Gary V uses this AI platform to generate content which delivered 12,000% uplift in social media e...

We do it better.

Anyway, we've got the guinea pigs in, right? I can't believe we've— we're having so much fun. I would have forgotten.

It's awesome. We'll have fun again, don't worry.

Thank God we, um, didn't get through the whole thing and, and have to do it again. Okay.

Do you know that I was a rock and roll DJ, Jim, in my past life?

I saw that on Sirius FM.

Yeah, so I've done this. I've done that too.

This is why airline pilots have checklists, right?

Okay.

We better start that again. Right. Okay, welcome to this episode of Speak PR. This is the podcast for business owners who know they've got value locked up in their organization if they can just find cost-effective and simple ways to share that. And today I'm delighted to have with me Kate Bradley Cherniss, who is on time. She's punctual, but she works for a company called Lately. Kate, thank you for joining us all the way from America across the pond. Tell us, what problem do you solve for entrepreneurs with Lately?

No one's ever done that joke, by the way.

Wow, this must be your first interview.

But you know, my team does call me Kateley, Jim, so you can—

Okay, thank you.

There you go. So the problem we're trying to solve is twofold. One is the pain point of writing and the fear of the blank page, right? Believe it or not, not only is that a problem for most people, but marketers especially have a problem with writing. They don't like it. They hire out consultants to do it, or they push it off to other people because it's hard. It takes on average 12 minutes to write one single social media post, right? So that tells you what goes into it. And then the second problem is the unlocking of the content we do create. So generally long-form content like blogs or videos or podcasts or newsletters, people spend several hours creating that and then most of the time nothing happens with it. Maybe there's one public shout out, check out my blog, which is like the most vapid call to action on the face of the planet and then that's it. Right? And so we magically solve those 2 problems. And you're gonna ask me how.

I am going to ask you how. I'm going to call you Caitlin.

You can call me Caitlin.

Thank you. How do you do that then? Is it lots of people who are very efficient writers? Or have you managed to not turbocharge the system, but to fundamentally re-engineer how this is done?

Yeah, so initially, by the way, I did this manually. I did it manually when I used to own a marketing agency for Walmart and I got them 130% ROI year over year for 3 years. So at one time it was little people, me, the little people, but now it's automated. So what happens is Lately first will, if you take a blog or a newsletter or a press release or a video or a podcast, you can put it into Lately and Then you connect your social channels and we immediately go out and we look at everything you've ever published and we study your analytics and we look at the highest engaging posts and we create a writing model based on what we learned that your customers are liking, responding, and sharing, right? So the most engaging content. And then we take what you've fed the brain, that long-form content, the blog, the video, the podcast, and we examine that for that same content. So we're looking for those magical keywords and phrases that light up your audience and we pull quotes into social posts based on what we found, right? So you get in 1.8 seconds hundreds of pre-vetted social media posts that we know your audience is going to want to watch, read, or listen to.

Now you've mentioned about my own posts and figuring out which ones are most successful, which wouldn't be difficult in my case because very few that are successful. But what about the general universe, like hashtag trends, for example, or social media channels that are trending with certain conversations?

You know, whenever companies always want to know what's trending in the world, and more often than not, that's not what's trending with like their own target audience. And so we create these word clouds that show you again what words your audience are engaging with in your own content. And we create clouds of hashtags too. And so you can literally look at what's trending with your audience on a daily basis, which is obviously way more valuable. So what our customers will do is they'll actually come into Lately's analytics and look at what's trending before writing the blog, for example.

I put in one of the links to one of my blog posts from my esospr.com website, and I got 71 different, you know, derivations, which I thought was amazing. Question then is, how do you then start to prioritize which ones to use?

Yeah. So what we found, and as you know, is that in order to scale, especially as smaller businesses, you need to be everywhere all the time, and you need both quantity and quality, right? So with those 71 social posts, we would recommend 2 things. First of all, you don't want the AI to run on its own. You want to put your human eyeball on each 71. Just take a few minutes. You can easily go through and grab like maybe 30 that are really awesome, but you need to put a little extra voice on. You have to throw in a special Jimism, you know, crack a joke, maybe add a different hashtag, that kind of thing. That's the difference, by the way, of starting at third base and getting to home plate or not, right? Like, so, Lately is awesome, human is awesome, Lately plus human, that scores the run, right? And that's all the difference. So that's the most important thing. Then the second thing is we do actually recommend you schedule all, let's say, 30 or 40 you decide to use, but do them out over time. Because nowadays, we've all been learning to make legacy content in real time. So this conversation you and I are having, you're going to say some amazing things, I'm going to say some amazing things, and it's going to be relevant whether someone hears it today, tomorrow, or next year. I would recommend you take all 71 posts, say you're publishing on Twitter, publish 4 a week out for the next 10 weeks or something like that. What's amazing is that because none of them are the same, you get a much higher reshare Percentage, even from the same people, because people love quotables. They love to share. And that's what we're looking for here. We're looking for, um, the, the meat. It's like someone called it, um, like at Costco when you get to sample the food before you buy it. It's the same idea, right? You're giving them a little sneak peek of what's really inside that podcast.

