Are you struggling to explain AI technology in a way that actually connects with your audience for B2B marketers? Many marketers find themselves caught between maintaining technical accuracy and creating engaging content that resonates with their audience. The stakes are high if your message is too technical. You’ll lose engagement to simplify it, and you might lose credibility.
That’s exactly what’s unpacked in the recap of the episode of Social Pulse Podcast: B2B Edition, powered by Agorapulse, where our Chief Storyteller Mike Allton talks with Kristina Keene, the director of Brand and Content at Flip. Her experience in brand development and creative direction combined with her current role leading content strategy for an AI-powered customer service platform makes her the perfect guide for this journey into humanizing AI through social media.
[Listen to the full episode below, or get the highlights of the Social Pulse Podcast: B2B Edition, powered by Agorapulse. Try it for free today.]
Share your journey into content strategy and how you came to specialize in marketing AI technology
Kristina Keene: Yeah. Honestly, I fell into the AI side of it. I started my career in non-profit arts fundraising, and from there I realized that to be an adult who was not living out of her car, I have to get into the private sector. Non-profits were great, but I couldn’t make a great living. It was during the Great Recession back in 2009, and 2010, so budgets were being slashed. It was difficult to get a job. But being in the non-profit art space and being a grant writer specifically, I was able to very easily translate that skillset into being a really great copywriter.
In marketing specifically, I started as a copywriter, and I hate to say it, but I worked with a couple of not-so-great graphic designers, so I had to teach myself how to do that better so that the language could shine. And from there, you and I were talking about it in the prep for this call, I became a bit of a creative octopus. So I do the whole broad range of marketing. Everything from copy to design, to web to social, it’s all me.
And how I got to Flip, I was at another company, and it just wasn’t speaking to my soul. So when I got the opportunity to come here, I said, “Get me the f*ck outta here.” And I had a half-hour call with our CEO, and I swore like a sailor the whole time. About a week later, I had a job offer. So it was like, “Okay, I think this is the place to be.”
So that’s how I got my start. That’s how I landed here. Yeah, let’s get into the weeds.
How are you telling compelling social media stories today?
Kristina Keene: Flip is in the customer experience space, we answer support, and we are a voice. We answer support calls for retail and e-commerce brands and transportation. And we’re about to launch a new vertical. If I utter it here, our CEO might have my head. But customer experience is human. It’s the most human piece of the customer journey when you know you’re buying something.
If I buy a sweater and that sweater doesn’t get delivered when I think it’s going to, if I call and it’s a bot saying, “Press one for X, press two for whatever,” it’s not a great experience, and sitting on hold is certainly not a great experience either. So what we do is we plug into a brand’s systems and we have all of the data on a customer. When I call in and I’m wondering about where my sweater is, Flip can say, “Your sweater was last seen in Soda Springs, Idaho. Here. Would you like me to text you a link to track it?”
And it’s a much better experience, and it’s a much more human experience because it speaks like a human, it’s responsive like a human. It’s empathetic, not quite as much as a human is, but—although I guess it depends on the human—it’s helpful.
And, for me, I don’t want to explain what Flip is in complex terms because quite frankly, our audience doesn’t give a sh*t. They give a sh*t that the AI is working. They don’t care to get into the weeds of how it is working. If we launch something super technical, we’ll put out a white paper, but by and large, those white papers are the least-performing content that we have on our website. It just doesn’t get engagement because people don’t care. They want to know that the AI can do the job. They don’t care beyond that, they don’t care about the tokens. They don’t care about what we’re doing with our LLM. It’s so ingrained now in the conversation about AI that.
The last thing I want when we are to do something so human in answering customer support calls, I don’t want to complicate it, I don’t want to muddy the message with technical jargon. And as our CEO Brian says, “F*ck buzzwords.”
And I feel like a lot of the marketing in the AI space is a lot of buzzwords. It’s a lot of jargon bullsh*t, and your audience just doesn’t care. They want to know it can do the job.
