Episode 95 - Kristin Chambers

Erik Martinez: Welcome to another episode of the Digital Velocity Podcast. Today we're talking about artificial intelligence and its growing role in social media. From content creation to audience targeting, AI is transforming not just how brands show up online, but also how consumers interact with the platforms they use every day.

I'm excited to be joined by Kristen Chambers. Kristen is an agency owner and a seasoned social media marketing strategist, who's been guiding brands through this evolving digital landscape. She has some powerful insights into where AI is taking social media and what it means for all of us marketers and business leaders. Kristen, welcome to the [00:01:00] show.

Kristin Chambers: Hi, Erik. Thank you for having me on.

Erik Martinez: I'm excited to have you on. We've been talking about this for a few months and finally made it happen. So, before we dive into our topic, you wanna tell the audience a little bit about yourself and how you built your expertise in this arena.

Kristin Chambers: Absolutely. I started my agency back in 2017 as a social media marketing agency. I was an accidental agency owner who fell into this after my full-time job ended at five o'clock.

I got into social media as a marketing manager for retired FBI agents, who did social media investigations. They had a proprietary tool that I was hired to market. I went to conferences nationwide selling the social media investigations tool and speaking about social media investigations and how to use social media. That was back in maybe 2013, so it was a while before I actually started my own [00:02:00] agency.

Erik Martinez: That's crazy, earlier this summer we had a gentleman on, his name was Bill Rice and Bill had started in the Air Force doing, intelligence gathering and using the internet back in the early two thousands. So that's a interesting coincidence that you two have that same background.

Were there any really interesting stories you could tell about doing a social media investigation?

Kristin Chambers: It's interesting. We did investigations, that we would hand over to the FBI. Some of them were on soccer teams and whenever there was a big soccer match, we would look at the different soccer clubs.

So we would look at the threat analysis in different situations. We can geotarget everything. We were looking at social media, everything from a hashtag to geolocation to Twitter conversations, and would do all of these six degree separations of different people. We did, gang analysis in Chicago all the way to [00:03:00] things happening in the Middle East.

It was really interesting.

Erik Martinez: One of the reasons I wanted to have this conversation is because AI has been a topic in the forefront, from the news media to our political sphere, to our marketing sphere, and it's changing every day. And it changing how we work with the tools as marketers. And it also is impacting the users.

So from your perspective, how is AI changing the way social media platforms present content and ads to consumers?

The second question is, do you see any evidence that AI is changing consumer expectations about the type of content that they're receiving?

Kristin Chambers: Yeah, absolutely. Things have changed so much. And it's can be very confusing going on social media these days, knowing what's real and what's not. The biggest change I think is AI has really allowed for a more personalized experience so a lot of people think that everyone is [00:04:00] seeing the same type of content when scrolling through Instagram.

But with the algorithm, it's learning what you engage with, what you're watching. So it's really catered and is a unique experience to every single different person, which is very interesting 'cause you think that you're having this experience with everyone else and that everyone is seeing the same types of things, but it's really not the case, it's really personal.

So being able to personalize content to your feed is a big one, and how it's changed. It's also changing ads in a way where you can better A/B test. Meta ads are now starting to push their advantage plus features, so doing less interest-based targeting. In fact, they may be phasing that out and only pushing their AI tools.

And they are pretty accurate to be honest. When we're testing between interest based and using Meta's AI platform, it does a very good job. There's a reason why they're pushing that forward. So there's a lot of changes [00:05:00] happening in social media.

Erik Martinez: Zuckerberg announced earlier this year that, hey, next year we're gonna introduce the version of the platform... you give us a budget, you tell us who your target audience is, you give us some assets and we are gonna go with it.

Google has tried this with their PMAX tool for paid search. Now Meta's trying to do it. Do we really think that these tools are gonna be able to do a good enough job? If you're a brand spending a ton of money on social media and you have a big following, maybe there's enough data there, but when you're a small brand and you don't have hundreds of thousands of followers, maybe you just have a few thousand followers.

Will these tools be predictive enough to help you find the right audience, and deliver the right message?

