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EP22 Amplifying Your Public Health Message with Chris Alexander
Deborah Onakomaiya: Hey, guys, and welcome to another episode of I AM GPH. I am your host Deborah Onakomaiya. On the show today, we have Chris Alexander, who's the Director of Communications and Promotion at NYU College of Global Public Health. He works with the communications team to raise the visibility of NYU's new and fast-growing college through a variety of non-traditional mediums, including podcasting, video live-streaming, and social media. He holds an MBA in digital marketing from NYU Stern and an MA in graphic communications from NYU SBS. A fun fact about Chris is that he's a novice bow hunter and an occasional painter. Let's go to our conversation with him. All right, Chris, thank you so much for coming on our show. It's awesome to have you on.
Chris Alexander: It's great to be here. It's interesting to be here on the other side of the mic, a little different perspective, but it's great to be here.
Deborah Onakomaiya: Awesome. You're the Director of Communications and Promotions at GPH. How did you get into this field?
Chris Alexander: Well, I guess I should start out by saying I'm from Camarillo, California, so I grew up in Camarillo, which is about an hour north of LA. I went to school at UC Santa Cruz, and I studied studio art. I was very much the art guy, and when I went to college, I specialized in steel and bronze sculpture, so metal sculpture. I was always attracted to bronze specifically because it was the work where you'd get a high amount of output for a relatively low amount of input. 100 work hours on a piece of bronze sculpture could produce something that could last 10,000 years. This is stuff that people find at the bottom of treasure ships or something like that. So I was the art guy all through college and I never was satisfied. I saw a lot of my peers and colleagues go off to do gallery stuff and be painters and filmmakers, and I never saw myself as doing that, and I always wanted to include my art in some larger operation, some cause, or business or something like that.
Came to NYU for grad school and I did my master of arts in graphic communications here, and I stayed around. I worked at the Wagner School of Public Service doing admissions and web design stuff, and I heard great things about the Stern MBA program. So I did the MBA program and I studied digital marketing there. I think my path took me from my interest in art and I followed something I was good at. Then evolved by finding out where that could fit into the world and a lot of what I do now is infusing branding and design and creativity into business problems. So how to recruit students or how to showcase our alums or how to communicate scholarship opportunities. Those are business and organizational problems that the college needs and where I come in as to figure out what's the artistic shell that could go into, what's the best media for that.
Deborah Onakomaiya: Wow, that's quite an impressive background.
Chris Alexander: It's an interesting route.
Deborah Onakomaiya: Yeah, it definitely is. It's quite versatile. Thinking of communications in that sense in the college, we do a lot of things like podcasting, video storytelling. Students are generally not the richest people in the world. That being said, how much do you think it'll cost students to start a small podcast or some type of video story series or something?
Chris Alexander: I think the best thing about that is that we... It's kind of cliche, but we live in a time where we have access to these tools and we have access to communicating our ideas and our message and our beliefs, or our thoughts to more people than has ever existed in the history of our species. Podcasting analytics are up. The most recent number that I found for this year is that 44% of the US population that has access to the internet listens to podcasts. It's 44%, it's almost half.
Deborah Onakomaiya: That's a lot.
Chris Alexander: That's a huge amount of people. If you look at other platforms, it's hard to find another platform that has that percentage of people listening to podcasts. Podcasting is a great opportunity, same thing with YouTube, same thing with blogging. These are all really great places for people who have an interest in getting their ideas and messages out there to explore. The best part about it is it's a low-entry cost. For podcasting, as an example, I mean the equipment that we have in front of us here, so we're using the Audio-Technica ATR 2100 mic, which is $75 on Amazon. We have a recorder in front of us that's the Zoom H4n, which is $200 on Amazon. To host this podcast, we're using Libsyn, which is one of many hosting services, which is $5 to $10 a month.
When we do Skype interviews, we use the Ecamm call recorder for Mac or there's an equivalent software called Pamela for PC. Those are both $30. If you think about from the standpoint of a student who wants to spend money and build the infrastructure to start a podcast, you are looking at the cost of buying a PlayStation or less. I mean that you can have a mic and at a minimum be able to Skype with somebody anywhere in the world and interview people working in different fields, experts, people you want to network with, peers, colleagues. There's really no limit to who you can talk to for very little amount of money. The potential upside is really huge. The potential audience you could reach, it's not a guarantee, but you could reach if you have a little bit of luck and you have a good story and you have a good message is really huge.
