Category Archives: Kate Bradley Chernis

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How To Produce Better Content With Collaborative AI

How To Produce Better Content With Collaborative AI written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

The Duct Tape Marketing Podcast with John Jantsch

In this episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast, I interviewed Kate Bradley Chernis, former rock and roll DJ turned founder and CEO of a revolutionary AI tool reshaping the landscape of content marketing today, Lately AI. With over two decades of experience in media and marketing, Kate brings a unique perspective to the table and shares invaluable insights on the evolution of content marketing and the intersection of aesthetic versus functional answers.

Embark on a transformative journey as we discuss the evolution of content marketing and the role of AI in shaping its future. Discover how Kate’s background in radio and storytelling paved the way for her innovative approach to crafting personalized social media messaging.

Key Takeaways

In this episode, you’ll gain actionable strategies for cutting through the content clutter, leveraging AI to boost engagement, and understanding the symbiotic relationship between humans and machines in content creation.

Learn how to harness the power of collaborative AI to enhance your marketing efforts, navigate the challenges of data privacy, and stay ahead of the curve in an ever-changing digital landscape. Kate’s expertise provides a roadmap for marketers to adapt, evolve, and thrive in the dynamic world of content marketing.

Stay tuned as we uncover the secrets to crafting compelling content, driving meaningful engagement, and achieving sustainable growth in today’s competitive marketplace.

 

Questions I ask Kate Bradley Chernis:

[00:57] Exactly how did you go from DJ to business founder?

[06:06] What’s your take on, how AI is changing the whole landscape of content marketing?

[11:53] As a social selling platform that uses AI what is Lately’s key differentiator from other brands?

[15:39] How much does the market currently understand the difference between public data vs privacy?

[18:59] How do you best describe what Lately does?

[20:15] Do you think that working in an industry that is evolving so quickly, makes it even harder to evolve as a business?

[21:52] Where can people connect with you?

 

More About Kate Bradley Chernis:

Like this show? Click on over and give us a review on iTunes, please!

Connect with John Jantsch on LinkedIn

 

This episode of The Duct Tape Marketing Podcast is brought to you by ActiveCampaign

Try ActiveCampaign free for 14 days with our special offer. Sign up for a 15% discount on annual plans until Mar 31,2024. Exclusive to new customers—upgrade and grow your business with ActiveCampaign today!

 

John (00:08): Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch. My guest today is Kate Bradley Chernis, former rock and roll, DJ, turn founder and CEO of lately, AI tool that uses proprietary language models to craft personalized social media messaging. Lately, AI ensures data privacy by not relying on public data sets. Kate’s also been a guest speaker at numerous industry events and organizations including Walmart, Ericsson, and Harvard University, and I don’t know, maybe third time back here on the Duct Tape Marketing podcast as well. Welcome back, Kate.

Kate (00:45): Hey, John. So great to lay eyes on you. I feel like it’s been a little while.

John (00:50): It’s been

Kate (00:51): So,

John (00:52): I know you get tired of telling this story because it’s the first thing everybody always asks you, but I know people are going, wait a minute, rock and roll, DJ now founder of a company. How do you do that?

Kate (01:01): I’ve gotten better at telling the story too, which is important I think. And my co-founder teases me. I do often bury the lead. So yes, guilty is charged. I was broadcasting to 20 million listeners a day with XM Satellite Radio. I was the first music director for a channel called The Loft. But what was interesting to me about radio was the Theater of the Mind, which a lot about being in podcasting, but to clarify for everybody else. So the theater of the mind is the act of the imagination playing a role either when you’re listening or reading, not when you’re watching tv, for example. And what you’re doing is your imagination is filling in the blanks that you can’t see, right? You’re imagining what the characters look like or what they’re doing. It’s why the reason when you see a movie and you’ve already read the book, you’re kind of mad because it’s never as good as what you’d imagined, right?

John (01:55): Well, or a lot of people, I love to listen to baseball as opposed to watch it because baseball announcers are so much better at describing what’s going on because they have to.

Kate (02:04): They have to. And they’re so crafty. I mean, that’s a real sport in itself. Exactly. Great point. And when I was in radio, I’m old enough so that there wasn’t social media when I first started or the internet and you couldn’t look people up. And so we would kind of mess around and play tricks on the listeners and make up these scenarios. It was fun. And I had written hundreds of commercials because I learned quickly that was how you made money in radio. And I was a fiction writing major, and I saw these parallels between wielding the mic and wielding the pen and listening and reading. And my boss, I was number one in our format, which was very rare because it was called AAA or Adult Album Alternative. There’s only a handful of stations in the country, but

John (02:53): We were, and even fewer women.

