Digital Marketing Tips & Tricks + Social Media Platform Rooverse That Blocks AI Generated Content

OPENING - EPISODE 20 MILESTONE PAUL WRIGHT Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Link Thru Social Podcast. My name is Paul Wright. Well, we want to thank you for all the support you've given us. We have now reached episode 20. What a milestone for the Link Thru Social Podcast. And we have all of you to thank for the thousands and tens of thousands of downloads on Spotify, Apple, and some of the other audio platforms that you get your podcasts on, and as well as the thousands every week of downloads and views on YouTube. You can go to LinkThruSocialPodcast.com for all those links. Keep sharing, keep liking and subscribing. We really appreciate all of your support. So for episode 20, we have two guests today: Seth Goldstein from Goldstein Media and Ross Thorpe from Reverse, which is a social media platform that blocks all AI generated content from being posted. Those two interviews will be on the show right after this short message. SPONSOR MESSAGE - SMART POST APP SPONSOR MESSAGE Tired of stressing over what to post on social media? Meet Smart Post App. You're all in one solution to create, schedule, and grow your content effortlessly. In just a few taps, you can generate engaging posts, stay consistent, and keep your audience coming back for more. No more guessing, no more burnout, just smarter content faster. Whether you're a business owner, a creator, or an entrepreneur, Smart Post App helps you show up like a pro. Start posting Smarter Today at SmartPostApp.com. Smart Post App, because your content should work for you. INTERVIEW 1 - SETH GOLDSTEIN / GOLDSTEIN MEDIA PAUL WRIGHT & SETH GOLDSTEIN And welcome back to the Link Thru Social Podcast. Well, we're excited to have a wonderful guest with us today, Seth Goldstein. He's an entrepreneur, founder, podcaster, techie, father and husband, social media junkie. What a long list. He's been podcasting since 2010 and owns his own digital marketing agency, Goldstein Media, for more than 15 years. Seth also helps business owners and individuals with their own podcasts through his podcast coaching consultancy podcast mastery. Seth, welcome to the show. How's it going? I'm very good. I'm very good. Thanks. before we get started, maybe you can. I kind of went over the highlights there. maybe you can just give me a little bit more information about your background and how you got here today. Absolutely. Well, I got here today through PodMatch. So that's that's an easy little plug there. Check out a lot of PodMatch. PodMatch is awesome. Alex Sanfilippo is a great guy, good friend of mine. Oh, great. Great service, you know, awesome dude. I've been podcasting for close to 15 years, digital marketing since for 18 years. Prior to that, I was a journalist out of college. I was a newspaper journalist. Remember those things, the broadsheets? Yes, Corona Star, all that. Barely, barely. Barely, barely exactly. So I worked for local papers in around the Philadelphia and Central Pennsylvania area for six years, massive burnout. And I had a choice to go between either PR or marketing. And I'm like, well, I don't want to do PR. I'm sick of PR people after being a journalist. So I was like, all right, let's go into digital marketing. Because I initially had wanted to do that prior to going into college, but back then in the early aughts in 2000, digital marketing didn't exist. No, it's scary. So I was like, let me go learn how to write. Got stuffed into the journalism field, the romantic kind of notion of Woodward and Bernstein and all that stuff kind of got me hooked on it. I talked to former president Joe Biden, who was a senator. He went to the same college that university that I did. He's the University of Delaware grad. So he, you know, we he actually take our calls like as a senator. I'm not sure if he would as a president, but yeah, I'm sure he would. He's a good guy. But I was talking to I mean the fact that the Joe Biden talked to me on the phone, and I'm like, I'm this stupid college kid. It was pretty that's amazing. Well, Seth, you know, you mentioned that you know there was no digital marketing in the early 2000s, and it's it's amazing how speed of light of how digital marketing has emerged. Now we're on the cusp of all this the AI speed for better for worse. For better for worse, yeah. Whether we like it or we don't like it, it's coming. It's yeah, it's here, that's for sure. It's taken over, baby. what you know, other than AI, obviously, as far as digital marketing, maybe say in the last five years. that's fair, that's fair. How's the digital landscape changed in the last five years? We'll say. Well, without the without mentioning the elephant in the room, AI. Yes, a lot of people have realized that wait, Google wasn't lying to us, produce good content, and they'll rank us, and now even more with AI, you produce good content, you'll show up in the results more. Now, they've been saying this till they've been