Summary

This episode of the Nod On This Business Bites podcast explores the authenticity of online content and the challenges of relying on it. The hosts question the legitimacy of online reviews, the power of AI in image editing, and the role of automation in social media. They discuss the deceptive nature of social media engagement and the use of AI tools in content creation. The hosts also examine the dilemma of faking success and the importance of building authentic relationships. They emphasize the dangers of taking advantage of others and the value of long-term connections.

Takeaways

• Be skeptical of online content and question its authenticity.
• Consider the role of AI in image editing and the potential for manipulation.
• Recognize the limitations of online reviews and the prevalence of fake reviews.
• Be cautious of automation in social media and the deceptive nature of engagement.
• Strive for authenticity and genuine connections in business and life.

#debunking #socialmedia #myths #factcheck #truth #dontbelieveeverything #mediaeducation #realitycheck #criticalthinking #verifyinformation #internetmyths #fakenews #digitalliteracy #misinformation #trustedsources #research #educationalvideo #digitalworld #onlineinformation #mythbusting

If there's one thing we've learned about business and life is that people are the X factor. They constantly surprise us both in amazing ways and not so much. We're Ben and Syya and welcome to the Gnaw On This Business Bytes podcast. This show is all about real life things we all deal with every day, how they relate to business and how to make some sense out of our daily chaos. Welcome to the show.

And welcome to another episode of non this business bites. I'm Ben and this is Sia. So here's a question. Do you believe everything you see? Do you believe everything online? All the reviews. All the images, all the videos that you see. Are legit. Do you see everything go OK? If I see it, it must be true. I mean I.

Person blew my doors away the other day. Absolutely blew my doors. Losing the latest, greatest version of Photoshop. I had a picture of myself where one of my arms was missing. The photographer took the picture and when they did the cropping, they cropped off one of my arms. He throws it in Photoshop, hits one button.

And Photoshop reimagines down to my fingertips what the other arm should look like. And it did it perfectly. It figured out what direction the arm should be, what direction the hand should be. And it just reimagined the entire picture. So all of a sudden, I'm sitting there with this perfect image of something that before, if I'm going to use this thing online, I had to

But it up against one of the sides of the of the of the image to make it look like both like my other arm was hanging up off the edge of the image. It was amazing to me. And you sit there and say OK in today's world with everything has evolved with AI with with with you know with all the things that are going on with reviews on Yelp and Amazon and.

You know, company websites and, and, and, you know, product reviews and everything. How much of this stuff can we truly and absolutely rely on? How much of it is fake and how much of it is actually people taking the time and actually writing, you know, honest to goodness, five store reviews, telling everything that is wonderful and perfect about a product or service or people.

I truly wonder, maybe it's a bit of a skeptic on me, but I wonder today how, with how easy it is to do, how many of the reviews that you're reading online truly are legit? Sia, let's not this. I bet you the fraction. It's a fraction of a fraction, like way lower than we think it would be. No. Um, so you just covered a bunch of things and I was just like, I feel like an answer for that and an answer for that.

So first and foremost, this is not a conversation on generative AI. We have had already a conversation on, you know, authenticity versus, you know, artificial intelligence. You can go and check and check that back to reference. Of course, we will talk more about it, but this is not for today's conversation. Exactly. But really looking at if I'm hearing you correctly, Ben is, you know, like what's screaming at me is this. LinkedIn is our social media platform. Yes, we're on YouTube as well, but.

LinkedIn is where we tend to find our, our clients, right? And a lot of our messaging is B2B oriented. So on that, when we're talking about, well, what is fake? What is real? We do have to make a nod towards, you know, platforms that generate content and automate it in a way where they say, Hey, we can make posts for you. We can comment as you, we can, um,

send DMS on your behalf, etc. Okay. And I get those requests every single day from some company that wants to automate my entire life for me. By the way, if you get a lot of those pitch slaps, I'm actually doing something called a art piece. So you're welcome to do screenshots and send it to me. Hey, listen, send me your pitch slaps, your best, your funniest, the worst, the most like tone deaf, like, I can't tell you how many times I get the

Hey ma 'am, have you ever considered doing short videos or putting your content on YouTube? No, I've never thought of that. Anyway, don't get me started. Anyway, you're making my day. Me ADHD here. Squirrel back, reverse the squirrel. All right, here we go. So.