I think it's a very accessible medium. I think we have access to tools that are very affordable now more so than in the past. Same thing with video if you wanted to get into video. Again, it's cliche, but start with your smartphone. That's a great place to start if you want to step it up one bit. I would say smartphones are notorious for having great video. They're also well known for having horrible audio. You can actually do a lot by using your smartphone to do interviews or short documentaries of things you're interested in, you're working on and buy a small microphone for your smartphone. RØDE makes one that's a video mic. It's about $70 on Amazon. It plugs right into your smartphone and it really boosts the audio quality. That's a great place to start.
If you wanted to get in a little bit deeper, there's some really good entry-level DSLR cameras that have interchangeable lenses that can do really beautiful portrait-style interviews for like $500 to $600 price range. One example is the Canon T5i series, which is a great starter DSLR. Again, a couple of hundred dollars in, and you really have the tools to create something that's high quality. Now that we have access to these different networks and different mediums, we have the capability of reaching a large number of people. It's a great time if someone's interested in getting in.
Deborah Onakomaiya: Yeah. I mean for the podcasting alone, it's less than $400 max.
Chris Alexander: Yeah. That's counting one of the most expensive pieces, which is a nice recorder. If you just did Skype... I tell a lot of people, if you want to start with one microphone and a laptop and Skype, that would be a $75 mic and $30 for the software. For roughly $100, you could interview anybody in the world and record it and edit it using Audacity as one program. There's many others like GarageBand or Adobe Audition, which are more expensive. But 100 bucks-ish, and you could start a podcast interviewing anybody in the world who has access to Skype. Five bucks a month to host it, and you can reach many, many, many people. I think the beauty with podcasting or even videos on YouTube is depending on what your issue or your subject matter is, you could easily get 100 loyal listeners or you could get 100 million loyal listeners, but the depth to which these people are coming along the ride with you to listen to your story is much, much, much deeper than, for example, a three-minute Facebook video or a 10-minute YouTube video.
If you make a podcast, that's 45 minutes and you have 100 people who listen to 45 minutes of your content, that's such a more rich experience and a richer transfer of what you're trying to get across. Just that alone, just the depth of what podcasts can become, I think is a really interesting and unique attribute of that platform. That's said it's not for everybody, and some people prefer video, some people prefer photography, blogging, but for somebody who wants to explore that area, I think it's a really interesting platform that hasn't fully peaked yet. I think we're reaching the stages where there's so many new podcasts coming online that it's a great time to get in and who knows what the next step of it's going to evolve into. We don't know yet. But it's exciting to see where it's going to go.
Deborah Onakomaiya: Guys, podcasts are the future. Get it now.
Chris Alexander: If you look at the numbers, they've only grown. Say in the past four or five years, they've only gone up. I think it's two sides of the story. I talked about how we have access to more tools that can get our message out to more people, and everyone goes, "Yeah, of course, because the internet, because of Twitter, because of Facebook, all these things." On the flip side, it's not just that our tools to broadcast are more powerful, but the tools to receive are more powerful. The fact that we're all walking around with a smartphone and we're increasingly buying cars that have integrated Apple CarPlay or whatever that's called, and Microsoft has their own version that has all these things integrated, so you can bring on your Spotify and your podcasts and your MP3s, and your text through the voice control on your car.
The fact that all these are integrated means that more people who would never have heard of a podcast or considered podcasting now have an easy button on their phone in their car that they can explore and they might check out like, "What is this podcast thing?" I think just the fact that all of our devices are becoming more integrated and more powerful, that more people are joining that potential audience that could maybe one day discover what you're putting out there.
Deborah Onakomaiya: That's the power of social networks right there.
Chris Alexander: Yeah, absolutely.
Deborah Onakomaiya: I would say you've mentioned several tools that are available. Would you say, are there any available to NYU students specifically in the NYU network, maybe online that they should look for?
Chris Alexander: Online? I'm not sure of. I know that as for NYU students, I think one of the biggest regrets that I myself had as a student and I hear over and over as I see students come in and out is that they just don't take advantage of the media labs and computer labs that we have on campus. There's a wealth of extremely expensive equipment sitting around in labs, and you need to either be in the right class or have the right access, or ask the right person. A great place to start is in the Bobst library. They have what they call the digital studio, which has everything from recording on green screens to recording a podcast in a sound booth, to video editing suites. They have everything right there, and you can go up and you can ask dumb questions, and there are people there to help you along, but you need to find out where it is.
You need to go there with a project and you need to have your own plan to move forward. But they have the tools for you. That's just one of, I don't know, 10 or 15 places around campus, but I would definitely recommend NYU students specifically to research what we have here. There's all these little nooks and crannies. I mean, just Google, NYU Computer lab, you'd be amazed how many computer labs we have around campus that each themselves have specific equipment for high-resolution image scanning to high-quality video recording, audio recording, all those things. There's a lot of resources here.
