Are you a lawyer looking to become better at content creation? In this episode of the Maximum Lawyer Podcast, host Tyson Mutrux interviews Hilary Billings, the "queen of content," who shares her journey from aspiring clinical psychologist to successful content creator and entrepreneur.
Creating content that people gravitate towards takes dedication and consistency. Hilary and Tyson chat about some of the things business owners should do, especially as it relates to the legal field. For those who are getting started in content creation, it is crucial to practice through repetition. Whether it is speaking in front of a camera or conveying a message in a certain way, practice is a necessary factor in being successful. Practicing and building confidence also involves figuring out who your target audience is and how to speak to them.
Content creation for lawyers involves determining what content type works for you. Though there are many types of styles and content, educational content tends to be the most popular. Hillary speaks to the need to figure out how to educate an audience through a certain style, such as skits or straight to the camera videos. Most people will be more interested in knowing how to avoid a situation or how to handle themselves in a situation.
Listen in to learn more from Hillary Billings.
Episode Highlights:
19:45 The importance of practice in building confidence
25:44 Creating content that reflects true self and values
33:57 Discussion on the effectiveness of personal branding
37:19 Insights on effective content types for lawyers
43:14 Identifying successful content factors in videos
Transcripts: The Best Strategies for Capturing Attention in a Crowded Digital World with Hilary Billings
Tyson Mutrux 00:00:02 This is maximum lawyer with your host, Tyson Matrix.
Tyson Mutrux 00:00:11 Hillary Billings, welcome to the show.
Hilary Billings 00:00:12 Thank you so much for having me.
Tyson Mutrux 00:00:14 Well, thanks for being on. We were having a nice little chat before, and it was funny because I noticed we were starting to get into like some things. I was like, oh, I think I want to talk about this on the show.
Hilary Billings 00:00:21 You're like, hold it, hold it.
Tyson Mutrux 00:00:23 Let's hold the good stuff. And it's funny because we've been doing this since 2016 and oh man, there was like, I learned early to not like chat chit chat too much before because you lose a lot of the good conversations. It's like, oh man, that originality, you know what I mean? Like like you can't you can't replicate it. Sure. It's like those, like you watch those shows. Those are reality shows. And like, they they're acting out what had happened before, like storage Wars and all that.
Hilary Billings 00:00:47 Yes.
Tyson Mutrux 00:00:48 Yeah. And so it's.
Tyson Mutrux 00:00:49 You can tell it's fake.
Hilary Billings 00:00:50 Totally. Oh, totally.
Tyson Mutrux 00:00:51 Yeah. But yes, I do want to start with, the queen of content, because you're known as the queen of content. So what's that about?
Hilary Billings 00:01:00 Oh, it sounds kind of cringey. Does it?
Tyson Mutrux 00:01:01 Did you give yourself that title? Oh, okay. It's usually at work. Someone else.
Hilary Billings 00:01:04 Does it. Yes. I have been called that by both the New York Times bestselling author Rory Vaden and, Sean Kelley, who's a podcast host of the Digital Social Hour here in town. And, it's kind of a play on, as far as I understand it, the multiple areas of my life that have just somehow magically come together from me being an accidental beauty queen to accidentally getting a billion organic views on social media, to becoming a chief content officer for a learning platform now helping personal brands and entrepreneurs through my company attention, create short form content and other types of content that people care about and want to consume. From keynotes to books to courses and really focusing on how do we take the personal brand strategy and everything I know about the psychology of attention and bring it all together? And I used to wear a tiara, so I guess it fits in a lot of ways.
Tyson Mutrux 00:01:54 So I think you probably know what I'm going to ask next Is everybody listening and watching? You want to know? Like the accidental beauty queen? Tell us about that. Yeah.
Hilary Billings 00:02:02 So I got my degree in psychology. I thought I was going to become a clinical psychologist. I wanted to get my PhD in body dissatisfaction, eating disorders and go into academics. And I was the number one graduate from UNLV. They had a special award for me called the Outstanding Graduate. They even have you stand up amid the sea of all the graduates. They do a special ceremony. And then I went on to be the proud owner of 14 rejection letters from every PhD program that I'd applied to. I even had one rejection letter. I think I still have it that wasn't addressed to me. And the name was crossed out and my name was written in and it was misspelled. You're kidding me. So you want to talk about feeling low already, and then, like I'm not even worth a reprint of, or even to have my name spelled correctly.
Tyson Mutrux 00:02:48 That is wild.
Hilary Billings 00:02:49 So I hold on to it, because it was such a low moment in my life and I didn't know what I was going to going to do, so I took off to Nicaragua. Like you do?
Tyson Mutrux 00:02:59 Yeah. Then that's the normal reaction. The normal reaction?
Hilary Billings 00:03:01 Yes, yes. And I started a travel blog, and in fact, I had this trip booked. It was to go to a surfer in Nicaragua.
Tyson Mutrux 00:03:07 Wait a second.
Hilary Billings 00:03:08 Why? Yeah. So I had found this woman. Her name was Holly Beck. She's a professional surfer out of Palos Verdes, California, and she runs these retreats. And at the time, I booked the trip when I was interviewing in Albany. It was January or February, and I was like, you know, this is going to be great. My last hurrah before I go to grad school. And then it turned out to be this what am I doing with my life trip? So I met these amazing women and it was the first time in my life I was the youngest attendee on this trip where I wasn't in direct competition, or I didn't feel like I was in direct competition, and I really learned the lesson.
Hilary Billings 00:03:42 If I didn't have to be everything to everyone, and in fact, if I just surrounded myself with the right people, I could actually go farther and I could really just live in my zone of genius and so on. That trip was when it was proposed to me by another one of the attendees. You know, why don't you just travel and write for a while? I was like, that's not a real job. No one's going to pay me to do that. But I started doing it anyway, and I would come back to Vegas.
Tyson Mutrux 00:04:06 And what year was this?
Hilary Billings 00:04:07 Oh, gosh. 2012.
Tyson Mutrux 00:04:09 Okay, so this is interesting because like, this is like at the beginning of like all this like all the influencer stuff, all of that. So at the very beginning it is really early. Yeah. Because I want to make sure I set the scene for that.
Hilary Billings 00:04:20 Yeah. I graduated in 2010. So like we're right after the crash. We're in the midst of the recession. And that was part of what I heard afterwards from these doctoral programs was part of the problem.
Hilary Billings 00:04:30 Right? Because for PhD programs, they won't take you unless they can fund you. And so I would be up against the same 70 people all over the country. And you also saw a new subset of people interviewing, which was people that already had their masters and were practicing psychologists coming back to get their PhDs because there was no work anymore. And so I got phone calls from some of the professors saying, hey, we loved you. You were our number two or our number three candidate. We only had funding for one, or we actually ended up not getting any funding this year, so please apply next year. And it was so devastating at the time that it seemed like and also so out of my control. Right? I had done everything right. I had done everything that I was told to do. And now the American dream that I was promised was no longer available to me.
Tyson Mutrux 00:05:15 And had they known the effect digital media would have on people's psychological well-being, they probably would have had more spots open up.
Tyson Mutrux 00:05:22 Yes.
Hilary Billings 00:05:23 Yes, probably. And so it was a really wild time and I, I would come back, I'd work some crappy job, you know, in retail or whatever, and I would take off again and I'd continue to write about it. And this weird thing started happening where even though the details were different. Right. Because my story of I was in college and then this wasn't working out for me, there were echoes of the similar sentiment, just different details all over the world where people were in agreement, and especially in America, that, like the American Dream, was no longer a guarantee. And so now what? And what do we want our lives to look like? If this isn't the path forward anymore, and doing A, B and C doesn't get you'd. So I accidentally or over the course of this next year, built a following in 120 countries. And it was really amazing. I'd go to different countries and I'd meet up with my readers and they didn't know each other.
Hilary Billings 00:06:13 And so we would all go in on an adventure together in Sydney, Australia, or Cairns or wherever I was.
Tyson Mutrux 00:06:17 Sounds terrible.
Hilary Billings 00:06:18 It was awful.
Tyson Mutrux 00:06:19 Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Hilary Billings 00:06:20 And I but you know, what's funny is, again, I'm in my early 20s and I was so set on what my path should look like. I was kind of mad about it. And I look back and I'm like, gosh, I wish I would have just enjoyed this more. But I was so focused on needing a real job and still not thinking that blogging was it. And like, I just really want to be with now with a real paper and have a real position with. I'm really a journalist because this is the journal.
Tyson Mutrux 00:06:46 People helped you though, like it was a little bit of fuel for it. Oh, sure.
Hilary Billings 00:06:49 Yeah. Yeah, absolutely.
Tyson Mutrux 00:06:50 Do you think that if you didn't have that, you would be where you are now?
Hilary Billings 00:06:53 The the ambition and the drive to keep moving forward? Yeah.
Hilary Billings 00:06:58 No, I think that I've always been a very ambitious person and constantly looking at how can you pivot and change and, and I think the part that I don't do as well is enjoying the moment while continuing to strive forward. And so finding that balance I think is really important in life. It's like, how can you be really present and grateful and happy to be here and get the most out of this, while also striving for the next thing? And I think people typically fall better on one side and the other, and we have to learn to do the other one in our lifetime. So it was a really interesting time. So I'll fast forward the story a little bit.
Tyson Mutrux 00:07:32 I had just I'm enjoying this take you take your time. There's a lot in this. Yeah.
Hilary Billings 00:07:37 So, along the way, I got invited to live with the fire walker tribe in Fiji.
Tyson Mutrux 00:07:42 And what's this?
Hilary Billings 00:07:43 The fire walkers claim to be the originators of the practice of walking on hot coals. In fact, Tony Robbins, if you're familiar with him, he learned fire walking from the tribe.
Hilary Billings 00:07:53 And it's an interesting dynamic because you cannot get to the island where they live, or go to the village where they live without an explicit invitation from the tribe. And so I had a lot of sociologists reach out to me about why I was invited and how that all came to be.
Tyson Mutrux 00:08:10 And how was it? Because I had the same question.
Hilary Billings 00:08:12 Yeah. So the one of the girls that I met on that surf trip, her name was Tal and she was Fijian. We were cabana mates. We were the two youngest on the trip, and she was actually the one that suggested that I start just blogging and writing and traveling the world. And at the time she was living in Australia, working for a Chinese company. Her father was British. Her mother was Fijian. She spoke like six languages. She was the most fascinating woman I knew and we all left this trip. I was like taking her advice to heart. And a week later, she was killed in a car crash in Jamaica. It was her final stop.
Hilary Billings 00:08:47 She had been on the six month journey traveling the world, and it was her final stop before going home, and she'd actually had a zoom or a Skype call, I guess, at the time, with her mother debating whether or not she was going to go. And she went because her best friend was going, and I and I remembered the story correctly, or what the news articles correctly. I think everyone in the car passed but her best friend, and it was just they were hit in a head on collision, middle of the night. Terrible. And it devastated everyone that had known her, and especially us in this group that had just met her and spent this time with her, and also knowing that she had sacrificed time with her family in order to get to know us and spend that time. So I sent her brother. I found him on Facebook stories, photos, videos, anything that I had and thank them for sacrificing that time so we could get to know her and share in her her essence and her beauty.
Hilary Billings 00:09:40 And about six months later, I was I just quit another retail job, and I think it was right around the new year, going into 2012. And I was like, man, I really don't know what I'm gonna do now. Like this. This doesn't feel right. And he sent me this email saying, hey, thank you so much. I know I haven't been in touch, but just wanted you to know in case Talia didn't tell you what she hadn't. We are one of the three chiefly families in Fiji. So the Fijian clans have split up all of the islands. And there's three main, chiefly clans that oversee the rest of these islands. And we belong to the Walker clan. If you're ever interested, we'd love to have you out to come to Fiji. And at the time I was like, oh, that's really nice. But Fiji is for honeymooners. That's not oh no, it's too expensive. There's no way. And I looked at flights and they were astronomical. And so I said, okay, if they just for whatever reason happen to drop below this price point, then I'll think about it.
Hilary Billings 00:10:35 Two weeks later, I just get the urge to go check. And magically, that was at that price point, So I booked a trip and I ended up doing a two week layover in Australia on the way and did some meet ups. It was really fun. And I get to Fiji and I think I'm there for three days and we're currently staying in Suva, which is the capital city, getting ready to go over to the village and her father dies.
