Your Digital Marketing Coach with Neal Schaffer

Redefining Social Media Content Measurement and Strategy [James Creech Interview]

• Neal Schaffer • Episode 212

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You've probably heard the term "data-driven content strategy," but what does that mean exactly? And how can it be applied to our social media content?

Enter James Creech, Co-Founder & CEO of Measure Studio, whose motto is "It's a pleasure to measure." In our interview we uncover a lot of great tips vis a vis how to properly measure social media content and what insights for our social media strategy we can find from doing so.

Some of the things we talked about in this episode include:

  • Finding an effective social content strategy is hard. It's a blend of art and science that requires constant experimentation and refinement. To do so effectively, you need strong tools at your disposal that go beyond the limited analytics available natively from social platforms.
  • The first 24 - 72 hours are critical for assessing content performance. You want to establish a strong early trajectory for your content to rank highly in search and boost organic discovery.
  • Benchmarking content performance allows you to understand what's working and what's not working, so you can focus on making incremental improvements over time. This is particularly valuable given how often social platforms' algorithms change.

Key Highlights

[1:15] Introduction of podcast guest, James Creech

[3:50] How James Got Involved with Influencer Marketing

[6:20] What James' Business Offers
How does Measure Studio differ from other content measurement tools?

[9:22] Measure Studio's Price Point

[15:30] How to Create Brand Impact
When creating a content strategy you need to think of the elements. Ask yourself,  who is your ideal customer? Where do you want to reach them?

[19:31]Benchmark Number of Hours Per Platform

[21:49] Important Metrics to Benchmark

[25:25] Where Measure Studio Focuses On

[29:56] James' Role in Biden Harrison Campaign

[31:57] James' Final Advice to the Listeners

[32:21] Ways to Be More Effective With Your Social Media Content

Notable Quotes:

  • Influencers are people, as much as they have distribution. They are also creative that storytellers have this really meaningful connection with their fans. And the only way to truly do that effectively is to organically get a tap into that authenticity in that audience.
  • We want creatives to be able to express themselves. We want brand marketers to be able to communicate the awesome things that they're doing and what their product stands for. But in order to do that, you have to understand how it lands with your audience who enable the best forms of creativity.
  • It doesn't mean you need to be on every social platform, you need to pick and choose which are the most important, then from there, understand the native content experience, the audience,  an experience that is unique to each platform.

James Creech Links

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Neal Schaffer:

Are you satisfied with your social media content strategy? Do you understand what you should be publishing when, and why certain content and not other content is tending to perform better? If you've ever had questions about your social media content strategy, its performance and social media, and what you can learn from to implement for your future content. You'll want to listen in to this week's episode of The maximize your social influence podcast. Welcome to the maximize your social influence podcast with Neal Schaffer, where I help marketers, entrepreneurs and business owners grow their businesses using innovative marketing techniques, leveraging the concept of digital influence throughout digital and social media. Hey, everybody, Neal Schaffer here. Welcome to episode number two, one to 212 of the maximize your social influence podcast. Today, we're going to be talking all about social media content, we are seeing a new generation of technology today I'm actually talking with James Creech, who is the co founder and CEO of measure studio. Interestingly enough, James is someone that I got to know because I was on his podcast, because he has another company called Paladin software that does influencer marketing campaigns for YouTube Twitch and what have you. So it was really influencer marketing, where we started. And then he let me know that he co founded a new company, one of these serial entrepreneurs. So this is someone with a background in influencer marketing measurement that is now applying that to How can any business measure their performance of their content and social media and what they can learn from it. So I think that this episode is really going to help educate you on how the algorithms work, how you should be redefining your social media measurement. And most importantly, what can you do to improve upon your contents performance and social media so that at the end of the day, you can maximize your social influence, whether it's from your brand's perspective, or from a personal perspective. Interestingly enough, James's company measure studio also worked with the Biden Harris campaign, on their social strategy during the 2020 election cycle. So we're gonna get into that at the very end, you'll want to stay tuned for, you know, what they saw during that campaign and the impact that social media content can have. But anyway, without further ado, let's get into the interview with James Creech of measure studio. Hey, everybody, welcome to another episode of The maximize your social influence podcast. Today, I have someone for those of you that know there is a really, really long waiting list to get out of this podcast. Because I only do interviews every other episode, meaning I only interviewed 26 people per year. So my guest today James was really nice to have me on his podcast, many moons ago, when I was launching the age of influence. He was one of the people I reached out to, and he was in the business of influencer marketing had his own platform Paladin. And it's like, hey, Neil, I'd love to be on your show. Awesome. We'll talk influencer marketing. So finally his turn in the queue came up. I reached out to him. And he's doing something completely different. Well, okay. Not completely different, which is cool. But he has a new. Well, I guess maybe I'll let him tell you what it is. But he's going to be launching a new venture soon. James welcome. James Creech. First, why don't we start with the old business that obviously you're still the CEO and founder of which is prominent. Tell me a little bit about what pilot it is and how you got involved with influencer marketing to begin with?

