← Next On Scene: The Human Behind The Brand
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- [00:00]
Jackie Zook
Welcome back to becoming Next on Scene everybody. It is your host, Jackie Zook. It is another awesome day for another awesome episode of how to become next on Scene in your field of business or in your passion. Before I bring on my amazing guests, I always like to start with a marketing tip and really like words of wisdom like life tip that can be incorporated in any area in your life. I think there's so it's so important to stand in your truth. I feel very compelled to talk about this today as it's come up for me a lot recently. And if something is not aligning in your truth, it's important that like to not one, you have to confront it. Right. I think what's really important and it shows self respect for yourself. But two, it's really important to surround yourself by people who support and can handle you being open and vulnerable and truthful. And if you are not surrounded by those people, whether in business or personally, it's time to click clear out and find people that are your people. That is my words of wisdom for today. I felt like that has spoke to me so much recently and I just think you need to stand in that power and yeah, I think doors are going to open so much more for you in the right spaces when you start to do that for yourself. Now I am so excited to bring on my amazing guest. We have Adriana Lacy, who is the founder of Adriana Lacey Consulting. She's also a journalist and adjunct professor. She is such an amazing background. I'm so excited for her to talk today all about AI and social media. We talk about all the different people she's helping, how she got started, so much more. So I can't wait for you to get to know this rock star and be sure to follow her. Stay tuned for the amazing Adrienne.
- [01:46]
Adriana Lacy
The ups, the downs and all the in between. What it takes to become Next on Scene. Are you next? Follow us at Next on Scene.
- [02:05]
Jackie Zook
Welcome back to becoming Next on Scene everybody. I am so excited to be here with the amazing Adriana Lacey. She is the founder of Adriana Lacey Consulting. She's also an amazing Forbes 30 under 30 honoree. Such an awesome journalist, an amazing woman to know and she's also an adjunct professor at Brandeis. So happy to have you here, Adriana. What a mouthful of introductions that are well deserved.
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Adriana Lacy
No, thank you so much for having me. Super excited, of course.
- [02:31]
Jackie Zook
And you're always adding things on. So like you have to fill us in on your newest ventures because you're always doing cool things. So first of all, let's first talk, how did you fall into journalism and how did you become a marketer? Tell us all the things.
- [02:43]
Adriana Lacy
Yeah, that's such a great question. So it's really interesting. I started off my undergrad career not even in journalism. I wanted to be an elementary education major, kind of focusing on special education education policy. And for the first few years of undergrad was really into that, always wanted to be a teacher. And then I just kind of started really getting interested in the media when I was in college. I started my own media outlet when I was in college, read a lot of newspapers, was just really interested in sports media and really just made that pivot. I think it was about my junior year that I switched kind of from the education world and to communications and from there really just fell into journalism. Worked traditionally in newsrooms for a while, doing a lot of social media audience engagement work. And then really after that, more and more just thought about it and realized I wanted to do my own thing and kind of started doing more communications, more marketing work, which led me to where I am now.
- [03:48]
Jackie Zook
Super impressive. So inspiring. And also one thing I want to touch upon is like really getting entrepreneur into entrepreneurship and consulting at a young age. So what really inspired you to take the jump? Because it is intimidating to start a business, especially being younger. Right. So walk through us. Walk us through that a little bit.
- [04:04]
Adriana Lacy
Yeah, that was always an interesting one. I feel like I have a lot of friends and colleagues who are in consulting and they're a lot older than me. You know, they've been consulting for 20, 30 years and then have kind of decided to do their own. But I think for me, I was working in a lot of newsrooms and was also just doing a lot of freelancing on the side. Was always really interested in working with a lot of different people. And I think when you're working at a publication or an organization, you can really only focus on one project. And I think for me, I was super interested in doing as many things as I could. So the idea of kind of starting my own business was really great for me because then I could have that opportunity to work on a lot of different things.
- [04:47]
Jackie Zook
I love that. So now let's talk about, like when you launched your own business. So, Adriana, Leasing, consulting, all the things it covers. And then I definitely want to deep dive because it's an area of expertise for you these days about AI and social media. So let's first talk about the services you offer. So walk us through it.
- [05:03]
Adriana Lacy
Yes. So we are full Service, which is really exciting. Pretty much that means that we pretty much whatever you want, I like to say we can either do it or find someone else who can do it. So a lot of our work has to do with that social media world. So we do paid social media, we do organic social media, we do graphic design, we do website design, we do website development. We also do a lot of work with marketing and helping, you know, write press releases and things. So really anything people need, I like to say that we have done it before and we're doing it. Something that we started recently was doing more work in the influencer relations field. I know a lot of people are really keen on working with influencers. So we pretty much take a lot of that work from the hands of a lot of our clients and handle the contracts and the payments and making sure that they're posting everything that the client wants.
