mike wolpert sqThe infectious, upbeat personality and the radio voice. Those are the first things I notice about Michael Wolpert. It’s kind of strange since he’s logged 25 + years in radio ad sales, promotions and events, not as a news anchor, announcer or DJ. No matter, Wolpert, the founder of Soci@l Jumpstart, a social storytelling platform that is focused on inspiring small businesses and entrepreneurs, might just be the most positive person on the planet.

I “met” Wolpert on the phone through a close friend (full disclosure: she works for him as a content editor) who’s helping small businesses and entrepreneurs tell and share their unique stories. Wolpert’s career in the radio business taught him that marketing works, but he realizes that traditional advertising doesn’t work as well as it once did. Social media and the ability to tell, share and promote stories has not only upended it, but communication in general. Wolpert saw a void in the small business world where mom and pop, family-run and other small, frequently boot-strapped start-ups could benefit by telling and sharing their stories in order to grow their businesses. The trouble is they often don’t know how or where to start.

That’s where Soci@l Jumpstart comes in. The company offers multimedia storytelling, social media training and brand services with the goal of helping small businesses and entrepreneurs of all kinds expand. Founded in 2008, Soci@l Jumpstart started out with the goal of helping small businesses build online presences. Flash-forward seven years later, and it continues dispensing advice on digital and social strategy but it’s also evolved to offer multimedia training, coaching, storytelling and branding services.

In a wide-ranging interview, Wolpert shares his inspiration for Soci@l Jumpstart, why it’s unique and describes the various iterations it’s gone through to send a message to small businesses on how to build consistency, authenticity and trust.

How would you describe Soci@l Jumpstart?

Michael Wolpert: Soci@l Jumpstart is a company that helps small businesses create shareable social stories about why they do what they do in such a way that it energizes their customers and has prospects flocking to them. Simply put: We focus on a good story, well-told.

Storytelling’s been around forever. What we do is help people tell their stories in such a way that when you hear their story, you’re inclined to share it. That’s the currency. The shareable social storytelling focus is what makes us unique.

The social storytelling as marketing concept is not a brand new idea. But it’s a wonderful idea. Small businesses have a really good opportunity to master it. I believe in storytelling as the best form of marketing for business owners vs. advertising, because social media has enabled people to become familiar with businesses in such a way that the stories, told well, create an emotional bond.

“What we do is help people tell their stories in such a way that when you hear their story, you’re inclined to share it.”

Why does Soci@l Jumpstart focus on small businesses and entrepreneurs?

Wolpert: We focus on small business owners because they have real, natural stories that they don’t have to make up. Big brands like Budweiser and Coca-Cola make up glorious stories. But for small business owners there are all kinds of stories—and I include myself in this—because we tend to do what we do because we’re so driven by the passion of doing it. We turn down corporate jobs to pursue our business ideas or join family businesses. I used to have a really good job, now I have a most excellent mission. And therein lies the story that I believe is attractive to people.

By the way, what do you consider a “small business”?

Wolpert: There are 28 million small business owners in the U.S. I define small business as one that’s run by the founder or owner and has zero to $5 or $10 million in annual revenue. I sometimes use the terms ‘family-run business’ or ‘entrepreneur-led business’. It could be a husband and wife, a father and sons or daughters, mothers and daughters or two siblings running a business. It’s more of an attitude than precise metric.

How did you hatch the idea for the business?                             

Wolpert: The business has gone through a few different iterations since I launched it in 2008. At that time, we were basically a consulting firm with the objective of helping small businesses build a place for themselves online. At first, it was all about their social media presence.In 2008, people were still wondering what Facebook is—is it important and is it going to last?

We still get a lot of ‘how-to’ questions about using Facebook and Twitter, etc., and what type of messaging works well for each site. But now we’re getting more questions about ‘How do I share my story in a way that engages others?’ ‘How do I make my story stand out?’ ‘How do I generate enough ideas for blog posts?’

Your background is in radio ad sales and promotion. How did it help inform your business ideas?

Wolpert: My background is in traditional media. During one of my stints at a radio station in Florida, it kind of fell to me to train the salespeople and I launched a program called Radio Jumpstart. It consisted of five two-hour sessions, Monday through Friday for people who were in their first week on the job. It was a training program on how to set sales goals, prospect clients, research clients during the sales process and even how to behave in a sales meeting. My idea revolved around ethical selling to develop clients for the long-term. I was the guy who asked ‘what’s good about this?’ There’s always something good about everything.

