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Remember Jarvis?
Jarvis is Iron Man’s AI (artificial intelligence).
The one that was overpowered by Ultron in the Avengers movie of the same name.
Stark talks to Jarvis, learns from Jarvis, has Jarvis do stuff for him, and generally loves Jarvis almost as much as Potts!

We’re not quite there yet, in real life, as it relates to AI.
But we ARE in a good place.

Hand up if you’ve heard of ChatGPT. (I’m willing to bet most of the readers of this column have their hands up)

GPT or Generative Pretrained Transformer is a top-notch language processing AI model. It was developed by a firm called OpenAI (which is now 49% owned by Microsoft). It can create writing that is human-like and performs functions, including language translation, language modeling, and creating text for chatbots and other applications. With 175 billion parameters, it is one of the most sophisticated and substantial language processing AI models created to date. We are currently on GPT-3 or third generation GPT. It’s rumored that the 4th generation will blow this one out of the water.

At its core, GPT is a predictive tool. It’s a way of automatically generating text based on machine learning. What this tool is doing for you is searching vast amounts of content, based on your prompts to give you a sequence of words that it thinks will follow. ChatGPT has become a phenomenon because it takes this technology and deploys it in a way that’s extremely easy, and intuitive, for the average human being to use.

Now most commonly on the interwebs right now, you’re seeing people post about how they’re using ChatGPT to generate blog posts, or articles. So let’s focus on that specific niche.

GPT is a tool, not a person. Use it intelligently.

For years, there has been widespread fear of artificial intelligence and its impending takeover of the world (probably not made any less sensational by Hollywood). Instead, especially as a small to medium business, look at it as firepower that you’re providing your people with!

So here are a few things to keep in mind as you use it – individually or as a team.

1. Treat your chat like a real conversation. Better questions in a conversation lead to better conversations. The same is true for AI.
2. The quality of your prompt is pretty key. Give GPT detailed and clear input. If you don’t know where to start, try this general prompt framework: “I want you to act as an expert in (put in a short description of your industry + niche). I will provide the following information: (put in more detailed information on the task at hand). You will use your expertise to create: (put in the specific output you want here)” (Bonus tip: save that the first time you use it so you can edit it later for future uses.)
3. Provide style guidelines to the tool if you want to edit a more complex piece of writing. For example, if you are editing a new blog, first feed in a previous blog post into ChatGPT and ask it to analyze the style and give you a guide. Now copy that style guide into your new prompt and ask it to edit the new post in the style of (insert its own analysis of the style here).
4. Part of the power of this tool is that you can ask it follow up queries. It’s not a one and done interaction, you can refine your parameters for better results. (That’s where us humans come in). So continue the conversation in your thread.
5. Think of AI tools as a way to make the grunt work easier. A lot of foundational stuff that we do over and over again. Like robotic process automation (RPA) for the creative space. The process of creating any kind of content involves a lot of work like pulling together facts, making sure things are accurate, looking at research, making sure tone and voice is right, and so much more. Many of those steps can be simplified when you use tools like ChatGPT, and you can free up your mind to bring out your best thinking instead.

Look beyond the sensational headlines

Remember ChatGPT can generate content super fast. This is why you see a lot of sensational headlines like: “I created all my blog posts for the month in 30 minutes using ChatGPT” or “I documented my marketing plan for the quarter in 15 minutes.”

Yes, all of that is possible.
But they’re probably not going to be very good blog posts or plans!

Let me give you an example. If you are a law firm and you go into ChatGPT and say something like, “write me a blog about five reasons why entrepreneurs need a lawyer”, you WILL get a blog post in SECONDS. 

At first it’ll look pretty impressive.
In some cases, maybe it’ll even be a piece that reads better than what your junior blog writers can give you.

But there are a couple of cautionary things that you want to pay attention to.

1. Remember that while ChatGPT is advanced, search engines – primarily Google, have tools (and are making more) that are able to spot a body of text if it’s generated by a machine. Think about it like anti-plagiarism tools. So you really don’t want to be using entire bodies of text that are spit out by AI. Be warned.
2. Further, for artificial intelligence to become truly intelligent, it needs continuous input into how humans want it to function. And the more us humans use it to rehash sh!tty content that already exists with no takers, the less we’re going to train artificial intelligence.

