We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Michele & Rochele Thompkins. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Michele & Rochele below.

Michele & Rochele , thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. Can you talk to us about how you learned to do what you do?

When we started our podcast in 2007, it was a self educate and observation process. After watching a few podcasts we decided to give podcasting a try. It looked easy enough, just get some equipment and have talk topics. Turns out it wasn’t that easy, podcasting is not for the weak. Mistakes were made and lessons learned, but slowly we started to develop our own flare in our production. To grow and develop better production, YouTube videos were a great resource for podcasting production and more!

Growing the podcast, we decided to add interviews to our podcast. When we first started booking guests for interviews, we did not always do a good job to see if the guest would be a good fit. Sometimes when starting out you can be a bit eager for growth and engaging in good conversation. Interacting with people on social media is a blessing and a curse. Social media is great for marketing and engagement, but people can label themselves whatever they like and that is all you have to go on. Titles including public figures, actors, models, comedians, etc. can interest you to lead to having them as a guest on your platform. The problem is not of the titles on the profiles are accurate and you find out too late during the course of the interview. Needless to say, we became more selective in choosing guests, and this definitely had an effect on our brand. Making wiser choices in who to have on our platform included doing more research and possible interaction on social media to learn more about their conversation style.

Some of the obstacles we had to face were people overcoming the name of our podcast, Gossiping Heifers. Being sisters, we call each other heifer all of the time and felt the name would stand out and cause people to laugh. Can you imagine calling a publicist for a celebrity interview and announcing that Gossiping Heifers would like to interview their client? Nine times out of ten we would get turned down or get no response when requesting an interview. Tyler Perry can have the word heifer repeatedly in his productions and he gets a comical response, but not everyone feels that way when it comes to women calling themselves heifers. We debated changing our show name at one point, but nothing we came up with seemed to fit us, so we kept the name. Even starting out Rushion McDonald told us that we should change our show name. “It almost sounds like 2 Gossiping Bitches”. Needless to say, it encouraged us to keep our name and keep making requests regardless. Learning not to switch up because someone is being judgemental based on their own mindset, is not our problem.

The moral of the story is, we are happy to be heifers. Plus living in Texas makes it all the more comical.

Michele & Rochele , love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

We are blood sisters, Michele and Rochele (aka Rocky) both born in Memphis, TN. We are 4 years apart and both born in October. We were raised in the entertainment industry with our father, TC Thompkins a music executive, and our mother, a former school teacher that was a stay-at-home mom. It was important to our father that our mother raised us and kept us safe, neither one of our parents wanted to take chances with being in the hands of others. Our mother once worked for Stax Records in Memphis, TN. During the Stax era, Michele recalls being in her mother’s office overlooking the music studio. The studio was full of instruments and live recording sessions by artists of the label.

Being raised behind the scenes of entertainment, we were fortunate to meet some of the great artists our father worked with such as Michael Jackson, Sade, The Clash, Teddy Pendergrass, Teddy Riley, the Isley Brothers, and many more! In building our brand we had the influence of the music industry, but never used our father’s name to gain leverage or momentum. It was important for us to build our brand on our own accord.

Some people would think that we would have gotten involved in the music industry, but that was not our path. We still fall under the umbrella of entertainment and do it our own way.

Any insights you can share with us about how you built up your social media presence?

Attending Instagram live videos really leads us to get additional followers.

What can society do to ensure an environment that’s helpful to artists and creatives?

It costs nothing to share on social media, its free and influences people to check out the content.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.gossipingheifers.com
• Instagram: @gossipingheifers
• Facebook: facebook.com/gossipingheifers
• Twitter: @2heifers
• Youtube: youtube.com/gossipingheifers

Image Credits
Gossiping Heifers