Every Business is in the Content Business + FridAI

Business Brain, episode 649 for Casual Friday, May 16, National Pizza Party Day 2025. Greetings, folks, and welcome to Business Brain, the show where we take some ideas, we crunch them, we dissect them, we use them, we to tune our business brains individually and collectively so we can each keep on living those charmed lives. Speaking of charmed lives, our sponsors this week are nordlayer.com brain that gets you 22% off this network security for modern businesses. And then Codebrain saves you another 10%. And shopify.com businessbrain where you can sign up for your $1 per month trial period. We'll talk more about both of those because they're both gonna help you lead those charmed lives. We'll talk about them in a little bit. For now, as usual, in Dur Hampshire, I'm Dave Hamilton.

And in Northern California, I'm Shannon Jean. Happy Friday. I.

Happy Friday. I. Yeah, absolutely, absolutely.

Go ahead.

Well, I was going to say we got a. We got an email from last week, but do you, do you have something before I start jumping in?

No, that's what I was trying to prompt for, but great. I didn't do it. I didn't do it very gracefully.

Yeah, we just ran all over each other. It's fine. David saves us and says, hi, guys. I was re listening to a great episode last night, the one about treating everyone like a customer. Thanks for some great insights. One of the things that you mentioned was reaching out to people before you need something from them. You talked about sending an email to your lawyer or accountant or other suppliers. I might say go one step further on that and send them a handwritten note. That's something that they will remember even more. I personally have a stack of thank you cards that I try to regularly send to customers, suppliers, et cetera. Interestingly, a good friend of mine wrote a blog post on that very topic recently. We'll link to it. Uh, and yeah, yeah, it's a, it's. It's. Of course it's a big deal. It's time consuming. But yeah, you know, I like his idea that he keeps a stack of thank you cards that he sends regularly to his customer suppliers. The idea would be don't set yourself up for failure by saying I have to do all of them, all of my customers, in one sitting. Just pick five, do five in a sitting. Send five cards, three cards if that. If it takes you. Yeah, whatever the timing is, send one. That. That's success, right? Define success is I sent out one card this week great. Well, if you do that 52 times, you know, a year. Well, you've sent out 52 cards. That's 52 more than I sent out last year.

Yep. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, it's, it is a great idea. And this, it's content, right? We're all creating content. Content. And you have this concept that I want to expand on, where you say every business is in the customer service business, right?

Yes, yes. And I, I, I still stand by.

That, by the way, and I agree with it. I agree. And I, I would also like to add to that, is that every business is now in the content business.

Totally. Right. I'm not going to argue that at all. Nope. Yeah, I know I can make the episode more interesting. All right. You're totally.

Yeah. Okay, good.

Shannon, you ignorant. Wait, what?

Yeah, yeah, so, and the thing that I see more and more is that, like when I work with my clients and we wind up talking about content all the time as it relates to them. And so of course, the obvious, it attracts clients, right? Using social media or wherever you're going to put it, your own website, whatever it is, it. But also it attracts talent, people that want to work for you, right? Because you're getting out there and, you know, they're seeing the way you do things, whether you're sharing time lapse of your operation. It could be anything. There's a great example of a guy on X right now that's he left the corporate world and is building a stump grinding business, okay? And he got some good advice. He said, hey, before you grind a stump, put your camera out your, you know, your phone or whatever and put it on time lapse and be sure you save every single video. And now I see, you know, he's growing at leaps and bounds up on X, up on Instagram because people love to watch those videos, right? And it brings in a whole nother level when people are on Facebook and they stop and it's like, who's this guy? Oh, I've got five stumps and I've got, you know, and he tells a story about like attracting a homeowner's association that way. And they had like, you know, some massive project because they had like 50 plus stumps out there that he had him and he's got somebody work from now went out and grinding and, and I find myself watching the videos too. Well, this is so cool.

