Nathalie Balda on the role of social media in entertainment

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Nat Balda is a Sr. Social Marketing Manager at Amazon Prime Video, and previously worked at Netflix and HBO. Brian and Nat go behind the scenes to talk about social media in entertainment, building a voice on a brand account, and the importance of social media in growing fan communities.

Full Transcript:

Brian Bosche:
Hey, everyone. Welcome back to creativeBTS. This is Brian Bosche. Today, we have a very special guest, Nat Balda, Senior Social Manager at Amazon Prime Video. She's waving even though this is on audio. Nathalie, welcome to the podcast. A hot start already.

Nathalie Balda:
Thank you for calling me out on this. That's great. Yeah, come at me. I am the person that waves on Zoom calls. [crosstalk 00:00:24].

Brian Bosche:
I am, too.

Nathalie Balda:
It's fine.

Brian Bosche:
Actually, I'm now the person who just never turns on the video. It's exhausting.

Nathalie Balda:
Exactly. That's me, and I don't turn it on because people like you called me out for waving.

Brian Bosche:
Yeah. No, I was very friendly at the start of the pandemic. Always video on, always would wave goodbye. Now, I'm just like, all right, the video's off. I'm exhausted. I'm tired of people looking at me.

Nathalie Balda:
Same. To be able to [inaudible 00:00:52] I feel like social managers have gone through a lot this year. I'm not going to lie, a lot of times I'm rolling out of bed, barely make it to the call. Like, "No, I don't want you to see sheets on my face."

Brian Bosche:
Yes, totally understand. Let's get into it a little bit because you have done social media at a number of different entertainment and media companies now. If you just want to talk a little bit and intro yourself to the audience, what do you do if they don't already know you on Twitter because you're all over Twitter, and we have this little marketing Twitter community now. Yeah, introduce yourself. What's been your journey through the entertainment industry been like?

Nathalie Balda:
Sure. I started at an agency back in Miami. They were basically looking for someone to launch the Mexican version of the Jersey Shore, so Acapulco Shore. I got to work with MTV to do the whole campaign. This was back in, I think, 2013 or something like that.

Brian Bosche:
Wow.

Nathalie Balda:
I was a one-man show. I was editing videos, doing the graphic design, doing the analytics, coming up with a strategy, all of it, plus account managing, plus everything, the time sheets, everything. It was a lot, but I think this is where I really got hooked on everything because it was a weekly release, and I had never worked in entertainment. Always a fan of entertainment but never really worked on it, and having a weekly release and seeing people react real-time to what you're posting, so live tweets and that were huge.

Nathalie Balda:
It was just super fun and I got hooked into it. I think a year-and-a-half into it, I got a call from HBO and they were like, "Hey, we need a specialist to lead all of Latin America, including Brazil," and I was like, "I don't speak Portuguese but [inaudible 00:02:36]." I got to go lead a tiny team really. It was like I think three or four people. Learned Portuguese while I was at it because-

Brian Bosche:
Wow.

Nathalie Balda:
Yeah, it was awesome. I learned mostly through community management, through seeing content calendars and what people were doing. Yeah, I launched Game of Thrones [inaudible 00:02:59] seasons there, all the brand accounts. Yeah, it was super fun, it was super interesting because I went from weekly release to another weekly release. But the thing is that at MTV, I had most of the information before. In Game of Thrones, I didn't so I had to literally go on Sundays to the office, one screen on the right side, one on the left. It was like real-time watching and live reading. One screen in Spanish, one in Portuguese, and us trying to hear the audio in English to try to translate real-time.

Brian Bosche:
Yeah, because they couldn't leak anything. You would have nothing ahead of time.

Nathalie Balda:
Right. For example, when Jon Snow ... Spoiler alert for-

Brian Bosche:
At this point, there's no spoilers.

Nathalie Balda:
Exactly, but Twitter can come at you for spoilers. When Jon Snow came back to life, I think, at season six, episode two or something like that ... Who remembers?

Brian Bosche:
Yeah, who knows the exact episode take?

Nathalie Balda:
Unit five was 70 seconds, I actually found out real-time. It was like our whole team screaming in a room and trying to [crosstalk 00:04:15].

Brian Bosche:
Oh, that's so fun.

Nathalie Balda:
From there, I got a call from Netflix. It was like do I want to move to California? I'm not really sure. I'm really happy leading this. It was basically like the same thing, but they wanted me to come out to LA and do global originals, so all of the global originals at Netflix, so think Stranger Things and House of Cards and all those things but focused in the region, so focused in Latin America and Brazil. I wasn't really sure. But this one guy called me and he was like, "You know, let me tell you why this is the best decision you're ever going to make in your life," and I was sold from there.

Brian Bosche:
That building in Hollywood, oh, my God.

Nathalie Balda:
Awesome. It's awesome.