Kristin Chambers: That's a really good question. I do think that it all comes down to historic data they have to have something to build upon and that's where continuing to collect first party data is so important. Having an [00:06:00] email list... you can upload your data into creating lookalikes and retargeting campaigns.

At the end of the day, I think it all comes down to testing. I don't know if it's going to be the best for smaller brands they're still figuring it out, and it might require more budget. It is all about testing at the beginning when you're starting any campaign.

If you're starting from scratch, it's gonna take more time to figure out. I would hope that the tools as they get smarter and time goes on can help brands save money. One way is also doing A/B testing. There's different types of creative in the platforms now that make it easier to see what resonates with audiences. Testing different types of advertising copy and ad variations. In that way we can optimize campaigns easier and at a lower budget quicker. There might be some trade off but only time will tell.

Erik Martinez: It's interesting 'cause I remember [00:07:00] long before Google launched PMAX, they had been pushing some of this audience development it was interesting to see how many records you needed, how many people you needed in the audience in order for it to start picking up the data.

But every time I've seen these automations, and obviously today's AI is so much better than the tools that were around 10 years ago, I'm really concerned that these tools, they're still not advanced enough to understand individual audiences very well. It is one thing to load up a list of your customers and say, these are my customers, but customers are wildly different and have wildly different behaviors online.

We did a research study in one of the things that we found, like even with small brands. Their customers are almost on every single channel. However, you can't afford to be on every single channel as a small brand, so where do you get your most bang for your buck?

If [00:08:00] you load up that audience list and you're looking for people who look alike them, but you're still only getting a small portion of the people who are really interacting on that platform, I'm not sure that the math makes sense yet to drive that.

Let's flip over to the content side because you talked about testing. Inside the Meta Advantage it'll suggest a myriad of titles, headlines, message copy and all those things. How much testing have you guys done and what are you seeing in terms of efficacy of that type of suggestive copy versus when you use stuff that you create?

Kristin Chambers: As far as copy goes, I will, utilize Meta's tools when it comes to what they suggest, but it always requires editing. I don't think I've ever seen them suggest 10 different headlines or copy options that nailed it. Because you, it still requires that human element.[00:09:00]

And that's very important to recognize AI as a tool to help, but it's not a replacement. Utilizing it to help come up with ideas or concepts, or maybe it's. Something that you didn't think of and still using it to come up with some outlines, but you have to still go in and steer the wheel and make sure it's aligned with your brand message. Maybe there's some words in there that are not under your brand guidelines. So it's really important.

We use those tools all the time as far as going in and testing out all the different copy variations. We do that with all of our ad campaigns. Unless a client specifically says, we only want this running, even then we try to educate them and saying, it's really important to test, even though you want this one thing to say this one thing, let's try another variation. Because you never know what's gonna perform best and also the algorithm, they're gonna be able to test that out more and hopefully get more sales or better results.

Erik Martinez: Do you think, at some [00:10:00] point, you'll be able to rely on the platforms to generate this content? Or is somebody always gonna have to say, that isn't quite right. And I think that's what you're saying.

We're just talking about copy specifically, but now we gotta go into the realm of imagery and video content and all the other different forms of media that can go up in a social media post. What are you guys seeing in terms of other forms of media?

Where do these tools have the most impact?

Kristin Chambers: Yeah. So I still very much believe in authentic content that is manmade but at the same time, if there's certain brands, maybe it's a product that you can test out multiple backgrounds with, it makes it so much easier to be able to use a AI tool.

Even Canva makes it super easy. They have background replacers, you can put any product in a different environment very easily and test out what's going to resonate. It makes it a lot [00:11:00] quicker. It is gonna save designers time, especially for social media content you can create a bunch of different variations in a short amount of time, if you're going to be putting an advertisement on a billboard or in a magazine spread, you probably want your art department involved.

But for social media. Utilizing these tools, 'cause people's attention spans are quick and they're not gonna stare at it for that long, creating lots of types of content and testing using the tools available, is a great use.