blue in the face to just write good content since the days of Matt Cutts at Google. And I've talked to the guy and he's like, they just don't listen. Just write good content, we will find the content, we will index the content, we will share the content. People are like, no, no, no, no, you gotta do X, Y, and Z, black hat this, black hat that, you know. I'm like, no. So you get banned from Google. So it's it's interesting. But that's the biggest thing is now you gotta write good content and also mark your stuff up in schema, in like the JSON-LD schema, so that the machines can read it a little bit better. So of course, of course. Now that's the last five years without the elephant in the room. Let's talk about the elephant in the room. Oh, boy, the last year and a half, pretty much. Holy last year and a half, it's going a thousand miles an hour, changing every single day. I mentioned off the top that you're helping you're coaching the podcasters and that. as far as the podcasting is concerned with AI, what are the what are the things that in the last few weeks, we'll say are yeah, are the are the how are podcasts how can podcasters use that as a success? Oh that's great. AI is helpful. I would not replace your voice with AI, don't do that. But transcripts are great, you know, using AI to for transcripts. that used to be an industry at some point, writing transcripts for podcasts, not so much anymore because AI is pretty good at that. you know, clips, finding the good clips in the in the podcast to share out. That's a great way to use them. You know, just social posts kind of get started on the social posts. Don't post verbatim what they write, but get an idea of where the hit points are. Right. And then tweak it, tweak it to your own. Tweak it, always tweak this stuff. Otherwise, it'll otherwise they're they're a little obsessed with the m-dash. Yeah, it looks and it feels so robotic. And you most people are smart enough to detect that too, right? You know, so if you're surprised, you know how you're giving people way too much credit. Maybe I am actually. I'm so immersed in this world that maybe I'm giving credit for people that aren't so dealing with it every single day, right? some radio segments every week, and you know, lately we've been talking about how AI is fooling people on social media. There's these Italian grandmothers that are out there have millions of followers giving recipes and life advice, and they're they're they're not actually a person. And the radio host got fooled. He got fooled. He thought he was actually listening to you know good old Nona giving some cooking the cooking advice. But yeah, it really is, it really is. So now you said you were a journalist in your previous life. recovering journalists now. Yeah, recovering journalists. How has that helped you in digital marketing? Oh, absolutely. Communication, you know, and being able to come up with ideas and come up with topics to write about, all that you know goes back to the journalism career. Right. Like knowing what people are looking for, being able to identify the fake news somewhat, every once in a while gets a little confusing. Yeah, but you know, everyone gets everyone gets had by this stuff nowadays. But also how to write good content. You know, writing is a is a lost art form. Sad. So it's sad. And so a lot of people need to realize that you know, yeah, AI can come up with a blog post, but go back in there with a fine-tooth comb and get rid of the m-dashes. There's something called ellipses, the dot the dots. Okay, those are so much better than m-dashes. but you know, rewrite the content, ask it for bullet points, don't ask it for the thing verbatim, write it out yourself. And yeah, if you want to use an M-dash, darn it, use an M-dash. You're allowed to, just you know, sure. No one might accuse you of being AI because they're ignorant. So yeah, that's right, that's right. So social media. So we're talking about podcasters and that a lot of the podcasters I speak to, they're solely on LinkedIn, which is fine. That's that's that's a good thing. Yeah, but I'm not everywhere. You do. I'm I'm everywhere. I'm you know with Instagram and TikTok and Facebook. Yeah, you need to be everywhere with your clips. Yeah, absolutely. You have to be, and unfortunately, but yeah. Yes, yes, and better for worse, often worse. Yeah, that's right. We actually have a sponsor, a cheap plug coming up here. We have a sponsor on the podcast, Smart Post app. And it's you know, for social media managers to have multiple platforms, you know, on the thing, same thing. So big up to the Smart Post app. but it obviously makes it easier, but you have to be across all the different platforms, you know, and but because of all the changes lately and everything, where do you see social media going in the next few months? Or oh, it's gonna get so sloppy. Yeah, it's people are gonna get so sloppy with the AI, and it's gonna be a lot of junk out there. one thing that people are like, you know, LinkedIn still seems to be