Kate (02:55): And even fewer women. Yeah. It was just totally random thing I fell into. But country and rock, those stations are number one. And so my bosses were like, what are you doing? And I’m like, well, I did know what I was doing. I threw out their playlists and I was running the whole show because all the content was produced by me, all the commercials, all the drops, everything during my time, but I looked into it more. This is a long story. I hope it’s interesting, and I read this book called This Is Your Brain on Music. You guys remember, I think Daniel Leviton did that hard read. It’s a F read, but it’s about the neuroscience of music and music listening. And I learned something interesting about the parallel of music listening and theater of the mind. All of this relates to lately somehow, but I’ll share it. So when your brain listens to a new song, John, what songs do you like, by the way? Are you classic rock guy like I am?

John (03:48): Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I listened to The Loft and occasionally jump over and listen to Earl Bailey.

Kate (03:53): That was my station. Yeah, I love Earl. He’s so great. Yeah, so great. Oh my God, you’re making me reminisce. So great quality music, rock and roll. That’s for I’d say intelligent rock and roll. Let’s say what I was learning from Daniel was that when your brain listens to a new song, it must instantly access every other song you’ve ever heard before. And it’s trying to index that new song in the library of the memory of your brain. This is happening in a moment, right?

John (04:22): Makes sense. And of

Kate (04:22): Course, in order to access all that memory, it’s pulling on nostalgia and emotion, obviously memory, all those things that create trust and trust is why we buy now. Guess what? The theater of the mind kicks in. Same thing happens, nostalgia, memory, emotion, trust. And when you’re doing a good job on the mic, John, you actually make your listeners feel as though they’re talking. You’re to them directly that this one way street is a two way street and they have ownership in the conversation and writing is the same thing, and it’s a complicated feat to do it well because you’re talking to nobody but also somebody specific. That’s the magic. So I took these ideas to a little company called Walmart and I got them 130% ROI year over year for three years with what became the prototype for lately.

John (05:19): Screw it. We’re not going to talk about lately. Let’s just talk about the Jay Hawks latest

Kate (05:24): Novels talk. Oh my God, you’re so funny. I took out their last, well, I dunno if it was their last record, but the one with cloud something cloud, it was their last really poppy record from the nineties. And I had that in my, I still have a CD player in my car and I was rocking to that record. I love it so much. Any other Jayhawks fans listening to us, I wonder

John (05:47): Of a certain age

Kate (05:49): Of a certain age. Yeah, for sure. But I love that record and it got panned for being too poppy, but I think it’s a real lot of gold in there.

John (05:57): Absolutely. So let’s talk about content marketing. AI seems like daily is changing. I mean, content marketing has changed dramatically over the last decade or so, but certainly AI seems to be changing it every day. What’s your take on how it’s changing really the whole landscape of content marketing?

Kate (06:14): Well, I mean, thanks a lot chat GBT, because now everybody can make more garbage than ever before. They made our jobs a lot harder. The task for marketers, the challenge has always been how do we cut through the noise? And now there’s just so that certainly has changed the landscape. One thing that I’m seeing, and I wonder if you are, which is astonishing to me, the laziness is not changing. So it’s specifically regenerative AI and text generative ai, which is where I live. People still hate writing. They don’t want to do it. But also their value behind it is save time as opposed to be more effective. That’s shocking. And honestly, I’ll ask our own clients this question all the time and the CEO or the CRO, they want to make more money, but the actual users are thinking of save time and getting them to be aligned is a challenge.

John (07:11): My take on this a little bit, I agree with you, at least we’re in this phase right now of more noise, but I think eventually all things people are going to go, it’s pretty easy to separate noise from signal, maybe even more so now, right? Because writing quality content still takes strategic thinking. That’s right. And I think it makes people who do strategic thinking even more valued, even though right now there a lot of ’em are feeling sort of undervalued.

Kate (07:39): So on parallel with that, so there’s this symbiotic relationship between AI and humans who can think strategically and analytically and they rely upon each other and it’s called collaborative ai. This is the year of collaborative ai, in my opinion. We built collaborative AI into lately from the beginning, which, but it’s the idea of a human analyzing and course correcting what the AI generates so that it can boost the learning. Fascinating about what you said, which is the number one vacuum of skills across the globe is guess what? The ability to analyze. And the reason that is is because we have, this is back to laziness too. We’ve become a culture unable to identify problems because for so long, especially in corporate life, it was like, don’t bring me a problem, bring me a solution. So even when I have a friend who has some teenage daughters and when they need to go, they know they can Google the answer to anything, but they don’t know what to type in, right?

John (08:49): Well, and that’s so many things brought up there. What I tell people all the time is what we’re left to provide is context. That context cannot be provided by chat GPT. And so to your point of the search, I mean a lot of it is the right context produces the right answer, but these machines are basically just going into a database and saying, here’s what I think the answer is. Whereas we are saying, well no, here’s the real problems the customer is telling us they’re struggling with and why our solution or whatever it is we’re selling is the answer for them. And I think short of having that understanding, it’s a crap shoot what you’re going to get back.

