Welcome to the Before You Market Podcast, where we challenge you to “Rethink Marketing.” To help us in the endeavor, we’ve invited some of the best marketers in the business to enlighten you on your path to a brand-first awakening.
Joe Pulizzi, along with past BYM guest Robert Rose, is one of my go-to experts for content marketing. Heck, he founded the Content Marketing Institute, which is still one of the best resources for content marketing and marketing in general. Some even call him the Godfather of Content Marketing. He and Robert also co-host the This Old Marketing podcast. And he loves the color orange, like, a lot. In this episode, we cover:
Watch the full episode below!
Joe Pulizzi is a pioneering figure in content marketing, best known as the founder of the Content Marketing Institute (CMI), a leading resource for educating businesses on content strategy. He is also the creator of Content Marketing World, the largest annual event in the industry. Pulizzi has authored several influential books, including Epic Content Marketing, Killing Marketing, and his latest, Content Entrepreneur. He is recognized for shaping how modern businesses use content to build audiences and drive customer engagement. In addition to his work in marketing, he co-founded The Tilt, focusing on empowering content creators.
Jon Bailey 00:02
All right, and we are recording, ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Before You Market podcast where we challenge you to Yes, that's right: Rethink marketing. To help us in this endeavor, we have invited some of the best marketers in the business to enlighten you on your path to what we have dubbed a brand-first awakening. So Joe Pulizzi, along with past before you market guest Robert Rose is one of my all-time go-to experts for content marketing. He even started, founded the Content Marketing Institute. So you could, you could say, you know, he's pretty much the godfather of content marketing. He and Robert also co-host a great podcast called This Old Marketing Podcast To Play On This Old House, and he loves the color orange, like a lot. Like, it's almost an obsession. So Joe, please take a moment and introduce yourself.
Joe Pulizzi 01:16
Jon, thank you for having me. Actually, I'm not wearing the full orange today. I'm wearing the the orange highlighted because I didn't want to comment too strong. I was sensitive to that. It's great being here. I'm, as you said, I've been in the marketing, content, storytelling business for 25 years now. So I started in publishing and sort of took those chops that I learned in publishing and brought it over to marketing, and I still do it today. And you mentioned the podcast, and I've got a newsletter called The Orange Letter, that's my personal newsletter. And really what I'm keeping busy with now is launched a new initiative with publisher Lulu called tilt publishing. We basically help content creators and marketers launch their books, and when they do that to sell directly as well, which is very near and dear to my heart, maybe we'll get into some of that discussion.Going direct and not around through social and Amazon and Facebook and all those other things. So just trying to, you know, as I, I change careers again, just trying to continue to educate people about the importance of storytelling, and here we are going to talk about it. Today. You're doing the good work, and we, as content creators, absolutely appreciate you and all of those you work with.
Jon Bailey 02:31
So it's been a while since you and I have last spoke, and much has changed in your world, and much has changed in the world around us. We are, I believe, on the verge of World War Three, which should result in some great movies and songs, which I'm looking forward to. So we also, we obey our robot overlords. So robots, if you watching, we're obeying and the rock now, Dwayne The Rock Johnson now actually feels like a viable option for President United States.
Joe Pulizzi 03:07
Yes absolutely, I would definitely vote for him.
Jon Bailey 03:08
Oh, no question, these are strange times, ladies and gentlemen.We have lots to cover here, and I'm excited. Joe, are you excited? You're ready.
Joe Pulizzi 03:20
I'm excited. I want to do this. Let's go.
Jon Bailey 03:22
Let's do this. So I asked your buddy, Robert Rose, the same question, and wanted your take. So Brand3 is on a mission, as we said, to bring about a brand-first awakening in marketing. So from a content standpoint, how important is brand now with content marketing, and do you see it growing in importance in the future?