James Creech:

Yeah, of course. And Neil, thanks again for having me on. Great to see you again. We got to always leave them wanting more. So it's not not a worry that we have to wait this long. It's great to see you again and have a chance to chat more in depth. But yeah, to give you some background, my business partners and I launched Paladin over five years ago, we had all come from working at early influencer marketing agencies and encountered a number of problems firsthand right from how do you find the right influencers to work with to managing those relationships, run campaigns, you know, it's all spreadsheets and screenshots back in the day. And so we started experimenting, building some tools initially just for ourselves to make life easier, and then woke up and realized, hey, clearly we're not the only ones banging our heads against this wall. Let's solve this problem for this rapidly growing industry. So watch Paladin, we focus on YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, twitch and tick tock so helping influencer agencies, media companies, creator networks and talent managers run better, more informed influencer campaigns. And then about two years ago, my business partner and I started seeing this opportunity to help people who were creating content for social media really understand what posts were doing well and what can be improved. Right. A lot of that was Kind of guesswork, right? Like finding a really successful content strategy is very difficult. And we wanted to take some of that guesswork out of the equation. So we're now launching measure studio, which is our new venture all fully focused on social media analytics.

Neal Schaffer:

Awesome. So James, let's, let's take a step back with Paladin. Yes, you I take it we're an influencer marketing agency that built your own tool. And then at some point, it's like, let's open this tool out to the world. Is that sort of the progression?

James Creech:

Somewhat? Yeah, so I was working at an agency. And then we had the idea. And we said, okay, we're gonna leave the agency business and just build a software solution. So we don't, you know, provide services, we don't run campaigns primarily because we didn't want there to be a conflict of interest. But we draw on that experience, that expertise to inform the software that we build, and we cater specifically to the agency market. So there's a lot of other platforms out there that help brands or help their media agency partners with campaigns, our unique differentiator, a paladin is we understand the agency use case, right? The tools that are needed are different, right? Everything is white labeled, it's a private environment. So you can present the information to a brand and a custom white label dashboard. But we are we're just the software provider.

Neal Schaffer:

So would you say your dashboard is a way to help brands, excuse the agencies measure and report back to brands rather than being like an influencer marketplace or an influencer database? Is that the right way?

James Creech:

100%. Right, we're not a marketplace. So we don't do the matchmaking, we're not taking a percentage of spend, you know, we're not the agency model. So we're not providing services or taking budgets that way, we are simply providing basically an enterprise software product agencies license or tools in order to save time and help them scale their business run more effective campaigns. And a big part of that is discovery, certainly finding the right influencers. And the other big piece of it is just streamlining the campaign reporting aspect, because typically, you know, that tends to be building these nice presentations, these decks, which are very involved, we can automate all of that we pipe in all the data via API, and then serve it up in a really nice format for them and for their brand clients or review.

Neal Schaffer:

So James, really interesting, I know, we're gonna move on to the social media measurement piece. But when I wrote the age of influence, and I've started to see it evolve more and more, where brands are saying, you know, what, we have enough customers, we have enough fans, we're going to build our own influencer network. But how do we manage and measure and build those reports? So I think that there's, I'm assuming you've also seen a new need in the market, not just serving agencies, but serving brands directly correct. As they bypass agencies for their influence, marketing,

James Creech:

100%, right brands are beginning to realize that their customers can be their best ambassadors. And sometimes some of those customers are already influential, right. So they want to build these programs, these tight knit communities where they'll give early access to these influential voices, new product announcements, you know, early releases of product before it goes live as a way to make these ambassadors feel very close to the brand, and also to amplify their message through their distribution channel to their audience of really trusted fans. So that has become a really successful strategy. I think the pendulum is swinging away from the one off activation and trying to use you know, the old marketplace model was, hey, let's disintermediate some of these people to do the matchmaking. And we'll really just focus on delivering views engagement, think of it as a programmatic ad buy. And I think what people have started to realize is that influencers are people right, as much as they have distribution. They are also the creative that the storytellers they have this really meaningful connection with their fans. And the only way to truly do that effectively, is to organically get a tap into that that authenticity in that audience. And so it's leading to longer term engagements. And it's leading to brands realizing influencer isn't just part of the strategy. It underpins the whole rest of your your marketing programs. Amen. Brother.

