Engaging Your Audience through Non-Linear Content Creation

Larry Roberts [00:00:09]:

What is happening, everybody? I'm Larry Roberts.

Sara Lohse [00:00:12]:

And I'm Sara Lohse. And this is Branded, your comprehensive guide to creative branding.

Larry Roberts [00:00:16]:

And on this episode of the podcast, we're going to be talking with someone that I actually have known for a couple years now, and he was on one of my previous shows. So it's kind of exciting to get back in touch with him, find out what he's up to today and find out about this amazing new app that he created that's going to help us kind of reevaluate how we create. So his name is Mark Hirschberg, and Mark is the author of the career toolkit essential Skills for success that no one taught you. And he's also the creator of the brain bump app. That's kind of cool. So he's educated at MIT. So I feel very underqualified to have this conversation. But Mark has spent his career launching and fixing new ventures at startups, Fortune, five hundred s, and academia, focusing on here's the kicker, digital media and even cybersecurity.

Larry Roberts [00:01:03]:

So, Mark, great to see you again, man. Welcome to Branded.

Mark Herschberg [00:01:06]:

Great to see you too. And nice to meet you, Sara. I am super excited to be here.

Sara Lohse [00:01:11]:

We're excited to have you. And this is our first time meeting. I did not have a previous podcast or else I would have interviewed you on. And I promise.

Mark Herschberg [00:01:19]:

Sure. Well, maybe I'll be on your next one as well.

Larry Roberts [00:01:22]:

Well, you know, Mark, it's cool to have you back, man. And hopefully Sara doesn't ever have a next one. I'd like for us to kind of continue this one for a day or two. But you know, what really caught our attention for this particular podcast was the whole discussion of nonlinear media. So I'm wondering if you can kind of help us understand what that is and how that applies to folks and how it's different than the way we currently look at existing media.

Mark Herschberg [00:01:48]:

When we think about most media consumption, there tends to be an ordering to it. A book, for example, you tend to read starting at page one and going to the end. Now, there are exceptions like dictionaries and encyclopedias and even my book, I wrote it so you don't have to read the chapters in order. When we watch a video, we tend to watch the star of the video and then go through straightforward. When we look at the media channels people tend to use, it is social media and email, but those are linear as well. They are ordered chronologically. And so here's the challenge we face. If you create evergreen content, if you're an expert on some topic, leadership, parenting, relationships, marketing, whatever it is, your content, it doesn't get stale after a few weeks.

Mark Herschberg [00:02:40]:

Now, there might be some subtopics we know. For example, with SEO, the algorithm changes every few years, needs to be updated. But if you're a leadership coach, for example, it's not like your advice that from three years ago, oh no, everything's changed about leadership. It doesn't apply. That was good three years ago. It was probably good ten years ago. It'll be good ten years from now. But when we put into our most popular channels, email and social media, it gets ordered by time.

Mark Herschberg [00:03:08]:

And this is a problem. So imagine you are a leadership coach. What do you do? You put out some leadership tip on social media at 03:00 this afternoon. And what does your audience do? They say, well, I'm not even on social media today because I have other things to do. Or the ones who are, and the ones who do see you, they see your tip and say, well, that's not wrong. In fact, that's even good advice. But this is not the time or place because I'm busy trying to close more clients, raise more money, grow my team, and six months from now, after I do all that now, I'll have a leadership challenge. But are they going back and looking at your social media posts from six months ago, are people saving the emails you send them every week saying, oh, I better save this because I might need it two years from now.

Mark Herschberg [00:03:55]:

They're throwing it in the trash. And in fact, every time you send them something that's not relevant, their brain says, ah, you're in my way. Your clutter I need to push out of my way. So we have a negative impact on our audience. And it's not that the advice is bad, it's just not relevant at the time. But then we, as these evergreen content creators have to think about, well, then I just need to send out more. I just need to do a leadership tip twice a day, every day. But that's sending more clutter and it's more work for you to recycle.

Mark Herschberg [00:04:26]:

And this is a problem. So our existing channels, email and social media, and some others as well, including podcasts and blogs, have a problem because they are chronologically ordered and that does not work for evergreen content creators.

