Digital Marketing Victories Podcast | Episode 18 - Tony Kopetchny (transcript)

[00:00:00] Katherine Ong: 
Welcome to the Digital Marketing Victories Podcast, a monthly show where we celebrate and learn from the change makers in digital marketing. I'm personally obsessed with how digital marketers sell through and get their ideas executed. I'm your host, Katherine Watier Ong Ong. I'm the owner of WO Strategies LLC. We focus on organic discovery for our enterprise clients with a training centered approach.

Today we're joined by Tony Kopetchny. Tony is the co-founder and CEO of ParsonsTKO, the engagement architecture consulting firm that serves mission driven organizations, working with nonprofit leaders to reduce stress over technology choices, ease anxieties and organizational tensions through change management, and gain new perspectives on data.

He holds an BA in film from Temple University and an MA in International Communications from American University. He currently resides in Fort Worth, Texas with his wife, daughter, and three doggies, Rocky, Apollo and Philly. So this episode is gonna be perfect for you. If you've ever wondered how to be persuasive in managing a digital transformation project, know more about how to read the room during the moment, in order to be more persuasive and how to successfully handle moments of conflict with clients and still be effective. So without further ado, here's our interview with Tony. Tony, thanks for agreeing to be on our podcast.

[00:01:25] Tony Kopetchny: 
Thank you. I'm so glad to be here today. Really looking forward to the conversation.

[00:01:30] Katherine Ong: 
Great.
So can you just tell our listeners more about your background, about yourself and how you became involved in digital transformation, particularly this movement from film to what you're doing now, I think is fascinating.

[00:01:40] Tony Kopetchny: 
Yeah, a hundred percent. I'm also the worst at talking about myself, so I'll try to.
To weave this story together. But I was doing it, I went to film school, it was late nineties. And there was this thing called the internet that everyone was really excited about in the nineties. And I learned how to build some websites. But, you know, in film school we were still shooting on actual film where we had to develop it.
And then by my senior year, I teamed up with a buddy and we shot the first ever digital video for senior thesis at Temple University. We wanted to do it because we were allowed to have 30 minutes instead of 10 for the short film. Then I launched, we took that film and then we started a small film company.
Neither of us were smart enough to have taken any business courses before that. And I went to Hollywood and tried to figure out how the big dogs played the game. and then we started building websites and doing prints. Print flyers and things as a company decided. I came back, and always had a semester at sea as an undergrad.

Always wanted to get into international relations. I grew up in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. I didn't realize international relations was a thing you could study, to try to get a job in. So I moved to dc, got into grad school, wanted to be a policy won, and then everybody hired me because I could build websites and shoot video.
That led me to my first website redesign, at an organization. I got really excited by the process. I thought it was really cool doing a lot of work on that. I was really excited when email marketing, the first time I did that with Constant Contact and I started watching the numbers. I was like, Oh, this is so cool.
And then went off to an agency after that doing a bunch of website redesigns for a bunch of think tanks. But it was really at the US Institute of Peace, which was my next in-house job after that where I. To a website or redesign, bringing a CRM system in, taking them from, I don't know, 1980s tech stack to, you know, mid two thousands tech stack and tons of extremely smart people who work there.

And one of 'em, as I was doing interviews, she looked at me and she said, The reason everyone's getting so upset with you isn't about the technology, it's because you're changing the culture. And I was like, Oh. Okay, well there's that. Then I had personally studied, it was, you know, my master's degree that did a lot into cultural anthropology. So I was like, it's not about my technical acumen anymore in digital transformation. This is really about people. This is about thinking about how they're gonna react to something rather than what the thing is itself. And so that's kind of where, where I, where I got into this and how I kept going and sort of built a career from there.

[00:04:10] Katherine Ong: 
Yeah, I think I discovered you because we were on the same list serve and you were, I believe, offering Google Analytics for webinars and services. And I was like, Oh, that's fascinating. Anyway, it's very similar to what folks do when they're working in digital marketing and SEO and trying to transform how folks are working and point out things that aren't working well and try to pivot them.

So what exactly does your agency do? What is this transformation stuff that you work on there? 

[00:04:42] Tony Kopetchny: 
Yeah, a hundred percent. So, you know, we pivot. You know, we are a consulting firm, and we focus on nonprofits. I'd say the mission driven sector too. I mean, I wouldn't exclude a for profit that's trying to make some positive change in the world, but really have sector expertise with think tanks, cultural institutions, higher ed, professional membership associations, policy advocacy organizations.

If any of those come talk to me. But it's really a lot of capacity building. You know, there's, what is the internal infrastructure around being able to get your messages out and retain an audience? What's the governance? What's the process? Why do you have these systems? Do the systems talk? Where's the data flowing?
What type of data do you have? What kind of questions do you have about your data? Do you even know if you're collecting it accurately? You know, a lot of the work too we get into is inertia breaking there. A massive amount of status quo, in the nonprofit sector and pre covid. I was starting to talk about it.

I had read this book, The Urban Monk, and he was talking about people who don't move enough, you know, and your body sits still. And he talks about stagnant water and his stagnant water breeds disease. And I started thinking about that analogy in terms of the status quo within an organization. Like if you're not trying to always get better, you really are stuck and you're just sitting there and what's gonna happen is there's a rot that happens and nobody can really see it.

And some of that with the inertia breaking is people got silo busters. I don't really know if there's silos as much as you're just sort of set in your daily routine and this is your department, these were your annual goals, this was your tasks, and you're doing what you can to get through to the day.
because you gotta deliver on these things and it's really hard to look. And across.

[00:06:16] Katherine Ong: 
About that, it's kind of struck me that a lot of times in order to get people motivated to change what they're doing, you have to change their incentive system and their job description and what their manager evaluates them on.
But in my in-house history, even though I was doing digital marketing and more like cutting edge building stuff, I don't think anybody reviewed my job description now that I think about it. You know, if you have the same role year after year, the space changes so fast. Perhaps your actual job description should shift, even though you don't get promoted. You know.

[00:06:50] Tony Kopetchny: 
I mean, it would be good to reflect on, I know for myself when I was in house, I think people struggled with where, what they call me, I'd always get a title of like special project person or something.