Eventually, I wound up in San Francisco working for CBS and my boss went to Monster.com to head their ad sales department. I’d wanted to transition to online for some time so I went to Monster. After about a year and a half, I realized I was done working for people even though it was a great job and a cool industry. This was right around the time that Facebook opened up to regular people—I was one of the first 500 people to have a Facebook account without an .edu email. I left my job at Monster around 2006.

“My idea revolved around ethical selling to develop clients for the long-term. I was the guy who asked ‘what’s good about this?’ There’s always something good about everything.”

I was experimenting with Facebook and accepted all the friend requests I received. I rapidly learned that Facebook had a 5,000-friend cap. I had some friends who were VCs and they used to make fun of me. They suggested that since I ‘knew’ so many people on Facebook, that made me an expert and I should I talk to their clients about social media.

So I started with a few specialty food companies, looked at their marketing and what they could be doing online to grow their customer base with social media. After my first presentation they said ‘great, how much will you charge us to do all of that?’ I pulled a number out of thin air and I was in business. The next day, I bought the domain for Soci@l Jumpstart.

An early client was Lotus Foods, a small company that imports exotic, heirloom varieties of rice from family farms around the world. It’s a business run by a passionate husband and wife team who work with people in emerging markets providing solutions for better rice yields while conserving water. They know their farmers and actually feature some of them on their packaging. This was, and still is, a business that has great stories.

What really galvanized the idea for Soci@l Jumpstart?

Wolpert: I knew from my experience in radio and being in the world of media for so long how difficult it was for small businesses, in particular, to make their marketing dollars pay off. I thought social storytelling would really take off. I realized that this would finally shift the power of advertising and transform it into something that small businesses could do really well, which is marketing.

I realized that people needed some inspiration and a little hand-holding and I was just a few steps ahead with the technology. I had some cool ideas about marketing and a vision for how that would play out. I was at a point in my life where I was willing to gamble and start my own consulting company.

I knew I could be useful to small businesses. I had handled major national advertising accounts for many years; it’s just transactional business. But when I would go in as an ad sales person and talk to a guy who owned a restaurant with his wife and he would trust me with $2,000, I felt I owed him $6,000 worth of business, at least. I had to make that money work because he trusted me.

“I knew I could be useful to small businesses.”

When did Soci@l Jumpstart segue from consulting and training to focusing on the storytelling around small businesses?

Wolpert: It became more of a focus around 2011. By then it was clear that people would rather watch the internet than read the internet so I began doing video interviews with clients as a vehicle for storytelling. It’s inspiring to watch somebody’s passion about their business surface as they tell their story on video. We now have a video production team doing that kind of work and my focus is helping people tell their stories. We also started creating video training tutorials for our clients who want to do it themselves.

How has your business evolved?

Wolpert: In the beginning, we were focused on helping people learn the technology. Now we support people by showing them why their story is so interesting and the various ways they can tell it so that customers really get it. Business owners are so close to their story they sometimes don’t notice what fascinates others about it.

Now it’s a matter of getting found online when someone is looking. I call it hanging your story on the little hooks of the internet. In other words: ‘Are you on Facebook, are you on Twitter, are you on YouTube, are you on LinkedIn? Are you using Google+, Instagram and Tumblr?’ All that kind of stuff. You can’t be everywhere—the key is knowing what works for you.

Where does storytelling come into play?

Wolpert: The idea of the story is that you’re actually sharing something that’s intimate and real. It’s pretty obvious that people don’t trust advertising, but they do trust recommendations from friends. The absolutely most successful way for small businesses to grow is to have happy customers, provide a good product and outstanding customer service. Happy customers bring friends. That’s how you can double your business in a year—inspire your customers to bring a friend. The way you do that is to give your customers something, some reason, to talk about you. Plant a little story in their head, since they like you anyway you’ll begin to develop a more emotional connection. The message matters.

“The absolutely most successful way for small businesses to grow is to have happy customers, provide a good product and outstanding customer service. The way you do that is to give your customers something, some reason, to talk about you.”

Once small businesses tell their story, they can spend more time on customer service, taking care of the customers that they have and equipping them with cool information about their business that they’re then likely to share. It’s really easy to share information via social media. The share is an endorsement and creates the reach and frequency that advertisers like to talk about but more importantly, it’s a recommendation from a friend to a friend. People love to share pictures and watch videos, so give them pictures and videos.

A lot of entities in the media and marketing world offer storytelling services. What’s Soci@l Jumpstart’s unique hook?

