Thinks Out Loud: E-commerce and Digital Strategy

Digital gatekeepers always work to get between you and your customers. That was true five years ago, ten years ago, twenty years ago. And it’s still true today. They kill organic traffic to raise their revenues and gain greater profits. That hasn’t changed in decades, and I don’t believe it’s going to change anytime soon.

What can you do about it? How can you bypass the gatekeepers and grow your business? That’s what this repost of a prior Thinks Out Loud episode is all about.

Want to learn more? Here are the show notes for you.

You might also enjoy this webinar I recently participated in with Miles Partnership that looked at "The Power of Generative AI and ChatGPT: What It Means for Tourism & Hospitality" here:

We have some free downloads for you to help you navigate the current situation, which you can find right here:

You can find our “Best of Thinks Out Loud” playlist on Spotify right here:

Contact information for the podcast: [email protected]

Recorded using a Shure SM7B Vocal Dynamic Microphone and a Focusrite Scarlett 4i4 (3rd Gen) USB Audio Interface into Logic Pro X for the Mac.

Running time: 20m 41s

You can subscribe to Thinks Out Loud in iTunes, the Google Play Store, via our dedicated podcast RSS feed (or sign up for our free newsletter). You can also download/listen to the podcast here on Thinks using the player at the top of this page.

If you’ve listened to this show for any amount of time, you know that I believe gatekeepers are the single biggest risk your business faces. Always. I usually lump those gatekeepers together under the mantle of big tech. I also refer to them as AgFam. You know, the AgFam. Apple, Google, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft.

Because those guys are the biggest gatekeepers at the moment. And they are hurting your business every day. They’re far from the only ones. In travel, you’ve got Booking.com and Expedia. In entertainment, you’ve got Netflix and Spotify and Live Nation and YouTube, and so on. Every industry has gatekeepers.

The job of those gatekeepers is to build a wall between you and your customers and control the only gates that let those customers through. They then charge you a fee. A toll, a tax, every single time they let someone through, always. That’s their whole business model. And yes, some of them are facing antitrust investigations and regulatory oversight and the like.

I would argue, though, that they’re mostly holding their own in those cases. Even Google’s recent antitrust lawsuit is going to need until next year, next August, before the penalty phase, after which they’re going to appeal, they’re going to fight this case. All the way that they can, all the way to the Supreme Court, because they can’t afford not to.

Their entire business depends upon being able to charge a toll, to charge a tax to you for every customer they let through. And while they’re fighting this, before we even get to that point, you’re still paying a toll for every customer they let through the gate. For all of them, Apple, Google, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft, Booking.com, Expedia, Netflix, Spotify. The AI companies are going to want to do it too at some point, though they’re not there yet. But that’s the whole gig. That’s what you try to do. Ben Thompson refers to it as aggregation theory. You aggregate demand, and then you control who you let it pass through to, and the people you let it pass through to are people like you.

So what can you do about it? How can you compete in this environment, especially as a smaller company? Well, that’s the subject of a prior episode, which I’m going to repost for you right now, all about digital gatekeepers, the death of organic traffic, and what you can do about it. I hope you give it a listen, and I hope you enjoy it.

Well, hello there everyone, welcome back to Thinks Out Loud, your source for all the digital marketing expertise your business needs. My name is Tim Peter. And as ever, I really appreciate you tuning in.

It means so much to me to have you here. Now, today we’ve got a lot to cover. We need to see the show notes for this one. There’s like, I don’t know, 30 links in it or something along those lines. because there’s a topic I’ve been thinking about a lot. You know, I talked about this weeks ago, in the episode, why Google is the beast that scares your industry’s 800 pound gorilla, And a piece I wrote both for Hotel News Now, as well as the blog, all about how,Google really represents the hotel marketing and distribution trend you care about most this year.

But I want to make this less about Google. And more about the rise of gatekeepers generally, how digital is beginning to enable gatekeepers in ways we’ve not seen in the past. Now, obviously Google is one of the biggest gatekeepers there is. But so is Facebook. So is Instagram. Obviously, Instagram being part of Facebook.

So is YouTube. Oh wait, that’s part of Google. And so is Amazon, which isn’t part of any of those, but certainly competes head to head with them. And I think we can say the same about Apple, as well as Android, which, oh yeah, that’s Google again. You’ve heard me talk about Apple, Google, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft, others in the past and how much control that they have and how much they.

I don’t want to say get in the way between you and the customer and your customer, but certainly they represent a gatekeeper between you and your customer. And I’m going to focus mostly on Google in this discussion, but everything I’m going to say here applies equally to Facebook. It applies equally to Amazon.

It applies equally to Apple. And it doesn’t really matter whether we’re talking about search or social or mobile or apps. It doesn’t really matter whether we’re talking about search or mobile or apps. When there is a single gatekeeper or just a few gatekeepers, suddenly the world changes. I mean, you could talk about Netflix and it is the same way if you’re in make video,Steam or Epic, when we talk about video games, Archive and Elsevier, when we’re talking about, you know, academic papers, these are all the new gatekeepers.

And a lot of the changes we’re seeing are related to the fact that these gatekeepers have a lot of power, have a lot of control, you know, everybody’s famous, everybody’s familiar with Stuart Brand’s famous saying that all information wants to be free, but it seems increasingly like we have to turn that saying on its head and say, does all information want a paywall?

You know, if you think about it, even Google’s ads are a paywall of a kind. So I’m going to kind of break this down for you. And I think why this is so important. And I want to start with a fantastic article written by Andy Crestodina at Orbit Media Studios. It’s a tremendous, tremendous article for those of you who care about Google and search and things along those lines.

But he has done a brilliant job of archiving and cataloging how Google’s changes to the search results are changing how customers find you. So he gives three examples of how the number one ranking has changed, not in terms of ranking on Google search results, but instead in terms of placement. Where the average placement of the three examples he provides, the number one ranking has dropped roughly about 570 pixels lower on the consumer’s screen than where it was three or four years ago.

So three separate examples, it doesn’t matter where it was placed. These were all number one, but number one moved from being somewhere around 350 pixels on the screen 350 pixels from the top to being roughly about 920 pixels from the top on the screen. As he says brilliantly, rankings are durable.

Placement is not. Now what’s causing the drop? Well, the fact that Google has added maps and ads, other Google features like related questions, featured snippets, videos, and so on, where what you’re seeing is we just keep getting pushed lower in organic terms in favor of either other Organic Types of Media, Maps, Featured,, Featured Snippets, et cetera, or Paid Media like Ads, or as we’re starting to see, there’s a tremendous, um, article about this on Search Engine Land, things like Ads, For my business listings or ads on maps.

And I’m going to link to these in the show notes, various examples of these. Now, this shouldn’t come as any surprise to you. Again, this is something I’ve been talking about going back a long, long ways. I’ve got, I’ll put some links in the show notes,dating back to, I think, 2011.a Biznology article that talks about whose brand does Google want to build, which of course the brand they really want to build is Google.

And,I, this one just struck me as funny, given the topic of today’s show, titled should marketers really trust Google in 2014? And if I could read one quick excerpt from that post, You know, I’d written at the time that these changes effectively reduce your opportunities to get in front of customers via organic search, RSS feeds, and email.

These were changes to Google reader, Google, changes to,Gmail. Etc. But I also said at the time, now none of this is evil. Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Google all have a right to do whatever they believe is best for their business. And as public companies, one could argue, have a responsibility to their shareholders to increase revenues and profits however they’re able.

So this isn’t new. This shouldn’t come as a surprise. This is something that’s been ongoing for years. You know, again, the oldest post I’m linking to today goes back to April of 2011, so this really shouldn’t come as a shock to you, but what’s increasingly important is the fact that Google has. Made more and more changes that make it more and more difficult for you to show up in front of your customers when you want, quote unquote, for free.

And you’re going to see your costs rise. Unless of course, you’re smart about how you react to this and do some really simple. But really intelligent things to continue to do well, even as these changes occur. You know, so a few things I want to talk about that you can do to adapt to this reality, you know, the first is thinking.

Pay attention to how your customers react to the changing marketplace. Pay really close attention to where your traffic comes from on your site. Are you seeing a drop from organic? Are you seeing a drop from organic channels? And I mean, organic search, organic social, things along those lines to understand, is it affecting you yet?

In all likelihood, it is. If in fact it is, you need to be really clear on where are the biggest drops and what do you need to do to address that. You also need to think in terms of growing your email list. That’s incredibly, incredibly important. If you’ve noted the growth of email newsletters over the last couple of years, most of that, in fact, is driven by reporters, journalists,writers, thinkers, publishers, et cetera, saying, we don’t want to be dependent upon email.

These giants like Google or Facebook or any of those other players, for the bulk of our traffic, we need to connect with them directly. The other thing you need to do is pay close attention to improving your conversion rates. The reality is it’s always going to cost you something to get customers to come to your sites.

No matter where they come from, if you’re doing it through organic search, if you’re doing it through organic social, if you’re doing it through any of the other things that I’m going to talk about in a moment, there’s at a minimum, a labor cost associated with it. And so you damn well better make sure that when customers come to your site, they convert.

It doesn’t matter whether they come to your website. It doesn’t matter whether they call you. It doesn’t matter whether they walk into a store or, you know, work through one of your third party channels. The reality is that every lost opportunity increases your cost. So you want to take a close look at where those customers come from and how effective you are at turning those direct contacts into action, into revenues and into profits.

You really want to work on improving those results. So you continue to get the best return on your spend. You also want to look at ways to unleash what I’ve always referred to as your secret sales force. And what I mean by your secret sales force are your best customers. How do you turn your customers into advocates for your business?

It’s one of the reasons why customer experience is queen is a constant mantra of mine. It’s all about helping customers have a great story to tell, how, how you can get them to participate in the creation of a positive brand story for you and share with their friends and family and fans and followers, whether it’s via email or social or texting, or just talking to them on the street about how much they like working with you to build your business.

It’s You can also look at building a dedicated referral program or an advocacy program for your business to engage that secret sales force even more effectively. And when we’re talking about our secret sales force, another portion you want to consider are your employees. Look at how you can engage your employees in addition to your customers in telling that positive brand story.

You know, there are tools like LinkedIn Elevate for building those employee engagement programs and are well worth taking a look at. And of course, the other thing you need to do is look at applying agile or lean practices to your business. When you’re in a rapidly changing environment, that’s not, that’s not something that’s going to change anytime soon.

I’ve talked about how speed is the biggest change we’ve seen in marketing and it doesn’t look like it’s going to slow down anytime soon. So, the best response isn’t necessarily to just anticipate every possible change, but instead to learn how to quickly respond, even if you’re anticipating, because maybe you don’t always get it right.

And so when we talk about things like Agile or Lean or Scrum or other IT development methodologies that have become fairly popular over the last bunch of years, those also work for digital marketers and digital strategists and can help you adapt more easily, more efficiently, and more effectively.

That’s incredibly important. And of course, the last thing you need to do is keep learning. Obviously this isn’t going to stop anytime soon. Google and Facebook and Amazon and Apple are going to do whatever they need to do to do what’s right for their customers. And more importantly for their business, you need to do the same.

And so that’s why you want to focus on continue learning, improve your conversion rates, engage your secret sales force, enlist your employees, test and learn, and just keep learning.

The post Revisiting Why Digital Gatekeepers Kill Organic Traffic (Thinks Out Loud) appeared first on Tim Peter & Associates.

Consumers are adopting AI at a remarkable pace, as fast as they adopted computers and the internet. And we’re only starting to see how that might shape our businesses in the longer term. Part of the problem is that it’s not always easy to know which customers are using artificial intelligence and how they’re using it.

One way to think about it though is to look at how a single individual uses AI, not as a representative sample, but to get a clearer picture of some of the possibilities of AI use. For instance, what does a day in the (AI) life of a marketing and digital strategy consultant look like? How are your customers using artificial intelligence in their day-to-day lives? And what does that mean for your business? That’s what this episode of Thinks Out Loud is all about.

Want to learn more? Here are the show notes for you.

You might also enjoy this webinar I recently participated in with Miles Partnership that looked at "The Power of Generative AI and ChatGPT: What It Means for Tourism & Hospitality" here:

We have some free downloads for you to help you navigate the current situation, which you can find right here:

You can find our “Best of Thinks Out Loud” playlist on Spotify right here:

Contact information for the podcast: [email protected]

Recorded using a Shure SM7B Vocal Dynamic Microphone and a Focusrite Scarlett 4i4 (3rd Gen) USB Audio Interface into Logic Pro X for the Mac.

Running time: 27m 08s

You can subscribe to Thinks Out Loud in iTunes, the Google Play Store, via our dedicated podcast RSS feed (or sign up for our free newsletter). You can also download/listen to the podcast here on Thinks using the player at the top of this page.

  Welcome to Thinks Out Loud, your source for all the digital expertise your business needs. Well hello again everyone and welcome back to Thinks Out Loud, your source for all the digital expertise your business needs. My name is Tim Peter. This is episode 434 of The Big Show. And I think we’ve got a really cool episode for you today.

I want to start by talking about the fact that artificial intelligence adoption among your customers is crazy fast. I’m going to tell you how fast in just a moment. There’s new research from Alexander Bick of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, Adam Blandon of Vanderbilt University, and David j Deming of Harvard Business School and the National Bureau of Economic Research that found in August of 2024.

So just last month, 39% of the US population age 18 to 64 used generative ai. More than 24% of workers used it at least once a week. At least once in the week prior to being surveyed, and nearly one in nine used it every workday. The paper went on to say, and this is a quote, Historical data on usage and mass market product launches suggest that U.

S. adoption of generative AI has been faster than adoption of the personal computer and the Internet. So that’s really very, very fast. I mean, quicker than the personal computer, quicker than the Internet. One last point that they made in their paper that I found fascinating is this. They said that generative AI is a general purpose technology in the sense that it is used in a wide range of occupations and job tasks at work and at home.

And I’m going to come back to why I think that is a huge deal before we wrap up here. No matter how you slice it, a good chunk of your customers use AI every day. And I thought it might be interesting to talk about some ways that some people are using it. For me, the simplest way is to talk about how I use AI in my daily life as a marketing digital strategy consultant, I want to be very transparent.

This is not a representative sample, not by any stretch. I am obviously a bit of an early adopter. It’s likely that many of your customers will be a bit further behind the curve and some undoubtedly will be a bit ahead of the curve, particularly in specific areas. Think of this, though, as an ethnographic study, a little tiny ethnographic slice of life from the perspective of an early adopter.

I’d also recommend that if you’re not already, Start talking with customers to see how they’re using AI in your day to life, in their day to day life, and see how that lines up with what I’m going to say. First, I see it as part of my job to understand these tools so I can better help my client. Unlike consultants and plenty of other folks who think that AI will steal their jobs, I think I’m doing a disservice to my clients if I’m not using AI.

I think we as a company are doing a disservice to our clients if we’re not using AI. How can we reasonably advise clients about These tools and how their customers will use these tools if we’re not using them ourselves. Again, we always have to remember, we’re not the customer. We want to back this up with real research, but we want to have a good sense of how you can use these tools in practice.

I’ve long said, That AI won’t take your job, but that smart people who do use AI will. I’ve recently updated to say that some dumb people using AI can take your job too. There is a lot of research that shows that lower skilled folks get the biggest gains from using AI. I sometimes think of artificial intelligence like a ladder.