Erik Martinez: So when you're doing these tests, some AI created content, some human created content, or a mix of both, how much budget do each variation need? Let's say you're running a social campaign for a week, how much budget do you need in order to get the metrics? A larger brand has more traffic and more activity, but let's stick with that mid-size brand.

How much should they be spending [00:12:00] in order to learn and figure out what works most effectively?

Kristin Chambers: Yeah, and it can take a while for ad campaigns to warm up You want a few days or at least a week to see some results and what's working and what's not. My rule of thumb. Is at least $10 a day for anything you're testing.

If you have different audiences that you're testing and you wanna test between three different audiences, $30 a day is what I would require as a minimum. The reason is that if you're just doing $5 a day, it doesn't have enough budget to show to enough people.

It's all a numbers game, right? The amount of money that you put in, you're gonna get in front of more people. Also the way that you're optimizing your campaigns, it's gonna make a difference in the budget. If you're selling a really expensive product and you're trying to do sales, you're gonna need a higher budget.

If you're optimizing for sales conversions, your cost per conversion may be more expensive, so that might require a bigger budget. So it does depend [00:13:00] on, what you're selling and what you're trying to do. If you're just trying to get in front of people, like impressions, it's gonna be more cost effective than a conversion campaign where it might be a cost per result that's higher.

So that's a longer answer to your question, but, starting at minimum $10 a day is my recommendation for a low budget brand.

Erik Martinez: Let's go back to the consumer side of the equation. What are you seeing in terms of how people's behaviors are changing and connecting to the content that's being generated? Because there's so much content. I just watch my feed, right? And I don't do a lot on my social media profiles partially 'cause it's a little bit of an experiment to see if I do interact with something, what am I gonna get next in terms of content suggestions, in terms of ads, what am I gonna get?

What are you seeing changing from the consumer side and what are the positive impacts of it and what are the things that we need to be concerned about in terms of [00:14:00] managing expectations and reality for our target audience?

Kristin Chambers: It is scary now because you don't know what's real anymore. When I see content that I'm like, whoa, that's crazy. The first thing I do is go to the comments. Pretty much the first comment always is okay, AI did a great job. I feel like the younger generation who are growing up with social media and are growing up essentially with AI, they're a lot more savvy into recognizing that it's generated by a computer and not a person, older generations or someone who may not be as familiar, might not know or go to the comments and might start spreading content that may not be real or authentic. It's a lot easier to spread messages, without verifying, and it could be a way of spreading misinformation. I think that's a scary part. The good part is that your feed is more relevant to you. It's a more personalized experience when you're scrolling through all of the [00:15:00] stuff. But, it can be a dangerous place these days not knowing what's real and what's not.

Erik Martinez: So what do you think the biggest risks for marketers is as they incorporate AI generated content into their social media strategies. And what should brands be thinking about as they're introducing AI content? How do we be more authentic and still utilize some of these great tools that are available to us?

Kristin Chambers: Just keeping your brand and values first and making sure you're staying true to your message and not just putting out content for the sake of putting out content, using it as a tool and a resource, but not as a replacement. For brands that wanna test out AI content, making sure that you're keeping the human element in there. If you're going to use AI generated content, make sure you continue to use real content as well so people are seeing your face.

At the end of the day, social media is meant to be social and people wanna [00:16:00] see something real, social media is primarily an entertainment or educational platform these days.

So that's where AI can be useful and helping create some funny things or be a tool for that, at the end of the day, people want to be able to trust the brand and who they're buying from, and that's gonna be continuing to stay true.

Erik Martinez: I think that's really good advice, it's so hard sometimes right? The brands we work with everybody has a small team. And everybody's really challenged. So one of the questions I have for you is, if you're a small team or you have a lot of things on your plate, and social media just happens to be one of those things, and you're not using an agency partner, what do you suggest to them in their planning phase to make sure that they are keeping in touch with the authenticity of their brand. How do you suggest they do [00:17:00] that?

Kristin Chambers: I like to batch things. Social media is very time intensive and a lot of people, that's the first thing to go when they're doing things themselves because they say, I have all of these other things on my plate... I don't have time for this one thing.