Joe Pulizzi 03:46
I think it's severely important and still severely underutilized by most organizations. I would have thought that by this point, we would have moved further from interruption marketing, which is what most of us still do, toward positioning ourselves as a leading expert through valuable content creation for a targeted audience. My goal is to increase brand awareness or positioning by consistently delivering helpful information to my target audience. The best approach is to ask, "How do I become the leading expert in this field, so I can help my audience get a better job, live a better life, or achieve something meaningful?" If I can do that, they'll likely buy from us as well. I'm not interested in marketing that only aims to sell all the time. Usually, the company with the biggest budget wins in that scenario. There are plenty of big companies winning by throwing huge budgets at social and television advertising, but I want to think more thoughtfully about my marketing. So, as a company looking to impact my audience of buyers, I want to ask, "How do I become a leading expert in something they really care about and need?" If I do that well over a long period, my customers will succeed, and so will my company.
Jon Bailey 05:42
Yeah, I agree. I would rather have that than someone begrudgingly giving me money because, you know, we just happened to be the most top-of-mind. I want to win them over on value.
Joe Pulizzi 05:54
By the way, Jon, we talked about this before—I don't do anything against advertising. Sure, nothing against advertising, but that game is being played. Everyone listening to this is playing part of that game. What's not being done as well is, "Wow, can I... can somebody actually want to receive my marketing?" Wow. Well, think about that—that's exciting to me. That's something that I think everyone listening to this could think about a little bit differently with their marketing and do something substantial, not only in their company but with their marketing careers.
Jon Bailey 06:30
I love the line from Anne Handley: she said, "Make marketing so good that your customers would thank you for it."
Joe Pulizzi 06:36
I mean, absolutely, I think about that with Lego all the time. We got—right, just a quick story. My kids still love Lego, and Lego sent their magazine. And then it’s like they grab it out of the mail—this is a print publication, by the way—and sit with it for 30 minutes. Come on, they're selling... this is, this is little plastic bricks! They've been able to do that, by the way. I was a subscriber to Lego magazine in 1987 called Kicks. So they've had a very long—I've spent a lot of money with Lego over the years, right? Because they decided to deliver something of value to me in 1987.
Jon Bailey 07:14
That value has turned the Pulizzi family into a multi-generation Lego evangelist family.
Joe Pulizzi 07:23
I have the damage on my feet from stepping on them at the moment. So there you go, exactly.
Jon Bailey 07:31
So I want to talk about your book, your new book The Content Entrepreneur, which is great. And the origin story of this book is really kind of wild and wildly inspiring—you basically formed a posse, and together you wrote a book. And I’ve been watching a lot of Westerns lately, so, good way to put it. So first, if you could tell our viewers a little bit about that journey, and then I’d love to hear your advice to a small business owner who might be thinking about writing a book.
Joe Pulizzi 08:07
To get too much in the weeds, but when we launched Content Marketing Institute—my wife and I owned that, we sold it in '16, and I left that in 2018. Then, during COVID, I started something called The Tilt. The Tilt was a content creation newsletter dedicated to content creators who wanted to be what we call "content entrepreneurs," people who want to do this as a full-time business. As part of that, not only to financially support the business but to support the entire business model, I wanted to know who our true fans or true believers were. So, we created a VIP membership package for about 75 people. They paid a bit of money, and those people are still members of our little community today. We go out to them regularly—we have an event every year in August called CEX (Content Entrepreneur Expo), and we get together at those events. We also meet monthly and have an expert speaker on, so we're a real tight-knit community. I know these people, I know where they live, and we're friends. When we started, it wasn’t like that, but over the last three or four years, we got closer. The one thing we thought was missing as a group was that there was no real book—there are lots of content creation books, and I’ve written many on content marketing. But there was no book out there to say, "Okay, you're a marketer with a side job or working somewhere else, but you want to be a content creator. What do you need to think about to do this as a full-time business?" So, we created The Content Entrepreneur. We did it together—it was not easy, because 33 of the 75 members decided they wanted to co-write this book. We got together at the second CEX in '23 and started planning it out, and a year later, the book was available. It was a labor of love—everyone contributed, each with their own chapter. From a helpful standpoint, anyone trying to build an audience should ask, “Who are your true fans?” Kevin Kelly talks about "1,000 true fans," and we found ours for The Tilt. They help us shape the entire business. When I need something, they’re there; when they need something, they come to me. It’s a great relationship. Imagine going to your customers and saying, “Hey, we want to launch this—what do you think?” or, “We need you at this event—can you be there?” That’s the type of relationship we’ve built by delivering value consistently. That’s our story: knowing our audience, bringing them in close, understanding their needs and pain points, and creating valuable content to help the larger audience beyond them.
