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Social media updates, trend alerts, original content ideas, music/audio suggestions, tutorials and more!
Welcome to the socialized forecast, Tuesday, August 27th. We are nearing the end of August. I can't believe it. Summer's almost over. Oh my goodness.
Helen:I'm I'm beside myself when I read the when I read the date today. I just came off a weekend of officiating a wedding, so I am coming down from the experience. I've never officiated a wedding before. So on a personal note, it was very, very special. And people at the wedding asked me how many times I have officiated a wedding because I guess I did well.
Helen:So I'm really happy about that because I was completely stressed. I wanted it to go perfectly. I've they're a very special couple to me. And I'm proud to I'm proud to say that I did myself proud and I did the bride and groom proud, and that's what matters. So it was beautiful and, just a gorgeous event.
Helen:I I'm I can't even get over it, so I had to talk about it very first. Now I will jump into the social media things of the week. I am gonna talk about trends and content ideas. I am going to try not to over elaborate on the trends on this podcast moving forward. It occurred to me that I the support of the newsletter with the trends.
Helen:It's just a lot easier to click and see what to do versus me describing it on a podcast. However, what I will do on the podcast is give some examples of how you can use a trend in the niche. So I think what I mean to say is when I get into describing the trends instead of getting into exactly the description of what the trend is, I'm gonna focus more on how to use it. And if you want to be able to click and see what the trend is, just make sure you're subscribed to the newsletter. This way, you can have the best of both worlds.
Helen:And alright. Let's kick it off. And before I dive into the trends, a few things I wanna talk about this week, which the first one being stealing content versus being inspired by content. And the reason I want to address this topic is for a few things. I mean, it came to a head this week with a couple of, things I noticed on social media.
Helen:The first one being the demure trend and the person who copyrighted it I've I'm sorry. Trademarked it, not copyrighted it. They trademarked it. And this person has nothing to do with the trend but I guess saw an opportunity to potentially make money on owning the trademark. So really, really frustrating.
Helen:And I know there's a lot of people coming to support the creator who exploded because of the trend and now can't trademark it because it was, this trademark was scooped up by someone else. But I do wanna say upon a little bit of digging on the topic, apparently, there's a creator a creator from a couple of years ago who has used the term demure in content. And now I think is starting was claiming that Jules, the creator that's now blowing up, stole it from that person back then. And I'm not sure. I here's what I wanna say about the idea of thinking that you came up with something 2 years ago and then somebody else jumped on it and is now known for it.
Helen:We're talking about something like a language, a phrase, a catchphrase that you pick up and then you decide to use. Now we can pick up catchphrases all the time by people. You know, we hear somebody say something. We're like, oh, that's a funny statement. I'm gonna use that term.
Helen:And does that mean the person we heard it from owns it? Maybe they heard it from someone before that. So I think that the problem we face with social media is that everything is so out there and available and public, I guess, you might say. So that when someone ends up running with someone and then it starts trending, is that person now considering, oh, maybe somebody said this a few years ago? No.
Helen:They just became known for it today from using it in a certain way on a video and happened to just go viral with it. So in my opinion, the person who goes viral with with it, if it's not an exact replica of a stolen piece of content you used in the exact same way this person did 3 years ago, I don't I don't consider that. It's just it's like saying somebody stole the word box. How can you you know, it's a word, demure. It was just the way this creator took off with it and made it her own.
Helen:So it's not like she invented the word and near nor did the person from 3 years ago invent the word demure. The word demure has been in the vocabulary for as long as the dictionary's around. Does that mean someone because she used the word, she stole it from someone? No. No.
Helen:She used it in a way that became a trend. She created a vibe around the word. That is the difference. She became known for it because the way she used it, the context in which she used it, how she put it together with of, an ex expressing a feeling, that is you can't say she stole it from someone because it's a word. However, I wanna switch gears now to say that I also heard and I will call out the brand because you'll find it very easily when you start, digging when I start talking about this.
Helen:There is a young woman and this happened on another advertising campaign prior to this where ad agencies are scrolling, you know, they're scrolling TikTok. All the creative people in the ad agencies that are coming up with the creative concepts for the clients are all inspired now by the things they're seeing on social media. So this particular creator whose idea was stolen by quote, well, quote, stolen by L'Oreal is saying that she came up with this thing that, she did a video about, using her boyfriend's face wash and now the ad agency for the brand or L'Oreal the brand has stolen her idea and is using it in ads and hasn't given her credit. And this happened with another brand prior. I can't remember which one it is it is now, but I did talk about it on a podcast where the creator called out the brand and said, oh my goodness.
