#026 How To Easily Create Authentic, Thought-Leader Content On The Fly

Getting content from clients worldwide that is authentic, creative, and unique has been a challenge that our organization has to innovate through daily. Beth and Kelsey talk through some of the easy ways the Chatterkick team has been able to capture, innovate, and create content without taking up a ton of extra time. Use these tips to help your organization put a new plan in place for developing unique, high-quality pieces of content.

Learn more about Chatterkick.

Biggest Takeaways From This Episode

Easy Ways To Get Thought-Leader, Unique Content From The Voices Of Organization

Record some of the day-to-day meetings like sales team meetings, organization-wide meetings, department meetings. Again, make rules on what should NOT be shared, but you can get the verbiage and most timely ideas that the organization and your customers are talking about.
- Pull multiple thoughts and verbiage from the one meeting. Sometimes you can create 30 pieces of content from one meeting. This content is insanely timely!
Have an executive or team member answer a question or share their thoughts in a voice memo, a selfie video, or even a video of the ceiling to capture their voice.
Right after talking to a prospective client, have your team member record their voice and give a play by play or answer these three questions: This was the prospect's problem, how did I help solve it or reposition, and what the next step will be. < This is major for writing blogs.
If you have someone who isn't comfortable with audio or video, have them send bullet points, texts, messages, or whatever works best for them!
Connect with team members who are already active and ask them for permission to grab content from their platforms if you think it's a good fit. Tell them once and then go for it!

Highest Quality, But Takes The Most Time

Blocking time on-location to do a photo and video shoot capture.
Schedule out who needs to be available when.
Create a shot list to know what you need to capture (using your phone is okay!)
Get the right equipment or environment to capture video. Having sound equipment is fantastic, but if you don't have that available, make sure the environment is quiet enough to capture good audio. Avoid any rooms that have a serious echo; you'll thank me later.

Easy Social Distancing Content Captures

Set up an interview with 2-3 people and answer FAQs. Exactly like the podcast! It would be best if you had the right personalities.
Send photo prompts to a person on-site. It's like a photo/video scavenger hunt. Just give them rules on what NOT to take.
Drone shots of exterior parts of the building are a great way to shoot from a distance. Just make sure your business is not in a "no-fly zone." Use this map to see if you can plan a Drone Flight.
Use assets from other ads like a photo in the background, copy, B-Roll, and repurpose the appropriate content to work on social!

Ways NOT To Get Content

Rely on your clients, departments, or executives to give you content. They literally do not have time, that's why you're here!
Give a list of 30 things to your team and have them fill it out.
Do NOT take your billboard or commercial content and use that on social. Those assets are not made for that!

Transcript

This text below is a straight-up audio transcript of the episode. In our humble opinion, we think the audio podcast sounds much better in its original form. We have not edited the transcription below so there are indeed some grammar errors (some quite funny, in-fact).

Welcome everybody to another episode of generation social media podcast, Kelsey Martin, our COO is joining us today and I am Beth Trejo the CEO of Chatterkick. And we're going to talk about content specifically how to get content that's meaningful to your audience. That's a thought leadership piece of content, and really being able to not make all of that content fall on one person in terms of the writing and the developing of the videos, et cetera. So, we're just going to give you some ideas today, hopefully some key takeaways of how to do that within your organization, from both the executive angle of having so much awesome content and messaging you want to get out into the world. As well as your teams supporting and helping of that content. So I'm excited to get into this today, Kelsey. But first, let's start out by just talking through Chatterkick as a social media agency.

We've had this challenge, Kelsey's been on the team for eight years and, we've worked together. It's been a challenge because getting content from clients all over the world. That's creative, that's authentic and that's not just leaving it all on their plates to do all the content development, et cetera. It's been tricky. Can you just give us a brief, like this is what we've tried throughout the organization of getting content and some of the things that have worked for us and maybe how people could use that to their advantage? Sure. I think content in general is it's really hard. It's hard to get the right images. It takes so much time. Even with phones in our pockets, it still takes so much time. Like, what do I say, what should I put with this? Should I post an image or post a link?