Yeah. See, this is. I agree that every business is in the content business now. There's some decisions to be made. The first maxim that I will add to this though, is that consistency is the key. Consistency matters more than quality. Consistency matters more than even being on the right platform, although that matters too. But just getting it out there and giving people something to see, the consistency is important for the humans involved for sure. But consistency also tells the platform, AKA the algorithm, that you are serious about producing content and that it's okay. It's lower risk for the algorithm to highlight you because if you're putting one thing out there, it might be the best thing ever. But it, you know, and even if, you know, and, and the platforms look at all this stuff and each, each one has its own thing, it's slightly different, but it's essentially you posted it. How quickly were people engaged? The people. How quickly were the people who watched it engaging with it? And how were they engaging? Right, that's the important part. Because if they see, even if you'll, if you have 10 followers and all 10 of your followers engaged with this thing and, and you know, commented on it and shared it with their friends and all that stuff, the platform's going to be like, awesome, I'm going to expose this to a hundred people. Let's see, you know, what percentage of those are we going to get? And then it learns and does it from there. But it's not going to do it if it's your first video, no matter how. If you have all 10 of your people, it's not going to do anything, right? Because it doesn't know whether you're ever going to produce another one again. So why would it pay attention? And I, I'm talking about that in like it, the platforms pay in attention, right? They, their whole thing is, and they don't want to get people excited about you if you're not going to deliver. Again, that's bad for the platform. It's also bad for you. But yeah, you know, so consistency is the thing. And you're gonna go post a bunch of stuff and nothing's gonna hit, but they're all building up to something because the platform will finally then take that thing that you happen to post that's really good. After you've posted 100 videos or 100 whatever's platform is going to take that thing that's like, oh, wait, all of that person's followers just engaged with this and they have 99 other videos. All right, let's go, let's give them a test.

And I like that comment of there's less risk for the algorithm to expose your stuff because it, you have to teach the algorithm who you are what kind of content you produce? Is it positive? Is it, you know, is. Yeah. Negative content may get a lot. May.

Yeah. Maybe that's what the platform wants.

I mean you don't know.

X was, was, was famous for that for a very long time and arguably still is in, in some circles.

Some, some. Yeah, some ways. And also the, the, the comment about where you're going to share that content. I just, you can't stress it enough is you got to know where your customer is.

Well.

And they're not the same across all platforms.

No.

At all.

I would say you need to pick one platform initially and it, yeah, yes.

It depends on what you're trying to do. But if you're just, you're. If let's say you're in the service business. My, my, my favorite H Vac company or whatever. Well, there's different depending upon the platform. Now if you're the owner and you're trying to build your personal brand, I would make a certain recommendation to you. But if you're the, if you're the business and you're like okay, we want to attract clients to buy our services, well, that's another platform.

That's a. Potentially. Yes, potentially.

Yeah, potentially. And if, if you're trying to attract a young male demographic, well that typically one another one time platform and a young female to. Oh, that's a different one. And even, I mean you can break all these platforms down but you, but I don't.

I think it's. You can also get into analysis paralysis with that.

Yes. You need, I have a solution to you.

You need to pick one and you're gonna be wrong about something and it's okay, go do your hundred videos there or 100 posts and just generate a presence and, and engage with people, reply to their comments, all of that stuff. You, it, it like if you have the, the staff who can genuinely do that on four different platforms simultaneously, well then sure, fine. But, but it has to be genuine tips on that.

Yeah, it does have to be genuine. Yeah.

Share, share your tips. I'm curious.

Well, I, when you first get on a platform, you're going to be very excited. Okay. You're going to be like wow, I got, I had 100 followers and look at this, I got, I got 10 today or something like that. You, oh you're highly motivated so you're creating all this content. You, you need to create. The first thing you create is a new folder either on your local machine, in your Google Drive, Microsoft, whatever. And this is what you call it content library. And Every single thing you do, you save to your content library. And I guarantee you, you will thank me months and years down the road because as you gain people followers that are interested in your content, well, when you posted the video and you had a hundred followers, well, now that you've got 500, well, that theoretically there's a ton of people that have not seen that content.

Even though it's in your back catalog. They just haven't gone and found.

It's like a social media is like a parade. You're just continually moving and there's a new group of people that are out in front of you every time. So you see the parade, they keep waving and throw, doing the same thing over and over again. It's exactly the same way. And the other part of it is that when you're all excited and okay, it's going to be great, you're creating stuff, eventually you're going to get a little bored and then you can go.

And then you can go and play some of the greatest hits again.

Of course, of course.

