Edition #7

happy Tuesday! I hope you’re enjoying your Summer and are getting enough time outside. To all the Netroots folks that are getting this newsletter for the first time — welcome! — every month, I put together a round up of news, highlights, tests and things we’re exploring around the creator economy as it relates to the progressive/impact space at Social Currant.

If you were forwarded this email, subscribe here.

I also share more about what we're up to at Social Currant, my interactions with creators and how you should be thinking about working with creators.

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WEBINAR ALERT: Before we dive into the main highlights, I want to share some exciting news. We’re going to be launching a two part webinar series (maybe more depending on feedback!) on how you can engage with creators.

It’s totally free and you can sign up here. You’ll hear from our team, our awesome creators and more about the best ways to get started.

Alright, so — let’s dive in to everything else:

1. We’re back from Chicago — Ellie & I were in town for a week. First as part of the Higher Ground Labs cohort (we’re part of the latest one!!) and then to rep our booth, panel and pitch at Netroots.

2. We were featured in Campaigns & Elections. Check out the article here.

3. We’re excited to demo some of the new features we’re releasing, primarily our updated campaign dashboard and first party sign on — giving you access to critical creator data. Give us some feedback by signing up for a demo with our CTO here.

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WORKING WITH CREATORS | USE CASES & RELATIONSHIP BUILDING: Through my role, as you’d expect, I have a lot of conversations with folks trying to understand ways to work with creators. This can be everything from where to start (why we’re doing our webinar) to how it can work on an ongoing basis. So for this week, I thought I’d get you started with some ideas, recommendations and more:

• SponCon aka sponsored content is the most common way of working with creators. You pay a fee to work with creators and reach their audiences. This can be one post or a hundred. It’s often the best way to get started and engage a creator and their audience.

• Creators produce high quality content that you can work with them to create and then use in various ways. Whether that’s to grow your presence, have better performing ads or more.

• Bring them on as Creative & strategy consultants to help you build a better campaign. One of the things we practice a lot is asking creators for feedback on whether the deliverables / asks make sense strategically to reach their audience or if there’s better ways to structure it.

• Tap into their storytelling expertise. Not only how to tell stories effectively, but their stories themselves. Collaborate with creators to explore issues they care about as it relates to your organization. Share resources, research — empower them to share their stories in partnership with you.

Now some more specific ways to collaborate with creators that we’ve seen:

• Rapid response: If you’re trying to respond to ongoing news developments and want to get content out fast, working with creators can be one way.

• Events: Invite creators to your next event, whether virtual or in person.

• Streams & Lives: Host events in partnerships with creators. Interview them or have them interview you!

• Press Opportunities: Pitch your creators to the press / submit them for press opportunities.

• Speaking Opportunities: Invite a creator as a speaker, performer or more.

• Advocates: If you’re looking for advocates for an issue, look through your creator network and see if creators want to speak on issues they’re passionate about.

• Staff: Hire creators onto your team to help you design, implement any part of your creator / content programs.

A few specific ways to put this into practice / start engaging creators:

• Build the network: If you aren’t already building a network of creators, start! It doesn’t have to be a 100, it can even be one creator that is relevant to your work. Reach out — engage them in a conversation.

• Resources: Share resources with creators, especially in rapid response moments that are related to the work your organization does.

• Regular Updates: Give regular updates on what you’re up to — things that your creators could learn from.

• Newsletter: If you have enough creators + enough updates, turn it into a creator newsletter.

• Access: Give creators access to things you have access to. Let your research director help them put together facts for a video (if they’ve got capacity) — make sure to highlight that you’re here to help them!

A lot of this is about working with creators in ways that are outside of simply sponsored content and building strong relationships.

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Creator Economy News I’m Reading:

• TikTok is testing out a new creator fund that would compensate creators for creating longer content. Read more about what this could mean for creators here.

• Threads is out, threatening Twitter (X??) and launching new features. It’s yet to be seen whether usage will be there or not. Read more about the threads launch & usage here.

• TikTok is partnering with Warner Music on a licensing deal. Read more about it here. This can only be seen as part of TikTok’s move to enter the music space in a more formal capacity.

• It’s already known that TikTok is the go to for music distribution and it’s taking on Spotify & Apple Music. Ready more about TikTok’s music streaming service here.

• From Jim Louderbacks ‘Inside The Creator Economy‘ newsletter is a great read on Activision and TikTok usage rights. Read the article he shared, published by Passionfruit here.

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NEW SECTION: Anecdotes, Observations & what we’re hearing from creators:

• Youtube trying to be TikTok and TikTok is trying to be Youtube. Not really, but sort of. Hearing reports from creators about how TikTok is trying to get folks to do longer form content (>1 minute) and Youtube is trying to push Youtube shorts (<1 minute) — this may mean more editing on content to fit the various needs of the platforms and optimize for their algorithms. Credit to our creator friend, Laurenzo here.

• The algorithms on TikTok and Instagram may be similar, but we’re seeing a lot of differences in terms of engagement. Posts on TikTok tend to have higher engagement (6-10%) than Instagram (1-5%). BUT, posts on Instagram tend to have a higher reach. We recommend prioritizing cross posting with creators where possible. Credit to Ellie for pointing this out in one of our metrics report.

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Some ideas we're testing/looking to test. I'd love to chat with you if you're interested. Grab some time / reply!

• Twitch: We’re diving into the twitch space with some clients in close partnership with some awesome creators like Ariana. We’re going to be testing individual streams vs group streams and exploring CTAs. If you’ve done some of this work, let us know!

• Ads: We’re exploring what it may look like to boost a creator in a specific geography before we work with them to reach that geography. This is more relevant to Meta’s targeting, but may also be relevant to TikTok as it may be a way to build your creators audience in a certain location and then reach them through sponsored content.

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FAQs from the month:

Can I run ads on creator content? The short answer is yes, if you have the right permission. The long answer is a conversation around usage rights. Assume that you have no usage rights at the beginning. You are simply paying the creator to create content and post it. They own it and have all rights to it.

If you want to run ads, you can ask them — understand their rates and build them into contract. Make sure to clarify:

• Type of ad: Boosting/Whitelisting, Running on other platforms, running anywhere else.

• Length of ad: How much time will you be running the ad for?

• Editing: Will you be editing the ad? If yes, make sure to get the appropriate permissions.

Running ads is possible as long as you make sure everyone involved knows what’s being done and it’s built into the contract anyway.

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If you made it all this way - thank you! For reading, trusting creators and me. I'm building Social Currant to make an impact and you all are a part of this journey. Until next month!

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