← The Marketing Millennials
The Marketing Millennials
SPECIAL SERIES: Why Every Brand Needs a Social-First Content Strategy with Eric Stark, Co-Founder of Slate
00:44:38
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- [00:00]
Slate Advertiser
A quick one before we dive in. If you're running a social team, you need to look at Slate video and
- [00:06]
Daniel Murray
image editing, long to short form, clipping,
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Slate Advertiser
team approvals and all of your brand guidelines baked in one place to create content. No chaos. It was built by the guy who ran social for the NFL so he actually knows what your team is dealing with. Go to slateteams.com to learn more.
- [00:31]
Marketing Millennials Host
Welcome to the Marketing Millennials, the no BS Marketing podcast. I'm Daniel Murray and join me for unfiltered conversations with the brains behind marketing's coolest companies. The one request I tell our guests stories or it didn't happen. Get ready to turn the up.
- [00:56]
Daniel Murray
We are back with another episode of the Marketing Millennial. Today I have Eric Stark, the co founder of Slate, super excited for this conversation, his journey through the NFL to co founding Slate. We're going to talk about all that and talk about social media and dive into all that fun stuff today. But I want Eric to give you a little bit of a story of how he got into social and then climbed up and decided to co found Slate.
- [01:24]
Eric Stark
Thanks Daniel. Excited to be here? Yeah, my background is really in sports and sports social media and I started at the NFL out of college on the digital marketing side. And this was in 2012, like right as social was actually becoming kind of a full time role. Like it was still, I think right when I started the NFL had just hired its first full time social media manager title people, you know, and it was really websites and you know, homepages were way more important than social feeds. But that transition started to happen like really quickly from like 2012 to 2014. And yeah, I was always really interested in the content side of things and I kind of followed the content. And that took me from digital, from websites, from mobile apps, you know, programming content for those channels to social media because that's where the content went, you know, and where most of the distribution of content went. So I kind of always had like one foot in both like digital and social. And now obviously those two things are much more combined in terms of content strategy. And social is really where content gets distributed. I ended up going to the 49ers and was their digital and social content manager and basically kind of controlled all the, all the content that went on the website and then, you know, was publishing to Facebook and Instagram and helped them launch their snap account at that time and start with stories and all these places. So yeah, it really went from sort of, you know, air traffic control, digital strategy to becoming like A content creator as social evolved. And I always found that I wanted my career to be broader than social. Right. Like marketing and digital as well. But I would always find myself going back to social because that's where most of the impact was possible, you know. So I kind of always avoided the social media manager title, even though that's where most of my work ended up, like funneling back to. Just because as a marketer and as like a content focused marketer, it's where all the impact was. So I kept finding myself, you know, I just realized over time that that actually was my like expertise. And yeah, I spent over over a decade at the NFL before starting Slate, which, you know, now we're, we're a content creation tool that serves social media and marketing teams. So definitely a type of tool I wish I had when I was, was doing the job.
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Daniel Murray
Yeah, I wanted to ask you that, like, what was that exact moment when you were in the trenches saying, like, these tools are broken, I need to start something new. Like, what was that, like, click in your head that decided that needs a new tool?
- [04:11]
Eric Stark
Yeah, I think it really came with the rise of, with the rise of the stories format on social. I think that format turned social media managers into like cell phone content creators, like very, very quickly. Right? Like all of a sudden in you weren't just asking your video team for, hey, make sure this video is like one by one for Instagram feed or like curating highly polished photos. You were picking up your phone, doing behind the scenes content and publishing directly to these platforms. So within that shift, I think everybody who was in our space at the time started realizing, oh, I need to film and edit on my phone. And that platform kind of introduced the idea of sort of. Or, sorry, that format kind of introduced the idea of like overlaying content, right? You'd like take a video, add a font on top of it and then publish it to your Instagram stories. And all of a sudden we started feeling the pain. Point of like, all of this stuff is nice, but it's off brand, right? Like, I'm creating this content in Instagram, like, why aren't we using the 49ers red when we try to create it? We needed to publish things to the public Giphy library just to have access to our brand in those formats. So that's when it really started to click of like, okay, we have to send this media back and forth to a computer to maybe try to make it on brand. Or some of us are using canva, some of us are using native Some of us are more adept at Premiere and there just really wasn't a tool that was built for like social first creation at a brand. And that social first creation is kind of what the native platform sort of introduced, right? The set a duration on a piece of text or yeah, like add a sticker wherever you want, swipe to add an overlay or a lower third or a Snapchat filter. And it's kind of like what happens with every platform, right? At first you want to be as native as possible and then you want to start like differentiating and being brand consistent across these platforms. And yeah, I think as I started creating more stories, content specifically, that's when I really started to realize, like, I'm creating this content on behalf of like some of the biggest brands in the world and I'm just kind of defaulting to the typewriter font on Instagram or whatever. I want to choose and we need to kind of evolve beyond that. But the tools weren't there to do it.
