This issue of Social Signals was written to Ginger Rootâs âShinbangumi.â
Hope the start of autumn is treating yâall well. Iâm not a big PSL person, but I do love the start of hoodie season. Bring it on!
Thanks for all of the great feedback on The Content Planning Issue last week. Isnât it so fun to work in an industry that is constantly evolving and needs smart communities like this one to dig in, explore whatâs new, and offer context to whatâs next? (Yes. The answer is yes).
In this issue, weâre covering signals from the real-time team behind Kamala Harrisâ overwhelming social volume (my favorite quote: âPeople get bored very easilyâ), generative AIâs impact on creativity, a new great ads library on Reddit, the opportunity to op-out of your data training LinkedIn, and a roundup of all those good social signals you can rely on.
Boom. Sounds like enough for one issue. LFG! đ„ -Greg
đŒ WaPo dives into the âferal 25-year-oldsâ making Kamala Harris go viral
Anyone who has ever staffed a real-time command center knows how much prep is necessary, the burden of creating an approval matrix, and the curse of having too many cooks in the kitchen. Now imagine youâre doing that in a three-month sprint and the stakes are the highest of your teamâs lifetime.
Reporter Drew Harwell dug into the team behind Vice President Harrisâ social team, and although itâs not apples-to-apples for your teamâs work, there are some notes here worth considering.
Key bullets (as curated by
) you should share with your social team:The team records and edits videos on their phones before sending them over Slack to Parker Butler, the 24-year-old director of Harris's digital rapid response content, who typically reviews and signs off in less than 15 minutes.
"In 2016, a single Hillary Clinton tweet might have required 12 staffers and 10 drafts; today, many of Harris's TikTok videos are conceived, created, and posted in about half an hour."
Each of the teamâs social media "strategists" specializes in an individual platform, catering to its audience, subculture, and slang. One strategist, for instance, is solely responsible for Facebook, where Butler said content for baby boomers thrives.
Lauren Kapp, 25, heads the five-person TikTok team. Every day, she wakes around 6:30 a.m. and starts scrolling the video app so she can be ready for their daily 9 a.m. meeting, when the team breaks down whatâs trending that day.
Kapp said she wonât use any TikTok "trending sound" if itâs been used in more than 200,000 videos. "People get bored very easily," she said.
The social team faces minimal content-approval checks and "barring objection, we're gonna go. Everything goes on a five-minute warning," Rob Flaherty, Director of Digital Strategy, said. "You just gotta trust your people. Our f---up ratio [is as low] as if there were 19 layers of approval."
Read the whole piece here.
đ€ Generative AIâs Impact on Creativity and Strategy â Are Humans Keeping Up?
Recent large-scale experiments reveal that generative AI, particularly ChatGPT-4, is demonstrating creative capabilities that often surpass human efforts.
The findings are based on the paper "Creative and Strategic Capabilities of Generative AI: Evidence from Large-Scale Experiments" by Noah Bohren, Rustamdjan Hakimov, and Rafael Lalive, published in September 2024 by the IZA Institute of Labor Economicsâ (h/t ).
In tasks requiring originality, surprise, and usefulness, ChatGPT-4 consistently outperformed humans, even though Bard lagged behind.
Of course, while humans augmented with AI tools showed improved creativity, they still didn't match the output of ChatGPT-4 alone. Because our brains have limits! However, when it comes to strategic tasks, like adapting in a rock-paper-scissors game, humans still maintain an edge, especially when the strategy involves adapting to unexpected patterns. Damn straight.
This research highlights how AI and human creativity can complement each other and how AI is increasingly an important tool in our creative toolbox. It also suggests a first-look at how the future of creative industries (and resourcing) may see a reshaping as AI becomes more adeptâ.
This wonât be the last study of this kind, and I encourage you to continue to push, learn, and then TEACH this technology to help others keep pace. Itâs gonna come even more quickly from here.
đČ Reddit Ad Info Library
This week Reddit launched its new Reddit Ads inspiration library to show real examples of top performing ads so folks like you and me can learn what works best on Reddit.Â
Search by industry, budget, ad type, and more to discover the top creative most relevant to your brand or industry. From there, you can click into your ad of choice to see the top 3 creative best practices used to create that content, then adapt them to your next campaign right from the browser. Check it out here.
đ” You May Want to Opt-Out of This
You have been auto-opted-in by LinkedIn to use your data in their Gen-AI model. Ummm⊠not cool.