Brian Bosche:
I visited a friend there and I'm in the cafeteria on the roof, and I'm just like, "How can they not convince people to work here? This is amazing."

Nathalie Balda:
It was amazing. Yeah, it was amazing. I also think the freedom that they give you to work allowed me to do a lot of really good work. I was there for two and some years, did some really fun stuff for Latin America mostly. But then I wanted to move on to the global part of it. I just wanted to do bigger things, I guess. Amazon came through and they were like, "So Lord of the Rings, biggest entertainment title ever, do you want to come do it?" I was like, "Yeah."

Nathalie Balda:
Started launching by launching those handles, ended up moving on to another franchise title that's called Wheel of Time and, eventually, those titles were so far away and I need to do things real-time. I said, "Can I please get something that's more immediate?" They were like, "Sure, take on The Boys," and I was like, "No big deal, sure." I took on The Boys right after season one launched and basically worked on it this year, and it has to be one of the funnest campaigns I've ever done.

Brian Bosche:
It was amazing.

Nathalie Balda:
It was fun.

Brian Bosche:
Yeah. It was so much when I watched it. This was such a good series to get into in the pandemic lockdown.

Nathalie Balda:
It was. It was messed up. It was messed up. I think I've watched every episode at least 15 times. But watching it, seeing people respond real-time, react real-time, it was a lot of fun. It's just like the intersection with culture and everything going on, it was so perfect. It was so much fun to work on that. The audience is one of my favorite audiences I've ever worked on with.

Brian Bosche:
Oh, we can go into that. Like different cultures for the different shows, I hadn't even thought of that.

Nathalie Balda:
Right, right. You got to think like every show, it's like a brand itself and every show has a fandom. Things like Stranger Things, there's so many things that you can do on that show that it just wakes that audience up. For The Boys, with this thing. I don't know, it was a small but vocal audience. It wasn't really that big. When I took over, I think it was 45,000 followers on Twitter maybe, a couple hundred thousand on Instagram. By the end of the campaign, we closed at 200,000 followers on Twitter, 700,000 plus on Instagram, and all organic. It was just all done through memes and community management. It was a lot of fun, yeah.

Brian Bosche:
Yeah, so you've been HBO, Netflix, Amazon, so not too shabby working through the entertainment industry, a lot of good opportunities. What do you really appreciate about social and entertainment? What keeps you in the industry and what do you see as its role?

Nathalie Balda:
I think it's interesting. I think social plays a huge role in anything in entertainment. I think you can build a really big marketing campaign and, obviously, social is going to be a part of it because it's social. But things, for example, The Queen's Gambit. Did you watch that show?

Brian Bosche:
Yeah.

Nathalie Balda:
All right.

Brian Bosche:
I'm currently watching.

Nathalie Balda:
It's amazing. It's such a good show. They basically did no marketing. There's no social pages for it. There's nothing. It was just literally people watching the show, get in and surf on the platform, watching it, and then tweeting about it, and that made the show take off immediately. Now it's like, what, one of the most watched shows this year on Netflix?

Brian Bosche:
Definitely. Yeah, I saw that.

Nathalie Balda:
Right. Also, don't quote me on that because I don't have actual numbers, but it's ridiculous. I think social plays a huge role in entertainment, a huge role. The way I think about it is more like you can do a really solid social campaign, but when people actually start talking or tweeting about it, that's when you know you made it because your job from then on is to keep that conversation going, but your real ambassadors are your followers. It's hard to keep them happy.

Brian Bosche:
That's what I was going to ask you. When you have all of these different brands, you're treating all these different shows, these different series as their own brands, what's the role of that brand account? Is it to foster that conversation? Do you have any other goals that you establish upfront with those shows?

Nathalie Balda:
I think it depends a lot on the titles. There's some shows that are purely awards play, for example, so everything you do is like FYC campaign.

Brian Bosche:
You have a different target customer or you have a different audience than you did for other shows.

Nathalie Balda:
In every show. Then there's a lot of things you do for talent and for EPs, the producers, the showrunners. There's a lot of things you do for them and then there's a lot of things you do for the fandom. Yeah, I think within each show, there's a hundred different audiences that you're servicing, but I think the most efficient one is the fans. How I try to lead my campaigns is everything I do is more focused on fielding the fandom. It's a lot of social listening and reacting real-time to try to get them to have those conversations and then keep talking about whatever it is that they're hooked on.

Brian Bosche:
Yeah, Marketing Brood just did a case study on how GIFs or GIFs ... Are you GIFs or GIFs? What team are you on?

Nathalie Balda:
I'm GIFs but I'm also-

Brian Bosche:
Yeah, think it's GIFs, too. I say GIFs just to annoy my wife, and I'll say GIFs.

Nathalie Balda:
It makes me cringe. It makes me cringe, yeah.

