Episode 77 - Michael Katz

[00:00:00] Welcome to the Digital Velocity Podcast, a podcast covering the intersection between strategy, digital marketing, and emerging trends impacting each of us. In each episode, we interview industry veterans to dive into the best hard hitting analysis of industry news and critical topics facing brand executives.

Now, your host, EriK Martinez.

Erik Martinez: Welcome to this episode of the Digital Velocity Podcast. I'm Erik Martinez, and today we welcome Michael Katz, the founder and CEO of Flowsend.ai to the show to talk about how we can use content marketing to grow our businesses. Michael, welcome to the show.

Michael Katz: Thank you, Erik. It's lovely to be here.

Erik Martinez: Yeah, I am super excited, Michael and I were introduced just a few days ago. Had a great conversation and thought, Hey let's get on the horn and talk a little bit about content marketing and AI and what you're doing at Flowsend. So , would you just [00:01:00] give the audience a little bit about yourself and your journey to this point in time?

Michael Katz: Absolutely. Yeah. Look, I have a background primarily on the software side of things enterprise software. And it's interesting that I've found myself here. Speaking to these audiences in this niche because it's certainly not something that I expected to be doing. I, was at a company called Qualtrics based in Utah for a bunch of years, and, was lucky enough to experience an acquisition and going public and all the different flavors of success and failure and mostly success.

And that was super lucky on our part. And then I wanted to set off and do something on my own, primarily in sales enablement. Not exactly everyone's cup of tea or what everyone gets excited about. But one thing we did as part of, building that company was we started a podcast and that was, a content marketing tool for us.

It's so hard to stand out right now. It's so hard to develop unique perspective. I thought, well, I could, hijack other people's perspectives, number one, and build a brand in our niche and really, get in front of our buyers and . It [00:02:00] worked and the only thing that didn't work, or that I felt really frustrated by was there's this ability when you have a long form piece of content like that to. Converted into so many different kinds of assets and be more efficient and really amplify those unique perspectives to stand out. And I found it to be very annoying using all the automation tools. Someone with a small team. I still want to sound like us and I wanted to mirror our brand voice.

And I felt like all the tools out there that I used from an AI perspective or otherwise were super generic and it didn't really sound like me and I'm really ornery about that stuff. And maybe a lot of people are perfectly happy with that. But I was pissed off and it was three or 4:00 AM every single time.

And if it's 3:00 AM or 4:00 AM and I'm pissed off and I'm getting mad at a robot it's not a very healthy relationship to technology or the business in general. And that's where I found myself consistently every Thursday night at 3:00 AM And I had a kid and I was like, I can't do this anymore.

So, I said, why don't we live the tool for ourselves? Something simple that we could, turn every single recording we have into a bunch of [00:03:00] assets, whatever it is that we have. And it started working really well and we gave it to people in beta last year and we started charging eventually. And, we saw businesses and brands and media companies and individuals really start to resonate with what we were doing and that's where we find ourselves today. Where, we're not just in the podcast space anymore. We, saw people putting in all types of content to our platform and we knew that we could kind of specialize in this brand voice aspect and understanding what you wanted to do and what you wanted to put out, but also ingesting original pieces of content.

Everything from calls to YouTube videos to whether it's your sales or your customer teams to your marketing assets like podcasts or, short form, long form videos. So that's the background behind me.

Erik Martinez: Michael. That's awesome . I love that comment about I'm getting mad at my software, and it's so funny 'cause these days (the robots) Yeah, you get mad at the robot. It's like the robot doesn't care. It's really funny. I go to Macon every year and, one of their general themes is- [00:04:00] use AI but keep it human. Right? And one of the conversations that always comes up is , how do you talk to your AI? So I have a team member and she's like, "I'm always really polite to my AI because at some point it might get angry with me", right? But it's still just a robot. So that's really funny.

What do you see today as key emerging trends in content marketing and digital storytelling? I think, many brands I think small to mid-size retail brands really struggle sometimes with the, "Hey we understand our brand voice, but". There's this battle between , "Hey, I've gotta do performance marketing, paid search and SEO and all those things to get myself noticed but my content". When you go and look at people's Facebook feeds or their Instagram feeds it's still a lot of just promotion. And it's not a conversation. And I'm seeing the data that people want to have [00:05:00] real relevant conversations with their brands and the people behind them. So what's your perspective on those trends and what do you see happening?