What about integration though, uh, Katie? Because— and I'm going to call you Katie now because you've offered You know, I use Zoho, for example, and people are using HubSpot or they're using Buffer or any one of these. How do people end up not duplicating or, you know, having multiple systems to manage?

Yeah, so we're replacing all those systems because Lately is a really robust platform. You can do everything you can do in those places almost at Lately, more or less. HubSpot is a little bit of a different beast, obviously, but it's pretty powerful. When I developed this idea for Walmart back in the day and got them that 130% ROI year over year, what I started with was the organization of the marketing, right? So with Walmart, this is fascinating for we marketing nerds. It was Walmart's corporate company and the foundation, so nonprofit, for-profit, the IRS, so the government in America, and then the National Disability Institute, United Way Worldwide, Bank of America, AT&T, right, all these different people. And these national and global companies all had franchises, and then they also had tens of thousands of other small and medium businesses and nonprofits participating. There was a good cause. Everybody wanted to help market it, right? But in order to do that, I just thought, well, we know nothing about these people, so I'm going to audit them, all 20,000. So I created an easy way to quickly understand what was happening and what, what skill levels were like. And I discovered that whether it was a library down the street or the packy store or the largest retailer in the world, they had the same problems, right? And what I first did was organized all that. I went everything from the calendar to what content we were pushing out and where it was going, and I just made sense of it. And that helped me uncover the redundancies and this lack of consistency. As we all know, that's like key in marketing. It's have a Coke and a smile, never have a Coke and a grin, right? And then that also helped me understand the writing problems and then the unlock of the content, all the things that have gone into lately. But what we built first as a company, and so this happens to all entrepreneurs, is first we built an organization system because that's really the meat of what I had done. But it turns out that that's the unsexiest sell around. Nobody cares about organizing, but they did care about this little feature that we had that let you push a button and create 100 social posts in 1.8 seconds. And so, we've learned to redesign and remarket the product around that. And so, all the other stuff that happens in the background comes as a second aha to our customers. They're like, whoa, wait a second. There's this beast back here.

We've talked a lot about text, but what about audio and video? What formats can you, can you work across? Just share with us about that as well, Caitlin.

I was actually asking one of our interns to take a podcast like this and transcribe it for me by hand, and then we would go through and run the transcription through Lately and push a link back to the full piece of content, the full podcast, um, by hand. And then at some point I was like, can you chop up those best bits by hand? Let's see if we can do that. And it was like, it took a year and a half and it never got done, and I had all these podcasts lined up and I was like, guys, I'm giving you gold. This is collecting dust. What's up? And we had some customers start asking for this to be automated. It occurred to them. And finally my CTO was like, you know, we can do this. And I was like, oh my God. So now we can also take podcasts and videos and run them through the same system. So again, you upload to Lately, push a button, we automatically transcribe the whole text, which you can then use as a blog post if you want to. And we will instantly find the smartest quotes that we know your customers want to read here or watch and match the video clips up with that. So you get 100 mini movie trailers to promote this podcast for the next year.

That's an amazing opportunity then. And then presumably we can plug into something like otter.ai or to repurpose.io because we've already got these distribution channels in place. So we could do that with Lately.

You can, and you can publish straight from Lately also. So you can, you can publish, you know, you can download it and put it where you want to, or you can publish straight through us. And the kicker, which I have to say because it's my job, is that we're working with Gary Vaynerchuk, Gary Vee, and he launched an entire Twitter channel that's fueled 100% with Lately's AI, and we're getting him a 12,000% increase in engagement.

Now, if Gary Vee wanted to get out into China or Japan, what about multiple languages?