[00:07:00] Katherine Ong:  
Right? Yeah.

[00:07:01] Tony Kopetchny: 
Anything that's not in this other well defined case.

[00:07:03] Katherine Ong:  
I had insights in my title at Catch 'em, so Yes.

[00:07:06] Tony Kopetchny: 
Oh, that's kinda cool though.

[00:07:08] Katherine Ong:  
But yes, big right.

[00:07:10] Tony Kopetchny: 
Right.

[00:07:10] Katherine Ong: 
Anyway, anyway, I just don't know that you pivot what people are doing. Corporate maybe, but in the nonprofit sector, I don't know that it ever gets down to. Level. I mean you talk about like, you know, what do you wanna learn next year professional development wise?
And that sort of gets baked into something. But it's not a conversation around TikTok. It is the new thing and I need you to figure out how to do TikTok. because that's where our audience, it's not that usually, unless you've seen that.

[00:07:37] Tony Kopetchny: 
No, I have not seen that as much. There's, there's really still a reliance on heavy hierarchical structures.
And that's, I think there's something to it maybe, but it's also, it hurts a little bit when you get into transformation modes. It's, you know, probably gonna dive into it a little bit later, but I think we struggle with collaborative creative meetings. Who is supposed to talk? Should everybody talk? Why are you in there?
And how do we - if you're a junior staff member and I'm the senior staff, how do I enable everyone to be able to talk and feel comfortable in those situations? And I. That sort of power dynamic hurts. Transformation. It hurts progress because we don't let enough voices come out and sometimes you're wrong. Like so what?
Have a hundred ideas come to the surface. You're not gonna use all of them. Maybe use one of the 99 and need another 900. Great. But. At least if everyone got to partake, now you start building a team, now you start feeling like, Hey, I'm here and I'm valued. I was allowed to have this opinion today. People listened to me today.

[00:08:33] Katherine Ong: 
So how much are you doing with your, again (coming back to your agency)when you're working with organizations, are you helping them reevaluate their audience, where their audience is, what their audience wants, how their audience wants to support the mission, that kind of stuff. How often are you noticing that that's gotten stale?

[00:08:51] Tony Kopetchny: 
I mean we come.

[00:08:53] Katherine Ong:  
..or it's inaccurate.

[00:08:55] Tony Kopetchny: 
It's a little bit of both. I mean, we come in at a lot of different angles, you know, try to meet an organization where they're at. I'll tell you this too. You know, we were using digital transformation, so we found it in 2013. Really hit the streets pretty hard. 2015, 2016 is when we start going full time.
And man, digital transformation is just a lead balloon like it. Nobody wanted that. Nobody understood it. It was so big. And this is where we came up with the phrase engagement architecture. We're like, Okay, architecture people kind of get, sounds cool, but it's all about engagement. And you know, for us in the nonprofit space, what I was enamored with was this book called The Attention Merchants by Tim Woo.

And he was talking about the attention economy and I was like, Okay, well that's great. You're a nonprofit, you need attention, but like you're not gonna write a salacious headline just to get. A click on your site. It's not your incentive model. You need engagement. You need someone to get on your email list, so then you can start following up with them, so then you can get a donation and then you can make 'em feel really good and turn 'em into a recurring donor, you know, and that, that type of thing.

It just, I think, is obscured by the heavy weight of what. Private sector marketing or advertising is really all about, which is more of a mass media approach. They do just wanna click, They do just want a little bit of an impression, you know? Mm-hmm. . And so it's a different model, but it's ingrained back to the nonprofit sector because the private sector has more money to add more conferences and more writing and more materials about it.

And so, you know, we're really trying to help people think that way. On the audience side, what I'd say is coming through the pandemic, I think. There was an awakening, you know, for the world. I think we're all saying that. And then lots of different levels, right? Social justice, all the equity issues, but then in an audience it was at times, time's such a blur.

I dont know if you feel that way too, but, maybe it's a year ago now, a year and a half, we started getting a lot of questions about, you know, started with I need a diversified revenue and it's, I need to diversify my audience it was like, Oh, what do you really mean by that? Like, is that sub, you know, especially in the dc area, right? Is that sub context for, are we talking about diversity? Diversity or are you talking, You just want to broaden your audience.

[00:10:55] Katherine Ong: 
Then you just need more donors and you just, Right, right. You're.

[00:10:58] Tony Kopetchny: 
Not the right mark. And I want people from Iowa too, not just, and I'd say it was all of the above. And what it has really revealed is, you know, 2002.
Segmentation is really back in trend and most people can't segment. They have switched and transitioned and been on too many systems. There's been bad internal upkeep. You know, the knowledge management of why do you have this record, not that record. Why are you collecting this data point? Well, that one was out of the box, so it's real.

I feel like a lot of times we're being brought in to do it. Help see where they're at the moment and then tune and try to steer them forward. Now, social listening, people love the phrase as we get. I like it too. I think it's really cool. But really the whole premise is you have an audience that you want to go meet.
But like, you know, I just don't show up at someone's house and start talking really loud and expect they're gonna be my friend, Right? You know? Or I'm gonna go to the new play community. I gotta go and watch and see what they're talking about, and you know how they're talking about the language. Then I could sort of come and present myself and my ideas too, in a way that will jive with the community.

And it's too often that in the nonprofit space there's this, well, we have a mission, so we're gonna show up and everyone's gonna care cause I care about this mission. They might think it's right. They're probably not gonna be anti you when you show up, but like, it doesn't mean you're, you're gonna suddenly get this new audience just because you're in that new space.

So there's a lot of that that we're working on with groups right now too. Yeah. And you know, all the data recording that goes around that.

[00:12:22] Katherine Ong: 
It’s funny. So do any of them have the budget to actually do social listening? I mean, I know you're working with bigger nonprofits, but the social listening tools are.

