Embracing change is essential for success in digital marketing, as discussed by host Brett Deister and guest Lorriane, an experienced entrepreneur and professional speaker. They explore the critical role of social media content and user-generated content in modern marketing strategies. The conversation highlights the significance of short-form video and the growing influence of AI tools in content creation. Practical tips for enhancing video and audio quality are shared, making it easier for small businesses to produce engaging content. As they look ahead, Brett and La Lorena also address the future of AI in marketing and the importance of actively engaging with user-generated content to foster community and visibility.

Takeaways:

• Embracing change is crucial for success in the ever-evolving digital marketing landscape.
• Short-form videos are gaining popularity; marketers must adapt to this trend to thrive.
• Engagement with user-generated content fosters community and increases visibility in social media.
• AI tools can enhance content creation, but original input from marketers remains essential.
• To create effective videos, focus on good audio quality and clear lighting.
• Marketers should actively encourage customer interactions to generate valuable user content easily.

Companies mentioned in this episode:

• Starbucks
• Google
• Opus Pro
• DaVinci Resolve
• Kinko's
• AppSumo
• Adobe

So I think the first thing I would tell anybody who's going to get into this game is that if you are not comfortable with change, if you do not always have one eye looking at what's next, you're never going to be successful.

Mmm, that's good.

And welcome to new episode of Digital Coffee Marketing Brew.

And I'm your host, Brett Dystra.

And if you could please just subscribe to this podcast and leave a review.

It really does help, as always.

But this week we're going to be talking about social media content, everything you know about social media and user generated content because they're just like the love child of marketing because they really go hand in hand with each other.

People on social media create content and the businesses, if it's good content, love the content.

If it's not, then we ignore it because I'm sorry, but we have to pick and choose too.

Anyways, I have Lorena with me and she has been around.

She has quite enough or a lot of experience more than me.

So I'm actually really excited to hear all this.

And she actually, she hates bad coffee, which is even better for me because I dislike bad coffee with a righteous passion.

But also she's a successful entrepreneur, author and professional speaker, enjoys sharing what she knows about marketing and presentations to groups around the country, in college classrooms and our weekly podcast.

More than a few words.

So welcome to the show.

It's so nice to be here.

Thank you for the invitation.

You're welcome.

The first question, that's all my guest is, are you a coffee or tea drinker?

Coffee, coffee, coffee and more coffee.

So what would you consider bad coffee since that was in your bio?

In corporate, they buy the cheapest coffee they can and it's usually watered down and half the time it's been sitting there too long.

So all of those things contribute to just a mediocre cup of coffee.

There's a.

I used to be a barista, so I understand it.

Not at Starbucks.

I was never barista.

Starbucks, it was a small local coffee shop.

So I understand like good and bad coffee.

Now I will go to Starbucks because it's easier to find.

Sometimes, especially when you're traveling, you have no idea where anything is.

And sometimes you're just like, I just need coffee.

Here's a Starbucks.

Now with Starbucks, I actually have to have something with sugar in it because unfortunately they burn their coffee.

They also burn their milk and I taste it.

And so I can only actually have cold brew coffee because they don't do any.

It's no heat process in it.

So that's a little tip for everybody.

If you don't really want your coffee burned, get their cold brew instead.

You know what?

I have said that for years.

I did.

I do not enjoy Starbucks coffee because they burn their beans and it gives it to me a very bitter flavor.

So I am, I'm totally with you on that.

I have a couple of local coffee shops here in town that I just adore.

I know the owners.

I walk in, if Wende is working, she already knows how I like my coffee.

It's a beautiful thing.

Yes, that is a beautiful thing.

I.

If I'm feeling the mood, I will do a pour over, which is a different way of brewing your coffee, which actually makes the flavor profiles stand out more than drip, drip.

I call my work coffee because it's just easy.

I don't have to think about it.

And it's right there.

Yes, absolutely.

Anyways, I gave a brief some of your expertise.

Can you give us a little bit more about what you do?

So I ran a Digital agency for 19 years.

Actually, I ran a marketing company for 19 years that started out as a traditional marketing company.

And somewhere along the way, along came social media and everything changed.

