“Flip Your Script: Own your story & unlock the positive power of social media” released Oct. 14, equipping leaders with a playbook to positively grow their social media presence. Leaders can form personal and professional connections with an impactful digital legacy. Photos courtesy of Media Minefield
Wrestling with the question of “How can innovative leaders use social media to tell their story and be a positive influence?”, Kristi Piehl (MSML ’24), Pepperdine Graziadio Business School alumna, said she drew inspiration from a class assignment to release her book “Flip Your Script.” It provides tools that show readers how to control one’s own story in a digital world that continues to be influenced by artificial intelligence and polarization.
As CEO and founder of Media Minefield, a national award-winning PR agency in Minneapolis, Piehl draws on her skill as a storyteller to connect with leaders and entrepreneurs to help them build trust with their audience, bring authenticity through vulnerability and instill motivation into others, Piehl said.
“How do we motivate and encourage people just through telling our stories and our own personal experiences?” Piehl said. “Odds are, there’s someone out there who is walking a similar path who could learn.”
Author and Graziadio Business School alumna Kristi Piehl (’24) holds a copy of her new book, “Flip Your Script.” In the book, Piehl discusses how taking control of one’s story can influence their digital legacy.
Drawing Inspiration From Charles Dickens
Piehl, an Emmy Award-winning broadcast news reporter, said she graduated from Bethel University with a degree in English Literature, which helped to shape her passion for storytelling. After a career in journalism, she furthered her education through Pepperdine’s Master of Science and Management Leadership program (MSML), where the initial vision of her book started to take shape.
“As I was going through my Pepperdine master’s program, I was again convinced and reminded that we need more business books written by women,” Piehl said. “The majority of books written are written from a male perspective and are very separated between professional and personal.”
In a hybrid work environment where people bring the professional to the personal and vice versa, to pretend there is a line between them is not real, Piehl said. She brought all of this and applied it to an assignment from the managerial innovation and creativity class taught by Steve Ralph, practitioner of organization theory management at Graziadio.
Ralph said the exercise is meant to help students learn a tool called perspective shifting.
“It’s taking a challenge that you currently have, or you need some breakthrough idea, and you pick a character,” Ralph said. “It could be a fictional character, it could be a real character, past, present, and you look at your challenge through their lens and their perspective. It’s to generate new ideas.”
The challenge is to tackle how emerging leaders can use social media to tell a compelling story and create a positive impact, Piehl said. Utilizing her undergraduate English Literature degree, Charles Dickens became her chosen historical figure.
Looking to Scrooge from “A Christmas Carol,” Piehl said she was able to find her compelling concept, something she felt often lacked in many books written by other entrepreneurial leaders in the industry. The concept of looking through with a past, present and future lens created a personalized and professional story.
For example, Piehl said she draws connections between the past, present and future through her late grandmother’s old diaries. By drawing comparisons between events that took place in the 1970s and applying them to how they would look in the present or the future, the tools she presents in her book are formed to teach how to take control of one’s own narrative.
“The internet is the keeper of our stories because someone can do an AI search or a Google search, social media search, and find things about us that maybe we want them to know, maybe we don’t want them to know,” Piehl said.
Piehl’s late grandmother’s diaries are laid out, containing daily entries from the 1960s all the way to the last few weeks before her passing. When Piehl inherited the diaries, she said she became the keeper of her grandmother’s stories.
The Making of the Book
Alumna Lisa Valle (MSML ’25), former classmate and recent graduate, said she was able to see Piehl’s early journey with the book come to life as they quickly became close friends together.
“Knowing who Kristi is from a PR perspective, and what drives her business, clientele and coaching, the book is really that in book form,” Valle said. “I learned from her that everyone has a story, and just by sharing your story, you could impact somebody else’s life or give them different perspectives in getting to know you better.”
Once she had the vision, Piehl said she put in the work drafting the book, working on it on the side throughout her time at Graziadio. But after her son’s cancer diagnosis in January, she had to halt the process.
