When we offer services, one way to connect with our audience is through social media. The challenge is that while we want to reach a large number of people, there are important factors to consider. But how can you truly stand out in the crowded social media landscape?
In this episode, I have Wendy Pace, Founder and Owner of PACE Setting Media. We talk about the importance of making content for a specific audience, and marketing strategies for businesses. We also discuss the limitations of algorithmic content creation and how social media algorithms work for content visibility. Learn how to stand out online!
—
Listen to the podcast here:
Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 44:46 — 41.0MB) | Embed
Strategies to Get Noticed on Social Media with Wendy Pace
Welcome to Action’s Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. Today, I want to talk to you about a broader category of getting noticed. You produce a product, you produce a service, you produce an offering, even wanting to, say, get people together for some sort of a social endeavor. No matter what you’re trying to do, you have to find some way of getting noticed, and as you’re probably well aware of, over the last half a century and particularly even the last 20 years, the landscape of getting noticed has changed quite a bit, there’s a very different way of getting noticed now than it was during, say, the middle of the 20th century. There’s a lot of stuff that involves digital marketing and content creation that I’m here to talk with my guest today, Wendy Pace, the founder and owner of Pace Setting Media, about this endeavor and what getting noticed in the 21st century really looks like.
—
Wendy, welcome to the program.
Thank you. Thanks for having me.
Starting on the topic of getting noticed and how much that has changed, what’s the number one thing that someone needs to think about, let’s say someone just finished building their product or finished outlining their service, outlining their offering, what’s the number one thing someone should be thinking on right now as far as getting noticed?
Okay, so they’ve developed a product or a service, they need to be thinking about who is this for? What does my audience look like and where is my audience at?
A lot of people just throw stuff at the wall and hope that it sticks and that’s not exactly the way it works in social media. Share on XIf you’ve noticed or paid any attention to your social media feeds, your view of the world has gotten narrower and narrower because of the algorithms. So you really have to have a keen understanding of who your audience is so that you can tell Facebook, you can tell Google, you can tell them, “This is my audience,” and you can get some of that knowing what your hashtag should be, knowing what the lifestyle of your audience is, there are other ways of getting around what Facebook used to, and back in the day, when I started, you could pick your household, right? You’d be like, “I want two-income, I want four kids, I want the dog, I want the cat, I want the white picket fence. I want it in this zip code,” and you could really kind of hand pick who got to see your stuff. Now, you have to be a lot more creative. You need to think about, okay, say it’s a car decaling or car mats, you make custom car mats. Well, you need to think about who’s that lifestyle? Who’s going to be that car person? What are the things they’re going to be interested in? What are the most common job titles they might have? Because you can’t pick all of them. And then what’s the income around base, what kind of generalized income would you be in? And that is where your key audience members are. So, first and foremost, figure out who you’re selling this service to, what do they do, what does their life look like, so that you can pick the right pain points to get into their feeds.
And while we’re talking about who your audience is, who you’re selling to, I think some people who are more familiar with the topic of, say, market segmentation may have heard the concept of, say, demographics versus psychographics, and it seems like demographics, when I think about that, I think about the old way, I think about TV ratings, it’s like the 18 to 34 or whichever demographic, whereas, of course, psychographics, for those not familiar, goes a lot deeper into a lot of the stuff that you’re saying, about, okay, even where does this person like to shop? Is this person tend to be Saturday morning at 9 a.m., is your target group still sleeping off last night’s drinking binge or is your target audience at a farmer’s market trying to get a head start on building some project or something like that. So is demographics, your standard race, age, gender, income level, some of those more standard ones, completely out the window now or does it need to more be supplemented by the psychograph?
They go hand in hand. Not only do you have to know the age range and income and ethnicity and the socioeconomic path that that person’s on. They’ve tried to strip away a lot of that demographic, that specific demographic. You have to think about, culturally, what does that person do? So, back to the car thing, are they a NASCAR person? Not only are they NASCAR, are they maybe college football? Or maybe they’re in the bootleg liquors or they like moonshine, whatever, and that’s very stereotypical, but then, from there, you can go out. Are they high-end vehicles? In the luxury lifestyle? Are these the same people who are at the golf course? Are these the same people who are taking luxury trips? There are those kind of little nitpicky things and details about a person’s activities that are going to help you get your product in front of them.
