How To Make Social Media Marketing Fun With Neal Schaffer

Neal Schaffer is the Founder and President of PDCA Social, a digital marketing consultancy and social media agency. As a fractional CMO, he helps innovative businesses digitally transform their sales and marketing. Neal is a social media keynote speaker, having spoken about digital media on four continents in a dozen countries. He has written three books on social media, including Maximize Your Social and The Age of Influence, which educates the market on influencer marketing.

Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:

Neal Schaffer explains why he believes marketing is fun
How to cultivate brand supporters
Building employee advocacy for brands
Neal’s analogy for influencer and social media marketing
The importance of curating content for various social media platforms
Vital considerations for AI content creation — and how to leverage various AI tools
What was Neal’s inspiration for delving into social media marketing?
Neal shares his humbling experience meeting Kobe Bryant

In this episode…

With brands leveraging social media marketing to acquire lifelong advocates, content creation must be enjoyable and entertaining. Rather than promoting products on various platforms, connect with your consumers by driving engagement. How can you market on social media to build a trustworthy brand?

As a passionate digital marketer, Neal Schaffer recommends cultivating lasting friendships with your customers to gain exposure. Consumers are more likely to purchase from companies they admire and trust, so building a personal brand through authentic and informal UGC content makes you distinguishable and relatable. You can promote your brand persona further by creating employee advocacy programs that allow loyal team members to produce branded content that aligns with their skills and strengths and resonates with your target audience. Testing various social media platforms and analyzing performance data is crucial when developing a robust marketing strategy.

In this episode of the Up Arrow Podcast, William Harris sits down with Neal Schaffer, the Founder and President of PDCA Social, to talk about social media and influencer marketing. Neal shares his medical analogy for social media marketing, why he studies the subject, and how to curate content for diverse social media platforms.

Resources mentioned in this episode

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Sponsor for this episode

This episode is brought to you by Elumynt. Elumynt is a performance-driven e-commerce marketing agency focused on finding the best opportunities for you to grow and scale your business.

Our paid search, social, and programmatic services have proven to increase traffic and ROAS, allowing you to make more money efficiently.

To learn more, visit www.elumynt.com.

Episode Transcript

Intro 0:03

Welcome to the Up Arrow Podcast with William Harris, featuring top business leaders sharing strategies and resources to get to the next level. Now, let's get started with the Show.

William Harris 0:13

Hey everybody, William Harris here. I'm the founder and CEO of Elumynt. And the host of this podcast where I feature experts in the DDC industry sharing strategies on how to scale your business and achieve your goals. Super excited about the guests that I have here today, Neal Schaffer, he is a leader in helping companies grow their businesses through leveraging the latest best practices and trends in digital content influencer and social media marketing. He's the founder of the digital marketing consultancy PDCA Social, Neal currently serves as a fractional cmo for several leading organizations, a popular International keynote speaker who has spoken on four continents. Neal is also an experienced University educator teaching influencer marketing at UCLA Extension in social media marketing at Rutgers Business School. He is also the author of four marketing books including Maximize Your Social, and his newest work The Age of Influence, a groundbreaking book redefining Digital Influence, check out Neal's blog, one of the most popular digital marketing blogs garnering millions of annual pageviews at Nealschaffer.com that spelled Nealschaffer.com. And listen to his Your Digital Marketing Coach podcast for weekly marketing inspiration. Oh, yeah. And he's fluent in Japanese and Mandarin. Neal, amazing to have you on the show. Has uma Marche de me how ma

Neal Schaffer 1:36

Haziran? Weston? Yeah, okay. Anyway, yeah, you got both of them covered there. It's an absolute honor to be here, my friend. Cool.

William Harris 1:42

I'm excited to dig in some of these topics. Before we do, I want to announce our sponsor. This episode is brought to you by Elumynt. Elumynt is an award winning advertising agency optimizing e commerce campaigns around profit. In fact, we've helped 13 of our customers get acquired, with the largest one selling for nearly 800 million. And we were ranked as the 12th fastest growing agency in the world. By Adweek. You can learn more on our website at Elumynt spelled elumynt.com. That said, enough of the boring stuff on to the fun stuff. Literally, one of the things that you've said over and over again, is marketing is fun. What do you mean by that? Why is marketing fun?

Neal Schaffer 2:17

You got to love what you do, right. And I think when we get to marketing, and E commerce marketing, there's on platforms, there's social media companies to deal with, there's content that we need to produce. And sometimes we forget that if we lose that passion for what we do, and I equate passion with sort of having fun, it's going to show in our content it's going to show in the way we treat our employees is going to show in the way that we treat others in social media, if we're always having fun doing what we're doing. And we truly love, you know, our products and our marketing. I think it's really going to show and instead of making customers, you're going to make friends. And I think that's one of the themes. As I am starting to write my next book. You know, we talk about e commerce, primary marketing channels advertising, you don't make friends through advertising. But if you can make friends, sure they talk about you, they come back for more, they write reviews, they post about you on social media. And so when you start to make it fun, I believe you begin that transition into making more friends. And that unlocks a lot of other things. So that's a short answer. But I think it's awesome. It's an easy to understand concept. And I just like to throw it out there that hey, let's not get too serious about this. Yes, making money, a serious business. But when you're going to have fun making money, I think that's every entrepreneurs dream. You

