- Duration: 28 min
- Platform: zoom
- Source: Read.ai 01K3RX4Q71RK51AQFRGQB054XQ (https://app.read.ai/analytics/meetings/01K3RX4Q71RK51AQFRGQB054XQ)
Transcript
[Sarah Parr]: Hey, Sarah, is now still a good time? [Michael Houck]: Should we do when you’re not in the car? Oh, I’m good. [Sarah Parr]: I have something up I can take notes with, but you don’t want me to share my screen or anything, did you? [Michael Houck]: No, won’t need that. Okay, perfect. Um, cool. Well, what’s going on guys? [Michael Houck]: How you doing? [Sarah Parr]: Hey, um, I’m great. Just visiting a friend at work. So this works great. [Michael Houck]: We’ve got the, uh, we’ve got the full Topanga brain trust here. Um, Blake, how you doing, man? Uh, my voice is a little dry. [Blake Emal]: I’ve been talking for like three straight hours. [Michael Houck]: Oh, wow. [Michael Houck]: What have you been doing? [Blake Emal]: Oh, just like a webinar for a friend and some other stuff, a bunch of calls. Word. That’s all good. [Sarah Parr]: Um, cool. [Michael Houck]: Well, I don’t know if we’re going to need the full 45, uh, Sarah for context, we did the first one of these yesterday with Tanya and we got through, I think both of his clients in like 30 minutes or maybe a couple of minutes more than that. So I don’t think we’ll need the full 45. Um, with that said, it might have another, your client coming your way pretty soon, so keep a Keep up with open for us if you if you haven’t. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, for sure, but OK, so let’s chat. [Michael Houck]: So basically the way that we want to do this is. Just sort of first getting a lay of the land like how it’s been the first few weeks. Getting a sense of what we’ve learned about the client and then sort of turning that into OK, how does how do our initial sort of expectations for format, voice, you know, goals sort of translate to the next phase. So I guess, Sarah, you can maybe start off and just say from your perspective, like working closely with them, like, what have we learned? What’s been surprising? What hasn’t been all that kind of stuff? [Sarah Parr]: Yeah, so overall, I feel like I’ve been getting more comfortable with the tone and the kind of content she wants to be putting out. So that’s, I will say, I think the biggest challenge with this client is she seems to be very precious because she enjoys writing as well, and I can tell that. And regardless of the strategy that we come up with and also like the engagement results that we’ve seen, which in my opinion have been pretty good, she still has a lot of like, she really wants to make it sound like it’s coming from her, you know, her brain, which is of course what we want. But I think that’s been challenging. And I’ve also been talking to Andrew about scheduling posts and alternating between re shares and original content. And apparently she’s been take like on scheduling posts. So I’m not really sure what’s going on there. But I think that’s been a challenge. But content wise, I’m, I’m personally happy with how it’s going. Reality wise, I don’t know if it’s exactly where we want it to be. [Michael Houck]: Well, okay, do we have any more context or unscheduling posts that that doesn’t sound that doesn’t sound good? [Michael Houck]: No, I don’t really have context on that. [Sarah Parr]: That was something that Andrew just told me because I was asking him like, there hasn’t been like a new post on her page. And we have a backlog of quite a few things. So that’s where I was asking about that. And that’s just what he said that he scheduled something and that it didn’t happen. So got it. [Michael Houck]: Okay, I’ll reach out to him about that. Because that’s, that’s concerning. Okay, so can you expand a little bit on like, you know, the sort of tone and stuff like that? [Michael Houck]: Like, when you say precious, like, what does that mean? [Sarah Parr]: I’m like, so he’ll go in and she’ll make things or, like, you know, we were talking about experimenting with various lengths of posts. And she was very clear that posts that she’s done in the past tend to be a little more dense, a little shorter, as opposed to like the large spaced out stuff. So I’ve been holding back on that instead of creating like a hugely detailed post, been focusing on like little details to, to just create like micro kind Um, so I’ve been experimenting with that. And, um, I guess another thing is that sometimes I will take quotes from her voice notes. And then she’ll say, that’s not what I would say, or like, that’s not so I think I’ve been, that’s the best, isn’t it? [Michael Houck]: Goddamn it. [Sarah Parr]: Yeah, cuz cuz normally, I would think that that’s exactly how she would want to sound, but I’m learning her voice versus the way she would write. So figuring that out too. Have you, Sarah, when that’s happened, what have you said to her? [Michael Houck]: Like, have you responded to her being like, I just took this straight from her voice note, from your voice note or like, cause I want to know, like, I’m probably going to send her a message, right. About, about like, you know, maybe be a little more hands off, like let us do our thing. We know what we’re doing type deal. So I want to know