So What? What is the PESO Model™?

Hello and welcome to So What the Trust Insights live stream. Man, I haven't broken anything yet. This is fantastic. We are here. Not yet.

It's still early, though. We've got you've never may have noticed that of course Katie Robert, CEO, is not here. She is traveling this week, as is Christopher Penn. So I am stuck. They've left the clown in charge of the circus.

Um and brought me in. I mean, this is great. And turn the clowning up another night just for you. The one and only Jenny Dietrich is here. She is founder and CEO of Armit Dietrich.

Um and you probably already know her from the Spin Sucks Podcast, SpinSex website, uh Slack community. She is the creator of the peso model, which we're going to be talking about. That's what and you know, normally I kind of get into the stories, but I have to follow the so what, you know, very dry and to the point thing. We have promised peso, and we are going to deliver that right out of the date here. Everybody gets what they want.

Um we've got a bunch of live streamers on too. Feel free to throw in questions uh via the chat from whether it's LinkedIn or YouTube, wherever you're watching. Uh but Jenny, thanks for joining me today. It is my pleasure. And I have to tell you that 30 seconds lasts forever in two occasions.

One, when you're riding your bike as fast and as hard as you can for 30 seconds. And two, when you're waiting for this to start. No, okay. So the the run time. I was like 36, 35.

Oh my gosh, we're not there yet. It hasn't happened. No, and I have a whole little routine. I have this special claw that I have to wave in front of the camera right before uh time elapses. It's just become a thing that we do because it makes everybody else laugh.

I don't know why I do it. Because it's weird, but you're fine. So yeah, here we go. Chip, uh your co-host is uh already heckling from the crowd. Yeah, that does seem appropriate.

I agree. All right, so we'll hide that and go. But we do let's jump in. Now you've come up with a framework for marketing communications PR called Peso. Tell us about that.

Give us the thumbnail of what it is and what it does and go from there. Sure. Um, so the the genesis of Peso model, which is paid media, earned media, shared media, and owned media, um, really was in my agency. We were trying to figure out how to create work that was more consistent and drove results for our clients. And what we found is that, you know, 10 years ago, we were doing a lot of media relations and reputation and crisis work, which is great and it's profitable and all those kinds of things.

But when there's not something happening, there's a lull, right? And clients don't like to pay an agency when it they're seeming not seemingly not doing anything. And because there would be sort of these peaks and valleys, clients would go, well, what are you doing right now? And we're like, well, we're pitching and we're and they they don't, they weren't able to comprehend that. And so we were looking for things that we could sort of even it out so that during those valleys we had something that was consistently going on that we could use to drive results.

And this was at a time that social media was becoming a thing, and certainly uh blogging was becoming a thing. Podcasting wasn't quite there, but it was on the cusp. So there were these things that were happening that we were like, oh wow, we can actually use these tactics in our toolbox to help sort of even out the work so that there's something always going on, and use that to drive results that an executive cares about. So when I wrote Spin Sex the book, I talked about the process and I talked about how we were doing this and why, and you know, the kinds of things that you could do. You could do blogging, you could do social media, you could do search engine marketing, you could do influencer marketing.

There were all these things that you could do. And my publisher said, This is great, it needs a name. And I was like, But I already wrote the book. She's like, No, we can we can do a second draft. I'm like, no, I already wrote the book.

And she's like, no, we're gonna do a second draft. And I was like, oh, I don't want to do a second draft. So we went round and round and round, and they actually helped me get okay to use peso because it's a currency, right? So we didn't know if there was gonna be a copyright issue. And so they worked us through that.

And then, and so we we named it the PASA model. And then uh she said, Great, we need uh graphic to go with it. And I'm like, but I already wrote the book, and she's like, Yeah, but we can do a third draft. And I'm like, oh my gosh. Never ends.

Yeah, it never ends. Um, so I hired a designer and he created a graphic, and the book was published, and here we are. Yeah, finally. But it is it is just a classic example of taking something really huge and complicated and building a framework around it, and now anybody can run with it because I we have our whole traction model that we've put together, and Peso just fits right into it. There's a whole chunk of like all the possible marketing things you can do.

