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- Hello Trendspotters
Happy Monday! In 2016, the U.S. scored a 94% in the Democracy Matrix, right around Germany. Now it’s 2024 and we’re down to 81%, just a skosh above Slovenia. This is fine!
Now let’s get into it…
In this week’s Spontaneous Content
HubSpot’s well-timed LinkedIn win
You can’t spit these days without hitting some company going “all in” on LinkedIn. Ever since Gary Vee called the platform “underpriced attention” , social strategists have been licking their chops and fine tuning their carousels. But HubSpot says they’re really onto something on the platform, to the tune of 84% growth in 6 months… and they’re bringing the receipts.
HubSpot is succeeding with personality led growth. Global Social Media Director Bryna Corcoran:
It’s almost like we’re turning HubSpot into a person, rather than a brand, by discussing the musings of how our customers are thinking or feeling on a daily basis as they try to grow their companies.
Yes, the piece was HubSpot marketing HubSpot, but that’s the whole point here, right? So many content pipelines, so many loops to close, so many ways to activate their audience.
Tip for you
Oh, and writer Caroline Forsay snuck in a LinkedIn growth nugget you can put to work today:
If Corcoran and I are connected as colleagues but I don’t follow Hubspot and she comments on or likes a HubSpot post, LinkedIn will auto-publish that interaction and post to my own feed. Which means LinkedIn provides incredible opportunities to broadcast your content to reach new prospects and leads simply through light-weight engagement.
Trust me, that will come in handy.
Captions is putting $100 million into AI video
This is a company to watch, and definitely some products to play with. Captions just announced a $60M raise led by a bunch of VCs and, uh, Jared Leto. This brings the total raised to $100M.
Most of us are making at least some “talking videos.” That’s what Captions calls direct-to-camera videos. When our editors want to express their annoyance, they say “sure, I’ll just hit the edit button.” … CAPTIONS HAS AN “EDIT” BUTTON
They’ve got a bunch of AI tools. So do a lot of apps. But this is the only one with a hundred million. And Jared Leto.
It’s interesting that they’re doing this in NYC. I mean, they say in the release that NYC is an AI epicenter, but come on… I think it’s notable that they chose the beating heart of the ad and marketing world.
What’s coming
The real promise here (as with most AI) is personalization. Over the past ten years marketing has shifted from first talking to THE audience, to then talking to AN audience, to now talking to OUR audience. With GenAI video, we will get to talk to EACH audience individually. I’d start thinking about that now.
Appreciate like your audience does
There’s been much discussion of this Glamour article, which declared a drought in new influencers getting big and possibly the death of the internet famous influencer/creator. I think t’s easier to get audience than ever, and lot’s of people are doing it.
Maybe nobody new is monetizing their audience in the same way that, say, Tinx did a few years back, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t monetizing their audience.
Increasingly, audience is getting monetized like an asset. It can cash flow, it can appreciate, it can do both. Tinx herself has a book, a podcast, and her DJs shows, along with her usual influencer advertising stuff.
Same goes for businesses that build audience. The “cash flow” may be actual revenue, leads, conversions, etc but the opportunity is to return value to the company while building value in the audience over time.
YouTube is making audience sound shiny by rebranding it as fans.
The folks who put together this trend report clearly put a lot of thought into its design and while I don’t love where we landed, I applaud the effort. In it, they argue that creators no longer make content for fans, they make content with fans (…hmm)
Fan content often extends well beyond its source material and attracts its own fans in the process. Meanwhile, brands and traditional creators have learned to actively respond to their fans’ content, forging a mutually beneficial creative relationship.
That beneficial creative relationship is another way of saying “closing loops,” and that’s how you build value in an audience. When I post on LinkedIn about this issue of the newsletter here, and then ask you to share it, we’re growing my audience together. (please go do that now).
That is closing the loop. Referral fees or incentives… closing the loop. You’re a Mr. Beast fan. You make a meme of something he said. It goes viral, you build a ton of audience… closed loop.
Remember this
The audience-as-an-asset phenomenon is not new. (Print magazines anyone?) And it’s also not going anywhere… in fact, what’s next is audience-as-a-personal-asset… where your audience is an asset for your resume, your income, and your independence.
So next time you look at the budget of a video content project, ask yourself if this project is an expense, or an investment. If it’s an expense, then what can you do to build in loops so it becomes an investment?
In the end, isn’t this all
that’s required of you?
To drink in what you love,
To concentrate it
in the crucible of your body
and, finally, to bloom.
A reminder that, in the beginning your audience of one is you. So make what you love.
Quick hits
On TikTok rn there is unmet demand for bee videos and beautiful morning messages. Get it!
Oatmilk maker Oatly runs the site FckOatly.com dedicated to gathering all its bad press and negative comments in one place.
Smarterlicense is trying to be a lighter rights management solution and a platform for buying and selling rights. Not sure you can be both.
Until next time…
be spontaneous, ae