Tyson Mutrux 00:11:00 Oh my gosh.
Hilary Billings 00:11:01 And so I am now terrified because I met their daughter right before her death. I met the father right before his death. And now I'm just really worried that they're going to see me as some sort of harbinger of death. Yeah, especially in a culture where I don't think cannibalism was abolished til 1988. they're they're they're so enshrouded and mysticism and spirituality and have so much tradition and heavy culture. I was like, gosh, how are they going to look at this? And I was like, prepared to pack my bags and go home at that point.
Hilary Billings 00:11:32 And Talley's mother sat across from me after the police had come and and everything in the corner. And she said, you know, there must be something about you that's very comforting in times of trauma and death.
Tyson Mutrux 00:11:46 What a wonderful perspective. Yeah.
Hilary Billings 00:11:49 I was completely floored. And her viewpoint on it was that Talley had waited to come take her father until I had arrived, and what I had kept saying in the three days was they were like, what do you want to do while you're here? And I was like, I want to just really just soak in all of the culture that I can and have the most rich experiences and, and learn more about your heritage. That's what I want. And she said, you know, there's two things that we do that are more culturally important to us than anything else. And that's weddings and funerals. So and it just so happened I had 30 days left in Fiji, and the funeral services for Fijians were 30 days. And she's like, you will perform all of the rituals and rites that you will be the stand in for Tali.
Hilary Billings 00:12:35 And that's why she brought you here. What an honor it was. It was. It was very emotional and an incredible honor. And just so heavy and also very beautiful in a lot of ways. And I couldn't I couldn't have asked for that experience. I couldn't even have known that that was going to be a possibility on this trip. And it was such a blessing to be able to do that for them and to be a part of that, and to allow them to want me to be a part of that and to see that was just very, very special. So that family and the tribe are still very near and dear to me in my heart even today, many, many years later. in fact, I just reached, the brother just reached out to me a few days ago, and so it's it's lovely to still be in touch and be able to share her story as well. So I had this experience, and there was a lot that happened on the island, which just continued to reinforce for me, how wide the world really is and how much we don't know about the world.
Hilary Billings 00:13:33 And I And I come back to the States, and I'm trying to just assimilate and integrate all this information. And I'm having a really hard time being back in American culture and being back here in Vegas. And now it's around the 4th of July. A friend has invited me to her 4th of July party. It was House sitting at the time, and it was just one of those eerie things where the universe, God. However you want to look at it was telling me not to go. I couldn't find my keys. I broke a glass. I stepped on the glass. I couldn't find the clothes I wanted to wear. I know you can totally relate to this, but I ended up wearing this super uncomfortable bra that I didn't want to wear.
Tyson Mutrux 00:14:08 Oh, totally. Yes, absolutely. That was me all the time. You know. Absolutely.
Hilary Billings 00:14:11 I had a feeling you'd understand. And I go to this party and they'd purchase these fireworks from an Indian reservation outside of town. And so they're larger and bigger and they're flashier.
Hilary Billings 00:14:23 And I've never been weird about fireworks, but I just decided, you know, I'm gonna stand over here. I'm gonna. I'm gonna sit and eat this hot dog, and you guys get it all set up. It's fine. They light off the first firework of the night and the fuse goes up, but nothing happens.
Tyson Mutrux 00:14:36 Oh, no.
Hilary Billings 00:14:37 Yeah. So everyone gets quiet because we know there's something wrong.
Tyson Mutrux 00:14:40 I'm an injury lawyer, so everything I look at and touch and think about. It's like, yes, I'm always looking at the danger. Stay away from it. Yes, yes.
Hilary Billings 00:14:46 Yeah. So we all wait, and it's a live firework, and then it explodes. But not in a pretty way. And the fuse, which is on fire is traveling through the air, and I'm watching it. And this all happens in the span of, I don't know, 2.5 seconds, but it feels like lifetimes. And it's flying through the air and it curves around, and then it curves around again and it hits my sunglasses and goes down my shirt, and I end up suffering second and third degree burns to my chest and my stomach.
Hilary Billings 00:15:14 And thank God that I had that super annoying push up bra, because it just ate through the whole thing. And if I hadn't been wearing that, the damage probably would have been a lot worse. we ended up trying to go to three different ers. Of course, most were closed because it was 4th of July And as I learned, the chest is the slowest healing part of the body. Doctors didn't know what my healing time would look like or if I would look normal. and I suddenly had to stop everything I was doing. All all my travel plans got canned, and I just holed up and spent the next six months healing. And it felt.
Tyson Mutrux 00:15:48 It took six months. Wow. Yeah. That's terrible.
Hilary Billings 00:15:51 Which is I mean, I'm very grateful for everything I know about Burns and the the severity of them. And depending upon how much of your body, it could have been a lot worse. I'm so grateful for that. And there was also a lot of struggle around femininity and beauty.
Hilary Billings 00:16:07 And would I ever feel beautiful again or confident in my skin?
Tyson Mutrux 00:16:11 And which is your background? Just in school. Yeah. Yeah.
Hilary Billings 00:16:14 So it was it was interesting to now be fighting all that and then having this weird wave of embarrassment about having this accident happen, even though it was completely an accident. And so I got to the end of the year. I was hired for a modeling gig. It was like a James Bond theme something or other. And I put on this black dress and I was super excited about it. And I turned around and I could just see my scars in the mirror, and I just break down about it. And I was totally done with feeling this pity party. So I told myself, okay, it's time to move on, and how am I going to figure this out? How am I going to find a way to get past my self-confidence issues? And on my blog, I talked a lot about putting yourself in uncomfortable situations, finding a way to make them comfortable.
Hilary Billings 00:16:56 And through that, finding self-growth, specifically through travel, which was how I focused on the blog. But it could happen with anything. So I just started asking myself, okay, what is the most uncomfortable thing that I could think of? Nothing sounded more uncomfortable than being on stage in a bikini and having someone judge me based upon my appearance. So I signed up for a beauty pageant because of that.
Tyson Mutrux 00:17:18 Oh my gosh.
Hilary Billings 00:17:19 And then I accidentally won.
Tyson Mutrux 00:17:21 So, I was telling you beforehand, like, one of the things people struggle with is like actually getting on camera and actually recording themselves. And because they don't, they don't feel comfortable about it. And so it does. It makes me think a lot about that. And that's, that's that's incredible. Congratulations on your win. Thank you. Yeah. But I guess what did what advice would you give to people that are. That was a big thing. Right. That's that's way bigger than just getting on a video and recording yourself. Talking about legal stuff.
Tyson Mutrux 00:17:54 So I guess what would you say to people that are hesitant to get on camera?
Hilary Billings 00:17:59 Something that my mentor and good friend Rory Vaden says all the time is that I'm going to totally butcher it now. But there is no fear when the mission to serve is clear. And I think what happens, especially on video, which I know we're going to get into my background and why I even talk about this, is that we we tend to sell focus. And in fact, psychology will show you that we believe that other people pay 33 to 40% more attention to us than actual reality. And so the first piece is that no one cares as much as you think that they do. But it's also can be very terrifying with video, because it lives forever on the internet, and you have keyboard warriors that tend to just find that nerve and that wound that you're trying to heal yourself as a person, and they just like to poke at it. And so that can be really terrible and hard for people, especially when you're starting out.
Hilary Billings 00:18:50 Any time that we put ourselves into the unknown or into a space of uncertainty and we're trying something new, we all feel very vulnerable. And then it's very difficult in a visual medium like social media or getting on camera, where even on zoom, right, we there's so much body dysmorphia that is increased with the use of zoom meetings and just social media in general because of how often we're looking at ourselves and it's not normal. So for one, I would just accept and embrace that it's it is a normal feeling to have and then look at why are we really doing this? Is it about you needing to look good? Or is it about someone else needing your advice, your help? Who are you actually trying to serve here? Because if you can get clear on that, what are you really trying to do and what is success look like? Then you're able to put some of these other things aside. I don't I don't personally think that there's a world where you can go in and immediately have confidence in a situation like that, if it terrifies you.
Hilary Billings 00:19:45 And we know that public speaking in general is the number one fear that people have worldwide. So the only way to get to that level of confidence, to just keep doing it, is to build the competence right, to do the skill and the repetition, and to show your body that you're not going to die and there isn't a woolly mammoth chasing you, even though it might feel like it right every time you turn on that button. And you know, when I work with clients, we like to talk about who's your avatar, who's that person that you're trying to save. And we give them a name and we give them a background and it's like, okay, I want you to talk to Joe, and I want you to tell Joe what he needs to know right now. Or I need you to talk to Cindy. And you know that Cindy is struggling with this thing. And that's what makes the messaging even more powerful and allows us to to get out of our own heads, to put it to the side.
Hilary Billings 00:20:32 And so in my situation with the pageant, I had so many days I would wake up with nightmares of me getting on stage naked and like tripping over wires and chords or answering on stage questions and having nothing to say. And it was really having to just walk through each piece of the puzzle and be like, okay, you didn't you didn't die this time. And in fact, that was a lot more pleasant than you thought it was going to be. And remembering, like, I'm just doing this to get over. I'm not here to win. I'm really not here to compete. I'm here to get over my own stuff. I'm here to write a blog article, and I'm here to tell others about this experience. And that's what that's the game. So being able to lower the stakes a little bit, I think also helps.
Tyson Mutrux 00:21:11 How do you come up with that avatar? I think some people struggle with that a little bit where like I'll give you an example, because personal injury is a good example, a really good example where people say, well, I don't know who my avatar is because like, I represent anybody that got in a car crash.
Tyson Mutrux 00:21:26 And like, so we're like, we're very specific with ours, like ours. Ours is a she's a surgeon. Her name is Mary Green. She's 50 years old. She lives in Chesterfield, Missouri. Like all these things. Like she has great insurance and all that. But because we know that those are the highest value cases. But a lot of people do struggle with that. We're like, well I get a bunch of cases from this community. even though that's not really what they want to target, they just get a bunch from that community. So how would you help people come up with that avatar?
Hilary Billings 00:21:54 So first we would figure out who do you want to target? Right. If you could have 100 or 1000 of a similar type of case, what would that look like? Who is that person? Where do they come from? What do they care about? What kind of house do they live in? What kind of car do they drive? What are they watching? What do they like to wear? What kind of family do they have? So we want to look not only at the demographics of okay, they're between the ages of 35 and 45 and Caucasian or whatever that looks like.
Hilary Billings 00:22:18 And they live in this particular part of the country. But then also those psychographics of what matters to them. What do they care about? Are they watching Joe Rogan or are they? Are they watching Oprah? Right. And the more that you get to understand them as a person, the better you're going to be able to communicate with them. And it's not about a lot of people get afraid to create that kind of relationship or personality or persona because they feel like it's going to put a limit on who they can work with. And all it does is allow your message in the way that you communicate to come across stronger. And so I like to think about it as dropping a pebble into a lake. Right. So instead of you're just blindly hurling something out in the middle of nowhere, you're able to say with decisiveness, this is who I want. And then there's going to be a ripple effect out. And so you're still going to get those other cases. You're still going to impact other people because you're actually talking to someone now versus just a Just a blanket.
Hilary Billings 00:23:15 You guys or everyone, right? It makes it. It makes it more unique and impactful. And they can tell when you're speaking to someone directly. So I would start with that of looking at okay, first of all let's just look at some of those hard numbers. Age, race part of the country they live in, how much money they make. What's what's the problem that they have that you can help them with? And then what do they care about and what does their life look like? And if you can paint a little picture for yourself, I've had clients that will print this off. They'll get a photo from some stock imagery online, or it'll be an actual client that they've worked with that they love, and they will post that up in their office. They'll have everyone on their team be like, we are doing this for Mary, we're doing this for Scott. And they keep bringing it back to that. Whenever they take on new ventures or looking to offer new business models, new products, because it's really important that they're serving that person.
Hilary Billings 00:24:06 And again, it helps them to get out of their own way. When it comes to making content.
Tyson Mutrux 00:24:11 What do you think about the idea of like you visualize yourself as someone that you're not. So you see an actor that you really want to kind of be like, so you want to be perceived almost as that person. And so before you step on the camera or for lawyers, maybe before you step into a courtroom or whatever, you kind of perceive yourself as that person to maybe give you that little bit of boost of confidence. And I think it's interesting with your background, I don't know, is that is that detrimental or is that something that is beneficial?