Helen:You recreated my piece of content as a commercial and and it ran, I wanna say, during the Super Bowl. So what I think I think what we have to acknowledge and and it is stealing in my opinion, but I think what we have to acknowledge is that people who are working in ad agencies and getting paid to be creative and come up with concepts as age old the the advertising business is, people have always been inspired by things they see out in the wild, in the real world, things that they see in other TV commercials, some things that they've seen that this is before the Internet now even in my day. There were inspiration. You'd see a movie and you get and the creative person might get inspired by something they saw in a movie and then create a commercial campaign around an idea. So there's there's a creative guy I used to work with who said, you know, ideas are out there for the picking.
Helen:Mean mean meaning, like, they're in the in the stratosphere and you there could be multiple people having the same idea at the same time even. But I think we all have to realize that when before it was harder to find and get inspired by ideas and then be able to be called out for them. It is much easier now when you are able to scroll and quickly get flooded with creative ideas. I know it myself. I mean, when I'm scrolling, I'll see something, oh, I gotta do something like this, like that, like this.
Helen:And, you know, my idea then flourishes into another idea. But if I wasn't a creative person who could evolve an idea and I was, the person out there who's, like, literally copying someone because they don't have any original creative ideas, there is a stealing element happening. And I don't know how we measure it. I really I'm at a loss. I'm at a loss and I'm almost we're gonna hit a therapy session here, but it happened to me a couple of years ago where a creative creator copied verbatim one of my tutorials.
Helen:And it was an original tutorial. It wasn't for a trend. So nothing was trending on it. It wasn't like she could have seen it from 5 other tutorial people and then decided to make this video. She literally took my video where I made the stop motion thing using nail polishes and she recreated it exactly verbatim, used my ways the expressions of the things that Helenisms I say.
Helen:She made the little movements on the products exactly mine, made them spin, used lingo, and she was not, she had, I can't remember what her her accent was. So she even she even used expressions that wouldn't be in her vernacular. It was a very Jersey girl, I would would say, expressions of the things that I said. Then you do it like that and spin it like that, you know, the things I say. And so it's such a blatant copy that I did have to call call her out on it.
Helen:And I wrote her a note and said, this is stealing of my idea verbatim. It's not even like you changed it or said, oh, I was inspired by this person and now here's my version of it. So I felt it deeply when that happened to me and it was a very minor thing. So if if something happened to me like that where a big brand took one of my original pieces of content and remade it into a commercial or launched a whole online campaign, I do think there's some accountability these brands have to hold to to say, hey. We were inspired by this creator.
Helen:There could be a compensation involved. If we, the people of the Internet, are helping the ad agency executives come up with ideas, maybe there should be some compensation, I think. I mean, do the right thing. I just don't know how you measure it. And this is where and this is why I'm not a lawyer, and I will never, profess to have any of the skills that a lawyer has to be able to see through that gray area and be able to know what's the difference.
Helen:Do you know? I mean, it's frustrating. So I did just wanna call that out because I do think what's happening because of the the creativity that's readily at our fingertips. And also, obviously, now we have AI. So a lot of times I'll go to and I'll hear people speaking, and I'm like, oh, that sounds like it was chat GPT yesterday.
Helen:It doesn't even sound like it's an original presentation. And I think that that's what we're party to now as a society, as a culture of people, just being being so driven by social media culture and the availability of creativity so so readily at our fingertips. I don't I don't know how we avoid it, and it's certainly one of those things that's probably gonna keep me up at night. Some of the times, some of the things that keep me up at night are not good. And there's not many, by the way.
Helen:I sleep really well. Oh my gosh. Okay. Moving on. Let's get into trends, but I I just I wanna leave you with the idea that being inspired is such a good thing that we are have access to.
Helen:And even from the standpoint of me officiating a wedding this past weekend, don't think I didn't look to TikTok for inspiration. I was listening to wedding poems and getting ideas from things I heard, people talking about their weddings. You know, this is where we go to do research now. We used to go to a library, and now we we can just go to social media and our favorite app, and we can really learn a lot and and get a lot of creative ideas. So if I sat here and said, oh my gosh.