So we've kind of gone through this journey and we'll continue to go down this journey of like, what's a different way. What's a better approach? What's going to save our client's time because we don't want this to be a heavy burden on anybody, but we also need their real authentic thoughts because if we're going and taking it from their competitors or just the industry in general, it's just going to sound like a watered down version of what everybody else is saying. And so ideally the best way that we've been able to do it is like literally going and doing photo and video shoots and traveling and being there in person. And same thing. If, if a client has somebody on their team who has done video or photo, that always gets the highest quality of content, but it is even if we're shooting on our cell phones, it's still a production.

We got to logistically figure out when we're going to do it. Who's going to be there. What times they're going to be there. You know, we've done shoots at doctors office like open clinics and it's like, they're in the middle of helping people. So we're going to stop a doctor and talk to them for 15 minutes? So it's a logistical nightmare, even if you're shooting on cell phones and shooting for 30 minutes, but it usually is the highest quality version. I think the new ways that we've been able to do this have been really exciting. Obviously COVID has kind of forced us to figure out like, how do we do social distancing content captures? And there's a couple of different things that we've done, literally doing what we're doing right now and screen sharing, just having a dialogue and pulling that out, by just doing Q&A, we've done photo prompts where we send that to somebody on the team for them to go capture.

It's like a photo scavenger hunt or video hunt for them to go take that. And then we edit it. We've done... Taylor from Honeywave and I just did a, well, that was mostly Taylor, but it was all Taylor, let's be real, drone shots so that we were literally shooting from a distance from like exterior's. There's just been so many millions of different ways. Yeah. And I think really the reason that we did this is because I really believe that our industry of social media companies. In many regards did it wrong in the beginning. And I still think they're doing it wrong today because they're either relying on the clients who don't have literal time to do this. They're physicians, they're business owners, they're CEOs. And they don't know what to post and they don't know how to post it.

And so that's why they're coming to us. And so for us to go back to them and be like, Oh, we need a list of these 25 million things. Like it never would've worked right from the beginning. We included a way to get content from them out of their brains and out to other people and their audience, their employees, etcetera. But can I jump in real quick? One thing that I did not say specifically that we don't do and I encourage other people not to do is like, what we've never done is take the billboard and just use the billboard, whatever, you know, this print company is doing. Let's just take that and put it on social. We've sometimes we've taken, like if you've done a photo shoot or product shoot, sometimes we take those assets that already exist, but we completely change them and redesign them to fit on social.

But we do not take, you know, your billboard with the quote over it. Like we would never just take that and put that on social because it doesn't belong. And people see that, that it's like, well, that just looks like an ad. If it looks like an ad, it doesn't usually perform very well. So we have used assets from other organizations, but we have never used pre-created ads for other platforms and or other mediums and stuck them on social. Yeah. I think that's, you know, we don't hear that as much anymore, but in the beginning that was a huge, Hey, we just got this commercial produced. Will you put it on our Facebook page? And it's like, well, it's not really the same. It's not the same form of media. It's not, I mean, in many cases like it doesn't actually fit within the Facebook kind of newsfeed visuals, the requirements, the requirements.

And so I, it just, it typically does not work from an effectiveness perspective. But one of the things that I think we have been able to do as part of our process, and I want to share this with other people in case they're interested is being able to sit down with CEOs, franchise owners, business leaders, and try to get the message that they want to get out to people because they're the ones like in most cases leading the ship, right? They're the ones that are either handling high level sales, relationship building. And in most cases they're not the ones actually posting on Facebook, Instagram, et cetera. So how do we help connect all of those lines of administration as well as communication? And I think there's been a couple of key things that we've done. One is the photo video shoots.

I think that's made a huge difference because when you take pictures of people or they're on camera, that's an easy way to capture that information and take it and put it out on your social channels. But what we've been able to innovate with with COVID, I think is really exciting and interesting, and it really kind of fits what's happening in the moment, which is recording some of the day to day things that are happening and then sifting through all of that stuff. Right. It's like putting it into a scrapbook and what are the best pieces that we're going to put on each of the different social channels. And we've been doing this with one client specifically, and I'd like you to share with people kind of the problem that that client had and how they wanted to push the industry, as well as like, okay, here are the things that we did that other businesses or marketing departments could probably take some of those solutions as well.