Hilary Billings 00:24:42 You know, it's funny, I had a brand for a while that was all about red carpet confidence and my perspective, which is a little bit different than the the common belief system is I don't believe in fake it til you make it. I don't I don't necessarily think it's can be helpful. It can in some circumstances. But if we think about confidence on a continuum and let's say you're at this end and you're like, okay, you want to get to Angelina Jolie, Brad Pitt, level of confidence or swag or whatever that looks like to you.
Hilary Billings 00:25:11 It feels like such a big jump. And so you could probably fake it and be like, okay, I'm going to come across in this persona and that might work for somebody. But I think for a lot of people, especially very emotionally intelligent and highly intelligent people, it feels like you're faking it. And then it's like, okay, well, if I'm walking into a networking room with this persona, am I getting these introductions and having these great conversations because people like something about me that I'm not? And now there's almost a question of, do I have to keep putting on this persona that I'm not? And it feels like a big jump?
Tyson Mutrux 00:25:44 It's interesting. I this is. Yeah. Because that that is real. That's that's the part that I was worried about. So that's interesting. So I want to hear a lot more about that.
Hilary Billings 00:25:52 But yeah. Yeah. It's so to me it's, it's not about you want to create the longest bridge possible so that if you then do want to do that, it's just a small step versus taking a giant leap, because then what happens if you try to take the leap and it doesn't work? That's going to push you right back down the continuum.
Tyson Mutrux 00:26:08 Maybe worse, maybe worse.
Hilary Billings 00:26:09 Right. Because now you feel like. Okay, well, I tried to fake it till I make it, and then I didn't do that. And so now I really do suck. And that that's going to put you into even more of a spiral. So I don't I don't believe in that. And in fact, one of the first things that we teach people when it comes to content is how to do that authentically. And I really hate the word authenticity. I feel like it's been overused a lot. It's worn out. And as someone who grew up, being a people pleaser and trying to morph herself into a lot of environments, I don't understand what it means when someone just says, go be more of yourself. It's like, what does that actually mean to be more of myself? So we had to create a formula actually, for how to measure whether or not content was aligning with who I believed I was as a person or how I wanted to be perceived.
Hilary Billings 00:26:55 And so the authenticity formula is very simple. It's your values multiplied by your voice. So your value is what you care about, right? if you care about sustainability, if you care about justice, If you care about proper representation, if you care about empowering your clients, I would expect your content to resonate with that and to have a lot of topics that cover those things that you care about. And the more that you're able to showcase what you care about or what your firm cares about, the more that's going to align with potential cases and people that also care about those same things, because not everyone cares about the same types of values. And then your voice. Right. Think about that as the personality of your brand. Right. How would you want people to talk about you? Oh, he's the best friend that you never had. He's the cool, fun uncle. Maybe, like, she's the serious kind of aggressive and can sometimes be a brat, but, like, she really knows what she's talking about.
Hilary Billings 00:27:55 Maybe she's. You're the tough love person, right? What is it you think about all these big name brands, these personal brands? You could put a voice to them very specifically. Mark Cuban has a has a very different voice from, Elon Musk from, Mr. Wonderful. Right. Like, you could you could put some different characteristics on this to describe them. And I think when you are able to put those two components together as your values and your voice, it becomes very easy to know what types of content align with you and what types of content to stay away from. We'll often get phone calls from people like, okay, I want to try content, but I don't want to dance. I'd be like, great, don't don't dance. Because if you're trying to dance and you don't want to be dancing, everyone's going to be uncomfortable. Yeah, right. The the world of social media especially, and just digital consumption users and viewers are so clear about whether or not something that's happening is real to that person, or if someone's uncomfortable on camera, that it's better to just stay in your lane and what feels good to you, because that's going to then transfer to the end product as well.
Tyson Mutrux 00:28:58 I think that it's really important that you point that out because you do hear people like, well, yeah, you should be funny in your videos. You should do this. And like, it's like, yeah, but like that's if that's not you, that just doesn't make sense. It just seems like you're just being fake and and. Yeah, it just doesn't it. It's never really made sense I think I think that's important. I want to go back to the, the values. I think it's really values times voice. That seems really simple. Yeah. How do you how do you how do you come up with those. But then also how do you I'm thinking about like sometimes I'll post something on X right. And it has nothing to do with anything else I've ever posted before. Right. Is that like so I kind of then maybe view that as a mistake because it doesn't fit within a set set of standards or values. Right. So when you talk about yeah, that's what. So like when you're talking about like those values like are you saying you should only post about those things with those values or, or am I misunderstanding? I want to make sure I understand.
Hilary Billings 00:29:57 Well, I think when it comes to understanding what feels authentic for you, If some people feel lost on what kind of content they should try, or how they should show up in a courtroom, or how they should show up at a networking event, that can be really powerful. Okay, what what are the values that matter to me the most in my life right now? And there's a ton of resources online where you can just you can go Google top 100 values and you can pull them up.
Tyson Mutrux 00:30:22 Pick your own.
Hilary Billings 00:30:22 Yeah. Pick your essentially. Yeah. That that is the point right. It's like pull 10 to 20 and then pick your top 3 to 5. And it doesn't mean that you never post about anything else. In fact the umbrella really which for which you should be posting under is the problem that you solve for people. Right? And if you're if you're sticking to that or you're sticking to the audience that you're solving it for, then you can talk about anything as long as it goes back.
Hilary Billings 00:30:44 I mean, Dave Ramsey is a great example of this, right? He has seven steps that he's been talking about for 40 years, and for him, everything is about finances. But he can talk about anything that he wants in through that lens of helping people to get out of debt. And so he will talk about politics. He will talk about current events. He will go beyond the scope of just his seven steps. Right. Because it all still falls under the same lens. And so I think that's where people can get a little tripped up. It's not that you never talk about anything else. And it's also a great idea to experiment and to put on that experimental hat and then let the data drive, because what you think might be the thing that your audience cares about. We want to use that to, to, to get the navigation started. But as you start to get feedback and or like, I like to liken it to setting a ship off to sail and like, okay, you've got a heading.
Hilary Billings 00:31:36 You've got, you know, where you're going. But then there's going to be storms and there might be icebergs or a passing ship. And so you're going to probably change your navigation to either continue to your destination or slightly shift your destination as well, depending upon the feedback that you're getting. So we want to utilize these as a kind of a rudder, but still be open as we go. So as far as you know, trying something that feels completely out of out of the blue, but that still probably falls under your if you're posting about it, you probably care about it in some way, or it's a reflection of you and your personal brand, wouldn't you say?
Tyson Mutrux 00:32:08 Or it's just a thought in my head, you know?
Hilary Billings 00:32:10 Yeah, sure. Yeah, it could be that too.
Tyson Mutrux 00:32:12 Which that's. It's not like I just throw, like, random things on there, you know? But I, I try to be as consistent as possible, but like, sometimes, you know, you'll have kind of a random thing.
Tyson Mutrux 00:32:20 Yeah. For example, I'll give you an example. and I guess I could have made it more related to like, personal injury, but I saw this shopping cart driving around Vegas yesterday. Oh, wow. That it was like a big vehicle. Have you seen these things?
Hilary Billings 00:32:31 No, it's a shopping cart.
Tyson Mutrux 00:32:32 It looked like a monster truck, but it was like a shopping cart. And there were, like, rows of people sitting in it, and. Okay, I think my, like, I think my post is like, why does this exist? Right? Yeah. So I saw something crazy and I could have said, like this, this seems really dangerous for whatever because of, you know, what I do, but like something random like that, I was like, what the. What is this thing? You know, like, so, like things like that is what I'm talking about. Really?
Hilary Billings 00:32:54 Yeah. Well, and when it comes to content, we often say an X is kind of a different animal.
Hilary Billings 00:33:01 You know, use your your reels, your posts to help showcase what you do. Like that's people are going to find you on their discovery page, on their for you page from that information. And then the stories can be anything about you personally. Those are people that are already bought in to what you have to say. And so that can be even more personal, like, yep, we're here in Vegas and here's my coffee and here's the shopping cart, and here's this random thing. So I don't think there's anything wrong with that. And especially if that ends up getting a lot of traction, it'd be it'd be curious for me to see how you could, in each city, find something very random and be like, we're. And even if we're just drawing the through line of we're here filming in a new city, here's this random thing I found. Yeah, that that still would create enough of a of a narrative connection where it feels just fine.
Tyson Mutrux 00:33:48 Interesting. there I do struggle a little bit with If the the branding of the firm and me as the person.
Tyson Mutrux 00:33:57 Right? So that is something where like I here's the perfect example. Right. So we've got we have an I think we have an Instagram for the firm. Maybe not I don't know, I don't run it but I have my own personal one. Yeah. Do we have a TikTok of the firm in for me? Yep. And I almost feel like the firm wins a waste. You know. So what is your advice to. There's I mean, lawyers all over the country that are doing the exact same thing I'm doing. So it should it just be one? Should it be both? What are your thoughts?
Hilary Billings 00:34:26 It's as much as you want it to do, as much as you want it to be. But the truth is, is that personal brands, people will always resonate more with people than companies. It's very hard to get a company account to do well, and if that company account is doing well, it's usually because they have found a way to extrapolate the voice and values of the company and find a way to make that relatable, or the types of content that they're putting forth.
Hilary Billings 00:34:51 I like to utilize the example of Ryanair. If you're familiar, they're like the Spirit Airlines of Europe.
Tyson Mutrux 00:34:58 I know, I've heard of Ryanair. I just don't know why. I know Ryanair, but I don't. I've never had I've never experienced Ryanair. Yeah.
Hilary Billings 00:35:04 So Ryanair decided to create a TikTok account for their company and they are super low budget, low, low budget flights. And instead of trying to compete with Virgin or any other luxury airline, they just said, let's just lean into what we are. And so we provide you cheap $40 flights from Germany to the UK. You may or may not have a seat belt, but you're welcome. Right. And so they gave their brand their plane. They anthropomorphized their plane to just be this sassy. Almost like the Wendy's Twitter account or X account. And people love it. People love to be roasted by this plane and it's got millions of followers and so much more brand awareness. Duolingo is another great example of this language learning platform. A very not sexy topic.
Tyson Mutrux 00:35:49 Not at all, not at all. It could be like, take their like, the original Rosetta Stone. Rosetta stone, very boring, very boring. Yes, yes.
Hilary Billings 00:35:56 Infomercials. Right. Not a sexy topic. And they decided to lean into their values, which was disrupting the language learning space and create the voice, which was super sassy. And they have this costume, this duo bird. It was probably left over from some conference activation. They spent $0 on this. And this bird just terrorizes people in their office every day. And people love it. And it is now the number one most downloaded language learning platform in the world. And what's interesting is they never talk about their product at all. They are never promoting the brand on any of their social media posts. They trust that the user is going to come for the content and then bridge the gap. Go to the link in the bio and then download the platform, which is exactly what's happened. So again, going back to if you're able to really lean into the values and the voice and find a way to present that to people.
Hilary Billings 00:36:51 Then that's great. It's a lot of work. And this is not everyone's full time job, or they don't have the ability to finance a full team, in which case people buy from people. People learn to trust people. And in fact, there's a number of accounts that we reference and talk about with our clients. And it is a singular lawyer, right. That is giving the information you're building trust by having that that familial, that face to face connection and allows people to do that.
Tyson Mutrux 00:37:19 What for professional services like for like lawyers, like what types of content. And I understand completely the formula I do, but are there specific types of content that are performing better than others, like more like case studies, more of like, you know, people like day in the life sorts of videos, funny videos, like what is there? Are there certain things that are that are doing better than others?
Hilary Billings 00:37:41 The theme there's a lot of different ways to portray the content. Right. And I think about that.
Hilary Billings 00:37:47 As styles versus topics. And I know we'll get into why I'm even the person to be talking about this at some point. But we're just there's so many.
Tyson Mutrux 00:37:54 Things I want to talk about. Yes, exactly.
Hilary Billings 00:37:57 but I think about there's different styles of content, right? So I look at that as skits, man on the street, a green screen, looking at that as a joke video, a straight to camera would be a style. And then you have topics of content, so that could be what to say to the cops, how to contact a lawyer, all the different topics that you might want to discuss with somebody, what you know, first steps if you get into an accident, yada yada yada. And then we have a content matrix where it's like, okay, what could we do? How could each of these topics or these subtopics of these topics then turn into any of these styles? What would make sense based upon your voice and values for you to do it? The type of content that I see working the best really is educational, and there's a lot of different styles.