Deborah Onakomaiya: I feel bad that I'm graduating.
Chris Alexander: Well, you still got a little bit of time.
Deborah Onakomaiya: Till the end of the month, I believe. Until I get kicked out. Sustainability of social media projects, that's quite challenging because in this very dynamic world today, you could go viral, the next minute, it's not viral anymore. It's like that was yesterday's news. From your expertise in communications, how can you sustain a viewer base so they don't lose interest?
Chris Alexander: I think the first thing to think about, and this is a very serious topic in that you have to remember that the platforms that people think about right now as the hottest social media platforms, Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, anything, you are a user you're able to use the platform for free in exchange for giving your data. That's the reality of the world we live in now, and there's a lot of controversies around that, a ton of controversies around that in the past six months. What comes with that is you need to understand that the platform that you're using is controlled by companies that have a financial interest to their business. When Twitter makes a change and Facebook makes a change and adds a button or changes a button or changes their policies or YouTube changes their policies of what they will allow or not allow, you have no say in that because you're a free user.
I just bring this up to highlight the fact that if you want to build something that's sustainable, and I mean sustainable like years, something that you want to build and it's yours, you really need to think about putting it on a platform that you own. This could be a Squarespace website, this could be a WordPress website, this could be just a site that you host that you put your content on and you link out from, but all your stuff is in a home base that you own because you pay money to host it or host it someplace. Now you can totally have duplicate content on a Facebook page or you can still tweet or you can put stuff on a WordPress blog or something like that to use that as a platform to amplify your work to get it out into the world.
But the home base of where your work should live needs to be on something that you own and that you pay money for. Because if you're not paying money for one of these services, then you have no say in what they do, or they could go out of business in two years, and people think that's insane and the sky is going to fall, but it's not impossible. These are businesses and they can make good or bad decisions and the world could go left or right, and you don't know.
Build all of your content and your work in a domain that you own and you pay for, and you have control over. Then use social networks to amplify it. That's step one is that you have to make sure you have a good foundation. Step two is to make sure that you understand or have put some critical thought into your target audience and what you think they might want, what packaged content they might want. There are some target audiences where the best way to reach them is 1,000-word persuasive essays. There's some target audiences where the best way to reach them is a GIF.
Deborah Onakomaiya: Literally.
Chris Alexander: Literally, a GIF, maybe a word. Thinking about long-term sustainability and reaching your goals and everything, it's not just about what you put out, but you have to think about, "Okay, how can I package this in a way it's going to reach what we call an avatar," which is a fictional representation of your person you're trying to reach. This could be someone who's 17 years old and lives in a certain geographic region and reads X, Y, and Z books and blah, blah, blah. This could be CEO of some company who travels in jets and owns this car. You have a vision of who you're trying to target, and then you got to think about, "So what can I put out there that this person given my assumptions of who they are and a little bit of market research, what might they actually look at? What might they actually pay attention to?"
Because back to, I think you mentioned some things go viral, and then two weeks later who cares? Who are you? You're just gone. Every single minute of the day that we're doing this work, we are competing with the flood of noise online on social media. We're competing with people's just busy schedules. We're competing with people just forgetting and making mistakes because we have so many obligations today. Honestly, at the end of the day, we are competing with the very real potential behavior where people might just say, "You know what? I'm going to go home and watch Netflix tonight. I don't care. I'm not going to watch your movie, go to your event, read your blog, anything. I'm going to turn off tonight just because." Everyone does that. They just have a day where they're just like, "Not today, I'm going to unplug today and I'm going to just do what I'm going to do."
We're always competing with that because that was a lost opportunity for them to read your stuff, listen to your stuff, watch your video. There's a lot of obstacles, but I think to have the best chance of success, it's, A, make sure for sustainability and long-term, make sure you understand the platforms that you are working on and make sure you understand that you need to package your media in a way that you think target audience is going to respond to.
Deborah Onakomaiya: To follow up, would you say there are any best practices to stay ahead of the game that maybe we didn't cover?
Chris Alexander: Some of the things I like to do are, number one, I like to follow big hot brands that are outside of the industry I work in. If you work in education or you work in a nonprofit or you work in anything, it's best to always make sure you have an eye in your antennas outside of that industry because innovation and really smart marketing and communications can happen in any industry. I love to pay attention to what is Red Bull doing, what's Tesla doing. Warby Parker, Charity Water, these are great brands with great marketing and communications teams. Subscribe to their newsletters, like them on Facebook, watch their stuff, watch what they're doing because these are successful brands. Now they are. Just this past week, I've been inundated on Spotify with ads for the new Volvo some car. Every two minutes I hear about this Volvo ad-
Deborah Onakomaiya: It makes you want to buy a Volvo.
