We’re about 22 people, and everyone takes the orders, makes the bagels, and does everything.<\/p>\n
You always have to recreate the wheel to stay competitive. Social media is where you need to be. I’m not naive to it, but it’s not a stronger part of my experiences. So, I’m learning.<\/p>\n
In the past, I’ve had great employees \u2014\u00a0i.e., college students<\/a> \u2014\u00a0who love social media themselves, so they’re happy to take it on. It’d be good for a few months, but then the rest of their lives come into place, and it wasn’t a full-time job. It would slowly die. We’d get along fine, but then I’d throw another person on, and the same thing would happen.<\/p>\n Why I used AI for our shop’s social media posts<\/p>\n I was pointed to a company that helps small businesses with AI. It helps with human resources<\/a>. I have a paid accountant and bookkeeper. They can give me their analysis, but why not have a third opinion?<\/p>\n This program does many different aspects of business, and one is social media. It was nice. There’s a calendar where you can build a whole month of posts to release on Instagram. We’re a college town, so graduation is coming up. I’d ask: What’s a neat spin on a post about graduation to encourage someone to come in? The program comes up with an idea.<\/p>\n It allows us to import our photos that we’ve taken, and it uses those, but it can tweak them. <\/strong>Part of the picture was real. I looked at it and said, “Not too bad.” Some of the AI bagels they had in the background didn’t look like ours, and I would say, “Can you make that smaller and thinner?”<\/p>\n It didn’t take long for our audience to realize what we were posting wasn’t 100% Myer’s. I appreciate their passion for us not doing this the way they’d like.<\/p>\n AI turned an online review for Myer’s Bagels into a handwritten note.\u00a0<\/p>\n Myer’s Bagels<\/p>\n One had a picture of our retail bags <\/strong>for the grocery store. Those were actually our photos of the bags. The AI went into our Google, Yelp, or old Instagram comments and pulled out a review from Sam. It put our bags in front of a wood fire that wasn’t our fire, and took that quote and made a fake handwritten note.<\/p>\n Was it untruthful? Yes. Was it our fire, image, and background? No. For McDonald’s<\/a> or anyone else who’s advertising food, it’s in a studio. But Sam is a real person. Sam made that quote, and those were our bags.<\/p>\n We have a picture that we’d used before of our baker rolling out the dough. AI took that photo, superimposed it on a nice wooden cutting board, and then put a fire in the background and a kettle to boil bagels.<\/p>\n That’s not how we’re laid out, and our customers know that. But it was our real bagels, real hands, real dough.<\/p>\n AI generated a new layout of the Myer’s Bagels retail store, something customers noticed.\u00a0<\/p>\n Myer’s Bagels<\/p>\n Between those two photos, I bet there were 25-30 comments for each one, plus people replying.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n