Redefining Engagement and Innovation in Tech through Content and Social Media

On May 1st, 2024, IT leaders gathered online for a webinar that went beyond the typical discourse on social media’s role in the tech industry. 

The webinar featured 4B’s Director of Strategy, Sam Grise, 4B Director of Content, Aaron Rosenbluth, and SkyFi’s Director of Marketing, Tom Babb, who discussed the landscape of digital content creation and its crucial impact on business strategy for the tech channel.  

The webinar provided more than just theory; it was a hands-on exploration of aligning social media efforts with overarching business goals. 

The trio discussed the importance of brand awareness and how social media validates business credibility. They also discussed the reality of constant testing and experimentation in social media, highlighting that sometimes businesses must get uncomfortable and throw brand guidelines out the window. Challenges like content volume management and outreach effectiveness were tackled, emphasizing the necessity for flexibility and innovation in strategy execution.

The session highlighted the power of internal buy-in and engagement, encouraging employee participation to magnify reach and authenticity. Additionally, the integration of AI tools was discussed, explaining their role in amplifying content creation while acknowledging the irreplaceable value of the human touch in maintaining relatability.

The webinar’s core message was that in the fast-evolving tech sector, strategic, engaging, and human-centric content is the key to an impactful social media presence.

Did you miss the live session? Watch the full video above, or read the detailed transcript below.

Sam Grise, Director of Strategy, 4B Marketing

Aaron, Director of Content, 4B Marketing

Tom Babb, Head of Marketing, SkyFi

Thank you so much for joining us today and really a hot topic in the space today that we’ll be chatting about. So really excited to chat with Tom and Aaron here. 

Thanks, Aaron. How many of these have you guys done, Sam? Let’s see, this is our 6th. I want to say that sounds about right. Between six and eight, we’ll say, yeah. Variety of topics all around the marketing realm, if you will, from just personal experience.

I think the last one was around personalization from a social media perspective, but also from a seller’s perspective of how you utilize social media to be effective, which was a good, good conversation with our buddy Dave Elsner. That’s right. That was a great one. Yeah. We had to bounce around a little bit because I had achilles surgery. 

So on the up now, I was lifting my foot up and holding it up so people could see the boot, but nobody needs to see my feet today. So now that I’m out of the boot. That’s awesome, man. I’m glad to hear that. That’s a good step for you. That boot loops. Been a long journey. Long journey, but excited to be out of the boot for a little bit. Perfect.

We’ll give it one more minute here and then we’ll get things kicked off with some introductions. Thank you, everybody, for joining. Really appreciate it. Excited for the discussion today. Man, I should have refilled my coffee. I’m running low already. I was just thinking a few minutes ago that I’ve had far too much coffee today. I’ve got the jitters. It’s getting me. I’m not the coffee drinker I once was. You know me, I’ve got the jitters. Always. So. All right, awesome. We’re about three minutes after, so let’s go on ahead and get this discussion kicked off here. 

So really excited for everybody joining today to talk through redefining engagement, innovation in the tech channel through content and social media. This is a very, very hot topic in the space. Social media continues to grow, but a hot topic from a B2B perspective. 

From my perspective, I have this discussion with customers every single day. What do we do with social media? How do we grow our social media presence? Whether that’s b, two b or b two c. It’s a constant platform that is being talked about. And how do you maximize the ROI of investing into a social media channel? How do you maximize roi with content generation? And how do you just do it for the business? Right. Outcomes driven. How are we driving revenue for the business? So thank you for joining. 

My name is Sam Grice. I’m the director of strategy here with four b marketing. We are an outcomes driven go to market and sales modernization consultancy. Really what that means is we take strategy and tie it back to financial outcomes. We live in a capitalistic society, especially in the B2B world. And understanding those levers that we’re pulling to drive revenue, really it comes back to five key areas, which is revenue growth, cost reduction, asset utilization, cash flow optimization. What strategies are we putting in place to be able to drive those levers forward today? Really exciting for the discussion because I’ve got two experts in the field when it comes to content and social media. 

We’ve got Aaron Rosenbluth with four b marketing, who is our director of content. Aaron, I’ll let you do a quick introduction. Sure, yeah, thanks. Thanks for that. Great intro, by the way, Sam. So I am our director of content. My background is not in the tech sphere at all. The tech space. I actually was tapped on the shoulder by our founder almost ten years ago because he enjoyed my social presence, my Instagram feed. And I at that point had a pretty substantial following somewhere in the realm of 4000 people. And this was 2011. So this sort of pre-influencer land, things were just sort of kicking off. So he tapped me on the shoulder and then he asked me if I happened to do content writing, which I did. I have a background in advertising and copywriting. So we put the pieces together and it actually was a benefit in the early years and still, I think is a benefit that I didn’t come directly from the IT space. Because of that, I had a completely different lens on things and that was the lens that we were looking for. So that’s sort of the foundation of my entry into this, into this agency and into the world of specifically IT marketing via content. 

And speaking of the Instagram feed and being excited about that with Greg working with you, that’s one of the reasons why we have Tom today. So weve got Tom joining us, Tom Babb with Skyfi. He is the head of marketing over there. And funny enough, I reached out to him on LinkedIn because I was loving the social posts. I was like, man, you are crushing it. You are doing a great job over there. I want to have a discussion about this and what youre doing from personalization, how youre creating new content, how Skyfi is leveraging that. But I’ll let Tom do his introduction. 

Thanks, Sam. And I’m happy you like my LinkedIn feed because I get some beef from it from my friends. But thank you. Yeah. So Tom Babb here, head of marketing at Skyfi. I have a background in ecommerce, primarily driving traffic to websites. And then I came on early days at Skyfi to help form the community and then have kind of just turned into a role that is really working on growing our, our overall brand growth and bringing people new eyeballs specifically to Skyfi. Just a little bit about Skyfi. Skyfi is a marketplace that is aggregating earth observation data and analytics into one place. So what that means for people who don’t know anything about geospatial data, earth observation is there’s a lot of satellites in space and there’s a lot more going up every year because of SpaceX has made it very cheap to go to space. So there’s all these satellites and other Earth observation things like stratospheric balloons that you may have seen on the news. And then, of course, people are familiar with drones. So there’s a bunch of different ways you can collect data about what’s going on on Earth, but it’s very fragmented. So there’s companies here that have five or ten satellites, there’s companies that have 100 or 200, but they’re all separate. And so Skyfi is working to aggregate all of those data sources into one marketplace. And then we also have an analytics marketplace as well, where there’s all these companies out there that are specialized in applying AI and machine learning to these, to this geospatial data. But again, that market is also fragmented. So we’re bringing both markets together under one umbrella. And that’s essentially what we’re doing at Skyfi. My main goal right now at Skyfi, just to kind of touch on a higher overall objective of what we’re doing, is from my perspective, I want to keep the brand ahead of the business at all times. So we want to look bigger than we are at all times. And, yeah, really excited to be here and talk about socials. 

