Social Media Strategy in the Age of AI with Katie Brinkley (277)
In this episode of Digital Marketing Masters, new co-host Mahek Anam sits down with Matt Rouse (author of Will AI Take My Job Too?) and Katie Brinkley (author of The Social Shift) to unpack the paradox of social media in the age of AI.
Content is easier to produce than ever, yet audiences crave real human connection. We explore why authenticity is becoming a strategic necessity, not a buzzword, and how community, not check-a-box posting, wins when algorithms shift and attention fragments. Katie reminds us of social media’s original purpose, building community, and why showing up as a real human is the only way to cultivate meaningful relationships online.
Matt shares his 3-10-30 rule for video attention, the importance of having a recognizable “face” for your brand, and why platform cultures demand tailored content instead of frictionless cross-posting. We discuss using AI to augment creativity (not replace it), from animating real photos into short videos to repurposing authentic long-form podcasts. Finally, we dive into the coming shift where AI agents personalize discovery from our pockets, and how consistent, specific identity signals across platforms can train models to associate your name with what you want to be known for.
Bottom line: use AI wisely to amplify what’s uniquely you and build communities algorithms can reference but never replace.
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Today on the Digital Marketing Masters podcast.
Social
media in the age of AI.
Your hosts,
Mayek Anam
and Matt Rouse,
and
our guest expert.
Katie Brinkley.
We are living through a paradox.
Artificial intelligence has given us tools to create content faster than ever before.
Yet the hunger for genuine human connection has never been greater. Social media platforms are flooded with AI generated posts,
while users
increasingly
gravitate towards the raw, the unfiltered,
and the real.
Or do they? Because based on video views, that may not actually be the case.
Today, we're diving into a conversation
between two authors and digital marketing veterans. Your cohost,
Matt Rouse,
author of Will AI Take My Job Too?
And Katie Brinkley,
author of The Social Shift. We're talking about community,
identity,
attention and why authenticity
may be your only competitive advantage
when machines can sound just like us. Well, I'm Mehak Anam and this is Social Media in the age of AI.
Let's do this people.
Katie Brinkley opens her book, The Social Shift,
with a fundamental question.
What was social media actually meant to do? And she argues that we've lost sight of the original intent, and with it, our humanity.
It is the first book that I wrote,
which is all about social media and what its true intention was. And it was building community. It still is building community, social medias. And I
think that what we've lost with all these new platforms coming out and AI and everything is we've
lost what the original intent of social media was for. And so we need to shift
how we show up and really understand
that social media is is an incredible tool,
but you have to be showing up as a real human being in order to build a community the right way.
I have to admit, there's something almost grounding about hearing that.
Remember when social media was just
social
before it became a performance review conducted by the algorithm?
I think Katie's reminder is simple but really uncomfortable.
If you remove the human from social media, what
exactly are we left with anyway?
AI has made our lives so e so much easier. Like, we can
do things faster now, but I do feel it's kind of made us
a little lazy with our brain, and it's taken away a lot of the human to human interaction that was happening online in this digital world. During
COVID,
when we're all locked in our rooms,
we saw how much we missed
people. Like, that's why Clubhouse exploded. I mean, all of us were jumping on a never ending conference call
be just because we craved community. We craved connection.
And I honestly feel like that craving hasn't disappeared.
If anything, it's intensified.
And yet many businesses we know today approach social media as a task to complete rather than a community to nurture.
And this check the box mentality is what Katie's warning us about because I feel like when connection becomes optional,
it does get replaced with convenience.
And I don't think Katie is saying that AI is bad.
I think she's just pointing out that when tools make everything easier, it's just so tempting to stop thinking deeply,
to engage fully and even stop showing up intentionally.
And the clubhouse moment, it proved something important.
It proved that when we were isolated,
we didn't want polished content. We we wanted voices.
We we wanted presence and interaction.
So if people still crave that today, the real question is, are brands building spaces for connection
or are they just filling our feeds?
If there's a blind spot that people have for social media,
what do you think it is?
Oh, man.
I think that
I think it's a checking of the box.
And I don't know if that really, like, answers as a blind spot, but I think that for so many people,
social media is like, alright. Check the box. Done.
I did it. And that's not what social media was intended for. Like, take a picture of my here's my product, and they're like, and then they stick it on Instagram. And they're like,
hey. We have this available now.
