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HRExaminer Radio
Guest: Lisa Cervenka and Jason Seiden, Co-Founders, Brand Amper
Episode: 141
Air Date: January 6, 2016
Jason Seiden’s personal mission is to ignite in others the power and influence of their individual voices; his professional goal is to help people, organizations, and brands find and fine-tune their voices so they can affect positive change at scale.
From his very first job, his career has centered around the highest pressure, highest stakes forms of communication: public speaking, social media, corporate politics, marketing, teaching, employer branding, authorship, blogging… the stuff that brings so many people to tears is exactly the stuff that brings him to life, and has helped make him a fearless communicator. He has been tested at the highest levels, at the best known brands in the world.
Lisa Cervenka, Chief Branding Officer & cofounder of Brand Amper… and a brand nerd. Her sweet spot is helping professionals and companies craft meaningful brands that stand the test of time. Lisa is partial to technology companies—the more complex the product or service, the better. Cofounding Brand Amper has allowed her to expand her skills even further, into employer branding—the most demanding brand you will ever meet. Brand Amper’s SaaS Employer Branding platform helps enterprise clients engage employees at scale to partner in genuine, high-impact recruitment marketing. Free time? Not much, but it usually involves cooking and writing.
Brand Amper pioneered the use of social media for employer branding by using it to eliminate the duality between personal and company brands. Brand Amper’s profersonal™ approach unifies employees’ professional + personal identities, giving people the confidence that their social identity will resonate across both their personal and professional networks, and giving them a clear, authentic reason to engage with company messaging.
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Transcript
Begin transcript
John Sumser: Good morning, and welcome to HR Examiner Radio. I’m your host, John Sumser. We’re coming to you live today from beautiful downtown Occidental, California, and somewhere in radioland. How are you?
Today we’re going to be talking with Jason Seiden and Lisa Cervenka, who are the co-founders of Brand Amper. Jason, Lis, how are you?
Lisa Cervenka: Good, John. How are you?
John Sumser: I’m great.
Jason Seiden: Doing well.
John Sumser: Doing well. Why don’t you introduce yourselves. Lisa, go first.
Lisa Cervenka: Sure. I’m Lisa Cervenka, I serve as the co-founder of Brand Amper and as the chief branding officer here. Which really is funny because when you’re in a start up you pretty much do everything all the time. So titles don’t really matter. I’ve been in the marketing space, branding space for about 20 years.
Jason Seiden: And talk about titles don’t matter, I technically have the CEO title but as Lisa said, that doesn’t matter. I’m Jason Seiden and, like Lisa I’ve been 20 years in business. My background’s more in sub-technologies and talent development.
John Sumser: Okay so, you’re the co-founders of Brand Amper, how in the world did you end up being co-founders of a start up?
Jason Seiden: Right? I think there’s two parts to that story. There’s the, where did the idea for the start up, for the business come from, and then how did we get together. Lisa, if it’s okay with you I’ll talk a little bit about the idea and then throw it to you for ‘why us.’
Lisa Cervenka: Yep.
Jason Seiden: John, we’ve known each other for a long time and this is one of those ideas that was probably a decade in the making by the time the lightening bolt hit. I used to do executive interviews and team building and coaching, and around 2009 that turned into requests from my clients to do social media work. That then became something, that part of the business grew. I ended up doing a lot of work with LinkedIn because the consulting I was doing, unlike a lot of people at the time who were raising their Facebook and Twitter, I was focused on a more professional audience, so I was doing a lot with LinkedIn. The more we did with LinkedIn, the more I started to see, “Wait a second, there’s this gap of companies want employees to talk about the brand, employees want to talk about the brand, but they’re not trusting each other. There’s a communication gap.”
The more we did the more my team heard the same issues from both sides. One day it was like, wait a second, we can actually solve this at scale, right? There’s a very specific element here and if we can get employees to tell the right story the right way, tell their own story the right way. Instead of asking them to do something for the company, if we can say, “Hey, go make yourself look good and the company’s going to support you.” So take that whole notion of who’s working for who and flip it on its head. Then all of a sudden everybody’s interests were aligned, employees were more than happy to be advocates for the company, they’d be responsible with the brand. Then we literally had 10,000 plus people go through a program, like wait a second, we had nobody going rogue. We have a third plus of our people who want to be advocates. Just as consultants we were seeing these incredible, incredible adoption numbers. That’s when we went, “Okay, there’s an idea here.” Lisa, I’m going to throw it to you so in terms of how we came together.