Tall people don’t need ladders as often as short people do. And they might only need to go up a step or two to reach what they want. Shorter people might have to go to the top of the ladder to reach what they need. And they might, as a consequence, be more shaky, less confident. They also have more to lose if they fall.

But the ladder still helps them reach it. And it makes them more capable than they would be if they didn’t have a ladder. Right? AI brings the average up by making the least skilled people more competitive with people who have greater experience and greater expertise. You do have to remember that you have to have at least a little bit of experience and a little bit of expertise to know whether these tools are actually working for you.

Ladders aren’t very helpful at all. www. larryweaver. com and might be actively dangerous if you try to stand on the very top step or if you try to use them without a proper foundation to rest them on. You’re very likely to fall and hurt yourself. As long as you have some qualifications though, using AI well offers a significant benefit.

It makes you better at what you do. So, let’s talk for a minute about some of the tools that I’m using. I use Google Gemini, both the standalone application called Gemini Advanced, and in Google Docs, mostly. I use ChatGPT a lot, and as a quick aside, I just got a new iPhone and assigned its action button to ChatGPT’s voice mode.

I use ChatGPT a lot, and as a quick aside, I just got a new iPhone and assigned its action button to ChatGPT’s voice mode. I’m going to give you a quick example of how I use it at work. The action button for those who don’t have an iPhone or don’t have a recent iPhone lets you just press a single button to open up an app.

I haven’t opened up ChatGPT’s voice mode. So I’m going to do this. I’m going to give it a prompt and let it answer the question. Full disclosure, this is a live demo, so I’m going to grade its output after it finishes and see if it’s any good. Okay, so this is real world scenario. Microsoft I’m pressing the action button, and now I’m asking my question.

I’m giving it my prompt. Imagine that you’re a skilled marketing professional with years of experience in the hospitality industry. What are some key elements of a marketing plan for a 100 room, city center, independent hotel to drive more direct revenue? Drawing on your hospitality marketing expertise, you’d want to focus on a few crucial elements to drive direct revenue for a 100 room, independent hotel in a city center.

Start by enhancing your online presence with a user friendly website. and a strong SEO strategy to capture those looking for accommodations in your area. Then, leverage social media and content marketing to showcase your unique selling points. Like local experiences or special packages. Also consider a direct booking incentive program to encourage guests to book through your website rather than third party platforms.

Finally, don’t forget to utilize data analytics to continually refine your marketing strategies based on what drives the most direct bookings. So it just gave that answer and I think that was okay. I don’t think it was the best answer I’ve ever heard. But it was solid in terms of at a high level.

There’s nothing that you can criticize about that answer. Obviously it’s lacking in detail, though obviously I could continue the conversation to get a deeper dive and more insights that it provides. It doesn’t scare me as a consultant. I didn’t listen to that and go, wow, this is going to take my job away.

If that’s all I’m offering my clients, if that’s all my company is offering our clients, we need to do a better job. But it certainly wasn’t a terrible place to start. Nothing that it said was untrue. I’d also point out that that was a live response. That was not a question I’d asked it before. It was not something that I rehearsed with ChatGPT.

That’s literally the answer it gave. So, you know, I’ll give it a solid B, right? B In terms of other tools, we also use MidJourney for image creation. I just started testing a tool called Beautiful. ai for making presentations. I haven’t yet used it for a real presentation, but I’m testing to see whether or not I could, and I’ll have more on this in a moment.

Those are the primary tools that I use, and those are the primary tools that I know my team uses. Obviously, I’m leaving out things like any of the AI capabilities within Google Ads, or Google’s AI overviews in Search, and that’s it. Or things like that. These are the primary tools we’re using on a day to day that we deliberately use AI.

How am I using AI? Well, a bunch of different things. One is brainstorming. When I’ve got something I’m testing out an idea, I might sit and have a chat with ChatGPT, or I might, you know, pop some ideas into Gemini to kind of refine my thinking a bit. Use it a lot for note taking, though there are some legal considerations to be aware of there.

Depending on the clients you’re working with, so you’ve got to be conscious of that reality. I use it for summarizing documents. Again, you’ve got to be careful there. But generally speaking, that’s a pretty common use we have around here. I use it for transcribing text a lot. The transcription of this podcast every week is pretty much mostly done with AI.

We’ll do a spot edit afterwards, but we more or less take it the way the AI provides it. I will use it for editing support. So, for example, I will often run outlines of either speeches or presentations or full writing through ChatGPT or Gemini to get their critique on my thinking, you know, where are there gaps in the thinking, where are there logical connections that could be stronger.

We use it a lot for image creation. The images on these podcasts and other places, such as LinkedIn, are often created using MidJourney. The team is using social is using AI for drafting social media posts, so a lot of the LinkedIn posts that you’ll see for the company, at least the initial draft came from AI, though it’s again frequently edited after the fact.

There’s some, we’re using it for some very high level market research. I, I kind of dig this marketing research and competitive analysis GPT plug in that my friend N. Saint Ong just turned me on to. It’s far from perfect. But it’s a solid tool to do some additional legwork when evaluating new clients and evaluating their competitors.

It saves us time and certainly cuts down on the number of Google searches we’re doing. And I mentioned Beautiful. ai, which is an AI powered presentation tool. This is not something I’m using day to day. This is something that I’m testing right now. I also think it’s a really interesting tool to think about where we might be going.

You give Beautiful. ai a prompt, and it creates an entire slide deck, in my experience, somewhere between about 10 and 15 slides, typically, that you can then edit. You can also have it create individual slides from the specific prompts you give it while you’re working through the deck. As its name suggests, many of its templates and its slides are genuinely quite beautiful.

They’re really very lovely. It also changes layouts and adds elements to individual slides more easily and with less pain in the rear than any presentation tool I have ever used. I have long complained about how challenging it can be for Non designers, like me, do add elements to slides in PowerPoint, Google Slides, and to a lesser extent, but still true, Apple’s Keynote, without royally screwing up the layout.

It’s, it’s a huge problem that I run into. You know, on a regular basis, it’s not the biggest problem in the world, it just comes up so frequently that it’s really annoying, nobody has come up with a better response before now. Beautiful AI does that part really well. So I’ve been using it for a little over a week, week and a half, couple weeks, mostly on dummy presentations, not real things, but when I’m working out, you know, the beginnings of a presentation.

And so far, I think it’s a pretty solid outlining tool. The general outline for the slide decks that it produce produces are not bad. They’re a little generic, but they’re not a bad starting point. I also would use some of its individual slides without hesitation in presentations to clients or during speak engagements.

I certainly wouldn’t use the whole deck as it creates it. But for a single slide or two, it could be a really useful tool. Full disclosure, for one test presentation, it generated a single slide that solely highlighted William Gibson’s quote, The future is already here, it’s just not evenly distributed.

Long time listeners probably recognize that quote since I use it a lot. And I feel seen. Clearly I need to up my quote game soon. Smart people who use AI indeed, right? Here’s what I don’t like about the tool. It’s, it’s, it’s a solid tool, but here’s what I don’t like about it. First, as I mentioned, I thought that the outline it produced, the outlines it’s producing are very generic.

Much as what we’re seeing with AI tools, just like we saw with the ChatGPT example I gave a moment ago, it didn’t do a bad job. There just wasn’t anything special about it. There wasn’t anything that made me sit up and go, Wow, that’s something I couldn’t possibly have come up with on my own with just a little bit of work.

Even the Gibson quote that I trot out less frequently these days. is simply because it’s become a bit hackneyed. So, I would say a lot of the work it produced was solid, okay, a little generic, and leaning towards hackneyed. I’d expect similar quality work from a smart, relatively junior employee, or a particularly sharp, recent college graduate.

Not A plus work, I’d grade it as a C plus or B minus. And its outlines might make for decent starting points that you could then upgrade with a little bit of effort. I’d also use, again as I mentioned, some of its individual slides without hesitation. They were solid, they were really, really good. It provides a decent foundation that you can build off of and significantly improve upon.

One thing I do like to note is, of course, it was much faster. It produced these outputs in minutes as opposed to waiting, you know, days from our recent college graduate or relatively junior employee. That obviously opens up the risk that we’re going to hurt learning opportunities for those folks. So what I might encourage those people to do in an organization is use it, but then improve it.

How do you make it better? How do you get a better result than what it gave you out of the gate? One other last point that I want to make is I now also want PowerPoint and Google Slides, and for that matter, Word and Google Docs. To adopt its intelligent formatting tools. As I’ve noted in other episodes, in other writing, we judge the experiences we receive against the best experiences we have everywhere.

If office suites don’t add features to work more like the way beautiful AI handles adding elements to a slide, I could easily see myself switching down the road just for the improved formatting assistance. Remember, customer experience is queen. Thinks Out Loud. This experience, though, also demonstrates why I still think we haven’t had our true AI moment, and this is the big point about what we, what it means for AI in the day of the life of your customers and of me.

Improved document formatting is very nice. But it’s not a game changer. Artificial intelligence doesn’t have its killer app yet. Killer apps, if you’re unfamiliar with the term, are applications that make some other general purpose tool a must have. The classic example is when software publishers introduced spreadsheets to the public back in the 70s and 80s.

Prior to that, there simply wasn’t a big need for most people to own a computer. When spreadsheets came around, though, suddenly, almost everyone could see why they’d want a computer. Spreadsheets made computers useful for the average user and drove demand for the category as a whole. Mobile phones had a similar situation with cameras and app stores and social media.

Before that, a mobile phone was just a phone you could carry with you. Certainly a nice convenience, particularly for people who traveled a lot. Not something you couldn’t live without. Give people the ability to take pictures at any time, anywhere, and through social media, a way to share those photos with friends and families.

To include the people that matter to their lives in moments, regardless of whether those moments were everyday or extraordinary. And suddenly, everyone wanted a mobile phone. We haven’t yet seen that for AI. And as a result, we haven’t yet seen everything that AI can and will do in our lives. To that end, I want to go back to the paper from Bick, Blandin, and Deming about AI adoption.

Despite its fast adoption curve, most people haven’t used AI. 39 percent of the U. S. population 18 to 64 using generative AI, and more than 24 percent of workers using it at least once in the week prior to being surveyed, and 1 in 9 using it every day. Means that 61 percent of the population has not used generative AI, at least so far as they’re aware.

That 76 percent of workers didn’t use it once during the week prior to being surveyed. And that 89 percent of people don’t use it every day. So, for as fast as its adoption has been, most people still aren’t using it all that much, again, at least so far as they know. And I think this is the reason why.

Remember the last line of the excerpt that I talked to you about at the beginning of this episode? They said, Generative AI is a general purpose technology in the sense that it is used in a wide range of occupations and job tasks at work and at home. Generative AI is still, even a couple years in, a general purpose technology.

It’s more akin to mobile or social or the internet broadly, or computers, than it is to an iPhone or Instagram or Excel. It’s not the end tool in and of itself, it’s the platform that those tools will be built on top of. Steve Jobs once called the Mac a bicycle for our minds. What he meant was that the computer made us able to think faster, to get to the places we wanted to go more quickly.

And it expanded our ability to go places that would have been too hard or taken too long to reach. Kind of like a ladder does. But the ladder and the bicycle analogy only go so far. Dope pun intended. AI is more than a ladder, it’s more than a bicycle for our minds, it might be a motorcycle for our minds, or it might be a car, a rocket, a spaceship, or some other conveyance that we haven’t even thought up yet.

Even the metaphor is framed by what came before. What I think is going to be truly interesting is when someone moves AI from a general purpose To a specific purpose technology, when they introduce the killer app that makes us all want to use artificial intelligence in our lives every day. The same way that we use social and mobile and the internet and computers.

I don’t think it’s going to be prettier slides, no matter how useful that may be, that’s going to drive that change. We still haven’t seen the driver of that change. And I think we have a little bit of time to go before we get there. As you saw in my conversation with ChatGPT using voice mode, AI agents that I can have a conversation with, that our customers can have a conversation with, and set them off to do tasks in the background, Could easily be that killer app.

I suspect it’s the most likely scenario. We just have to have, you know, time will tell, since there aren’t any true AI agents yet in the wild that work in practice. What we’re seeing now are mostly proof of concept, or mostly some demos. We haven’t seen the real world of agents yet. I can’t wait to see what those look like when we do.

What I will say is that the day in the life of a marketing and digital strategy consultant is likely to be a very different place. And I think that’s going to be true for you, and for your customers, and for society as a whole. I don’t think we’re there yet. I think we have a long way to go. But I will tell you, I think when it happens, it will happen fast, just as we’ve seen with adoption overall.

And I, for one, can’t wait to see what it looks like.

Now, looking at the clock on the wall, we are out of time for this week.

And I want to remind you again that you can find the show notes for this episode. As well as an archive of all past episodes by going to timpeter.com/podcast. Again, that’s timpeter.com/podcast. Just look for episode 434.

Don’t forget that you can click on the subscribe link in any of the episodes that you find there to have Thinks Out Loud delivered to your favorite podcatcher every single week. You can also find Thinks Out Loud on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube Music, anywhere fine podcasts are found.

I would also very much appreciate it if you could provide a positive rating or review for the show whenever you use one of those services.

If you like what you hear on Thinks Out Loud, if you enjoy what we talk about, if you like being part of the community that we’re building here, please give us a positive rating or review.

Reviews help other listeners find the podcast. Reviews help other listeners understand what Thinks Out Loud is all about. They help to build our community and they mean the world to me. So thank you so much for doing that. I very, very much appreciate it.

You can also find Thinks Out Loud on LinkedIn by going to linkedin.com/tim-peter-and-associates-llc. You can find me on Twitter or X or whatever you want to call it this week by using the Twitter handle @tcpeter. And of course, you can email me by sending an email to podcast(at)timpeter.com. Again, that’s podcast(at)timpeter.com.

Finally, and I know I say this a lot, I want you to know how thrilled I am that you keep listening to what we do here. It means so much to me. You are the reason we do this show. You’re the reason that Thinks Out Loud happens every single week.

So please, keep your messages coming on LinkedIn. Keep hitting me up on Twitter, sending things via email. I love getting a chance to talk with you, to hear what’s going on in your world, and to learn how we can do a better job building on the types of information and insights and content and community that work for you and work for your business.

So with all that said, I hope you have a fantastic rest of your day, I hope you have a wonderful week ahead, and I will look forward to speaking with you here on Thinks Out Loud next time. Until then, please be well, be safe, and as always, take care, everybody.

The post An AI Day in the Life of a Marketing and Digital Strategy Consultant (Thinks Out Loud Episode 434) appeared first on Tim Peter & Associates.

A listener of this show told me recently that, “People are already overwhelmed with the amount of social media they manage.” That’s a real challenge, on that can make it tough to find the time, resources, and budget to break up with Google, Facebook, and the rest of Big Tech.

And that’s a problem. Because reducing your dependence on Big Tech is core to driving more profitable revenue for your business in the long term.

So, how do you do it? How do you diversify your marketing mix when you’ve already got too much to do? How can you make the most of your existing channels and find new ways to reach customers when you’re already overwhelmed? Most importantly, how can you reduce your dependence on Google and Big Tech without killing your business? That’s what this week’s episode of Thinks Out Loud is all about.

Want to learn more? Here are the show notes for you.

You might also enjoy this webinar I recently participated in with Miles Partnership that looked at "The Power of Generative AI and ChatGPT: What It Means for Tourism & Hospitality" here:

We have some free downloads for you to help you navigate the current situation, which you can find right here:

You can find our “Best of Thinks Out Loud” playlist on Spotify right here:

Contact information for the podcast: [email protected]

Recorded using a Shure SM7B Vocal Dynamic Microphone and a Focusrite Scarlett 4i4 (3rd Gen) USB Audio Interface into Logic Pro X for the Mac.