And when people are thinking through this, because this is not something you do in, say, 10 minutes of just being like, “Oh, of course, it’s for them,” it takes some more in-depth thoughts, what are the biggest mistakes you think people make when they’re looking at who they’re selling to, when they’re trying to figure out like who is that person that I’m really trying to get noticed by?
A lot of times, they’re not open to the fact that it might not be the person they think it is.
Interesting.
So they get a little short sighted. They’re like, “No, it’s absolutely – this is my person,” and it’s like, well, how do you know that? If you don’t have a brick and mortar and you’re working online, you don’t know who’s walking through your store door, so you have to get a really good CRM because you want to start analyzing that data as soon as it’s coming in. Then the other thing they need to understand is when Facebook does this, I won’t say well but they do this, they offer a 2 percent differential on your audience so if you find that you have a successful audience where you’re getting engagement on that first ad, it’s starting to get some traction, you can ask Facebook, “Can you do a 2 percent differential on this?” and it’s going to skew it just slightly and then you might be grabbing a few more that you didn’t even know were in your pool. You had no idea they were fishing in your pond.
So, let’s say someone gets their report on who’s coming through their door and it turns out to be something different than what you had at first imagined, is this more likely to be because you had an idea for a target audience and it turns out to be a little bit different or because you did something, say, incorrect or different than what you should have done in your SEO, in your presentation, in your content creation?
It could be both of those things and here’s why. Have you ever typed in something into Google incorrectly but it gave you what you wanted? So, it takes into consideration the way people tend to misspell work. Same thing with the algorithms. They’re going to take into consideration that this was the lane you chose and it’s just going to go like that, just slightly go, “Hmm, we’re gonna go pick a few of these others,” and, all of a sudden, you start seeing traction. What do you have to do when you see that traction is dive into that audience. So you get your analytic report from Facebook, you get your analytic report from Instagram, and you look at all of these things and it’s like, oh, okay, for example, I have a country artist that I’m helping promote. He thought he was going to knock it out of the park with young 20-something guys who like country music and tweens. He thought, “That’s my –” His demographic is actually Gen X female and he was like, “What?” I was like, “Yeah, you’re trending really, really high with the 45-year-olds to 50-something-year-olds, female, and this is your niche, dude,” and he was like, “Okay.” So, when we started creating his content, he was like, “This feels like a 90s video,” I said, “But think about who your audience is.” So now we had to start changing the way his perception of his product, which is himself and his music, and going, “Okay.” I was like, “But this is a good demographic for you, because they have money, so they have money to spend and come to your concert. So you have to think about that that way.”
That’s interesting, because one of the things I wonder is, as people discover, say, a completely different group of people, and you start changing your content, how do you force this balance between changing my content to attract the audience that I’m attracting, to cater to my audience, versus people who can end up feeling like they’ve started to do something that’s running contrary to their initial vision? How do you kind of maintain that initial vision, like I’ve wanted to do this and I don’t want to compromise that while also kind of tweaking it and tailoring it to whatever the audience turns out to be in situations like this?
I think a lot of us go into business with an idea of exactly how it’s going to go, and one of the things you have to understand, as an entrepreneur, you have to pivot, and you have to understand that what your perception was is not necessarily your truth so being open to the fact that I thought I was catering to this and it turns out this is what actually needs my service, now you have to make the decision, do I want to stay in business or do I want to keep going after a fish that’s not biting my bait? So it becomes a business decision. Do I embrace the audience that I’ve got? Yes, you sure do, and you engage with them, and you put out more content that they like, because that’s going to get you the traction. What else do you get from that is you start opening up to their whole network because if you’re interacting with them and they’re engaging with your content, it gets noticed by people that are their friends and allies. So you might get to that audience eventually that you thought was your primary audience but it went through a different path than you expected.
Interesting. So kind of like when you mistyped something on Google but Google knew and it says, like, “Did you mean to type?” and then it’s showing the results.