Chris Alexander: Well, there's an attention curve I noticed with myself. The first 10 times I heard it, I was really irritated. I was like, "Oh, my God again." Then the next couple of times I like, "What does this Norwegian wood trim really look like?" Then I googled it and I looked it up. I'm like, "Wow, this is really nice." Volvo has always been known for being the older safe choice for families when they have three kids and they've in the recent years reinvented themselves and they're really good-looking car. I don't care about Volvo. I never even thought about looking at them. But I heard this ad and I looked them up, and I'm like, "Oh, that looks pretty good."
Deborah Onakomaiya: I'm considering a Volvo.
Chris Alexander: Yeah, I bring that up to say, branch out, look at what other companies are doing in categories that you have no relation to because you'd be amazed what you can learn from that, whether you know you're learning it or not, just being exposed to good work. That's one thing. The other thing is just follow people who are really smart about this. Some of the people I follow are Gary Vaynerchuk, who's the CEO of VaynerMedia. He's a blogger, podcaster, author. Seth Godin, he's a great author on marketing. Tim Ferriss, he has a couple books out. He has a great podcast. Joe Rogan, who's a comedian, and he has probably, I would argue, one of the most influential podcasts in history maybe.
Just watch people who are doing really good work in different areas and just sign up for their stuff. Just go along for the ride because you'd be amazed what you can learn while you're not seeking out how to learn best practices. That's the thing about marketing and communications is you just got to absorb yourself in it. You can't always just buy the next book that's on the 10 new tactics and strategies, and that's not how you learn it.
Deborah Onakomaiya: Communications for dumb.
Chris Alexander: Yeah, that's not really the way to learn it. Just dive into the flow of what good work is out there and just go along as an informed consumer, and you'll pick up a lot of interesting things.
Deborah Onakomaiya: How do you determine the right medium to tell a story?
Chris Alexander: That is an excellent question and that was one of my favorites. First off, I think by asking that question, I think it means that one is thinking critically about their communications. There's a lot of people who wake up the next day and they're like, "Oh, I'm going to start a YouTube channel." Okay, that's nice. If you've put any thought into who's your audience, what are you going to do, how often are you going to publish? There's all these questions. The question of what's the right medium to tell a story I think is hugely important. If I could, I would zoom out just one level from that. I'm a visual person, so I'm thinking about, in my head, a Venn diagram with three circles. That's the thing if we can remember from middle school, different circles and they overlap, right?
The stuff in the overlap sections is what they have in common. I picture this as three circles in a Venn diagram, and the first circle we can talk about is what are your strengths in communications? This is where I would suggest people really look in the mirror and know that as human beings, none of us are a 10 out of 10 in speaking, writing, visual photography, art and video. None of us are experts in everything. To really hone in on what am I good at and what do I maybe enjoy doing. For some people, it's being on camera. For some people, it's absolutely not being on camera. For some people, it's writing short-form pieces. For some people, it's writing really long essays. For some people, it's expressing themselves through photography. For some people, it's just the back and forth on Twitter. They're really good with that.
I think it's really honing in on what is your strength in communications. That's circle number one. Circle number two I would say is what are the unique attributes of the subject matter you're interested in? If we can twist this towards some cause communications examples. If you're really interested in doing stuff to increase after-school sports programs for kids or something, right? If that's your subject matter, instantly, that's extremely visual, it's probably great on video and photography. If you're interested in, I don't know, housing policy for lower socioeconomic status groups, that might not be a great visual subject matter, but it might be good with infographics and written communications. I think you have to look at for this second circle, what are the unique attributes of the subject matter you're interested in?
Then the third circle is depending on your goals in this area, whether you want to just inform people about a thing that's interesting, whether you want to change policy, raise money, get people to start a group, get people to come to events, whatever your goal, the call to action is, you have to think about, "Okay, again, who's our avatar? Who's our target audience member? Then what media might they be interested in consuming?" Again, is it short video, long-form audio, written work? Is it eBooks? Is it blog posts? These are all these different options and I think if you lay down those three circles, what you're good at what your subject matter uniquely has, what unique attributes fit with your subject matter and what types of media you think your target audience would resonate with, then somewhere in the middle you can put together the formula of like, "If you care about something, what's the right media, what's the right platform, what's the right tactic or strategy to tell that story?"