Michael Katz: Yeah, I wouldn't say it's a new world 'cause this has always been true. We always want it to resonate with the people we buy from. We always want to feel like they understand us. That's not new. What is new is just the digital proliferation. Social media marketing feels like this quaint thing of the past.

Like, oh yeah, I'm gonna use some sort of social automation tools to schedule out a bunch of random, little promo tweets with hashtags. That's what social media marketing feels like to me, and that feels really dated suddenly. It's hard to describe why. It's like, it feels so quaint. There's so many more places to live now than your blog and your Instagram feed or your Twitter feed or whatever it might be.

It's just everywhere all at once. And you feel like you need to do everything and you feel like you need to be perfect because these big brands have these big teams that can do flashy videos and you want to buy from them. [00:06:00] And we all know what that feels like. But it's not attainable for most people.

And that actually could be a good thing. It could be your greatest advantage. I think authenticity is something that we talk about but don't understand. And that authenticity of our perfection is really important. We all know about user generated content and, influencer based content, and everyone says, how do I get involved in that? I can't pay people a bunch of money to do that either. Well, the good news is. You don't necessarily need to. There's a lot of ways to be authentic. There's a lot of ways to just talk about what it is that you're doing on a regular basis, bringing people into your brand story, the kinds of things you're thinking about, the things only you care about.

So community driven content co-creating with your audiences, with people who buy from you. I think employee driven content. Something that's really interesting, a trend right now of whether you're a B2B B2C brand, how do you enable your employees to post things themselves, even on their personal feeds?

It is crazy when you see someone kind of start catching on as an independent creator within your [00:07:00] company just talking about their job or talking about stuff they're interested in, and that is a huge point of leverage and I've, seen it happen where these brands go parabolic just off a random person creating stuff.

So I think that's one area. From a digital perspective, you talk about other channels, long form's also making a comeback as opposed to just the short form, snappy, highly polished content. Really bringing people into your perspectives. We have short attention spends, but we are willing to invest time in something on a significant level if we are really interested in it.

Whether that's long form video or audio, or even long form text. So that's a trend. And this is just my opinion, right? You talk about AI - AI is obviously a huge factor in content marketing trends, as it were. We talked about authenticity already in that sense, but it's something to enhance our capabilities.

Enhance our productivity and our ability to output a lot without saying, gimme 10 posts about how I can sell more hardware. Kind of, that's gonna be a bunch of bullshit, honestly. It's not gonna be good. What it's about is kind of amplifying what you're already doing in your existing [00:08:00] perspectives.

And then the last thing course I'll say is audio, video is still huge is gonna get bigger. I think a YouTube channel is the new blog. Crazy enough to say . You'll start to see a lot of explainer and listicle videos I think from brands in the future answering questions. We're used to just see that on the blog.

People wanna know what's coming from somebody coming from the brand and that those kinds of results are gonna start to get prioritized to. So that's just a bunch of things I'm starting to see.

Erik Martinez: I don't disagree with you. I feel like some days I'm a dinosaur. I was working on a speech the other day and I'm sitting here in front of my laptop, and I'm banging away, just trying to get what we call the shitty first draft done. And I'm sitting here going, I don't have time to always sit in front of my laptop and bang things out, but I've got ideas when I'm in a car and I've got ideas when I'm walking or whatever it is I'm doing, I'm sitting there and going, I should just record some of this stuff, transcribe it with AI and then I can go edit and clean up and mix and match and put stuff together. It would be so much more effective. [00:09:00] "Oh, well, okay. Why don't you, Erik, why don't you do that"? Oh, right. I built a habit of doing it a certain way. So I think you're absolutely right. Whether it's an individual or a brand, we have built habits around our business and sometimes it's hard to change those habits and adopt some of the new things.

