Diego and Jean-luc are joined on #SocialConfoes by James Tucker. We talked about his journey from the UK to Spain, the process of Digital Content Creation, how to incorporate Agile into Social Media Marketing, GIFs and Emojis.

You can also connect with James:

• Check out his company Cruz Creative and sign up for the newsletter for all things Agile.
• Instagram
• Linkedin

Episode Overview

• 0:00 – A midnight introduction
• 3:07 – From the UK to a Spanish island next to the Sahara
• 9:23 – Why is the internet infrastructure in Tenerife so good?
• 12:01 – Quickfire
• 17:05 – From software development to marketing
• 22:01 – Agile (in marketing) explained
• 32:42 – Memes and GIFs
• 42:45 – Using agile and Notion in daily work processes
• 48:27 – All about emojis
• 50:24 – Advice for content creators afraid to start
• 57:25 – Closing remarks

Video Version of the Episode

The Hosts

• Diego Ameerali
• Jean-Luc van Charante

Feel free to join our Discord Server.

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Full Transcript

Diego: [00:00:23] Good morning. Good evening. Good afternoon, everybody. And for some very, morning, sorry about the delay. We’re slightly late. We had some technical difficulties with the YouTube connection, so we had to fix that.

Jean-luc: [00:00:59] No, no,

Diego: [00:01:02] no. This is actually true. On the other factor, I was actually recording the Twitch stream on the website as we were waiting for a fix.

So the YouTube got fixed like 10 minutes ago, like five minutes before we had to go live. So I had to input that. But the other reason, yes.

Jean-luc: [00:01:18] And the other reason is for me being late, I’m sorry for if you’re watching and you’re a couple of minutes late it’s because I was in a previous, in another meeting and I could at the board, the meeting either, it was a very important topic, but that’s not what we’re here to discuss today.

Diego, we have a special guest because we talked about good morning, good evening, and actually good midnight because it’s midnight, almost midnight or actually midnight where he is right now. So our guests for today is I actually met him through a mutual fan friend, actually, somebody who’s already been on a Social Confoes and that is Dorien and while speaking to her. She was like, you have to meet James, you have to meet James. And I was like, who, who is this James and why is he so special? And why is he all the way in Spain? And why is Tenerife so far from Spain? And basically we got to meet, meet each other. And in our first meeting, which was digital, of course, because I’d love to go to Tenerife.

But currently that’s not an option for me, but in a first meeting, he already taught me something new. And I was like, okay, well, this is cool. This is a cool tool. then I found out that he actually is using agile. The agile method for social media, which is very interesting to me because a year, well, five years ago I was also searching like, how can you implement agile into social media?

So this is somebody who I’ve only recently just met, but we had a really fun talk and we connected. And it’s somebody who is really into Social, who is actually also an international speaker. And without further ado, we’d like to introduce you, Mr. James Tucker, James. Welcome.

James: [00:03:02] Thank you very much. 

Diego: [00:03:07] and then as you’re talking just before we went live, James has given me like some geography lessons on Tenerife and all the islands, like seven or eight islands, like right. To the West of the Sahara. And you talk about Spain so how does that even make sense James?

James: [00:03:23] I know it doesn’t know. That’s how I know most people I speak to. I know we have this conversation before mainly for the British really because Tenerife. If you don’t know, is a huge was on the minute, he’s got struggles, obviously for obvious reasons with COVID everybody’s a huge holiday resort and it’s very, very popular for British as well as people from Northern Europe, we don’t get fantastic weather in the summertime. And of course they couldn’t down to the canaries. One of which is Tenerife or Grand Canary one of the many islands. And that of course is a big plus there. And it’s got sunshine all year round.

Jean-luc: [00:03:59] We’re laughing of the comments. First of all, thanks for joining. And again gravity, we’re going to go into that. What’s agile leader, but he’s also saying that’s a very, very British accent and he’s also saying, can you say a bottle of water? Wow. That’s a lot of water. Okay. Gregory. Hey, he did it for you now you have to send them some Ethereum okay.

James: [00:04:24] It just depends. It just depends on what dialects of English or British English actually want wherever you want it in London, Manchester accent, which of course is where I’m originally from Manchester. If you’re from Manchester, you just say, well, if you, if you proper Brit, you know, if you proper posh, British is water.

Diego: [00:04:41] So speaking of the British so assuming from your accent and some of your background you’re all the way in. Kind of Spain now, but you’re originally from the UK. So tell us a story. Like how did you even end up to this, like Ireland in the middle of the Atlantic?

James: [00:05:00] Again, as I mentioned before isn’t,  a huge holiday resort Island. I came to the for, as you probably did, though. When you’re in your early twenties, I came on a lot of the holiday party mood came to Tenerife, went to the resort areas, actually in the South side of the Island. So it’s a huge complex, it’s really a massive, huge industry. And it’s one of the biggest economies if for the Island.

So I came here. Knew of it has been a bit of a party Island you know, sunshine beaches don’t need to go into any of them,

Diego: [00:05:34] but you say holiday sunshine Island, but you kind of like operate from there now, right? Like in a professional sense. So we were talking about this the digital nomad movement and a lot of these islands, you know, that attract that are attracting a lot of individuals or freelancers or just people from big companies who are working remotely from these islands. And so what is it, aside from the partying and, you know, being remote that attracts these nomads and that attracted you, I guess?

James: [00:06:05] Yeah. Or working Absolutely. I mean, of course it’s a lifestyle, so you choose it, you choose it on lifestyle. You’ve got that sunshine and you really do have sunshine all year round.

Tenerife is actually named the Island of eternal spring because it’s got a spring light temperature for 12 months a year. We’ve literally had two weeks of bad weather. I’m not set. It’s finished with the only way forward now we’re in may is it’s just going to get hotter. Cause we’re going to go into a summer season, then it cools down.

So as part of that, yes, you’ve got the weather here, but you’ve got absolutely fantastic activities here as well. So it’s actually quite amazing, like almost like a surface paradise, so you can just go surfing most places on the Island and over islands as well. So you’re not just strictly restricted to tannery.