Jon Bailey 11:04
I mean, it's really taking all of the drum beating advice from the last, you know, 10 or 15 years of, you know, involve your audience, ask your audience, you know, get them excited about something, and you've just amplified it to the next level. So you've got now not only 33 authors, but 33 cheerleaders and their networks to help spread the word around this book. So I think it’s an interesting thing to look at for business owners, if they are looking at writing a book, is, is, you know, bring your customers in, involve them in some way.
Joe Pulizzi 11:47
Well, I mean, and if you look at it just from a larger marketing standpoint, I’ve been doing some speeches lately, and I’m like, okay, your employees and your best customers, they’re your best marketers, right? So, and by the way, they’re creating content too. They’re doing like, they have, and they have audiences, and probably their audiences are your audiences. You just don’t know them yet. So if you think about that and how that works together, really, really powerful. And I think sometimes we tend to overthink, you know, the market, you know, the sales journey, the buyer’s journey, that all that stuff is really good, but hey, they’re right in front of you, and they probably love you so much as a company, as a brand, that they’re willing to do a little bit more. So ask them, absolutely. Well, and your answer might surprise you.
Jon Bailey 12:37
Or start a podcast and invite some of the best marketers around to come on that podcast, and then maybe, I don’t know, maybe they might share it out to their networks.
Joe Pulizzi 12:47
We’ll see. They might. You never know. You never send them like a gift bag or something.
Jon Bailey 12:55
So I’ve also seen musicians and comedians and other artists self-publishing their content, basically going around the traditional publishing avenue. And, you know, we’ve seen podcasts that are getting audience numbers that a broadcast TV show would kill for. So, so my question is, you know, are we finally in that new era? Is the power shift happening that is tipping towards the content creator?
Joe Pulizzi 13:34
It’s A good question, but it depends on what you say by power shift. I mean, the power is still with the big money, and the big money is still with traditional publishing. If you put that to the side and just forget about power shift and just talk about what’s the best way to communicate with customers today, it’s not through the traditional right pay to play, and it’s with, oh, well, there’s all these ways that I can reach my customers. How do I do that effectively? It’s not through a sales pitch, it’s generally through something else. So what is that? And do you have some kind of a point of view? That’s where a lot of, you know, if we just talk about basic marketing, that’s where we tend to go wrong, because we’re like, oh, okay, well, let’s just talk about cloud computing in this way, and we’ve got to list this information and be very educational. And all that might be true. But if you don’t have a point of view, who cares? You have to have something. We call that in my second most recent book, Content Inc., I talk about this idea. Another great content tilt is that, what is that differentiation, that you can break through all the content clutter out there? So if you’re sitting here thinking, I can be a content creator, I am a content creator, you have to think of, how am I going to break through all the other noise? It’s really, really difficult to do that, and you have to do it over a long period of time. So, and you so you look. Listen to this little marketing podcast. Robert Rose and I, we talked about Mr. Beast years ago, right? Probably 2017-2018 and said Mr. Beast is going to be, probably going to have the largest media company in the world, and he’s well on his way to doing that right now, an individual content creator a lot, but what we forgot was Mr. Beast’s journey. Mr. Beast’s journey was he focused on one channel. He focused on being the best at that one channel, doing and doing it consistently over, consistently over a long period of time. Started in 2012 didn’t get 30,000 subscribers, followers till 2016 so did this for four years, did the hard work, and now has, as we record this, 346 million subscribers, most companies, most content creators, aren’t willing to do that kind of work, right? So yes, when you hear about all these creators that and you get very famous people, and people running for president are trying to be on these content creator led podcasts and YouTube channels and TikTok channels. It’s amazing what they’ve been able to do, but then look at what they’ve done. They focused on a niche topic. They focused on a very particular audience. They deliver value to them consistently over years to get to where they are. And that’s why, when you, you know, you or I do a speech about content marketing to somebody, they get very excited. And I have to say, hey, if you’re thinking this is a six month, nine month thing, go interrupt people. Go do something else. Don’t do content marketing. Content marketing is a labor of love for yourself and for your customer. It’s going to take time. You got to really want it. You got to work for it. It is a marathon, not a sprint. So that’s where we get it. So back to your question, absolutely not power shift. Big opportunity, absolutely for those who are willing to do the work over a long period of time, break through and build that audience.