William Harris 3:36

know, it reminds me of running, I don't find running to be particularly fun. But there's a lot of people who do and they like to go for long long runs, 100 mile runs, ultra marathons and, and to your point, anything can be fun, if it's something that you're passionate about. And marketing does have a lot of room to be really fun. Even on this podcast for those who've been following from the very beginning here. I've been doing a lot of interesting antics on a lot of the different podcasts The one time I picked my nose for tolerance, solid 10 seconds waiting to see, you know, the guests would notice and change outfits a couple of times on one to see like, when would I actually get called out for this. And so simply because of exactly what you said, it's like, I I'm doing this and it's fun, and I need to make sure that I'm enjoying it and having fun. And to your point, as a brand. If we're able to have fun. We can create, you know, not just customers but friends. And I think that that goes a long way because we don't we don't get into doing a really good job of looking at the impact of friends of brands as opposed to just customers of brands. Is there any way that you would look at how can we tell whether or not a brand is doing a good job of creating friends as opposed to just customers?

Neal Schaffer 4:47

You know, it's actually a quotes that I stole from Taco Bell. And this is the early days of social media marketing but they were just killing it on Facebook and Twitter, before Instagram and there's they're still killing it. But what you know, Director of Marketing is like, look, we're on Facebook to make friends, we're not here to promote. And if we can make friends, obviously, you get the engagement, you get more exposure. So, you know, the way I looked at it, and I recently had this experience, where I've just started to get into YouTube, and we can talk about that as well. And if you look at YouTube thumbnails, they're very emotional, like the, or the, you know, all sorts of weird faces. And I do regular photo shoots. And I recommend anyone who wants to invest in a personal brand, should do a photo shoot once a year, you get tons of photos, you can use them for selfies, like on LinkedIn, Instagram, what have you. And so I go to Japan a lot. I did mine in Osaka in April. And it's like, you know, what, I just want to have fun, I just want to be smiling. I don't want these serious looking photos, even though I'm gonna sue. Like, I want to have fun, and I want to show my emotions and and just be myself. And those photos are just so much better, exponentially better than any other Photoshop that I've ever done. And like, you know, I now have like a few 100 photos that I go through. When I do my tweets or LinkedIn posts or YouTube thumbnails, it gives you a variety of things, but they're all having fun. People want to buy from people they like know and trust, right. And I think, a smile, you know, having fun, can get you pretty far in life. So yeah, I think that it is a and you know, if you have outward facing employees, if your community managers, what have you. You know, if I was working with influencers for influence mark, I'd say hey, you know, they would probably smile anyway, because that's their, their jive, but, you know, become a company of smiles. And I think it's just it's a concept that if you can remember that I think it'll just go go miles, and give you a lot of a lot of benefits that you might not have thought of.

William Harris 6:38

I use the one of the quotes that you just said there of people do business with companies that they like or whatever people, right. It reminded me of a quote from Jeffrey Gitomer, his book, where he talks about, there's page one said, All things being equal, people do business with their friends. That's it, the whole page, flip the page, it says all things being not quite so equal. People still do business with their friends. So even if you're charging a little more, it's the fact that it's like, yeah, but I liked this guy, I liked this girl, I want to work with them. And so I used that we were at, I was running some trade shows for a company at the time, that sold marketing materials to car dealerships and realtors. And one of the things we would do just to kind of get a little bit more attention at our booth is we had what we call the CEO laugh. And we were just started laughing, not unnecessarily about anything, just laughing just so people would say what's going on in there. It's just it was the boisterous laugh, right? So you just gotta go for it right

Neal Schaffer 7:31

now.

William Harris 7:32

What's going on over there, and we were just all of us just started laughing. They're going, Oh, what's going on? And it was a really fun gimmicky way of getting people. But to your point, people want to be a part of what, whatever exciting or fun is going on.

Neal Schaffer 7:45

Now, absolutely. Yeah, yeah, it's just a small thing. But just something I'm not gonna say it's gonna make you a billion dollars. But just something to keep in the back your head the way that you approach people, because it's all digital now. And especially I know, we're going to talk a little bit about employee advocacy. But any outward touch point to the world gives you the opportunity to shape the opinions of people. In fact, you know, one of the classic quotes about employee advocacy comes from the CEO of Honeywell, this industrial product, you know, air defense, whatever, military, you know, product company in, like the 1970s. You know, the CEO said, Hey, anybody who engages with the customers, any one of our employees has the chance to improve our relationship, more to tarnish our relationship. And it really is that easy. And that's once again, it's part of all this that I teach is it's mindset. Once you get the mindset, it's a lot easier to implement. But if you don't get the mindset, it's really hard to implement.

William Harris 8:40

Yeah, you read my mind, you've got a great memory, because that is exactly what I wanted to get into as employee advocacy of your brand. And you had on your show, Deb, and I'm forgetting her last name for some reason here. But talking about gobbling up. Yes. Thank you, an army of irrationally loyal fans to your brand. And so those immediately first, those first fans of your brand should be your own employees, your own team. And this is true for any business, but especially for E commerce as well. I would say that if your own team isn't using your products, loving your products raving about your products, why not? Right? They've got all this access to it all the data, all the knowledge, how do you go about building up employee advocacy for brands? Wow.

