Importance of Digital Content with Patrick Shanahan

Below is an auto-generated transcription of my conversation with Patrick Shanahan. Because this is auto-generated there are likely some grammatical errors but it is still a useful tool to search text within this podcast episode.

Feel free to join our Chamber Chat Champions Facebook Group to discuss this episode and to share your own experiences and tips with other Chamber Champions.

Introduction

Brandon Burton 0:00
This is the Chamber Chat Podcast, the show dedicated to chamber professionals to spark ideas and to get actionable tips and strategies to better serve your members and community.

Now, your host, he would like you to join the Chamber Chat Champions Facebook group. He’s my dad Brandon Burton.

Hello Chamber Champions. Thank you for tuning in to Chamber Chat Podcast. I am your your host, Brandon Burton, and it’s my goal to introduce you to people and ideas to help you better serve your Chamber members and your community.

Our title sponsor is Holman Brothers Membership Sales Solutions. Let’s hear from Jason Mock president and CEO of the San Marcos Area Chamber to learn how the Holman Brothers have provided value for his chamber. Two years ago,

Jason Mock 0:51
We brought in Holman Brother to help our organization go to that next level. And in those two years, our team has transformed the way that we think about sponsorships and non-dues revenue. And I would really encourage you if you’re looking to take your chamber to the next level to bring on the Holman Brothers.

Brandon Burton 1:01
You can learn more about Holman Brothers Membership Sales Solutions by visiting HolmanBros.com.

Guest Introduction

Our guest for this episode is Patrick Shanahan. Pat currently leads the enterprise sales team at Glue Up. Pat’s responsibilities are focused around building a team of consultants tasked with providing full digital transformation for large scale associations and membership based organizations in North America. Pat’s consultative approach to SAS sales has enabled him to grow companies in the hospitality and technology space. Pat’s most notable accomplishment ranged from programs focused on revenue optimization and the hospitality space for some of the largest hotel groups to repositioning and building new teams within technology companies to starting and exiting a technology company of his own. Pat, I’m happy to have you with me today here on chamber chat podcast, if you would take a moment to say hello to all the chamber champions and share something interesting about yourself so you can get to know you better.

Something Interesting About Pat

Patrick Shanahan 2:12
Absolutely. Thanks, Brandon. And welcome, everyone. Thank you for having me, I guess I’d say something interesting is once upon a time, my mid 30s actually went ahead and quit a very lucrative job and just tried to start my own company. It’s kind of like the stars line I had, it was, it was the right time, I was actually still unmarried at the time didn’t have as many responsibilities in the scope of family. And man, my actual family was really just like that, they thought that my trajectory was going really well. And it wasn’t easy. I had, I totally lacked the resources that I needed to, to get it off the ground, I had Uber Lyft for practically a whole year and sort of simultaneously get my, you know, on the street MBA, so to speak. But, you know, ultimately was successful, it’s taught me a valuable lesson in faith. But I kind of call it these days, I don’t know if this is really a buzzword or phrase, but faith by intelligence, meaning that, you know, I like to have as much info as possible before taking a leap of faith. And I’m not saying that this is something that you do when it comes to, you know, religion or anything along those lines. But as a sensor, you can take, take as much information as you can before you take a leap. So it’s still a leap nonetheless. Because that’s something random but interesting.

Brandon Burton 3:33
Yeah, like that reminds me of the quote of Martin Luther King, Jr. About how it goes to the effect that you don’t need to see the whole staircase to take the first step. But you know, if you can see that first step and take that step with faith, and you’re on the right track. Well, why don’t you take a take a few minutes and tell us a little bit about about glue up? What is the company glue up? What do you guys do? What are your services? And then that’ll help set the table before we get into our discussion for today?

