This University is Helping Students Grow their Reach and Monetize their Social Channels

In this episode, Duke McKenzie and Kyle Kaplanis, dive in and talk with USC student, Dylan Huey, who is the president of the club called "USC Reach" how this program is helping its students build community online and monetize.

 Reach is the first and only social media club at USC. However, they are more than just social media. At Reach, they aim to create a community for content creators, digital marketers, influencers, actors, and anyone interested in entertainment and social media.

Come learn more about how they got started, what they are up to, and whats next at USC Reach!

For more information be sure to check out USC Reach on their website!

 Guest:

Dylan Huey
President of USC Reach
Instagram @rodinflash (77K Followers)

Duke McKenzie
LinkedIn - Duke McKenzie

Kyle Kaplanis
LinkedIn - Kyle Kaplanis
TikTok - @theweb3guy
IG - @kyle_kaplanis
YT - The Web3 Guy

Transcript

Kyle Kaplanis: 0:00

What is going on, everybody? Welcome back to another episode of Tomorrow Today you have myself, Kyle Kaplanis, and my co-host over here, Mr.

Duke McKenzie: 0:09

Duke McKenzie. Mr. Duke McKenzie, baby. How's it going Kyle?

Kyle Kaplanis: 0:13

Doing well, Duke. How are you doing?

Duke McKenzie: 0:15

I'm good. I'm good. I'm excited for what we got coming up today. What have we got going on?

Kyle Kaplanis: 0:19

So in the studio today we got Dylan Huey. He is a president, founder and CEO, and content creator himself at USC Reach. And we're really excited to have him in the studio to talk about, being a student in this space and also what the future looks like for students in Universities today, and are they involved in social media in whatever capacity that they're in. And we'd love to talk to Dylan about that and what's going on in that space and what he's doing with USC Reach. So Dylan, welcome to Tomorrow Today.

Duke McKenzie: 0:46

Welcome, Dylan. You know what? You know what's interesting about Dylan? I think Dylan is the first college student that we have had on the podcast. Do you think so? Kyle, what do you think? Yep, I think so. That's for sure. Welcome, Dylan. How you doing, my friend?

Dylan Huey: 0:59

Thank you so much. Appreciate you guys having me. And I think, this semester, especially for myself, because I've had so many college professors ask me to guest speaking their classes. I'm literally an undergrad student as well. I'm not sure if I'm the right person reading of people I'm probably friends with, but it's so interesting how, I've been able to have such an amazing presence online and on social media and I'm grateful for all the opportunities that I've been given. So thank you so much for having me. Love to dive right in and get going and help, share my advice and my experiences in social media.

Kyle Kaplanis: 1:33

Absolutely.

Duke McKenzie: 1:34

That's great.

Kyle Kaplanis: 1:34

So Dylan, typically how we kick this show off is we love a quick origin story about who you are. Let our audience know a little bit more about who you are and what you do.

Dylan Huey: 1:42

Totally. My name is Dylan Huey. I'm a college student at USC, so I'm business administration minor in music industry. But I've done a lot more beyond just being a college sit-in. When I was five years old, I started learning piano. When I was 11, started learning guitar. Fifth grade, started making electronic dance music. 2016 I jumped on a platform called Musically. You might know it now, called TikTok. First week of being on the platform, I gained. 30,000 followers. I joined the platform because I was getting bullied in middle school and I wanted to have an audience and show other people that there are people around them who felt the same way that they did. Quickly garnered a following. I was doing all sorts of live streams. Freshman year of high school, I was reading Shakespeare for a live stream just because that was my homework. I had to do it for class and I was like, if I have to do it, other people have to listen to me doing it as well. I think 5,000 people at one time watching me read out Shakespeare, which was part of my homework. I had to annotate it. And since then I've been on, a ton of social media tours. I've been on Lights Out Tour, I've been on part of my story, Good Times Live, done a lot of conventions, VidCon, cetera. I've had a lot of success. Have over a million followers myself. I used to manage a few influencers, Lil' Huddy to name one of them, who I'm sure you guys are familiar with.

Kyle Kaplanis: 3:00

Mm-hmm.

Dylan Huey: 3:01

Million followers in TikTok now. I got him from 200 K all the way up to 5 million followers in span of a year and a half. Still do music, still do content creation myself, also run an influencer club at USC called USC Reach, where we have, a ton of content creators who are, students who are coming together, collaborating, learning, growing. We announced that we're expanding to Duke, So our Duke chapter already has 10 members and growing. We're also expanding to UCLA, LMU, Chapman, so a lot of great things in the works for the club for what I've been doing last few years.

Duke McKenzie: 3:35

That's pretty exciting. You know the crazy thing is when I was in college, I did not do all of those things. I thought, like I did some PA announcements and I thought, Hey, that's a lot. That's doing a lot.