So by the time I sold the business, it was exclusively a digital marketing firm.

Today I have the podcast, which I.

And I would say that in a way, I'm like a general practitioner, a physician.

You don't feel well, you know something is wrong, but you don't know what's causing it.

And so the companies that I work with typically have an established marketing program and they're just.

It doesn't feel right.

They're not communicating well with their agency.

I'll go in and do a diagnostic and help them develop a plan that they can either take back to their existing agency, handle with their internal team, or I have people that I can refer to.

But my job is really to develop that plan, diagnose and then develop a plan to create a healthy marketing program.

Got you.

And so just getting right into it, like social media is like when I was in college, they didn't tell you anything about social media.

It was still when Facebook was like, you had to have a college email to actually be on Facebook type of a thing.

And MySpace was actually MySpace and not a laughing stock that it is now.

But how has it changed?

Like, recently with everything going on?

We have TikTok that may or may not be banned in the United States, we have everybody trying to do shorts because the youngins love short form videos.

What does a digital marketer need to know to be successful in creating content in social media and just being good at social media?

So I think the first thing I would tell anybody who's going to get into this game is that if you are not comfortable with change, if you do not always have one eye looking at what's next, you're never going to be successful.

When I started the agency, I started it before Facebook was even created, not just before it was available to people other than college students.

There was no Facebook there, there were none of these platforms.

So I've lived through each iteration.

And the thing that I always recommend is test, put your toe in the water, learn the rules really quickly and get comfortable that anything you create is going to be great for a limited period of time.

When Facebook first rolled out business pages, they introduced something called FBML and it was Facebook markup language.

And you could create custom landing pages on your company page.

And after we sold a bunch of them, Facebook changed the rules and they went away.

And so for all of those clients, we had to go back and come up with different alternatives.

And that lesson I learned over and over again.

Today people are dealing with, I think, four trends that are really worth looking at.

One is the short video phenomenon.

You mentioned a TikTok.

It doesn't matter if TikTok goes away.

Now, if you're a content creator earning your living on TikTok, you care.

But the rest of the world, it doesn't matter because they have changed forever, changed video or not forever.

They have currently changed short form video and now there are reels on Facebook, there are.

In the newest LinkedIn app, there is a video feed that never existed before.

On YouTube, there are shorts.

So the impact is there.

The advice on that is get comfortable with video.

It doesn't matter whether you like being in front of a camera or you don't.

You have to get comfortable with video.

And it is exhausting to make short form video.

It's absolutely exhausting.

So don't make long form video and then leverage the power of AI to cut it into multiple clips.

The tools are so good right now that the AI will find the most relevant content, it will find the most interesting shots, it will do the transcripts right on the screen for you and so record a good 10 or 15 minute piece of content and then turn it over to AI and you will have 10 or 12 depending on how good you are, little snippets and create long form video, cut it into shorter pieces, distribute it everywhere.

The second thing that I think is really hard for marketers right now is the move to zero click environments.

We went through a period for a very long time where you put something on social media, but you put a link in it.

And that drove people to your website.

And now the algorithms are really, they've been really fine tuned and adjusted to keep you on the site.

And so if you put an outbound link in your content, the algorithm will penalize you, it won't show it to as many people.

And so that's creating, I think, a different structure.

Those.

And then the third thing is just the explosion of AI.

Everybody is using it, not everybody is using it.

And I think finding that balance where you start with your original content, but then you let AI break it up and tell you what the best of it is.

Don't start with AI and then post it because that's just going to be mediocre.

Got you.

And like we talk about video because obviously it's the number one thing that almost everybody's watching.

But how can marketers actually create the 15 minute long one?

Because there are skills that you have to learn through it and there's also tools that you have to figure out which ones to use.

And there's a plethora of tools or plethora of AI tools and there's more AI tools coming out every day.

So how do you like figure that part out?

Because I'm pretty sure everybody wants to create video, but it's the where do I start?

That I think gets to a lot of people.

So I work with a lot of small business owners.

They're not even marketers, okay?

They're plumbers, they're roofers, personal trainer.

And the reality is that video is not what it was when I started.

When I started in marketing a good video, you were paying between two and $5,000aminute to create and you expected a very high level of production.