So, the article about why entrepreneurs need lawyers. You would need to think about a few foundational things that marketers would think about automatically. Who is the audience, what’s the goal, how does this link back to results from what was done before, what are the problems the audience wants fixed, how does this answer those problems…

Pretend we have all that information.
Feed those things into ChatGPT so that the deep research work that you have to do, and the outlining work, for example can get taken care of for your “sh!tty first draft”.

I would provide a prompt that’s a bit more custom like this: “Write me a blog post about five things entrepreneurs, making revenues between 1 and 2 million need to think about as it relates to their corporate legal structures. Assume these entrepreneurs are in Canada. Also, please use the following style guide (information on analysis of previous content goes here)”

Now, can you see how this second prompt is going to give you a piece of content that is far more advanced than what you would get with that first prompt, which said “write me a blog about five reasons entrepreneurs need a lawyer”!!!

And that’s just the beginning of it. You can continue the conversation asking it to make specific improvements and deletions.

My follow ups would look like this:

“Give me 5 headline options in active voice”
“Make those headlines under 5 words”
Expand on paragraph 2 (and copy in the para)”
“Make this section less wordy”
“Consolidate these facts into 2 key points”

What that gives you as a marketer, or a writer, or really any kind of person who is influencing the creation of content out there is that you’re not starting from a blank page, instead you’re focussed on bringing together a series of ideas to make a powerful whole, more robust than anything you’d do on your own; or that a machine would spit out on its own. 

Think laterally with your GPT

We often think about tools, which promise to make our lives easier, like a writing tool in absolutes. We want a perfect tool that’s going to fix all our writing problems, and just take ALL THE writing off your plate. 

I’m here to burst our bubble and say that is rarely possible.
That’s probably not even possible if you hire high level, external fractional support for content creation. 

But what you can do with tools like ChatGPT is make specific areas of your work simpler.
Like researching a ton of material you need for a blog post.
Or pulling together multiple models as you’re planning something.
Or creating agendas and outlines for meetings and interviews.
Or writing out the logic for your quiz that just won’t work right on your website.

Don’t forget to use it in your personal life

During the holidays, I had a bit of time set aside to do some deep cleaning of our home. As people who live and work in the same environment, we feel for our poor, neglected home that is coping with the kind of footprint that it never really signed up for! Enter the need to  clean way more often than we did pre-pandy. So to keep us organized, I used chat GPT to generate a cleaning list. 

Here’s the prompt I gave ChatGPT: “generate a deep, detailed cleaning list for a home with the following specifications.The tasks will be done by two adults and an 11 year old child over two days with lots of breaks and downtime. The home is a townhouse, and has four floors. The first floor has a small entryway, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.” 

And I proceeded to describe the home, and ask it to allocate time as well as include indications on what my 11 year old could help with.

Here’s what it came back with:

Fourth floor office space: one hour. Wipe down all surfaces including desks, shelves and decorative objects with a mixture of water and mild soap or gentle cleaning product. This will take 15 minutes and it’s appropriate for an 11 year old. Then vacuum all floors including carpets, rugs and Hardwood laminate. This is appropriate for an 11 year old with some supervision….”

And so it went, giving me a 100+ list of items we needed to tackle.
And we got about 60% of it done in the two days!!!
The rest got done over the weekends following.

I gotta say this is unprecedented in my cleaning history.

That customized, clear list took away a lot of the time I waste in trying to decide what to tackle next (and watching cleaning videos on TikTok instead).

This kind of artificial intelligence is here to stay. It’s only going to get better. There are a number of other tools that exist with less of a cult following. It’s really worth spending some time getting your teams to gain mastery over what’s out there. And as you play, you’ll find your favourites! 

Looking for more UNboring ways to up-level your content?

Get your copy of my book, “UNboring: Take your content marketing from blah to brilliant”. It takes readers through 10 lessons on how to use humour and other forms of entertainment to stand out among the clutter online, post-pandy. The book is available on Amazon and all other book retailers.