I really think it's worth thinking through those things to really, again, approach this critically and to set yourself up for success, especially if you're not just doing this for fun. If this actually has a long-term goal or specific goal in mind and you want to build something or change something or persuade people or raise awareness for something, it really helps to think through those different questions.
Deborah Onakomaiya: I mean, I would definitely have to chime in the level of planning and detail that goes into thinking about all these three things I think is what sets you apart in the communications game. You're not just one person that's just tweeting all the time or something like that.
Chris Alexander: I'll add onto that. There's so much noise out there that if you're not going to bring your A-game and if you're not going to try to be high quality, then have fun, but you're probably going to fizzle. There's just too much. There isn't space in the world for a C minus blog, someone who really wants to-
Deborah Onakomaiya: You need to hashtag that.
Chris Alexander: It's good intentions, but there isn't a good fit in those three dynamics of what are you bringing to the table, what are you trying to communicate, and who are you communicating it to? If those aren't lining up, you're never going to reach your full potential of what you're trying to put out into the world. I think if you know that going in, then don't do it if you're not going to do your best possible work.
Deborah Onakomaiya: I definitely agree with that. I was recently at some conferencing. We were talking about communications, especially in public health. One person was like, everyone thinks they can just go into communications. Even based off of this discussion, there's things that you need to critically think about before you just say, "Oh, I want to start this project." There has to be a goal in mind. "Are we just going to raise awareness and shout about it? What is the end goal?" I think that's something that we should, especially in the age of everyone's always protesting starting a media campaign, a movement. I think at the end of the day you have to critically think about what is the end goal. What do I want to achieve at the end of this I think is very important.
Chris Alexander: I think it's really important. I think it's also important that people know it's okay to approach this if you know upfront I'm going to fail five times and then figure it out on the sixth. You don't need to go out into the world with a fully baked business plan of what you're going to do. In fact, that's probably not the best way to do it because you don't know how an audience is going to resonate with your message. You don't know how it's going to go. It's totally fine to beta-test it, right? If you're thinking about starting a video series or a blog or a podcast, say, "Okay, I'm going to do this for three months. I'm going to hit it really hard. At the end of that three months, I'm going to look at it and be like, is this performing how I wanted it to perform? Is this inching towards the goals that I had in mind?" Then you can reassess.
You can either dump the whole thing or you can just pivot a little bit to the left or the right and change things up. It's fine to move forward and say, "I'm going to fail at iterative steps." Because you're going to chisel away at finding your way back to the Venn diagram. You're going to chisel your way into finding where exactly you fit in that formula. It's good to think critically upfront, but you also just got to go with it.
Deborah Onakomaiya: Does marketing always have to be visual to make an impact?
Chris Alexander: I think it doesn't have to be visual or visible either. I think the best marketing is invisible. So I think the best marketing and the best communications to a certain extent is something that educates and entertains at the same time. Very few people in the world, back when we had encyclopedias, which a lot of people don't remember what they were, but very few people in the world would open them up and just read about giraffes because they want to just learn. They need the spark, they need the hook. Two really great examples that come to mind for me are, number one, if you've ever been on a flight, and there's the inflight magazine, and a lot of airlines have these, so you might be flying on Delta or something and you flip it open and they got watches and luggage and jewelry and cool stuff that you can buy.
Then they'll have this huge feature on the top 10 hotels in San Francisco or something like that. You read through it and it's beautiful imagery. It's just nice design, really well-written. It's not a coincidence that the stuff in those magazines are talking about specific cities with specific airline hubs, with specific tourism requirements and quotas. That's a great... The inflight magazines I think are a genius move on the airlines part of putting something in front of you that you are a captive audience for X number of hours, and that is an advertisement that you're getting plugged into your brain. When they talk about the best places to go in San Francisco or Louisiana or cruise ships to The Bahamas or whatever, that's because they got new flights to sell you, and these hotels made a deal with the company and they packaged it in a magazine that is educational and entertaining and it's beautiful and you flip through it. I think it's just a really, really smart move.
That one absolutely genius. That one comes to mind. The other is Neil deGrasse Tyson, who's a science communicator, and he's the director of the Hayden Planetarium. He has a podcast that's really cool called StarTalk for anybody interested in science and pop culture and that intersection. He had this episode all about the zombie apocalypse. I just thought, again, this is just genius execution on the level of marketing and communication. He brought in a epidemiologist and they talked about the zombie apocalypse. Could it be real, could it happen? They talked about all the examples from HIV to SARS, to Ebola, to cholera, how our cells work, how diseases are spread, what happens to the brain. While he's entertaining and talking about these comic book references and these comic book ideas, you're learning about how your biology and your cells are working. It's this perfect marriage between maybe you don't really know you're learning right now, but you're definitely learning.