Brian Bosche:
It's not GIPHY, it's GIPHY. Just about the case study of using GIPHY as that search platform, and the response on Twitter has been crazy. There are so many threads right now of people giving case studies of how they used GIFs in their entertainment launch strategy and using that as a part to drive the conversation. I want to react with those different show titles and the different scenes that I love. You just said that you did a ton of those. Why didn't Quibi do that? Because I loved The Agua Donkeys and I didn't have any GIFs about it and it drove me crazy. It really does help. The GIF creation does help.

Nathalie Balda:
It does. It does. Yes, we created a lot of GIFs every week. Every episode, as soon as they came out, we made them public and people would use to react because we understood the audience-

Brian Bosche:
You're fueling the fire. You're arming me with my tools to be funny about the show. Thank you.

Nathalie Balda:
That's right. That's right. Exactly. Why didn't Quibi do it? I don't know but I also don't understand a lot of things about Quibi.

Brian Bosche:
True.

Nathalie Balda:
I wanted them to succeed so much.

Brian Bosche:
I know. I did, too. I watched it, I subscribed. The Agua Donkeys show I thought was hilarious. My wife and I watched it all the time, it was amazing. But then I would try to screenshot a GIF or anything from the show because it was hilarious, couldn't do it and it just killed it in its tracks. No one was talking about it.

Nathalie Balda:
No one was talking about it. It's such a shame, the second [crosstalk 00:11:55].

Brian Bosche:
It's a shame. Okay, let's take a step back and not go into a Quibi podcast, which would be very easy. Pretend I know nothing about the entertainment industry, which I don't as much. I'll be a beginner's mind here as I ask you these questions. For the marketers out there, give them a sense of when do these campaigns start. In retail, they're like 18 months ahead of their season. B2B software were like a month before because we're shipping so frequently. What is it like in the entertainment industry? When you have like The Boys, if you know season two's coming out a certain time, when does that planning process start and how do you kick that off?

Nathalie Balda:
I wish I had a really solid answer for you but-

Brian Bosche:
That's an answer, too.

Nathalie Balda:
There's different audiences. If it's something like a movie, it probably has a longer lead campaign. Sometimes you see trailers for movies that will come out in a year or so. Sometimes there's shows that the trailer goes live a month before they launch. Sometimes they'd be on some drab shows and just say the trailer comes out the day that they launch. It literally depends on the priority of the show, I guess, for the platform or the audience itself.

Nathalie Balda:
For example, for Gen Z, does it make sense for a show that's geared towards Gen Z? Does it make sense to release a trailer now? They'll forget in a year. Attention span is so short. It really depends on who you're trying to target and what your play is. I'm thinking that the most solid answer I think I could give you is almost all the campaigns start either the second the title is acquired. There's acquisition and originals. Sometimes studios buy titles from other people and then they start marketing campaigns, or there's titles that are produced from day one on the studio.

Nathalie Balda:
Basically, the second it is acquired or the second that it's been greenlit, you start thinking about like, "Okay, so what is our plan? What is our strategy? When does the trailer drop? Does it drop a year before? Does it drop two weeks before? How do we want to see this campaign? Do we open social channels for the title specifically? Do we just lean on the brand accounts?" By brand accounts, I mean like at Netflix, at Prime Video.

Brian Bosche:
Yeah, yep. Like do they deserve their own accounts or not?

Nathalie Balda:
Right, and it's not like even do they deserve. It's like, for example ... Let me think of one. I don't know, Borat. I don't think they opened a brand ... Not that many accounts, I guess. But he had his own account and they just used his account, videos account. They didn't make it like Borat The Second movie at [crosstalk 00:14:39].

Brian Bosche:
Yep, that's fair. But a lot of in-person activations and I saw so many in London, too, which were hilarious, like the mask grabbing. That was an incredible campaign.

Nathalie Balda:
I think that's the other beauty of social for entertainment. There's so much you can do and, literally, it's all about the fandom. The more you involve the fans, the bigger the campaign can be. Sometimes it's just like a tweet of something really random that takes off the second it comes [crosstalk 00:15:14]. It doesn't have to cost a million dollars, that's what I mean. It doesn't have to be a huge, highly produced trailer. It could just be like a text only tweet at 11:00 p.m. right before you go to sleep and then you wake up and you're like, "Oh, my God, what did I do?"

Brian Bosche:
Yeah. In that process where is social at the table there when they're starting ... or the strategy around the campaign? Because in a lot of industries, social is like, "All right, you're an afterthought, just tweet this stuff out once we're done with the main campaign," but it seems like social in entertainment would have a much bigger role. Are you at the table when they're coming up with the overview for the campaign?

Nathalie Balda:
Usually, yeah. Usually, there's a social person sitting at the table, and mostly because if you think about it, if you're going to release a trailer for something or a teaser or a first look or whatever, it's going to live on social whether you want it or not. Are you going to give it as an exclusive to deadline or are you going to use it on your own channels. Social sits at the table from day one basically to make sure that we're given the right guidance, I guess, for whatever next step in the campaign is.

