Social Strategy in the Age of AI with Jack Appleby, Founder of Future Social | Ep. 411

0:00Pop quiz. Where do all your tasks live right now? If you don't have one answer, that's a red flag and a sign you need Wrike. Wrike is an intelligent work management platform that kills the friction, killing your speed. Visit wrike.com slash TMM to see what I mean.

0:22Welcome to the Marketing Millennials, the no BS marketing podcast. I'm Daniel Murray and join me for unfiltered conversations with the brains behind marketing's coolest companies. The one request I tell our guests, stories or it didn't happen. Get ready to turn the f*** up. We are back with another episode of the Marketing Millennials. And I have someone here who has been in social media over 15 years. He's built social strategies for some of the top brands that you probably have heard of. Beats by Dre, Verizon, Microsoft. You probably heard a lot of them. He also writes a newsletter on this topic.

1:07So who's better to talk about social media? And to be honest, he's grown two different followings, which is pretty cool. a basketball following and a social media following. So who's better to talk about social media and the age of AI than Jack? So welcome to the pod. Thanks, man. It's funny, like marketing millennials, like I feel like I'm, millennials is such an interesting topic in marketing now. Like I'm 37. I'm like, oh, am I old in marketing now? I'm definitely old for the social media crowds. Like I feel like I'm like a good company now with a podcast with this title. Yeah, it's funny because we used to be the generation people look at and now they're like, oh, Gen Z.

1:43and then in like five years, Gen Z is going to be like, there's going to be Gen Alpha in the workplace. And then, especially in social media where it's getting more and more hype now, but it's still kind of seen as a get out of college role to a lot of people. So, which we could talk about. Oh, I mean, when I post some of my like, yeah, when I post my thought leadership sometimes, like I'll get called crusty by people who are working in the industry. It's like, and it's like, I'm like, okay, I could be the old guy. That's fine. I'm cool with this. That's funny. You want to give a little background?

2:15I know I gave a slight background on what you do, but your experience in social and how did you get into marketing? Yeah, man. Coming out of college, I didn't really know what I wanted to do. Had some like family stuff go down. So I didn't even finish college. Like I'm like a semester short, basically. But my college girlfriend's sister was like, hey, I think you'd be good at social media. Let me set you up with an interview at this like tiny 15 person social media firm. Um, I got offered the job on the spot, like just like had no idea what I was doing. Uh, and then somehow a year later, like I'm leading conference calls with electronic arts about like not leading social media strikes, but like leading these calls as like a, one of the first hires of this team and then ended up staying in agency social for 15 years.

3:03Like you listen to some of the brands I worked on, but like, because I got it in the space in 2011 ish, none of us knew what we were doing. Social strategy barely even existed at that point. When I started working in social, Facebook didn't have video. YouTube didn't have real-time analytics. The number 301 plus was the number we would stare at until maybe sometime that day would update with the real numbers of a video. We're making it all up. But I stayed in the industry. I think a lot of my peers of similar age went off to brand marketing or various other elements. And I've just always been so fascinating.

3:38I stayed in social and got to lead social for a lot of like cool tech brands. And then along the way, it was just kind of tweeted and wrote on LinkedIn about my thoughts on the industry, never to be a content creator, just to find jobs. But then eventually it grew to the point where I started my newsletter, Future Social, and that's 85 ,000 subs. Like I write a original essay once a week about social strategy. And now I actually started my own consulting agency to get back in the work because I miss doing social strategy, which we came in with two Fortune 100 clients right away. And it's been very fun.

4:13This industry has always been really cool. I'm fascinated by it. I think we do a lot of stuff wrong in it. I think we do a lot of stuff right in it. I think it's just forever going to change. I'm glad you're getting back into it. It's funny because I started creating content about marketing like six years ago or seven years ago and i didn't see myself a content creator because that wasn't even like a term in b2b back then it was just people right putting out random stuff online uh and now it's an actual way to make money which is hilarious um but i want to talk about ai because uh everybody's talking about ai but specifically in social media because i know a lot of brands i know a lot of people are using AI to pump out a lot of content, but you could see that.

4:59So do you think, are we in the golden age of social media with AI or are we watching it get destroyed by people using too much AI? I think that it's such a fascinating topic, right? Like we see people who are terrified they're going to lose their jobs. We see people that are trying to replace themselves, where they're trying to scale themselves and like almost clone themselves by using like a clawed co-work type of situation um i'll tell you that i'm excited about it um and i'm not nearly as worried about the ai slop of it all as i think many people are um i think you and i are two guys who like use a lot of linkedin and probably more linkedin more than the average human right there certainly is tons of like for like again lack of a better word slop out there but i think what's been really incredible is like the original thinkers who are still doing their own strategy.

