The Social Shift, with Katie Brinkley
Funnel Reboot podcast
Social media platforms can serve as both vibrant marketplaces and spaces for genuine social interaction, where consumers feel valued, while businesses boost engagement and sales. This picture may not look anything like the reality of social media that you see, but our guest will remind you that things haven’t always been this way. A short glance back of the Internet shows that in the year 2000 the Internet’s governing body actually had looked at using a citizen model to allow individuals who use the internet to kind of come together as a social contract and to decide how they would...
info_outline
Pushing back on AI campaigns with humans in the loop, with Lyndsey Maddox
Funnel Reboot podcast
Episode 229 We need to talk about what’s been happening with the use of AI on Google and Meta’s ad platforms. A few years ago, we were surgeons. We had the scalpel. We chose the exact keywords, the specific bid modifiers, the precise placements. Now? Google and Meta are basically telling us, "Hey, don't worry your pretty little human head about it. Just give us your credit card, a few grainy images, and a vague 'goal,' and we’ll take it from here." Performance Max (PMax) and Advantage+ are the ultimate "Trust Me, Bro" of the marketing world. They’ve turned "manual control" into a...
info_outline
Paid Traffic for Non-Profits, with Sean Moher
Funnel Reboot podcast
How do you amplify a message when you can’t lean on traditional justifications like “because we’ll make a profit out of this”? In the for-profit world, the justification for marketing spend is straightforward: you put money in to get more money out. But how do you amplify a message when you can’t lean on traditional bottom-line justifications? For non-profits, associations, and social enterprises, the "profit motive" is replaced by a mission, yet the fundamental challenge remains identical—you must find and keep your "customers," whether they are donors, members, or...
info_outline
Depositioning, with Todd Irwin
Funnel Reboot podcast
Episode 226 Positioning is an element that’s so foundational to Marketing, it’s taught in every introductory class alongside the "Four Ps" of marketing. Positioning is meant to describe the choices a brand makes to maximize how the market sees it. Positioning is very powerful because it can set perceptions that drive customer loyalty, strong demand, and the willingness to pay a premium price. But if all this is true, then why is the landscape littered with examples of where brands have flopped—cases where brand positioning actually caused a product to fail? Take...
info_outline
Tried and True Marketing Reads
Funnel Reboot podcast
Episode 225 At the time I’m recording this it’s a new year. This is a typical time when people plan what they’re going to achieve fitness-wise, financially and professionally. If you’re working on that last one and wonder about what marketing reads you should try, I have some marketing books that could do just the thing. There are Five in all. - Let’s dive right in. Links to everything mentioned in the show are on the Funnel Reboot site's page for this episode.
info_outline
Mastering constraints of Healthcare Marketing, with Cindy Grabowski
Funnel Reboot podcast
Thinking up a new product and commercializing it is not easy. All products face Financial, Technological and of course Competitive market barriers. But doing this in the field of Healthcare is not like any other industry. In healthcare, there exist extra regulatory hurdles that make product innovation even more difficult. Before every medical device is introduced, they must find academics who will research them and publish articles that are heavily scrutinized by peers. Then they have to endure clinical screening before receiving government approval, which applies tight...
info_outline
The Classical Marketing book, with Anthony "Tas" Tasgal
Funnel Reboot podcast
The world we inhabit today is, in countless ways, an extended echo of breakthroughs made by two extraordinary cultures that came from a compact corner of the mediterranean between the 4th century BCE to the 2nd century of the current era. I’m talking about Greece and Rome, whose influence on contemporary language, thought, and culture is so deeply woven into the modern world that we navigate it every day without noticing. Taking just language, be it English, French, Spanish or Italian, they all use words with origins that tie back to ancient law, institutions, arts and sciences. The...