Helen:My whole entire wedding thing was no. Of course, I spoke about the bride and groom specifically and thoughts I had in knowing them. But I looked for words, not words verbatim, but I looked for inspiration for different poems. We chose a poem for the moms to read directly from a TikTok creator. Her name is Whitney Hanson, by the way.
Helen:Lovely poet in case you're interested. But I have just been I think I'm just at odds with this, and I can't I can't get over it because I, well, I need to have some type of resolution in my mind of how to be able to differentiate between the inspiration I find and being authentic and not copying. And I don't feel I'm guilty of stealing anyone's ideas. I never would consider that. But I suppose if you look at how maybe doing a trend or I saw something and I'm like, oh, that that woman was so funny when she did that.
Helen:I'm gonna do this trend, but I'm gonna talk about being older when I do mine or I'm gonna talk about being a TikTok teacher. So by by nature of social media apps, we are we are always copying because we're we're doing trends and we're making them fit within our niche. But somehow, trends become an acceptable form of copying and imitation, but yet there has to be a differential between stealing someone's content and then taking credit for it or stealing a creative idea and then turning an ad campaign into it without giving the creator credit. I don't know. But anyway, let's carry on into the trends and and and move past this because it's gonna take a a lot of wheel spinning before I ever spin my way out of it.
Helen:So the first trends today, you have 30 minutes, is a quick lip sync you can take on. And you can use this for so many different things. So rather than describe the trend to you, I'm gonna tell you some of the ways you can use it. It can be it's the idea is that you have something that has the title is that something that you have a time limit of, but something that's gonna take longer and where so it's also the 30 minutes feels too short. So you might quick lip sync it and think when you're getting getting dressed for an event and you think you have a certain amount of time, but, obviously, you know, it's gonna take 3 time times longer.
Helen:So you can use it about getting ready. You can use it about how long it's gonna take you to do a presentation. You could use this for how long it's gonna take you to finish a, a college paper if you're in college. You can do it for how long it's gonna take you to pack a bunch of orders that you've got in such a quick amount of time. So it's different ways you can do it for a business in that way.
Helen:Okay. The next one is really fun because it's just simply dancing to the song came here for love. I came here for love. Keep my day job. I know.
Helen:This idea is to record yourself in real time celebrating or you can be in slow motion and you're dancing and you're spinning. And what are you really excited for? So this can be anything excited for, launch of the kids going back to school in September. This could be your and you're dancing around because you're gonna have your house to yourself. So you can plan ahead for us back to school type thing.
Helen:You can plan ahead for when it's a new season in your business and you're if you're in retail and you're out your fashion changes. You can do it for something where college one person did a college getting back to school where my parents aren't asking me what time I'm coming home or I don't have to be accountable for what time I for telling them where I was or whatever that is. It can be something like that. It's gotta be something where you are freeing, where you are just experiencing some freedom and good vibes and what is that force. This is such a blank canvas.
Helen:You can do whatever you want with this one. And those are the TikTok ones. Now for the Instagram ones, which are funny, this is the first one's easy because it's it's just comedy. Where did all my money go? And this is where you're gonna you're gonna use yourself whether you are just on camera making expression, trying to wonder where all your money went, and then you're gonna show all the places you spend your money on, whether it's vacations, clothing, makeup, skin care, if whatever your obsession is.
Helen:If you're a coffee fanatic and you're buying coffees, if you're a collector of something and you're obsessed with, like, collecting turtle memorabilia. So it can be so many things. Then it can also be something very, very simple. It doesn't have to be something too elaborate. Okay.
Helen:Then the last one is a nice just a really a song choice that's trending on Instagram with some vibes and it's called flower child. The idea here is just that you can show off fun travel. You can show off, I mean, this would be a great one for someone going to, like, wedding weekend or going up to a fall apple picking weekend because you're looking for beautiful imagery. And it's like a vibey song to celebrate maybe the end of summer or maybe the beginning of fall. So it's a nice it's just a nice feel good piece and putting it together with some good visuals.