5:53You can use AI to scale yourself in such tremendous ways. Like that it's like, it's actually incredibly helpful for me. I'm not worried about someone who pumps out tons of slop content because I just don't think at the end of the day, they're going to succeed. Yes. It's like wasteful on the internet. Yes. We got to scroll past it, but like mediocre content, whether it's created by AI or not, it's just not going to perform the algorithms anyway. And I mean, I'll double down and say that even before AI, there was a lot of slop that just people, it wasn't as scaled and people didn't recognize the slop because it wasn't put into an AI and it has M dashes and all these things that people are calling out everybody, which I think it's weird that there's like AI police now out there that are calling people out for AI, which is, it's hilarious.

6:43It's the concern in LinkedIn in discourse, but like, the AI police of it drives me absolutely crazy. And something I talk about a lot now is like, oh, we're going to pretend like there wasn't a lot of human slop out there before. Like, there's so much mediocre thought leadership. And like, I will adamantly defend all of our right to like be on the internet, share our own thoughts. But again, the great thing about these algorithms is content that resonates with people performs and content that doesn't doesn't perform. And that's where it's like, I have seen posts where like, I can see them like, that is 100 % AI generated, but it really resonated with a lot of people.

7:19So what do I care if AI wrote it or not? If someone learned from it, like I'm not that worried about who's making it as long as we're all learning something from that content and, or enjoying the content. Yeah. Cause I mean, it's still like the same format, like if it's relevant to that audience, if they're entertaining, if it's educational and most of the time people are putting in original thought, they just weren't as great writers before and they let AI write a little better than they did before. So it's not like - AI has changed my life. Like I'm a writer by trade, but I have like severe ADHD.

7:53I'm trying to run like four businesses at the same time. The fact that I can like open up Claude, I can whisper flow into Claude and go like rant for 10 minutes about like, hey, I saw this happen in the industry. I want to write an essay about X, Y, and Z. Here's my thoughts on it. I just rant, rant, rant. Like, can you make some sense of this for me? And it can bake out an outline for me. It can take a draft pass for me. It's still me, but it's allowing me to do work that's like better structured, more readable. Like you mentioned like the M - and the AI police. Like AI is a better writer than most human beings.

8:29But we like, the reason we've always been told to make our marketing content at like a third grade level of writing is because that's like what most people understand. We're actually getting mad at AI for the thing that it's helping people learn how to do, which is consume more content because it's better written. So like, I think people are just very insecure about it. I think AI can make us all incredible writers in a good way. I want to go into, I know you've talked a lot about how there's different between like content creation and actual like social strategy. I want to go into what goes into social strategy because I think that we have gotten to this era where like people think that content creators can replace like social media managers or social media managers don't need content creators or there's like all these battles online.

9:16But what is an actual strategy? What does it look like? Because you said some of the best people on social are the ones who are continuing their own strategy. So what does it look like developing the social strategy? Yeah, I mean, man, we could do like a TED talk worth about like seven different things from what you just said. So like, I think if we like, if we stick to like, what is social strategy? you kind of alluded to this. It's gotten a little lost in the modern industry. Like there are people who are still building social strategies, but like if you look like discourse about social media and brands, it's always about tactical.

9:49It's always about creative. And we live in a culture where because trend content gets a lot of views, more and more trends are being used as strategy. Whereas to me, like the way I was trained, a social media strategy is how are you taking the brands and what they represent and the emotional value that they provide to an audience and then bringing that to life through social media. And like, we all know, like we've seen the decision tree, like, is it educational content or entertainment content? And that's where we go further down into what a strategy is into more tact, into more like emotional strategy and tactical.

10:22And then tactical even further down there is what platforms, what type of visuals or text are we doing? But I think the thing that I, that I ended up writing about a lot, it comes through in a lot of my essays is it feels like we're skipping brand strategy and social strategy in favor of very reactionary strategies to just like whatever's existing on the internet. Whereas with the brands I've worked for over the years, we weren't trying to respond to culture. We were trying to create culture. We were trying to create trends and make sure all of our content spoke to like the emotional value you get out of the brand that we're working on.

10:58Totally makes sense of what you're saying, because I do see there is a chase of virality out there. And it does work. I mean, if something's trending and you hop on a trend and you see it works, but going back to what you just said, that could be part of the strategy, but it needs to layer up to the overall, what is our brand? What are we trying to messaging? What are we trying to message? Do we even have a brand strategy? And also, I want to ask you because there's also like the fight between social and brand team because like brand wants to have this like perfect aesthetic social media feed, but doesn't mean it fits like what works on social.