Neal Schaffer 9:24

Well, I mean, a lot of people listening are probably already have their team. So it's just a matter of you know, the younger the employee, the more active they are on social media. And a big thing about employee advocacy is we want our employees to talk about our brand and social media. You know, I would take it one step further, because I think that there's a lot of invaluable ways they can contribute to your company. They can give you ideas, marketing ideas, product ideas, obviously some of them might be nano influencers. They might already have 1000 influencers, in which case they could talk about you but it can't be forced. It has to be natural. I like the idea. If you have something sort of external influencer marketing program in place, I would now apply that internally, I'd actually bring your employees give them the chance to engage with your external influencers, train them, right train them how to take better photos, better videos, better tick tock captions, whatever it is, any employee advocacy program, if you really want to invest in your employees to, you know, get them to help share the word about your products, the best way to do that is actually through investing in them, then they feel you have skin in the game, it's you know, their people as well, they feel you're invested in them. But obviously, they have to want it. So you might have 100 employees, not everyone's going to take part in it. But you know, what, if there are five or 10 of them that are really active in social, and they've never posted about you, and if they can post about you once a month, that can be really impactful because they like know, and trust your brand more than anyone that you know, I talked about, you know, brand affinity, and the circles of brand affinity. And it's really your employees, even more than your customers are invested in your company. So I know you know, with influencer marketing, we talked about employees, then we talked about customers. And then we talked about external influencers that may not even know your brand exists. So many brands immediately go to those people that don't even know about your brand, without starting with the people that do know about your brand. And as important as you know, brand loyalty and customer advocacy is, I'd say equally your employee advocacy, even if you only have a few employees, you know, I'm thinking I work for a startup ecommerce bubble. They're big in Japan, but they're a startup here. And our marketing person is also a bonafide photographer. So she's helping and she has friends that are influencers, because she's a photographer in LA. So she puts together some photoshoots we get some great UGC content, right? A benefit of saying, you know, what we really want to tap into who you are and what you do. And rather than go outside for this, we want to we want to collaborate with you internally. So it's internal collabs is the way to think about it with each employee and their special skill set. Is there an internal club we can do? And I think with that mindset, you're gonna find doesn't have to be everybody doesn't even have to be 10% your employees, but but guess what, if a few of them start doing it, the other ones are gonna go, hey, you know, I saw that tick tock plus, that was awesome. It got like 2000 likes, you know, I, you know, Can I can I join the program as well, and, and you start a very, very positive atmosphere within the company where everybody's just naturally sharing. And that's the ultimate, very few companies have that, you know, back in the day, Zappos was an example of a company where any employee could post on their Twitter. And I met like, you know, three of them from marketing and customer support at a conference once right? Yeah, like, I'll show you, I can do it right here in front of me. And it was pretty amazing. So, you know, that's, I don't think you have to go that far. But just think internally, and I think you're gonna find some hidden opportunities.

William Harris 12:38

One of the brilliant things that I think you said there, too, is just eliminating the friction for them to be able to do this is huge. So if you're investing in them, if they're not really comfortable on Twitter, don't have that be the place that you're looking for them to engage on. But if they're really great on tick tock, it's like, find out where their superpower and their interests are, like you said, internally collaborate with them. And now there's less friction there. But if they feel like this has got to be like, hey, LinkedIn post or whatever, that might not work for everybody figure out what's, what's working for them, and lean into their strengths and their skills and their heart's desire.

Neal Schaffer 13:12

Yeah, you know, in b2b, it's really big. In b2b, you often have these like technology people that your CTO, their internal influencers, like, you know, people go to see them speak at conferences. But even with E commerce, I'm thinking of one of my clients who has a hair color company, and they have a, one of their employees is in charge of training. And she goes out to barbers, and trains them how to use our product, in addition to just haircutting and taking care of beards, what have you. And she is really, really popular in her field, people know, her people, you know, go to a training, they line up to meet her. So why can't we start to put some of that stuff online? Why can't we start the livestream, take videos repurpose that, with her permission, of course, and maybe trained her on how to do it herself as well, it's this little thing can really have big impact over time, especially when they are not creating very much content on their own. This can be a boon. So you know, as E commerce companies, even just with advertisement, you still need to make content, right. And you realize, the more powerful your organic content is, it also helps your paid. So there's still a need to create content. And that's really where whether they're customers or employees, they can really help you know, create a lot of really authentic, you know, I think being happy is a form of authentic emotion as well. But they can really help you create this authentic content that really resonates better. And when the content resonates better, we know the click through rates going to be better, you know, the Ross is going to be better, you're going to reap all those benefits as well. Yeah,

William Harris 14:35

if it's forced, it doesn't feel as genuine. It doesn't feel as happy like you can see right through that reminds me of Dave Mortensen, one of the cofounders of Anytime Fitness, the gym franchise, him and his partner Chuck Runyon they wrote a book called Love Work in it they talked about how a lot of people have gotten even, you know, the Anytime Fitness logo tattooed like these, you know, their employees gets a tattoo of the low Go on their body, this is a very permanent thing. You only do that if you love the company that you're with. And let's say that we go beyond whether or not you're trying to get people to post on tick tock or or some other social platform, do your do your employees, they might love your product, but do they love your company? Do they love their way they're being treated at your company? Have you taken care of them in their emotional needs, their physical needs, their their monetary needs? Right? If you haven't done that, then then you can say, well, it's gonna be very difficult for them to do a good job of being your own influencers in this space, because it's going to come through, it's not going to feel very genuine when they do that. Yeah. And