Running time: 22m 43s

You can subscribe to Thinks Out Loud in iTunes, the Google Play Store, via our dedicated podcast RSS feed (or sign up for our free newsletter). You can also download/listen to the podcast here on Thinks using the player at the top of this page.

Well hello again everyone and welcome back to Thinks Out Loud, your source for all the digital expertise your business needs. My name is Tim Peter, this is episode 430 of The Big Show and thank you so much for tuning in.

In some ways, this episode is a follow up to the episode we did last week about how Google lost its antitrust case and why that matters to you. And the reason I say in some ways is because I’ve talked at length both in that episode and in a bunch of other episodes this year about why you need to think about diversifying your traffic, why you need to think about becoming less dependent on Google.

And it led for a marketing manager to send me a comment and ask, "people are already overwhelmed with the amount of social media they manage, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, Snapchat, the list goes on and on. How is it possible to really do this? How is it possible to manage all of these different things and, and, you know, diversify away from Google?"

That’s a really fair question. I do think people are already overwhelmed. I do talk to people all the time that go, "I just can’t keep up." So I understand that completely. And I thought it would make sense to talk a little bit today about how you can do this very effectively. And there’s a few things that I don’t want to say they’re simple. But they require a certain level of focus, a certain level of attention, and they can help you manage it a little better.

First, you’ve heard me mention Core and Explore many times over the years. Core focuses on the things that always work. The channels that deliver the most business to you today, the channels that deliver the most revenue today, and the channels that tend to have the best return on spend for you today. And that could be spend in terms of actual dollars that you’re putting out in terms of buying, you know, paid search ads or paid social ads. Or it could be in what are generally referred to as soft dollars. Like your people’s time, the amount of time that they spend on those things.

Core is going to take up roughly 75 to 80 percent of your time. That’s just a fact. That’s why you want them to be the things that are most productive for your business. So, right out of the gate, if things are not generating really good return for you, or they’re really not benefiting you, they should be moved out of the core, pretty much immediately. You want to focus on those areas that work best for you. The

Explore phase of the Core & Explore methodology is where you try new things. And Explore is going to take up maybe 15-20 percent of your time. These channels, these areas, may be things that you haven’t figured out how to use yet. You know, you might be testing something new to think about and see if it works. But you’re learning to see is this something that works for us and is it something that I need to get better at. So you’re going to spend only 15 to 20 percent of your time there. And again you’re going to be somewhat judicious in how much time you put into each of those things.

It’s reasonable to ask how do you find the time to explore? You’re already doing so much. As my commenter noted, “people are already overwhelmed.”

Well, it starts with knowing where you are. It starts with knowing where your time actually goes. Sometimes it’s tough to know where you’re spending 75 of your time or 20 percent of your time if you’re not actually aware of where the time goes.

When I was younger, when I was earlier in my career, a mentor of mine sat me down and said, “It’s really important when you’re overwhelmed to take an audit of how you’re spending your time.”

You can just jot it down on a piece of paper, you can type it into a spreadsheet, you can use one of the many, many fine time tracking apps that are out there, and you can track in increments. Maybe 10 minute increments, maybe 15 minutes, maybe 5 minutes, depending on what’s important to you. But it’s worthwhile for a few weeks to simply note where your time goes. Just keep a record of it. Then take a look at where you’re spending your time.

For some people, and in some cases, many people, it’s not that you don’t have enough time. It’s that, you don’t know where it goes, or you’re not making tough choices about where to spend it. So, it starts by getting that picture of where are you today.

Once you see where your time goes, you can then prioritize. And sure, we’ve all heard about, oh, setting priorities and things along those lines.

But I would argue that truly prioritizing means deciding what not to do. It’s not about saying, “this is the most important thing.” It’s about saying, “this is the least important thing. This is something that is not worth my time.” And deciding to either put it aside for now… or choose not to do it at all.

If you think about this, the word decide is the same root word as things like homicide. You’re literally killing options when you decide. You’re saying, “nope, that’s gone. I’m not going to worry about it.”

I legitimately have a “to don’t list.” When I write down things that, you know, I start to think about that I could do, I’ll put them on a list of “to don’t.” These are things I’m not going to focus on because they’re a distraction from the things I do need to focus on.

Warren Buffett has a similar exercise he recommends. He says that you should make a list of the 25 things that are most important to you. Then you want to order the items on the list from the most important to the 25th most important. Once you’ve got those written down on a list, what you’re going to do is you’re going to throw away number 6 through 25. Just cross them off.

And the reason you’re going to do that is, either you don’t have enough time to do them, so you’re probably not going to do them anyway, or they’re going to distract you from doing a great job on the things that are most important to you, the five things that are most important to you, or, if you’re like many people, a little bit of both. You’re gonna do kind of a bad job at everything because you’re trying to do too much.

Of course, if you finish your five most important priorities, if you succeed on accomplishing your five most important priorities, you can always move on to numbers six to ten, and then again, eleven to fifteen, and then again, sixteen to twenty, if you get there.

I’d argue it’s much more likely you’ll get there if you focus on numbers one to five. So go ahead, just put them on your “to don’t” list. Don’t worry about them.

To bring this back to your marketing activities, You don’t have to be on every social platform or every marketing channel that exists out there.

You’re much better served doing a fantastic job in just a few places than doing a half assed job in many, many places. My company’s entire marketing strategy focuses on a relatively small number of channels. We focus on our website and blog. We focus on this podcast that we do distribute through Spotify and YouTube, along with a few other channels to get it more traction. We focus on email marketing, which is powered primarily by our podcast and blog. We focused on LinkedIn. And we focus on guest writing for a few other online publications in hospitality and digital marketing. That’s it. That’s all we do.

We don’t really do an Instagram. We don’t really do Facebook. They’re just not that important to us, so we don’t really worry about them. Those areas that I mentioned are where our customers live. So that’s where we focus.

There’s another great prioritization method that I want to talk about that you can also use called he “Four D’s.” Same basic

If you notice, we’ve already kind of talked about the Delete and to a lesser degree Defer. When we talk about a “to don’t” list or we talk about deprioritizing those items 6 through 25, you’re deferring them or deleting them.

What I want to talk about, though, is delegate. When we think about delegation, we think, “Oh, well, we delegate to somebody on our team.” You know, we delegate to somebody who reports to us. But that’s not really true. You can delegate down, obviously. You can delegate sideways. You can delegate up, and you can delegate outside your organization.

As a friend of mine puts it, "Think who, not how." It’s about getting help, not just figuring out how to do the thing yourself.

Now in marketing, and especially in social marketing, there’s a lot of people who can help you. There are influencers and creators, which are a tremendous way to improve your social media presence without you doing the work. 7 to 10 people, 69 percent of all Americans aged 16 to 54, follow creators and influencers.

And of those that do, 55 percent researched a brand’s website after hearing about that brand from a creator. 46 percent followed a brand on social media after hearing about it from a creator. 43% — 43 percent! — purchased from a brand after hearing about it from a creator. And 42 percent recommended a brand to someone.

That’s fantastic. This is a remarkable opportunity for you to reach out to creators to help you tell a great story on your brand’s behalf.

You don’t have to do the work. You can delegate the work. And there are literally tens of millions of creators using social to connect with their audiences. The largest share of creators, those with 10,000 followers or less, make around $14,000 per year. Even those creators with 10,000 to 50,000 followers average less than $50,000 in income. In other words, these levels of creators can be very affordable for individual marketers to work with.

The key is that you’re not really looking at the creator. You’re looking at their audience. You’re looking at, is their audience your audience? Do these creators talk to the people you want to talk to? Do they help you reach the people you want to reach? It doesn’t matter how many people are in the audience. It matters that they’re engaged and they’re the customer types you want to engage with.

There’s lots of great ways to find these creators. There’s tools like SparkToro. Or you can simply ask your customers where are the places where they follow people on YouTube, or they follow people on Instagram, or they follow people on LinkedIn, who they find interesting. Because those are the people you want to talk to. They’re all about helping you reach your customers better without you having to do all the heavy lifting.

Speaking of customers, your customers, in a way, are creators and influencers, too. They create reviews, they talk to friends and family on social about great experiences that they’ve had. And ultimately, everything we do is about our customer. Given all the changes around AI and technology more broadly, the way we can compete is focusing most on how we help our customers.

I’ve said for years that social is people and all marketing is social. My friend Mark Schaefer likes to say, “the most human company wins.” I think he’s absolutely right. When you give your customers a great experience, they’re going to tell their friends and family and fans and followers about it. And it’s one of the reasons why I’ve talked about things like we need, we owe it to our customers to make their lives better. It’s the core of everything you do. It’s another way of saying something you’ve heard me say many times on this show that customer experience is queen.

You’re trying to encourage your customers to work on your behalf to tell a really positive brand story. I can tell you I’ve sold really great products and companies in my life and I’ve sold really not so great products or companies in my life and selling a great product is so much easier. Right?

It’s much easier to tell a great story that cost about a product or service that customers love. And it just makes the marketing easier. You don’t have to work as hard or work your butt off to be on all of these channels. Your customers and creators will be falling all over themselves to do it for you. So, focusing on your customer experience is an amazing way to improve the value of everything you do.

Now, you might say, sure, but isn’t providing a great experience expensive? It is, it absolutely is, or it can be. It’s also much cheaper than providing a bad experience. Are guests canceling their reservations at your hotel or restaurant cheap? Are returns of your product cheap? Are refunds because people weren’t satisfied with the service you gave them cheap? Do you think that bad reviews don’t cost you money? Do you think you’re going to drive business value if you don’t take care of your customers?

Your customers rely on their friends and family and influencers and creators to help them find products and services that work for their needs. You’re going to have such an easier time reaching them if people are telling a great story on behalf of your brand.

So the fundamental point here is that you need to focus on customer experience so that you don’t have to work so hard to market in the first place. Then, when you are marketing, I go back to saying:

Ultimately, that will make your job a lot easier and will prevent you from being overwhelmed or struggling to figure out how to reach the folks you want to reach. And that will help you diversify away from Google over time. Because what people will search for is not a company in your niche or a solution to their problem. They’ll come looking for you by name. And no matter what happens to Google in the future, you’ll be well positioned because you’ll be in all of the places your customers need you to be without having to do so much work to be there.

That allows you to gain the benefits that you want, to grow your business, and to do it without being so overwhelmed. And that’s the best place to be.

Now, looking at the clock on the wall, we are out of time for this week.

And I want to remind you again that you can find the show notes for this episode. As well as an archive of all past episodes by going to timpeter.com/podcast. Again, that’s timpeter.com/podcast. Just look for episode 430

Don’t forget that you can click on the subscribe link in any of the episodes that you find there to have Thinks Out Loud delivered to your favorite podcatcher every single week. You can also find Thinks Out Loud on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube Music, anywhere fine podcasts are found.

I would also very much appreciate it if you could provide a positive rating or review for the show whenever you use one of those services. If you like what you hear on Thinks Out Loud, if you enjoy what we talk about, if you like being part of the community that we’re building here, please give us a positive rating or review.

Reviews help other listeners find the podcast, and we’ll see you Reviews help other listeners understand what Thinks Out Loud is all about. They help to build our community. And they mean the world to me personally. So thank you for taking the time to do that. I very, very much appreciate it.

You can also find Thinks Out Loud on LinkedIn by going to linkedin.com/tim-peter-and-associates-llc. You can find me on Twitter or X or whatever you want to call it this week by using the Twitter handle @tcpeter. And of course, you can email me by sending an email to podcast(at)timpeter.com. Again, that’s podcast(at)timpeter.com.

Finally, and I know I say this a lot. But I want you to know how thrilled I am, and I really am thrilled that you listen to what we do here. It means so much to me. You are the reason we do this show, you are the reason that Thinks Out Loud happens every single week.

So please, keep your messages coming on LinkedIn, keep hitting me up on Twitter, sending things via email. I love getting a chance to talk with you just as I did with the commenter this week. I want to hear what’s going on in your world and learn how we can do a better job building all the types of information and insights and content and community that work for you and work for your business.

So with all of that said, I hope you have a fantastic rest of your day. I hope you have a wonderful week ahead. And I will look forward to speaking with you here on Thinks Out Loud next time. Until then, please, be well, be safe, and as always, take care, everybody.

The post Revisiting How to Diversify Your Marketing Mix When There’s Too Much to Do (Thinks Out Loud) appeared first on Tim Peter & Associates.

Google faces enormous threats to its business. New entrants using artificial intelligence may provide a better search experience for their customers. Those same new entrants are also competing for Google’s massive ad revenues. And, of course, the search giant is fighting for its life in a government antitrust case. Those are major challenges — and a giant signal that Google might not win the AI economy.

At the same time, they’re still one of the world’s most valuable brands and a key driver of traffic and revenue for most businesses. So, which is it? Should marketers continue to bet that Google will win in the AI economy? Or is it time to chart a different course? That’s what this week’s episode of the Thinks Out Loud podcast is all about.

Want to learn more? Here are the show notes for you.

You might also enjoy this webinar I recently participated in with Miles Partnership that looked at "The Power of Generative AI and ChatGPT: What It Means for Tourism & Hospitality" here:

We have some free downloads for you to help you navigate the current situation, which you can find right here:

You can find our “Best of Thinks Out Loud” playlist on Spotify right here:

Contact information for the podcast: [email protected]

Recorded using a Shure SM7B Vocal Dynamic Microphone and a Focusrite Scarlett 4i4 (3rd Gen) USB Audio Interface into Logic Pro X for the Mac.

Running time: 23m 19s

You can subscribe to Thinks Out Loud in iTunes, the Google Play Store, via our dedicated podcast RSS feed (or sign up for our free newsletter). You can also download/listen to the podcast here on Thinks using the player at the top of this page.

Well hello everybody and welcome back to Thinks Out Loud, your source for all the digital expertise your business needs. My name is Tim Peter. This is episode 433 of the Big Show and I think we’ve got a really cool episode for you today.

I want to start by talking about Perplexity. If you haven’t heard of Perplexity.ai, it’s an artificial intelligence powered search engine that focuses heavily on providing great answers.

I’ve said for years that “people don’t want a search engine, they want a find engine. “ And what we’re seeing happen in the marketplace right now, whether it’s people like Google’s AI Overviews or Bing Copilot or Perplexity, we’re moving towards a legitimate answer engine where the tool is simply answering the question for you. Of course, ChatGPT belongs in there as well.

The challenge for Folks like ChatGPT and Perplexity is that they have to find a way to pay for their product. If you think about Google, it is one of the most profitable businesses ever built. It’s an extraordinarily profitable company. And folks are trying to figure out how to monetize the answers they’re providing.

Well, according to Digiday, Perplexity has come up with one answer — and shocker — it’s advertising. According to Digiday, Perplexity’s new advertiser pitch deck shows how the “AI search startup hopes to win over advertisers later this year as it works to set itself apart from competing startups like ChatGPT and giants like Google.”

The article continues,

According to a copy of the pitch deck obtained by Digiday, the plan is to integrate ads within users, queries, and answers, potentially as soon as the fourth quarter of 2024.

It finishes up by noting that “…although the pitch deck didn’t talk about pricing, a source within Perplexity confirmed the goal is to target CPMs north of $50.”