11:48So how do you like, how have you partnered in the past with brand teams to make sure like the brand strategy and the social strategy work together? Maybe some of the things are not perfectly on brand, but there's guardrails to make sure we don't jump outside of the brand. It's funny, you're hinting at something I've wanted to write about for a long time and have not found like the perfect words or format to do it. which is like, I think the thing that changed my career the most was I decided that it was my job to make people understand the ideas I wanted to do. And I wasn't going to complain about it.

12:24And I wasn't gonna be like, why doesn't my executive get social? Why does the legal team keep killing my ideas? Like if I can't get my ideas bought off by those people, I decided that was my fault, not their fault. And what that like little mindset tweak did for me was it made me very, very good at selling social media strategy and ideas where I became like the second half of my agency career I was very c-suite facing very executive facing and my job became like I was flying around the world like I sold a 17 million dollar marketing strategy in Poland as like part of my job and I think the things that like really helped me start to sell in my own ideas which I think is the like we talked about like oh the social team wants to make their own stuff you You need to do the work and the soft skills and the managing up to build trust with those teams, not just present them lots of social media ideas that may be perfectly on brand, but are maybe tonally a little different.

13:20Or maybe you're building ideas that you feel are native for a platform, but like a brand person who doesn't work on social may not understand the link there. So like the best advice I can give social teams is spend lots of times with your brand teams building trust. And you're not building trust by doing these huge plans for social strategy because they don't understand them. You're spending that time learning about how they view social, what they view brand as, what kind of taste they like, bringing them examples of things that you like and showing them how things work. Like that was the, I didn't do this on purpose, but when I was at agency that was so fascinated by social, I was consuming lots.

13:57And I became encyclopedic of like, let's say like 2010 social, what the biggest campaigns were. So where like people much more senior made agency would come to me like, hey, Jack, do you have an example for something like this? Oh yeah, here's this, here's the results, here's all that. And I would take that type of work too. Because I was like, here's three brands that tried something that I want to do. Here's my own version of this. Here's the reason why I think it works. It's presented in like a very pristine deck. I'm dressed appropriately to try to sell something through. Like, I think it would behoove all social professionals to get really fascinated with selling social media as the method to get their own ideas made more often.

14:33I think two things you are also saying and alluding to is I think people don't realize that probably like 50 % or more of the job is just like managing internally people. um it's not actually like the content creation part and i think that's where the big difference between a good social media manager and a good content creator is like is all that bs they have to deal with selling ideas eternally making sure brand is on the same page maybe sure demand is on the same like demand team is on the same page making sure growth is on our page making sure like this c-suite doesn't like get annoyed make sure lawyers don't get annoyed like there's so much of those skills that aren't learned by content creators and that social media managers have to master to when in social especially in these bigger companies where there are a lot of rules a lot of guidelines a lot of brand a lot of stakeholders a lot of things at stake from one post then a smaller team a smaller company that's just coming up which is the advantage of smaller companies too totally yeah yeah i mean and like you you hit on something that's like such an important conversation in our industry right now which is just like what do social media managers do now like that title can mean everything and nothing it it was it was the original social media title and like a lot there's a lot of people it's been funny it's like i build my newsletters like i have lots of people who work for eight seasons have similar careers to me and then i have people who have been a team of one for 15 years and they're like freelance social media managers.

16:10So there's no right way to do any of this stuff. But I think that the thing that becomes really important as people are building their social careers is which area of their expertise are they leading into, especially for social media managers, where it's like, I would encourage almost all SMMs to get really, really good at social strategy because the admin part of the work, that can go more entry level at some points. And I think a lot of SMMs will end up wanting coordinators on their teams. If you want to be a content person, if you're going from SMM to content creator, you better be incredible at making content because that's where like, if I'm like, I wrote an article last year about how if I'm building a team from scratch, I actually probably would hire a content creator before a social media manager, not because I think the content creator will be amazing at strategy or because they'll be amazing at the SMM admin work, but because if I had to choose between okay strategy and okay content and great content and a strategy will bake out as we go, I kind of have to choose that ladder or the, uh, the one that's more content creation based right now because of how the platforms work.

17:18Otherwise the content doesn't even get seen. So like, I mean, you and I, you and I've done this for a long time. We could go in 48 different directions of this conversation. I would agree to the point of like the starting point as content creator because I do think the one advantage a content creator has over a lot of social media managers is that they just understand the audience better than the social media manager at first and know how to create for that audience. Like something that's really curious about that now is these, I have found content creators are more interested in making original content for brands than many social media managers are, which is fascinating and bizarre.