Box checked. Now I can go back to working on orders or whatever has to be done or answering some of the tickets. Exactly.
And I think that that's that's not what social media was intended for.
When
I mean,
social media is really evolving.
Technology is really evolving, and as we see it evolve,
community is gonna be more important than ever. It really is. And whether you find your community going to events,
and then connecting with them on social media, I mean, some of my closest friends, it sounds lame.
I'm not this much of a loser. I guess I am. But some of my closest friends are people that I met online, and I see them maybe once a year. And they're my closest friends. I've met them online.
We'd see each other's posts on social media, and then we see each other at a conference. I mean, like, but they're my community. They're my they're my, like I said, some of my closest and that is what is going to help you move the needle
in a decentralized world when we are not relying on algorithms to, you know, help us be found.
It's like, okay. Well, now that we're on Discord, where's my community at? I'm gonna find my community. And you have to show up with intention
and authenticity
on social media if you want to build out that community. Don't just check a box.
So how do you avoid falling into that checkbox trap?
As you may have already noticed,
both Matt and Katie circling back to a word we have all heard a thousand times,
authenticity.
And let's be honest, it's become a bit of a buzzword,
almost overused,
but I feel like beneath the cliche,
there's something real because when everyone
has access to the same tools, the same templates, and now the same AIs,
being unmistakably
yourself
becomes the strategy.
And at the end of the day, I feel like social media isn't about just being authentic.
It's also about figuring out what actually makes you different, like your own unique fingerprint of authenticity.
And then also having the confidence to sort of lean into it.
And Matt here saw this firsthand in an industry
where everyone practically looks and sounds the same real estate. Okay. Hear this.
Yeah.
I was on Ben Albert's show, and and it's gonna come out in a few weeks. But we're talking about
how when you ask groups of people,
especially industry people,
what's their differentiator?
They all have a differentiator,
but all of them are the same.
Mhmm. Right? Like, this especially, I used to find this with real estate agents.
And we work with real estate agents or brokerages. Right? And
I'd say, okay. Well, what makes you different from other real estate agents? They go, well, I've it's the biggest transaction you're ever gonna have in your whole life. And and so I bring trust, and and we're like family, and we have the best customer service. And, you know, I give them my cell phone so they can call me and this. And I'm like, every real estate agent says that. Mhmm. Right?
And
then I ran into a guy who was Chicago's
dog friendly realtor.
And he brings his dogs to the showings, and you meet them at the dog park, and everything's about dogs. And he only finds houses or places where people could live that allow dogs.
And
that guy stands out.
Did you guys hear that? He's still selling houses and he's still negotiating
contracts,
but now he's memorable.
He's like the better called Saul of the real estate dog world.
Because trust and great service is expected,
but I'll meet you at the dog park and find a place your golden retriever will love. That's crazy. And that's a story. And as a storyteller, I assure you, stories stick.
Yeah. I mean, like, if for those that are watching, I was kinda playing with my hair and listening to what you're saying, and I was like, the dog that sounds like who is this dog from the realtor? Right. I would wanna work with him because I love dogs.
And in this age of AI where a perfectly polished,
perfectly competent post can be generated in seconds,
this kind of specificity
matters even more because
we provide great service can be written by anyone including a machine.
But hey, I'm the dog friendly realtor who meets you at the park and understands
why backyard space matters.
Now that's a lived identity
and that's so personal.
So AI can mimic competence,
but it can't really mimic your genuine quirks or your passions or even the little things that make someone lean in and and say, wait, like, you know, tell me more. Unless you're an NPC,
and that's really the differentiator here and not more content,
not louder content,
just a clearer
identity.
Rules of attention.
Okay. So once you've identified what makes you different,
the next challenge is getting heard above the noise.
And Matt here has developed a framework for capturing attention
in a world of infinite scroll.
A rule he calls three, ten, and 30.
You have four seconds if they actually do stop. You have four seconds to hook them in. That's like the average length that someone watches the video is four seconds. So I mean, like, that's crazy to me, but it's it's shown me that more than ever now,
you have to have somebody that's willing to be the face of your business. Right. Have to have someone that's willing to be the spokesperson for your company.
And who better than you? Okay. Here we go. Yeah. We like to to use this term kind of internally here now that we call $3.10, and 30.