Now for those of you not familiar with CPMs, that’s a very traditional way of selling advertising where CPM stands for cost per thousand impressions or cost per mille. You know, because so many marketers speak Latin as their first language. It’s a thing that’s existed for a very long time, though, and it really is what it stands for, cost per mille or cost per thousand. Keep that CPM point in mind, because we’re going to come back to that in a bit.

Nonetheless, Perplexity’s pitch deck is the most aggressive approach that I’ve seen so far to going after Google’s massive ad revenues, to hit them where they live.

As a reminder, when we looked at Google’s earnings a couple of weeks ago, Google had just shy of $85 billion in revenues last quarter and almost $24 billion in profit.

Among the five big tech players who I pay the most attention to — Apple, Google, Facebook, Amazon, and Microsoft — Google’s profits were the highest among any of them. So going after their ad revenues is an important first step for anyone who’s looking to challenge Google as king of the hill and bump them out of big tech.

Think about it. If you’re a marketer, you have limited budgets. That’s generally the truth. There are only so many places where you can afford to spend your ad dollars. I’m not usually a zero sum thinker. But marketing budgets in practice tend to be somewhat zero sum. Every dollar you spend with a new marketing channel is one dollar fewer for Google.

So this is a potential threat to them that’s worth taking seriously. And it fits into a larger pattern of all of the threats that Google is facing right now. And that brings up a question of, are you willing to bet, as a marketer, that Google wins the AI economy? Are they the ones who are going to win in the long term?

I’m going to be honest, I don’t know the answer to this. I tend to think in bets a la the great book, Thinking in Bets by Annie Duke, the poker player. And I don’t know that I would bet a lot one way or the other at the moment. I’d call it roughly 50/50.

To be fair, I think Google has the best odds of anyone of winning. They probably have a 50% chance of winning. I think maybe Microsoft and OpenAI have a 25% to 35% percent chance of winning. And everyone else combined makes up the last 15% to 25%. Perplexity is in that mix, but they’re only a very small part of that mix, in my mind, at least for now.

To break this down a little bit, SimilarWeb shows that Perplexity got 57.8 million visits last month. Bing, by contrast, got 1.78 billion. That’s billion with a “B,” to Perplexity’s 57.8 million with an “M.” Google got 83.5 billion.

Google is almost 50 times larger than Bing, and over 1,400 times larger than Perplexity. So, it’s tough to see Perplexity as a big threat today.

That could change. They could grow. They could grow really fast. But they’re a long way from being a major threat at the moment, even if they do take a couple of ad dollars away from Google.

So it makes it tough to bet against Google. At the same time, let’s talk about why I wouldn’t bet for them. Let’s start with why I wouldn’t bet for them.

First, they have a fairly fragmented product strategy. Just to think of all of the places they’re working to put AI and the different names they’ve tagged all of these with.

Even Gemini, their primary product, they offer in four tiers. There’s Ultra 1.0, Pro 1.5, Flash 1.5, and Nano 1 0.

Lots of these tools, lots of these things I’m talking about are very cool. They’re also incredibly difficult for the marketplace to understand and keep up with. I do this for a living. I spend a lot of my time researching various products and services that are available to my clients and to marketers and other business leaders. And it’s really hard to keep up with their whole product portfolio.

If you think about this from a pure marketing perspective, that’s not a great marketing message. It makes it really difficult for potential customers to keep track of what they’re doing and what they offer and what the benefits are to you as a customer, which makes it tough to choose them sometimes.

By contrast, lots of the competition that they’re facing, like Microsoft and OpenAI, are well funded and have much clearer product strategies.

Microsoft’s entire product strategy is wrapped up into what they call Copilot. You’ve got Windows Copilot, Microsoft 365 Copilot, Bing Copilot, Excel Copilot, GitHub Copilot, Outlook Copilot, and so on. Microsoft also has enormous enterprise sales capabilities, so they can get their corporate customers, their biggest group of customers, to keep using them.

Google also has this little problem with the antitrust suit that they’re facing right now. And not doing a great job of it. They just lost the first phase of it. I had a whole episode about that a few weeks ago, which I will, of course, link to in the show notes. It is tough, however, to run forward when you’re looking over your shoulder because, you know, you might be big tech, but big government is gaining on them, at least at the moment.

Most importantly, and the biggest challenge I see for Google here, is that ads placed alongside AI search results, a la the Perplexity deck, might not be cost per click or CPC ads, which Google has always done. But might be CPM or cost per thousand impressions. If you’re Google, that could be a big problem.

CPM ads are not anywhere near as lucrative as CPC ads. They’ve never been. Facebook, which is the third most visited site in the world and the second biggest seller of advertising after Google, made $39 billion in revenue last quarter and almost all of that from ads. Again, I mentioned Google made $84 billion overall, $48 billion of that from search ads alone. That is, mostly from CPC. It made another $36 billion from other sources. Still mostly ads. They make a ton of money on this, mostly on CPC. And you probably know this, but CPC ads print money because they hit customers when they’re ready to buy. They’re right there, they’re as good as any other search result, or as bad, if you choose to look at it that way. They’re a good answer to the question, and people click on them, and Google makes a ton of money.

If AI results begin to overtake traditional search engine results pages — and the ads alongside them — Google could see a decline in revenue simply because the new ad formats or new ad models may not work as well as what they have today. That may be great for consumers, but it might not be great for Google’s business. It also might not be great for your business as an advertiser, so something you want to think about here.

This reality underscores the challenging path that Google has to navigate. They can avoid building AI into their most lucrative search engine results pages because they don’t want to lose clicks on ads. But that could cause customers to switch to a better search experience on Perplexity, Bing, ChatGPT, or whomever, which would hurt Google’s revenues.

Or, they could build AI into their most lucrative search results to keep customers on the SERP, on the search engine results page, and lose clicks because customers get an answer or don’t find the ad necessary. Which could hurt their revenues.

Google could be in a “damned if you do, damned if you don’t scenario.” That’s a very real problem for market leaders generally, and for Google specifically. Even if they win at keeping the most traffic, they could lose from a revenue perspective.

Now, I’m not convinced that either of those are entirely likely, but they are plausible.

There’s obviously a third scenario where Google successfully incorporates very high value ads into the search engine results that work both for consumers and advertisers and grow its revenues. They have enormous incentive to find solutions that do that. I wouldn’t bet against them finding that, to be honest, because it’s existential that they do.

They cannot afford to lose.

And they have a whole bunch of positives in their favor of why they could win.

The first is that they have an enormous, enormous amount of money available to play with. Google is sitting on about $100.7 billion in cash. Now, I don’t know about you, but I think there’s a lot you can do with $100 billion to support your business. I’m pretty sure I could find some things to do with it, right?

We know that they have amazing technology and significant computing capabilities. We know that they have a ton of talent whose core job, whose whole reason for being at Google every day, is to solve this problem.

And they also have one other massive advantage that we always have to keep in mind, which is their brand equity.

We all “Google” every day; It’s a verb. It’s a core behavior we all do. Gmail also is one of the biggest email platforms in the world. Billions of people use Google Docs and Google Drive to manage their work and their lives. Billions of people use Android phones and so on. That’s a lot of human behavior to change, to get people to switch away from doing.

I spend time as a marketer trying to get people to change their behavior. It’s really hard. Think about it: If you’re trying to get somebody to do something they’ve never done before, that’s a difficult proposition. Whenever you’re trying to get people to change — and this is true in marketing generally &mdsash; that’s the biggest competitor you face.

Is inertia, getting people to take on a new behavior, getting them to take a new action, is really, really challenging. And getting people to stop using Google and start using something else, even though all they have to do is type in a different URL, is difficult. We just don’t see it happen very often. Note the difference in traffic that Google gets versus Bing, who’s been competing with them for 20 years.

Even on the antitrust side, I’m not convinced this is a long term threat to Google. It’s a, it’s a distraction. It’s definitely a problem. But I don’t know that the antitrust thing is going to be that big a deal in the long term.

Benedict Evans made a compelling argument in his most recent newsletter that it doesn’t matter if they lose. Apple probably isn’t going to move away from Google to use Bing or Perplexity. This is a quote from Apple’s SVP of Services, Eddie Cue, that Benedict Evans highlighted in his newsletter, where he said,

“There was no price that Microsoft could ever offer to make the switch because of Bing’s inferior quality and the associated business risks of making a change.”

This is the quote from Eddie Cue.

“I don’t believe there’s a price in the world that Microsoft could offer us. They offered us to give us Bing for free. They could give us the whole company.”

Cue continued,

“We’re not going to take something that isn’t as good and provide that to our customers. Our customers are too important to us. One of the reasons Apple’s been so successful is the fact that we treat the customer as the most important thing in the world, much more important than the revenue.

Again, that’s Eddie Cue, Apple’s SVP of Services, on why they might not switch, even if Microsoft no, excuse me, Google no longer pays them billions of dollars every year to use Google as their main search engine. Google is just a better product.

So it might not actually matter that much in terms of what’s happening there. And, just to put some further context around this, the judge in this case will not be proposing remedies in terms of what they might do to Google until August of next year. That’s 11 months from now before we figure out where their antitrust situation is going.

Additionally, their competitors aren’t winning. I mean, look at the numbers we just talked about from Bing or that we talked about from Perplexity; Google is still the dominant player. There’s data that comes from a variety of sources that show Google’s market share really hasn’t budged in months, so they’re doing pretty well. And they may continue to do pretty well for some time to come.

The question for me becomes, how much are you willing to bet? This, to me, is a 50/50 proposition. Maybe you think I’m wrong, and that the pros in favor of Google are much higher, and they’re the ones who are going to win. Or maybe you think, “wow, there’s a lot of problems that Google has to face and so they’re going to lose.”

But are you willing to put all of your eggs in Google’s basket and expect them to continue delivering the bulk of your traffic and revenues? Or are you going to move away from them entirely and hope for the best that it works out, that somebody else takes their place?

Or, are you ready to do what I tend to recommend, which is something like a core and explore strategy, where you test new ideas to drive traffic and revenue from other sources, while continuing to do some of what you do today?

As I noted, I wouldn’t bet too much on either scenario. I don’t think it’s a winning strategy for you to bet on either outcome right now. Instead, it’s about how you succeed no matter what happens to Google. It does mean diversifying your revenue and traffic. It does mean trying new channels and new ideas.

It does mean listening to your customers and building greater connection with those folks to drive more business from alternative sources like email or social. Most of all, it means placing a bet on your business, and on doing what’s right for you… so that no matter what happens with Google, its antitrust problems, or its competitors, you still win.

That’s the bet I would encourage you to make, because it’s the one that’s most likely to pay off in the long run.

Now, looking at the clock on the wall, we are out of time for this week.

I want to remind you again that you can find the show notes for this episode, as well as an archive of all past episodes, by going to timpeter.com/podcast. Again, that’s timpeter.com/podcast. Just look for episode 433.

Don’t forget that you can click on the subscribe link in any of the episodes that you find there to have Thinks Out Loud delivered to your favorite podcatcher every single week. You can also find Thinks Out Loud on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube Music, anywhere fine podcasts are found.

I would also very much appreciate it if you could provide a positive rating or review for the show whenever you use one of those services.

If you like what you hear on Thinks Out Loud, if you enjoy what we talk about, if you like being part of the community that we’re building here, please give us a positive rating or review.

Reviews help other listeners find the podcast. Reviews help other listeners understand what Thinks Out Loud is all about. They help to build our community and they mean the world to me. So thank you so much for doing that. I very, very much appreciate it.

You can also find Thinks Out Loud on LinkedIn by going to linkedin.com/tim-peter-and-associates-llc. You can find me on Twitter or X or whatever you want to call it this week by using the Twitter handle @tcpeter. And of course, you can email me by sending an email to podcast(at)timpeter.com. Again, that’s podcast(at)timpeter.com.

Finally, and I know I say this a lot, I want you to know how thrilled I am that you keep listening to what we do here. It means so much to me. You are the reason we do this show. You’re the reason that Thinks Out Loud happens every single week.

So please, keep your messages coming on LinkedIn. Keep hitting me up on Twitter, sending things via email. I love getting a chance to talk with you, to hear what’s going on in your world, and to learn how we can do a better job building on the types of information and insights and content and community that work for you and work for your business.

So with all that said, I hope you have a fantastic rest of your day, I hope you have a wonderful week ahead, and I will look forward to speaking with you here on Thinks Out Loud next time. Until then, please be well, be safe, and as always, take care, everybody.

The post Will Marketers Bet that Google Wins the AI Economy? (Thinks Out Loud Episode 433) appeared first on Tim Peter & Associates.

Is AI destined to make content, music, art, and marketing worse? Almost certainly. Truly. It’s also almost certainly going to help many people create many great works that they had neither the skills or access to create in the past. That’s the reality of new technology and new tools. As the quote says, “when you invent the ship, you invent the shipwreck.” Some of what AI offers will be amazing. Some will be will terrible. The key for marketers, business professionals, artists, and, frankly, everyone, is to learn how to use these tools the right way to help their customers — and humanity overall.

Why is AI destined to make things worse… and better? How can we use it well? And what do we need to do to make sure we shape AI’s destiny for better, not worse? That’s what this episode of Thinks Out Loud is all about.

Want to learn more? Here are the show notes for you.

You might also enjoy this webinar I recently participated in with Miles Partnership that looked at "The Power of Generative AI and ChatGPT: What It Means for Tourism & Hospitality" here:

We have some free downloads for you to help you navigate the current situation, which you can find right here:

You can find our “Best of Thinks Out Loud” playlist on Spotify right here:

Contact information for the podcast: [email protected]

Recorded using a Shure SM7B Vocal Dynamic Microphone and a Focusrite Scarlett 4i4 (3rd Gen) USB Audio Interface into Logic Pro X for the Mac.

Running time: 24m 32s

You can subscribe to Thinks Out Loud in iTunes, the Google Play Store, via our dedicated podcast RSS feed (or sign up for our free newsletter). You can also download/listen to the podcast here on Thinks using the player at the top of this page.

  Welcome to Thinks Out Loud, your source for all the digital expertise your business needs. Well hello again everyone and welcome back to Thinks Out Loud, your source for all the digital expertise your business needs. My name is Tim Peter. This is episode 432 of The Big Show, and thank you so much for tuning in today.

I very much appreciate it. I think we’ve got a really cool show for you today, and full disclosure, this one may go a little long because it speaks to interests near and dear to my heart, and that is marketing and music, and the relationship between those. My, my good friend Mark Schaefer, and anybody who’s listened to the show before knows that I think the world of Mark, he’s one of the smartest people in the world of marketing today.

And he has a must read post about what he calls the real reason marketing content is getting worse. And he compares it to music. Now, long term listeners probably know that I was a music major in college and I started my career as a musician and a recording engineer before I got into marketing. So this one was like catnip for me.

, I was just like, oh, I can’t wait to listen to it and I can’t wait to talk about it. And I want to be very, very clear, right out of the gate, Mark is 100 percent right about why there’s so much crap out there. AI makes it easier and cheaper to produce content. As a result, more people make more content.

And many of those people either don’t take the time to make sure that they’re producing quality content, They don’t have the skills to produce quality content, or frankly, both. As a result, we’re seeing lower quality content. As Mark rightfully puts it, quote, We risk drowning in a sea of mediocrity. The craft of marketing, the human touch, the unexpected twist, the soul.

is in danger of being automated away. I could not agree more. It is tremendously easy for folks to create lots and lots and lots of mediocre or actively bad content. And that makes it tougher for you to stand out. In a sea of noise, it’s just harder to be seen and heard and recognized. I actually made a similar point way back in 2018 in an episode called Digital Makes Marketing Easier for Everyone, Which Makes Marketing Harder for Everyone.