- [06:42]
Daniel Murray
It's actually kind of crazy to think about that you only had two choices back in the day where you record a content live, whether it was like with a cam, with someone, with a video camera or on your phone. And you had two choices, like, I need to send these assets back to someone. And if you're the only social media manager, that means you're gonna have to go back and then go edit it yourself or you have to go like, use whatever is available out there and there's nothing available. So you have really two choices. You either could be like, live in the moment or delayed a little bit and wait till you get back to a computer to edit something, which is a crazy way to live. That was like five years ago. It's not even like it was crazy to live that way.
- [07:28]
Eric Stark
Exactly, exactly. And then I think what we saw too, and it was like a signal to us as well that Life Slate would be valuable. This sort of brand powered creation tool that is still easy to use because social teams need to move quickly. They don't want to learn Premiere, which is why a lot of social teams just download consumer apps. The same apps that are really made for influencers or just you and I, any sort of individual creating content. But we saw a wave of brands. I don't know if you remember this brands would post all of their stories would be these like old school film strips like that look where it's like, okay, there's like a three photo film strip and it would like look like it's like an old camera and like, all of these brands were downloading these random apps that had these filters or frames that Instagram didn't provide because they wanted to, like, differentiate from. You know, again, the first wave is like, let's be as native as possible. Everyone's using what's in app. Then it's like, how do we get more creative? So we saw a lot of brands doing that and it was like, okay, this is different than native, but it still wasn't on brand. Like, it had the app's name in, like, the film strip that they were using. So it was still like an influencer sort of thing, not a brand thing. And that was a real signal to us too that, like, brands are craving and social media content creators, marketers are craving, like, more creative tools. They have all these robust brand guidelines. But those two things aren't, like, connecting, right? Like, the creative tools aren't using that. The ones that are actually easy to use, that are actually social first.
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Daniel Murray
I know, because you did this yourself. Like, you posted on Instagram, you managed all these assets. You went through, like, how to do the old school way and not being like a native designer, doing like Photoshop and Premiere and all these crazy, like, tools that are actually pretty hard to use if anybody's been in Photoshop. It's like the old school Photoshop. It's a hard tool to use if you're not done. And I know, like, Slate is built by people who actually have done the role and doing the role. So what is those unique edges that you think Slate had? That the practitioner lens that beats out other tools that don't have the practitioner lens, if that makes sense.
- [09:54]
Eric Stark
Yeah, it's a good question. I definitely think it comes to life in a lot of really little ways across the product. There's so many small product decisions we make every day that we just come naturally to us because we do the job. You know, I'd say first at like, a high level, we make sure the editing is built for social media. Right? And that means it's like, fast, it's easy, it's intuitive, it's as, like, mobile friendly as it is, like, web. And it doesn't feel, like, heavy in both its complexity, even though it's powerful, but also the content scope. Right? So when I say complexity, that's when it's like you're comparing it to, like, yeah, using a Photoshop or a Premiere. When I say, like, Scope, that's when you're comparing it to, like, maybe a Canva or a cap cut that has a lot of Power and a lot of things you can do in it, but it's a lot of stuff you don't need as a brand social person, right? It's like canva, for instance, amazing tool, but it's like designed for everything and everyone, right? It's like the same tool your mom will use to make an invitation for her birthday, right? Like you can make mugs on it, you can do a ton of stuff. So like the purpose built stuff just for social media, right? Like how to edit an Instagram reel is kind of like lost in that. You know, I would say Cap Cut is more social first, but it's also filled with so many things that are like TikTok focused and also creator focused. Right? Like things that might not be approved by a brand or things that a brand would have to sift through to find anything that is like consistent for them. And, and like a lot of things that they can't customize on both of those tools because they're really built for someone to just jump in and use stock templates. Right. So what makes us different on the creation side is like a kind of like a deep, deep focus on just like social media formats and how social media managers create and that comes to life in things like, you know, safe zones. Like always updating the sort of TikTok L bar to make sure like when you're creating a piece of content, you could actually see what it would look like, you know, when it's, when it's live on social media. And then the customization side on the brand part of it is being able to set your text presets for reels vs your text presets for a caption vs your subtitle font vs the stickers you want on TikTok vs the stickers you want on Instagram. So the customization of the experience on the back end and how you could set up your brand in Slate, that then the editing becomes like free and quick, but within the brand framework that all starts to kind of come together. Just like, because we're so used to creating content in that way and we still, you know, rely on our own tool to create content for like slate social channels. You know what I mean? So we, we kind of have that feedback loop built in and yeah, our company basically like anyone who's not an engineer at our company has done social media management in some form or fashion. Pretty much like we're a company filled of practitioners and just shows up in a ton of little decisions.