Yeah, we do that too. Softball, did you know this? So yeah, if you take a blog that's in Spanish and you push the button, we'll give you Spanish social posts. It works in Japanese, I know. I don't know about Chinese 'cause I haven't tested it. In fact, we didn't know this. Our customers just started doing it and we were like, oh my God, it works. And then we learned to start to optimize it for a better So yeah, it's, and that's really important, Jim, because most social media platforms that you know of don't cater to the rest of the world.

Are you going to enable then companies to have like a multilingual campaign with a central technology platform? Because that's, that really is a glorious solution for those of us that are taking content and having to repurpose it across different regions.

Exactly, right? So one of the things that we did with the Walmart project was we started to write social posts in Spanish. And we weren't very good at speaking Spanish. We had to bring someone in to help us. But that was radical almost a dozen years ago. Now you walk into Lowe's and all the signs are bilingual, right? But here that was, we were just discovering that. And it was because we'd learned that the population we were trying to reach largely was Spanish speaking. And so you can do that now lately. The tough thing is we don't have a translator We don't have that, that part built in yet, but coming soon. We'll work on it.

Fantastic. And if someone wants to integrate, for example, to WeChat and to Weibo and Youku?

That's a question we get a lot. Yeah, on the roadmap for sure.

Now tell us then about prices, Katie, because on this show we like to talk about solutions that people can actually use, right, that are accessible. What's the pricing model?

Yeah, so, you know, we're a growing company. We're learning a lot. And we've pulled the pricing off to be mysterious, but also because we're consistently testing. And we have clients that are small, medium, and large. Essentially, the pricing starts at $300 per month with annual contracts per license. We do a sliding scale fee though, Jim, and it really depends on the qualifications of the customer. I mean, we, we know who's going to be a super user and who's not and how many licenses you buy. So if you're going to buy 100 licenses, that the price will go down, right? You get a bulk deal. And we're taking— we're still studying our customers, right? So that's why it's really important to get on a call. I know it's like, oh, you got to get on a call with somebody, but we treat our small customers the same way we treat our very large customers, with lots of love. And we're very nice and fun. So it's a painless 20 minutes.

Do you want to tell us who is using— you've mentioned it's a new company, Kaitly, and Apart from superstars like Gary Vee, who would be some of your other customers that you can mention?

Yeah, sure. So we've been working with SAP. We worked with Microsoft, AB InBev. So very large customers, but also very small customers. So like Small Business Solutions, Gather Voices, who you mentioned before, that's one of our customers as well. We worked with midsize people, AmeriFirst, Husky, right? So one of the things we can do, which I didn't mention to you, is we, we can stack Lately accounts upon each other. So there can be a national or global account that acts as a puppeteer for all of its local franchises and can use the AI content to syndicate across thousands of channels, right? So that's how we work with those larger customers.

Could I buy a license and then have multiple clients? Because some companies limit the number of channels that you can connect the platform to.

Yeah, so you can, as an agency, you can, and it's a single login for you. So it's really easy just to bounce between different clients without that pain of coming in and out and then keeping the logins private on the client behalf. So there's a lot of nice features there. As far as the limits that we've made them very friendly and we're always playing with them, Jim. And so we do again cater that per customer. And honestly, we just changed it, so I can't rattle off what they exactly are.

No, no, that's okay. But that— because that's important, because as an agency, we're working for half a dozen clients, um, and not every client wants to pay, uh, an individual subscription, but you can add a lot of value, uh, that way. So, Cately, if people want to find out about you and Lately, where can they do that?

Um, we just rebranded ourselves and we did a poor job of it, which is ironic. Of course, shoemaker has no shoes.

We can help. We can help.

Can you help me? But we're now lately.ai online, and then all of our social spaces are also @latelyai. I'm Lately AI Kaitly everywhere also. And again, we're humans just like you. This is one of the most important things for us is not only does the AI require a human to make it awesome like we talked about before, but as you know, Jim, like marketing runs on emotion. And only a human can translate a hug to a guinea pig through a Zoom screen, right?

And Caitlin's referring to my friends Basil and Piglet, who are outside right now in the garden, actually watching right now us having this call. Kate, it's been a pleasure. Thank you so much, Caitlin Bradley Cherniss, for joining us all the way from the States.

Thank you.

So you've been listening to Kate Bradley-Chernes and I talking about Lately, which having tried it is an amazing engine for creating a huge amount of great content from a small start. So personalization at scale, content creation and amplification. This is a fabulous tool. Kate, thank you for being with us today. And we look forward to watching with interest the progress of Lately.