All the other islands are in close proximity. So if you want one to have a change, you can go on a ferry. I can go to grand Canary within 40 minutes. I can go to the South side of the Island again in 40 minutes. Some of the other ones like first venture, which is a lot narrower to the West coast of Africa.

Again, you’re only talking about a couple of hours to get to them. They also have flights tomorrow as well, which again, if you’re going to go take a flight 20 minutes between going from one Island to the next, so a can Island hop very, very easily, but you’ve just got all this huge amount of activities.

See activities I say with surfing, you can go hiking. You’ve got amazing food here. So also you’ve got not strictly speaking the Spanish food. Cause of course it is another story for you, but with the Canary islands, it, the Canary people as well. So they actually take on board a different culture than what they do from mainland Spain.

Of course, we also have a very close tie to South America as well. Because of the trade routes that the canaries used to use. When I think Christopher Columbus came to the Canary islands to basically spin him off to all the conquest. South America. So it’s got a very, very strong link. We have a very large community with Venezuela as well.

So we have that culture here as well. So it’s a really nice mixture of culture, not only just from mainland Spain, but also from Latin America as well. And then on top of that, the infrastructure here is amazing. We’ve got, you know, high speed internet. So if you’re a digital nomad and you want a bit of fun and you know, you want that lifestyle, you want that sunshine, you can work from a MacBook.

We know now we’ve jumped into a different realm of having video technology in terms of things like w what we’re doing now, which is possible. Then it makes the Canary Islands such an attractive place. Plus, geographically from an economy point of view, we’re next to Africa. were only say three hours away from St.

Madrid or Barcelona. So we’re primarily positioned for Europe, but also primary position. Because if I pop my head out of the balcony and look left the only wall, I’m looking across the water, the next piece of Island, the next piece of quality call it. And I hope the next, the next bit of country I come along to is either Florida or South America. or the Caribbean.

Jean-luc: [00:09:23] No, but Diego, I almost want to go into, to do some quick-fire questions because there are so many questions I want to ask. Or people that are watching, are there any vacancies in your company right now?

James: [00:09:38] I get this, I got this all the time when I did well. You’ll know our good friend Dorien so the last summit I did, they social media content summit. And of course we’re, we’re, we’re doing one actually next month.

The amount of peoples whereby is this guy from he’s from, it sounds British, but he’s not in Britain is in Tenerife, again, all the buck store with regards to the sunshine and the lifestyle. everybody said, when you got any positions in your company.

Jean-luc: [00:10:04] Yeah. I mean, it feels, it feels a, such a good sales pitch, like for anybody who has doesn’t have any commitments right now, it’s like, wait a minute, wait a minute. I can have sun all year on. I can go to a place. So why is the internet connection? Is there a reason why the internet connection in Tenerife is so good?

James: [00:10:23] Okay. I could, I could actually be wrong on this, but I seem to think I remember reading about it somewhere, but of course you can’t believe this. Sometimes I remember watching the lay of Cable networks for the internet. Yeah. I kind of thought to myself Oh, surely all this is operated by satellite, but actually there’s a physical piece of infrastructure. That’s basically done on the back of a ship on a, on a roller and they roll out a cable and the Atlantic Ocean to connect to America with the rest of the world and your consumer. And I actually think, and I might be completely wrong on this, but I’ve got a, I’ve got a feed in to lay that cable. They rerouted it between the good area and leave the Canary Islands up to Europe. And,

Jean-luc: [00:11:08] and, and, and because you’re so close to the ocean there’s like nobody who can screw up the connection between where it comes, land and where’s and where you’re actually stationed.

So I guess that also plays a very important, we got a lot of covenants. There are a lot of Gregory’s in the comments, so don’t get confused with them. First. Gregory wants to tell you, this is your audio sounds amazing. It’s the best audio I’ve heard from any guests so far. And he says it might have to do with your British accent even twice as good.

Another Gregory wants to jump in and say like, has anybody ever told you, you sound like Ricky Garveas Oh, that’s

James: [00:11:45] that’s, that’s completely new. Ricky Garveas he’s I here’s the thing he’s he’s not a Londoner, but he’s from the South of England and I’m from Northern England. We shouldn’t have the same accent. Well, thank you very much, cause he’s a hero.

Jean-luc: [00:12:01] A couple of quick fire and just to give you a quick-fire hats off is just, we’re going to ask you two questions and then and then you can tell us which one you like better. And, and these are fairly simple questions and basically to test how much you’ve integrated into Spain already. So, so the first question is sangria or lager. Hmm.

James: [00:12:20] Okay. Largo, definitely. Don’t my son grew up.

Jean-luc: [00:12:23] Okay. Pahia or black pudding.

James: [00:12:30] Listen, you’ve done your homework.

Jean-luc: [00:12:34] Hmm. No, I, I have to, I mean, as a British, when, when I have a British guests, we don’t have a lot of British gas, so these are always fun to see like what, what is, okay. So I’m going to make it a little bit easier for you now. Hiking or surfing?

James: [00:12:48] Surfing.

Jean-luc: [00:12:49] Yeah. Okay. And last one and then Diego will, will take over piercings or

James: [00:12:54] tattoos.

Oh, I’ve got the wrong guy.

Jean-luc: [00:13:02] So Diego do, do you have a couple of quick fires as well?

Diego: [00:13:04] Yeah. Sure. So you’re in social media right now, but if you look at the different social media platforms Twitter or TikTok

James: [00:13:11] I’m too old now he’s got a bit Twitter. He’s got about, I can’t, I’ve tried, I’ve tried Tik TOK. I dunno. I think it’s for a younger generation. Now leave it to them.

Diego: [00:13:25] That let’s go back. I think you already hinted at this, but Microsoft are Apple,

James: [00:13:32] Apple. Isn’t it? I know it’s gotta be Apple, Microsoft. I mean, he he’s, I mean, is this still going Microsoft these days?

It’s strange. Isn’t it? Cause at one time, I mean, at one time everybody used to use windows. Didn’t windows XP. Yeah. In the nineties.  in the nineties early 2000. Yeah.