Now, there's some brands here, like, we're gonna try everything under the sun and see what sticks. Right? And I'm not a big proponent of that either, because that's the shotgun approach and

Michael Katz: But there's only one way to get to the answer and that's kind of doing stuff and just like kind of screwing up and failing and being like, that didn't feel right to me. Something I was thinking about literally yesterday. And I don't mean to come off as judgmental, but it's really interesting seeing this trend right now of, you used to have a product that solved a problem and then you'd go promote it. Oh, I'm gonna do that through cold email marketing, whatever your kind of brand you have. And ads, and this is the way to reach the [00:10:00] most people with this amazing product I have. And something we've seen, and this isn't a new insight, is the rise of kind of the creator driven brand.

You have an audience first in whatever it is, and then you think of the product that aligns to your audience. And funny enough, actually, this is very B2B, but I know these folks who started a big brand in B2B tech partnerships primarily. And then they ended up getting acquired into another company that primarily sold the partnerships folks as like the chief revenue officer and COO of that company.

They were building media first. And then this company said, I wanna reach more people. He said, let's buy a media brand. Basically. And I think that's an instructive lesson where you're like, okay, you can be audience first. And what that means, is there's a lot of people out there with a lot of influence, making a lot of money online who you wouldn't consider to be the smartest people, not even close. And they're just the people who are either most shameless, for whatever reason, they've kind of been programmed in a certain way where they're like, I just like to record [00:11:00] myself in my car.. And that works. That's the weirdest part, and it's, I feel almost inadequate in my own way. I grew up in a immigrant and kind of red neckish background, and I was lucky enough to go to an Ivy League school, and that's not a brag, that's just what I was indoctrinated into.

And that's actually the worst in some ways, as much as I loved it, because suddenly I gained this, "Oh, I have too much to lose", type mentality that I didn't feel before at all. And you gotta lose that shame factor a little bit. That veneer of , it needs to be to perfect. Authenticity kind of thing.

I met a guy recently who works a lot with dental practices and he just gets outta meetings and records a video in his car, whatever the hell he is thought about. And he puts it there and has a big influence and you're like, that's crazy. I met a manufacturing guy two weeks ago, it was a hundred thousand LinkedIn followers, just records, random videos and tinkering around. He was a sales guy, and that's kind of what I'm trying to say.

Yeah

Erik Martinez: You know, an example of that. I had a colleague at a prior company who this a, YouTube [00:12:00] channel review restaurants on Disney property in Florida. He grew the subscription base. He's telling me this story, "Like, I got, stream myself eating this food and talking about it". He built a really nice side hustle. And, using the money folks, is crazy, but it's true. He put money away for his kids to go to college. And I'm like, it's brilliant. It's brilliant and it's simple. And yeah, it requires, time. He's evolved beyond the just, you know, living himself eating food. But,

Michael Katz: You gotta look like an idiot. No, I'm serious.

Erik Martinez: Gotta be kidding me, man. Somebody's sitting there watching you eat? But you're talking about that creator economy. Ah that's pretty interesting.

So let's go back to the vast majority of us and say, "Okay, but Michael, I've got a product line already". I'm a middle market everyday leisure wear brand. How do I take this brand and promote it? You know, I go out and do my [00:13:00] socials and I we're getting some traction, and it's really important to us that the visuals look great, but how do we really make ourselves stand out? Because we're in a crowded field, right? We've got Kohl's nipping on our heels, we got Target, we got Walmart, and we've got Amazon, right? All those things are encroaching on our space. Plus there's. 10, 15, 20 other companies that are just like me, they're not anywhere near as cool as me, but you get my point. So what do we do?

Michael Katz: Well, it's funny, something that comes to mind when I think about like retailers. And that, is there was this trend over the past decade and a half -Oh, collect user reviews for your website- kind of thing. First you had these review platforms and the yacht posts, all the world and Bazaarvoice. And then they said, collect videos of your customers, or whatever it is, and said you incentivize them. And those are good things. I think we're like in another area now where it's like an even more personal approach, which is like, could you literally hop on the phone or talk to your customer?[00:14:00]

And this is crazy for a consumer brand or even in person, and it might sound nuts, but we're in this era of not only short form produced content that was record yourself an ad of why you love something or take a picture of yourself wearing our helmet or something like that. I think there's this major thing of people just wanna be connected to people.