Kate (09:29): Yeah, I mean that, thank you. I’m going to steal the context because it is so true. Someone was just asking me the other day, well, should I second guess everything that lately generates for me? And I said, yes, you are still the king, the humans. We are still the king of the food chains. Of course. And he’s like, well, won’t AI know better than me? And I’m like, never. No. All AI is good at doing is now is synthesizing scale really,

John (09:56): Right? Yeah. In fact, I’ve been for a long time because I don’t really think it’s AI yet to be truthful. It’s not really artificial intelligence, turn it around. It’s more informed assistance is kind of how I talk about it. It’s my pleasure to welcome a new sponsor to the podcast. Our friends at ActiveCampaign. ActiveCampaign helps small teams power big businesses with the must have platform for intelligent marketing automation. We’ve been using ActiveCampaign for years here at Duct Tape Marketing to power our subscription forms, email newsletters and sales funnel drip campaigns. ActiveCampaign is that rare platform that’s affordable, easy to use, and capable of handling even the most complex marketing automation needs. And they make it easy to switch. They provide every new customer with one-on-one personal training and free migrations from your current marketing automation or email marketing provider. You can try ActiveCampaign for free for 14 days and there’s no credit card required.

(10:57): Just visit active campaign.com/duct tape. That’s right. Duct Tape Marketing podcast listeners who sign up via that link will also receive 15% off an annual plan if purchased by March 31st, 2024. That’s activecampaign.com/duct tape. Now this offer is limited to new active campaign customers only. So what are you waiting for? Fuel your growth, boost revenue and save precious time by upgrading to active campaign today. Alright, so I’m going to ask you a really hard lately question. You and I started talking about lately three or four years ago at least, and at that 0.3 or four years ago, what lately was doing was very cutting edge. People didn’t necessarily understand it, but it definitely produced a result that was very cutting edge. Fast forward to today, everything you buy now has AI in it, supposedly like your detergent now has AI in it. I think if you buy it, so what’s the differentiator or what’s your stay ahead cutting edge play.

Kate (11:59): Yeah, yeah. So I told you it was going to be a hard question. Great question. Well, a couple of things. Yeah, it’s a hard one and there’s functional answers and then there’s kind of aesthetic answers I’m going to call them. But so functionally we’re the only generative AI that I know of where we have a continuous performance learning loop plugged in so that the results that we generate for you are always tied to your personal analytics or the analytics of your company, which is to say it’s never out of thin air. All other generative AI doesn’t know you in any way and can never give you results that are essentially really meaningful. The other component there is the collaborative ai. So because we built that into the product, the whole product originally we have kind of pole vaulted over everybody else. Harvard Business Review just released an article about collaborative AI citing lately as a leader and one of the studies they did show that collaborative AI outperforms AI alone two to seven X every time.

(13:02): But on the sort of aesthetic side, again, what’s really interesting to me is that the save time piece. So of course we save time everywhere else, but that is not our cutting edge leg up. The leg up is we show you why it’s effective, what’s the DNA of the messaging that will get you the highest response. And I think what we’ve done a poor job of is actually leveraging how well we do that and what that value is. So I’ve called upon my engineering team for this year to actually do a better job of getting people to understand this information and how to use it. Fascinating to me is I can show you these words, John. I can show you the ideas, the send, the structures, all the things that will get you the most engagement, but people then don’t know what to do with it, which is like to me, duh.

(13:58): But that is the crux, right? The last answer to your question is going even deeper here. So I’m planning an integration with my friend David Allison, who owns the value graphics database and value graphics are identifying how to group people by what they care about as opposed to demographics, which is more insightful, radically more insightful, and they consult the United Nations. And so some characteristics would be like if I care about the environment and you’re selling me lipstick, you want to sell me lipstick that talks about how great it is for the environment, or if you’re selling me lipstick and I care about family, you want to mention that the family company has been around for a hundred years passed on by daughter, whatever. And so we’re working on a way of integrating these values inside lately, so you can get more of that why and understand who your target audience is and why are they responding to the content we’re generating for you? Kind of nerdy, I don’t know. I’m excited about

John (15:02): This. No, but I think you’re absolutely right. I mean, I’ve been saying for years, I mean my target market is based on behavior, not on how old somebody is. It’s what they value. It’s do they invest in the community? I mean do they invest in their industry? Those are how we actually identify some of those behaviors. And I feel like that’s a way to actually niche down is to focus on behaviors. So having obviously tools that, and I’m guessing that you’re going to go into personalization at some point with that level of segmentation as well. Let me ask you, I said in the intro, in your bio I mentioned the idea of data privacy. I know it’s a big deal. How much has the market perceived this idea of public data sets versus privacy versus, I don’t know what you’re talking about.