Wolpert: Our unique hook is that we’re mashing together a lot of stuff that engages the brain on different levels. We’re looking at storytelling in terms of the ‘why’ in what you do. Our training is video-based so it’s really easy to engage with. We’ve put together a program that includes everything from basic ways to tell a story and how to tell it in a way that engages the brain and impacts someone, to neuro-linguistic programming, meta models, Jungian archetypes and neural marketing.

Our core services are online training and inspiration. As a consulting company, we do high-end video production in the San Francisco Bay Area.

But I consider Soci@l Jumpstart a training and inspiration company vs. a production house or boutique ad agency. What makes us unique is the ability to help people understand how the brain responds to stories and why.

When I say training and inspiration, I’m selling people what they think they need—marketing information and training. That’s what they want. But I’m also offering them personal development which is motivation, because the more times they tell their story—about how cool what they do is and the benefits to their customers, they’re re-investing continually in themselves. It’s a beautiful circle.

“Our unique hook is that we’re mashing together a lot of stuff that engages the brain on different levels.”

Can you share an example of a client project?

Wolpert: An interesting project I recently completed was a training program for Hispanics and Philanthropy (HIP) called HIP Give. HIP is an umbrella organization for small Hispanic philanthropic groups. It created a fundraising platform called “HIP Give” and we created a series of five videos with them on video storytelling—essentially, how to make a video for fundraising purposes. We looked at it from the angle of why the story matters, who in the community you’re telling your story to and how to use your smartphone to produce a simple video. The best video camera is the one that you already have.

Where is your business today and what are the main services that you offer your clients?

Wolpert: We’re in a point of transition now. We’ll be offering services that will expand our reach. The core services we’re offering in 2015 are online training and inspiration for small businesses—especially around discovering their story and understanding why it’s interesting, how to tell it and where to tell it. We want to establish what small businesses have over big brands—our stories are true, their stories are made up. A real story told in an emotionally connected way creates a relatable identity.

“We want to establish what small businesses have over big brands—our stories are true, their stories are made up.”

An example of this is a donut shop about five blocks from me that sells donuts for $3. I know the donut guy from the gym and he has this belief that donuts make people really happy. He believes that if he can sell a really great donut and a cup of coffee for $5, then he’s delivering something really cool into peoples’ lives. That’s a more impactful and interesting story than ‘I opened a donut shop’.

I want small businesses to tell their stories in a way that makes the story part of who they are. In many ways, that’s the way that kids tell stories.

How do you see your business evolving over the next three to five years?

Wolpert: I changed from being very focused on revenue goals to being on a mission. My mission is to reach and inspire a million small business owners and entrepreneurs to tell their story in such a way that it energizes their clients and has prospects flocking to them That’s my mission and mantra. I know we can reach that in 2015. I have a podcast launching in February, a cable TV show in the works and plan to do more TV appearances and live talks.

It’s a matter of scale. The idea of shareable social storytelling is always evolving and requires training.

My function is to continue to distill and interpret what’s happening in the worlds of technology and marketing because small business owners and entrepreneurs are busy running their businesses. It’s my job to say ‘hey, this big picture thing is happening’ and why it’s important and ‘here are three things that you can do today’ to implement this trend in your business. Many people need tactical, how-to information. Most of our training videos are between five and 15 minutes. People don’t have time to listen to a 90-minute presentation.

How do you acquire your customers?

Wolpert: We tell our story. I’ve been very successful with word of mouth. People tell my story and I also give a lot. When I’m asked to speak, I do. At Chamber of Commerce meetings, Rotary clubs, large conferences like San Francisco Small Business Week or business shows on MSNBC. Shareable social storytelling can change the world—it can certainly change a small business owner’s world and my job is to get that idea out—to spread the word.

We attract a lot of customers and prospects to us by doing content marketing—giving away stuff for free. When you sign up for our free training, you’re going to get a five-minute video, a newsletter and access to other resources a couple of times a week. This has allowed us to build our tribe, to build our network of prospects.

There’s a void in this marketplace. By empowering small businesses to tell their own stories, we’re offering training that they might not otherwise get and results they might not otherwise achieve.

Also, part of what we’re dong is creating a community for our customers. For example, ‘I made it, you’re struggling with something similar, I can help you’. I want to create a forum for small business owners called the Master Mind community where they can go and ask questions. I’m part of several of these kinds of groups and find them very useful.

What is your key takeaway?

Wolpert: Shareable social storytelling is incredibly powerful and is easily within every business owner’s grasp to do and do well.

 

Tobi Elkin is a New York City-based journalist, interviewer, editor and content marketing strategist. She writes in-depth stories about the creative people bringing great ideas into our world. Check out more of her great storytelling at www.tobielkin.com