But it’s also if you sometimes use those mistyped words in your SEO, you’ll get people because there are people out there who consistently misspell those words and that’s how you get found by accident because you misspelled it too.
That’s crazy. So I want to talk a bit about how the landscape has changed over the years. I think some people who are either older or talk to their parents or read some stuff about recent history does remember the whole demographic groups around television shows and I think if we were to reset to, say, 1975, people would decide who they want to advertise to, there would be a show and like say, “Oh, this TV show has their Nielsen ratings,” and the Nielsen rating say households in these zip codes or households with this type of family structure, whatever, do the show and that determines where you want to do the advertisement. How has things changed in the last 50 years since then as far as how we kind of connect to the right advertising source?
It comes back to those algorithms, right? You create your ad, you create your audience, and then you pick interests that these households that you’re trying to hit would have. The algorithms then determine through search data, because everything we look up is archived and saved, whether you save your history or not, sorry to tell your audience, everything we do, Siri is listening, Alexa is listening, all your apps are listening, and so that’s how your audience is now determined. It’s by their online activity. Where are they searching? What are they looking at? And do they fit the outline of the audience that you’ve created?
So does what platform you use still factor in? Because I think a lot of people have this idea about at least an age demographic around Facebook versus Instagram versus TikTok and how it stands now. Or does it become based on what you said about the algorithm knowing all your search data, everything you’ve been to, does it become more important to think through those interests and just release the content than actually obsessing over, “Well, I should be on this one versus that one because I’m going after this age group.”
Some age group comes into play, though it’s getting very muddied because TikTok used to be the tweens, right? That was where you get the tweens. Gen X is all over TikTok. They love them some TikTok. Boomers have taken over Facebook and LinkedIn is still your business platform and that’s where you show your expertise. So you have to think about what’s the type of content you’re creating and who are you feeding this to. So I always say Facebook is your warm fuzzy, that’s where you show you celebrated your secretary’s pregnancy or it this one’s birthday or you highlighted or you’re doing a behind the scenes kind of thing. Instagram and TikTok are your short bursts of maybe behind the scenes, this is our latest product, this is how we’ve updated, and it’s a short and quick, fast and dirty. So it just depends on the type of content you’re trying to create, what can you do consistently, and then hitting all the different formats for the different platforms that you’re on.
So, for instance, if you’re going to be on Instagram, you’re going to be with your millennials and your Gen Z’s are mostly there and they want visual, they want fast, quick and dirty. They don’t want to have to think, they don’t want to have to read.
How important is the consistency of content creation? Because we hear a lot about you need to create content this particular frequency and sometimes that could actually intimidate people.
Yes. So frequency is important. If you think about it and you look at a business, you’re going to look them up on Facebook. A lot of times you got a business, you’re going to think it’s easiest to find them through Facebook. If they haven’t posted anything since 2018, you’re going to assume they went out of business. So consistency is key. But once you decide how often you’re going to post, consistently do that. So if you’re a once a month, you’re going to knock it out, you’re going to have one week of posts per month, then consistently do that. My company does it five days a week. I like to have something on the feed every day, Monday through Friday, branded and consistent.
They’ve moved on to something else and now they’re looking somewhere else.
Yeah, and that’s just the nature of the world today. So this is a good opportunity for anyone listening that’s feeling a little bit intimidated about the content creation to hear about how to best kind of get a hold of you to talk to you about your services and see if that could be right for their businesses. What will be the best way for someone to contact you if they want a consultation?
So wendy@pacesettingmedia.com is always the best way to get a hold of me. They can also reach out to me on LinkedIn, I’m usually there at least once a day answering messages and I do answer everybody who reaches out to me.
And now, with this whole content creation, or new-ish paradigm, I know it’s constantly changing and we can talk about how AI could potentially change it, but with this paradigm kind of a shift from the big media companies really controlling our content to the algorithms controlling our content, do you believe that it’s gotten more fair in the sense of who has the opportunity to get businesses noticed?