The brain is kind of sitting in the background sometimes. It doesn't need to be like explicit marketing content in the same way that it used to be. That's like the next era of authenticity is it's not even about the brand anymore. I just know the brand. I know the people there. I feel connected to the people using it.

I wanna know their stories. People so deeply connect to other people right now and just their stories, whether it's about buying the product or not. So yeah, you could interview them about why they love the product. That's one great way to do it, not just a review anymore. It's like a real thing. What does this do for you?

What's your life like? 15 minutes, 10 minutes?

Erik Martinez: You know. It's funny that you say that. I just finished a book a couple weeks ago called, Pick Up the Phone and Sell, and the, whole premise [00:15:00] of the book is you can build more business with a phone call than you can through email, social media, all the other thing. Right? Now we're an agency so that makes sense.

But now I take that to a retailer. You just gave a retailer a really good reason to pick up the phone. Have a conversation with a customer. And yeah, your end goal is to sell some product at the end of the day, right? You still want to do that, but what you're saying is, "Hey, go connect with the customer, learn their stories, tell those stories and amplify them, and other people want to connect with your brand too.

That's what I heard you say. Is that a reasonable interpretation?

Michael Katz: Yeah, record your conversation and anonymize it. People still want to hear these stories. It used to be like, get customer feedback to make our product better. Now it's like, get customer feedback or have customer conversations just to get to know your customers and broadcast the stories of the people who buy from you.

This is Erik. He thinks about these things every day. He has this many kids. This is his family, this is where he lives. And yeah, if you want to tie [00:16:00] it off with, here's what this product helps him do, or here's why he loves this product. That's great. Doesn't even necessarily need that. People are already making the brand association. You could talk about these things. You don't need a formal podcast. You can just be authentic, be genuine, record dumb car videos, record yourself getting out of some meeting. People want to hear your perspective regardless of how specialized your brand is.

And so. I think a lot about that of like, there are new reasons to talk to the people who buy from you. Unless you have zero people. There is someone with a perspective.

Erik Martinez: That's powerful message. I think we get lost in all the to-dos, right? Everything's measurable to a certain extent and we get really KPI focused and I'm a numbers guy, so I get the KPIs. But, we just completed some research and a couple of key points, one, majority of people hated interacting with chatbots. They just hated. Particularly in a retail environment and, you've messed around with retail [00:17:00] chatbots, none of them are good. I mean, they're awful, right? They're really terrible. There's no conversation, there's no interaction, no helpfulness, no back and forth. So one of the things that the survey said is like, "Hey, we want to talk to people". Amazon has dealt with this kind of cleverly 'cause they just make easy for you to return stuff. You know, just go drop it off at a UPS store and you're good. Right? But have you ever tried to navigate the labyrinth of customer service and get to a human?

It's,

Michael Katz: That's better than most. That's what's crazy.

Erik Martinez: It's near impossible.

Michael Katz: I would almost rather you not even have a chat, just tell me to email a certain email or to call in. 'cause the chat sucks so bad. Don't tell me you have a chat. If it's not gonna give me my answers, it almost never does. That's what's crazy. Our trust has been eroded. And I think to your point on numbers, Erik, it is a really interesting point. There's a lot of amazing people like you who can help people with their numbers. You wanna go hire an agency? Go do that. If you wanna go hire somebody to run your performance marketing, to [00:18:00] analyze what you've got going on, there's a lot of great expertise out there. They don't know your brand as well as you, but they know the numbers better than you. And they can optimize every little last thing. There's only one person who could tell your story the way you can tell it. That's you. That's your employees, that's the people doing the job every day.

That's it. That's the only thing that they can't replace. Now you can help, you can have software or agencies that can, record your perspective or help you amplify that perspective, but you're the only person that can tell it. And I think that is what is really powerful right now. And that especially a lot of owners are missing out on or high level people with these brands. 'Cause that's it.