Neal Schaffer 15:37

you know, it's funny, a lot of companies are investing in creating virtual influencers, right? These are not real people that have full control over but but think if you could invest in and build an army of influencers that are your actual employees, I think that's huge. And it's something I'd like to see more brands do, like I said, doesn't have to be everybody. But just a few people can create these really, really positive role models. And those role models are going to be the reason why people want to work at your company people want to buy from your company, once again, it's it's the human emotion. It's the side of advertising that you don't really see. But it's to me, it's the yin and yang, you really need both, if you really want to capitalize on all the opportunities out there. Yeah,

William Harris 16:12

that's brilliantly worded. I want to transition then into also you use a really good doctor analogy. The other time we were chatting with the idea of a lot of brands right now maybe get hyper focused on one specific area that they're trying to work towards or optimized towards, and they're missing a lot of other things. Can you walk me through what this analogy is?

Neal Schaffer 16:34

Yeah, so I wrote a book. My last book was influencer marketing called The Age of Influence. It came out in March 2020. Just perfect timing. But it ended up with getting remote work, I ended up getting a lot of what I call my fractional cmo clients. So people that are willing to work remotely over zoom and what have you. So that was a boon. But I had a lot of companies reach out to me saying, read your book, when I need your help to do an influencer marketing, I'm like, Okay, let's, you know, sign a contract. And let's start to dig into all of your marketing, because influencer marketing doesn't live in a silo. And I need to understand everything you're doing. So I would have like startups, they didn't even have a social media profile. And they wanted to get an influencer marketing, like, Wait a minute. Sure, right. Anybody that talks about you, and social media is gonna want to tag you, and then they're gonna go to your profile, and it doesn't exist, you're not gonna be very effective, right? So there's a certain order of things, there's a certain infrastructure, and as I write my next book, which is going to be this digital marketing playbook, I'm trying to organize what this looks like. But it's almost like you need to start to grow the scale, right? The start is that bear infrastructure? The grow is you need to get some customers, you need to get some customers talking about you. What have you started advertising to realize what types of networks and what types of ads perform? Well, the scale is really where I see the influencer marketing come in. Because if you don't already have customers talking about you, if you don't already have followers on social media, if you're not doing all that you don't have a list. Right? You're not doing email marketing. If you know you're doing Facebook ads, what you haven't tried Google ads, you haven't tried Tik Tok ads, you haven't tried Twitter ads? I mean, you know, you need to give all this a try. Because you can't assume I mean, you know, so I like to say the analogy I use getting back to your question was, you know, think of me as the doctor, right? You don't go to a doctor saying, I have, you know, meningitis and I need this medicine in 5% per prescription strength. I mean, you ask the doctor for their opinion. And I think in marketing, a lot of companies, a lot of business owners will assume this is what they need. They'll talk to someone like myself, and I'll say no, you know, I think if you want to reach that goal, which at the end of the day is increased sales, I think there's a more effective way of doing it. And in fact, if you want to leverage influencer marketing, the most effective way is to first do A, B, and C. And then when you begin to do it, it'll be that much more effective. So once again, people try to jump to the scale without doing the start and the growth phases. And it's almost like we're going to do a million dollar daily ad spend without doing any ads before. No, no, that's a scale, you need to grow. You need to forgive me to learn about ads, you need to learn about audiences, build up custom audiences, et cetera, et cetera. Right. So that's, that's sort of what I'm talking about there. And I do think that, you know, sometimes you need to ask your employees and this is the problem with a lot of marketing employees is they only know the networks they're personally on when it comes to social media. I hate LinkedIn. Well, if you're selling a high demographic, you know, high wealth individual, LinkedIn might actually be really effective for you. Oh, no one's on Twitter. Well, have you been on Twitter? Have you done searches on Twitter, so I prefer this very data driven, you know, methodology, which means take your emotions out of it. I don't care if you like Tik Tok or hate it. I don't care if you think it's gonna get banned. It is the most influential social media app in the world right now. And you know it even if it gets banned, use it while you can. You know, I tell people LinkedIn groups, you used to be able to download an email address everybody in your LinkedIn group, and then LinkedIn stopped doing that. And this is like 10 years ago, right? You take advantage of things while you can try them and they will repeat that take advantage of things while you can. If you think like Facebook ads are doing really, really well right now. You never know when Apple is going to come in and say Nope, we're going to stop you know eating cookies. And you know, things change really, really fast. So I just see that, you know, even LinkedIn. And I know that you know, a lot of ecommerce may not be on LinkedIn. But there's a type of carousel post that's going really viral on LinkedIn, and LinkedIn starting June 23, you can't do that anymore. So you know, things change fast. So when you find something that works, you need to leverage it and not worry about is it going to get banned, or I personally don't like it, or I don't care about dances, you need to get the data first. And if your marketing team is telling you oh, we need to do this, ask them for the data. Have we tried this? Have we tried that? What's the comparison? And And I'll end with, you know, one of my first clients, when I had an agency, I don't do agency work anymore. So like, oh, we need to do Facebook ads. I'm like, well, let's A B test Facebook and Twitter. And our Twitter ads did so much better and conversion, that the Twitter AD team actually wanted to feature our company as a case study, right. And we would not have known that unless we did the experiment. So data driven, and I would enforce data driven, you know, company wide as a culture, especially in your marketing, and make sure that you have all of your digital bases covered. There's a lot out there, right? I mean, I don't know if tick tock is going to be good for you. But you'll know if you do some smart investing and you know, a B testing, you'll be able to figure it out. But guess what a year from now you're gonna get different results. So some of this experiments you need to do on a regular basis, if you really want to maximize your ROI. And