No, I don’t think it’s fair. I think that because the algorithm is in charge, you’re less likely to come across new stuff. It doesn’t just happen to come into your feed unless they’re following your pattern, you’re buying pattern. I’m the queen of shopping online so I get a lot of new clothes vendors come into my feed, but I don’t get, say, necessarily dog products. Even though I’m a dog mom, I don’t get a lot of that. If I’m not looking at that stuff actively and regularly, then it doesn’t come into my feed. The fact that I haven’t interacted with my mom on Facebook in the last month, I no longer see her posts, like they change that quickly what you’re seeing. So, no, it’s not fair. It used to be fair. Nine years ago, when I started Pace Setting Media, I could get things out there and get traction because the algorithms weren’t in control of what was being seen. It was more by demographic, right? What area. If I have a client down in in Snellville, which is south of me, the fact that I’m not in that zip code, the post I create for him, I don’t even get them unless I put it for a more broader area. So our views online have gotten a lot narrower and I don’t think we all realize how narrow it’s gotten.
So I kind of feel that way, even when I listen to Spotify, in particular, because I kind of feel like Spotify plays me the same songs over and over again and I wish that there was a little bit more variety or a little bit more surprise naturally built into the algorithm. Are you familiar with the book Filterworld by Kyle Chayka, I think is how it’s pronounced?
No.
The book actually came out this year and I just started reading it, but it’s kind of about how algorithms have homogenized a lot of things and Kyle wrote it because he suddenly started noticing that he saw the same coffee shop in every city he went to. He would travel all the world and every coffee shop would look the same and the argument behind this is that everyone’s now trying to cater everything to what’s going to maximize on these algorithms and, therefore, everyone’s producing more or more likely to be producing the same type of content.
Yeah. Well, there is that. And I think the more they use AI to create images, the more narrower the view gets, because AI’s view is just as narrow. It’s based on what it can gather. And I will say this plain and simple, AI is not honest. It will pull stuff out of its virtual butt and create content that is not verified, it’s not true, it’s just – So, yeah, you need to look at it. But also, I think all of these AI-created images are very homogenized.
Yeah. Now, recently, Jack Dorsey, one of the original founders of Twitter, floated the idea of allowing people to choose between multiple algorithms. And, by that, I assume he meant that some of the algorithms would introduce more of this element of surprise and I’m thinking about kind of what we might have lost in our algorithm culture of like, okay, well, you’re listening to, let’s say you listen to Hits 1 or your standard Kiss FM radio, you’re going to hear a song that’s not necessarily a song that you chose, but, oh, this one’s really neat, and then you get into it. The same thing can be said about artwork, TV shows, all kind of aspects of our culture, any kind of content creation. Do you see any hope in this idea of multiple algorithms or do you see like another way we can possibly get people exposed to this element of surprise, exposed to more different types of content?
I think people have to actively choose to see different content. And I say this because every time I get a new client, I mess with the algorithm, because I have to now do the research on the background of each client and their service and who that audience would be and I’ve just thrown all the algorithms out the window because they were like, “Wait a minute, we thought we had her, and now, all of a sudden, she’s studying vascular surgery. Why?” They’re like, “We thought she really wanted to see more puppy dog videos. Why is she now in here going with bioptic surgery?” Because I have a new client so it kind of skews my stuff. If you don’t actively search for other things, even if it’s an alternate view of, say, your local politics, if you don’t actively seek out information on the other side of the aisle, you’re only going to get one view and one slant of information and news. You have to actively choose to see different. And a lot of people get very comfortable in their lane. It’s like, “Oh, I wanna be in this lane because everybody in this lane agrees with me and they all think the same and they buy the same things. I’m in the right – I’m in the right place, the right time, because everybody, in my view, agrees with me. We’re all thinking the same,” and that’s one of the biggest problems with online, not only just marketing but news and otherwise is you no longer get the variety of difference of opinion.
So, as you go out in the world and you meet people and you just kind of hear them talk for a little while, are you able to intuitively determine if someone has been, say, really filtered into only hearing basically viewpoints that agree with them and have been kind of just on that path?