Erik Martinez: So let's take this a little tactical for a moment. You know, if I'm listening to this podcast and say, okay, Michael, that's great. That's good information. I get it. I'm still stuck as to where to start. I go have this conversation with a couple of customers. I learn their stories. Now what do I do? How do? I, tell that story in a meaningful way without market-defying is that word? Can I make up that word ? How do I still keep that [00:19:00] story intact and make it meaningful? Because I think, there's one gathering the stories and then there's two, how do I properly use those stories in context?

Michael Katz: Yeah, absolutely. And there's a lot of ways. You could obviously go the polished route. I think it's not always the move. And again, everyone here probably has different channels they publish stuff on. Whether it's social media, blogs, in-store stuff, whatever it might be. I would think about starting to publish a series. If you really wanna just do it as simple as that, publish the videos in your social, doesn't even matter. Go figure it out. And the next step is, of course, you can publish these things in your blog and try to repurpose these stories. Use even basic AI tools like Claude or ChatGPT to say, how do we talk about this thing? Right? We obviously try to be really opinionated there and perspective based at Flowsend, but you know. Don't get blocked by that. Then, I would actually start to publish and clip down some of these videos to highlight the stories and you can use very simple software to do that. Does not need to be too good remember, but also look at those and [00:20:00] try to understand what your customers care about, what are their questions. I would actually advise people for any kind of content work that they're trying to do. One of the reasons to talk to customers is to understand what questions they have and what challenges they have in their lives.

Why do I say that? That's how you plan content. I was talking to a coach the other day, a big coach who's a customer of ours in the relationship space. Million followers. Plus, it's huge. Now. People already want to hear this guy's perspective on everything in their lives, but. What's fascinating is , one of the ways he is able to churn out content now is they kind of source questions from customers and then he just answers them in a video.

That's it. So simple and they completely rephrase the way the question's asked. They don't say exactly what the person said. It's like, dear Abby, there's a reason people connected that they just wanna like hear your answers to stuff. I don't know. What do you [00:21:00] think about something? What's your favorite movie?

I mean, not even related to the brand, but definitely about the brand. Relatedly, a lot of brands will start like a podcast and they come up with no plan. They just want to have this like big flashy film style thing. All this money spent. I talked to a brand recently who I thought did it in a really smart way.

They talked to their customer facing folks, they surveyed customers. I mean, this is really comprehensive stuff. What are your biggest challenges? Day to day? Nothing related to our brand. Yeah. Obviously adjacent, but you know, what are you thinking about day to day? Every single episode they did was just focused on one of those topics, bringing someone on who could maybe talk about it.

In a smart way and give a perspective. It just, the value of accrued back to the brand. And so I think , fundamentally, whether we like it or not, we're always just answering someone's question or someone's need, such that when they're ready to buy whatever our product is, they see us as the experts there or someone they like.

And I think especially [00:22:00] when it applies to like specialty brands. One way to think about a social media strategy. I don't know if you follow this guy, Erik, this guy Die, Workwear!

Erik Martinez: Die workwear, no. No, I don't.

Michael Katz: On Twitter. I think, I guess that's his real name. I don't know. He loves style. Men's style.

That's like his whole bag. And he's just a really, creative guy in terms of, he can really clap back at people and say smart things, but he would comment on every single thing pretty much. That was of note, about his specific perspective on why this suit doesn't fit well or, something about the history of this and he's a complete nerd about it.

And everyone wears clothes, but only this guy's obsessive enough about certain aspects of like formal wear that matter. And then what ends up happening is people start expecting him to respond to anything. They start tagging him and stuff saying, this is something that you might want to comment on. I wanna hear his perspective on it.

And I think that really applies to brands too, which is like if you are an expert on whatever it is your product is, 'cause [00:23:00] you must care about it enough, you need to be in the conversation- in people's conversations- when it comes to that. Comment on other people's posts about it. You don't need to be the poster always be in the comments. That's a great social media tip. Be in the comments. People are looking at comments. Stay relevant there, even if it's local. So that's another kind of like tactical tip I would think about is don't just think about creating your own content. Think about how you're engaging with other people's stuff such that you're always appearing there.