We are guilty of that as an agency ourselves, we get super busy, we're like we shouldn't do that but sometimes it happens, the best way of combating that is to set aside maybe block of time every single week, or once a month, where you say, this is the hat that I'm gonna put on and I'm gonna plan out for the next month ahead.

And you can use AI for this like ChatGPT is great for coming up with different ideas you can prompt it within what you're looking for. Maybe it's coming up with the ideas and some copy with your content calendar.

And then filming content in one batch so you're not having to think about it every single day, 'cause that's where people start dropping the ball. They're like, okay, I don't have time to do this today, but if you do it once a month you don't have to think [00:18:00] about it for the rest of the time. You just knock it out, it's done.

So scheduling in advance using social scheduling tools are great. We use Buffer and Hey Orca. They're both very affordable for brands that are just starting out. They even have free versions, if you can schedule in advance and not think about it there's also AI tools incorporated in there, everything from copywriting assistance and prompts, Hey Orca especially, you can train it to be in your voice they're incorporating a lot more AI within their platform. I think we're gonna see more of that.

Erik Martinez: Yeah, and that was actually one of my questions. When I go into Meta, and by the way, I am nowhere near a Meta expert, but when I go into the platform and I'm looking to maybe boost an audience or see what headlines might work on an advertised post. It's suggesting some content to me, but it doesn't appear that Meta is very helpful on the planning side.

is it more effective for you [00:19:00] to use ChatGPT or Gemini Pro or some other tool outside of the platforms to help you build that broader plan?

Kristin Chambers: I say have your tool bucket and different tools depending on what you're using them for. In ChatGPT, you can have different folders for different brands, we'll train each of our GPTs for our different brands. It can learn your brand voice, you can upload documents. Training one thing to be in your brand voice is great, but diversifying the tools you're using. I also love to use perplexity since it gives us citations and different resources explore using things outside of the platform to see if it can be more effective or help.

Erik Martinez: What I'm seeing across most companies right now, agencies and clients, is that everyone's still dabbling. Kristen has her way of using ChatGPT or Gemini. Erik has his unique way and no one's really sharing best [00:20:00] practices. You were talking about, using custom GPTs. I don't use custom GPT's. I use the instructions and the projects part of ChatGPT. It's basically the same thing, right?

But if you were a marketing team and you're just getting started, where do you start? How do you pick what to do, what tool should I use, and then how to apply that in an upcoming campaign? One of the biggest challenges we're facing right now is, there is no set process for how to do these things.

As agencies, we're always trying to build some kind of process, for the clients listening to this, realize your agencies are experimenting with these tools and getting better at using them, but there is no one way of using these tools because of their varying capabilities.

If you were to give somebody some advice and say, here's a way to think about this, step by step, what would those steps [00:21:00] be to get them started?

Kristin Chambers: Start with ChatGPT and just play with it yourself it doesn't have to be for client work I also like to sign up for newsletters that are gonna be sending out information about AI. So it can say what the new update is, or ChatGPT five is coming out.

Because things are changing so rapidly, the first thing is to pick one and play with it. Sign into Canva, play around with the tools. See what you enjoy and what might be helpful to you. Over time, you might find, tools that are good for your brand or work that you can start to utilize to make your job faster.

But if you pick, one or two to start so you're not overwhelmed, tools on your belt. That way it won't feel overwhelming and that you have [00:22:00] to try to learn everything because no one actually has time to learn all the AI tools that are out there.

There's tools for everything Now from. Video editing to photos to, resizing to copywriting. It will depend on what you find most effective and not overwhelming and you'll get more comfortable over time.

Erik Martinez: Do you have a favorite tool, or set of tools that you or your team are using when you're crafting social media messages on behalf of your clients?

Kristin Chambers: Being a social media agency, we love Canva. You wanna use InDesign for layouts for the bigger design projects. But for social media, Canva's great, it has the brand kit and we can have brand colors for all of our clients in there. It makes stories, for example, putting stories out on Instagram. Hey Orca, our social scheduling tool, has a lot of AI features, and that's one of my favorite social specific tools [00:23:00] for scheduling.