like, what’s the context that I should sort of go into that conversation. [Sarah Parr]: with um I I don’t think I’ve really fought her on it because you know I want to try to balance being happy with the client versus just doing you know whatever we think is right but I when Jenny comes in who’s I guess her like assistant and she’ll kind of do some edits or give some feedback I will tell her this term came exactly from her voice notes so then that’s a little okay But then page will come in and maybe delete some stuff or like do some little editing rewrite sort of things which I haven’t again like really fought back on. I’ve kind of just incorporated. Incorporated that maybe that was the wrong thing to do, but no, no, I think it’s fine if I sort of you play good cop. [Michael Houck]: I played bad cop type deal, but I guess we’ve seen when there are teams involved like Jenny and Ryan. And obviously Paige, right? There’s like three people here. Do you feel you have clarity on like who’s doing what on their side and like whose advice you should prioritize? Because I feel like we’ve seen with other clients when this happens, it can get a little too many cooks in the kitcheny, right? [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Is that happening here? [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah. [Sarah Parr]: Maybe a little bit. I don’t know if, again, I think Jenny is like the main editor, but then Paige will still come in and like look at it. And I feel like the voice and the objectives can sometimes get twisted when we do have a third party like Jenny. But at the same time, I know Paige is very busy with her founder duties. So I’m not sure what the right thing to do is there. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, I mean, usually the right thing to do is just for them to pick one person to own this and either Paige delegates it or she does it herself, right? So either way, I think that’ll probably be what I push care who it is it could be jenny who’s more responsive or it could be page who sort of is the person but it probably is better for them to just have one one primary person on their side I agree and then of course I I don’t want her to think that you know it’s not worth it working with us too right no exactly exactly that we want to make it so that you know it’s not like some big time suck for page right but also the that. You know we don’t have it. You know the results are not going to be good if we’re getting mixed feedback from different people and stuff like that so. OK. Any other like I guess. Concerns that we should talk through on on that and then we can sort of talk about strategy. [Sarah Parr]: I think those were my main things in the slack to catch Jenny up. I put my. And this might be going into strategy, but I was thinking two to three posts a week and then alternating between links and reshares and original to integrate it more seamlessly. So like every other post, you’d have a different version of it. [Michael Houck]: And she seems aligned with that. Okay. Okay. So that seems fine. But the actual like style of the posts, it sounds like we’re sort of like deferring our better judgment to what they have done in the past. Is that, I mean, like maybe that’s a place for you to jump in. Is that fair to say? Yeah. [Blake Emal]: So, um, the first round of edits, I was working with Sarah and I was like, Hey, I’m not sure if this is like you, or if this is what she’s told you to do, but this, these things go against what I would do. And she’s like, yeah, me too. She told us she likes the, these flowy things and this flowy sentences and the longer chunks and certain tone. I’m like, okay, cool. So I think we’ve, we’ve learned that part, but even after that, I think there’s been the main concern is voice. And I, my question on that is. We talked about cooks in the kitchen thing. Um, so we’ve covered that, but the other part of it is like, when page herself has been going in and making these edits, is that being done fully in a silo so that you can’t really see her thought process. And if she’s going to do that, can we at least get her to turn suggest edits on so that we can see what she wants to change? It’s not ideal for her to have to do that. If she’s doing it and we can see her thought process, we’ll learn a lot more. So I’m just trying to like make the best out of that if that’s going to be happening. Or the flip side is she just feels really good about Jenny nailing the voice and she can do it. Then that kind of takes off the pressure from her and can stick with that, but I guess it’s unclear on who has the most authority to let edits through. Like, should we be listening to anything Jenny is putting in edits-wise? Or if Paige is going to do it anyway, should we just wait? [Sarah Parr]: That kind of puts us in a weird spot for that. It does. From what I’ve seen, Jenny tends to use the comments section, social highlight, and then I’ll see what her thoughts are. Paige tends to do a rewrite. At the bottom, like taking what we did and then kind of translating it to her, like what she would write. And sometimes it’s not super different, but I do feel like because it’s coming from her own account, she feels like that’s to have it really come from her, which I understand. But if they can’t, yeah. There’s no notes when she adds stuff. So suggestions would be good for me to see. [Michael Houck]: Sarah, I think you’re Your signal might be bad or something. [Sarah Parr]: You’re breaking up. Does that make sense? [Michael Houck]: Oh, did I freeze? No, we heard it all. [Michael Houck]: It was just like… [Michael Houck]: Did I freeze? No, Sarah, we can hear you. Sarah, can you hear me? Yes. Okay, we heard everything. It’s just that you were like… It was like… [Sarah Parr]: The whole time. Okay, you got it. [Michael Houck]: Did you need me to repeat anything? [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: No, absolutely not. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Okay. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Sorry, guys. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: No, you’re fine. [Sarah Parr]: Blake, what are your thoughts? [Michael Houck]: Does that align with sort of what you see? [Blake Emal]: Yeah, I think I’ve seen that, but it’s always tough. So if a client is feeling misaligned on voice, but they’re not giving you like, this is what I don’t like, don’t do this. Which I understand if they don’t want to do that maybe they feel but mind reading is not easy it’s not really possible so we do find ways to at least really digest anything she gives us so I don’t know if you have like a a note thing that you can just keep tabs on oh she changed this to this I need to keep that in mind for you know going forward that stuff will stack up a little bit and give us better stuff going forward that will require fewer edits but ultimately either we have a conversation with her and she’s like, hey, what are the things that you specifically don’t like, So we can be very clear on it. Or the flip side is, I know we’ve done this with a client semi-recently where we’re just like, hey, can we just ask you to literally stop being and just let us, just give us like a week to show what our stuff does versus the old stuff. I don’t think that’s the point at all, but it’s always in the back pocket, I guess. The voices, biggest thing across any client. It’s always gonna be the toughest thing to nail. We just have to be showing that when we do get notes, we absolutely don’t make the same mistakes again. And from my view, I don’t always see 100% of those notes, but you probably will. So I’ll have to defer a little bit on some of those things, but the more that we have like a running voice doc for this client is probably helpful. [Sarah Parr]: I have a lot of the notes that she gave in a doc in Notion, and I’ve been working to apply them. So she likes concrete examples at the top. Specific examples, of course, showing, not telling. And we’ve been able to incorporate them more. But for example, that one post about working with your best friends on creating a product, she added little details like my life partner and co-owner of our chocolate lab. Like I wouldn’t have known any of that, you know? So it’s like things like that that she wants to really personalize that I’ve seen. And then just like little tweaky things, like maybe doing a run on sentence or not using like a break where, you know, Blake and I would. So just that sort of thing, which I’ve been able to catch on with as well. [Blake Emal]: I think you’ve done a good job of adapting. Like I’ve seen that and I know these are things that go against, I would not be adding any of this stuff personally. So yeah, I think we obviously have to make her happy, but maybe there’s some pushing back we can do. I don’t know. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, we’re not going to know the sort of personal details, right? That stuff that, you know, she just will see it and be like, oh, this could be a good place for me to add this. And OK, fine, whatever. But I think to Blake’s point, Sarah, it sounds like you’re already doing this, which is great. The stylistic things and the preference things, those are the things that we need to show her that we’re continuously like osmosising into ourselves and creating this voice for her. So, um, yeah, it sounds like we’re doing that. So let’s just keep doing that. And in the meantime, I’ll sort of lightly broach this with her probably through the lens of like, you know, um, you know, what are the sort of things that we don’t know so that we can speed this up and like, let’s have a single owner of the process, whether that’s you or Jenny doesn’t matter. Um, and I’ll just approach it kind of through that, through that angle. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Okay. