In this episode, host Stephen Goldsmith is joined by communications expert and strategist Cameron Trimble, founder and CEO of Hip-Politics, to discuss the evolving role of local digital influencers in city government communications. Trimble explains exactly how local governments can leverage digital creators to spread important messages in an authentic and engaging way and highlights the importance of multimedia strategies as a crucial tool in reaching today’s audiences in a fractured media landscape.
Listen here, or wherever you get your podcasts. The following is a transcript of their conversation.
Stephen Goldsmith:
Welcome back. This is Stephen Goldsmith, professor of Urban Policy at the Bloomberg Center for Cities at Harvard University. We have another episode of our Data-Smart City Pod, and I have one of our most interesting and engaging guests today. Cameron Trimble, who is the founder and CEO of Hip-Politics. I'm not sure why you need to put “hip” in the name to prove you’re hip, but you're pretty hip. Anyway, Hip-Politics. Previously Cameron was director of Digital Engagement for the White House Deputy Digital Director for the Presidential Inaugural Committee, director of Communications for the US House of Representatives, and probably most importantly for this podcast, has a family relationship with a great city of Indianapolis. Welcome, Cameron.
Cameron Trimble:
Steve, thank you. Thank you. Thanks for having me on.
Stephen Goldsmith:
So, before we get into your background, tell us a little bit about how you got into digital media and what led you to your stint in the White House and how you came about forming Hip-Politics.
Cameron Trimble:
Okay, I'll break those down to three very, very quick stories. How did I get into digital media? I actually went to Howard University and pursued a career in medicine in the very early 2000s, made it to medical school, but me and a group of friends, we started an event management company at the ripe age of 23. Facebook had just started. We were still in the MySpace, email days and our event management party throwing during summer break. After my first year of medical school, I took on the Online Media Manager, online media and promotions role, because I was like, that's what I really want to do. When we got that first big check, $28,000 for a successful event during my second year of medical school, I was convinced we were on our way and I was going to be the online marketing guru. That was literally almost 20 years ago.
So, a lot has changed and happened since then and how I made it to the White House. Since then, I really moved into political communications with the emphasis on digital starting in the Obama years and the Obama campaign. My first ever internship on Capitol Hill was for the Committee on Science, Space and Technology, and then I was hired by the late great Eddie Bernice Johnson as her – then it was called New Media Manager. This is 2009 before digital roles really existed in politics. And then I've just been stacking up experiences and campaigns and opportunities since then. Taking some time both in the private sector, working for organizations, companies, sports leagues, while always keeping at least one hand or one foot into politics through campaigns or as a Digital Director, like I said, and Comms Director on Capitol Hill. And then when the White House, when it was 2020 we're all sitting at home, one of my former bosses took over as the campaign manager for Joe Biden and tapped me to run advertising and engagement for African-American voters, which steamrolled right into an opportunity to do a unique role that hadn't existed before in the White House: to be responsible for our entire digital engagement strategy, both from the White House and across agencies.
Stephen Goldsmith:
Thanks, Cameron. That's a pretty impressive list of things you've done. We're used to, in these podcasts, to saying flattering things to the people we speak with. So take this with a grain of salt, but you spoke to our Project on Municipal Innovation on leadership and narrative in a complex communication environment, and I really think it was one of the most important things we've presented to city leaders ever because the narrative of leadership is stress today. So, could you talk to us a little bit about what you presented that day to leaders of the major cities of the US?
Cameron Trimble:
Yes. The ultimate focus there for me was around how micro and local digital influencers are the future of city communications. It's just on the premise that we are in a very fractured media environment. If you look at various polling and focus groups and data to show not only where the average person is watching or consuming their media or consuming their news and information, it is across platforms. It is across shows. When people say social media, they think it's just young people or influencers. This is everybody. Now, everyone is ultimately ending up in a digital product, from 80 to eight. And then the other big thing is we are at historic low levels of the erosion of trust amongst major institutions, including both media, government, companies, education systems, so many different places that falls into place if you look at some of the data there.
