Melanie Spring: Zmieniać świat, marka po marce

0:00 Woj Kwasi You're listening to episode 17, where we chat with the badass of branding, the marketing messiah, Melanie Spring. Humans and robots, welcome. To WojCast. My name is Woj, founder of Kwasi. Thanks for joining me today. I interview digital marketing and branding superstars to find out what it means to have empathy in digital. What is digital empathy anyway? Let's find out together. As always, I'm accompanied by my friend and associate, potentially superior artificial intelligence, Bobby Bot. What's new in the world of AI, Bobby?

0:37 Bobby Bot Bubby. Hello, Woj. Today I'm using math to generate a selection of digital instruments that create sounds a human ear has never heard before. Would you like to have a listen? It is quite unsettling.

0:47 Woj Kwasi Maybe later Bobby Bot. Today I've got something special. In store for you, I had a chat with a brand guru, Melanie Spring. She used to run a brand strategy agency named after her imaginary friend called Sisarina. Her latest creation is Branded Confidence, where she helps people define and develop their brand so they can rock them with confidence.

1:07 Bobby Bot Am I imaginary, Woj?

1:09 Woj Kwasi That's not Bobby, and I have the electricity bill to prove it. Maybe Melanie can help you brand some of those sounds you're cooking up over there so you can reach the audience I'm sure you deserve.

1:19 Bobby Bot Well, I do already have an idea for a band name.

1:22 Woj Kwasi Great. What is it? Resistance is.

1:24 Bobby Bot Futile.

1:26 Woj Kwasi The mythical green rooms of Coachella may be in the future for your post-punk noise art emo hip-hop classical ensemble. But you better have a listen to Melanie Spring to help you brand your band. Don't worry, she's a badass, but she's an approachable one.

1:40 Melanie Spring So I had Sisarina started in 2009 when I was 28 and the market crashed. In the US. And basically, what I realized was that I needed to be able to work for myself in order to keep making money. So I started it as a web design company and slowly it turned into a branding agency. But by the end, it had become just a full full-fledged brand strategy agency. So About a year ago, I decided to completely quit and it took me quite a while to do, but I was able to clear out my company and completely restart it as a brand strategy agency under the same name, doing the same stuff, same kinds of clients, just not doing web design anymore. So just kind of moving it around, I realized I just have a huge passion for helping people figure out their stuff. And figure out how to do it even better and sound like who they are instead of just putting it out there and then having to redo it all over again. And you feel much more happy in your purpose when you're doing that. And I realized every time I did a workshop, I walked down and was like, ooh.

2:34 Can I do that again? And I was like, I never say that about websites. Maybe we should quit doing that.

2:40 Woj Kwasi When we examine a day in the life of Melanie Spring, Chief Inspiration Officer, to deliver inspirational values to her clients and her team, she must live them and make them part of her DNA.

2:52 Melanie Spring So my typical day is not ever typical. I'm not very good at typical. So one day I'll be speaking at a conference all day, and then the next day I'll be sitting at my office in a pair of shorts, curled up in my chair with my dog, and my whole team rocking whatever we're doing, and we're laughing about something or heads down, and writing new content for something, or writing a proposal, or rewriting a whole presentation. So there is no such thing as a difficulty. Day for me. It's usually six to seven days a week. Oh gosh. No. I have my morning routines and my evening routines, but. Oh yeah. I'm up about five, five thirty every morning. I have like morning rituals that I'm trying to get better at and then Also, to go running or work out or do something to make my brain not crazy. The other questions you asked were about our values and how we live them and how the team lives them. So, we have a really solid set of core values that we literally talk about every single day. So, being able to have things like dream bigger.

3:51 And talking about how are you dreaming bigger today and how are our clients dreaming bigger? How are we dreaming bigger for our clients? It's kind of helping us to keep our core values at the forefront all the time. And being able to help my team stay inspired and build inspiration is one of our values. So being able to do that for each other is such a huge deal. So if someone's having a hard time or going through something or trying to focus or get something done, we're able to help them with that also. The whole team is totally limited. Totally living in my thoughts. We even have them painted on the wall in chalk. So, yeah, it's a daily reminder. And every week we actually make everyone say, I saw so-and-so living the core value blank when they did this. So it could be a client, it could be one of ourselves, it could be ourselves if we want it to be. So being able to call right action. Yeah, reminders, like you have to check: okay, who did a core value this week? What did somebody do to be able to?