Love the background there. And I’m going to go ahead and stop sharing my screen so that we can get into the discussion side of this. And I’ve seen some of the pictures that you’ve shared on LinkedIn with SkyFi. I always like going through my feed to see them because they are awesome, man. They are really, really cool. So really, from a content perspective, it is a major pillar when it comes to the marketing effort. It starts foundationally to be able to expand. You give it to your sales team, they’ve got additional resources to be able to use. I would love to just open it up to both of you from a perspective of content, because it can be multiple things. What do we see from a content perspective on the social media front? What platforms should we be utilizing? We’ve got x, got LinkedIn, we’ve got Twitter, or x is Twitter, I should say Instagram Meta. I’m behind the times on the social side, right. TikTok now, right. And there’s big news with the government and TikTok and where that’s going to be. But I would love to just get both of your takes from a B2B world, right? The social media platforms, what platform should we be utilizing? How are we utilizing them? So I’ll open that up to Aaron first and then Tom, jump in on that after. 

Sure, there’s a lot, there’s a lot in your question there, but let me start at the beginning of it. So, from my view, I take a very, very broad view of what content is. So to me, this is going to sound vague initially, but content is everything. It’s the copy on your website, it’s your social media, visual content, and also the captions. It’s white papers, it’s one pagers, it’s sales sheets, it’s all these things. Actually, this doesn’t necessarily apply to this, but just to give you a sense of how broad I view the content world, I even think of a retail experience. So the interior design of a retail store, in my mind, is also content. So broadly, it’s everything. It’s everything that touches the customer experience that can drive loyalty, sales, and that long term relationship. It’s the thing that turns an average brand into a love brand. So that’s kind of my overall view of it in terms of, wow, we could go deep into the platforms. We’ve talked a lot about it. We talk a lot about platforms all the time. There’s an obvious and easy to understand perception that because a platform is there, a brand or business should be on that platform. That’s not the case. It’s going to be led by where your Persona lives. So if that’s LinkedIn, then invest most of your time, your money, in publishing there. If that’s Instagram, then go there. So we determine how we invest in specific platforms based on where the Persona research guides us. 

Understanding where the audience lives is huge, and especially from a B2B perspective, in the tech channel, where is that audience living? Where are our customers living? Is it on LinkedIn? Is it on Instagram? Is that just a trust signal to have an Instagram? And what are you putting out there on Instagram from a business perspective? Those are questions that all teams should be asking. But Tom, I would love to hear from you as well on what is content, right? What are you creating? What impactful? 

I really like what Aaron said about kind of anytime you’re writing down words or just putting something on paper, whether it’s in person for your website, blog, and then, of course, socials, I think that’s kind of how we view it as well. So what we do really well at Skyfi is we try to share content internally in every direction. So if I were to learn about, let’s say, a new industry that we might be able to impact at Skyfire, potentially a new product that’s coming out, there’s just giant note documents of people saying, hey, here’s what I learned today. And then that can be spread into multiple different directions. So, typically, a blog will live on socials by itself in four or five different pieces. But what I really look at right now, how I’m thinking about content, is long form to short form. And so taking long form pieces, whether that’s a podcast, you going and speaking at a conference or a blog, let’s just say in this case, and then turning that into, let’s say for a blog, five social media posts, a podcast, stepping that up into whatever, highlight clips, or live tweeting a conference or something like that. So, looking at these broader initiatives that you’re taking on as a team, that would fall under the content realm, and then figuring out how you can turn that into a million different pieces that live everywhere all at once. We’ve spent a lot of time on quality of content, and quality is extremely subjective, especially on social media. And it’s subjected to one, the user, but also the algorithm. So, yes, the user may love it, and every user who sees it loves it, but the algorithm may decide it’s not worth it and they’re not going to push it. So we really go for quantity over quality on most of our stuff. We don’t go too deep into videos. We won’t spend hours on videos or hours on small bits of content. We’re just trying to push one to three out a day and really push the content. 

There’s so much that you just said that I love that resonates with me. But we say quality over quantity. We talk about this often. Sorry, Sam, but just take us derail for 2 seconds. We often talk about this idea with email, too. You’re either training people to pay attention to you and find value in what you do, or you’re training them, and on social media, specifically the algorithms to ignore you. So focusing on quality over quantity is absolutely, I think, critical. I love what you said about taking all of the content that you produce and breaking it into small pieces. Make the most of everything that you do. It’s such a heavy lift to create content to begin with. So you want to make the most out of everything. We’ll go the other way. Sometimes we’ll actually take, we’ve started taking blogs. Of course we take a blog. We break it into multiple social media posts, we break it into an email, whatever it is. But at the end of a year, if we have a set of content blogs, let’s say ten of them, that we see a roadmap or they can form a long form piece or a book, we’re now actually taking that. We’ve done that recently with some tech channel marketing blogs that we did that say we basically wrote the book on tech channel marketing. So let’s actually take all of this content that we produced and write transitions and just edit it so it can be that book. So it goes both ways, breaking things into small chunks, and then when you have the opportunity, taking them and making it bigger. 