Dylan Huey: 3:46

I'm also a full-time student and I'm in 13 clubs at USC as well, including a VP of a fraternity where I'm doing everything. So I didn't even get back to my apartment.

I was out from 8: 3:56

00 AM all the way to midnight yesterday. Doing work.

Duke McKenzie: 4:00

Just doing stuff. Doing stuff. Grinding, grinding, grinding, grinding, grinding. So let me ask you a question. Is there a big cross section of college students at USC particularly who are creators? So right now you are a college student, right? You're studying and everything, but also with a million followers, you're putting out content. I'm just curious, are there a lot of you or, are you seeing a lot more of you, like creators like yourself who are college students who are putting things out there?

Dylan Huey: 4:28

It's interesting. My club USC Reach, it was established in 2017. I obviously was not a college student in 2017. I went to USC starting fall 2020. From me being the president of the club last semester, we had 250 people apply to be in our club. Obviously we only accepted 15. We vet all of our club members. This semester we're expecting 500 plus people that apply to our club. So I think this is an ongoing progression where we're seeing more and more people wanna become content creators. I know at USC there's going to be a class called Creators as Entrepreneurs that focuses on being a content creator. At Duke University they have a social media class that they started last semester, which is the reason why we have a Duke chapter for Reach over at that school is because we're seeing more and more students want to become content creators want to be in social media. When I was in high school, there were people who were content creators and it was very niche, but I think ever increasing. You know, more and more people wanna become content creators. I think I read an article last week that said One in four gen Zers want to be social media influencers.

Duke McKenzie: 5:30

That's a good stat And what's interesting about that is, the difference between yourself and myself. Now if you wanna hear something scary, I'm 46 and fresh, and I looked at, when I graduated, I'm like, Whoa. It's pushing almost 20, 27 years now. But what is interesting is that being a content creator is a viable potential career option. Where that is relatively recent.

Dylan Huey: 5:51

That's interesting cuz being in the industry, I feel like I'm also old in the industry because I've been a content creator for over six years. When I started being content creator back in 2016, I really had to pitch myself two brands and show them, Oh, I'm of value, I'm worth partnering with. And now it's like I have companies like bmw, Boohoo, et cetera. They're reaching out to me. I'm like, Oh, okay. This is a very unique perspective. I really haven't seen until from when I started.

Duke McKenzie: 6:18

And then what percentage of your time, it's almost like you're a student athlete, right? But you're a content creator if you're dealing with brands. What percentage of your time are you working with brands and stuff like that, and what are the type of executions are they asking you to do?

Dylan Huey: 6:30

I'd say the minority of my time is being a student. Actually the majority of my time is doing content creation in some capacity or in meetings with brands or, helping my club with brand deals or et cetera. A lot of what I've seen the last few months and talking with a lot of brands, a lot of brands are looking for UDC content, for influencers to run their own social media accounts, their own social media profiles. We are seeing brands that, paid media, of course, a lot of gifting. We just wanna give you our product. If you guys like our product, then post it on Instagram. And, that kind of natural organic relationships. And I think that more and more companies are not doing one off brand deals, where it's like, Oh, just post for your fall campaign. But they're like, Can we do this on a rolling basis every month? And maintain the momentum? Because brands know that, if they're working with an influencer continuously and having the influencer continuously talk about that brand, Of course their audience is gonna want to, get involved with the brand and resonate with it more.

Kyle Kaplanis: 7:31

That's a great example because I think that there is better ROIs and everything that come out of working with somebody on a long term basis. A great example of that is Nike with Jordan. Like when you think Jordan. You think Nike, vice versa, And I think one off campaigns, it's easy to forget, but let's say there's a beauty crater who is a diehard urban decay, loves that product and they're always known as that, and then you start linking that crater with that brand, that's where you're gonna see huge results. And that community of that creator. Is going to be, known as that and it's going to grow. That, community's gonna grow with Urban Decay as well. So I think, we're gonna see that more progressively as we go, as more of these long term, partnerships.