Diego: [00:13:55] I still use windows

Jean-luc: [00:13:56] alleyways you have in the compensate Apple all the way. No, but I mean also like Diego it’s, it’s funny that you use windows, but also, I mean Explorer, I mean, We at a certain point in time, we would like, look how innovative an organization was based on whether or not they were still using internet Explorer or not basically those kind of a sign knowing like, Oh, okay, you’re in that generation. It’s also kind of similar, like knowing how old the company is. If they have a Yahoo address, you know, like, Oh, they’ve been around since you know.

James: [00:14:30] that I it was only actually a couple of days ago, literally only a couple of days ago. I was talking to I suppose a client of mine is kind of a sort of similar, similar age give or take five, six years. And I remember telling him, I’m seeing an internet browser for the first time back in before it was kind of a commercial success.

And I was actually at Salford university back in 1993. We were still using predominantly the operating system was dos six. I don’t know if you remember dos, so used to use like dos six as a kind of a base operating system. And a mate of mine gave me a nudge and he said, Hey, James, have a look at this.

And I was like, what, what am I looking at here? You know, this is kind of graphical front-end he was still primitive, but it was a graphical front-end with almost like a table of contents, but the table of contents were hyperlinked. And it was the first time I was looking at a web browser and it was Netscape.

Yeah.

Jean-luc: [00:15:29] I was just going to say Netscape, so okay. For most people. So can you quickly for those people who are not familiar with dos, explain what DOS is

James: [00:15:39] If I’ve got this right. This is this, this is testing me. This is, this is a test to me. So DOS right. It was a disc operating system. Developed by Microsoft. So it was basically what propelled bill Gates to his fame and his and his fortune. And he was just, I don’t know, it was just, it was just a, what what’d he call it? Command line? Well, it was a command line operating system, so it wasn’t a gooey and it was literally, I remember rightly it was a black background screen, white text.

And literally when you booted up your machine mainly been a PC. I think my first PC was a three eight, six, and IBM emulators in that sense. So it was a three exits machine dos 6.2 powered up the machine and you just got little flushing cursor, and that was it. It was like waiting for your command.

What, what do you want me to do

first time? The first time I used windows, it was windows 3.2. Remember this one? Windows 3.1, all 3.3 0.5. I

Diego: [00:16:45] dunno. I heard it. I never used it. I started reading it. It was

James: [00:16:48] before windows. It was definitely before windows XP and you had to, so in order to run windows, you have to be shamed. So it went into dos, the dos give you the in flushing cursor.

So then you’d have to type in run, space, win, and then it would start with

Diego: [00:17:05] all right, James. Since it says, since we landed in the realm of, you know, programming and the history of Microsoft you have quite some history with the it world as well before moving to social media. Right. Having gone software. So I guess why. Did you do that? And then make the jump. This is social media, or just marketing in general, all of a sudden.

James: [00:17:30] Long, long ago. It’s a long, long story. In some respect, it’s kind of probably easy to say. I kind of fell in it. I, once I fell into it, I absolutely enjoyed it. I probably cause actually all, ultimately when I, when I finished, when I was at university, I was I did a degree in software engineering.

So my kind of setup like career progression after university to get to go into the real work hours and a software engineer. So software engineer, you know, coder fell into a web development. So web development way before it was categorized, not like today, like you get web development and it’s you either classified as a front-end back-end a full stack.

I didn’t really exist. Like. I’m quite old now. So you were just, you were just a web developer to sort of do yourself the service, which sometimes I do myself because I kind of just go, I was, you know, as a web developer, but because I did those different roles, so a year to be a front-end developer. So you have to do the graphical design of it.

Plus she was a backend developer. So you have to do all the backend systems. I was already in that sort of creative state anyway, so it already, and if I’m honest with you, I was a better front-end developer, and the model was a backend. So I wouldn’t tend to naturally lead to doing more frontend stuff.

And of course, that was kind of like very Still primitive in terms of the sort of technologies that we were using, although they were state of the art at the time, especially, we kind of see them, we’ll use two now. So I kind of did that for a good, a good few years. And I think I ended up working actually for a Canadian bank and a just natural progression was, Hey James, what do you want to do?

You know, in terms of career progression, you know, you don’t want to be a coder of your life, do you? And I was like, Oh, that’s the quite enjoy it. But there’s a science, a cogent as well. That the one thing I didn’t particular enjoy was it felt as though you were a little bit more, this isn’t probably now bore.

So what I’m talking about late nineties, I guess, early two files. And I felt as though from a communication point of view, I was missing that human interaction. I wasn’t getting that from web development. No, what development was like, James LR code, sit down, code it, go on without output the

Diego: [00:19:55] very isolated

James: [00:19:57] products from it, you know?

And I was like people kind of like, so I don’t know something in me that I didn’t really give myself justice. So it was like, James, you’re a good talker. You could community, you know, good gatherer, a good team player, blah, blah, blah. You’re going to be good at leading teams. So I asked them naturally fell into then still working with coding teams, but we fell into a project management role.

So I kind of just left coding to one side completely went into being a digital project manager. Which is probably what we’re, we’ll move into later on. But yeah, I went into digital project management and then obviously agile became part of my project management life. And then eventually I ended up working for a company which was a digital marketing agency.

So it was still predominantly producing products from a web development side of things. But because it was a marketing agency, I got that in-depth knowledge in terms of marketing. And of course, because we’re advancing forward with, with these technologies, web social media became prevalent in terms of everyday businesses.

So I have kind of gone through a journey where it was just something in the background. It wasn’t sort of like at the forefront of a business. Or it wasn’t seen to be that way. It certainly wasn’t sexy. Whereas like now it’s kind of like, it’s everything, you know, you, you, you can’t run a business without a web.

You can’t run a business without social media. Even though we’re doing, like now we’re becoming more involved in terms of digital media, in terms of video, you know, just if you, even, if you just use video as a standalone point that was unthinkable, say 10, even 10 years ago now, by the things that we’re doing now, you would never dream of doing 10.