“I stopped writing the book, put it on pause, and then applied every single lesson in the book to my own story,” Piehl said. “There are pages in my own diary that talk about how applying those lessons to my own story really made a positive impact for good and how my social media community helped me.”
Social media can be a place of negativity, hate-filled judgement and polarization that prevents people from truly opening up and building a platform for themselves, Piehl said. Inspired by the podcast “Flip Your Script” she started in 2020, Piehl also used the title for the book, as the message aligned for both.
“We need to turn the page and flip the script of how we think about social media, because for many people, social media is a dumpster fire right now,” Piehl said. “But social media at its best can be a place to build connection and trust and meaningful relationships in the future and the present.”
Navigating Authenticity vs. AI
With the rising trend of AI in various digital platforms, knowing how to effectively use AI as a tool to help curate one’s digital platform can help prevent leaders from relying on it too heavily, Piehl said.
AI is very useful for gathering information and research and generating ideas, but it lacks the ability to know all your life experiences and understand the nuances of emotion, Piehl said. When people rely on AI to write stories, articles or social media content, it comes across as stale and doesn’t feel authentic and real.
“We need to have relationships with people to make connections, which means we have to be vulnerable,” Piehl said. “AI teaches people that you should show up as some sort of robot, the perfect version of yourself, which is social media at its worst. That isn’t content people want to see.”
Certain platforms — for example, LinkedIn — will flag AI content and not serve it on their algorithm, Piehl said. Therefore, to grow your digital platform, it’s important to post authentic content.
“Authenticity is telling your own life experiences and what’s happened to you in a way that is appropriate and meaningful for the audience,” Piehl said. “If you can show up and share your story, share your experiences with other people in a way that has context and meaning, now you can build connections with them and you can be authentic.”
A quote from “Flip Your Script: Own your story & unlock the positive power of social media.”
Building Trust
To feel connected with an audience, trust has to be built, Piehl said. Connections can’t be built without vulnerability and authenticity.
“Leaders have to share credibility, their own unique thoughts, their expertise,” Piehl said. “What are you, in whenever I do a workshop with an executive team? Tell me what you’re an expert in.”
In a big company, the leadership team are experts in whatever role, Piehl said. For example, the HR professional is an expert in people and the accountant is an expert in finance.
It’s important to establish credibility, to be able to show up authentically and show a profile that is reflective of one’s own values, Piehl said. However, to put words around one of the hardest periods of her life was a bit more difficult.
Piehl said she knew she had to share a part of her perspective in going through with her son’s journey with cancer. There had to be other people who also were experiencing similar things and raising awareness meant helping a cause and raising money.
“I needed people who might hear about it,” Piehl said. “I have 40 employees. We have clients all over the country. I needed those folks to know that I was going to be able to show up and still run the company.”
It’s important to stay grounded in your own story, as we don’t have the right to share other people’s stories, Piehl said. She can only tell her own perspective of her son’s story, not anyone else’s.
“The point of the book is that social media can be a place of purpose and positivity,” Piehl said. “As long as you show up to the platform thinking, ‘How can I help other people?’ And if you show up thinking, ‘How can I help someone else?’ You’re going to reap many professional personal rewards.”
Piehl, with her son Alec Santelman, celebrates her 50th birthday with friends, family and coworkers by donating blood at Memorial Blood Centers on Aug. 25. With her son’s journey with cancer, Piehl credits the lessons in the book for helping her navigate a difficult time in her life.
The Book’s Mission
In honor of her commitment to raising awareness and money for the cause, Piehl is donating all the proceeds from the book to the Cancer and Blood Disorders Program at Children’s Minnesota.
Through these funds, families are able to receive the support that is needed in all different aspects of their necessity to receive optimal care for their own children’s battle with cancer, Piehl said. She set a commitment to raise at least $100,000 for the fund.
“Flip Your Script” released Oct. 14 and is available for purchase.
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Contact Christine Park via email: christine.park@pepperdine.edu