Brian Bosche:
Yeah, okay. You have a pretty active role there when you're actually on the strategy side. More than other industries maybe?

Nathalie Balda:
I don't know. I'm not sure. Maybe but I think there's still the whole meme around social being the interns, so you're sitting at the table but I'm not sure how loud your voice is heard sometimes.

Brian Bosche:
Okay, that's fair. Making progress is, as you see, if it goes off on social, that can literally turn around an entire franchise or you can boost Ocean Spray drinking cranberry juice or whatever it happens to be, it can really change it up. On that point for the actual social publishing and social side of these campaigns, I'm really interested in the change where a lot of these studios or entertainment companies are releasing to homes directly next year instead of in the theaters. Do you think that's going to change the approach to social around these different trailers or is it just the same thing just trying to drive more conversation with people at home?

Nathalie Balda:
I could be super wrong. I don't think the approach is going to be different because at the end of the day, what you're trying to encourage is people to watch the show or the film. Personally, I love watching things at home. I love movies. I don't love the movie theater experience, I don't know why. But I have friends that are the biggest [crosstalk 00:17:51].

Brian Bosche:
All movie theater.

Nathalie Balda:
What they miss the most is the movie. I think there's going to be an interesting conversation from people who love the movies. All the Disney releases, that's what I'm thinking about. Movies that you're used to watching on the theaters, having to watch it by yourself, the conversation is going to be interesting. I don't think the release of trailers and things like that will change much. I think social managers are going to have to prepare for a lot more negative sentiment on things they can't control. Like, "I wish I would have seen this in a big screen with perfect surround sound versus my computer screen." I think that's the only thing that's going to change, but I could be 100% wrong. We'll come back to this next year.

Brian Bosche:
Yeah, it's like you're live tweeting during movies in theaters, where if it's a release at the same time, like Game of Thrones, you're off-Twitter until you watch that episode. It might drive more of the real-time conversations around it just because people are actually at home watching, but it'll be interesting to see the change. Here's a great question for you. Do you prefer when it's the Game of Thrones style where it's week by week or the binge watch drop-all-at-once from a social perspective?

Nathalie Balda:
It depends on where my [Eagle 00:19:11] falls, I guess.

Brian Bosche:
Okay, explain.

Nathalie Balda:
Yeah. When it's binge, there's a huge spike if the show's really good. Think about it like, I don't know, if Stranger drops-

Brian Bosche:
Stranger Things?

Nathalie Balda:
Yeah, let's say Stranger drops tomorrow. The conversation is going to be huge for the next two weeks or so, and that's going to be going down. When you have weekly, you have 8 to 10 weeks of peaks every weekend of people going wild, you get to dive a lot more into the little nuances that happen in every episode. All the cliffhangers, all the jokes, you get to enjoy them a lot more and at the end of the day, an eight-week spike type of thing will give you way higher conversation than a movie. If it comes through Eagle weekly, because I get to mess around more with my titles and I get bigger numbers at the end, from a consumer point of view, I love watching.

Brian Bosche:
You want to binge?

Nathalie Balda:
Yeah, I love ... I understand both, but yeah.

Brian Bosche:
I love the weekly, too. I want to have the cultural conversation around it. The Last Dance this summer where it was every week, every Sunday you could look forward to it and then it drove a whole week of conversation about those episodes. You can go deep. You had a fresh set of memes every Monday morning that you could do for the entire week and then you had it again. It feels like it resonates so much more, but I'm saying that where like Stranger Things, that's just like such a big impact, too. It just seems like the weekly drives so much more interest than just the all-at-once binge.

Nathalie Balda:
I think it's the way the show is shot also. If you're going to do it weekly, I don't know, but from my perspective, like Stranger Things is a really long movie. It played really well together. But something like The Last Dance, you need to be able to understand what just happened, what you just watched, react to what you were seeing, the memes and all these things. I think it serves a purpose for different titles, but I don't know.

Brian Bosche:
Yeah, it's so interesting on the social side where it's like I was curious. It's interesting to know that you get a lot more when it's weekly in volume, but it's like a huge spike all at once. I'm sure that plays into your campaign strategy as well, knowing that you'll get that spike and then it'll be gone.

Nathalie Balda:
Right, right. Then the interesting thing is, of course, you always get asked of trying to keep that peak high, but you can clearly see a decrease by Monday or something. Then it's interesting to try to play with different formats and different type of content that can give you an extra little spike on Tuesday or Wednesday, release on BTS or anything that would just get those spikes, and that's where Eagle comes into because you're like, "Oh, I did it right, they reacted, this is awesome," versus weeks where you were like, "Oh, man, I guess no."

Brian Bosche:
What's it like going viral consistently and just getting all of those notifications come through?

Nathalie Balda:
Anxiety-inducing.

Brian Bosche:
Really? I'm just imagining the Game of Thrones tweet where Jon Snow dies. Does it just break your phone?