real. Which I so it's credit. Like I'm I'm glancing over at my other screen here, and it's just so happens that LinkedIn's up on that screen, and I can never close it. Usually I closed it before podcasts but left it up. And there's there's three guys in a Panera Bread. I'm not sure if you Panera Bread up in Canada. Yes, we do, yes. Oh, I'd love that bakery. Yeah, it's at a Panera Bread at a networking event, and they're all smiling at the camera. And I happen to know these guys, so they are real people at a networking event. Now, the thing is that sometimes you need a banner or you need a picture real quick of something. You can go get stock art, which might or might not be AI, or you can go in the Gemini and you know, waste a little bit of water. I should say that in Philadelphia water. And some and get an image. It might be good. I mean, you're not getting those seven-handed people anymore, which is good. But things are starting to look real now. They really are so, but also like LinkedIn knows when that's a an AI image and will tag it as such. So it's always a good thing. So absolutely, and their security about you know proving that you're a real person is pretty good because I hadn't used my account for a long time and I tried to log. I know. And I had to you know get my driver's license out and take a picture of it and the big yeah. It took it took about a day and a half, which good on them for you know trying to set up a little layer that will with spammers. Yes, it is rampant. I mean, as much as the real people, I mean, I think they're real spammers, the real spammers is what they are. Yes, that's right. But they put a pretty picture of a pretty girl up there and they start talking to the guys, and the guys are like, Oh, what does she do? And then you look at there's like no background information on her, or it's all either so you have to be an investigative journalist about it. You have to look at it and say, Is this person really legit? Are they gonna ask me for some call tracking software or whatever? Yeah, yeah. It's that anticipation when you when someone tries to send you a message and you start thinking, okay, is this too good to be true? Usually it is, right? or and then you try to look a little bit at their background. Oh, they set up the count like three days ago. Exactly. You gotta look at that stuff, yeah. You have to look at that. It's it's you're you're almost like a constant private investigator. Always you gotta be on your toes. You have to be on your toes, or you're gonna get caught, you know. So your website is GoldsteinMedia.com. tell us a little bit about the website and this some of the services that you're offering on there. So we do something that's you know, you know, digital marketing strategy. We don't do as much implementation because that's a special breed people, which I'm sure you do more implementation, like you actually put the content out there for your clients and stuff like that. It's a pulling teeth for me, so I'm like, no, thank you. But we'll strategize but the idea is like we do everything from website design, WordPress design all the way through SEO, AEO, EIEIO, all that stuff, you know. Right, right. It's all it is, is all it's all SEO, it's just different acronyms that people trying to be slick about. SEO is dead, all hell AEO. It's the same damn stuff, it's just using AI and a little bit of it. That's right. You're doing all kinds all kinds of that stuff on there, and we've been doing it for 18 years. That's amazing. So it's go at GoldsteinMedia.com, and I also saw that you're on Instagram, on Seth the Podcaster. Love it. I just followed the podcaster or goldstein.media is the other one. Oh, perfect. Okay, so I'll make sure that I post those links up on the podcast, and encourage everyone to check out Seth's website and perhaps reach out to him to tell them that you heard about him on the show. And appreciate you being here, taking the time. You have a wonderful day, enjoy the summer, and we'll talk again soon, hopefully. Talk to you soon. Thanks, everybody. Okay, well, the Link Thru Social podcasts will be back after this short message. LINK THRU SOCIAL MESSAGE LINK THRU SOCIAL Connect with your audience through strategic digital marketing. We help brands grow their online presence with expert social media management, AI-powered solutions, engaging content, and professional podcast services. Link Thru Social, that's T-H-R-U, is the company for you. Linkthrusocial.com. INTERVIEW 2 - ROSS THORPE / RUVERSE PAUL WRIGHT & ROSS THORPE And welcome back to the Link Thru Social Podcast. Well, we have a very interesting guest today, Ross Thorpe from Ruverse. That's R-O-O-V-E-R-S-E. He is the CEO of Ruverse, the social media platform that blocks all AI generated content from being posted. Ross, welcome to the show. Thank you for having me. Well, you definitely caught my attention when we got when we were connected on PodMatch, and I should really give them a shout out. they've really been able to get a lot of top quality