Layla Kasha

Senior Vice President & CMO, GROCERY OUTLET HLDNG CORP

2024 AO Seminar - Marketing, Promotion & Brand Awareness

🎥 Mar 05, 2024 📺 TSA West Video ⏱ 54m 👁 92 views

Speakers: Phil Cooke and Layla Kasha.

About Layla Kasha

Layla Kasha, Senior Vice President and Chief Marketing Officer at Grocery Outlet, has discussed the company's marketing strategy in several recent appearances. She described the retailer's model as a "beautiful marriage of entrepreneurial spirit and the backing of a corporate brand," noting that its independently owned stores allow operators to tailor their offerings and community partnerships to local needs. Kasha stated that the company's marketing focuses on the people behind the business rather than just products, and that its decentralized social media strategy, which empowers store owners to post content, proved advantageous during the pandemic by enabling real-time communication with customers. Kasha has also spoken about her career experiences and the role of women in leadership. In a 2018 TEDx talk, she said that "every single break in my career has come from a man" and cited a 2011 UCLA study that found women often preferred male bosses. She described what she called the "queen bee syndrome" as a "career-killing phenomenon" and advocated for women to support one another professionally, stating, "Be the girl boss you wish you would have had." More recently, she credited women, including her boss Pam Burke, for her success and emphasized the importance of failing forward and taking risks.

Source: AI-verified profile updated from Layla Kasha's recent appearances. Browse all interviews →

Transcript (34 segments)

Phil Cooke0:01

You know, and it would be a dead end. I have to say a meth Bible camp would be a dead end. So the bottom line is whatever we say today, just don't send your kids to a meth Bible camp at any point. I love this George Bernard Shaw quote: the single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it's taken place. We often think because of what we've communicated, we think that's what they're hearing. And it's taken me a long time to learn that the message we communicate is not always the message they hear, and it's our job to make sure both are working and both in sync. So the big question is, when you launch out ministry, how do we get that message noticed? Hopefully you won't have to stand in a chicken suit on the side of the road. But we want to talk a little bit about some of the issues that we've encountered and some things that maybe can help you get your story out there more effectively and hopefully change the world.

Layla Kasha0:51

Absolutely. Yeah, so I would say the thing that I want to start with is I feel that with the church and most Christian organizations, we feel a little bit like marketing is very self-serving. And this is a modest group of people, and we don't want to go out and cheerlead and shout. But I got to tell you something: no one can hear you if you're not doing that. It is so noisy. We just had a really long conversation about how much is out there and how noisy it is, and how do you get over the noise? But also, it's not necessarily that you have to be the person. We talked a little bit about this too: if you are going into a new area and you're getting ready to set up your board, find the marketing people in your town. There are marketers, like full-blown born and bred marketers. I'm one of them. I never met a microphone I don't love. It's what I love to do. I've been doing it since I was a kid. I love to talk, tell stories, talk about things that I'm passionate about. And that naturally makes you either a lawyer because you like to talk a lot, or it makes you a marketer. My dad was hoping for lawyer, he got a marketer. It is what it is. But if you can find people that are willing to do that for you, and you might not be so comfortable, that's totally fine. Go find people like me, like Phil, that are in your community that want to serve, and they will help tell the story and help you package your story better. Because that's the name of the game: you've got to find the right packaging that's going to connect to people. People want to connect to a story. They want to hear from real people. They don't care about how splashy and flashy your video is. They care about what are you trying to say and are you connecting to them.

Phil Cooke2:32

I agree. The big message here, in fact, when it comes to looking for people, one of the places you might go is find a big church, get their communication director on your board, because they spent their whole life trying to help a church communicate their message. And you can go to universities, a lot of places. But I've always believed that ministries need to understand, have a relationship with an attorney, that's important, but you also need to have a relationship with a communication professional who can help get your story out there in a bigger way. And she's right about the clutter. One British study indicates the average person sees about 10,000 media messages every single day, which means no matter what message you're sharing, they're hearing 99,999 more messages. So who's going to cut through and actually get heard? That's a big, big issue. One study indicates we touch our phone 2,000 times a day. If you're in your 20s, probably 3,000 times a day. But that amount of clutter is absolutely overwhelming. In fact, who was it? Somebody mentioned newspapers this morning. I know nobody reads newspapers, but it's in that this acceleration has happened recently. When you read seven days of a daily newspaper, you've read more information than most people just 100 years ago read during their entire lifetime. That's how quickly that has happened. In fact, it's really interesting. One study, this is super fascinating to me, one study came out last year that indicated all the information that's ever been created from the beginning of time to the year 2000, all the writing, all the music, all the data, all the art, all the information that's been created from year zero to the year 2000, now we create that much information every two days. And now that AI is jumping into the mix, it's going to even go up much, much, much higher. So understand, first of all, the reason people aren't responding to you is because of the clutter. They're just being overwhelmed. Some researchers call it infobesity. We're just being overwhelmed with information. There's so much of it out there, and that's a huge issue. So that's why some of these principles are really, really important.