Dylan Huey: 8:12

Yeah. And for my club reach, brands are now asking, can we get you guys. Working with us every single month, et cetera. And now that we've expanded to Duke University, now these brands are like, Can we help you guys grow to these other universities? And can we be the first sponsors of. Duke University's reach

Duke McKenzie: 8:33

when you look at Reach right now it's a collection of university creators. What type of creators do you have on there? And then what's the pitch to brands? And so like that when you go out and talk to them,

Dylan Huey: 8:43

Yeah, so we have creators in every single niche, and it is, very unique because, social media space, everyone has their own audience and their own kind of market that they've tapped into. So we're of that same exact way. We're not an agency where, we only accept tickers and we're not even an agency. We are a community. that builds content creators to our college students. We have people who are in fashion. We have people in lifestyle, we have people who are in acting. We have now that all these nil rules, are established. We have athletes as well. Mm-hmm. are applying to our club. All these kind of different spaces are, things that we tap into when it comes to, pitching brands and having brands pitch us. They already know we've had so much press with Good Morning America and Bloomberg and all these article. A lot of brands come to us now and they're like, We are looking for college age influencers for our campus ambassador programs, or UDC content, or we just wanna get into higher ed space. And because we fit two markets, we fit the college demographic that a lot of brands are looking for, a prime target demographic for them as well as influencers with audiences. It's a two way street that they're like, Okay, this is a no brainer for us to work with.

Duke McKenzie: 9:53

No, that's great. That's pretty exciting. And then what is one of your favorite brand executions that has worked with the group of people and just describe that a little bit and I'd love to hear more.

Dylan Huey: 10:02

We have an exciting brand that we're working with. I don't know if you're familiar with Allison Stoner, who was on Camp Rock. She played Isabella and finds and Feb cheaper by the. She has a mental health company, called movement Genius, and we're working with them to set up a. USC Wide Experiential Mental Health Day. They're, gonna take over the entire USC and have activations throughout campus, to talk about mental health, to help college students, feel like there's a place for them at college, which I think really resonates with me as a content. I think it comes full circle. When I started social media and I was getting bullied, that was something that I wanted to do to build community. And I think reach is that same exact thing of community. And I think this brand that we're working with, Movement Genius, I think they're doing that same exact thing and I think they're executing the best way possible where it's a fun experiential event, Getting reach, partnered with them, making a usc y for the entire community.

Duke McKenzie: 10:59

That's great.

Kyle Kaplanis: 10:59

That's, that's awesome. I love to bring education back into this because you mentioned that USC now offers a class, Right. That is geared to social media creators and then you said Duke also is now adding a class this semester. Do you think that students are craving classes like this? Do you think that they're wanting an education route that revolves around being a crater or maybe the back end stuff of social media management and things like,

Dylan Huey: 11:22

I think, you know from how our curriculum at Reach developed creators and students are looking for ways to gain insight into the social media space because it's such a new industry, still relatively new, it's a viable career and we know that it's a multi-billion dollar industry and. People, are tapping into social media careers, whether it's being a social media manager, being a content creator, et cetera. And I think people want to learn. Obviously, being a college student, you wanna learn about what you're passionate about and that's the major that you study. I'm a business student. I'm passionate about entrepreneurship, which is why I'm studying business. Same exact thing for being a content creator, people. Who are passionate about content creation, wanna learn how to excel as a content creator. And from what I've seen, there's not too many places that, help with the educational aspects. At least right now, you learn on the way. And that's from when I started social media, I was like, I'm going into this heads deep. I don't know anything about content creation, being an influencer. I'm a kid from Silicon Valley, surrounded by business, surrounded by tech. I guess I have a phone, so I'm. Use the camera and make content, and that was my whole Navigation into the social media space. And I think now that people are seeing that this is an industry where you can make money, people want to learn about the space.

Kyle Kaplanis: 12:36

Yeah. And I think that colleges are gonna end up having to add more classes considering that stat that you shared and one in four Gen Z students would love to be a content creator or an influencer or involved in that. So that tells me that the future of education needs to start adding more classes like that. If one in four gen Z want to be that, right. There's gotta be options or they're going to start looking at other sources of just doing it themselves and skipping school, and doing

Duke McKenzie: 13:03

that. And, and you know what, I, you know what? I think col it's, it's kind of funny cuz we have a theory that, The majority of, if not all consumer focused businesses will be creator driven, creator led. And that's where the next generation of major brands will come from. Whether it's your beauty brand or consumer package goods. Anything gets consumer facing and it's really important that these schools and all those things start. Not only fostering creators, but also teaching people about the business aspects of it. Because it's gonna be affecting everything, most aspects of our business lives.

Dylan Huey: 13:32

I don't know if you guys used to see this in social media, but when I was growing in the social media space, there's a lot of content creators who drop out of school and drop out of like high school. Mm-hmm.. I know my entire friend group. I probably was the only person who went to school in my friend group when I was like 16, 17, in the content creator space and. There's a need for the educat. To help support creators who wanna maintain longevity. Mm-hmm.. And I think that there's, the need for classes, but then it also helps, students understand, okay, you don't need a drop out of school. You can still learn while being a content creator and you can learn how to be a content creator at school. And I think more of these classes, if they come up, That'll increase the education of content creators, whether it be, content creation, in terms of finances, managing your finances, and, should you be pocketing money in the bank or investing your money, et cetera. I think there's a lot of different spaces beyond just being a content creator where, there's a lot of content creator education that should come up for content creators to have and maintain l.