William Harris 21:15

here's the thing, the Tick Tock ban, here's the reason why I fully support what you're talking about with getting people on Tik Tok. It is a completely different style of content. If you're doing okay, content on all the other social platforms, you take any of that content over to tick tock, it will bomb you will completely just not get anything out of it. But if you learn how to do tic tock content well, and you can actually crack the code there, that content does amazing on literally almost every other social platform. And so even if tick tock goes away, you will have gained a skill you will now know how to create content that's gonna work very well on any other social platform probably better than what you currently have. Because you're able to get away with some just subpar content on some of these other platforms, right? That

Neal Schaffer 22:02

is so true. And I will also say, you know, everybody's on Facebook ads. So there's competition, not everybody's on tick tock ads. And it's really interesting, because in the SEO world, I've blogged meals here but are calm. And my tick tock content is just killing it. And it really is a tick tock is banned in India. So all these, you know, outsource content writers, all these big companies use they can't write about tick tock tick tock says all right, and maybe that might affect ads as well, because I hear case studies of companies, e commerce that have done really well on Tik Tok. And I used to hear a lot more of those on Facebook and Instagram, not as many these days. So once again, if it isn't something that you've tried, and just because no one's talking about it. In fact, when no one talks about it, that's actually the opportunity that there might be a lot less competition there. 100%

William Harris 22:42

Yeah, if you're a brand that wants to get on Tik Tok, and you haven't cracked the The Tick Tock content game, and you can't figure that out, because I'd say that's one thing that we see in the ad side is people who come to tick tock, and they bring over the stuff that they've already produced for their ad on Facebook, and they try to run that on it as an add on on tick tock, and it bombs and up tick tock doesn't work for us know, your content was just absolutely pitiful. This is not the right content for the platform. And if you don't know how to do that content, and you don't feel comfortable with it, there are ways around this. And one, I'll just give a plug here for one of the agencies that I've co founded along with Jordan Erickson, here, he runs the TIC tock creative challenge. There's a bunch of Tiktok creators that are in this space that know how to do this. They've run ads now for John Wick for Alibaba, for a lot of other brands. And it's completely pay for performance. So you're getting some of the best creators to make content for your brand, run them as ads and you only pay if it's converting you only pay if it's working better than your other ads. And so that's one way if you're not quite familiar with tick tock and you can't figure it out yourself. Find partners like this, who are willing to create this work with influencers who are really influential on tick tock and say, I need you to make this content, but I don't understand how to make the content for that, you know, it sounds like something that you would do, right? So it's like work with me on some of these influencers and say, Great, I need this kind of content. Now you're going to take the right content of the platform and the ads should be significantly more effective. Yeah,

Neal Schaffer 24:10

I mean, every content is so every platform is so unique and its demographic and I think with tick tock it really, it really made every content every platform really unique. And then I think we saw the demographics, Facebook really skew old Instagram really skew in the mid Tik Tok really young plus you have this content format. Plus, you know, I don't think people are on Facebook and Instagram, like they would watch TV, but younger generations are on Tiktok. That's TV to them. Like we spent a few hours watching stupid Scooby Doo, you know, cartoons when we were young. There, you're scrolling for hours at a time. So it is just a different. It's a different vibe, a different way of communicating and you need to figure it out, especially if you want to target you know, those people now are starting to go to college. They're gonna be graduating soon. They're going to be young executives soon, right? So you need to think a few years in advance and get on and out because you're right And if you can figure that out, you can tap into it, it will carry over on every other platform. Yeah,

William Harris 25:05

something else that is up and coming that you've written a lot about, I've seen a lot of your posts on LinkedIn about is AI. It's absolutely game changing is one of the biggest things that I think that we are going to witness in our lives. I would even say that this is probably on the level of what the internet was like when that came out in the 90s. Right? What what are you? What are you watching? From an AI perspective? What do you think would be important for brands, especially ecommerce brands to be paying attention to in the AI space, and other tools that you really like that you're looking at? So