- [05:58]
Jackie Zook
Super fun. And I'm sure every business is creative. And what would you say in terms of like the companies that you help mostly like these days, aren't they like tech companies? Can you like, elaborate more on like, type of people you're working?
- [06:11]
Adriana Lacy
Yeah, that's a great question. It's kind of a pretty broad match lately, which has been exciting. We work with some people who are just, you know, individuals who are looking to have a logo for a new business that they're starting or building, you know, a personal website or brand. We also work with a lot of technology companies, a lot of nonprofits, and a lot of folks in that journalism media industry. But a lot of our clients as of late have been more in that kind of E commerce field. They have been more into brick and mortar businesses. So I think we're starting to pivot a little bit to being a bit more broad, which I think is really exciting.
- [06:46]
Jackie Zook
And it allows you to help the small business too, which is cool. You get both dynamics, right? The larger scale and the smaller. I love that too, so I can relate to that. I think that that's amazing. So tell us now about like, how is AI really playing a role right now in the social media world and how are you seeing it day to day in business?
- [07:04]
Adriana Lacy
Yeah. So I think what's really great about AI is that there's so many different things that you can do with it. I think a lot of times when people think about AI, their first kind of go to is, you know, chat GPT, where, oh, I can ask it a question that can do something for me, but I think there's also other things you can use, you know, AI and Autom for for example, even just setting up automations, you know, marketing one so that someone fills out a form, they get a follow up email and there's kind of these triggers that happen. I know you do that a lot too, which I think are really great. Really just starting there I think is really good. But using it to help you draft copy for your social media, building out an editorial calendar, there's really just so many different ways that you can use it and I feel like it can really be your social media sidekick.
- [07:51]
Jackie Zook
I love that. And like in terms of. Because obviously there's Grammarly, there's like things that can help you edit. Like what are some of your favorite tools to use these days?
- [08:00]
Adriana Lacy
Yeah, of course I feel like everyone loves chatgpt which I know has been the big one. But I've really been interested in Claude, which is a similar kind of Chat GPT rival. It's from an organization called Anthropic and I find that their newest model is really, really intelligent. I think it's really takes kind of a lot of the Chat GPT work a little bit of a step further. It does a lot more work kind of on the strategy and reasoning side. I find it to be really helpful if you're trying to think through, you know, big complex issues. I think can be really helpful with that as well as just kind of planning and things. So I really like using that. I love using Zapier as well. That's a great tool for automation. So you can pretty much set up any sort of automation. If someone you know write your a review on Google, it sends you an email or if someone you know sends you a message, it creates an automatic follow up email. And I think being able to have those automations can just make your business run smoother, especially if you are a business of one or you have a really small team.
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Jackie Zook
And I want to follow up on this because when we work together like it just has come up. But as a professor you've seen students start using this now too, right? So like I think it's really good advice because my podcast is pretty broad like how to go about AI when it comes to schoolwork like in college.
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Adriana Lacy
Oh yeah, that one is a hard one. I think we're seeing more and more that it's really just becoming so much easier to use these tools for school. I think Apple just released a really interesting update on its iPad for the calculator where pretty much type in a math problem, it'll just answer it for you. ChatGPT does the same thing. So it really is, you know, really tough because a lot of times you could give someone a take home math assignment and they would have to do it, but now there's no need to do that. That. So I think we're starting to see this pivot of a lot more in classroom work because anything that's really homework these days I think can be done by a robot.
- [09:58]
Jackie Zook
I love. We were talking about it because I feel like when we were growing up there was like Cliff Notes and like things that were similar. This is like advanced times, like 10 of that, right? It's so how the world changed so much and like, but also I feel like. Do you think it takes away from the thinking? Like I know you need to edit it, but like in terms of being even creative, do you feel like sometimes the AI can take away from that?
- [10:20]
Adriana Lacy
Yeah, I think it can. And I think it's, you know, something that's a bit of a challenge. I was talking to someone who works at OpenAI, so that's the company that created Chat GPT and they were arguing, you know, actually it's really cool to use it because it kind of helps you be even more creative. But I don't think so. I think that a lot of times, you know, when we're thinking about things and we get these really innovative ideas, I think those are really special and those are things that, you know, these chatbots and things can't create. So that's why I'm hoping that people will use AI to do the hard work and the kind of more things that are time consuming so they can kind of focus their minds on doing the more creative work themselves.
- [11:01]
Jackie Zook
Very interesting take on that. I love that. And then also you have your own kind of AI tools that you've created. So can we talk about your two apps that you've created?