About Glue Up

Patrick Shanahan 4:05
For sure, well, it’s there’s kind of a lot to it. So I’ll keep it pretty simple. We’re a software company, you know, a SaaS company, a cloud based, you know, application with, with mobile apps, but at our core, we’re a CRM company that helps member based organizations manage, you know, their, their contacts, their members, their prospects or opportunities. And it’s sort of modular in its in its capabilities in terms of, you know, the membership management, you know, events, community engagement, it being app based it really, really what we do, it’s two things. So we try to kind of go in and discuss with our clients, how do we remove any manual processes here, this is meant to be sort of an all in one out of the box solution that can, you know, greatly enhance the full ecosystem. And the second thing that we do really is just drive engagement. So in a very segmented and relevant way meaning that it’s all about the data that you have at CRM level, how do you segment lists of of data segment your your people and then you know, drive real information and get them to engage you’re basically on a on a mobile app or on the desktop in a community sets. Awesome. So I mean, we see what that really does is it kind of certain things that we do like for example, our virtual speed networking, version two, which is a really cool, kind of putting the pizza lovers with pizza lovers and putting the the wings lovers with the wings, lovers, you know, you ultimately in a networking sense, hopefully what that does is drive perceived value into ultimate tangible value.

Brandon Burton 5:45
Yeah, and we can touch more on that in a in a moment, but I’ll introduce our topic for discussion today is going to be around the idea of creating more high quality digital assets for your chamber, to kind of diversify your digital outreach to your membership and your community in general. And we’ll get into this discussion as soon as we get back from this quick break.

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Topic-Importance of Digital Content

All right, Pat, we are back. And as I mentioned before the break our our focus for our discussion today is around creating high quality digital content for chambers of commerce. And specifically, just to kind of give a heads up to everyone is I’m partnering with Glue Up for a special online podcast live event, if you will, with with glue up and we’ve got a panel as well of speakers that will be on this live digital event really focused on this whole topic. So today, we were hoping to kind of whet your appetite a little bit, hopefully to gain more people to join us for this digital development event.

So Patrick, you had mentioned before that break about how you mentioned segmentation. So taking for example, a Chamber of Commerce to be able to segment their members. Can you talk a little bit more about what what you mean by that?

Patrick Shanahan 9:35
Yeah, for sure. Well, I’ll use the example of email to start with at least but you know, we all get hundreds of emails a day and many of them just aren’t relevant per se. You know, I get a lot that it looks like somebody just didn’t do their research when they’re trying to sell me you know, a sales enablement tool or something or, or data that they’re trying to sell. You know, because we’re a software company we need to acquire data so that we could reach out and, you know, what happens is like, Okay, we get, we’re getting the same even with organizations that I’m interested in or that I’m a member of, I’m getting stuff that’s just way out of my realm, it’s not necessarily truly relevant. And I don’t have time, unfortunately, all the time to, to dig in and just read all that. So one of the things that I like to talk about is how to really segment your your actual audience, whether it’s members or non members, especially the non members, because, you know, hopefully, members are receiving value Otherwise, they wouldn’t continue on. But the non members obviously are being a little bit more picky, perhaps they need some more value to be, you know, instilled in them, or you need to demonstrate that. And it’s really starts with, like, how you reached out to them in the first place. So, I hope that’s kind of a decent answer. But basically, that’s really just one of the probably five Pong endpoint. Yeah, concepts that I discuss on a daily basis for chambers,

Brandon Burton 11:00
that I’ve joked about this a few times. But my background is in chamber publishing, so doing advertising sales, for chamber directories, and maps and different things. And as I do that, I joke about that, I often feel like a bartender, you know, I meet with these Chamber members, and I hear, I hear their complaints, you know, with unmet unfulfilled expectations from their chamber, and so forth. And one of those things that I hear from Chamber members on pretty much a daily basis is how they get so many emails from their chamber, they just can’t even keep up with all the emails. So as you talk about that, just email as a example, the value that comes in segmenting your membership base, maybe as a starting point, to say, yes, there are certain things that every chamber member needs to know about. But there’s other things that maybe just the restaurants need to know about, or maybe something that just this service based industry needs to know about, or the retail, you know, so you can really hone down and you can get as niche as you want with the segmentation, to make sure that the messaging you’re putting out is relevant to those that you’re putting it out to. And then they also feel like you’re doing something for them, specifically, instead of just sending out a wide broad casting net, and hoping that you bring somebody in to the next event, you know, that your chambers doing. So I see a ton of value in being able to segment and in that that’s best done in a digital way, you know, and being able to input your data in a way that makes sense to be able to segment it later.