Yeah, I love this idea of like the content engine. That’s something that we really try to think about with every single thing we do. So I’ll give a quick cycle that I’m just thinking about that literally took place today, which is a conversation between a partner of ours, who’s the expert in their product, and then our marketplace. So that conversation took place and it was recorded, and that recording was turned into a blog. But then that recording was also sent to the product team and it was turned into some instructions on the product that was then turned into a one pager for a conference. So we just created three things out of this video, and then now we have this beautiful one pager for a conference. And now we’ll put that on socials as a lead magnet. Essentially, we’ll say, hey, we have this awesome how-to guide. Again, we created this for a completely different event, but we’re like, we’re sitting on this gem of a one pager. How should we now recirculate that and turn it into something else? So then we’ll go put it on socials and put essentially an email paywall behind it. If you want this how to guide, give us your email. And then we turn that into an email campaign. So now we’ve taken one call and spread it across every direction. And that’s the content engine at play. 

And I’m going to jump in really quickly because I forgot to do a couple pieces of housekeeping. One question and answers. Feel free to jump in and ask questions. I see Thomas in there already asking some questions as well. And a really good question of how did you do that right when you talk about the one pager in the recording. And I think we’re going to get into that tool set, being able to maximize the investment that you put into one piece of content. Are there tools that we utilize to be able to help that? AI is a huge topic, so that’s going to be a great question that we’ll get to in a minute. The other thing is the chat’s open as well, so feel free to use that as well and comment on ideas that we’re talking about. The last piece that I had is stick around to the end. We do have something at the end from a giveaway perspective, so you’ll want to stay to the end to be able to see that. I love a couple pieces that you mentioned there, Tom. And one of the pieces that I want to touch on is that social media is personal. It started out with Facebook and being personal and sharing your lives and having that personality of social media, and it’s transformed into, hey, we’ve got the social aspect for personal use, but we’ve also got the business aspect of it as well. And one of the pieces that you mentioned is you involve the whole team, the whole business from a content perspective. And that is huge because you get the personality of the individuals at the company. But then also you tie that back to the voice tone personality of the brand to be able to bring that out. I would love to hear from both of you on social media from a business perspective of getting that personality through what the voice tone personality is of the business, but also, how do you have those individuals within the business leverage that so that the personality is getting out there? Tom, I’ll open it up to you first on this one. 

I think it comes down to two things. Freedom to say what you want from leadership and consistency. So at Skyfi, our two co founders, Bill Perkins and Luke Fisher, are all about just speaking your mind. They don’t care if they disagree with you or not. Put out what you want on socials. And then when it comes to consistency, and I’ll dive deeper into both of these, we have a channel in slack. We use slack for our internal comms that’s called like this post. And if you post on social media, you put your link in there and everyone goes in and likes it. And so it’s just a very, very easy way. It’s a convenient way to engage, essentially. And then we’ve tried to encourage comments, this post and things like that. But, you know, different people have different ways that they want to represent themselves on social media. So that’s another thing that we’ve learned to respect is, okay, so we know that if you post every day, more people are going to see your feed. But also you may not want that as a personal Persona, as someone that wants to post every day on LinkedIn or Twitter or whatever it is. And so we try to respect what people want to do, but really encourage them to post. Outside of that, we have centralized messaging documents for every campaign or every product or essentially what we’re going to, you know, whatever we’re trying to push that week or that month. And that is a place for anyone to go to to learn the facts about what we’re talking about, just in case they’re not deep on that topic. But also they can run that through chat, DBT, or whatever their tools they’re using. And it’s essentially that central hub of ways that we can conveniently maximize what they want to do. And then I’ll touch on one more thing. Whenever we go into new campaigns, I’m essentially spending my weekends just building out a giant content library for my team. And because I work in satellite imagery, it’s really easy because there’s a lot of content in satellite imagery. It’s literally just images of the earth. And then sometimes you run analysis over it. And so I’ll just build out giant folders for my team. And then on the Sunday night before the Monday launch, I’m like, hey, team, here’s your folder. They expect it every time now because we do it every time. And they can go in and figure out, oh, I like this post, or this resonates with me, or this location is important to me, or whatever it is. I think it’s about giving them what they need to post in advance and then also giving them the freedom to do what they want. Wow, that’s so smart. I’m Tom.

In what you said, we do something very similar, and I totally, and I’ve seen this work and not work at other places, but we also have a channel in Zoom, which we use zoom chat, where somebody publishes new posts. We go in and we encourage everyone to engage with it. But I love what you’re doing to make it as easy as possible for your employees to get in and help spread the word about Skyfi. Because of that. And I saw this, I had a brief stint at an HR software company, and I realized while working there for just eight months, long story there, that it was like pulling teeth to get employees to actually engage with the published content and then to want to publish it themselves. And so we did something very similar. That was the experience that I needed to understand that you have to really support the people in your team if you want them to help do some of that heavy lifting from a social media publishing standpoint. So totally aligned with what you’re discussing. That’s a brilliant way to do things. I also really love to piggyback off something that you’re talking about, the idea of authenticity. So I think because of the way that social works, because it should feel like, to some extent, a human to human connection, even if it is a brand, speaking to people or speaking to the many, you want it to feel really personalized. And I think authenticity is absolutely essential in that. So, you know, giving your team, your employees some support and how in helping them create content easily, because that can feel like a mountain to some folks, and then allowing them to be entirely authentic within, I’m sure within reason, is a, you know, that’s a great way to do things. I mean, I think anymore, there’s so much inauthenticity in the world that if you can come swinging with genuine content, with a real point of view and an authentic voice that is unique to the company, but also the people that work within the company, it’s a winning formula. People want to hear from people. So as much as you can foster that sense from your employees and also as the brand, I think that’s a huge benefit. 

I think there’s a thin line between providing them with enough content to say, go out and do it yourself, and providing them with the content to do it. I hate when I see the same group of people in a company post the same thing, and it’s super clear that the marketing person said, copy and paste this into your caption and put this picture out. They need to have that authenticity and that autonomy to go say, okay, I understand how this affects my life or my position or whatever my perspective is on that piece of content, and I need to formulate my own opinion on it and put it out there. The other thing I’ll say is what I’ve learned and what we’ve learned is once you see them with these little pieces, like, let’s say it’s ten images of agriculture, and we say, choose which one’s important to you. Once you see that in their mind, they start to realize, oh, I have ideas of what else I could do. And then that trickles back to me and it’s a cycle. It’s like, hey, what if we did this next week? Or what if you did this? And I, you know, I love, I’m, I try to stay as open as possible to all these ideas so that I can then go use that. The best thing for me is when my team has too many ideas and I don’t have to do any work, I just need to execute on their ideas.

