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TikTok 101 for Late Adopters

2023 was a turning-point year for TikTok. The influencer hype started to wear off. Brands have pulled back on advertising and influencer marketing spend. Investors have, too; after a “funding bonanza” in 2021, VC money is much more skeptical of the economics of the creator economy.

Nevertheless, TikTok has a stickiness that other platforms struggle to match. The “For You” feed is completely behavior-driven, meaning your algorithm is influenced by what you've historically watched, rather than who your friends and family are. This makes TikTok inherently different from other social media platforms.

I keep going back to TikTok, despite all the misinformation and noise, because it has largely replaced Twitter as the place where news often gets broken first. On-the-ground footage and citizen journalists. While I'm not really publishing on TikTok yet personally, I log on almost every day to poke around and do research.

It's also the origin of vertical, short-form video, which nearly every platform has now also adopted. This doesn't mean you have to get into video, but it's good to understand what types of content platforms like to distribute and why.

If you're a late adopter to TikTok like I was, here's a new post that'll give you a rundown of the basics and how the app works.

🔗 A Hype-Free Introduction to TikTok

The Best “Black Mirror” Episode Is Now a Thing

A new AI product might offer glimmers of the dystopian future featured in a 2011 episode of Black Mirror.

In “The Entire History of You,” humans have grains installed in their brains, which allow them to recall and replay anything they've previously seen or heard in their lifetimes. Like most Black Mirror episodes, this goes south rather quickly, as the ability to replay any moment in life leads to inevitable breakdowns.

Rewind AI is a startup that uses an app to record your search history and browsing history. It essentially creates a library of your digital life that can be searched and summarized by AI. The company's newest product, the Rewind Pendant, is a wearable necklace that would record all your interactions throughout the day, adding them to this database so that you can recall or reference the data later. The wearable is available for pre-order with a $59 deposit.

Meta's updated camera-equipped Ray-Bans went on sale yesterday. And Apple's first AR, the Vision Pro, is on track to debut next year.

Are data-harvesting wearables our inevitable future? And would you wear one?

Reminder: Airtable Webinar Tomorrow

A reminder that my friend and mentor Ashley Pendergraft, aka Airtable Goddess, is hosting a free webinar tomorrow, October 19th. You can register here.

“The 3 Simple Airtable Systems You Need To 3X Your Group Offer Sales & Triple Your Testimonials”

Many people who read my newsletter are service providers or online professionals who want to produce and publish more content, for a variety of reasons.

We want to figure out how to publish content faster. But consider that you don't need to be faster. You could instead make other parts of your business less time-consuming.

That's what Airtable has done for me this year, and why I built Airtable bases for my clients in Camp Wordsmith®. Airtable organizes and centralizes everything so you spend less time looking for files and whatnot. One study found that the average American employee spends 1.9 hours a day just looking for information. Don't be that person, get yourself organized instead.

Ashley's free webinar is tomorrow, register below.

🔗 Register for the Webinar

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Cheering you on,

—Nick