Kate (15:46): Yeah, pretty huge. And it’s another arena of AI where everybody thinks they know all about it but they don’t, which is kind of the whole trend of the last year. So some companies come to us with an AI task force and that has to be part of one of the initial calls where we’re checking the boxes for them, the safety boxes with their legal and IT teams, which we check a lot of those boxes. Then there’s other companies like PWC who’ve gone full on into AI and they don’t seem to really care, which is, and then there’s a lot of companies where they know people are using it even though there’s maybe a ban on Chachi PT throughout the company, but people are using it anyways. So there’s nothing consistent for sure. My husband actually just bought Chachi PT for his phone because he didn’t want to put on his work computer, but he wants to be able to use it for work to help him do things faster, smarter, better. Of course, I think there’s a lot of that going on. What I understand,

John (16:52): I mean it’s stupid. It’s stupid. I mean it is like I can write a formula in Excel or I can just dump all this in and say give me the answer. So I use it all the time for stuff like that. But maybe we better back up just a minute because I asked that question assuming a lot and assuming that people knew what that really meant. So when I go to chat, GPT, everything that’s being put in there is helping teach the entire language model and everything from my statistics to my Google analytics that I’m getting analyzed. I mean that’s all just being fed. And then theoretically in some fashion, anybody has access to it that, I mean not specifically to it, but it’s feeding the machine that then is going to produce something. Whereas the private data set that is if I come to lately and I put that same kind of information in there, it’s only going to be used to build my personal model. Is that the way to sort of explain it? That’s

Kate (17:46): Right. That’s correct. Yeah. We don’t take any of your information and muddy it with anybody. And the one thing we can see is the patterns that if things are working well for you and they’re working well for another customer, we can see those patterns but we don’t share them with you individually. We would take the knowledge and share it at large. And so that’s been a real win for us by the way, because I’ve been asked to actually give courses on AI to educate companies on why that exact thing matters. I think David, not David Allison, David Meerman Scott who was investor and friend, he put it succinctly where to help people understand, he was like, listen, there’s only two questions that matter whose data and whose math with chat CBT, it’s the world’s, it’s your data, it’s the world’s data, everybody’s data and general math like a general generic math with lately it’s your private data and then our math on top of it.

John (18:49): So I need two more questions. I’m going to ask you the first one just because we haven’t, you and I have talked a number of times, it’s that idea of like, oh yeah, we have listeners too. If somebody came to you and said, lately I kind of heard of that, what does lately do? How would you describe what lately does?

Kate (19:05): Oh, I’m so bad at this. It’s like the shoemaker has no shoes, but I’m evolving. So lately learns the patterns of when you write well, what helps you do that. And it also learns the patterns of what your unique audience will actually reply to on social media. And then we help you evolve that model by repurposing long form content and identifying what part of that content will actually get you the highest possible engagement on social. Awesome. How did that go? That was

John (19:35): Great. So the output could be a blog. No, that was very good. It was still maybe a little philosophical. It’s long.

Kate (19:42): I know.

John (19:43): So the output, the end output is a blog post or is a LinkedIn post or is a X post, right?

Kate (19:49): Yeah, the output is a social media post and so much more. I mean it’s really the insights to know this is why we have investors like you and David Merman, Scott and others, is like there’s so much potential in what we’ve identified. How can we evolve the product to really give you more

John (20:07): So an entrepreneurial question to send us out. Do you think, I know you haven’t done this a hundred times, do you think that working in an industry that is evolving so quickly makes it even harder to evolve a business?

Kate (20:24): Oh, I mean the challenges are, yes, for sure, but there’s so many other smaller challenges that I didn’t expect that seem to me to eclipse that some of it’s being a female entrepreneur, let’s be honest. Some of it’s working through a pandemic. I think the way that we come at this from radio, from this totally unfathomable background gives us a huge insight as a company, not just me at how we go at AI and we go at it very humanly. That’s just how we did it from the beginning. So I love that what we’re able to see about the benefits of it our often inside out of what everybody else is seeing. And I feel really proud about that.

John (21:10): Yeah, that’s really interesting because I do think a lot of people approach this as what can the machine do? And I think that you’re actually saying our point of view is how do we get the output that’s going to have the most impact from a neuroscience point of view? And I think that’s a harder one to explain probably, but it’s certainly more impactful than a machine view for sure.

Kate (21:33): I just got a Kennedy chill, so not what can machine do for you, but what can you do for your machine?

John (21:40): I like it. I like it. Okay. T-shirts. Start printing right now. We have to. Alright, Kate, it’s great catching up with you. Obviously we’ve mentioned lately do AI numerous times. Is there anywhere else somebody should connect with you?

Kate (21:55): They can find me in all the places LinkedIn. I’m just playing Kate Bradley and tell me that you met me with John and that we can be friends.

John (22:03): Okay, awesome. Well it was great catch up with you again. Hopefully we’ll run into you soon out there on the road.