Larry Roberts [00:04:43]:

Well, that's a very valid point. And it's definitely a struggle that every content creator faces. And, and you're right. I mean, what I've seen is you just, you're not posting enough. I mean, if you listen to some of the, the more prominent marketing gurus that are out there, they're just, you're never going to post enough, post, post, post, post, post. And you could even recycle existing posts. You could do the same post, because the people that are looking two days from now aren't going to be the same people that were looking two days before. So they didn't even see the first time you posted that exact same post.

Larry Roberts [00:05:12]:

So what do we do and how, how do we overcome those challenges, though? How do we change our mindset from mass quantity post to a more nonlinear approach?

Mark Herschberg [00:05:24]:

So the idea of nonlinear is that you don't have to go from front to back. Now we know with a dictionary, for example, they say, don't read this front to back. We created this very simple system so you can find what you need and get it. You dive into that one little part you need and then you put the dictionary down and you come back to it later when you need a different part. This is what we have to do with our content. Now, let me say from the outside, I'm not saying don't create long form content. Here we are doing a podcast, and I've been on, when I met you early in my podcasting career. I've now been on over 400 podcasts.

Mark Herschberg [00:06:00]:

I love podcasts and I write long form articles. Keep doing that. But we need a way to access them in a nonlinear faction, just like the dictionary. It's big, but you can access it in a nonlinear fashion. You can jump in. So here's a simple thing you can do. Let's take your blogs or podcasts, for example. By default, they're ordered chronologically and that's fine.

Mark Herschberg [00:06:28]:

And there are people who are regular subscribers. You want to get the next one because you love the great content that YouTube put out, but you also want them to be able to quickly find other historical content without having to start from the beginning and go through each one on the blog page. On my books website, I have multiple websites. So my books website, I mean, give you the name, not that the books relevant to this audience, but so you can see it. So the website is thecareertoolkitbook.com. and if you go to the blog page, yes, you see all my blog posts and they're in chronological order, but they're also tagged by topic. So if you say, I am going to a conference tomorrow, I just want networking tips. And again, I don't care if they're from last week or last year, because these tips don't get stale.

Mark Herschberg [00:07:16]:

You can just tap networking and all the networking content. It's tagged as networking, all the networking blog posts and now you've got all the networking articles. Or you might choose interviewing if that's what's relevant to you. So I've created a secondary index, effectively the first one is that chronological index that we get by default, but there's a secondary index to get you in by topic. And this is a very easy thing you can do. Most content management systems for your blogs, your podcast episodes, other things on your website. You can create this other way to start accessing your historical content.

Larry Roberts [00:07:56]:

Yeah, I mean, categories have existed on blogs since I think blogs have existed, in all honesty. So now whether or not folks leverage that, that type of categorization is a whole nother story.

Sara Lohse [00:08:08]:

But so once we have them categorized on the website, you were talking about email and social and everything, like how do we get that system in front of our audience? Because our audience is probably more likely to find us through those media channels versus I'm going to go on their website and oh, I already know they have these categories. I'll pick the one I want. How do we tie it together?

Mark Herschberg [00:08:33]:

Let's talk email. Here's another example, and you're right that for blogs and content management systems, this is step one. If you're not doing it, you should because your CMS probably already supports this and you can get very easily. Email is one where I see a lot of people not utilize email in a way that's more effective. So certainly yes, you should have an email list if that's right for your business and get people to sign up. But it's the same problem. Someone somehow finds you and then they're just getting that email every week. That may or may not be relevant because we do this, push it out and then just hope it lands with some people and we'll talk about flipping that a little later in the show.

Mark Herschberg [00:09:15]:

Something you can do with email is you can create specific, almost email channels. So for example, suppose you are a speaker and you did a talk on a particular topic. So someone says, oh, I went to your talk so much. Great advice, I want to remember it. They are now in market for that content and will be for perhaps the next few weeks. But your general email list, you're hitting some of that, some of your other topics, it may or may not resonate. What you can do is create a follow up email list dedicated to a specific topic or subtopic that you focus on. So I'll just use myself as an example.

