In this get to know you episode, William Smith, the Producer for the Attainable Podcast Network, talks to Daniel Parscale, the host of Reach. We talk about what Reach is and who it is for, and get a little into Daniel’s background.
Read the transcript:
Hey everyone. My name is William Smith. I’m a producer on the Attainable Podcast Network. In today’s show, we’re talking about Reach, a brand new show that’s being released that we’re really excited about. I sat down with Daniel Parscale, the host of the show, to learn more. Hope you enjoy.
I’m excited at the growth of the network. We have three shows. We’ve had a lot of success with downloads, and subscriptions, and people giving really good feedback. We’ve actually heard from members recently there were like, how do you do this? I want to learn how to do it myself, which is awesome.
It is.
But I’m excited. This is the fourth show, it’s called Reach, and I’m sitting here with Daniel Parscale.
That’s right.
It’s funny, because the first time we recorded, you said, hi, I’m Daniel Parscale, and I was like, that’s not at all how I thought you would say your last name.
What is the origin of your last name?
I was already prepared to hear that question, because I get asked it a lot. And the truth is that nobody really knows. A lot of people speculate that it’s Italian or French, but it more likely got its roots in German or Dutch. I don’t know why, because it doesn’t make sense to me, but I know that’s the most traceable lineage to my family. So probably somewhere in there, but you know, Ellis Island. It’s probably just all confused anyway.
Yeah, I got to be honest, I was doing some Ancestry.com look up here.
Well, what did you find?
So on my computer it said, well, it’s weird, because it brought up like England and Wales.
Yeah, so when you say German, French, Italian, you were hitting every country but the ones that Ancestry, but then when I looked up on Ancestry, it couldn’t pinpoint it.
And it actually also– let me look at really quick– it brought up a– like, where were you born?
I was born in Portland, Oregon.
Oh, OK. So this found Missouri–
Oh yeah.
That’s where the families concentration, or people that have that name, live in Missouri. So I was wondering if you lived in Missouri or something.
I did not, but my dad is from Tennessee and I know I have some family who started off there and moved over to North Carolina, so a little bit more southern. But I’ve always lived over here. I don’t know a whole lot about the people on there, but I know that I haven’t found them on Ancestry, but I have done some Facebook snooping and found a couple of other people with the same last name as well.
I also– I thought this was really interesting– way back when the internet was still in its teenage years, I think it was like 2000 or 2001, I did a Google search for my name, because back then I don’t think people really doing that just yet, and I found a post from somebody on a family tree website who was looking for me because they had found my web page. And it took a year for a response to come, but it was my dad who said, that’s my son. And that’s all it was. It was all dramatic. And I wrote back and I was like, it’s me, guys. I’m here. I’m looking for you. What’s going on? And nobody ever responded, so I think they shut down the website and I never found that family member.
That’s crazy.
Yeah.
So Reach, who is it for, what kinds of things are you going to be talking about and why should someone tune into it? Give me kind of the elevator pitch.
Elevator pitch. OK. So Reach is designed for people who are in entrepreneurial positions, they have their own business and they have the savvy to run that, but they want to get better. And they want to focus a little bit more on their marketing, but they don’t necessarily know how to digest all of it all at once, because marketing is a huge umbrella term that covers a whole bunch of different categories.
And we want to break those down into smaller, digestible units, and kind of the pitch them to you in a way that is conversational so that you can hear it from somebody who’s actually doing it professionally for a living, but in a way that you could explain, even if you aren’t doing that.
The people we’re hoping to reach, some of them might be small business owners, some of them might have some more established businesses, or they might have been in business for a long time. But you know, the marketing landscape has changed dramatically over the years and especially in the past, I’d say, 10 years or so.
Digital and marketing, for instance, is going to be huge focus of what we’ll be doing. And we’ll be comparing it to traditional marketing approaches as well. So people who want to be able to understand that, feel like they’re caught up, but don’t necessarily want to go back to school for it right away. This is a show that I want it to be what I would have listened to years ago when I was just starting out marketing.