Using AI with Human Touch to Create Great Social Content

Using AI with Human Touch to Create Great Social Content written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

Marketing Podcast with Kate Bradley Chernis
Podcast Transcript

Kate Bradley Chernis headshotToday’s guest on the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast is Kate Bradley Chernis, co-founder and CEO of Lately.

Bradley Chernis started her career as a radio DJ, then started a marketing firm, and it was there that she identified a unique problem: Businesses need to create tons of social media content to get noticed online, but your content will only really stand out if it’s high-quality.

And that’s why she founded Lately. The tool uses AI to turn long-form content (think: blog posts, transcripts from webinars or podcasts, or even chapters from a book) into short-form content (AKA social media posts). Marketers can then take the content created by Lately and finesse it with a little human touch to create dozens of social posts in a fraction of the time.

Bradley Chernis and I talk about some of the biggest social media marketing trends today, and how Lately helps marketers stay ahead of their competition.

Questions I ask Kate Bradley Chernis:

  • How did you go from being a rock and roll DJ to founding a social media writing tech startup?
  • How does Lately work?
  • Do you find that the AI works particularly well on any social platform, or do you need to personalize content for each channel?

What you’ll learn if you give a listen:

  • How to strike the balance between automation and human touch.
  • The difference between basic automation and AI.
  • Why storytelling is an important element in social media.

Key takeaways from the episode and more about Kate Bradley Chernis:

Like this show? Click on over and give us a review on iTunes, please!

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Klaviyo helps you build meaningful relationships by listening and understanding cues from your customers, allowing you to easily turn that information into valuable marketing messages.

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Transcript of Using AI with Human Touch to Create Great Social Content

Transcript of Using AI with Human Touch to Create Great Social Content written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

Back to Podcast

Transcript

Klaviyo logo

John Jantsch: This episode of The Duct Tape Marketing Podcast is brought to you by Klaviyo. Klaviyo is a platform that helps growth-focused eCommerce brands drive more sales with super-targeted, highly relevant email, Facebook and Instagram marketing.

John Jantsch: Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing podcast. This is John Jantsch, and my guest today is Kate Bradley Chernis. She is the CEO of Lately, an AI-powered social media writing software, that can be found at TryLately.com. We’re going to talk about social media, and maybe AI, and just, who knows what else?

John Jantsch: Kate, thanks for joining me.

Kate B. Chernis: Hey, John, thanks for having me. How are you?

John Jantsch: Great. I said you were the CEO of Lately, but, like most people that come on this show, you had a life before Lately. Maybe tell us, how did you get here?

Kate B. Chernis: Yeah. It seems so long ago, doesn’t it?

Kate B. Chernis: In another, other life, I was a rock and roll DJ, John.

John Jantsch: Well, I had a little hint, because I think I was looking up your Skype handle, and it had music in it. I had a little hint, there.

Kate B. Chernis: Ah. Outlandos, right? Because I’m a huge Andy Summers fan, so this tells you how old I am, I’m in my mid-40s, and I’m a ginormous Police fan. Andy Summers is a great guitar player. I opted, or co-opted Outlandos for the name of my first marketing agency.

John Jantsch: Awesome. So, you ran an agency? Well, you were a rock and roll DJ, you ran an agency. Did you, like a lot of people, stumble into Lately because you needed a solution for something?

Kate B. Chernis: Yeah, exactly right. How I got from … I was actually at XM, so broadcasting to 20 million listeners a day, crazy town. How I got from radio to marketing is a little bit of a longer story, so I’ll just jump into time.

Kate B. Chernis: Here I was, with a marketing agency, and my first client was Walmart. It was an interesting collaboration, because it was Walmart with United Way Worldwide, National Disability Institute. They had AT&T involved, and Bank of America, and the IRS, and 10s of thousands of small and mediums businesses. Suddenly I was like, wow, this is a complete, giant mess. I built us this monster spreadsheet, and my boss was like, “Oh, you’ve got to show that to the team.” I had just built it, at first, for my own brain, to sort this out. The spreadsheet system that I built ended up getting us 130% ROI, year over year, for three years.

Kate B. Chernis: Lately is the automation of that. It’s the idea, to give you the ability to do what I did for Walmart, through the use of AI, for way less money and a fraction of the time.

John Jantsch: Yeah. Let’s talk about the AI part. Everybody is talking about AI, but I think everybody has a different idea of what it means, how it actually works. I mean, is it really a computer, or is it just a bunch of people in a building somewhere, that are spitting out this stuff to look like artificial intelligence? I think we’re in a transition period, where all of that’s on the table.

John Jantsch: At the risk of sounding like an ad for Lately, I do want you to explain, how does it work?

