any thoughts or builds on that? Because I think those are like so super critical. I have one small one. So even though I’m a documentarian as a marketer, sometimes I don’t know how to shut up. I do feel uncomfortable.

19:54
giving advice to people I don’t know. So a lot of times when people flip the question, a lot of times people ask me for advice. And then the only way that I started to feel comfortable would be say, well, I’m gonna give advice to my younger self. And for some reason, that tactic made me feel so much more comfortable to give advice. And the way that I’ve translated that into kind of my workflow of getting my voice out there on LinkedIn and YouTube is

20:24
I do pro bono consulting for a really cool platform called Growth Mentor. I don’t make a dollar off them. I don’t own anything of them. I just love that. I’ve done thousands and not thousands. I’ve done 500 free pro bono consulting on there. And what I do is I ask the people that I’m helping if I can record the call and then I promise I won’t use it publicly. I’ll use AI and I’ll strip their name and anything confidential. And then I’ll have I’ll write up a script where I’ll share my screen.

20:53
and I’ll walk people through, I’ll do a recording of how I helped this person. It just won’t say their name and it just translates for some reason it feels like I’m talking to one person instead of talking to this like lost world of space of I don’t know who I’m giving advice to. And then I’m able to share that across LinkedIn. Those are two tactics that help me feel comfortable, which as you said, where people are giving value, they feel comfortable. Those are two tactics that help me feel like I’m giving value. So when you’re…

21:19
encouraging or doing these teaching moments and Ann mentioned before kind of where things don’t go so well. What are some of the other, like you said, people are terrified to speak in public in general, right? Like what are some other examples of pushback and how do you work through that with people? Because I think these tactical examples are so good and they give people something to instantly go and do about it. So maybe just continue on that path of how that works. don’t know if I’m going to answer your

21:49
question the way that you asked it. So feel free to redirect me. But the first thing that came to mind was I regularly hear CEOs and founders afraid to give room to non-founders because they think that they’re just building up the person’s resume and given the person leverage to negotiate a better salary. So I talked to clients when I’m saying, hey, you don’t want to be on camera. You don’t want to be on a podcast. You don’t want to go to a trade show and be a

22:16
Well then, just so you know, knowing your brand, you’re missing out on a lot of opportunity, a lot of potential from your brand, so choose somebody. The negative scenario is, yes, you give the keys to someone in your executive team, they build up their own brand and then they walk away, right? But if you’re good at people, right? People wanna work with you, they wanna work with the mission, they wanna work with it, and you just have to sometimes at a point take a risk, right? You’re leaving money on the table if you don’t do it. And that happened with me, the…

22:47
the instance that I became kind of the face of an enterprise SaaS company was I was the VP of marketing and the CEO didn’t have time. He was great on camera. He would also be a great public speaker. He didn’t have any time. So I got put into this role of doing it. And you know, somebody offered me $100,000 a year salary over what I was making with him. I didn’t even think about it. didn’t take the job interview. And it’s partially because he also gave me room.

23:15
to grow and to grow into that role. I didn’t answer your question exactly, April. It made me think of like some fears and some negatives that could happen. Well, I think it did in a different way. And I think that was extremely insightful because what it led me to really want to bring to the forefront is some of this like, don’t necessarily, if it’s not me, it’s nobody, right? Like I don’t necessarily want to bring somebody else up because of that fear. And that is a big fear of

23:45
facing somebody else that is not like the key face of the business because whether it be somebody that’s within the company, whether it be an influencer, whether it be a celebrity associating the brand with or the business with somebody else that isn’t that key person is a key point of contention for a lot of people when they’re trying to develop what they want the business or the brand to mean.

24:12
And I think there’s two really important things if we’re gonna use the tactics as April had asked for that I find that’s been very, very helpful as I’ve done all this work at P &G and we had a lot of spokespeople from internal to external. One is message tracking. This is one of the biggest ways that you can ensure that you have people who aren’t gonna hijack the conversation with their own personal agendas is that they are message tracked. And message tracking.