So, this has been a topic that I’ve thought about a lot. Over the last couple of years, I also share his very real concern about providing younger marketers with the opportunities to learn and learn their craft better in an episode called Will AI Make Marketers Dumber Earlier This Year? Those are very, very real concerns and very real risks.

And shouldn’t be ignored in marketing, or in music, or anything else we do as creative individuals. And frankly, creative people as human beings. Creativity is such a core component of what we do. So up to this point, I completely agree. So you might be going, cool, what’s your beef then? What’s your point?

Really, there are three points that I want to make. One is that we need to keep growing and learning. We need to learn how to use these tools to our advantage. The second is that we need to help others do the same. And the third is that we need to give space for new ideas. Because ultimately, we’re not the customer.

We have to be willing to listen to what’s changing in the marketplace and changing in our customers worlds to support them. And I want to be fair, I don’t think Mark is suggesting don’t do that. I, in fact, I’m confident he’s not. It’s that we want to be very careful when we talk about, when things were better or how change can hurt, that we’re looking at both the pros and the cons.

Microsoft Mechanics www. microsoft. com I’ll give an example. Mark said, quote, When everyone relies on the same tools, you create a homogenized sound and a lack of diversity. He was talking about both music and marketing. Ironically, in the episode about one of Mark’s favorite topics, building a human brand in the age of AI that we did about a year ago, I mentioned one of my favorite YouTube music shows Mary Spender, who’s a bit of a protege of Rick Beato, the YouTuber Mark mentioned.

I am very familiar with Rick and his arguments. My issue with his arguments, his general argument, is that not everything was better years ago. The way we did things before can lead to stagnation. Or missing something genuinely interesting and novel DECA Records famously passed on The Beatles, Millennium Records rejected Madonna RSO, the Robert Stingwood Organization, passed on U2, and Def Jam Records, Signed and then dropped from the label, Lady Gaga, a decision Def Jam’s founder has called one of the worst decisions he’s ever made.

And that’s before we get into some of the terrible behaviors that existed in a world where gatekeepers existed. We need to remember the famous quote. That the customer is always right in matters of taste. We need to listen to our customers because the things that they hate, whether it’s music or marketing, isn’t going to work.

And the things that they love, even if we ourselves don’t love them, are going to work much better. And that’s true whether we’re creating our content with artificial intelligence or with human ingenuity. It’s just the way it works, right? Now don’t get me wrong, I love Mark’s taste in music. Anyone who name drops folks like John Batiste or Pat Metheny or Rhiannon Giddens or Mark Rebo has got, to my ears, Spectacular taste in music, but as marketers, we have to remember that the things we don’t like might still work for our customers.

They’re not us, and I have to touch on a point here that’s really important for anybody who’s listening and is over the age of, say, 30 or 35. As we get older, it’s tougher for us to get excited by the new. There’s research that shows that we love stuff we first encountered between the ages of 10 and 30 more than the things we’ll encounter at any other period in our lives.

It leads to something called the Reminiscence Bump, where art and music and film and fashion and a whole host of other life experiences we encounter during those formative years have greater, longer lasting impact than items we encounter before then or after then. We simply are wired to like the things that shaped us at certain points in our lives more than other things.

It’s one of the reasons I’ve talked about reverse mentors from time to time. These are younger colleagues who mentor more veteran professionals on technology, media, trends, things like that. They, they help you keep in touch and get exposed to new things. Maybe the thing we don’t like works for other people, for customers in different demographics or sociographic segments.

And our Reverse Mentors can be an important part of learning what resonates with audiences other than ourselves. For example, I think there’s a lot of great pop music out there, most of which I was introduced to by my Reverse Mentors. I’m thinking of people like Chapel Roan, or Sabrina Carpenter, or Zach Bryan, Casey Musgraves, Kendrick Lamar, Megan Thee Stallion, SZA, Billie Eilish, Olivia Rodrigo.

They’re producing, in my opinion, amazing work. That might take a little bit more exposure to get comfortable with if you’re outside the resuminescence bump period of your life. And that’s as true for people who are 40, as it is for those who, like me, aren’t 40. And let’s be fair, there’s a lot of crap, too.

What we have to remember is there’s always been a lot of crap. We remember the great stuff, not the crap. I looked at the top hits of 1984 on Wikipedia, which was right in the peak period of the reminiscence bump for me. I was a teenager. It was also a fairly great year for music. Given the number of songs you still hear from that period played, on Spotify and on the radio and in stores and restaurants and the like.

There are some absolute classics on that list. What would surprise you, if you looked, are there are also some, well, let’s call them not so much classics. Things like Twist of Fate by Olivia Newton John, or Think of Laura by Christopher Cross, or Time Will Reveal by DeBarge. They barely register in my mind.

And again, I loved music in that era. These were some of the biggest hits of a huge year in music, and I’m like, what? Huh? Meh. They just don’t stick because they were garbage. There’s another example that I point to all the time that Tina Fey once mentioned. She said, Saturday Night Live. We all remember the Saturday Night Live when we were in college because it was great.

It was the best. And Tina Fey has said Saturday Night Live was always terrible. Think about this. There are roughly 8 skits in every episode. They’ve had 968 episodes since the show started. And they usually have about 21 episodes per season. So that’s, if we take 8 skits and 968 episodes, That’s roughly 7, 700 skits across its 49 season history, or about 168 skits per season.

Now, how many of those do you remember? I can maybe think of a few dozen. I mean, let’s call it 100 in total, which is just a little bit over 1 percent of all the skits they’ve ever done. I suspect if you spend some time on this, maybe you’d come up with 100 or 200. That means that roughly 98 to 98. 9 percent are, at best, not very memorable, if not actively bad.

We just remember the classics, the ones that really stand out for us. And I’m sure if we think of the television commercials, or the radio commercials, or the print ads of that period, or whatever period was your youth, there is going to be some absolute classics that stand out in your mind. And most are going to be things you don’t recall, because there was a lot of crap in that era.

Two, which brings me to my next point and the next thing that I want to remind folks about and why I’m actually encouraged to a degree by the amount of garbage that’s out there. I know that’s a weird thing to say, but the reality is we live in a world now where there is more democratization of access to these tools.

According to Clay Shirky, the media scholar, publishing used to be an industry. Now it’s a button. That’s more good than bad. It doesn’t mean that there’s no bad. You’ve heard me say many times before that when you invent the ship, you invent the shipwreck. By creating more access to tools, more people can create.

Some of them are going to create garbage. Some of them aren’t going to know the difference in creating garbage. And some of them are going to come up with ideas and brilliant concepts that we might never have heard of. Whether that’s music or art or publishing or marketing or anything else. But they simply never had access to the tools before.

I told a story not long ago in a back and forth I had with some folks on Reddit. About starting out in recording studios, and how inexpensive computers and recording have opened up making music to an entire universe of people who would never have had a chance to make records. All of my mentors, everybody I worked with, worked on major label releases.

The engineer who taught me the most Had learned from Roy Halle, who’d won multiple Grammy awards working with Paul Simon and other artists in the 60s and 70s. And he’s in the Tech Hall of Fame, which is a hall of fame for record producers and engineers. I started out as a gopher. Then I was a second engineer under that guy for a couple of years before I was told I could call myself an engineer.

And it was another year or two of long shifts and lots of hands on experience, recording anything I could before I even started producing. The point is, before that, somebody had a door shut in my face. Anything that I did was done on cheap. , consumer quality gear that couldn’t possibly sound like a record.

You couldn’t possibly release it. It was just pure trash. The gear wasn’t good enough. So we were kind of capped out. And I knew too many people who were capped out because they didn’t meet some standard of getting in the door. One of those standards was money. Even the first semi professional studio I worked in The gear alone cost probably 100, 000, which would be roughly 250, 000 to 300, 000 adjusted for inflation.

Quality professional rooms had, were studios where the gear ran into the millions. In 1980s money, you couldn’t get your hands on pro quality gear without someone, a gatekeeper, letting you in the room. That isn’t necessarily a good thing, right? Because it created a whole environment where you couldn’t create.

Where you couldn’t explore, you couldn’t do things unless somebody let you in the door. And if you couldn’t hack it, if you couldn’t cut it, they’d shove you out the door just as quickly as they let you in to replace you with the 50 or 100 or 200 people who had their faces pressed against the glass hoping for a shot at getting in.

My point is that the old way prevented many, many people from ever getting an opportunity. Today’s marketers, folks who are trying to learn how to do this on the fly, without the gatekeepers, they lack the tutelage, they lack the training, they lack the teaching that I got from some of these world class engineers.

But they also lack the gatekeepers who are preventing them from getting their foot in the door. That’s a pro and a con simultaneously. Marketers are no longer getting yelled at for writing terrible copy or letting an AI do it. There are no gatekeepers, and that means that if you’re, like, a small business listening to this, you can do things that couldn’t have even been done 30 years ago.

That’s not necessarily bad. Yes, you invent the ship, you invent the shipwreck. No gatekeepers means some people who shouldn’t publish get to. And by, I mean, shouldn’t get to publish, I mean spammers and, and terrible folks who are trying to, Defraud customers, that’s bad, that’s actively bad, but creating the opportunities for folks who may not have had them before is a good thing.

And I think that’s why what we really need to focus on and what’s most important, and this I do come back to Mark in a big way because I agree with him entirely, is that we have to learn A, to listen to our customers. B, we have to learn to help others learn. And C, we need to cultivate judgment. We need to learn how to have great judgment, and we need to teach others to have great judgment.

AI can create. But not everything it creates is going to be good. Not everything it creates is going to work for our customers or for their taste. That doesn’t mean that it’s bad and we shouldn’t use it. It means we have to exhibit judgment. We have to exercise judgment. We have to help people who we encounter who maybe’s judgment needs a little bit of help to learn what makes for good quality and what makes for less good quality.

What’s better or worse. We need to do the work and especially teach our employees, our mentees, younger colleagues, other professionals who we encounter in the world and in the marketplace, how to think through the answers that artificial intelligence gives them, to know whether those answers are helpful, whether they’re true, whether they’re kind, whether they make a better reality for all of our customers.

Because machines Can’t do judgment, and it doesn’t matter whether it’s creating something that sounds like it existed in the 80s or the 90s or the 2000s, or if it’s creating something that sounds entirely novel and new. Judgment is going to matter. That’s a place we own. Better or worse are judgment calls.

It’s up to us to make sure we’re thinking through what better or worse means, what better or worse content and messages and experiences we’re putting out in the world, and whether we’re willing to live with the consequences of those judgments. Because ultimately, it’s not artificial intelligence that decides to release content.

We’re the ones who decide whether we put out something that’s great or something that’s crappy. We’re the ones who decide whether we’re going to try to create something that might go down as a classic. Or something that we put out there because we’re just trying to get a quick hit. AI is not destined to make music or marketing worse.

That’s our decision. The only ones we’ll have to blame, and that our customers and audiences should blame, for crappy content, for crappy music, for crappy marketing. is us. So let’s celebrate the demise of gatekeepers. Let’s use that to our advantage. Let’s ensure we’re thinking long and hard about what works for our customers and trying to explore and embrace the novel and new when it works.

Artificial intelligence can be an incredibly powerful tool. It’s our choice whether we use it to create something crappy, Or whether we use it to create classics. I can’t wait to see how you use it.

Now, looking at the clock on the wall, we are out of time for this week.

And I want to remind you again that you can find the show notes for this episode. As well as an archive of all past episodes by going to timpeter.com/podcast. Again, that’s timpeter.com/podcast. Just look for episode 423.

Don’t forget that you can click on the subscribe link in any of the episodes that you find there to have Thinks Out Loud delivered to your favorite podcatcher every single week. You can also find Thinks Out Loud on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube Music, anywhere fine podcasts are found.

I would also very much appreciate it if you could provide a positive rating or review for the show whenever you use one of those services.

If you like what you hear on Thinks Out Loud, if you enjoy what we talk about, if you like being part of the community that we’re building here, please give us a positive rating or review.

Reviews help other listeners find the podcast. Reviews help other listeners understand what Thinks Out Loud is all about. They help to build our community and they mean the world to me personally. So thank you so much for doing that. I very, very much appreciate it.

You can also find Thinks Out Loud on LinkedIn by going to linkedin.com/tim-peter-and-associates-llc. You can find me on Twitter or X or whatever you want to call it this week by using the Twitter handle @tcpeter. And of course, you can email me by sending an email to podcast(at)timpeter.com. Again, that’s podcast(at)timpeter.com.

Finally, and I know I say this a lot, but I want you to know just how thrilled I am that you keep listening to what we do here. It means so very, very much to me. You are the reason we do this show.

You’re the reason that Thinks Out Loud happens every week. You’re the reason we produce a new episode. So please, please keep listening, keep your messages coming on LinkedIn, keep hitting me up on Twitter, sending things via email. I love getting a chance to talk with you, to hear what’s going on in your world, and to learn how we can do a better job building the types of information and insights and content and community that work for you and work for your business.

And with all that said, I hope you have a fantastic rest of your day. I hope you have a wonderful week, and I will look forward to speaking with you here on Thinks Out Loud next time. Until then, please be well, be safe, and as always, take care, everybody.

The post Is AI Destined to Make Marketing — and Music — Worse? (Thinks Out Loud Episode 432) appeared first on Tim Peter & Associates.

Google makes immense amounts of money. It is, by far, the biggest website in the world. Its size and success, though, can mask deeper issues. Its size and success can hide big problems. And Google has a big AI problem.

Google, in all likelihood, is also one of the the biggest drivers of traffic and revenues for your business. And its problems — big or small — could be a much bigger problem for you. That’s why it’s crucial that you keep on what’s happening to the search giant… and why you’re ready if it should stumble.

What is Google’s big AI problem? How might that problem affect your business? And what can you do about it? That’s what this episode of Thinks Out Loud is all about.

Want to learn more? Here are the show notes for you.

You might also enjoy this webinar I recently participated in with Miles Partnership that looked at "The Power of Generative AI and ChatGPT: What It Means for Tourism & Hospitality" here:

We have some free downloads for you to help you navigate the current situation, which you can find right here:

You can find our “Best of Thinks Out Loud” playlist on Spotify right here:

Contact information for the podcast: [email protected]

Recorded using a Shure SM7B Vocal Dynamic Microphone and a Focusrite Scarlett 4i4 (3rd Gen) USB Audio Interface into Logic Pro X for the Mac.

Running time: 25m 28s

You can subscribe to Thinks Out Loud in iTunes, the Google Play Store, via our dedicated podcast RSS feed (or sign up for our free newsletter). You can also download/listen to the podcast here on Thinks using the player at the top of this page.

Well hello again everybody and welcome back to Thinks Out Loud, your source for all the digital expertise your business needs. My name is Tim Peter. This is episode 423 of The Big Show. And thank you so much for tuning in. I think we’ve got a really cool show for you today.

In an episode a couple of weeks ago, I talked about the new models coming from Google and AI, OpenAI, and I said I would dive into them a little deeper in a subsequent episode. And I’ve tried out the new models. So we’re talking about ChatGPT featuring GPT 4o; that’s "4-lowercase-o." And I’ve tried out Google Gemini 1.5 Pro. They’re both excellent. They’re really, really good. If you’re not using them, and I suspect many of you are using them, but for those who aren’t, they’re definitely worth checking out. I’m going to come back to that in a bit, though.