Right. So we recently implemented and kind of shifted this into more like, how can you do this on the go without being super time consuming or just really getting bogged down by quality? So what our conversations have been regarding the, I guess like agriculture cattle, livestock industry, is that a lot of the content that's being put out by like industry and associations, this client felt like was pretty generic and that they had a really unique position and really unique approach to the problems that everybody was talking about. And they just flat out felt like the topics that everybody was talking about was just the wrong information. It just, wasn't what people should be talking about. Like they're saying problem A, when that really isn't the problem it's problem B. And so, you know, as we're going through and writing content without being in the office with the client all the time, you know, we have to source what we find online.

And so when we were sourcing things, we were like, okay, well everybody's talking fence about line issues and how that's such a disruptor and like fence line disputes. And he was like, I mean, I could see how that would be a problem, but like that's such a small, like coffee shop thing that people are like, it's just making people angry, but it's not the problems that people should be talking about. And nobody has a solution for that really, other than your attorneys. So he was like, we don't want to talk about that. That's not like our purpose. And so we just had this barrier of like, how do we help you be a thought leader without knowing your thoughts? And so it really came down to like an "access and time" things. So we put quite a few things in place at this point and are starting to try new things.

And they're the happiest they've ever been with the content because it's uniquely them, it's their own words. So one of the things that we're doing is they have a weekly sales meeting where they're talking about current client problems that they're either hearing that are new or that they're solving. And they are recording that themselves. The option was we can go and be a fly on the wall or you can record it. And they thought us being a fly on the wall would make everybody be awkward. So we were like, cool. So he literally sets his phone down in the middle of the meeting and turns on the voice recorder and just records the sales meeting. So we're not using sometimes we can use specific sentences from that and either write a quote for it, or we literally use the audio and put it on a video or an image.

But oftentimes we're just using that for inspiration, right? So it's those unique phrases that we can use in copy images, and even audio content. So that's one way, and it's been a game changer because we know exactly the problems they're having and the way that they describe them, the words that they use, which is not what would show up in Google, everything's kind of been like changed, right? Well, I want to stop you right there because I think that that's such a simple thing and it seems so obvious, but if you were a CEO or a sales, vice president of sales, or you're in charge of leading a team, the easiest thing, put your phone, voice memo. If you have an Apple or an iPhone, and just, I'm sure Android has a version of that and just record the meeting, give that to someone else.

Then that's an easy handoff, it's a small file size. You, you can record you on a sales phone call, whatever the case may be. It's so simple, but it can create an entirely different way that you're able to capture that content, your team can write transcripts from it. They can take audio from it and put it on a Facebook or Instagram story. There's so many awesome things that you can extract from that. And from a crazy busy CEO perspective, how it's easy, it's not hard to get. I don't have to make sure my hair is nice. I mean, it's just like audio only, nobody's intimidated by it. You make sure then that you have to do is you have to make sure that when you're handing that file over that you tell them, like this part is proprietary. Do not use these words, or do not use the client's name.

Some people are fine with that. As long as you know, they have a great relationship, but you do have to give those black and white guidelines. And obviously approve it and make sure that it's going in the right direction. But I mean, we've been able to make 30 pieces of content just from one sales meeting and they do one every week. So that's a ton of content just from one meeting. And how timely is that? I mean, that's the other thing right now is, you know, the whole world of creating a marketing plan for the next six months has been rocked because we don't know what our world's gonna look like in six months. Most businesses are still trying to figure out what a remote learning environment working environment looks like, or, or just how sales are gonna go. And so their marketing plans are constantly changing and those sales conversations are equally, constantly changing.