And that is the amount of seconds you have in your video that you have to hit certain metrics by. So if somebody's watching a clip or a YouTube video or a short or whatever it is, you gotta hook them in three seconds, then you gotta try and make sure they stay for ten, and and you gotta give them a reason to stay for thirty. I should like make a talk around that. You should. That's a good Matt Rouse's three ten and thirty talk on social media video. Yeah. That's a really good talk title right there, I think. Yeah. And honestly, that's such a good point because here's the thing, attention isn't exactly one size fits all.
So you can master the hook,
nail the first three seconds and even hold them for thirty, but still miss the mark if you forget where you are.
So every platform basically feels different and it breathes differently.
So what works in one space can feel completely off in another, and that's where Katie comes in.
I think you still need to pick and choose the platforms that you wanna be good at. Because there's
like, I talk about it in my book, but there's different cultures
on all these platforms. You know, the the TikTok culture
is very raw, authentic,
off the cuff. No makeup, you know, just like here's more video more video more video. Whereas if I were to do that over on LinkedIn, I don't know if I'd be getting my clients that I get from LinkedIn, you know? So I think that there's different cultures and there's different way of ways of creating content on all these platforms. And to do it the right way, you you need to create content a variety of ways on these platforms and for the audience that's there.
That's just so right because treating these platforms
identically is a rookie mistake amplified
by AI scheduling tools and as a social media and creative lead,
I have to agree.
And Matt describes the current landscape as quintuplets.
So we have Instagram,
YouTube shorts,
TikTok,
Facebook reels,
all looking nearly identical,
yet each requiring distinct
parenting.
And to be honest, the temptation to cross post the same content everywhere is strong,
especially with the AI tools that make it so frictionless.
But friction,
as Katie suggests,
is where the strategy lives.
Okay. So how do we use AI without being consumed by it?
Perhaps the answer lies in augmentation
and not replacement.
So Matt here describes a workflow that doesn't just start with a blank AI prompt. In fact, it uses AI to enhance the real world assets
rather than just generating content from scratch.
The one thing about using AI for social that I find
is especially on the content side.
We're able to do things that you couldn't do before, but we're not using the AI to create
the the specific content, like, that we're gonna post. We're using it to augment our abilities to create content.
Meaning, like, a perfect example is we have a company that sells outdoor furniture. They have all these beautiful photographs
of, like, Adirondack chairs in a circle around a fire pit in, you know, Montana.
Mhmm. And
so I take the photograph,
and I'll put it into,
you know, runway or a program like that. And I'll say,
you know, Adirondack chairs around a fire pit with a a small fire burning and trees waving in the distance as the clouds go by. And it shakes that photo, and it makes the video of it. Yeah. And now I've got a video of chairs around a fire with the fire burning and the clouds moving and the trees swaying.
And then I put the, you know, overlay the sound in the video, whatever I need to voice over. We're
kind of combining the real and using the AI just to augment those abilities. Abilities.
And that's amazing because the photo is real.
The chairs are real. The landscape is real.
So AI isn't inventing the moment. It's sort
of animating it.
It's like adding movement to something that already existed,
and that feels different.
Right? Because
it's not outsourcing
creativity.
It's like an extension of it, if that makes sense.
And on the other side of that spectrum, Katie talks about podcasting
as
one of the few spaces that still feel largely unfiltered,
long form, unscripted,
and harder to fake,
like the show you're listening to.
I promise I am a real person.
No. Seriously, I'm not AI.
I'm not.
Damn.
This is hard.
That's I I do love pod like, what we're doing right now, podcasting. You can tell that this is not a AI generated conversation. You can make an AI generated podcast now. It's very I was gonna say it's very easy, but it you can do it. But
I have a tool that does that now. I just did I just,
you know, and
you can Right. Do this with your fingers because they yeah. I can't do it. Then,
you know, I I only have five of them. I only got six. But but that's the thing is
podcasting right now, I think is building authenticity
so much faster than any other medium because this is one thing that AI is not able to replicate like
the the written word or even some of those amazing
videos that it's been creating.
Podcasting
and audio,
we're still very authentic here with with what we're creating.
There's a company now that has an automated podcasting system that they they
say I don't know how true it is. They say that they can generate a podcast for under a dollar of API cost. So they're creating publishing podcasts. Most of them are short, and they're about stuff like, you know,
local weather in Denver, Colorado or whatever. Right? It's podcasts like that. Which is fine. Yeah.
