social media – Page 3

Why Generic Pablum is Critical for Your Company—Critically Bad

(Imagen 4)

I spend a lot of time on LinkedIn and therefore endure the regular assault from the so-called LinkedIn “experts.”

You know them.

The people who get all bent out of shape over this character—because it’s certain proof that you use “ChatGPT” (because there is no other generative AI tool) because no human ever uses em dashes.
And then in the next breath the LinkedIn “experts” slam people who don’t use “ChatGPT” to increase productivity. For example, jobseekers should use “ChatGPT” to “beat the ATS,” automatically fine-tune their resumes for every individual application, and apply to thousands of positions.
Oh, but the LinkedIn “experts” say you shouldn’t spray and pray. Tap into the hidden job market via our members-only gated website.

But that’s not the worst thing they say.

Formulate Safe Generic Pablum

When they’re not commanding you to avoid the em dash, the LinkedIn “experts” remind us that LinkedIn is a professional network. And that our communications must be professional.

No cat pictures.
No “life sucks” posts.
Nothing that would cause anyone any offense.

The ideal personal communication is this: “I am thrilled and excited to announce my CJIS certification!”

The ideal business communication is this:

Yes, the “experts” wish that businesses said nothing at all. But if they do say something, a statement like this optimizes outcomes: “WidgetCorp is dedicated to bettering the technology ecosystem.”

Such a statement is especially effective if all your competitors are saying the same thing. This unity of messaging positions you as an industry leader.

Which enables you to…argh, I can’t do this any more. I am hating myself more and more with each word I type. Can I throw up now? This is emotionally painful.

Derek Hughes just sent me an email that describes this generic pablum. It read, in part:

“Everything reads like it was written by a robot on decaf.

“Same recycled tips. Same recycled tone. Somehow, it’s all… grey.”

Obliterate Safe Generic Pablum

If your company wants conversions—and I assume that you do—avoid the generic pablum and say something.

This will bring your hungry people (target audience) to you.

And for the prospects that despise humanness and glory in generic pablum…if their focus is elsewhere, your focus won’t impede. Let them roam in the distance.

In the distance.

Did I Subconsciously Inject Emotion in My “Impede” Reel?

Remember my “In the Distance” Bredemarket blog post from Saturday?

I embedded a reel in that post with the following text:

If their focus is elsewhere

My focus won’t impede

Since I had created the reel anyway, I repurposed it by sharing it on Bredemarket’s social media channels.

Including YouTube. You can see the YouTube short here:

Now when I shared it on YouTube, I did so with no context whatsoever. The caption simply read “In the Distance.” Without the words I wrote in the original blog post (I’ll get to two particular words later).

Yet by Monday morning the short had over 1,000 views. For Bredemarket’s YouTube channel, that’s a lot. Only three shorts have attained higher views: two about Tropical Storm Hilary, and one about squirrels.

But why?

Why?

The relative popularity of this short on YouTube is a mystery. Other than its brevity, it includes none of the elements of a successful video:

It does not use trending audio.
It does not use trending key words or hashtags.
Its message is obscure, if not downright cryptic.
Its visuals do not appeal to a mass audience.

Perhaps…

I have a theory that probably isn’t correct, but I’m going to entertain it anyway.

If this didn’t immediately occur to you, the reel subconsciously incorporates emotion. Emotion at the loss of my “former friends” as mentioned in the blog (but not on YouTube). Yes, some of the same former friends who forgot my birthday long ago.

Needy people, hungry people, it’s all the same. Picture from https://bredemarket.com/2024/01/02/pizza-stories-the-worst-time-to-read-a-pizza-post-on-social-media/.

So my wild theory is that the sense of loss, resignation, and renewed determination (I won’t impede on them) permeated the reel and subconsciously increased interest.

Or maybe I’m wrong. Perhaps there are just more wombat fans than I realized.

Regardless of the unexpected popularity of this YouTube short, it illustrates why emotions are now the seventh of the seven questions that a content creator should ask you.

