Hello my friends. I’m so excited to welcome Canna Boss Amy Donahue from gethybridsocial.com This amazing social butterfly has an energy level that feels like a gushing fire hydrant. Today we’re here to find out how Miss Donna you are going to help us with our business social media and make our companies grow with management from a pro and the industry. Stay tuned to bust in on our conversation right after the Intro.

Intro:
Welcome to season three of the Cannaba Verum podcast, the cannabis truth podcast.
I speak the language of cannabis freely and uncensored while educating my audience on safe use of this live Plant Therapy.

You should know what’s in your cannabis. what’s good and what’s not. It does not come with an FDA stamp of approval yet.

Using cannabis mindfully as medication is a different concept in western healthcare philosophy, specifically the past 100 years. There’s a lot to learn and reconsider.

The information you’ll find here comes straight from scientists and clinicians doing the work and reporting their findings in real time through various live online outlets.

The scientific truth of cannabis is finally getting out and is wide open for all to see at respected medical sites like pubmed.gov and JAMA, the Journal of American Medical Association.

I’m right there in the thick of it with all those titans of medicine… as a fly on the wall. I’m not a doctor nor did I go to med school. But I did take dozens of private cannabis courses and still engage in continuing education offered by cannabis expert scientists over the past few years and slowly began to see and understand the bigger picture.

Now I talk to people all day long about cannabis and hopefully inspire them to research the facts as we know them today. Cannabis is an amazing alternative in health remedies.

It can reportedly alleviate typical disease problems and troubling side effects, even those caused by synthetic prescriptions.

This is Honey Smith Walls, a 21st century cannabis shaman, not a doctor, not a scientist. Raised by nuns and wolves in the verdant cattle pastures of the Oklahoma oil fields.

I’m here to amplify the truth of this great big story and language of cannabis in historical, political and scientific terms… so you can make educated decisions about the medicine you choose to ingest.

Honey Smith Walls 2:07
Okay, well, sometimes the technology has dueling systems. And I don’t know why but your phones don’t always Jive for some reason. And I’ve even had to unplug my own. So when I use a professional, you know, set headset and blah blah blah. So anyway, I know you know what that’s all about.

Amy Donahue, Media Maestro3:31
I do technology man!

Honey Smith Walls 3:33
Gee It’s so fun to have you here. Your energy is so high you lift me instantly and I just want to acknowledge that.

Amy Donahue, Media Maestro3:40
Oh, thank you for acknowledging me. I feel like we’re in a drum circle right now.

Honey Smith Walls 3:47
Can you smell my white sage burning? All right. My little bugs inside just gave me goosebumps so Oh, we’re all happy together. No, I’ve got another little friend here today. I’m sitting with a little sweet little buddy. A little bird of some kind and taking care of it for a friend. And he’s she it her….They? I don’t know. Whatever her pronouns are is just very sweet. And so I’m sure you’ll hear her I hope it’s not distracting…

Amy Donahue, Media Maestro4:22
No I love the sound of birds.

Honey Smith Walls 4:24
I do too. I think their little songs are so joyful and the music always lifts me so. I enjoy the songs of a bird truly. I do. I’m sitting here looking at your darling picture on this fantastic website. I got a bone to pick with you on it.

Amy Donahue, Media Maestro4:43
Oh yes. I love picking bones. Good. Me too.
Because when I went to your services page, and I poked on every damn single one of those green icons to find out what you were going to tell me and there was nothing behind them. No, they’re

Amy Donahue, Media Maestro4:59
No they’re just placeholders. Because I am also a one woman show and need to have a budget for that. But I have assistants and interns as well.

Honey Smith Walls 5:11
You look like you’ve got an incredible team with you already. And so and I’m sure you do but I’m glad to hear that you’re one girl operation… I am as well. And I’m building my team.

Amy Donahue, Media Maestro5:22
It’s really hard. It takes a while. I mean it took me years to be able to hire because of course in cannabis we don’t make as much money as the guys do and…

Honey Smith Walls 5:35
Wait… what? In cannabis? What are you talking about? The whole world darling. You know what planet we’re on. Right?

Amy Donahue, Media Maestro5:40
I know I know. And I know what country we’re in too.

Honey Smith Walls 5:43
I see that you’ve been blogging since 2018, though, and I gotta say your blogs are still very current.

Amy Donahue, Media Maestro5:50
I mean, I would say I’ve been blogging for way longer than that. But that’s a website.

Honey Smith Walls 5:55
Yeah. Your website is just very, very current and still very fresh and yet, I know it’s dated, you know, but I gotta say the one that I love the most was “Five posts with hashtags get less engagement than those without!” and that just sent ice chills down my bugs. You know down my blood. Oh I’m thinking what am I wasting time on and then I realized that… wait a minute. This was written in 2018 Surely everything has changed since then on social media.

