Is Talent Management About Managing Talent, or Content?

Depending on where you are at the table in the influencer marketing space, your meal is slightly different. Creators can range from nano-influencers who barely consider themselves influencers or creators at all … to those who achieve true celebrity status and have full production teams they employ to create all that content while they live off their personality and audience connection.

For brands, you can be super nimble with your budget and work with the former of those. You can go big and work with the latter. But most find themselves somewhere in the middle jockeying around a mix of small and medium creator partners with a few big ones popping in from time to time.

That same range is found in the software space. You can find influencer marketing solutions for free or close to free. And you can also sign up for enterprise solutions that run thousands of dollars per month.

Then there’s the talent management segment. You don’t find many who work with creators under around 40-50,000 followers. But there is a huge difference in those who work with that level and those who manage six figure brand deals with the biggest stars on social media. 

Temima Shames falls into that last category. The 24-year-old former child actor started Next Step Talent at age 21. Its employee roster is all people under 30. And they are responsible for amplifying creators to become some of the most followed influencers in the world. Their roster includes a bunch of Gen-Z creators I’ve never heard of, but that’s what makes the next tidbit most impressive. 

That roster has more than six billion YouTube views, one debuted an album at No. 7 on Spotify. Another was TikTok’s biggest POV or point-of-view star. They had talent featured in YouTube’s Black Creator Class of 2023 as well.

I’ll drop a link to their roster page in the show notes so you can go see who they are. I didn’t recognize any of them, but I’m certainly not their target audience. 

Temima knows how to shape content creators into influencers with massive followings. I asked her to come on the show to share some of that knowledge with us, as well as talk about the impending threats to the big influencers businesses as brands recoil from inflated prices and an abundance of UGC.

She’s a smart one, gang. Get ready to learn a thing or two from the queen of influencer talent, Temima Shames today on the show. 

This episode of Winfluence is presented by CIPIO.ai. We are helping brands transform their digital marketing with user-generated content videos and images at scale. Come see us at CIPIO.ai. If you want me to personally show you the platform and how we can solve your digital marketing performance problems with high-performing UGC, just go to jasonfalls.co/cipio … fill out that form and I’ll personally set up time to chat with you.

Find show notes for this episode at jasonfalls.co/temimashames.

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