Jon Bailey 17:08
Well, every time someone says quotes Malcolm Gladwell and talks about 10,000 hours, I think a kitten dies, but I'm going to do it anyway. You know, like Malcolm Gladwell said, You got to put in your 10,000 hours. I mean, it's just, there's no way around it.
Joe Pulizzi 17:24
There's no, you know, when somebody asks me, I always say, You know what, minimum nine months. I mean, like when we looked at the case studies over the years, John Lee Dumas and entrepreneurs on fire with his podcast. He was probably the first one that I know that hit that nine-month mark that was making significant money building an audience, and it took about nine to 12 months to do that. If you look at what we did with Content Marketing Institute, took three years, yeah, to build a minimum viable audience, enough that we had an audience that we could persuade them to buy other things. So if you know that we were a media model, so it's a little bit differently, but if you are a marketer and you're trying to do this, I would say you've got, it's got to be 12 to 18 months that you got to put in. That’s why a lot of these things are pilot programs that are run under the radar. You’ve got to position them as, hey, we’re just taking we’re testing things, until you get to a point where, oh my God, look at what this is doing, and then you get organizational buy-in for something like that.
Jon Bailey 18:21
That’s yeah. It’s It's wild. It’s a yeah for Content Marketing World. It was an institute. It was a three-year overnight success.
Joe Pulizzi 18:33
Yeah, it’s funny, oh, he came out of nowhere. We started what became, what became Content Marketing Institute. 2007 is when I left traditional publishing, and launched the business. April, 2007 and I thought we were going out of business for the first three years, like I would wake up in a sweat. I’m like, Oh, this is not going to work, not going to work. And then all of a sudden, September, 2011 Content Marketing World was born as our first key product. And, you know, from there and on, it was successful.
Jon Bailey 18:59
It's funny. I don't know if I've ever told you this story, but I was talking to one of our development managers at my old company, and I used the term content marketing. And this was, this was like, like 2009 or 2010 or something like that. And he goes, "That sounds like a made-up term?" I said, "No, they had their own institute."
Joe Pulizzi 19:27
Did you tell them? Oh, it sort of was a made-up term, yeah, sort of, it sort of was, yeah, it was. And by the way, this is just everything in marketing is a made-up term. It was an organism. It was a way to organize the audience. Because when we launched in 2007 it was called Custom Media, custom publishing, customer media, branded content, branded journalism. It was called 1000 different things. But again, you gotta remember when you launch these things, you have to call it something that will resonate with that audience. So what do I know about marketers? Everything the marketers do. Is something marketing, it's search engine marketing, it's social media marketing, it's direct marketing. Everything is blank marketing, and we were calling it publishing, right? No. CMOs are interested in doing publishing, but they're all interested in doing content marketing because it's blank marketing. So it's just, again, we talked about understanding your audience, who's your audience, and how do you get things done with that audience? You call it what it's supposed to be called. So exactly. It is a made-up term, though. So...