Mark Herschberg [00:09:58]:

And I don't happen to have email lists, I don't use them. But if I did, here's what I would do. I talk about different topics. I mentioned networking, interviewing, leadership. Those are my topics. If I had a general email list, I'm going to cover all that. But then let's suppose I do a talk on networking. I would have a very specific, networking only, automated email list that when someone signs up, they get a drip campaign, maybe an email a day for the next 20 days, maybe it's an email a week for the next eight weeks.

Mark Herschberg [00:10:32]:

However you want to set up, and they sign up to that list, they get the drip email. But not just one or two, they get 810 20. That's all content following up for what they have now expressed interest in. So I went to my networking talks. I love this content. I want to get this content. They now get that content regularly for days or weeks, and at the end it converts them over into my main list. And so what you've done is you've had people express, I am interested in this specific category and you have set up a feed specific for that category, an extended feed using your existing content that you're recycling.

Sara Lohse [00:11:14]:

So basically like lead generation and list segmentation. But I have to ask now, why don't you have an email list?

Mark Herschberg [00:11:23]:

I don't have an email list for two reasons. One, I, we will fight about this. One is I think email is a very crowded channel and it's hard and takes a lot of effort to get into it. And two, it's because I have nothing to sell. This surprises people. I have my book, and yes, there's a cost. If you want to get the book, there is a cost because we print it and we ship it. The app I have is completely free.

Mark Herschberg [00:11:50]:

The content I put out online is completely free. I'm a paid speaker, so companies can hire me to do a talk. But you're not going to get a lot of speaking gigs from an email list. I'm also in my day job. I'm a fractional CTO, fractional chief technology officer. That also, you don't really sell that through an email list. That comes from a lot of relationship buildings, building some credibility, just being very well known. So what normally gets sold through emails, I don't do.

Mark Herschberg [00:12:22]:

So I didn't see a point to have an email list.

Larry Roberts [00:12:24]:

So from a traditional content creation perspective, how can people look at it from not using necessarily a blog, but from a social media type perspective, how can you leverage like nonlinear media and nonlinear content creation from that perspective? Because we're constantly being bombarded with create content, release your episode. We'll call content, we'll call it a podcast. Create a podcast, release it on whatever day you release it on. Stay consistent and you'll find your audience. How do we start creating from a nonlinear perspective right out of the gate?

Mark Herschberg [00:12:59]:

Create that long form content. As I said before, I'm a fan of it and still create it. And I'm not saying don't use social media or email, use those channels, but take that content you have and convert it into micro content. So you probably do some of this. You probably do already with a podcast episode, say, oh, we're going to pull out this 32nd clip. Sure this nugget of information, but turn that up to eleven. Keep doing that. And today there are more and more tools that will let you do it.

Mark Herschberg [00:13:34]:

Great tools like pod intelligence and other ones out there. And a lot of people are just doing it directly within, especially for just written content. They're doing it directly just in modern AI Lom tools so you can start to pull it out. And don't just get one or two clips, get ten clips, get 20 clips. And now you're going to build up this archive. You have all these clips, all this micro content. It might be text, it might be a couple lines of here's that great piece of advice. It might be an audio clip or a video clip.

Mark Herschberg [00:14:06]:

And it's got your subtopic. If you're a marketing expert, you'll have subtopics around SEO or email marketing or list building or whatever it is. So you're going to have all this great content targeted within that specific subcategory. And now you can start putting it out onto these specialty channels where you let people direct. I want this subcategory of information, whether they sign up for your email list, whether they search for it on your website. And so now you're taking your evergreen content, you're making it easy to find because they don't have to read that dictionary front to back until they find that one word they're looking for, they can go directly to it. Especially as you put this on your website or other sources, especially when you link it back, you're going to really help your SEO.

Larry Roberts [00:14:54]:

So how can you streamline this process? One of the complaints that we get a lot, and I love the fact that you dropped pod intelligence on us. I've never heard of that one. Sari, have you heard of Pod intelligence?

Sara Lohse [00:15:05]:

No, I was thinking like Capcut is one of the ones I use and I know you used opus.

Larry Roberts [00:15:10]:

Yeah, opus.

Mark Herschberg [00:15:11]:

For a while.