guests for the Link Thru Social Podcast, and we appreciate we appreciate them. Now, Ross, I signed up last night and I went through the process because I was very interested about this. I'm a social media guy, been doing it since 2010, and you're right. There is so much AI-generated content out there. There are so many bots that you're dealing with on the different platforms. I'm not going to name them all, but you know what they are. And there's statistics that show that some platforms have potentially 45% of the users as bots. So obviously I can kind of get the gist of what inspired you to do this, but tell us a little bit of a little bit more about verse. So some of the statistics are astonishing, like you said, 45% of some of the platforms are bots. Some even more astonishing statistics is that 71% of images being uploaded to social media every day are AI generated. So and then on some platforms, over 50% of the text being uploaded is AI generated. So what we're doing is as users of these platforms is we're just interacting with machines at this point. internet usage, internet activity as a whole has gone up to 54.7% non-human activity. So the majority of activity on the internet is now non-human activity. And just in the short time we've been speaking, how many AI agents have been spun up to do this stuff on social media or in the internet? Thousands, possibly tens of thousands, even who knows. So we wanted to create a space that people can go and just see human-made content. we very much don't believe that AI is here and it's here to stay. And I should note that we're not anti-AI deserves. You know, we think that there are some huge potential benefits to AI, i mean, absolutely meaning to cure cancer, absolutely meaning to solve the environmental crisis, etc. etc. etc. I could go on. Yes. But the way we view it is that because it's not going anywhere, people didn't used to live in cities, they used to live in the countryside. And as cities and technology developed, people started living in a city. And in the same way that AI is now built into every aspect of our lives in many ways, that's like living in a city. And Ruverse is like going for a walk in the countryside, because even though you live in a city, you still like to go for a walk in nature. We view reverse as a nature reserve for human-made content. Wonderful. I'm immersed in social media and I see statistics that you actually see what's going on. And we've talked about on this show in the most recent weeks how to keep the human elements on social media. It's very difficult on a lot of these platforms because there's so much thoughts and all this. So like I said, I signed up yesterday and I was very impressed with the process that had me verify my phone number, my email, and then an identification process which is totally safe, where I had an option of different types of ID depending on the country you were in. And then you took a selfie and I set up my account. And I haven't gone through the entire app yet because we just connected in the last couple of days, but I'm excited to check it out and see what it has to offer. And you're right, people need a break. They need they're you know this fast-paced city type life. we do need a break, and we want to engage with people and real people. So I'm really excited to just you know, just going through the app, I have it on my phone here. your mission, tired of AI spam, reverse, verified human sanctuary where every voice is real and every connection is authentic. how many users have you do you have Ross? And when did it actually launch? so we launched in April. Okay. we're into the we're into the thousands. users and we're we're entirely we're entirely reliant on organic marketing yeah we've we've funded this yeah we haven't got external funders in we've funded this ourselves you know the build everything like that from my other business so we've been building it up we've made some excellent connections across various different organisations i've I've become a founding member in Ruverse become a founding member of the AI Trust Council okay which is based out of New York they've got some incredible technology launching in the form of the TEEP protocol which I highly recommend people have a look at and that's a way for people to be able to mark the provenance of any posts they do online whether it's a website an article you know scientific publications really fascinating stuff very and I think that there is there is a there is a movement here to have people retain the sense that they are talking to a person and one of our big concerns is that it's really hard to tell now yes so some of the AI models are actually scoring better in the Turing test than people. Wow the a lot of the videos now are you can't tell I mean some of these grainy wildlife videos that you see if it wasn't for a ridiculous thing like an orangutan saving a kitten from a from a burning car you'd you'd think it was a real video. Yes no you're right the human imitation deep fakes are getting