Erik Martinez: I saw a really interesting LinkedIn post the other day it was the founder of a brand and she was basically saying, Hey, people want connection. They're thriving for it. But it's not just the people listening or reading, Right? It's people who are actually writing the blog or doing the podcast or whatever, who want interaction too. She was like, you know, liking or loving a post, hitting the little button. Yeah that's great, but it's not really meaningful. Gosh, I know how guilty I am. I finished reading [00:24:00] that post and I'm like, "God, how many times have I just hit the love button or the like button in the last 24 hours without writing anything down and responding or putting a viewpoint behind it. So I think you're absolutely right.

In order to create that connection, you actually have to put yourself out there a little bit. And it's okay. It could be in a form of a question. It doesn't even have to be a response to the topic. It might be, "Hey, I wanna learn more. Tell me a little bit more about that". And it doesn't take a lot of time.

I think that's the, one hurdle everybody struggles with on this, content creation thing. I know I get stuck on, it. It's like, " It's gonna take me so much time". But what you're suggesting is it doesn't really take that much time if you're intentional about just doing something, right?

Michael Katz: And this is like B2B of course, and you and I briefly have talked about this, but something I started doing is I prototyped a tool for us, where I would just take my call recordings from a given day and create content from those calls. I have a specific kind of a knowledge [00:25:00] base database system to go do that in.

It's not that hard to do if you wanted to do something basic on your own, but I'm like. Every single call I have with somebody, every single conversation I have with somebody is content. That's just the reality. I'm sharing my perspective. I'm dealing with a dilemma. I'm learning something from someone else.

I'm learning something from you. I wanna go share that sometimes. And so I don't think about it 'cause I'm just running from thing to thing. But that's the beauty I think of where like AI comes into the picture is people are really scared of it. And I have my own fears about it and I have my own issues with people using AI for certain things.

I hate it sometimes, but. Can you help develop systems to scale yourself or to scale your team or to empower your team to do things in a more effective way? And can we scale our authenticity through that?

Erik Martinez: That's great. Let's change tracks for a moment. You know, were starting out and like, "Hey Michael, great, these are all really, super simple things we can do. . You kinda showed, us a couple ideas of how we can go [00:26:00] about doing it. How frequent do I need to do this"? You know, how do we gain some momentum in doing this? Do you have a structure that you recommend"?

Michael Katz: Yeah I mean, it totally depends on who you are. I do think you need to pick one or two channels to focus on, just to start. To build habits. We all talk about habit building and that might mean posting three times a week on Instagram or on LinkedIn or whatever your business, wherever your buyer might live. And doing the same with commenting and just building up a little routine, maybe 20 minutes a day to be doing that and utilizing whatever tools it is and, do it in the most authentic way possible.

That same coach who I was just talking about, actually posted every single day for 10 years. Yeah, we're not gonna all do that, but I mean, he's got over a million followers now and he was just a random guy. And it just goes to show you the value of habit building. So I would say , pick a channel or two and maybe you take one day to make a list of 10 to 20 questions you think your customers have and 10 customers that you want to go talk to, to go [00:27:00] get their stories in general. Very simple things. You can just pull your transaction data if you really want to, or pull your customer data and every single day, answer one of those questions. Make a video of you answering one of those questions.

You could turn that into 10 different things if you want to, or you could just post that by itself. You could turn that into a blog. There's tools out there, Flowsend and many other kind of situations where you can just go turn that into other pieces of social content, give it to your marketing team and say, I just recorded myself doing this. Can you convert this into some sort of short form video for us to post? Because you never know what'll pop off, and that's the only way to do it, is to almost kind of like batch your strategy. Think about the questions customers are asking, start to answer those. Then once you get into routine, maybe you start doing things a little more whimsical. Or higher polish, interesting. But that is, I think, the fundamental thing that you need to articulate and that creates assets behind what you do. That's what I'd say. Pick a channel, pick one to two channels. I think audio and video is a really great way to start if you can [00:28:00] because it sticks out and you can make it into a bunch of other things.