Because when you get into marketing, you can understand the basic concepts of things, but you don’t know them well until you’ve been doing them for years, right? So I want this to be something that will help to push that along. It’s kind of like a guidance counselor for marketing, I guess you could say. I don’t know. That’s the first that comes to mind, but somebody who’s there to really tell you, I know exactly where you’re at in understanding of this. I know a little bit more and I’m going to show you how to understand it so you can get up to here too.
So what’s your background in marketing? I mean, I know you work here at Audigy Group and you work on the Digital Marketing Team.
I do. I started here actually as a marketing coordinator– I’ll start back there at the start of the story– as a marketing coordinator where my focus was a little bit more on the day to day and what I would consider traditional marketing. So things that went to print often went through me, whether it was a letterhead or some sort of collateral that you’d use day to day in the office, or if it was an advertisement that was actually going to print. So I helped with that.
Now that I’m in digital, which is where I’m really excited about because there’s so much to learn and do, I’m helping people with website optimization, SEO, which is going to be a big topic. I’m also getting my feet wet again with social media and multimedia kinds of resources.
Prior to that I’ve had kind of a diverse marketing background. I worked in the concert industry for a few years. Basically I helped– well, I wore a lot of hats in that industry because I was a small business too. But the stuff I was really excited about with marketing was I helped to start our social media campaign there, introducing the concepts, which were new at the time of Facebook and Twitter into our campaigns, building ways to reach people, sell our product, generate brand awareness and generate content also.
We were also in the process of building a website that had blogs and we needed to write and fill those things up. So working with that with the music focus, locally, and I guess you could say regionally too, because we hit the Pacific Northwest pretty heavy.
I also have some guerrilla marketing experience. For about a year I worked for a company that our client was Sony PlayStation. And what I did there was, basically I got out in front of people. I drove around a giant box truck that was full of video games and introduced the product to people, answered their questions, and really show them the ins and outs of that.
And that, to most people, sounds like, whoa, that’s a cool, fun job and like it’s more of a vacation than actual work, but it is marketing in a modern sense and it also taught me lessons that I apply today in all of these other facets too, because ultimately what you’re doing with marketing is you’re really trying to sell a story and an image. And there’s so many different ways of doing that that I think that whatever you can learn from any of your experiences is applicable elsewhere also.
Yeah, I was going to say, that actually does sound like a dream job.
It was rad.
Yeah, I’ve been really hooked on, well, not on PlayStation, but on Xbox recently. Got into the world of playing Destiny and I’m just kind of hooked on it, I just play it all the time.
OK. Maybe we’ll clock out early today.
Yeah. Yeah. We need to have a room here where we just have– well, we have a TV.
This is a good one.
Yeah, this actually is a pretty comfortable room here, our podcast studio. We could just set up the old Xbox here and play some games.
I’ll go pick up some chips.
Yeah, that sounds great. This is the get to know you episode to kind of give people, I call it the Episode Zero. It’s just before we really dig into this to the meat of these topics. But what’s coming up on the show? Who have you talked to? Who are you planning on talking to? And what are the topics?
So our first episode is really exciting. We’re going to be talking with Gary Jackson. He’s the manager of Digital Services and he is going to be joined by our co-host Nathan Miller. We’re talking about basically why should you even have a website. And I thought that that was a good place for the show to start because it’s a question that still deserves exploration, even though it might seem apparent to everybody.
But I think a lot of people will take for granted that they need a website just because everybody else has a website. But why do you actually need it? And from there, you get to figure out what can I do with it? And from there you can figure out how do I do this better?
And we’re going to talk about the high-level view of that perspective and I think it’s really going to open up the pathway for the upcoming shows that we’re going to do. Some of those topics are going to be things like online reputation management. We’ll figure out how you incorporate local listings into the website that you currently have and the one you’re building.
We’re also going to talk about social media a little bit later down the line and a whole range of topics. One that I’m also working on that I’m really excited about is the comparison between what I, again, call traditional media and digital media and see how they are not just independent, but they’re similar and they really should overlap in a lot of cases too.