Larry Roberts [00:15:12]:

Yeah, this, but pot intelligence, that's a, that's a new one. I'm gonna have to check that out. And you'll have to excuse my flower pin. It's the only one I could find this morning. But I actually wrote down pot intelligence because I'm like, I gotta check this out. This is what I haven't heard of and it kind of shocks me. But, and I had a meeting before this and this is the pen I was using. But you know, Mark, this, I love the concept of nonlinear content and I see the value in nonlinear content, but it also sounds like a heck of a lot more work for the content creator.

Larry Roberts [00:15:41]:

And that's something that a lot of the people that are listening to our show, they already struggle with is streamlining the process of content creation. Is there a streamlined approach that people can take to start leveraging the benefits of nonlinear content?

Mark Herschberg [00:15:56]:

I created a free app to do this. Now you can use my app again. It's completely free. There will be other apps and tools out there in the coming years. I hope mine is not the only tool out there because this is where content needs to go. I think other people are going to join in on this trend. The essence of all this, it's about push versus pull in these traditional media channels. We push it out, we throw it out there and we say, well, I'm going to push out to 10,000 people and maybe it resonates with 100 of them and I'm going to either be ignored by or annoy 9900 of them.

Mark Herschberg [00:16:36]:

Not great. Wouldn't it be great if we could let people say, this is what I need here and now.

Larry Roberts [00:16:42]:

But let me ask you this, Mark, let me jump in there real quick because how do people know that we have what they need?

Mark Herschberg [00:16:47]:

It would be when you use these topics or categories to let you know this content. If you go to my website, for example, and look at my blog page, you see about twelve topics they talk about. If you're looking for marketing advice on my books website, I don't see marketing. Okay, this guy is not helpful. And you go to someone else or you have a larger set that says, here's where you can find marketing people. Here's where you can find other people with leadership or parenting or whatever your topic is. So we need that meta index certainly to help you where to look.

Larry Roberts [00:17:25]:

Okay. And your app, now your app is there for your content. Do I understand this correctly?

Mark Herschberg [00:17:32]:

My app is there for everyone's content.

Larry Roberts [00:17:35]:

So they can use your app to potentially, I'm assuming load their content. Help me understand how this works.

Mark Herschberg [00:17:42]:

That's right. So let me explain. The app is called brain bump. It's on the iPhone, Android stores. It's 100% free. We do not charge anyone anything. We don't sell data. We don't steal data.

Mark Herschberg [00:17:53]:

No ads. It is free. It's how I'm trying to make the world a better place. Love it. You take the key ideas from your content. If you have a book, imagine you went through a book with a highlighter. What would someone want to remember? Okay, these are the key things. Now, we support books, blogs, podcasts, classes, talks, events, all sorts of different types of content.

Mark Herschberg [00:18:16]:

And it's pulling out those key ideas, typically about one to four sentences in lengthen, but we allow longer. And right now, everything is just done as text. We don't yet support video or audio, but that will be coming down the road. You take those nuggets and you put them into a spreadsheet. You, as the content creator, put them all into a spreadsheet. And so you've got them organized and you'll put the topics. This is about leadership, this is about parenting or whatever your topics are. Think like hashtags.

Larry Roberts [00:18:45]:

Sure.

Mark Herschberg [00:18:46]:

You upload that to the server, and then you're done. You've done that once. Now, all your content that you chose to put on there, whether it's everything from all your podcast episodes or just from certain ones, whatever you choose, it's all there on the server. Now, the app users, they've gone to the app store, they download the free app, and they go and they say, oh, here's Mark's book, here's Tammy's book, here's Sara's podcast. Say, when I access that, I'm getting all the tips from that book or that podcast for that blog, they're now all on your phone. And so people will access it one of two ways. Either they will do a just in time access. So I've mentioned before, networking tips in my book.

Mark Herschberg [00:19:33]:

Where do you read it? Sitting at home? Where do you need it? When you're in the lobby of the conference you're at saying, boy, I wish I remember these tips. So imagine you're in that hotel lobby and you pull up your phone and you click and you go, okay, networking, that's the topic I want. There's all the networking tips. You just quickly flip through them, go, great, great.