Tyson Mutrux 00:38:40 I'm actually surprised by that. Are you? I'm very surprised that.
Hilary Billings 00:38:42 Yeah, well, it's it's people want to feel empowered to know what they need to know. When it comes to legalese, when it comes to being in a situation that they're not familiar with. Especially because we as humans, right? We tend to want to avoid pain more than we want to go towards pleasure. So if you're able to help them avoid a situation, then that piques their interest. So, there's a great account called law by Mike. If you're not familiar, he does a lot of entertainment, funny skits, you know, fast transitions, but everything that he's doing is teaching people something. So a lot of his content will start off with great hooks. Like, here's what to say. If the cop says this, here's what to say. If you get pulled over about this, here's what to do. If you get a subpoena, here's what's. And it's just providing people with information especially that's helping them to overcome fears that they might have about a situation.
Hilary Billings 00:39:35 And I see that work across the board, whether it's someone just speaking it directly to camera or someone doing it in a in a very fun way, like he's doing it. And that really comes down to the personality, the voice and values of the the lawyer that wants to make that content.
Tyson Mutrux 00:39:51 Okay. So I'm going to come back to this in a second. Yeah. Because I want to make sure that people we do get to this because it will be like ten minutes left and we'll get to like, oh yeah, by the way, like why? Why is it why do you know what the hell you're talking about? So how about that for a question?
Hilary Billings 00:40:05 That's why. Why do why? Why am I here giving people a bad news? So I after I became Miss Nevada, I went on to work with USA today as a journalist for a number of years. I produced for E! News. I had a short stint as a songwriter in Nashville. I then went on to be a personal brand strategist, work with everyone from Victoria's Secret models to billionaires to help them craft their personal brands.
Hilary Billings 00:40:29 And then I was also an on camera host. I did a lot of red carpet award shows, behind the scenes interviews. I covered the Grammys, the Billboard Music Awards. I've had the pleasure of talking to talking to Ringo Starr and Mark Cuban and Dolly Parton and conducting a lot of these interviews. And then 2020 hit and all the revenue streams dried up. And so at the time, me and my partner were like, gosh, what are we? What are we going to do? He was a professional touring musician. I had this background in hosting, and I was approached by an acquaintance of mine who happened to run the largest network of Facebook Watch pages in the country. So at the time, Facebook was a lot like a record label where you couldn't monetize unless you had a publisher. And so he had these pages collectively. His creators were doing about 60 billion views a year. And we're like, okay, this is great. This is highly viral content. So think hacks, pranks, recipe videos, feel good gifting videos, crafting.
Hilary Billings 00:41:31 I've done hundreds of articles. I've built this following, this blog following. He had a Billboard charting song. We clearly understand content. Let's just make three minute sub three minute videos. This will not be hard. Turns out it was very hard actually. And we spent about nine months banging our heads against a wall.
Tyson Mutrux 00:41:49 Thanks for being honest with that too, because sometimes you like you'll you'll have someone coming on like, oh, I was killing it from the beginning. And here's how you know.
Hilary Billings 00:41:56 So yeah, it's so easy. I just opened an Instagram account and everyone came to me. No, it was incredibly frustrating, and we knew so many creators that were killing it in the game, and we would try copying what they would do and it wouldn't work. And it just felt so frustrating. It felt like no one wanted to hear from us. We were so smart and yet we couldn't figure this out. And it was demoralizing. And so we finally hit this point of we either have to turn this around, or we have to move on, because now we're losing money trying to be viral video creators, which is just very when you're in your late 20s and early 30s is just very demoralizing, right? Yeah, yeah.
Hilary Billings 00:42:31 So the narrative that I had in my head, which was just feeding the frustration, was like, man, these kids are just so lucky. Like, they just pick up their phones and they just hit record and they start recording something and then just post it to the internet and it gets accidentally, gets a million views. And I was so angry by this narrative that I was telling myself.
Tyson Mutrux 00:42:50 All lies, probably.
Hilary Billings 00:42:51 Yeah. Well. And mostly. Yeah. So I had to I had to reframe the question, what if everything that I thought was accidental was actually really intentional? What if there was a way to engineer content and I just didn't understand the formula? So we took a weekend and we watched thousands of viral videos. I do not recommend doing this for your mental health.
Tyson Mutrux 00:43:12 Sounds absolutely terrible. It was.
Hilary Billings 00:43:14 Yeah, it was not a fun weekend. We went into The Matrix and we watched videos across every genre, every industry and every platform, from Facebook to TikTok to Instagram. We really wanted to understand, based upon the most viral content, what was working, what wasn't working.
Hilary Billings 00:43:30 But we didn't know what factors mattered. So we took a very experimental approach. We created a created a spreadsheet. What was happening at second one? What was happening in second three? What was happening at second? Five. What were they wearing? What were they saying? What were the hand gestures? What were the camera angles? How are they cutting? Was there music? Was there trending audio? Was there some sort of viral challenge happening? What platform was it on? And after our eyes, like, stopped twitching and we were able to come out of the matrix for a couple of days, it was almost like, oh, what's that movie? John Nash in a Beautiful Mind, where the patterns and numbers started to merge and come off the wall. We're like, okay, this is interesting. Outside of platform, outside of industry, it looks like from our research, certain things need to happen in order for people to want to propagate the video. So we took those learnings. We applied it to our next video.
Hilary Billings 00:44:24 Mind you, up until now it's been nine months of maybe our best video. Got 1200 views.
Tyson Mutrux 00:44:28 That's that's it. That's right. Yeah.
Hilary Billings 00:44:30 Wow. So we we up until that point, Nothing. Nothing was taking off. This next video did 5 million views. The video after that did 10 million views. And it's not to say that everything that we touched turned a gold, but roughly one in every four of our videos did over a million views. One in every ten did over 10 million views. And we went from no views the first nine months to over a billion organic views. And the following 12 months, we built my TikTok following from 0 to 400,000 followers in 40 days. It's now well over double that. And we've since helped clients at attention. Here's to 250 X their results on their content through the same system. We've had clients go viral, we've had clients get more clients, and really, we've given them a system from which to think about how to engineer content, to get it to do the thing that you want it to do, which is get people to care.
Hilary Billings 00:45:21 So we we essentially learn the system. And we were full time viral video creators for a number of years. And then we knew so many people and the personal branding space that in the service, professional services space and companies, we just saw them struggling to figure this out and they had a message to give. They had a mission that they were on. And so we like to joke that we left the dark side and came over to the light to help people to actually get their messages out there, because at the end of the day, yeah, you can spend a lot of money to promote posts and do ads and sponsorships, and that's fine. Like anyone can pay to get in front of people now, but you cannot pay to get them to care, and you cannot pay to get them to consume the content. And you certainly cannot pay to make them share it. And so how do you get the right behaviors? Understand the psychology of attention to then get the people to love the content enough to want to keep propagating it for you and become an evangelist for your message.
Tyson Mutrux 00:46:18 So I want to thank you for sharing all that. Yeah. and so I'm glad that people do know that you're half the content. Yes. Exactly. Yes. Just some girl.
Hilary Billings 00:46:26 That talks about Instagram. Yeah.
Tyson Mutrux 00:46:29 Because we we definitely were jumping around. But I want to circle back so you can get the the views right. You can get the followers. And so I what I would like to know is how do we connect the dots from get the, the the views, the follower and then clients. So there's probably multiple steps in between those two. Yeah. But I do wonder like how do you do those. Because that's ultimately for my my investment in it I want I don't care about views, right. I don't care about followers, I care about clients. And so how do we do that?
Hilary Billings 00:46:58 And that is the right way to think about it. When we first start working with a client, that is one of the first questions we ask is like, what does success look like to you? Because if we don't know what we're going for, it doesn't matter what I'm going to do for the client, they are going to be unhappy because there's a lot again, there's a lot of fear that goes into this.
Hilary Billings 00:47:15 There's a lot of unknown. The social media and videos in general are the Wild West, for we don't have a lot of strong metrics that people can lean into of decades and decades of saying that this works, right. It's very new and it's a risk for some people to put that kind of time and energy, especially when they don't like being in front of camera. So it just gives them an excuse to say, no, I don't want to. So the first metric is what what actually matters. Is it getting a new client? Great. Then let's back into that client journey. How are they going to find you? What is that page that they're hitting on? Once they decide they want to leave your social media profile to go, and how are they booking and what is that experience like? Because I can help you to get the eyeballs. But then if that piece isn't set up correctly, then we're going to lose them anyway. So there's a lot of these components that we keep working backwards.
Hilary Billings 00:48:03 Okay. Then who is this person? Right. We go back to that persona. What are they looking for? What do they care about? Great. Now let's look at what types of content we would want to create for them. And then let's engineer that content in such a way based upon everything we know in our formulas, so that you can actually get the eyeballs to begin with. And then if you're finding on the organic side that that content's working, then if you want to put marketing dollars or spend behind it, we also can show you, based upon the data and what we measure as success when it comes to content, which isn't views, it isn't followers, it isn't even engagement. What you need to be looking for to then decide which videos you want to promote. And so it's it's helping to create a really a system for how we're going to do this, that takes that personal or that precious feel out of it, especially when we're trying something new. It's really easy to want to pull the plug and pull the plug too soon.
Hilary Billings 00:48:53 And so we got it, just like any other part of the marketing plan be able to commit to. Okay, now let's let's be able to figure out how we're going to execute this so we can objectively then look at what's working, what's not working, and continue to iterate.
Tyson Mutrux 00:49:05 How long do you give? Let's say you're trying something new. Like how long do you give to test it out?
Hilary Billings 00:49:10 I mean, I would say 3 to 6 months minimum, especially depending upon the types of accounts that you're working with. If you have bad page health, which most people do because they've either done nothing with it, they posted.
Tyson Mutrux 00:49:19 Inconsistent getting bad pay.
Hilary Billings 00:49:21 What bad bad page health okay.
Tyson Mutrux 00:49:23 Bad Okay. Got it.
Hilary Billings 00:49:24 So. So think about this. I like to attribute it to your body. Right. If you come to me and let's say you're overweight, you have some sort of autoimmune disorder. You have not been eating well. And you're like, well, I want to have a six pack and, you know, be on the cover of Sports Illustrated.
Hilary Billings 00:49:41 Okay, great. Well, we've got if depending upon where you're starting, we have a long way to go. And so if you're expecting a certain type of result within a short amount of time, right, that's that's an unfulfilled expectation to begin with or a high expectation that's going to be unmet. So how do we look at what can we do and what are going to be the metrics again of success so that we can easily say or show that this is working or not working. And and then over time, as the page health increases, right then we can see more and more traction. And sometimes it's even easier just to start over depending upon on the page and what's going on with it.
Tyson Mutrux 00:50:17 I've never heard of someone call it page health, so I think that that's that's really I love that I love that phrase. I like the way you put it with, like, actually working out all the kind of stuff. Yeah. It is. What do you what are you looking for when it comes to good page health?
Hilary Billings 00:50:30 Well, number one is the engagement ratio to the number of followers that you have.
Hilary Billings 00:50:34 And what typically happens is people want to buy followers, which is fine. We're now in a space where I think anyone can go to a page, and if you have 100,000 followers but you're getting 100 or 1000 views, it's very clear that you've bought them. And as long as you're okay with that being the look, then that's fine. But also now you have a bunch of people that are sitting there that are not engaging with the profiles, so are engaging with the content, which means the algorithm isn't going to help you. As much like the game that we were playing when we were viral video creators is how do we bat above our average? We would on average, only have 10,000 to 30,000 followers on our Facebook page, and we were getting five, ten, 50, 70 million views because we were able to leverage the algorithm to help say, oh, interesting, something is happening here. And the people that do follow this page are really engaged with it. So let me find more lookalike audiences, more people that look like this to see what they think.
Hilary Billings 00:51:28 And so if you can keep the people that you have, even if it's small, very engaged, that's going to help you to grow and grow. The one metric for success that we look at, which is the only metric that I can control, is watch time. How long are the people that are watching the video? Actually sitting there and staying through another. The average watch time of a video, which is if the video is three minutes long, it could be the average is 130, it could be two minutes. And then there's percentage watch.
Tyson Mutrux 00:51:55 So which of those which ones are more important.
