Meet Stephanie Michele of SocialBling in DTLA

Today we’d like to introduce you to Stephanie Michele.

Stephanie, please share your story with us. How did you get to where you are today?
When I was growing up, all I wanted to be was a fashion designer. I loved (and still love) seeing how people express themselves with what they are wearing. I went to college for fashion design but ended up getting a marketing degree. At the time, I realized I didn’t know anyone in fashion and I did not see a clear path to meeting Donna Karen, (still one of my professional heroes to this day) so I began to move in the direction of where friends and colleagues were guiding me to and this was advertising agency work in Dallas. After working retail jobs, I landed my first professional job as a production manager for an agency called M/C/C. Production work at ad agencies is stressful. You are responsible for everything but have very little authority to implement change where it is needed. And where it was needed most of the time was the space between what account managers wanted and/or promised their clients and what creative services wanted to spend in terms of time and money to produce their best work.

These two groups of people hardly saw eye to eye. I spent most of my time figuring out how to communicate with each group to get them on the same page. I did not know it at the time but the emphasis on efficiencies in communication would end up being one of my areas of expertise. During my early agency days, I also started talking to my colleagues about how consumers were learning how to tune-out advertising messages and how we (marketers) would need to learn how to leverage the personal relationships of consumers in order to influence buying decisions. This was before social networks existed. When LinkedIn and Facebook became a thing, I knew exactly where it was going.

After M/C/C my career took off. I moved into account services and became a principle in a boutique agency. I worked for JCPenney’s corporate office and ended up at the age of 26, the youngest and only female executive as the VP of Marketing for a chain of men’s shoe stores in the southwest. Before this time, I had tolerated my share of “me too” incidents but in this work culture, I experienced them daily from the owner of the company. I don’t remember talking to anyone about it, I tried to ignore him and concentrate on doing great work but at some point I had enough and started standing up for myself. I would ask him to stop or tell him, “That is not appropriate.” He did not appreciate my new voice and even though my work was produced sales and desirable results, he was building up a lot of resentment towards me. One day after returning from one of his infamous “liquid lunches,” he interrupted a meeting I was having with my staff. We had a few back and forth words and then he insisted I was being disrespectful to him and he fired me. Later, I was told I was not fired to which I replied, “I will eat bugs before I will ever tolerate this kind of behavior again, I am not going back.”

This was a pivotal turning point in my career. I had worked with top fortune 500 companies and fashion brands that I loved. But it was no longer about the project, brand or company for me. It was about the people. I started my first marketing consulting firm in 2000. It was called iConsonance. Consonance means harmony. I was only interested in doing marketing work for companies that valued and honored their relationships. Relationships with vendors, employees, shareholders, and customers. Over time I developed several strategies, tools, and training programs that measured and tracked relational wellness in the work culture, customer service, and increased profitability due to the lifetime value of loyal customers. During this time, I also hosted my own branded events where I would make strategic introductions for people, both for personal and business reasons. I had a formula for removing the awkward and boring parts out of networking events. The Dallas Business Journal called me a “Relationship Broker” which still resonates with me today. I love making introductions for people.

In 2005, I moved to Los Angeles with a lot of heavy reflection around what would be next for me. I wanted to do more personal relational work. I saw a tremendous gap in terms of what every person needs to understand about relating and communication and what many “Relationship Experts” were talking about. There are many people talking about intimate relationships, dating, online dating, and issues in marriage. But hardly anyone talks about relating in everyday life, all the opportunities to learn, experiment, and practice communication in ways that bring wellness into our lives. In the first five years of being in Los Angeles, my time was consumed by relational learning. I took a lot of workshops, read books, experimented with holistic healings, worked with personal coaches and did various other activities to expand my spiritual horizon.

When I started my new marketing firm, SocialBling in 2009, I had many new tools and offerings to help my business clients. I specialize in retention marketing strategies and developing brand identities that are specifically catered to a desired target demographic. In order to do this, I am always emerged in behavioral data and research. One correlation I have noticed – companies who have a hard time understanding how to leverage social media to their benefit are most likely to have a work culture that is resistant to change where people are not encouraged to take a risk, learn, collaborate and improve on methods of communication. Out of necessity to help my clients, I developed a proprietary way of measuring workplace cultural pains with actionable procedural plans and wellness activities to improve the quality of learning and understanding in the workplace. As a result, relationships with customers dramatically improved via customer service and marketing engagement. Better employee morale also improved quality of work and motivation to innovate. The tangible results of these programs are trackable via increased sales and cost savings in human resources (less turnover) and marketing spending. Acquiring a new customer can cost five times more than retaining an existing customer. When you increase customer retention by as little as 5%, expect to see at least a 25% increase in profits. The success rate of selling to a customer you already have is 60-70%, while the success rate of selling to a new customer is 5-20%.

In 2016, I finally launched my personal body of work with a new website, (stephaniemichele.com) and a YouTube show called, Relatable with Stephanie Michele. I say “finally” because it took me more than ten years to do it. In those ten years, I struggled with and finally defeated the perfectionist living inside me. I was holding myself back waiting for the perfect idea, offering, and time. I realized that giving love to that “work in progress” struggle is the thing that I stand for the most. I don’t believe in calling myself a relationship expert, yet my toolbox is full of communication and relating tools that have significantly increased the quality of my own life and the people I have been fortunate enough to share and use these tools with. I strongly believe, life-changing relational wellness comes from a commitment to grow and learn each day. I think life is so much harder to grasp when we seek definitive answers from a world that is consistently evolving. When we can find a way to evolve with it and each other, that is where the magic and beauty is. Each week on Relatable, I invite people into this evolution by offering a social challenge of the week to encourage new experiences and relational learning. We live-stream the show because I believe most of the digital content we consume is unhealthy for us because of how much sensationalized editing is done to it to elicit anxiety, fear, and more consumption. I refer to this type of content as, fast-food content/fast-food relating – It will fill you up but offers no relational nourishment.

Doing an hour-long, unedited digital media talk show with a commitment to vulnerability and slowing down to make time to relate with people is extremely counterculture to how most of us live in Los Angeles. We let the fear of missing out get in the way of understanding it is ok to need each other. We reward for bad behavior instead of honoring each other with genuine compliments, respect, and loyalty. We push away feelings and joke about other people’s feelings. There is a lot of pain in our social environment that at some point, we won’t be able to tolerate anymore. I am confident if you took the 121 shows to-date and locked them in time capsule with a note, “Humans of the Future: The knowledge you are searching for in terms of wellness and how to thrive together is here,” future generations will get it but I can’t help but wonder, “Will it be too late?” I believe our connection and curiosity for each other is just as vital to our wellbeing as eating organic fruits and vegetables. Trends towards division, quick judgment and fast disregard are not just a threat against communities of people who are marginalized, it is a threat to humanity.

Contact Info:

• Website: http://www.socialbling.com/
• Email: guestservices@socialbling.com
• Instagram: instagram.com/relatewithsteph
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/lovemorenow
• Other: https://www.stephaniemichele.com

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