Some of the things that you see happening in the world is because there are online campaigns to get that information to those different groups and so they get them riled up and, all of a sudden, you’ve got this thing percolating and bubbling and you’re like, “Where did this come from?” And it’s because the information being fed to certain sections of the audience knows that that algorithm is happening and they’re feeding that content and creating those online communities that are all like, “Oh, we all think like this. We all feel like this. And, no, we don’t.” Again, it just comes from your online activity. There’s been say talks and jokes about big data. It’s not a joke, it’s a serious game, and the reason Facebook is free is because they’re selling your information. And if everybody’s like, “Oh, but my privacy.” I’m sorry, as soon as you put your information in there, that went away like wings. It’s gone and getting it back means basically blacking yourself out on social media completely. Don’t use your phone. Get a dumb phone, not a smartphone. I mean, I can’t express enough to people how much information you give out even without giving out information, even if you put the wrong birth date in, even if you put the wrong – the minute you got one of these –
I think most people know now that those things, our smartphones are listening to our conversations. Anytime that you’ve had a conversation with someone about something and, all of a sudden, your next four Instagrams are all about, ads, at least, are all about whatever it is that you were talking with your friend about at lunch yesterday.
Exactly. A lot of people don’t. They’re like, “Really?” Yes. Yes, ma’am. Yes.
This show in no way has ever desired to promote any kind of political view, one over the other, and I’ve kind of reiterated that a bunch of times and even said that, like if you’re looking for political content, there’s plenty of sources for that. The only reason I bring this all up is because I think there is an element of it where you can get so far into your own rabbit hole, like you said, entrenched, not even realizing that not only are there people who don’t see the world the way you see it but it’s probably the majority of people that don’t see the world the way you see it can be pretty bad for business, because, in some particular situations, unless you’re only kind of building a business for one particular corner of the political spectrum, because you’re going to end up having some misconceptions about how the world even works and how people go about their day-to-day lives.
And that’s exactly what we’re seeing. There is such a disconnect. It’s not just political identity. There’s just a disconnect and you see it between socioeconomic. I call it the bubble. I’m in a bubble and somebody in a lower economic socio path than I am are in their own bubble. Somebody in a higher economic socio path than I is in a different bubble and we’re more separated than we’ve ever realized because our worldview is being skewed by algorithms and so you get this sense that, well, everybody is like me, is just like me because they’re all seeing the same thing I’m seeing. That’s not the case.
And it definitely goes on so many more dimensions than just politics. There’s so many different ways in worldview, outlook, priorities, where you think the world is going, what do you think is the most important thing in life. What is the best right now antidote for anyone listening to that kind of filtering or being filtered into a cluster, if anyone knows anything about I was a data scientist for a while so there’s this like k means clustering, which essentially is an algorithm, I think, is being used, to be honest, in some of these platforms, where they put you in K being a number so one of, I don’t know, say, six clusters, and, all of a sudden, they’ve analyzed you to be in that cluster and, all of a sudden, you’re being kind of clustered even more by the content they’re feeding you. What is that antidote? What can someone do after listening to this episode, as soon as you take your headphones off and go about in the world, to avoid being clustered and being so far in that cluster that you’re not seeing how most of the world thinks, operates, and works?
There’s a few things I think you can do. You can shut off the mic on all your apps so it stops listening to you. Shut off your locator on all your apps so that they can’t pinpoint where you’re at. Hide your VPN online. And those are short term, small things that it’s not recognizing where you’re logging in from and so it’s not getting all that external data that is associated just with your zip code. Just from a zip code, there’s so much information that they get on you. So minimizing that as much as possible. The other thing is to maybe log on to, say, an alternate news source. Now, you have to be careful there because there’s a lot of alternate news sources out there that are not news at all. It’s all opinion. So you first have to determine the difference between opinion and news and then looking at something that’s counter to you. So, if you’re a Fox News person, go look at ABC or CNN or MSNBC or any of those just because it’ll start tweaking what gets put into your feed. If you’re all day, all hours on just Fox because they’re the word for you, then you’re narrowing your algorithm substantially as to what’s going to be put into your feed. But if you take a moment and you look at something alternative, like the Atlantic or some other news source that’s the opposite of what you regularly listen to. Some of that comes from people wanting to be fed what to think. That’s a topic for a whole different conversation. They like the story that they’re being told and they want to stick with that story so they’re comfortable in their algorithm. Their algorithm is safe. Their algorithm, to them, is true because it’s telling them what they want to hear, what they already believe.