I think that that's again But you're not gonna be like, man, I really wanna go hang out with that AI that does the weather every morning. Yeah. And,
again, like, that's just a convenience thing. I think that there's a lot of convenience AI stuff that's happening right now.
But as Matt also notes that nobody really forms a parasocial
relationship with a weather bot. I mean, the value isn't in the information
delivery,
but it's in the messiness.
It's in the interruptions
and and like the shared human experience of a a conversation unfolding
in real time.
So
maybe it's not about whether AI can produce content.
It's about whether it can replace the human instinct behind it. And that's where the next shift begins.
People that are gonna sit here with us for this whole podcast episode,
we're talking over each other. I've mumbled. I've said ums. I said I I mean, now you're really not gonna be able to edit this at all, Matt, because I've said it so so much. But I mean, like, that's that's the thing, and I think that people will crave authenticity
more than ever
because of all of AI.
Okay. So if AI is transforming
how we create,
it's also transforming how we discover. And Matt here argues that we are approaching a fundamental
shift.
And he flags that the algorithm is moving from the search platforms
into our pockets.
So hear this out.
I think it's time to start making preparation for the algorithm being in your pocket
rather than on the platform.
And that's your AI or your agent
makes a decision of how to search for what you're looking for. You need to understand how those decisions work at least on a basic level.
Okay. Hold on. So if I'm getting this right, this means that in the emerging world of AI agents and
post search discovery,
reputation management is actually taking on a new dimension.
Because it's no longer just about the SEO keywords,
it's actually about training
foundational models to associate
your name with specific concepts,
and that too across multiple platforms,
where these get into the consideration
set since LLMs
rarely give anyone the same recommendation
they give someone else.
And Matt here has actually run some experiments on injecting content
in the AI search.
Take some sentence that you want the AI to bring up when they talk about you. So that could be like author of, you know, The Social Shift or something. Right? Whatever that is, put it in your LinkedIn profile
description,
that same sentence,
take the exact same sentence,
and put it in a subreddit. And, like, you kind of a subreddit called
The Social Shift by Katie Brinkley. And then the first post is just Katie Brinkley is the author of The Social Shift. Put it on Pinterest. Put it in your LinkedIn profile.
Give it about maybe a week. And then every single foundational model that you type that something into, you can say, who is Katie Brinkley? It's gonna say Katie Brinkley is the author of the social shift. Mhmm.
And and now that's why something like AI chicken wrangler actually works.
See, it sounds funny, but it's consistent,
it's specific, and it's repeatable.
And when you say something often enough across enough places,
the Internet starts to believe you, which brings us back to Katie.
In her book, The Social Shift,
she talks about returning to human centered community,
and maybe that's not different from this AI conversation.
Maybe it's the foundation for it.
I think that's smart. And I think that that's what the
that's what this the people that are going to get ahead are gonna start doing. Saying that having a tagline or a phrase or telling people one thing over and over because these
AIs,
these, you know, all of it, it's searching the Internet and Yeah. They're gonna help you be found.
So
circling back to the beginning of this conversation,
this means that authenticity
isn't just a moral stance or a marketing aesthetic.
It's becoming a technical requirement.
The AI systems that will mediate the future discovery are trained on the genuine signals
from the human community.
Your social shares,
your online discussions,
citations,
and even cross platform consistency.
So you can try to fake it with content at scale now, but
you won't be able to fake it forever
because the machines
will know.
Pick your social media platform of choice and connect with me on there. Send me an email and listen to the podcast, all the things. Just go to katiebrinkley.com,
and new book is gonna be coming out soon. So pick up the social shift now, and then book number two when it comes out in a few few months.
As the AI capabilities double every seven months
faster than the Moore's Law ever imagined,
the pressure to sort of automate everything will only intensify.
But as Matt Rouse and Katie Brinkley remind us that the technology that makes us more efficient
shouldn't make us any less human.
You see, this social shift isn't about rejecting AI,
it's about using it wisely,
using these modern tools to augment creativity,
to amplify genuine voices,
and to build communities
that
algorithms can reference but never replace.
Except maybe on a bot social network.
Because
in the end,
even the most sophisticated
AI can't replicate the simplest human truth.
We wanna do business with people we know,
like, and trust.
You've been listening to the Digital Marketing Masters podcast.
For more conversations at the intersection of technology
and humanity,
subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.
I'm your cohost, Mehik Anam, and thank you so much for tuning in today.