Eric Hultgren (00:02)
the way to weaponize your own curiosity is to go the other direction. Find wonder in everything. And I often say two phrases when I'm teaching in college or working with clients is that one, fun and play aren't the same thing. We always want to be playing and sometimes it's fun, but those aren't the same thing. And the other thing is if you can put your head
space in the mind of a child. How would a child look at this problem?
Ben Ard (00:52)
Welcome back to another episode of Content Amplified. Today I'm joined by Eric. Eric, welcome to the show.
Eric Hultgren (00:57)
Thank you, it is my pleasure to be here, my friend.
Ben Ard (00:59)
Yeah, Eric, I'm excited. Even in our pre-conversation before we hit the record button, I can tell you have a crazy amount of passion for this subject. I'm excited to dive in. But before we get there, tell us, the audience, a little bit about yourself and your background.
Eric Hultgren (01:13)
Sure. I am a storyteller by trade. I've been telling stories since I had a camera in my hands at age eight. As of right now, I work for a company called Advanced Local running their national content platform. So we have four verticals that we do in travel, education, recruitment, and health care. So I manage all of that for both our external getting clients in and in some cases helping the clients scale up their own content. Prior to that, I worked for I Heart Media for two decades.
And during that time was doing some fill in work on the ABC affiliate here in Michigan. So I've sort of done, if it's in media, I've done most of it.
Ben Ard (01:49)
I it. This is amazing. You have a phrase I have never heard before and I am obsessed now with this phrase. I think it's amazing. I think it's so cool. We're going to talk a little bit about this today. Weaponized curiosity. Now with that phrase, you could take that in a million different directions, but what do you mean by that term that you've come up with?
Eric Hultgren (02:08)
What I mean by that term is that I have a question about everything. And to some extent, it drives my wife insane. But from a work perspective, it's highly helpful. So I'll give you a real quick story. We were doing a video shoot here in Michigan at a company that made microprocessors. And they wanted the kind of who we are about us video for the website. So we're doing kind of the pre-storyboarding. we're walking around. And she's showing me the clean room. And she's showing me where they make the, you know,
all the stuff and walking by employees is stage one, stage two, stage three. And then she walks by this card table and she goes, and that's where we test the black boxes. And then she keeps going. And I go, wait, wait, wait, wait, like, like black boxes, black boxes. She's like, yeah, like what, what, happens over here? And she goes, well, in this box, we turn the black box to the temperature of the sun essentially. And it takes 10 days to cool down. If it passes that test, it goes to box number two, where we simulate.
60,000 feet of pressure or something crazy like that. And if it passes those two things, it ends up in a plane or a train. And then she walks away again. And you don't think that is an interesting story. You take a box and you throw it into the sun and watch it come careening back down to the earth and then give it to a client. And that's not the most interesting thing you've done today. That's what I mean by weaponized curiosity. So many times, especially in B2B, we are so close to the product that we do that it bores us to death.
And so I tend to lean into this weaponized curiosity to make sure that I'm always questioning what we're doing to make sure that we're delivering best for the audience. We're trying to serve.
Ben Ard (03:34)
I love that. So obviously there's this innate talent that you have. I'm sure you were born with this to a degree to have this natural curiosity, but for anyone who's listening and thinking, well, I need to develop more of this curiosity, dive into the audience a little bit better. Any recommendations about how they can question everything and where that comes from, even like daily activities that they can take a part in just to get better at it.
Eric Hultgren (03:56)
Yeah.
I think it's easy, especially in a year like now, to lean into the cynicism and
the way to weaponize your own curiosity is to go the other direction. Find wonder in everything. And I often say two phrases when I'm teaching in college or working with clients is that one, fun and play aren't the same thing. We always want to be playing and sometimes it's fun, but those aren't the same thing. And the other thing is if you can put your head
space in the mind of a child. How would a child look at this problem?
Those are two quick ways that you can dial down the cynicism and dial up the, I wonder why they do that.
Ben Ard (04:36)
I love that. That's amazing. So when you have this curiosity, how are you letting that translate into the content that you're producing and let that shine through and kind of the end piece. Like I love this example of the black boxes, how you ask these questions and it kind of led you to a new story to be told. How do you help that translate into the different content that you're producing for your audiences in general?
Eric Hultgren (05:00)
Yeah, so this isn't much of a cheat code, but Reddit is a great source. There is a subreddit in marketing in any vertical that you are working in, I promise. And if you go there and you lurk and you listen to the problems that they're talking about, often you will have a litany of these aha moments. And I go back to when I worked in radio, one of the things I would do every Friday is I would go to the mall. And as I talk to students in high school and college, I tell them that's a building where we used to buy things, right?
But I would go to the mall and I would go to the clothing stores and listen to the overhead musax system because when you're running a radio station, you're programming a soundtrack for somebody to get from point A to point B. It's their musical score. And so I was trying to figure out, OK, what are the songs that Ben wants to listen to as he goes to his class or he goes on a first date or goes to a movie? It's the same thing. So go to places where you can observe like you're an anthropologist.