Quality Internet video is not in that quality.

And so there are some basic things you can learn.

But get a tripod, turn it on and start talking.

And the most effective videos are really and truly the best content I have is when I sit down with the client, turn the camera on and start asking them questions.

So my furnace smells funny.

Why does my furnace smell funny?

What do I do?

How often should I change my air cleaner?

I talk to my trainer, I'm eating all the right foods, but I'm not losing weight.

What should I do?

And then I just Let them riff and I just let them talk about what they do best.

And the funny thing is, this is exactly the strategy that I used to use when I was blogging and writing for clients.

I would just let them riff and I would just get the transcript and turn it into an article.

Do you need good lighting?

Yes.

Does it have to be professional?

Big no.

Play with the lighting.

Get an area where it's clean and it's quiet and recording.

Because for the Internet, now this is not for your website homepage, that's got to be a higher quality.

But for the Internet it has to be good because it's disposable.

Think of short form video as the paper plates at your picnic.

They got to hold the chicken, but they don't have to last forever.

That's what you're creating.

You're creating disposable content.

And so just short start filming.

Personally, I love Opus Pro.

I stumbled on it about six months ago.

I upload my video and it cuts it into little pieces for me.

It will format it in real format, in square format and in wide format.

It will put the captions in for me.

It will rate my content based on what else is out there and it'll tell me this is a good hook.

This is.

This is not a good hook.

This topic is on trend and I rely on AI to help me curate my content.

But I am not letting AI tell me what I should say.

Got you.

And Opus Clips Pro or just Opus Clips just released their 2.0 video editor.

Yes, I follow them.

I understand what's going on within there.

But I always say for video, your cell phone or your smartphone is has really good video quality.

The only thing you cannot skimp on is audio quality.

Because people will never forgive you for bad audio quality.

They'll forgive you for lower video quality because like you said, social media.

But if you have bad audio.

There's been times where I've listened to a video or podcast and it was bad audio.

And I went, nope, I cannot listen to this anymore.

Absolutely.

And so you can get a little bit of an external mic if at all possible.

I would record.

Yes, it's easy to record on your cell phone when you're somewhere live action.

But I would, if at all possible, record on your computer because you can get a better microphone.

There are some nice little microphones that you can attach to your iPhone as well.

The other thing that you can do, the other trick you can do is depending on what it is you sell, if you're doing a how to Video.

I do this with my trainer all the time.

She'll get out, we'll do some outdoor work, she'll do all sorts of different exercises.

But then we'll do voiceover and we'll do that inside where it's quiet, where there's good sound quality.

And.

And the other thing is the most of the AI tools will do a little text transcript across it.

And half the people that are watching your videos on you on social are not listening to them.

They're sitting at their desk and they're scrolling on their lunch hour.

They're taking a quick five minute break and they're just watching the videos and they're reading your cat captions.

And so the captions are really key and that can help you.

It won't improve, it won't improve crappy vid audio, but it can help.

Got you.

And so segueing to like user generated content, it because we create content on social media, how do you find, maybe you're a small business or how do you find that stuff?

Because small businesses, they don't have the time or luxury to go like searching hours to find that perfect user generated content.

They need it quick and they need it now.

So the key with good user generated content is content that you have encouraged your audience to create for you.

The most commonly thought of user generated content are reviews and testimonials.

And so anytime you do work for a client, send them a quick note, send them a link to your Google my business page, send them a link to your Yelp page.

Send, send them.

I've seen people send a link to Loom so people can record a quick video testimonial in the minute.

The number one thing you need to do is ask.

But beyond just the testimonials, and this is where you need to be a little bit clever.

If you are a venue, people come to your location, have a hashtag, encourage people to take a picture while they're there and share it with the hashtag.

We just did a.

In Indiana there is a conference called PopCon.

It's Comic Con or Gen Con, but it is more of a general pop culture.

And we were doing social media and PR for the event and I would walk up to people and I'd ask them some questions and I'd shoot a little video and then I would say, hey, would you like me to take a picture of you in your costume with your phone?

And people would be like, oh yeah, because all we have are these crappy selfies.

So we would take the picture, they'd be like, oh wow, thanks, that's great.