Layla Kasha4:26

I think that's really important. We're talking about clutter. We're talking about... sorry, this is going to take us a long time. By the time this is over, we'll have figured out that we've got to stand right here. I think it's really important to understand how many of y'all do Facebook or Instagram or some version of social media? All of you. Okay, great. So here's the deal with social media. People think, and I use social media for a retail grocery for-profit business, right? So this is my bread and butter, my wheelhouse. Most of advertising and marketing has moved to social media. Most of our ad dollars used to be on print circulars. I work in grocery. Used to be print circulars, you know the ones you get on Wednesday. We don't even do anymore. Those are fish wrap. Those are of the past. We moved into doing TV commercials and radio commercials. We still do some of that, but we do it on streamers. We don't really do it on broadcast anymore. But 90% of our actual working media dollars have moved over to social media. So what does that mean? That means that's where everybody is. Everybody's there. Everyone's consuming information. The challenge we have is people think that when I post something on my phone, everybody that follows me sees it. Is that what you guys think? Like when you post an update or whatever, you think everyone that's in your network sees it? Less than 10% of your followers will see it. So that means you need to be posting way more than you think you should as a business. So getting people to understand you need to post once a day at minimum, if not more than that, to feed the algorithm. You don't want to post like 20 posts in the same 15 minutes, but if you want people to see your story or your message, you need to be posting it every day. You need to be posting something. And your message is really important, but you have to also remember you're telling it to a lot of different people. Especially at Salvation Army, you're trying to hit a lot of different demographics, a lot of different age groups. So what does that mean? The message stays the same, but the packaging might look a little bit different. If I'm a 60-year-old woman who's retired and sitting at home, or a 20-year-old that might also be looking for the same type of connection, they really need to see that message, but told to them in a much different way because that's how they're consuming media. They're consuming video, right? So they want to watch a quick video that tells them the story. But a 60, 65-year-old might want to actually read a blog or an article or look at a post with a funny meme on it. Everyone's different. And so understanding who you're talking to and that your message doesn't need to change, but the way you package it out maybe does.

Phil Cooke7:02

Right. Yeah, the Bible says God's word never changes, but trust me, everything else does. People change, trends change, culture changes. And she's exactly right. Think of social media as a stream, not a pond. It's not the same people sitting there all the time. It's constantly changing. Don't be afraid to repeat it. And one of the big mistakes I see in ministry with social media is they forget that it's social. You know, we use social media as a me phone. We're announcing this youth event we're having next Tuesday night, be sure to come. It's a one-way thing. We're just constantly announcing stuff. But social media is a conversation. If you talk to social media influencers, people that have millions of followers, they will always tell you one thing: they never post unless they've blocked out a half an hour or more afterwards where they can respond to the people that respond to them. I tell this to pastors all the time. Most pastors I know will post stuff and then walk away and leave it. I was with a pastor one time about a year or two ago, and he called me and said, 'You know what, I know you've been telling me I need to have conversations with people and jump in there, and I've never done it. But last week on Facebook, this woman asked a theological question, and I felt led that I should maybe respond.' And she was responding to something he'd said, so he responded to her. And lo and behold, the next Sunday she came to church. Lo and behold, at the end of the service she came forward and accepted Christ. And lo and behold, the next Monday I got a call that she'd been killed in a car accident. And he said, 'I don't want to make this over-spiritual or cheesy sounding, but I just think what would have happened had I not engaged with her on social media?' And obviously you're not going to have time to engage with every single person that responds to you, but if you can get in your mind that this is social, this is a conversation we need to be having. Stop making it one way. Stop just announcing all the cool things your church or whatever your ministry is doing, and start making it a conversation that engages people. And they will jump on board at a much, much better rate, and you can make a real impact. I mean, trust me, today a housewife in Des Moines can bring down a major corporation simply from the momentum she builds through social media. So it's a very, very powerful tool. So I would start there. And every high school kid in your core will know about social media. If you don't, if you're not an expert, you don't know how to do it, find some young person to do it. It's like my Mac. When my Mac breaks, I don't take it to the Apple Store. I find a high school kid and he fixes it. So that's the way to do social media. You can learn, obviously you'll eventually grow to where you want a staff person or a professional helping you do it, but I think social media really is the core.

Layla Kasha9:35

I think you're right. The other thing I would say is when we look at social media, I always think about it from a what we call in the biz UGC, all right? So user generated content. So what does that mean? That means if somebody comes to the Salvation Army and either does something... one of the best videos I ever had on my social media page was when I went to Modesto and I was digging a ditch at the Salvation Army, which is how I ended up here by the way. I was really connected. My husband was on the board in Modesto, and he said... and I was just really connected to... they had a new Major Harold. It's how I ended up here. He sent my name that way and said, 'Hey, I think she'd be great.' Because they had just done this big... they had taken on this big space and they needed help digging and building these planter boxes and things like that. I don't do that kind of stuff in my regular life. I would not dig a planter box at my house. I would tell my husband you need to go out and dig in the yard and build me this thing. But for some reason I felt compelled to go. And I was digging, and I posted a video. My husband took a video of me like digging this ditch, and we posted it and we tagged the Salvation Army in it and just said, like my husband said, 'This is what it takes to get Layla to dig a hole. She's not going to be doing this for funsies. She's the only person she'd ever do it for is Major Harold.' What a good opportunity for the Salvation Army to have shared that video, because then it makes the person in it feel like, 'Oh wow.' It's like when a big brand... imagine that you buy something from a store or wearing something from a brand and you post, 'Oh I love the new t-shirt I got at Target,' and Target reshared it on their platform. Doesn't that make you feel like a little bit like, 'Oh, I'm cool. Target saw my post.' Right? It's the same thing at the Salvation Army, with churches, with like... I do my church where I go to church. I'm constantly on them to say, 'Hey, you guys are doing all this cool stuff and people are coming to these things and tagging St. Philip. Please reshare it on your pages.' It's not self-serving. You're helping get the word out.

