#100 - Reddit for Higher Ed 101: Why Every College Needs a Subreddit (AI Search, SEO, and Enrollment Strategy)
w/ Ross Simmonds
CEO of Foundation Marketing and Distribution.ai
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SHOW NOTES
In this episode, Ross Simmonds, CEO of Foundation Marketing and Distribution.ai, unpacks why Reddit has become one of the most influential platforms in the student decision-making process—shaping search rankings, AI responses, and campus reputation in ways most institutions aren’t tracking. He explains how universities can strategically participate without sounding promotional, how to build karma and credibility, and why owning your subreddit is now essential brand hygiene. Ross shares practical steps for teams of any size to start distributing content effectively, encourages leveraging student-generated stories, and highlights how repurposing existing assets can drive massive impact. He also discusses his book, Create Once, Distribute Forever, and offers low-lift strategies to help higher ed marketers turn Reddit from a risk into an unmatched opportunity.
Links:
Ross’ book: Create Once, Distribute Forever
Ross’ companies: Foundation Marketing and Distribution.ai
Key takeaways:
Reddit now shapes both search results and AI-generated answers used in the college search.
Universities must own and actively manage their subreddits to influence student perception.
Zero-click storytelling outperforms link-dropping and builds trust on Reddit.
Studying subreddit culture and tailoring content to it prevents bans and boosts engagement.
Consistency—15 minutes a day of authentic activity—compounds into real visibility and impact.
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Transcript (done with AI so only about 90% accurate):
00;00;00;08 - 00;00;17;12
John Azoni
Well, hey, folks, I've got a special treat for you today. For anyone in higher ed. Mark, I'm looking to dive deep into Reddit. And if Reddit isn't on your radar, I would say this is a must. You know, there's a lot of platforms that pop up all the time. And you're maybe like, oh, we add this to the mix.
00;00;17;12 - 00;00;41;15
John Azoni
Do we get on TikTok? Do we get on, you know, threads, whatever. It's another platform to manage. It's more work. But not being on Reddit these days is sort of like saying, I don't want to be on Google or like, I don't want to show up in my search results because as you'll hear in this episode, that's where search engines and chatting, beauty and perplexity and all these places are pulling a lot of their content from is Reddit.
00;00;41;15 - 00;00;58;15
John Azoni
And you want to be in there and you want to show up in a positive way and you want to guide the things that are being said about your institution. So my guest today is Russ Simmons. Ross is the CEO at Foundation, which is a content marketing agency as well as Distribution Dot II and all in one content repurposing platform.
00;00;58;15 - 00;01;27;06
John Azoni
And as you might expect, he creates some really interesting content that caught my attention specifically around Reddit and the massive opportunity for higher end marketers to tap into this platform and really understand how students are already using it to shape perceptions, to make decisions, to share unfiltered opinions about colleges and programs. In this episode, we're going to cover so much stuff we're going to cover why your school and even your specific program should have its own subreddit.
00;01;27;11 - 00;01;45;15
John Azoni
What to do with it. Once you have one. How to interact, what kind of content to post, what to avoid, how not to get banned. So much stuff. And we also dive deep into Q&A from our actual listeners. So stick around and get ready to learn a thing or two. So, Ross, welcome to the show.
00;01;46;13 - 00;01;48;12
Ross Simmonds
Thanks for having me on. John Really excited to be here.
00;01;49;04 - 00;01;58;11
John Azoni
Yeah, awesome. Let's start off on a light tangent. So what's what's something that you've been nerding out about lately? It could be work related or not. Yeah.
00;01;58;26 - 00;02;24;06
Ross Simmonds
So a lot of my work is done in the wonderful world of search engine optimization, now generative engine optimization, lots of optimizations, but I've been geeking out a lot about sleep optimization. So like, how can I maximize my sleep to be deep and great and awesome? So I have gotten a few conclusions that have helped. Like I made sure that my room is absolutely pitch dark, that it's been cool.
00;02;24;16 - 00;02;43;06
Ross Simmonds
Eye masks have been a game changer for me and then I've also put lavender on my eye mask, which has helped a lot, and I've been able to get some pretty deep sleep. So sleep has become an obsession for me recently. And I think 21 year old Ross would think I'm out to lunch because I didn't need a lot of sleep back then.
00;02;43;06 - 00;02;44;20
Ross Simmonds
But now it's important. Yeah.
00;02;45;16 - 00;03;10;03
John Azoni
It's becoming more and more important to me to like. So we do a hybrid homeschool program with my kids this year. As you know, the first year we're doing it. So I'm down to working like four days a week. So like I get up, you know, so I can do all day Friday homeschool with the kids. So I make up for that by waking up at like five every morning to just get to crank out a couple of hours at work, kind of get that extra day back into my schedule.
00;03;10;03 - 00;03;29;00
John Azoni
And this sleep optimization has become more and more important to where like something just very simple could throw it off. And then but when 5:00 hits, I'm like, I can't do it today. I got to leave it. So it's it's becoming like I really pay attention to it. Now. What's the you said it's a I'm ask.
00;03;29;09 - 00;03;44;17
Ross Simmonds
Yeah, just like an eye mask. I've got like I've tried a bunch of them, a bunch of different variations and they all pretty much do the same. But I found one that has like a cushion that goes around your face and it gives you like a little bit of space between your eyelids and the mask, and it allows you to still blink.
00;03;44;17 - 00;03;51;08
Ross Simmonds
So in those first few minutes before you, like, doze off and you're blinking, it doesn't like irritate your your eyelashes.
00;03;51;08 - 00;03;55;28
John Azoni
So now you're talking about an actual eye mask. I thought you were talking about like a like an Apple products.
00;03;55;28 - 00;04;04;28
Ross Simmonds
Like no, no, this is no tech in this. This is just basic, basic things. Yeah. This is a real eyebrows that you just put on your face. Yeah.
00;04;05;26 - 00;04;24;15
John Azoni
That's awesome. Well, cool. So you're coming to us from you have a couple companies. Yeah. Foundation as well as distribution that I Yeah. So give us some context for our listeners. We like to bring in folks from, you know, outside of higher ed. I know you've done a little bit of work in higher ed, but yeah, give us some context for our listeners where you're coming from.
00;04;24;24 - 00;04;46;06
Ross Simmonds
Yeah, So Foundation is a content marketing firm. We started ten years ago with the exclusive focus on B2B and SAS. So we worked with some of the top software companies in the world like Eventbrite, Canva, Procore, those types of brands, helping them with their content marketing, SEO, social media marketing. And back in 2013, we started with our first 2018.