24:37
simply means making sure you’re very clear about the overall takeaway that you want whoever your audience is to believe once you’re done talking to them or engaging with them. And then you have pillars that answer the question, well, why should they believe that? So for example, if we wanna be like the best podcast in the world, if you listen to this, we want you to think you’re the best podcast in the world, then our message tracking is, okay,

25:01
Well, what would make you believe that about this podcast? Well, one, we bring on really fantastic guests who have really great insight. Two, we have a specific format that we follow that allows people to really have really great and tangible takeaways. So you have that message track. And so when people go and speak on your behalf, it doesn’t matter if it’s internal to external, they are speaking the messages that you feel are important in order to build your brand and build your business. So I think that’s really, really important for people to hear when you’re having that kind of that fear of like, eh.

25:31
Well, I don’t want my business to be associated with any one person if it’s not me. But then also, I think on the flip side, and I’m just gonna throw this all out there and then Peter, you can take this wherever you wanna take it. I think on the flip side then, it’s being very careful too that the personal brand doesn’t monopolize or doesn’t hijack the conversation as well. And if we think about how important it is that those people have a reflection on the business, you have to be very specific about what…

26:00
Is it about my personal brand that I’m gonna bring into this conversation? And how do I wanna show up so that it reflects well on me and reflects well on the business? I mean, if I was gonna bring Elon Musk as an example, mean, how many people would, like, whether you think about Tesla, you think about Elon Musk. You think about who he is as a person and you think about how he projects and how he shows up and that reflection is back on Tesla, right? Whether you intend for it or not. So I think there’s like two sides of that that I think are really, really important.

26:29
to consider about this hijacking or this fear of having somebody coming in and not being you. So thoughts on that. What came up for you as I was sharing all that? I think where my mind goes is it has to do with how much you wanna hold on to control and hold on to the mic, right? If we’re gonna continue down this idea of there’s…

26:55
potential right there for you to grow your ran. And if you don’t feel comfortable, don’t have the capability or don’t have the time, then, and you’re not going to share it. It also means that you don’t have the capability to grow from a marketing point of view or from a revenue point of view. And you’re leaving that on the table. You you asked me April for anything negative and I can’t think of anything negative. My mind went to the fears that I deal with as a consultant. My mind went to what could potentially happen. I can’t think of one instance where any of it happened.

27:25
I I can’t think of a place where a CEO who is a little bit nervous of giving up the reins for someone else to be the face of their brand or two or three people to be the face of their brand and ended up hurting them or going against their interests. There’s a private equity client that I’ve worked with for the last year and a half and their COO is on three podcasts a week. Their CEO is on two podcasts a year. If you…

27:53
came about it in kind of a skeptical manner, you’d be like, oh, just somebody picked that person up and move them over and the brand goes to crap. Not the case, right? Like the COO is married to the brand and married to the CEO’s role that he’s given them as well. Yeah, I think that’s a really good point. And I mean, I think you both said some really insightful things in the back and forth there around one, you you said, Peter, this is my synopsis of

28:23
When you try to hold things in control like that, you’re playing too small. And so that doesn’t allow anybody else to be in and to be part of it. And, I think your point about, well, you have to make sure that people feel bought into being part of the brand. It’s not about their personal brand. You have to make sure you flip that too. And so I think the whole point is that if you want to grow,

28:48
as a leader, have to give up control at various points throughout your journey and continue to do so in order for there to be other people and you can’t do it all by yourself on an island. And so you have to constantly be pulling more people in. But I think what we’re saying here is that there’s an approach and a structure to that that can guide you, but also be freeing and help get over some of these fears. And then the payoff is

29:15
the expert Peter here telling us, I’ve never seen it go bad when people do that from my experience. I’ve had a little bit of a different experience being in corporate America for 20 years where untrained spokespeople can tend to say some silly things to some extent that then have to be cleaned up later. But well-trained people who are invested in the business

29:44
always want to do right by the business. And I think that was the point that you were trying to make. And I totally acknowledge that point. The question that I always asked, because even in the corporate side, when we were, we had multiple people to choose from, was what’s best for the business right now? And that doesn’t mean you’re going to be so short-sighted that you make a silly decision that could impact long-term. But it does help you to kind of dimensionalize what

30:12
is needed right now and then what the risk is associated with that. And I think to the point you were making, Peter, almost all of these risks can be mitigated to some extent or they can be transformed or translated or jumped off into a new version of whatever you have before. Things change all the time. mean, to expect that, you know, your CEO who’s talking right now or is on podcast three times a week right now,

30:42
is going to be the person who’s talking on behalf of the company and even a year or five years from now is actually thinking probably too long term. But what I’d to kind of get to and kind of breaking it down to some of the tangibles, we’ve talked about a lot of different channels. We’ve talked about podcasting, we’ve talked about LinkedIn, we’ve talked about even small settings. I’d love to understand from you, Peter, like in general and knowing that, you know, we say start where you’re comfortable, but just in general.