Phil Cooke11:43

That's good. And when you bring people in, when you invite people in, it makes them feel that much closer to you. And that's how I ended up here. I ended up here because... you should have avoided that. I know, I know. Digging is not for me. So let's go back a little bit and talk for a second about what branding actually is. Because a lot of people think it's voodoo and weird, and it's not at all. A brand, you know, everybody has a brand. A brand is ultimately what do people think of when they think of you. Starbucks has a brand. Tom Cruise has a brand. Nike has a brand. The Salvation Army has a brand. We can't always control it, but we can help move the dial and help shape it if we try. And there's a lot of things we can do. It's essentially your reputation. It's what people think of when they think of you. So it's easy to destroy that brand, really easy, and it's a little tougher to build it. The point being, we need to think about it. We feel like we're called to share the message of the Gospel, the culture, we're helping people in need. But the truth is, we also need to make sure that story is out there. Because if you're not telling the story of your ministry and your work, you'll spend the rest of your life at the mercy of other people who will. Do you want to tell your story about the incredible impact of the Salvation Army, or do you want our critics to tell the story about the Salvation Army? Who's going to tell that story? And that trickles all the way down to your local corps wherever you happen to be, whatever you happen to be doing. We personally have a brand. We have a corporate brand with the Salvation Army, and we want to make sure we put our best foot forward. Because trust me, nobody's going to donate to you, nobody's going to come to your church, nobody's going to show up to volunteer if they don't have a good feel about you. So we really need to do whatever we can to help cultivate that feeling. And one of the things, you know, when you were talking about social media, maybe realize one of the biggest problems churches have with a brand issue is that every communication that goes out from a church or a ministry often tells a different story. When I'm working with pastors, I'll often tell them, you know, you get up in the pulpit on Sunday, you preach a message about grace for instance. Well guess what, the email blast that goes out that following week is telling a different story. The video that goes out is telling a different story. The social media guys are telling a different story. It would be like an army going into battle and pointing all their guns in a different direction. You make no impact whatsoever. The churches, the ministries, the nonprofits that really make an impact in the culture are guys that align all their guns in the same direction. Which means you don't have to repeat everything, but it all needs to be in the same theme, the same message, the same direction. We all need to be repeating that. Somebody said that this morning. Dan, I think, said it this morning about telling people you're going to tell them what you're going to tell them, and then you tell them, and then you remind them that you told them. That happens over and over. In fact, Seth Godin, the marketing guru, said repetition builds trust. You know, in this cluttered culture we live in today, we have to constantly be telling people and retelling people. So that's really, very important. And aligning all your messages really helps build that brand. Does that make any sense?

Layla Kasha14:48

Totally. Totally makes sense. I think you were talking about you telling the story. Yeah, if you don't tell it, someone else will. But here's the deal: it's never more important than when things are going bad. It's one thing to be telling your story when everything's great, everyone loves us. Businesses go through this a lot, so does the Salvation Army, so do churches. There's crises in what we do all the time. And so you're building your reputation, you're building that feeling. To me, a brand is a feeling. How do people feel about you when they see your logo? Do they go, 'Oh, I love them,' or do they go, 'Uh, like oh, I just saw this thing or I just heard this thing or I bought something from there and it wasn't a great experience'? It's how they feel. They don't care about the logo. We were talking earlier about 'make the logo bigger.' That's always my CEO's like, 'Layla, I love this but the logo is not big enough.' It's not about how big your logo is. It's how people feel when they see the logo. When they see Salvation Army, do they go, 'Oh, I love them. I had such a good experience with them. I did a bell ringing or I went to the kettle kickoff.' We were talking about how events are marketing. Everything you guys do is marketing. It's telling a story. What story are you telling? But more importantly, when things aren't going great and there's a crisis, everything that you've told people for the years and years and years, every feeling that they've had, is going to come into play. And they're either going to say to themselves, 'Oh, that can't be. I don't believe that. I don't believe they're doing that,' or they're going to go, 'Yep, I totally get it because XYZ experience, XYZ thing I read, I've read too many of these things.' Because the other thing that we like to do, especially in church marketing, is they're saying bad things about us. 'I'm not going to say anything. It's going to go away. It'll blow over.' It's not going to blow over, y'all. If they get onto something and they want to talk about it and talk about it and talk about it, and you're not talking, you have to be able to speak when it's hard. And if you don't have any credibility built up, it's really difficult then when the crisis is happening to have any kind of credibility where people will believe you. And I do PR where I am, and I do marketing, and I do a lot of things. And I am telling you, communication is one piece, marketing is another. Communicating is basically giving you information. There's no secret sauce to that. We want to tell them multiple times because they do need to hear it. But marketing is really building that brand and that feeling around an organization or a business. And I think being consistent is key in that. You have to be consistent. You need to be saying roughly the same message. Doesn't mean you have to say all the time it's grace, grace, okay that's what it is. But having a content calendar and knowing what you're going to talk about. If you know what you're going to talk about on Sunday, then everything that you're putting out the week leading up to it is talking about whatever that thing is you're going to talk about on Sunday and getting people to go, 'Oh, that's interesting.' Different things peak people's interest and getting them butts in the seat is the most important thing. So how are you going to get them there? It's going to take multiple times. It's going to take multiple ways. And it's going to take a lot of creativity.