Neal Schaffer:

I mean, you've seen me people don't see the video, but I've been nodding my head like 100 shots, you're saying that? Yeah. And it's funny because often, these people are better storytellers about your brand than you are. It's like anyone that's ever traveled out of the country, you learn more about yourself and you live in a foreign country and or what it means to be an American if you're an American and go overseas. So very, very similar. I couldn't agree with you more. I think that's awesome. And I think there's a huge need just one last question before we go to the social media measurement piece. How I assume since you are geared towards agencies, it's more of like an enterprise business model. If there's small businesses that want to do this in a smaller scale, what is sort of the minimum price point for your tool?

James Creech:

Yeah, you know, we try and make the pricing be accessible for people, right? We want it to have a clear ROI. So you know, at the end of the day, our software needs to save you time help you win more business, like there needs to be a very clear value in exchange for the license fee you pay. And so what we've done is we've essentially gear to towards which of the products are you using right you can have an ala carte offering or I just need the discovery piece. I'm gonna start small build that flywheel and then over time, you know, build, get the CRM aspect and then maybe add on the campaign management reporting aspect. So the pricing really varies. But you know, we love working with entrepreneurs. We love working with small businesses, and sometimes we can get creative with those model. To say, Hey, you know, you may just need one element to start. And so we can work with your smaller budget all the way up to bigger enterprises that are saying, Hey, give me the full suite. Because, you know, we're running big influencer activations on a regular basis, and we need, you know, a robust system that can handle that.

Neal Schaffer:

Okay, so yeah, and I don't want to put you on the spot either like, like, Hey, I didn't promise that price. So those of you interested in Paladin, we'll put links in the show notes, and reach out to James grage. And say, you heard it on the podcast, and he'll work a deal with you. But I think that there's there's incredible demand for just for that reporting piece. As well as the influencer management CRM piece like really built for influencer marketing, which regular CRM is not you had reached out to me because I have this blog post the influencer marketing tools that like 64 different ones, right. And I couldn't figure out where to put you. But now I know where to put you. So I'm gonna make sure I update that we found

James Creech:

there are so many out there, right. And I try, you know, hundreds It feels like every day I find out about a new one. And there's so many models, right? Like you said, there's the marketplaces, there's the pure play software providers like us, some of which, on the on demand side, we cater more to the supply side. They're the tech enabled agencies, right, that the space is constantly growing and evolving. And that's what's so exciting about it. But yeah,

Neal Schaffer:

I think that reporting is for brands that want to do it themselves. They don't even need to discovery, they need the reporting, and maybe the CRM management that there is a real meeting tomorrow, I've had people come up to me and asked me what I recommend, and I didn't really have an answer up until now. So yeah, now I have an answer. So that's good to know. All right. Yeah, there we go. So what made you move on from Paladin and you're still doing pilot and obviously, but your new company, which your co founder and CEO measure studio, all about social media measurement, did some how your work with politan influencers? Why did some influencer content perform better than others? How can brands leverage that for their own content? Which user generated content should they utilize? Well, I'm assuming there was some sort of connection there between now

James Creech:

