In this talk Bryan Kramer addresses the common challenge of scaling social media engagement while preserving authentic, one‑on‑one relationships. He argues that while many processes can be automated, genuine conversations that build relationships must remain human. Kramer introduces a "rule of thirds" framework that allocates effort across automation, content sharing, and direct personal interaction, and warns that excessive automation erodes audience trust and magnifies human mistakes. He highlights how automated systems cannot prevent social errors, leading to potentially career‑damaging blunders, and suggests that brands sometimes need to turn off automation to respond authentically. Finally, Kramer notes that audiences are forgiving when brands own their errors, emphasizing the importance of demonstrating humanity rather than striving for flawless perfection.
Chapters
One of the top questions I consistently get asked is, how do I scale my engagement across social? See, managing large communities or listening all the time, it's time-consuming, and we've developed so many time-saving apps and software to help us automate the process. But herein lies the distinction: processes can be automated, but one-on-one conversations meant to relationship build cannot. The bottom line is that meaningful one-on-one conversations require human-to-human interaction and a personal touch. It's the blending of the two that's an art form, and it's always evolving. See, when you can automate in the right places the human touch points within any campaign, product release, or general sharing system, you've hit the jackpot. And to achieve this, we use the rule of thirds to split between automation, sharing, and one-on-one interaction. This will make the difference for companies and for people. I approach it this way for myself. And a word of caution, while great tools do help us automate the process, too much automation of engagement gets us in trouble. The more complex we get with our automation systems, the harder we have to work at humanizing what we do. See, unfortunately, the science of automation has taught your target audience to distrust most marketing. For instance, when you're doing email triage every morning, do you question whether a particular email is from a real person, or is it an email blast that's been personalized to you? Are you suspicious that the ads that you see are even retargeted, or do you stop looking at your direct messages on Twitter because all you seem to receive are automated messages? Your audience is just as sick of being bombarded with automation as you are. And in this discussion of automation, let's also consider the human error factor. Currently, there's no automated system that prevents humans from making mistakes or social errors online. And as companies, we've been used to having a little space between developing content and distributing it. But digital sharing, especially immediacy of social, has made many of us wish there were more filters in place to prevent human mistakes from coming in. So where should we draw the line? People want us to be more human online, but part of the discomfort many companies have with embracing social business is the possibility of embarrassment due to that human error. See, some of the errors committed online by corporations have been more than just embarrassing. They've been career-ending. However, companies are learning to demonstrate humanity rather than knee-jerk reactions to save face. That's a good thing. In the corporate world, there's still a little too much emphasis on appearing perfect. People are surprisingly forgiving brands when they own up to mistakes. And unfortunately, some haters out there love to point fingers and jump all over imperfections. But for the most part, people understand people make mistakes. So sometimes, however, the tools we use to automate some of our content distribution and sharing processes can exacerbate a mistake. There are times when you just need to turn it off, and you turn off automation altogether and react as a human.