Diego: [00:21:54] I want to pause there for a second.

Jean-luc: [00:21:57] quality was of the good enough either. So I guess

Diego: [00:22:01] I want to pause there for a second before we go further on the social media side. And I sense that based on your it experience, then project management and. We already had this question before was agile. It’s, that’s very good. The agile learned agile and learn to apply it. And I think this is what you’re using as a core differentiator in your social media strategy right now. So for the people who don’t know, could you briefly explain what agile is and how did you like translate that into the social media when you ended up there in the end?

James: [00:22:35] Yeah, so agile, I mean, this is good because there’s two sides to what I child in terms of what I’m going to explain here. So for Cruz Creative, which is mine and cause of course is a cofounder as well. So from where a social media management agency. And so we use agile every single day within the agency there, but of course agile has its roots in software development.

So agile is a really big buzzword at the minute in terms of marketing, but of course, agile started off in this software development world, which is how I, how I picked it up. But I was applying it to, I was applying it to my everyday life being now in marketing, but I didn’t really know that it was out then it was prevalent.

So agile in a sense is when I started doing digital project management, we worked in what was called a waterfall method. So these, all these different types of methodologies. So when I first started doing projects for, in our particular software products, we would, we would fall into what was called a waterfall model.

So you have to start off Certain point, which is a requirement before you can finish your requirement and move on to the next step. You’ve got to finish that requirement point and then move down onto a, so you’d have a project definition and requirement and you do the development. Then you would do testing and then you would get feedback from the customer or potentially roll out that product.

Now there’s a lot of issues I’m involved in them. Mainly being that if you’re using a waterfall model, you’re not getting continual feedback from the customer. Also your projects will be timeboxed in terms of, they’re never, they’re gonna run for quite some time. You’re never going to get that feedback from your customers.

So you’re never going to have continual improvements. You might not even have a much it to what the cost is or customer requirements are for a majority of waterfall projects. You tend to go over budget of it as well. So you always kind of, once you find it, a London, that project or that product, it’s not what the customer wants.

I have overspent on it. And so really he was getting kind of really a bad name and you’re not delivering on time to budget. Agile works really different to them because what you’re doing is you’re releasing quick iterative development. If you’re talking about software development, we can apply this to any, you can actually apply this to any friend in life, but how I picked it up was from a software.

We’ll so you’re basically, they deliver in products in small chunks and iterative workloads. So you’re not doing this delivery of products for say a six month spell. You’re delivering something that’s tangible for two weeks, four weeks. You’d never go over that period. So you’re just quickly releasing products all the time.

And ag you’re not wasting that time. You’re not wasting a lot money like you would do with a waterfall effort, but you’re also continually with the customer getting feedback all the time. If something does go wrong, guess what? You’ve only wasted two or four weeks. You’ve not wasted six months, which could be very costly in terms of budget and also time on yourself.

So that’s in a sense in a, in a very, very basic, basic nutshell is agile just allows you to work and release products fast. I don’t sometimes like the idea of when it says fast, cause fast sometimes also kind of brings in the concept that you’re not delivering quality as well, because you just there’s some things like I’m going to deliver something as fast as possible.

So a quality goes down, but also it’s a little bit unfair on the people that you’re working with because you’re trying to get. It feels like you’re trying to get the most out of them. What you’re not trying to do that you trying to make your teams as efficient as possible. That is less costly, but you’re also releasing products faster at the same time.

Now that’s in the software, that’s in the software development world, but you can, I believe that you can apply agile into everything in your life. So we say we apply agile to marketing, but you can apply our job to everything that you work on in life to even plan in. I dunno, planning a wedding. You could, you could, you, you could use, you could use a gel form.

So, and again, I kind of fell. I kind of fell into that in kind of like I missed that. I knew it was a good methodology to use because of that experience in software development. So I took that and when I started to run with crews, creative, Being my own agency, although that’s not a development or a software house, you know, it’s a marketing agency.

I had just adopted our German and applied it to marketing techniques because you come there because I work with clients and clients want at a given delivery of a, of a, of a product that I can use Agile methodology to apply those techniques.

Jean-luc: [00:27:58] yeah, I think it’s works really well because in the end, your clients also have clients that are expecting like communication on a, on a certain, a certain set of time.

So I think that the reason I found it also interesting for social media is because with software development, of course you can do agile as well. But often, especially if you have to build an application or a website, it’s basically a one and done, you build a thing and yeah, there, there is a surface contract connected to it.

But basically when a website is done, the website is done. Whereas social media, you kind of iterate whether it’s a week, whether it’s someone it’s kind of also, and we also adopted it for inevitable because we want it to bill on a monthly level, a monthly basis. And when you’re going to bill on a monthly basis, your clients are going to want to evaluate on a monthly basis as well.

So you kind of automatically get into this kind of structure where it’s like, okay, wait, there’s actually a methodology to this. Let’s read into what the methodology is. And I think it’s, that makes it really interesting to use it in social media. But what I also find interesting is like, how do you, like, how do you convince like, companies that are.

Like really old fashioned that are not looking at edit in such a way. Do you in the end compromise and say like, okay, we’re, we’re gonna do a waterfall technique for this project. Or you say like, we can find ways that we can actually adapt it to agile.

James: [00:29:30] Yeah. Yeah, no, that’s a good point. I had that kind of situation. When, when I picked up digital project management, I was working for a Canadian bank in Manchester and predominantly because of banks, as we know, they’re heavily regulated. There’s a lot of red tape so that their methodology was always around waterfall because we’ve waterfall model in terms of what they were adopting.

Every single waterfall step below is kind of before you get, before you can get to the next level down, you have to go through a sort of, kind of sign off gate. So you kind of, before the requirements can move into, I dunno, say like the development, you’ve got to have a sign off on the requirements before you can move on to the next step.

So it was very sort of a very Katy process. And of course, banks want though, because of the way they are heavily regulated and the red tape that the loan and that, especially with the UK banks I think the governing body was the FSA. And of course, the troubles that we had with the banking collapses for lights and 2008, they need that kind of implies.