00;04;46;06 - 00;05;11;23
Ross Simmonds
We started with our first Reddit strategy for our clients. So we were very early in Reddit. I wrote a book on Reddit way back then, didn't get a lot of sales because not everybody was bought into Reddit and didn't believe in the channel. But now you fast forward today and it's everywhere. And then we have distribution this. So we started a software company called Distribution RTI with the simple belief in philosophy that there's a lot of brands, a lot of businesses and a lot of creators who are investing a lot of money in creating great content.
00;05;11;29 - 00;05;27;26
Ross Simmonds
But that content collects does. So we wanted to create something that makes it easy to share on LinkedIn, to share on Reddit, to share on excellent Twitter, Facebook, whatever channel you want to. And we'll take your YouTube video, your podcast, your blog post, and then scale that so you can have it distributed on the various platforms.
00;05;28;12 - 00;05;49;06
John Azoni
That was awesome. I love that. And I was checking out distribution that because I was like, Oh, I think our clients need this and our audience in general needs this because that's one of the things that, like I try to drive into my audience is like, it doesn't matter what content you create. If you don't distribute that like it's you can't just leave it up to the algorithms.
00;05;49;24 - 00;05;56;22
John Azoni
They're going to do whatever. The algorithms aren't catered to you, they're catered to the companies that wrote them.
00;05;56;28 - 00;06;14;18
Ross Simmonds
100%. So it's so true. Yeah. Like oftentimes people create things and they'll spend like hours putting in time and energy to produce an asset, but then they'll spend one minute to try to distribute it and get in front of the right people. And and I feel like that's a bit of a waste. And that's why we created distribution, not I.
00;06;14;25 - 00;06;24;19
Ross Simmonds
I also wrote a book on the subject around distribution a few years ago, and it's become a part of our DNA foundation and hopefully more people can embrace it because it can change everything.
00;06;24;19 - 00;06;42;26
John Azoni
Awesome. Awesome. So I got you on here talking about Reddit because I have been seeing your stuff on on Reddit. Read some of your articles and stuff you had about one article that's called Why aren't you using Reddit in that you say Reddit's the it was the number three most visited site in the U.S. and has partnerships with alums.
00;06;43;05 - 00;06;48;06
John Azoni
So from your perspective. Why is Reddit so uniquely positioned for higher ed marketers today?
00;06;48;20 - 00;07;24;27
Ross Simmonds
So with a lot of higher ed, their audience, their customers, the people who they are trying to reach are mostly skeptical of brand communication. They're skeptical of communication from a business, from an org, from an institution. They trust what other people say, their peers, people who they see online on Tik Tok influencers like that's who they trust. And Reddit is filled with people sharing their opinions, their perspective, sometimes raw, sometimes real opinions on why you should go to this school, why you shouldn't take this degree.
00;07;25;03 - 00;07;49;23
Ross Simmonds
And these conversations are happening right now, whether we like it or not. And for a lot of the institutions, you have a very interesting situation when you see the rise of Reddit directly in the SERP a.k.a the search engine results page. So on Google now more than ever before, you are seeing Reddit threads showing up at the second or third query when people are asking questions.
00;07;49;23 - 00;08;16;19
Ross Simmonds
And this isn't by accident. Google noticed that Reddit as a solo modifier for search terms was being added more frequently than any other word. More frequently than cheap or frequently than top people were adding in the word Reddit, meaning they wanted to hear from other people that would be transparently talking about your institution, what your campus life was like, what your culture is like.
00;08;16;25 - 00;08;41;11
Ross Simmonds
They wanted to see what other people would see or say. So Google adjusted the algorithm to increase the visibility of Reddit on the SERP. So what does that mean for hire? It It means that there's an opportunity in front of you to not control the message, but to influence it. Some of you may have already been a little bit too late at getting your own subreddit, and somebody already runs that.
00;08;41;11 - 00;09;00;09
Ross Simmonds
And there's hundreds of students, alumni, thousands of students and alumni talking about your brand every single day. That doesn't mean that you can't still be there. It just means you have to think a little bit differently about how you get there. Are you going to engage? Are you going to request to be added as a mod? Are you going to have to create your own subreddit from scratch?
00;09;00;15 - 00;09;11;00
Ross Simmonds
There's a lot of complexities that come into it depending on the maturity of the communities on Reddit and their brand association and the stories that are being told about your institution today.
00;09;11;20 - 00;09;34;10
John Azoni
That's great. Yeah, I do. I'm one of those people that types in something, something Reddit and you know, and it's really interesting. I mean, any time like because I really trust like product reviews too much on Amazon because you can like I mean you can sort of tell when they've they've solicited reviews and even if it says verified purchase, I like to go on Reddit and find out the real the real solution.
00;09;34;10 - 00;09;53;19
John Azoni
And so yeah, people are getting more, more curious about it. I pulled my audience to ask, you know, if Reddit was part of their school's marketing admission efforts. Cool. 76% said no, but they were curious about it. So yes, 76% not at all. User 12% said no and they weren't curious.
00;09;53;25 - 00;09;55;02
Ross Simmonds
Yeah, that's wild.
00;09;55;07 - 00;10;09;27
John Azoni
So they were saying absolutely not. But 76% not on it. Curious about it. So this feels like this is the perfect episode for them, for these people. If they really started focusing on a Reddit strategy, what would be the evidence they might see that tells them it's working?
00;10;10;08 - 00;10;32;16
Ross Simmonds
Yeah, well, I think some of them. So there's a few things that you want to understand. First and foremost, it's like I would do an analysis of my brand name or queries associated with the degrees that I want to show up for. I would do an analysis of the domains that show up when people type in those queries, because that's where the vast majority of discovery happens.
00;10;32;16 - 00;10;52;29
Ross Simmonds
It's still with Google. So I would analyze those domains. What you'll probably find is that for percentage of those, Reddit is one like for percentage of the keywords that you're targeting with Google or even with your PPC budget, Reddit is showing up for some of them. Then what I want you to then understand is what are those Reddit thread saying?
00;10;53;06 - 00;11;16;03
Ross Simmonds
Because some of them could truly be resulting in millions of dollars worth of tuition, hundreds of applications not reaching you because people are seeing negative sentiment on Reddit and saying, this isn't a school for me, this isn't a culture for me, this isn't where I want to go for things that aren't even true, that might be inaccurate, that could be misinformation.
00;11;16;10 - 00;11;39;29
Ross Simmonds
And when this happens, you're not seeing the losses because they never show up at your inbox. So that's one opportunity that could be very obvious for folks as a reduction of risk. The other piece of it is when you think about the fact that people are typing in top colleges for certain things, I would be curious to know how often Reddit shows up for those types of queries.