Lisa Cervenka: Sure. It’s actually, John, you’ll find it quite appropriate that Jason and I, the whole reason we sort of came together was Facebook really. I had a friend, a mutual friend of Jason and mine, a friend of mine from high school. I was looking for a very specific gig which was start up, tech, having to do with social media. So he spoke to me briefly and said, “You know what, little do you know this, on the side I kind of love, I’m a business matchmaker. I think there’s someone with a business right now that could use your help and you guys would really get along.” He introduced me to Jason and I think very quickly after joining his consulting firm I realized, “Look, you’ve got something here, know what you have it’s time to move it to the next level, and frankly I don’t want to consult, I want to get into more of a product and technology.” We agreed.
Jason Seiden: Ta-da.
John Sumser: Okay, so I’m going to skip past the current job thing because you just described, I assume you just described the heart of your product Brand Amper. So if I could spit it back to you, you said that you have a method for causing a pretty dramatic alignment inside of an organization so that the organization expresses itself in a certain way going outbound and that outbound message is reflected back into the organization, strengthening the culture. Is that what you said?
Jason Seiden: Not nearly as eloquently as you said it. I think that is absolutely accurate. I think there is one other piece to put on that, which is it’s not just the messaging, it’s also the channels through which that message is being shared. Increasingly the outside world, and even the inside world, puts more weight on what the individual says and less weight on what the quote-unquote “company” says. The pre-approved PR language and HR approved language, it just doesn’t resonate with people and people poke and they look for ways around it. Whether it’s on Glassdoor or other areas. So not only is it creating alignments around that message and engagements around a common set of cultural themes, it’s also making sure that those ideas show up in places where the right people will find them. Mainly that means in the feeds and on the profiles of the actual employees who work at the company.
John Sumser: So this sounds like an idea that’s essentially a network strategy for building an employment brand, is that right?
Lisa Cervenka: I think it’s right, and I think the network actually expands beyond just profiles and social media. I think it’s critically important that people internalize and believe in, I mean Jason and I sort of poke at the term brand ambassador or brand advocate, while it’s literally quite true, it’s often executed in sort of a contrived way. I think the idea that we bring to the table is to let people express, it’s more of a brand awareness than on brand. That’s kind of the new idea, and a scary idea to a lot of companies. But we’ve seen that needle move quite a bit in the last year.
John Sumser: That’s interesting. Isn’t that how brands work now? It used to be that a brand was sort of a stern, religious teacher with a strict catechism, right? Here’s the color, here’s the message, boom, boom, boom, here are the talking points. Today’s brand is a conversation. Today’s brand has positives and negatives in it and people consume both of those things as they make up their minds about their relationship with the brand. Yes?
Jason Seiden: The simple answer is yes. I think the reality is more nuanced. Lisa, I know you have a story about this from earlier this week. I’m going to tell a quick story about the disconnect between that as an idea and that as how it’s executed. This is what we can really help organizations with. A couple years ago when we were first starting out we did a ton of research. Before we ever launched the technology we brought a consultant into the consulting firm. We reached out to our clients, we analyzed all the data from 10,000 plus people that we had put through regimented programs, all of that. At the same time we were also going out and just reading voraciously and just experiencing as much as we could in the market about what was there, what was happening, what wasn’t happening, to make sure that we had a gap that could solve.
One of the events that we attended, Lisa went the Integrated Marketing Communications Program at [inaudible 00:09:48] Northwestern and she was nice enough to invite me to one of the panels that [Madil 00:09:55] put on. There we heard, this was for a marketing audience and we heard a CEO of a large well-known company talk about the very idea that you just set up, John. About how branding was becoming more fragmented, companies were losing control. But when he talked about how the company was responding from a marketing standpoint, what he described was dollars shifting and attention shifting from TV channels to YouTube channels, and influencers who have these amazingly popular YouTube channels. Because it was on YouTube the assumption was it’s more interactive. The reality is that when you step back and look at what’s happening, the company’s just treating their YouTube channels the same way they would treat a television station. It’s still broadcast, right? They’re just instead of dealing with the airtime buyers and the programming directors, they’re dealing with an individual who has a channel and maybe a producer behind the scenes. The process is a little different, tiny little bit on the margins, but at the end of the day it’s still the company pushing a message.