Nathalie Balda:
Yes, and you learn very quickly to turn off notifications. Yeah, it gets to a point when there's things like that. I've learned that it's a lot better to not lean into it and just let people freak out on their own. It's really awesome to see people that you know are such big fans react the way you wanted them to, and you should just let it be. Yeah, your phone, your notification, it's wild. Definitely, I turned off notifications.

Brian Bosche:
Yeah, and everyone that listens to this knows, interns don't run these accounts. This is a huge part of the marketing profession. But I'm interested, is it just you running all the accounts? What is a team behind these shows usually look like, like actually have the password login materials where they can actually start managing it?

Nathalie Balda:
Right. Again, I wish I could give you a real solid answer, but it depends on every title. For The Boys specifically, I was the one that had the logins on the Amazon side and I was very much active on there. I would literally tweet before I would go to bed and first thing in the morning and was on there all day. But then there were three or four people on the agency side, they're fantastic. Literally, one of the guys, we had the same brain, so everything we were doing was the same. Yeah, overall, I would say a good six to eight people total have access to the account, which then gets weird.

Brian Bosche:
For each show, too?

Nathalie Balda:
For each show, yeah. It depends how comfortable ... As the lead of the show, do you feel to give a lot of people access? Because believe it or not, there's butt dials, too.

Brian Bosche:
Oh, I'm sure.

Nathalie Balda:
You accidentally like a tweet that you shouldn't have liked. Things like that get really complicated so it's like, "All right, let's keep it tight," but there's usually a lot of people logged in.

Brian Bosche:
Then do you have a scheduled set before typically or are you doing things in the moment? I can just imagine if you have six people, one person's posting this before bed, the other's doing the same. How do you coordinate actually who does it at what time?

Nathalie Balda:
For us, there were six people because I wanted to make sure that we engage with the community, I guess, globally. I would tweet in Spanish and Portuguese and someone would tweet in French. There was a lot more people just because we had a lot more languages to work with so we want to-

Brian Bosche:
Each language has their own account?

Nathalie Balda:
No, no, it was the same account. We all logged into the same account but we would respond to Spanish tweets in Spanish [crosstalk 00:25:09].

Brian Bosche:
Got it, got it. Makes sense.

Nathalie Balda:
That's why there were so many people on it. I forgot the question. This is-

Brian Bosche:
No, is there a schedule? Do you say like, "Hey, we're doing six tweets a day, we're doing 25," how do you determine who's doing what at what time?

Nathalie Balda:
Yes, there is. There's usually one person that's in charge of the account, one person that tweets whatever is on the content calendar. Then basically it's a big Slack channel where I would go like, "Hey, I'm about to tweet," or like, "Oh, shit, I just tweeted this, I'm sorry. I know you were about to tweet. I totally forgot." It's like that really.

Brian Bosche:
Yeah, it's just humans just sending stuff out.

Nathalie Balda:
Just try. When the show is live, I would say that we had a pretty solid content calendar of things we knew people would react to, but I would say at least 50% of what we were doing was real-time to someone finding something funny. We told a lot of people to ef-off and that was our main stress, I guess.

Brian Bosche:
What moments surprised you that caught on with fans more than you thought it would? Do any jump to mind?

Nathalie Balda:
The milk.

Brian Bosche:
The milk?

Nathalie Balda:
Yeah.

Brian Bosche:
In The Boys?

Nathalie Balda:
Yeah. I knew it was going to be big, I just didn't think it was going to go ... People really went hard into it. It was a lot. [crosstalk 00:26:32].

Brian Bosche:
In your strategy meetings, you're not like, "Let's go hard into this"?

Nathalie Balda:
No, I definitely wanted to do a God Milk? type of ad and there's a lot of things that we wanted to do, but COVID happened and we couldn't shoot a lot of things. It was like, "All right, fans are going to see it anyways." It was just interesting how quickly it just resonated. It's just disgusting. The things that they were doing with those memes, it wasn't great but it was fun.

Brian Bosche:
That's a good one. God, what a creepy show that I loved. I usually am not creepy horror show type of a person but this one got me. This is really good. Okay, we have a great question from the audience, [Adam Ilenich 00:27:13]. Do you know Adam?

Nathalie Balda:
Love him. Love you, Adam. That's it.

Brian Bosche:
He wants to know how you develop these different brand voices? At what part of the process do you start to understand how you're going to tweet from these different accounts and how do you actually establish what that voice is?

Nathalie Balda:
I think in every marketing campaign for entertainment, the voice of the show is defined very early on. There's a specific we are, we are not type of thing. Let's call it the basic tenants of the show. From there, you can basically start coming up with a strategy. For us, for something like The Boys, for example, I didn't do season one, but there was a very much like a Billy Butcher tone to the account, and I wanted to lean a lot more into that. But in season two if you see, there's a lot of things that sound like Butcher and there's a lot of things that sound like anyone with a foul mouth, I guess, would just tweet. I wanted to move more into the relatable "I'm your brad" type of thing more than Butcher, and that was-

Brian Bosche:
Which is harsh. It's a harsh voice for that, yeah.