Larry Roberts [00:19:53]:

Yep.

Mark Herschberg [00:19:54]:

Okay, this is all good. You've got them there in seconds, right when you need it. Or it might be something where it's more foundational. If you're a new parent, you don't want to say, wait, my kid's doing something. Hold on, wait, wait. Pause. Let me go look this up. You need to remember it.

Mark Herschberg [00:20:10]:

And we know spaced repetition works. We know you need to see it over and over. So you set up what I call a daily affirmation, but instead of it just gets sent to you at two in the afternoon because that's when the person decided to just push it out. You say, you know what, I'm a parent. I want at 06:00 p.m. because that's when I walk in the door and see my kids. I want the leadership tip at 09:00 a.m. because that's why I walk into the office and need that.

Mark Herschberg [00:20:37]:

Because if I got the parenting tip at 09:00 a.m. my brain is going to say, it's not that, it's not the right tip, but I'm not parenting now. This is the wrong content in the wrong time and place. So we let the app user pull the relevant content. I need this now. I need that. Then they don't even have to open the app. It just pops up on the phone.

Mark Herschberg [00:20:59]:

There's a parenting advice I need. There's a leadership advice I need now. All the content, when they see it, it is branded with your cover image, with your title, with your name. So they see your brand over and over. And that's the brand exposure you want, instead of, oh, I got swiped through all this on social media. You're in my way, you're in my way. It's, I'm getting exactly what I need when I need it from you. What a great brand.

Mark Herschberg [00:21:27]:

This is always relevant to me. It's also all hyperlinked because unlike social media, we're not trying to keep people doom scrolling on the app. We want them to find the content on the app and then go to your website. So if you've got that quote from your blog post or from your podcast, they go, wow, great advice. I love this. I want to go deeper. They just click the link and they go right to hear the episode or right to read the article driving them to that evergreen content. Because we're not ordered chronologically, they're going to see the post that came out two days ago, two months ago, two years ago.

Mark Herschberg [00:22:03]:

It's all the same. It's relevant now. And so this will automatically continue to recycle your content. And unlike social media and email, you don't have to say, oh, I got a post again. Oh, I got a post this week because once I put the tips for my book in there, I'm done. I've never gone back, but every day someone is getting relevant content.

Sara Lohse [00:22:25]:

So as the user, I say, I want to. I don't know what term y'all use. I'm going to say subscribe because it's a regular one. I said, if I want to subscribe to, like, the networking tips, am I subscribing to networking tips from mark or just networking tips? And it goes from everybody.

Mark Herschberg [00:22:44]:

Good question. We may roll that, the everybody version out later. For now, think of it like a Kindle. With a Kindle, there's a massive number of books out there, but you don't want every book you say, here are the books I like and that's what you've installed on your Kindle. So with the brain bump app, you install tips from your podcast because it's great quality, but not that other podcast. They might have something on marketing and content too, but yeah, they're not very good. I don't want their tips because that's going to clutter it. So the app user gets to say, I want from this book and these podcasts and those blogs.

Mark Herschberg [00:23:25]:

Now, once they've installed it on the app, they can either look within just your podcast or they might say, of the ten content sets I've installed, I know they're all good. That's why I selected them. And when I want SEO tip, I don't care which one it comes from, so they can look across the ones they chose. We don't yet have it where we can look across everything because again, we're worried there's going to be too much clutter. So we're going to have to eventually build tools to help you filter so you have control, but can go wide.

Larry Roberts [00:23:56]:

Okay. And Sara, that's a great question because I was wondering the exact same thing. Is this an opportunity for content creators to essentially have their own app for their content? But with that description there, Mark, it sounds like that there are a number of contributors to the app and then the user comes in and selects the contributors that they want that content from. Did I understand that correctly?

Mark Herschberg [00:24:19]:

You did. If you roll back the clock about 20 years when phones were starting to get popular smartphones and people said, oh, I'm going to turn my book into some type of app someone can put on their phone. Well, no one wanted to have 50 different book apps on their phone. It was just clutter. And so Kindle was the right answer. I can put any of these books into there. The other challenge you would get is if you had your own app, and certainly if you want to build your own app, more power to you. Sure, I welcome you to do it.