It was a dark and stormy night in the city. One of those nights when you couldn’t be entirely sure if the stuff falling out of the sky was rain, or snow.

It was late.
The streets were empty. 

A lone figure trudged through merciless rain-snow.
A woman.
She walked fast towards a car, like a woman with a problem to solve.

The woman’s name was Jasmine, and she was the CEO of a consulting company that offered services to large corporations. Unbeknownst to many, the company was struggling in the aftermath of a pandemic; and the blaring news that regularly tells Jasmine she is now in the midst of a recession offers no comfort. 

Business was down.
Morale was at an all-time low.
For her and her full-and-part-time team of 6.

Jasmine knew that she needed to do something drastic to turn things around, and fast.
She had heard rumors of a woman, a mysterious figure known only as “The Advocate”. 

They said on the marketing street that “The Advocate” could make even the most troubled of companies shine again, using the power of brand advocacy.

Jasmine decided to take a chance and seek out The Advocate.
What did she have to lose?!

She’d fed the location pin into her share-ride app. The ride took her to the seediest part of town, to a dingy little office in a rundown building.
“Great!” she thought to herself. “Exactly what I need on a night like this.”
She was here. She may as well do what she came for.
She pushed the buzzer. 

The door was answered by a nondescript man who gave her a once-over before nodding and letting her pass by as he turned the two locks on the door back resolutely.

There was no turning back.

Jasmine went up the stairs to find herself in an office.
The Advocate was a surprisingly regular woman.
Jasmine wasn’t sure what she expected but all-black track pants, tee, and runners, with glasses was an oddly comforting look. So when she asked Jasmine what her problem was, Jasmine couldn’t wait to spill her stressed-out guts.

The Advocate listened in complete silence to Jasmine’s story.

Jasmine paused.
15 seconds passed.
Then 30.

Jasmine forced herself to say nothing.

After 54 seconds The Advocate spoke.

“Ditch the brand account,” she said. You’re wasting time creating too much content that speaks to everyone and no one. Instead focus on your people. Starting with yourself; and everyone you know by first name who is a supporter.”

Jasmine was skeptical.
That sounded like too small a pool.
She had already dismissed a lot of that pool!

She held her tongue.
“Tell me more”, she said to The Advocate.

“Don’t dismiss your relationships.” The Advocate said.
“Building connections and trust with a smaller group of people will take you much further. See how those people can help you. Seek their advice and custom.”

Jasmine thanked The Advocate and left the office, feeling hopeful and confused all at once.She knew this would take hard work and dedication, but she needed to gather up her people. And allow them to speak for her.

As she waited for her ride back home to get to her that stormy night, she couldn’t shake the feeling that she had only scratched the surface of this mysterious woman’s true power. 

But that was a story for another day.

What was that about? 👆

That was an UNboring account of how brand advocacy cannot be ignored by small businesses in a recession. (pssst: I am the author of “UNboring: Take your content marketing from blah to brilliant”. If you’d like a copy, you’ll find it on Amazon.)

The reason I’m bringing this to mind today is because the question of whether small businesses should use brand accounts or those of co-founders, leaders, and team members to distribute all the content marketing material that is created is one that comes up very, very often from clients and partners. 

My response to this question is almost always the same. 

Start with people (over brands), no matter how small or big you are.

Yes, it is 100% possible to build successful brand-driven infrastructure. That said, it is not the path of least resistance. In 2023, with the rise of artificial intelligence, the latest mainstream star being ChatGPT, people like to see PEOPLE at the front. A person is always going to attract more connection than an institution. 

Content marketers, particularly those in the technology-friendly space, have been using multiple modalities of artificial intelligence whether through words, visuals, or editing of audio and video for a while now. And we’re eventually going to get to a place where “a genuine voice” will be hard to come by in marketing content. 