So when you start introducing into your algorithm, listening to something alternate for you, that’s when you start skewing what they’re presenting to you. Share on XAnd so can the same go for music? Let’s go back to the example with the demographic, with the country music fan and some of the people in that demographic, they might be 90s pop, just all day long, and to just say, “Okay, well, that’s great, but I’m going to, I don’t know, just purposely type in something. I’m going to purposely type in something new or type in something like older, like from the 60s or 70s, even before that, just to kinda throw a little bit more variety into that.”
So, yeah, if you’re a regular 90s club rat and you type in death metal, you’re going to change up your algorithm just a little bit. No, it’s going to ignore it at first. It’s going to be like, “That’s a one off.” If you consistently go, “Okay, I want alternate rock 60s,” or, “I want sea shanties,” whatever it is, you want to fix it up, you’ve got to do that a few times, then even save so you have to take an action, because you have to show engagement and download or save or like something in that genre so that the algorithm goes, “Okay, they did like this one song, that one sea shanty, we’re gonna throw this one in there just to mix it up.”
These algorithms, they’re always kind of changing and being tweaked. I think in reading that Filterworld, I think I’ve read about a few key dates in which people have changed the algorithm. How do you stay updated on when the algorithms are changing? Is there something that you notice in content engagement for your clients that then goes in and says, “Oh, it feels like this is happening”?
Yeah. So it’s funny because I pick up on algorithm changes before they announce and they’ve actually stopped announcing changes because they’re happening so fast and so frequently, they’ve just given up on announcing them. I think they’ve also given up on announcing them because they don’t like the backlash and the criticisms that they get for it. It is subtle things that I will see. I’ll put something up and I’m like, okay, that trended for me last week. All of a sudden, it’s not. What have they changed? Because I’ve done the research, I know that this particular ad is supposed to get this much traction and I’m getting crickets. No, they’ve done something. So then I have to go back and tweak it or look to see for that week what was trending, what was happening, and almost be like a Sherlock Holmes of the internet and try and be like, “Okay, with my magnifying glass, what little 2 percent differential did they just do to me to screw up my whole process?” That can get aggravating but that’s what I get paid for.
And then, do you believe that the algorithms that are being developed, refined at all the platforms are purely only being developed for the purpose of maximizing engagement with the platform? Or do you believe that any of the platforms, any of the people running it have any other agenda involved in why they tweak the algorithms and why they promote some content over others?
The cynical me says they tweak the algorithms because they want to justify having a job. They want to show why they belong on the team because, truthfully, they have no reason to mess with the algorithms other than, “I wanna keep my job, I wanna look important.” They say it’s for a better customer experience but please tell me when an algorithm change occurred that the customers were like, “Hallelujah. That fixed everything. That was awesome. I want it to stay just like this,” said no one ever in the history of internet. So, truthfully, I think they just keep changing the algorithms to keep people on the platforms but what they’ve really caused is people to leave the platforms. The things they don’t address are the issues with fraud and replication of accounts, because that’s a harder rock to break than, “Oh, I’m gonna tweak this algorithm so that people who like teddy bears gets more action in the furry community.” No, that’s not – that didn’t help us. Sit down, shut up. Fix the fraud, that would be awesome.
You keep reminding me of a phenomenon I witnessed roughly 10, 12 years ago, and speaking as a millennial, I refer to this as the Facebook era because most of us have kind of moved on from Facebook, but I often say I remember during the Facebook era that they would change something about the way the website worked and every time they changed anything, people would post on Facebook up in arms about how their experience has changed and then they could change that back like a year later and then they would be up in arms about that too, like they did – people just didn’t want that to change and it reminds me of what I feel about software development in general, and what I mean by that is that people who develop software, as you said, have to keep their jobs but they also live in that software all the time and so they’re always thinking about these little things, these little tweaks, and the average user of any piece of software, any platform, just wants to get to what they want as quick as possible. They’re not worried about whether or not there’s a new feature or a new item that could really, really make it cool. Maybe 1 percent of users care, the other 99 want to just get, like if you’re booking a trip, “I just wanna see the cheapest flight that goes from one destination to another around the time when I wanted it and I want that to be the first thing that pops up and everything else is just auxiliary.”