Helen:If you are an artsy photography person, this is a good song for you to hold on to. Alright. We'll pause into we'll pause, but we'll jump into the Jamaica. Just a reminder that I am going to be speaking at the conference. I mentioned it a couple of weeks ago that I am attending a women's entrepreneur conference in Jamaica from May 1st to 4th in Montego Bay, and I've never been to Jamaica.
Helen:So I am so excited to go. And there are so many good speakers. I'm not gonna elaborate too much because I really did get deeper into it on the last time I mentioned it. But put the link here so you can explore. Lots of fun people in attendance.
Helen:The speakers are amazing. And the package that things come with, between photography and expertise and helping you with setting up your your entrepreneurship journey is it's it seems to have a lot of value. So take a click on it and and enjoy browsing and seeing who else is gonna be speaking at that thing. And if you wanna come and hang out, it's gonna be a fun weekend. I can guarantee you that because there will be dancing and other things besides dancing.
Helen:We will have a good time. We're gonna have all the social media. We're gonna do social media workshops. We're gonna learn how to make content. What I may do is give some assignments for people over the weekend.
Helen:So do a test on this. Learn how to do a transition this way. If you wanna just learn how to edit a music video, we're gonna do that. So we're gonna do a lots of different styles of editing and tips for making your content the best it can be. That's my goal at the conference.
Helen:Now for original content ideas today, I I Julie and I came up with these together because a lot of times I will just get bored of content doing tutorials, and I'm always trying to think of something creative, which brings me to this. And this is important because I've been trying to think about how to explain this because it's so clear in my mind that I want to make sure I'm articulating it as clearly as I understand it. I was thinking about how a trend gets lit, and I was thinking, then people do the trend and then more people are getting views and they're and then something is, quote, trending. So then you think, oh, we we have a newsletter. We're gonna be able to share the trends because I wanna hop on the trends because I wanna make sure I'm doing something that's trending.
Helen:But get this, this is what just clicked into my brain. Every single thing that is trending started out as one person's original idea. Process that for a second because when I realized it and articulated it in my mind out loud, I was like, oh my god. I'm on to something here. I really have to talk about this.
Helen:So we could say, oh, Demure is trending. Okay. Excellent. But it was not trending when Jules made a piece of content in her car and started talking about being demure and cutesy. It was not trending.
Helen:That was her original content idea. You get it? So when you are looking at the newsletter and you're like, trends. Great. Great.
Helen:Good. I need to know the trends. Think about this. If you pick one of the original content ideas, you could be the next trend. And if you're not even not even using these content ideas, your own content idea.
Helen:If you have something that you do for content, you could be the next trend. So you don't have to even do a trend. You could just disregard and say, I'm just gonna keep making content of whatever I wanna do, and then one day I'll be the trend. Be I'll be trending. I don't know.
Helen:It just kind of clicked in and was a little mind blowing to me when I realized it. I'm like, think about if I think about the trends through the years of being on social media and TikTok where they where a bunch of them started with the ocean spray guy on a skateboard to a Fleetwood Mac song drinking from an ocean spray bottle, that was not trending until he did it as an original idea and then it became a trend. Right? Doing Risa Tisa, who TF did I marry? She just got on and talked to her story.
Helen:It was an original idea. She was talking about what happened to her And then she was trending. And then everybody was coming up with, like, who who TF did I this and who TF did I that? Because then it started trending and then people started telling their stories. Anyway, the point is, I'm gonna say it, like, again because it just blows my mind, that every single thing that is trending started out as someone's original content idea.
Helen:So here are the original content ideas for this week. 1, common mistakes. Share something that you know about that you know really well and you know something you're really it's a thing in your industry, whether it's something you know from growing up, maybe you're a musician, whatever it is. Something that you know really well but other people might not know or find interesting and then teach that. Talk about that.
Helen:You don't even have to teach it. You could just say, here's a common mistake people make when they're buying retail. I'm gonna give you one that's really mind blowing to me that I learned from somebody years years ago that was in retail. That when you are in a store and you're buying a piece of clothing and you go, oh, I'm gonna try this. I you try it on in a large and you wanna you say, oh, I think it's maybe a medium would fit me better, for example.