Mike Allton: Yeah, that’s absolutely right. And I’ve started to see studies about how—because of the way that AI can be trained and the way that AI uses natural language—it can actually seem even more empathetic than a human.
Because to your point, not everybody can be empathetic. We’re going to assume for the moment that if you’re hired to be a customer support center individual, you have some empathetic skills. But as humans, it can be inconsistent. I can show different levels of empathy depending on my mood and my professional ability to turn it on, regardless of how I feel. Whereas an AI is going to be flawless and consistent every single time, and they know to ask questions like how did that feel? And so on, depending on the application.
So this is interesting to me the way that you guys are empowering other businesses to have that level of not just empathy ’cause that’s important—but to your point, most people, when they have an issue, they just want to get it solved as fast as possible.
With AI, there’s no wait time. It’s instant, you connect and you’re already into it. And getting that problem solved hopefully, I love that look as to what Flip is and does and how you’re helping businesses. But you talked about white papers and technical support and that sort of thing that you need to put out there.
How do you balance having that level of necessary educational content versus engaging storytelling?
Just to give you an example from my background, I used to sell swimming pools a long time ago. You sell swimming pools, and it was the same kind of challenge. I know people are like, “What? Swimming pools?” Yeah, because when you went to buy a swimming pool. Yes, you might want to know, “Okay, what filter does it come with? What’s the horsepower of the pump? How tall are the walls? How big is it?” That kind of stuff. That’s the technical information I needed to be able to provide, but that wasn’t the story I sold.
What I sold was the background oasis that awaited you once you invested in a pool and that ability to create this space outside your home where you and your kids could enjoy all summer long—without having to get in a car and go anywhere and pay membership fees. Yeah, no, that you’ve got your own outdoor oasis.
So how do you do that with Flip?
Kristina Keene: Yeah, so we decided, gosh, almost two years ago now to do weekly product releases. And in doing that, our product is growing so fast. I get Slack alerts several times a day, if not at least once an hour, that our engineering team has done something else that we could talk about in a product release. And instead of just banking, all of that and doing one release like a month or once every six months, when we’ve got really big things to talk about with putting them into, with doing these weekly product releases.
What we’re doing is we’re cutting things down into bite-sized pieces. If we do an update to, let’s say, an integration with one of the help desks that one of our retail customers is using we know that, so many other brands are using that help desk, too. So let’s talk about it in simple terms. You don’t need to know the ins and outs of the API. What you need to know as a customer experience professional is, okay, now Flip can do this, that, and the other thing within my help desk. And I was told about it in a really digestible format and I heard it from that girl Kristina who flies off the handle and has swear words all over her LinkedIn.
So that’s how we did it. We just took things from big to little bite-sized pieces and regular content. People think that building is a public idea. People are seeing the product develop as it’s developing, and they’re seeing it in super digestible content.
What role does customer feedback have for you and how does that play into your social media strategy for this kind of AI product?
Kristina Keene: Yeah, so when I started at this company, I thought it was really important to focus on community.
Our customer service, as you said, it’s not the sexiest space but, yeah, customer success and customer experience aren’t the sexiest things about a retail brand.
However, they are the things that will keep shoppers engaged. So, if your customer experience is really solid, retention is just baked in. In marketing, this tool in some respects takes away some of the human elements from a customer success or customer service or customer experience department.
We’re also enabling them to, since they’re not answering basic questions, like “Where’s my order? When’s my return going to process? Can I ask about my warranty status?” We’re giving time back to agents and customer service professionals to answer more complex questions and issues.
And I thought, “We’re giving them time back to focus on things where their attention is really needed, and we’re helping in this community customer experience journey to help speed things along to help enhance the customer experience journey.”