You just plug Peso right in there, and it like solves all those. It solves it all, yep. And gets it to go. Now, how about you were talking about measuring too, though, and being able to kind of show what you do. How does measurement fit into to Peso?

And where do you go with that? Sure. One of the things I think from a PR perspective, especially is that we are really challenged with measuring the work that we do because we do brand awareness, right? So brand awareness is is extremely challenging to measure. You can certainly do it with you know aided and unaided brand awareness studies.

It's expensive, you can really only do them once a year. You can do sentiment studies, you can you can do those kinds of things. But what we have found, especially in the last five or so years, is that executives don't really care. What they care about is is this money I'm spending with you translating to dollars? And if you can't prove that, you're we're not gonna work with you.

So bring bringing in the Peso model as your foundation really helps with that, because now you have more than just media relations. You have content, you have social media, you have search engine marketing, you have all these other pieces that you can measure and you can show. Yeah, so okay, we did some earned media, we did some media relations, and a story ran in the Wall Street Journal. And here's what happened we had a 30% increase in webs unique website visitors, and here's what they did 10% of those subscribed to our our marketing um email, and you know, five percent downloaded content, and like you can actually prove that now, especially from a digital perspective. And it the peso model allows you to have all those tactics in your toolbox to be able to do that.

Yeah, and this it's good that you mentioned this five year window too, because as part of this deal as co-hosting today, uh, is that I'm gonna run this as marketing over coffee next week. So we're gonna repurpose it. Oh, great. And so for our listeners over there, we you've talked to them last time we talked to us back just before the pandemic. And one of the things that you had laid out then was that you thought that over the next five years that communications and PR would just be rolled into marketing almost entirely, just because of what you just mentioned about executives that only care about results, they don't care about the structure.

But has that really come to pass? I mean, or do executives now just view this all as marketing, or is PR com still a thing? It depends for sure. It depends on the organization and what the executive sort of how the executive was quote unquote raised. You know, if an executive came up through the ranks on the sales side, they don't give a shit.

If they came up through the ranks and communications was a big part of what they know, then they do. So we would have one client that's a global client and they have a 20 person communications team. We have another client that has a 35-person team, but that it's the marketing team, it folds under the chief marketing officer and everything, even the communications team follow fall falls under that. So it depends. And we have another client where we report into HR.

So it's it used to be that we only reported to the CEO, and now we're reporting to a CMO or HR in some cases, or still the CEO. Okay. And uh Chip did ask, will I be paying Ginny for the extra second use? And I have to say, yes, we will be paying in double the Totino's party pizza that we normally send to Gina Jenny for this kind of stuff. Such a great inside joke.

How about you know, bring us up to date too, though? So again, as last time we talked to us prior to COVID, how has that changed everything? Like I know you were just getting involved with Syracuse, like everything was gonna take off. You were gonna be doing peso at the college level, and suddenly there's no college. So what's you know gone on there?

Suddenly there's no college, yeah. So we did we launched the peso model in partnership with Syracuse University on February, it was like February 20th, I think, of 2020. And we all know what happened. Um, but the good news is is that what we found is it it didn't it didn't go the way that we planned, which I think is is the case with most things, right? Um, but because everybody was learning virtually and the peso model course is a virtual course, we were able to insert it into classes really easily.

And we still do that. So I think we're in 40, 41, between 41 and 43 colleges now, uh universities now into their PR programs. Um, and we've created this opportunity for anybody who's graduating with a PR marketing journalism or advertising degree in many of those cases, has a Peso model certification, which is fantastic. Um and then what we have found is on the the professional side, the you know, uh a PR or marketing professional, they are taking it as well to either evolve their skill set, learn a new skill set, learn how to implement the peso model, um, and become certified in the model. So we we do a nice little run there as well.