[00:12:31] Tony Kopetchny: 
They are, I mean, some do, it's usually targeted. It's not like it's, it's pretty quick, you know, we'll do like two week, we use a couple tools and then like we throw some comparisons together and sort of help them look at language. We also make sure that they're supplying us with, you know, who they think the experts are.
So then we can go and look and sort of create a halo around those folks and try to find the other influencers. But then that space, so it's, it's very targeted. It's never very like a really open blue sky. And that's sort of what helps keep the budget down.

[00:13:00] Katherine Ong: 
Yeah. Alright, that makes sense. And for those that are listening, if you're more interested in how to be successful on different social media platforms, you should check out our second episode with Joe Federer, who's written a book about how the different social platforms are sort of like a different social environment.
And if you've attempted to copy and paste the same stuff across every platform, you might not be very successful. I know when I was at Keem, I, When I was training on social media, one of the things, the analogy I used was, you know, you're not gonna be walking into a friend's party and walk up to the first person you say, see and say, I've got a car to sell you.

And just start pitching them on selling a car. They're gonna kick you out of the party , you know, you have to talk about something else before you start trying to sell somebody. Same thing on social media. So I know when we had our earlier conversation. Before recording this podcast, we talked, you particularly talked about how you mentioned it in the intro actually. How technology is easy and people are hard.

Can you share some experiences related to that or tips about how to tackle the people part? Because that's the heart of this podcast actually is the people part.


[00:14:12] Tony Kopetchny: 
Yeah, a hundred percent. I like that phrase a lot. I started using it years ago, as I was trying to think about how to pitch things through.
Again, it was the US I, the experience at Institute of Piece really woke me up to the people part where it was, you know, And

[00:14:26] Katherine Ong: 
How big is that organization? because this is like an inside DC baseball thing. Most people would even know that organization exists.

[00:14:33] Tony Kopetchny: 
Well, if you are an American citizen, you are paying tax dollars, which help for this wonderful organization called the United States Institute of Peace.
It's congressionally funded, which means they're not, there's no one in there that's running on the politics circle. So they're not appointed. They're in there for the long haul, paid for by us, the citizens. They have done some amazing work with peace building overseas and since they are congressionally funded, pure citizens like we are, they could go in and they don't have to affiliate as being with the US government, which helps them a lot when they're out there doing their work.

For the tax dollars as an American, they are probably one of your extremely best investments. I think you pay probably half a cent or is cent a year for their budget. And they were under attack before, and they tried to have that killed by two senators or Congress members at the time. One of those was Anthony Weiner and we all know what happened to him, so he got his chest due.

So at the time I was there less, less than 200 people, organizations overseas, but it was in the growth phase, you know, it was before if so, inside or DC they had, there's a. Building on the National Mall now was one of the last new construction, after the African American Museum on the National Mall has this roof that's supposed to evoke a dove is very controversial.

Is getting put in. So this was pre that. This was getting them ready for that. I was part of the team to help get 'em in there. So it was a very growth phase. Like okay, it's got the growth phase part is nice because you could do a lot and. You're gonna get some result, right? There's so much low hanging fruit when you're just starting to do this work.

So that part was great. But there were people who had been there for years. They operated out of a very small location, undisclosed. It was actually in the National Restaurant Association at the building at the time. So people used to think, Oh sure. Institute a piece. You're not the cia. We're like, No, we're really not,
but just that's to say there was a lot of the status quo momentum. They were publishing books. They were doing great work. They were, I know at the time the president called it the best kept secret in Washington. And I was like, Man, when you opened that building with that roof, you are no longer the best kept secret in Washington.

[00:16:34] Katherine Ong: 
Everyone buys it and you're like, What's that? Yeah.

[00:16:36] Tony Kopetchny: 
So you need to be ready for this. And so I think this was, the question was really just about how do you deal with the people. People are, you know, hard technology's easy, like technology is always gonna do what it's supposed to do. It functions very well.
What we've seen, and I, you know, I say we, my company and my co-founder, Nate and I started this, It's one of the things when we first started the company, we talked about right fit technology because one of the things was always, You can get a best in class, it gets delivered and it never really lives up to the promise that you were sold because you don't have the capacity and the capabilities to take advantage of the tool.

Mm-hmm. , you know, Salesforce, I think a perfectly great product, so I'm not trying to put a dig on it. I just think it is really big and it is hype itself really heavily into the nonprofit space and a lot of nonprofits have it. But then they don't invest in it. There's no staff member, There's no, who's the person who owns this?
Who is the governance of the system? How does it work? Why is it going in there? How do I get a report out of it? Like, there's a lot of work that has to go to make the thing happen. And that's all people stuff, you know? I was in a conversation yesterday with Nate and we were talking about conferences.
Cause I'm about to start hitting the conference circuit and we were talking about artificial intelligence and that, that's, everyone's talking about that in nonprofit space. I'm like, Here's this gonna happen. There's gonna be, what do they call it? The science lab, the booths, the fair? Mm-hmm. . There's gonna be a whole bunch of technology there.

Someone's gonna have the AI tool, and it is gonna sound like it hits every freaking requirement you've ever wanted and is gonna make all your dreams come true. But that software assumes that you have your shit together. It assumes that you have a governance and that you have process, and you have policies, and you have a staff that can work this and that.

You've got structured data that can get into a system to have sense made of it. You've got a taxo. You don't have any of that. That tool's not gonna work. And it's not the tool's fault. So people are hard. All of those layers, then that's all this change that you've got to bring into an organization. And it is not sexy.
Hey, we gotta stop and make a governance. You gotta do what? Yeah. I just wanted the AI thing, man told me like the next thing I'm supposed to do for the next owner .

[00:18:37] Katherine Ong: 
It's fascinating that you're mentioning that because Google just finished rolling out their helpful content update, which has killed some sites that used ai.
Predominant AI in their content, as in like de-index them, you can't find them. Wow. Yeah. So it's not that every site that's using some AI generated tool, you know, where you come up with an outline or maybe even the content for a page. Anyway, but some. And been danged.

[00:19:09] Tony Kopetchny: 
It's fascinating.