It's packaged around the theme of the zombie apocalypse. But at the end of the day, you definitely learned about how your cells move around and how things can be contagious and how they can move from carrier to another carrier and all these crazy ideas. But back to the question, I think, in my opinion, the best marketing is invisible, and you don't know that you're being marketed at. There's a lot of that today. That's good work in my opinion. It's entertaining, it's slick, it's pretty, and you respond well to it. Then at the end of the day, you're like, "Oh, let me look that up. What was that thing?" Then you've been marketed at.
Deborah Onakomaiya: Yeah. I think that's really interesting. Back to the podcasting, it's like the best biology class in the world where you don't fall asleep.
Chris Alexander: Yeah, it was super interesting.
Deborah Onakomaiya: Yeah. Shifting gears a little bit, how important would you say communication analytics is?
Chris Alexander: I think analytics are really important, but it's a balance between the brain and the heart with a lot of this work. There's a podcaster, Jay Acunzo, who has a great podcast and he's also keynote speaker. He has this quote that I wrote down that is, "Lead with intuition and course correct with data." I love that quote. I think it really summarizes my feelings towards analytics in that you have to measure what you're doing. You have to weigh that in the decisions you make because to not do that is irresponsible from a business standpoint. Even if it's a personal project, you got to look at your numbers and the numbers will tell you if this is working or not. That said, it's like a left-foot, right-foot thing. On one hand, you got to move forward with what you believe is worth doing and what you believe you can do well and what you feel that the audience would like or needs or would learn from or find funny or entertaining or something.
On the other foot, you got to measure it and you got to do a little research to see how are the industry numbers on this platform I'm looking at. If you want to reach a certain target audience, you need to look at are they known for being on a certain platform. That's a place to start. It's a left foot, right foot dance, and working with both of those together, you can move forward. But I do think it's a balance. A great example is to just look at comments. Comments are great, likes, re-shares, all that's great, but when you look at comments, there's a huge difference between a comment that says, "Cool video, versus one that says, "Oh, my gosh, she took the words right out of my mouth. I feel exactly the same way and I wanted to say the same thing."
In my mind, I'll give 2 points to one and I'll give 98 points to the other. I don't care how many shares that video has. I know that hit a tone for somebody on a level of magnitude that makes me back to the brain and heart thing. It's all heart and I don't care what the number is. That said, it's good to over the long term, take a look back and say, okay, how has this been doing over weeks or months or something like that, and take those numbers into account. If your views are going at a certain level or going up or down, that's something you look at or your audio listens, same thing. I think, in general, when you're starting out with zero, I think it's a mistake to have expectations that it's going to go like a rocket ship into the sky. I think that's a real mistake.
Because everyone starts with zero and then you get your first 10 and your first 20. I'm talking about anything, views, listens, downloads, anything, shares. It could be anything. But as long as you have momentum going forward, in my mind that means something's working. So let me keep going, and then I'll find out, maybe learn a little bit more about what is working. As long as you had five last week and you have eight this week, and then 10 and then 15, and then 200, 300, as long as it's going up, it doesn't need to go 100 and then 10,000 views. But as long as you're moving forward, I think that's positive and that's measurement that indicates this is worth doing. Now if it tanks, then you reassess and you go, "Something's not working."
Deborah Onakomaiya: Go back to the drawing board.
Chris Alexander: Yeah.
Deborah Onakomaiya: Bringing it back to NYU, how can student organizations expand their reach?
Chris Alexander: I think student organizations, the best place to start is starting with a core group. This could be 3 people, this could be 100 people, it doesn't matter. But you need a core group of people who are absolutely signed on to what you're interested in, who are the ones who show up, are the ones who do the work, are the ones who respond to emails, are the ones who go to your events. You need a little engine that starts with real people. Once you have that, I think for us here at Global Public Health, it's great. I can say, "Partner with our communications department, we are looking for students who are doing this work, who are interested in putting their message out there, and we would love to work with them to amplify that."
I think depending on where you are, what school you are, what business you're in, find partners because there's always going to be somebody interested in helping you help them and find those relationships. That's a great place to start. The other thing is if you want to expand your reach, you have to put out a good product. Back to the Venn diagram, make sure you are capitalizing on your strengths. Back to the YouTube example, it's very tempting for a student organization to be like, "Oh, let's start a YouTube channel." Okay, great. But do you have the time and capability to keep that up? Is that what your strengths are? Are you a bunch of great writers? Are you a bunch of people with a ton of Twitter followers? Are you guys good on audio interviewing?