Now, of course we know the problems with waterfall model because if you’re looking at a particular product and it takes a long time to get that product to market, our is a much better way to release a product quickly. And once you’ve released it quickly, guess what you do. You just keep improving releasing cycles of that software or that market implant.

Now the one way the bank was very, very. As well as others who adopts waterfall methodologies are very reluctant, sort of as anybody is. And anybody come ever is in a sense, we looked into changes, especially in large corporations. You have to do a lot of convincing. The great thing with our journal is, is it’s a good methodology that you can test out on smaller products.

So the, the, the, the, the buy-in is, is let’s not make a massive, let’s not make a huge change and go across the departments and just say, let’s swap out the waterfall methodology and replace it by our jail, pick on a small, tangible project and work on that, and kind of almost use that as a case study and a proof of concept, but I’d joke, come, come work.

And yeah, of course, you know, you’re gonna get restrictions. You know, people are not going to wait. People are not going to be quite happy to accept it, but agile in that respect it certainly worked for the, for the bank. It didn’t happen overnight, but at least minimal changes happened on the start side to adopt agile.

I think I spoke to somebody from that bank literally only about say six months ago. I think probably around about if I can guess it’s probably about three quarters of their projects and now our jail. So it was a slower, so it was a fairly, very slow adoption, but they did start off that way. Start, just start small and use that as your test bed to apply agile.

Jean-luc: [00:32:42] We have a question which is because we want to jump to make the jump from the technical project management side. So the digital content creation, and we have some guests will want to help us do that. And then Gregory’s his question is, could you give your opinion on the future of memes I believe that memes a big have become more sophisticated and a way to bring down the whole existing narrative through humor.

James: [00:33:11] I think that’s brilliant. Actually. I I’m a massive fan. I’m a massive fan of at the minute is Giphy. I absolutely love GIPHYs. I’ve gotten into it in a really big way at the moment. Creating my own and actually starting to create my own memes .

Jean-luc: [00:33:25] so you can answer actually, any question that comes into your pace, you can answer it a gif from, from yourself.

James: [00:33:33] I’ll be honest with you. That’s that is, that is my plan to that is by actual plan today

Diego: [00:33:39] I found it quite funny. It took me a second to realize when I shared the announcement on Instagram yesterday, today, and when I woke up this morning, I saw you. You you reshared it. And I started stiff like, wait, how did this guy? Yeah, he himself, it was really funny. And actually quite I was quite intrigued by it then how you, how, how easy it is to do.

And so quickly on that, we’re like, well, what’s your thought process behind that? And how do you decide, like what kind of gif to go for? Like how humorous, how crazy do you go with it?

James: [00:34:17] Do you know what I don’t, it’s I absolutely love it and I’m trying to think to myself now how it kind of like stumbled across it because we all know that with gifs .

However you want to call them again, that they’re not, it’s not a new thing. Is that the kind of a really old concept, you know, PNG files took over from gifts because of low quality or graphics, but it seems to have like a real resurgent for, you know, crying gifts again. Hey, here’s, here’s, here’s the thing, especially with what we work with at the mandate, in terms of social media, people like people like you being authentic.

And I kind of thought self the outcome will be a little bit different and just sort of stand out a little bit from, from the crowd, not to use it, the sort of stunted. Stock yeah. Stock gifts that are available, but all sorts of port your brand, your voice, and have a little bit of like a, fun with it.

So I didn’t actually realize, I knew that there was the, the Giphy platform, but what I didn’t realize when I actually looked into it and a little bit more that, that you could actually set up your own brand account. Right. I never know that’s a good one. Yeah. Okay. So I never knew this. I’ve only just, I’ve only just found this home, right?

So you can go to, you can go to give a, you can set. So it’s actually super easy to set up. So you create yourself an account. I’m guessing once you set yourself an account on Giphy upload five gifs so five gifs that you’ve made yourself, and then you basically register yourself as a brand account. Give it a couple of days, a normally combat team.

Cause we basically, we’re just checking that you, you know, you are who you are, you’ve uploaded only five gifs only 5. So upload five guests, nine times out of 10, you’ll get approved once you’ve done that. And as long as you’ve tagged your content, so those five pieces of gifs yeah. You may only have to put a hashtag against them. So choose our hashtag wisely. My hashtags are just as simple as Cruz Creative. Guess what happens? And once you’ve been approved, you can go into your story, click on GIF. and it’s there

Jean-luc: [00:36:30] really brilliant,

Diego: [00:36:34] that is, that is good stuff for the marketing people.

James: [00:36:39] It’s absolutely. Now here’s the other thing for

Hey, here’s the other best thing? This was unbelievable. I’ll be honest to God. I only opened up this Giphy brand account just over a week ago. The reach on it or the views on those gifs are amazing. They’re like do you know the one you saw? I guess, you know, the one you saw on my story, which I think it was me just go in this, it’s got about, I only uploaded it about five days ago.

It’s got like something like 7,000 views on it.

Jean-luc: [00:37:13] Yeah, that’s pretty cool. It’s better than hectic though.

James: [00:37:19] Seven thousand views. Now the great thing about this, because I love it. I’m in love with it, but the actual link to these gifs actually go is dependent on what your call to action is.

So the actual gifs is we’ll refer back to, for example, from, for mine, it takes me to the website. It takes us to the Cruz Creative website. So then we will have a laugh with it, but also what you can see in there is absolutely super powerful. So to go back to, I’m sorry, I forgot the name of the guys. The question for the memes.

There, there is definitely, it definitely has a future.

Diego: [00:37:55] For the people listening in, make some Social Confoes gifs from this, from these conversations

Jean-luc: [00:38:03] Okay. So, so what do we have to do now is if you have ever have you guys searched the gifs on Suriname?

One of the most popular gifts aside from our former president, Desi Bouterse, who appears in WhatsApp and Facebook, if you type in Suriname, there’s one of the most popular gifts in Suriname is actually a toad that has leased ag in a ferry where the way and small thoughts come out of the back of the throat.