Oh, that's brilliant, man. I like that. Okay, yeah, we have more to talk about on this subject. For sure. The next thing that I want to do is tell you about our sponsors for this week because, well, when we're building our businesses, our to do lists are long enough without accidentally leaking data to the entire Internet being on there. Right. And that's where our sponsor NORD layer comes in. This is a toggle ready network security platform that protects your business without turning our IT setups into like Rubik's cubes from hell. Right. Whether you're a solopreneur scaling a team or an IT pro running remote everything, NORD layer gives us that VPN protection, access control and threat monitoring in one sleek, ridiculously easy to use platform. You can set it up in minutes. There's no hardware, no wizard robes required or anything. And it all runs on zero trust principles. It works across every major OS and it helps you stay compliant and secure as you grow. And the best part, you get to control who accesses what from where and on which devices. It's like bouncer level security. Right? But for your internal data instead of your, you know, Friday night doubting whatever it is, you know. So if you want to keep your team secure and keep living that charmed life without a cybersecurity meltdown, go to Nordlayer.com brain and then use code brain to get up to 22% off plus an extra 10% off of yearly plans. And here's a great part. You can try it risk free 14 day money back guarantee. So go check it out. And our thanks to Nord Layer for sponsoring this episode. And now let's talk about starting a business. Because you've got the big idea. The caffeine free ambition, respect and the dream of waking up to passive income. But then reality hits. You need a storefront payment system, inventory tracking, emails, marketing support, shipping. Basically you need Shopify. I use Shopify to sell merch for one of my other podcasts and merch for one of my other website businesses. And it's super smooth. I. I like it. Makes me wonder if it's secretly run by a team of caffeinated owls in a server farm somewhere quietly shipping your orders while you sleep. It's really, truly. Shopify powers 10% of all E commerce in the US from giants like Mattel to folks like me or anybody. Just getting started. You get gorgeous plug and play templates, AI that writes your product descriptions and marketing tools that make it feel like you hired a team of pros without hiring anyone. And let's not forget the purple shop pay button. Right? That beautiful little thing your customers already know and trust. It's one of the reasons Shopify has the best converting checkout on the planet. Turn your big business idea into Ka Ching. With Shopify on your side. Sign up for your $1 per month trial and start selling today at shopify.com businessbrain go to shopify.com businessbrain shopify.com businessbrain and our thanks to Shopify for sponsoring this episode. It's time for Friday. I. Shannon.

Yes, sir. And I. I think I can. I'd love to tie it into this content idea because.

Let's go.

There's so applications, websites, whatever, what have you that can help you with it. And one of my favorite ones, I've talked about it before. It's Opus Pro. Opu. Wait. Oh yeah, Opus Pro. Okay. And it can create all kinds of content from any type of video that you have, any type of YouTube or you recorded. It's. The sky's the limit. It's really easy to use. I use it all the time. And you can take. Like I said, you. You just record a long video. You can, it'll just pull things out for you. You can give it some guidance. Everyone should be using this thing that does any video content. And you should be doing video content on your website and your social media, wherever it goes. This app is terrific, huh?

All right. Yeah, I've heard of, I mean I've heard of Opus Clip before.

Amazing. Yeah.

I mean, there's, it's, it's quite popular. People. People.

Oh, yeah. It's used all over it does all your cat captions for you. There's a bunch stuff that it tied into it and you'll just, you'll use it all the time. The other one that I love is Loom, everybody. I don't know how I'd live without Loom. Same it is. It is just such a game changer to have a.

Not so much AI with Loom, though. No. But super valuable.

Like super valuable. But it also, they do have the key. What you're doing here when we're talking about content is you're going to capture every little bit that you make. So if you have to do like an FAQ or, you know, frequency questions or opera sops for your business, do them in Loom. It'll create the transcript and the, the Loom AI pulls out sections of that transcript that you can use for other things. And so the, the concept I'm trying to get across is that. And I want to come back to your comment you made before the sponsor spot about mastering one platform first. Okay, sure. But so let me just back up a little bit. Loom, you know, builds out everything, creates a great library for you to use for all different. All different stuff. Now, if you're trying to build your brand on a platform, I definitely agree that, that you should focus on one first and really master it. But as a business owner, if you're trying to attract people from all different brands, different platforms, there's a ton of automation that you can do and push this stuff out automatically to those different platforms, just like we do.

Right? Yeah. And I, I have used that and I've watched it fail most of the time and I've watched it fail. I can often tell when I see a brand that's taking stuff and repurposing it from one platform to other platforms because it doesn't feel authentic on the satellite platforms, because it feels out of place. Right.

Out of context.