Hey, if you post it, use this hashtag.

And the hashtag not only created traction during but after the event, they could pull down the images and use it in future publication.

So creating a hashtag, creating an incentive.

Hey, we're collecting pictures of people drinking our coffee today.

Upload a picture for a chance to win a gift card.

You already know these people like your coffee.

You already know they want.

Starbucks does this all the time.

And so you already have something people want.

It doesn't cost you a lot to give it away.

And the funny thing about user generated content, the incentive does not have to be big.

Social media is about ego.

And when I put something on social media, I want someone to notice, I want someone to pay attention.

And so as a business, if you ask a question, if you ask people to submit a comment or share a picture and you acknowledge that you have fed their ego and they are more likely to do it again and other people are more likely to do it because they notice that you pay attention.

So if you want to cultivate a community that is willing to create and share user generated content, you need to do it by acknowledging, by engaging.

And the cool thing is when you do that, not only do the people notice, the algorithms notice and when the algorithm notices now they're more likely to share your content to a wider audience and it feeds that visibility in that zero click environment.

And so user generated content, cultivating user generated content helps you win the algorithm, win the hearts and deliver your message in a more relevant way.

What's if they're having a hard time actually getting that stuff?

Because like I said, it's easy to do that when you're at a conference because I've done conferences too and everybody's there for a reason.

It's not hard to get someone.

But maybe they don't go to conferences, maybe they're scrapped for budget which is a pretty reasonable right now since everything is expensive right now.

How do they generate that?

Maybe when they're in a no to a very small budget of they may not be able to give stuff away.

What can they do?

I'm going to tell you that if you're not willing to spend anything on your marketing, you're not in business.

That does not mean you, that does not mean you have to spend hundreds and thousands of dollars.

But carving out, taking a look at what is it that you do.

I'm going to give you a couple of examples.

A plumber heating, a heating air conditioning contractor ran a contest for the oldest fur.

He was looking for the oldest furnace and he offered to do.

He actually now he had a big prize.

He was going to do a free furnace for the oldest furnace that he found.

But later on he just did.

Hey, I'll just do a maintenance check or a cleanup on your old furnace.

So he got hundreds of people to take pictures of their old furnaces.

He got invited to come in and look at a lot of this equipment.

Yes.

He gave away a service call that would have been.

That he would have charged $200 for, but he picked up way more customers.

I'll give you another example.

Jimmy Fallon.

Okay?

He used to ask questions on Twitter.

There was no prize.

There was no prize.

If you answered his question and he thought it was funny, he read it on the air.

It was all about ego.

So, hey, we're putting together a contest of the best 50 photos of our outdoor garden.

Have you been to our restaurant?

Take a picture of the food and we will share your photo.

We're going to have a photo contest.

If you're in business, you have something you can give or do a collaboration.

The wedding industry is a very collaborative industry.

You have a customer who is in it usually only once in her life, maybe two or three times now, but in theory, once in her life.

And she's going to need all of these services.

So you get a florist and an invitation person who collaborate together.

They run a joint promotion.

Take a picture of the flowers.

Have you been to a wedding this year?

Take a picture, you have your favorite flowers and share that on our page and get entered into a drawing for flowers or an invitation.

Send us pictures of your favorite invitations or share, share your favorite font, whatever it is.

All you're trying to do with user generated content is get people to interact with you.

And if you acknowledge when somebody shares and you go back, hey, that's a great photo.

Where did you take it?

What were the bright.

What were the bride's colors?

Whatever.

They're going to be excited because they people feel important.

They don't share stuff on social media to be ignored.

They share stuff because they want you to notice.

And when you take the time to notice it, it's pretty easy to cultivate it.

And again, you can do this for any business.

We did a coolest pup contest with where you took a picture of your dog and we let people vote on the coolest pup and the dog got, I don't know, you got a bag of dog food and a dog daybed.

It doesn't have to Be hundreds and hundreds of dollars or thousands and thousands of dollars.

But if you're not willing to spend $25 on a Starbucks, on a locally owned coffee shops gift card to cultivate engagement, there is doing it on a shoestring and then there's kidding yourself.