31:10
What platforms are you seeing as being like the right ones or good ones for people to start to really develop their expertise, their reputation, their credibility? The first platform that comes to mind, and I’ll give you some kind of entry-level tactics that I think anyone can do. The first platform is LinkedIn, definitely. The tactic that I can think about that if you have a little bit of fear, you don’t know how to go about execution.

31:39
is start off by commenting. So you don’t have to post anything in your own LinkedIn. Start finding people in your network who are sharing interesting things. Use a tool that will tell you what are trending topics in areas that you’re passionate about and go and leave valuable comments. It’s just like that trade show room during coffee break. Go out and help somebody with a short three to five sentence take.

32:05
and it’s supporting them. You’re not promoting yourself. If you’re too humble to be posting things about yourself or your company, it’s really easy way to do it. The second level is my favorite person on LinkedIn. I’ve done keynote talks around personal branding and I always give the example of this gentleman and he’s from Ohio. So you two are going to love this. Representing his name is Bob Spielman. He’s from a long-term care company in Columbus.

32:33
And he posts on LinkedIn every single day. It’s usually a picture of somebody in his organization. He probably has a thousand employees across his, you know, 80 different long-term care senior living communities. And it’s a picture of somebody who’s making a difference on America’s seniors. He talks why he loves them. He talks why they’re amazing. He explains how they do their work, what makes them unique and how much better his job is and seniors lives is because this person, and all he does is shout people out. He never talks about himself.

33:03
He’s never promoted in his company. And he was the first person that I met back in, you know, 2022 when we were right in the middle of COVID and everyone in healthcare was going through a staffing crisis. He’s the only person who didn’t have agency in his building. Agency means he wasn’t hiring nurses for a 12 hour shift and they would leave. He had people come from these Uber economy and they were coming to apply for him to work with him because he’s great at calling people out. So comment where you can help or shout out all the amazing people in your organization.

33:33
No, I think that’s great. mean, because I think that’s the other way of getting over the fear to some extent when you it’s another side of value, right? You’re maybe not imparting your own experience or expertise rather, but your experience, you’re showcasing what makes the business so great. And that is the other way of really differentiating in a way that

33:58
to your own personal sense of who you are as a person, right? Who’s this awesome guy who’s shouting out the people that he works with? That must be a really cool guy who really appreciates and respects people. So just think about all you’re taking away from the deliver of their message as well as the message itself and what that says about that person as well as that business. And so I think that’s really…

34:24
great example and I like what you had to say about Hennest stepping in about commenting and the only build I would put on that is comment with value too. So instead of just liking or just saying, oh, that’s so cool, add some element of just something that comes from you that kind of put your own stamp or your own mark on it that allows people to, it’s like, oh, well that was thoughtful or that was interesting or some exemplification of your own personal brand or your own personal

34:52
experience or expertise. So I think that helps to build. But I would be remiss if I didn’t talk for a second and ask you to comment about using external people as spokespeople, regardless of what the business is in need of, whether it’s because you don’t want to do it internally, or you’re trying to build either familiarity or getting access to

35:16
a group of people that you don’t necessarily have access to, which is one of the common reasons why we use influencers or more of that authentic voice. Can you speak a little bit about influencers as hired spokespeople and how do you help people navigate that and what are some strategies you give to businesses for when they want to use hired spokespeople? So one of the clients I work with is B2C client and worked with a lot of influencers. I don’t

35:44
oversee that partnership side, but we do talk about channels where we want to find influencers on and we also think about the demographic of where these influencers lie, right? So this is a high end B2C travel company, packages are costing, you know, a couple thousand dollars. And so you’re thinking, you know, do you want a 25 year old on TikTok? Do you want a 35 year old on YouTube? And so we slow down there and we think about

36:13
Who do we want to reach and what is the kind of message from a strategy point of view? I do want to kind of go back to how you can do this internally without giving up the control, controlling the narrative, which means, you know, paying attention to what you said, Anne, which is paying attention to the people who might not feel comfortable or might make some mistakes, how you can do this, you know, in audio visual format, but

36:40
making sure that you’re enabled to polish it and put the spin on it, but make it seem authentic the same way. And this takes me to an example of one of the things that I did on, I think it was in Ohio actually, I did on stage with these executives who were struggling with the staffing crisis. And I said, who in here absolutely loves their company? And I said, it has to be someone under the age of 25. And it was in a trade show and there was 600, 800 people there.