All right, and one thing that gets passed up, a lot of you know, people focus on being able to dump this stuff into channels specifically, but a big thing that you talk about that I love to hear more about is having a communication strategy where you're running the same stuff across every channel, where you're getting some you know value by having it be on all fronts because so many organizations are just pumping stuff, you know, it's completely unrelated garbage across the channel. So, how do you get your clients you know on all in order and get all the ducks in a line so that it's all moving in the same direction? Sometimes it's very challenging. Um we have one client who hired us almost two years ago and said we want you to implement the PACEL model inside our organization. And we were like, great.

And my team and I got in there and realized that they had each of the media types, they they had teams for a paid, they had a paid team, call it they call it growth marketing, they had an earned team communications, they had a social team, and they had um a content team, which was great, but they didn't talk to one another. So you're right, all this stuff was happening, but they weren't working together. And then they also have an internal team who was creating their own content and sharing it internally, and employees were super excited about it, but it wasn't going external at all. Um, so that's what we found is we they had these great big silos. So we probably spent the first 13 or 14 months breaking those silos down and helping them develop relationships with other people on the teams and not hoarding information and you know, sharing here's our editorial calendar, or what can we do to boost some of this content or do some sponsor content?

So it, you know, we in I would say in the last seven months we've actually been able to start doing real PASO model work, but it took us more than a year to be able to do that. Yeah, it's just kind of crazy how that uh again, people can just be going in different directions and to take over a year to get it in line and and back where it should be. Yeah. Um, I had a question come in, John Blue said he he was not able to make it today, but he did want to ask about press releases. What's your current take on that's easy?

And that'll work for audio only. So John, you heard that first. Is there nothing left of that then? Do you is completely throw that overboard? Yeah, I mean, there are situations if you're doing investor relations for sure, like if you have to report through the SEC, absolutely you need to uh do a news release.

But for the most part, nobody really cares anymore. And you're pitched all the time, John. Like can does it work for you? No. Oh my god, those go to the dumpster so fast.

Right? So fast. You don't care. No one cares. Send me a three sentence email that tells me why I should pay attention, why I care, and what you know.

And by golly, if I get one more email that says, I love the Spin Sex podcast, you should have so and so as a guest. We don't have guests. Yeah, that's worse for you. Like we at least do have guests, uh, not here, but on marketing over coffee. So that's the but yeah, the best is when too they you know, they screw up the uh the form and it's like, hey, I love every episode you do of the marketing book podcast.

And I'm like, yeah, no, that was for Doug, you know. I'm the next guy. Right. That's that's great. Yeah, you know, they just mess this up.

We should just share. Um yeah, I've got one Surya actually sent in a a question here asking about as you're doing campaigns, you know, how do you judge what's successful or not? And you know, is there any other model besides peso to consider for that? I mean, I don't think there's any other model besides peso, but certainly there are integrated marketing communications models that you can use that work. Um, but you know, one of the things that we look at is, and and I will I'm gonna take this with a grain of salt if you do do consumer or nonprofit work because we only do B2B, but the work that we do has to be related to marketing leads, marketing qualified leads, sales qualified leads, and conversions.

It just does. Everything that we do has to point to one of those four things. Um, and because we're using the PASO model, we can say, okay, our earned media efforts drove this number of marketing leads, and then our own media efforts drove took those marketing leads and and drove a certain percent of them to marketing qualified. And then, you know, all this other stuff that we do from a PASO model perspective generated sales qualified leads, and then we hand it over to the sales team. So when we're reporting on things, I'm really careful to say the marketing and communications program influenced, and then I say a dollar amount.

So I just sent a report to a client yesterday for February, and it said our program in February influenced $379,000 in revenue. The sales team gets credit for converting that, right? But we have influenced that from by lead generate nurturing them through the process. Yeah, that makes sense. And how about as far as the marketing mix, too?

Because we've talked in the past about how you know PESO it works, but actually paid is not the first choice. Like most people are would lead with owned. Do you have a formula for that, or is it that you go into every client and come up with a plan based on what they're doing? Yeah, it depends on on the organizational goals, right? I mean, there are some instances where you would start with paid.

If you're trying to sell widgets in the next two weeks and sell out of target, that's a great place to start with paid. But for the most part, it especially if you're using PASO from a um a commas perspective, it really is you're building thought leadership authority and reputation. And to do that, you need to start with owned. Okay. Uh we have another comment.