Phil Cooke18:11

Right. And so, yeah, consistency and the integrity issue is really big. I used to say that before he passed away, Billy Graham could have committed some really serious sin out there and fallen from grace in some way, and people would have given him a lot of grace simply because of his track record over the years. So the question is, do you build up that goodwill, that bank of goodwill? It's so critically important. And let me tell you how important this whole brand story is around your ministry and your work and your own career. Think of Harley-Davidson. When you think of Harley-Davidson, you don't think of a bunch of little old ladies having a tea party. You think of outlaw bikers, you think of freedom, you think of the open road. And it's interesting that a lot of companies have what's called a brand statement. It's not public, you know you have a tagline that goes in your advertising, but a lot of companies have an internal brand statement that drives what they do. For instance, Nike's tagline is 'Just Do It.' Their brand statement is 'the spirit of the athlete.' Which means when you see a Nike commercial, it's never about the quality of rubber that goes in the shoes. It's never about how easy they are to put on. It's always about how you feel when you strap those babies on. You're going to feel like Michael Jordan or LeBron James or somebody like that. That is so incredibly important for those guys, and it's why they do such creative advertising. Volvo. What do you think of when you hear the name Volvo? Yeah, well, yeah, but reliability and safety, mostly safety. They've done a brilliant job over the years of marketing that. The funny thing is, in the last 10 years, no Volvo has ever appeared on the top 10 safest car list. But they've just built that brand up so much around safety that people automatically go, 'Oh yeah, that's got to be the safest car on the road.' Your brand story really has an impact on people. And I think there's nothing better to have a brand story around than the Gospel. And that's what we want to do every day of our lives and get it out there. So I think those kind of things are important. But credibility really, really does matter.

Layla Kasha20:20

I agree. What are we left out? Well, I think the only thing else I would say is that when you're out there talking or you're doing videos, all the things that you're going to do to market your church, be authentic and be genuine. Because if you're not, people are going to be onto it and they're going to turn on you quick. It's really important to really let your heart talk. People really will give you a lot of grace if you're being yourself. If you are not authentic, not genuine, not leading with your heart, yeah, people will figure it out and it's over.

Phil Cooke20:58

I think it's one of those things where you talk about Billy Graham, things are baked in the cake. I'll give you the opposite of that, right? I'm gonna say Trump. People have very specific opinions about Trump, but a lot of that is baked in the cake because you know what you're getting. He's authentic. You can say a lot of things about him, good, bad, yeah, he's authentic. You know what you're getting. And I would say the same thing about Billy Graham. There's a lot of people you can think of right out of the jump where you go, 'I know who they are.' There's no facade there. They're not trying to hide anything. And so I think it's critical when you're looking at what you're going to do for your church and how you're going to build your board. Again, I go back to you don't have to be the expert. Find some people in your town that are, that can give you this guidance, that can help you, that can help shoot really compelling videos on your phone. Y'all already have what you need. Everyone's doing it. No one needs a digital camera and a 5D and all this stuff that people have. You don't need that. You need your phone and you need your heart and you need a really good message, and people will follow you.

That's good. Let me say a word about transparency by the way, along the same line. We live in this digital age and you can't hide it anymore. You absolutely cannot hide it. As a leader, particularly as a Christian leader, we need to be more transparent than ever. The river of information that flows into Google... I don't even think about Google as being about search. I think about it as reputation management. You know that DUI you got in college you thought everybody had forgotten about? It'll show up in a Google search. More young people are denied jobs today because of what comes up in Google searches than anything else. In fact, I saw one story the other day of a person that posted all their pictures of getting drunk at Daytona Beach in high school, thinking that was so cool. And once an employer sees that, that's not so cool anymore. I had a pastor tell me, 'Phil, it would probably be best if you didn't mention to my congregation about my yacht.' I said, 'Well, number one, if they got Google, they can download the title. If they got Google Earth, they can download a satellite photo of the boat sitting at the dock.' So we just can't hide anymore. And we have to really think about that as leaders. We have to be more transparent than ever. Because trust me, you drive out of here at the end of the day, get into a fender bender up on the main road up there, get out of the car, you're angry at somebody else's fault, you start getting upset with them. Somebody's going to be on the corner and whip out one of these, start videoing and put it up online. That's happened so many millions of times you can't even believe it. So we really do, as leaders, Christian leaders especially, need to be absolutely transparent in everything that we do. That helps build that credibility, that brand. It really does make a dramatic, dramatic difference.

Any questions so far? By the way, anger, bitterness, we can take it. Yes sir?

Audience Member23:49

How do you know when you've crossed the line social media wise? You know, in terms of all these individuals, but they represent the Salvation Army whether they're Doug Riley or Commissioner Doug Riley. Doesn't matter, it's the same person.

Layla Kasha24:08

Yeah, that's a really big issue. And I talked to a lot of churches about that. And the truth is, if we utilize social media in a positive way, if everybody does it, it can make a huge impact. However, your personal life and your Salvation Army life are not separate when it comes to social media. People know. People will know. So just because you're posting on your personal feed, if you're out at the bar on Friday night, I'm sorry, it's not going to help. It's not going to help. It's going to really make things worse. So we have to be very careful and we have to monitor kind of what we do. We have to have some integrity. If we're going to post, you know, you're not speaking for the Salvation Army, but people will know that you're connected with the Salvation Army in some way.

Phil Cooke24:46

I had a pastor... I was flipping around on Facebook the other day and a pastor friend of mine took his wife on a well-deserved vacation to Hawaii. And they were posting pictures of them out at the pool, you know, fooling around. But the angle, the pool bar was right behind them. And all behind them you see liquor bottles all lined up. It looked like they were having a party at the bar. And I called him and he was horrified. I said, 'You might want to switch those pictures out with some others.' And so just being aware of those little things because people construe all kind of weird stuff from what you post. And you have to just kind of be sensitive. I would also say that as leaders, be careful about email. Email, be extraordinarily careful about email. Remember when you hit send, you have completely lost control of that email. And Google says it never deletes email. Even though you've deleted it, Google says it keeps the data stored. And trust me, I've seen many cases where in a police investigation, in a courtroom situation, your text messages that you thought deleted will come up. Your emails you thought you deleted will come up because they keep those records. So be careful what you say as a ministry leader on email, on text. Be really vigilant about that because you just never know how that will come back to haunt you. In fact, very often I've worked with pastors who will get suggestive emails from people in their congregation or people who heard them speak at a conference or an event. I had a girl... I spoke at a big media conference in South Africa a few years ago. About six weeks later, I started getting a series of really suggestive emails from this woman who had attended the conference, and she was sending me some pretty borderline photos. So I immediately gave it to my assistant. And my email, I set up our email so that everybody in our office sees my stuff. I can't hide. I could never have an affair or anything just because I've set it up that way. And so my assistant had seen it, my wife had seen it, my producer had seen it. And so I had my assistant respond. And the minute this girl found out my female assistant is reading all my emails, we never heard from her again. And remember, even if it's a crazy person responding to you, just responding to them could look later like you were a part of this conversation and that you condoned it. So I would be very, very careful when it comes to your email behavior, social media, text messaging. It's just a dangerous world we live in out there. And people are always looking to take down Christians for sure. And we have to be very sensitive to that.