You can opt-out here. (h/t
)âĄïž Social Signals
Meta announced Orion, their next step into AR-enabled glasses that donât require a cord or synced phone. You should watch this. And the neural wristband control appears to work similarly to the Mudra neural band I tested at CES last year. I knew it! Hereâs my POV: These arenât the smart glasses weâll all wear. But theyâre a step toward them. And Iâm very bullish on smart glasses in the long run.
The word "Google" was first added to the Oxford English Dictionary in 2006. Is using the word Google as a verb dying? Probably. At least for Gen-Z, who use social search instead.
LinkedIn is removing ALL Community Top Voice badges (gold badge) due to their inability to maintain a standard of quality and consistency. That makes sense, it was turning into a lot of rote answers and didnât actually carry much weight. There will be no change to LinkedIn's Top Voice (blue badge) program, which is invitation-only and led by LinkedInâs editorial team.
Important signal here related to Discord, the software that adds a social layer to anything (gaming, hanging out with friends, metaverse experiences): Why Discord is making key hires to build out its advertising business. Note, if you havenât yet downloaded Discord and started joining some servers, now is the time.
X will now make your posts visible to users youâve blocked. In a reply on Monday, X owner Elon Musk said the âblock function will block that account from engaging with, but not block seeing, public post.â This seems dumb and dangerous.
Reddit screenshots are flooding TikTok and Instagram. Itâs giving Reddit some incredible visibility, though bringing users back to its platform may prove more difficult.
âDeep learning worked,â writes Open AIâs Sam Altman in a victory lap blog post trying to introduce âThe Intelligence Ageâ as a thing not dissimilar to how Zuckerberg and other Silicon Valley leaders have prematurely declared macro trends and ages only later to just declare a different one.
Buffer released their The Best Time to Post on LinkedIn to Boost Your Following + Engagement in 2024 findings, but before you immediate shift your posting schedule to Thursday and Friday, a reminder that these kinds of generalized guidance are NOT a substitute for you to think through your own audiences, your social objectives, and determining whatâs best for your brand.
If your website runs on WPEngine, you better poke around and make sure nothing is broken. The drama between Wordpress and WPEngine reached a new level this week.
Loved this paragraph from
âs How TikTok is the new TV:For starters, Gen-Z media consumers use their phones to watch content like itâs TV. They are not âcord cutters.â They never had a cord in the first place. In fact, Gen-Z spends less time watching traditional TV than any other age group, while Gen-Z TikTok users spend an average of 77 minutes per day on the app. TikTokâs growing market share of Gen-Z attention is even coming for the big streamers like Netflix â more than 50% of Gen-Z have canceled a streaming service in the past 6 months, and 66% would prefer watching TikTok over streaming.Â
Meta's AI chatbot will start speaking in the voices of Judi Dench, John Cena, Awkwafina and Keegan-Michael Key. Of note, I did paid for the Samuel L. Jackson voice on Amazon Alexa a few years ago but only used it maybe one day.
2025 Planning Resource of the Week: Check out the 2025 Planning Swipefile curated from
. Some gold here. Also, he made an AI podcast out of it. YES!Mandatory Social Media Strategy Read of the Week: Youâll never believe the Nutter Butter lore, how their strategy is paying off in the long-game, and the history of Aidan. Wow. Nice work
.Podcast of the Week: Check out episode 1 (if you donât count the pilot) of Further Comments with my favorite AI-literate lawyer Damien Riehl and his cohost Horace Wu: Horses, Cars, and How to Charge an AI Billable Hour.
Survey of the Week: About 43% of Gen Z shoppers plan to spend more for the holidays this year, compared to 37% of millennials, according to a report released by Fiverr. Per Fiverr, Gen Z continues to do much of its holiday gift searching on social platforms.
YouTube of the Week: What Are Next?! asks, âToo many shows. Too many streaming services. Too many monthly charges and most people have to work 3 jobs to make ends meet. Who has time to watch all this stuff?â (via
)Thread of the Week: People are not liking posts on Instagram anymore and it's a problem: a thread of thoughts from a social media manager with 18 accounts who has been doing this for a long time.
Buzzword of the Week: "Prompted Moment of Truthâ via
.Thread of the Week: Love this VR entrance to Meta Connect via
.Good Retro Tech Nostalgia Read: The Story of the Successful Life and Abrupt Death of Flip Video Cameras. I still have mine!! I need to dig it out and check out the content.
Tool of the Week: Buzzfeed made an AI Moo Deng generator. Youâre welcome.
See you in the future! đ
Greg