Nathalie Balda:
It's harsh, exactly. For people to love you online, you can tell that it's awesome because we could tell them to ef-off and they loved it even more, but we also had to be relatable and lovable every once in a while. We've moved a little bit away from that, and that was like I would say 10 months before the show launched maybe that we had to get new strategy approved for the show, yeah. I think-

Brian Bosche:
For the voice itself?

Nathalie Balda:
Yeah, and then you go through a lot of iterations of what the content calendar would look like on that voice and what are the things in those brainstorms that came up and you're like, "Absolutely not, this is not going to happen." It takes a lot of "This is going to be bad," but it takes a lot of trial and error to get it right.

Brian Bosche:
Yeah, I'm sure.

Nathalie Balda:
Yeah. There's a lot of if it's in the world and it's in the tone of a character, there's a lot more involvement from producers or writers and things because they help you do that, but then it takes a lot more processes and approvals.

Brian Bosche:
Yes. That's a great segue to my next question. I'm so curious on this. How do you just send tweets out? Is there a review and approval process that goes into it? Are there pre-approved responses? Because I feel like some of the best tweets I've seen from brand accounts couldn't possibly be ... They're like at 10:00 p.m., they're not getting approval and they're just like spur of the moment. How much do you have to get things approved before they go out, not just at The Boys or at Amazon but any of these companies?

Nathalie Balda:
If you think about a content calendar, most of the things that are in the content calendar you need to get approved or want to approve based on basic guidelines. Things that are riskier, you run it by a couple people and then there's those one-offs, like what you're saying, like 10:00 p.m. tweets that you're like, "Hmm, fuck it."

Brian Bosche:
Just fire it off?

Nathalie Balda:
Let's see what happens type of thing, but those you usually do when you're very sure that it's going to work out. Remember a year ago when Netflix was like, "What was one thing you can tweet from your brand account and whatever," and it blew up, I should ask them. I don't know if that was approved or not but-

Brian Bosche:
That could not have been approved. That was insane.

Nathalie Balda:
That was insane. Things like that, I don't know. Sometimes they're pre-approved because I can imagine legal and other studios would go wild over studios interacting or other brands interacting with your brand. Yeah, I don't know. I think a lot of the good, good tweets that really take off are not approved.

Brian Bosche:
Yeah, they're just organic.

Nathalie Balda:
Like don't forget this. Like people, don't get fired over tweeting late at night. It's bad.

Brian Bosche:
That's scary. You can tell that they're authentic and you're like, "Oh," you know there's a social media manager behind there that's just giggling to themselves and is like, "Yes, I just did this."

Nathalie Balda:
Exactly, and those are the best ones, to be honest. There's a lot of things that I would tweet and I would just literally laugh to myself and send it to the other guys that had access to the account, and I'm like, "I'm sorry but I had to type it in."

Brian Bosche:
Yeah, exactly. This is a question you don't have to answer but it's from [Zach McIver 00:31:37], [Zach McVick 00:31:38].

Nathalie Balda:
McVicker.

Brian Bosche:
McVicker, so you know this person, too? How many times have you typed fuck soups into a caption? That is like you get these ... You know it's the voice.

Nathalie Balda:
Yeah, way too many. That was the most interesting process of this account. The amount of times that I had to get approval to use the C word, for example, on edits, it was a lot. Yeah, I got in a lot of trouble once because I didn't really sunshine it, I just ran it through people that I knew who were going to be like, "Oh, yeah, it's [inaudible 00:32:12]," rather than [inaudible 00:32:14]. Fuck soups on the caption, a lot, way too many. Fuck soups on replies to people, way too many. It's pretty fun. It's been fun. I've never gotten to curse at people before.

Brian Bosche:
I love that that's the tone of the show, though. Okay, so I've asked a few other social people this, Paul Bae, about the OKC Thunder where he was talking about how he works with players to capture this social content. I'm curious, how do you interact with the cast, with the producers, with the show themselves when you're putting this content together? Do they have to approve stuff? Do they have ideas that they want give? Because you have a lot of great personalities on the cast. How do you bottle that up and reflect that on social? Because especially for The Boys, I'm looking at Homelander, him in real life, and he's a totally different person and I don't like it. I'm like, "I don't like you but you're just your normal person now, you're not acting." How do you interact with the cast when you're working on these different campaigns?

Nathalie Balda:
It could be through different channels, I guess. It could be through PR, it could be you talking directly to them. A lot of times, you're building content that you know they're going to like as they go ... The last thing you want, I can assume with players, too, is your players or your talent mad at you because you're making them look bad. I guess it would be really similar. You work with them and trying to explain to them why every once in a while you're going to tell Antony, Homelander, you're just going to be like, "Fuck you," and he's going to have to be cool with it and it's not you don't like him.