Because during the time I’ve been playing with them, another situation has come up around AI, and especially around Google with AI, that highlights a big, big problem for Google. And that big, big problem might become a big, big problem for you, too. And that’s why I think it’s worth talking about today.

As part of its product announcements a couple of weeks ago, Google released its AI Overview in search. Now this is essentially what was Search Generative Experience. It’s just now incorporated into search in a more consistent way across a wide array of searches. It’s not terrible. It’s also… not great.

There have been some hilarious and a few truly atrocious errors. To get one of the ickier ones out of the way, it presented the obviously false summary in response to a question stating that Barack Obama was The first Muslim president in US history. Now, we all know that that is not true. We all know that that was something that was used against him a lot in his political career. But it’s factually inaccurate.

That’s a big problem for Google and potentially a big problem for you. The consensus for the funniest error Google’s AI overview made was it said that one way to keep cheese from falling off of homemade pizza is to, and I quote, "…add some glue. Mix about one eighth cup of Elmer’s glue in with the sauce."

Happily, it also says, "non-toxic glue will work."

Y’think?

For the record, don’t put glue on your pizza, please, I’m begging you. My personal favorite screw up, though, said that 13 U. S. presidents attended the University of Wisconsin Madison, which is obviously not true, receiving a total of 59 degrees among them. That one just keeps getting funnier to me, by the way. Andrew Johnson was particularly industrious, according to Google’s AI overview. Which claimed he earned 14 degrees as part of the classes of 1947, 1965, 1985, 1996, 1998, 2000, 2011, and 2012. That’s super impressive if it were true, especially given that Johnson, by 1947, to say nothing of 2012, Had been dead for over 70 years.

I mean, this isn’t a little false, this is super false. For the record, I fact checked Andrew Johnson’s date of birth and date of death on the White House website. I didn’t fully trust Google to give me the right answer.

And that’s a big deal for Google. Google has a problem that no one else in this space does. They’re not allowed to get the answer wrong.

Google is the number one site in the US and all around the world. They’re the number one site in the US and the number one site globally, according to SimilarWeb. It also says that Google got 250 billion visits over the last three months, and tends to average around 83 billion visits every month.

By contrast, over the last three months, OpenAI, for all the hype that it’s getting, got 5.3 billion visits. Now that’s a big number, but they’re averaging around 1.7 to 7 billion visits every month. They’re the 23rd most visited site on the internet globally, and only number 53 in the US. What’s truly amazing is when you compare them with Bing, Bing got just over 4.1 billion visits from February through April. They’re averaging about 1. 37 billion visits every month. They’re the 26th most visited site globally, and good for them, they made it all the way to number 19 in the US. But think about that. Bing launched almost exactly 15 years ago. Ironically, 15 years ago this week relative to when I’m recording this episode.

OpenAI has existed for a grand total of 8 years, and ChatGPT has only been around for 17 months. Their growth is unlike just about anything we’ve ever seen. Even with that, though, their traffic is roughly 2 percent of Google’s. Two! Two percent! That’s not very much.

Recent research from the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism and YouGov, this was a partnership, only 53% of Americans have heard of ChatGPT. Not used. Heard.

Another way to say that is that 47% of Americans haven’t heard of ChatGPT. I’m going to go out on a limb here. What percentage of people do you think have heard of Google? Now, only 24% have heard of Google Gemini, their AI, or a bit less than half as many as know about ChatGPT.

And let’s be fair, this data was captured between late March and early April 2024. So it’s not like we’re talking about earlier in ChatGPT’s life and people didn’t know about it.

As much as we all talk about ChatGPT and AI all the time, most people don’t. Seriously. Only about 18 percent of US respondents use ChatGPT at least weekly. Which was one of the largest usage patterns in the study, and that’s kind of Google’s problem.

They’re super, super big and that creates a whole separate issue for them. I mentioned they’re the number one site globally, they’re the number one site in the US. Even Facebook, which is the third largest site in the world, gets only about 60% of Google’s traffic monthly. Right? That’s a big difference and that creates a problem for Google and a benefit for folks like ChatGPT.

We frequently laugh and shake our heads at ChatGPT’s hallucinations. But think about those numbers we just talked about. Most people have never seen them. Ever. And now Google, with its 83 billion monthly visits is going to attach an AI overview to all kinds of its roughly eight and a half billion daily searches.

As we saw with Barack Obama and Andrew Johnson and Pizza Toppings answers, sometime it’s going to get those answers spectacularly, hilariously, frighteningly wrong. A lot! Right? Think about this. I use this analogy all the time. I use this thought exercise all the time. But let’s say that Google does an amazing job.

Let’s say that their AI overview gets it right 99.999% of the time. That’s the so called five nines many technologists refer to in terms of what getting it right looks like. That means that they’d provide a great AI overview 8,499,915,000 times every day. That’s fantastic, right? They’d also give a bad AI overview 85,000 times every day.

That’s actually a lot. If they get it right only 99% of the time, just to give this context, they’d be giving a bad result — every day — 85 million times a day.

Now, obviously I’m only talking about the frequency of errors, I’m not talking about the magnitude. Not all errors are created equally, and sometimes those errors might be fairly minor. But sometimes they might be huge if we’re talking about people’s health, if we’re talking about people’s finances.

This could be an enormous problem for them. I talked about why this is a problem a few episodes back when Google launched Gemini and it was creating imagery that was troubling. It too was a launch that went spectacularly, hilariously, frighteningly wrong. You’re noticing a pattern here, right?

Google’s scale, the very strength that allows them to create amazing artificial intelligence capabilities, is also an incredibly dangerous weakness for the company. What happens when they get it wrong? What happens to their user experience? What happens to their brand?

I believe bad answers. are a huge problem for Google, the biggest problem they face by far. Consider this, that Reuters/YouGov study that I talked about before shows that ChatGPT use is most common among younger users and declines among older cohorts. 43% of folks age 25-34 have used ChatGPT, as have fully 56% of those aged 18-24.

Over a quarter of respondents aged 18-24 use it at least weekly, which is 50% more than the general population in that study. And their top use? "Answering factual questions."

Funny, isn’t that, you know, Google’s job?

By the way, 60% of that rough cohort also have used TikTok as a search engine. This is according to data from Adobe. Younger users, millennials and Gen Z, are learning that Google doesn’t always give the best answer. And I’m concerned in the longer term that AI Overview might reinforce that belief.

Obviously, it’s not like Google can’t incorporate AI into its results. Remember, AI Overview only launched two weeks ago on May 14th.The Reuters/YouGov study occurred before that. And the same with the TikTok data that I referenced. Younger users are already looking for alternatives.

They, Google, need to be able to respond to what’s happening in the marketplace. The challenge for them is they appear to face trouble no matter which path they take.

I don’t want to make it sound like they can’t figure this out. I do want to point out that they face a challenge that nobody else does. In their defense, Gemini is a brilliant product. I’m using it regularly, and I’m very impressed with it. Google is awesome at building these kinds of tools. I can’t say that it’s better at ChatGPT than ChatGPT for every use case. My experience suggests that ChatGPT is a little more creative in its responses, which is cool when you’re doing like brainstorming activities, or, you know, outlining writing, or discussing writing. However, Gemini, I think, is much better at summarizing documents and a handful of other use cases that I’ve tested it on.

Google’s technology leadership, their compute capabilities, their access to data, and their pile of money they’re sitting on is second to none. There’s a lot of ways they can figure this out.

They’ve also done a great job of clearing up some of the most egregious errors in AI overview. Quickly, the ones that I just talked about, you can’t reproduce now. Hopefully, they can keep up that pace of cleaning up after themselves. I’m seeing some reports, though, that some users are seeing AI overviews less frequently, maybe while Google’s trying to iron out some of the more egregious errors.

Also, Google is operating from position of strength. Remember the part where they’re 47 times bigger than OpenAI? And significantly larger than TikTok and Facebook, too? So, you know, Google might be in an okay position to weather this storm.

As marketers and business strategists, though, I keep coming back to the same questions. Starting with, how much of your traffic comes from Google. If you think about organic search, paid search, local search, meta search, things like that, you’re probably getting 40-70% of your traffic and a similar amount of business from Google.

Remember, Google doesn’t have to fall from number one for any downturn to impact your business. They could lose a billion searches a day and a billion users per month and still be much larger than their closest competitors. The question is, can you? What would happen to your business if Google lost 10% or 15% or 20% of its traffic? They’d still be bigger than everybody else. But what would happen to your business?

Your job is to ensure that Google’s artificial intelligence problem doesn’t become your company’s actual business problem. We can laugh when Google gets it wrong, but if they get it wrong too often, there’s nothing funny about it for your business. That’s the challenge today. That’s where we are today.

Google has a big problem with AI. Your job is to make sure it doesn’t become a big problem for you.

Now, looking at the clock on the wall, we are out of time for this week.

And I want to remind you again that you can find the show notes for this episode. As well as an archive of all past episodes by going to timpeter.com/podcast. Again, that’s timpeter.com/podcast. Just look for episode 423.

Don’t forget that you can click on the subscribe link in any of the episodes that you find there to have Thinks Out Loud delivered to your favorite podcatcher every single week. You can also find Thinks Out Loud on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube Music, anywhere fine podcasts are found.

I would also very much appreciate it if you could provide a positive rating or review for the show whenever you use one of those services.

If you like what you hear on Thinks Out Loud, if you enjoy what we talk about, if you like being part of the community that we’re building here, please give us a positive rating or review.

Reviews help other listeners find the podcast. Reviews help other listeners understand what Thinks Out Loud is all about. They help to build our community and they mean the world to me personally. So thank you so much for doing that. I very, very much appreciate it.

You can also find Thinks Out Loud on LinkedIn by going to linkedin.com/tim-peter-and-associates-llc. You can find me on Twitter or X or whatever you want to call it this week by using the Twitter handle @tcpeter. And of course, you can email me by sending an email to podcast(at)timpeter.com. Again, that’s podcast(at)timpeter.com.

Finally, and I know I say this a lot, but I want you to know just how thrilled I am that you keep listening to what we do here. It means so very, very much to me. You are the reason we do this show.

You’re the reason that Thinks Out Loud happens every week. You’re the reason we produce a new episode. So please, please keep listening, keep your messages coming on LinkedIn, keep hitting me up on Twitter, sending things via email. I love getting a chance to talk with you, to hear what’s going on in your world, and to learn how we can do a better job building the types of information and insights and content and community that work for you and work for your business.

And with all that said, I hope you have a fantastic rest of your day. I hope you have a wonderful week, and I will look forward to speaking with you here on Thinks Out Loud next time. Until then, please be well, be safe, and as always, take care, everybody.

The post Revisiting Google Big AI Problem (Thinks Out Loud) appeared first on Tim Peter & Associates.

Big Tech announced their earnings for Q2 2024 and, to be honest, not much has changed in terms of the big trends. Lots of talk about artificial intelligence. Lots of talk about cloud computing. Lots of talk about advertising.

You know what we didn’t hear lots of talk about? Customers changing their behaviors much.

What’s also true is that customers can change at any time. We saw it with mobile. We saw it with social. We saw it with the internet. Sometimes it’s like everyone wakes up on the same day and decides they want to work a whole new way.

As you start planning your budget and marketing plans for 2025, how can you plan for that reality? How can you build plans that work regardless of whether customers all jump at once… or if the status quo stands still? How can you set your business for success in an uncertain future? That’s what this episode of Thinks Out Loud is all about.

Want to learn more? Here are the show notes for you.

You might also enjoy this webinar I recently participated in with Miles Partnership that looked at "The Power of Generative AI and ChatGPT: What It Means for Tourism & Hospitality" here:

We have some free downloads for you to help you navigate the current situation, which you can find right here:

You can find our “Best of Thinks Out Loud” playlist on Spotify right here:

Contact information for the podcast: [email protected]

Recorded using a Shure SM7B Vocal Dynamic Microphone and a Focusrite Scarlett 4i4 (3rd Gen) USB Audio Interface into Logic Pro X for the Mac.

Running time: 26m 49s

You can subscribe to Thinks Out Loud in iTunes, the Google Play Store, via our dedicated podcast RSS feed (or sign up for our free newsletter). You can also download/listen to the podcast here on Thinks using the player at the top of this page.

  Welcome to Thinks Out Loud, your source for all the digital expertise your business needs. Well hello again everybody and welcome back to Thinks Out Loud, your source for all the digital expertise your business needs. My name is Tim Peter, this is episode 431 of the Big Show, and I think we have a really cool episode for you today.

It is, you know the beginning of Q3, well actually we’re about halfway through Q3 now, but this is the time each quarter when I review big tech’s earnings calls and kind of try to tease out big trends that we see. I do one of these recaps every quarter. You can find them on the podcast website at timpeter.

com slash podcast. And the reason that I do this is fairly simple. Big tech drives a lot of the change that we see in the marketplace, where they certainly try to anticipate that change and get in front of it. And I’m always looking to get a better understanding of the big trends about which we should be aware, based on what they’re telling us.

I mean, they just say this stuff out loud every quarter. What’s also true is, a quarter is not a huge amount of time. The trends don’t always change much quarter to quarter, and that’s kind of true this time around. Though, I’m going to come back to why it still matters to look at these a little bit later in the episode.

As you might imagine, though, the three big trends that came up again and again and again during the earning calls from Apple and Google and Facebook and Amazon and Microsoft were AI, you know, Artificial Intelligence, Artificial Intelligence, and more Artificial Intelligence. Businesses shifting to cloud computing in a big way, still seeing a lot of that activity happening.

And advertising growth remaining very strong, which obviously has some effects on your business because you’re probably buying some advertising. And if advertising growth is going well for big tech, it means you’re either paying more because they’re charging you more for the ads, or you’re paying more because there’s more competition and it’s a little harder to do.

Those trends aren’t necessarily all that interesting, at least in the sense that those were the big trends last quarter. And the quarter before that, and I think the quarter before that, right? So, it might seem like we’re not seeing lots of change. At the same time, there’s something I want you to be aware that we want to think about as we go forward.

First is that big tech is doing tremendous amounts of investment in where they think the market is going to go over the long term. They’re making lots of money based on those investments. We just haven’t yet seen a step change in terms of dramatically different customer products, customer experiences, and most importantly, customer behaviors.

Big Tech is offering enhancements. They’re using AI to make their products better, to make their advertising products better especially. We just haven’t yet seen, for instance, the AI killer app. I want to be fair, they’re all doing dramatically better in terms of their financials. Big Tech mostly has driven double digit increases in their revenues over the last year.

Their profits are up a lot too. And when you remember that these companies bring in tens or hundreds of billions of dollars each quarter in revenue, and between ten and twenty five billion each quarter in profits, that’s an amazing number. I would absolutely call that dramatic. Before I get to why this, you know, slow change matters to you, I want to talk a little bit about some of the changes we’re seeing in customer experiences and customer products.

Again, I don’t think most of these are dramatic, but I think they’re interesting to watch. So, let’s talk about AI for a moment. First, Sundar Pichai said on Google’s earnings calls that, this is a quote, all six of our products with more than 2 billion monthly users now use Gemini. Gemini being Google’s AI model.

So, two points about that. Clear example of where Google is using AI to make its products better. And putting its artificial intelligence in front of more people than just about anyone else. There’s another player here we’ll talk about in a moment. For all the well deserved talk about ChatGPT, it’s pretty clear that most people who are using AI are using AI from Google, with, again, one potential outlier we’ll talk about.