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Sounds good. [Michael Houck]: Um, OK, and then in terms of Like I guess like the formats of the post, like do we feel good with the strategy? Do we feel like that’s going to drive results for them or we just sort of doing it to appease them in the short term? Because I know she was like, oh, like I had a friend or two or whatever. Say that this sounds very different than my old post and she was like very self conscious about that. Yeah, like how much are we? How much are we making concessions realistically to appease that in the short term versus do we actually think this strategy will drive results? Because eventually her focus is gonna change from, oh, you know, this sounds slightly different than I would write it to, hey, I’m paying X dollars for this per month, is this driving Y dollars for me in revenue for the business, right? So like I’m trying to get ahead of that. [Sarah Parr]: For sure. [Sarah Parr]: Well, I mean, we only have three posts on her account because of, again, like I don’t know what happened with Andrew would be the one to defer to to talk about that. But from what I’ve seen, the one that I would say incorporated, like most of her rewrites, performed the worst, and it still had 13 reactions. So it’s not like doing badly. But the ones that we’ve incorporated more of our strategy, I do believe have gotten engagements up in the 20s and 30s. So I think, like, airing more on our side has been proven to work at least a little bit. [Michael Houck]: Okay, I’ll confirm the data there with Andrew and just be like, Hey, can I get a sense of, you know, for the ones that we’ve posted versus the ones that we’ve like, biased towards more of her stuff? Like, what are the early what are the early results there? Yeah. Okay, that’ll be helpful for the conversation, too. Okay, I think that’s most of what I had, like, is there anything on your that we should cover here? [Blake Emal]: There’s, there’s one like part of the types of content or topics that I think maybe is worth talking about. Maybe this might just be, I don’t know. I went and edited all this stuff in a batch, but it seemed like, so for what she does, there’s some like altruism to it. There’s some like visionary stuff to it. It’s like, you know, a lot of, some of these posts ended up being kind of virtue signally, not your fault, but just like inputs maybe from the client or whatever. I just want to make sure we’re not like every post is not, you know, we’re doing this because of this grand old mission. And this is what this company is about. Like, I don’t want every post to start leaning toward that. So when we get inputs from the client where we’re brainstorming our own ideas and things like that, trying to maybe balance that with some deeper things. Cause I get the sense, like a lot of this that she’s wanted to push is it’s like everything says the company name or what the company is doing and it’s really exhausting for an audience for every post to be like a mini sales pitch. I don’t think that’s really a note on you necessarily but definitely something to keep in mind if we can start getting those deeper topics as well trying to get insight as opposed to just info I guess or like info about the company because that stuff will get tired pretty quick right so like more like general from her like as a leader as opposed to always about Topanga is that what you mean yeah and there’s so many angles too like yeah go based on her skill set you can go based on leadership you can go based on behind the scenes of the company you can still do thought leadership within the industry there’s like a lot of different ways you can approach it but it’s okay if None of what she’s building today is mentioned if that makes sense And then there it’s okay flip side of some of those posts are more like filled in public But I just I felt editing like I don’t want all of these to be like we have this vision at Topanga and it’s this this and this or whatever. Hopefully that’s sense. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, it’s it’s I think it’s fair for us to establish that early on right like with these first few that we’re doing for her, but I agree Blake I think that We don’t want her audience to feel like when they see a post from her, it’s just gonna be an advertisement for a company. We want them to be like, what’s her story? What’s happening in her life? [Sarah Parr]: Like what’s she learned? [Michael Houck]: All that kind of stuff. Got it. Cool. Okay, sweet. So I’m gonna take the action from this to go chat with her. I’m getting some feedback from Andrew right now. And then I will follow up with you guys if there is like action from that. There probably will be one way or the other. But yeah, I think it’s good to sort of, you know, when there’s too many cooks in the kitchen, you can always sort of have longer term issues. So I think good for us to nip it in the bud. [Sarah Parr]: So I’m gonna try and do that. Yeah, I appreciate you, like doing this call. This was really great. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Cool. [Blake Emal]: I just want to say really quick, you’ve been awesome. I’ve actually I thought the writing has been really, really good. Really. Yeah. Even as we’ve had to adjust and there’s some voice things, I think you have tackled it very well. So thank you for making that. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, nice job, Sarah. [Sarah Parr]: It’s been good. Thank you guys so much. I really appreciate that. It’s always nice to hear that, because you never know when you’re getting all this feedback. [Michael Houck]: So thank you. [Michael Houck]: No, yeah. It’s solid. And that’s why we’re going to keep, obviously, sending you folks, too. So yeah. [Sarah Parr]: Appreciate it, guys. All right. Talk to you guys later. Bye.