Miami's Joe Casanova Launches Furlough: The Next Era of Influence

Miami’s Joe Casanova Launches Furlough: The Next Era of Influence

You’re either best to market or the first to market in the world of social media I would choose the latter.

Whenever a new social media channel comes to life it’s usually the early adopters that made the most of it. In the case of Instagram during its infancy, organic reach was much better in comparison to today.

We had the privilege to sit down with the man known as the influencer whisperer, Joe Casanova, the founder and visionary behind Furlough™.

When social media was really getting off the ground there were no laws behind it because it was so new. It was similar to when Uber was breaking tons of laws penetrating new markets.

At first, they were hiding under the radar until people started realizing how much money was flowing through this market. The same goes for social media. Social media is like the wild, wild west, and these influencers are doing whatever they want by following their own rules.

Influencers are charging monthly subscriptions to their “premium” Snap (private Snap) and not reporting taxes on it. This created the trending hashtag known as #thotaudit where their followers began reporting the influencer’s premium snap revenue to the IRS.

If a financial transaction takes place between a business and a personality that endorses a product it is no longer a testimonial but a paid ad. Influencers have been getting paid by brands and not disclosing it to their audience.

The governing bodies are beginning to crack down and forcing influencers to use the hashtags #ad and #paidad to disclose this information.

Joe explains to us that as different as social media is today as it was two years ago, so it will be the different two years from now. This is where he shared with us what he is doing with Furlough.

Joe Casanova coins Furlough as the Next Era of Influence. Social media is simply comprised of content creators mostly showcasing their lifestyle. He explained that in order to have a truly authentic audience who genuinely believes in you, your brand, your products and services, they must genuinely know who you are.

Furlough strives to give depth to the modern day influencers. Joe first got his start helping influencers such as @lynaritaa and @iamalexismichaud. He originally helped Lyna Perez scale her presence from inception to more than 3 million followers. He created multiple channels to help her monetize along with products and services.

When Joe started working with Alexis, his full-service agency, CXN Collective, was taking off, working with brands like David Beckham’s Soccer team Inter Miami CF and Prive Luxury Rentals, a global high-end short term vacation rentals company.

He leveraged the resources of the agency to build out a website that was able to capture the audience data along with creating an email list and offering her audience the ability to text her.

This captured the audience data which will allow the influencer to text or email their audience whenever they have a new post (since they complain so much about the algorithm) and offer brands more services like advertising to their audience.

The CXN Collective was doing some interesting work with an underutilized social media platform by influencers known as Linkedin.

He would have targeted campaigns aimed towards companies in specific industries and people with specific positions in a company to generate qualified leads.

He transferred this logic to create media kits for influencers, create a conquest list of brands they want to work with and then reach out to every social media director of the brands to encourage them to work with the influencer.

Through this influencer network, he began a service that created a data tracking empire which had a very well built infrastructure that is not seen in the space of influencers.

He began reaching out to brands through Linkedin and brokering deals for influencers at a standard performance-based (eat what you kill”) 20% commission.

The first company he offered this service to was Metal Pay, a cryptocurrency similar to Cash App and Venmo that offers up to 5% cash back for every transaction on their platform. Joe met the team at Metal Pay at his time servicing Richard Branson’s Necker Open and Necker Cup.

He became an early investor and opened the conversation as a test pilot.

He discovered there is no proper process for creating an influencer marketing campaigns especially when it comes to the negotiation process.

So he did what any entrepreneur would; made one from scratch.

He managed the best way to move forward was to talk to the brand and design a more professional structure with pricing and deliverables to pitch to his influencer network.

After approval of the pricing matrix, he would ask the influencers if they are interested in a proposal where they have the opportunity to accept, counter the bid, or reject it entirely.

After that, it goes back to the brand which will ultimately approve the influencer’s bid or send one last counter offer. It then ends at the influencer who can either accept or deny the bid.

Joe’s focus in this industry is creating processes and structure that can become a universal standard.

He intends to eventually build these systems in later versions of Furlough.

As of now, his main focus is establishing a business and credibility behind the influencer which showcases their depth along with their intellectual capacity to do business with.

Most influencers focus on the bottom funnel of their business behind their social media while Joe focuses on building their own platform where they can ultimately own their audience.

Furlough first came to life as an escape, a leave of absence.

He coined the term when he launched his real estate company, Furlough Real Estate that has properties through Mexico and Los Angeles. His latest real acquisition resides in Tulum Mexico, the hottest location of 2019 for influencers and content creation.

His hotel known as the Moma is located in Aldea Zama, prime location in Tulum, and can accommodate over 130 people.

He plans on putting together an influencer summit for content creation with brands, photographers, videographers, models, and influencers that are focused on value first.

Furlough started as an incubator within the CXN Collective, an agency based out of Miami, FL with their CEO Peter Quinones. Another founding member of Furlough is Igor Montemor who has been an asset in expanding the network and their reputation amongst influencers.