Neal Schaffer 25:40

AI, we call the recent evolution of AI, we're calling generative AI, which is AI for content creation. So you have text you have audio or video, video not there yet there are you know, if you have like, you know, customer support, like an FAQ, and you wanted to create a, a, someone that looks like a person that looks like they're really talking, it's really, really easy to create those explainer type videos with AI right now. But, you know, I think the main use for E commerce is going to be visual and tax, the visual is really, really interesting. Because I mentioned the photographer, and the photo shoot for UGC content. Well, there are now and if you go to Shopify, and if you just do a search for AI visuals, you'll find a bunch of tools, where you upload a picture of your product. And they will take out the background and just immediately give you lots of really really competitive looking visuals that you can use for social media, you know, for your for all agree advertising. So that is really excited, I think quantity is only going to get better with that. So that is something I would definitely especially if you just want to cut off face, if you only show the chin, you can get away with it. If you need to show an actual person, I do not believe AI generated people are there yet. But visually, I think that's really powerful to be able to create imagery at scale, that textual is really, really interesting. So you know, I have a lot of different clients and some write short form content and some long form content. So short form, content is like ad copy. It's like an ad title ad description, you're limited like 120 characters, 200 characters long form is like 2000 word blog posts. So I am not recommending you write a 2000 word blog post using AI. I know some people that do that. And the problem with long form content is you're often writing it because you want to get indexed and seen in search results. But I believe that content is not going to perform well for a variety of reasons. However, if it's short form content, and if the SEO is not a matter if it's ads, or if it's like Amazon bullet points, or short, little Amazon descriptions, I think these are perfect scenarios, to leverage various AI tools to give you new ideas. I was listening to a podcast today, someone who's done really, really well in E commerce. And he will go and find, you know, competing products, very, very similar products on Amazon. And he'll find five star reviews. And he'll cut and paste all those reviews in the chat GBT. And say, based on these reviews, please create really 10 different 100 character variations of ad copy that talk about all the things that people like about the product. So there are so many compelling ways it's it's out of control, right? It's just giving you you know, how many times we've been at like the Google Ad Manager, well, if your outsource your Google ads is one thing, but it's like, damn, I need like 20 headlines like, I don't know what you know, that's where there's no more writer's block that AI will give you will let you do this at scale. And it's part of the experimentation. Because the more variations of visual and text you have, the more you're going to figure out what resonates with people, right? And the better your ad spend is going to be. So I think right there, those areas for E commerce is absolute killer, stop wasting your time on it, leverage AI to generate the variations, and then follow what the data tells you to do. Done. Yeah, it's not easy. It's,

William Harris 28:40

it's a no brainer. Yeah. Well, like you said, the volume of of ideas that you can test is huge. And even just with the tools, so some of the tools that I've personally been very interested in, one that I haven't gotten access to. So I'd really like Adobe Firefly, lately, which is kind of like their mid journey competitor. And I would say, one of the benefits of that one is, is it wasn't trained on copyrighted works, they said, which is really huge. But the other thing that I really like is there's one called wonder studio by Wonder dynamics. And you can CGI, basically entire characters. So you could have like a person acted out, basically, click on the person have this like animated whatever. It just basically, like put them in there. And it's like, the whole rest of the movie is them. I mean, it's just like instant CGI. I think there's a lot of opportunity to that one. I haven't gotten access to that one yet. But the other one that's interesting is Google is actually releasing a lot of really interesting AI features. And the one that they just released last week that I was really excited about was automatically looking at the different sizing for particular clothes. And so if you run an e commerce Store and you've got, you know, this particular size, and people want to see what does that look like on my body on my figure. They're using AI right now to generate that for hundreds of different body types and shapes and figures. So you can see how All those clothes would fit you specifically, which is which is absolutely wild.

Neal Schaffer 30:04

Yeah, one of the first billionaires in Japan Maezawa son created something called Zozo town and they specialize in online clothing where you basically took a photo and it would show you, you know, using AI how that looks on you. And you'd buy clothes that way. So, so yeah, that technology has been, and that's the thing that AI is not new. It's just evolved. It's evolved really, really quickly. And the tools we talked about today, I don't even know if they're gonna be around tomorrow. I mean, they open AI by them, Google might buy them. So rather than specific tools, just do Google searches. Because we're seeing a renaissance. Now, I think all of the Silicon Valley money that went into like NF T's and web three, and crypto is all going in AI tools right now. So I'm really excited. And like I said, for whatever purpose you have, you don't want to use a tool for the purpose of using the tool you want to use it to to help you do your job better. I mean, there are tools that help you optimize ad spend, obviously, using AI and those has been around for a while as well. Right? So you just want to find how what has taken a lot of time? Or what do we need to improve? Or what don't we have time to do? And then is there an AI tool that can get us 50% of the way there 70% of the way there 80% of the way there that would be the the mind, you know, the thought process I would have when looking at AI I find some people are so enamored with AI, it's like, Dude, your job is not prompt engineering, like, you know, it's an engine, you need to drive the car to your destination, who cares about the engine, right? You don't need to learn how to fix it, you take it to a dealer. So I'm more interested not in and I love Google Bard, and you know, Chachi Beatty, I'm more interested in the specific use case scenario tools that are being developed like stuff, we've talked about that that solve these very, very specific problems. So I'm experimenting with one right now. It reads it basically summarizes in will answer any questions, give it about a document, so you can upload like a 300 page PDF, and say, What does this author say about influencer marketing, right? But it's like, Well, can I take you know, blog posts. So if I want to write a blog post about, you know, summer hairstyles that are gonna go trendy in 2023, I might want to do some research on what other blogs have talked about, can I like upload, can I take a URL, and then upload 10 different blog posts, and then you summarize what it says are the three most trendy and then the three that I might be interested in that are less written about, but they're more relevant, because I'm located in Southern California, this is something that this tool can do so every day, literally, there are new tools out there that that just, it's just amazing. We live in an amazing time. And really, you know, everyone listening should be all over this just at least doing searches and finding out what tools are out there that can help you with whatever you need. Yeah,