Uh our campaign is crowned by Bernie in the background. Rebecca! Thank you for notificing. Oh, that's about it it looked like an eagle. Oh no, it's Bernie.

He has the mittens and everything. And he's masked up. Oh, yeah. He's at the uh inaugurational uh festival there with the my mom made that for me. Oh, no way, that's handmade too.

That's not true. Yeah, she made that. That's bespoke. All right. Well, uh swing on over to uh Pinterest for only 99.95.

You can hit your own Bernie doll made. We'll set this up a small fee for Jenny's mom. Uh, but that'll be excellent. Uh how about now, since we last talked, TikTok is on the scene. Is that on your radar at all?

Are you doing anything with that? And is that something that people need to be paying attention to? I mean, it's like anything else, right? It depends. Um, I would say for consumer businesses, especially fashion and food, yeah, you should be.

Uh for B2B brands that we work with, no. And I'm also really paying close attention to what is happening from a government regulation perspective. There was an article just this morning that talked about, you know, Biden is behind the bill to start to ban TikTok. And they've already banned it on government phones, which I think makes sense. Um, but that that could become an issue for sure.

And so you have to really pay attention, not to just the trend and what's happening and how you can pr potentially use it in your own business and your own comms or marketing program, uh, but what's happening more globally as well, because it could very well go away tomorrow. Yeah, there's so much going on in that front. I don't know what happened here, but StreamYard suddenly just woke up and pumped like 25 comments into the scream group. So I don't know what uh something was broken. And even my camera is out of focus too.

I don't know what the hell this is ridiculous. This is what happens. This is what happens when they leave you in charge. Yeah, I was gonna say this is the dumpster fire everybody's been waiting for in the next. We we finally got all right.

There we are. I'm back. This is back. Uh Rebecca asked if your mom would make a chip griffin doll. So absolutely, yes.

I will have her do that. That's a really good idea, Rebecca. I like it. I'll keep it back there during the agency leadership podcast. Yeah, if it's at a voodoo doll that you could stab.

Every time I stab him, he's like, well, it depends. It depends. All right, back on track. Let's get the bus back where it needs to be going here. Um Twitter, everything going on over there.

Are you steering folks away from that? Is that still should that be part of your S factor? You know, we're not stirring people away. I laughed out loud when uh Chris left earlier this week. Was it earlier this week that the Twitter was down because somebody was messing with something?

And it's like Chris takes great joy in in the dumpster fire. It makes me laugh. It makes me laugh really hard. Um, but we're not steering people away because still, I mean, for what we do for a living, still reporters are using it pretty liberally to find sources and story ideas. So from a communications perspective, we are definitely not stirring people away.

Um, but we aren't also aren't doing anything new. Like we were launching a new podcast with a client and they wanted to do it on Twitter, Twitter Live, and we were like, new. Let's stay away from that. Let's not put our eggs in that basket. Um, so you know, from that perspective, we are steering them away, but not entirely.

Yeah, that makes sense. I don't know. It's just so bizarre. Well, how about as a comms person for yourself? It's it's so bizarre that we have a media outlet and yet all of the internal company politics are playing out right in front on the stage in front of us.

I mean, it's and the insane thing is that it's crossing over to Tesla as a public company, too. I mean, I don't it's nuts. Some uh what happened last something happened last week. Their stock price dropped because I think because of the recalls. And I was like, well, that's because their founder is busy putting another company into the ground, like doing random stuff.

Yeah, I it's I've never seen anything like this. It's amazing. We'll keep an eye on it. But so that's uh yeah, uh again, something to steer. But it is interesting also that there is no recipe for channels because like we see this all the time.

We see so many customers that you know, just LinkedIn is where they need to be because they're that B2B audience and that's where the fit is. But then there's other clients where it's still Facebook ads. I mean, for everything that people have said about Facebook too, there's folks where that's you know where their audience is. Yep. Um I don't know what is there anything new on that front too, as far as when you go in with the client and start putting this together, determining which channels you want to run with.

