Latest / Imagine If with Doone Roisin | Health, Wealth & Wisdom for Women (formerly Female Startup Club Podcast) / GEMS: The Impact of Organic Storytelling with Lezlie Karls from Mid-Day Squares

Transcript

GEMS: The Impact of Organic Storytelling with Lezlie Karls from Mid-Day Squares · Imagine If with Doone Roisin | Health, Wealth & Wisdom for Women (formerly Female Startup Club Podcast)

• 0:09
  So I want to talk about your content and how you've kind of like approached and evolved and just a little bit of insight into what you guys are up to. I'm like such a sucker for guerrilla marketing and like organic storytelling. So I love to see it. I love to see it too. I think that there's a lot of content out there and we're, you know, drowning in content. And I think we're...
• 0:35
  lacking a lot of originality in content. And I understand why people don't get original in content because of the algorithms and because of, you know, the want to go viral. So I think if we go back to, you know, what we do at Midday Squares and how we tell our stories, I just want to start by saying, like, we don't have it all figured out. Like, it's really an ongoing process. What
• 1:05
  is not going to work for us for five to 10 years, right? Like content creation is ever evolving and changes and you need to kind of grow with it. And I would say for us, we started off with telling a story with our iPhones. When we started in our condo, just picking up a phone and recording
• 1:28
  even when we felt super uncomfortable doing it. I mean, I hated being in front of the camera and it would take me sometimes hours to put together a video. I'd have to retake it a hundred times. Why? Because I didn't like the way I looked. I didn't like the way I sound. I felt cringe. I was like, who am I even speaking to? And you push through it, you get better at it, you get more comfortable and you realize that there are people out there that resonate with you. There are people out there that
• 1:53
  are your people and connect with your messaging. And so that's what happened at the beginning of Midday Squares. We were telling our story, people connected with it, and it created...
• 2:03
  you know, a community. And so for the first like three years, we really focused on the behind the scenes of building midday squares, the drama, the highs, the lows, the good and the bad, and even the characters in the story. So like, you know, when we first started, we had, you know, some of our early startup team, like Jordan and Allie and
• 2:27
  Kran, like different people that were real characters in the show. Like they were big, larger than life personalities and that added to it. So we had this dynamic, we had this kind of energy that was going on early on with our stories, which was a lot of the behind the scenes. And then that kind of evolved into how do we tell a really impactful story or not even impactful. What does impactful mean? I mean, for us, it's, does it make somebody feel something deeply? Yeah.
• 2:54
  Is it hitting somebody emotionally? Is it educational? Is it entertainment? I mean, what is it doing to the viewer, right? How is it affecting them? And so we started telling these like three minute, four minute short episodes, right? And that was really, really challenging to figure out because basically at that time we had a full-time videographer.
• 3:18
  who would just film at the office and follow us around with a camera and follow the team around and be in on the meetings. So we'd get like 40 hours of footage a week. And then we'd have to kind of navigate that down to three, four minute stories. So that was really challenging. But we figured it out and we did it.
• 3:38
  And I want to say like building teams to do this is really hard because it's new for businesses. It's new for the industry to find creators that want to be in a company and want to tell stories for a company. It was definitely challenging because creatives want to work on many different projects and don't want to be tied down. So kind of finding those creators that were willing to stay, that wanted to stay, and that also didn't get involved in the politics.
• 4:10
  office culture because the videographers couldn't, shouldn't get involved with the office culture because then it makes their job complicated because they're supposed to be telling a story, you know? So anyways, that's a whole other episode on the dynamic of how we've had to navigate that and how it was challenging too for the teammates. But ultimately by separating the two, you got the best content because the videographer was like a journalist looking
• 4:40
  We worked on those stories for a little bit. And then we realized that the strongest stories, well, not the strongest stories, but stories that really got virality on our TikTok and stuff like that were stories that were scripted. So we started writing scripts for our stories. Everything is true. It's just more scripted. And basically we take all the B-roll and we build upon the script and tell the story. So that's what we do. We started doing that about,
• 5:09
  a year and a half ago, and we started getting virality on TikTok. And I think it really resonated with people, that form of storytelling. So basically what we're trying to optimize for is how do we engage the algorithm, but also stay true to our storytelling style, which has been really hard because, you know, the algorithm...
• 5:30
  favor certain things and you're trying to be original and still tell great stories, but you still want to get organic views. We're still a business, right? Like our content arm needs to make sense financially. So we need those organic views. Like last year, I think we did something of,
