Your Message Doesn’t Matter If No One Hears It with Joshua Altman

Ever feel like you're putting your message out there and... nothing? No response, no engagement, just silence. In today’s world of nonstop content and ever-changing algorithms, just showing up isn’t enough. You have to show up the right way. On this episode of Action Antidote, we're joined by Joshua Altman, Chief Marketing Officer at Beltway Media, to talk about what it really takes to get your message to land. With a background in journalism and social media strategy, Joshua knows how attention works and how to earn it. He shares why a message often needs more than one shot to stick, how to find the signal in all the digital noise, and why staying human is your greatest advantage in a crowded space. If you’re tired of guessing what works and ready to start communicating with clarity and impact, this episode is your cheat code. --- Listen to the podcast here: Your Message Doesn’t Matter If No One Hears It with Joshua Altman Welcome to Action’s Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. Today, I want to talk to you about getting your message out and about all the different ways that we have available to get our messages out and even how this landscape is changing quite a bit. I’m sure you’ve all heard a little bit about AI and the hype around where AI might be taking some things, but there are plenty of other progressions and other trends taking place. To stay updated on that and to give us some information about all the different platforms, all the different methods, all the different places we can go and also the ways we can craft our messages to our audience, I would like to bring on my guest today, Joshua Altman, who is the chief marketing officer of beltway.media, a company that provides fractional services to small- to medium-sized businesses. --- Joshua, welcome to the program. Thanks for having me so. So, yeah, let’s start out by talking about your story. Has marketing, getting crafting messages, getting messages out, has that always been part of your path? In a way. I did not start in corporate or in marketing or anything along those lines. I went to journalism school and started as a journalist, and then went from being a congressional news producer and reporter to being a corporate communications person. I left my job, I was with The Hill newspaper for about five years and I left that to what I thought would be freelance reporting and producing. I was a cameraman, I was an editor, I was a producer, so very hands-on technical side of things in addition to the reporting, doing the interviews, the research. All the things people associate with print reporting, I was doing that plus video. That’s what I went to college for. I did my masters while I was a reporter. I was all in DC. I did that in something called communications, culture and technology and I thought I’d spend my career as a journalist. That wasn’t what ultimately happened. I left my job as a journalist, thinking, like I said, I’d be freelance, and then I kind of just fell into the corporate work, which is kind of what I’ve been doing since. So what made you leave your job? What was the –– was there an event that made you leave it? A certain realization? No. I mean, in terms of an event or a realization, I’ve been there just, like I said, for five years. I was kind of looking to grow and do something a little different than what I had been doing. I had great experiences where I was, was just looking to do more, again, as a reporter. I ended up doing something entirely different. So, when you were on the path of being a reporter, it seems like you had your hand in a lot of the areas of content creation or what we would call content creation now,. You talked about filming the video, video editing, doing everything. Was there certain aspects of it that started to intrigue you more, because you talk now quite a bit about how our messages are crafted, how are we actually reaching an audience? So in addition to doing video with The Hill newspaper, I also did a lot of their social media, not for my whole time there but for about the last 18 months or so, I was doing their social media as well. So, what I did a lot of was pooling things and making it fit how we wanted to communicate that story. So, sometimes, it was a longer three- to five-minute piece, sometimes it was just a sound bite. Sometimes, we have an interactive map. Sometimes, it was, primarily a social post. One thing we did a lot of there were vote counts, who’s going to vote for or against this bill that’s coming up. And a lot of that was literally on the website, it was a list. How can we make that list more engaging? That was a lot of things on social media, that was regular updates through different channels. At that point, it was Twitter, Twitter posts, Twitter accounts so if it was an energy bill, we had special ones for energy. How can we profile things? If this person’s likely going to vote for this but here was their past voting record on similar things. What groups could we make of people? So, when you’re looking at crafting this content, what was the process that came to mind? Was there a certain amount of analytics around who you’re trying to reach, how you’re trying to reach them as well as what you want them to get out of the engagement in your platform? A lot of is what do we want them to get out of it. Yeah. And some things are just, like I said, better suited for a forty-second clip, a sound bite versus that five-minute long to sit down interviews, longer piece, and we would look at things like this story did well on this platform, this got a lot of social media engagement. What made that happen? Was it a particular topic? Was it time of day? Was it people –– there was nothing else going on on that Tuesday and it just happened to be that Tuesday was really good, which happens more often than people would like to admit that, that is just a day people were paying attention to you. I think the phrase slow news day comes to mind. Yeah, but it doesn’t necessarily have to be. It could be a fast news day and they’re paying attention to something else on your website and that got collateral traffic, which is great and, of course, any website is going to plan for that. That’s why you see related stories on everything. It’s to get people to click again and they’re related, they’re based on your interests, based on that story. So, we’re always looking at those sorts of things and I wish that was some sort of great secret but you could see it on every website, news website you go to, you see related stories, you see you might also be interested in. It’s to keep you on the website. It’s to keep you clicking and reading. So, is there an actual way to determine why any particular story or any particular thing that anyone posts anywhere on the internet gets engagement or doesn’t get engagement? I would love that to be yes. Other than asking people directly, “Why did you click on this?” pretty much no, unfortunately, because there are so many factors. I mean, sometimes you can make good, reasonable assumptions. A picture was particularly compelling, the headline was good, or it got picked up by an influencer, sorts of things, but, at the same time, unless someone tells you, “I clicked this because of that,” it’s very hard to know with 100 percent certainty. Yeah, so if anyone’s like looking at their posts or something and say, “Oh, this one got a lot more traction than that one,” but they keep scratching their head as to like why because the one that got less traction maybe was even the post they were more proud of for some reason. Yeah. In that case, you look at what was different. It could be time of day, if you’re doing your corporate posts, it could be time of day. Your audience is a lunchtime audience and you posted that around breakfast. Well, okay, you’ll know that if you do five more posts and the lunch ones do better than the breakfast time ones, that’s a way that you can start figuring that out. It could be the topic. I worked with one company and they did email newsletters, among other, they had their social channels and books as well, other things like that. What we found was posts, if we use pictures, if the pictures show people who were more real looking as opposed to supermodel looking, the real people got a lot more engagement. Really? Well, these were stock photo models, all of them, ultimately, but people who kind of looked like you, your friend, your neighbors, the guy in your office, those got more engagement. Could I say that was 100 percent the reason why? Probably not, but it was a trend over enough posts of trying different things that it made a difference when we kind of stuck with it. And you saw that, and it makes me wonder if the same is true for AI where a lot of people say they can tell if something’s an AI-generated image and if that also kind of handicaps people in that way? Sometimes, the tells are really easy. Someone has seven fingers, three hands, things like that, all your people are cross-eyed in a photo of six people, the odds of having that, six people in your photo cross-eyed are relatively slim in real, so those are kind of more obvious tells in AI. Sometimes, it does pretty good when you’re trying to get something that looks like a person but I’ve noticed, been doing this for however many years it’s been, humans have a natural ability to tell a real face from a fake one. It’s just an evolutionary trait we have is we can tell genuine expression from fake expression. We all kind of see that in our normal, everyday, going about our lives. Okay, that person’s really not as happy as they’re pretending to be. We see that every day. We can just tell when a face isn’t real. There’s just –– often, I’ll just say,...