- [13:03]
Daniel Murray
Yeah. And that safe zone thing's such a Good call out. Because anytime I've used Canva or Capcut, I always, like, I don't use the text overlay until I get onto, like when I used to use it until I got into native because I couldn't tell where the safe zone for text is where it's gonna be cut off. And it was just such a painful. It's like I have to use three tools to get this one thing and still you might have to move the image down or move the video that overlay down because it's on the safe zone. It's such annoying process to go back and forth, especially if you're doing that as your full time job. I'm doing it as a creator, but as a full time job. That would be so annoying to have to hop through 18 different tools to do that. Totally.
- [13:58]
Eric Stark
Yeah. We hear from so many brands, like, how many different editing tools they use. And if you're a social team of like two or three, you know, oftentimes each individual is using different tools for different things and they're not connected. Right. It's like, oh, yeah, like, I have Capcut on my phone. I like it for that. Like, this person uses Inshot because they like Inshot for a very specific, like, transition. But like, none of them are centered around a brand and none of them are like collaborative with the team, you know, Then it's like, yeah, you're exporting it, you're dropping it into Frame IO, you're getting feedback in frame IO, then you're like going back to the source material and that's only on someone else's phone to make the edit. So, you know, it's. It's more than obviously just the creation part of having it be easy to use and confined to your brand. It's also the like steps before and after of like, okay, how can multiple people all work from that same framework in the same editor? Can you request approval in there? Can you get your feedback in there? Like, how do social teams sort of like work around their content creation? And that's been sort of the evolution of our platform.
- [15:06]
Daniel Murray
Yeah, I want to also go into. I know you have a very strong point of view that distribution in 2026 starts with social. Can you walk us through operationally what that means? If you say it starts with social, what does that mean as a marketing department? And how should marketing departments think about starting with social? I know, because a lot of, a lot of people think of it as the add on. Like, oh, we're doing this campaign, like, what should we do? For social, like we're doing this, like, what should they don't think of it as? I mean, DoorDash was like a perfect example for like the super bowl. How they like did the whole like campaign social first. They didn't like, think about it. So like, how do you, how do you operate? Operationalize that internally?
- [15:52]
Eric Stark
Yeah, I mean, I think social is the best place to get like instant feedback on if your content ideas are resonating and you kind of have like infinite at bats. Right. It's not like a Super bowl commercial or even like putting a bunch of money against like an ad campaign. So one way to operationalize it that, you know, I think some of the best brands are doing is you don't actually have a content or a campaign idea extend to multi platforms until it's been validated on organic social. Right. Because it's so easy to validate an idea on organic social. Whereas taking like six months to come up with a campaign with an agency and you kind of go back and forth internally, everyone has different ideas. You're like spending so much time, effort and money and then you release it and hope like the kind of old way of marketing, like you hope that it resonates and hope that it performs right. But on social, you can come up with different content ideas every day and like have lightweight versions of ideas or, you know, use the data from the content you're posting on social to inform like, okay, like, what is resonating that we should now invest more in in terms of paid, in terms of, you know, our messaging, on digital, in terms of even like billboards and. Yeah, like commercials. Right. So I think reorienting marketing around social first doesn't just mean like, okay, everything only goes on social. We don't do other channels. It's more of like social is the sort of center of excellence and intelligence, like the media entity that informs the rest of marketing. Because it's where content is created at the highest volume. There's daily iteration and posting and creativity and that provides such rich feedback and material that then can get used for what would be slower marketing, you know, slower burn marketing or marketing that costs more and is harder to iterate. So I think that's a big piece of it. And then the other piece, like, besides just looking at social as like the first stop of any campaign to prove if it should go wider is resourcing, you know, that team accordingly and really thinking a bit more like I would say like a media entity that lives within your company versus, yeah, like just another distribution channel. Right. Not just like a different stop, like at the end of a campaign to share something. But social teams have turned like you know, 20 fold from what I was talking about of, you know. Yeah, we used to go from like posting links on social to creating Instagram stories. Like now social teams are really just like in house production houses. Like they're on camera personalities, they're video editors, they're scripting like mini TV shows and skits every day. Like they're just this sort of production house. And that should fuel social but fuel other parts of marketing as well. So I think they should be resourced differently and resource more like a sort of internal agency, like an internal media entity and thought of as sort of the content like heartbeat of an organization versus just like okay, they manage like our Instagram account. But the other parts of marketing are sort of more prestigious or you know, get more money because we, we have to spend money to actually get distribution on those other places. So I think that that part really needs to shift.