Kate B. Chernis: Yeah, for sure. You’re right, in the scope of AI, just to back up, we’re at the baby, baby, baby steps. If AI was a human, we’re not even toddlers, we’re infants, here. There is autonomous AI, which is true machine learning, and then there’s pseudo AI, which is where the machine still needs a human to move things along, which is really where we are, as a race, for the most part.

Kate B. Chernis: With Lately, the way it works is we … First of all, when you connect all of your social channels, we go ahead and we look at a year’s worth of content, and this happens instantly. We’re looking at everything you’ve published, and we’re analyzing all the words, all the keywords that resonated from your highest engaging posts, and we’re looking to replicate that model.

Kate B. Chernis: We extract short form content from long form content. Short form, in this case, being social media posts. Long form could be anything that has text. It could be a book, a newsletter, a blog, a press release. It could also be anything that we transform into text for you, like a podcast like this, or a webinar, or a video. As we’re looking at those long form content, we’re looking for similar patterns and keywords that we found already resonate with your audience. We also, then, start to learn from your analytics, and suggest additional keywords as you go forward.

Kate B. Chernis: So, there’s a coupling between the human and the AI. It’s very much a partnership where we give you the opportunity to not only curate what words we’re looking for, but then enhance the content with that magical human touch, that only you and I, and the rest of the humans have, John. So, putting that emotional component in there, so that gets you to that one plus one equals three, magical scenario.

John Jantsch: Yeah. So, the problem then is, let’s say I have a transcript of 3000 words of this podcast. The promise, then, is that the tool, the platform, can actually turn that into a bunch of tidy little social type posts, and put it in a platform that would actually allow me to schedule those posts. Is that a good summation?

Kate B. Chernis: Yeah, exactly. From this podcast, you might get 100 social posts. They’re drafts. We start you at third base, and about 60% will be ready to go. The other 40% requires a little human touch, so you might want to trash them, or you might want to be like, I just want to finagle one word here, and it’s going to be ready to rock. Then, we do give you the ability to publish those posts, across your various social platforms as well, yeah.

John Jantsch: Let’s say I’m a person that likes to read lots of blogs, and news sources, so I’ve actually aggregated them into some sort of reader. Theoretically, could the tool, then, take that feed, and produce a lot of content from other people’s content?

Kate B. Chernis: Yes. We do that automatically, so you can add an RSS feed. Every time a new blog is posted there, it automatically generates a pile of content, just waiting for you in a holding pattern. So, whenever you come back to the platform, it’s ready for your eyeballs.

John Jantsch: Okay. I’m sure there are a lot of listeners who are thinking, oh, this is great. I can just automate everything, I’ll have hundreds of posts that I can just spray everywhere. I can also see, from my standpoint, five years ago I would have thought, yeah that’s how I’m going to get all this stuff out there.

John Jantsch: I think people, because there’s a flood of content now … How do you make that type of practice useful, today? Instead of just, yeah I can schedule this stuff for two years out, and never have to think about it, there’s no real thought of engagement. It’s just, publish content. How do you stay away from that trap, of just producing stuff that nobody actually looks at?

Kate B. Chernis: Sure. Well, a couple of ways.

Kate B. Chernis: Number one, this is not just automation, it’s AI. It’s actually compelling, relevant content. We’re researching specifically what your audience is already raising its hand, saying I want to engage with this content, and analyzing that for you. It’s high quality content, and that’s the big difference. This is where everyone’s been making the mistake, in the past.

Kate B. Chernis: More is unavoidable. We all have to do more, we want more, more, more, more, we’ve already gone down this path. The only way to be good at more is to cut through the noise with quality. Doing what I did for Walmart as a human, alone, no one could possibly do what I had done 10 years ago, now. Everything is just growing, growing, growing. You need the coupling of the AI. That distinction of the quality is an important thing.

Kate B. Chernis: Lately is not a social marketing tool, Lately is a content writing tool, an AI powered content writing tool. We focus on making marketers better writers, and we help them do that at scale.

John Jantsch: Let’s use … I’m sure you’ve seen lots of ways that people have used it very effectively.

Kate B. Chernis: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

John Jantsch: Let’s talk about a couple, and I already mentioned this. As a podcaster, I produce a transcript of this show, it produces 3000 to 5000 words per show. We do publish that, in a lot of ways, for SEO purposes. But, I could certainly see a tool like yours being able to turn around the quality bits of that, in a way that would actually help a podcaster attract more listeners. Now I’m putting words in your mouth. How would you see a podcaster effectively using this?

Kate B. Chernis: Yeah, exactly. You got the point.

Kate B. Chernis: One of the things that it touches on, whether it’s a podcaster or any other kind of use, is that the beauty of Lately is giving you, let’s just say, 50 social posts from your podcast that are all different, still point back to the link of your podcast. This is important, because …

Kate B. Chernis: There’s that old marketing adage, about winking in the dark, right? Not marketing is like winking in the dark, get it? These days, actually, the similar equivalent is marketing once or twice, meaning publishing one Twitter post, you might as well be winking in the dark. Who the heck is reading that? Never. Really? You have to publish multiple, intense, 10 or 20 a day, to hope that I’m going to see that. What are the chances, right?