Brian Bosche:
Yeah, because that's the role he bought into.

Nathalie Balda:
It's just the role he plays in our account. I'm sorry, my dog is going crazy.

Brian Bosche:
Oh, no, that's okay. You're talking about Homelander, it's scary.

Nathalie Balda:
Right. I think the biggest role that you would play in this scenario with talent at that would be to make sure that they understand the strategy and that you understand who they are also as a person and not a character. When you're giving them content for them to post, you're giving them content around what they like and not what you need them to do.

Brian Bosche:
Yeah. Yeah, that makes sense. Are there some that are really good at it and that you totally get it and some you have to pull teeth a little bit from?

Nathalie Balda:
For sure. For sure. Not naming names.

Brian Bosche:
No, no names. You do not have to name names. Yeah, it's-

Nathalie Balda:
There's people that are wonderful to work with and it's the funnest thing you could ever imagine, and then there's some other people that are-

Brian Bosche:
Some are hard.

Nathalie Balda:
Yeah.

Brian Bosche:
Such is life.

Nathalie Balda:
It's weird because at the end of the day, think about your own personal channels. You don't want to post things that are #Ad. It's fair. I respect it.

Brian Bosche:
Yeah, it makes a lot of sense and it's good when we talked about Steven Adams and that he was so fun to work with on the Thunder because he would just do these little silly antics after practice every day, like throwing balls into the rack and he'd miss 37 in a row and he'd make the last one and be like, "First try," and they can just bottle those little social moments up of the player personalities, and I'm sure you can do with the cast as well. Yeah, that's fun to see. It's fun to see like, "Hey, please post this," and it's funny to envision a social team harassing an actor to make sure to post on their channels.

Nathalie Balda:
Yeah, and think about it this way, too. A lot of times, you give them content but most of the times, they're shooting things on their own phones. They're shooting the best BTS that you'll never get. They're shooting the greatest things, and think about Comic Cons and things like that, for example. We're creating the best content. A lot of times, it's facilitating a crew maybe for them to have better quality content. That's when you come in with the support more than anything, I guess.

Brian Bosche:
Just like you said, it's helping them understand the strategy, so when they do things like that, they're already on board.

Nathalie Balda:
Exactly, exactly.

Brian Bosche:
Let's switch over to mental health in social. As you said, it's been a very hard year for social media managers. Any tips you want to give social media managers out there dealing with trolls, dealing with nonstop, 24/7 being online, your eyes bleeding from looking at a screen for too long? Any tips you want to give to other managers out there?

Nathalie Balda:
There's one specific because I had a really hard time with this, and it's the art of disconnecting.

Brian Bosche:
Like turn off your phone? Like put it away?

Nathalie Balda:
Yeah, just like walk away from everything for a minute. Even-

Brian Bosche:
Where do I get my dopamine then?

Nathalie Balda:
Exactly. I honestly don't understand that either but it works. There was a time towards the end of The Boys where I literally was sleeping two hours a day just because I wanted to be reacting all the time at night.

Brian Bosche:
Yeah, and you're so wired. You just get that constant positive feedback loop.

Nathalie Balda:
Honestly, I was really trying to not get the agency involved at after hours because I felt bad that someone had to work after hours, so it was like me overnight and then waking up to meetings anyways. My advice would be try to get some sleep. Eight hours of sleep a day, it's amazing how much better your brain works when you do get some rest. Other than that, have fun. At the end of the day, doing social, think about it like having fun. When it stops being fun, then it's time to move on, I guess.

Brian Bosche:
Move on to a new show.

Nathalie Balda:
Yeah, exactly.

Brian Bosche:
Do a different voice. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Okay, a couple more questions before we close out here. Entertainment, I think, is one of the best in class of doing social, everything we just discussed. What can some other industries ... Like I'm in B2B. There's some older industries in manufacturing that might not be as active on social media. What advice would you give to those industries on the power of social that you've learned from the entertainment industry?

Nathalie Balda:
I think it's all centered around building communities. It doesn't matter if you're not doing entertainment marketing. At the end of the day, the people that are following you is because there's a common interest. Finding ways to create a safe space for people to have conversations about that common interest or you providing that asset or that, call it, like a photo or a video where people can learn more about something and you do it in an entertaining way or an informative way, I think that's a good lesson that you can take from entertainment in general, but it could be applied to anything, really.

Brian Bosche:
Any industry has a group of people that focus on it, so that's just what you can do.

Nathalie Balda:
Exactly.

Brian Bosche:
Might not be on TikTok but it could be on some other channels that they're on.

Nathalie Balda:
Think about it. You could be entertaining ... I don't know, think about-

Brian Bosche:
I just had Johnas Street on and he does social for Cadence, which is like telecommunications, electrical engineer ... I can't even remember the industries because they're so technical, but there's a place for it. There's a community there.

