Social Platforms Are Flooded With AI Slop | Misbah & Farah Uraizee

Misbah Uraizee (0:00)

We, on our side, have measured 5X increase just from March alone inside of these social platforms of AI-generated content. Ultimately, I think most content is gonna be AI-generated content.

I think it's gonna be hard to discern whether it's authentic or not. I see this as like a tool that everyone is gonna adopt. So there's no fighting it, in my opinion. It's more of how do you then qualify what is actual high-quality content, what is an actual real person that you should be collaborating with, you know, working with to represent your business. And I think that's where some of those problems really get interesting, and those are the kind of problems that we think about at Nectar a lot.

MTS (0:37)

Hello, everyone, and welcome back to MTS. Today, I'm joined by Misbah and Farah, who are both the co-founders and sisters together of Nectar Social. So, so excited to be with you guys here today in person.

Misbah Uraizee (0:49)

So excited to be here as well. Thank you for having us. Likewise.

MTS (0:51)

Thank you guys for joining. Let's talk a little bit about the origin story, because I do think it's unique to find sisters who are founders and you guys understand the space so well. Maybe Misbah, I would love to start with you. How did Nectar Social begin?

Misbah Uraizee (1:04)

Yeah. Where did Nectar begin? Honestly, it goes back like decades, but I will start with the more recent history. I spent the last decade on the product enduring side for the same thing. Both of us found ourselves at Meta for a while, overlapping, working on the same floor at Jason Teams. And that's really where Nectar and the space that we operate in was incubated. And we're happy to unpack that even more. Yeah, that's here. Yeah, fun fact, we were on the same floor at Meta.

I was engineering leader on Facebook groups, growing out that product from 10 to 1,000, really. Misbah was leading feed product across the board. Brain-grinder monetization. And we were really just in the belly of the beast, like seeing how consumers were changing their behaviors rapidly, going from feeds to private groups to messaging, and how brands were falling behind. And if they weren't building those relationships with their consumers, they were at the mercy of Meta ads and having to pay rented space and relationships instead.

Owned is everything. Honestly, we saw black and white. If you're a brand that was growing rapidly off of Meta ads alone and then the privacy changes hit, you kind of died. Yeah. And if you were actually building direct relationships with consumers and prioritizing that internally, just in terms of where you were hiring, you still survived.

And so that was a really front row seat into brand building 101

But also more importantly, I think working inside of a platform like Meta is consumer psychology front row seat as well.

Where are consumers spending most amount of time? What are they doing? Where do they discover? How is shopping fundamentally changing? I think that whole ecosystem has significantly shifted in the last five years, and especially in the last two years. If you look at platforms like TikTok, for example, two-thirds of TikTok users within the first eight seconds are searching for something.

MTS (2:45)

Wow. Really? I had no idea. Are searching for something like a product that they want to buy?

Misbah Uraizee (2:49)

They're searching for a product, they're looking for reviews.

If you look at platforms like Reddit, we have enterprise data partnerships with all of these major social platforms. And Reddit, same thing, it's the most cited source when you're inside of an LLM and ChatGPT, and you're trying to search for the next kitchen, I don't know, something, product that you want to buy. You're just going to, for that category and those kinds of categories, you're just going to trust and purchase. You have two readers, you have humans, and you also have LLMs.

MTS (3:15)

Oh my gosh, what's interesting about your guys' background is that you've been at the forefront of how brands have been actually doing advertising from the very beginning. I think even meta ads was a bit new to just being able to be online and actually try to use technical tools, social tools to identify how to position your brand. And now we're entering this whole black box era. Brands don't even know how to actually position themselves, what data they should be doing, how they should be tracking, how do you actually track ROI of your marketing spend? And so maybe I would love to start with your perspective. How has this whole era panned out? What's the history of it? Where did it start? Where is it now?