[00:19:11] Katherine Ong: 
Yeah. content con, you know, Google likes to know there's an expert behind your content generally.
So I wasn't, I've always been a bit iffy. In fact, since you're in DC you could go to the Planet Word Museum where they have an exhibit about how they can measure who has written the content. because it turns out as a writer you have a unique fingerprint. So even if you write under a synonym, like JK Rowling with Harry Potter, they still know it's you.
Hmm. So I wonder if Google does, considering they do in general, No. Using AI, looking at different CorpU.

[00:19:45] Tony Kopetchny: 
Fascinating. Fascinating.

[00:19:47] Katherine Ong: 
Actually, I actually brought up ai. You can use AI for other things, but , all those are listening. I might not use it wholeheartedly across all of the content on your website. Just, just a little note
So do you have a standard approach for handling digital change through your clients? There's a completely custom, depending on where your clients are and how big they are, and all.

[00:20:07] Tony Kopetchny: 
Approach. Yes. I mean, we try to have a similar approach, so as a company we can continue to learn and tune it, but everybody's situation is unique.
So it's, it's applying that to the current circumstances. But the common thread honestly, is we talked to a lot of people. You know, one thing in the, when we were early on, you know, we, we took a contract and we shouldn't have, because they want you to talk to all these folks. That should have been just this ginormous, ginormous red flag.

This work can't happen in a vacuum or silo or you know, its own whatever, bust out of it and get across to the other line, the inertia busting. So that, that's really, I mean, that's the crux of it. You gotta be willing to talk to people. You gotta be willing to listen to a lot of people, you know. And if there's people that are listening and they're in house, or they're running one of these projects for the first time, or they're trying to figure out what to do, you gotta listen to everybody.
And the champions, you don't have to worry about them as much because they're already on board. You gotta find the naysayers and then you gotta find the nuggets and the negativity. Like that's, that's really the thing. Cause.

[00:21:06] Katherine Ong: 
As in like the positive that you could spin basically.

[00:21:10] Tony Kopetchny: 
Yeah.

[00:21:10] Katherine Ong: 
What do you mean by nuggets?

[00:21:11] Tony Kopetchny: 
I say there are nu, there's nuggets of wisdom in the negativity that's coming out. They are negative about what's this experience. They're negative about the change that's coming for a reason, and some of it is personal. Some of it's, Hey, I did this this way for a long time. You move my cheese. And I'm just trying to get through the workday, man, and it's like, Oh, I get ya.

But there is something else in there too, right? Like and there even that you moved my cheese. I did it this way forever. Okay, Well if you're really not paying attention, then you're not thinking about the training that you're setting up and the type of training you're gonna set up, how hands on that training's gonna be?
What are you gonna do to help this person cross that bridge? And so, Anyone who's already on board, you know, you got fans like great, grab their feedback. It's helpful. It's not as helpful as the negative folks and you, you're not like you're gonna sway them necessarily to be positive about it. But over the course of time, if you're able to get them and be inclusive with them, it is gonna help you in the long run to be more successful.
And that takes a lot, I think from the people doing it. That's not, I mean.

[00:22:13] Katherine Ong: 
So do you do that upfront? I mean, the first thing you do is discover, chats with everybody. And do you talk to their outside consultants as well.

[00:22:22] Tony Kopetchny: 
Yeah. It depends on what, It depends on what we're working on. You know, if it's for, if it's around a specific tool, we would talk to all the people who used it.
You know, for our interview process, we do have a pretty, robust process. We come in with standardized scripts. We do that on purpose because we're looking for similarities, but also the anomalies like, Wow, this answer is super different from this person. Why is that so different from everybody else's?
And then we use ai, but you know, translators, we have recordings. So when we're recording the conversation,

[00:22:54] Katherine Ong: 
Yeah.

[00:22:54] Tony Kopetchny: 
The team doesn't have to stare and try to take notes for having the robots take the notes, pull it back out to us. And then over time we've been able to train this. And that can also start to pull out some of the pieces from the conversation that are interesting.
We anonymize all of those afterwards, and then we create a. A lot of times the executives wanna see it, and a lot of times the executives don't like what they're seeing, you know? They, but we've had that before. You know, some of these questions have been like, gimme some tough times. You've been through, I mean, they, they don't like it, but it is the truth.

You have to be able to stand in that and stand with them and say, Yeah, this is what was said. What do you want? There's, I can't change it. Yeah. But we can make, we can make change together. And it, I think it's one of those things where when someone points out your flaw, it hurts first. No one likes fat.
And we're not trying to do it in a mean or an afar way, but it's, here's where it's at. If you really want to be at the core of your own reality and how you can start to maneuver differently based on the on the ground moment, this is it. Then if you're the person who's doing that work, just be prepared.
people don't always like what you're packaging for him.

[00:24:00] Katherine Ong: That's fascinating. Cause I think I've also been really stunned by. Real live user feedback is persuasive. Most of the time I've used it like audience research, using UserTesting or whatever and provided that back to the client. And recently I did some of that sort of discovery work with a current client, like asking them about their target audience and stuff, and just great insights that came out of it.
Getting back to the delivering of bad news, what tips do you have considering? Those of us in the digital space tend to deliver bad news, maybe more frequently than other roles, . Cause you bring us in because things aren't working. So, you know, we're gonna deliver the news that things aren't working often.
It's not like we're gonna come in and be like, you know, that traffic decreases, nevermind. It didn't really happen. , most of the time you're like, right, it did Google hates you now you or whatever. So what are your tips around being a better deliverer of bad news? Other than my default, which is. I'm just delivering Google's rules sort of language, right?

[00:24:55] Tony Kopetchny: 
You know, I think for myself and then just what we try to infuse value wise, the company. I mean, you gotta be honest, empathetic. You gotta really, because you know we could deliver something you didn't like to report. It was the truth. My company can still get paid and we're going somewhere else because you don't wanna continue.

But that might be somebody's job on the other end. Mm. So we really gotta be empathetic towards how we're bringing the messages across. And anything negative isn't. I mean, it's not necessarily negative. It's like, Hey, look, here's the truth of where you're at. Like, now let's get better. Like, we got so much information now let's, let's improve.