Mark Herschberg [00:24:48]:

But if you build your own, then you have to get people to install your app. Once people have Kindle, you don't have to say, oh, first install this app. That's my book. It's like, oh, you have the Kindle. Just get, oh, you have brain bump. My tips are there and so it's much easier. And people on brain bump already can now find your content as well as they're looking around. Just like someone on a kindle can do a search and say, oh, what other books are here?

Larry Roberts [00:25:14]:

I think that's really, really cool. And it's an entirely new avenue for people to get their content out and have it readily accessible in a, here's the kicker, non linear format. I got the concept, guys, as far.

Sara Lohse [00:25:27]:

As discoverability, when you said, like, you can go in there and then like, look around and they can find you, are they finding you only by name or can they find you by topic?

Mark Herschberg [00:25:37]:

Right now, the app, we're relatively early, we're a younger app, and because I do not charge anyone anything, features get funded out of my pocket as I do it. So right now you can search by title. Okay, we will start to add ways we can search by topic. Now, when you look at a particular piece of content, you say, oh, here's a podcast. Maybe you type in marketing and you see a couple podcasts and books that have marketing in the title. Then you can look at the topics and see, is it the type of marketing I want? So that will give you some indication. There's also a description that they have so you can go a little further. We'll later have other discovery methods.

Mark Herschberg [00:26:19]:

The way a lot of content creators use this is when you're a content creator. So this is the author, the podcaster, the people putting out these tips. When you put your content on brain bump, you get a unique link and a corresponding QR code. Now, these can be shared on your website, social media, email lists. So a lot of people will share it to their existing audience and say, hey, if you want all my tips in your pocket, if you'd like to get the relevant content of mine, when and where you need it, click this link or snap that QR code and instantly adds that content. So, for example, when I complete my talk, the final slide of my talk, there's a QR code where I say, do you want to remember everything you learned in this talk. Snap that QR code. Want to remember everything you learned in this episode and all my prior episodes? Go click that link.

Mark Herschberg [00:27:14]:

So a lot of people use it to engage their audience in a way where they know you're going to get relevant stuff in a timely way. And that's going to really help that brand association instead of I'm just going to keep throwing things at you and hope maybe, maybe eventually you finally start to trust me.

Sara Lohse [00:27:33]:

So I love that and I love that it is focused on, like you said, brand trust and brand awareness, and we're really building that relationship with our audience. But is there a way that this translates into sales? I know you said you don't sell anything, but some of us still do. We don't have our MIT multiple degrees, so we got to sell some stuff. Is there a way that like, you click on it and it goes to buy the book?

Mark Herschberg [00:27:59]:

Yes, there's a couple things you can do now. I admit this is more about building that brand trust. You're not going to be selling really high priced items through the app itself. We have a basic interface for books. There is a buy button. Now there's only a buy button on the Android version of the app because iPhones don't like us to have a buy button that takes people anywhere but Apple. And so if you put your Amazon link, Apple got upset about that, but there is the buy button. If you want to direct people to buy the book, you can direct people to your website, where of course, that's where you're going to upsell people.

Mark Herschberg [00:28:40]:

There's also a way for you as a content creator to have lead magnets. You might offer, for example, sign up here and get my free resource for whatever. And when you do that, of course you're capturing the email and they're getting your resource. You can also put, if you have a calendarly link, a lot of people say, I give a free 30 minutes consultation. Call that as well. You put in the app and people when they look at your profile say, great, I'm going to sign up. And again, you'll capture their email address. They'll go into whatever lead gen system you have so you can promote that type of content on the app.

Mark Herschberg [00:29:17]:

Because we know people are here to sell things, as you said, I might not be, but others do. And that's what we want to support. The Brain Bump app. It's brain bump with a b, the Brain Bump app. You can download the app on Android and iPhone stores. That's the app if you want to learn more, and particularly if you're a content creator and want to get your content on there, the website to go to is brainbumpapp.com. and if you go to brainbumpapp.com comma, there's a 92nd video that will show you how the app works so you'll have a better sense of it. I didn't want to show it here because I know we have audio listeners or people who listen while driving, but there's a 92nd video.