What gets me a little bit, um, the whole idea of I do, I do leverage, we use, you know, chat GPT, uh, right now we're working with unchained. Um, so there are lots of platforms that are out there. Okay. The question is, is to what degree do you leverage it? Is it a tool or are you relying on it? Like not even a crutch, you're just using it as your own, like submarine jacuzzi ride across town type thing. Right. Some people are using it if they get writer's block for inspiration.

No harm, no foul. I don't think there's anything wrong with that. So I just want to be very clear. But, but, but it is if they represent, if they take an article, they, I can't think of anything this week. I asked chat GPT to write an article. I put it in and I represented his mind. Yes. That's the problem I'm having. 100%. But I also have a problem with, look, if you want to support local businesses, that's great. Actually please support.

If you're going to take the time to support local business, do that because you know what? Apple doesn't need any more attaboys. OK, I think they're doing pretty damn well on their own. Celebrate the freaking smaller businesses, you guys, because there's the ones that actually meet. They need it right. But I do wonder to some degree. I do see a lot of posts on LinkedIn where I'm just like. This person does not mean what they're saying right here.

There's a lot of like fake genuineness, I think, on LinkedIn. I think I kind of pivoting us a little bit that, again, I'm trying to get away from the AI component of it because that's not what we're talking about. We're talking about like those fake engagements where you're just like, are you do? What does someone and I'm just going to say it in one geographical part of the country, give a poop on poop poops about gas rates in freaking Texoma, right?

And then they comment on it or they say, Oh, that was really enlightening. What's enlightening about it. Okay. You're in the freaking North pole. What does that have anything to do with what's going on here? So that's what bothers me about that fakery. If that makes sense. And I am guilty of it as anybody else's, we want to play the LinkedIn algo game. Okay. But to what end does that algo game actually net you? Are you actually getting business out of it? Are you developing any real relationships out of it?

I love my friends out of the North Pole. Don't get me wrong. Go Santa. But Santa has nothing to do with my life as an adult. Unfortunately, Santa cost me money apparently because I've got ten nieces and nephews.

But it's more than that. It's more the fact of, are we being deceptive? I mean, there's a couple of different things here that you're going at. One is the automation of the me too's, yay girls, all that kind of stuff. Trying to get people to connect with you because you fake connected with them.

And it's just, just, it's just try to drive, you know, drive your likes up, drive, drive your, your, uh, you know, push up, push up your numbers on the algo and all that kind of stuff. There's that. Then there's the, then there's the fact of, of just absolutely being deceptive of, of who you are, what you do. It's just, you know, the, the, I'm going to fake it to the make it, and I'm going to show the world that I, that I'm living the caviar life when I'm not.

And you know, the five star, you know, getting a 500 people to write five star reviews for my product who've never even touched my book. You know, I get people all the time say, will you write a review of my book? No. Why? I've never read it. I don't even know who you are. I don't even know who you are, but you, but there's, there are, there are groups out there who will just sit there and write reviews on Amazon. Why? Because they get free product out of it.

You know, they're given free product. So therefore somebody's paying for this free product to happen. So therefore they can write reviews and you know, and, and the machine goes on and you sit there and go, okay, is this thing a number one bestseller because you know, somebody job the system or because actually 2 ,500 people actually turned out and bought this book on day one. You know, did somebody actually do the marketing and do the hard work and actually.

You know, build a content following and be able to get people excited enough to actually go out and there and buy 2 ,500 copies of this book at full pop. Or did you sell, you know, 2 ,500, you know, Kindle versions at 49 cents a piece because you, you put it on sale for 49 cents and people say, Oh, what the hell for 49 cents, I'll just buy it. And then all of a sudden you're a number one bestseller. It's that kind of stuff that drives me absolutely nuts.

It's the fakery, it's the jobbing the system, it's sitting there going, that trying to make yourself look better than you are, more important than you are, more successful than you are, by putting out all this fakery and silliness. And I guess that's where my real challenge is. If you actually got 2 ,500 people to pony up 20 bucks for your book,

Kudos for you, you deserve the Amazon best seller for the day. But if somebody just went out there and sold it at 49 cents and you didn't make a penny off the book, you've actually paid $3 ,000 for somebody to send it out to his list of 180 ,000 people. What have you gained other than the fact that you got this badge that says I'm a number one best seller, but you didn't make a dime?