Nathalie Balda:
Place for it. Yeah, think about it, when did Burger King and Wendy's and Oreo, when did food become funny on Twitter?

Brian Bosche:
Seriously. The primo brands or the fast food restaurants.

Nathalie Balda:
Right. When did that happen? A cheeseburger is not funny but they found a way to make it hilarious. There's a way to talk to your audience and it doesn't have to be super technical and pristine, I guess, so look into that.

Brian Bosche:
Yeah. What's your favorite channel to manage, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, Triller?

Nathalie Balda:
I haven't noticed really yet, to be honest but, goddamn, I think Twitter.

Brian Bosche:
Twitter's your favorite?

Nathalie Balda:
I think this year Twitter just because it gets one-on-one communication with the fans. It's actually building a community. I think Instagram is really cool for really good photos and videos and the creative as a whole. But on the connection part of everything, Twitter has been my favorite this year.

Brian Bosche:
Yeah, it builds community, just like you said, more than any platforms. TikTok seems to be coming forward a little bit because TikTok comments are almost funnier than TikTok videos and how people interact with it. But Twitter, it's so underrated, too, because it's not one of the first advertising platforms you even think of.

Nathalie Balda:
It's not. When you think about it from an entertainment point of view, it's not the place where you go watch videos, it's not the place where you could go. [crosstalk 00:41:02]

Brian Bosche:
It's the fandom. It's like you're talking about, I want to have a conversation with the fans.

Nathalie Balda:
Exactly. That's why for this year's strategy, we leaned a lot into checks on retweets because it was like they would always [crosstalk 00:41:13].

Brian Bosche:
Just drive the conversation, yeah.

Nathalie Balda:
Yeah, it was just like a space where people ... Literally, I would tweet something like, "Tell us to fuck off," and all of Twitter would reply like, "Fuck off." It's great. They're just going with the show. Yeah, Twitter was fun. Twitter is my favorite right now.

Brian Bosche:
Twitter has been really fun this year in general as people ... I'm stuck in my one-bedroom apartment in Seattle. I just want to reach out to the community, and Twitter's where you can actually interact with people like that.

Nathalie Balda:
Exactly. No, I've met amazing people on Twitter this year. Case in point, here we are.

Brian Bosche:
Us, yeah, this is where we are. Okay, one more question for you but before that, I just wanted to shout out Sprout Social's Sprout Spotlight Awards, you are a finalist for Best in Class Social. Let's go. I voted for you.

Nathalie Balda:
Yes, thank you. Don't tell Adrian and everyone else, I guess, they'll get [inaudible 00:42:03].

Brian Bosche:
Sorry, Adrian. I didn't vote for you. This was before I knew you were coming on the podcast so it wasn't even that biased, even though it's a tiny bit biased. Just want to shout out. You're doing some amazing work. I'll have you do plugs right now, but I'm going to let you delay a little bit because the last question is always what is your parting shot to the audience? What is the one piece of wisdom that you want to communicate to everyone? It's a little bit of pressure, so that's why I'm doing plugs now so your subconscious can work on an answer. Where can people find you, vote for you on Sprout Social Awards?

Nathalie Balda:
I'm @natbalda everywhere, literally everywhere. [crosstalk 00:42:44].

Brian Bosche:
Amazing.

Nathalie Balda:
They could find me everywhere. I honestly don't know how to answer your question.

Brian Bosche:
What's one piece of advice? It's been all over the place. What is your parting shot? I'll cue it up.

Nathalie Balda:
Honestly, this is not going to be the greatest advice ever, but just have fun, I think. At the end of the day, no one is going to die if you don't send that tweet. Don't take it too serious. Have fun. You're just engaging with people. I don't know, that's like-

Brian Bosche:
It's like talking with your friends

Nathalie Balda:
Yeah, that's what the conversations I'm having, like, oh, hard day, I guess.

Brian Bosche:
The parting shot is not a big deal, by the way, but that was a great one. I really liked that one.

Nathalie Balda:
Thank you.

Brian Bosche:
All right, thanks everyone for listening. Nat, thank you so much for coming on. That was a really fun conversation. Rate and review us. I always forget to say that, too. Do you think people actually rate and review when you say rate and review?

Nathalie Balda:
I don't know. Let's try it. Where do you go? Go [crosstalk 00:43:46].

Brian Bosche:
Rate and review.

Nathalie Balda:
I don't know what it is. I think I'm on YouTube.

Brian Bosche:
This is audio. We're pointing even though it's still audio. We're not good at this.

Nathalie Balda:
Right. Right. We're pointing. Like click on the button.

Brian Bosche:
Click it. Just do five stars. It's fine. We did a good job.

Nathalie Balda:
Great interview. Great interview.

Brian Bosche:
All right. Thanks, Nat.

Nathalie Balda:
Thank you.