Hilary Billings 00:51:59 They're both there. They're both equally important. Okay. Well because here's here's the reality right. Let's say that you have a watch time of 10s. Well, if you have a video that's 10s long, that's a great watch time. Okay. But if you have a ten second watch time for a three minute video. Terrible watch time. Yeah. So, what you're looking for is you really want both.
Hilary Billings 00:52:20 You want both of those to be high. And that's what we can think about. And when it comes to engineering content, because the reality is, is depending upon what's happening in the world, an election season. Taylor Swift drops a photo of her cat or a new album. Doesn't matter what the rest of us are doing, everything is going to be focusing in one direction, right? So I can't control the number of views that I get. I can't control the I can do things to try to increase engagement, but I also can't control my number of followers. What I can control is of the content I'm creating. How long are the people that are actually seeing it? Watching it? And if I put my effort there, then everything else will naturally increase.
Tyson Mutrux 00:52:57 So how do you make sure that that happens? What are the best practices to make sure that that happens?
Hilary Billings 00:53:01 So what we found is there are three things that every great video needs to do.
Tyson Mutrux 00:53:06 You have you have an answer for everything.
Tyson Mutrux 00:53:08 That's fantastic. All right. Let's hear I love. What are the three things.
Hilary Billings 00:53:11 Yeah. So there's there's three things that need to happen. You need to grab attention, spark an emotion, and create a curiosity gap. The grab attention feels almost like a no duh. Hillary. Of course, we need to start a video off. We want to grab attention. But this is very important for a couple of reasons. A lot of people don't understand one, that 20 million videos are being posted to social media every single day.
Hilary Billings 00:53:35 And with AI, that's only going to increase. The average person sees between 6 to 10,000 ads every single day. We're spending roughly 187 minutes every day on social media of movies length worth of time, but we're not doing it all in one go. We're doing.
Tyson Mutrux 00:53:49 What was it like a year or ten years ago, like.
Hilary Billings 00:53:51 Well, ten, ten years ago? I don't even think we had the metrics on this.
Hilary Billings 00:53:55 I would that have just been Instagram, right? And maybe Myspace. I think Facebook.
Tyson Mutrux 00:53:59 YouTube I guess.
Hilary Billings 00:54:00 Is just coming on.
Tyson Mutrux 00:54:01 The short term. Yeah, not the short form because I do wonder how much it's it's grown and how much is it growing each year. Do you know how much?
Hilary Billings 00:54:07 I know it's exponentially growing. I don't have those metrics for sure.
Tyson Mutrux 00:54:10 I do know it's a specific number. I'm asking. So that's a that's tougher.
Hilary Billings 00:54:13 I know our attention spans have decreased 25% in the past 17 years. Wow. So. And that's only, I think, going to increase or it's going to continue to go down rather as the usage of short form content goes up. And the average person, when they're on their phone is spending 80% of their time watching short form video. So when you think about that, excluding calls and text messages, that is where people are spending their hours. So we're taking a lot in at any point in time. So people are becoming very discerning.
Hilary Billings 00:54:41 They will give you 0 to 2 seconds when you're scrolling to decide if they're going to watch. And then when they decide they're going to watch, they're maybe going to give you another two to 10s before they decide if they want to keep watching.
Tyson Mutrux 00:54:53 So yeah, you get that emotion, right? That's where you kick in the emotion, right? Yeah. So what do you what's the best emotion to target.
Hilary Billings 00:55:00 It's a great question. Well I it depends upon what you want them to do or how you want someone to engage with it. I will say there's six core human emotions right. We have joy love wonder surprise Anger. Sadness. Oh my gosh. Why can't I think of the the last one? it's going to come back to me. But the the media is really good at leaning into the negative three. And everything kind of spirals out from there into an emotion wheel. Right. Again, going back to what we talked about. Our brains, our lizard brains. We are more primed to avoid pain than to go towards pleasure.
Hilary Billings 00:55:36 So anything that helps us to avoid pain, we are going to engage with more like our brains. Want to know how do I keep myself from losing the house? How do I keep myself from being involved in World War II? How do I make sure I'm prepared in case there's a doomsday right? These there's a lot of those clickbaity headlines that media will use. And that's also the reason that fake news spreads six times faster than truthful news, because people are too busy being outraged or in their limbic system brain than they are to be able to engage their prefrontal cortex to have rational thought and say, okay, wait a minute, let me fact check this before I share it.
Tyson Mutrux 00:56:08 I did not know that stat! That is wild.
Hilary Billings 00:56:11 Yeah, so it's sad.
Tyson Mutrux 00:56:12 Actually, that's a better word for it.
Hilary Billings 00:56:14 Yeah. So there's also so just but even just knowing that right. That okay we want to avoid pain. That can also help you when it comes to setting up content right now if you people are more likely to share something, if it puts them in an emotional feel good state, they're more likely to become keyboard warriors if they're angry.
Hilary Billings 00:56:32 We used to do things purposefully wrong in videos like I would hold a hammer upside down. We'd include like, we.
Tyson Mutrux 00:56:38 Noticed that in videos. Drives me nuts. Yeah, yeah.
Hilary Billings 00:56:41 And it almost compels you to want to say something about it. Right? So there's there's ways that you can you can leverage that to help increase or encourage certain human behaviors. But at the end of the day, the point is, what is the emotion that you want someone to primary emotion you want them to feel. Because then everything else in the video can help you support that. So and then even going back to the grabbing attention piece, we would spend more time focused on the first three seconds of a video, then we would anything else, because it's a lot like the title of a book, or the title of a podcast episode, or the trailer for a movie. If you don't get that right, people aren't going to watch. They're not going to engage. They're not going to pull the book off the shelf and buy it.
Hilary Billings 00:57:23 They're not going to keep watching the video. So you could have the best message. You could have the best ending. You could have this crazy plot twist and this great script. But if they never get there, it doesn't matter.
Tyson Mutrux 00:57:32 So what's working now?
Hilary Billings 00:57:34 Well, to me, I am all about the sustainability of what the the evergreen pieces that you need. And then there's always going to be challenges and trends and things that come and go and, and different types of, of music and what have you. But my belief is that if you focus, if you focus on the core, you will always find more success. Because at the end of the day, if you want to follow a trend that by definition makes you a follower, what do you mean?
Tyson Mutrux 00:57:59 What do you mean by the core? Focus on the core.
Hilary Billings 00:58:01 The core three the spark, a spark, an emotion. Grab attention and create a curiosity gap If you build your content through that piece, you know, then then you can play with styles that come and go.
Hilary Billings 00:58:12 But we used to. We used to create the viral trends. And then we also would exhaust them very quickly. And then you have to pivot. So if you get in my opinion, if you get too focused on this is the thing that's working right now that puts you in almost like a day trader mentality of like constantly having to check the market, which no one has time for. When you're in professional services. So the more that you can stick to the core, I think, and the three things that matter the most, I think that's where you're going to get the most traction.
Tyson Mutrux 00:58:39 So I want to come back to number three in a second. because I want to ask you about tracking. And I do wonder, so you had that original grid that you created when it comes to the content matrix, and I'm assuming that has changed over time, right? Like, like the things that were working five years ago are not working anymore or they've adjusted a little bit. So how often do you revisit that? And I bet you're not like doing a weekend of watching videos is probably on a more regular basis.
Tyson Mutrux 00:59:04 So I do wonder how often like that changes.
Hilary Billings 00:59:07 Yeah. Well, there's there's things that change and there's things that never change. Right. And so with the, the core concepts of what makes a great video that never changes. And because that applies to content in general and how we as humans are attracted and captivated by.
Tyson Mutrux 00:59:22 Content, is that the core.
Hilary Billings 00:59:23 Three? That's the core.
Tyson Mutrux 00:59:24 Three. Okay. So I mean, that's I think that that's what most people need to hear, right? Like, like do these things always do this, do.
Hilary Billings 00:59:30 This always if you do, if you start to do all those three things, you will see more results than if you're trying to chase a trend or you're trying to. And the reality is, if you get really good at that, then you can experiment and say, oh, interesting. I'm seeing a lot of content like this, and if that aligns with your voicing your values, then try. And if it doesn't, then give yourself permission to not do it right.
Hilary Billings 00:59:50 I think a lot of people put so much pressure on themselves. If they see other things working that then they feel like they have to make it happen. But if that doesn't fit with your authenticity, it's not worth it. Just dare to pass, right? Dare to pass on that. I will say, when it comes to the content matrix, right. Like the topics that you might want to talk about, those can always be changing the styles of content that you see. Those can always be changing. And you could even take the same great idea, the same video concept, because that's what we use that for as a way to come up with a never ending stream of ideas. And we could take the same idea and do it a dozen different ways. And if it worked for you one way, please redo it a dozen different ways. There's no reason not to.
Tyson Mutrux 01:00:30 What are your thoughts on reposting the same video?
Hilary Billings 01:00:32 I'm for it. I would put some time in between it, but we certainly see that content can get a resurgence.
Hilary Billings 01:00:39 You know, we've had numbers of cases where content's been stolen from us and posted on people's platforms or profiles that had no followers, that had massive existing. I had one video and I'll never. And this just goes to show you that sometimes it's not the content. I posted it on Facebook. It didn't do anything. I was really sad about it because I had a feeling this was a great video. It was really shot.
Tyson Mutrux 01:01:03 It was like, you're like, oh, this is gonna do well.
Hilary Billings 01:01:05 You're like, I love this video. You're like, oh man, no one loved it. And this guy ripped it and he posted it on his TikTok and it got 40 million views overnight.
Tyson Mutrux 01:01:12 What?
Hilary Billings 01:01:13 And he blew up his following. He gained like 100,000 followers in a week. It was on international news. I had no attachment to it. Now. We also had rights protection and so we were able to go in and I could track everyone on Facebook and these different platforms that had pulled and posted my video.
Hilary Billings 01:01:30 And what was really fascinating is I think in the span of three days, 30,000 different profiles had posted the video, but only maybe ten of them or 20 of them had gotten over 2 million views on the video. So there was also this interesting, depending upon the time and the audience and just, you know, maybe some random luck determine the scope of who got the views. Now we pulled all them down because by the terms and conditions, you cannot post my content without my permission. How hard.
Tyson Mutrux 01:01:55 Is that to do.
Hilary Billings 01:01:55 Though? you can report it. And the platforms are very serious about it. And then the T's and C's when you sign up, everybody agrees that if you upload a piece of content, that doesn't mean repost, it doesn't mean share. If you're using a feature within an app to to alter it, to increase the thought leadership, that's fine. But if you're taking someone's video and uploading it originally, you're then saying to the platform, you have the right to do that.
Hilary Billings 01:02:20 And in fact, we've gotten we actually got that guy's profile taken down. Good. Yeah.
Tyson Mutrux 01:02:24 They should give you all of his followers.
Hilary Billings 01:02:26 That's what I was. I think that's the next step is I would like I would like the followers. I would like the monetization. But all that to say, it's not it just depending upon the, the time and the season, we also see videos that'll come back around, especially if they're seasonal. So or different types of content people care about at different times of the year. So with Halloween just past, for example, people are more interested in scary types of content going into Christmas. People love feel good types of types of content going into the new year. And in January, people want more motivational types of content. And then just depending upon how there would be seasons of people just wanted rageful justice videos. People are really into food over Covid, so just depending upon what's happening with the current events will also shape the types of content people are most interested in.
Hilary Billings 01:03:17 And so we would see resurgences where certain videos would come back around during certain seasons because of the thematics of it.
Tyson Mutrux 01:03:24 Yeah. Let's go to number three again. Let's go back to that. Yeah. So the the creating the curiosity gap, which I like. It's similar to something I had heard from someone else about. and I can't remember the third thing that they talked about. And this is not for social media. This is just about like making sure someone, a person remembers something when you're telling a story. So I think the first part is like you're telling the story. You use an analogy in the story, and then you you make sure you create a question in their mind, which is, and I wonder if that's what you're talking about. That last part. Yes.
Hilary Billings 01:03:55 So what's happening in these three different stages is the viewer is unconsciously asking different questions. So in the grabbing attention, the question they're asking is what's going on here? And their brain is trying to answer this for them.