The second point I want to call out is, think about this quote, all six of our products with two billion monthly users? Holy crap, six products with two billion monthly users. That’s ridiculous. That’s just insane. We wonder why big tech is big tech. That’s the reason why they know much more about customers than anyone else because they see much more data about customers than anyone else.

I want to give credit where due. I said there’s one other potential product. Mark Zuckerberg, in their earnings call, in Meta, slash Facebook’s Durbing’s call claimed that Meta AI is quote on track to achieve our goal of being the most used AI assistant by the end of the year. So we can debate whether Google or Facebook has the most users and is popularizing AI among the most people.

But I think it’s pretty fair to say that they are absolutely right. Making AI a normal part of the customer experience for more people than anyone else. The other thing I want to talk about here for a moment is what I mean when I say we have not seen dramatically different products. And I’m going to build this off of a statement from Sundar Pichai.

He said that in a recent One of their recent product announcements, they showed new features, quote, coming soon to Gmail and to Google Photos. Soon you’ll be able to ask Photos questions like, What did I eat at that restaurant in Paris last year? Which, that’s a legitimately cool thing, truly. That’s really neat and something that I think we all look for sometimes where it’s like, man, I know I took a picture of something or I know I saw this somewhere, you know, it would be great.

I’ve been asking for years for not a search of my browser history or a search of my desktop. But rather, a search of all of the things I’ve touched, whether it’s on social networks, or email, or text messages, or photos, to say, I know I saw this somewhere. Just search through my corpus of information and find the thing that I was looking at the other day.

Which, who are we kidding? Sometimes the other day might have been, you know, a week ago. Sometimes the other day might have been days ago. Six months ago, right? We’re clearly moving towards a world where that’s becoming possible. And this very cool feature that Sundar Pichai talks about underscores that we’re still in the early days of AI adoption among consumers.

To Sundar Pichai’s point and Mark Zuckerberg’s point about how frequently these tools are used, I would argue most Customers don’t realize that you’re using it most of the time. It’s just sort of there in the background. We still don’t have the killer app that makes everyone start using AI all the time.

I’m not alone in saying that. Sundar Pichai answered a question, and I’m going to ask you to pardon the lengthy quote here, but this is all a quote. He said, Search, which is used at scale over many decades, we’ve been able to introduce AI in a way that’s additive and enhances the overall experience and is positively contributing there.

I think across our consumer products, we are seeing progress on the organic side. Obviously, monetization is something we will have to earn on top of it. He then went on to say, On the enterprise side, I think we are at a stage where there are definitely a lot of models. I think roughly the models are all kind of converging towards a sort of base capabilities.

But I think where the next wave is working is to build solutions on top of it. I think there are pockets, be it coding, be it in customer service, et cetera, where we are seeing some of those use cases, seeing traction, but I still think there’s hard work there to completely unlock those. That’s the guy who’s probably bringing AI to more people, saying there’s still hard work there to get more use cases.

And who knows, maybe we never will see it. Maybe it will simply be a series of enhanced features built into email and messaging and advertising and office suites and so on that simply make these tools work better. I also don’t expect that to be the case. Here’s why. If you think about mobile, just to pick one for instance that has upended our lives tremendously, mobile phones existed for years before the iPhone did.

And Friendster and MySpace were social apps that predated Facebook by a year or two. It was only when smartphones and social media came together, though, that that world exploded. Each one provided a reason for consumers to want the other, and it led to this mobile evolution that we’ve gone through over the last, you know, 15 years or so.

You could also add Google Maps, which came out nine years after MapQuest. But crushed the older apps because it was a better mobile experience. They understood this changed everything. And now it’s something we use every day that went on to enable things like DoorDash and Lyft and Uber that simply wouldn’t have made sense in a non mobile context.

So I think that AI will make experiences better in a ton of different apps. But I think its long term success is We’ll come from some other major use case that we just haven’t seen yet. There are two that I think are likely. One is, I should say three by the way. One is virtual reality, one is augmented reality, and one is self driving cars.

AI will make all those experiences better. Probably. Mark Zuckerberg made the same comment in his remarks, in his earnings call, noting that last quarter, this is a quote, I discussed how advances in AI have pulled in the timelines for some of our products. A few years ago, I would have predicted that holographic AR would be possible before smart AI, but it now looks like those technologies will actually be ready in the opposite order.

That’s, you know, something. He’s saying these two things are going to go hand in hand. And I’d bet a little bit that that’s probably right. I will be fair, not a lot, but certainly a little. I also think we’re still a few years away, probably three to five best case. And the numbers back this up. Facebook’s Reality Labs division, which makes the company’s Quest VR headsets, had revenue of 353 million last quarter.

That sounds like a good number. It’s also only about 1 percent of Facebook or Meta’s quarterly revenue. While that was happening, the division lost, brace yourself for this, 4. 5 billion dollars. I mean, that’s insane. Meta’s total earnings for the quarter were 13. 5 billion. If Reality Labs broke even, which it’s a long, long way from doing, the company’s profits would have been 33 percent higher.

That’s not even close to breaking even. What’s wilder is Susan Lee, who’s Meta’s Chief Financial Officer, said they’re doubling down on Reality Labs. She said this as an actual quote, quote, We continue to expect 2024 operating losses from reality labs to increase meaningfully year over year due to our ongoing product development efforts and investments to further scale our ecosystem.

Increase meaningfully? Is a remarkable statement when that division lost four and a half billion dollars in just the last quarter. Clearly, Mark Zuckerberg is willing to make a much larger bet than I am. In his defense, it seems to have paid off pretty well for him. And he owns enough voting stock to avoid shareholder revolts, at least for some time.

I think something’s gotta give there, though, in the long term. These things either have to pay off, or people are going to walk away from them. Now, I mentioned the other killer app for AI is self driving cars. And again, we see a similar model. Google talked about Waymo and the fact that it has made 2 million trips, and this is a quote, driven more than 20 million fully autonomous miles on public roads.

That, by the way, is really cool, and it might be a long term good thing for your business. Microsoft Because if people don’t have to focus on driving, they have more opportunity to engage with their content and experiences on mobile, which could then drive, no pun intended, more business for you in the long term.

It’s also not likely to happen overnight. You know, yes, as Sundar Pichai said, Waymo is, quote, delivering well over 50, 000 weekly paid public rides primarily in San Francisco and Phoenix. Let’s put that in context, though. Phoenix has a population of 1. 6 million people. San Francisco’s population is about 800, 000 people.

Those are just city limit numbers, by the way, not metro area, so that’s 2. 4 million folks. I looked at the data for Phoenix, just for Phoenix, because I’m nutty like that, and roughly 550, 000 people drive alone to work every day. If you assume a round trip for three days a week, that’s 3. 3 million rides. So Waymo, best case, is only 1.

5 percent of all rides, And it’s almost certainly a lot less than that, probably a third of that number. Again, to give credit where due, if you look at the data, taxi rides have risen dramatically since 2017 in Phoenix, and have now equaled roughly the same volume of rides as motorcycles. I’m going to assume the bulk of those taxi rides are Uber, with Waymo picking up the rest.

But that’s pretty great. That undoubtedly is good for people, good for people’s wallets, good for the economy, and good for safety. It’s also not a massive percentage of all the rides. There’s still, clearly, a long way to go here. The thing I want you to notice, though, is that big tech is investing in long term trends.

Augmented reality, virtual reality, self driving cars, artificial intelligence adoption in huge numbers. We’re not there yet. They do believe we’re going to get there. And I think they’re probably right because we saw this happen with mobile and the internet and with PCs before them. The pieces came together slowly, then everything changed at once.

If you think about iPhones and Facebook and Google Maps and how it all came together, it wasn’t an obvious thing till it was. Now, here’s why this matters to you, because we have to think about how we can plan for that reality. Many of the companies I work with are now in budget season. We’re looking at how and where we’re going to invest next year.

And the question comes up of how do you plan for something that isn’t changing that much quarter to quarter? But could change at any moment in a huge way. How do you actually build your plans and your budgets for next year knowing that that’s possible? Well, one of the things you can do is scenario planning.

And there’s a fairly simple process I’ve talked before on this show. First, we think about what do we know that’s going to happen? What are the things we take for granted? One that comes to mind all the time is, you know, there’s going to be a presidential election this year. There’s going to be a Super Bowl next February.

There’s going to be things that happen in your local market that are just going to happen. You know, some of the things that you then want to think about are what are the critical uncertainties about what’s likely to happen when those occur. So, who wins the election? Does the economy stay strong? Does it slow down?

Does it accelerate? Does Google win or lose the next stage of its antitrust case? And do consumers shift their behaviors away from traditional search and towards either ChatGPT or Bing or embedded AI like Gemini and Google Suite or Microsoft 365’s Copilot? What are the things that would dramatically alter what you do if any of those came to pass?

The next thing you do is look for the early warning signs. What are the early warning signs you want to be looking for? So, it could be things like the election results. It’s also more about just watching your website and your app’s traffic sources. And watching your company’s revenue sources. Carefully, it’s talking with consumers, talking with customers.

What are they telling you? And pay close attention to whether their actions or their words align. Are there differences there or are they saying and doing the same thing? I see this all the time right now where people complain about the economy while they’re also out shopping and buying and eating at restaurants and staying in hotels.

Something doesn’t jibe there. Something doesn’t line up. So which is going to give up first? Their behaviors? Were there vibes? Note, the point here isn’t to make a prediction. I’m literally just asking the questions and looking out for the changes there. Which then leads to the next step. How would you react to one of four different scenarios?

One is the worst case. What would you do if all of the bad things that could happen, happened? The next is, what would you do in the best case scenario? What if all the good things that could happen, happened? The next is the Goldilocks case, which is kind of the just right. It’s some good, some bad, and kind of the most likely.

And then the fourth scenario is the, you know, it’s not quite Goldilocks, but it’s not quite the worst case. It’s just a little bit worse than what you expected. Don’t worry about which of these is most likely. I mean, you can if you want, but it’s more important to plan for all of them. What would you do?

What would you change about where you’re putting your energy, your focus, your resources, your money? That’s how you build out your plans. The point isn’t to get it perfect, it’s to do the work of thinking through what you’d do if one of any number of various scenarios came to pass. You’re not trying to predict the future.

I don’t know too many people who have successfully predicted the future repeatedly. What I do know is that big tech is telling us what things could look like in time. We’re already seeing what some of those things could look like down the road, probably when we talk about AI or we talk about Google’s antitrust situation.

Your best strategy is to be ready to adapt if things change and when things change. It’s doing scenario planning, it’s banking on things like Core and Explore, which we’ve talked about in prior episodes and I’ll link to in the show notes. And then it’s building your plans and budgets for next year with those exercises in mind so that you’re set up for success regardless. We may not see any dramatic changes in the big trends big tech is talking about in the next quarter or the quarter after that or even the quarter after that. But being ready for whatever happens. This is a big trend we all want to get on board with, and it’s one that ensures you’re successful regardless of how the trends change over time.

And that to me feels like a big trend we can all take ownership of to set ourselves up for success.

Now, looking at the clock on the wall, we are out of time for this week.

And I want to remind you again that you can find the show notes for this episode. As well as an archive of all past episodes by going to timpeter.com/podcast. Again, that’s timpeter.com/podcast. Just look for episode 431.

Don’t forget that you can click on the subscribe link in any of the episodes that you find there to have Thinks Out Loud delivered to your favorite podcatcher every single week. You can also find Thinks Out Loud on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube Music, anywhere fine podcasts are found.

I would also very much appreciate it if you could provide a positive rating or review for the show whenever you use one of those services.

If you like what you hear on Thinks Out Loud, if you enjoy what we talk about, if you like being part of the community that we’re building here, please give us a positive rating or review.

Reviews help other listeners find the podcast. Reviews help other listeners understand what Thinks Out Loud is all about. They help to build our community and they mean the world to me. So thank you so much for doing that. I very, very much appreciate it.

You can also find Thinks Out Loud on LinkedIn by going to linkedin.com/tim-peter-and-associates-llc. You can find me on Twitter or X or whatever you want to call it this week by using the Twitter handle @tcpeter. And of course, you can email me by sending an email to podcast(at)timpeter.com. Again, that’s podcast(at)timpeter.com.

Finally, and I know I say this a lot, I want you to know how thrilled I am that you keep listening to what we do here. It means so much to me. You are the reason we do this show.

You’re the reason that Thinks Out Loud happens every single week. So please, keep your messages coming on LinkedIn. Keep hitting me up on Twitter, sending things via email. I love getting a chance to talk with you, to hear what’s going on in your world, and to learn how we can do a better job building on the types of information and insights and content and community that work for you and work for your business.

So with all that said, I hope you have a fantastic rest of your day, I hope you have a wonderful week ahead, and I will look forward to speaking with you here on Thinks Out Loud next time. Until then, please be well, be safe, and as always, take care, everybody.

The post Building Plans for an Uncertain Future — Big Tech Earnings Q2 2024 (Thinks Out Loud Episode 431) appeared first on Tim Peter & Associates.

We talk a lot on this show about diversifying away from Big Tech generally, and about diversifying away from Google, specifically. Which is great in theory. But it can be hard to do in practice. As one listener of the show said recently, “People are already overwhelmed with the amount of social media they manage.” Even if you want to diversify, it can be tough to find the time and resources and budget to make that happen.

So, what can you do? How can you diversify your marketing mix when there’s too much to do? How can you manage new channels and new messages when you’re already overwhelmed? And, most importantly, how can you reduce your dependence on Google and Big Tech without killing your business? That’s what this week’s episode of Thinks Out Loud is all about.

Want to learn more? Here are the show notes for you.

You might also enjoy this webinar I recently participated in with Miles Partnership that looked at "The Power of Generative AI and ChatGPT: What It Means for Tourism & Hospitality" here:

We have some free downloads for you to help you navigate the current situation, which you can find right here:

You can find our “Best of Thinks Out Loud” playlist on Spotify right here:

Contact information for the podcast: [email protected]

Recorded using a Shure SM7B Vocal Dynamic Microphone and a Focusrite Scarlett 4i4 (3rd Gen) USB Audio Interface into Logic Pro X for the Mac.

Running time: 22m 04s

You can subscribe to Thinks Out Loud in iTunes, the Google Play Store, via our dedicated podcast RSS feed (or sign up for our free newsletter). You can also download/listen to the podcast here on Thinks using the player at the top of this page.

Well hello again everyone and welcome back to Thinks Out Loud, your source for all the digital expertise your business needs. My name is Tim Peter, this is episode 430 of The Big Show and thank you so much for tuning in.

In some ways, this episode is a follow up to the episode we did last week about how Google lost its antitrust case and why that matters to you. And the reason I say in some ways is because I’ve talked at length both in that episode and in a bunch of other episodes this year about why you need to think about diversifying your traffic, why you need to think about becoming less dependent on Google.

And it led for a marketing manager to send me a comment and ask, "people are already overwhelmed with the amount of social media they manage, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, Snapchat, the list goes on and on. How is it possible to really do this? How is it possible to manage all of these different things and, and, you know, diversify away from Google?"

That’s a really fair question. I do think people are already overwhelmed. I do talk to people all the time that go, "I just can’t keep up." So I understand that completely. And I thought it would make sense to talk a little bit today about how you can do this very effectively. And there’s a few things that I don’t want to say they’re simple. But they require a certain level of focus, a certain level of attention, and they can help you manage it a little better.