Mark Herschberg [00:29:58]:

You'll get a sense of what it looks like. There's a description, there's faqs, a bunch of information, and at the bottom of the page or hit the link at the menu for content creators. If you're interested in getting your content on the Brain bump app and it is completely free, click that link. There's a 32nd form where just say, tell us your website, your email, your name, how to get in touch with you, and we'll be in touch about how you can get your content on the brain bump app so you can continue to engage your audience with always relevant content with no additional effort on your part. Because we're one and done. Once the content's there, you never have to go back and do it. So all of that [email protected] dot so.

Larry Roberts [00:30:42]:

Let me is it all there? And maybe you don't want to give up. Maybe this is proprietary, but I mean, are you basically just using RSS feeds to, to access the data or.

Mark Herschberg [00:30:52]:

No, it's not RSS feeds. Once you put the content on the server, once you upload that spreadsheet, the app and the server just, we've written a whole lot of code, sure. To have them connect and get the relevant information for the end user.

Larry Roberts [00:31:07]:

And the reason I asked about the RSS feed and you'd brought up the spreadsheet earlier, but if it's one and done, it seems like if we're creating more content, we're going to need to upload to the server as we create more content. Is that an accurate assumption?

Mark Herschberg [00:31:20]:

So that's a good question. When you have a book like mine, I'm done. The book doesn't really change. And so I don't go back. If you have continual content from your blogs, from your podcast, yes, you do need, if you want the newer content there. And let me talk about that for a second. Now, an RSS feed. There are RSS feeds for the podcast, but not yet for that snippet of content.

Mark Herschberg [00:31:46]:

Sure, eventually there will be the technology is not quite there. So what you can do, you can add things one at a time. So you might say, here's my blog post of the week, and I'm just going to click a button on the server that I, as a content creator, see and just drop that in and that's going to take you 15, 20 seconds or you take that spreadsheet. What I do with my blog is every week I put out a blog post and I might take one or two takeaways, nuggets from that blog post. I'll just add to the spreadsheet. I just keep re uploading the same spreadsheet because our system is smart enough to say, you know, the hundred tips you had before, I see those. I'm not going to add those a second time. The two new tips you've added, I'll just add those.

Mark Herschberg [00:32:28]:

And then the app user, the next time they log in, the app users who have, I, like your term, subscribed, who have downloaded your content or effectively subscribed, the system will automatically pull in those two new tips. It will bring it in for them with no effort on your part or their part.

Larry Roberts [00:32:44]:

So I'm assuming there has to be some normalization of the data, though on a consistent basis. I'm assuming there's upload formats that the users have to follow.

Mark Herschberg [00:32:53]:

If you're a content creator, it's very straightforward. You put in the text. We're not yet doing other media. We will eventually, let's just, you put in the text, you put in the topic, think hashtags. That's all that's required. Many people put in, for example, for a podcast or a blog post. Here's the title of the blog post. Here's the link.

Mark Herschberg [00:33:14]:

This will let people click back, but it's very straightforward. It's text and links. So pretty simple. We have directions for all of this. We have video directions, we have written direction. Most people say it's intuitive what we found for people with podcasts, for people with blogs who are constantly putting out new content, it's typically, it's about a minute or so per episode, because once you've extracted it, which you probably already did for social media, copy and paste into the form, upload it, very straightforward. So it's very easy to do. And you can use social media, excuse me, you can use AI these days.

Mark Herschberg [00:33:54]:

A lot of people I know will say, take my transcript, extract it. We talked about high end tools like pod intelligence, but we see even with off the shelf stuff for text, again, for a podcast, you might want video or audio clips for text? You can literally drop in a transcript or a blog post or a chapter from your book and say, give me ten to 20 tips and give me the topic tags for them. Give me the page number or give me the timestamp. If it was video, you'd have timestamp. It can pull that out for you. The reason we haven't integrated this is the dust hasn't settled on those tools and we're waiting for the dust to settle. We'll eventually integrate it. For now, we're asking you to do it yourself and then just put into the spreadsheet.