Hilary Billings 01:04:07 And so if you're not clear about what's going on in those first few seconds, they're going to keep scrolling. Right. They need to clearly understand the scope of what they're getting into. Then once they understand what's happening, the next question their brain is unconsciously asking is, oh, do I care? Because I may or may not care? That's fair. Yeah. And if they don't care, then they're going to keep scrolling. And if they do care, they're watching. And they may not know why they care, but they might. And then the curiosity gap gets them to ask the question of what's going to happen next. And so the curiosity gap, I think, is the piece that people struggle with the most. But this is purposefully leaving something out at the front of the video and either visually or phonetically, telling them that you are. And then answering that. So it can be a question in the form of a question. It can be utilizing numbers, right? The five best tactics.
Hilary Billings 01:04:55 The number one. Biggest mistake. here's what I learned. Here was my biggest mistake on this journey. Here's how I got my client X amount of money. Here's how I went from blankety blank to blankety blank. Right. You're creating a gap in the knowledge that you're then going to fill. And that's how you increase the watch time. So you utilize the attention getting to get them to stop the scroll. You utilize the emotion to help them engage and share and want to propagate the message. And then you use the curiosity gap to increase that watch time. And if you put all those three things together, then your video has its best chance of going viral, of spreading to the right audience. Living here in Vegas, growing up in Las Vegas, I like to attribute it to I can walk into a casino floor. I can't just pull a lever and magically make $1 million. But I can tell you which slot machines have the best odds. I can tell you which ones not to play, and I can tell you that that little old lady has been sitting over there all day, and she just got up to go to the buffet, so you should go use that machine because that one's about to hit.
Hilary Billings 01:05:53 And so it's just increasing your odds by engineering things in such a way that people want to engage with it.
Tyson Mutrux 01:05:59 I love that. Can we do can we like, do a little exercise and like, like like create a video? Kind of like like. Sure. Yeah.
Hilary Billings 01:06:05 So you can totally do that. And I want to come back to remind me. I want to come back to what you said about how do you keep on top of trends and what's working. So I have a great spot.
Tyson Mutrux 01:06:13 For that too. Okay, cool. I'm glad you said that. So I came up with a video as you're talking, like, yeah, this is the. This is like the hook. Kind of like, this is the worst client I've ever had. Like, like, so, like, I thought it'd be kind of funny. It'd be, like, catch their attention. So then, like, where do we go from there? So I kind of give what's the story? All right.
Tyson Mutrux 01:06:33 So I'm trying to think of. Like what? Like then I was trying to think, like, rapidly. Like, what is the worst story or what worst client I've ever had? It is. Let's see. I gotta be very. I can't be too specific, you know, but I can be specific enough, know. You know, I can generally tell you that a human being.
Hilary Billings 01:06:52 Yeah.
Tyson Mutrux 01:06:53 No no no no no no no. I love my clients. It's the it's usually the ones that don't. I mean, you'd be more general. The ones that will. They know everything and will not listen to us like, those are the ones which we've had, you know, multiples of those. There's lots of no at all. So, like, it's, there's one in particular that he thought that he could do a better job handling it on his own. And then so he ended up firing us, which never happens. We never get fired. And then he end up doing a terrible job and selling it for the exact same amount that we had on the table, which we could have gotten him more.
Tyson Mutrux 01:07:25 So that was a it probably wasn't my worst client ever, but that's when the first came to my mind.
Hilary Billings 01:07:29 Okay. So I you could you could do it that way of, here's how this could be. They're a one of the worst clients I ever had. Here's the time I lost my client money. Right. And then the answer is, really? It doesn't make you look bad. It's like, well, he decided to leave, and then he got the same. This is why we didn't end up winning for him is because he fired us and then turns out, you know, didn't do any better than we were planning on doing, and then we were going to do beyond that. But the immediate idea that came to mind was the top three reasons that are top three ways that make a difficult client, or the top three characteristics that make a poor working relationship. This is the ugly way of saying it, right? But yeah, or the top, top three characteristics that make bad clients okay.
Tyson Mutrux 01:08:17 I like that. Yeah.
Hilary Billings 01:08:17 So now so we've got we've got an attention grabbing hook that's kind of in their face. It's it's a bold statement as well as we're including numbers. People love to complete things with their minds and then. So they need to know the three. It's not just one they got to sit through all three to figure out. And they may be having a reaction to you about this, right. And the way that I would expect that you would present it is like, look. And here's why this doesn't help your case. If you, number one, people coming in thinking they thinking they know it all. If you know it all, that's great. You probably don't need us. But if you're here, it's because there's probably something that we can help you with that you don't know. And in fact, in the situations we've had clients that have taken this attitude, here's what's happened. Number two insert here. And then finally, last but not least. Da da da.
Hilary Billings 01:09:02 Right. So that that would be the way that I would set up that piece of content.
Tyson Mutrux 01:09:05 So where do I create. What's the gap like? How about that? the curiosity crowd.
Hilary Billings 01:09:09 Yeah. So this is where people can overcomplicate this, because the gap needs to be clear, but not complicated. So for me, the gap of the video is the title. It's the three ways or the three characteristics of bad clients.
Tyson Mutrux 01:09:23 So it's getting from 1 to 3 essentially. Yeah. It's like what?
Hilary Billings 01:09:26 Yeah. It's like what happens next. What are the three. Right. The question that three characteristics of bad clients gets you to ask is what are the three characteristics?
Tyson Mutrux 01:09:34 Interesting. Okay. So like the the original one that I presented, which I like yours more, but would be essentially like what made them a bad client. Yeah. Okay. Gotcha. Okay. Yeah. So you don't don't give away the goods at the beginning. Make sure you give it at the end.
Hilary Billings 01:09:46 Yes. And you want to.
Hilary Billings 01:09:47 You want to take them on that story arc, right? Because we want to elongate that watch time. We never and we never want to do filler as much as possible because people will just scrub through. But how can we continue to engage in that story? I mean, think about this as these are all miniature stories, whether they're eight seconds long or three minutes long, that's what you're doing is you're creating a story. You're telling a story to people.
Tyson Mutrux 01:10:05 So what is the optimal length? And then we're going to go circle back to where you're talking about tracking.
Hilary Billings 01:10:10 you know, I haven't found personally I haven't found what I've had people say about 40 30s 40s, but we've had content that's been three minutes and five minutes long. It's done very well. We have content that's eight seconds long. It's done very well. It really just depends on the content itself. I'm a big believer and as short as you can to get to the subject, but as long as you have to to cover the subject and if you're able to balance those together, then that's that's very helpful.
Tyson Mutrux 01:10:35 Script or no script?
Hilary Billings 01:10:37 I believe in scripting because I believe that a great post-production strategy is a great pre-production strategy, and especially for professional services or someone where this isn't their full time job. But even when it was right, you want to be as efficient as possible. There was one month that we filmed 189 videos. We'll never do that again. But you have to be super organized, right? In order to do that. Just like when you're if you want to film a podcast, it's better to try to batch content, right? Because if you can batch and do certain things at certain phases, or maybe you as a speaker, you want to write out your speech and practice it like some people can go off the cuff. But at the end of the day, how can you be as efficient with your time as possible? And so if you know ahead of time what you're going to say roughly, that also then takes the pressure off your brain in the moment, and then you can be experimental and then you can say, oh, let me try this.
Hilary Billings 01:11:23 Let's, let's add in this, I don't know, let's bring in this prop versus like crap, what am I going to say today? Right. And and the more you can get into that mind and again reset your nervous system so it's not so fight or flight when you turn on the record button, I think that's that's where you win. And at the end of the day you cannot out strategise bad videos. So the more you can do on the front end to make great content, the easier it's going to be while filming, the easier it's going to be while editing, and the better the post-production is going to be. It's a.
Tyson Mutrux 01:11:51 Great line. Thank you. That is a great line. That's that I love that. That's we had clip that part. Yeah. You can't can't Outstretch what is it you can't outstrip you.
Hilary Billings 01:11:59 Can't out strategize bad content I.
Tyson Mutrux 01:12:02 Love it. All right. So you had the idea about tracking.
Hilary Billings 01:12:05 Yeah. So a lot of people get nervous about how do they know what someone else is doing on social media.
Hilary Billings 01:12:14 My suggestion to them is to take 3 to 5 minutes. It can be once a week and just pick your. Everyone usually has two platforms. Pick your platform of choice and just go and consume some content. But do it from a place of an observer of your own behavior. What do you stop on? Why did you stop on that video? Or if you have a contemporary, go watch some of their content. What are they doing? Why did you stop on a video of theirs? What was what kept you going? When did you scroll away? When did you start watching and then say, never mind. And the more you can even just make those mental notes, if not physical notes on those reasons, you're going to start seeing a lens into human behavior itself. And you could do this with your kids. You could do this with anyone that you want your spouse to get a better understanding of. Hey, why did you stop on that video? Oh, well, I like the title or I like this had an animal or I like that it was colorful or and we'll run this exercise with clients and even in our bootcamps.
Hilary Billings 01:13:08 And people will usually have very similar answers. And so it's a great way without any money, without needing a, a sample size population or needing to do any deep dives for you to understand human behavior just by observing your own or those around you.
Tyson Mutrux 01:13:23 I like it. So there's a quote from a lady named Sally hogshead, which you may or may not know. Yeah. So she so she's a she's a branding specialist and she talks about different is better than better. And I really like that. But if I. If I'm listening to everything you're saying and I, it kind of sounds like if you do what most other people are doing that are, that are successful at it when it comes to the videos. That is better than doing something different. Or maybe I'm misinterpreting it. So I wonder what your thoughts are. And different is different is better than better when it comes to social media.
Hilary Billings 01:13:58 Sally is so amazing and I believe this came from the whole idea of knowing your uniqueness is what really matters here.
Hilary Billings 01:14:07 And so to me, that premise and piece comes into the authenticity formula, because at the end of the day, people are selling similar services. If I own a gym, there's a thousand other gyms here in Las Vegas. There's hundreds of thousands of gyms across the country, and we're all selling a similar result. Right? But the experience is going to be different. The how we get there is going to look different. The environment, the types of people we serve, the the workout methodologies and my a Pilates studio and my kickboxing studio. Am I a P90x gym? Am I the guy?
Tyson Mutrux 01:14:43 Do they have those gyms or P90x gyms a thing? Yeah, I.
Hilary Billings 01:14:46 Guess I think so. They have, you know, they have hot yoga, they have regular yoga, they have yoga outside, they have regular gyms. You have the guys that parked the Ferraris in the in the gym. You could go work out there, right. So depending upon the experience you're looking for and who you want to have it with, and the way you want to get the results also really matters.
Hilary Billings 01:15:07 And so that's where what you value really comes into play, because a lot of people can get you the results that you want. And of course expertise comes into play here. Credibility comes into play here. And that's what you're building with the content. But I would say that they're not separate that you need to know how to why people are engaging with content, why they're consuming, what they're consuming and how you can leverage that. It's just a major understanding of marketing. And then it's knowing your uniqueness in the space and blending those two together.
Tyson Mutrux 01:15:38 Yeah. So we had, Justin Barry on, I don't know if you know who he is, but he does social media and, for Ryan Piana. Oh, awesome. Yeah. And he was talking about how, like, it was interesting because we were talking about sort of in relation to the election where the celebrity endorsements did nothing. the, the influence of influencers, influencers is starting to kind of wane. And he calls like the new breed sort of personalities.
Tyson Mutrux 01:16:05 And I wonder what your thoughts are on that, because he was talking about how creating more, content of the person as a personality. That's why lives are so popular as opposed to like, yeah, an influencer can talk about things but just doesn't have quite the effect that it once did. He doesn't seem. He doesn't think so. So I wonder what your thoughts are on that, that whole concept of like celebrity versus, the influencer versus like personality because it was I was asking him kind of the same questions about like, yeah, you can get a bunch of views, but like, what about like getting clients? It was a very similar conversation in that. So I wonder what your thoughts are on those tiers of.
Hilary Billings 01:16:42 Of celebrity versus influencer versus like a personality.
Tyson Mutrux 01:16:46 Right. Like we're the personalities. We're getting more engagement.
Hilary Billings 01:16:49 Well, I'd say that what has been true and continues to be true is that smaller influencers micro-influencers as they've been called normally they tend to get better engagement. They tend to get better conversions because you're building credibility, trust and conversion with a particular population.