Jon Bailey 20:29
Just slap marketing on something, and you're off or on.
Joe Pulizzi 20:33
It’s marketing.
Jon Bailey 20:34
It’s marketing. It’s just marketing. So you mentioned noise, so why don’t we talk about AI? So I was gonna put together a question about AI, and then I thought, "You know what, let’s say hey AI, ask Joe Pulizzi a question," which is what I did. So I went into chat GPT, and this is what chat GPT wants to know from you, specifically. Okay, this is fascinating: "With AI rapidly transforming content creation, how do you see content marketers maintaining authenticity and trust with their audiences in this evolving landscape?"
Joe Pulizzi 21:15
Well, thank you, ChatGPT, for that question. To be a little bit honest and negative, please, please. Most brands aren't authentic and aren't trustworthy. They don't deserve any of that, any trust, because most of the content creation that you see, that I see out there, it's terrible. It's mediocre at best. It probably is lacking in substantial goals of any kind to the audience. So, it's not a very high bar, Jon. It's not. I mean, you just did average work, you would be probably better off if you're a company. I mean, do an audit. And by the way, don't take my word for it, if you're listening to this, do an audit of your own company stuff. I love a visual audit. It's like my favorite thing, get all the marketers and executives into a room and print out so you can see it and feel it. Print out the content you're creating. See how much you can't do the videos, but do it with blog posts and do it with some of your imagery, some of your education, your newsletters, your educational content, you'll realize that this is stuff that you don't even want to read, right, and probably don't. So, ChatGPT, I'll go back to your question. It's not going to affect it at all, because it's all it's not there. Now, what I would like to say is that if you are authentic, which is an overused term, but if you do want to help your—let's say you do really want to help your audience. Let's say real and of value. Yeah, let's say you want to deliver real value to your audience outside the products and services that you offer. That's the true definition of content marketing. You do that through communication if you really want to do that, then AI can help you with all the mundane tasks you probably shouldn't be doing anyways. So I'll give you my own example on how I use AI. So I use Descript to publish my content. Inc. podcast, which is my five-minute podcast. We use Streamyard, which is what we're using right now to do our This Old Marketing podcast. I use things for transcription. I use ChatGPT Pro for ideation, for persona. I got persona development in there. I mean, like I ask questions, I've got a little persona built up. I can ask questions to it. Those things I think are truly valuable. If I can save time on the mundane tasks that theoretically, I don't know if it's true, but theoretically will help me think more about the problems of my audience and deliver better, more interesting, more valuable information to them, then that's how AI can help me. That's how I've been coming at AI since the beginning, since the late teens, when it was really starting to come out, since 20 November 22 when ChatGPT first came on the scene. It's always been, how do we stop doing the things that we probably shouldn't have been doing in the first place, that we just got all this mundane and from day-to-day tasks, type things, and how can we use that to spend more time thinking and acting on the problems of our customers? Thank you, ChatGPT, very good question.
Jon Bailey 24:34
Way better answer. No, I couldn't agree more. I mean, it has removed—you know, writing is hard. Anne Handley says that all the time, and she writes about writing, writing is hard, and getting started is hard. And I think that's where AI has done tremendous things. Is getting you over the, those mundane and, you know, sort of boring and tedious tasks, so that you can get straight into the creation part, which is the fun part.