And then for research, I really love perplexity. That's probably my favorite. We use ChatGPT all the time as well. We have folders for our clients and for ourselves so that it can help to learn over time the different brand voices. We also have a responsible AI policy within our agency that is saying that we're not going to replace the human element.

We always have a hu human element in our work, and our entire team knows that these are resources and they're not replacing us. We're the ones using them responsibly, and that's very important for us. It's also a responsibility to stay on top of it and use the tools. Otherwise we're gonna become obsolete.

I think our clients expect us to be on top of this and they expect us to come to them with ideas outside of social media, AI and SEO is really big, this is talked about on a [00:24:00] daily basis. Even with clients that are knocking on our doors saying, Hey, so what's going on? They expect us to know.

Erik Martinez: I think that's true. My particular group of clients, are expecting us to use AI tools and it can be incredibly overwhelming, because there is a plethora of tools and in my experience and working with them, some of 'em are good and some of them are really quite terrible.

Kristin Chambers: Yeah.

Erik Martinez: That's one of the hard parts I find. So that's why it's always nice to talk to somebody and say, Hey, what tools are you using? What do you get the most value out of? There's a thousand tools and they're all very different, and they all use AI in a very different way, and they train the data in a very different way.

You've been talking about training the AI on brand voice. And I find that a particularly interesting how do you get your client to really establish their brand voice because some of 'em are really good here's our brand [00:25:00] guidelines.

But most of the brand guidelines I tend to see are about colors and fonts and they don't really get into how do I speak, how do I sound? If somebody asked me a question, how would I respond? How do you get some of that information so that you could teach the AI to communicate in a way that is brand appropriate?

Kristin Chambers: From the starting point, we like to ask a series of questions, and I think it's a fun exercise. When we're onboarding clients, we'll ask them if they showed up at a dinner party, what would they be wearing, what would they bring? Drilling into questions that are talking directly to the founders or the marketing director.

They may not know their brand voice yet. Helping them find that is a fun exercise and it's something that may evolve. Starting with a series of questions that dig into, would they be wearing a denim jumpsuit and a cowboy hat? [00:26:00] Bring in Budweiser or are they gonna be, in a cocktail dress, in heels bring in something fancy like tea sandwiches? I don't know, but it's gonna help us figure out, what sort of tone we're going for.

From there, you can plug in all of these questions into the AI and ask it to help to pinpoint the tone and certain attributes that, were feeding it. It's helping us to figure out what that means. And from there develop that voice and figure it out over time.

With a more established brand, you can put past social media posts or past copy in you can say, okay, this is what the AI is identified as their tone and certain words that they use often or don't use, and you can develop your brand guide that way too.

That's pretty fun.

Erik Martinez: It can also be extremely frustrating. I was working on a project earlier today for a mutual client. I was going [00:27:00] through the list of negatives, things that the brand won't do, won't say.

Do you find that giving the AI the positive attributes is as effective as telling it what it shouldn't do?

Kristin Chambers: I like to use both, but I think it's very effective to tell it what not to do, that gives it the more direction the more rules that you put in place. Telling it the negative things like, make sure you are not saying this.

If someone gives the AI a very basic prompt and does not give direction, it's clearly going to be AI generated with the long m dashes and words that are unnecessary and it loves using certain descriptive terms, it's really not something you can just press go and copy paste over. Even with the most developed prompt that has the positives and negatives in there. It's [00:28:00] still gonna require editing.

Erik Martinez: Yeah, I was doing this project and I was just writing some statements and it said something about pair this necklace with something for weddings. Pair with what? What is it you're supposed to pair that with? I have a very specific set of instructions that I've built in to the prompt to generate this stuff. But, oftentimes, you have to remind it.

I was reading a book by Ethan Mollick, a professor of business and innovation at the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania, I like following his stuff, I read his book that he wrote, two years ago, and it was still dead on. And one of the things that he was saying to remind people like, when you're working with these AI tools, don't treat it like software. If you ask the AI the same question 10 times in a row, you're gonna get 10 different answers.