You know, it's, but you gotta be earnest and you gotta just be willing to say it. I think people try to, you know, the phrase, I don't know if. I, it was a phrase when I was younger, but like, I'm gonna couch this in something comfortable where they can, Nobody hears that shit. Say it the way it's supposed to be said, but say it honestly empathetically and be earnest, and then let pause, let people sync it, sink it in, let 'em have their questions and the feedback, and let 'em know you're in it with them.
You guys are, you're gonna fix this together. You're gonna move forward, right? Like, I'd rather, I'd rather know or I'm not doing well, and then have an opportunity to improve and then someone just says, Hey, you're doing okay. Am I, I don't know. It doesn't feel like I am.

[00:26:10] Katherine Ong: 
So you had mentioned earlier a little bit or you sort of hinted toward, when you do the discovery, you can figure out that people are, on the spectrum of technology adoption.
Some of 'em are champions, your early adopters. But as the bell curve goes, you've got a couple laggards. And I know we kind of actually mapped this out when we did the plan for health it.gov, knowing that some doctors would be laggards and there'd have to be like a. Stick to get them to transition. But what kind of approach do you have as an agency to kind of, obviously you gotta bring everybody on board if you're trying to get them to pivot to a new technology for them to see you as successful.
As an agency, ideally everybody adopts the new technology. So do you have sort of a different approach depending on how you flag somebody as an adopter?

[00:26:57] Tony Kopetchny: 
Hmm. I'd probably not. I feel like there's a point. If you're gonna use it, you don't have a choice. You're going to be adopting it. You have to use it because your other tool's gonna go away.

[00:27:10] Katherine Ong: 
Oh yeah, okay.

[00:27:10] Tony Kopetchny: 
I think, I think it's more the spectrum of, hey, this group over here is excited about it. This group isn't, What do I do with the group that is not excited about this? How do I pull them into the fold and get them ready to move forward? And I think it gets more complicated when it's a tool like a CRM that cuts across program areas.

So it's then how do you, you know, everyone wants to create these little teams and pull 'em together, but they don't give them any teeth. Like you gotta get a real team. If you're gonna do that across departments that share information, that meeting is sacrossing. They're gonna go, this is what they do.
It's not just some committee that shows up once in a while. So the head of fundraising, the head of communications, and the head of program, and the person who works with the executive. All their bosses have to say, Yes, you're going to that meeting every month and I wanna report it to you. You tell me what you heard there.

So you gotta find ways to start changing the culture to get people involved. But they need to see, it's important from all angles too. And then, you know, it's pretty classic. They're like, What's in it for me? What's in it for that person? Why are they doing this? You know, I think it was one of the larger nonprofits that I worked at.
At one point I came in and they added Salesforce and then they were forcing everyone to use it. But they were, They weren't telling 'em why. They weren't telling 'em why it was good or what they were gonna get out of it, how their workday was gonna get better, how anything they were doing was gonna be better.
Because it was just, you need to do this because we need adoption numbers. Like, oh, that doesn't work and that just turns people off. You know, the tool should make things easier and if it doesn't, we should know that too, because it's the wrong tool.

[00:28:38] Katherine Ong: 
So this sounds like for most of your engagements, you must have some sort of process to engage the C suite.

[00:28:44] Tony Kopetchny: 
A hundred percent. I think, transformation change management, it's an all encompassing effort. You need to go to both sides. You know, one of the tactics I used in-house was I would talk to all the executives, but I talked to all the staff. So we'd have to figure it out. And I, I need to see where the gaps were between the people who were gonna be using it and the people who were assigning the contracts and assuming that the thing was gonna work the way it was.
you've got nothing if you don't have executive tension at. You know, that's really important because the staff wants to know I'm doing this. Oh. And they're, they know I'm doing this and they know it's not easy and they know it's gonna take time. You know, ex, you know the other thing I'd say to your audience sitting was doing work expectation management, Super important.

You know, there's this false assumption that in this six month contract to get some new tool put in place, and then at the end of that, we've done it. We transformed, everything's changed. That's not it. This stuff takes years, two to three years sometimes, and you gotta be okay with incremental improvement.
Not, hey, by, you know, Tuesday, October 27th. We're gonna be a whole new organization and everyone's gonna be doing this new thing and it's gonna be fun. It doesn't work like that. And..

[00:29:54] Katherine Ong: 
That there is the similarity between transforming an organization in relation to putting together a CRM and putting in an SEO program. It's a cross silo. It takes years, , especially depending on what kind of process you have to change with folks writing, promoting, doing technical stuff.

[00:30:14] Tony Kopetchny: 
My favorite was I launched a microsite once, and then I got an email 15 minutes after it went live and it was like, we're not number one on Google. What did you do wrong?

[00:30:26] Katherine Ong: 
Nowadays we're like, Google has an TO index. Unfortunately, that's the challenge.

[00:30:33] Tony Kopetchny: 
Sometimes it's only 15 minutes.

[00:30:35] Katherine Ong: 
Exactly. We're not cnn. They don't come around that quickly to see what changed.

[00:30:43] Tony Kopetchny:  
What are you gonna do?

[00:30:44] Katherine Ong: 
I know. So, are there any processes that you've implemented to be more persuasive as an outside agency over the years?
Like as you've run your agency and learned more working with clients, are there particularly things that you think you've come up with and used regularly?

[00:31:04] Tony Kopetchny: 
Yeah, I mean it's gonna sound, I don't know, hippy-dippy, but I, I think it's the trust factor. How do you build a rapport? How do you get in and everyone, when they talk to you, they feel like they're really having an honest and frank conversation that they can be open with you about.

You know, I always tell people the reason you want us to come in and do the interviews is because the conversation that your colleague can have with a consultant. Is very different from the conversation they will have with you as the colleague that they're gonna see Tuesday at the 10:00 AM meeting every Tuesday.
Mm-hmm. So they, they can, they don't. They don't feel this. It's not like I hear bad things, it's just they're very honest with me in a way that I think they might be afraid it could hurt somebody that they're working with and they don't want to be hurtful like everybody is. Everybody's very good. They all come with wanting the right intentions, but you need us to be able to come in and have that because we're neutral.