So in order for you to break through with your messaging, you can no longer just send out a press release or send something out. You have to have trusted messengers. And what I talked to them about was how they tap into those local influencers, digital influencers, and by influencers – those are not just people. Those are also websites, shows, it may be people on the radio, those may be local business leaders or local faith leaders, but people have a specific amount of trust or heightened amount of trust around the people that they follow, usually that they follow on social media. And you've got to find a way to get your message into the hands of those creators and those influencers in order for it to break through in such a fractured media landscape where people are getting inundated with music, movies, podcasts, traditional TV advertising, every time they drive down the street, everybody's trying to put something in their face constantly.
And if you want, ‘hey, city council meeting here at 7:00 PM on Tuesday,’ or ‘did you know you need to fill this form out here to be able to get a reimbursement for, I don't know, changing your lead pipes,’ any kind of critical information, you've got to find new ways to break through and break through efficiently and financially, because I know you don't have the same budget cities, even the biggest cities, let alone the smaller and medium sized cities don't have the same kind of money that maybe a Proctor and Gamble or McDonald's has to throw at the problem and just advertise people to death. So you've got to find organic or low cost ways to get your message out consistently.
Stephen Goldsmith:
Cameron, I want to get into the details of that, but before I do, when you were speaking to the large cities with us at that event, you destroyed one of my myths, which is that when as mayor, when I walked out in the morning to the TV cameras of the local press, if I could effectively communicate my message, I therefore was communicating effectively to my residents. And in these sessions you told all of our participants how few people actually paid attention to the mayor speaking on evening television. So can you put the micro influencer potential reach in comparison to the average news message of a mayor?
Cameron Trimble:
I would say this fret not, it's not that people are wasting their time. When you go on front of TV cameras, you have all the big three, big four news cycles that NBC's, ABC's, CBS, and Foxes, those local channels. You have your local newspaper, you have your maybe regional newspaper if it's something major, maybe even the AP, you have a few people…if you put a press conference on and you go speak to some cameras, they're going to put that out. If it's really interesting, they'll put that online and they would clip it for social. But you don't control that and you don't control how many people truly overlay and see that. And then the thing about TV and news is it's still targeted, it's the five o'clock or the six o'clock news. It's the 7:00 AM morning news. So you're hoping to find a very narrow portion of people who happen to be tuned in at that specific time to catch that amongst a bunch of other stories that are in that news block at five o'clock, six o'clock or seven in the morning.
So, the potential reach, when you start thinking about cities and so forth, there's no hard number on this because obviously different cities in size, I would say you're reaching at least less than 20% or some very small percentage of your population in that immediate kind of address. As opposed, if you have a healthy mix of influencers, digital influencers, they can overlap an entire city. You're referring to one of my presentation I went through and walked through just Washington, DC as an example where I took some social media platforms and social media sites of the local mayor's office and analyzed some of her recent video that was put out by the news versus the reach and resonance, the amount of views, the amount of comments and engagements to micro influencers, people who cover food in the city, people who cover the local government, people who cover local events.
Even when you start thinking about the influencers, it can range from your local foodie, a person who's going around reviewing businesses and different food. It could be your local business leaders. There's a lot of business leaders who really jumped into talking about content. Shoot, it can even be your local promoter or event managers, people who have a special connection to probably tens of thousands of people in any city who come out to their events every week. They get much higher open rates, higher engagement and sharing rates on their social media posts because people have a trust with them. So it is not that you scrap all traditional media, it just needs to be integrated in an overlay to understand that when this goes out, this needs to go out across all these different channels, not just ‘let me do the easy thing, stand in front of a camera and hope the news media does the work for me.’
Stephen Goldsmith:
So, Cameron, if we think about this interaction between mayoral leadership, senior officials and city government and micro influencers, we can think about it in two ways. One is the mayor has a broad message that spans different groups. The second would be to think about…the mayor has a message that he wants retail businesses or that she wants bicycle enthusiasts to listen to. So one would be a segmented message and one would be broader. Let's take the segmented message first. How do you go about finding – if you are a city leader – a micro influencer community that you could trust because there's reputational issues here that are pretty significant. I know my question is general and the issue would be highly specific, but what rules or approaches would you suggest for a city trying to find the right partners?