I (always) need to improve my INTENTIONAL injection of emotions into my content.

And yours.

Expanding My Generative AI Picture Prompts

I’m experimenting with more detailed prompts for generative AI.

If you haven’t noticed, I use a ton of AI-generated images in Bredemarket blog posts and social media posts. They primarily feature wildebeests, wombats, and iguanas, although sometimes they feature other things.

My prompts for these images are usually fairly short, no more than two sentences.

But when I saw some examples of prompts written by Danie Wylie—yes, the same Danie Wylie who wrote the Facebook post earlier this year at the https://m.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=pfbid0nvmhyuLpn3jwMv8K8sbK5EXfS4kcpjfWHicgj4BJhdFLMme87P5fvPSYf9CwjRH7l&id=100001380243595&mibextid=wwXIfr URL—then I realized that I could include a lot more detail in my own image prompts.

If you read Wylie’s Facebook post, or my own subsequent post at the https://bredemarket.com/2025/06/03/when-hivellm-pitches-an-anti-fraud-professional/ URL, then you know exactly what the picture depicts.

Plus some other stuff buried in the details.

By the way, here is my prompt, which Google Gemini (Imagen 4) stored as “Eerie Scene: Sara’s Fake Bills.”

“Draw a realistic picture of a ghost-like woman wearing a t-shirt with the name “Sara.” She is holding out a large stack of dollar bills that is obviously fake because the picture on the bill is a picture of a clown with orange face makeup wearing a blue suit and a red tie. Next to Sara is a dead tree with a beehive hanging from it. Bees buzz around the beehive. A laptop with the word “HiveLLM” on the screen sits on the rocky ground beneath the tree. It is night time, and the full moon casts an eerie glow over the landscape.”

I didn’t get exactly what I wanted—the bills are two-faced—but close enough. And the accident of two-faced bills is a GOOD thing.

How detailed are your picture prompts?

Eerie.

Your Friends Aren’t Your Hungry People

I’m moving in a different direction on social media. Well, personal social media anyway.

There are multiple schools of thought about whether small companies with well-known leaders should share content on their company platforms or their personal social media platforms.

On one extreme, companies only share content on company channels, to better establish the brand of WidgetCorp or whatever.

On the other extreme, company heads only share content on their personal channels because their personal connections are so important to the company’s success. In fact, these company heads may not even bother to create separate company pages.

Obviously, most companies and company heads adopt a “do both” tactic. Maybe the company head reshares company posts. Or maybe the company reshares company head posts.

Or they do something that John Bredehoft and Bredemarket have done in the past: share the same content on both the company and the personal channels.

I might not do that any more.

The experiment

The rationale behind sharing company posts on your personal channels is that your personal friends like you and will engage with your company posts.

But this rationale ignores one very pertinent fact: most of my friends have NO interest in identity, biometrics, cybersecurity, or related technologies.

Why would they engage with such content if it doesn’t interest them?

I’d share Bredemarket Facebook content to my personal Facebook feed…and with very few exceptions I’d end up with crickets.

African field cricket, *Gryllus bimaculatus*. By Arpingstone – Own work, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=620363.

Or I’d share some Bredemarket LinkedIn content to my personal LinkedIn account. Often…crickets.

But most painful of all was when I would share Bredemarket Instagram posts to my Instagram stories. Higher impressions then the same stories on the Bredemarket account…but absolutely no engagement. Crickets again.

So on Monday afternoon I intentionally conducted an experiment on my personal Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn accounts, where together I have a combined 3,396 connections. My Monday afternoon identity/biometric and product marketing-related content received a total of 9 engagements…and that’s counting the Instagram user who requested “Can u share it @canadian.icon”).

Even acccounting for the three algorithms involved…that’s low.

And it…um, prompted me to ask myself a “why” question.

Why share corporate content on personal feeds?

Good question.