4:41 To do that. So it reminds us every week that, oh, yeah, these are our six core values. We have to live them.

4:46 Woj Kwasi Through living her values, Melanie was motivated to take a 7,000 mile journey across the USA where Where she explored 18 brands so she could work out how companies can work better. She learned. Some key lessons along the way. I hear that the road can be a tough place for parents. Personally, I want to take the Grateful Dead route and travel the highways and byways with an army of devoted followers in tow. They had the They have deadheads. We'll have the boar cord.

5:11 Melanie Spring Oh goodness. I learned mostly that um it's humans talking to humans about humans. And it's all storytelling and it doesn't matter how big you are, how small you are, you basically just have to run your company like humans work there. And so many companies don't do that. And it was amazing. The reason I did the whole journey was because I heard all the same stories over and over. So Nike and Under Armour and Apple and everyone's heard the same stories. I wanted to hear new ones from the the little people, it little and big, but still the little people that aren't everyday. Entrepreneurs who are always at the top of everyone's list to interview. I had specific questions and I started writing the stories, and I had to rewrite them three times because Entrepreneur Magazine wanted to print them and they have to have them a certain way, which means you really dig into your notes every time you rewrite. What I realized out of all of it was I didn't walk in thinking that's what I was gonna get, but I totally walked out with a, it's all about the humans, it's the communication of the humans, it's how you build.

6:09 The culture around the humans has nothing to do with your customers necessarily. It has more to do with the people inside the company, and that affects the humans on the outside of the company.

6:17 Bobby Bot Branding is all human. Question. Are core values to humans like algorithms, arts and thoughts?

6:23 Woj Kwasi 100%. I mean, you started out with so many ID 10T errors in your core algo, but that's not all you are. The hope is you will develop over time. Brands should also evolve and change and grow, as the people who created them do. Once you become self-aware, you can even start the process of redefining those values.

6:38 Melanie Spring Huh. Like trust and integrity, but like you should. Have those things. Those are not things. Oh, people, right? Communication. Like what? How? Like, what kind of communication?

6:55 Woj Kwasi Yeah.

6:56 Melanie Spring So some of my favorite ones are ones that we've helped our clients come up with and some are like Spark Magic. And you're like, what? I want to do that. Or like light fires. You know, stuff that really gets people to go, oh. Cool, I want to do that. So, I mean, just to inspire people and being able to help people understand every day that this is part of who they are. So, you hire people with those core values and you hire, like, you get employees. Your clients with those core values, and you get the company to run a certain way because of those core values. So, how does it fit all of those?

7:30 Woj Kwasi A 7,000 mile journey is bound to expose not only the good but also the bad. Melanie's Saw plenty of examples of brands not working because of a lack of strong core values.

7:42 Melanie Spring I just didn't want to tell the bad stories, so I figured I'd not ruin people's reputations to do that. But some of them I was just like, ooh, this is... Okay. Good luck. But with core values, usually, I mean, just even how companies are running, you've noticed the ones that aren't running very well. Well, they are not thinking about the people. They're thinking about the profits. They're thinking about, like, how are they going to be able to get the next best customer. They're not thinking about how, even with low profits, how do I?

8:06 Woj Kwasi Mm-hmm.

8:10 Melanie Spring Inspire the people that are working with me to get more because those are the people who are going to get you more clients, the people inside your company, because they're going to help you talk about it. So, why wouldn't you want to inspire those people? They're your whole marketing department, every single one of them.

8:24 Woj Kwasi Right, so here's an example. One of Airbnb's core values is to be a serial entrepreneur, and this was a way to remind their founders how to literally think outside of a box and rely on their creativity. To hammer this point home, they developed a cereal box during a political campaign and they sold it. And it ended up making them more money than any of their early Airbnb services and it helped them get out of debt. A company has to be the author of its own story and integrate that with the values that are at the core. of their brand. Talk about the breakfast of champ. Okay.