37:09
And this woman raised her hand and I said, can you ask your executive, your boss next to you, if I can have you up on stage and record you talking about your organization? The executive said, of course, like they could take the recording and not post it if they want. So the person just came up on stage. I said, give me your cell phone. They gave me their iPhone. I turned the iPhone around and I just pointed it straight at them. And I said, tell me in less than 15 words why you love working at X, Y, and Z. And they told the name of their company. They said this, this, and this. And I said, now I want you to tell me,

37:39
Who are three people inside of your organization that their epitome of your mission and why you love it. And then they named three people. And I said, what are special about them? They started going through the intangibles of the human beings. And I said, if you were gonna translate what it feels like to work here to someone who’s never been inside of your building, how would you do it? You just ask those kind of low, low hanging fruit, these softball questions with a person who works inside of it. If it goes wrong, you can erase the recording, right? And I pass that.

38:06
iPhone back to that person. said, now I’ll go pass this to executive. Tell your executive to fill up meta ads with this. And it’s an authentic video. It doesn’t look like something’s completely polished by corporate marketers. And it feels like a TikTok and it’s someone’s authentic voice. That’s a blend between kind of what we’ve been talking about. Someone’s voice, you control in the message, but it’s authentic. Well, and I think that that’s so good because that would be a clear example of the actual

38:35
mission, vision, values of the organization being put to work, where if you were in an organization where that wasn’t the case, that person wouldn’t have been able to authentically answer those questions, right? Or to your point, they wouldn’t have been at a deeper human level, which is what I’m interpreting as what happened in that instance, right? There was that deeper connection to the organization. But the other thing that as you guys were kind of going back and forth and with this latest example, I think it’s important to make the point that

39:05
We’ve talked about personal brand, we’ve talked about authenticity, we’ve talked about being intentional and all of these things. But I think where we see this work, and Anne, you made the point before about I’ve seen people not be message tracked well and it’s disastrous. What is happening here with the examples we talk about is no matter where anyone is showing up in these good examples of organizations, it’s authentic.

39:30
So with your example of Bob Spielman, right? And him putting those posts out, if he were just putting the posts out and propping people up, but in other instances, he wasn’t showing up that way, it would all fall apart, right? If you weren’t in this room with a company that actually, number one, let their person come up on stage with you, that’s a testament to the fact that they trust in what that person’s gonna say. But then number two, that person reflecting that back and that being authentic content, all of that takes a lot of work.

39:59
And now more than ever, and I think this is also where some of the fear comes in, people get nervous not only about what to say, but where to say it, how to say it. So your point about the influencers and asking those questions, right? It’s like, do I want a 25 year old on TikTok or do I want a 35 year old on YouTube? It’s just as important as the message we’re putting out and all of it has to work together. Because I think the big risk, and as you’re bringing in outside influencers and all of that, the risk gets greater is not having that solidified.

40:28
and then letting anybody go and speak on behalf of your brand or business. And that’s where I think things can fall apart really quickly. That made me think of another kind of hybrid space between personal brand and reaching somebody else’s audience as an influencer. I’m sure either both of you have done this or you’ve it or you’ve helped your clients do it. In the last year, I’ve gone on doing as a podcast takeover five different times for my clients.

40:57
And that mostly has to do with the fact that the podcast host who has me on, trust me, they know that I’m gonna make them look good. A lot of times, podcast people are really good at asking questions like the two of you, but you might not feel comfortable talking about yourself, looking at a screen by yourself. You’d feel much more comfortable if someone asked you that question. So when I just finished a podcast and any CEO can do this or any CMO or any VP of product or recording stops, say, hey April, hey Ann, I love the way that you guys do this.

41:27
Do you feel comfortable talking about yourself? How about I interview yourself? And as long as we’re not competitors, right? And that is a way for me to reach your audience right away is you’re being the influencer, but I’m making you look good in front of your audience. And we’re sharing our audience together. That’s actually a really good idea. We haven’t done that. should. kind of did it. Max, our producer, right? Flip the camera on us and he interviewed us.

