Episode 417: Human to Human: Rethinking Social Media with AI

Intro

0:00:18 – (Bob Woods): Welcome to the Making Sales Social podcast featuring the top voices in sales, marketing, and business. Join Brynne Tillman and me, Bob Woods, as we each bring you the best tips and strategies our guests teach their clients so you can leverage them for your own virtual and social selling. This episode of the Making Sales Social podcast is brought to you by Social Sales Link, the company that helps you start more trust-based conversations without being salesy through the power of LinkedIn and AI. Start your journey for free by joining our resource library. Enjoy the show.

00:00:44:10 – (Brynne Tillman): Welcome back to Making Sales Social. I’m Brynne Tillman and I am really excited to introduce you to today’s guest, Greg Weinstein. Greg is the founder and CEO of Aggie, an innovative AI tool designed for small businesses to navigate the complex world of social media without the stress of becoming content creators. With a rich background in digital media audience development and marketing, including leadership roles at MTV, Comcast and Univision. Greg’s expertise has helped brands connect with their audiences to powerful storytelling and data driven strategies. Today, we’re going to dive into his insights about social media’s role in business. The significance of showing up online in 2025, and much more. Greg, welcome to the show.

00:01:32:08 – (Greg Weinstein): Thanks for having me.

00:01:34:02 – (Brynne Tillman): Thrilled to have you here today. Excited to jump into your genius. Really excited about your platform that we are now playing on. And it is magic. Really like, really magic. I’m excited about that. But before we jump into all of that brilliance, we ask all of our guests the same first question, which is what does making sales social mean to you?

00:01:57:25 – (Greg Weinstein): Oh, I love that question. Well, you know, from my perspective, we often get asked the question about our tool. Does your tool work for B2B because we create social content? Does your work work for B2B or does it only work for B2C? And what I always answer is, well, when you’re selling B2B, are you still selling to a person?

00:02:22:09 – (Brynne Tillman): Right. 

00:02:23:25 – (Greg Weinstein): Because ultimately, when you’re selling, whether that’s through a direct sales pitch or you are actually just conveying what your brand stands for, what your products or services actually are, you’re not sharing it with the ether, you’re sharing it with other people. There’s recipients on the other side. And that’s really what we are focused on, is how can you understand what each of those people are most likely to resonate with and respond to?

00:02:56:02 – (Greg Weinstein): But, you know, whether it’s you know, obviously 1 to 1 sales, you’re thinking people. But when you’re thinking about actually putting stuff out on social media, we find that it’s really helpful to think that you’re not just putting something on Instagram, you’re putting something on Instagram to reach another person on the other side. That’s why it’s called social media. Somehow that seems to have somewhat been forgotten, 

00:03:21:09 – (Brynne Tillman): I think. I love it, so it’s really h to h human to human no matter what you’re selling. 

00:03:25:02 – (Greg Weinstein): I love that. Yeah, absolutely. 

00:03:26:09 – (Brynne Tillman): That’s fun. That’s awesome. So just give us an overarching what is Aggie, if we even want to say who is Aggie? Because sometimes when we talk about Aggie now, it’s like a human, right? And even the website which is letaggiedoit.com is like, it’s just, very relatable. But talk about the value of Aggie in this AI digital world. And a little bit about why you started her.

00:04:01:08 – (Greg Weinstein): Sure. Actually, if I may, I might go back to Aggie’s predecessor, which was a company named Audience Genomics, which was an insights tool that we sold for a good number of years, as consulting to large enterprise customers. And, effectively, as I was talking about, in the last question, it was answering the question of, hey, what’s the best thing to talk about for my brand? So if you’re a dog food brand, for example,

00:04:38:01 – (Greg Weinstein): as a dog food brand, you can talk about any number of potential things. You could talk about how it tastes great, how it’s nutritious, and where the product is sourced. It brings you and your pet closer together. It gives your pet a healthy coat. Any number of those things, as well as then how are you featuring and showing off your product? Or is it showing a person with the dog? Just the dog? Just the food, the food in the bowl? Is it indoors? Is it outdoors?