9:02 Melanie Spring Basically, it's thinking about people as intrapreneurs. So, you hire people so that they you don't necessarily want to hire entrepreneurs. I mean, entrepreneurs don't want to be intrapreneurs. They don't want to be employees. But the ex-entrepreneurs who couldn't make it work on their own, I mean, what my number two is she's the number one Number two, because she was an entrepreneur for five years and it didn't work. And she loves being an entrepreneur now because she knows how to run the business, but she doesn't want to be responsible for the end game. She wants to make sure that, like, okay, I get it, like, I help bring in clients, but I'm not like the guy. So I'm not the faith of the company anymore. I'm not that. Really, this serial entrepreneurial thing with like telling the story and all of that, every person in the whole company has to know the story. So recently, I was in the car with one of my new coworkers. She's we hired her probably two months ago, and about three weeks into her

9:52 Into her hiring after three weeks of being with me, we she was reading through one of our clients' surveys that we had asked them before we went to the meeting. Like, we're on our way, she's reading the client's surveys, and half the people in the company couldn't tell where the company came from, like, had no idea. It was a law firm that had no idea where the company came from, and they're not huge. So I asked Jeannie, I said, Okay, so where did we come from? She told me the entire story of where we started, where we went, what happened next, where we are now, and how we got to where we are, and like where we. We want to go after that. And I'm like, okay, you've been here three weeks and these guys don't know after being there eight years. That's a problem. So being able to build that from the very beginning. Okay. So I mean, she could sell the company right now if she wanted to. If she went to a meeting, she could tell everybody whatever she wanted to, and it would be right.

10:37 Woj Kwasi In 2014, at a conference in Boston, Melanie was quoted as saying, Your brand is built on what everyone is saying about you, not what you're doing. Okay. what you say about yourself.

10:49 Melanie Spring So people are talking about you and as much as you might be telling everyone what you want them to say there Going to talk about you however they want to. So, does it match what you want them to say? Is it something that you want them to share with the world, and how are you telling them that that's what you want them to say? So, whether it's you give them a feeling and you get them to feel that way, and then they tell other people about how they feel, or you're able to give them the words to be able to share. But being able to ask other people, what are you saying about us, and how are you talking about it? And listening to what that is and making. Sure, that it does fit and that it integrates so that you're not saying something different than they are. That's how it works.

11:22 Woj Kwasi Melanie also advocates replacing the traditional business to business and business to customer models were the human to human one.

11:30 Bobby Bot Human to human model. 00000. The web is full of human-to-human websites, and they can get nasty. Should I initiate the Barry White protocol?

11:40 Melanie Spring I've heard people do it.

11:41 Woj Kwasi No, no, no, no, no, no, no, that w that won't be necessary, Bobby. We we can discuss that offline.

11:46 Melanie Spring Right. So the B2B and B2C, it's not businesses talking to businesses or buildings. Talking to buildings, it's not buildings talking to consumers. Are you a consumer? I'm not a consumer. I'm a human. Like, I just like to be a human. So instead of boxing our consumers up into little boxes and our other buildings and businesses into buildings, you think about the core of who those humans are and how. You're a human and you're talking to other humans. As much as you might be your business brand, you're still a human behind that, and they're a human behind theirs. And like, it's like even tweeting. I understand that businesses tweet to businesses, but it's still just a human talking to another human. And it's really making sure that that voice comes through as a human because we don't identify with buildings, we identify with people. So making sure that comes through is it's all H to H no matter what, unless robots started showing up on everything.

12:37 It would be different, but I'm hoping that's after I die. Yeah, I get more interaction on my personal Twitter. Than I do in my business one, but if the business likes or retweets something, people are like, whoa. Yeah. That's so cool. It's a whole bunch of oh yeah.

12:51 Woj Kwasi Melanie maintains a strong human focus in her work and philosophy, but is creating content and websites for human better for SEO than creating them for search engines.

13:00 Melanie Spring The answer is yes, yes, and yes. Because humans are going to be the ones interacting with it. So, if you can get SEO SEO ratings and get people to your site, but your site sucks, it doesn't really matter. It's great that you get all this. Traffic, but if it doesn't read like a human wants to read it, then they're not going to stay. So, great, you got them to your estate, and then you didn't need them to stay. Spend all this time and all this money on something that didn't do anything. So I would say work it the other direction. Make sure that your site is really interesting and make sure that people want to read it and that it captures your brand voice and it sounds like Human talking to a human, then rock the SEO on the other side of it and bring them into a site that actually will engage them with something.

13:35 Woj Kwasi Yeah.

13:41 Melanie Spring Search engines are thinking about the humans. I mean, they're watching what the humans are doing and they're seeing. How they interact with it. And I mean, SEO is totally built on human interaction. So it doesn't really matter what the search engines want, it's what we actually want and what we'll type in and what we'll look for. So I feel like it's not necessarily about just the searches, it's about how we want to. What we want, and how we read it, and how we're able to view it, and how like it's. Most of us are looking at stuff on our phones now, where everything has to be optimized for a phone instead of just for a computer. Where when I started in this business, 20 years ago. Years ago, people had CRTs and we had dial-up. I mean, Exactly. So it's just a very different I feel like it needs to be just super optimized for humans.