Kristin Chambers: Yeah.[00:29:00]

Erik Martinez: And it doesn't matter how much instruction you give to it. I can see that as I'm iterating through working on some basic written content. This is not even like major things where I can give it hey, here's a product, I want a description for it. It'll write one,

I'll give it a little bit of feedback, it'll write another one. Then I'll go back to the start and ask it to do it again, and it'll give me three or four or five different iterations in a row. And so I think that's one of the challenges that we don't have, the consistency from these tools, yet, and maybe we never will because it isn't software.

And that was one of his key points is that it's not like going into Excel and adding two plus two. You're always gonna get the answer four, every single time. With AI that isn't necessarily true and it's [00:30:00] notoriously bad at math.

Kristen, if you are using AI to help with your social media program. How are you guys going through and evaluating the resonance with the audience? What metrics are you looking at? What other things might come into play as you are trying to build content that engages the audience?

Kristin Chambers: Analytics are so important, and that's something that we measure monthly. We can see the top performing posts directly when we're looking at our monthly analytics reports, we can see exactly what the highest engagement is.

For organic social, I always go by engagement first, views, comments, shares, likes, anything that's interacting with the post means someone, felt something or reacted in a way. That's what I wanna do more of.

So if we look and see the highest engagement on the top three posts that gives us direction for what types of content [00:31:00] the audience is resonating with and what we can create more of in the future that will help keep engagement up for the brand.

Testing out different types of content's good too. Typically when there's higher engagement, there might also be higher impressions. I look at organic social as a brand awareness and engagement tactic. The top two metrics are impressions and engagement for organic social specifically.

Erik Martinez: Have you found that where you send a customer from a post matters, do you get better engagement if you drive them to the website? Do you get better engagement if you do a lead form on Facebook? Where do we send these people? Or are we really just trying to improve awareness?

My personal viewpoint on social media is that it's great at building awareness. It's not necessarily great at selling things. I know a ton of people out there who will totally disagree with me because I, we have some brands that we've worked with [00:32:00] who spend a ton of money on social media advertising.

So I'm not saying you can't sell through social media. My worldview is that social media still sits higher in a funnel in most cases. Do you find that there is a particular tactics that make the most sense in getting people to engage by driving them to a place?

Kristin Chambers: I think it depends on the goal. Different networks are gonna be different for Facebook versus Instagram, on Instagram you can't direct to a link. You'd have to say, click the link in the bio. But Facebook, you can have a link, though now they don't like third party links as much. For organic it's less about directing, a lot of our clients still wanna call to action in there, but I think it's more about starting a conversation. Like you said, with it being not so much a sales channel it's meant to be a conversation. It's meant to be introducing who you are and building trust, [00:33:00] and that's where authentic content is very important, you're gonna build trust through having real content, putting your founder out there, being educational, being entertaining.

That's where it's gonna drive people to watch and interact with your stuff and want to eventually go to the website, but no one wants to be sold to, especially on social. Social wasn't built for that. So I think it's a great tactic for top of funnel, for getting in front of new audiences for letting people know that you're real. Everything's online now, you have to have your social media, your website, your reviews.

On that top of the funnel, I think organic social is great. That's where engagement, brand awareness and then you can supplement with the paid. That's where you can measure conversions and clicks, and that's where you drive the call to action. Social media organically is more your brand awareness, building trust.

Your paid stuff, you say now we're gonna nurture them. And that's where the Nurture funnel comes in, where we're saying, here's the call to action. Click here [00:34:00] to learn more, click here to buy now, click here to download. And that's where you can start to put them into the funnel where you're actually getting the action you want your customer to take.

Erik Martinez: That makes perfect sense. I'm not the social media guru that you are, so it's always fascinating to me I don't engage with much content in social media. Lately, i've been engaging with some cycling content just to see what happens and how many ads.

