Social Media Examiner

“The value that you get for this ticket price is unbelievable." Hear why Maggie Carey calls Social Media Marketing World "the place to be." 👇 socialmediaexaminer.com/nm9x #SMMW27

New at #SMMW27: the Creator Track. Learn from Derral Eves, Sean Cannell, Maria Wendt, Adley Kinsman & more. Then meet the marketers who hire creators. April 1–3, Anaheim. socialmediaexaminer.com/ngfl

Dan Woodruff didn’t know what Social Media Marketing World was. A friend invited him. He went. His takeaway: “Define what you want to get, and then come and get it.” Who would you bring to #SMMW27? 👇 More info: socialmediaexaminer.com/nm9x

She flew from Austin to California and met her neighbors. 📍 Christina of LED Marketing on her favorite part of Social Media Marketing World: people who came to learn AND collaborate. See you at #SMMW 2027 in Anaheim! 👇 socialmediaexaminer.com/nm9x

Chris wanted to come to Social Media Marketing World for five years. He couldn’t justify it. Then he showed up…and he’ll be there next year, too! What’s held you back more, budget or the boss? (Chris has a line for the boss. Watch to the end.) Learn more about #SMMW27: socialmediaexaminer.com/nm9x 👋-Jason

One word. 30,000 new followers. A marketer changed her Reel hook from "homeowners" to "women who just bought a home." Same video, same offer. Specificity stops the scroll. Free guide: socialmediaexaminer.com/w7xe

Almost every marketer is using AI now. The harder question: are you actually getting better at it, or stuck in the same patterns you started with? We built a free quiz that places you on one of five levels and shows you the one move that matters most for your level right now. No pitch. Just clarity. Take it here 👇 socialmediaexaminer.com/5czh

Last day. 50% off all Social Media Marketing World and AI Business World tickets ends tonight at 11:59 PM. Prices go up tomorrow. All-Access covers both: 3 days of marketing training + 2 full days of dedicated AI sessions. Refundable through October. socialmediaexaminer.com/nm9x

The math this week: at 50% off, one full-price Social Media Marketing World ticket now covers two people. Bring a colleague, come back with a shared playbook, and start implementing the same week. Built for small-business marketers. Taught by practitioners doing the work. socialmediaexaminer.com/nm9x

Social Media Marketing World: 3 days of hand-selected practitioners teaching organic social, paid media, AI, and strategy. No panels. No pitches from the stage. Just tactics you can run the week you get home. Tickets are 50% off this week! Sale ends Friday, Aug 28 at 11:59 PM Pacific. 👉 socialmediaexaminer.com/nm9x #SMMW27

681 marketers told us how they actually use AI. Not the hype, not the guru predictions. The 3rd annual AI Marketing Industry Report is here: which tools marketers trust, how they save time, what they spend, what worries them. 32 charts, free and ungated. aisociety.socialmediaexamine…

Your AI prompts are great. That's actually the problem. Prompting has a ceiling: nothing runs until you show up, and AI can't touch your real tools. AI strategist Isar Meitis calls it the "operator gap." He broke down how to cross it on AI Explored. Free field guide here 👇 socialmediaexaminer.com/zimx

Last year, I seriously considered shutting Social Media Examiner down. After 16 years of building, I was hitting brick wall after brick wall. And the story I kept telling myself was, "It's time to call it quits." The narrative in my brain went something like this: "Nothing is working anymore." "You've been going at this too long." "You're too old for this. It's time to move on." And I was really, really close—multiple times—to just shutting it all down. AI was zooming past. Everything was changing rapidly. And in my mind, I had already decided it wasn't going to work. But then I started looking around. I noticed other people were actually figuring out how to make it work. So I did a little introspective analysis on myself. And I said, "Maybe I'm the problem." The moment I named the real issue—me and the way I was thinking—everything shifted. The fear of failure literally lifted off of me. And I stepped into opportunity. Here's what I discovered. In the early days of my company, I had no idea what I was doing. But in the latter days, I was trapped by my experience. The things I had always done built walls along the side of me, forcing me to move in only one direction. Experience can be a trap. When something works over and over again, you build a rut for yourself without even realizing it. I had to break those walls down. I had to say, "No. I'm not too old. This is not the end. Remember what you did when you built it." So I jumped out of the rut. I started experimenting. I started trying brand new things. And the moment I did, everything turned around. My energy came back. My excitement came back. The truth is the brain is a very powerful thing—and we can get stuck in it. Have you ever been stuck? What did you do to get out of it? I'd love to hear from you.