Joe Pulizzi 25:09
So yeah, and by the way, so many people, because of AI tools, can create average content, right? More than ever before. Yep. So it’s basically AI, for right now—and this probably won’t hold true in the future—but right now, it’s average intelligence content you’re seeing. We’re seeing that now that I’m more involved in the book industry. You’re seeing thousands of books a week being created by AI tools, really just saying, "Hey, here’s what I would like the book to be. Here, write it." And you know what? It will, and by the way, it’ll create a podcast about it, and it’ll do it, and you won’t even know that it’s a computer. It is astounding, amazing, and terrifying all at the same time. But as a speaker, I still do a lot of speaking, and my speaking inquiries have probably gone up, right? Because people still want the person behind that. So again, you know, you look at your content marketing strategy as an organization, people are more important than ever before. You’re seeing that happen in newsletters. Look at what the New York Times is doing with their newsletters, where they have 60 of them, or whatever the number is. It used to just be the name of a newsletter, a logo, and whatever. Well, half of those right now are people’s pictures, and I would imagine in a year, they’ll all be people because people want to connect with other people. So your newsletter, you might want that not to come from your company or content brand, but from a person who they can reach out to, talk to, have at events, and write books and those types of things. I think that’s a big opportunity for people right now—not human to computer.
Jon Bailey 26:58
Yeah, yes, human to human, people to people. Yes, absolutely. That’s the new shiny object, which I fully support, by the way. You mentioned not being able to tell when something’s real or not. I’m not yet fully convinced that Chris Penn is real. I think that Chris Penn is a made-up person in Boston who the computers have generated, and I don’t know, I don’t think he could possibly exist in the real world. And I’m pretty sure he’s going to be on this podcast.
Joe Pulizzi 27:36
Well, okay, so I know Chris really well; I’ve been friends with Chris for years. But I do think he carries around a small computer with him that basically makes him smarter than everyone else because I don’t think it’s possible for an average human being to be that smart. So there’s something... And, I mean, without being weird about it, I’ve tried to look when I see him. I saw him at a conference a few months ago, and I’m like, "Where is..."
Jon Bailey 28:09
Where is Chris?
Joe Pulizzi 28:11
Where? Where’s the other GPU? Where’s the button? He’s hidden it really well.
Jon Bailey 28:20
Yeah, that’s awesome. All right. So, as usual, we have a bonus question, and this one is from one of our genius strategists, Sarah Pattisall, and she asks, "You’ve emphasized the importance of focusing on audience needs to make your company stand out. Aside from when an audience tells you what they need or want, what other methods do you find most effective for identifying and understanding these needs? Then, what steps do you take to turn that information into a compelling story that resonates?" I can read those parts again? Wow, Sarah.
Joe Pulizzi 28:57
Jeez. Kill me. Sarah, not only the one amazing question, you added the follow-up to it, and I’m over 50 now, and I can’t remember anything, right?
Jon Bailey 29:07
The two questions again were: Aside from when an audience tells you what they need or want, what other methods do you find most effective for identifying and understanding these needs? Then, what steps do you take to turn that information into a compelling story that resonates?
Joe Pulizzi 29:22
There’s lots of ways to answer this. I would probably push back on that and say that most organizations really don’t. They think they know what their audience wants, but they really don’t, because they’re not spending enough in-person time. And I’ve been talking about this since I got into in-person events in the late '90s. The best way is face-to-face, talking and in contact with your customer, your buyer, your audience, whatever the case is. I’ve worked on a lot of content marketing programs over the years, and 90% don’t talk to their customers, their audience, face-to-face, right? So when I see that, and by the way, Sarah knows this, you can get that information off of Google. Look at what people are searching for. You can do wonderful surveys. I love surveys, so do as many surveys as you can get. But the best way to do it is an in-person conversation with lots of your customers, lots of your audience. So that means, as part of your marketing program, you need to send human beings that are part of your marketing team out to human events, in-person events all through the year. And I would say there’s probably not a month that goes by that you don’t have your marketing team, your content creation team, talking to other people at the event. It’s not easy to do. You actually have to go to the show, wherever it is. Then you have to actually talk to people and, like, strike up real conversations. Most people don’t do this anymore, so you have to do that. So get that information, and then what you would like to do, if you’re doing this really well, is send two or three people to this event. You distill that, you get together with them in a meeting, and you distill what you found so that you can start brainstorming that together and figure out a way that you can insert that into your content plan. I would say less than 1% of companies do that. That’s the best. I’m not saying you have to do that. You can still be successful and never see your customer face-to-face. But, man, take the hard road. So, to answer Sarah’s question, figure out that in-person route, talk to them. Have your list of questions. I mean, basically just get to know them. I mean, we talked about this before, but like, I have 70-75 people that I rely on on an ongoing basis to tell me where I’m right, where I’m wrong, what their challenges are, how, why they’re getting up in the morning. How, if they’re not going to bed at night and they’re not happy with themselves, why is that? I want to know that as their journey for a content creator, content entrepreneur. If I don’t know that, I can’t help with the Tilt newsletter, I can’t help them publish a book. All that said, I do like the idea... we’ll get back to AI here just for one second... I do like the fact that you can train a thread to be, what, who is your persona? I want to take the 75 of those people and put that into a thread. So, if it is 2 o’clock in the morning, I don’t want to bother anybody, I can use that and talk to that persona in chat, GPT or whatever tool you’re using, and then integrate that into the content plan.