41:52
He did on his podcast, but we haven’t had somebody do it to us on ours. No, we haven’t had a you know what I’m going to ask you when we turn off the recorder. Yeah, I was like, oh, OK, this is a little bit of a planted.

42:04
to go back what you guys were saying because I want to dig into this word authenticity for a second because I feel like we use that word a lot and I feel like sometimes when we say that word people feel like that gives them carte blanche and to just say whatever they want to say as long as it’s them, right? And so I want to be very clear that when you’re speaking on behalf of your business you want your personal band to show through but you also want to be intentional about what your audience needs to hear.

42:34
in order for you to get whatever your objective is for having that conversation across. So that means being very clear about who your audience is, what is their tensions, how are they feeling about you and your business right now, why would they even need you, what is your purpose for even existing, and be able to craft messages, that message track that I was talking about, that helps them to understand why they should believe you. Over everybody else out there, why should they believe you?

43:00
Now, again, you don’t want to show up in a way that is very counter to who you are because then it just doesn’t come off as feeling, I’ll use the word authentic and hopefully in this context, people understand what authentic means here where it’s like, you all know when you’re like, somebody’s just a mouthpiece, right? And whether they’re an internal or an external person, whether or not they’re just a mouthpiece, but you can drive authenticity externally too.

43:25
if the person is a lover of your business, if that person uses your business or your product, or if they can have their own personal story about your business and your product. So there’s authenticity that can be built across the board. But what I want to address, and this is kind of like where I think some people go wrong, is they feel like being a credible spokesperson means then all they need to do is just speak from the heart. I don’t have to have a plan, message, track. I don’t need to…

43:55
pay it or think about how my message is being received. I can speak off the cuff. I don’t need to practice. All of these things, think some people kind of get in their heads when they think about being a credible sports person, or they feel like if they were really good at it, they wouldn’t need to do all those things. So Peter, looking for your thoughts there a little bit as I kind of pulled out authenticity for a second, but then also some of the speak to it once I shared or once you have.

44:23
of like where people or some misconceptions people have about being a credible spokesperson and where it can sometimes go off the rails. I think I’m going to do the tactic that I told you about 20 minutes ago, which is what advice would I give my younger self? So I don’t know. I don’t know if I can give advice to the open world. What I can tell you is when I was trying to figure this out for myself and when I’ve tried to help it out with my clients,

44:51
similar to, I almost take out a spreadsheet. I did this for myself and I have something in my professional personal world, which is a spreadsheet called the life clarity map. And this life clarity map is where I approach about five tenants of my life as if it were a business. So who do I want to be as a family man? How do I want to approach wealth? How do I want to approach my body, my temple, my human being, my social life?

45:19
And then also fun, like what makes me laugh. And then I approached those five elements into with KPIs and goals. So they have goals and there’s KPIs underneath them. And there’s a spreadsheet of how I’m going to get there. And what are some indicators that show that I’m doing that? That life clarity map helps me figure out what are the things that make me tick that I think that I can offer the most amount of value on. And you’ll see if you saw my life clarity map and then you listen to hundred podcasts interviews, you’d be like, Oh,

45:48
you know, it looks like he reads this once a week. Or if you looked at my LinkedIn posts on the professional or how I help people or how I approach finances, similar, right? So like the way that I approach relationships is thinking about who can I be the most helpful person with today? And then I always think when I approach LinkedIn, how does that translate? Right? I can’t help a CEO on LinkedIn right away on LinkedIn, but I can help all the decision makers around that CEO. So usually the person who hires me as a CMO is the head of sales.

46:18
right, because they’re tired of working with five to 15 agencies. So that’s kind of the roundabout way that I’ve found my authenticity is by starting off with almost like a game plan from below of who I am as a human being, unrelated to who I am as professional. That’s an extension of it. I didn’t do the life clarity map with a client recently, but I did do it like a fast forward version. I’d spent, you know, I’d onboarded this client for six weeks in a row over many different things. We were solving lots of

46:46
and sales problems and SDRs, everything, they rebrand and so forth. And I just got a feel for who the person was. And I was able to determine the way that she talks to her staff, the way that she talks to executive team was extremely, extremely helpful. And for her a way to be authentic is when she didn’t think she was on stage, when she was only on a Zoom call with me and four other people, she was being extremely authentic. So I just found a way to put that into an AI prompt or an AI agent for her.