00;11;40;05 - 00;12;01;01
Ross Simmonds
And if you're not in those lists that are showing up, you're having a bit of a double whammy that you might not know about the double whammy being on one end. People are being influenced on Google, but on the second in the most highly cited sources on chatty, pretty perplexity, clod, all of the different alums I believe in the top three is Reddit.
00;12;01;16 - 00;12;26;12
Ross Simmonds
So Reddit's comments and Reddit threads about the best university for x, y and Z is not something that you can actively track inside of Google Search console or anything like that, but it's influencing your potential students and that's happening right now. It could even be influencing whether or not people apply to work there. Like it could be professors saying, What's it like being a professor at X, Y and Z campus or university?
00;12;26;12 - 00;12;38;13
Ross Simmonds
And if there's a Reddit thread from somebody who talks about that, that's going to influence them as well. So those things all come into the mix and it's hard to track, but that would be to me, that makes the case for it.
00;12;39;06 - 00;12;52;17
John Azoni
So give us a rundown of Reddit. And, you know, let's start at the basics for folks in that 76% that are curious but aren't quite on it. Like how does it differ from other platforms? What's kind of the lay of the land?
00;12;52;23 - 00;13;10;10
Ross Simmonds
Yeah. So on Reddit, there's three key accounts that I want you to understand. One is the user account. So the user account is just like a profile on X, on LinkedIn, on any of the other platforms where it's an individual who is going around and communicating as a person. Now that person, however, on Reddit can be fully anonymous.
00;13;10;18 - 00;13;29;10
Ross Simmonds
So it could be Ross Simmons or it could be RS 2943 right. Like I can throw all the names and keywords and blah blah blah and be a fully anonymous user talking about your institution and you'll never be able to put two and two together that this is the person who is the head of a certain program in your school.
00;13;29;18 - 00;13;54;11
Ross Simmonds
Like those are things that you can't put together on Reddit. So there's users and those users can create content in the form of links. They can create text posts, they can share videos, images, all kinds of different types of assets. Now the second thing that you can create on Reddit is called a subreddit. So a subreddit is a micro community within the larger ecosystem of Reddit.
00;13;54;20 - 00;14;20;00
Ross Simmonds
So the same way that on Facebook we have Facebook groups, on Reddit, we have Subreddits, and in these subreddits people join. So that profile would join the subreddit to have a conversation with people on a certain topic. So I might join my Alma matters subreddit to stay connected to the university the same way that I would subscribe to your newsletter.
00;14;20;09 - 00;14;39;23
Ross Simmonds
Right. And the alumni would join that subreddit to see what's going on with events, to see what's going on with the culture. All of those things happen today. Students join when they're about to apply, or if they have gotten in, they've gotten accepted. They share their acceptance letters. In these subreddits, people celebrate, they cheer when they graduate, they share pictures.
00;14;39;29 - 00;15;01;12
Ross Simmonds
All of these things are happening again inside of these subreddits. Now, the other thing that happens on Reddit is a bit of a self-regulated market, and what I love about this is that it is all maintained by the users. So upvotes are a thing that gives you karma. And I know we're using words that you might not understand.
00;15;01;15 - 00;15;22;10
Ross Simmonds
That's okay. You can dive deeper into the Reddit world and you'll learn these things. But karma is essentially brownie points, if you will, that say this is somebody who you can trust. This is somebody who adds value to the community, to the subreddit, to the world of Reddit, and they are allowed to comment and engage and you don't have to worry about them.
00;15;22;18 - 00;15;36;26
Ross Simmonds
So you want to build up karma with your profile so you can go into subreddits associated with your institution and have meaningful conversations. So that's a bit of the lay of the land for Reddit. That gives you a bit of an insight into how it works.
00;15;37;17 - 00;15;45;24
John Azoni
Yeah, super helpful. Okay, Love that. And we're going to get into some of those nuances here in our quick Lightning Q&A round here.
00;15;46;07 - 00;15;46;20
Ross Simmonds
Let's do it.
00;15;47;06 - 00;16;07;11
John Azoni
Before we get into the rest of the questions. All right. So we got Denise Nunley from Arizona Christian University. Denise asks, There are very few questions about her college on Reddit. I use Reddit answers once a month to take a look at what's being said and have started our college subreddit, just not sure what we should be doing with the subreddit.
00;16;07;18 - 00;16;09;10
John Azoni
So what would you say to Denise?
00;16;10;08 - 00;16;33;29
Ross Simmonds
Well, I appreciate this question. This is a great starting point. The fact that you have a presence and you have created a subreddit is exactly the first step. Now, the second step is to promote that subreddit with your existing students, alum, etc. So the same way you announced when you were on LinkedIn or Facebook back in the day, you're going to do that with your students, your your alumni, your your faculty.
00;16;33;29 - 00;16;53;20
Ross Simmonds
Everyone needs to know that you're on Reddit so they can join. Then you're going to if you own your own subreddit, you are a mod, and a mod is somebody who owns and kind of operates as the admin, if you will, for that community. You have a functionality in the back end of Reddit that is super powerful. It's called scheduling posts.
00;16;53;20 - 00;17;19;05
Ross Simmonds
And what I would do is I would be scheduling posts over the course of the next year, not the year quarter, let's say, of pre established content that I want to be fed into the Reddit machine. Some of these are going to be specifically about your campus, about your culture, about the institution, about your degrees, about your programs, and you're going to schedule these with SEO in mind.
00;17;19;13 - 00;17;37;18
Ross Simmonds
So you're going to create some that might be around our X, Y, Z program or whatever it might be. I don't know the institutions target. Like if you have a master's of theology, whatever it might be, maybe you're going to create a piece that's dedicated to that and you're going to schedule that to go to your subreddit in the future.
00;17;37;20 - 00;17;56;27
Ross Simmonds
And it's going to be a long form piece that talks about the story of students who got their masters and what that experience was like. So you're going to schedule those pieces, but you're also going to look at blog content that you might have published in the past. Any stories that you told in the past that generated lots of clicks, engagement and relevant conversations with your ideal audience.
00;17;57;06 - 00;18;20;12
Ross Simmonds
You're going to schedule those links as well to go into your community. You're just going to fill up the pipeline. So your subreddit always has stories being shared that will inspire conversation and also get people talking. And as that happens, the numbers go up. The last piece that I will share with this question would be you have to have a code, a code for the type of content that you want to share on Reddit.
00;18;20;17 - 00;18;41;23
Ross Simmonds
And I believe in a concept called the four E's, Educate, engage, entertain and empower. Every story that you tell should fall into one of those four categories. And if it does that, it educates people by providing them with the information they didn't have and entertains them by putting a smile on their face and engages them by striking up a conversation.