So, focus on using people to spread your message.

~~~

Before you know who your advocates are, you need to know what content you have.

I am offering an intensive review workshop for small business publishers. A deep dive into your content so that you know exactly what documents and systems you have (and might have forgotten), what formats you own, and where you can find the original pieces so that you CAN USE THEM MUCH MORE. 

You’re going to need it in a recession. If you’ve got over a 100 pieces of content from the last 12-18 months and still find your team creating a lot of new stuff, you may want to dig deeper.

Learn more about the Program

Every time you create fresh content, you do it with a certain goal and target market in mind. Often, these factors can shift and change to meet new priorities. Many brands therefore get stuck on a hamster wheel of creating more, and more content that becomes “use and throw”. Therefore wasteful! Not ideal in the best of times!!

A recession can be a great time to reassess where you are having the biggest impact and focus on strategies that will bring in the most revenue. As small businesses, we often focus on vanity metrics for our marketing, rather than revenue metrics; and this needs to change in order for marketing to be more successful. Instead bring a renewed focus to the importance of revenue-generating activities.

Enter repurposing!

4 keys to start repurposing your content

1. What content should you repurpose? Focus on pieces that relate to your core marketing message. Get past that idea that content is like an event where it’s “one and done”. As long as you’re not talking about time bound events, you can make content work in an evergreen fashion for a very long time.

2. Start by adding external content onto your website. If you have a show, like a podcast or video series, think about how it can add to your website, because often people look at their website publishing goals and their show production in separate silos. At the very least, add the shows to your website, and then think about publishing writing from it.

3. Recognize that good publishing is “more than words”. While the internet does recognize content primarily in words, it’s a missed opportunity to have a blog that is only in written format. Use snippets from your shows, graphics (tumbler-style image-led content), or slideshows to increase content on your blog.

4. Employ proper referencing when cross-populating content in different places. If you are not new to repurposing and have been posting your content across different platforms, you must stay aware of the pitfalls and protections that are around you. The 20’s brings with it a plethora of AI tools, which is fantastic, and also means that it’s activated the system’s defenses. Search engines have the tech which is able to spot fake news, and artificially generated material. So how do you protect yourself from being dinged or being punished? The simple answer is to leverage the power of crosslinking; so that the internet recognizes that you are a multi-format, collaborative publisher.

Start thinking about repurposing with focus!

Because in a recession, full utilization of your content marketing materials stops being an option and starts becoming a responsibility.

Mood of the moment: Stop wasting content

I am offering an intensive review workshop for small business publishers. A deep dive into your content so that you know exactly what documents and systems you have (and might have forgotten), what formats you own, and where you can find the original pieces so that you CAN USE THEM MUCH MORE. 

You’re going to need it in a recession.
If you’ve got over a 100 pieces of content and still find your team creating a lot of new stuff, you may need this.

Learn more about the Program

2002 felt hard for me.
The hardest year in the pandemic.

I cried too easily.
I second guessed myself too much.
I bummed harder than I should about some bad decisions.

I drank too much.
I moved too little.
And I made almost no time for myself.

Or at least that’s the story I was telling myself until November. At which point I gave myself some serious structure and did a reframe.

Here’s how I’m seeing 2022 now. This year…

📕 I published MY FIRST BOOK 📕 UNboring (STFU… this is still surreal for me!)

💰 c+p digital made more than we did in 2021 and we were more profitable.

☮️ I made some serious changes to our business plan to focus on our core audience.

👧 My 11 year old daughter went back to school this year after 2.5 years fully virtual. She loves school now after so much drama over the last year. Super, super grateful for this 🙏

💄 I really, truly, finally can say that I got comfortable with the way I look – on video and photos. And that opened up a world of expression for content creation.

As I read that second list, I’m grateful.
Particularly to the people who have helped me reframe the narrative.
(Side note here on the value of coaching, mentorship, and peer masterminds. I’d be nothing without those 3. Make time and budgets for those in 2023.)

Reframing to positive is valuable in content marketing

In content marketing, the negative typically feels MUCH more sexy. People literally tell you to frame your hooks from the negative perspective for platforms like TikTok and YouTube. This is a strong way to bring people in.

But that approach of negativity can get in your head.