- [19:33]
Daniel Murray
One of the craziest things I think in marketing especially now is that like organic and paid don't work together. Like organic should be like the validator of ideas that you spend because once you validate idea and you put extra distribution through paid behind it like that you're know it's going to be seen by more instead of saying I have a bad piece of content, let me put money to make the bad piece of content be distributed even more because you haven't validated that piece of content before. It's. It's crazy to me that people blow millions of dollars or thousands of dollars behind content that has never been proven out before.
- [20:14]
Eric Stark
And it's well known and highly encouraged by every platform now that the best like paid, performing, creative looks and feels like organic social. So that means you should have one, it should be validated like you said on organic. But two, the same team that's creating the organic content should be also informing and creating the paid content, which also means more resources for this sort of like content entity internally that can produce stuff that, that gets super high engagement versus that team creating highly entertaining organic content on a shoestring budget. But then you pay an agency insane amounts of money to make what looks and feels like a traditional Google Ad unit in 9 by 16 or whatever. And those two things not working together. So it's all content at the end of the day. So resourcing the content team and having the social team really just turn into the content team. And yeah, organic needs to inform paid for it to Perform well. And it is wild. How many brands still really, really silo those those two things I want to also ask you.
- [21:35]
Daniel Murray
I mean you have some huge brands on slate right now. When a brand comes to you and says like our social media is broken or it's like not working, like where do you like go to diag the problem? What are usually the top 1, 2, 3 problems? You see that when someone says my social isn't working or I'm not getting distribution or my videos are not performing, what are the things you see as common problems that could be fixed?
- [22:03]
Eric Stark
I think there's two sides to that. There's obviously a lot of problems about just resourcing and structure and that's not necessarily something the individuals can fix, but it's more the institutions around social and how social is viewed and resourced, that's separate and that's more I'd say there's shared misery and complaints about that. And that's what I try to do on my LinkedIn a lot is advocate for C suite and the folks who make the decisions of resourcing. As to the importance of social, I'd say in terms of okay, how do we actually get our content to perform and what do brands do to start to change that? I mean those two things obviously are tied. You mentioned doordash and obviously they have have made a decision from the top down that social is going to be a priority and are like investing in that accordingly, both with who they're hiring. And it's not just the social media manager who gets to make a decision like that super bowl thing. So that's a big unlock. But you're always working within the constraints that you have within your organization. I think volume and video are two of the things that often are pointed to as like some of the harder things to the harder barriers to like overcome. Right. Like the algorithm does need feeding. Right. It's not just a volume game and there's always like quantity versus like quality sort of balance. But ultimately like you do need to like pump out ideas, fail with ideas to get the ones that hit and then start, you know, going deeper on the ones that hit until they don't anymore and they keep so being able to like increase the volume of content you're actually producing and the like at bats you're having is, you know, something that we talk a lot about with, with our brands and our customers. Obviously video is like a format that always like wins, you know, carousels on Instagram are still very, very valuable. And same with LinkedIn and it's, you know, we're always surprised at how much static and image content still gets exported from our platform. It's honestly about 50 50. So you can't sleep on the importance of image and graphic and static based content for social media. But video is the more complex format and ultimately the most valuable format. And having workflows for producing enough video content is always something brands are looking to find ways to increase.
