Edition #9

Happy Tuesday! I hope you’re enjoying the (hopefully) cooler weather wherever you are. To all the new readers from the events we’ve been doing recently — 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.

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

1. Ellie was named a Rising Star in Influencer Marketing! (she is a star!) Make sure to send her a note congratulating her! Read more here.

2. We were grateful to speak at a range of conferences, from Vidcon Baltimore to Way Forward in Las Vegas. We’ll do a few takeaways below.

3. We worked with Courage for America to host our largest in person activation with creators. 9 creators descended on DC, held meetings with representatives and went to the White House. See one of the pieces of content here.

4. We launched a newsletter for creators with Girl & The Gov. We’re excited to bring resources, updates and more to creators over the coming months.

5. We’re going to be launching bi-weekly sessions for existing clients to learn from each other. Stay tuned!

6. We’ve built quite a bit in the last few weeks and are excited to test it with clients and partners. Here’s a quick look at what you can do on the platform!

   

   A GIF of everything you can do on the Social Currant platform.

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A few takeaways from Vidcon, Way Forward & a few of the conferences we’ve been to in the last few weeks:

• Youtube is important and we must have a strong strategy around communicating on the platform. Whether ad placement is the right strategy is yet to be seen.

• We must invest in talent if we want the creator space to succeed. Whether that’s investing in creators, media companies, influencer marketing folks — investing in talent is a long term power building strategy.

• Long term strategy includes short term actions and we must start thinking about how we can prepare for 2024 NOW.

There was also a lot of conversation at both conferences about the nuance in the creator economy and the importance of thinking through how you’re communicating with the different types of creators.

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Alright, so — for today’s newsletter I’m going to focus on tips, tricks & advice for organizations on navigating creator programs internally and how to connect with different stakeholders. This newsletter is based on a panel conversation I did with the awesome Julia McCarthy (Priorities USA) & Mikka Kei Macdonald (Community Change). Both have been instrumental in helping Social Currant navigate the progressive space.

Quick tips:

• Get ready to talk to everyone. Running a creator program is the most cross-functional role you can imagine. From legal to finance — you have to be in close communication.

• Process is everything. Make sure you build out the right process and get buy in from organizational stakeholders before you do anything.

• If you’re not able to do things fast, you may have some challenges. Running a creator program is a million different pieces and steps with each one holding up the next. Speed can help ensure that things are running smoothly.

Diving Deeper:

• Start with a test that isn’t critical: When you’re thinking about running a creator program, make sure you start with a test that isn’t immediately critical. For example, if you do electoral work, start early — more than a year out and test in a small scale so that you’re able to build and navigate the right practices. A few key things you want to make sure to figure out after you’ve done your test:

  1. Approval process

  2. Vetting requirements on creators

  3. Types of content that perform

  4. Types of creators that resonate with your organization

  5. Processes you need to do this work

  6. Understand if there are specific parts of this work that will take longer internally so that you can get ahead of them.

• Set expectations and have conversations around metrics: Before you get started on a creator program, when you’re in the planning phases, it’s important to think through the metrics and the expectations that other people have around creator work. A few things to keep in mind:

  • Have a conversation around the metrics that are available, which can often be different than other tactics. For example, demographic and geo data is always hard.

  • Talk about what success looks like, whether it’s impressions, persuasion metrics or something else.

• Thinking through navigating conversations with paid: Most organizations are used to paid marketing efforts on Meta, Google, Youtube and other channels. It’s important to have conversations around the differences between paid and organic marketing forms. A few differences:

  • Paid marketing can be turned on and off. Creator work takes time.

  • Creators have relationships with their audience.

  • The platforms give more data on paid efforts than they do on creator work.

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Creator Economy News I’m Reading:

• Taylor Lorenz published a great piece on the ways the White House is thinking about engaging creators based on a speech their Head of Digital, Christian Tom gave at Vidcon. Check it out here.

• META is debuting a series of new AI tools & chatbots. Read more about these here. This is in an attempt to compete with Snap’s chatbot that is becoming more popular.

• After watching TikTok take all the glory for editing tools with Capcut, Youtube is jumping into the space with an app called Youtube Create. Read more here.

• TikTok is exploring featuring Google results in it’s search. Read more about what a partnership could look like.

• There is a growing scrutiny on the different social media platforms to pay creators. X appears to be leading the charge (to some extent), paying $20M to creators to date. For context, Youtube has paid out almost $30B. Read more about X here.

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

• Facebook is paying people more for short-form video, often more than other short form platforms like TikTok, Instagram Reels & even Youtube Shorts according to a creator we know. The data still hasn’t been released, however.

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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!

• Cross Creator Collaboration: Lately we’ve thinking a lot about the importance of creating spaces within your organization for creators to connect with each other. Have you succeeded in doing this? How has it gone? We’ve tried a number of approaches and have always seen value and great feedback from creators who are always looking for ways to connect with peers.

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FAQs from the month:

Should you get exclusivity with creators? The TLDR on exclusivity is that if a creator works with you, you can specify who they can’t work with if they’re similar to your organization. It is commonly used by brands to prevent creators promoting similar brands and showing a conflict of interest. In the nonprofit space, it can get a little nuanced. The true question here is whether you want to prevent a creator from posting about a similar issue — which you probably do not want to prevent.

However, if you want to make sure that creators don’t post too many similar types of content in a short window, you can ask them to avoid doing brand deals or issue area deals for 24 to 48 hours. That may work better!

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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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