00:05:07:00 – (Greg Weinstein): There’s infinite numbers of choices. How do you de-risk the choices that you’re making so that you’re not throwing spaghetti against the wall, but you actually have a data backed hypothesis that saying X instead of Y is likely to land with your target customer. What we ended up learning was when working with portfolio companies of private equity companies, we heard them say a number of times, hey, we love these insights.

00:05:35:00 – (Greg Weinstein): Like we’ve never seen insights like these. You’re effectively giving us the ingredients to make awesome social media content. Can you just cook the dish for us? The first question I had was, don’t you want to be the chef? Wouldn’t you rather just have the ingredients and you be in control of cooking the dish? And they said, yeah, actually, we would, but we’re so under the gun of feeding the beast of social media that we just don’t have time.

00:06:05:22 – (Greg Weinstein): And if you already know what’s likely to work much better, if you could just make it for us.And so our light bulb moment at that time was if a private equity backed company of 4 to 5 marketers was saying they don’t have time to handle social media and do an effective job, what’s the local bakery saying? What’s a three person law firm saying? And, this all happened around the rise of AI. And we realized that I was a garbage in, garbage out medium. So I don’t want to go deep into jargon, but one thing that I think is helpful and important for audiences to understand is that AI is built to generally give you the average answer, because it’s trained on everything.

00:06:55:06 – (Greg Weinstein): And when it stills down everything, it’s kind of tailored out of the box to give you the average of everything. 

00:07:01:09 – (Brynne Tillman): Right? 

00:07:02:06 – (Greg Weinstein): So if you put, you know, a question in, you’re going to get an average answer. If you’re right, make me a social media post, you’re going to get an average social media post. It will be serviceable. But if you can give it better inputs, context matters tremendously in terms of AI when it comes to telling the AI who you’re making it for or other parameters to keep in mind. Think of them as creative guide rails. So I don’t want to necessarily just say anything. I want to make sure that my company is coming across with the following personality.

00:07:40:06 – (Greg Weinstein): I want to make sure that we’re answering this specific set of pain points. I want to make sure that not every single post is just selling, but there is a certain amount of posts that are actually creating inspiration and teaching. And none of those things would really work out of the box if with general AI to say, just make me something, it requires all of those other inputs and parameters, and then those inputs and parameters can either be good or bad.

00:08:15:22 – (Greg Weinstein): And so effectively, I’m going to get very Hetty here with you for a minute. What great creatives do is that they really take into account all of these elements and connect the dots in their brain, so they have a good sense. One is, who’s my customer? Another dot is, what’s the pain point I’m solving for that customer. Another dot is, hey, what’s the brand voice that I need to speak in times, you know, 20 other dots. And if you connect the combination of all of those dots in the right way, you’re going to get a much more ideal or optimal message that’s going to speak to that customer than just, hey, buy my dog food.

00:08:56:12 – (Greg Weinstein): And so what we realized was that, computers are much better at connecting or at collecting dots than humans are at finding all of that, that investment faster. That’s what machines were really built to do. And then we’ve built a tool that basically connects the dots on your behalf to make posts. But what we’ve also learned is that our users in particular, I would say probably this is going to be true for every user, if they don’t want to just trust AI out of the box.

00:09:31:28 – (Greg Weinstein): And right now, give me a good starting point. But I may not love every single thing. Like maybe you’re getting me 95% of the way there on that post. Or, you know, hopefully the vast majority of posts are close to 100%, but every once in a while, hey, I’d really rather it be a little more, friendly or have a little bit more teaching or have it, you know, say something that I know that the machine doesn’t know yet. We’ve built the tool in a way that it works out of the box, but also gives the user the ability to weigh in and guide if and when they need to.

00:10:07:18 – (Greg Weinstein): And so I would say that’s another fact to come back to your original question. It’s another definition of making sales social is that, we are allowing or not, you know, building a straight up AI solution where the sender of the message has no guidance over what actually goes out once the inputs get in, but that you can actually weigh in yourself and inject some of yourself into the content as well.

00:10:40:09 – (Brynne Tillman):  So I love, I mean, now I see why we’re so aligned, but I don’t know if, you know, our crispy framework for prompt writing, but it’s content based. So all that context that we need is a role. Who was my inspiration? This is tone, company voice, brand identity all those things. Scope which is the parameters, prohibitions, everything we don’t want AI to do, which sometimes is as important as what we want it to do. Right then you. Which is to ask me all the questions you need to complete this task in my voice, with my perspective, one at a time.