I think you’ve touched on a couple of items that are extremely important. And when we think about the tech ecosystem with the channel, a lot of times manufacturers have a marketing team and theyre sending this out to the channel, and the channel takes that and they automatically just post exactly what the OEM or manufacturer had provided. And really what it comes back to is strategy, because they dont have a strategy around social media or that content presence, if you will. Because if theyre just taking what the manufacturer says and posting what the manufacturer is saying, where’s their value proposition? Where’s their personality, where’s their voice, where’s their tone? What is their benefit to the marketplace for doing that? Really, what I see all too often is no strategy behind content and social media. And so I’d love to understand from both of you, where do you start? How do you start a content strategy? How do you start a social media strategy? Because you need to have it, otherwise you’re just putting pieces out there to put pieces out there. And for example, Tom, you mentioned as a lead magnet, so how do you start getting on this journey, and how do you set a strategy to be effective. And, Aaron, I’ll pass this over to you first. 

It’s a great question. We’re, you know, we’re trying not to just throw spaghetti at the wall and see what sticks, to use an overused analogy. But truly, I mean, we start with the goal. So I think the goal of the business, and then filtering down with the goal of social media aligned with the goals of the business, that is where we start. So that is the cornerstone of everything. So we take a look at what our clients or ourselves, our goals are overall, and then we filter that down into, okay, what are our goals for social media within this? And then we create a strategy based on that. But I’ll say something that, Tom, you might agree or disagree about it. We don’t stick to a really specific brand style or rigid strategy over time. I’m saying that slowly and strangely, but that’s because social media wants agility, and what is going to work one week might not work the next week. So we came up with a pretty broad strategy. But we also know that there are going to be times where we throw that completely out of the window because we need to jump on a trend or do something to inspire engagement. That I think part of the strategy is always aligned with the goal, or the strategy overall is aligned with the goal. But to get there, it needs to have some level of agility. And sometimes you have to get uncomfortable and throw the brand, I say throw the brand book out of the window. And that kind of leads to some of the crux of what I’ve been seeing for years, which we kind of talked about, or I’ve talked about a lot. And it’s sort of embedded here is this idea of the tech community specifically sort of thinking a little bit bigger when it comes to social media. I think that the way that they generally market themselves isn’t really aligned with the innovation of the product. So you’re talking about technology, something that’s on the cutting edge and moving forward, but a lot of the ways that you see it being marketed is a sort of step 20 years in the past. So a lot of our goals are aligning the product with the marketing. Let’s make this thing as cool and innovative as the actual product. And that requires sometimes stepping outside of a really rigid, defined brand voice and personality. I think I kind of answered that question. 

I completely agree. So you’re not. I don’t disagree at all. But in terms of Skyfi, we’re still finding product market fit in our category. We’re slowly coming into it and we definitely have industries where we know that our product works really well for. But on an overall social strategy perspective. And this is not like a very clean strategy per se, but we really experiment quite a bit. We’re very, very similar to what Aaron says. So, like, this past week, we posted a song before a conference. So we used AI to make a song about our company and the conference, and we wrapped this all around this campaign. I’ll send a link out after this. But the campaign is. Every band tells a story and we’re piggybacking off of this design that looks similar to Pink Floyd. And then we were able to make a psycho or psychedelic rock song using AI, talking about Skyfi. So, like, that’s extremely futuristic. I found that tool, like, one day before we made that. So, like, that’s an example that that was a huge hit in terms of awareness. And now everyone wants a t- shirt and they want to come talk to us at the conference, which is a big strategy piece, right? So we created brand awareness on social media, but now we have this t-shirt and now people are going to come talk to us in person. So in a way, that’s a lead magnet. 

So really what it comes down to for us is trying new things a lot and then figuring out what sticks and then hammering those things down. But we’re constantly tinkering with new things and just trying to figure out how we can kind of surprise people, disrupt the industry. And I really like what Aaron said. We want to follow our product in terms of messaging. And I don’t know if that’s exactly what he said, Aaron. But essentially, we are disrupting the industry as a product, and we have a very tech oriented product. And so with our messaging, with our socials, we want to add that consistent brand voice. I’m super locked into the brand voice for Skyfi, and I’m trying to get out of it. Thankfully, I have people on my team who are like, hey, what if this week we went with, like, this hippie logo? Or, like, why don’t we just introduce four new colors this week just for fun, you know? And so trying to get out of that, because I, you, you know, I live and breathe our brand guidelines. I would say just overall trying to find ways to tinker around and then also trying to find win win content, as I mentioned before. So if I’m learning or you’re learning, let’s figure out how we can put that out there so it’s not just stuck in our slack. That’s brilliant. Ooh. Do you mind if I kind of. 

You’re up to something that is really, I think, critical here is that understanding that when people, people are seeing thousands of pieces of content on social media a day and most of it is getting lost. So the kind of stayed standard, I’ll say it, boring approach to marketing tech products on social media is not going to stand out in the feed and simply not going to give people what they’re there for, which is entertainment, something that’s going to help them in their professional life or they want to get pissed. I mean, that’s kind of what you’re seeing now. People want to argue, they want to be entertained and they want to succeed. So I think stepping outside of a rigid box and being able to experiment and then see, try to your point, try different things. I mean, I guess it is sort of the spaghetti as well approach to contradict myself. But you do it in a calculated way. You have to try different things, you have to experiment, and then you see what people react to positively and they engage with, and then you just try to hammer that over and over until it stops working. But what you see is a lot of this we talking about sort of like oems who are providing their partners with content, social media content. And these are just these very throwaway captions that people are kind of tossing out there lazily. And you can recognize them when you see them. And it’s easy to copy and paste that caption out of a LinkedIn post, put it into the search bar and see that, you know, 30 other partners have literally said the same thing with the same imagery, and there’s no goal and there’s no strategy behind that. So kind of taking it back to the strategy, aligning with a goal and then also making it feel innovative and fun and entertaining so it doesn’t get missed in this rush of content. I think that’s the key. 

