What is EEAT from Google? and Brand Ambassadors on the RISE! w/Chris Carver, CEO Sessionboard | Ep. 339

0:01What up? Welcome to Do This Not That, the podcast for marketers. I'm Jay Schwetelson. Let's dig into some tips and some randomness. We are back for Do This Not That podcast presented by Marigold. And we have somebody on the show today that I was like, I need this guy on the show. He's Chris Carver. He's the CEO of Session Board. And the reason I need him on the show, I was blown away by the platform that he's created. It's this whole speaker management platform for webinars, for events, all this stuff. I'm like, why didn't this exist before? Because it really speaks to what's going on on the planet in terms of the value of faces in your business brand, your consumer brand, whatever it is.

0:42Of course, we call it influencer marketing, but it's beyond that. And I want to get into why it matters so much now. And I'm just fired up. So Chris, welcome to the show, man. Thanks for having me. This is awesome. Appreciate it. So before we get into this idea that the days of faceless marketing are over, whether you're a B2B brand consumer, it doesn't matter. Your brand needs faces and people. What is your deal? How did you wind up session board and organizing speakers and call for papers? What happened? Yeah, it's a long, windy road, but I have 60 seconds to do it. So 12 years ago, I was in the nonprofit space and my partner and I started a tool to help most of the major music festivals around North America manage their operations.

1:29COVID hits, no music festivals. So we pivoted and built a platform to help nonprofits raise money during COVID, virtual event platform. Everybody was doing it. So we sold that in about 10 months. But during that time, we really started seeing the value of content and had this hypothesis about what we thought was going to happen in the space and blah, blah, blah. And so we took the proceeds from that acquisition and dumped it into another company and started from scratch. And that's that's where Session Board was was born. And our whole hypothesis is that we want to go super deep into content management for events and really efficiently manage speakers and the power that is a part of them to really help marketing teams kind of maximize their ROI.

2:18why. Well, you know, it's funny. Sometimes you hear people say, I heard Damon John say the other day, there are no new ideas. There's just different spins on old ideas. I'm going to tell you right now, I think session board is a new idea and it's a great one and you guys are crushing it. So good job with you. I'm going to tell Damon John he was wrong. So I want to get into something. I'm seeing everywhere this stuff about Eats, E-E-A-T-S or whatever it's Google Eats, everyone's Eats. What is this Eats thing? Why does it matter? What's going on? Yeah, this kind of blew my mind when I saw this about a year and a half ago.

2:50So essentially, when we started the company, it was really to focus on managing speakers end-to-end for a big conference, right? And as we were doing that, we were focused on saving the organizer a ton of time. And then I see this article, I forget who put it out, about how Google was changing their algorithm to focus on what they call EAT-based content. So it's an acronym that stands for expertise, experience, authority, and trust. So they were signaling for content that is based in that. And immediately I was like, that's your speakers. That's your speakers for your conference, for your webinars, for your community events, for your field marketing events.

3:35And your speakers are, when you think about it, they really are a key component. So if you break it down, speakers have that lived experience that AI generated content lacks. Speakers naturally bring that real world experience. They often bring a network which gives them authority. Obviously, they've built trust over the years because they've gone super deep into their specific area of expertise. So the idea that we are starting to leverage our brand and connect it with those speakers, those authorities, those subject matter experts is very much like what the B2C world did with influencers, right?

4:16And so your speakers are your subject matter experts. They're your thought leaders. They're your champions. They're your content creators. But they also have that network. But most importantly, they bring a human connection. They bring that personal resonance to the topic and to your brand. So, you know, the other interesting thing is if you look on the other side of it, and you and I have both spoken at other events, is speakers want to speak. They want to share their knowledge, right? So giving them the opportunity to speak throughout the year, not just on stage, is a big win for both sides.

4:51And so it's really exciting to be a part of this, especially as you see all of the stuff that is impacting marketing teams and the challenges that they're having with AI generated content being 10x that of human centered content, how search engines are starting to, obviously, the AI results are filling up the top third of the page. And they're, they're also anchoring on more, more paid ads, more sponsors. So that's just pushing the organic content down, which is why organic content is down like 30 % year over year for the last five years. And then what, what we didn't talk about is, is Gartner just released a study that said that 30 % of all searches will soon be AI agent based searches.

5:37So that totally changes how human centered search is going to be different than the agent based search. So we really need to anchor our full marketing strategy across the board, not just for events to those speakers and those subject matter experts. You know, it's funny. This is my hot take, and I'm curious what your opinion on it. I believe in the next, let's call it 24 months, regardless of company size, you could be a five person company, a 5 ,000 person company. You can be a consumer, a B2B, boring, regulated industry company. I don't care, but that every brand is going to need to have humans, well-known humans in their category that are operating as brand ambassadors.

6:18Every brand is going to have multiple brand ambassadors that are not employees of their company necessarily but that are onboarded to amplify to speak to be involved and i think it's going to be table stakes just the way it was table stakes to have a blog you're going to have table stakes that you're going to have brand ambassadors adding that human element to what you're doing and speaking on your behalf what do you think of that nonsense well i just it's been really interesting diving deep into this because the stats actually say it all. So Edelman did some research not too long ago that says 62 % of B2B buyers trust what influencers say about a brand more than what the brand says about itself.