Oh, yeah. Right. So part of it was just, you know, I've been working in this field for over a decade. And we've been building tools with Paladin for influencer marketing software for five years. But we kept hearing, there are these other problems out in the market that aren't being addressed? And I think one of the things that really caught my attention early on was this growth of digital publishers and the US we think of companies like group nine media, you know, the young turks, donut media, some of these brands that are saying, Hey, we're going to have our brand, be the influencer, we're going to build an identity around this social content, and attract a loyal, engaged audience online. So I was really fascinated by this movement. And it's, it's repeated in other parts of the world, right? You have like hotmail and Singapore, you've got lad Bible in the UK, right? And countless examples of this digital publisher phenomenon. And then, simultaneously, it was hearing from our platform partners, we would go to these enterprise summits from YouTube, or we talked to our Facebook Rep. And they would say, Have you looked at individual creator tools? Or what's going on in the digital publisher market that just aren't really effective solutions for that? And that was like, okay, that's interesting. I want to, you know, pull up that thread a little bit more. And particularly within Paladin, we're constantly looking at, you know, what are the ways that we expand our market? Certainly, we started with influencer agencies, creator networks, talent managers. But like you said, Neil, we're spending a lot of time now with brands that are trying to build their own influencer programs and want to manage that in house and say, Hey, you know, I need to figure out an ambassador strategy for long term engagement, right? We saw the rise of Esports teams, and we said, you know, hey, these guys are representing talent and need help understanding how to do that effectively. So there were all these new kind of growth segments that we wanted to develop. And so one of those was this digital publisher segment. And so we just spent about 12 months, talking to as many people as we can, and trying to listen, right saying, What are you using today? What are the challenges that you face? And the two answers that we kept getting back, were either on the one hand, I'm doing everything manually. So I rely on Native platform analytics, which range from extremely robust and effective, like YouTube analytics to, you know, pretty limited when we think about something like Instagram analytics, or I built a custom solution with my own data warehouse, and I'm doing the plumbing and piping everything together, I might use a visualization suite like DME or tableau, which are amazing tools. They're infinitely configurable and incredibly powerful. The problem is, they just tend to be very expensive and hard to implement. So we said, there's clearly a market here on the low end, people are tired of doing the manual work on the high end, people are frustrated with the cost and the ongoing maintenance and expense. And then there's this whole segment in between, we want to solve that problem. So that's what caused us to start pulling out that thread.

Neal Schaffer:

Gotcha. Okay, that makes sense. So you talk about those digital publishers, it's really interesting, because any brand could have become an influencer. They they just let influencers take over the market. So on the other hand, I have another podcast that I do with my co host, Amanda Russell called the School of influence, we had the opportunity to interview the CMO of Lamborghini recently, and that is truly a brand where the brand is the influence or the car is they don't hire influences. Everyone went around the car, but very few of us are in that situation. I'm curious and I think we'll we'll start to go into this some of the things that you wanted to talk about today, I guess, first of all, when you're talking about these digital publishers, they're aiming for brand impact. Once. And that brand influence will be in, obviously in social media. So we're not talking about like for the website, we're talking about social content. So how do you as the creator of this tool and all the brands, you've worked with this notion of an effective social content strategy, it's what brands, social media is not new by any means. But as you know, brands still struggle with this right? What is your advice for finding that, you know, the blend of art and science? And I'm sure I'm assuming your tool will help solve some of these problems. But what is your advice for people listening on, on how to create that?

James Creech:

There's so much to dig into, we could probably spend the whole podcast talking about just this element. But to summarize, where do you start? The first thing is to understand where does your audience already spend time, right? Who is your ideal customer? Where do you want to reach them? Because there's so many social platforms, and we're kind of in the midst of this great platform on bundling anyway, so we're not just focus on three core platforms anymore, we live much more in a world that's dominated by YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, you have to think about Snapchat and Tiktok. And right all these emerging shore from video to live streaming to audio formats, like club house. So you know, you have to really be conscientious about who is my audience? And where are they spending time. And that doesn't mean you need to be on every social platform, you need to kind of pick and choose which are the most important, then from there, you need to understand the native content experience, the audience, you know, experience that is unique to each platform, this type of content you use on Reddit isn't going to work on clubhouse isn't going to work on Twitter. So you have to be very purposeful about your approach. And then you need to think about Okay, how much of this are we creating ourselves? How much of it is coming from our customers, UGC? Right? How much of it? Should we leverage influencers? I think one of the best ways to start is using effective collaboration. That's why influencer marketing is so successful. The truly successful influencer campaigns are when a brand and an influencer come together to do something so unique that neither one could have achieved it on their own. The brand is bringing much more than just money to the equation. They're part of the communication, the strategy, the messaging, the influencer has a great idea. But it's only possible and empowered because of the resources that the brand can bring debater and the creative kind of synergy that comes from the two. So take that idea of collaboration, which is so native to the social platforms, we've seen influencer collabs. For years, we're both podcast hosts. And I think we touch on similar audiences. So there's, you know, just a natural opportunity to kind of share insights and learnings from our collective experience to you know, different audiences. So think about ways that you can leverage that experience and build on successful collaborations to magnify the impact.