Patrick Shanahan 12:42
Totally. And then, you know, even on the front end, the marketing front end, you know, the chamber, I see pretty much every chamber just its sign up for a newsletter or something. Yeah, well, you can think through that one even better to you can actually maybe even have a little bit more of a segmented approach from the former facing, like, even in the initial pre membership phase, like signing up in picking sort of an industry segment at that point to receive communications from so

Brandon Burton 13:12
for sure. And then that gets takes us to the next point that I wanted to touch on is the ability to diversify our digital outreach. So I think every chamber out there has got email, most of them have some kind of social media. Those tend to be you know, we’re most chambers kind of a baseline, you know, they’ve got their Facebook, they’ve got email, but maybe what are what are some other examples that come to mind of other ways that they can reach out digitally to their membership base and and prospective members?

Patrick Shanahan 13:48
Yeah, absolutely. Well, there’s a few. Number one is that, you know, this is my perspective. So I’m not necessarily trying to be out here talking about technology, but you know, it’s, it’s an app based world now. And so, you know, we have the likes of the, you know, the Instagrams, and Facebook’s, and LinkedIn, those are certainly very important. However, none of those actually are enable you to truly do what we did in our last couple of thoughts, you know, to truly segment that and actually have it so that, for example, and with our product with with glue up the community engagement solution, you pull up in the app, and you’re privy to what you have sort of subscribe to terms of the topics that you want to hear about, and it works much like a social network. So you kind of you’re scrolling through but it’s all people that are like minded maybe or have the same challenges. And so again, it’s it’s like value driven there because you’re not you know, you ever scroll down forever and you just didn’t really scroll and scroll on most can’t find anything you really are interested in and so that’s that’s, like probably the main the main gripe, actually that I hear from her clients is that A is the same thing we were talking about where it’s like, yeah, we have trouble kind of finding our niche, but it’s because in this whole thing, and actually, I’m just gonna throw out that, you know, Scott Pleasance is, you know, is going to be on this podcast. And I’m super excited because he comes from this economic development mindset, that’s just fantastic. And so when we were designing the community engagement solution, you know, we pretty much worked with him on on understanding what that would entail. It’s very programmatic in nature, it translates very well to industry segmentation, special interests, economic development, so forth. So when, when you’re scrolling forever, on a social network, and it’s not very segmented, there are, of course, you know, channels and people that you can, like, they all work a little bit differently. But when we were designing ours, it was very focused on trying to trying to be able to satisfy, you know, the, whether it’s, you know, economic development, or if it’s topical in nature, industry segment in nature, I’d say that’s the number one. The number one thing in terms of expanding as reaches, so you know, you’ve got, you’ve got all the whatever social networks, you’re using us also, you should have something that can tie them all together. So we’re well integrated into all of the social networks that that you know, a chamber would have or that a member based organization would have. So that’s, that’s the other thing is that it’s got to be something that’s integrated, so that it can be done at scale, because it needs to be done at scale, because there’s a hyper focus on the delivery of the information.

Brandon Burton 16:37
Sure, yeah. So you drop Scott Pleasance name. So Scott will be joining us as a panelist on our the live digital event that we have coming up and this is going to be on February 24. So for all you be listening, kind of bookmark that save the date. And we’ll we’ll get a link out for you to register for this here in just a little bit. But also on that panel is we’ll have myself we’ll have Patrick, it will also have Izzy West. And I know a lot of you are familiar with Izzy between her her blog, the Izzy West and she does several YouTube videos and very involved with digital content creation and working with Chambers of Commerce now as a consultant to take on their their social media presence. But as we talked about diversifying digital outreach, you know, the, you’ve got your social media, you’ve got your podcasts, you’ve got blogging, you’ve got video, you’ve got, you know, all of the different social platforms. So being able to reach out to your members or potential members and meet them where they are, and being able to communicate with them effectively in the way that’s going to resonate the best with them, I think is so important, and why we’re going to have this digital event to talk about creating high quality digital content and the importance of it for Chambers of Commerce. So one of those things, Pat, that you mentioned with the with Scott is around economic development. And and we had talked beforehand about how really economic development is something that every chamber should be a part of to some degree. Do you want to touch a little bit more on that about some thoughts? I know Scott’s no expert on that, but maybe give a teaser?