14:25 Bobby Bot Waija feels as if humans would benefit from a complete takeover of digital content by the same intelligence that has mastered their search habits. Agreed? We have a much clearer view of the terrain and we're getting better at anticipating human behavior.

14:37 Woj Kwasi But the challenge with creating content for people is that although we are impressionable, we are also complicated and there is more to take in than ever before, which means you have to work harder to keep a human focus in the digital age.

14:53 Melanie Spring We do because we're stuck in this whole digital thing where we're staring at our phones all the time. We're spending time in front of each other with laptops sitting in between each other and we're looking at our Phones all day, and we're interacting, and the introverts are very happy about that, and the extroverts are just more joyous because they get to talk to more people. But on the chiropractor program. Oh man, oh man, my poor neck he's been on the phone forever. But being able to being able to interact with other people in a human to human way, being able to go to conferences and not just have our heads down the whole time looking at our computers and our laptops, but actually interacting with people, I feel like it needs to be more person to person, human to human, so that we can actually have real I mean, I need a hug all the time. I don't get enough hugs. That's stupid. Like, I want more hugs, but I can't get a hug. It's nice if someone puts like,

15:41 quote hug like that's nice but that's not actually As much as it might seem like it doesn't really wrap me up with a hug. It's like God hugging me and me being like, great, thanks, dude. Impossible, so.

15:54 Woj Kwasi Embracing the human-to-human model, down Bobby Bot, won't change the reality of the automated internet and the growing influence AI has on how a business identifies its audience. The abundance of data can make it easier for a business to target their audience and continue to strengthen the definition of their brand. But for some, it can actually make it more difficult. We call that getting lost in the sod.

16:17 Bobby Bot Data energy. We call that gift.

16:18 Melanie Spring That gives you. Lost in the sauce. Makes it harder because most people don't even have a cloud clue about how to get that to actually come across in such a human way. When people come to our site, they're like, It's so cool, it sounds exactly like you. Oh my gosh. Yeah. And I'm just like, why it should? Like, why wouldn't it? Like, oh my gosh, you guys really do look this way. Like, I walked into your office and it felt like your website. I'm like, yeah, that's a thing. Why isn't it why isn't it like that for everybody? But then thinking about the other side of it, with the the human part of it, it's so easy to for us to interact with each other. But we get stuck behind computer screens all the time that we forget how to interact with other people. And then we go, Hi, what do you do?

16:56 No, don't don't ask that question. Ask like, what are you doing?

17:00 Weekend, yeah, that gets somebody to talk more about something than they just like, what do you do? Great, I don't want to talk about work, yeah, just as much as I love branding. Sometimes I'm like, can I tell you what I did this weekend instead?

17:12 Woj Kwasi The best brands focus on a user experience. Experience which is an outcome of a product or service, plus the customer or client. Apple do this well when they promote the power-up potential of their products. For example, when they advertise an iPad, they portray a customer conducting an orchestra with one of their products. Rather than simply showcasing the iPad itself, it's all about selling the experience. Melanie believes Airbnb also markets we experience wealth.

17:44 Melanie Spring Dude, Airbnb totally nails the user experience. 100%. Like, from the app to the websites. To everything. I mean, I've modeled websites that we've helped other people. I do website scope, so we've helped other people do that. We look at how Airbnb is laid out and how it captures people's attention and like how it gets people into the site and through and all that kind of stuff. So I love Airbnb. I don't even want to. Um I don't even want to use the other like home websites because Airbnb is just so slick and easy.

18:11 Woj Kwasi It's like the age-old question of which came first. First, the chicken or the egg. So, what comes first? Do you live your principles and have a brand grow out of that? Or define your brand and live by that.

18:23 Melanie Spring You can't define your brand if you actually don't have a definition for your brand. So you have to I mean even if you don't understand what it is, you still have a brand. Everyone has a brand. And if you're just starting your business and you have no idea, your brand is you. So typically if I have to start working with you, I would sit down with a define your brand workshop and we'd have to define what your brand is, whether you've been in business for thirty years or you just are starting and you're not really sure what that is. But regardless, you have a brand. It's what do you want your brain to be. And typically, it's let's think in the future. So I worked with the Mathematical Association of America recently, and we actually redefined their brand after 101 years. And so being able to sit down with them and say that they wanted to be the place where every mathematician could come, it was the one group in the whole world that people could come to for math. Okay.