I remember when Facebook was changing its interface, so the way your page worked, and I was like, I was happy with the way that worked. That was easy. Now, when I have a client sign on and I have to explain to them how to make me an admin on their page, it’s painful. I’m like, “Okay, so last week it was sitting under Tools, but this week it’s sitting under Settings because they’ve moved it around yet again,” and I’m just so over it. But since my whole company is based around social media, yay, I get to play with these. And LinkedIn is doing the same damn thing. They’ve changed up the way you can manage a page, they’ve changed up the way an image is seen when you connect a URL. I mean, can we, I don’t know, give me a year off. Just stop messing with stuff for a year. Why don’t you fix the stuff you got and then we can look at changing or tweaking the way the Facebook page looks or the layout on your LinkedIn is.
And speaking of how things change, so we’re recording this in the summer of 2024, we’re I would say roughly two years since the latest craze around AI kind of started by ChatGPT’s release, I think that was November of ’22 when that really started to come out and blow up, have you noticed algorithms changing because of AI? Have you noticed AI impact?
So, there’s a lot more websites now that AI can’t read because they’ve put in the code to block Chat from gaining access. We have a bigger problem with plagiarism, because it’s taking the information and rewriting it and spinning it out as fact without giving any credence to the author or the researcher. It’s going to continue to change. The other reason the algorithms are changing is because AI figured out the algorithm and goes, “Okay, this is how you’re gonna get your website to the top,” and Google’s like, “No, damn it. I’m gonna decide who’s on top, not the AI bot. You’re not getting around me, you still have to jump through my hoops.” So there’s that war going on. It’s like we’re going to still decide who’s in the top five. No, no, you’re not, because we’re going to create this content that, according to your algorithms, is exactly what you wanted, and now they’re like, “Damn it. No, that’s not what we wanted.”
It’s just like back and forth arms race. It reminds me of when drivers started to get radar detectors for cops and then the cops started getting radar detector detectors and then people started getting radar detector detector detectors and it just like kind of went back and forth for a little while and you’re just like, just getting – your head start spinning.
That’s exactly right. And you see across the dashboards like all the little beep, beep, beeps, it’s like, I just – it’s the same thing when you get online, it’s like that’s been detected, no, no, that’s been detected, we’re going to block you.
So now, the ultimate goal, to kind of tie everything back to the opening of the episode, is to get your business, your services, your things noticed, and I would say a layer up from that, the ultimate goal of all these services that we have, these platforms at least should be getting people connected to the right content, the right services at the right time and I even think about the idea of, say, business coaching or therapists, where there’s going to be a lot of services out there and if you go online and do a web search, you’re going to get tons and tons of results, but there’s all these kind of intangible factors, such as, well, which one’s going to be the right one for you, who can work around, like, say, the time frame that you’re working on, the hours that you’re working on, even personality factors, priorities, what matters the most? Are you someone that, say, really just looking for a way to earn money to get out of the corporate rat race as quick as possible? Or do you have a business that’s really prioritized around the impact? And so there’s all these factors coming in. As we see AI progress, and it doesn’t even have to be AI, it could be any technology, what do you see in the future for people getting their services noticed and getting noticed by the right people so that the people that are going to be the right people to do business with based on all those factors are the ones that they find and they find with, hopefully, as little of a hassle as possible?
As a marketing person, it’s not all totally online.
So it’s not just a one and done video, this is my product, put it out there, they see it. No, it’s a multi-faceted approach. You have to network within your own community. You have to network online in your community, not just in engaging with the people that interact with your content but you have to find your communities and your groups. You do that by joining groups on LinkedIn, you join groups on Facebook, all of the possible audiences. You got to try to find as many segments of your audience that you can interact with. It’s not just, “I built this widget. Here’s my widget. There you go.” Doesn’t work that way. You have to make sure that your website is designed to convert so your social media is working, your SEO is working, and they come into your website and your website falls flat and they can’t find the product or they can’t score the service, they’re out of there, so you have to make sure that your website is dialed in, your audience is dialed in, your social media content, all of these things have to work together in order to create that marketing campaign that’s actually going to get you business.