Do you know that you have Diego?

Diego: [00:38:36] No, I don’t actually, I’m looking it up right now.

Jean-luc: [00:38:39] That’s watching search Suriname toad GIF and never do it while eating or having an appetite or a grieving to eat something. Because it’s one of the most disgusting gifts out there. And it’s one of the most famous gifs from Suriname just, just for that perspective.

So we definitely need quality certain of these gifts. So if you’re watching this and you’re like, I’ve got to do that, I’m going to go to give you five gifts and get us album rather than call it. That makes you to be his gift. We would really appreciate that.

James: [00:39:10] I’ve got one actually, which I come, whereas I know there you go. There you go. There’s, there’s a brand account. So you’ve got a brand account there, but cruise creative, it’s like literally only over a week old. So it’s got 65,000 gif views and they’re just, Transparent gif backgrounds that I use in the stories

Diego: [00:39:33] I think that’s something for us to consider Jean-luc, to reach, especially through DMS and instant messaging. Cause gifs get used a lot aside from, you know, instead of pushing people, their social media accounts to follow this follow that hashtag uses gif as a comment.

James: [00:39:50] Well, I’ll just say, I just think there’s, there’s definitely something that we can get from them.

Diego: [00:39:57] Yeah. Briefly touch on the memes and meme culture. What’s your take are, yeah, I guess it’s more on the human behavior side, but from your experience why do people. Enjoy this funny, disgusting humorous. gifs Well, why, why does it work? Cause it’s basically a picture it’s even shorter than a video. It’s like a moving picture for like one and a half to two seconds. Sometimes even looks like to infinity.

James: [00:40:27] I don’t know. I dunno what it is. A total it’s high. It’s almost like it’s a phenomenon, isn’t it really?

Diego: [00:40:31] Why do you use it?

James: [00:40:34] Do you know what I, actually, the reason why I use it, I mean, those I’ve just showed you that not I mean then they’re not means they’re just part of gif and they’re just some fun way of our then our brand and our voice to stories, you know, rather than just using like the sort of stock, but in terms of means I have my comparison only because I don’t think he saw this one actually Jean-luc it was actually our friend Dorien had mentioned something about agile on LinkedIn.

And she’s a super fun, right. Doreen of using post-it notes. And I go mother and say to a one, we still using post-it notes for, you know, pieces of paper. I know you can stick them on a board. And so on you still using that, how come you’re not using like electronic digital boards, like, I don’t know, JIRA or Trello or something larger.

I do use, I suppose I do like my kind of like post-it notes. So I was like, ah, you know, so old, old hat. Anyway, she put a comment on LinkedIn now, you know, from LinkedIn, from, from a voice point of view, we’re all meant to be kind of like super serious business conversation. But you’ll notice that there is a little bit of an element that’s creeping into LinkedIn.

People are starting to show like life or the weekend started to show what the CA the dog family members, you know, he’s fun. He’s starting to creep in. Well, Dorien put a comment on there with regards to Agile and you made a comment Jean-luc about, you thought he was a stack of books, but it wasn’t, it was a stack of post-it notes.

I kind of looked at it and kind of thought I’ve got to jump in there with a main, I said that deserves a main bot. It was a very personalized mean, and it was, are you, are you funded back to the future? So you, you know, the yeah, yeah.

The doc

yeah. I had a background of the doctor and I actually put a meme over the top of the, the, the, you know, the right font and the meme over the top of it and kind of said where we’re going is that there’s no postage.

So I actually love crate. Am I, I actually, I like creating my own.

It’s just so funny. I just think he’s, I just think he’s super fun to watch the dope,

Diego: [00:42:45] bring it together a bit. So we we’ve talked about gifs we talked about agile and another phenomenon in communication. That’s on the rise is the use of emojis, but not just in communication, just in text, in general, in descriptions, if you look at all these discord servers, check on whether people are starting to use a lot of emojis for a channel, and I know you use notion as well to, to apply, you know, your, your agile principles and notion is very it encourages to use gifs icons as well to pull your pages and notes. So how do you use notion combined with agile and combine it with this way of communicating in, in your daily or, you know, Processes for work projects or just personal.

James: [00:43:35] I liked it. Do you know what the one great thing is? I loved it. When you sent me an invite for this particular show on the back of it was a notion link, really massive fan of notion. I love the simplicity of it in terms of the user interface, the simplicity of it. It’s like, it’s kind of gorgeous. Really. It sounds really strange. It’s gorgeous, but it’s so it’s kind of like so simple.

Diego: [00:43:57] Yeah. fell in love with it immediately when I got introduced to

James: [00:44:00] yeah. When I saw it, I was just like, there was something about it. It’s like, it’s not, you know, graphic user interface wise. It’s just such a nice interface. But at the same time, it’s such a complex database system as well. And some which you can do with it. We S we S we certainly use on a day-to-day basis what our agile

yeah, in terms of how we plan content is 100% in notion. I know you can use it for many other things, but the other great thing about it is, is the communication of it. Because we apply a gel to our notion system, or however you want to call it, our notion boards, we have a great way of communicating that and being transparent with all our clients.

And because I said that the sort of beauty of it and the simplicity of it, our clients are completely on board of it at the start. I’m not too sure about it’s popular. I’m guessing it’s popular, but it’s not as popular as say for Trello we tried Trello out with clients, and they get completely confused by it.

Refuse to use it. I’ve never really particularly had a client, a refuse to use Notion. You can put your own brand on it. You can put your own communication take on it. It’s just super clear. It’s just such a clean system and environment to work with, but at the same time, you can put a touch of your own voice and brand on there.

And the great thing is, is what you were saying that is, it’s like it technologies come around technologies or trends come round in cycles. So I’m a big, I, when I use notion I’m a big user of using emojis in it to convey emotion and emojis is so simple bluntly, but they’re so simple, but everybody uses emotion.

Emojis, text messages. So email. So any other messaging platform that you use and everybody uses that it’s kind of like commonplace. So why wouldn’t you use that in systems like notion. Fantastic system.