Neal Schaffer:

So outside of that, though, obviously, you built measure studio, because you feel that if you want to publish content, then you're going to get some data from your analytics. But that data is not enough. So what is the secret sauce that measure studio has that allows you to better measure that I

James Creech:

guess really is, is one of the $64 million questions that comes from this conversation, for sure. And then you get into the the fun weeds, right? We get to geek out about all the stuff that we as data nerds really love. So you know, one of the first things that we heard from our early beta, especially with some of our Hallmark customers, like group nine media, they were spending a lot of time capturing hourly performance data for new content within the first 24 or 4872 hours. And why is that important? Well, the early growth trajectory of a piece of content signals, number one, how your audience is receiving it, and so that immediate, quick feedback can allow you to optimize it say, hey, this content is is really doing well, how do we ensure that it continues, you know, at this pace, it might signal Hey, something about this just isn't working? Can we tweak something about it, like adjust the metadata, maybe take a video down and republish it with a new thumbnail, or, you know, put some paid media behind it to really amplify it out of the gate. It's also critical because that first 72 hour window is really when the algorithms start to rank your content. So if you want to boost your performance in search, if you want to promote more organic discovery and get put on the Discover pages, or the watch pages from these various social platforms, you need to do well, early on. And so that was something we incorporated into the product.

Neal Schaffer:

So James, let me ask you, every social network algorithm has a different timespan in terms of that first, is it like the first five minutes the first 60 minutes? I'm curious if because the the audience listening are very proficient social media marketers, what you know, do you have like an estimated number of hours per platform that you internally benchmark.

James Creech:

So we benchmark the first 72 hours, we get hourly data for each platform, right? So that's pretty unique because YouTube had for a while they were experimenting with a 48 hour on a rolling basis. And now they've just released last month 24 hour as a as a new kind of time series in YouTube Analytics, which is great, right? And I think more platforms will start to embrace this and give you that more granular data. But every every platform is different to your point. I anecdotally I can tell you that on Instagram, the first 24 hours seems to be that period. And part of that is because they emphasize stories contents of the ephemeral foot posts much more than they do in feed content. Obviously, they're boosting reels really heavily right now, as they lean into short from video and try and compete with tik tok YouTube shorts, you know, Snapchat spotlight etc. But 24 hours is critical on Instagram. The same is really true for probably a tick tock and a Snapchat, YouTube tends to emphasize a little bit of a longer horizon. And so just facebook, facebook, and YouTube will probably look at more of a 48 hour to 72 hour time horizon. There's also evidence to suggest that on YouTube specifically, it's not just an isolated video, single videos performance. But actually, videos uploaded before this recent piece of content can impact the performance of future uploads. So if if you have videos that are consistently doing well, that will help kind of build that flywheel effect. Whereas if you have a miss, you know that upload can actually penalize your performance in the algorithm for future videos.

Neal Schaffer:

Right? Okay, that makes sense. I want to give a shout out that Jason Duncan, one of my friends here, and in Orange County, Miller farm media, he's been a contributor to my blog on YouTube and video marketing, as well as someone that I've interviewed in this podcast, and he was the one that first said, Hey, YouTube, first 24 hours, just make sure you you just focus on getting as many views as possible. So understand that it could be 24, it could be 40 to 72 hours, but the strength of your tool and your recommendation is if you can focus on the first 72 hours and how well or not well the contents doing. If it's doing well, that's awesome. You can repeat that. Obviously, if it's not doing well, you need to figure it out, because it actually may be negatively impacting the algorithm. And so so is that really like the core focus of your tool then is with every let's something you posted like a month ago on Twitter, forget about that. You only wanna look at that for 72 hours and how it did and what we can learn from that for future content.

James Creech:

Yeah, that was probably the first killer feature that we identified is we have to understand this early performance. That's number one. The second piece is automated benchmarking, how do I understand how this video did against that video, this story against that story, because oftentimes, it's a pile of numbers, especially if it's just across multiple platforms. So we wanted to give you a better apples to apples comparisons of similar assets, even across different platforms, and then show you in a very clear visual sense, almost so basic to the point that in our interface, that's, you know, green is good, and red is bad, there's a little border around pieces of content that are outperforming your median value by, you know, at least 20% or more. And similarly, if there's something that's underperforming your average range, we'll call that out to you. And then you can filter by that you can say, Show me the stuff that's really doing well, what's outperforming my standard index? And how can I start to understand why that is, is something about the content format, the release strategy, the metadata, how do I lean into that and create more content like that? So you're incrementally improving every time? And conversely, what's not working, which is clearly isn't resonating with the audience? How do we move away from that strategy and focus on what's working?