If you're someone who likes to write long form stuff, write 10 pages. With all the different stuff that you're interested in and that you solve for customers. But I think that's where it starts, is fundamentally understanding customer questions and starting to schedule real customer interactions. Ideally under the banner of generating content where you tell 'em, "Hey, I'm just gonna interview you about yourself". We're not just gonna talk about the brand. But also potentially if you just wanna do a testimonial in a sense, that's great too.

Erik Martinez: Yeah I think great idea, you know? I'm done taking this public speaking class. Spent eight months doing it called Heroic Public Speaking. They're, absolutely amazing. But one of the key principles that they kept saying to us over and over and over again is , just keep doing something. Improve, speech every day. Improve your performance every day. Give a talk or whatever -you were talking about, "Hey, don't worry about it being perfect". That was kind of their message. They want it to be good. And in order to be good, you gotta practice. And that's exactly what you're saying. It's like just practice. And the [00:29:00] first part of doing that is starting with something and then doing it. And as you do it more frequently, you're gonna get better at it. As you get better at it, you can do more of it. Right? Building, good habits.

Michael Katz: I struggle with it too. We all do and I think if you wanna live stream something too, that's another great way to do it. You talk about live streaming. The beauty of live streaming is it almost reduces all the pressure. It doesn't need to be good. We're just chatting. You know what I mean? It doesn't need to be edited. Fine practice that way. Right. It totally reduces the need to feel polished.

Erik Martinez: So Michael, these are all great ideas. As we kind of move to close here. What- is that one big- you know It doesn't have to be one, but what last piece of advice you'd like to leave the audience with? You know, some really practical ways that people can get started with some content generation that are really simple. You've given some great ideas. Is there anything else you'd like the audience to think about?

Michael Katz: I think kind of the same place we started which is we're in this era right now where authenticity will be at a [00:30:00] premium. Whether you love AI, you fear AI, whatever it is, there's really only one way to stick out among the noise and against the robots, if you will. That is being authentic, being the person only you can be, even if that's embarrassing or bad, or unpolished, in certain moments.

The reason we're so passionate about recordings as a source of content in general is conversations, even if that's a one way conversation, those all contain buried treasure. Those are what makes us human. That's the one thing that's still incredibly uncannily bad from the computers, and I think that we are going to need to lean further into that, the empathy aspect of what we do.

People feeling like we understand and care about them, them actually hearing our voice, seeing our people feeling connected to us. That extra little pull that we feel like when we know a brand or when we know a person. [00:31:00] I know that I'm guilty of that. Everyone is guilty of that. We know it's a flawed thing in us.

Okay. Lean into that thought. That is the only thing that I really kind of come away with right now is I think we're just in this next era of like authentic business. And even if that means sharing your challenges and things that you're dealing with that are bad, people feel like, whoa, I'm along the journey with this person. I want us to support them.

Erik Martinez: I think that's a great message to, today's conversation. Michael if somebody wants to reach out to you, what's the best way?

Michael Katz: I'm at Michael@flowsend.ai, F-L-O-W-S-E-N d.ai. LinkedIn is a place where I hang out a lot, and Michael N as in November KATZ. You can find me. I'm a little bit everywhere right now. Go to Flowsend.Ai, hit us up if you wanna ever work together. We're always interested. And yeah, focus on what you know.

And just the last thing I'll say actually is don't expect immediate results from anything you do, especially content. That is the one thing is unlike everything else you do, there is no immediate [00:32:00] outcome. That's the hardest part for most people. And it's something I kind of wanna share just before we go.

Erik Martinez: I think that's a, great point. It's like a, team driving down the field, right? Some days, you get it in 50 yard chunks. Chances are you're getting it in one or two or three yard chunks, right? That's the way to move down the field.

Well, thank you so much for coming on the show today and having this great conversation. I think there are some actionable tips for everybody to take from the episode and think about when they go back to your day-to-day routine and what's the one thing that I could do today to help move my content forward?

Whether that's commenting on somebody else's post on LinkedIn or just recording a short snippet about some challenge you overcame today. Call a customer, ask them questions. Those are great starting points. Thank you very much, Michael. I really appreciate it.

Michael Katz: Thank you Erik

Erik Martinez: That's it for today's episode of the Digital Velocity Podcast. Thank you for listening and have a great day.

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