I’ll say one thing that you just brought to my mind. Something that’s super important to us and definitely a strategy, a business strategy in general, but we take it to socials a lot is just listening to the customer and just listening to what people say. We are a very engaging brand. So if you comment at us, we will reply. And it’s very likely that someone on the team will reply. So a lot of the time if someone asks a question that would be answered by our customer service team, instead of the brand account taking what the customer service team would say, the customer service person will just come in and their personal account and be like, hey, this is the answer. Like, let’s talk if you want. And so that type of, like, personal engagement and listening has been huge for us. I’ll just share one tidbit that we, in terms of customer listening and strategy that’s been huge for us, is a big thing that’s going on right now in the earth observation industry. I forget what this person called it. Essentially, it’s finding toxic things going on in the world. Let’s say for the one that I saw, that was a good example was when that bridge collapsed in Baltimore and there’s like ten satellite images of it, right? And so every company is trying to get their own satellite image so that they can post about this event, and people are like, that’s so tone deaf. Once we have one satellite image, that’s enough. We don’t need nine other images of the exact same thing so that you have your image. And so we quickly picked that up inside Skyfi that circulated really quickly. We’re like, hey, this is tone deaf. We agree with that. Let’s make sure in the future that if there’s something that bad that happens and it’s already covered, we’re not just piggybacking on it so that our audience can see that same image. And so just listening to the customer is what it comes down to and making, whether that’s product feedback, social feedback, how you should engage with them. Just like looking at the comments, the comments are always the goldmine. 

Listening to your customer, one can create a ton of content as well. What doing as a business is, we’re solving challenges and complex problems for our customers. And so having that feedback loop of conversation is huge because it’s essentially breeds more content. And we’re that answer. And when we think about content, right. There’s a bunch of different aspects that this plays into, right? When you talk about SEO and the Google algorithm, if you will, with EEAT, experience, expertise, authoritativeness, trust, even that being able to have that to put onto your website to help with SEO is all content, and you’ve touched on a whole bunch of items here tomorrow. But a question that I have for you is you seem to have addressed a lot of challenges within your social media practice today. For those that are just getting started or those that have a program that they’re working on, I would love to hear some more challenges. What are challenges that you face with the social media side of the house or content generation. It’s a fast moving environment. We work in tech. Tech is fast. It happens overnight. I love to hear some of those challenges or pitfalls with social media that your team is facing, and Aaron as well with some of the customers that we work with. But Tom, I’ll open up to you first. 

Two biggest challenges that we face is bandwidth for quality of content and attribution of content. So, like, is this working? And if so, what are we looking at to say if it’s working or not? I’ll dive into one of each of them individually. So I’ll start with the is it working? And kind of our overall attribution model. So typically you post a link on social media and you can see if it’s set up right, like through UTMs or whatever your attribution type is. You can see how many clicks go into that link. You might even be able to see how many purchases if you’re only, like, if you’re an e-commerce website. And so that would be your typical attribution model. But when it gets into the social category, it gets really messy because someone might come to your page, they might see it, but then they’re going to leave, and then they’re going to Google you and come back. And so now you’re attributing to Google instead of social. But really, the first touch point was social. And so, like, that whole ecosystem is a huge challenge for us. To make it worse or more complicated, we have a mobile app. And so if you think about how URL’s work and Utms work, that’s only in the URL system. The second they get into a phone, then on an app, now you’re working with code, and so you can’t track them on a URL anymore. Now you’re tracking with code. So we’ve set up a super, super, like, intense attribution model. But the biggest thing that we deal with on a day to day is like, hey, we did this, we got a bunch of likes, we got a bunch of views, but did it actually lead to sales? And was that actually the audience we care about, or was that just viral worthy? Because it was cool, cool images of earth. So first one attribution, the second one is going deep on quality. And that’s why, and Erin brought it up at the beginning is like quality versus quantity. And we clearly care about quantity and we care about consistency. But at the same time, you need a level of quality that is not crap. You know, like, you can’t just put out, you can’t just go to Google Slides, say, this is why you should buy my brand. Throw a black background on it and post it on social media. You need to have some layer of, like, design brand elements that are incorporated into everything. So figuring out how deep to go on different things, especially video, because video is so hard and so expensive, is a huge, huge challenge for us. 

I mean, attribution is a huge challenge for us with our clients, even for ourselves. Drawing a straight line between a social post and revenue is really challenging. Unless you’re selling a t- shirt or something where you can literally shop through either the social platform or you can see, oh, yeah, directly. We had 20 people come from Instagram over to this page and buy 20 t-shirts. You know, it’s just not, it’s not that clean. So we do what we can to try to direct that. We look at our impressions, engagement, a lot of vanity metrics, to be quite honest with you. And then we try to kind of align that with what we’re seeing in our clients sales numbers. But it’s really on the agency side, it’s even more difficult because we don’t often have the level of visibility into their sales in real time that we would if we weren’t the agency. So there’s that, and then there’s the fact that social media is a content machine. So getting content, making content, having the budget and the time to make the content, that is always the challenge. But that kind of goes back to what we were talking about earlier. That is the reason that you want to take everything that you do and break it into various chunks to be distributed all over the place. So that’s what we’re doing for ourselves and for our clients. But I would say for me, the single biggest challenge is getting content produced to the volume and quality that we need to produce an outcome. And I love what you said, Tom, about, I’ve said this for a long time. I’m not really interested in it. No, I’m not interested in vanity metrics overall, because what do I care if 10,000 people are engaged with the post? But none of those people are customers. To your point, if something goes viral simply because it’s out there and wild, that’s cool. And there is a benefit to that ultimately. But if it doesn’t result in anything in terms of action from a genuine customer, then was it really valuable? What did it really do for you? So there’s a lot in there. 

I’ll flip that as well, though, just for newer companies or, or companies that aren’t going viral. A different way to view that, which is something that took us a while to figure out and we still don’t know, is like, you also don’t need to go viral. You might need five likes, and one of those likes is the decision maker. And so, like, like, in terms of looking at just overall metrics that you can see on social media, it’s so hard to figure out, especially LinkedIn. LinkedIn is like, you’re not going to get the same impressions on LinkedIn as you are on any other platform. It’s going to be way lower, but they’re so much more valuable. Like, you will get the decision makers looking at your stuff on LinkedIn and you just need one, right? Especially if you have a big product or a longer sales cycle or, you know, you just need to open up those relationships. So it’s, it’s, yeah, it’s easy to look at the number and say, we did well, but also you have to just remember you just need one person and it’s, you just got to find them. Absolutely. You actually bring up something really interesting I want to talk about related to LinkedIn. Because what we’ve seen and what we continue to see is that going back to the idea of people wanting to connect with people before they connect with a brand, we’ve seen the most success for our clients and ourselves when there are internal thought leaders publishing as themselves on LinkedIn and then highlighting or sharing the company shares that or they tag the company. We’re seeing the best engagement and return from LinkedIn is when you have these people who are willing. 