Neal Schaffer:

So you're looking at impressions, views, comments, I mean, anything that age measurable, and then creating a benchmark average has that average per content, medium per social network, or just for everything?

James Creech:

So we're benchmarking every single metric. So everything you touched on views, impressions, reach, revenue, CPM, right fill rate, like you name it, we've we've got it, we've benchmarked it, everything we can pull on the API we do. And then yes, we're actually there local benchmarks. So they're done at the individual account type per platform. So today, if I'm, you know, posting on my Instagram, I can understand how did this story do against all of my historical Instagram story content? You know, how did this YouTube video do against these other YouTube videos with a goal of ultimately working more towards global benchmarks where you can say, How am I doing, you know, if I'm trying to reach males 18 to 34, and are interested in sports or this is sports related content? You know, you're in the 98th percentile, something like that,

Neal Schaffer:

do you so it's funny a James because back many moons ago, I was also developing my own little social media analytical tool, which never made it to the public. But one of the things that I was putting in that tool that I do with my customers, as part of my consulting is an audit. How are you doing compared to your competitors? Who are your role models? Let's take a look at their engagement rates, etc, etc? Do you have that built into your tool as well?

James Creech:

Not yet, but it's probably the number one feature we keep getting asked for is those kind of competitor analyses. One of the reasons we hadn't built it in the MVP, or kind of the version one for launch was number one measure studio, you know, operates in great depth of your owns and operated data. So you know, we wouldn't have the same level of data available for your competitor accounts, we can do the surface level stuff. So you know, here's your follower count comparison, here's how often you publish versus them, you know, here are the top performing posts and what we can learn about them. So I suspect we'll ship that soon. The other reason we hadn't built it is we're really trying to differentiate from social listening tools and social publishing tools, of which there are a lot of really good solutions out there. And one of the key features you know people tend to go to them for is that competitive intelligence or benchmarking, but knowing how important that is? I think it'll find its way into measure studio in the near future.

Neal Schaffer:

So your focus now is gonna ask you, like, Who's your competition, your focus is really on social content, analytics. And so if I'm a user of your tool, and I'm reporting back to my client, or I'm reporting back to my boss, I'm showing them how we're improving every metric about our content with every iteration is an ideal scenario, correct? That's right.

James Creech:

Yeah. Right. And people hear, okay, social media analytics, or business intelligence, you know, data insights for social media. And you can probably list you know, 100 companies that do that, but the way we thought about it, and what we tried to be so purpose built, you know, in our intention from the very getgo was, you know, a lot of these tools are social listening, they are social publishing. And so analytics tends to be a bit of an afterthought, where, you know, they'll pipe in some data, and they'll give you some charts here and there. But we really wanted to go in that we wanted that to be the true focus the product and the real unique differentiator. And so we don't ask for write permissions at all, we're only asking for read only data access, which on the one hand, helps from a security standpoint, but to is, you know, really, it speaks to the focus of the application is, we are just trying to help you understand your content performance. And you know, I do suspect that we'll, we'll add more things about, you know, the the competitor audits and analyses in the future. But for now, we really just want to go in depth on showing you what's resonating with what the folks that you're you're publishing to

Neal Schaffer:

Yeah, I'm sort of getting goosebumps because you've you've really hit I mean with with Paladin as well, the reporting and the CRM, but with measure studio, you've hit upon this great need. So I've always talked about how I hate the analytics that most social media dashboards have, because they're just showing you what they have, like, the average retweets per tweet, what does that get me? I mean, for instance, so

James Creech:

many packaging what's already available to you in Twitter? Exactly,

Neal Schaffer:

exactly. And I've always been in a battle to Okay, you have all this data, why don't you give me some actionable advice, which that's not I mean, that's not the focus of their tool, right? Then you get these these tools that are quote, unquote, social media analytics. And because they specialize in showing you the data, they give you a little bit of like, ways to customize it and print out beautiful reports and things and yeah, maybe they integrate with and you can create a custom dashboard like with Google Data Studio, yep. But they're not giving you the insight. I really love, love, love the fact that because that's what marketers need, they need a little bit. And that's where you can use and I'm sure use, like machine learning and AI to help. That's, that's where they need that help. It's like, Hey, have you noticed this? Have you noticed that based on all this data, so I think the direction of your tool is bang on? And, and hopefully that resonates with what you've been doing as well?