All too often you start to become more negative than you realized. And nobody benefits from that.

If you’re in need of a jolt out of negativity, here are some factors that are important in the process of reframing any narrative. As a marketer I’ve worked with 100s of brands, personal brands, and show hosts who already have very cool, very advanced messaging and positioning in place. The change often comes in the clear targeting and the refinement of tone.

Enter: the need to see a lot more positives.

5 steps to reframing negatives into positives for yourself

1. Start with an honest listing of the positive as well as the negative of the situation as you see it. And if positives don’t come easy to you, make a rudimentary list. And employ the secret weapon in step 2! Show them your list so they are able to point out more positives to you than you have listed.
2. Invite a fresh set of eyes to view the facts; and the emotions. You don’t want to have too many voices in your head pulling you in multiple directions, but a core set that is almost a “personal board of advisors” is lust worthy. 
3. Find space. It’s easy to dismiss wins and positive narratives when you’re constantly on the run. When your battery is empty, you need to recharge it. Likewise, making space to rest is pretty key to reframing any type of narrative. 
4. Systematize gratitude. If listing your wins doesn’t come easy to you, don’t despair. It didn’t come easy to me; I had to train myself, with a lot of help. The single easiest way to unblock the inability to see the positive is to reframe your sentence as gratitude. When you start expressing gratitude for things in your life, it becomes so much easier to see the positive. 
5. Learn to use visualization. In my book UNboring, I use a number of images to illustrate key points because “a picture is worth a thousand words”, and I really wanted to hold myself to that discipline, which is not easy as a writer! As we start a whole new year, people often use vision boards which involve images. And that’s because visualization is really powerful. This is also true when you’re having to reframe things away from the negative! Don’t forget to use images to show you what you’ve already done and then start to visualize the next chapter of your series. It gets a lot easier and a lot less theoretical this way.

I wish you a wonderful 2023!

Podcasting is an extremely effective tool for boosting your sales pipeline to move you ever closer to achieving your business goals. Particularly in a recession.

To use it well, you need to focus on two key areas: 

1. Planning your podcast in a way that moves it away from being ad-hoc and instead pays attention to the core differentiators that make you perform and activate your network 
2. Stop thinking about your podcast as a publishing channel to keep running on the content hamster wheel and instead start using your podcast as the “Trojan horse” of business pipeline discussion openers.

Let’s get straight into it. Be warned, this is going to be a long read! If you stay till the very end, I may, or may not, reward you with a Schitt’s Creek meme 📌

First, here’s the exact podcast planning process we follow for The 4am Report podcast, the ABCDEI podcast, and for all our podcast clients.

 And you are welcome to, as Neil Patel says, “steal my process”.

In an ideal world, if you have less than 100 episodes, I suggest you go through this process once a quarter. As time goes on, this gets easier and easier and you can cut it down to twice a year.

Here are the seven factors to consider when planning your podcast for 2023:

1) Bandwidth

We start with bandwidth, because in light of the last couple of years we’re all tired, folx, so instead of fighting it, we need to try to navigate the waters we’re currently swimming in. That means assessing a couple of things. 

Do you have the time to do it yourself?
Do you have the budget to get someone else to do it? 

And then if you do have the budget to get someone else to do it…

Do you have the ability to step away and let someone else lead the project? 

Have a think about that because, often, I think people underestimate the amount of time, work, and consistency that is involved in making a show whether audio or video.

2) Themes

Think about the type of content you want to be producing – themes and points of view that you want to hit, the various contexts you want to have a perspective on, all that good stuff. Here’s an image I look at frequently to guide me.

3) Market

What is it that your specific market is looking to hear? 

And don’t forget that at this particular time, there are some universal truths. One of those is that we all know we’re in a recession in 2023 and beyond. The second universal truth is that the whole entire marketing world needs some levity and kindness. 

Bring some fun into your podcast calendar.

4) Your Ideal Client Profile

Make sure that your podcast guest roster features your ideal client profile. This is not because you want to hit on your podcast guests!! But because you want to understand and message to the type of person that you’re hoping to attract. 

This helps your listeners feel like you know exactly what’s on their mind. 

5)  Editorial Calendar

Make sure you have all your editorial in one place with a calendar. Put somebody in charge of it so that it’s updated regularly, and be sure that all the necessary people can access it easily. You might hate me for this, but the simplest place to put an editorial calendar is in some kind of spreadsheet.