stronger and stronger some of the studies on this stuff are incredible so there's been some work by Dr. Jeremy Fannin and he's been working with his institution in Cambridge and they've shown that once someone has seen a deep fake of a brand or a person their trust in that brand or person is permanently damaged within the length of study because they then question every time they see that thing is it a deep fake right and if we start getting into a world where if you start believing nothing you'll believe anything it's true. Yeah it's it's you know I'm glad you're doing this and I'm I'm I'm a social media guy but I get it and it's it's it's something that has to be addressed and I will be looking further into what we're talking about I'm glad that people are stepping up like AI is moving very quickly so it's very hard to be proactive but instead of reactive way down the road when it's too late I really think government agencies should be behind these type of as well because this is on a very fast speeding train and speed of light changing second by second people really have to keep up so I'm curious about your background Ross before you got involved in this process. Yeah so I'm not from a tech background at all okay so my other business works in the higher education sector at the universities and one of the things we saw through COVID was that there was a huge spike in mental health problems among students through the isolation this wasn't just limited to students you know everyone experienced this and that was from a reduction in human interaction and so people turned to social media for that interaction now what quickly followed COVID was AI and so now suddenly people have become habituated to an even greater extent to be using social media for their social interactions that they've now just interacted with machines and you cannot get that same level of impact. The other thing that we've seen is that 90% of social media users post less than once a month and I think that yeah so and I think that's down to a problem in terms of people feeling like they have something worth saying and everyone has something worth saying. Absolutely and I think social media is a misnomer. I think it shouldn't be called social media anymore. The big established platforms couldn't be called social media it should now be called short format entertainment media because most people now are going on and they're just entertaining themselves with short clips or images that are were previously the realm of content creators and the content creators production value over time rose and rows and rows. And I think this is the reason that people stopped posting so much because they didn't feel their content was as good as these content creators that were posting right and now we've got to a point where AI agents were able to post quality content that is you know of a of a yeah some of it's obviously slot but some of it is better and so they're just entertaining themselves as opposed to being social. And I think most social media platform now platforms have stopped being social. Yeah they've taken the social out of social media they've taken the social out of social because how can you be social when the majority of the content you consume is made by a machine right you must it's like someone talking to their kettle you know there's there's no that's not social if you if you said oh do you know what I do I go and watch my kettle boil or watch my washing machine go round for in some cases four to five hours a day on the average user you'd think they were mad. Yeah yet this is exactly what we're doing on social media now. So you said you have several thousand users already what is some of the feedback you're receiving from those users and I'm curious to know yeah it's really positive actually people are people are thanking us for creating the space a lot of people who have come over are sick of ingesting AI slop constantly or having to question what they're seeing online. The other thing that we're seeing is it's a really positive space we're not seeing all of these negative hateful posts or comments and I think that's down to two reasons. The first is that the type of people we're attracting really care about interacting with people. So they're just more positive joyful people generally we're seeing a lot of creatives a lot of academics on there. The other thing is that and we've seen numerous reports studies investigations on this Russian bot farms or bad actor bot farms are the response are responsible for creating these hate comments this rage bait content online and because we don't have any bots no one's creating rage bait wonderful which means it's actually a really wonderfully positive space to be yes which is quite a contrast to some of the other platforms that you see now. So I'm curious now I've just been thinking about this as we're speaking we've talked about this a lot on the program that it started in Australia banning of social media children under the 16 since crossed over into Europe