And even if you're not using social media as a sales tool, you can do the same thing in your employee meeting. If you're looking for recruitment and digital engagement with employees, there's so many things that are amazing, that businesses are doing in their day to day. They're just not documenting it, right? Get it out there. Not only does that create content, but what it's helped us do, and it would do the same thing for whoever's doing your social is now we have better phrases to use when we're moderating and answering questions and comments, or when inbox messages come in, we know like, Oh, this was the FAQ of the week. So now we know how they're answering it from an industry perspective and it's completely improved the quality of our responses, but also just like making sure that we're using the right verbiage. Like we say, cow, they don't say cow, nobody be in the industry, says cow, you know, it's just like the small things like that.

That obviously is a learning curve if you're working with an outside agency, but even just those nuances that are changing within the business as time goes on of like, you know, COVID completely blew up. Everybody's like timeliness of their content. And so everybody needed to make a shift and this has helped just the relevancy scale go way up. But one thing, Oh, go ahead. Well, one thing I was just thinking of is, you know, if you are a business and you're not working with an agency, the reason why I think you should care about this is this stuff isn't just agency specific. This isn't just us going in as experts to businesses saying, how can we make sure that your most authentic voice is heard? This is happening with a disconnect between departments, it's happening with a disconnect between your seniority levels between your executives and your vice presidents and the people that are actually doing the content, creating the work, it's happening, across, you know, linear administrative structures.

So all of these ideas and tips we're trying to help businesses understand so that they can make their content more approachable, more authentic. And in the moment without having the, what are we going to post today? And same thing with like, you have multiple locations and we saying like, okay, get the executive. But it goes both ways. Like how somebody, you know, especially for recruitment, if you're trying to recruit drivers, like talk to some drivers and see what they're like, what's important to them right now, because it might be changing. It also could just help indicate if your internal, like some things that you might need to be talking about from a structure or support perspective. So it just gives so much more information, but what you can do with this same exact thing, other than just recording a meeting is having an executive record their thoughts at any given time, we have a ton of, you know, growth minded, growth set, new problem.

A lot of our clients are identifying in, coming up with new ideas all the time. So this same company, we just opened up a million avenues. So the same company, the owner, whenever he has a new thought, cause he is working in developing, he just records it and text it to us. So if he's like, Oh, we should, or, Oh, I saw this the other day. They're saying this, we should say this. He's just texting those whenever they come to his mind, sometimes they're three seconds. Sometimes they're a minute. But, it just depends on whatever's easiest for him. So he can either he's done a voice memo or he literally records a selfie video, or he records like the ceiling and does a video. And like, we don't care what's in it anyways. So that's been helpful and anybody on the team can do that of just sharing their thoughts.

But another way and another time that he's really been able to like game change content for us is right after he closes a new client or just talks to a perspective client, giving us a rundown of these were the problems that they said, and this is how they said it, and this is how I repositioned them. And this is what we're going to do next step. They kind of like, just play by play of what just happened. Again, just a ton of content of they're saying these types of things. This is how we would answer that. And it just goes such a long way of just giving us that like inside scoop. Yeah. And I think, you know, from my perspective, you know, trying to run a business and all the different elements that come out of it. If I could, if I had time, I would write a million different blog posts and all of these things.

But the reality is, is like the second that you sit down it's like you get interrupted or something else needs, it goes off. Yeah. Higher priority. And like, if you're not using those voice memos, it's almost like leaving a voicemail on something. And if you're uncomfortable with that, or if you're uncomfortable, like hearing yourself or seeing yourself on video, I think we've gotten a little bit more used to that with the virtual element of the world these days. But I also know that that fear and hesitation of I'm going to sound weird, or like you said, I don't want this to be word for word, but let me just throw my thoughts out there. There's still that hesitation there, but then all you have to do is communicate that to your team. Just let me approve it. That's all you need to say because that'll close the loop for you because if they write what you said and they take the ideas that you had and put it on paper or digitally, then at least you can review it and say, Ooh, adjust, adjust.