- [24:45]
Daniel Murray
Well, like the two things, I mean both those things work because I mean the platforms reward now like shareability and sends and if you have a good slider or you have a good dwell time on like all time on. Yeah, yeah. On multiple slides or multiple, whatever you have on a static post, you're going to get seen bigger in the feed because it's seen as a post that is relevant. And if it gets sent after that or to DM like in DMS or shared like on LinkedIn or whatever, it's going to get distributed more. But I wanted to go into like the video content feed because it has really, I mean in the last like five years it's really like eaten up a lot of the feed. Like before it wasn't like eating up the feed as much. And like you probably came from one of the best organizations at clipping videos and clipping highlights and clipping the best type of content and redistributing. But a lot of people, they just get a long form piece of content. They clip it. They don't think about the social first aspect of it. They just clip a video and then put it on social. So what is like when you were at the NFL or where you see other brands in it, like what does it look like to be like social like video first with either repurposing or like coming up with original like skits and content or behind the scenes stuff. Like what does that look like when you're thinking about creating video first Content?
- [26:22]
Eric Stark
Yeah, I think, I mean sports teams and leagues have sort of a different challenge than you know, I'd say the rest of us because now, you know, even though a lot of our customers are in that space. Sports media entertainment, we also work with a lot of brands and we ourselves are like a B2B company. Their challenge is there's such a volume of content and opportunities like incoming that how do they actually triage, like turn those around, optimize them for social in like a very rapid succession. I'd say most other brands, whether you're a supermarket brand, a B2B tech brand, a podcast network, the challenge is Different. It's more of, like, how do we get more content out of more limited source material? And that's where at Slate, we take the approach of making original content, coming up with original ideas, and having sort of these, like, content blitz opportunities where we, like, are both scripting things out, but also just like creating on the fly and trying to build up sort of Personas and personalities, like, internally that we could, like, turn into content. It's also why we focus on, like, the other formats, like you said, like cutting down, like webinars, interviews, podcasts, and thinking about those from a social first lens. Both, like, when we're recording them, but also, you know, how we actually pull out like, the social first moments from those. And obviously that's something like our tool that we use like our own tool for of like, okay, we're gonna just like, actually get five or six really compelling social clips from this webinar without having to like, scrub through each one. And then same with like, live event coverage. Right. So not a lot of brands have like, sort of experiential moments, but you can make those moments, whether that be a conference, whether that be, you know, again, like sort of a manufactured tentpole event that you're covering in real time. Those are opportunities to sort of like run and gun and capture content more like an entertainment brand or a sports brand. And I think any brand should, like, if you don't have those moments, start to manufacture them. And any ones that you do, like, get the most out of them by really thinking about covering them in a, in a content first way.
- [28:49]
Daniel Murray
And I know also I'll go one step deeper because I know you've talked about this, like, rise of serialized content and thinking of like, radio first as like a series instead of, like, I'm going to get this one off post of this experience, like, and if you can come up with like a better strategy, when you say, like, let's try do one or two or three or four episodes, like part one, part two, part three, or whatever. So could you explain, like, from your point of view, like, how people should think of executing serialized content? Like, how does that look like in the back end and why you think that that content performs very well?
- [29:32]
Eric Stark
Yeah, I think with all social media, there's people, audiences want to know what to expect. Right. And that's why we see a lot of the same formats get repurposed across brands and the same sort of jokes or memes or just styles of video kind of repeat themselves. But it's about having almost like it's like genre familiar formats. But mixing it up and having it be specific to your brand. I think serialized content works well because it provides deeper engagement. Right. It provides an expectation and you're able to build a brand voice in a very specific way. For us at Slate and our own content strategy, that doesn't necessarily mean we're going to script out a five episode show and go film all of those things. That definitely is one way we could do it and something that we have done and will do. But it also means building certain themes and Personas over time. We have personalities on social media and almost employee branding is really important for us and we kind of build up our own personal sort of identities on social. But how those come to life on our content, even though it may not be a specific series, is almost like there's an expectation for. There's a character we all play in certain ways on our social content that we repeat in different formats about the dynamic within the team. For instance, and it becomes of like a humorous thing that we can now go film what would otherwise be like a dry sort of product promotion video. And since we've built up like a good example is like this Christina versus Christina thing that we're doing, we have two marketers named Christina in real life, their personalities are very different and like we've like amplified those to be like caricatures for whenever they're on camera together. So when that we're promoting like a specific product they end up like arguing because one Christina wants to be like bubbly and like B2B sass and synergy and the other wants to be like direct and no bullshit. Right. So that's something we kind of play across like lots of different pieces of content. So I think when brands think of serialized content it becomes daunting because it's like, oh wow, I need to like script and film like a mini TV show. But there's other ways to think about like serializing your content, your like personalities on social media and those don't always have to be like super highly produced. Although highly produced stuff I think does, does perform well. It's just a lot more budget and time intensive. Yeah. And I guess just the last thing I'll say on that is like there's been other things too that we don't serialize until we've proven out it's worked once or twice. So again like you can say like, like okay, we got to make a show or you can just have a one off idea, post it and if it does well be like okay, maybe we should do more of these. And that's, that's really what we've done with anything we've kind of repeated in the past. It started as a one off.