For those who aren’t able to follow this very fast conversation. Let me introduce our guests. Can we just take a deep breath and go back. I am so tickled that you are here Miss Canna Boss Amy Donahue. That gave me the biggest giggle when I saw that…
I thought, Oh hell yes.

Amy Donahue, Media Maestro7:00
It’s so dumb. People like it, you know,

Honey Smith Walls 7:04
How can you not? I know… how could you not… it’s just priceless. Anyway, you know if I were to dream up my own, which I did… my own preface… it would be you know, it would be something like that. Something really cute but mine turned out to be a 21st century cannabis shaman. So

Amy Donahue, Media Maestro7:26
I should be a 21st century Cannabis Social Media Shaman!

Honey Smith Walls 7:31
Yeah. You know, social media is terrifying. It is terrifying. And we need a guide. I’m not kidding. You need a shaman in this social media because the energy is real. It is extremely real. Yeah. And what you put out there may or may not be perceived as good or bad or whatever. But whatever energy you’re putting out there is what you’re putting out there. And if it’s not lifting, then oh, we need to change that. Right?

Amy Donahue, Media Maestro8:01
Well, then you have to worry about the person behind the screen and what kind of mood they’re in that day where you could have the best intentions possible and it just hits somebody the wrong way. And you have to know how to respond to someone who gets hurt feelings by something that wasn’t intentionally put out there in that way too. It’s it’s it’s really hard.

Honey Smith Walls 8:19
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been in that position and wondered how the hell I got there when I know deep down inside I’m a good person! Trust me, I’m with you on that. Anyway, Amy, please, please tell our audience what you’re doing in the cannabis industry. And you know, just given the elevator spiel or a little bit longer… I mean, there’s no time limit on this conversation. We love gabbin here.

Amy Donahue, Media Maestro8:50
Yeah, well, you can’t fit me into two minutes anyway.

Honey Smith Walls 8:55
I don’t know how that came out of my mouth.

Amy Donahue, Media Maestro8:58
I’ve actually been doing social media since MySpace. I made my first $50 on MySpace helping a mom and pop air conditioner repair in the suburbs of Phoenix. And we I had met them on MySpace because at the time I was a stand up comic and radio DJ which is why I’m good at what I do, because I had to use it for myself.

But um, they asked me you know, hey, what would you charge to put our company on here and I’m like, Why do you want your company on social media? That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard. And look where we are now.

Yeah, so then I got so I’ve been doing social media for 16 years. And after I donated a kidney in 2011 is when I got my medical marijuana card here in Arizona, you know, to be legal, and that’s when I started doing Cannabis Social Media. 2012 was my first cannabis client. It was a cute rolling paper brand and it’s no longer with us rest in peace.

I’ve seen a lot of those come and go. But I just positioned myself as having expertise on the compliance side of it because you have to be 100% Organic right now. There’s no you know, ads you can do on Facebook for your dispensary. So I had to go back to doing everything organically and doing the actual social of social media because a lot of people don’t understand that your Facebook page has to like other pages and comment on them.

So there’s like the basics that I teach, and implement and do strategies and I’m a real nerd about analytics. I want content because it is so valuable to be posted at the right time on the right networks. So I’m a nerd. And I don’t know how many other nerds are out there doing what I do. But it can be frustrating. And it’s a lot of work. I don’t take on a lot of clients at once because I think I messaged you. I said well, you need an hour a day for each of those accounts. Yeah, yeah. So if you have seven accounts that is seven hours a day of work.

Honey Smith Walls 11:08
I see that. Yeah, that’s a lot. And I could easily take an hour with each one of them. I could, but I forced myself not to. Yeah, it’s a lot of work because I’ve got other content I’ve got to create for the podcast and because I’m a distributor for Dustin Sulak’s Healer CBD products…I try to do my own promotion for that but like you, I’m a one girl show. And Holy mother of God… Is it tough being your own team?

Amy Donahue, Media Maestro11:44
It is and then you’re in the CBD space which is even more competitive, but still organic. You have to be social and I think a lot of people don’t understand the social part of social media, right. So yeah, it is a lot of work and tough.

Honey Smith Walls 12:02
It’s a huge, huge amount of work. And you really have to grow a team. I’m glad to hear that you’ve been growing yours too, because that’s the only way that we’re going to build the the Empire.