We always have to ask that question because like I said, especially right now, it's like everybody's trying to save money wherever they can, but you still have to spend money to earn the money too.

I had when I first started the business and back then I was a traditional agency, not a digital company.

And so we did a lot of design work, we designed business cards and postcards and I ran into a consultant and his average customer at that time would probably be a $5,000 consulting gig.

It was not a small gig, but he was running around with business cards that he had printed on his desktop computer run through a printer on the paper that you punched out.

The individual cards had a little bit of a frayed edge.

And he handed this to me and I said, you have to be kidding.

You don't look like a legitimate business.

You don't have to spend $1,000 but spend $25, $10, have them printed on cardstock at Kinko's.

There's saving money and then there's just being foolish.

And no matter.

Okay.

Ran the business 19 years.

I've been through the cycles.

You don't stay in business through the cycles.

You don't grow the business by completely cutting your marketing budget.

When things get tough, it doesn't work.

Got you.

Are we going to see more videos being created?

Are we going to see the mixed reality or VR or AR finally taking off?

Even though I still don't foresee it too much right now, Are we going to see AI really taking control of more things in marketing because people get lazy.

You're a one man show sometime or one woman show sometime.

Are we going to see like a mixture of things?

Are we finally going to see Web3 take form?

So I think that this is going to be a year of a lot of pushback you're already seeing.

I don't know if you follow some of this, but a lot of the Hollywood actors are starting to push back if their voices and their likenesses are being used.

Scarlett Johansson just, I think she filed a lawsuit against OpenAI over the use of her voice without her permission.

And the so I think this is going to be a year of pushback.

I think people are getting smarter, they're more used to the AI content and so they.

As a teacher, I have students that were turning in papers, my college students were turning in papers that I could tell were being written by ChatGPT and I pushed back on them and I've changed the assignments.

So it's harder to use AI generated content to answer my questions.

I think you're going to see a little bit of that reaction.

I also think that the good marketers are going to figure out where the balance is, how to overlay original content enhanced by AI rather than the other way around.

AI is great for things like if I was, and I'm not doing this kind of work anymore, but if I was doing a website for a company that I didn't know anything about, I would go to AI and say, hey, what are the top 10 most common questions that people have about this product or service?

I'd get that list of questions.

I would then ask my customer or the business owner.

Go ahead and answer those questions.

That then becomes your content.

You have their original answers.

I might use AI to dust and polish, but now I have wave copy, I have social media copy, I have video scripts.

And it's based on the research of what are people asking and the answers of the subject matter expert.

And I think that's where we're going to go on this journey.

Do you think marketers are going to have to eventually, like really use AI to get a job eventually too?

Because I still think right now it's a nice to have, but it's not mandatory.

Is there eventually going to be a point where it's going to be it's mandatory to understand how to use prompts with chatgpt or Perplexity or Claude or whatever else comes down the pipeline?

I think with every new tool there is a period where it is a nice to have and then there is a period where you just expect literacy.

That was fundamental to what we were doing.

It was just the currency of that market.

So the idea that AI literacy is going to become a requirement is very consistent with everything we've seen up until now.

And do you recommend them try one or the Other because like I said, there's a lot Google has their own may or may not be good.

ChatGPT is the darling of the AI right now, but you have other ones that people use as well.

So should they pick and choose, they just try them all and figure out which ones works best for them.

Because you don't really know right now and everything's up in the air.

You need to try as many as you have time for.

One of the things about social media was once you understood one platform, it was pretty easy to transfer what you knew to other platforms as they came online.

And I think the same is true for ChatGPT and perplexity and Bard and whatever else you are playing with.

If you learn to write good prompts that create the content that you are looking for, whichever platform ultimately becomes the dominant platform, you will be prepared When I was looking for a video editing short clip tool, I signed up for trials for anybody that would give me a free trial.

I hopped on and took a look at it.

I even did one or two very inexpensive paid trials just to see if those tools what was good out there.

I ultimately settled on Opus Clips because it worked for me the way I wanted to work.

I could see it fitting into my rhythm.

I would recommend anybody do the same thing with any anything in their tech stack.

From your calendar to your productivity tool to your podcast recording software.

Try several and then pick one and stay with it.