You want dates,
you want people in charge of the step,
you want topics,
you want episode names,
you want notes.

If you want to go old school, put pen to paper and manage a handwritten calendar that captures the elements I’ve listed. 

We love pen to paper around here.

6) Team Briefing

Once you’ve figured out what you’re working on and what your calendar looks like for the quarter, make sure that everyone you’re working with receives a briefing of some sort. Written format can be a little intense, so some people do it in a meeting or recorded call format. 

My preference is a recorded Loom that’s really efficient and under 5 minutes because nobody has time to watch long briefing videos. 

And if you’re truly ninja about this, you can timestamp the vital parts and send them off to your team.

7) Put the scheduling in place

Work backwards from the episode release date and figure out at what points you need to have all your pieces in place to make sure it’s “in the can” and ready to go on time. 

This piece of timing will be determined by whatever works for your space. 

Now that you’ve run through the factors of planning a podcast, let’s talk about how to link your efforts clearly back to your business goals.

Five types of business goals that can be serve by podcasting 

1) Product – to serve product sales goals, you’ll need to create information around the category and problems to be solved.

2) High ticket services, or enterprise level deals – you really want to think about how to speak to your ideal client profile via your podcast. Remember, we’re not talking about hitting on your podcast guests (duh), but the more you speak to the type of people you’re hoping to serve, the sharper your messaging becomes for those who do want to work with you.

3) Also consider the role of a podcast as it relates to your goals with partnerships, collaborations, and recruitment.

 4) Funding (particularly if you’re a product that’s on a funding trail) – think about the right level of showcasing of your thought leaders, your founders, your executives to make sure that you are getting into conversations with the type of people you want to partner with. 

5) Fundraising – in an age where purpose is as important, if not more important, than profit, you definitely want to be thinking about how to make sure you’re using tools like a podcast powerfully to shine your beacon for the causes you support.

Remember to calendar your shows with intention

Focus on having a good mix of guests who offer diverse perspectives. 

Make sure that you have a great format mix that is not entirely reliant on interviews, and, most importantly, make sure that you have the bandwidth to keep executing what you have committed to audiences at the start. 

Whether they notice it or not.

Looking for a more detailed podcasting resource? 

If a podcast is on your mind for 2023, and you plan to do it yourself, we have resources. 

In our podcast program focussed on building business (over audience) we cover:

1. The podcast business case
2. Building a podcast brand
3. Setting up and integrating with the right podcast technology
4. Deploying the robust marketing plan that will take you through the crucial first quarter to help you rank in the top 25 podcasts in your industry in six months. 

Find out more about the program here.

We talk often of creating less content in your marketing. And there are a number of ways to achieve this. Today I’d like to focus on one key area that needs to come to mind: the concept of curation.

Content curation is when you pull together various pieces of content created by other people to support and amplify your own original content. Think of it like art galleries that curate collections around specific themes.

When curating content, an important ratio to bear in mind is the 1:4 rule.

The 4-1-1 rule was originally articulated by “Brandscaping” author Andrew Davis and made popular by Joe Pulizzi of the Content Marketing Institute. It states that “for every self-serving tweet [or post], you should retweet one relevant tweet and most importantly share four pieces of relevant content written by others.” 

The rule is called 411 after the American informational phone line number.

This ratio was created from a need to move marketing away from promotional blasts into informational content. It provides a clear direction on how to share material on social media for us as marketers, business owners, and marketing leads. Basically, it prevents us from repeatedly flooding our followers’ and likers’ news feeds with promotions and one sided monologue. 

“4-1-1” categorizes the information you offer into three categories:

1. 4 pieces of curated content, shared from external sources
2. 1 piece of original content, produced by you
3. 1 piece of promotional content, aimed at making sales

As the 2020s progress, for most content marketers, this has simplified down to a 1:4 ratio in terms of time spent on content creation vs content curation.

While it may not always add up in sequence, we would all benefit from applying the ratio to our content marketing programs.

But first, let’s hear from the naysayers 😁

Common resistances to the concept of curation