Patrick Shanahan 18:28
Totally, totally. And yeah, I wish he was here. But um, you know, he’s, he’s, I’ll give you a little background. He’s he actually is from Lynchburg, Virginia, at least now in his life. So that’s down and in sort of, sort of the country, at least in my perspective, you know, because I’m from the DMV, the Washington, DC metro area, I’m in the suburbs. And he’s tasked with economic development, he actually his organization is called innovate Lynchburg. And that whole corridor is a place where he and his his board are trying to really think outside of the box in terms of how do we attract, you know, and educate new talent to basically get, you know, economic stimulus via bringing, bringing in organizations like I’ll give another example of Scott for a get back to it. But like, when you think about Fairfax County in Northern Virginia, and I actually live in montgomery county, which is on the Maryland side, Virginia is absolutely crushing it. I mean, they’ve got Amazon Web Services there. It’s already been there. They’re moving, they’re getting the HQ to how does that happen? There’s a lot of things in terms of tax incentives, server time and certain things like that. So a lot of that’s going on and a little bit of a smaller level out there. What he’s doing, but the the point is that, you know, whether we like it or not, and I never really realized this until I spoke with my CEO and this is actually a couple of months ago, and certainly when we had that conversation Two weeks ago, Scott, whether we like it or not, if you start a business, you’re you’re simulating, you know, economy, you’re developing the account, you’re creating jobs, opportunities, whatever we do, it’s all centered around that in a business capacity, and then our allies really, so he’s all about that, very cognizant about that. And he really, I think they started this tech hub in a more hyper focused way to try to get the tech companies that presumably, will grow fast, you know, and, and, and provide faster value, maybe that just any other industry segment out there is. So I think what they’re betting on to start, he actually, I mean, I’m not sure if anybody knows, but I mean, it’s in Virginia, it’s like, it’s like, if you get at a high school, there’s a program where they practically pay you to go to school, and they practically sign you up for the job of your dream career, that it’s a two or four year program. I mean, they made that happen out there. And that is fantastic. It’s having a major impact on lives out there. So hopefully, that’s a good summary of it. And I think it’s going to be epic, they’ll just continue to really, really do well.

Brandon Burton 21:12
Yeah, I’m looking forward to seeing what seeing what Scott has to bring to this digital event. And for those of you who who are interested, this is the the morning of February 24, that we’re doing this, this digital event for creating high quality digital content for chambers of commerce. And you can access it, probably the easiest way to register would be through the shownotes On this episode, which is chamber chat podcast.com/episode 160. And I’ll have a registration button there, that’ll take you to the page to get signed up for it. But Patrick, I don’t want to, you know, giveaway, everything that we’re going to be covering in this event. But I would like to have you, you come from a digital background for sure. Like to get your perspective on a tip or action items that listeners chamber champions can do to help take their chamber app to the next level.

Action Item/Tip for Chamber Champions

Patrick Shanahan 22:12
Absolutely. Number one. Sorry, you said a tip, I have a few

Brandon Burton 22:17
that will take bonuses. I mean, we’ll charge extra for those for the list. No, I’m just kidding. Well, yeah,

Patrick Shanahan 22:23
me too. Now, obviously, number one would be attend this actual event coming up on the 28th. So for sure, register for that. And yeah, check, check out my website, go up.com. But with this series, you know, to, I think a really cool exercise to do would just be to create a list of all the small business businesses that are in your, you know, in your area, that are in your database or not. And that are, you know, they’re not member, take, take a small sample of this random. And, you know, if it’s, if it’s a ton of data, yeah, just take like maybe five of them. Hopefully, once maybe the, you don’t even really know, if you’re in a really, really small place, that’s probably going to be pretty hard. But go to their website, see if they even have one, see if it’s really out of date. We’re gonna chat about this just a little bit, probably, if we can get to it on on the event. But I mean, there’s some chambers that I work with, that are totally making money off of this type of strategy. And I think we spoke about this as well, really out of the box thought process and a really, really cool strategy that I think is, is on the economic development front, it’s on the, it’s on the, it’s on the front of chambers, you know, really spearheading the advancement of their members where applicable.