I mean, if they have some successful ones, great, but where do you start to look when you want to suggest other things to try? We so it's a it depends on the organization for sure, but what we find is that most are on LinkedIn and not doing anything else. And so we look at, you know, we'll look at Instagram for sure, depending on on which organization it is. We look at Facebook as well. But Instagram ads, they work really well.

And I know that people are like, I don't want to give them Facebook any money, but man, they make you a lot of money. Make you a lot of money. Yeah, yeah. No, the the turnaround on that kind of stuff is just amazing. If it works right for you, you can just jump into it.

How about and working that for customers? I mean, as far as how far uh you know your agency goes, do you actually get in and start to do that kind of actual tactics for customers or what what's the breadth of service that you cover? Yeah, I mean, we have I I mentioned that we have one client that does that has a 20-person comms team. And so from for with them, what we're really doing is strategic coaching and consulting and helping them just you know outline a strategy and then giving them a plan to execute internally. And then we have several clients who don't have a marketing person, and so we become the marketing team for them.

Um in those cases, the the goal is to hire onboard and train a marketing team so that eventually we either exit or we do more strategic strategic consulting, but that's actually the work we love the most because we're we're inside, but not employees, and it's really fun work. It's really fun work. Yeah, I mean, what do you enjoy the most? I know one thing that with stuff like that is you do get to be the truth teller. You know, so many organizations are doing campaigns and the people you know involved with them are vested in their success, so they don't always give the best info, right?

Um what other things do you enjoy about it though? What else makes it you know the strategic side better to work? Yeah, I I think it's that it's also, I mean, just doing the work in a different way for an organization and showing success. I mean, like I mentioned earlier, we influenced in February $379,000 in revenue for a client in one month. That's super compelling, right?

I mean, that's really fun work to be able to say this is everything that we're doing. And we also have an opportunity to to your point where we can say, this isn't working like we thought it would, so let's try this. And many executives really appreciate that approach where they're like, okay, well, let's stop spending the money there and let's put it into into here. You know, for instance, we have one client who was spending about $7,500 a month on Google Ads with literally no success. None.

But no, they didn't have anybody running it. They just had ads created and versus. And I was like, no. So we shut the ads off probably for about six months, and then we said, okay, we're ready to reinstate this, but you have to actually have somebody running it. So then we brought somebody from my team in to run those ads for them.

But yeah, it's it's it's really compelling. I mean, because we get to actually do the work, which is a lot more fun than coaching and consulting. Yeah, and there is the the value of now when you talk to other clients, you know what you're talking about. You know, you actually have your hands dirty and know how that stuff runs. Yep.

Uh one thing in the rundown, we did promise that we would talk about where to get training on Peso for your agency. I know you have you have the Slack community, you have courses available. What are the best ways to get your team up and running with this? We have the PASO model certification, which is a certificate certificate from Syracuse University from their um school of public communications. Um it's probably the most robust thing that you can do.

There's certainly, you know, places on the internet, like with PRSA and other places where I've done less expensive training, but it isn't the full robust um plan, and it doesn't include the certification. So if you want to be certified in the model, the best way to do it is you can find it on SpinSucks. Um, but get that certificate from Syracuse while you're doing it. All right, that sounds great. Yeah, I know.

You know, normally we have to have people tell us where to plug them, but I know spin sucks.com is just the one stop. It's easy. We don't have to spend time. And so I wanted to give a plug too for Strava. We are both on Strava.

I always get a laugh whenever I do a workout and I see a thumbs up from Ginny, it's her sticking her tongue out at me on my watch. Which my husband bought me a shirt for Christmas that says if it's not on Strava, it doesn't, it didn't happen. Yeah, yeah. People don't realize the dark side to Strava. You know, people think it's like a happy workout thing.

They don't realize that there are groups of people who punish those who don't post, you know. Yep, it's true. To dig way back on old school references. Um it seems I have like the wheel of shame that we usually spin, and it's uh, you know, NFTs, AI or whatever the shiny object of the week is. But we're talk beforehand about AI.