Like, I'm great. You didn't like that, You like this thing. That's wonderful. You know, other things inside of the process. I know it's about persuasion as much as when you're, when you're getting buy in. But you know, we're brought in to look at a certain thing. So in those interview conversations, we'll slip ideas in, you know, that's real.

Like, Hey, what'd you think about this? Oh, that didn't work out well. Why didn't it? What changed? What did you think about doing something like this? And then you get a little bit of very soft feedback before you even start trying to push any ideas beyond, you know, the stakeholder who did bring you in to look at specific areas.

And that's, that's a really nice way to collect some honest information real quick upfront. Hmm. And it also helps people then, because they've heard it, so next time they start to hear something, it's not the first time they heard it. It's that rule

[00:32:42] Katherine Ong: 
of three, right. ? Yeah. Or seven, whatever the number is now .

[00:32:47] Tony Kopetchny: 
Yeah.
But it's, it's hard and it's, it's easier when they're hearing it in a small group or one-on-one rather than when they got invited to the executive meeting and they're the last executive or heard about this plan. Yeah. That's not gonna go over well with anybody.

[00:33:01] Katherine Ong: 
Yeah. Interesting. Pivoting a little bit to your team.
Is there anything that you do with your team members in relation to onboarding to make sure that they have the same DNA and are impactful with clients? There's something about your agency, I'm fascinated with this by the way. I've asked this question with other podcast guests like, Okay, so I can tell what your philosophy and NA is related to interacting with your clients.
How do you ensure that everybody at your agency has the same focus?

[00:33:34] Tony Kopetchny: 
Yeah, we actually just had a really long leadership meeting yesterday. We were talking about positioning for our company and, you know, coming through the pandemic and things we're doing, and we did a, I called it the Lightning swat. But one of the questions is like, what have we been hearing from other people, you know, that they like about us?

And we hear from our own staff and whether people like our culture. As a company, you know, and I think we've invested in making people feel like they're a part of something because we've always been distributed, you know, from day one. And you have to be really conscious and cognizant of building community when Zoom is really where we see each other all the time.

Slack. So I, and what we talked about yesterday was interesting is that one of the things we're starting to notice, I think, is when we work with clients. A lot, all of our work is, it's some kind of change. Like there's some transformation happening. When they want that, when they want some culture to change themselves, those projects go way better.

Even if it's like that, I don't understand this part. We're able to create much more trust. More quickly we've run into the one or two clients that they don't wanna change, they don't want..

[00:34:44] Katherine Ong: 
But they still hired you.

[00:34:44] Tony Kopetchny: 
They don't want the culture shift. Yeah. I, we can't work with someone and won't let us do it.
Like that became clear after the one who hired us. Someone let us do interviews.

[00:34:53] Katherine Ong: 
Yeah.

[00:34:53] Tony Kopetchny: 
You know, it's, it's these realizations you start to get over time. So I. I think that's part of it. I think our team feels trust in each other and I, you know, we have created that and one of our values is no one fails alone, or, you know, you gotta help each other out.
We have Creativity Inc. You know, I think it's one of the books I sent you to Link. I took the idea of that from the Brain Trust, which I just loved, which was about Ed Kamo when he was starting Pixar. But the Brain Trust was this group of all the executives or other directors. And as you were making your film, if you wanted to come in and call them in and show them stuff there, just there to give you all the feedback, but you didn't have to do anything with it.
Even if they were the heads of the head of Pixar, you don't do anything with it. But like, I'm just giving you these ideas. So we've, we've initiated that on our company, The Brain Trust. But, and what I learned early in the company was I needed to show other people that I needed that help too. I was having too much one-on-one slack.

With, you know, the other people I started the company with, and so over time we just, all this is public. Like, I don't know what I'm doing on this. Y'all, can you come in and help me? And then everybody throws ideas. I think that infuses itself back into our client relationships. I think the other thing we've always talked about here is I just remember when I was on the other side as a client in one group, I was working.
And they just had bad company stuff happening. And when they came in, like that meeting was just awful. Like nobody wanted to go to it anymore. All the energy that came into the room was just wrong. And that is what I've, with this company, I was like, We're never gonna do that. And I've said it since we started and I repeat it quite often.

I want our clients to be like, I'm going to a meeting with Par. I was gonna have the best part of my day. If we can bring, you know, it's the job and people are like not, you're not always, I can't make happiness happen, but if we can feel good when we have the right energy, we're creating something together.
I think that matters. And I think it helps our team when they hit the difficult spots, because I know they can talk to us too. And you know, as leaders we're always ready to come in. I've probably had far more difficult conversations than anybody on staff and I could either talk them through what they're hearing.
It's always this moment of, hey, sometimes it's, it's actually not you. You're just there in the moment when someone else is having a moment and they're releasing it. But because you're an empathetic human being and we want you to be, you're taking on their emotions and you're probably not realizing it.
So there, there's a lot of that that we try to, to help with them. I don't.

[00:37:19] Katherine Ong: 
I don't know. As I get further in my career, I'm very intrigued by energy. The energy you bring to something, right? And how that could, pivot your success level. And I know when I'm going to do training, for instance, I certainly develop this different energy level in getting people excited about you.
So do you have, particularly as you're walking into some of these tougher meetings, maybe, do you have anything that you get your team to do to be in the right mind space?

[00:37:50] Tony Kopetchny: 
Well, there's one thing I always do. I do 'em more when, Cause we've started running online events every month, beginning of the pandemic.
Cause we were like, Oh my God, we can't see people in person anymore. What do we do? Yeah. But you know, I have staff lead those and what I always say is just smile and have fun. Like you're about to hit the stage, Like have a good time. Like you fumble on your word, you get the wrong slide. Who cares? Like, have a good time.

People have come to listen to you. I think that little triggers there. The other thing I'd say is another book I'd sent you is The Art of the Pitch.

[00:38:22] Katherine Ong: 
Mm-hmm.