Duke McKenzie: 14:35

That's exciting. You're very impressive young man.

Dylan Huey: 14:37

Thank you.

Duke McKenzie: 14:37

Congratulations on all the success you've had so far. Let's talk about the organization. Like where do you see it going? What are your plans this is your second year, right? Yours junior, right.

Dylan Huey: 14:46

So in terms of the club, we're in an exciting time because we're expanding our club, nationally to four universities this semester. Ucla, lmu, Chapman, and Duke. Mm-hmm.. With that being said, This is no longer a USC thing. This is a national thing. This is a national organization. This is something like, I don't know if you've heard of American Marketing Association, where they have 300 chapters around the United States. 1800 degrees consulting, same exact thing, multiple chapters. Around the United States, I see it reach as being a national organization, the same exact as these other organizations, but tailor towards social media. Whether it's someone who's focused on being content creator or someone who's focused on the backend in terms of talent partnerships or creator partnerships, or social media management, digital marketing, Nationally educational resources, nationally, brand opportunities. There's so many things that we can provide our club members on a national level. Perks of being in the club. And I think that's the way that we're headed towards.

Duke McKenzie: 15:46

Just explain to me like a two year old that's pretty excited. Like how do you set up. When you say, Okay, yo, I am at usc and now I get how you jump over to US ucla, that's down the street. But how do you add a chapter and if you want to get to, I think, American Marketing Association, aren't they on 300 or something like that, or whatever that is. Yeah, yeah, yeah. How do you particularly open up another chapter? How do you plan to expand?

Dylan Huey: 16:09

Exactly. We're obviously not American Market Association. Right?

Duke McKenzie: 16:12

Start, you gotta start somewhere right before you start.

Dylan Huey: 16:14

So you, you have to start somewhere. And the first thing that we are doing is targeting college age, influencers who are college students. When I've talked to a lot of brands, they told me that they look for college age influencers to target and they have to sift their Instagram themselves, make their own spreadsheets. College age influencers who are, have their college and their bio. We're doing the same exact thing on a national basis. We're just making a table spreadsheet of college age influencers who are passionate about community. Reaching out to them and telling them about our club. The success that we've had at usc and, tell them here's all the perks that you get for starting an organization. Obviously if they start their organization, at their university, it's leadership skills that they get, add to their resume. There's a lot of perks on an individual basis that they get, at least for a Duke chapter. They actually reached out to us because they. The success that we had, they already had 10 members and they were like, We wanna start a student organization, that social media focused at our university. How can we get involved with your club? And I said, We're expanding already to these three other chapters. Why don't you just come under umbrella? It was that organic and they're like, there's so many incentives that come with being under umbrella that they get. So it was a no brainer for them. And I think the same exact way we're gonna get it organically and we are also gonna get it by reaching out to these students who are already, doing social media and just one another jump of building up a community because having people alongside yourself to work together, to network, to collaborate, those are things that will only boost you as an in.

Duke McKenzie: 17:52

I like that. I like that. You know what, that is a strong way to close it off. Kyle, what are your last thoughts? How do you wanna close this off? That was a strong way to close it off.

Kyle Kaplanis: 18:02

What I love about it and for the future cuz the, thought of our. Show is tomorrow, today. So what are we focusing on today that is gonna be involved for tomorrow? This is very interesting because I think we are going to see a giant shift within the education spectrum of offering. A lot more opportunities for kids to learn how to be a good content creator, how to learn the backend stuff. So I think that over the next decade we're gonna start seeing more and more progressive guarantee you in the next decade, a whole undergrad class, like instead of having a degree in business, it's gonna be a degree in content creation. Mm-hmm.. I really strongly believe that we're heading in that direction.

Duke McKenzie: 18:35

Yeah. And I'll leave My final thought on this is, is that I do think the next major media and marketing organization reaching college students across the country. This is definitely a way to go and a way in there. And I think that, what you're building is quite impressive. Dylan and I, I appreciate you coming on.

Dylan Huey: 18:53

Well, thank you so much for having me, both of you guys. It was an honor to be on this podcast and to share what we're working on at Reach. I think we're doing some exciting stuff and the next few semesters, next few years are exciting for us, so I appreciate you guys giving us this platform and for speaking with you too.

Duke McKenzie: 19:10

Dillon Huey, Everybody. Dillon Huey. Here we go. Here we go. Remember, I'm Duke McKenzie. This is Kyle Planet. And thanks for listening to tomorrow today. Please subscribe. Please leave a rating. This was an excellent podcast. Looking forward to, talking to you all soon.