When it gets really interactive is when the company says, “You know what? We’re going to trust our employees with the message. We’re going to trust the network with our message, and we’re going to work with them. We’re sometimes going to lead and shape things if we don’t think that the way they’re going is where we as an organization need them to, but we’re also going to listen and we’re going to be responsive. If we’re pushing something that doesn’t get uptake, we’re going to take it as feedback and we’re going to ask ourselves the hard question about why we’re not getting feedback around that.” That nuance, with not just using social channels, it’s also being responsive to what the market does. That’s where we’ve seen a lot of meaningful progress in the last year. Hopefully that makes sense and puts a little color to the point you were making.
John Sumser: Yeah. Let me spit it back to you and make sure that I got it. The nuance is that this is not just another sliced up broadcast media play, which is what you hear in that fragmented and targeted marketed kind of view of things, this is about, again, having a conversation with the marketplace, and when the marketplace twitches, responding to that. You don’t have to … This isn’t a referendum necessarily, but it is a conversation.
Lisa Cervenka: Yes. I think that’s correct. I think it’s very logical in a lot of ways, but still very intimidating. I was talking with a client yesterday and it’s a very large company, quite sophisticated in their marketing, and consumer marketing and employer branding efforts, and there was a consumer branding initiative that they had created and that sort of has a lot of equity at this point. The question was, “Is it time to let employees be part of that?” It sort of shocked me a bit because I thought, “Okay, you’re trusting consumers with your brand and letting them weigh in and sort of take this on as their own and say what they’re going to say, but when it comes to your very own employees, not strangers, people you supposedly let in and hired, it was scary.” Do we let employees do this too?
My question was, quite directly, “What is your worst fear? What are you most afraid of?” It really took this person a minute to think about it and then the answer was, “Well, what if they damage? What if they damage this initiative that we worked so hard on?” We kind of talked through all that and did this sort of pro-con, and at the end of the conversation she sort of came full circle and said, “You know what, this is silly.” We can give my advice as guidance versus control, of course, but at the end of the day all the really good stuff that you love about consumer marketing campaigns and the spontaneity and the authenticity you have to allow for that internally as well, and a lot of companies just kind of don’t go there.
John Sumser: That’s very interesting. So what you’re saying is that the very question, the very fact that people are scared indicates that they don’t trust their employees, and that the essence of the next generation company is that management has to trust the employees. That’s fascinating. That’s fascinating. What does Brand Amper do?
Jason Seiden: What does it do or what does it do to solve that problem?
John Sumser: What does it do? No, what does Brand Amper do?
Jason Seiden: Brand Amper’s one of these things, on the face of it it’s a very simple looking tool that has a very sophisticated impact on an organization. On the front end, to the end user, it’s a storytelling coach. It’s an automated storytelling coach that helps a professional employee tell their story. Answer the question, what do you do? Whether you all it an elevator pitch or whatever you call it, you’re going to create your new Brand Amper, you’re going to create a very simple, straight forward, easy to understand answer to the question, “So what do you do?”
As you go through it there’s certain prompts that were hard won. This is something people ask us, “Can’t we just do this ourselves?” It’s like, “Yeah, you can. Good luck.” We spent five years testing different questions and different formats and different orders. When we were consultants and we were being locked into some of the most choice organizations on the planet, so if we didn’t perform we were gone instantly. It turns out there’s a lot of nuance to getting something like that right, but be that as it may, you’re in and out within 15 to 20 minutes. You get a story, the response that most people have when they’re done is, “I never really thought about myself as a product. I never thought about how the way in which I tell my story actually signals who I am. People say, ‘What do you do,’ and I would normally answer, ‘Well, it’s complicated,’ or ‘What do I do or what do I want to do?’ Or somebody tells me they looked at my LinkedIn profile and I’d be embarrassed. I’d say, ‘Oh, I haven’t updated that.'”