and many countries including the UK are looking into this ban or have already implemented a ban and also here in Canada and I'm not really a hundred percent for them being banned. I'm more about providing education for the children and because some of the reasons for the ban are bullying and content that possibly you know they shouldn't be exposed to and becoming addicted to screen time and that but perhaps you know there's there's a happy medium because there are a lot of youth advocacy groups out there right now kind of protesting this and perhaps an app like yours Ruverse that doesn't have the bot influence that causes a lot of these problems could be something that can be encouraged in the future instead of a full out 100% ban if you know what I'm saying. So we took I think a radical but I thought I think now still at this time necessary approach and Ruverse is actually 18 plus. Okay. Now the reason we did that is because and we did this prior to the meta and you know court case prior to everything else because yes the studies we were showing is that on average the studies demonstrate that social media is damaging to children. And so I think that the under 16 age bracket seems rather arbitrary why have they picked 16 I can't work out why so we decide to make it 18 plus and what I've said since the start if the is that we're based in the UK so you know it's we're we're now we're already more than compliant with the with the ban that's coming in next year. Yes. But what I've always said is to people is that I would be willing to drop it to under 18 like remove the aspect of it but I would want someone to explain to me the method the practical method to remove the damaging aspects to children with for me where I have absolute confidence that this practical thing the practical things we can implement in means that there's no harm to children. And the analogy I use here is that imagine you're walking to a business meeting and you've got a brand new suit on it's very expensive suit and you've bought this suit just for this business meeting it's a really big business meeting you're gonna get do very well out of it and you walk past a pond and there is a child drowning in that pond everyone and I if you don't agree with this then you're a bad person everyone would jump into that pond to save that child from drowning ruin their business suit missed a business meeting they would sacrifice those things instantly to save that child's life. Yes now what we have to consider is just because you don't see a drowning child every day it doesn't mean that your actions shouldn't be to help save children every single day. Whether that's a financial loss to you or a time loss to you whatever it is every single person needs to do something every day to help that drowning child even though they can't see them. So for me until someone can present me and I would love if someone who has been studying this is if anyone is listening of your listeners know about this I would love to hear from them. Sure if anyone come up with a method where we can make a social media platform that is safe and beneficial to children I would absolutely take that with both hands. But until I'm comfortable with the idea that there's zero risk to children yeah then I think that's that needs to be done. I think that children need to be able to build social interaction in the real world and my advocacy to people and I'm I'm the CEO of a social media platform here and I'm saying to people if you have the if you have the choice between going on social media or ringing a friend or going and talking to them in person pick going and talking to someone in person or talk to them on the phone or whatever it is. Do you know social media is absolutely huge benefits can connect people can reach people who are in a dark place can form connections socially business brilliant but nothing can ever replace going and talking to a person in real life so I always say to people look if you've got the ability to go and talk to a person in real life. Yeah absolutely right Russ well you know what I'm very happy that you came on the show today so anyone that is interested it's available on both Google and Apple reverse dot that's R-O-O-V-E-R-S-E. Like I said I signed up for an account yesterday and I'm looking forward to this weekend spending a little time on it to see what it's all about and I encourage everyone else to do the same and reach out to Ross's team and let them know what you think about it. And Ross, as time goes on, I'd like to bring you back on the show to see how this journey is progressing with this very unique app that I think in this time that we're in right now is very, very good. And I really appreciate you taking the time to talk to us here on the Link Thru Social Podcast. Ross, appreciate it. No worries thanks for having me on. Okay well that's reverse dot app that's R-O-O-V-E-R-S-E dot app and that's Ross Thorpe. Thank you very much. And the Link Thru Social Podcast will be back just after this short message.