Right. And it should completely improve your workflow process when it comes to content development. I think if you're just on the other end, you need to find the way that it's not even what you're the most comfortable with the most confident, the way that you can express yourself, even if it's like texting. Which Is not ideal for everybody. But if you're like, I could text this to you or give you four bullet points or send you a messenger or whatever it is. As long as you have that straightened out with whoever's receiving it of like, if I ever send anything to you via messenger, it's like my idea dump. I'm just like sending anything to you. I think that, that as long as you clarify that whatever's comfortable for you, it's going to be the most authentic and the best piece of content. One thing though, with, um, what you were saying is like, I wish I, if I had all the time, I would write all this content.

If you do have an executive or even an employee on your team, one thing that we've done with the same client is we ask them to identify any employees that are posting. And we've just asked to be their friends. And we just had them tell them like, Hey, if you post something and it's obviously it's positive, we're just going to take the photo from there or the copy from there and we're going to use it. So we've connected with different levels of employees that are engaging. And instead of asking them then to post it and send it to us, we just told them we're going to pull anything that they post that we think is a good idea. Same thing with like this CEO in particular is very active on LinkedIn. And so he likes a lot of articles and shares a lot of articles.

So we asked him like, Hey, anything that you share? Can we post that? Or we'll, it'll be in the queue. We'll take something from that, basically what you posted. And he's like, Oh, cool. Then I don't have to send anything to you. You can just watch me online and same thing with you. Like you're getting more active on social when you can, same with our team of like, go take that thing that Beth posted and then share that with her thoughts. So, you know, the more that we can just wipe out administrative. Back and forth, right. And not even it's, again, it's not unique to us it's but it's the world of like, Hey, Hey, you like check this. That is so time intensive. And it's like the passing of the baton. If you can limit the number of touches and passes, that sounds really gross.

But it really is like, if you can limit the number of that, obviously the quicker you can turn around content, the telephone game, it's probably going to be less watered down and more authentic anyways. And it's just way more stress-free. Right. Well, I think that's really just the name of the game right now is like, how do you develop more content? Like volume wise, that's even more authentic. That's connected to your audience and your customers and you still get your job done. If you can get those three things solved. I think that you're 10 times further, along than your competitors. If you're someone who's listening to this, who's like very methodical, okay, so I get the recording now what? Just make a system for yourself, always make a quote, one quote from it. Always make one blog from it. Always make like, just make the checklist.

If I need to make four, I'm always going to make these four things. If I can go beyond that. Cool. But if it's audio, you can always make a picture with an audio over it, but just make that checklist. And so at least it's like, at least I know I'm going to get these four things out of it. If I get more, like that's going into superstar mode, but just make as much of like a process in your mind. If that's what you need to know, like what to do with this information. Because I'm not going to lie, some of the recordings that we've gotten, I'm like, he just switched directions 40 times in this, but I found three sentences. So that's just going to be copy or it's just going to be a quote. And it wasn't as much content as we would like, but at least we got the three things from a very basic level.

Yeah. Some of those conversations and videos and copy, you're going to get like a million things like this is so good. Cause all of the thoughts are complete. That's you got to kind of think that you are, a video editor, like looking for those sound bites, right? Like what are the little like golden nuggets that I don't need the rest of the context to make sense? So complete thoughts, complete sentences, aha moments, those things that kind of just naturally land as like, Oh, that was good. Right? Like people say that all the time when it comes or they think it when, when their meetings. But those are what you're looking to extract to get out to other people. Or really solutions, anything that's solving a direct problem. It's those aha moments, but I'm not going to lie. It's hard because we're humans and we don't always complete thoughts.

We're like we talk and we're like, Ooh, that's another one. Ooh, that's another one. Oh, that's another one. And they kinda like overlap. So it takes a little bit of finessing, but once you do it a couple of times, you kind of figure out those spots. Right. Well, awesome. I think that this is some really valuable information for our listeners and, or not you're looking for a direct, hiring an agency or just building out your internal teams and improving communication, hope that you got some value on how to take this content and, really continue your authenticity within your organization. So thank you, Kelsey. I thought this was a good conversation and next time, see ya.

Social Media, inspiration, BusinessChatterkickJuly 14, 2020social media best practice, content