info_outline
Keeping the Revenue Engine Running, with Karl Ortmanns
Funnel Reboot podcast
We often hear marketers talk about how vital their work is to sales. What we don’t hear nearly as often is the reverse: how essential sales is to a well-functioning marketing team. If marketing creates the content, sales provides the context. And that context is what makes campaigns relevant, credible, and grounded in the real world. Sales teams feed marketing the on-the-ground truth—what prospects are actually saying, how they react to new pricing, and how they interpret a company's positioning in different segments. That’s especially clear when a business serving the SMB market tries...
info_outline
Brandjitsu, with Michael Dargie
Funnel Reboot podcast
Is your Brand truly memorable? Would a person who bought from you a year ago be able to recall your name or say what they found compelling about you? The reality is that a lot of brands are instantly forgettable. You don’t have to wallow in a world of Meh - you can turn your brand into something memorable - we’re going to hear a process that’s been codified in a book that came out in 2025 called BrandJitsu. . Listen in as we delve into the book’s process, which begins not with a funnel but with a Loop we’ve got to Embrace. We’ll hear how to plumb the depths of our brand...
info_outline
Human Centered Marketing, with Ashley Faus
Funnel Reboot podcast
Here’s a question a lot of us are asking ourselves today. How do marketers build genuine, durable trust when the cost of generating massive volumes of AI content is basically zero? How can you argue for making humanly-crafted content in small quantities When it’s so easy to have AI pump it out in big quantities? The hard truth is that humans are wired to notice what other humans do. Meaningful communication with buyers contains elements that just don't scale - this takes more than a trivial amount of work. But that is precisely why you need to do them. A new book came out...
info_outlineSocial media platforms can serve as both vibrant marketplaces and spaces for genuine social interaction, where consumers feel valued, while businesses boost engagement and sales.
This picture may not look anything like the reality of social media that you see, but our guest will remind you that things haven’t always been this way.
A short glance back of the Internet shows that in the year 2000 the Internet’s governing body actually had looked at using a citizen model to allow individuals who use the internet to kind of come together as a social contract and to decide how they would be able to vote on changes to the internet - and at their peak 158,000 people were on the voting rolls. This was a radical global experiment in direct democracy.
That model didn’t take off, partly because to be a voting member, Internet users everywhere would have to (at least temporarily) upload some Identification - and most weren’t willing to share that kind of data.
What happened instead was the rise of social networks owned by a handful of companies, who conditioned us sellers to post promoted content with attention-grabbing messages because that could be used by the algorithms to keep buyers on the platforms. And I’ve got to call out how , as buyers, we’re also complicit because we now give those platforms way more data than the Internet governing body ever asked for. How ironic.
But our guest maintains that it’s in our ability to regain our equilibrium. While we’re all collectively responsible for how we communicate, marketers can be an ideal catalyst of change. We can make content that prioritizes authentic interaction over consumerism, be it on the current platforms or ones yet to exist. We should remember the saying of the American philosopher Thomas Paine: “We have it in our power to begin the world over again.”
My guest has been leveraging social media to grow audiences and income since MySpace was around. In that 20 year timespan, she has leveraged her social media knowledge both by working for sports organizations and corporations like AT&T, iHeart Radio and DirecTV to running the agency Next Step Social that does this for health and wellness brands. She’s also a speaker and a podcaster.
She lives in Colorado with her husband and daughters. Let’s go now to speak with Katie Brinkley
Chapters/Timestamps
00:00 Introduction
03:01 Meet Katie Brinkley
04:01 What Community Means
06:03 Attention Economy Shift
08:58 Audio Beats AI
10:40 Discovery On Rented Land
11:48 Four Post Strategy
16:10 Platform Culture Matters
17:35 Metrics True Fans
19:47 Beyond Consumption Mindset
23:35 Katie Origin Story
28:03 Burnout And Conversation
32:16 Audit Your Feed
33:29 Where To Find Katie
34:00 Closing Thoughts
Links to everything mentioned in the show are on the Funnel Reboot site's page for this episode.