I have a friend who has decided that technology moves too fast.

She no longer signs up for annual subscriptions.

She says yeah, they're cheap, but then I am stuck for a year.

So she actually the first year she uses almost any software she will only do it on a month to month basis.

And then once she's really sure she's been with it for a while she's yeah, this is what I want to use.

Then and only then does she jump on the annual.

And I think that's also an interesting way to approach this.

Different from me because I just use appsumo and try to find all the lifetime deals I can find.

Now I have some appsumo deals that I absolutely loved and I would recommend that people look there.

You have to understand that some of the software is a little premature or that your lifetime deal is going to be great but the software will be improved and you may never get the upgrades.

But my scheduling tool, which is Publer and I had a proposal tool I don't use anymore because I don't need to both of those.

I had lifetime subscriptions and they were ridiculously cheap.

Yeah, they recently did have an alternative to opus clips called Manuvo on there as well.

So they do have things that will help you.

I had ca.

They had Cast Magic on there, which is one of the good tools for podcast.

Wow.

Yeah, I got it when it was for a lifetime deal, so I don't have to worry about that.

So yeah, I tend to do lifetime deals instead of monthly or annually because then it just gets really ridiculously expensive over the long term.

But the lifetime deals on appsumo are usually so ridiculously cheap.

That's different than an annual subscription with an established company.

But yeah, because the thing is with appsumo, most of the software companies, they need to in order to get their second round of funding, they have to be able to say we have this many paid users, they don't tell their investors how little we paid.

They just have to be able to say we have X number of people who have paid to use our platform.

Yeah, it's a good deal.

And then obviously for those that are out there, if you are looking to video edit, I recommend using DaVinci Resolve.

If you want a traditional NLE that's similar to Premiere, they do have a free version so you can actually use it for free.

It doesn't have a lot of the bells and whistles of the studio version, but if you decide to buy the studio version, it is a lifetime fee of $300 and that's it.

So I paid it once and I've been using it for since version 16.

We're on 19 in the beta right now.

I also think that free Trials and inexpensive or some of the appsumo deals let you see see how much of the software you're really going to use.

I had this fabulous product that I'd used for years and I'd gotten it right at the beginning.

I actually knew the developers and they kept improving the software and that was great.

But the price kept going up and I didn't need the new features.

And so eventually I said, love you guys, don't want the product anymore because it was overkill for what I was doing.

Because I teach at a university, I have a subscription to Adobe, so I don't pay anything for my premiere.

But I got to tell you something, I use about this much of the capabilities and at the point that I'm not teaching at the university anymore and I have to pay for my Adobe subscription, I'm going to think about that long and hard because it's not cheap and Canva is amazing.

Yeah, and that's unfortunately they bought for me the Affinity software suite this past year.

So I'm not really happy about Serif maybe going to subscription, but I'll use it for as long as they're not subscription based.

But yeah, Adobe you still get an actual discount through the student and teacher thing or you can get a discount through Adobe on that way, which makes it even cheaper.

But yeah, the regular license is like 80 to $100 a month and when.

I had the agency it was worth it.

I don't anymore but because it's one of the perks of teaching.

Cool.

Anyways, people listen to this podcast and they're like where can I find you online to learn more about what you do?

So the best place to find me is on LinkedIn.

Look for the rain ball on LinkedIn.

Click over, say hello, tell me you heard me on Digital Coffee.

Look for more than a few words.

My marketing podcast.

Wherever you listen to podcasts, look for morethanafewwords.com or on iTunes or anywhere else.

All right, any final thoughts for listeners?

Being active and contributing to the conversation on social media is not optional.

If you're going to have a business, you have customers.

Find a way to connect with them.

Do not over stress, do not overthink and ask people to share their thoughts and opinions and you'll have a wealth of user generated content.

All right, thank you for joining Digital Coffee Marketing Brew and sharing your knowledge on social media and user generated content.

Thank you and thank you for listening.

As always, please subscribe to this podcast and leave a five star review.

It really does help with the rankings of media.

Know how I'm doing but join me next week as I talk to another great thought leader in the PR marketing industry.

All right guys, stay safe, get to understanding your social media and how to find user generated content and see you next week later.