Brandon Burton 23:46
I think that’s so key, especially coming off the heels of the pandemic right now, where, when, when COVID first it and businesses you know, brick and mortar businesses had to close their doors for, you know, the two weeks to flatten the curve, or however long they ended up closing their doors for those who had a website who had a digital commerce, you know, presence, were able to pivot and actually still do pretty well, even through the pandemic. So I think that’s a great tip that that’s us offered is to, to take a look at, you know, a sampling of your members or prospective members and see, do they have a website do they have what kind of digital presence do they have? Are they operating just with a brick and mortar and a Facebook page? Because that’s not going to help a whole lot with SEO rankings are people trying to find them online? I know in fact, one of the sponsors for this show for the for chamber chat podcast is chamber nation. And they’ll they’ll help chambers do this or they’ll build out the number of web pages for their members. So it helps to with rankings with search engines help them to be found in a digital world that we’re now a part of. So I think that’s a huge Did that path just offer there’s to do that evaluation, and then look for the opportunity where you can help these businesses to get more into the digital world, just so they can stay relevant. We always talk about chamber staying relevant, but we need to help our members, businesses stay relevant as well. That’s a great tip. Tony, Pat, as we look to the future of chambers, how do you see the future of chambers of commerce and their purpose going forward?

Future of Chambers

Patrick Shanahan 25:30
Pretty much what your last statement was, I mean, you know, chamber personnel, are some of the most diverse people they know, almost to a level of high granularity, you know, of not only their members, but they, they have the full idea of their area of what can be done, what can’t be done, the trends in all these different segments. And, you know, I think that, I think sometimes we we, we make the mistake of just thinking that someone knows their business, like 360 degree in and out, people are also very inundated with their lives to so a small business owner, and I’ve been with myself, is inundated by a hyperfocus of something, and mostly it’s revenue driven. Right. But perhaps, you know, one could actually kind of take a higher view, you know, back it out and say, Well, what is the risk involved? Potentially, and we saw it with COVID. You know, we saw restaurants like shutting down, you know, if they were able to pivot fast enough, would it have happened? So, having an idea of even like that, for example, they’re basically, you know, it’s it’s all about two things, the economic economic development, but also just basically being able to kind of be a consultant for, you know, all businesses within the area member or not. Yeah.

Brandon Burton 26:51
Which I know, can be hard as a bandwidth so wide. But there are certain things, I think it goes back to the segmenting, you know, if you can segment and share information to these specific groups, you’re not needing to do as much of the one on one stuff, but you can still do the one to many, it just may not be the entire base as many, but maybe it’s 15 or 20, in a group instead of 200 or 400. You know, it’s like

Patrick Shanahan 27:19
the glaring opportunity, you know, go for that, what can be done for everyone?

Brandon Burton 27:24
All types, but absolutely, yeah, yeah, go see where the biggest needs are, and attack those first. Absolutely,

Patrick Shanahan 27:31
totally. And maybe the other thing would just be to continue to focus early, because I know a lot of chambers is really great, but you know, use use the tools and the knowledge and the data that you have to truly put value to value within their relationships, you know, so finding people that, you know, be Cupid, you know, in a business sense.

Brandon Burton 27:53
Yeah. That’d be that matchmaker. Yeah. For sure. Well, Pat, what would be the best way for a chamber champion to reach out and connect with you if they want to learn more about glue app or anything that you had to share? And beyond joining us for this digital event on the 24th?

Connect with Patrick Shanahan

Patrick Shanahan 28:12
Sure, absolutely. Go to the website, glueup.com. Or you can reach me by email. patrick.shanahan@glueup.com. So that’s Patrick Shanahan. And that’s spelled s h a n a h a n at glue up.com. And we’re common. Well, that’s 443-282-8656. Happy to speak with you.

Brandon Burton 28:38
All right, we will get that in our show notes for this episode, which again, is going to be at chamberchatpodcast.com/episode160. And again, we invite everyone to join us for this digital event. Again, it’s going to be on the morning of Thursday, February 24. Depending on your time zone I’m in Texas, so I’m Central. So it’s 9am Central. So do the math to wherever you are, you’re located. But we’re going to have a great discussion on creating high quality digital content for your chambers and why that’s important. And again, I’ll be on that presentation. Patrick will be on there. Scott Pleasants and Izzy West. So we’re going to have a great discussion. There’s going to be opportunity for those in attendance to ask questions, get some live feedback. And we’ll also do some speed networking at the end as well so you can get to connect with some other Chamber Champions that are out there and be a part of this great event. So check out the show notes page again, chamberchatpodcast.com/episode160 to register for that event.

That Patrick, thank you for joining me today on chamber tap podcast, and sharing some of these key highlights and insights and, and helping to tease this event a little bit. We hope we get a great turnout.

Patrick Shanahan 30:00
I appreciate it. Thank you.

Brandon Burton 30:04
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