It sounds like you’re fostering the kind of culture in your company that encourages and empowers your employees to get in and jump in as themselves and create this content comment back to people as themselves on posts, brand posts. But I think the best thing is when you get that empowerment and then you let those people go out there and say what they know, and that points back to the company page and you see everything sort of elevate from there. 

Ideally, yeah, I’ll just add one last thing to that, like, employee thing. In my opinion, you need to make it worth their time because it’s like, okay, if you’re an external facing employee, it’s a lot easier to think, I want to post on social media because you understand why you do. But let’s say you’re like a developer. The developers don’t understand why they need to because they’re so head down in the product, they’re not seeing the external views, they’re not looking at all those metrics. And so it’s something that I preach to my team is like, okay, we have this like this post channel, we have all these other people on our team that are extremely stoked to comment and like on your stuff. Like this is a way for you to build your personal brand as well. By joining our team, like environment and ecosystem, we will launch you up. Like every single time I post, I get like twelve likes because my team, every single person on my team likes it. And then just based on how the feeds work, that’s then going to circulate into all of their feeds, right? So I’m trying to help my team understand the value of just getting out there. And the way I say it is, I say press more buttons. That’s it. I just need to go on the platform and press buttons. I love it, man. That’s great. That’s great. I totally agree. Press more buttons. I might have to steal that or get it on a t- shirt. We’re making that sound, we’re making this sound simple, but if anyone who has tried to be in a content marketing role or a marketing role inside of a company and overseeing this, trying to get your employees to engage with your content, like really engage and do it consistently, it’s not easy. It’s like one of the biggest barriers that companies have. And that engagement, again, as we just discussed it, engagement fuels further engagement. So getting those people in there, it’s critical and it’s really hard to do. So I really compliment you for coming up with the structure that fosters that. 

I mean, it’s a challenge all in itself, right? Social media in general is a challenge. So how do you get the most bang for your buck? And that kind of leads me to my next question, if you will, is it takes time, it takes money to have creatives build this from a platform perspective and getting it out there and publishing it, and then it takes the time of the developer to go like that post and so on. And so it is an investment, whether it’s time based or cost based, there is an investment into social media. And for those business leaders out there that are debating from a perspective of where do I spend my marketing dollars, I would love to hear from both of you on the social media side and the content side of what is the benefit. Awareness is a big piece of it. And we’d like to talk about driving back to that outcome of revenue or new customers or those goals specifically. I would love to hear from both of you. What are you missing out on? If you aren’t investing into social media, if you aren’t investing into content, what are you missing? So I’d love to open that up to you first here, Aaron, and then Tom, feel free to jump in. 

I think you’re missing a tool for awareness. Obviously, if you’re being intentional and you’re doing things the right way. Again, to what you said, Sam, it might not happen overnight. Could happen overnight. You never know. I mean, that’s what viral posts do. But generally for this world, it’s a long term strategy, but you have to do it. Awareness is important. It’s still a key driver for awareness. I think. Also, engagement results aside, a lot of people will go to validate whether or not you’re a real business or if you still exist based on your social feed. So if you had a feed and you stopped publishing two years ago and you’re talking to somebody who wants to validate that you are who you say you are, that’s going to be a harder conversation. If you aren’t consistently publishing or if you’re not there at all. If you’re not there at all, what’s going on? It’s going to raise a question. So at this point, it’s table stakes for business. It’s almost like I’ve said this, probably too much, but it’s like ink cartridges for printers. It’s just something that you have to have. It’s just a necessity. Now, going back to what you said earlier, that doesn’t mean that you need to be on every single platform, because it takes money. Social is a content machine. You have to figure out where to smartly invest that time. Where is the best potential to have some sort of return. So really dialing into where you’re going to be not, you’re spreading yourself too thin by forcing your brand onto every single platform, that’s pretty essential, but it’s just, you have to be there. It’s just a part of contemporary business. 

And if I go, if I see something that looks semi-sketch, I will instantly scroll down to the bottom of their website and go to their social media. And just, I’m looking for two things. Do they have any type of engagement? Like when’s the last time they posted? And do other people like their stuff? So I can know, is this legit or not so in terms of the credibility thing, 100%. Once you get past the credibility side of it, like, let’s say you are posting and. And you’re going, I’ll tell you this, Skyfi is on a zero dollar marketing budget right now, and our sales are up and to the right because of organic. So. But we are, we are two years into posting every day. So it took a long time to get here. But we’ve gotten to a point now where essentially people just expect us to post what’s going to come out. And every single person says, I see you on my feed every single week, and, you know, we’re coming into a hackathon next week. And all the people at the hackathon know who we are because of organic social media. So I really like what Erin said about finding the channels that work for you. We don’t put a ton of time on Instagram because we’re so B2B focused. And Instagram’s typically direct to consumers. But the reason we are on Instagram is because we do believe that direct to consumer falls into b two b. The decision makers are on every platform. So, like, my CEO is on Instagram, surfing Instagram. He’s not in the mindset of, like, he is on LinkedIn, right? He’s not saying, is this someone I want to partner with? But he’s there if something comes up in his feed and his reels and he’s like, oh, this is interesting. I work in this industry. I’m going to check it out. Right? So it’s almost like you need to be everywhere, but also focus on what’s most important. So just for Sky, Skyfi specifically, we’re on, we. I spend most of my time on four platforms, and again, we’re b two b focused. So that’s why we’ve chosen these platforms. But LinkedIn, Twitter or X, which, by the way, I’ll get into my x rant. But I think that was the biggest brand mistake ever. Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram and discord. So Discord is one we haven’t talked about, but we’re pretty community driven and we want to know what people are doing in the world of art, or geospatial, especially because it’s small and it’s growing. So we do have this, like, community, essentially, where people just talk all week. It’s not daily all the time, but sometimes it blows up. And I’ll go in there, there’s 100 unread messages. But that’s also like a social listening tool for us where we can be like, hey, guys, we’re thinking about doing X. How would you react? And then that’s like a way for us to A/B test ideas, marketing, messaging, all that stuff. People are like, I don’t understand what that means. And they’re ruthless in discord. It’s kind of like Reddit. And so that’s been just huge, I guess, is finding our power for putting so much time into those four consistency for two years, and now we’re running on an organic zero marketing budget, which has been great. That’s amazing. 