- [32:55]
Daniel Murray
Yeah, it's like the old school TV model where you pilot, see how it works and then you go. But I, I like, I, I like the, the theory of like, there's multiple types of serialized content. I think it's like what you're doing, you're like coming up with things you could be known for. Like yours is like characters. Some people are like highlights, some people are like tv, like TV show themes, theories. I think even like a format that you own is like something you could like that people know that this is your format is another way. There's so many different ways to consider like serialized, but it just helps you become more known. Like when someone goes to your social media, they're like, okay, Christina versus Christina. I know what to expect with Christina and Christina instead of like, what is this video? Or like, I know what to expect. This is the format they do every single time. I know that when I come to this page, I'm going to get this format. So it's, that's a good. Obviously you can test it now with like trial reels. You can test a lot of things too, which is not one of the best things about social now. It's like you can try a lot of things and see if it flops or not.
- [34:08]
Slate Advertiser
We're brought to you by Slate today and honestly, if you run social for a brand, listen in for like 20 seconds. How many tools are you using just to make content? Because most teams are at five or six apps and you're still chasing logos in some Google Drive folder. Nobody's organized since 2022. Slate is one content creation workspace base. The NFL, Amazon, New York Times are on it. The Pistons, Lily, Dish cap cut for Slate, video and image editing, AI clipping approvals, brand assets, all of it. Slate Teams.com links in the show notes
- [34:46]
Daniel Murray
back to the episode. I want to also go into. You talked a lot on the show, but you've also talked a lot publicly about like social media roles are like very undervalued. But I want to know like, if you were running a brand right now, like how would you structure the social media team? Like what are those roles that you would hire under, like the, the social media content team that will be so valuable to make the best social thing?
- [35:17]
Eric Stark
Yeah, good question. I mean I definitely think it starts with like a vp. A VP of social content. Right. Or A VP of content, like whatever you want to call it, like an executive who actually owns the function, who has a true seat at the table to advocate for resources versus just having sort of social managers under a different sort of broader marketing org and seen as like a separate thing. Right. I think you need an executive for the function and again I would call it a VP of content versus a VP of social and have that be much more of like, like a content entity. Social is the main distribution channel for that entity and they're running those channels. But that content needs to inform other parts of the business as well, like we talked about. And then in being a content entity I think you have to resource that like appropriately. Right? Like you need multiple content creators, like folks who are skilled at different things, like folks who can work together as sort of like that writer's room mentality, who could be on camera, who could edit content, who could do this sort of end to end sort of creative work. So you know, having somebody under that social media person or sorry that, that VP who is kind of, you know, managing, directing the channels, having three ideally minimum, like content creators who are focused in different areas and can work together to like, like build the things we're talking about in terms of like skits and scripts and personalities and then you know, making sure baseline like that sort of media entity isn't just in a silo, like they are very deeply connected to the rest of marketing. So yeah, for me it definitely starts with like a vp, then having like you know, a manager director kind of overseeing under three ideally minimum content creators who could work across different formats and channels. Probably a designer as well, like a professional designer who's connected to the brand and design team. Ideally there's video editing resource too because I think it's a mix of social teams need to edit their own video and quickly turn things around. And I also think you need professional editors to do more highly produced stuff when you need that highly produced stuff, you know. So I think it's kind of how we operate at Slate, like day to day. We're editing our own videos in Slate, but we also work with an agency for anything that's like we want to be like super, super highly produced. Right? Because you need both like that sort of two types of production for social media to make sure that you have the things that will stop the scroll and you're testing different formats and you can try different things. And I do think again it is much more like resourcing a true content entity. I think it's so much More valuable to have that P and B internal than pay an agency to do all that work. But I also think agencies can provide a great bridge to building up internal teams or a great resource to be, you know, an extra content creation resource on that team. I'd also probably put Influencer within that same team because Influencer is social. You know, it's just a different distribution side of that.