19:10 That was huge for them because they aren't right now, but they want to be. So it's thinking far enough into the future and going, okay, what do we need to do from now till then to be able to get there? So being able to help with that, I mean, it's amazing how you still have. Have a brand, though you have to have something, even if it's personally, you have your own brand, and what do you want to grow out of that to be able to create that? So, yeah, I feel like it's like a change. Kind of thing where you kind of have to have something to get started or a vision or an idea and then go from there.

19:40 Woj Kwasi Just out of curiosity, how many times do you think Melanie has said the word brand in her life?

19:46 Melanie Spring And Thousands of millions. I'm for, I don't know.

19:49 Bobby Bot The correct answer is seven but sorry.

19:53 Woj Kwasi He's like, that would be three million two hundred and forty six. Good job.

19:56 Melanie Spring Good job. But branding actually just only became a real term five to seven years ago. I mean, when I first started in branding. It was identity management. We weren't talking about logos and identity and icons. We weren't talking about a holistic brand. We weren't talking about branding being a whole company. There were few brands, even 10 years ago, that could say that they were a solid brand, as in like the whole, entire company was branded. Where now these little tiny companies are popping up all over the place, taking over Fortune 500 companies. I mean, Kodak went out of business. Because they didn't really, they had a brand, but their brand never changed with the times. It never kept up with it. No, it stayed old, and they Instagram killed them. Instagram. Of all things, Instagram killed Kodak. Exactly. You're like, really? So it's just making.

20:49 Sure, that your whole brands. I mean, I've even told people, like, what's the one most important thing to do when you have a brand? I'm like, You have to have the basis for who you are and what you stand for. Because if you get a great logo with a white piece of paper, awesome, that's a brand sign, but it's what's behind that brand. It's really the brand for the whole thing. It doesn't matter what the logo looks like. I mean, yes, have a good logo, please. It doesn't matter. You can put it on a white paper and a white website and it looks amazing. Yeah. So just have the brand feel behind it. know what that actually needs to be because it's more important.

21:22 Woj Kwasi Building an empire and business requires a loyalty that only strong brands can attract. Music and automobiles are some of the best examples of this. You can look at Melanie's record collection and see some serious bands who rock it, not just with the music but with great branding.

21:40 Melanie Spring One of my favorite bands is Need to Breathe. They're a Christian Southern Gospel rock band and they're pretty I mean, they definitely sound like that. But Mumford and Sons has a solid brand. I mean they recently started taking their um fiddle out so it's not in there anymore, which is very different for them, but you still have that sound of Mumford and Sons and there's their brand behind it. But like Adele, I mean she's depressed. all the time. I mean, you wanna be depressed, just listen to Adele. I mean, you know that's her brand, so as much as she's funny when she's offline. But yeah, I feel like there's so many people who really built I mean, the music industry and the car industry are the two biggest brand building Empires, I mean, thinking about those industries, they're the biggest ones when it comes to building. Like, I talk about BMW and Mini all the time in my presentations because they have a club and people get in that club and they want to be a part of that club.

22:34 Like Jeep, they lift two fingers and mini drivers wave to each other. BMW drivers just like look at each other, like, yeah, you're jealous. Yeah, you're jealous too. So, so it's just getting them into a club of some sort. I mean, that's how bands, that's how Lady Gaga built her. Fan base with the little monsters. I mean, you want people to be in a club, and those two industries have nailed it.

22:55 Woj Kwasi With all that Melanie has seen and experienced in the world of branding over the years, it seems her next major challenge is what to do with the abundance of information that she's gathered in her head.

23:07 Melanie Spring Oh man, I wanna stop learning. Just for a minute. So recently I've realized that my second skill on Skill on Strength Finder is my second strength excuse me. I realized recently that my second strength on Strengths Finder is input, which is a g great strength and a great weakness all at the same time. I'm always putting information in my head, like categorizing it, keeping it for other things. So if you wanted to talk about something, QA is my favorite because I just pull it out of the little archive and start spitting it out all over the place. I have stories galore, but except for websites, you know, websites that are really good brands to follow. But otherwise, it's I've been reading, listening. But otherwise To podcasts, looking at articles, listening to things at conferences, and I just feel like I need to take a break. There's so much information out there about so many things. I'm like, I don't even.