00;18;41;23 - 00;18;48;18
Ross Simmonds
Or it empowers students to feel good about the fact that they went to your school. Then those types of stories will win.
00;18;49;05 - 00;19;05;01
John Azoni
So you're saying stories. So that's categorically different to me. I think Then if you were to say, okay, I'm going to post like, you know, we have such and such this at our school, like, like very direct cell type stuff. Is that am I hearing that correctly?
00;19;05;11 - 00;19;26;09
Ross Simmonds
You're hearing me correctly. I think there's a mix of both. So I believe you need to have mostly stories on Reddit, but a few of the things should be cell oriented where you're trying to really drive value, where you're educating on a certain program or some initiative like that, but they're less on the mix. So I kind of always view marketing, kind of like investing.
00;19;26;09 - 00;19;46;01
Ross Simmonds
So you should never be super risky and go all in on stocks. You should never go all in on bonds, never go all in on crypto. You should kind of have a bit of a balance. In this case, I would say you want to be 75% stories and then 25% you're going into your own subreddit with a call to action driving back to your core offering.
00;19;46;13 - 00;20;11;02
John Azoni
Got it. Okay. I love that. All right. Next question, Jose, Tig from University of Chicago's Data Science Institute. She writes, I've been thinking about making a program specific Reddit account and responding to questions about the program only in the main use Chicago thread. I feel like it might come across weird if I were to respond to posts outside of the Chicago subreddit community like our grad admissions.
00;20;11;17 - 00;20;27;10
John Azoni
I think people have to be careful with how they are responding to questions, since I feel like most of the questions are coming from those wanting feedback from alumni or students currently in the program versus people who run the program. But I'd be curious to hear opinions on this kind of a nuanced question. But yeah.
00;20;27;10 - 00;20;52;07
Ross Simmonds
It's a it's the exact right question. And the reason is a lot of people play both strategies where on one side it's going into exclusively your university subreddit and responding to people in there. That's a perfect strategy. I think it makes absolute sense to do that. However, when you do want to expand your reach, I have no issues with you going into other subreddits and engaging as well.
00;20;52;15 - 00;21;18;05
Ross Simmonds
This brings new people into your community. However, when you go into these other subreddits you do have to be self less versus selfish, so you can't go in and just plug yourself or you're going to be on a fast track to getting banned. And I know I've been banned like 18 times from Reddit. So like there's no question that you can't go in and just start seeding your links in every comment saying, Oh, you should use us.
00;21;18;05 - 00;21;38;04
Ross Simmonds
We're the best school. Like that doesn't work. But you can give people options. Like you can say, Hey, it looks like you're on the West Coast. Here are some of the schools I know. Shameless plug. I worked for so-and-so, so of course I'm going to include us in the mix. Talk like a human, don't air ify it and sound very robotic and like you have to like, say, shameless plug.
00;21;38;04 - 00;22;00;12
Ross Simmonds
Like I will say like, be transparent but include yourself in the mentions. That is all good because you're adding value to the communities. And we've done this time and time again with our brands and our clients that we work with, and you would be surprised how many times we get people who reply back and say, Oh wow, thank you for actually getting Reddit and not showing up and just spamming yourself.
00;22;00;12 - 00;22;05;13
Ross Simmonds
Like that's the way that you want to do it. So go in and kill them with kindness and just add as much as value as possible.
00;22;05;23 - 00;22;13;13
John Azoni
Cool. That's great advice. Yeah, it's just the shameless self-promotion that's a perfect just, you know, loving. Always, always having your.
00;22;13;13 - 00;22;38;04
Ross Simmonds
Back from it. Exactly. And one more thing I would throw out is that you don't want to make every single post about the same thing. So, yes, you want to talk about yourself when people have questions about your programs. Yes. You want to go into other threads when people are asking about your programs, but you probably should also be in the our gymnastics subreddit where someone is saying, what's the gymnastics team like or what is the gym like?
00;22;38;10 - 00;22;58;13
Ross Simmonds
You want to go into some communities that have absolutely nothing to do with you selling and trying to get an applicant in. Still add value in those conversations. If someone's asking a funny question about homecoming, have some fun. Have fun with your accounts. Reddit is not a place to kind of be stuffy. That would be my other piece of advice.
00;22;59;00 - 00;23;21;13
John Azoni
Love it. All right. Rachel Patrick from Worcester Polytechnic Institute. She says, I've been seeing research that suggests Reddit is one of the biggest sources for A.I. slash L search, which you just talked about. We know prospective students are likely using AI in their college search. What strategy does Ross recommend for leveraging Reddit to get your university cited in A.I. results?
00;23;21;13 - 00;23;25;11
John Azoni
Anything anything additional that that we didn't address a few minutes ago?
00;23;25;11 - 00;23;51;01
Ross Simmonds
Yeah. I think the biggest piece would be to take into consideration the value of getting your students to use Reddit. Like if you have a program or any type of or alumni, right? Like let me put on my to B hat for a second and then hope that someone out there can get some value from this. So one of the strategies that we've tapped into with a lot of B2B brands is they oftentimes ask for reviews on sites like Cap, Tara Trust, Radius.
00;23;51;01 - 00;24;11;17
Ross Simmonds
These are like software sites and the clients who have started to ask for reviews on Reddit have seen a massive increase in both the sentiment and positive citations on Reddit. For people who are leaving positive reviews in their subreddit. Now, I don't know enough right now to say like, how do universities ask for reviews? Is that a thing?
00;24;11;17 - 00;24;42;04
Ross Simmonds
Maybe not. If so, I would 120% start finding ways to ask alumni or asking students to give a review of your experience going through this program. What was it like living on campus? Give us your feedback on Reddit in our subreddit, because what's going to happen is the alums will find those reviews and it will use that to inform the prospective student when they ask What's it like living on campus at such and such a university or college?
00;24;42;13 - 00;24;57;18
Ross Simmonds
And then that response will be the response. So try to encourage and inspire reviews would be one of my key pieces of advice. And then I'd also encourage people to run Reddit ads to increase the mind share on Reddit so people are more likely to talk about you because they're seeing you on that platform.
00;24;58;03 - 00;25;10;08
John Azoni
Oh, that's smart. I hadn't thought about reviews on Reddit, but yeah, if you're in the subreddit and someone's just kind of along the lines of that storytelling of just like, right, you know, telling a story of a great experience that they had, I think that's.