So it's okay. Now this is really shifting towards fake it till you make it right. Is it ever a good idea to do that? Because I think that's what the fundamental I think the crux of our conversation really is, is like, like, do you believe what you see to be true? And if so, do you believe in faking to making it because a lot of that may or may not be real? Yeah.

I am all about you be you boo, right? Like look warts and all because over time we're going to get to know who you are, whether you're smiling sweet soul or you're like, you know, not. But, but.

At some point, again, it goes back to what is it you're trying to accomplish too? Cause you know what, man, look, we're all guilty of it. Like I, you have a huge following. I'm growing my following, but I'm not growing it at like an outrageous rate. Like, because I know that my followers are followers that I have had over my career. They have seen me.

Good, bad, ugly, like me, indifference. I don't give a crap. We're connected because we worked together at some point. It could have been a painful relationship, but it doesn't matter. We're connected because we knew each other. Right. My following is over 17 years. I have been on LinkedIn for 17 years. It's not that I sat there and faked the algorithm or created some type of, you know, some type of hack software that goes and gets people to connect with me or whatever.

My connection rate is what it is because I've been doing this for 17 years.

Yeah, you just made me math. I'm not that far behind. And that's really depressing. Stop aging me. I'm still older than you are. So it's okay. Oh, I get it. Just deal with it. Just say that I'm your older brother and just be done with it. It's not that you're my older brother. I love that. Okay, that I can respect. And you'll always be the older brother. I will always be the older brother. It's that I'm nearing certain no, no, no, you're always younger. Just

Just look at it that way that you're always see it's the whole, you know, it's how you couch it. I'm trying not to fake it. I'm trying not to fit. I understand. And I've tried to enable you to fake it. So, you know, let's, let's look at it this way is that it really depends. Are you doing it for nefarious reasons or are you using it just to sit there and say, I'm not there yet, but I'm on my way.

And I think that there's the comes down to things is, you know, I was part in the 1980s with the guys on stage, the true, true guys, the guys that sold you the timeshares, the guys that sold you, you know, the, the, the, uh, the courses that you would take for $10 ,000 for you can get rich too. Okay. I was involved in all of that. I've seen the worst of human beings and I've watched, I've watched people with starry eyes.

and get rich in their heart, take the money from people that are, you know, that they're just looking for a way out. And those people today are the same people. They've just got more technology in their hands. And what I'm saying is those are the people we got to be aware of. Those are the people we got to be suspect of. And those are the people that we need to be, you know, we've got to be warning other people of. Okay. Okay. That's a different, oh, that's a different conversation. You just made me go on and I don't want to do it.

But yes, there are folks that are charging premiums for people who may or may not have the funds. Most of them don't. And and that's the sad part. And they won't and they don't execute on behalf of those. The intention isn't there to be there. Look, I get it. Not everyone's going to be hippie dip roses working with people. But I have unfortunately, especially in our industry. I've had to clean up the.

the slop, if you will, of people who have just so badly taken advantage of other people horribly. And that puts us in a precarious situation because we're like, sorry, you got burnt, man. But I can fix this. And then they're going, yeah, you're going to try to take advantage of me, too. Well, that that or they're like, hey, you know what? I see that you can do it. But can I just pay you a quarter of what I pay? It's like, no. But you know, like because that was all they had.

Yeah. Right. It's almost like, Oh my God, if you cannot afford it and you're at this level, let me coach you on how to do things yourself before you can afford outsourcing, right? At least stop gap measure until you can get that. And then we can talk about, okay, we digress. I think that we digress. We need to sit there and say, look, we need to sit there and be, be wary of the people that are, that are trying to jam the system that are people that are.

are sitting there trying to make themselves look better than they are because they've got a deal for you and they could they could help get you there too because most of them can't. Is it fake or not kids? Is fake or not? And if it smells fake, it probably is. So with that, I'm Ben and I'm Syya and we'll see you soon.

Hey hey hey, thanks for listening to another episode of Gnaw On This Business Bytes. If you liked what you heard, we most humbly ask that you like, share, and hit that subscribe button. If you want to communicate more effectively within your organization, contact Ben at yourbrandmarketing .com or me at brilliantbeammedia .com. We can help you build your community, brand awareness, and personality through digital content and podcasting.

We cannot wait to hear from you. So see you next week for another episode of Gnaw On This Business Bytes.