Audience Member27:20

Yes sir. Can you both speak a little bit more? I mean, you started touching on accountability when it comes to social media, lifestyle, even what we're going to put out and produce as the Salvation Army and as personally in ministry as Christians, as believers. And then how do you guys take steps to manage accountability internally to just protect the external view of you?

Layla Kasha27:45

You should see the file of things my wife won't let me post on Instagram. That's pretty large. Yeah, go ahead. You want to speak to that?

Phil Cooke27:54

Yeah, I mean, I definitely can. I would say this: what you said about posting on your personal, that is so true. You have to be very intentional about what you're posting on your personal page. And here's the other thing I'll tell you: you cannot, like in our employee handbook at Grocery Outlet, so we're a business, right? We cannot tell people you can or cannot post this or that on your social media. But best be sure that we are looking at it. So when you're posting about how much you hate your job, I saw it. And as much as you think it's locked down and you can't see it, I mean, this is real. This is real. I can see it. You think you're a private page, you think it's private, I will see it. There are ways to see it. There's ways for your business, your bosses to see it. There's ways for leaders and at Salvation Army to see it. You have to be very intentional. I think the days of posting everything are over. I think people need to... I tell people that on the opposite side, be careful of judging your life on someone else's very carefully curated social media feed because it's not real. It takes 75 pictures to get that one that they posted that looks like, 'Oh, my life is so fantastic, it's so carefree.' Don't judge your life by that. So this opposite is also true. You want to be authentic. You want to say what you want to say. You want to still have your personal feelings and thoughts out there. But the whole world didn't know what you had to eat in 1985 for dinner, and they don't need to know it now. I just think that... I mean, I know some people make a lot of money doing this, like 'I ate this, I went here, I did that.' It's very precarious to put that much of your life out there. And I think people have overcorrected. People were out there doing all of that, and now I think there's a return to normalcy. Like, here's my two pictures for my vacation, not an endless reel. And if you're going to do that, it's in a story and it's gone for 24 hours. And people will do things like that sometimes. I was at the Hollywood show this weekend and I got to go around and meet some celebrities, and that was in my story. I don't even think I did a post on that because it lived for 24 hours and it was gone. But you have to be very intentional about what you want out there and know that this will live forever. So what do you want people to know about you and to think about you when they see this post or the next post or 20 posts from now? What do you want people to think and feel about you? To me, less is more. And I think when people go off on a tangent and post something, I think that's a very slippery slope. From a business or from the Salvation Army corporate perspective, you could have some bylines. I don't know how that works for how this would work, but I just think you've got to be smarter. And if you're wondering when you're posting, 'Should I post this?' Don't post it. Just don't post it. It's not worth it because it's never going to go away. Someone's going to screenshot it. As much as you had a feeling and had an emotion and you posted, 'I'm so mad because XYZ,' and you think about five minutes later, 'Oh man, I shouldn't have posted that. I posted anger, I hate my boss,' and you take it down in five minutes, I guarantee you somebody saw it, somebody screenshot it, and probably sent it to your boss. So just be very careful.

More ministry leaders are being forced to step down because of stuff they posted than any other reason. And I deal with crisis communication. A big part of what I do, because I'm kind of known as the media guy, churches and ministries and nonprofits will call me when a disaster is happening, when a crisis is happening. Pastors run off, the secretary or youth leader had an inappropriate relationship, or somebody's embezzling money. And one of the things I see a lot is pastors being forced to step down because of a social media post they did or a person they responded to on email that they shouldn't have. And we just have to be more vigilant. It's hard. You know, St. Paul didn't have to work with this stuff. But every generation, my feeling is every generation gets stuck in a cultural mix that they have to deal with. With Paul and the apostles, it was the Roman Empire. They had to deal with the frustrations of being thrown in jail every five minutes. You go throughout history, every generation of Christian leaders had to deal with something. We have to deal with the digital world.

Audience Member32:19

Yes sir. About a year ago, we had a friend whose Facebook account got hacked and made her... we're trying talking Facebook, we don't have access to the account, etc. What do you do in a situation like that where it's your reputation being aimed at or targeted but you have no control over it at that point?

Phil Cooke32:40

That's really hard. The best thing to do is get the communication out in as many other ways as you can that this has happened. Most people will figure it out after a while and understand it. But it's... I used to have some friends that worked very high up in Facebook, and they've left the company, so I don't have that outlet now to call them to fix it. But it's a very difficult... it's just again part of the world we live in. It's terrible. If it's a targeted attack like that, you can... there are reputation companies that just do that, that redeem people off of Facebook. I had someone that had something similar happen, and she owned a very big business, and she ended up having to hire a reputation repair service. And all they... I mean, all they're going to do, it's not cheap, but all they really do is start a new page and start posting like crazy and start trying to get you PR. They start trying to put your name back out there. So this is where your credibility is really going to come in, right? Because your friend, if she had already built, spent time building up her personal brand... and personal brand sounds super fancy for 'what do people think about you?' Yeah, it's not splashy. I didn't hire anybody to do it. Everyone in this room has a personal brand whether you know it or not. So if her personal brand has authenticity and is genuine, people understand who she is. What I probably would do is reach out to all of my best friends and have them posting on their social media, 'Hey, Layla got hacked. This is all nonsense.' And people would watch it and look at it and go, 'You know what, she probably did get hacked because I can't imagine she would ever say stuff like this.'