00:11:17:21 – (Brynne Tillman): And so everything becomes an interview versus, producing. Right? So these are all the things I want to do, but I want that in my own voice. And I want you to interview me.And so that’s our whole, like our entire AI product, ask us Excel is built in that, mentality in that, you know, in that framework. And it sounds like it’s very aligned with what you guys are doing. 

00:11:44:18 – (Greg Weinstein): Absolutely. That I love the framework. It is, you know, I think what’s happening before our very eyes is that the, the the entire definition of creation is changing before our very eyes and, and ultimately, the way I’m looking at it right now is that AI is is very good at handling a bunch of the mundane execution elements, but the I found, I think, when I first started using AI and this is outside of the product AG, but in general that in some ways it felt like using AI was cheating.

00:12:25:15 – (Greg Weinstein): And, and I’ve used it and the more I realize, hey, like the, the, the crisp that you can add to it, just be the, the crispiness that you can add to the crispy process is the essence of what the creative process is anyway. It’s all of those dots that are. Yeah. And that is still entirely human. I think like I, like I started to say before, what we do with AG is we then basically make that process bionic. We like to expand that by, like just guesswork. Yeah. So so you can, you could kind of guess, hey, what is my brand voice?

00:13:07:14 – (Greg Weinstein): But wouldn’t it be better to know what your brand voice is? Well, how would you know? Well, one way to know is to actually look at a whole bunch of other things that you’ve said in the past. Figure out what the different brand voices were for each of those things, and then see if there was any pattern that made one brand voice stand out above all the others. And then you could say, my audience really loves it when I’m being funny, or they hate it when I’m being funny. They love it when I’m inspirational. They love it when I’m teaching. They love it when I’m doing A, B, C, or D for that. We work with a marketing framework called Brand Archetypes. 

00:13:48:21 – (Brynne Tillman): Oh, yeah, I love brand archetypes.

00:13:50:20 – (Greg Weinstein): And, we’ve really built the first algorithm to actually identify by looking at past content, what your optimal brand archetype actually is to just, you know, that sounds like a big fancy word for people who have never heard it before. But the idea of archetype is a character type and basically, 

00:14:13:21 – (Brynne Tillman): there are 12, right? 

00:14:14:20 – (Greg Weinstein):There’s 12. And these are character types like the hero, the jester, the ruler, the creator, the innocent, the lover, so on and so forth. 

00:14:25:21 – (Brynne Tillman): And I’m going, really? Guess you’re the magician. 

00:14:28:20 – (Greg Weinstein): You’re exactly right. Actually. Funny enough that you would say that, magician,just now teaching people about archetypes. Magician stands for a character that is able to get oversize results by kind of skirting the rules of nature. So you might want to think about, like, the alchemists of the days of all. That’s what the idea of where magic kind of started was. I could create wealth by turning lead into gold. That’s what alchemists were doing. So it was a shortcut to wealth.

00:15:01:05 – (Greg Weinstein): So magicians are any product or company that delivers the feeling of magic? Or does this kind of shortcut achieve better, outsized results? Ultimately, brands that understand these archetypes, again, for people who are marketing geeks like me and brand, the best brands in the world often will pay hundreds of thousands of dollars on brand studies to identify this archetype, to understand, hey, if my brand was a character, what kind of character would it be?

00:15:37:01 – (Greg Weinstein): And why? Why does my brand need to actually have a character? Well, the reason is that by giving your brand a personality characteristic, you’re shifting the relationship between you and your customer from transactional to emotional, because now they could connect with you for what it is that you stand for, not just what you’re selling. So what? Let’s make this very practical. What does Nike stand for? What is every message that’s ever been said about Nike for the past? 

00:16:08:21 – (Brynne Tillman): Nike, if I remember, is a hero.

00:16:10:16 – (Greg Weinstein): Exactly right. 

00:16:11:21 – (Brynne Tillman): Nike Fedex like that. Yeah.