My thought was, “Let’s make them superstars.” So, when they are celebrating something like a new store opening, what do we do? We immediately repost. When they get a promotion, what do we do? We comment, we repost, we like, and we do whatever we can. When they have great feedback from a caller, what do we do? We celebrate them and we, we celebrate them as a whole, as a company. We have this Slack channel called the LinkedIn Flip Hive where if one of our clients is celebrating something, we drop the link to the post in there and we all jump in and we celebrate them because without them we don’t exist. We’re phones, so we’re super hyper-niche.
Phones are the most human channel for a brand. Email isn’t a very human channel neither is chat. Social is a bit more human. When you have an issue with a brand, your first instinct to resolve it is to call ’cause it’s the fastest path to resolution.
So, when we are in a position to impact the phone channel as we are, it’s really the people that are behind it, the people that are at our brands are where we should be celebrating, not, oh, Flip did this really great thing. That’s true, but it did it because our brands and the CX people who work at them are so stellar. Really focusing on that community piece, that engagement, with what they are putting out into the world as a first priority has been huge for us.
Share a specific example of an actual campaign that you have run on social media that helped humanize your AI technology
Kristina Keene: Yeah, This comes back to the community piece. But we got the opportunity last summer, summer of ‘24 to have a billboard in Times Square. One of our vendors Brex said, “Hey, we’ve got billboard space. Do you want a seven-second spot on it?” And [Flip] said, “Yes, we do.”
And we settled on this idea of let’s call out our Flipping Legends. So what we did was we had a very simple video where you’re a Flipping legend, and then we just cycled through a bunch of names for some of the clients that have been with us for the longest or had a really big impact on our product and focusing it on the humans that make our AI work. It was one of those marketer moments where I’m like “Oh, I’m doing a good thing here. I’m not selling people something they don’t need. We’re selling them something that can very much help and improve their day-to-day operations. And we’re celebrating them and putting their name up on a billboard in Times Square. And their name is as big as a car. And we spent nothing on it.”
We didn’t spend anything on the billboard. We spent, oh gosh, I think two grand to have a photographer come and capture everybody’s name that came through in a still image and a video of it that was high res, and he got some really great shots of the team in New York. And we threw it all up on social and it blew up. Biggest engagement I’ve ever had. Biggest engagement. It was probably the best campaign of my career thus far.
And it really was that because we were celebrating the people. We weren’t celebrating what we were doing.
We were celebrating the people at the heart of it.
Mike Allton: I love it. That reminds me of a campaign we did here at Agorapulse many years ago. We were celebrating this woman Ingrid, who is an adventurer. That’s probably the title on her business card. And we were supporting her journey as she was biking across Europe at the time or something. It was just so cool to celebrate her story.
Check out Agorapulse’s spotlight on Ingrid Ulrich, one of the people who inspire us.
How do you measure the business impact that social media efforts have—particularly around AI and storytelling?
Kristina Keene: Yeah, that’s a great question and the answer I have for it might surprise some people, but maybe not.
I rely on anecdotal evidence we are given that we are a voice product. Ours is an AI that has to listen and hear callers. So for me, I can look at my LinkedIn Analytics, I can look at Google Analytics for our site. I can look at so many other pieces of data.
But what tells the story of the success of our marketing for me is the anecdotal evidence that I get. We’ve had closed loss deals that have come back after a year and said, “We were watching the weekly product releases and we think they’re really funny and we’re enjoying the content, so let’s have another conversation.”
So, on LinkedIn, I have my platform of course, but then I run our social for Flip, the company proper. And I decided when I took over doing everything on social that I wanted Flip to be the cutest robot in the world. Our marketing was already very digestible, but Flip, the cutest robot in the world, just really drove that home, and—in addition to all of the team going into people’s comments section and jazzing them up—Flip only speaks in all caps, and Flip is just silly and funny. It’s not uncommon for me to see people respond to it: “Flip, you’re the cutest robot I know.” or “Oh, Flip, thanks, I love you.”
Or things that you just wouldn’t say to another AI or another bot. But people do it for us because we have humanized it.