These are things you need to assess before you dive in. I think if you really want to expand your reach, you have to have a high-quality product. You have to have a core team that really believes in it and will... Communications is not the job of one person. Communications is the job of empowering your whole team to then spread the message. If you have one person who's the Twitter person, you're never going to succeed as much as another organization or club or group who their communication's person empowers the other nine people to tweet out, put stuff on Instagram, write stuff for the blog. It's a group effort. It's back to the power of the networks. It's not a singular job if you want to reach the maximum number of people for your content or your cause or whatever it is. That's where I'd start.
Deborah Onakomaiya: Coming back to you. You've talked so much about communications, things that go into doing that. I would ask, what are your biggest market failures and what did you learn from it?
Chris Alexander: I think my biggest failure, I worked with a startup a couple of years back. Basically, I was doing the marketing and the design for this startup, and it was starting from ground zero and it had some promise. I think it had a lot of promise, but this is relating back to the fit in the Venn diagram example I was telling you. There's a lot of different types of marketers that have different types of expertise. None of us are a perfect 10 out of 10 in anything. I was working with a startup that at the phase that they were in really needed a certain type of expertise, and that wasn't my expertise. I was a website design video guy. That's really valuable to have on a team for a certain project or a certain group that needs that at that moment. There are other times in the growth phase of different organizations where you need someone to stand on a sidewalk for three hours and get people to sign up for something. That's not my thing.
For some people, that's totally their thing, and they cannot do the videos that I can do. I think my biggest failure so far was a mismatch of what the group I was working with needed at the moment and what I came to the table saying, "This is my expertise." I was really good at what I did and I was happy with the work, but it wasn't what that organization needed at that moment in their growth phase. It didn't really work. We didn't really hit the goals that we wanted to hit, and we didn't see the success that despite things being pretty and snazzy and cool, it just didn't go. The analytics didn't lie, it didn't work.
I think it was a mismatch of the expertise that they needed at that moment and what I brought to the table. That was the failure and the big lesson that I had was being aware of what I bring to the table and what I'm not that good at. Coming to the table saying, "I'm really good at this and I can offer this, but I'm not going to do this work because I'm not the best at it." Then if you can find that perfect fit, then you can have monumental success. But if you're not having a good fit upfront with what that group needs, then it's going to be hard.
Deborah Onakomaiya: Yeah, definitely. Talking about failures, now successes, what are you working on now? What are you excited about?
Chris Alexander: Here at the college, I'm most excited about, as everyone knows, we are a young college and we always talk about how we're a startup college within the big monster of NYU. I'm most excited about growing our communications team in the years to come. I'm most excited about growing our reach and our capabilities. It's not only... There's two sides to that coin. There's the growing what we can do and what we can have the human capital hours of the day to produce. There's also, on the other side of it, there's a bit of behavior change. Before we started doing videos and podcasts and we redid the website and stuff, I'd send a lot of cold emails to different people around our college saying, "Hey, I want to do this thing. It's going to be like this. Are you game to do it?" They'd go, "What is this? Who? What? What are we doing here?"
Deborah Onakomaiya: What college?
Chris Alexander: Yeah. "Why are we doing a video? It's audio. Why are we doing?" It's a whole different story when you have some of that out in the world and you can show someone, "Hey, would you like to participate in this? Here's an example." It completely changes the behavior of people wanting to help you help them and participate in communications. I think we had a really amazing kickstart this year of the projects that we're working on, both again, in what we're able to do and talking about behavior change within the college. People know that we're doing this stuff. They know that we have a podcast. They know we do videos, they know we do Facebook Live, they know we're going to start blogging more, all these things. I think going into next year, both our capabilities to produce good content is going to be good. It's going to be increased.
I am hoping that from the college community level, people are going to probably say yes a little bit more often because it's more clear what we're doing, what they're getting into. I've slowly seen that pop up, people popping up saying, "Hey, I'd love to come on, do a video or a podcast or write a blog." People sort of volunteering now. That didn't happen before. But you have to have that track record out in the world for them to see, and then people opt in to say, "Hey, I want to be a part of that." I'm optimistic.
Deborah Onakomaiya: A Drake reference comes to mind. We started from the bottom and now we're here.
Chris Alexander: Totally. We started from nothing.
Deborah Onakomaiya: Now people are volunteering to participate, which is exciting, I think.