[00:38:23] Tony Kopetchny: 
I read that when we were first starting out, but it really stuck with me. Every angle of everything you're about to do when you go into a meeting matters.
Like, think about the room. Are you standing or sitting? What are you wearing? If so, what color? Sh i, I even think about the color shirt I wear. Is this a calming color? Is this a. Co. A color that could, has more of an excitability to it. Like what am I trying to do when I'm in there? And I think about where I sit within now cause of Zoom, where I sit within my Zoom box, how do I see everybody on the screen?

[00:38:56] Katherine Ong: 
Mm-hmm.

[00:38:57] Tony Kopetchny: 
If you're going in person, think about the room ahead of time, know the technology ahead of time, be there early. Think about if you have your team, if you wear people on your team are sitting, think about how you're gonna coordinate and choreograph how they're coming. I feel like if you go into anything and you've prepared that well, What you're able to do then is to be able to react.

Cause what's gonna happen is you have a great plan and you roll in and you got all the things you want to do and then someone's gonna interrupt. The president of the company is just gonna say, Well, I got a couple questions on X. Okay, well it's up to you. Then you command the room because now you, you, if you can then take ownership of everything.

Hey, I hear you on that. Let me get through two more things and I'm absolutely gonna get to all your questions. Now, you just owned the room. And it didn't take much, but you were prepared and it wasn't like you were trying to own it over somebody else, but what they're seeing in you is a lot of confidence.
And when you're coming in as a consultant with the work you do, the work we do, they wanna have confidence that you're gonna, you're going to be the people that help them get to the next place. Because they've got a lot of, this feels risky. All the work we're doing in a digital space and it is expensive. And they wanna know what they're making, they're there doing it with someone who could make it right and make it work.

And so they want that confidence. That's, that's for me, a big thing. I mean, prepare, That's what we're paid for. We're paid to show up and be prepared.

[00:40:20] Katherine Ong: 
Interesting is, it's very similar to what my, my boss at Ke Tim had us do, because I remember a few meetings that we talked about where it was sitting , we talked about making sure we got the feds to break up where they were sitting and try to sit in between them.
[00:40:34] Tony Kopetchny: 
Mm-hmm.

[00:40:35] Katherine Ong: 
And, I had a favorite suit jacket that was red that I loved, but I always had to look at it and be strategic about when I, when I wore it. So it never went to any client. If I had a day where it was just me and my, my, colleagues in the office and I wasn't doing anything pretentious, I got to wear it.
But otherwise, it didn't get a lot of air time.

[00:40:55] Tony Kopetchny: 
It'd be great for speaking engagement too, though. Oh,

[00:40:57] Katherine Ong: 
I did wear it for speaking engagements actually. But, not so much for any sort of other meeting.

[00:41:04] Tony Kopetchny: 
I don't expect my staff to go to that level all the time, but it's, when I talk to them, those are the things that I talk about and prepare and, you know, if we're really gonna do a talk and we practice it ahead of time.
Like me, I've always just personally hated it. The first time I hear something coming outta my mouth is in the moment in front of everybody , it's like, Oh, did that sound right? So, you know, it helps to practice these things ahead of time.

[00:41:27] Katherine Ong: 
Yeah, we did some drive arounds too for not every meeting, but the ones that we thought were more important.
Yeah. Yeah. so, I'm sure you will experience it. Moments of conflict, in the moment in some of these meetings with your clients, how do you coach your team to actually handle some of those moments? You just mentioned one, which is like, you know, I hear your question. I got two more things. I'll go back to you.
Are there other things you sort of coached them about?

[00:41:54] Tony Kopetchny: 
Yeah, I mean, I, I saw that question as we were getting ready for this, and I just thought about the word conflict and I think it's taken on such a Standoffish meaning in society anymore, and it, everything feels so ready to bubble to the surface. And maybe it's covid and maybe it's everything.
You know, I, The other thing I'd like to say to people, my last job, and I like to say here and I'm writing about, you know, disagreement does not mean disrespect. And we have to learn how to talk to each other again. I am far more afraid of being in the meeting. That's a creative or an idea meeting or planning.
Everyone is just shaking their head yes. Cause they've all got something else they wanna say. They. Possibly cannot all agree that everything is just right. So just going along does not produce anything of really high value in the end except resentment. And so how do we really start to change that? I, the conflict is healthy in these things.

Like this is the diversity of ideas coming to fruition. It's how we manage the meeting at the moment. So I think for us, you know, one thing we've heard feedback wise, when we've given some deliverables, the way we've done it, we've had teams come together. It's the first time we ever all sat with our colleagues.
This is the first time I really saw what my colleagues were doing on this side of the building. Like this is really eye opening to me, you know? And we're able to facilitate that again because we're coming in. Its consultants, not colleagues, and they have to take the time to sit with us because somebody paid them and it turns out to, to really be well for.

Ways to manage it. I mean, expect it, encourage the healthy part of it, try to get to the reason that it's there. And then, you know, if you own a meeting, I think we've all. Over the years, I somehow lost how to manage meetings. But if you can manage the meeting, you can get the conflict out. You can record it.
If it's relevant to the meeting, you can explore it. If it's not, you could say, I absolutely hear what you're saying. I'm gonna put this over here cause this is really important, but we do only have 15 minutes left. Jane, I gotta get through the rest of this real quick. Yeah. People want to be heard. I, yeah, I'm far more afraid of silence.

I'm far more afraid of passive aggressive conflict. Yeah. Then I, then I am anything explicit and external. Like I, if I'm seeing it, stop having the meeting, outside of the meeting. Have the meeting in the meeting, so I have the damn meeting.

[00:44:19] Katherine Ong: 
Yeah.

[00:44:19] Tony Kopetchny: 
You know,

[00:44:20] Katherine Ong: 
Do you, do you, in your discovery, do you, do a little bit of personality flagging with some of your stakeholders?
I'm only mentioning this because I know there's a few personality types where they're not, the extroverted one that shares, So do you, do you end up like literally recording that to share your clients and then making sure you specifically ask certain people to participate.