47:15
took the recordings and I said, can I make this for you? And I turned it into a prompt and I said, now run this through your LinkedIn posts. Yeah, it’s really interesting. And your point on the word authentic, I wish we could find a better one because it is kind of overused. Maybe you’re used in the wrong way. But I love the systematic way, Peter, that you think through things and that you use tools in order to do so, because we’ve talked about

47:44
well, authentic and intentional and all of these things. But I think a tactical example like that is really good for people because you’re taking a step back before you ever get into a situation and you’re prepared for it. And so, Anne, back to your point about the message track, these things I think go together and help you show up in all those different ways and instances. And I love the idea of having goals against them. I actually made myself a note, like, I need to do this for myself.

48:14
I’m also an Enneagram 3 and super high achiever so goals are my jam. anyway. That’s so new. She just found out she’s just found out. So now she’s been like practicing that for like the last like two weeks. And part of it is saying it, Ann. I’m really trying to do my work here. She thought she was an 8 everybody and now she founds out she’s a 3. I’m living my best life as a 3. What was life? But all of that to say.

48:41
I mean, I think the idea here is again, to do the work, but then put tools into place to help track yourself, but also give yourself guardrails and be able to try things on, but within an intentional set of items so that you don’t, like you said, Ann, kind of walk off or do something the wrong way. To me, it all reflects back on being prepared and doing the work before you end up in a situation, especially because of all the conversation we’ve had today about how people

49:09
are already fearful or uncomfortable or whatever when they have to speak. And I think sometimes the stuff that comes out of people’s mouths is not even ill intentioned, but it’s wrong because they get nervous and they don’t know what to say. So love the idea of defining the authenticity and then having these tools in place in order to make sure you’re managing it. I thought of one other item and sorry that it’s coming in. It’s not coming in an organized format. It’s coming in kind of like organic as my mind works. And it’s kind of going back to the beginning of

49:39
take a step back and think on a smaller scale. So going back to the woman who taught people how to eat better in a gymnasium, I am about to publish a book and the book is aimed at CEOs who need to build a remote team. When I first wrote the book two years ago, it was horrible because I was thinking about how people were going to read the book and what their interpretation was. When I wrote a second version of the book,

50:05
All I did was think about one human being and I thought about how could I write the most amazing book for this one person for him to scale his team. And it became so much easier and it obviously comes across authentic because I’m speaking to one human being and similar to my documentary. I first started doing my first TV show that I started as a host was about eight years ago. My first three episodes, I was so nervous because I was thinking about what are the millions of people going to think when they see me on TV? Well now,

50:35
All I do is I think about the family members of the people that I’m interviewing and I’m leaving them a small record, a small archive for them to remember this person if they were to pass away tomorrow. And it makes my job so much easier. It’s like the life clarity map goes back to my needs and how I can help myself, not to how I can help the world on LinkedIn. I think that is gold and I hope everybody heard that and if they didn’t, that they rewind and hear that again because

51:04
That is, again, a really big key is knowing who you’re talking to and what impact you want to generate with that person. And it is getting very clear on a person. Me and April are putting the finishing touches in our book too. And it started as all on personal branding, ironically. And it started with this really big target. And we’re like, we can’t like cover everything we want to cover on this big target. we’re like, and it gets so diluted when it’s such on a big target.

51:32
The more we’ve narrowed it down and we’re like very clear now who we’re talking to, we’re talking to struggling middle managers, all of a sudden everything has tangibility. It has relatability. It has practical use. has the stories become more stories of insight that people can take and then they can replicate and it becomes so much richer. And I think a lot of people are very afraid to do that because they feel like, oh, I’m niching down.

51:56
really when becoming a credible spokesperson, it is about niching down. That’s where you need to start. You need to start with who you’re gonna add the most value to and build it with that. Like the woman did with the 20 people in the gymnasium. She wasn’t looking to like talk to everybody in the whole entire town. She’s looking, who’s gonna have the most appeal or how’s my business gonna have them, or who’s my business gonna have the most appeal with? And then how can I impart value in order for them to see that I am the right choice for them?