Hilary Billings 01:17:09 And so they're able to get a lot more out of that particular audience. And from my understanding, a lot of big companies will try to focus on the micro-influencers. Of course, everyone wants Kim Kardashian because they know if she's got, I don't know, 40 million followers, let's call it. I'm sure it's more than that, that if they reach 1 to 3% of that population. There is going to be a massive conversion for them. Right. Celebrity is great in the sense for brands, and that the familiar faces create trustworthiness for people, and there's always going to be some conversion for that. I think maybe the tiresome feeling that we're experiencing around influencers in general is because of the lack of the uniqueness in the space, right? It's just influencers being popular, potentially because they're popular, right? It kind of goes back to maybe even high school. Like, why do we like this person? Why is this person her homecoming queen? I don't have really thought about this before having this conversation, but I would imagine that maybe we're we're kind of rescinding or recalibrating what we actually care about when we're consuming content, especially because there's so much to consume now and there's so many ways in which we can do it, and different types of people we can do it from.
Hilary Billings 01:18:16 We really want to align with creators that share our values. We really want to creators that share what we care about, that are going to post about things that matter to us, even me as a former full time viral video creator, is now spending a lot less time on social media because I'm trying to protect my peace more. And so I am very intentional about the accounts that I follow and who I engage with. And the and my algorithm reflects that. Right. So the algorithm is also going to determine what we get shown. And we are not actually shown content by people we follow. We're shown content by people we engage with. So it doesn't surprise me that personality content or micro-influencers, as it were, are having a moment. And this is also the reason why I don't believe that you have to have a massive following to get successful. Because if people are searching for content like yours, the algorithm will help them find you. And so this is where professional services can win as well.
Tyson Mutrux 01:19:12 I wonder if you think that we're going to start eventually and I mean by eventually like fairly soon or.
Tyson Mutrux 01:19:18 Yeah like yeah. Yeah like fairly soon like over the next few years start to see A decline, if not a rapid decline, in social media usage. Because I'm very similar to you where I've been using far less social media. It's weird cause I'm still on my phone, but less on social media, and because I don't want that distraction. And so I wonder if you're going to start to see that or if if we're just like the exception.
Hilary Billings 01:19:43 Yeah. Goldman Sachs has predicted that by 2030. Oh my gosh, I'm going to get the number wrong. Essentially, we will have quadrupled the amount of money in the creator economy than we've done in the last 17 years. So the predictions are that it's only going to increase, that it's only going to continue to replace typical television entertainment, cable radio, what have you. And I would assume that we might be the exception, especially considering that by 2026, Gen Z is going to be the predominant population and they have grown up on technology. I'm a millennial.
Hilary Billings 01:20:19 I'm a I'm a younger millennial, but I consider myself a nice millennial. I come in peace, right? I'm gonna wear a millennial, but.
Tyson Mutrux 01:20:25 I categorize on the upper end of a millennial. Oh, you're an elder millennial. I'm an elder millennial. Okay, I've never used that, but that's. I don't appreciate that at all. No.
Hilary Billings 01:20:40 That's right. But as as Gen Z is coming into the marketplace and going to be the primary consumer population, they've only grown up on digital content. And so they expect that companies are going to interact with them that way. That is, TikTok is now the a bigger search engine than YouTube and Google. It's wild. It is wild. And so that's also something to be under the consideration for, is that user behavior has shifted dramatically. And so I think we are more likely to be the exception. But I do think that there is more of a call for mental health and boundaries.
Hilary Billings 01:21:13 And so again, we're opening up the apps right now on average 6 to 8 times a day. So it wouldn't surprise me if we walked walk that back, but maybe we make that time more intentional. But right now, our lizard brains kick in and time just flies.
Tyson Mutrux 01:21:26 What are you doing with AI that you're excited about, if anything?
Hilary Billings 01:21:29 Yeah, well, out of tension errors, we have a video AI genius, scriptwriter and idea generator bot that we're working with that we've fed all of our information, all of our teachings, all of our tactics to help come up with never ending streams of ideas, come up with never ending scripts for straight to camera style videos. And I love utilizing those lies and those, as well as ChatGPT to help me hone other pieces of content and material. I think that there's a lot of if you know how to ask the right questions, if you know how to work within the scope or learn that, or have the capacity to, it can really shorten the learning curve and the resistance to certain parts of the process.
Hilary Billings 01:22:09 There's even lots of AI tools for editing, like OpenAI is a great one that's out there that you can feed in a video, it'll automatically cut it up for you. So I think we're going to see a movement more and more towards either AI generated AI edited AI supported content. And with that, and we're already seeing a trend towards this, which is people are craving more humanity within the content. So there will always be a place for people. And there's also going to be a place for us to utilize the AI to become more efficient.
Tyson Mutrux 01:22:39 So when do you think we're going to have realistic videos from people that are AI? They're like. So you take essentially a clone of me, right? And I'm creating a bunch of videos. We create the video that we just talked about. Right. The about the bad employee. And you know, we've got the ChatGPT script. It looks like me. Sounds like me. Yeah. Like, when are we going to start to see those realistic videos? And do you think that's going to give people the humanity that you're talking about?
Hilary Billings 01:23:07 You know, this language learning app that I support.
Hilary Billings 01:23:10 On the content side, they're actually doing there's a number of companies that exist within the United States already that's doing this. Where you go in, you'll film yourself for 15 20 minutes. They will take that and turn it into an AI version of you. They call it your clone. And we're also we're playing with those for localization of languages and being able to then change your facial features and your mouth expressions to and then your voice as well, to be able to say different things. I think we're relatively close. It's very terrible. It's terrifying in a lot of ways. And it also means that global access is an accessibility to content is just growing magnanimously. yeah. I think there's probably going to be, you know, we often would joke that content, digital content right now is very much in the Napster days of music.
Tyson Mutrux 01:24:02 Probably.
Hilary Billings 01:24:02 Yeah, about from 20 years ago. And so I'll be very curious to see, as AI content continues to flourish and become even more prominent, I think maybe a year out or two years out from that being a popular, easy to access technology.
Hilary Billings 01:24:17 But I don't I can't say that with any sort of confidence, except that I see the usage of it now. It's a higher ticket product right now, but I see the usage of it now, and it's very compelling, and it's kind of scary how compelling it can be.
Tyson Mutrux 01:24:28 So I the I can't remember the software that you're talking about because I think I use that software. Right. I'd clone I'd uploaded some videos of me. They cloned me, but they couldn't clone the voice yet. They could only clone the actual physical appearance. And so I had to put some other voice on it. And although it did match up, it was so creepy. It was so weird.
Hilary Billings 01:24:47 What voice did you choose, like Arnold Schwarzenegger?
Tyson Mutrux 01:24:50 I chose a variety of voices. Some were like, felt like they're too squeaky, some were too deep. So it's just like nothing matched. And like, I'm never gonna be like, I'm never going to be able to pick the right voice for my face, you know what I mean? Yeah, because I'm gonna be so critical of it.
Tyson Mutrux 01:25:02 Yeah, but it was just such a weird thing to look knowing I had not said any of that stuff. Right. And it was not my voice. And I think I had posted it in our Facebook group about like, I showed it. It was like a year ago. It was so weird. But that was a year ago. And if you think about ChatGPT was. Was the end of 2022 or. Yeah. Had it been end of 2022 that it came out.
Hilary Billings 01:25:25 Of the adoption?
Tyson Mutrux 01:25:26 Yeah. And look at all the different models that have come out since then. So I mean, we're going to see just a massive proliferation in videos over the next few years, maybe even next year. It's going to be wild. So I wonder, what does that scare you at all with what you currently do?
Hilary Billings 01:25:45 Scare me how?
Tyson Mutrux 01:25:46 Like any any fear that the the amount of work that maybe that you will have a number of clients that you'll have will be reduced because. No, none of that.
Hilary Billings 01:25:57 No, I, I you know, if you played around with chat GPT two for ideas or script writing and what have you, it's a great framework. but at the end of the day, it's not a person. And even as someone that used to be a full time journalist, I remember even being in conversations with like, okay, can you adjust this for grammar? And it would send me back and it's like, what did you do differently? It's like, oh, actually, I didn't do anything different. It's like, okay, so we change. These are the same. Or why did you do this? Isn't this grammatically incorrect? It's like, yes, that is true. So I think maybe in a couple years it'll be bulletproof, but I doubt it. And I think at the end of the day, just like with content, people are always going to want humanity. And of course things might evolve. I don't know where my career is going to be in a couple of years.
Hilary Billings 01:26:43 What I can tell you, based upon how my career has evolved over the past 15 years, is that it's always going to be shifting, and the way in which people need the knowledge that I have or you have is probably going to change a lot, but I it doesn't scare me. I think you know, more of what I'm scared around is the, the deep fakes of it. All right. And like someone else being able to take an identity. And how do we protect against that while still being able to have this type of content.
Tyson Mutrux 01:27:09 So yeah you've definitely shown resilience. That's that's for sure. That's that's a that's a really incredible trait. I have sort of a question that I've had for a long time, and I don't know if anyone has a good answer, but do you think that do you think that. Yeah that.
Hilary Billings 01:27:25 So that would also be, by the way, a really great hook of curiosity. I have a I have a question I've had for a long time. I don't think anyone has the answer.
Hilary Billings 01:27:33 It's like, well, maybe I have the answer.
Tyson Mutrux 01:27:35 That's interesting. Okay. I like that very much.
Hilary Billings 01:27:37 There you go. Just teaching moment. Go ahead.
Tyson Mutrux 01:27:39 Do you think attractive attractiveness matters for successive videos?
Hilary Billings 01:27:43 I think it's one of the things that can help in support. You know, of course, we see that very attractive men and women do better. But it is not the only reason that content does well and it doesn't. You don't have to be, just in general. And there's a lot of statistics around, like people, like even babies like to look at what we would. And I don't know how you qualify this. This is all very subjective.
Tyson Mutrux 01:28:04 Well, there is I've seen objective metrics. It's like, oh, the width of the eyes. The the position of the nose. The. There is, there is a there is a again. Here's the thing. Someone created that a human kind of like right eye data. They they put their own inputs which affects the output.
Tyson Mutrux 01:28:20 So who knows. It's one of those things you don't know.
Hilary Billings 01:28:22 Well, look, model women are always going to have an advantage when it comes to content. And but their content probably isn't going to be the type of content that your clients are looking for. Right? So there's there's a difference. I think again, it goes back to who are you trying to target? What do they want, what do they need. And and there's a lot of people that would have very distrust of or a lot of distrust of a super attractive type of person. I don't think one way or the other, it should hinder you from doing what you want to do. Or and again, I was a former Miss Nevada and people have called me a lot of names on the internet, and there's a lot of days that I don't feel attractive or pretty about myself. And I think at the end of the day, if we're if we're using that as a reason to do or not do something, then we've already lost, right? And this is more about, again, the message.
Hilary Billings 01:29:09 And who do I want to serve and what are what is my measure of success? Because there's going to be a lot of opinions from other people telling you how to do something, or why you should or shouldn't have the space on the internet. And if we listen to them, then we will never get the traction we want. Yeah.
Tyson Mutrux 01:29:24 So there was this. There was this guy, and I since you since you were a reporter, you. I think you'll have an appreciation for this. Yeah. There was this guy and his wife. They had this company, and I don't I don't know their name of the company or the name of either of them, but this was. Man, this was like, back in like 2014. I'd gone to this conference. It was put in by Infusionsoft. It's called icon. And there was and I'd seen them at a couple different conferences where their whole shtick was getting people on, like local TV or in sometimes national TV, but like, usually it's easier to get on local TV.
Tyson Mutrux 01:29:56 Yeah. But their thing was it was that. But like then also like getting you looking good for TV, so didn't matter what your looks were. But yeah, so your suit might be too saggy. So like, maybe take some paper clips and like, make fixing the back. So like, they're like, see, when you're going on TV, you'd go out there, you'd make sure they look good. You also give them tips and stuff. Yeah. So my question is like how important are those little things? Like, yeah, you may not be attractive, but and I don't want to focus too much on that, but I want to focus more on this like presentation. Part of it, like the way you present yourself in these videos. Do you have any tips on how like one, is that even relevant? Does it matter? And if it is like, what are some tips on making sure that you present? Well for the camera?
Hilary Billings 01:30:40 It's very great. Interesting questions. I'm going to back it up and give you kind of a divergent answer, but I think is more important, which is for me, it's not what you do, it's how you do it.