00:16:15:04 – (Greg Weinstein): Yeah. Mastery accomplishment, achievement is hero. So you look at their tagline, just do it. You look at every message that they’ve put out in the world. It has an element of our to the challenge. It makes you a hero. Yeah. And, what studies have shown is that when these archetypes take hold and people have these emotional connections with brands, they have real business benefits. They can charge more. They get better word of mouth.

00:16:48:00 – (Greg Weinstein): They can withstand more. There are a large number of elements, and all of these things really ultimately accrue to people who may have heard the term brand value, but what is brand value? Brand value is outside of tangible assets of a company, a company still, you know, you add up all your assets to the company. It might be worth 10 million, but the company in total is worth 13 million. So what makes up that difference? The 3 million

00:17:19:12 – (Greg Weinstein): is the equity in the brand is of brand value. And how is that equity built? It’s built one message at a time, one message at a time. And ultimately when you’re doing it right, one consistent message at a time, that is continually reaffirming that, hey, this is what my brand stands for, so that now when somebody goes to buy sneakers, they’re not just going to buy rubber and leather.

00:17:51:10 – (Brynne Tillman): They’re buying the promise of success. Massive success. 

00:17:55:12 – (Greg Weinstein): Exactly. 

00:17:56:10 – (Brynne Tillman): Yeah, yeah. 

00:17:57:12 – (Greg Weinstein): And so to tie this all back to what we’re talking about here, whether you’re using a tool like Aggie or doing it on your own, any business owner is well-served to try to create a hypothesis of, hey, what values do we really stand for? And ultimately trying to always weave some of that into your messaging, no matter what it is, if it’s teaching or selling or persuading, always tying it back to.And this is why I’m sharing this, because we stand for making you a hero, transformation, caring for others, etc., etc. and the way that I like to think about it is that,

00:18:40:24 – (Greg Weinstein): if you’re putting out either a social media post or an ad, you could look at that as, hey, I am just, putting money into a savings account like it and put it in, and whatever I put in, I might get something that I have that value for it. But if you’re always tying your messages back to brand value, you’re putting it into an account with compounding interest, because now you’re not just selling that thing that you’re selling in that post, you’re selling sneakers, but you’re also selling mastery accomplishment. And then, 

00:19:16:10 – (Brynne Tillman): yeah, 

00:19:17:24 – (Greg Weinstein): continue to sell those two things continuously. That mastery, accomplishment, achievement in this particular example is the thing that’s always going to be there for you.And the more powerful that becomes and the more people connect with that piece, easier it ultimately is going to be to sell, because that stuff is now baked in there, like, oh, I get it, you are the Patagonia of birdhouses. You are, you know, ethically sourced and,

00:19:45:03 – (Greg Weinstein): you stand for charitable giving and etc., etc.. So I know I’m going to buy your birdhouse instead of some other birdhouse, because I know that your birdhouse comes with this other layer of meaning that maybe they’re even subconsciously.

00:20:00:01 – (Brynne Tillman): So talk to me about how Aggie learns all of that so that when it builds the content for the month like this. Crazy how amazing it is. How do you build this to know that brand and be consistent so that every single one of those posts throughout the 30 days of the month are completely aligned with that message? And the brand archetype.

00:20:29:01 – (Greg Weinstein): So it’s, it’s a great question. So I would say that,

One of the things that I think, somewhat proud of, is that we are a data company that was initially built by a group of creatives and not data scientists. So we started from the perspective of what does it take to create great content? I was a television producer and then ultimately digital content producer for many, many years. Is it the world’s biggest media company? So we approached this to say if I needed to tell a story, what are the elements? What are those dots? I would like to know. Then we set out to say, how can we get those dots?

00:21:11:21 – (Greg Weinstein): And we realized the best way to get those dots is by looking at content that was put out in the past and tying it together with engagement signals. So you could think of messaging on two levels. Level one is what is a brand choosing to say about itself, and level two is is the audience reacting or not giving the intended reaction when they’re choosing to say that particular thing about themselves?

00:21:41:24 – (Greg Weinstein):  So go back to the idea of archetypes. You could be a brand that’s trying to be funny. But if you analyze all of your posts where you make a joke or put something in that’s funny and that gets lower engagement than any other post that you put out, you may think that you’re a jester, but your audience is telling you otherwise. You know, I’m just telling you I don’t relate to you as being a jester. But if every time you put out something that’s about how your product is from, you know, the purest sources and ethically sourced and it’s good for Earth.