One of the things that we want people to know is that we’re going to be talking to people that are both in and out of the audiology/dentistry/medical industry. You know, the Attainable Podcast Network is a production of three different companies. It’s Audigy Group, which caters to audiologists, Stratus Dental, which caters to dentistry, and Audigy Medical, which is kind of touching the EMT world. But a lot of the concepts, I think, are probably applicable whether you’re selling medical services or you’re selling home repair services, or retail, or e-commerce, or whatever.
At least in that first show that I got to kind of listen to, the concepts about the website, they’re the kind of questions that are universal. It doesn’t really matter if you’re a doctor asking whether I need a website. I mean, there’s a lot of companies out there that rely on social media.
Yeah, they do. We’ve got a guest who’s going to be coming on in a couple of weeks who that’s kind of a specialty too. He has built his brand using almost entirely social media, but then he’s also taken the leverage that he’s gotten from there to get out into the world and do some really awesome grassroots stuff too.
I don’t want to give away too many of the surprises there, so you’re going to want to tune in, but he’s a friend of mine and he works in a completely different industry than I do. So I thought he would be a great guest to bring on board. We’re going to try and extend that offer to other people in other industries also because as you pointed out, a lot of this stuff is applicable across the board. It’s just told in a different way.
You have like this, like a radio voice.
And I mean that in the most positive way.
But I have a TV face too, let’s make sure that’s heard.
Yeah. Have you– I don’t think you’ve done podcasting before, but have you done broadcast radio before?
Kind of. Halfway yes to both of those, actually. I used to work in college radio for a while. I had a Friday night show called Medium Rare that was probably the best metal show on the radio at the time, but this was years ago. So I did that for a long time and yeah, I had some college radio experience.
And then the video game job that I talked about too, I was on the microphone quite a bit. We actually got a little bit of training through Second City in Chicago, just a quick, quick crash course on how to be able to talk to people on a microphone because it’s intimidating. Is actually kind of fun to watch people get on the microphone and put on their headphones for the first time and be like, this is a different social experience. They don’t know what to do.
Everyone is scared. They see this contraption, and we don’t even have the most– I mean, we have a pretty comfortable set up.
It’s in a really like, just kind of chill room and environment. But yeah, people come in and they see these microphones and it’s like, oh my god, I’ve got to sit three feet away from it.
And oh my god, I’m so loud in my headphones, and yeah, it’s definitely an acquired skill.
It is.
So what was like the one takeaway that you had from the Second City experience, like what they taught you?
You know, it was probably to be agreeable, because if you disagree with somebody out right, it takes you away from what you’re actually talking about and you start to talk about your disagreements. So even if you do disagree with people, you need to find the common ground so we can talk about it. It’s a social skill that’s helped me outside of radio also, I think.
Yeah. That’s a good one. Mine is I’m trying to learn to not talk over people. Just let them talk, because the podcast and the conversations I like to hear are the ones that I respond to most are when it’s just a person talking and there’s not a lot of cut ins, or right, yeah, you know, stuff like that. I just I like to hear like a complete, just pristine thought that’s just from start to finish so I’m trying to work on that.
I agree. I try to listen to a lot of podcasts like that too. The ones that I actually listen to the most are I like music, podcasts where there tends to be a lot of overlapping, but there’s music to back it up. And I like philosophy podcasts a lot too.
There’s a lot of people who you can almost hear them nodding and planning their response in the background, but they get out this really well-thought eloquent monologue almost. And then the response is someone doing the same thing. And it’s like, wow, they sound way smarter than I could ever sound, even if I knew what I was talking about in philosophy.
Yeah. So Daniel, I’m super excited about the show. I’m super excited to edit shows and to kind of be the fly on the wall here as you’re going through these interviews, and talking to people, and teaching about marketing.
And I just want to commend you on a really taking the ball and running with this and reaching out to me and saying, hey, how can I get involved? This is something that I dig. I would love to have this opportunity to host a show.
And not only that, but finding guests, and coming up with the questions, and doing the research, and doing all the legwork. And so I really appreciate it and I think that it’s going to come through in the final product and people are going to love the show. So thank you very much.
My pleasure. Thanks for having me, giving me the opportunity to do this, and thanks to everybody who is listening today and who’s going to continue listening in the future. I really think you’re going to enjoy the stuff we put together for you.