Hilary Billings 01:30:51 And the creators that I've seen have massive success. They aren't necessarily a miss universe or a, you know, bodybuilder type, but their energy is captivating. And. And they're beautiful inside and out, right? And it's because it radiates out of them. And you can tell they have joy and fun and they're they're enjoying the process. And the reality is, is you could look perfect, but your energy is saying, I don't want to be here. This sucks. I'm terrified. And people be like, wow, I don't, I don't understand, but this video is making me very uncomfortable right now, right? So above anything else, it's like, how can you get yourself into the energy of being excited to be there and to have that expand out? And to me, that comes back from being authentically yourself. Now, I think services like what they provide are really amazing and powerful, because they help people to feel more confident. They help people to feel more like how they want to present.
Hilary Billings 01:31:43 I think that matters and that can help expand the energy.
Tyson Mutrux 01:31:47 Confidence is so important. And so I agree with the energy of the confidence. So so important.
Hilary Billings 01:31:52 Any and but then you have you have like the darling of TikTok which is oh my gosh now I forget her name. There's, there's so many creators that were sweatshirts and hairs and a bun, no makeup. And people love it because that's authentically who they are and it's relatable. So I don't think perfection is the answer. I think it comes down to how are you going to show up? What is going to make you feel and your most expansive energy? That's then going to translate to the next person that you want to see it.
Tyson Mutrux 01:32:19 Yeah, I think that's taking action like you have to. You definitely have to do that. You have to get get the videos out there. And I don't want to create a bunch of excuses for people. I'm just more trying to create like some solutions. Like so that like some workarounds to some of their objections that they have.
Hilary Billings 01:32:33 I mean, there's a lot of them I, I don't believe that you need if you don't like wearing makeup, don't wear makeup if you don't be. But if that's going to make you feel better to do it than do it right. So I'm a big believer and do the things that you need to do in order to feel better, to do the thing that's scary. Yeah.
Tyson Mutrux 01:32:49 So how did you like what did you do to kind of build your confidence up whenever, like you went and did the beauty competition, so you had to I know you're not into the fake before you make it kind of a thing, but you you weren't a great state of mind. Probably. So. Like how? Like how did you convince yourself I'm going to do this? I've got the confidence I can, because you can't just go on to a beauty contest and have and and not have the energy you've got to. Yeah. Get it someway. And you got to believe in yourself and you got to believe you're going to do it because they're going to read you.
Tyson Mutrux 01:33:18 People can read you. So how how are you able to do that?
Hilary Billings 01:33:21 So the first thing that I had to get clear on again was what was success for me, which was doing this, going, getting through the swimsuit preliminary and being able to express myself in that way. And just that was the win of like getting on stage and doing.
Tyson Mutrux 01:33:36 Get a good, easy win, just.
Hilary Billings 01:33:38 Doing the thing right. So just just showing up and doing it was the success. But of course, I'm a highly competitive person. I had a 3.9 GPA in college. I really like to win. So it wasn't just going to do that. Well. That was the goal and the measure of success. I still would love to have one. I still would have been nice to come away with the crown. So I looked at in order to help me feel better about the experience because I had no pageantry back then, I was competing against women that had been doing this their whole lives. I looked at what was actually required to win.
Hilary Billings 01:34:10 And so in my competition, there were four phases of competition. It was swimsuit, evening gown, on stage, question and interview. So everyone freaks out about swimsuit. Everyone's going to look good in an evening gown. Half your score is talking. I was a state debate champion, an impromptu speaker. I was like, I can do the speaking part really well. And it turns out that's a majority of my score.
Tyson Mutrux 01:34:32 And they probably they didn't look at that, didn't prepare as much for that part. And so you had a huge advantage. That's great. I liked the way you.
Hilary Billings 01:34:40 Looked at that. I came in for my interview with a business plan as to how I would run my year because I was like, look, if you want me, here's what I'm gonna do. Here's this is why I'm here. Here's all the organizations that I'm currently working with. Here's the organizations I'm going to move forward with. Here's my platform, here's how I'm going to attack nationals. And one of the judges came up to me afterwards and was like, you know, because there's a lot of really amazing, intelligent women.
Hilary Billings 01:35:01 They all come in with a purpose. They all know why they're there. And she's like, we just believe that you're going to do the things that you said that you were going to do, and I did. I did like 300 appearances my year, and we ended up tripling the number of entries the following year to a much more diverse group of women. We had lawyers, we had business owners, we had publicists. And so it was very exciting for me to see that women could see how they could utilize that as an opportunity to really monopolise and expand their businesses, as well as their personal brands, and do all this other fun stuff as well. So I think for starters, it was, okay, what do I actually have competence in here? Right. What am I really trying to do with this? Where is the competence? What actually is required to make this happen. And then let's try it and see what happens. And and leave space for the magic to come in and for it to be fun.
Hilary Billings 01:35:49 But again, I, I didn't try to be A beauty queen or someone that had competed in hundreds of pageants, I was I really leaned into my uniqueness. I was a travel blogging, lion taming, burn survivor turned Miss Clark County that was here to with a message of you don't have to be flawless to feel beautiful. That was what I was here for. And they either wanted that or they didn't. And if they didn't, that was fine too. And if they wanted another competitor that had a different story and a different platform A-ok, I was going to win or lose based around who I was and what I knew I could bring to the table. And so I think that applies to anybody. Like don't don't try to compete on their terms when where, you know, you can win and you do better than anybody else. And that is actually Sally hogshead fascinate core principle right of like different is better than better. I don't have to be the best or the better. Beauty pageant contestant, long term beauty pageant contestant.
Hilary Billings 01:36:41 I need to be the different the only beauty queen lion tamer, and in fact, that I would go on to say that a lot my year of like I'm probably the only journalist, lion tamer, burn survivor, or Miss Nevada that anyone knows, and I'm okay with that.
Tyson Mutrux 01:36:55 So the Miss Clark County and the Miss Nevada, were those the only two you had ever done? Oh my.
Hilary Billings 01:37:00 Gosh. Well, and, Miss Clark County was an at large title so they didn't have local competition. So I my first pageant was the state pageant. And then I went straight from there to nationals.
Tyson Mutrux 01:37:11 Okay. So then I'm going to get into haters. I can only imagine the what people thought about a newcomer winning. So, how do you. Because lawyers see this like you get you get success in your area and everyone's hating on you because you're getting all the clients. And so, yeah. How do you deal with haters?
Hilary Billings 01:37:37 for a while, I didn't deal with it very well. You know, being a former people pleaser and a recovering perfectionist, it's really hard for me, especially people that don't know me to make those types of judgments.
Hilary Billings 01:37:47 And in fact, it fact, it really wasn't until I became a viral video creator that I really recognized and understood that any judgment that someone else has on me comes from their own rules about life, and my rules and their rules are probably very different. And so anytime you get a piece of hatred, really it's just a window into their belief system. And if you can understand that, then you can always show up with compassion. It's like, oh wow, it must really suck to be in your head for this to be the thing that matters so much. and I always, I'm a big believer in there's no one above you that's busy hating on you, right? Yeah. I remember when I started working for USA today, I went in my sash and crown. It was the same idea of, let's grab attention. There's hundreds of reporters. We're all smashed in like sardines. All I have to differentiate myself is this little mic flag that has the USA today logo on it. You've got all of these celebrities, all their handlers, all the bodyguards.
Hilary Billings 01:38:46 What I and I had no relationships. I was brand new to the industry. I didn't know any of the publicists. I didn't know any of the managers. I didn't know any of the talent. How could I get them to come to me and say, well, my uniqueness being here isn't that I'm the most tenured reporter, isn't that I've built these relationships in hundreds of articles. It's that I miss Nevada. So let's see what that gets me. And it was like moth to flame, and all of the celebrities wanted to come over to talk to me, because they were so curious to see me standing on the other side of the carpet. They would take photos of me, and it was a lot of fun, and it created great rapport throughout the year, allowed me to build the relationships and show my credibility and get past that initial inertia. But a lot of the journalists were very upset about it, and some of them even accused me of not being Miss Nevada. I was like, okay, well, like, I don't particularly care what you think about me at this point in time.
Hilary Billings 01:39:34 It's it's tough, especially when they're peers. But I think it goes back to if you can understand that they're operating from their own belief systems and getting that compassion, then all it just kind of becomes a hater block at that.
Tyson Mutrux 01:39:48 Point in time. I heard someone say recently about like, if someone like posts something like really nasty on a comment about, let's say they comment about like their video or something like that, or just a post anywhere and they they're not a follower. Yeah, they've you've never seen them before. They don't know you like they are. They're attacking you based on their own imagination. So they're really just attacking their own imagination. Yeah. And I like the way of thinking about that because it because it can suck when people post something that's negative. It can get to you. But I love the way. I'm like, no, nothing would bother me now. It's like, no, what are you talking about? It's just their own imagination. They're the one that's got the problem.
Tyson Mutrux 01:40:26 Yeah.
Hilary Billings 01:40:26 Yeah. And if it ends up hurting you or hurting me as it does, it's always been a great opportunity to say, oh, look, I still have a wound there. Like, there's they're hitting on something that I need to go heal within myself. Because if I were to say, oh my gosh, you're a purple elephant, you could probably just laugh at me because you know that you're not a purple elephant. But if I was to say like, man, he's really terrible at these types of cases and you'd be like, I can't believe she said that. How could she? Like, how does she know? And so it just goes to show that unless we're carrying that wound, unless we have somewhere in our own bodies or in our own brains, that belief about ourselves, then it doesn't matter to us. So it's a great opportunity for you to say, oh, gosh, okay, there's something that I need to look at because I'm clearly still attaching and calling this in versus the the comments that were so clearly out of left field were easy to overcome.
Hilary Billings 01:41:13 It also depending. I mean, I at one point I had to hire someone to start responding to comments because it wasn't good for my peace of mind. Other times, I would engage with them myself, and I would allow my voice and values to shine through and how I responded to people, and it would actually pick me up. More followers and more engagement and more support from other people that would see how you can handle that. So there's ways you can use it in your favor, and it's also ways that you can try to just work around it so that it doesn't impact you. Because at the end of the day, the people that win are the ones that keep going. And you know, Beyonce has haters. Taylor Swift has haters. Anyone at the top of their game has a subset population of people that are just waiting for them to fall. So if you don't have haters or you don't have people that are pushing back, it probably means that you're not doing anything remarkable enough to keep them from commenting.
Hilary Billings 01:42:02 And I don't think in a world where if you want to be seen, that's where you should live. And it's scary for me to write. The last thing I want to do is post something I care about, or something I've spent time on, and have people tear you down, especially because they are more likely. They're tend to be louder than the ones that are there quietly supporting. But if you're able to zoom out a little bit and see the bigger picture, you can you can muddy through it enough to understand that it's the consistency of keeping going that matters.
Tyson Mutrux 01:42:30 So I want to wrap up with this. Yeah, I think that was a great message and I almost ended on that. But I do want to ask you like just this last question, like you've you've your career is about help people. Helping brands earn attention, right? It's all about helping them earn attention. And with the legacy media that is. Kind of seems like like the cable news and all that. Seems like it's kind of I don't know if it's going to go away, but it's decreasing as every year goes by.
Tyson Mutrux 01:42:56 And but you do have many different channels of media. So, you know, back in the 90s you could advertise on TV and reach a lot of people. Yeah, it's it's gonna probably start to get more and more difficult as more and more channels develop. So looking forward. What's your advice to people about making sure that you're still able to earn attention? You've been able to adapt. It's like the whole tiara thing. Like that's that's brilliant right? You're able to stand out. So like, what are some things that that people should focus on in the future to make sure that they're able to stand out?
Hilary Billings 01:43:29 I think one, being open to the fact that platforms are probably going to change, they've changed in the past ten years, right? Rest in peace, Myspace. Rest in peace periscope. Rest in peace. Vine. And we will always be engaging on different platforms. But the way in which people engage and why they watch what they watch at a core level doesn't change. And so again, if you focus on the core tenets of what makes great content and you're putting your time there, that is going to help you to weather the storms of the different platforms, the different trends.
Hilary Billings 01:44:00 I think just in general, video and short form video is going to continue to skyrocket over the next five years. I don't think that's going away. I don't know what platform is going to stick around and which one's going to go, and the next one that's going to rise up. But if you're focused on utilizing and leveraging the psychology of attention to make great content, you're going to have much more success than anyone else.
Tyson Mutrux 01:44:21 Well thanks, Hilary. Appreciate it.
Hilary Billings 01:44:23 Thanks so much for having me.
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