So for now I’m “moving in a different direction” (a few of you know where THAT phrase originated) and not bothering to share Bredemarket content on my personal feeds. At least for now.

Those who are dying to see Bredemarket content will subscribe to the appropriate Bredemarket Facebook, Instagram, or LinkedIn feeds.

But frankly, my friends have no need or desire to see Bredemarket content, so they won’t.

In my case, my high school friends, church friends, and even some of my former coworkers (who left the identity/biometric industry years ago) are NOT Bredemarket’s hungry people. So I’ll spare them the parade of wildebeests, wombats, and iguanas.

It’s all for you.

What’s Your Opinion of My Performance?

A lot of U.S. identity, biometric, and technology marketers like baseball. But some of you don’t know about the time that Paul Olden asked losing Dodgers manager Tommy Lasorda a now-infamous question, “What’s your opinion of [Dave] Kingman’s performance?” (Lasorda’s response—edited—can be heard here.)

(Incidentally, while the picture of Lasorda looks realistic, it is not. Imagen 4 generated it.)

But any of us who write online worry about our own performance, whether we publicly admit it or not.

Why do the wrong things enjoy stellar performance?

Take Becca Chambers, who like the rest of us wants to perform well, but observed:

“There’s a direct inverse relationship between how much time I spend on a post and how well it performs.”

It’s happened to Becca, it’s happened to me, and it’s probably happened to you. Chances are that this post and its social reshares will NOT reach tens of thousands of views, but my trivial observations about silly stuff will.

As an example, this Bredemarket Instagram reel about the San Antonio Avenue bridge between Ontario and Upland, California has been viewed over 6,800 times, when most of my reels only feature double digit views. Why? I have no idea.
Similarly, this Bredemarket blog post that mentions both the Shipley Business Development Lifecycle and the ? and the Mysterians song “96 Tears” (geddit?) continues to rack up views week after week, having amassed over 3,000 views since its 2021 publication.
And both are dwarfed by my Private Equity Talent Hunt LinkedIn post and its 24,000+ impressions.

For me, these random posts delivered big numbers.

The performance that matters

But in the end, do impressions matter? I constantly remind myself not to chase impressions, and to that end offered this comment on Chambers’ post:

“Depends upon how you measure “performance.”

“If you measure performance based solely on impressions, then you can realize great performance by random succinct thoughts on ghosting or the em dash or whatever.

“But if you measure performance by your paying consulting client saying that they liked your post on an obscure topic that only you and the client care about…then say what you need to say to your hungry people (target audience) and don’t worry about getting 20,000 impressions or 500 likes.”

And if we need any confirmation about the temporary nature of impressions, let’s look at Dave Kingman’s performance for the Chicago Cubs on May 14, 1978. “Three homers, 8 RBI, 3 runs, 4 hits, 1 walk, 13 Total bases.” Plus an uncountable number of expletives from manager Lasorda.

By 1981 Kingman was a New York Met.

What about your performance?

So how do you create content that truly matters to people who will buy from you? By asking yourself some important questions and then developing the content.

And if you’re an identity, biometric, or technology firm that needs help to get content out now (rather than never), talk to Bredemarket. Not about bridges, but about your prospects. Book a free meeting: https://bredemarket.com/cpa/

Friction Is Bad

(NOT part of the biometric product marketing expert series)

Friction is bad.

I know some people think that friction is good, because if you tolerate the friction to get to the thing, then you must really want it.

But more often than not, friction is bad.

Which is why when I create a reel, I try to post the native reel in all places where appropriate.

Take my most recent 8 second “biometric product marketing expert” reel.

When I posted on Instagram, I shared the reel natively.
And despite the fact that the Instagram reel automatically shared to Facebook, I also shared it on Facebook natively.
And of course LinkedIn also got a native version.
As did Threads.

But you don’t have to leave this blog post to see the original reel.

See how easy a frictionless experience can be?

More here.

Biometric Product Marketing Expert.