Helen:You don't just go and take the medium off the rack and buy it. You try it on mostly because there are this is a known fact in the wholesale industry that if a company has to fulfill an order and they need to fulfill to a store, they need to supply 10 mediums, 10 larges, and 10 smalls or whatever, and they don't have the stock of this amount of smalls, they could label them as mediums just to fulfill the order for that store so that you might be getting a medium that was either mislabeled by accident or perhaps on purpose. And I know this as an insider from someone who worked in retail. And so now and it just happened to me recently because I bought I wanted something in a smaller size and, of course, I was in a rush. So I just took the one size down and left, and I figured it's gonna fit me because the other one was too big.
Helen:I got home and it was like 2 sizes smaller easily. So I had to go back. But this is exactly I I didn't even learn my own lesson. But that's a really great example. Like, if you have a little insider knowledge about something in your industry, it's like, oh, if people only knew this.
Helen:I'm telling you, the Internet loves that shit. They love that shit. They only eat that up. So I might have to make a video about my retail experience on that on that sizing thing. So there's one.
Helen:The other, content idea is an August recap, and this is your last chance to really get pick the maybe pick the August song by Taylor Swift or pick another song like the one I just shared and talked about for on Instagram and show off your final months of summer video. I mean, your finally final days of summer content and have some fun with that because you really only have a couple days left and it's already August 27th. So hop hop to it. Hop to it. The last one is doing a behind the scenes of creating.
Helen:And these do better than you think because Julie and I just were at a wedding and even my son was filming the 2 of us while we were trying to make a TikTok, and I set up my tripod and I was doing my thing. Well, I posted the video of the the dance trend that Julie and I did. But but she filmed us doing it behind the scenes. My son was filming us doing it behind the scenes. So she put together behind the scenes of us creating content and how we were trying it over and over.
Helen:We did so many takes, how I had my tripod set up, how how we were cleaning the lens because we were she was like, the lens of your camera's dirty because I got had maybe got some food stuck on it. Who knows? So all of this created a really fun piece of content for her so that we didn't both just post the same dance. I posted the final result and she posted the process of us filming it. So those behind the scene things, especially if you're doing one that's hard to accomplish or requires a lot of people helping you behind the scenes, people love to see that.
Helen:And even when that Taylor Swift song where the love song was trending and it was the person was holding the phone and the phone was flipped to face the person that was holding it up. And that was a cute little trend that showed a lot of people were showing behind the scenes of how that was done. So you never know. You might you might go viral with something that's just like a quick little behind the scenes share. Let's talk about the featured tutorial for today.
Helen:And it is one tutorial because it is a long and detailed lesson that could come in handy for anything where you wanna split the screen and make something clever. You can take this and run with it and it's easily doable. You need cap cut for it because you need an edit app that will show you well, that will do a split screen. It's important. And so I did the demonstration.
Helen:This works for TikTok. It works for Instagram. You can take this, make this piece of content where it looks like your phone is feeding is like a little, soda machine into your glass. So you're putting your phone on top of your glass, you're pressing on top of your phone and ice is coming out. Then you hold up your phone and you show what beverage is gonna go in, and then you put the phone on top of your glass and you press and then that beverage goes into the glass.
Helen:It's a very clever, fun effect, and I had multiple people send me the video and ask me how it was done. So you've got that tutorial covering you on TikTok and Instagram this week. So go check it out. That's a nice and it's a nice one to you could be very creative with this. There was a person who did a split screen where they took the legs of somebody running on a treadmill really, really fast, and then they were just on the top, you know, drinking a martinis.
Helen:They split the screen with the person running really fast. That was a really fun use of a split screen from a couple of years ago. So You can do something like that. You there was also a few years ago gosh. I've been on, social media a long time because I'm remembering a trend where the bottom half was person tap dancing.
Helen:Really, really good tap dancing. And then the top half was the person just, like, sitting there, like, drinking a drinking a cocktail or something or having a cup of coffee where meanwhile their lower half was doing a whole tap dance. So if you're creative, maybe I will even do this, but there is that Chicago dance. Oh, yes. Oh, yes.
Helen:Oh, yes. And they're just, like, doing the all the moves. I mean, that would be a fun one to take the legs of the person who is going viral with that and then put yourself on top of her. Maybe just put your head on top and you can make a really fun a really fun effect. Maybe I'll even be inspired to try that myself.
Helen:That could be funny. And that is it for this week. Have a wonderful week. I will be back on Friday where I will do my usual deep dive into a topic, and then I will get into some answering some questions at the end. Have a good one, and I'll see you Friday.