And that's how you can move that into your content and go, I didn't know. I thought they were worried about AI doing X. And it turns out they're worried about AI doing Y. Let's shift the content over to talk about AI doing Y, which I figured out because I went to where the actual customer is and either went to a conference and asked them or went to Reddit and watched them.
Ben Ard (06:13)
I love that. So you're talking about kind of doing things the opposite that everyone else is doing to a degree. Does this mean that you're meeting with customers and people more often in person? Like that that's an actual something you're carving out day in and day out where right now everyone talks to people digitally. They can send the emails. They can do all that stuff. Are you a proponent of like more in-person opportunities like the black box experience?
Eric Hultgren (06:36)
I mean, absolutely. think if we go back to the pre-call of this episode, if you and I were in person, that pre-call would have been probably three times as long, because we would just gotten jamming about all the stuff that we were talking about, because there's that serendipity and that energy that you miss when you put it in front of a mediated device. And so if you can, when you're at a conference, if you work in B2B marketing or B2C marketing,
and your employer or you you work for yourself as an entrepreneur you get the gift to go to a conference and you don't feel every minute talking with carbon-based life forms over coffee or beer you're missing the point of going to that particular conference even if you don't think the conference is great you still have an opportunity to make some insights.
Ben Ard (07:17)
Okay, I love this. This is amazing. So I'm going to take this a different direction because of one line you sent in an email to me as we were talking beforehand. How does AI play a role in weaponized curiosity? Where is it productive and where is it not in this whole process?
Eric Hultgren (07:33)
So I mean, and you and I probably both see the million and a half people on TikTok and Instagram and LinkedIn telling me to write 15,000 terrible posts using chat GPT or cloud or perplexity or whatever one you want to use. Right. So I don't say that's a good idea. What I use AI for is essentially as a writing partner. You were just talking like we spend most of our time online. A lot of times I'm working from my home. There's no one else here. And if I have an idea, I might use
And AI probably usually chat or perplexity or Claude. Like those are my three that I go to, to beat it up a little bit and see if there's a there there. And then I'll take it two steps further. One, I've got kind of a core group people that I'll text and I'll kind of text the idea. What do we think about this? And then I'll pick up the phone and talk to some of my team members about where we are. But I use AI every single day, either as the aforementioned B2C site where we're using it as a search engine.
right? It helps me search or I'm using it as a writing partner. Like it's a writing room to help me either iterate something I'm working on or flush out an idea or poke holes in something faster than I can poke holes in it. And I find the access that you have when you're using multiples of them keeps that weaponized curiosity kind of top of mind.
Ben Ard (08:47)
I it. How did you get this text message group? Like, how did that start? Because that's an interesting idea, being able to throw ideas around. You have people. I'm assuming they're texting you as well. Where did that come from, and how did you pull that off?
Eric Hultgren (08:55)
Yeah. Yeah.
was from having a lack and this is not what this podcast is about, but you and I wrote in the business space. was having a lack of feedback. I was doing a lot of video projects and all the feedback I would get was, was this was awesome. And I would know in no uncertain terms that some of them were not awesome. And I went, I need to like, I need to get better and I need somebody to call this terrible or ugly or just help me iterate on it. And so I went to look for people in creative fields that you may not see as creative. So they.
own a coffee shop, or maybe they do do video work, but there's like five or six of them that I know will tell me the truth, no matter what. And that's kind of how we started is we just created this Petri dish where we're not hurting anyone's feelings. We're trying to get the best thing out of each other. And we live in a world where feedback is really difficult because everybody wears kind of their heart on their sleeve. And so feedback can hurt, but
It's the most freeing and my favorite thing ever is when that thing dings and it's that group chat. Like this'll be, this'll make my day better.
Ben Ard (09:58)
That's awesome. love that. We actually, my wife and we were sitting at the breakfast table with our kids and we were talking to them like, we're going to correct you because we love you. Like that, that is something that we have to do to help you. Please don't be offended. Please don't like think that you're a terrible person. You're doing so many great things. But the fact that I actually am comfortable enough to tell you you're doing something wrong.
Eric Hultgren (10:09)
Mm-hmm.
Ben Ard (10:25)
And there's a better way. It means I love you because the easy way is just to say, yeah, you're doing great. Don't change anything. And I think that's true. Having that group of people in your life that can call you out and say, this sucks is like really meaningful and valuable. So the fact that you have that is incredible.
Eric Hultgren (10:38)
And
And I would say on the parenting tip as they get older, allowing them to give you feedback because you're not going to be right all the time either, you know?
Ben Ard (10:49)
Yeah. I often tell my kids very frequently, I'm not good at this. Like I apologize. Like I didn't get training just the other night. I didn't get training for this. You came one day and I had to figure it out. So like, this is a two way street here with chat GPT in the mix and all of these AI tools, they are overly complimentary of what we're doing.