So, the last thought that I have on that, Jon, is that I think that if you’re not doing a consistent show, and that show could be anywhere, it could be a podcast, it could be a newsletter, it could be a YouTube channel, it’s going to be much more difficult for you to be able to approach those people and get the kind of information you want if you’re not consistently going out there with your point of view, like, kind of like poking the bear a little bit. You have to do that. If you don’t do that, people aren’t going to be as willing to talk to you about it. I mean, right? What’s great about this old market? We’ve been doing this whole marketing for almost 12 years now, and people are very honest. They’re so honest you almost don’t want to hear some of it, but that’s what you want, right? Like, some people don’t want to be fact-checked, and some people do. I want to be fact-checked. I want people to say, “Joe, you’re wrong.” You know. And if I get to that point, then we really know that we’ve hit something on some need. And when you get that, Sarah, then to answer Sarah’s second question, you take that information and you say, “We have to put this into our content plan. What are we going to do about it? This is a major problem that we only uncovered because we’ve been sending out the signal for so long, and now we’re getting something back.”
Joe Pulizzi 34:11
Right, right? So,is there a third part to that question?
Jon Bailey 34:17
No, I was going to say, so Joe knows you’ve got to go to the show. That’s his sage advice.
Joe Pulizzi 34:27
You’re not going to get it on a Zoom call, folks. You’re not going to get it on a survey. You’ll get bits and pieces of information. My mentor, Jim McDermott, who passed away a couple of years ago, taught me when I got into publishing. He said, “Joe, set up your listening posts and know them very well.” So what are your listening posts? Is it Twitter? Is it surveys? Is it talking to customers on a regular basis? Is it making reader calls? Whatever it is, what are the ways you’re getting that information so that you can distill that with your team? Then you send out another signal to get it in. After that, it’s the flywheel. It continues to work for you.
Jon Bailey 35:07
Yes, absolutely, absolutely. Well, you never disappoint, Joe. This was all I really...
Joe Pulizzi 35:14
I just wanted to disappoint, Jon. No, I know. I wanted to get on here and just be the worst guest he’s ever had.
Jon Bailey 35:25
How do I do? I’d like to think it was the quality of my questions.
Joe Pulizzi 35:29
You’re very organized. You did send the questions ahead of time.
Jon Bailey 35:33
Yeah, about four hours.
Joe Pulizzi 35:38
But you’re always on time. Yep, I can always count on you, Jon.
Jon Bailey 35:44
Awesome, awesome. Joe, once again, thank you so much. I can’t wait for you to share this podcast.
Joe Pulizzi 35:56
It’s fun. I love... you know, what I love about our conversations is we just tell the truth, and that’s all people want. They just want the truth. They don’t want the canned answer. They want the point of view. So there you go. So, thank you.
Jon Bailey 36:09
My apologies. My apologies to Chris Penn, and thank you, everyone. We’re out.