Nicole Leffer's AI demo died on stage. The platform went down mid-presentation. She opened the same Excel workbook in a different AI, and it picked up exactly where it left off. Same agent, same memory, different brain. Want to know how to build an AI workflow that survives outages, price hikes, and model changes? Download our interactive field guide. 👇 socialmediaexaminer.com/70wj

Survey closes Sunday. Bonus: Most people say the questions alone show them where their own AI usage has gaps. A few minutes, real impact on the report. surveymonkey.com/r/BDJ86FZ What's one AI use case you keep putting off?

You don't need more AI tips. You need to know which ones actually matter. The AI Business Society filters the noise every week: expert-led training, live skill-building sessions, a community working through the same challenges you are. socialmediaexaminer.com/ndpa What's one AI tool you keep hearing about but haven't learned yet?

We're building our annual AI marketing report, and we need real data from real marketers, not more hot takes. Quick survey on how you're using AI, what's working, and what's not. Closes Sunday. surveymonkey.com/r/BDJ86FZ 🤔 What's the one AI tool you'd never give up right now?

Many marketers added AI to their ad process. The grind didn't go away. On July 16, AI Business Society members are learning to build an AI system using Claude Code that writes the prompts, generates the variations, and reviews its own output. No coding required. 30-day money-back guarantee. What part of ad creative still eats your time? socialmediaexaminer.com/ndpa

Many marketers are already paying for AI education. Just in hours, not dollars: searching, testing, rewriting. The AI Business Society does the filtering for you: curated training, live sessions, rapid-fire lessons, and peers who share what actually works. 30-day money-back guarantee. What's the AI skill you keep meaning to learn? socialmediaexaminer.com/ndpa

I was days away from vacation. My product site looked like it was built five years ago. And I had zero budget to fix it. That's when I decided to try something I'd never done before. In the past, I hired a user interface designer. He built the design system. Then I hired a WordPress developer to make it come to life. This process would take months and tens of thousands of dollars. This time, I didn't have the luxury of going that route. I needed something quick and it needed to look good. Then it clicked. There was a new way to solve this problem. A guest on my AI Explored podcast was raving about the relatively new Claude Design. It's capable of creating slides, wireframes, animations and… landing pages. It was a Saturday and I was just days away from going on vacation. No better time to try something new, right? What I experienced absolutely blew my mind. Here's what I did. I downloaded the product logo and masthead image from my AI Business Society sales page. The main image was an illustration of people in the wilderness pointing to a mountain. And the logo looked like a badge with earth-tone colors. I then went to Claude, clicked on the Design icon, and chose Design System. All I did was upload those two images and the URL of the landing page. Before my eyes, I saw the art elements come alive. Claude Design created motifs and surfaces (paper grain, trail rules, brass hairlines, dark fields), core brand colors (barn red, forest green, brass, sunrise ember…), fonts and spacing, buttons and icons, and a whole lot more. It also was able to clearly identify my style of writing. It keyed in on things like sentence rhythm, social proof use, and even outcomes over features. All of this was simply discerned from what little I gave it. What happened next was the big unlock. There was an option to create a landing page. So I clicked on it. It asked me if I would like to see multiple hero sections to select from. Of course I said yes. Then it started building out the full landing page. It wrote all the copy and it was good. It crafted all the sections. It was amazing. I was flabbergasted. I then downloaded the HTML file and sent it off to two of my staffers and texted them. They loved it. I would go on to art direct Claude Design by simply telling it what to change, just like I was talking to a person. We are now running a split test on the new design and so far it is winning. The initial design took less than an hour. Let me know if you want to see the before and after. Have you tried out Claude Design? I'd love to hear from you. - @Mike_Stelzner