- [11:11]
Adriana Lacy
Yeah, of course. I kind of started these two, these two apps, these two products mostly because a lot of our clients are kind of asking us the same things. The first tool that we created was, the first tool we created was this tool called Insight Flow analytics, which essentially is a tool where you can take all of your data and kind of put it into one place. So great way to think about this is let's say use mailchimp for your newsletter. You use Twitter and Facebook for your social media and you also have a website and you want to know those metrics. And basically what we can do is put them all into one dashboard so you can view all of those things at one time and you don't have to worry so much about where this information is coming from. You don't have to worry about, oh, do I have to check four or five different websites at the same time? So it's a really great tool. It has integrations with things like WooCommerce and Stripe as well. So if you're running a business, you can get daily kind of automated reports of everything that's happening. And the automated reports have been a really great thing for our clients because they just want to wake up every morning and and say, like, here's how your business did yesterday, or here's how it did last week without having to go get a bunch of paperwork. And then our second tool, Social Chime, is really just a social media management system. So very similar to, you know, things like hootsuite or Sprout Social. And what we really like about it is that it has a lot of AI tools featured and kind of built into it. So, for example, it has an AI writing assist. So it can kind of help you draft a posts for Facebook or Twitter directly into the scheduler. You can also connect your RSS feed to it. So, for example, let's say you run a blog on your website. Anytime you publish a new post, it'll tweet it out or put it on Facebook. So really just kind of helping people manage a lot of these things like social media management, which can be super time consuming and kind of have them centralize it all in one place.
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Jackie Zook
I love it. And also, like, the reason you started it too, was to give really small businesses outlets to be able to have systems in place if they can't hire an agency or a bigger company. Right. So I thought that was great.
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Adriana Lacy
Yeah, for sure. And I think that's a big thing where we have a lot of clients that are like, we need some help, but we're not ready to take kind of, you know, a bigger step of hiring someone on. So this is a great way to just start where it's like, at least you're not having to go into, you know, Meta Business Manager and Twitter and TikTok all the time. You can at least be able to schedule everything and have that editorial calendar.
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Jackie Zook
I love that. So cool. So cool. So how can people reach out to you to work together? How can they get in touch?
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Adriana Lacy
Wait.
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Jackie Zook
And actually, I want to share a fun fact about you because I love repeating this and learning this about you, but you've traveled to 48 out of 50 continents. That's pretty amazing.
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Adriana Lacy
Yeah, I've seen, you know, all the different places. I love to travel. I'm a huge traveler. I always tell people there's so much to travel in the US Which I think is really fascinating. I think a lot of times you think, like, the best destinations are, you know, all over the world, but even just the national parks I think you can see in the US Are incredible. I love going to national parks. I've been to tons of them all over the country. They're all really, really beautiful. So I love to kind of alternate between going outside the US but really just exploring as much of the US As I can as well.
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Jackie Zook
So cool. So cool. I love that so much. And I think you're. And you started. You just started a subscriber blog, right? Can you talk about that? You talk about your travels and stuff?
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Adriana Lacy
Yes, of course. I've been trying to, you know, have an outlet to share some stuff that's less about work and business, but more just kind of fun. Fashion, travel, food, things like that. So I just started a cool subsect blog called Adriana's Almanac, which is really just fun things to do, vacation photos, mindfulness, travel, living. So really just kind of a fun lifestyle vlog to really just kind of show the person, I think, behind the scenes.
- [15:06]
Jackie Zook
Yeah. And I also like, from knowing you now, like, you just have really fun, like, hats, like DIY quick things like you were talking about, like the TSA check and like, go, like the best ways to go about it. Like you leave like, not super like a long early before your flight. You know what I'm saying? Like, you know things now, like, and I just feel like I'm learning from you for that. So thank you.
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Adriana Lacy
Yeah, no, I'm excited to keep doing it and I'm hopefully going to have some guests on the blog as well to kind of curate some things too. So I think it'll be pretty fun.
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Jackie Zook
Super cool. You are awesome. So now can you share with everybody how they can get in touch with you? Following social media, all things things.
- [15:39]
Adriana Lacy
Yeah, for sure. So our website, Adriana Lacey consulting.com. that's pretty much the easiest place to reach us. We're Adriana Lacey consulting on all of our social media handles. If you want to follow me myself, I like to say I'm really big on Instagram, so I'm just. Instagram.com AdrianAjlacy Perfect.
- [15:59]
Jackie Zook
Thank you so much, everyone. Reach out to Adriana. She's so fun, inspiring, great business. Thank you so much for coming on today.
- [16:06]
Adriana Lacy
Yeah, thank you so much for having me.
- [16:08]
Jackie Zook
Of course. Thank you so much everyone for tuning in to be coming next on scene. And stay tuned for who's next on scene.
- [16:25]
Adriana Lacy
The ups, the downs, and all the in between. What it takes to become next on scene. Are you next? Follow us at Next on scene.