00;25;10;08 - 00;25;31;08
Ross Simmonds
One of the other pieces like. John That's a great point. So I know universities do a lot of work in storytelling, but people who have graduated, like alumni who have had success in sharing about their successes after they get awards and stuff, repurpose those stories that live on your site. But for Reddit in your institution's subreddit, I think that would be absolute gold as well.
00;25;31;22 - 00;25;52;19
John Azoni
Cool. All right. Last Q&A question here. Sharlene David from University of Michigan asks if you have any recommendations around Reddit for teams of one, this is this is a huge one for my audience, especially when you get to these like the smaller colleges where it's like maybe one marketing director, right? You know, to rule them all.
00;25;53;15 - 00;25;53;21
Ross Simmonds
Yeah.
00;25;54;06 - 00;26;02;02
John Azoni
Tough. What would you recommend as like high leverage, low lift kind of work to do on Reddit?
00;26;02;02 - 00;26;25;01
Ross Simmonds
The number one thing that I would try to do if it's available is create your own subreddit and own it. Like just make sure that you have that because if someone else creates it, if a student creates it, it's very difficult to get that back. So this is a bit of a brand reputation management and like ownership, like making like PR crisis avoidance strategy, but create and own your own subreddit.
00;26;25;04 - 00;26;53;13
Ross Simmonds
That's the number one thing I wish every listener would go and do ASAP, because if your subreddit is created, you have very close to no chance of getting it back unless it gets completely ignored for multiple years. And then you can request access from Reddit to get it. But it's difficult. The second piece of lightweight effort that I would advise would be to actually install on your site a read a pixel and run a small budget of remarketing through Reddit.
00;26;53;21 - 00;27;15;07
Ross Simmonds
And the reason why I would encourage you to do this is because if Reddit is one of the top sites in the world, it's likely that your audience is going to read it when they're making decisions on which university, what campus would Stewart like, where they should go. So by running remarketing ads, you're targeting somebody who already considered you and you're only running ads against the people who are on your website.
00;27;15;13 - 00;27;26;11
Ross Simmonds
So it could be a stakeholder, it could be a a parent, it could be a guidance counselor, it could be any of those people. And if you run remarketing ads against those people, you're more likely to be top of mind. So that would be one of my tips.
00;27;26;23 - 00;27;43;01
John Azoni
Love it. All right. That was fun. We don't do the Q&A section very often, but I thought, you know, we're approaching 100 episodes here. And so, you know, so I thought, you know, it's a good this is a good time to sort of shift a little bit and get some audience inclusion here. So thanks for thanks for hearing me there.
00;27;43;07 - 00;28;04;23
John Azoni
All right. So higher Ed, we experience this all the time. Just higher. It's generally just like incredibly risk averse, 100%. And, you know, everyone's just afraid of anything. Someone saying something wrong. It's just like designed by committee, like all this kind of stuff. What are some fears that people have about Reddit that that might be, you know, preventing them from really embracing this?
00;28;04;23 - 00;28;10;13
John Azoni
What would be your advice? I'm curious also to hear you've been banned 18 times. So.
00;28;10;13 - 00;28;29;20
Ross Simmonds
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think the fears are real. Like Reddit is one of the most raw, real places left on the internet where if you go there with the intention of plugging a bunch of links, of extracting value instead of giving it, you're going to be banned. And that's why I was banned, like when I went into our technology subreddit back in the day.
00;28;29;27 - 00;28;49;00
Ross Simmonds
I took all of my blog posts that I had written about Taco Bell marketing, about social media, about Reddit, and I started to just see links. I think I tried to submit 20 links in 20 minutes and I was banned very, very quickly. And then I got a new account, did the same thing, kept getting banned, is like, Why am I getting banned from Reddit?
00;28;49;00 - 00;29;10;19
Ross Simmonds
And it turns out the reason is simple. You need to understand the stories in the content that your audience wants and then give it to them. So instead of going in, being selfish and just saying, This is what I want, I want referral traffic from Reddit, you have to go into your subreddit, your campus, your universities, subreddit, whatever it might be, sought the content by top posts.
00;29;10;27 - 00;29;32;19
Ross Simmonds
And when you do that, what you're going to see is the best content that has ever existed in this community that got people talking. And when you see that, you should be able to put two and two together around, okay, what type of stories are these folks resonating with? Oh, they like memes. They like interesting stories, they like in-depth the assets, whatever it might be, and then you give that back to them.
00;29;32;28 - 00;29;48;09
Ross Simmonds
So study the community before you go in. I know the biggest thing that gets a lot of folks afraid of Reddit is that people have no filter on Reddit. They will say anything. This is going to happen, folks, whether you like it or not.
00;29;48;13 - 00;29;48;29
John Azoni
Whether you like, you.
00;29;48;29 - 00;30;18;02
Ross Simmonds
Can't control that message. You can influence it, though. I would rather be able to influence a message than not have anything to do with it at all. Because the stories are happening. We can put up our blinders and pretend, Oh, there's not 50,000 people in our university subreddit talking negatively about this one. Prof. Every day. Okay, We can pretend that we can pretend that's not happening or we can acknowledge it's happening and we can try to shift things around.
00;30;18;10 - 00;30;41;06
Ross Simmonds
I lean towards that. So that's really the key part of it is like you can pretend that nothing is happening, but it's still going on. And I think the best thing we've worked with a few universities in Reddit marketing strategies. One of the things that has given a lot of calm amongst the chaos is community management guidelines. So this is how we show up on Reddit.
00;30;41;12 - 00;31;03;24
Ross Simmonds
These are the types of threads that we do engage in. These are the threads that we avoid completely, and this is how we manage that. So having that type of a structure provides a lot of institutions with a lot of clarity on this is how we show up and then they can even bring on someone who's a Reddit specialist to lead that, or they can have a community manager lead that, that type of thing.
00;31;04;09 - 00;31;22;20
John Azoni
That's really smart. Yeah. Having just having some guidelines and yeah, you know, kind of keeping everyone in line. So, you know, you're mostly in B, B to B and you said you worked with some, some universities. So your answer to this can be either or, But can you tell me a story of an opportunity on Reddit that was missed Could be by oh, I've got major brands.
00;31;22;23 - 00;31;27;14
John Azoni
Yeah, smaller organization. How could that organization have flipped that into an asset?
00;31;27;29 - 00;31;53;13
Ross Simmonds
So this one, we did flip it, but it was long after the opportunity had arose. So we were working with this partner and they have a ton of great valuable educational, sometimes historic content, like a lot of universities. Like, imagine that they're publishing journals, they're publishing reports this one institution had this landing page in this asset that talked about a moment in history that was significant to their campus culture.