Jean-luc: [00:46:07] I want to jump into this because basically notion brings together Google docs and Asana or Trello, or any of those projects with those. And I want to, yeah. So Marlon mentioned something which we can plug in. I remember reading once that Suriname was in the top three for using emojis, it was, it was reactions. So let me go into efficient, would like to see if Jeff’s and reams of if we are somewhere there as well to talk about Marlon  mentioned of the emojis.

It was actually reactions the first year that Facebook went from the light button to those five different reactions in the top 10 of the world when it comes to actually using those. So not in total, but like on average, compared to how many people were using Facebook at the time in our country, we kind of adapt the trade quickly.

Because you have to imagine, like, we are a very humorous country. So if somebody would fall into the gutter somewhere in Europe 10 people would just give it to like, because Oh, somebody were like, okay we like that, you actually mentioned this. Let’s do something about it. But if some buddy would fall into the gutter and Suriname, there would be three people laughing, doing the ha reaction.

And then there would be two people upset and the government will be posting the bad emoji. And then there would be a two person doing the caring emoji because they care about the person that fell down and it need fixing. And so we would be all over the place and showing different reaches of emotions.

So I think, yeah, there is some truth to that as well that we had, it was also very obvious that in the top 10, there were like seven Latin American countries with high emotional response to things. Yeah. We, we kind of in Dutch, we call it leed vermaak. I don’t know what the terms in English, Diego, do you know that.

It’s, it’s, it’s meant to poke fun of the struggles or the pain of others.

James: [00:48:08] Well, in German, that’s Chardan pride there. Isn’t it? When you, is that similar to, yeah, I shot him. Freida in Germany is what I mean, the English we’ll use it as well, but it is a German word. Shout on Fridays. Yeah. Is when you poke at someone’s misfortune.

Jean-luc: [00:48:27] Yeah, because, because we have a lot of misfortune, I give it a positive spin is to make a joke or a joke. But I have to ask now because we talk about emojis. Have you guys already made a yet? There’ll be no. Do you guys have domain? No.

James: [00:48:47] Yet demand.

Jean-luc: [00:48:48] Yeah, no, it’s a y.at. And it’s you get the domain where actually you can buy one emoji, two emojis, three emojis, four or five emojis after each other, and that’s kind of your domain. And then you can link it to your Twitter bio. And so actually on my Twitter bio now I forget domain. I took a really cheap one because doing three about Jesus, like a couple of hundred, or even a dose of dollars and like five, the cheap 10, 10, zero, or $10 version, the less you should take.

So if you take a laugh yet, yeah. That’s probably a couple of thousand dollars to get that. But it’s something to look at if you’re, if you’re not familiar.

James: [00:49:30] No, I’m definitely going to look at that. One thing I do use a lot is I’ve done. Actually, you guys use it is Emojipedia. So if you really struggling or you just want to solve and be, you know, extra creative in terms of the, I use it a lot for, if you’re doing copy for content posts.

So you want to break it up a little bit and you want to add a, you know, a few random emojis there. So you can mind put words in, like, you know, you kinda like want a different emoji for star, so you type in the word star and it’ll give you all the variations of stars that you can have. Or you might want to have I don’t know, till box type until toolbox.

And it gives you kind of like random icons for representations for that word. So, yeah, I use Emojipedia quite a bit as well for them plus about that. That’s a good, that’s a cool site to go to as well for, for emoji recommendations or inspiration.

Jean-luc: [00:50:24] Okay, but let’s, let’s do a final question and more into the, to the content. I mean, a lot of people want to create content. A lot of people have fears of not being able to do it. There’s also a big difference between creating content for yourself as a personal brand or doing it as agency for companies for people that are interested, I want to start with creating content, but they are afraid because they have to get over to the threshold. What, what would be the advice that you want to give people that are interested in creating content, but are afraid to start?

James: [00:50:55] I think we’re all like that really.  I used to be very, very fearful of doing video. It’s quite, I don’t know what you guys were like when you started to do live, especially the adoption of doing lives for the first time. When you say, like, if you’re going to do content, the main piece of content and you do need to focus on is video, you can do you know, photos, graphics, you name it.

But if you really want to sort of like drive forward with content creation, everybody needs to take on the adoption of video. Now I know that’s a massive hurdle for most people. And I say it was kind of like a massive hurdle for myself as well. I don’t know what it was. It was kind of like, it was almost like the fear factor, even though I’m talking to you guys, now I can see. Wow, but there’s still an element. Now I’m talking to a camera lens, you know? No one knows how kind of like. how strange that feeling is, especially alone is if you’re doing solo videos, you’re doing solo videos, it’s that technique and practice that you need to do in front of a camera to produce video.

And that’s a really fearful thing. It sounds so easy to do. Everyone’s got it. Everyone has a mobile phone. Just keep practicing and practicing every moment that you can, you can take practice in front of, I mean, I’ve got my mobile now just prompt the adjuncts in terms of video, it’s called sorry.

Diego: [00:52:19] Apply agile to it.

James: [00:52:21] Apply agile to it. He’s the son. You got to apply a gel to everything now. But the thing is, is once you record your first one, the first one, if I went back to the very first video, I that, of course, it’s not going to be as good as what I can probably do them. So you’re always going to just accept that with time you’re going to improve, but you’d need to do it.

You need to press that recall button and continue that kind of process of sort of like this video making process. I don’t know what you guys were like when you first did video, but to me, you’re all super great in front of a, in front of the camera, but were you great in front of a camera the first time he did it.

Jean-luc: [00:53:04] I shouldn’t have a look, Diego. I really think that like, especially the first episode, zero of Social Confoes even look back at it.

Diego: [00:53:12] That’s interesting. That’s an interesting, I was asking Jean-luc okay. So we’re going to start next week, right? So we joined the session here and we’re like, okay, so I’m asking him. So we’re doing it live. Yeah. Yeah. We’re doing life. Are you ready? All right. Just, just like that. We went live. Okay. I didn’t have any fancy setup methods.