Eric Hultgren (10:53)
Ha ha!
Sure.
Ben Ard (11:10)
Have you found ways of having more honest response from AI? Cause I run into the problem all the time. I correct or I type something and almost everything is, this is a brilliant idea. How have you gotten past that with AI, just like your text message group?
Eric Hultgren (11:24)
Yeah, and I don't know that I've got a great way to get around that. There've been a couple prompts that work for a little while to kind of give it an edge that helps with that. But that's where I find the human element becomes vital is that if I've got something that I think is, let's 60 % there, 70 % there, I'll send it to my friend Nick and go, okay, I think I'm close, but you know, Claude seems to think I should win a Nobel Prize for this. And I know that we're not quite there. So could you get me somewhere between 60 % and Nobel Prize? That would be great.
Ben Ard (11:53)
Yeah, I love that. So with the curiosity, when you are trying to interact with your audience, we've talked about in-person events, we've talked about, you know, potentially having, you know, Zoom calls, things like that. Do you have any other methods for kind of extracting answers to your curiosity, working with your audience, understanding them? You talked about Reddit, anything else that comes to mind as far as like gold mines for finding information?
Eric Hultgren (12:17)
I so I would say that I don't necessarily have any gold mines that has not always already been mentioned on this show. But the you know, the third component of that would be looking at your data and looking at what pieces of content not only have engagement because that might not be a measuring stick that you want to use. Maybe it is conversion. I one of the fun things about where we work in marketing is that we've lost complete perspective on audience. So we get mad.
when 300 people watch our video. But if we went to a conference and spoke in front of 300 people, that would be a great day for us. And if it was 10,000 people, we would have thought we've arrived, right? And so it's looking at the data and making sure that the content is doing what you wanted that piece of content to do. So if it's just branding and you just want engagement, awesome. If you wanted them to do something and they didn't do it, well, that's on you. Either the content sucks or your call to action sucks. And it's kind of going back to that.
writer's room feedback mentality and going like, it's not who's right, it's what's right. And the audience is going to tell you the market will decide at every turn what we're going to do when.
Ben Ard (13:20)
Yeah, I love that. Okay. We're getting close to running out of time, but I have one kind of final question for you to understand how this works with your insane, you know, the, weaponized curiosity, the insane curiosity, internal, I don't want to call it politics because I don't think it's necessarily always the way there's typically inside of a business. There's a lot of people that do things because it's the way we've done them. And it's not just finding the insights and being curious about your audience. It's also.
getting everyone inside your organization to understand like that we need to ask more questions and maybe we need to tell different stories and go in different directions. How have you kind of spread the good word of curiosity amongst coworkers and people inside your business who may honestly very well be comfortable doing what they've always done before instead of asking the hard questions and maybe doing things a little bit differently. How have you found success there?
Eric Hultgren (14:12)
I built a personal brand. came from radio, right? So we were, we were building shows or personalities on the show. So I built a personal brand. And if I have an idea that I want to test, I test it on myself. And when it works, then I can bring it into the audience and go, look, I'm not coming to you with a half baked idea. I'm coming to you with a loaf of bread or a cake, pick your baked goods. Sure. Right. I'm coming to you with something fully baked that we can do now in this particular vertical. And we're just going to take this thing that I did and
tailor it for travel or tailor it for recruit.
Ben Ard (14:42)
I love that. Very cool. So the extra work and having like not just the idea coming to the table, it allows more people to get on board and be excited about kind of adoption of that.
Eric Hultgren (14:52)
I would say if you were going to start running a triathlon at the end of October, would you just start in October and run? No, you would go to the gym and you would go, you would do a work. So I don't say, see it as extra work. I see it as reps. It's my, if I want to get somebody to do something, marketing is getting somebody to take an action. If I want them to take an action, I have to do the reps in order to know how that works. So the personal branding stuff to me is just
honing my craft. It's not extra work at all. It's a joy. I want to make stuff every single day. And this job has gifted me with that ability. And so I don't I would just correct that I don't think it's extra work. I think it is the work.
Ben Ard (15:29)
love that. That's amazing. Eric, we have run out of time. We try to keep these episodes short so our audience can get back with their day and all the fun things that they're doing and hopefully weaponize their own curiosity and what they're doing day in and day out. I love this phrase. But Eric, for anyone who wants to reach out and connect with you online and further this conversation, how and where can they find you?
Eric Hultgren (15:48)
LinkedIn is probably the one that they will like the best, but it's Eric Halkren on every single platform you can think of. So I'm more fun on TikTok, but you can find me on...
Ben Ard (15:56)
Love it. And in the show notes, we'll have all the links there so you can connect with Eric. Eric, thank you again so much for the time and insights today. I really do appreciate it.
Eric Hultgren (16:03)
You're welcome.