Amy Donahue, Media Maestro12:16
Yeah, I mentor and bring assistants on as interns I get. I’m going to be working with one of the colleges here because they actually have a social media track. So I just need to find consumers because I will only work with consumer people who actually consumed cannabis as far as working on my team. Because you have to know the culture and you can’t know the culture unless you actually are part of it. So I’m very particular about who I work with. Because I’ve been in the trenches for 51 years now for cannabis. I expect the people I work with to be as well.

Honey Smith Walls 12:53
Well, I am just desperate for some help, obviously. I mean, we all are. And Eastern State University is just like a mile down the street from me. And I would love to go to them and say look I’m in the cannabis industry as an educator in this space. I’m also selling a high quality CBD product and your students could have an advantage by tutoring under me or coming and helping me in the space for credit, but I just don’t have the time to sit and write that letter and approach them or pick up the phone and call them… I’m just… I’m running my little tail off already as it is.

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Amy Donahue, Media Maestro15:35
I work internationally I have clients in Germany yeah because cannabis is cannabis no matter where exactly. But as far as the schools the biggest thing because I I know that they’re interns and they get college credit but I do believe in paying people also. So for me it has you know it’s a budget thing so I can’t always afford to get an intern and I see all these ads on these you know like indeed and all the job postings and the and no offense if this was what your thought was but they want interns who won’t work for money. They think that interns should be working for free. Whereas to me, if I’m going to be bringing an intern on I’m teaching them business as well and nobody works for free in my house because if we did, we wouldn’t be able to eat. So I’m a stickler for that as well. So if I don’t have the budget for an intern, I have to wait until I do and you know get more clients so that it makes it financially able for me to do it. So I see a lot of people wanting to take advantage of that and I don’t like it. I don’t think that we should be looking for free labor. It’s not fair, especially for women.

Honey Smith Walls 16:51
Yeah, and I wholeheartedly agree with you. So what should we budget for in order to be able to afford interns? To come in and help us and learn part of this industry? You know it’s a trade off. We’re teaching them. Yeah. And so you know, it takes training and training is slow and repetitive and it takes time for us to train and lalalala so it’s a trade off to have an intern instead of somebody who’s already professionally there for you.

Amy Donahue, Media Maestro17:31
It really is a trade off and any any sort of fees or pricing that I do is customized so I can’t answer that. Because I don’t know how many networks where’s the content coming from? Because I’m a social media manager. I’m not a content creator. So you have to also have a budget for a content creator. What are you putting on your social media? You need to have three posts and three posts a week and two or three stories a day? Where is that content coming from?

So to have a real social media presence, you also have to have a content creator. Yeah. And that’s where things can get pricey. But yeah, your social media is literally the welcome mat to your brand. And I say this till I’m blue in the face, but people need to hire professionals because this is a branding thing. It’s not to sell product. Social media is not for selling. It is for branding, and that’s where I see a lot of myths as well.

In compliance, even CBD, in fact, CBD is at a national level more illegal than cannabis because there’s no regulations, at least on a state level cannabis is regulated. So then it can be in a more dangerous territory to be in the CBD space. Because if it’s taken through the mouth, it has to be FDA approved and it’s not. So there’s just a lot of compliance things most people don’t even realize they’re out there.

But that’s my job… to know all the rules of every product out there. And unfortunately, accounts get shut down because people don’t take the time to learn that.

Honey Smith Walls 19:07
Well, it’s horrifying the amount of knowledge that we should be able to call up when we need it and can’t.

Amy Donahue, Media Maestro19:19
Yep, I’m with you. I understand. It’s very frustrating. It’s still the wild wild west. No matter how long cannabis has been legal medically even. It’s still growing. It’s still immature. I’m overqualified for an industry basically.

Honey Smith Walls 19:41
Well, what’s it like to be a patient out in Arizona right now?

Amy Donahue, Media Maestro19:48
Well, we just went adult use January of last year. So I’m not entirely sure because we also had a pandemic so I wasn’t out and about and learning as much as possible. I know that since we are adult use now, people will will purchase recreationally like most patients here including myself, I just recertified because I don’t have to pay taxes on it. I’m not paying tax on cannabis that I use medically.

So yeah, it’s it can be frustrating because a lot of our shops are getting acquired so you could become really comfortable in a place and then all of a sudden it’s gone. Oh, well. So yeah, we have great products. In fact, Arizona, I think medically had the best program as far as products because in states like Pennsylvania or New York, you can’t get edibles. Even if you’re a medical patient, they don’t have edibles. You can get tinctures and cartridges and topicals. Whereas in Arizona, we used to have medicated toothpicks, medicated breath spray and inhalers, suppositories… everything that you can make out of weed we can do… so that’s what I love about the medical industry. In Arizona. We didn’t have any limitations on that. Which is good because there are patients who need a lot of different products. So that’s one thing that Arizona did right. That I feel good about.