00;31;53;17 - 00;32;17;11
Ross Simmonds
And it was cool. Every year for the last four years, they had a traffic spike of 125,000 people on a single day going to this page. Nobody talked about it. Nobody at the campus knew. No one knew why. So we did research into Google Analytics and it turned out that it was going viral. And this subreddit called today, I learned on Reddit.
00;32;17;27 - 00;32;46;25
Ross Simmonds
So every year someone would share this link on Reddit and hundreds of people, thousands of people would be talking about it, having conversations about it, discussing it, celebrating it. And we were like, You folks know that people really like this thing that you did back in like 1962 that no one talks about. They're like, Really? We're like, why don't you create a Facebook ad or campaign around this concept and see what it does?
00;32;47;09 - 00;33;15;26
Ross Simmonds
They did it 900,000 plus views after and now they can rinse and repeat that same strategy. Some people are sitting on cultural and audience gold that they don't even realize because the conversations are happening on Reddit. Reddit has such a pulse on what people care about that institutions and organizations that have published tons of great information are just sleeping on things that people care about that they don't even know about.
00;33;16;02 - 00;33;28;04
Ross Simmonds
So that was cool. That was one of the most rewarding projects I even was ever on. It was a few years back, but it was rooted in Reddit research that then goes multichannel or outside of the platform, and I think a lot of brands are sitting on that.
00;33;28;17 - 00;33;50;11
John Azoni
That's interesting. Yeah, and I really like those Reddit threads that today I learned one of our clients is University of Chicago, and I was in Chicago on a shoot there and I don't know why I Googled this or something, but for whatever reason I found out that the city of Chicago was lifted. Like interest, like a lot like, like a couple of feet or something like that.
00;33;50;12 - 00;34;05;29
John Azoni
It's something about like it was like flooding or something like that from Lake Michigan or something like that. So they they engineered this way to lift the entire city. And I'm just like, that was a brilliant like today I learned that, you know, stuff like that where it's like this sort of like.
00;34;06;01 - 00;34;07;14
Ross Simmonds
Right. Did you know the.
00;34;07;17 - 00;34;08;00
John Azoni
Answer.
00;34;08;00 - 00;34;10;11
Ross Simmonds
Is yeah, yeah. Up in the air.
00;34;10;11 - 00;34;31;12
John Azoni
Yeah, yeah. I'm like, I don't even know how. I mean, it's like if you want to teach a University of Chicago, you know, if they had like a I'm sure they do like engineering, you know, things like, here's an example from our yeah, from our city because that's a, that's amazing. I don't even know how you even know how they, like, move a building like that.
00;34;31;12 - 00;34;48;23
John Azoni
Yeah, the house that my mom lives in is the oldest house in Troy, Michigan, just outside of Detroit. It was like this tall house. Yeah. Where you'd have to, like, pay the toll to, like, keep going down the Rochester road. And eventually they picked it up and moved it. And so now it's like this historical site.
00;34;48;26 - 00;34;50;19
Ross Simmonds
That's so cool. That's what.
00;34;50;19 - 00;34;52;18
John Azoni
I'm like. I'm like, Yeah, how do you just move a how do you.
00;34;52;18 - 00;34;53;26
Ross Simmonds
Do that for a whole city? Yeah.
00;34;54;17 - 00;34;54;24
John Azoni
Yeah.
00;34;56;04 - 00;34;57;17
Ross Simmonds
That's awesome. I love that.
00;34;57;28 - 00;35;18;06
John Azoni
So, Ross, you've advocated for organizations have they're on subreddit. So our friend Denise from the Q&A has taken that step. What would be your action plan for her for the next 3 to 6 months in terms of habits she can put in place to build consistency and make steady progress? I feel like the question really is like, what would be the step by step?
00;35;18;06 - 00;35;20;16
John Azoni
Like do this than do this, than do this?
00;35;20;16 - 00;35;36;22
Ross Simmonds
Yeah. So the first thing that I would recommend is that you take a step back and don't create anything because the first thing that you're probably going to want to do after listening to this is start creating a bunch of content. And that content might get You bet. So what I would actually do is go and identify 5 to 10 subreddits where your audience is.
00;35;36;29 - 00;35;52;13
Ross Simmonds
If you don't know where they are. There's this tool called Spark Turo, where you can upload your university's domain and it will tell you what subreddits your visitors are more likely to visit. So then once you've gotten that, you're going to see the top subreddits and I want you to go into those subreddits, sort the content by top posts and study them.
00;35;52;13 - 00;36;14;23
Ross Simmonds
You're looking for trends. You're seeing which content got the most upvotes, the most comments, the most likes, all of that stuff. And that's going to provide you with insight into the types of stories your audience in those different subreddits. Then your account is going to join those subreddits and you're going to do something outside of just posting. You're going to cross posts so you'll share content in those subreddits and then you'll cross-posted in your own subreddit.
00;36;14;28 - 00;36;34;23
Ross Simmonds
But you're not just going to end there. You're going to go into those communities and you're going to add value in the comments and people who are asking questions. You're going to do this over the course of a month. It's not something that you do in one day at 15 minutes to your calendar every day for a month where you're just going to do Reddit activity and some of it is going to be pre-scheduled.
00;36;34;23 - 00;36;53;18
Ross Simmonds
So you don't actually have to do it every day. You're going to schedule content from your website by doing an analysis of your most viral, most visited, most trafficked, most shared content. If you don't know what that is, go to Google Analytics or use a tool called Bas Sumo, which will show you any of the URLs that you have published that have generated a lot of shares on Reddit.
00;36;53;27 - 00;37;16;19
Ross Simmonds
You're then going to schedule those to go into your subreddit and then you're going to, again, encourage people from outside of your Reddit through ads or through your newsletter, through social to join your university subreddit, rinse and repeat that for 12 months. And I would say with relative confidence, you're going to see a shift in the sentiment around your institution on Reddit.
00;37;16;26 - 00;37;25;04
Ross Simmonds
You're probably going to see a lot of threads that you started or contributed to cited in the LMS, as well as showing up in Google. And that's the playbook.
00;37;25;13 - 00;37;47;03
John Azoni
That can seem overwhelming. But I love what you said about 15 minutes every day. So I have I have this little analog timer that just sits on my desk now. It's like 15 bucks on Amazon and that's that's me on LinkedIn. I set a timer for 30 minutes every morning with my coffee and I respond to messages. I reach out to new people, I comment on people stuff.
00;37;47;12 - 00;38;06;07
John Azoni
It's just like I think just that having one block of time where you're just going to be in the the world of that platform and figure something out or just move some stuff forward. Yeah, is huge. At least that's how my brain works. I'm just like, I just like the safety of knowing I don't have to have it all figured out right now.