Kate B. Chernis: Similarly, if you think about marketing in radio, back to radio, we used to play the same … Not saying this is good, but this is how it was. We played the same song, 300 times in one week, with the hope that you would absorb it, and listen to it, and remember it. In marketing, that used to be seven times you would have to hear, read or see an ad for you to absorb it. These days, it’s 12 to 14 times. I have to hope that you somehow see my ad 12 to 14 times, before it’s going to sink in with you.

Kate B. Chernis: Again, the only way to do that is through quantity, but then you have to have the quality as well. If I just sent you the same 40 social posts, pointing to your podcast, I’m spamming you. We hate that. If I give you 40 different access points, what we’ve found is that not only are you able to reach new and greater audiences, because different messages about your podcast resonate with different people, but even the same people will start to share your content in a greater way, because they start getting excited about it.

Kate B. Chernis: One of the ways that we found our customers are using Lately to grow their audiences, and to get that impact, is by, literally, tagging the person you’re interviewing. If you, John, were using Lately to auto-generate content from this podcast, you’re going to get all these quotes. It’s look for the most compelling quotes of what you and I are saying, because there’s some gold in here. Then, it’s going to automatically add a short link to your podcast, on the back of it, plus a hashtag, or whatever. And, you can automatically tag me, as well.

Kate B. Chernis: Here’s the beauty, is that if you publish those 40 posts, once every week, for the next 40 weeks, the chances of me retweeting your post are super high.

John Jantsch: I want to remind you that this episode is brought to you by Klaviyo. Klaviyo helps you build meaningful customer relationships, by listening and understanding queues from your customers. This allows you to easily turn that information into valuable marketing messages. There’s powerful segmentation, email auto responders that are ready to go, great reporting. If you want to learn a bit about the secret to building customer relationships, they’ve got a really fun series called, Klaviyo’s Beyond Black Friday. It’s a docu-series, a lot of fun, quick lessons. Just head on over to Klaviyo.com/BeyondBF, Beyond Black Friday.

John Jantsch: Yeah, even if you have a smaller following, that really actually reads your Twitter posts, I think the compelling idea, here, is that you’re actually … Let’s say they catch five of them, they’re catching a story as opposed to, there’s another read my stuff.

Kate B. Chernis: Yeah, totally. We had a customer, David Allison. He wrote this amazing book called Valuegraphics, which is the death of demographics. It’s the idea of grouping people by what they value, which is brilliant.

Kate B. Chernis: He used to have a marketing team, he would pay them $3000 a month. He fired them, he purchased Lately. When he released his book on a Monday, by noon he was number one on Amazon’s Best Seller global list, and he gives Lately all the credit. That was his book, he was running the chapters through the generator.

John Jantsch: He ran the actually PDF of a document through?

Kate B. Chernis: Yeah.

John Jantsch: Yeah, that’s awesome. Awesome.

Kate B. Chernis: It’s amazing. By the way, we have customers now, who are actually optimizing their content for the generator. So, they’ve asked me, how do they write a blog so that more posts will get picked up, which is interesting. They want to game the AI, I love it.

John Jantsch: Let’s talk about another use case. I’ll give you an example.

Kate B. Chernis: Sure.

John Jantsch: This is going to be a hard one for you, but let’s say a remodeling contractor. It’s a local business, but they’re a pretty good size. They’ve got 50 employees, and do millions of dollars worth of remodels in their community. Is a tool like this something that could benefit them?

Kate B. Chernis: For a contractor? You know, I’m going to probably say no, unless they happen to be a thought leader who is producing a ton of content. If they have a website with tons of content on resources for home buyers, and the content is long form, so blogs, videos, podcasts, then they’re going to be a great candidate for us. If they don’t already have pieces in mind, what we’ve found is that …

Kate B. Chernis: It’s so interesting, John. People hate writing, marketers hate writing, which is also kind of interesting. They just don’t want to do it. There’s this strange thing, where they want to do nothing so bad, they just want to be able to push a button and be done with it, but marketing cannot ever work that way. Marketing only works when there’s an emotional connection tied to it. You like me, you buy my things, that’s the end of it. There’s some kind of liking happening, or sympathy, empathy.

Kate B. Chernis: It’s funny, because people buy QuickBooks, for example. You sit down, and you have to do some work to get QuickBooks to work for you. But, with marketing, people are like, well why can’t I just push the button and have it done? You’re like, no. There is a reason people have a degree in this.

Kate B. Chernis: That’s the way we’ve learned to filter out our customers, by the ones who understand. They have a team in place, they’ve already educated themselves to the fact that the work is part of the deal.