Jean-luc: [00:53:31] I didn’t give him a way out

James: [00:53:32] Well, that’s usually, that’s, that’s usually the best, the best way.

Th th the thing is, is people watch any of these, take this opportunity now, because, for example, COVID enabled us to push a lot further in terms of using and adapting to these technologies. So now this is a sort of like great time to use it. And everyone’s got cheap, cheap availability to tools like we’re using now stream yard.

We as an agency use streaming extensively ourselves as well with our clients as well. The clients first ones, when we get them on board, we push it. That’s our main push we do with clients is to get them on board with video. But also live video. There’s something very, very special about doing live video, especially with the level, what we’re doing now.

So always get clients on board. Let’s push it towards live video. It’s super scary for them, but also at the same time, there’s a lot of fun with it. You know, they come away. They’re a little bit sweaty. They’re hot, they’re nervous. There’s an energy there, but once it finished, it’s like, wow, that was great.

When do we do the next one? So the first one’s always a little bit nerve wracking, but once it finished, it, there’s that buzz that it’s like, wow, did you see that person? That person made this comment and in the head, that kind of thinking, ah, I’ve made it an engagement with an audience that they’ve really enjoyed this show that made a comment.

I made a comment verbally verbal and they responded to it. Wow. I like this. This is, this is really good. And then they had to kind of go, right. Okay. Well, I did this wrong. I didn’t do this quite right. Okay. We’ll practice that. You know, for the next one. So it’s a continual, you know, improvement. The main thing is, is you just gotta get out there and do it.

Yes, it is. You know, I’m being honest there. Yes. It’s going to be a little bit scared and a little bit nerve wracking. We’ve all done. It. We’re all in the same boat, but it gets easier with time.

Jean-luc: [00:55:34] Authenticity helps. I think people really liked the authenticity of, of video that you don’t get to hide away. People get to see if you make a mistake, a mistake

Diego: [00:55:43] especially live, because then you see the errors and you get that instant feedback loop. Like James was talking about that you get with agile as well, iterating it in the moment actually. And yeah, and adding to that authenticity people. Feel you and you as a creator and a video producer or our client get this intimate connection with your audience directly getting that instant feedback.

And I think that’s, that’s a really great way to look at it. James Thanks for sharing that with us, kind of forcing people to build a life, to just plunge into the depths and then go from there. And that’s your buy-in basically,

James: [00:56:26] definitely because I mean, to sort of say it like, you know, advice in terms of content creation or content creation on its own is a very wide piece.

But if you want to take an element of content creation, my go to so like, yeah, if we have a client on board and they say, Oh yeah, can you give us a content strategy? Yeah. So content strategy is like, well, it’s a lot of things. Yeah. But one of the key things in that content strategy I always push towards is a live stream.

And you should see the reaction sometimes when you say live stream. Cause they’re super scared of it.

They’re scared of it. But at the same time is that kind of, I like what you’re saying that this is going to be this connection with an audience. I’m going to get this engagement. Yeah. There’s an authentic side to it. Yeah. It is a little bit scary, but also at the same time, there’s a lot of fun to it and I quite like this adrenaline.

Diego: [00:57:25] awesome. We hear, we’ve got a few final comments here from Saph she’s loving this tutorial. She’s sold so lovely. Love the session. And then she went to look for that gif you sent Jean-luc and yea I’m not even going to for now, but if you’ve searched for it, you know what Saph means? Probably with that being said, James.

This was a really, really fun conversation, really in depth. And it took a very, I guess not traditional marketing spin. We talked about gifs we talked about emojis, talked about video strategies. Really cool stuff. So to give you like a, the final word now what can people expect from you? How can people find you? How can people connect with you if you want that at least in the next few months or so, what can people look forward to?

James: [00:58:19] Well, as myself and Jean-luc would catch up with us on the social media summit. Which is next month. So you’ve got to see both me and Jean-luc, you’re looking forward to the others.

Jean-luc: [00:58:30] I’m scared, scared, but I’m looking forward to it

James: [00:58:36] actually on that. Now, if you do, we have got some exciting, I can’t say too much on it at the minute, because it’s still under a little bit of development, but hi, I’ve got some news, some big news on an agile marketing in next month. So we are launching a platform.

Target is probably beginning of June I’m looking at around about June the first. So we are launching a coaching training platform around agile marketing. So there’s more news to come on that if you want to keep up to date on that news, you can always visit me on www.cruzcreative.agency. We’re also on, that’s the best place to get news updates and also on Instagram as well.

It’s probably the best place as well, which is @cruz. creative  , but yeah, we’ve got some big news coming up. That’s the big, big news, more, more and more agile stuff next month.

Jean-luc: [00:59:34] Yeah. And for people that don’t know, there’s already, I think a white paper or an ebook that you can download, if you want to know the basics of agile. So we’ll make sure, like Diego said to add the links to the description of, yeah.

James: [00:59:49] And if you want to know more from a training point of view, like say there’s going to be more news. Next moment. You’ll be able to get the newsletter off the website.

Diego: [00:59:56] Great. We’ll add though everything from James in the link, follow him check out the big announcement coming next month. And yeah, as you guys know this episode, the audio version will be released on Saturday, coming Saturday on all the podcasting platforms.

If you, you may have noticed I’m fixed on the website. I saw some people actually entered their email in a newsletter that was still in development, so that’s pretty cool. But yeah, I think in the next week or two, there’s going to be an overhaul on that side. So we’re hoping to get that, doing that more seriously.

Also at the bottom of the website, there are some ways you can support us, check that out as well. Added some integrations there as well. So we’re doing, we’re being agile, but iterating week by week. And yeah, with that being said, Jean-luc last word and then closes off.

Jean-luc: [01:00:47] Yes. Thank you so much for being our guest James, we had a really fun time. This was really a social conversation, so we’re really happy to have you as a guest on Social Confoes. And as you guys know, we’ll be back next week, Tuesday at 9:00 PM, Surinamese time or wherever you are in the world. Thank you again for watching. This was Social Confoes bye-bye.