00;38;06;07 - 00;38;19;28
John Azoni
And I don't have to, like, hope that I'm going to be consistent. Yeah, you know, make a really big push and then like, hope that the habit sticks or something like that. But if it's like, just take a small bite every day and figure it out within that time frame, 100%.
00;38;19;28 - 00;38;37;02
Ross Simmonds
Yeah. Like calendar management in this world today is so important. Like you have to be able to say, I'm willing to invest because that's what it is like. Folks think that they're just like wasting time already know this is an investment of your time. You're investing in this platform to create content for the benefit of the university, for the institution.
00;38;37;08 - 00;38;51;26
Ross Simmonds
So you're investing 15 minutes, 15 minutes, over 300, 200 days is a lot of time. Like that's a lot of invested time. But it's all it takes is to block that into your calendar and the compounding rewards can be significant.
00;38;52;10 - 00;39;04;08
John Azoni
And you mentioned in this should avoid just like posting you know right of hosting content right away is there anything else that you would recommend that that she avoid in that first I don't know, three, three months or something like that?
00;39;04;08 - 00;39;25;17
Ross Simmonds
Just yeah, in the first month I would actually avoid links. I would avoid sharing links in that first month because links scream, Oh, you're being selfish unless it's a link to like a funny YouTube video or a gif or a cat or something. Like people will be okay with that. But if it's to your site, if it's an institution page, like people are going to be a little bit sketched by that.
00;39;25;17 - 00;39;36;06
Ross Simmonds
So first month I wouldn't share any of those links. I would try to just build my karma up in those early days and then after my karma is strong, start thinking about sharing links and distributing those as well.
00;39;36;22 - 00;39;58;28
John Azoni
Got it. Love it. All right. Let's talk about Reddit as a distribution platform. So, yeah, you know, Josie, let's say Josie from you, Chicago's Data Science Institute from our Q&A here, has just created a video that's, say, an alumni spotlight, and she wants prospective students to see it. So is it as simple as her just posting to the school's subreddit?
00;39;59;08 - 00;40;12;08
John Azoni
Should she write something that leads into the video? So there's some like zero click value? Like what's something like how do you handle that? Like, I've got a piece, I want to get people to see it. How do you handle distribution on Reddit?
00;40;12;17 - 00;40;36;04
Ross Simmonds
Yeah, there's two ways. One is the organic and one is the page. So on the organic side, you're very close. Like, yes, you're going to share that video link directly in this area where the university is. However, you're not just going to share the link and walk away. You are going to add context. So you're going to write a bit of a story around why the video exists, what its intention is, tell the story a bit with written text so it's something that can be easily crumble.
00;40;36;12 - 00;40;54;15
Ross Simmonds
You're then going to pin that in your subreddit. So if you own this subreddit, I want you to pin that post so people who visit it for the first time are meeting it. Kind of like a billboard where they see that PIN video, they watch it, they consume it, and then they make a decision of whether or not they want to join your community in your subreddit as well.
00;40;54;23 - 00;41;17;25
Ross Simmonds
Now, the other piece of this is or paid. So you do need to consider running paid distribution to reach other communities. So if you are actively just running your own subreddit but you want to show up in a subreddit for our technology, if you're a technology institute or pharmacy, if you're going after pharmacies, you can run ads in these communities to read those, reach those people as well.
00;41;18;00 - 00;41;23;24
Ross Simmonds
Or even a state specific subreddit would probably be a brilliant play for a lot of you as well.
00;41;24;06 - 00;41;41;09
John Azoni
Got it. All right. That makes sense. Okay. So for people looking to dip their toes into Reddit for the first time, I'm really big on like, you know, where do you go to learn? Yeah. Like what's what's one subreddit that you would encourage marketers to follow right now? Higher ed specific or not.
00;41;41;25 - 00;42;07;13
Ross Simmonds
So Reddit for business is actually really good. I would recommend that people go to Reddit for business, which is their subreddit that is dedicated to talking about running ads, talking about marketing, etc. to learn a little bit more about how that application of Reddit for business or institutions work. So I joined that subreddit. You can also look at our marketing, you can look at it, our big SEO, those subreddits.
00;42;07;13 - 00;42;29;25
Ross Simmonds
There's a lot of marketing oriented subreddits specifically around Reddit. I think the R Reddit for marketing subreddit is number one. I have a chapter in my book Create Once Distribute Forever that is dedicated to Reddit as well that I would encourage folks to check out. And I'd say don't hesitate to embrace Reddit in the Reddit way. So if you have a question, go to Reddit for business and ask the question.
00;42;30;05 - 00;42;38;29
Ross Simmonds
Marketers who use Reddit for business will respond to you and you'll be able to get a great taste of what Reddit is like by just being in that community.
00;42;39;11 - 00;42;48;10
John Azoni
Cool. Love it. And when we say you're saying our marketing are Reddit for business, we're saying the letter R slash, you know, marketing.
00;42;48;10 - 00;43;18;21
Ross Simmonds
Great clarification. Yes. So whenever you're talking about our marketing, our big SEO, our mean subreddit, so Reddit dot com slash R slash Reddit for business, that would be a subreddit domain. If I'm talking about an individual user account, it would be Reddit dot com slash you slash R Simmons And that's my account. So that's the difference our mean subreddit U means user.
00;43;19;04 - 00;43;23;05
John Azoni
Got it. Okay. Yeah. Sometimes that doesn't come across for people that are just not obvious.
00;43;23;05 - 00;43;40;00
Ross Simmonds
It is. Reddit has a whole new language that you have to learn. So that would be my other piece of advice to everyone is like, be gentle on yourself. You're not going to pick up all the lingo. Probably took me a year and a half before I knew what Reddit gold was. Even though I was getting it, I had no clue what it was.
00;43;40;04 - 00;43;47;04
Ross Simmonds
And I know you're probably like, What is Reddit gold chill? Just you'll find out soon. You'll find out someday. You don't need to know everything right away.
00;43;47;20 - 00;44;05;05
John Azoni
So on a personal note, so we often learn the most from from failure. Can you tell me about a moment when something didn't go the way you expected on Reddit, but maybe it ended up teaching you something that shaped the way you work or the way that you advise your clients? Now?
00;44;05;05 - 00;44;24;17
Ross Simmonds
Yeah, John when I first got on Reddit, I thought I could win by sharing good content, and my content on my site was good content. I was just repurposing it and taking the links and sharing it. You know, all of these subreddits thinking, of course they're going to like it. People on Hacker News like it, people on X like it, people on LinkedIn like it.