Discord. That’s really smart. Discord is a great call out because social media is building a community, right? You’re getting your personality out there and building a community. And so I think that that’s really important. I want to jump back because I saw a question come in in the Q and A, and you mentioned something about X and Twitter being a mistake in the past. And one of the questions we got here was from Thomas saying, we found that Twitter is filled with bots and junk. Yeah, I would love to get your opinion there, Tom, on Twitter, from what you guys did. And then Aaron as well, I think Twitter. 

Okay, just touching on the Twitter thing real quick. I just think that, that I just. My biggest argument for why it should never have been rebranded is I always just ask people, well, what do you call a post on the platform? It’s called a tweet. No one else calls it anything else. And people still call it Twitter. Twitter at face value, just like I did by accident on this call. So trying to move that brand over is going to be such a pain in the butt. So, anyway, that’s my rant on that. I just think that was a dumb idea. But in terms of the bots, yes, I agree. It is full of bots. But the problem and the reason that this person is probably saying this, comments, I don’t. I’m not sure if we know each other, because you’re early, your brand is new, and so when you post your engagement, are these bots, essentially. And so you’re seeing. Oh, well, I’m only getting bot engagements. Yeah, that’s because bots are engaging with mine as well. But now I have enough engagement to kind of cover that up. Overall, Twitter’s probably been our biggest winner. I think we have 12,000 followers on there, and it just comes down to, it’s a whole different discourse. Right. So we change our voice right away when we get on Twitter. We might cuss, we might use the letter c instead of s. So we just speak to the crowd a little bit differently. But overall, that’s where we go viral, is Twitter. And the other thing is, it might depend on your product. We’re selling satellite imagery, and we can get images over the South China Sea when there’s some type of disruption going on near Taiwan. And that’s Twitter ish news. People want to talk about breaking news on Twitter. One other thing I’ll touch on real quick on Twitter, and I actually really like this. Gary. I love Gary V. And I just heard this on a podcast recently. Everyone’s like, what’s the new best thing? What should I be doing on this platform? They’re always asking those questions. Just do what the platform is telling you to do. Like, if Instagram says we’re pushing carousels, do carousels. It’s not that complicated. So, X. Twitter says they’re pushing spaces. We’re trying to push. We’re trying to get into Spaces now. We’re trying to find people who have a couple more followers than us or a couple less followers than us and get into a space with them and invite three other people. And now we’re in everyone’s feed, that is, their followers, and we just have a conversation about something. So, I guess to answer this person’s question, it comes down to consistency. Yes, there’s bots there. I don’t see bots on LinkedIn. But it’s just. It’s an early stage thing that you’re not. You’re going to have to fight through, man. 

That’s totally interesting. There’s so much in that that I want to explore. I even have a question for you, Tom. How so. How often are you guys tweet? 

How often are you always gonna tweet throughout the day? I’m really curious. 

Would you consider a retweet? A tweet? 

Sure. Yeah.

Cause it’s, you know, I would say we’re adding to our feed five times a day. 

Okay. That’s a lot of the challenge. That’s the ultimate content monster, because things die within minutes, if not, you know, or an hour, if not minutes, on Twitter or on x. So I always wonder how often you have to publish consistently throughout a day to see that and what you guys do. To your point, you actually have something really interesting that seizes on what people go there for, which is this kind of real time, relevant, news worthy. It’s a newsfeed, really. So with your ability to get satellite imagery of virtually anything in real time, you can really play off of what’s happening there, which is brilliant.  

I love my job because I do content and I sit on a bank of content that’s real time and interesting to a lot of people. That’s cool. But one thing I’ll touch on real quick on, just in terms of bandwidth and stuff, because that’s a huge problem with the fact that we can do five Twitter posts a day, is my job revolves around socials and I’m refreshing my Twitter, x and LinkedIn three or four times an hour. Imagine a young Gen Z person who’s Instagram obsessed with Instagram or TikTok, and they’re always on their phone. That’s how I’m interacting with our brand accounts. And so I’m in social media mode all the time and just engaging. I’ll toggle between my personal and brand account all the time. I’ll comment with both accounts all the time on the same post. So it just comes down to, like, someone. If you’re really going to go hard into socials, someone needs to be dedicated to being a social person. And they cannot need to run anything by anyone. They need to be a trusted candidate. 

Full autonomy? 

Yeah, yeah, full autonomy. If they have to go to legal for, like, every other post, that’s going to eat up everyone’s time. They need full autonomy. If they screw something up. Legal comes in, says, hey, you can’t do that. Which has happened to me five or six times. Right? Legal’s like, hey, this looks like an endorsement because you said this. And I’m like, oh, shit, I understand. Taylor Swift is not endorsing our brand. That’s just a meme I thought was cool. And so, you know, I love it. I love it. But, yeah, full autonomy is huge for owning social media. 

We’re getting close to time, but I feel like that’s such a good way to kind of wrap things up. You know, it’s like, because you’re highlighting all of this, like, even what you said about changing your language on, on x, so that it’s a little looser. Like, even the way you spell things, you have to play to what the audience wants when they’re on that platform, and then you and it does. It requires constant care and feeding, and somebody has to be able to have a license to go in and just be crazy if necessary. You’re making me think of RadioShack, which has one of the most legendarily unhinged feeds of all time. But it worked for them. People are astonished that, like, how is Radio Shack allowing this to happen? Not that we need telling everyone to go absolutely crazy, but maybe… you must experiment.