The anecdotal evidence that I get from these various different channels is just “Yeah, okay. We’re doing it right, we’re going to keep going with this.”
What tools or resources do you rely on to try to stay current with AI and social media today?
Kristina Keene: Honestly, I think LinkedIn has a personal vendetta against me. Its algorithm changes so rapidly that I can’t keep up with it.
As much as there is out there about trends and everything that’s happening in the world of AI when it comes down to it, I pay attention to engagement both on my posts and on our Flip company posts and on the comments that Flip or I are putting in all sorts of posts. It’s the octopus—and maybe I’m more of a jellyfish actually because there are more than eight tentacles—but I pay attention to the engagement when I find that, something like our weekly product releases, their engagement is dropping and it’s “Okay, wait a second. That means that I need to pay attention to something here. The algorithms and people’s attention spans have changed. So I need to pivot.” It’s an odd science of putting your head to the ground and feeling the beats. If the beats change, then you have to pivot.
If all of a sudden things are rumbling, then you have to take your head out of the sand and really pay attention to what’s happening. I don’t know if that’s the most helpful answer, but being in tune and not tuning out your audience is the best advice I can give.
Mike Allton: I think it’s very relatable. Because the things that you’re describing, the challenges that you’re running into are the same challenges that all of us as social media managers and marketers across all industries and spectrums are running into on all the platforms. I do have a few resources of my own that I’ll throw out at, everyone listening.
First, if you’re not already following or following Annie-Mae Hodge on LinkedIn or Instagram, she does. I think it’s a weekly post where she shares the social media updates for the past week. So, if you’re struggling to keep up with LinkedIn, algorithmic changes, or anything else, she’ll include that in that free post. All I have to do is follow her and you can tune in there.
I do recommend the Artificial Intelligence show that’s put on by the Marketing AI Institute hosted by Paul Roetzer and Mike Kaput, that’s my weekly go-to for what’s happened in the AI industry over the past week. Comes out every Tuesday morning, they record on Mondays and they talk about the developments, models, investment, what’s happening across the industry.
That’s the extent of what I would recommend. Most people pay attention to the industry. Other than that, you don’t really need to know what the latest models are from, Google or Open AI and that sort of thing. And, of course, there’s my own podcast, the AI Hat Podcast, where I’m interviewing folks and talking about how these developments in AI are impacting marketing business leaders and so on.
Learn from leading B2B experts in every highlight of Social Pulse: B2B Edition.
For B2B marketers trying to incorporate generative AI, what advice would you give them?
Kristina Keene: I think the advice I would give them is to make it as digestible as you can for your audience. Think of them first. Don’t produce something and think, “Oh, they’re not responding to it.”
You have to think of them first and foremost, you have to make things digestible. You have to make things bite-sized. You have to make things in a format that people want to engage with. If you’re putting out a 45-minute video, no one’s going to watch it. No one’s going to watch it. Keep things in a format that people want to consume. And if you’re not sure what that is, think about what you like to consume.
So if you are like me and you are on Instagram, whenever you have time before bed, where your head’s racing and we’re all ADHD now, I like to scroll before I go to sleep. I take notes and I think about, “Okay, what are these pieces of content that I’m consuming, where I’m staying for the whole thing? And what is it that I like about that and how can I translate that to what my audience is interested in?”
That’s where I would recommend people starting. Think about your audience. Think about yourself within an audience and how you like to consume and take it from there.
And don’t overcomplicate it. You don’t need to be on every channel. You don’t need to be doing every type of content. If you are a video and a copy person, focus on video and copy. If you are a designer, focus on design. If you are a yapper, go talk.
Yeah, that’s what I would suggest: focusing and thinking about your audience and thinking about yourself.
Don’t forget to find Social Pulse Podcast: B2B Edition on Apple and drop us a review. And check out other editions of the Social Pulse Podcast like the Hospitality Edition, Agency Edition, and Retail Edition.