My blog is philcooke.com, I'm Cooke with an E, and I write about this stuff all the time. So I would encourage you to go check it out. You can do a search for any question you have about media, communications, ministry, that kind of thing, and it's on there. And my socials are @PhilCooke on Instagram. And you can kind of see... disregard everything I've just said about social media when it comes to my Instagram page. I just have fun there. It's my therapist.

Layla Kasha34:43

I can't wait to see your Instagram page. Yeah, it's a little wild. Very excited. I post serious stuff on there but also post some crazy stuff on there too. But I just have fun with it. But I'm not representing a big organization like the Salvation Army like you are. So we have to always think in context of... oh, I'm sorry, I'm in the wrong place. Yeah, yeah, yeah. We always have to think in context. Figure this out by 1:30 of who we are, who's doing what.

Phil Cooke35:08

Should I show them the name stuff? The name things? Yeah, you want to... let me tell you one. We'll show you one quick thing here that's kind of funny. One of the things that ministries generally don't get is understanding of the power of a name. You know, you already have a big name, Salvation Army. But as leaders, you name everything. You name youth outreaches, you name church programs, you name ministry outreaches, you name all kind of things. And Christians... oh, I'm sorry, sorry God, I don't know what my problem is... Christians are notoriously bad at naming things. So these are actual names of real churches that are out there. I just read through that list: End Time Church of God, Custer United Methodist, Runs Baptist Church... may be my favorite... Hooker Church of Christ, that's actually in Hooker, Oklahoma. Peter's Chat... oh yeah. And trust me, the list just goes on. I mean, how many people would drive up to Sleeper United Methodists and think, 'Wow, that's a church for me'? What are they thinking? Now, there are some... okay, don't get ugly... there's some situations where name can help. I found this in Louisiana, this is awesome: Community Tip Revival with Brother Jack Daniels. They're probably packed every night. But I'll tell you, don't tell me names don't matter. There's a CBS story a couple years ago on a town in Mississippi called Cowpens, Mississippi. Whoever named it that should be shot. But two years ago, they changed the name. Didn't change anything about the town. They changed their name from Cowpens to Olive Branch, Mississippi. Today, Olive Branch, Mississippi is the fastest growing metropolitan area in the country, all because of a name change. There's a Bible College in Grand Rapids, Michigan. It was originally called Grand Rapids Bible College. Great reputation, been around forever. They dropped the Baptist a number of years ago, maybe 50 years ago, and it went to Grand Rapids Bible College. Great. Well, about 10 or 15 years ago, they decided to take a bigger step and they went from Grand Rapids Bible College to Cornerstone University. In one year, enrollment doubled. Remember, they didn't change anything else. Didn't change the faculty, didn't change the funding, didn't change the programs. They just changed the name. In one year. I mean, who wants to go to Grand Rapids Bible College? But Cornerstone University sounds pretty awesome. So names really do matter. Now I will show you also your URL matters. You're picking stuff for the web too. Remember, the website address, no punctuation, no spaces. There's a graphic design company here in LA, a really actually very popular one, called thespeedofart.com. They get you graphic designs really fast. Problem is, if you look at the URL by itself, this is what it looks like. You probably... I can't believe you noticed that. I thought I would have to explain it to you people. You're not as spiritual as I thought you were. Yeah, you don't want to be the... you don't want to be Speedo Fart. You just don't want to be that company. And there's another one I love. It's a website that fixes computers. It's called theexpertsxchange.com. It's a legit company, but out of context, that URL is 'expert sex change.' So nobody thought of that. So just look at the URLs you pick for programs, outreaches, ministry things. You absolutely do not know. So with that, I rest my case. Any questions?

Audience Member38:30

Other questions? Yes, question. You talked earlier about online criticism and the need to respond immediately. Are there any exceptions to that? Because I know from experience, sometimes people respond...

Layla Kasha39:03

Yes, well, you definitely don't want to fly off the handle and start defending. You don't want to get out there and start a Facebook war or Instagram war. But you don't want to leave it. It's one thing... there are people that are just going to say things and post things, and sometimes the best method is to ignore. But when you have a real life crisis going on, meaning there's something that's definitely out there and you're seeing it posted... here's the worst thing you can do on social media: start deleting people's comments. And watch how fast your whole organization gets burned to the ground. About 15 years ago, Applebee's had that thing where they had the waitress that had the tip, right? And they went in and started deleting people's comments, and it turned into the biggest firestorm. It was such a firestorm that I remember staying up all night in my bathroom because I didn't want my husband to wake up because I was watching it in real time. And it was insane. They burned Applebee's to the ground, and it happened in 12 hours because people at the social media agency that they were using started deleting people's comments. People don't like that. If they're saying something to you, the worst thing you can do is say your voice doesn't matter, I'm going to delete this comment. So if it's a one-off and somebody has something not nice to say, here's what I suggest. If someone says, 'I was at the Salvation Army and my turkey dinner was burned and it was disgusting,' the best response is, 'I'd love to talk more about that with you. I'm going to go over to your DM. Take it offline.' Get them either on the phone, that's the best way to do it, or get them in the private chat. Because you don't want the whole world jumping in either trying to defend you and making those people even more angry, or getting other people to go, 'Yeah, I was there last week and this happened.' And then you've got this village burning down. So if it's a social media situation and it's a one-off comment, get them offline. Get them into the private chat. Get them on the phone. Get them out of social media. If you've got a Salvation Army crisis happening and people are posting, that needs to be a concerted effort. The message comes down: here are the talking points, and here are the social media approved responses. Because to just leave it out there says, 'Look, they're ignoring us. They don't hear us. They're so out of touch. They're so tone deaf. They only think about what they know and what they think is right is the only way, and they won't even engage in a conversation.' That's not actually true, but you have to be prepared. So you have to be very specific about how to respond, when to respond, and what you're doing. But if you've got just a one-off crazy troll, get them off the main page and get them onto the phone. You'd be amazed how many people change their tune when you actually have them on the phone.