John Jantsch: Let’s talk about the platforms, then. Have you found that … We already mentioned Twitter, I’m going to go with Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, maybe even YouTube. You can throw anything else in there you want to, Pinterest maybe. Have you found that your tool does particularly …

John Jantsch: Well, let me ask this two ways. Do you find that your tool, the AI, does particularly well on certain platforms? Or, do you just merely find that you need to personalize for the platform?

Kate B. Chernis: Yeah. The AI will work on any platform, because the learning capabilities are the same across the board, and they’re applicable no matter where it is. It’s learning for that specific audience, of that platform.

Kate B. Chernis: But, there certainly are tweaks. You can have it create content for the different platforms, or you can say, I want to clone this thing that I made for Pinterest on LinkedIn, and that kind of thing. You have a lot of options, where the AI is letting go at that point. That’s where the human is coming in, and making those decisions.

Kate B. Chernis: For sure, LinkedIn is having a moment with the world right now. If you’re not actively doing social organic on LinkedIn, you are missing out. I can’t even believe it. This is how we got Gary V. to be our customer. Thank you, Jesus, that was a super awesome day. We’re actively pushing our customers to really enhance their LinkedIn, and to promote and publish more there.

Kate B. Chernis: Then, it’s interesting because … I heard somebody say, “Oh, Twitter is dead.” It is not dead. It’s just as mighty as before, it’s just different. Really, the SEO capability of Twitter, I feel, is as powerful as ever. It’s a little bit different in Instagram Facebook land, because that’s so image driven, and that’s not where our forte is. You can add images to Lately, for sure, but we’re focused on the writing.

Kate B. Chernis: Yeah. We’re definitely watching this across, we have data across all of our customers. We’re watching to see, even across the industries of our customers, whose having greater uptick against which channels. There is some ebb and flow, and again it relates to either photos, specifically, or like I said, just trends, like LinkedIn being a great place for organic.

Kate B. Chernis: You know, John, the other thing I should say is, one of the requests we used to get all the time, and we don’t so much anymore, is when are you going to integrate with paid advertising? Of course, organic and paid is connected. We just stuck a stake in the sand, and we stopped doing our own paid ads. We do 100% organic, all dog fooding our own product. Dog fooding, for those who don’t know, means when you use your own thing to do your own thing. We decided to put our money where our mouth is, so to speak. We’ve seen an incredible uptick in our own sales leads, and ability to generate sales.

Kate B. Chernis: We have a 50% conversion from trial to sale. The reason we do is because, by the time we pitch our leads, they’re already warm, because we only pitch leads who like, comment, and share our social. We use the social to get those people, because we’re able to do it at scale. I’m just a little company.

John Jantsch: Yeah. Let me ask you one more thing, about, say, a larger organization. Are they able to segment? In other words, they may have different product groups, or different service offerings, or different target markets all together. Have you been able to effectively allow them to meet all those objectives?

Kate B. Chernis: Yeah. One of our favorite features is called campaign tags, and it allows you to tag all of your content any way you like. This comes from my spreadsheet days.

Kate B. Chernis: Secretly, on the outside I’m a rock and roller, but on the inside I’m an organized nerd. I think that Martha Stewart and Marie Kondo are the end all, be all. I’ve been doing my underwear drawers for years, long before Marie came along. So, organizing is really big for us, and we found that it was our second most used feature, was this ability to literally tag your content and organize it.

Kate B. Chernis: So, for example, say you wanted to see all of your social posts pertaining to your Easter blog campaign, you can literally click a button, and it does that for you. It’ll even, actually, roll up every piece of content by campaign, so you can see all the social post links, images, videos, whatever you want, that went along with Volvo’s end of the year sale, for example.

John Jantsch: Awesome. So, Kate, tell people where they can find out more about Try Lately? I know that you have a trial period, I think, that they can actually kick the tires a little?

Kate B. Chernis: Yeah. We actually just 86d that in the new year, sorry. Anybody can always ask me for a favor, and I’ll probably say yes.

Kate B. Chernis: It’s www.TryLately.com. The best part, John, is on Tuesdays, at 2PM Eastern, we do a free webinar. It is super duper fun, it’s open to public, where we go over some of our top features. There’s an open Zoom channel, so there’s lots of chat, there’s lots of marketing advice. Then, once a month, actually, I get on and I do a writing class, showing people exactly how to get that 70% increased engagement, by adding a little human touch to their Lately AI. It’s super fun, so I hope everyone will come.

John Jantsch: Awesome. We’ll have, obviously, links in the show notes.

John Jantsch: Kate, thanks for stopping by. I know it took us a while to get this one on the books, but I appreciate it. Hopefully, we’ll run into you next time I’m up in the Hudson Valley.

Kate B. Chernis: John, you’re cool as heck. Thank you so much, rock and roll.