Is there anything peso related in AI that you're looking at or interesting? I mean, I obviously copywriting is been talked a lot about lately, but what's on your radar? Yeah, I would say the copywriting for sure is, you know, um, I have a really, really talented writer on my team, and she had writer's block a couple of weeks ago, and she's like, I just I can't get past this, and I know I have a deadline. And I was like, here's what I want you to do. I want you to go to ChatGBT, I want you to log in, and I want it to create a first draft for you.

And she's like, Can I do that? And I'm like, I'm your boss, and I'm telling you to. So she did. I was like, I don't want the first draft. I don't want what chat GPT pushes out, but it'll give you something to react to so you're not staring at a blank screen, and it worked for her.

So, you know, we are looking at it from that perspective. I love Chris Penn's analysis of all this, which was probably five years ago now, where he said the robots aren't going to replace us, but you have to sort of become the conductor of the orchestra. So you have to know enough about all of the pieces to be able to say, yes, that's doing it correctly. No, that's not. Here's what needs to be improved.

Here's what we're gonna tweak. So you're conducting the orchestra of artificial intelligence to be able to get what you need. And I think that's a really good description of where we're going. Yeah, it's interesting, all the stuff that he's thrown out about that. You know, it's just obvious that his prompts are so much more effective and powerful than the average person because he's thinking about it as a designer.

Even last week he was talking about just telling Chat GBT to list your data and separate it with pipes, because then it will do hashes that you can just import right into a spreadsheet, you know. And I was like, Oh my god, I never thought of pipes. I wouldn't have thought of that either. Yeah, so again, right on mark of like, oh yeah, it makes the world better for people like Chris who are already in positions of power. For the rest of us, we're just in trouble.

We're just in trouble. But that's kind of how that rolls. Um, all right, yeah. Uh so again, anything else going on though on this front that you have to talk about? You have events coming up, or what's uh you know, keeping you busy for the next few months?

Uh no, we don't. Um, you know, family is keeping me extraordinarily busy right now. Um, but before we started recording, I think you guys are seeing this too. We've seen a massive in top in input on um speaking engagements, like massive in the last two weeks. So I think people are getting back out there and hiring speakers again and doing events again, and you know, it only took three years, but here we are.

All right, well, so family stuff has been keeping you busy. Any, you know, reading, books, music, movies, anything else keeping you, you know, that's got you interested that you can recommend. I will take that laugh as a not so much. No, I I'm laughing because uh we're watching Descendants right now. Okay.

So it's we watched zombies one, two, and three last weekend on Disney Plus. So yeah, that's yeah. You're big Disney Plus family. Okay, that sounds good. There's yeah, it for the right age group, you know, you cannot beat that service.

That's that's the best money you'll ever spend in entertaining the 12 and under crew, that's for sure. All right, that sounds good. Well, again, spins.com if you want more. Uh, I have to do all the trust insights plugs, which I have failed to do as we go here. Uh the biggest one is uh where where is this danger?

Oh no. No, no, this is legit. Come on over to TrustInsights.ai slash analytics for marketers. Ginny is over there and watching, so if you ask her a question, she may even answer it. And of course, the Spin Suck Slack group is a great place for PR and communications folks.

Uh otherwise, that's all I've got. Ginny, thanks for spending some time with me today. That was so fun. I was happy to. They should go on vacation more often.

I'm not gonna tell them that. You can tell them that. I can tell them that. I'll tell them that. This week, let me do the roll out.

We thank everybody for taking the time to check out our show today. That's gonna do it for this week. We will see you next week. And I don't know how else I'm gonna end that. This is I've never had to end the show before.

I'm just like stuck with I could tell about that amazing time that I swam the English channel. And then Thanks for watching today. Be sure to subscribe to our show wherever you're watching it. For more resources and to learn more, check out the Trust Insights podcast at TrustInsights.ai slash T I podcast. At our weekly email newsletter at TrustInsights.ai slash newsletter.

Got questions about what you saw in today's episode? Join our free Analytics for Marketers Slack group at TrustInsights.ai slash analytics for marketers. See you next time. Go home.