Yeah, you have to experiment for sure. Tom, before I jump to this last question here, you mentioned the four platforms that you guys are investing your time into. It was X, Twitter, Discord, LinkedIn. And what was the fourth one? Instagram.

The experimentation side leads to this last question that I have here. And I know we’ve got three, four minutes left. We’ll keep it brief, but AI, it’s a hot topic. It’s experimental. People are utilizing AI like crazy. Now, we mentioned ChatGPT a couple of times when we talk about maximizing content, and we talk about it from a perspective of long form to short form and vice versa, creating a book or writing the book on something. I would love to hear from your guys perspective how AI is impacting not only content and social media, but how are your teams leveraging it? Because we talked about bandwidth as well being an issue from a person on a keyboard, if you will. So, Tom, I’ll open it up to you first. How are you guys leveraging AI to help drive this? 

I’ll do a use case here, and I’ll also try to answer Thomas’s question in this answer. So, Thomas, you asked earlier on, how did you do all that? When I was saying we took a video and turned it into twelve pieces of content, AI is the answer, but mixed with a bunch of tools that are now also coming up. So we use Google Meets instead of Zoom, but zoom, I’m sure, has a similar feature. But on Google Meets, you can transcribe the call or you can record it on zoom. You can definitely record this as being recorded. There are AI tools that can take videos and put them into transcriptions if you have the video. But again, I’m transcribing all of my calls, and now I just have this giant transcription of the conversation. So we were to transcribe this call. I could then feed that into ChatGPT and say, give me high level points about this call. So that’s how I’m creating a lot of these centralized messaging documents that are then powering all of this other content in terms of overall AI and how we see it, I’m using ChatGPT every single day. And then we also have a ChatGPT channel where people are saying, this just saved me 5 hours. My new tool that I’m using the most is called Cassidy AI, and it’s just next level. It’s essentially workflows on top of ChatGPT. So if you’re running the same prompts over and over and over again, this essentially just makes all that one. So now I can say it already knows that I’m going to make three use cases out of this conversation. And so I can just say, hey, here’s the transcription, please make me three use cases. And then I just press the button. It gives me the three use cases. So that tool is insane. It’s called Cassidy AI. I want to pass it to Aaron, but one thing I will caution on is that I use ChatGPT so much where I know that people, and I’m going to start flaming people on LinkedIn. I’m ready. I got my, like, my arsenal that I’m building up. I can tell when people are using ChatGPT if you use the word unlock, leveraging, revolutionizing in an era of. There’s a million words that it loves. And so you need to apply the human element every single time, and you need to be aware of what sounds so dumb and just not like human. And then if you want, throw in a couple, like, human dumb things like a like, or something like that in the middle of it, so the reader knows they’re still reading something a human wrote. Yeah, that’s all I got. The last thing I’ll say, you got to use it. You got to just start using it. I don’t know, just start playing with it, talk to it. It can do so much. 

I totally agree with you. We’re using it similarly, actually. I want to point out that we’re making content right now, so we’re recording this webinar. This is content. I’m going to take this or my team’s going to take this. And we use a really great tool that is not widely available yet, but will be called OneCliq. And that is the thing that’s enabling us to take what will be a 1 hour recording and return it into several, several social posts so we can upload this thing into OneCliq. It’s going to break things into several different videos. It’ll give us headlines, it’ll give us a lot. So that’s the way that we’re easily able, it’ll transcribe this for us. So we’re easily able to take this 1 hour video and break it into several, several potential posts, blogs, whatever it is, also totally, totally with you on being a prompt engineer, understanding skillfully how to prompt these tools to get the best out of it, and then absolutely going over every single line of copy it writes with a fine tooth comb, a magnifying lens, and making the language natural, removing the things that are obvious, not just because, not because we want to fool people, but because you can’t just let this thing do the heavy lifting, at least not yet. And that’s not what people want. We’re still, it kind of defeats the purpose to some extent of trying to be a real person, even if you’re operating as a brand, connecting with other humans. If you’re just having ChatGPT run wholesale with something and just like copying and pasting it. So it requires skillful prompting and a human to go through and ensure that like is this how we want to say this? Is this natural language? Does this sound like a robot? No, but AI. But these tools like to your point, in OneCliq, all of thes these things enable you to get the most out of every single piece of content you produce. And that’s huge. It’s a huge cost and time saving. So use it, don’t fear it. It’s here. It’s only going to get better. You know, don’t run away from this stuff. 

I know that we’re a few minutes over and I think that we could have gone for another 3 hours. This has been an awesome conversation and Tom, thank you so much for making the time. Aaron, thank you for making the time for the conversation. I am dropping a note in the chat. So the offer here, if you will, is to email me with the subject line content at Sam@4BMarketing.com, we’ll do a free social analysis and a free content analysis, so give you some feedback from industry experts that have been doing this for 20 plus years. What it looks like from a B2B perspective. So email Sam@4bmarketing.com with the subject line content and we’ll get you set up for that. The last piece that I want to say is just kind of encompassing the discussion today, just from a high level perspective. I think that, number one, having a strategy, understanding where your audience is and where you want to invest your time into those social platforms is foundational for a successful content strategy. For a successful social strategy. Number two, community engagement, your internal team, getting them engaged, getting their ideas and then also the customer feedback loop, understanding where the customers are sitting. The discussion point of having a discord is amazing because people hide behind keyboards and they’ll type what they want to type in a discord to be able to get that conversation going, getting that feedback loop to help generate content. And the last piece that I’ll leave you with is maximizing your investment. If we’re going to do a webinar or if you’re going to do a long form piece of content, you have multiple pieces of content to push out on social there from that and engage. When you have a social strategy and you’re posting things on social media, make sure you’re engaging with the people that are liking and commenting. And Tom had a great point about not always having to be from the company page. Have your customer service representative respond to that. It creates that personalization and really starts to amplify that social media brand and really your brand in general. So that is going to be it today. From the discussion standpoint of redefining community engagement and your content strategy through social media, we can’t thank you all enough for joining us for the conversation today. And one more time, giving it up for Aaron and Tom. Thank you guys both for joining me. Really excited about the discussion. 

Yeah, thank you, Sam. This is great. 

Great. Thanks. Awesome. Appreciate you guys. Well, thank you everyone. Really appreciate it and have a great day. Bye.