Out of context. And often there's no engagement. Right. So I can see it's being barfed out and somebody might comment and there's no response or there's nothing. And it's, it's not so much of the success on a platform is your engagement on that platform, your company's engagement. And, and the algorithms know this too. And so I watch this content that's just put out there. And again, we did it at Mac observer, you know, we used Buffer, I guess, was the probably the one back then. Right. This, you know, was, was allowing us to take one thing and just barf it out everywhere. Which initially when social media started, that was 100% the right thing to do. And then I watched it just fall off a cliff and it was like, oh, the places where we are actually like paying attention to the account and doing all that. Now, we could have done that everywhere and probably would have done great, but we didn't have the manpower or the focus to do that.

Good, good.

So that's, that's where, I mean, you can bar. I. What, where I, where I get concerned is if you start barfing it out everywhere, you're teaching the algorithm that on this platform, I don't care.

And if you don't have the people to engage.

Yes.

With your, with the, your followers or whoever sees that, don't do it.

Yes.

Because if you just post and you don't follow up and you don't add context and you don't answer questions, you're, you're going to have a bad time. It's just not like you say, you're, you're, it's not going to work.

And you're training the algorithm that you're not paying attention to its platform. And then when you do finally come in and do that, and I don't know this, but it would seem to me that you'd have more to prove for it to move the needle. Actually, I have seen that where it's like, oh, now that you're doing the right thing. Well, still, like, Reddit was a great example of doing it wrong and basically being blacklisted.

Yeah. You know, you can easily.

Yeah, well, you know, it's just like, well, you're, you're, you're not involved here. And it's like, well, I am now. It's like, yeah, but you have 4,000 posts where you weren't involved, and so now you have to post 6,000 where you are in order to offset those 4,000. It's like, okay, well, this is it, then. We're done. We're never gonna work here. Like, it's, we're out.

That's it. It's a really good context to add to being on multiple platforms. You got to have the people to manage engagement. Yes. You really. Yeah, I really do. And even though it's not an AI thing, your, your phone probably has it built in. Get to know time lapse videos, get to understand how they work, get, get a great tripod for your phone. If you're going to be using Your phone to stuff. I. I have a client that I'm working with that's going to get. Getting their first shipment of stuff. They're learning how to be. Become a reseller. And I said, great, when's the ship and show? Okay, great. On Thursday. All right, Order your tripod now. Get your camera ready. And he's like, what? I said, no, we're going to create this content. Don't worry about. He's like, what are we going to do with it? I'm like, don't worry about it yet.

I have just. I have one tweak to this advice, though.

Great.

Do your first video. Don't worry about the equipment you don't have.

Yeah.

Just do it. Because once you see it, then you'll be like, wait, this would be better if I had a tripod. And then you want to buy this tripod. Right. But otherwise you're like, I don't want to buy a tripod.

And.

And that's now your excuse to never.

Start doing videos, everybody. Yeah. I always say, beware the onces, right?

Yes.

Once I have this.

Once I have.

Once I have that. Yeah. So we, in this case, we had time. I'm like, great, you got a week. Get yourself a cheap tripod so you can set it up, because I want you in the video. Yeah. You're unloading this truck.

You can always teeter it on a chair somewhere. It's not going to look good. Correct. That's something. It doesn't matter.

It doesn't matter.

Even if you have a tripod, your first video is not going to look.

Yeah. Sometimes the videos that don't look the best perform better because it shouldn't be authentic, polished and super. Yeah. It's just. It's you. Right. You're there. But put it in your. Your content folder. Just don't be worried about when you're going to send it out. You've got this. You know, you can build your schedule and all that stuff later and you know, it's. You want to just gather it up to have it. Because you can't go back and capture my first shipment.

Right? Right.

You can't go back and capture that enthusiasm when you created your first long form post. Yep. Don't create the post on the platform. Create it in Word, you know, or Google Docs or whatever you use. So you have it because you'll go back and go, wow, like I said, I've got thousand followers now. Nobody's heard this. And you'll read it and go, wow, that was terrible. I fix it.

I should fix it.

You can, you can and use it over and over again. But yeah, but I. Everybody's in the content business. It is super powerful on so many different levels. If you have tools that you use. Feedback at BusinessBrain Show. We'd love to hear hear from you.

Absolutely. Like he said, easy for him to say. Feedback at BusinessBrain Show. Thanks for hanging out with us folks. Make sure to leave us a review at BusinessBrain Show. Review and keep living that charmed life. We will see you next week.

See.