6:55And then DemandGen Report did another one that says 71 % of B2B buyers are more likely to engage with a brand's content if it is shared by someone they know and respect. And then Salesforce did some research that says 92 % of B2B buyers are more likely to engage with a brand after reading a trusted review. The other one that I love, and we'll talk about it at Eventastic, is that B2B campaigns with influence marketing can generate up to 11 times higher ROI compared to regular digital marketing. And that's only going to increase. So the reality is we're a small company. We're growing small companies still, but we're having to walk through the event marketer shoes as well.

7:40We're trying to leverage these subject matter experts in everything we do. And it's just really critical. It really is. And you saw Salesforce went into this early on with Matthew McConaughey. He's not really a subject matter expert, but he has become their celebrity brand ambassador, influencer, whatnot. But what we're seeing now is these smaller brands that are taking people that have a midsize following, 100 ,000 people, whatever it may be, that are regarded highly in their category and they're on board of these brand ambassadors, especially for B2B companies, the consumer guys get it. But the B2B companies, I think the word influencer is just a bad word.

8:18People think it's stupid, it's juvenile. But if it's like you're an ambassador, and it's a speaker, and it's not like somebody that you're bringing on to speak once, like in your world, are you seeing more of this where it's not just transactional? Come and do this one webinar are you seeing more of that one person is now doing a series or a bunch of stuff and how is that looking two things there you look at like what groups like money 2020 are doing right they they use their speaker throughout the entire event like eight times you know they go from the stage to a step and repeat pr style interview to a podcast they're going and leading a phd level session and then throughout the year they're putting them on their podcast and things like that.

8:59That's what brands need to be doing, right? Salesforce is doing it with their podcast team and their broadcasting team, which is why there's another stat by Ogilvy, 93 % of CMOs plan to increase their use of B2B influencers in the coming years. It's like really critical. And then the other point I should mention is, is these don't necessarily have to just be external folks. There are so many internal folks that love to champion their expertise. So let them thrive. But you need a system to be able to connect and see who those are so that you can search by topic and location or whatever attribute you want to make it as easy as possible to execute that in your marketing strategy.

9:44Yeah. And I also think it's so important that this is for everybody. You know, somebody out there is listening. Oh, I'm in a 30-person company. We're not going to have an influencer. That's ridiculous. and that couldn't be further from the truth. You're spending money right now on random paid ad on Instagram, on LinkedIn, or search that's generating clicks that go nowhere. That budget is so much better spent onboarding an ambassador that can champion you in front of their whole audience. That's where we're headed. I mean, this AI stuff is pushing us more into being human, which is the irony of all of it, right?

10:16Yeah, the small company thing, to your point, Like, for example, we do two, three webinars, podcast style a month with external subject matter experts. We're really small. But we then actually try to leverage them when we're in market hosting a dinner so that they're coming or, you know, we're thinking about like even going to a third party conference. We make sure that we are building around them because the more we invest in them, they're going to invest back in us. Right. And we're a channel as much as they are a channel. And so as soon as we understand that, it just becomes easier and easier to break through the noise of all the things that we've seen happening.

10:55And it's only going to get expedited more and more. All right. Before we run out of time here, I want you to explain to everybody, because I really want to get this across. I want you to do a commercial for Session Board, because I want to explain to everybody what it is that you guys have built, what it is that you guys do, and how to find you. Because this is important. Okay. Yeah. So you can find us very simple sessionboard.com. You can always email me directly. I'm okay with giving out my Chris at session board. Any feedback, really critical, no matter what, whether you work with us or not, it helps us make the platform better.

11:28So we actually do two things. So we started with streamlining the speaker management process. So if you have a conference, you usually spend about five to seven hours per speaker end to end. Our system saves about two to three hours of that time. It just automates that. And then we're rolling out things like, you know, with AI evaluations, evaluating those speakers to make sure that they're right for your particular session or your agenda or webinar, whatever it might be. So we really hyper focus there. The second area that is so critical is now giving you a tool that allows you to automatically aggregate, index, search, invite, and activate and manage all of those speakers that you have across your entire event marketing portfolio.

12:12So whether that is your in-person events, that's your field events, your webinars, your podcasts, your community, your marketing activations, we consolidate all of that in one place with various integrations with your different registration system, your webinar platform, and then other avenues that you can now actually search by topic, area of expertise, whatever attribute. it pulls up those list of folks that you can quickly identify and leverage so that when you have a certain marketing activation, you can pull the right folks. Listen, I'm telling everybody the truth right now. My company puts on some of the world's largest virtual events.

12:50We have a zillion speakers. Session Board is our exclusive platform that we use. And it's one of the few MarTech platforms that we use that our team actually thinks it goes beyond. It does more than we thought it was going to do. so I'm not just saying that because I'm staring at you and it'd be awkward if I said the opposite I'm saying it because it's 100 % true we're going to put all this information in the show notes and everyone's got to go to Eventastic to see Chris speak there world's largest virtual event about all things events Chris man I appreciate you being here I appreciate you I appreciate your team and shout out to our team at Session Board they just are killing themselves to continue to add and add more value.

13:31So I wouldn't be here without them. Awesome, man. All right, thanks again. All right, have a good one. You did it. You made it to the end. Nice, but the party's not over. Subscribe to make sure you get the latest episode each week for more actionable tips and a little chaos from today's top marketers. And hook us up with a five-star review if this wasn't the worst podcast of all time. Lastly, if you want access to the best virtual marketing events that are also 100 % free, visit guruevents.com so you can hear from the world's top marketers like Damon John, Martha Stewart, and me. Guruevents.com.

14:10Check it out.