James Creech:

Yeah. Now we, you know, we give you the customizable dashboards, we want you to have all that fun stuff, too. But at the end of the day, you need something that goes far and above beyond, you know, what is available, and Instagram analytics and Twitter analytics and snapchat analytics. So for instance, on Instagram, there's nothing on a time series. If you log in to Instagram analytics right now. It'll show you here's the lifetime performance for this piece of content. But it's like, Okay, well, now, how do I analyze that against all my other posts? Like, sure I know what my best piece of content was. But I don't know why. And I don't know, you know, how it did in that early window, or how to compare it against this other piece of content? I don't know, for instance, when people are dropping off in my stories, that's one of the questions we tried to answer, we, you know, allow you to do a comparison and say, Hey, if you publish eight, you know, photos or video clips in a single story in a 24 hour period, people are tuning out in story five or six. And here's why. Right? You're losing their attention. Or Same thing with YouTube, people are always trying to kind of figure out when does my content get demonetised? Or why is the CPM of this video so much lower than this other video? Well, there's something about this piece of content that's just deemed more advertiser friendly by the algorithm. And now you can start to identify those patterns and reverse engineer it so that when you go back to create your next video, you're thinking about that proactively, you're building, you're taking that the insight and applying that into the content creation strategy.

Neal Schaffer:

Yeah, James, that is awesome. And while you're talking, I figured out a tagline for measure studio, look at it. It's the Google Analytics for your social media content. That is it that doesn't exist for your website content, we can go to Google Analytics, and there's other platforms, but we can figure out a way, you know, build conversion, what have you. But on social media, it's it's, it's all over the place. And it's limited. And there's not much insight. So for sure, yeah, that's awesome. So we're getting near the end. And I'll ask you, like where people can go to find out more about measure a studio. But you in, you know, talking about this episode, you also wanted to talk about how you worked with the Biden Harrison campaign on their social strategy, and what you learned about that? So I'm very curious, not that this episode is about or my podcast is not about social media for politics, per se. Sure, but obviously, some politicians have been very good. And some have been very bad about leveraging social media. I'm really curious as to what role measures Do you had in the success or maybe the shaping of that content?

James Creech:

Yeah, absolutely. Well, it's no secret that we live in an era by social media so whether you're an athlete, a celebrity, a politician, you have to have a presence there. Now it's a, it's an incredible way for a politician to connect with their constituents. And it played more of a role than ever in this recent political cycle, largely in part to did the Coronavirus. The global pandemic has limited the number of in person events and the the typical door knocking and other campaign tactics. So so much of this campaign had to be conducted through digital means. And the Biden campaign was very progressive and very forward thinking in their approach to leveraging new platforms, whether that was, you know, twitch and using live streaming or working with influencers or, you know, going on fortnight and finding ways to reach new and younger audiences, it was exciting for us to get to work with them on their social strategy and help them understand what contents working and how do we improve, you know, your message so that you can communicate that you can, you know, get get the the key components of your platform out, but also drive voter turnout and all the other kind of key components of this election. So there was an incredible opportunity to learn from them about what is important, from a political campaign standpoint, how do we reflect that in the tool, and then, you know, they're making split second decisions to keep up with the new cycle and, you know, really rapidly moving pace of this campaign. So they needed a tool that can be really responsive. And that, you know, that was a big part of our strategy and making measures to do instantly benchmarking the constant performance and helping them have that, that information at their fingertips that they can make those quick decisions.

Neal Schaffer:

I can see so many use case scenarios just based on what you're talking about there with a political campaign, a launch of a new product, crisis management, just so many were day to day, your messaging, if you want to be more effective with it, you might want to tweak it. And you obviously provide the data and the insight to allow them to do that effectively. So that's really cool.

James Creech:

Yeah, thank you. It was honestly, it was probably like the coolest thing I've had a chance to work on in my career. And we were a very small part of a much bigger initiative. But it was amazing to be just to be a part of that and to see the success that they achieved for sure.

Neal Schaffer:

So James, just final advice for the listener, they want to be more effective with their social media content, I'm going to assume that your advice based on everything you're talking about is obviously you don't know until you publish. But look at your data, let the data drive you. Obviously measure studio is going to give you a better look at your data, but nevertheless, really have a completely data driven content strategy. I mean, anything else you want to add to that?