00;44;24;17 - 00;44;50;22
Ross Simmonds
Why wouldn't Redditors like my content? And after getting banned multiple times, I realized the idea that I've shared with your listeners today, you need to sort content in these individual subreddits by top posts so you can understand the types of content they want. When I did that in these communities, I realized none of the top poser links. So these people actually hate links in these communities.
00;44;50;28 - 00;45;13;25
Ross Simmonds
Some communities love it, some communities want links. Why? I say every subreddit you have to do this sort technique to understand what content market fit looks like within this community for them. For the group that I wanted to connect with, entrepreneurs, marketers, tech founders, etc., they wanted all of the texts from my blog posts copied and pasted into Reddit so they didn't have to leave the platform.
00;45;13;25 - 00;45;36;16
Ross Simmonds
When I started doing that, I started getting karma. I started to get gold. I started to have threads that had hundreds of comments. I started to win on the platform, so my advice out of this failure, which was lots of blocks I had, I had like four months where I couldn't even log in to read it and I was like close to winning my fantasy football championship and I lost it because I couldn't get into Reddit anymore.
00;45;37;03 - 00;45;44;20
Ross Simmonds
Like, my biggest piece of advice to folks is truly to embrace the idea of studying a community before you jump into it.
00;45;45;05 - 00;46;03;15
John Azoni
Yeah, zero zero click content. I feel like there's there's a lot of people in marketing that will, you know, are still out here saying like, Hey, go, go check out my blog post. Here's a link. Right? And not understanding the value of just like putting everything in the post because it's like, well, we want people that end up on our website.
00;46;03;16 - 00;46;10;10
John Azoni
It's like, Yeah. And it's like, well, do you want people to get the value off your site? Yeah, So, so true.
00;46;10;20 - 00;46;34;14
Ross Simmonds
And I think it's the same thing on Reddit. That was the biggest lesson. It was like people want to have it right here. So I had to change my behavior and instead of just trying to send them to the URL, I had to take all the value deploy it. They're still include at the bottom, like, Hey, if you want more, check out this link or I'll give them three tips instead of five and then say if you want the other to just check on my website.
00;46;34;14 - 00;46;45;26
Ross Simmonds
I break it all down. It's so you can find a way to still get that visitor. I like the visitor because you can get that email subscription and then you can nurture the relationship. You know, all of us do. But that's kind of the thinking around it.
00;46;46;11 - 00;46;58;10
John Azoni
Yeah. Yeah. Smart as a marketer in general, you know, stepping outside of Reddit a little bit, what's an area where you are actively learning right now? What resources have been helpful to you in that learning?
00;46;59;02 - 00;47;29;29
Ross Simmonds
Yeah, so Reddit has been helpful in the but I have been spending a lot of time better understanding video. I've been trying to really crack the code around video. I think video is one of the last formats that is difficult to replicate with API. And because of that I believe we're seeing a necessity from the market of seeing humans more human and people want to connect with people and thus I'm all in on video moving forward.
00;47;29;29 - 00;47;41;19
Ross Simmonds
I think it's a it's the last frontier for A.I. to replicate. It's getting close. It's not there yet, but I think video is still that the closest that we have as people to stay human to human.
00;47;42;01 - 00;47;57;21
John Azoni
Yeah, for sure. It is getting and I've been I've been experimenting with Sora too, and it is getting wild. It's getting pretty crazy. And I'm like, Man, it's still not quite there. It's not like it's quite usable, but it's scarily close. It is.
00;47;57;21 - 00;48;19;18
Ross Simmonds
Scary. It is scary. I think the one that is very interesting with those platforms or even with video in general is like it's still very difficult to replicate the rawness in real time of like a live or somebody just sending you an off the cuff video 1 to 1. Like that's still very difficult, but we're going through a wild time.
00;48;19;23 - 00;48;21;09
Ross Simmonds
It's cool, but it's wild.
00;48;21;17 - 00;48;30;16
John Azoni
Yeah, for sure. All right, man, we'll put a bow on it on this Reddit discussion for us. How would you sum up your advice here to our audience of Marcum leaders?
00;48;31;03 - 00;48;55;15
Ross Simmonds
Yeah, my biggest piece of advice is, folks, over the last few years, maybe even decades, you've invested a ton of money, time, energy in creating robust content engines. You've told great stories, you've created great landing pages, blog posts, etc., and you're sitting on literal gold. Some of that content is collecting dust. The best posts from 2018, 2019, 2021, 2024 shouldn't just collect dust.
00;48;55;19 - 00;49;14;26
Ross Simmonds
It should be repackaged, repurposed, ready to fight. If you will, and then given to the community that already probably wants it is maybe already talking about it and give it to them regularly and then apply that same thinking to every other channel that you have. That would be my biggest piece of advice. It would be don't be afraid of read it.
00;49;14;26 - 00;49;22;13
Ross Simmonds
Be afraid of the stories that you invested in collecting dust when they could actually be collecting more applications and results for the institution.
00;49;22;28 - 00;49;31;05
John Azoni
Love that. Perfect. All right, man. Well, tell us, where can people connect with you? I know you got a book you got. Yeah, a couple of companies. Yeah. Yeah. All the things.
00;49;31;12 - 00;49;50;20
Ross Simmonds
Yeah. So easy to find. You can find me on LinkedIn if you want to get connected, just have him. Rob Simmons. But I also run Foundation. Foundation is a digital marketing firm. You can go to a foundation ICO to learn more about us and we have an entire page dedicated to higher ed. If folks want to learn more about the services that we offer and how we work with higher ed companies on a day to day basis.
00;49;50;24 - 00;50;06;26
Ross Simmonds
And then of course, as I mentioned, distribution dot I, a software that I've been building to help brands spread their stories. And then lastly, if folks really do enjoy a good book, create once distribute forever, I'd encourage them to check what they read. But before we wrap, John, I want to say thank you to you and congrats on almost getting to 100 episodes.
00;50;06;26 - 00;50;19;18
Ross Simmonds
That's a huge accomplishment. Anybody who can create 100 episodes of anything is doing something right and adding a lot of value to their industry, their communities. So thank you for doing that. And yeah, I appreciate you having me on.
00;50;19;27 - 00;50;35;07
John Azoni
Yeah, man, thanks for being here. It's great, great honor to have you here. And I it's one of those episodes where I'm like, personally curious. I'm just like, I love this is this is perfect because I'm just like, you know, I'm just like, thinking of all the questions straight from my heart, all the same questions that I personally have.
00;50;35;07 - 00;50;38;09
John Azoni
So that's, yeah, thanks for being here. Is great chatting with you.
00;50;38;09 - 00;50;38;28
Ross Simmonds
Thanks for having me.