00:22:21:13 – (Greg Weinstein): And maybe you only you only do that about 15% or 20% of the time, but that’s driving 80% of your engagement or all the posts where you’re talking about your ethical values, your your, your cleanliness, your goodness, your that ties to something called an innocent archetype.

00:22:42:22 – (Brynne Tillman): Yeah. 

00:22:43:13 – (Greg Weinstein): That’s what the audience is actually reacting to. So you may think you’re one thing, but you also with every message you put out, there’s multiple archetypes that are woven into each and every one of those. And so, if you look at a big data set, you can actually ascertain, hey, we’ve noticed every time that you are expressing this type of brand value, you’re getting an outsized return or response from your audience.

00:23:14:16 – (Brynne Tillman): Well, the interesting thing is that I could do this all day. And I know we have to wrap this up very soon, but, if you are innocent and you’re pretending to be a jester, you’re going to lose your innocence because innocence is all about trust, right? And, I think. Right. So if you have not, you know, that optimism where humor often is pessimism.

00:23:39:10 – (Brynne Tillman): Right. Not always. But, my mind goes to if you’re trying to show up, it could actually hurt your reputation. Not just even be a neutral issue. It could actually reframe how people see you in the marketplace in a way that may not be conducive to business growth. 

00:24:04:13 – (Greg Weinstein): I think you’re absolutely spot on. I mean, these are the dangers of this kind of marketing by gut.bBy gut only.

00:24:12:23 – (Brynne Tillman): And so, you know, what separates random acts of, of sales or random acts of social greatness? Well, yeah. 

00:24:21:13 – (Greg Weinstein): Yeah. And I guess maybe. Yeah, maybe to kind of tie this up, this is kind of an overall thesis is like the, the way that, you know, we’re I’m a, I’m of a certain age and I’ve seen a lot of changes happen in the media. And so I’ve seen that if you look at what it takes to tell a good story, as a brand or even a communications entertainer, my brand, like I was in before, and you kind of need three parts. You need to you need,

00:24:48:08 – (Greg Weinstein): distribution, execution. But to do it effectively, you need insights as well. And so I love that the distribution has been democratized in our lifetime. Right. It used to be that if you wanted to reach a mass audience, you’d have to go to somebody who owned a tower and could reach you by 

00:25:06:23 – (Brynne Tillman): social media level, the playing field level, 

00:25:08:08 – (Greg Weinstein): the playing field makes it available for everybody. Right? Your iPhone has democratized content creation. So I used to have to pay as a TV producer, three guys lugging big boxes with cameras this big on their shoulder and, you know, perfecting all sound people and, you know, thousands of dollars a day to capture something. Now, any kid with an iPhone could get better quality than those guys could. 

00:25:36:23 – (Brynne Tillman): I turned my office into a recording studio and my son produces it.

00:25:40:24 – (Greg Weinstein): Right. So now you can make stuff that’s professional quality. You can get it out there as equally as any brand in the world. But the thing that separates Joe’s Beer from Budweiser is that Budweiser has lots and lots of money that they pour into research and insights to understand what they’re saying and why to who and to test all those things. And that has yet to be democratized. 

00:26:09:23 – (Brynne Tillman): Like, you can do that. 

00:26:11:24 – (Greg Weinstein): And that’s where AG comes in, is when I recall the insights that these we kind of realized, you know, we because when we, you know, we pivoted from selling to big brands to selling to small brands. And that was partly a business choice because there’s a lot of scale there and there’s a lot of need there. In the past, there was a philosophical choice that we made as well, which is the small businesses of the world or the fabric of America. And the world. Right. And there’s far more of them than there are these. 

00:26:47:23 – (Brynne Tillman): Sure. And they’re underserved. 

00:26:48:24 – (Greg Weinstein): They’re completely underserved. Let’s give them the tools to be able to compete with the big boys. And the insights is one little way that you could actually do that to build a powerful brand. So that is such a good way to start wrapping this up.