Chris Alexander: Yeah. It's all good because the work that is coming out of this college needs to be shared. The work that these people are doing, from nutrition to obesity, to Zika to everything, drug addiction, everything, mental health, every issue area imaginable. People are putting countless hours into these really awesome causes and this really awesome work. The fact that we are going to be in a better place to showcase that in a richer way and showcase more of them next year and the year after, I think is a really great direction to go in. It makes me happy that we can do that. It makes me happy that we can showcase the work that people are... They're going to put in the work anyway at the college. I'd love to be able to share that with the world. I did touch on a little bit at the beginning, but I think the communications and design and marketing and how all this rolls into one big... It's all kind of the same thing to me.
It's really powerful and it can solve real business problems. Everything from increasing staff morale to making our community that's spread across to different cities and different continents feel a little bit closer together. Again, showcasing the great work that's happening and making sure that maybe that's visible to employers and recruiters. That's all communications. That's all the work that we're doing. Why I think it's so great is that I understand that is a solution to the problem. A lot of people don't understand that. They think it's a nice to have and that it's fun and that's entertaining. That is great. I'll take that because back to the marketing thing, if I can make something that's educational and entertaining, that's good work to me. But I think it's great because it solves real problems. I think it's great because it reaches people across boundaries that we would not be able to reach. It's so accessible. We can do so much with so little. I'm talking equipment, people, access everything. That was not the reality 10 years ago that it is now. That's why I'm excited.
Deborah Onakomaiya: Final question. Do you have any parting messages for students who are interested in using communications specifically in public health?
Chris Alexander: Sure. I have two parts. From my parting message, the first is to never let the fear of technology hold you back from putting something out into the world. There's so many people who don't know how to use cameras or are afraid of microphones and audio hookups and recording on their laptop and all this stuff. There are so many resources out there to learn. I just think that should not be a barrier. Especially, if it's something that you're really interested in, I don't think that should be something that holds people back and it holds a lot of people back. Of course, I don't understand that because it's the curse of knowledge. I understand how to use all this stuff. I then can't fully understand how daunting it must be to not know and to dive in from zero.
I can't fully understand that, but I do encourage people to not let it hold them back. The second piece of parting advice I would say is that if you look at the state of communications today, I mean Facebook has over 2 billion users, Twitter has 330 million users. I mentioned this at the beginning, but today, we have the ability to communicate a message or an idea to a greater number of people than any other human being has been able to in the history of our species. Really, seriously, it's an amazing time to be alive and breathing and have this stuff here that we as smart, educated people can afford and we can use, and we have access to these platforms that allows us to get that message out into the world without the gatekeepers that existed 20, 30 years ago. We don't have TV networks telling you what you can put on YouTube.
We don't have magazine publishers saying, "This thing you wrote isn't going to work." There's nobody that's going to cut you down today. This is my opinion. I'm sure some people may feel that this is aggressive or extreme, but my opinion is that I believe that if you care about something in the world and if it's a cause you believe in or an idea or a philosophy, or you want to raise awareness of something and you think you're going to care about that for a long time, you're in it for the long haul that I believe as smart, educated people who have access to this stuff, I think it's our duty and our responsibility to use the tools we have today and use the networks we have today to create, to publish, to put the ideas out into the world and try to get that out into the world.
Because back to the fear of technology, I think the most regretful, saddest things that I am aware of is people have ideas and they want to communicate them, but they just can't get started. I think the best thing you can do is think critically about how you get started and try it and know you're going to fail the first two or three times. But again, people who were born 100 years ago did not have the option of doing that. We have the option today of doing that. Binge your Netflix stuff and then play your video games and then take time after that to really sit down and if you have something you want to put together a podcast, a video series, a blog, make a plan, do your research, find people to partner with who will build a network around you.
For people at Global Public Health, talk to me, talk to the communications team. We're always happy to help or advise or chat about this stuff. But again, I think we're living in a very special time with just immense opportunities. I think it's our responsibility to take advantage of those if there's something you really care about. I would encourage people to really just get started and put something out there.
Deborah Onakomaiya: I mean I would completely agree with what you said. Just an add-on to this is like I myself wasn't sure because I host this podcast and I wasn't sure how do I get started with editing and all of that. I'm not necessarily the most technical savvy person, but honestly, if you put your mind to it, you can do it. I want to say thank you so much for coming on our show today. We learned so much.
Chris Alexander: Happy to do it.
Deborah Onakomaiya: Finally, the interviewer became the-
Chris Alexander: Interviewee.
Deborah Onakomaiya: Roles changed. Thank you so much, Chris, for being on our show.
Chris Alexander: Thanks a lot.