18:02And like, also I think kind of a sign of, we have to elevate what we view as social media strategy because originality does win, especially originality that actually shows the emotional value of the products. Like how can we build original IP? I think it's so important in this space. How do you think about, when you're thinking about a social media strategy, and I know we just talk about originality but um how do you think about content pillars inside like how much should be original how much could be like a little bit of back off like like news cycle trends and how much could be um like evergreen content that you know that works and you can continue doing it over and over and over because you know that type of content works yeah i mean so i'll get an example I'm working on right now.

18:53So like one of my consulting clients is an AI content creation company. Their specialties video. And I'm doing their first ever true social strategy. They've already got a half million followers on Instagram from like that they've pieced together. But I'm building their first like proper in a deck, how do you scale out strategy? And as I work with them, I work with them differently than I would work on a soup brand, a fast food company, a tech brand. Because for them, it's like, what's the emotional value that they provide, they can generate these gorgeous videos from people who don't have great prompt expertise.

19:29So all of the pillars that I'm building them after we build, I want to give away too much of their strategy, but all of the pillars that I'm building for them are based on mostly providing context for why their tool is very, very cool. For them, it's going to probably be like, let's say like 20 % to 30 % is like, I call it seasonal instead of trend because we might tie on to like back to school or halloween to inspire some creation the real-time stuff i think it's it can be very effective i like what i call planned real-time content a lot more than just true real uh than like really reactive real-time and that's where it's like the example our whole industry is like taylor swift plans a tour having something in the bag ready for that tour launches is an example of planned real time so it kind of depends on brands i think that the challenge with reactive trend content is you're spending a lot of time looking for a needle in a haystack but there's a lot more interesting work to be done i think i and it's and it's it's hard if you're not chronically online it's really hard to find those needles in the Second, also, if you're not really good at taste, I would say, it's hard to spot this would be great for my brand versus I should not hop on this and I should not.

20:47That's why I think what you just said, that planned out content needs to, you need to have bank stuff so you know it wins because otherwise you're just going to be, your whole strategy is just off a reactive post. But I want to ask you too, because we talked about the content creation side, but I think like one of the hardest parts of social media is like the, the, like the social part of social media where it's like that community management, making sure you're in the comments, making sure that you're, you're in the DMS. Like, I know you can't give an exact number, but how much of social media is media and how much is, is like social, like media, meaning like content creation and like social, meaning like community management stuff.

21:30So it's funny. I got my start in community management. Um, I was working like my very first social job was I was at an agency where electronic arts paid our agency to have community managers running around the clock. I actually worked graveyard my first year of my career because I was doing community management. I was, I was overseeing a team of community managers on European hours. so what like one-to-one marketing can be incredibly effective like the reply to someone can make their day or the reply to someone who's having customer service issues can like absolutely make sure that they continue on with your brand that said as we've seen social change as we've gone from like the follower-based years where your content really only went to people who hit the follow button to you to now where it goes like half and half it feels like in the interest graph era with like an Instagram reel or a TikTok.

22:24I am more and more bullish every day on the thing we got to focus on is the top of funnel of social media. So I think community managers are important, but the way I think CM should spend their time is less just replying directly to every comment. And they're operating almost more as like an additional arm of social team where it's like the commentary on other brands' posts has become very, very popular now. They're getting a lot of pull-in engagement from that kind of stuff. Because I think community, I think if we're being really honest with ourselves, very few brands have communities. What they have are people who comment on Instagram posts and TikToks.

23:03They're not a real community. There are some exceptions to that. But as a strategist and as someone who is responsible for telling brands how to use their budget, I think it's harder than ever for me to not justify spending most of that money to try to make the best contents possible so it gets seen by the most people possible. And if I'm making content that speaks to the brand, that speaks to the products, that will convert to sales. Whereas things like comments are something I am less worried about than I've ever been before. This hurts to say, but a lot of marketing ops are built on top of accidental processes.

23:43Wrike is a work management platform that fixes your workflows from the ground up. Let's say your approvals are buried in email, your assets are across three different apps, and your Mondays are one long status meeting. Wrike has AI-powered automation, whiteboard style collaboration, and 400 plus integrations to connect everything into one scalable source of truth. Teams at Microsoft, Tiffany & Co., Southwest Airlines, and thousands more already use it. Go to reich.com slash TMM to get out of the weeds today. I know we're bouncing around and I know we started this talk on like AI, but I want to know like, what parts of social should be doubling down on AI?