Cameron Trimble:
The trust issue, the reputation issue in terms of politics is a tricky one, but I would start with the different premise in the sense that we are in different times. There used to be a point where, hey, if this person had ever been to jail, they can never be seen standing next to a mayor or they may have said something crazy or something of that. I'm not saying throw all the vetting out of the window, but again, you're trying to be on platforms. And this speaks back to the theory of the case where my job at the White House is Digital Engagement Director. We came in and the president and senior leadership agreed with our general theory of the case is that more people will interact with the president and vice presidents, the White House's messages off of our channels than on our channels.
And mind you, we're operating probably at the highest level of government channels, six to 10 to 15 million followers on every single platform. And even then, when we dig in the numbers, we know who's there and who's not. You can really do the analysis of who your real followers are especially. So we're in a country of 350+ million, and if we only are reaching 10, 12, maybe 20 odd million people across platforms, there's still over 300 million people we need to meet. So we've got to be other places. So that problem and how we solve that problem is you find people who speak to various audiences and now your level in closeness of engagement is where we as a White House and where cities have to do their discernment. Do you need to have the mayor sitting right next to the local strip club promoter or the local bar owner right now in the same video?
No, but I would argue that the local party promoter, I would send him talking points and send him information around things you're trying to communicate and let them take that information and disseminate or maybe turn it into their own content or just a repost. People are not going to look at, oh, you know what? The mayor is doing something nefarious with this person because they reposted an announcement. But then there are other influencers, maybe there's a content influencer who's really like, ‘Hey, these are cool places to check out in the city.’ There's a lot of that kind of theme content from Oklahoma City to a Chicago. There are so many different creators who go on TikTok and Instagram and YouTube and will go visit the cool museums, the cool popups. Those are people that through a mayor or city government, if you task some interns or you task some of your Communications Directors to really just do some organic sweeps of social, you can find some of your top performing local social media influencers across platforms.
You've got to do some of your own vetting at least, at that initial level. But say somebody who goes around and shows, “these are the coolest places in my city. These are the coolest places in Oklahoma City.’ I would say the mayor's office should schedule some time with them like they would at local reporter and say, ‘Hey, let's shoot a video to highlight something else in the city that includes the mayor and the content.’ So the closeness of your city office to local and digital influencers obviously will vary, but there's less concern that because you are at least even in one-way communication with a wide variety of folks who you're asking just to share and amplify your message, you're not as much risk if something goes wrong with one of them. It's really when you start putting mayors or you start putting city leaders in the same video and in the same content.
This is some work that we do and we do pretty effectively. When you're trying to do things at scale, it's easy if you just have it regularly going on where, hey, we put out a press release or we want some information, here's our group of 40 content creators that we just send information to and ask them to potentially share. But if you're trying to do a sustained messaging campaign or you're consistently trying to get out a message and you need to know conversion metrics, or people need to sign up for something, there are firms like ours that do have technology who kind of go a layer deeper to be able to really scrape the internet and identify through whatever parameters you give us the amount of influencers that cover your local region. So just depending on the budgets and depending on the scale of the program is how you really go out and find those influencers. But any city of any size can task and start scraping social media to find people who have impact and connection in your city.
Stephen Goldsmith:
Let's take this one step deeper. So if I want to sell athletic shoes, I might find an influencer in the sub niche of particular type of athletics shoes and I would provide some incentive to the influencer to pay attention to my product. I'm a mayor and I want to encourage influencers to put out a message that's consistent with their message, authentic for them, but important to me. How do I go about thinking of the ways to make it in their best interests that are appropriate and possible inside the rules of city government? I mean, it's not like it would be unethical, but I mean, how would you arrange one of those relationships so that their voice in proposing a message would be authentic? As you think about that, we did a project, I think I mentioned a few years ago, on vaccine hesitancy, right? And we measured social media to find out what sort of message appealed to what sort of person by what sort of messenger. And some communities, particularly ethnic communities, were much more impressed with a message from a local influencer, generally a pastor, but a local influencer. So how do you form those relationships? How do you get them to work in a way that's authentic?