William Harris 32:31

just just start playing with it. And testing things. I heard Ben Folds talking about learning the piano. And one of the things that we we should do with kids is just let them just mash the keys. Because guess what you do when you learn how to paint and like everything else as a kid, you just finger paint, and it's just an absolute, you know, barrage of whatever. And it's like, Well, why don't we teach piano that way we teach it so methodically is like, your two years, we'll just get up there, just start banging on the keys, just feeling how things work. Same thing, this, don't worry about necessarily the outcome of what you're producing, just start playing with the tools and seeing what happens and just getting familiar with the way that this works. Because it's going to be an inevitable part of your future. Yeah, I

Neal Schaffer 33:08

couldn't run an hour. It's it's not going anywhere. So I mean, even if there are some legislation, you know, put on this, they are an amazing, they're a time saver for the economy. It's like the internet itself. As you said, it's just another it's a different iteration. It's now taking all the knowledge that's on the internet, and how can we leverage all the knowledge to help us work better, live better play better? So it's, it's a definite positive thing, and the earlier you realize it, I think the more benefits you get from it. Yeah,

William Harris 33:35

one of the things I want to dig into that a little bit is, who is Neal Schaffer, then as well, I think it's fun again, to get into this and you seem to have a pulse on so many things. And you've really got this this, this mind that is wrapped around the future? Is there something that made you this way, or helped to develop you this way? You know, childhood, your grandma or something? You're like, this is why I am who I am.

Neal Schaffer 33:59

No, I mean, we're a collection of all of our experiences and all the people around us, right. I will say that my father was an educator, he was an elementary school teacher, who would often create, you know, they called them dittos back in the day, because you use this ditto machine to make copies of them before the Xerox came out. And he would he would write these materials, he actually worked with special needs children's children that were late in learning how to read. So he would help them learn how to read he realized if you made it fun for them, giving back to you know, Ben and his piano analogy, if you made it fun for them, they would want to do it and they would learn to read faster so you'd create these these worksheets and had these like animals that were smiling and having fun and and the kids would want to you know, they'd want to be able to color in the eyes after they get the correct answer, whatever it is, and other teachers started borrowing his worksheets and then one day is like, you know what, there's a California Teachers Association I'm going to make, I'm going to put these together in your workbook, and I'm gonna go there I'm gonna make 200 copies. And I'll never forget in the living room we were all doing the whole punching in the brass fasteners and creating knees, and he sold out that weekend. He's like, You know what I'm gonna, I'm gonna start a publishing company. And he did. And he was very, very successful. And this is before the emergence of PDF, before Teachers Helping Teachers before, that's when he became somewhat of a celebrity in the space. So I'm very fortunate to have seen life before and after and realize, you know, that entrepreneurial spirit has definitely infused in me that anything is possible. And, yeah, and it's also it's genuinely offering value, right and being recognized for that. So for me, you know, I feel a need to do that for my own life for my own career. And that's why I really enjoyed this fractional CMO. It's not just one company, I get to experience working at different companies in different industries. And it gives me just the best chance to learn so much in so little time. And the more I do, the more I learn, the better I get at it, and the more I can share, so I think what you're seeing is just this iteration of over the last, you know, I started my consultancy in January 2010. So over 13 years, just working with a variety of companies, variety of industries, sometimes going really deep in certain platforms when I needed to when I felt that, you know, I lacked the understanding. But that's I've always taken, you know, a lifelong learner approach. When I graduated from university, the University speech was, you know, today is the first day you're learning, right? And this, this lifelong, it's not because it's a job, it's because I love it. And I'm the Doctor, I want to know how to best treat my patients I want to best understand if I don't know Amazon ads, I'm going to spend time on it, right? And I'm gonna learn it. And so it's those, you know, tick tock, same thing, short form, video, same things, whatever. Something new comes out, I take it as a challenge. And it's the Barney Stinson Challenge accepted. It's that attitude that it makes it fun for me, but it helps me understand and because of all that, you begin to see, okay, we went through this with Google plus, okay, we went through this with Digg would stumble upon. Yeah, Facebook ads used to be this way, they're not anymore. So, you know, over time, you begin to get a historical perspective. Right? And that really helps you see sort of what is like clubhouse? It's, I knew it wasn't gonna last and it didn't, right. Did this happen? Because of COVID? Tick tock, obviously, yes, it happened because of COVID Partially, but it obviously had legs and continues to grow as we speak. So, you know, I think over time, you become wiser and you begin, you begin to see the trends. And that's it, you know, what if, if I'm the doctor, and if I think AI is not helpful, I just start writing more content about it, I need to put it on my I need to tell people because they still don't understand or they're still not leveraging it. So it also with with the passion and lifelong learning, and if you're the doctor, you have to help people, you have to let them know. And it's that sense of urgency that's preparing, you know who I am as well. Yeah.