Simple things, simple prompts within Brand Amper get people to think about how their intended audience, who they really want to connect with, not the message they want to deliver to those people but the message those people need to hear. Then in just a few minutes we help them build this little story that then gets the right message to the right people. That’s it, it’s a storytelling coach.
Lisa Cervenka: Well it’s [crosstalk 00:17:22].
Jason Seiden: Go ahead, Lis.
Lisa Cervenka: I was going to add, before we get off that, and welcome to our everyday.
Jason Seiden: Right.
Lisa Cervenka: [inaudible 00:17:30] here. I was just going to say, it’s been pointed out to us by our own customers that, one of my favorite authors is Joan Didion, and she said, “I don’t know what I think until I write it down.” In this world of video and all this audio stuff, we’ve been asked, “So wait, people still have to write this stuff? They write it down?” Then what our customers have said is, “Right, until I write it down, literally forced to think it through and take the time,” and they view that time and that resource that the company gives them, as a genuine benefit. Almost like professional development.
John Sumser: That’s very interesting. This marketing thing that you’re doing has learning methodologies embedded in it. I don’t think I got that about Brand Amper. That Jason’s background in learning is married to Lisa’s background in marketing to produce a marketing system that learns through the employees. That’s fascinating.
Lisa Cervenka: Awesome. Yes, you said it well.
Jason Seiden: That’s exactly right.
We’re recording this right? Because we’re going [crosstalk 00:18:49].
John Sumser: We are. We are, we are.
Lisa Cervenka: Perfect.
Jason Seiden: That’s exactly it. What took us a long time was creating this really simple front end, and it was one of these things when we started sharing it with the market, Lisa and I were deathly afraid it was going to be too simple, that people were going to laugh it off and be like, “Pssh, this is it? You guys disappeared for a year, you came up with this?” And we found just the opposite, because as people got into it and they started using it, the responses we got were, the employees were saying exactly what Lisa’s saying. “Gosh, I never … I now understand where I am.” Then the feedback we get from the company 30, 60, 90 days later is that this process of having employees go through it, the invitation, the communications from the employees that the company is giving them the brand, the process of having people write stuff down, it actually creates a level of engagement that’s sustainable. It creates a meaningful connection between the employee and the company.
Then the data that’s collected, we can look at those stories in the aggregate, see the choices that employees make, which brand statements, which cues did they respond positively to? If the company chooses to insert some brand bumpers into the wizard part of the application and say, “Hey, when you’re thinking about the company, here’s a couple things that we do that you may be interested in,” what choices to people make, and do they modify the statements that the company is providing? Everything’s opt in, so we can look at those choices and then we can go back to the company and say, “Hey, here’s the truth of your brand. Not in six months, not based on a limited focus group that you’re going to spend a ton of money and a ton of time just trying to validate, but like literally from every employee. Here are the choices that your actual employees make when talking about your company to the outside world. When they don’t think you’re paying attention, here’s how you’re really being described.”
Even beyond that, John, we’ve had some instances where we get data back and there might be an area of the company that doesn’t engage, or an area of the company where engagement rates are through the roof, and we’ve had clients look at that and say, “Hey, we can tell where our internal communications is actually working really strong, or not so much.” We focus on the employer brand aspect of it with organizations, but the reality is the marketing aspects of what we’re able to spit out are very, very powerful in terms of helping a company be responsive in almost real-time with how they develop their employer brand. It provides a way for HR and marketing to actually start to integrate that employer brand into the overall master brand. We provide a channel for internal communications to get smooth. As soon as you start building trust there’s all kinds of cultural and communication aspects that start to fall into place. We focus on that foundational piece of getting the employees to start telling that story, get the company’s message in the channels that matter, creating that alignment, and we let our clients tell us how those benefits then start rippling into real business impact.
John Sumser: This is very, very interesting. You know, I’ve been watching very closely the conversation about engagement, and it’s very clear now. China Gorman, one of the ex-presidents of SHRM, is publicly going, “Engagement is a sham.” So the end of that particular buzzword is upon us. What you’re describing is a tool that has the capacity to deliver on the promise of that idea of engagement, which is that the company and its workforce are intimate with each other and are able to harness the strengths of each other in a more complimentary kind of relationship. I’m impressed. I didn’t know this stuff about Brand Amper. This is really quite an amazing discovery for me. What else should I have asked you?