I could tell you what my feed is filled with

Kristin Chambers: yeah,

Erik Martinez: cycling, cycling more and more cycling. It's almost overwhelming. It's like I've suddenly discovered there's 18 bajillion e-bike brands out there because I've been specifically clicking on e-bike content. With that narrow niche, that's all you're presenting to me. There's nothing else going on in the world. I find that kind of interesting.

If you are gonna put on your prediction hat [00:35:00] and look three to five years down the road how do you see AI continuing evolve in the social media space? What should brands do now to prepare for that future?

Kristin Chambers: It's just going to get more real, you're gonna see more of it. I think social media platforms are figuring out how to regulate, but they haven't nailed it yet. We will see more regulations come into place, but at the same time, TikTok has celebrity endorsements. You can sell your likeness on there to sell products.

It is gonna be harder to know what is trustworthy? Does this person actually like this product that I'm being sold right now? It's just going to get more gray. But I think that's where brands have to be different in using AI responsibly.

Testing out things that will help them to be more effective, but also stay true to what is real in your [00:36:00] brand because I think that's gonna be really important. It's gonna be even more important for people as they're trying to figure out how to navigate what's real and what's not.

Erik Martinez: It's interesting you say that because in the study we did, we saw that one of the key drivers for information was your circle of friends or family. Do you think that is going to be a bigger factor in decision making when it comes to engaging with a brand in the future?

Kristin Chambers: Yeah, absolutely. If your friend or family member is sharing content with you that's AI generated and maybe they think it's real, but it's not. That's another way of AI content proliferating throughout your circle but it's from someone you trust.

We do a lot of influencer marketing and try to make sure the people we work with align with the brand's values it's not just someone saying they believe in a [00:37:00] product, but making sure that if you are spreading your message, using those types of tools, it aligns very clearly, if you're working with an influencer or an AI bot it is something that actually speaks to your values.

Erik Martinez: And I think that brings us back to where we started. We started talking about content and what type of content you should be creating, whether it's AI generated or AI assisted content, building that brand voice. I think if there's one like key lesson here, is really spending the time to generate that brand voice and define what that is to you and your target audience. if you don't, you're just gonna be in the sea of sameness. That's one of the pitfalls of AI generated content right now, if you're not specific, you don't have a point of view.

I was reading something the other day that actually struck me really powerfully where the individual, and I think it was a LinkedIn post, [00:38:00] was talking about one of the best capabilities of using these AI tools is that it you more capability of expressing your point of view in the world than you probably had before.

Kristin Chambers: I agree with that. It helps you find a voice in a way that maybe you are struggling to develop, but now you have these tools and resources that can help amplify you. It's just making sure that you know what your message is first and you really have to do the groundwork in order to effectively use the tools in that way.

Erik Martinez: Before we move to close, Kristen, are there any other thoughts or advice you'd like to leave with the listening audience?

Kristin Chambers: Social media has changed a lot . Stay on top of the new features that are coming out. Test things out. When Instagram rolls out a new feature, they typically prioritize brands that are [00:39:00] using them, so don't be afraid to try things that are new. Stay true to your brand. Stay authentic. Don't throw away the human element. At the end of the day, that's what people wanna see. They wanna see the people behind the brand. That's really important to standing out and building trust. Use AI as a tool, not a crutch, just take baby steps and go from there. See what works for you.

Erik Martinez: If somebody wants to reach out, what's the best way to get ahold of you?

Kristin Chambers: They can visit us on our website to check out some of the social media stuff that we do at mekamediagroup.com, and email us at hello@meerkatmediagroup.com.

Erik Martinez: Folks, I can tell you Kristen and her team are fabulous. We do some work together and we'll be doing more work together pretty soon. If you're looking for advice on how to use AI and social media, talk to Kristen and her team because there is no right answer [00:40:00] yet.

There is no one right way of using these tools to plan or execute your social media, but you should be using them because they can be very helpful. Kristen, thank you so much for coming on the show today and sharing your insights. I really appreciate you taking the time and sharing with our audience.

Kristin Chambers: Happy to be here. Thank you, Erik.

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

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