24:33And what should be the human part of social? What should humans be focusing on? I mean, the AI is so incredible at research. It's so incredible at framing ideas. I mean, I'll just tell you exactly how I'm using AI for my business. Even for like How to Hoop Forever, right? My basketball business, where it's everything I do is video contents about my pursuits of playing pro basketball in my late 30s. I've worked in social for 15 years. I know what good and bad social looks like. And I grew that account mostly pre-AI, but I wanted to increase my watch through time of my videos. I have to make 60 second videos to qualify for TikTok creator rewards programs.

25:14So what I did was I built a chat GPT agent where I was like, when I give you scripts, I want you to help me edit them to increase the retention so I can have as high of watch through as possible. And I learned things through that process that I either didn't know or had forgotten where it's like, hey, like you give a script, like, hey, you know, at the 32nd mark of your scripts, you're actually losing people because you're not building a secondary hook and you're not increasing the tension. It's like you're giving away the outcome of your videos too much. So I helped to start working with all my scripts.

25:51I had a video a couple of weeks ago that was a minute 30 video, 90 seconds, that 42 % of people who clicked on the video watched the entire 90 second video and did a half million views on an Instagram account that only has 110 ,000 followers. I couldn't have done that without AI helping me write the better version of the script, which is still very true to me. I took the script and I used all my own language and I tweaked and did things. But I think that's where it's like using it to help optimize your creative and cover the things that we don't have time to think about every single thing. That's where it's like really, really incredible.

26:28I don't think it should be doing like your community management for you. I don't think AI replies are going to work nearly enough yet for it to be considered an option, but every task we do in social, it's worth asking Claude or ChatGPT, how could you help me do this better and toying with it to see if it actually does help you do your job better? Yeah. I mean, one AB test, I mean, even with trial rails right now, like you could do a lot of those, those things but also would you what i what i think that the human side of it what you just said is it takes you and actually understanding social media to like know to ask the question to say at the like my videos are dropping off at the 30 second mark help me do something that like better like if i was not didn't know social media i probably would say hey write this script great for social media so everybody watches it exactly um but if you knew that like at the maybe a three second there was a drop-off and i know how to read the metrics and i know that maybe at 30 seconds or the cta there's no like a closed loop or like all these things that you know is needed but you don't have time to think about um a good social media strategist would know like what all this means someone who's new might just be have to do a bunch of research guess and then play the game um which makes you way behind that someone like you who's going to say optimize the things that i know i'm not good in the script yeah i mean and that said like i think they are incredible like the new crop of social strategists will learn faster because of ai Are there concerns that it will maybe limit their ceiling of understanding?

28:15I understand that perspective. And I think there's some truth to it. You need to learn from being in the work, getting your 10 ,000 hours, doing the homework yourself. You can't just rely on AI to do everything. But I think we got to be honest with ourselves. I think this is the thing that I would encourage all social media professionals, whether you're worried about AI taking your job, or you want the next promotion, or you worry about like you work from home, do you get noticed enough? Content is so easy to make now that we will be held, like if we want to be paid as social strategists or social content creators, our content has to significantly perform better than the AI content that's pumped out so easily.

28:56Because how do we justify$50 ,000,$100 ,000, $200 ,000 salaries if we're not really outperforming content that takes 10 seconds to make. And I think that's why it's so important we continue to get better at this stuff as humans. Yeah, I said from the early, when I used to create LinkedIn content, if you're just doing B plus content and A plus consistency, you're pretty much one out of most people. But the thing that's changing is that B plus bar is getting higher and higher and higher as more people pump out content more people get better with tools more people that's what's really changed and that's also why attention spans are like worse and worse because that be the way like people now see like b content like as we watch we go back like us and watch an old movie and see how bad cg like all like the technology to make that movie and now we see movies now like we we might get bored because we're like oh my goodness that sucks like how did i watch a movie like that people who understand plots and stuff will say this is a good or movie boss will say this is a good movie but people who are looking for like fast-paced movements cgi realistic things might be this is a lame movie that's the same thing that's happening in social where content is just getting way more and more better yeah it's like the phrase i use a lot is like, it's easier than ever to make responsible contents that checks every box.

30:34It's going to make your boss happy, like super easy to do that. But I think that's where so much of where, whether we're talking about like personal brands or like true proper brands, I think perspective is going to really, really matter. And like when I work with content creators on like content creators or executives of building their personal brands, it's easy for me to pump out a bunch of leadershipy type content for you. But what's going to make people remember you is a stance that you have, an opinion that you have. I worked with one guy where he, obviously we can all work off of Zoom every day, but he's like, you know, one of my big things is like, if I can't shake your hands, like real business gets done like in person and that will never change for me.