Has TikTok caused more people to have that delusion? Because, supposedly, it’s a lot easier to get something noticed on TikTok than it’s been on any platform before that.
Yeah, and TikTok has its marketplace. Facebook has a marketplace. Hell, everybody’s got a marketplace, but TikTok, they’ve kind of made it a shorter path but you’re still creating content, you’re still making that effort. You have to have something up – To me, TikTok is almost like the way Twitter was when it first came out. Every 20 minutes, you have to have something out there. You have to have something scheduled. You need to be in that rotation. I need to see you 12 times before I’m even going, “Do I need a hair clog remover? It worked for her,” but I had to see that 12 times before I finally went, “Yes, I’m gonna click on that.” So if you’ve made that one video, it’s come up one time, I’m like, screw, you have to catch the people at the right time in the right moment and the only way that happens is by constantly creating content and putting it out there. And that’s how TikTok gets you. It’s consistency.
I even think about some YouTube channels I follow and there are sometimes I’ll watch 30-minute YouTube videos, and that probably is enough, like even say this podcast, these podcast episodes tend to be 30 to 45 minutes long, that’s enough for you to really get to know someone. But on TikTok where you’re getting 30 seconds to a minute of someone’s attention at a time, have you ever, in real life, decided to do business with someone just based on having met them for 45 seconds?
And, at the end of the day, and this is something I tell my clients all the time, is you’re building a relationship. It’s an unseen relationship but people now feel like they know you the more they see you online. My mother, bless her heart, 82 years old, refers to Joanna Gaines, the home decorator chick, as, “My friend, my friend.” I’m like, “Mom,” I had no idea who she was talking about, then she was like, “See, my friend,” and I was like, “Okay, you do understand you don’t know her, right? She’s not your friend.” She’s like, “Oh, no, but I love them. They’re so funny.” Okay, but she’s not your friend. But there’s still that mentality of a connection because you’ve seen somebody online over and over and over and over again. You feel like you have a connection to them and you do business with those you know, like, and trust, and so you think you know them, you already like them because you’re following them and you’re trusting what they say is true.
So it’s almost like even though the mechanisms by which we connect to people, the mechanisms by which platforms has changed quite a bit over the past century, I’d say it was about a century ago when radio started coming in and really kind of kicked off this new information distribution age, the overall reasons why someone does business with someone, you know them, you trust them, you trust them to do the job you want them to do, deliver what you want them to deliver, that all has remained the same.
And it will. End of the day, we’re as disconnected as we’ve ever been but we’re more connected than we’ve ever been and so the whole idea of establishing your online reputation comes from consistency of posting, consistency of message, staying on brand and understanding who it is you’re talking to and connecting with.
Well, Wendy, thank you so much for joining us today on Action’s Antidotes, for giving us a really good perspective on how to get our businesses noticed, what we need to do and think about what content creation as well as a little bit on how we can kind of mitigate the impacts in our own lives of being kind of clustered into a bucket hole where we don’t understand the rest of the world outside of our little bubbles.
I appreciate it. Thanks for having me.
And I would also like to thank everybody out there listening today. Hopefully, you’ve got some great inspiration. Hopefully, you’re ready to create that content that you need to create to get out there in the world and bring the service, the product that you want to bring to have the impact that you want to have out there today.
Important Links:
About Wendy Pace
Wendy is the owner of Pace Setting Media and a Social Media Manager. Wendy’s approach is strategic and results-driven. Leveraging her expertise, she shifted from content writing to becoming a key player in social media management (SMM). Recognizing the power of SEO and keyword-driven content, she makes sure her clients use her as the go-to for answers for what people are searching for online.
At the core of Pace Setting Media’s services is a comprehensive suite, ranging from content writing and blogs to direct mail marketing and email blasts. SMM stands as the bread and butter, while Wendy also dabbles in website design. Pace Setting Media doesn’t just provide services—it takes the responsibility of marketing off business owners’ shoulders, allowing them to focus on growing their enterprises. Wendy is well-versed in AI, algorithms, and digital marketing, with a particular focus on platforms like LinkedIn and TikTok