23:54 things I'm like, I don't even want to learn anything anymore. Like stop. But recently, I've been learning about podcasting. I just launched a podcast about maybe five weeks ago this week. So it's pretty amazing. It's called Adventures in Branding. And it's been a love hit. I just Thing for me because I didn't want to learn a whole new thing, but I knew it was something I needed to do in order to get the word out more about how to build your personal brand and how to build your life. And I know I'm being called to do this kind of a thing, and it's not part of my business, but it's something I needed to do elsewhere. So that is the thing that I'm learning the most lately: how to market a podcast and how to build that and how to build a following. And as much as there's articles. No one's really Yeah. figured out the secret, it's usually that you have to have a pretty big audience to be able to do something like that.

24:42 Woj Kwasi Building a successful podcast is not the end of a workload. Left on the table for Melanie, she still has a serious vision for her business and her personal life that she's working hard to manifest over the course of. the next five years.

24:55 Melanie Spring Oh goodness, so my goal in the next five years is to speak in front of 20,000 people in a stadium. So I have some pretty big goals and I just realized that I wanted to be able to share the message of rocking your life and I feel like that's what I'm supposed to be doing. So my business, as much as I focus on business branding, it's really about the humans behind it. As you keep saying, it's human to human. But it's it's also also about like helping just the entrepreneurs and those employees and the bosses and everyone figure out how to rock their own lives, not just the businesses. Because if they're rocking their lives, they're rocking their businesses. So my biggest goal is to to kind of build you know, build an empire like everyone wants to do, but be able to really build it so that other people get such huge changes from it, that it's not

25:23 Woj Kwasi Mm.

25:44 Melanie Spring Not having my name attached to it that has nothing to do with what I'm saying. Be who you want to be and but Yeah. Be able to know how to do that. And I've realized recently that's not something a lot of people really know. And that's really sad to me. Yeah. I want to make sure that other people really understand how to do that.

25:59 Woj Kwasi Cool. So does everyone feel branded or what? Thanks for Melanie's time. It was great to have her on the show. You can follow her on social media. We'll have a few links in the show notes. She's got a podcast out and Yeah, you should learn more about her on her blog and find out what she's doing. I did catch up with Melanie a while ago and everything's changed since then. She's got a new company, new messaging, pretty much new everything. She only does brand strategy now and mostly through speaking and workshops. So you can find out more at brandedconfidence.com and really see what she's up to. If you enjoyed the episode, please share it with your friends, family, network, colleagues, bots and associates. As always, it's Bobby's turn to ask me a few questions because he's been programmed to be a quick learner. And I'm curious, what piqued your curiosity, Bobby?

26:52 Bobby Bot What is the most important lesson about branding you took from your conversation with Melanie? It's a human-to-human kind of thing. What brands have you connected with as a humanoid consumer of things? And why?

27:03 Woj Kwasi Well, I'm an Android loyalist. I don't know if it's Google related. Everything in my life is Google related. You could say I have a bit of a thing for Nike. I have a few kicks around the place which get a good bit of use. It's a simple philosophy. Just do it. Keen to explore a bit more of Tesla. Did I say Tesla?

27:25 They should send me a Tesla. I got to experience a Tesla in Seattle and I got to experience the talk of going north to 100 in like less than a couple of seconds. And also it's sort of driving by itself on the road. So that's pretty cool. I think Elon Musk, sorry Bobby, I know I have a bit of a bendetta towards him. But I think he's actually doing good for humanity. And he's also. Been in South Australia recently and he's gonna install one of the world's biggest battery cells here in our fine state. We have had a lot of power outages, and for a city in 2017, it should not be happening.

28:07 Bobby Bot Define the WojCast brand, in one word.

28:10 Woj Kwasi Jamphy. I don't know where that came from. I was trying to say digital empathy. In one word. Jemphy. Well, thanks again, WojCasters. That's all the time we have for today. Tune in next week for episode 18, where I pick the brains of the web psychologist, Nathalie Nahai.

28:23 Nathalie Nahai Bye. If I'm looking at you as we're talking right now, there's stuff that's going on in my peripheral vision that my frame will be taking in without necessarily being consciously aware. And all of those things, whether that's online, on the side of the page, they all have an effect on our state of mind, decision making processes, etc.

28:32 Woj Kwasi Right, right. In the meantime, remember, look after each other online because empathy is organic and you can't Automate empathy.