[00:44:41] Tony Kopetchny: 
Yeah. Thanks for bringing that up.
That was, I was thinking about that too when I was thinking about the questions and it's, it's in how you run the meeting. If you gotta watch when everybody's being real silent, why is that person being so silent for so long? Is it because their boss is there and they don't wanna talk in front of them?
Is it because they are introverted? You know? And there's tactics for that too. Have a freaking agenda. Send the agenda out ahead of time. Introverts want to think about things ahead of time and they're gonna come up with great ideas. But when you hit 'em on the spot, you're gonna get the person who reacts really well.
Cause they got a bunch of energy. because people are around them and they love talking and they can't help themselves. You know, it's, you gotta encourage that. I think it's, you gotta be able to spot that personality too inside of a group dynamic. It's a lot easier for us. This is why the one-on ones and the small group interviews are so important because no one's afraid to talk to everybody.

I get a little bit, at first, you get a little snow, man, I gotta spend an hour. We're like, Okay, it's gonna go faster than you think. And then they get into it, then they get talking and by the end they're like, Ah, that's so much more. This was great. Like, okay. But yeah, it's, it's getting people into the groove, but you're right.
Yeah. Managing a meeting and thinking about who's talking, why they're talking, the power dynamics of who's in the room, who did you invite into the room, All that matters. Yeah. 

[00:45:56] Katherine Ong: 
Do you rehearse some of that beforehand too? Depending on how important the meeting is? If you know who's coming.

[00:46:03] Tony Kopetchny: 
Yeah, we talk, not necessarily rehearse, but like, who's coming?

What do we know about? Who's gonna be there, what do we need to hear? Like it's, you know, if, let's say there's heads of six different programs coming, it's a big org and then some other staff. But we know we really need to hear from one of the programs because we don't have as much information from them. It's like, all right, we gotta find a way to make sure we get Bobby to talk in this one.

How do we pull this outta Bobby? So we could think about things like that ahead of time and it helps our team too, just sort of knowing he's gonna be there. Ahead of time and they can be prepared. Did I meet this person yet or not? You know?

[00:46:41] Katherine Ong: 
Right.

[00:46:41] Tony Kopetchny: 
Thinking about that a little bit.

[00:46:42] Katherine Ong: 
Well, this has been a fascinating conversation, so thank you for coming on and chatting with me.
I've got a couple final questions I ask everybody. Yeah, yeah. So the first one is, as marketers we're constantly thinking of a better audience and how to persuade them. So have you had a recent aha moment with either a client's target audience or yours that you thought was fascinating?

[00:47:03] Tony Kopetchny: 
You know, I was thinking, I was like, it's 2022 and quote, Zoolander, like, segmentation is so hot right now.
I don't, I mean, segment, I, I was shocked. But people can't, People are still trying to figure out how to do segments and they want to advance. Into a more personalized type of emails using marketing automation tools.

[00:47:24] Katherine Ong: 
Mm-hmm.

[00:47:24] Tony Kopetchny: 
And they don't have the initial like, why would I segment a certain way? What do I really want to know?
How would that build? So I mean, that's my thing. Diversify your audiences. You need to be able to segment to understand what you're doing within those messages. And I think you had said it earlier, stop having one message for every medium.

[00:47:41] Katherine Ong: 
Right. Every social media platform. Yeah. Right.

[00:47:43] Tony Kopetchny: 
Think about where you're putting it out.
And hey, email. Still a really, really powerful tool. Invest in it and figure it out. Those are mine.

[00:47:52] Katherine Ong: 
I mean these are all like, it's, it's more work I realize because usually there's like one social media person for every platform they decided to be on. [00:48:00] But all of these platforms use artificial intelligence to filter out your message.
Full stop one way or the other. If it's email, it's Gmail doing it. And so you have to be targeted to your target audience. Same with seo. Cause it gets filtered out, So what's the win or resource you wanna share with your audience today? I know that you've mentioned a ton that we're gonna put in the show notes.
Different books.

[00:48:23] Tony Kopetchny: 
Yeah, a lot of books I would say, you know, The big win. I mean, ground yourself and know yourself. I think you've got to be, if you are a change agent, you've gotta understand that it can be good in the end, but not everybody wants it. Your job's to help them get through it sometimes and get to the next place, and you're going to feel heavy emotions from people and you just need to know and have confidence in what you're doing, that it's right that a lot of that negativity isn't about you personally. You know, I've seen a lot of people in these positions. It's easy to burn out because you feel the weight of everything and you feel isolated.
And in an island like I talked about earlier, I mean those are the things we a hundred percent have been building to avoid in our company. No one here is on an island inside of Parsons tko. And when we find it. Staff people with our clients, we've gotta support them too. because they shouldn't be on an island either.

[00:49:17] Katherine Ong: 
Yeah. As an in, I've been an internal change agent and it, frankly, it only worked when I had a boss that had my back.

[00:49:24] Tony Kopetchny:
 Mm-hmm.

[00:49:25] Katherine Ong: 
Otherwise you're very exposed. Yeah. You know? So how can people learn more about it?

[00:49:33] Tony Kopetchny: 
Yeah. Thank you. So check us out on our website, parsonstko.com. We have tons of free resources. We do at least one free webinar every month.
Usually on a Wednesday. We got a newsletter you could sign up for. You get to know about all that. Sometimes we're doing events now back in person, in the cities that we show up to. You could find out about that on the website. We have a podcast as well, which I'm gonna. Likely interviewing you on later to speak to.
So I'm super excited about that. And if anyone wants to hit me personally, just find me on LinkedIn. I'm the only Tony Kopetchny, K o p e t c h n y that you will ever meet. I'm unique in that. So come find me. I'm on LinkedIn. I'd love to talk to you.

[00:50:15] Katherine Ong: 
Great. Thank you so much.

[00:50:18] Tony Kopetchny: 
Well, thank you. This is wonderful.
I really appreciate it.

[00:50:21] Katherine Ong: 
Thanks so much for listening. To find out more about the podcast and what we're up to, go to digital marketing victories.com. And if you like what you heard, subscribe to us on iTunes or wherever you get your podcast. Rate us, comment and share podcasts please. I'm always looking for new ideas, topics, and guests.
Email us at digitalmarketingvictories@gmail.com or DM us on Twitter @dmvictories. Thanks for listening.