Honey Smith Walls 21:11
So in Florida… It’s strictly a vertical corporate attitude. And have to owned from seed to sale. Yeah, but they’re talking about capping THC out here. And you know, we know that recreational is coming but it’s interesting to hear what you say about your own experiences with it since January… you say you’ve had recreational?

Amy Donahue, Media Maestro21:44
Since January of last year we’ve had adult use… it passed November 2020. And Arizona was the first state two months after the election who just flipped the switch and shops could start servicing both that day. In California when they passed adult use. It took 18 months for recreational stores to open. So just another thing I think we did right was okay, well now we have two different buttons to push on the software. Let’s just let everybody so adult use as well. So it happened very fast. Here it is a red capitalist state and it’s been killing it ever since.

Honey Smith Walls 22:34
Well, I’m glad to hear that the industry is up and coming there for you and that you’re pleased with it. I’m a little concerned about the elders out here and well all across the states and just not being able to use cannabis properly for their needs. Yeah. That’s what I’m concerned with. And also then kind of getting tangled up in too much THC because that’s the attitude of Rec. You know, the higher the better, the higher the better.

Amy Donahue, Media Maestro23:14
Because this industry doesn’t know how to market itself properly. They’re marketing… They’re racing to the bottom by marketing their THC level. And it’s not necessary. There’s no reason to do that. But that’s a marketing thing.

Because now micro dosing is very popular on the west coast. It’s so funny how the two coasts are completely different, but micro dosing is the big thing out here and it helps people to try something that adds a Gen X or…

I have a ton of friends who are like, I don’t know how you could do that. You know, we haven’t smoked pot since high school in the 80s. And I’m like, but you’re drinking like a fish! How is that okay? And how is that going to affect you in the next coming years because I’m 51… I’m not messing around at all. Yeah, I could go on… you can tell…

Honey Smith Walls 24:06
I love hearing it darling. I love hearing it because I get this way too and it just makes me… you know… calm down honey… calm…

Amy Donahue, Media Maestro24:13
Well I’m also an intuitive so those chills I can feel for a reason.

Honey Smith Walls 24:18
Yeah, exactly. No, you make me go into a daze with every descriptive thing that you’re considering and I’m just like, Oh yeah, then there’s that. We’re singing in the same choir, basically. And I love this choir. I do.

The industry is already tainted with corruption from greedy bastards. Greedy Fucking bastards. Yep. And yet it really is upcoming of its own.

Bling:

Hey my friends. I want to give you a tip about a neurologist I know and trust. Dr. Anthony Mazo is a highly rated specialist here in Melbourne, Florida. One of the first physicians to research and study cannabis since 2016 When it was legalized in Florida. Dr. Mazo is not quick to prescribe traditional synthetic chemicals when he knows that this gentle live Plant Therapy will likely give needed relief.

I know this to be true. Because I had to see him for my own old lady neuropathy issues. He did not prescribe the usual stuff. He told me to go get a particular kind of cannabis instead and use it in a very specific way to find relief. And that is what every doctor in America should have in their little black bag.

His clinic details will be in my show notes for you. Why? Because he’s a trusted cannabis expert in the field of neurology right here in Melbourne. Dr. Anthony Mazo at the Brevard Neuro Center on Nasa Boulevard. See details in my show notes.

Bling:

Hey, friends, you know Amy, and I just couldn’t stop what an amazing conversation and I want to invite you to come back next week and hear a lot more oh my goodness what this girl has got to tell us Come on back next week. And you can always come visit me and ask live questions on Mondays at 888 am on clubhouse 8am clubhouse Cannaba Verum presents rising cannabis connections come on over a visit with us.

You’ve been listening to another Cannaba Verum podcast with 21st century cannabis Shaman Honey Smith Walls about the importance of using verifiably safe products.

The process of getting a diagnosis from your family doctor and taking your records to a cannabis specialist can lead you to the correct cannabinoid therapy for those issues. Otherwise, you’re just your own guinea pig looking for answers without any foundational knowledge or ability to determine the best choices or strategies.

To find a qualified cannabis expert to help you in your area, visit cannabis clinicians.org. It is a National Society of cannabis experts and you’ll see that link down in my show notes.

Unless otherwise proven by a reputable third party lab test, please be advised that all street weed is contaminated. It may do grave harm to a patient with a delicate immune system who already has inflammatory issues like arthritis, IBS, fibromyalgia or worse.

Thanks so much for listening today. And don’t forget to join us live on our Clubhouse stage every Monday at 8am Eastern. Just look for me and Rising Cannabis Connections.
I hear the cows callin…

Transcribed by https://otter.ai