Lisa Cervenka: Well, we could go two different ways with that question. I’m going to offer one suggestion. So, Seid and I like to talk, we’re big fans of the Proust Questionnaire, you know, back of Vanity Fair questions, certain questions to ask. We spend a lot of time in airports and traveling and stuff so one of the questions that we often go after is, “If you weren’t doing this, what would you be doing?” We really like to think about that as sort of an exercise. If that’s the question that maybe we can approach, I would say, if I wasn’t doing this right now, I would be a grief counselor of all things. There are some things that have transpired in my life that I feel very strongly that we don’t communicate well about loss and grief in this society, and there’s some cultural aspects that need to be changed. I think I would take all of my writing and communications skills and channel it into doing that.
Jason Seiden: For my part, I’m a writer. Oh, John, what’s amazing, you want to talk about cultural impact, I’m a writer, I love to write. It’s how I express myself, it’s how I relax. Whether it’s stories or things for business. If I wasn’t doing this I would be a writer. But your [inaudible 00:24:56] is exactly right, what we find is we’ve actually found, without even trying, just focusing on this has sort of given us an opportunity to sort of build pieces into our job that let us actually touch on what we’re passionate about. I know, Lisa I’m going to embarrass you for a second but, Lisa comes from marketing, we’re selling to HR. Between the two of us, she’s newer to a lot of the people we meet, or was for a while, now it’s evened out.
Lisa, you don’t even know this, but I would get texts from people who would meet her and be like, “Okay, that’s amazing,” because just in like a conversation, Lisa has a way of finding out what’s really going on with somebody and just saying that one thing that the person needed to hear on that particular day. For my part, even just being aware that that’s a passion of hers and something she would do … I don’t make the mistake of trying to keep things completely business all the time, because I know that’s a skill of hers and we’re doing real work with real people, and people need people. Whether someone’s going to be a client or not, I know that Lisa Cervenka that has that nature so she’s really good at it. I know that there’s been plenty of times where that’s been a genuine connection, that she’s met somebody in the industry who is going through lots of grief and she’s got some skills on that side. It’s just nice to work with somebody where you know what makes them tick and you can help create space to indulge that other side of them even while getting the work done.
John Sumser: See, I want to join in on this lovely, lovely little bit. If I were not doing this right now, I’d still be doing this. This is what I do.
Lisa Cervenka: Nice.
John Sumser: I don’t have … I don’t need to escape somewhere, I’ve already escaped. But I think that what you’re getting at there is even more interesting than you say. I’m pretty sure that what we all really do is teach each other. All of the … Well it’s decreasingly the case that what people do when they go to work is anything that resembles work. So you have these people in these great big giant institutions who are moving information around, which means talking to each other, right? It’s the information business that we’re in, and people move information around, and our organizations exist to move information around. It requires a different way of looking at things than a more mechanistic kind of organization that’s good for building cars or railroads or buildings or something. In order to function effectively in that world, I think you, I’ve always hated the term, Jason, but you coined this pro-fersonal thing, I hate it, but it’s really spot on for this stuff, because what we do is far more human than our roles would suggest. [crosstalk 00:28:28].
Jason Seiden: Shifting from a consultant who is watching it happen on the outside, to somebody who’s co-founding a business and actually forced to make it happen with a co-founder who has different skills and different interests, that was, I’m not going to lie, that was a transition, but to your point about learning from each other, it has been such a rewarding transition. When you’re putting yourself in a place where you force yourself to actually do that and integrate those parts of your life, really amazing things happen, John, no question about it.
John Sumser: It’s wonderful to hear about your business, we’re just about out of time. If you would take a moment to reintroduce yourselves and tell people how to get a hold of you, that would be really cool.
Lisa Cervenka: Sure. Lisa Cervenka, and the best way to get me is my Twitter, which is @BrandNRD, Brand Nerd.
Jason Seiden: And I’m Jason Seiden, I’m on Twitter @Seiden, S-E-I-D-E-N.
John Sumser: Great. Well, you’ve been listening to Jason Seiden and Lisa Cervenka, who are the co-founders of Brand Amper. This has been HR Examiner Radio, I’m John Sumser, your host, and we will see you same time on Friday.
End transcript