William Harris 37:31

This one, we were talking a little bit before the show, and I don't have any context even go into and how I want to lead into the question. Other than you said, you got a good story about somebody famous. You bet. Normally, I would lead into it some way, but I don't know what the story is. So I'm just gonna say, well, what's the story? It's not

Neal Schaffer 37:46

it's not a really good story. But you know, we all think about celebrities. And you know, would it be great if we met them? So I used to live in the same city as Kobe Bryant. And people who live locally said, oh, yeah, we see him here. We see him there. So the first time I saw him, I was with my wife and our kids. We had a baby, and she was three or four. And Kobe was just chillin outside the local pizza place waiting for his pizza, right? And so it's like, oh, you know, he's probably gonna hate me. But my wife is like, come on, come on. So, you know, and I was a huge Laker fan, right? And they were about to go into the playoffs, they just finished the, you know, the season and, and I said, you know, I said, Kobe, you know, I just really enjoy watching you play. And I just wish you only the best of luck. And I, you know, I took up my hand, he shook my hand, right? And it's like that feeling of and he shipped, you know, my wife's hand as well. And he was just smiling. And just, you know, thank you so much, and just very, very humble. And it just sort of, you know, no matter how successful you are in life, to be that humble, to be able to accept that and to be able to talk to people like a normal human being. Because sometimes you go to these conferences, and you see these like rock stars or like influencers. And I mean, we're all just normal people, right? And I think no matter how successful we are, we we should strive to be that normal person that is always open. So it's not much of a story, actually. But it's just something that I cherish and remember. And I'll continue to remember it's funny because I ended up meeting Jeanie buss who is the General Manager with the owner of the Los Angeles Lakers, after her father, Jerry buss passed away. And I was doing a event for Comerica Bank, and she was one of the keynotes. And so I you know, I'm like, Jeannie, I'm like, Can we get a picture stock share, and I'm like, obviously, a huge Lakers fan. I'm like, you know, I can't wait you. I bet you can't wait for Wednesday. She's like, what's Wednesday? I'm like, it's the NBA Draft. You have the number two pick. Oh, don't worry. So that's the other side of the Lakers. Like the management you and I love Jeanie buss. I'm not gonna say anything bad about it. But it's like the management who doesn't know like really, you know, be a fan. Have the heart of the fan, the heart of like your fans of your company, what would they what would they ask you about if they met you? And would you even be able to have a conversation with them? I think that's the other thing for you know, the E commerce executives that are listening. Be generally excited about what you're doing and be able to talk ask anyone about it, it's really the message I wanted to share in there. I

William Harris 40:03

love that and I have to hit on that black mamba here just a little bit because obviously big fan as well. And one of the things that I remember seeing him, something we've talked about here a little bit is obviously there's this imperative This is hustle, there's this desire that's inside of you, you've, you've got to fire and I think that that's something that I have as well and others do. And if you're going to be successful, you have to have that. And I remember seeing a video of him talking about his work ethic in the gym. And he'd get their hours before the game sometimes right practicing and practicing. And I don't remember who it was with, but he talked about there was somebody else that showed up to practice early in the gym to it's like 4am or something. And he said they're there for like eight hours practicing. And the other guy was like, can we still care and he's like, Man, I thought that I was going to you know, to outwork him, but Kobe still here shooting. And they were they talked afterwards, Kobe was like, man, I was tired, I was ready to go home, but I was not going to let you out. Practice me, I'm gonna stay here until you leave. And before I leave kind of thing. And sometimes that's what it takes. And to me, I

Neal Schaffer 41:01

think a lot of people misunderstand, like the hustle. And I think like Gary Vee and others about it, I talk more about the reps, Kobe would say you got to put in the reps to master your art, right? You got to shoot a million free throws until you perfect your form. So I don't, you know, I don't think you need to only get three hours of sleep a night to do that. But you do need to put in your reps, whether it's ads or influencers or what have you. And that's a very, very powerful thing. You know, just if you can remember Kobe for one thing for me, it's the reps. You know, my daughter was struggling in calculus, and I talked to talk to you know, her teacher and, and her teacher was saying some stuff and like, Oh, you mean, she has to put in the reps, doesn't she? Because yes, you got to put in the reps to master. Like, okay, I get it. Right. So I think it's just you know, remembering Kobe, and that that work ethic, whether you call it hustle or reps, it's really, really powerful thing to, to, you know, encourage you to keep going. Yeah, yeah.

William Harris 41:47

You've been absolutely incredibly helpful here today. If people wanted to follow you work with you, what's the best way for them to get in touch with you? Obviously, listen to your podcast, read your blog. We talked about that before. Otherwise, what's the best way?

Neal Schaffer 42:00

Yeah, so Your Digital Marketing Coach podcast weekly episodes, I'm not publishing two to three videos a week on my YouTube channels. So youtube.com/nealSchaffer, for blog posts a week on nealschaffer.com. So I got a lot of content going there. So I would say those are the three places if you wanted to sort of learn more about and you know, whether you reach out to me or not, I have content that I think is relevant to ecommerce marketing and all those platforms. So check it out. If I can be of any help, you know, just go to Nealschaffer.com/contact. Easiest way to get ahold of me.

William Harris 42:27

I love it. Thank you again, so much for coming out and joining us and everybody listening in. Thank you and have a great day.

Outro 42:33

Thanks for listening to the Up Arrow Podcast with William Harris. We'll see you again next time and be sure to click Subscribe to get future episodes.