52:25
And how do I continue to nurture that in order for them to then finally make a choice? Because these 45 to 55 year olds, yes, it might be their parents today, it might be them tomorrow, right? And so it continues to be an ongoing conversation and that’s really where it starts. That’s the center of your bullseye and then it halos from there. And that’s why I also think it’s very important. I’m gonna bring in a bridge to another tactic, which is bridging. Because a lot of fears that lot of people have is like,

52:51
Hey, if somebody asks me a question I don’t know how to answer to, I’m gonna look like an idiot, right? And I think that’s another one of the fallacies that I want people to hear is that you don’t need to know the answers to every single question. There’s this wonderful strategy which we use in PR all the time called bridging, which allows you to bridge back to your message track. You could say, well, if somebody asks you question, I don’t know a lot about that, but that makes me think of this.

53:16
And that makes, and then you bring another piece of relevant expertise or advice and may not be answering their question directly. And sometimes it’s like, I can get back to you on that or you follow up with that later, but it allows you to impart wisdom that may even add richness to the conversation that they didn’t even anticipate, or maybe you’re answering the question, you understand the question they’re asking a little bit better than the way that they’re asking it. So I think that.

53:42
all of that kind of combined together provides a lot of wonderful strategies and tactics. So before we kind of like close this out, because we’ve covered a ton and we’re going to have some wasn’t on your original, your original discussion guide, Peter, but we have some rapid fires for you before we allow you to close this out. But was there any other strategies, anything else that’s kind of popping up? I love the organic way your mind’s working. So I want to make sure we’re extracting all of that out as it’s kind of coming up for you. Anything else that you would want to share with our listeners?

54:11
I can’t think of anything. Thanks for putting up with my scrambled brain. Well, you know what? find that’s why, you sometimes you just use as a discussion because you just never know what’s going to come up and it takes you to unexpected places. So I love your scrambled brain. I think it’s been a fabulous complement to this discussion and bright, providing a lot of really great insights and jump offs for some really fabulous discussion. But before we close out, you’re open to some rapid fires. Let’s do it.

54:41
All right, since you live in a zoo, your favorite animal to watch in the zoo and why? Goat. It’s the goat. I think it’s because they come over and look at you goofy. I think it’s because they’re gentle with toddlers. I think it’s because they make sounds all day long. I don’t know. You would think if I would see cheetahs and zebras and rhinos and hippos all day long, it would be one of those. It’s a goat. I love that.

55:11
Okay, if you could rewrite history, was one thing you would rewrite? I think it has to do around cell phone addiction. I think that if we could slow down in 2005 when social media came in, in 2015 when we all started to have two cell phones and carry it on our body, I think if we could slow down and think about what we were missing out on connection and understanding others.

55:39
we would be in a better place. And I think I’m optimistic. I think in five years, we’re going to be there. I think there’s a backlash. I wish we didn’t have to wait 15 years to learn it. My daughters criticize me. They say I’m addicted to Hay Day. And I said, no, I’m not addicted. I just like to play a lot. Nice little reframe. It makes me feel better. Third and final rapid fire. What are you reading right now? I read it on Kindle. So I’m not going to get the name perfectly. I think the name of the author is called

56:09
Hampton Sides. It’s a biography about Captain Cook in the 1770s, his third journey around the world. I read two books previously by him around the person who killed Martin Luther King Jr., which is fabulous, and how he escaped out of jail. And then a book about how we left U.S. soldiers in World War II over in Southeast Asia and then came back and got him. So go check. It’s Hampton something. And if you just Google Hampton and Captain Cook, you’ll find it.

56:36
So my history question actually has a lot of relevance. reading a lot of history. See? I do. I almost finished my history degree in undergrad. It’s what I loved most in college. Oh, you and my mom would get along great. All the other little kids were going to Disney World. I was going to battlefield. So I get it. Well, now that’s really fun rapid fire responses. Before we close it out, tell everybody where to find you. Yeah, best place is LinkedIn.

57:06
think that I am the only Peter Murphy Lewis on LinkedIn. Add me as a friend, I accept everybody. You can even send me some spam if you want to, I usually don’t block you. And go connect, send me a message about what you loved about the conversation and go follow Bob Spielman and LinkedIn for some early easy wins for you to start shouting out people on your team. Oh, I love that. And that we encourage all our listeners to take at least one powerful insight, to do the one that Peter’s just said, I think is a great one.

57:35
and put it into practice. And remember, Strategic Counsel is only effective if you put it into action. Did we spark something with this episode that you want to talk about further? Reach out to us through our website, ForthRight-People.com. We can help you customize what you have heard to move your business and make sure to follow or subscribe to Strategic Counsel on your favorite podcast platform!