- [38:47]
Daniel Murray
I was going to mention Influencer too, because Influencer is like. But I wanted to also go into something that like you could do, like activating like employees into your brand. Because I know that had you doing that at Slate. But like there has been a rise in B2B of like people calling it like EGC employee generated content or whatever they're calling it now of like that. But what's the best way to like activate personalities in your company?
- [39:19]
Eric Stark
Yeah, I mean, I'd say a few things. One is if you're sort of a leader, a boss, you know, an executive who feels like this is a necessary thing, I would like, honestly, like start with yourself a little bit, right? Like, okay, like start posting on LinkedIn, especially if you're like a CEO, right? Because it's, you know, you're the type of person who is going to get more baseline sort of attention and engagement and be a voice of the brand. So start with yourself. If you think it's valuable, kind of prove out like why it's valuable. I also think in terms of how do you actually get employees engaged? One, hire people who already kind of prove that they are active in the space. And that's why what we've done with our team, I've kind of hired marketers who already prove that they're good at that versus trying to just force somebody or convince somebody to do that. Then the second thing is find those people internally who are really interested in building up their presence, who have directly expressed interest or shown that they can do that even if they aren't doing it consistently yet. And start there versus saying, hey, all employees, you need to post or we're going to start a whole employee advocacy program and start sending content to everybody and tracking the results across who's engaging and who's not. Basically, like, start small. Like, prove it out with a few people who are going to be the most engaged and active and then build it from there. And also, yeah, consider like hiring folks who have already proven like their ability to do that.
- [41:07]
Daniel Murray
The last question I going to ask is like ask everybody in this podcast, but what's a marketing hill?
- [41:13]
Eric Stark
You would die on A marketing hill I would die on, I would say is we. I've kind of alluded to this a few times, but I think, I think the title Social Media Manager needs to be retired. I think it calls back to a different time when social media management was really just that of like I am managing these feeds and I basically am kind of air traffic control of like I'm going to post links back to our website, I'm going to post promotional material, I'm going to take in these inputs and distribute them on social and track the results. The job has changed so much to encompass like so much more of brand voice marketing, content creation, production. And I think the title itself is still associated with like a different sort of function and folks who aren't as day to day in it, you know, and executives. I think, I think it's a bad, I don't think it gets resourced appropriately because the title almost gets like looked down on by external like marketers or external executives who aren't seeing the value right. So I think that title should be retired completely. And folks who run social media feeds and social media brands should be brand marketers. They should be heads of content. They should be content marketers in house media production. And they would then be resourced with designers and video editing and video editing tools and creative resources. And then again, like we talked, talked about a lot already, like that content would be seen as something that can power not just an Instagram feed, but your paid social, your marketing campaigns and everything else.
- [42:59]
Daniel Murray
It makes total sense because now like you have to manage long form. Like long form is a big reason. Like feeder into social. There's a lot of content pieces that are big feeder and social. And if someone is not in the room with like a social first lens, it's hard to like take a long form piece of content and put it on social when there's no like, like it's not shot the right way or it's not produced the right way. So I totally agree. Lastly, where could people find you and what you're doing at Slate?
- [43:29]
Eric Stark
You can follow me on LinkedIn. Eric Stark, Slate Our website, SlateTeams.com I think those are the two best places.
- [43:39]
Daniel Murray
Sweet. Thank you so much for joining and really enjoying the conversation.
- [43:43]
Eric Stark
Thanks Daniel, appreciate it.
- [43:47]
Marketing Millennials Host
Thanks so much for listening. Keep tuning in to hear more great insights from the coolest marketers from around the world. If you haven't already, make sure to subscribe and follow the Marketing Millennials podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube or wherever you get your podcast. And if you like what you hear, I would greatly appreciate you giving us a five star rating. It helps bring more marketers into our community.
- [44:12]
Daniel Murray
Community?