00:27:01:22 – (Brynne Tillman): So that is such a good way to start wrapping this up. My next question, we may have talked about everything. Maybe not, but what’s one question I should have asked you that I didn’t? Greg.

00:27:11:21 – (Greg Weinstein): One question is, hey, who uses a tool, 

00:27:17:22 – (Brynne Tillman): who uses Aggie, who uses social sales? Like, now we just got, like, onboarded today. I think 

00:27:24:21 – (Greg Weinstein): That’s awesome. Fantastic. What we’re finding is that, we’re seeing businesses of all stripes. But interestingly enough, we’re seeing an over-indexing of service based industries that are coming to us. So these are home services, legal services, like personal injury and worker’s comp attorneys in the home space, cleaning services, plumbers, electricians, handymen, contractors. And what we are really kind of learning from our audience is that there’s, there’s a very large group of people who have the same exact pain point, which is, I know I should be posting more, but I just don’t have the time, money, energy or scanned with, yeah, 

00:28:11:22 – (Brynne Tillman): bandwidth yeah.

00:28:13:14 – (Greg Weinstein): Bandwidth.Take it off my plate. 

00:28:15:22 – (Brynne Tillman): Just what I need to let Aggie do it. 

00:28:16:14 – (Greg Weinstein): Aggie do it. And, so yeah. So that was a surprise. Learning for us was, you know, we figured this was really ideally suited for product based companies. It turns out service based is where we’re getting more of our traction today. I don’t know that that will always be the case, but as of today, service based industries. So you know, those service based industries, like we started talking about before B2B, you might think, hey, I don’t need to market or it’s not critical. But what, you know, we typically say to customers is

00:28:51:00 – (Greg Weinstein): every single day these social media platforms are basically offering you the equivalent of a free billboard on the side of a major highway. You just have to decide, are you going to put something on that billboard today or not? And every day you choose to not put something on the billboard, you’re just missing that opportunity

00:29:09:12 – (Brynne Tillman): so well. And what I really love is there are a lot of companies where you can put anything on the billboard. What you’re putting on that billboard is so spot on that it’s attracting the right people for the right solution, and that you have a framework behind the scenes. But I thought, there’s no way you’re going to capture our voice. We have such a distinct voice. And I’m like, honey, you know that.

00:29:42:10 – (Brynne Tillman): You know, you can’t like and that’s the like, it’s not about scheduling have been schedulers forever and ever and ever, but it’s about the content that you are creating at scale for brands is completely spot on to their brand voice. And that’s the magic. 

00:30:03:00 – (Greg Weinstein): Thank you so much, Brynne. I will take your ear, labeling me as a magician archetype any day of the week. I appreciate that. And yeah, we are hoping to bring a little bit of magic to people’s lives here, and just empower them really ultimately as well. You know, these bakers, they’re too busy baking. The lawyers are too busy lawyering for social media to be a whole second job for them.

00:30:28:13 – (Brynne Tillman): I also see this not to contradict what you’re saying, but I also see marketers in companies grabbing on to this because you can share too many different platforms in many different ways. That’s significantly more productive than anything they’re doing now. It’s not a push button. Hey, this is the voice on Instagram. This is the voice on Facebook. This. And it’s just. So, although I hear that you are going after the small services, I can see market marketers inside of companies and marketing agencies really getting a lot from this, too. But that’s just my perspective. Thank you so much.

00:31:11:08 – (Brynne Tillman): If people are interested in learning more about what Aggie do a.com other than go to letaggiedoit.com. you do you have a free trial. What would be the next step?

 00:31:21:00 – (Greg Weinstein): We offer a free trial? we would welcome any one of your listeners to get on. Let us know that you came from this podcast. We’ll give you a custom onboarding session. And we’ll get you on it. Make sure that you’re set up, right out of the gate, with real humans, on borders here to help get you set up, get you on the right track. And make sure that you have a successful experience. And, thanks for allowing me to share the message.

And thanks for everything that you’re doing for your audience. It’s an amazing service that you’re providing as well. And, I appreciate being able to be a tiny little part of it. 

00:32:02:08 – (Brynne Tillman): And, I do, with you guys as well. Thanks so much. And to all of our listeners, when you’re out and about, don’t forget to make yourselves social.

Outro:

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