James Creech:

Yeah, it's the scientific method at work. I mean, yeah, we want creatives to be able to express themselves. We want brand marketers to be able to communicate the awesome things that they're doing and what their product stands for. But in order to do that, you have to understand how it lands with your audience who enable the best forms of creativity, you need to blend the art and the science and that's where measure studio comes in. So you know, benchmark everything, have a hypothesis, but then iterate, learn, you know, and continue to experiment to identify what really is making a difference in what matters with the type of content we produce.

Neal Schaffer:

Awesome. So measure studio, is it currently in beta? Is it out for public use? Is it like it's out there, it's out in the world this model so anybody can sign up. And

James Creech:

that's right, you can go to measure dot studio and take it for a test spin anyone can sign up for a free two week trial, no credit card required. So dive in, play round, see what you think we'd love to hear your feedback. We have a number of early customers, group nine media IGN, you know, we were working with FaZe clan and some other eSports teams. So it's, it's already out there in the world, we would love to hear from more people. Also, the pricing is really accessible, it starts at a really affordable price point at $15 a month for an individual creator. There's a business plan for $100. There's you know, more of another kind of business plan that's $500 a month and then the enterprise tears scale for those in larger organizations. We wanted it to be a really effective but also accessible tool for everybody.

Neal Schaffer:

Very cool. And I'll put that in the in in the show notes measure not studio also, you did write a case study of the Joe Biden campaign so measured out students, that's Joe Biden for president case study with hyphens in between those words, that'll be in the show notes, you don't need to take notes right now. So this has been really, really awesome. Thank you so much, James, for coming on and sharing your wisdom and, and just all the best of luck with measure studio.

James Creech:

Thanks, Neil. Such a pleasure to be here and great to catch up and share more about what we're up to.

Neal Schaffer:

Well, there you have it, you know, in a similar way, I was talking on my digital first group coaching membership community, we have weekly calls. And I was talking about keyword research because someone one of our members wanted to start a blog, they didn't know where to start, I go look at the keyword research. You've heard me talk about it here on this podcast. In fact, very recently, Episode Number 209. I basically give you my process for how to strategically create your library of content one year, this is the library of content 52 blog posts, based on keyword research. And the idea is that the keyword research gives you a direction to go. The compass is pointing north, you want to go north, right? You want to blog about these keywords, how you blog about them, is going to be completely based on your company or your own unique perspective, your objective, the unique value that you Add unique experiences, you know, whatever it is. And I'd say the same thing for social media because a lot of companies don't really have that strategy. And what they're measuring is very ephemeral. It's very, sort of at the very top, you have these very, very broad numbers that each of the platforms give you. But when we get into a deeper level, using a platform like measure studio to James was talking about, you really begin to get that detailed level, that gives you more confidence that, okay, I just like we're going to blog with intent with a keyword research strategy, we are going to post in social media more with intent with a social content strategy with benchmarks, knowing that with every iteration, we're going to be working towards improving our performance in the social media algorithm. So for a lot of small businesses, just being able to publish on a frequent basis and social media is not easy. But if you want to get to the next level, or if you are a larger enterprise, using a tool, or just using the thought process that James talked about, however you want a measurement is going to be critical to your success, and ultimately, to maximizing your social influence. So I hope you enjoyed that interview. As always, I like to thank all of our global listeners at first of all, I want to thank those of you that have gone out of your way to post a review on the wherever you listen to this podcast. It's been a while since we've had him on an apple podcast. So a little bit of a humble request, reviews really are important to expose this podcast to more listeners, they are part of this algorithm that we talked about on social platforms, on platforms like Apple podcast, review is a social signal. So if you had a minute, I'd really, really, really appreciate it, let me know. And if I could repay the favor, just let me know. But in addition to that, that humble request, I also wanted to thank you, I know that we have a lot of international listeners, I see it on the rankings, you know, people in countries like Portugal, and Finland, Croatia, Luxembourg, Belarus, Moldova, I want to thank you all from the bottom of my heart for listening and really helping to rank this podcast in in marketing quite high actually, in some countries. So thank you for that. And finally, if you would like help with your social media content strategy, I do have a fractional cmo service but I'm really enjoying the students or I should say the community members in my digital first group coaching membership community, it's part mastermind community, part mentorship, part group coaching, if you would like at a very, very small price to be able to get access to me on a weekly basis. And I think more importantly, access to an amazing community of doers. You'll want to check that out Neal schaffer.com, slash membership, we also have the link in the show notes. And that is it for another episode of The Maximizer social influence podcast, wherever you are in the world. Make it a great virtual although it's opening up but we're still gonna go virtual for a while. Social day. Bye bye everybody and SEO nada.