• 5:49
  55 million organic views, which is incredible. I mean, if you put a dollar cost, a dollar to that, it's quite high of what that would cost to pay for those views.
• 6:02
  So there's real accountability and real challenge there on how to continue to get organic views and to continue to get videos that take off and kind of hit the algorithm. So we're still a question mark. And then there's the piece of how quickly we get content out. And that's one of our biggest challenges because to make these stories takes time. It takes about eight days for my content creator, James, to really put together a script and
• 6:29
  bring the B-roll in, start piecing together a story, get a first story draft to me. Then we go back and forth. Then we keep, you know, the process is eight days and it's long. How many stories do you post in a week? One story. That's the problem.
• 6:45
  You know, that's what we're facing today. That's the problem today. The problem today is that we need to get content out faster and we can't. The issue is, is how do you continue to build this division and, you know, manage costs and make sure it makes sense and create an ROI and create accountability and, and continue to keep the community engaged? Like there's so many times you could tell.
• 7:08
  you know, the story. And I think for Midday Squares, when we started a couple of years ago, we constantly had that drama. We constantly had so many stories to tell. Now the business has gotten to a point where there's a lot of stories to tell, but we can't tell all the stories. And the reason why we can't tell the story is because it can hurt our business. And why will it hurt our business? Well, it could be with...
• 7:37
  you know, retailers, it could be with government, like government agencies and how we interact. And like some of the things like there's crazy stories that happen at Midday Squares that we've recorded, we've documented and we want to tell, but it could put the company at risk. So a content creator has less risk than a company has, right? Because a company still needs to sell bars. So a company needs to tread relatively lightly on, you know, the type of content. So that's what we're kind of
• 8:04
  grappling with today, like how to tell our stories. And we are kind of our mission is to tell the good, the bad and the ugly. And we are still doing that. But as you get bigger into a business, the problems are different than let's say, oh, we have no more coconut sugar. And what are we going to do? We can't produce, right? They become a little more complex. So we're still trying to figure out how to navigate that. Like how ballsy are we willing to be? How much risk are we willing
• 8:33
  have our back? Are they not? That's where we're trying to test the waters and figure out like, what is next? And how do we kind of continue to build this company? And is the strategy even going to work for us anymore? So there's a lot of question marks around the expansion of our content and how we're going to see it unfold. But for anybody who's listening to this, that's thinking about getting into content and wants to tell stories or wants to get out there,
• 8:56
  for their business or whatever it is that they're doing. I mean, social media is amazing. It's a free platform you can use to get your story or get your product or get anything that you want out there. I think it's important to be yourself unapologetically as much as you can. And I think that people will resonate with you in terms of like the midday squares process. We so right now on the team, we have one content creator. His name is James. He's fucking amazing. I love him.
• 9:23
  And then myself. Okay. And we have had bigger teams at times where we've had multiple videographers on the ground. And right now we're a small team, but we haven't decided how we're going to expand the team. And so this is what we're going to be working on in the future. I know I'm jumping. I have ADHD, so I'm all over the place, but let me just go back. So we basically, our process is record what's kind of happening the day to day and,
• 9:52
  get the story on whatever's happening. It could be what's going on in the business. It could be what's going on with the founders, anything, anything.
• 10:00
  And then basically take it back to the editing suite and look at your content. You know, then James and I will sit in a room. We'll talk for about an hour on an audio recording and we'll talk about what's kind of going on. So let's say it's we're going to be doing a story coming up about like how we had to change our name. Busta Peanut, which was our original name of our peanut butter bar to Peanut Butter. So we'll go in the room. We'll talk about what happened. And then basically we'll take that and we'll develop it into a script.
• 10:29
  We'll refine it. And then we'll go into piecing together the story. Then we'll record. And then it takes me like a good hour to record. It's very hard to like memorize the lines and record it. And then James goes back, edits it into a story. We try to make it a minute, minute and a half, you know, and then we throw it up on TikTok. And the goal is to try to get...
• 10:52
  four or five of those videos going up a week at the question marks, what's the cost and how do we do it efficiently and optimize for it? But that's really our process right now.
• 11:05
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• 11:29
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• 11:52
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