Cameron Trimble:
I think on the front end, cities need to do a couple things. One, you've got to bring them in, but more than one time, there is a mix of a call to action across the city channels. You do have to say you're looking to recruit or looking to work with local influencers and digital influencers that give them access. When I say bring them in, it is ‘how are you treating them similar to traditional media? How are you treating and giving them access to understand what's going on?’ Inviting them to city halls, inviting the same way you may do a round table with several different reporters. You're doing round tables with content creators and influencers. Have them sign up and so forth in advance. So you can do some vetting. I think on the organizational opportunities. When you think about creators, you’ve got to think about them in a few different buckets, and I think I was explaining that in my talk at Harvard.
Mayors, pastors, faith leaders and organizational leaders, they're in a different bucket than ‘I'm a person who's a professional or semi-professional content creator that focuses on a niche’ who's also in a separate bucket than ‘I'm just a popular person who does…because of my job, whether I'm the local DJ on the rock station or I'm a local influencer that a lot of people know.’ They all have different aims of what they're trying to do. When you say local community organizers, those are local influencers. You create those relationships, expand the relationships you already have with your kitchen cabinets, with your pastoral cabinets and so forth, but increase and include a digital ask. They almost all have some level of a social media presence or a website presence. Find a system to how to disseminate that information to those community leaders and organizations that as a city hall or a mayor or any elected leader, you already have those relationships.
Just expand them to create a two-way dialogue of like, ‘I'd like to create a way to give you information to put that content out.’ Those professional content creators and so forth, it's like I said, it's treating them kind of like media because they want to expand their reach too. You can do organic things, you can do paid advertising, and a lot of the laws that are starting to catch up to this, you can treat them just like paid advertisers. Me giving 10 different creators each $2,000 to run content is the exact same thing as you taking that $20,000 and putting it on YouTube or buying TV ads or buying radio ads. And then those popular people and the opportunities, those are things that if you don't go with say, a firm or you don't go with someone who's going to aggregate and pull this all together, I think that's just a running list of things that you either task your intern, your Comms team to continue to curate organic opportunities.
Again, find opportunities to let them know they're important to explain their program. It's a thing. You don't want to just say, ‘Hey, we have this one content creator.’ Most of these kind of do a thing to check the box, and that's kind of where you lose the relationship opportunity. It needs to be integrated into your normal communications calendar. You don't just say, ‘Hey, media, you get one press conference, local news, one invite, and you never see me again, or I never interact.’ There's a constant communication with that group, which also now you need to integrate all three different types of those content creators into how you talk to media.
Stephen Goldsmith:
So we're about out of time, but I could continue this actually for hours. I'm just fascinated with the potential here. But let me ask you one tactical question, then I want to ask you a conclusion question. The tactical question, I was surprised, this is just because I'm old and you're not, but I was surprised about your emphasis on video and YouTube.
Cameron Trimble:
Yes.
Stephen Goldsmith:
Explain to me a little bit about multimedia as a communication strategy.
Cameron Trimble:
No one reads anything. That's not hyperbole. That sounds like a shocking statement. I'm an avid reader myself. I'm reading a great hardback book right now, but we are dinosaurs. Tell me when the last time you saw a physical newspaper, tell me when the last time you even got past the first paragraph of a digital article. We are a headline, picture, video culture, and everything that you do, video is growing exponentially. You can see this also anecdotally through the technology and how they're adjusting. Do you know the number one search engine, Steve? What's the number one search engine? It's pretty simple.
Stephen Goldsmith:
I think I know because you told me three months ago maybe.
Cameron Trimble:
Alright, number one is Google. We Google search...
Stephen Goldsmith:
YouTube?
Cameron Trimble:
No but the number two search engine is YouTube, which is owned by Google! So, the reason why I say that, like I said, there's practical thought about this, is that when we go look something up, we don't even say, I'm going to look something up. Google it. Google is incentivized to even send you back to their website that they own if you want to see anything. And then when people do go online to look for something, they're looking for, ‘Hey, send me a quick video’ or ‘send me something around this.’ They're bypassing typing anything in, they're going straight to the YouTube app like the amount that YouTube is actually, people don't think about it in a social media standpoint. It is both kind of social media and tv. It's just it fits in so many different platforms depending on how you'd like to perceive it, but it's still growing at an exponential rate, and it feels saturated and it's nowhere there. So the reason why we emphasize so much video is that that is just how people are consuming. People are not getting past headlines. People are not getting into these long articles and news. So constantly have a video option, even if you're just reading, if you're reading your press release or finding a cool way to do that, constantly giving people a video option to make it easy for them to digest and easy to share.