Phil Cooke41:54

That's a great point right there. That's fantastic. But I... I got my wife a membership into the airline lounge a couple years ago, and I didn't think of it till the night before she was leaving for an international trip. So I called the airline, gave them the credit card number, and I said, 'You sure she's going to be able to get in in the morning?' And of course they said, 'Yes, absolutely, just show them the sheet.' So I printed it out, gave it to her. She goes at 6:00 in the morning, tries to get in the lounge, they wouldn't let her. Hadn't showed up on the computer yet. And I just went on to Twitter and just lit into American Airlines. Just lit into them. And immediately somebody responded and said, 'We'd love to solve this problem for you. Give me a call at this number and we'll work it out.' I did, and guess what? It took my criticism offline immediately because they were there ready, watching, dealing with it. Took it offline, which is great. They also solved my problem, not with that flight but the next one. So responding... I mean, it's rarely helpful to not respond at all. I mean, sometimes you might want to hold back for a few hours or maybe even 24 hours. There's also something weird out there called the news cycle. Just show you how complex this can be. Many of you may remember or have heard about early in Ted Kennedy's Senate career, he went to a party one night, picked up a senate intern, drove her back to his place. He had been drinking, ran off a bridge, went into the lake or the ocean at that point. And not only did he leave her, he walked home, didn't even tell anybody until the next day. This poor woman drowned under a car in the inlet there. It would have ruined anybody's political career. Ruined it. But guess what? The next morning, we landed a man on the moon. And the complete news cycle shifted away. And they said had that not happened, Ted Kennedy would have never... his career never would have... he'd have been destroyed. But because that news cycle shifted, everything changed and all the attention went off that. And he went on to have a very celebrated career in the Senate. So the point being, this communication thing is a complex thing. And when it comes to your board, the sooner you can get somebody who's professional from an ad agency or like I say a church communication director, somebody has experience particularly in the ministry, the better it will be. Because you just never know what will happen. You just never know.

Audience Member44:17

Yes sir. So that's a great lead in because sometimes we think we have to respond. No, no, yeah. So go ahead and talk to that.

Phil Cooke44:25

No, that you've seen spokespeople, men and women who speak for the leader. Very often it does help credibility if the leader is the person that responds to the media. However, that doesn't have to be at all. Having a professional person... the White House has a spokesperson. Most major corporations have a spokesperson. So when a crisis happens, it doesn't have to be us that speaks up. So somebody who's articulate, somebody who's fast on their feet. I will say this about the media: be very, very careful dealing with the media. And if you want to get advice at any point in your career, if you get a call from the local newspaper or TV station, they want to do a story on you, I would say call your media person for advice. Because they're not necessarily out to get you, but they're out for a story that will generate a lot of listeners, viewers, or readers. So they'll go a long way to make that story exciting, whatever it takes.

Layla Kasha45:17

I agree. And as somebody who's been the spokesperson during real bad times at a lot of the companies I've worked for, when it's a good story, it's always great to have the CEO out there doing his thing, shaking hands and kissing babies. But when the babies become people that are shooting arrows, it's critical to have somebody that is very skilled in media and trained. And I know that Salvation Army probably has people that are very, very trained and media savvy. They will get you. If there's something really, really bad going on for the Salvation Army and they call you to do a local news story, that's not what they want to talk about. They're trying to get you. They just are. If it's kettle time and there's nothing going on, they probably want to do a nice warm and fuzzy story. But there have been several times where I've had to be the face of a company that's got something real bad. And my expertise next to my CEO's... I'm not real good at a lot of things, but I'm better than him at that. I can do that and he cannot. And so it's not smart for you to put yourself out there thinking you're doing the Salvation Army a favor or you're trying to defend. A lot of us get our heart and soul tied up in this and we want to say, 'Y'all are crazy, you don't understand what we do here, let me tell you all the great things we do.' They will get their sound bite and they will take the other 10 minutes that you talked out of the equation, and they will take that one snippet where you got mad or you said something, and they will put that on a loop. They just will. If you're ever being interviewed and the interviewer stops asking questions, if things go quiet for a minute, this is so weird but it's so true: you have this innate desire to fill the void. And you want to say something. Whatever you say at that moment, they will crucify you with. And that's a technique they use. In the middle of the conversation, they'll just stop talking, and you feel like you need to blurt something out. Whatever you blurt out at that moment will usually be the wrong thing. So if they stop talking, you stop talking. Nervous people will feel the silence. I mean, that's not just a media tactic. That's also like if I'm talking to an employee that I feel has done something they shouldn't do, I'm going to ask one question and I'm going to shut up and I'm going to wait and see. Because they're going to start talking because they're nervous, and they're going to tell me what I need to know. So the media is going to do the same thing. Which is why when someone is very skilled and knows the pitfalls that are coming, we know how to spot that stuff and we can pivot and go back to the one or two or three core messages. So I'll give you a real life example. A very, very, very long time ago, and why I now have the job that I have. I was working for Cold Stone Creamery and we were launching a partnership with Oreo. We were doing a flavor. Good choice. And I was... literally, I'm not a trained marketer, so I'll just start there. I used to own my own business, and when I owned my business I fell in love with marketing and decided I was going to sell my business and become a marketer. And eventually worked my way to be a CMO. So I was working for Cold Stone. It was my first real marketing job that was not my business. And they sent me to New York to do Neil Cavuto on Fox News to promote this stupid ice cream flavor. And I was media trained, but not like super savvy media trained. And I wasn't going into a gun battle. I was going in to talk about Oreo flavored ice cream. How hard can that be? Everyone loves Oreos, everyone loves ice cream. I mean, come on. It was Saturday. Like, who cares? So I show up on the set and I'm talking to Neil Cavuto, and the first question out of his mouth is, 'I know you want to talk about this Oreo cream filling flavor, but I really want to understand where the company's position is for this massive class action lawsuit that was just filed by all your franchises against Cold Stone Creamery.' I don't know anything about this lawsuit. Nobody prepped me. My president didn't tell me. The VP of marketing didn't tell me. I went in there stone cold, no clue, on national TV with Neil Cavuto. And I'm caught on camera with no answer. And I was so... I don't know where God... that's the only place I can tell you. Because I said, 'You know, Neil, I can't really comment on that. What I can comment on is that our franchisees are super excited about this Oreo cream filling flavor.' And off to the races we go. And he couldn't get me. Brilliant. I came off set, I called the president of Cold Stone Creamery and I said some very not God-like things because I was not set up to succeed. I was set up to get crucified by Fox Business because my company didn't want to go out and get the heat. Well, I didn't know anything about it. But that turned me into... man, I really need to have, no matter what I'm doing, I need to know. And then unfortunately for me, I've become the crisis person at almost every organization I've worked at because I've done a lot of work on it personally because I never wanted to get caught like that again. So you have to have somebody that can do that for you. And you don't want to get caught.