Larry Roberts [00:34:41]:

Might be a little bit before that dust settled. It's the wild, wild west out there right now.

Mark Herschberg [00:34:47]:

One other thing we know for people, I have people who say, I've got 1000 podcast episodes, say, okay, you do not need to take tips from 1000 podcast episodes. That's going to take you forever. Take 50 episodes, your last 50, or your next 50 on a go forward basis, or your most popular 50, or whatever feels right and put those in and get that to start. And then do new episodes on a go forward basis. And then later, if you want, you can add in back catalog stuff. So if you feel, wow, I have so much content. We don't want you to be overwhelmed. You can say, I'm just take a handful of episodes, get those tips in, get going with that, and then it's just that other, literally minute a week to just add the new content.

Larry Roberts [00:35:33]:

Sara, anything before we wrap up?

Sara Lohse [00:35:36]:

But I'm curious because I have not yet been brave enough to even add categories to blogs because I'm like, that's going to take a thinking. And I already thought too much when I wrote them. So I will take the first step and I will categorize and then I will graduate to brain bump.

Mark Herschberg [00:35:57]:

Here's something else you can try. Think about your categories. You probably have five to 25 that you generally write about. If you can come up with those categories, you can use one of these AI tools and say, here's the article. Which categories? Pick three categories that this applies to. And now again with AI, because it's not perfect. It might pick two that are good and one where like, how'd you come up with that? Or really you only needed two and the same thing. When you tell it to extract the quotes, you might say, that quote makes no sense.

Mark Herschberg [00:36:34]:

Why is it pulling in that quote? That's a silly thing. That was your welcome comment. It's not 100%, but it's going to get you 80 or 90% of the way there. So you can use AI tools to help you automate some of this.

Larry Roberts [00:36:47]:

Yeah, I mean, you could even do the same thing in chat GPT and tell chat GPT what categories you want to categorize your content in. Feed it the content and have it recategorize it and spit it out in a spreadsheet for you.

Sara Lohse [00:36:57]:

It's easy enough for people who spent 20 years in data analytics.

Larry Roberts [00:37:03]:

I didn't spend 20 years in chat GPT.

Sara Lohse [00:37:07]:

I think my favorite ever. How did AI find that quote? Quote was, I think it was. Kristen was on our podcast. We were talking about marketing and storytelling, and the AI tool said that she gave a definition of an irish dance from traditional ancient irish settlements, and that had never been mentioned, but AI decided that's what we were talking about.

Larry Roberts [00:37:31]:

That's a wonderful hallucination. It sounds like AI took a little different kind of bump. Maybe a little, maybe a key bump. Might have been the bump that we use there, not a brain bump. But anyways, mark, man, it's been great. I really appreciate you coming back on the show. I apologize for my lack of technical stability on this end. Typically doesn't happen, but it's always fun when you're podcasting remote.

Larry Roberts [00:37:54]:

So thank you for your patience, thank you for your time. And I got to tell you, man, when we first started the conversation, I was trying to piece all this together, but as we continue down the path and we finally got to brain bump, I was like, oh, my God, this is actually really, really cool stuff. So pretty exciting stuff. Definitely going to dig into it myself, and I hope some of our listeners dig into it as well and really appreciate all the work that you put into developing this app so people can reach more people in a more, I don't know, I'd say beneficial way, you know, so they don't have to sort through all the, all the nonsense and get right to the. Just the tips.

Mark Herschberg [00:38:30]:

Thank you. I think brain bump is a fantastic tool for content creators to use, and I also think, as I said before, it's just the beginning. I am looking forward to a whole bunch of other tools from other people that's really going to revolutionize how we access content in a non linear manner.

Larry Roberts [00:38:48]:

Love it, love it. Thanks again, Mark. We really appreciate it. Hey, everybody, if you're listening right now or watching right now and you found some value in this episode, confident you did. Man, this brain bump seems like a really, really cool app. I highly recommend you check that out, and I also highly recommend that you subscribe to branded so we can continue to bring you these very insightful, amazing, technically challenging episodes each and every week. And with that, I'm Larry Roberts.

Sara Lohse [00:39:11]:

I'm Sara Lohse. We'll talk to you next week.