Stephen Goldsmith:
So Betsy, when this podcast is over with, I want to be hip, so I expect you to put Cameron and me up visually. I don't care if it's YouTube, or where it is. I want to be seen with him. Okay?
Cameron Trimble:
Oh, we’ve got to put this out!
Stephen Goldsmith:
And the headline is ‘these are hip guys.’ That's what I want. But Cameron, my audience is a little bit tech nerdish more than hippish…
Cameron Trimble:
Me too! I'm a tech nerd.
Stephen Goldsmith:
Okay, good. Well then tell my audience in conclusion, city officials, where to start. They've listened to you, they're excited about it. Where do they start? I mean, other than maybe I should probably give you a commercial here, since we've asked you to do this as a volunteer twice, they could start by asking you to consult with them
Cameron Trimble:
They can start with that!
Stephen Goldsmith:
So we'll do that. But let's say you're too nice a guy to actually say that. Where else would they start?
Cameron Trimble:
I would say it's a couple simple things that any city office or a city communications team of any size can start; building out your list of content creators that are local. The same way every office, every communications and press office has some kind of spreadsheet or list where they're tracking phone numbers, names of the different reporters and editors and things of that nature. Create a new tab there and say, ‘Hey, I'm going to start looking up content creators’ and spend a little bit of time on social platforms across, I would say across Meta. So that's Instagram threads and Facebook. You can look up through YouTube, through TikTok, even look through X, you're looking at these places just organically looking. I would say too, the integration of creating an event or creating a couple different opportunities to where you're doing a public call out, to ask content creators to either submit their information and say, create some level of program. Say ‘hey, we're looking to work with five or 10 content creators around getting our organic message out.’
Again, one of the carrots we were able to offer in the White House, we literally invited them in. So, during our COVID period when we were still trying to get everyone vaccinated and build trust there, we had a safe – and we had to plan this out – we invited content creators to the White House and did stuff in the lawn and did stuff in some of our larger rooms. That in and of itself, we can't pay them, but ‘oh my gosh, I get to come to the White House!’ Think about that same effect, ‘oh my gosh, I get to come to city Hall and meet with the mayor and meet with deputy mayors!’ So create opportunities for engagement that they normally would not have had. And then the third thing you can start doing right now as a city is that you have some level of advertising and communication, budget, whatever you're doing to promote, if there's ever a dollar or two that you're looking to promote programs, whatever that looks like within the scope of your city budget, start to allocate at least 10% of that advertising budget to digital boosting and influencers.
That needs to be in your mix of advertising, whether it's around programs – I mean, cities use their advertising budgets and they vary wildly. Obviously, much bigger cities usually have much bigger budgets. Some small cities have next to nothing, maybe enough to put something in the newspaper or a few things. But whether it's a couple thousand dollars or it's six or seven figures depending on the size of the city, you need to explore that because the one thing I want to make sure I emphasize to your audience, Steve, and as a small plug, we actually have a three part series that our firm is going to be doing is symposium on creating authentic engagement, digital engagement coming out, starting at end of March, but organic and viral moments are dead or close to dead now. So think of it as a highway or tollway system. Every social media platform, from TikTok to Threads to Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, they have now put up barriers to make it much harder for you to organically reach your entire audience because they're trying to encourage people to pay for ads, to pay to boost. And so those things now you've got to put some money inside of those in order to really make that happen.
Stephen Goldsmith:
Well, this has been fascinating. There's so much that mayors could do to rebuild their civic infrastructure, to create narratives which drive positive action. Thank you so much, Cameron, for your insights. I hope people will take advantage of them. This is Steve Goldsmith, professor of Urban Policy at the Bloomberg Center at Harvard University, and I'm with Cameron Trimble, who is the founder of CEO of Hip-Politics. Thank you so much for your time.
Cameron Trimble:
No, thank you Steve. Thanks for having me.