Phil Cooke50:29

One last thing I would say along this line, we need to probably wrap it, but one last thing is a lot of you are going to be assigned to small towns. You're not always going to be in LA or San Francisco. You're going to be assigned to a relatively medium to small town. Get to know the media people as much as possible. I used to go to a church in Van Nuys called Church On The Way, Pastor Jack Hayford, who I just think is one of the great pastors of all time. And when Jack started the church, it started its first Foursquare Church of Van Nuys. And when it started, like 50, 60 years ago, one of the first appointments he made was with the religion reporter for the LA Times. Never met him. Just called, took him out, offered to take him to lunch, took him to lunch, and said, 'Look, you're dealing with LA. There's a million religious faiths here, stuff going on. He said, 'If something comes that you're struggling with or you need some research done, I will give my entire office over to your disposal. We'll research whatever you need. We're here to help and be a blessing to you.' Well, guess what? Over the next 45 years, the LA Times quoted Jack Hayford on more issues than you could possibly imagine, more than every other pastor in LA put together, because he developed that relationship. And so, 'Just call Pastor Jack, see what he says about this.' He got more free publicity in the LA Times than it would have cost millions and millions of dollars to get the kind of publicity Jack got, just because he decided to reach out. Most pastors hate the media, and there's some reasons to hate the media. But instead of being antagonistic, if you're in a situation, a town that's small enough that you can actually reach out to local radio reporter, TV reporter, number one, they'll always default to you being their friend and give you better coverage. But number two, if you do get hostile coverage, you can say, 'I need your help here. What should I do? How should I respond to this? Can you make a call for me?' It's always good to know media people in your community wherever you are, because that's a great thing for the Salvation Army.

Layla Kasha52:25

It's very true. As a big organization, we do it. I have relationships with Wall Street Journal, with Jim Cramer, with all those guys. Because when bad things happen, I can pick up the phone and say, 'Hey, I need a kind interview for my CEO because we've got this drama, and I need somebody that's going to actually have a conversation with him that's going to let us tell our story.' And Jim Cramer will always come through for us because he loves my CEO. Did some fluffy piece for him that we didn't really want to do, but I said to Eric, 'Hey, this is a good guy to have in our corner.' So going out preemptively before you need them is critical. And don't be afraid of them. I mean, especially in a small town, they usually don't have anything to write about. You'd be amazed how many times they'd be like, 'I don't have anything going on. Hey, can we like... what do you have going on down at the Salvation Army? We could write about.' And you can get tons and tons of free press in those small towns because they don't have anything to talk about. Get in the habit of talking about what you do. Yeah, you know what? You're changing people's lives. Talk about that.

Phil Cooke53:21

And let me say this, I promise I'll shut up. Personal testimonies are the most powerful thing you could possibly ever do. I used to, early in my career, and I have to apologize for this, I produced some infomercials. You know those 30-minute commercials for all those weird products? I needed the money. And we learned something early on. Foreman Grill, remember? Oh yeah. George could talk about that grill till he was blue in the face. We could show the features, all the awesome stuff it does. And guess what? Nobody would call. But at the end of the show, we'd show the story of Floyd in Cleveland who ordered that thing, got it home, took it to his family reunion, and it worked so well he became a rock star. The phone would light up. And we realized that people think, 'Oh, you know what? If it worked for that dude, maybe it'll work for me.' And I've translated that to Christian programming. If we can show the story of a life changed, that's what gets people to respond. So the more you can showcase people whose lives have been changed because of the work you do... I don't care about stats. I don't care about all that kind of stuff. Tell their story, and that'll impact people. That's all I got to say. Thanks, y'all. Thanks for coming. I hope we weren't a downer. Remember, you want to know about hell, come here, our preacher. Just remember that. If you guys have Instagram, follow him on Instagram.