Many brands are reluctant to curate material and ask why they would want to direct customers to another website or source that is not theirs. I mean, getting any type of click is hard, and if the audience clicks through to the curated bits of content, what good does that do you? 

Fair question.
The answer has to do with community.

Content curation is a powerful way to build community

Content curation is a powerful tool for building community around your brand. By sharing content from other sources, you show up and become a part of a larger conversation. You’re letting audiences know that you value the perspectives and ideas of others. 

There’s an air of camaraderie,
belonging to a category,
and a spirit of collaboration and co-creation that will come through to  your audience. 

This mood is especially important during times of uncertainty or change.

Here’s a couple of beginner examples of curation that will build community. Typically involving posting links to sources of content in different formats (articles, podcasts, videos) 

• Perhaps you’re a fashion brand that sells online; and you share an interesting video about the history of a style of garment that became popular during a previous recession. This will attract those interested in fashion history and sociology. While it has no direct link to something you may be selling on your website in your spring line, it will give your audience a flavour of your brand’s holistic interest in fashion beyond just selling it to them to make money!
• Or perhaps you’re in the service industry, offering home renovations. Curating content around kitchen design trends from leading publications as well as videos and podcasts from top creators in the space is an excellent idea. Even parts of your audience who are not currently upgrading their home, will notice and remember the offering when they need it. 

Now take that spirit and put it on cr@ck!!! 👇

Content curation in the age of TikTok

It’s no secret that TikTok has truly found its people in the pandy! It’s an uber simplified form of video expression for even the most video-challenged among us. It’s made showing up “as you are” totally ok.

Not all videos created on TikTok need to be original. One of the features that sets TikTok apart is the ability to “duet” with other users’ videos, essentially creating a split-screen video (in which you can choose a few grid options to showcase the content and your reactions). The original content is played alongside your new recording. This feature allows users to create their own content while also drawing attention to and amplifying the original video (it gets automatically tagged).

In essence, this makes creating video as easy as retweeting! 

Case in point: The world’s most popular TikTok star – Khaby Lame is a masterful curator of content 

Khaby is a Senegalese-Italian TikTok star who rose to fame for his creative use of the platform’s duet feature. In a majority of his videos, Khaby films his reaction to things other creators are presenting in their videos. Khaby has a massive following of over 150 million and his videos have been viewed over 5 billion times.

While his success on TikTok comes from a number of factors, including his sense of humor, his ability to spot engaging content from other creators, and his willingness to experiment with different formats and techniques consistently, one key tactic to note is his use of the duet feature. This helped Khaby tap into the sense of community and connection that is central to TikTok’s appeal. By duetting with other users’ videos and building on their ideas, he’s created a mammoth community who values shared experiences. 

Another feature on TikTok is the ability to “stitch” together multiple videos. This feature is most often used by creators who want to strongly agree or disagree with a point of view on a subject. It’s particularly often used in connection to material in the current news cycles. An excellent tool for newsjacking for brands.

Both the duet and stitch features offer highly overlooked opportunities for brands to curate and share content on TikTok in a way that engages and resonates with a much wider audience than what you may have now. 

Adding value to curated content 

When curating content, one thing you want to spend time on is providing your own perspective and context. Khaby’s success comes from unifying his curation into a few key pillars. If I had to guess, I’d say his focus is humour, inventiveness, and social justice. 

Pick your own 3 pillars first.
And then only curate material in those areas.

Second, with each post, provide some context on why you think this is of value to your audience.

If that feels hard, here’s a hyper simplified template to help you get started.

This makes me feel (describe emotion) because (describe what caught your attention about the piece) and I think it will (what reaction do you think your audience will have?)

Focus on curation!
Thank me later.

Mood of the moment: Stop wasting content you already have!

I am offering an intensive review workshop for small business. A deep dive into your content so that you know exactly what documents and systems you have (and might have forgotten), what formats you own, and where you can find the original pieces so that you CAN USE THEM MUCH MORE. 

You’re going to need it in a recession.
If you’ve got over a 100 pieces of content and still find your team creating a lot of new stuff, you may need this.

Learn more about this program