First, you’ve heard me mention Core and Explore many times over the years. Core focuses on the things that always work. The channels that deliver the most business to you today, the channels that deliver the most revenue today, and the channels that tend to have the best return on spend for you today. And that could be spend in terms of actual dollars that you’re putting out in terms of buying, you know, paid search ads or paid social ads. Or it could be in what are generally referred to as soft dollars. Like your people’s time, the amount of time that they spend on those things.

Core is going to take up roughly 75 to 80 percent of your time. That’s just a fact. That’s why you want them to be the things that are most productive for your business. So, right out of the gate, if things are not generating really good return for you, or they’re really not benefiting you, they should be moved out of the core, pretty much immediately. You want to focus on those areas that work best for you. The

Explore phase of the Core & Explore methodology is where you try new things. And Explore is going to take up maybe 15-20 percent of your time. These channels, these areas, may be things that you haven’t figured out how to use yet. You know, you might be testing something new to think about and see if it works. But you’re learning to see is this something that works for us and is it something that I need to get better at. So you’re going to spend only 15 to 20 percent of your time there. And again you’re going to be somewhat judicious in how much time you put into each of those things.

It’s reasonable to ask how do you find the time to explore? You’re already doing so much. As my commenter noted, “people are already overwhelmed.”

Well, it starts with knowing where you are. It starts with knowing where your time actually goes. Sometimes it’s tough to know where you’re spending 75 of your time or 20 percent of your time if you’re not actually aware of where the time goes.

When I was younger, when I was earlier in my career, a mentor of mine sat me down and said, “It’s really important when you’re overwhelmed to take an audit of how you’re spending your time.”

You can just jot it down on a piece of paper, you can type it into a spreadsheet, you can use one of the many, many fine time tracking apps that are out there, and you can track in increments. Maybe 10 minute increments, maybe 15 minutes, maybe 5 minutes, depending on what’s important to you. But it’s worthwhile for a few weeks to simply note where your time goes. Just keep a record of it. Then take a look at where you’re spending your time.

For some people, and in some cases, many people, it’s not that you don’t have enough time. It’s that, you don’t know where it goes, or you’re not making tough choices about where to spend it. So, it starts by getting that picture of where are you today.

Once you see where your time goes, you can then prioritize. And sure, we’ve all heard about, oh, setting priorities and things along those lines.

But I would argue that truly prioritizing means deciding what not to do. It’s not about saying, “this is the most important thing.” It’s about saying, “this is the least important thing. This is something that is not worth my time.” And deciding to either put it aside for now… or choose not to do it at all.

If you think about this, the word decide is the same root word as things like homicide. You’re literally killing options when you decide. You’re saying, “nope, that’s gone. I’m not going to worry about it.”

I legitimately have a “to don’t list.” When I write down things that, you know, I start to think about that I could do, I’ll put them on a list of “to don’t.” These are things I’m not going to focus on because they’re a distraction from the things I do need to focus on.

Warren Buffett has a similar exercise he recommends. He says that you should make a list of the 25 things that are most important to you. Then you want to order the items on the list from the most important to the 25th most important. Once you’ve got those written down on a list, what you’re going to do is you’re going to throw away number 6 through 25. Just cross them off.

And the reason you’re going to do that is, either you don’t have enough time to do them, so you’re probably not going to do them anyway, or they’re going to distract you from doing a great job on the things that are most important to you, the five things that are most important to you, or, if you’re like many people, a little bit of both. You’re gonna do kind of a bad job at everything because you’re trying to do too much.

Of course, if you finish your five most important priorities, if you succeed on accomplishing your five most important priorities, you can always move on to numbers six to ten, and then again, eleven to fifteen, and then again, sixteen to twenty, if you get there.

I’d argue it’s much more likely you’ll get there if you focus on numbers one to five. So go ahead, just put them on your “to don’t” list. Don’t worry about them.

To bring this back to your marketing activities, You don’t have to be on every social platform or every marketing channel that exists out there.

You’re much better served doing a fantastic job in just a few places than doing a half assed job in many, many places. My company’s entire marketing strategy focuses on a relatively small number of channels. We focus on our website and blog. We focus on this podcast that we do distribute through Spotify and YouTube, along with a few other channels to get it more traction. We focus on email marketing, which is powered primarily by our podcast and blog. We focused on LinkedIn. And we focus on guest writing for a few other online publications in hospitality and digital marketing. That’s it. That’s all we do.

We don’t really do an Instagram. We don’t really do Facebook. They’re just not that important to us, so we don’t really worry about them. Those areas that I mentioned are where our customers live. So that’s where we focus.

There’s another great prioritization method that I want to talk about that you can also use called he “Four D’s.” Same basic

If you notice, we’ve already kind of talked about the Delete and to a lesser degree Defer. When we talk about a “to don’t” list or we talk about deprioritizing those items 6 through 25, you’re deferring them or deleting them.

What I want to talk about, though, is delegate. When we think about delegation, we think, “Oh, well, we delegate to somebody on our team.” You know, we delegate to somebody who reports to us. But that’s not really true. You can delegate down, obviously. You can delegate sideways. You can delegate up, and you can delegate outside your organization.

As a friend of mine puts it, "Think who, not how." It’s about getting help, not just figuring out how to do the thing yourself.

Now in marketing, and especially in social marketing, there’s a lot of people who can help you. There are influencers and creators, which are a tremendous way to improve your social media presence without you doing the work. 7 to 10 people, 69 percent of all Americans aged 16 to 54, follow creators and influencers.

And of those that do, 55 percent researched a brand’s website after hearing about that brand from a creator. 46 percent followed a brand on social media after hearing about it from a creator. 43% — 43 percent! — purchased from a brand after hearing about it from a creator. And 42 percent recommended a brand to someone.

That’s fantastic. This is a remarkable opportunity for you to reach out to creators to help you tell a great story on your brand’s behalf.

You don’t have to do the work. You can delegate the work. And there are literally tens of millions of creators using social to connect with their audiences. The largest share of creators, those with 10,000 followers or less, make around $14,000 per year. Even those creators with 10,000 to 50,000 followers average less than $50,000 in income. In other words, these levels of creators can be very affordable for individual marketers to work with.

The key is that you’re not really looking at the creator. You’re looking at their audience. You’re looking at, is their audience your audience? Do these creators talk to the people you want to talk to? Do they help you reach the people you want to reach? It doesn’t matter how many people are in the audience. It matters that they’re engaged and they’re the customer types you want to engage with.

There’s lots of great ways to find these creators. There’s tools like SparkToro. Or you can simply ask your customers where are the places where they follow people on YouTube, or they follow people on Instagram, or they follow people on LinkedIn, who they find interesting. Because those are the people you want to talk to. They’re all about helping you reach your customers better without you having to do all the heavy lifting.

Speaking of customers, your customers, in a way, are creators and influencers, too. They create reviews, they talk to friends and family on social about great experiences that they’ve had. And ultimately, everything we do is about our customer. Given all the changes around AI and technology more broadly, the way we can compete is focusing most on how we help our customers.

I’ve said for years that social is people and all marketing is social. My friend Mark Schaefer likes to say, “the most human company wins.” I think he’s absolutely right. When you give your customers a great experience, they’re going to tell their friends and family and fans and followers about it. And it’s one of the reasons why I’ve talked about things like we need, we owe it to our customers to make their lives better. It’s the core of everything you do. It’s another way of saying something you’ve heard me say many times on this show that customer experience is queen.

You’re trying to encourage your customers to work on your behalf to tell a really positive brand story. I can tell you I’ve sold really great products and companies in my life and I’ve sold really not so great products or companies in my life and selling a great product is so much easier. Right?

It’s much easier to tell a great story that cost about a product or service that customers love. And it just makes the marketing easier. You don’t have to work as hard or work your butt off to be on all of these channels. Your customers and creators will be falling all over themselves to do it for you. So, focusing on your customer experience is an amazing way to improve the value of everything you do.

Now, you might say, sure, but isn’t providing a great experience expensive? It is, it absolutely is, or it can be. It’s also much cheaper than providing a bad experience. Are guests canceling their reservations at your hotel or restaurant cheap? Are returns of your product cheap? Are refunds because people weren’t satisfied with the service you gave them cheap? Do you think that bad reviews don’t cost you money? Do you think you’re going to drive business value if you don’t take care of your customers?

Your customers rely on their friends and family and influencers and creators to help them find products and services that work for their needs. You’re going to have such an easier time reaching them if people are telling a great story on behalf of your brand.

So the fundamental point here is that you need to focus on customer experience so that you don’t have to work so hard to market in the first place. Then, when you are marketing, I go back to saying:

Ultimately, that will make your job a lot easier and will prevent you from being overwhelmed or struggling to figure out how to reach the folks you want to reach. And that will help you diversify away from Google over time. Because what people will search for is not a company in your niche or a solution to their problem. They’ll come looking for you by name. And no matter what happens to Google in the future, you’ll be well positioned because you’ll be in all of the places your customers need you to be without having to do so much work to be there.

That allows you to gain the benefits that you want, to grow your business, and to do it without being so overwhelmed. And that’s the best place to be.

Now, looking at the clock on the wall, we are out of time for this week.

And I want to remind you again that you can find the show notes for this episode. As well as an archive of all past episodes by going to timpeter.com/podcast. Again, that’s timpeter.com/podcast. Just look for episode 430

Don’t forget that you can click on the subscribe link in any of the episodes that you find there to have Thinks Out Loud delivered to your favorite podcatcher every single week. You can also find Thinks Out Loud on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube Music, anywhere fine podcasts are found.

I would also very much appreciate it if you could provide a positive rating or review for the show whenever you use one of those services. If you like what you hear on Thinks Out Loud, if you enjoy what we talk about, if you like being part of the community that we’re building here, please give us a positive rating or review.

Reviews help other listeners find the podcast, and we’ll see you Reviews help other listeners understand what Thinks Out Loud is all about. They help to build our community. And they mean the world to me personally. So thank you for taking the time to do that. I very, very much appreciate it.

You can also find Thinks Out Loud on LinkedIn by going to linkedin.com/tim-peter-and-associates-llc. You can find me on Twitter or X or whatever you want to call it this week by using the Twitter handle @tcpeter. And of course, you can email me by sending an email to podcast(at)timpeter.com. Again, that’s podcast(at)timpeter.com.

Finally, and I know I say this a lot. But I want you to know how thrilled I am, and I really am thrilled that you listen to what we do here. It means so much to me. You are the reason we do this show, you are the reason that Thinks Out Loud happens every single week.

So please, keep your messages coming on LinkedIn, keep hitting me up on Twitter, sending things via email. I love getting a chance to talk with you just as I did with the commenter this week. I want to hear what’s going on in your world and learn how we can do a better job building all the types of information and insights and content and community that work for you and work for your business.

So with all of that said, I hope you have a fantastic rest of your day. I hope you have a wonderful week ahead. And I will look forward to speaking with you here on Thinks Out Loud next time. Until then, please, be well, be safe, and as always, take care, everybody.

The post Diversifying Your Marketing Mix When There’s Too Much to Do (Thinks Out Loud Episode 430) appeared first on Tim Peter & Associates.

The big news story this week is that Google lost (the first round of) its antitrust case in Federal court. While it’s way too soon to know for sure how this will affect your business in the near term, it’s nowhere near too soon to think about why it matters in the long run. Because, if you’re like most businesses, Google represents a significant chunk of your traffic and revenues. Anything that causes them to lose focus, lose their mojo, or, most importantly, lose trust among consumers ultimately will impact you, too.

What happened in the trial? What did the judge say about Google — and about its competition? How might this affect Google both in the near term and down the road? What did we learn about how Google operates? And, finally, why does this trial matter for your business?

That’s what this week’s episode of Thinks Out Loud is all about. Want to learn more? Here are the show notes for you.

You might also enjoy this webinar I recently participated in with Miles Partnership that looked at "The Power of Generative AI and ChatGPT: What It Means for Tourism & Hospitality" here:

We have some free downloads for you to help you navigate the current situation, which you can find right here:

You can find our “Best of Thinks Out Loud” playlist on Spotify right here:

Contact information for the podcast: [email protected]

Recorded using a Shure SM7B Vocal Dynamic Microphone and a Focusrite Scarlett 4i4 (3rd Gen) USB Audio Interface into Logic Pro X for the Mac.

Running time: 26m 28s

You can subscribe to Thinks Out Loud in iTunes, the Google Play Store, via our dedicated podcast RSS feed (or sign up for our free newsletter). You can also download/listen to the podcast here on Thinks using the player at the top of this page.

Well hello again everybody and welcome back to Thinks Out Loud. Your source for all the digital expertise your business needs. My name is Tim Peter. This is episode 429 of The Big Show. And I think we’ve got a really cool episode for you today. I will admit it’s not the episode I thought it was going to be.

My podcast schedule just got seriously shaken up. My original plan for this week was to dive into Big Tech’s quarterly earnings, as you know we do every quarter. And don’t worry, we’ll do that in about a week. But news broke Monday afternoon, that’s about an hour or so ago, relative to when I’m recording this.

That shot that schedule all to hell. It’s one of the key points from earnings that I will return to. During this episode is that Google made about 85 billion in revenue last quarter. With 48. 5 billion of that, or roughly 57%, coming from search. So what does that have to do with what blew up my podcast recording schedule?

Well I don’t know if you saw the news, but Google just lost a major Major, huge, antitrust case. The judge in the case noted that, and I quote, Google is a monopolist and it has acted as one to maintain its monopoly. Going on to say that Google, quote, violated section 2 of the Sherman Act. That’s the Sherman Antitrust Act.

For those of you playing along at home. And whether you know it or not, this case matters to your business. I will explain why later in the episode. I’ve been talking about Google’s potential antitrust problems for at least five years. In a article I wrote called, Say Goodbye to Google, Hoteliers, and Gatekeeper’s Gonna Gate, Apple, Google, and Antitrust from way back in 2019, and as recently as 2023 with an episode entitled, The End of Google, because this matters a ton.

Now, I’m going to break down What’s going on, then I’m going to talk about why you care, and then I’m going to talk about what you do about it. The first thing I want to remind everybody, of course, is that I’m not a lawyer, so this isn’t intended to be a detailed legal analysis. I will share what I know to be true, right?

First, being in a monopoly is not illegal. It is illegal if you use your monopoly to maintain your market power. Though Google argued that they’ve achieved Their monopoly status because they had the best product. Generally speaking, the court actually agreed with them on that part. And I’d agree with them on that point.

Google wanted the marketplace because it has long been the best search engine. No offense to Microsoft and Bing, but they’ve been 20 years. As I’ve said before, though, if Bing was going to beat Google at Search, well, they’d have beaten Google at Search. The court also, at least in my first fast reading of the ruling, Seems to understand the power of scale for making Google’s product better, and that its scale is tough for others to compete with.

One thing to keep in mind throughout this is that the court refers to Google and its competitors throughout the ruling as General Search Engines, or GSEs. Keep that in mind for any quotes I share with you where that comes up. They also refer to Special Vertical Providers, or SVPs, for folks like Amazon or Expedia or Indeed.

Or Yelp, where you’re searching a very narrow channel, a very narrow vertical search that only focuses on products or travel or jobs, for instance. Anyway, the court stated, as the most widely used GSE in the United States, Google receives nine times more queries each day than all of its rivals combined across all devices.

This disparity is even more pronounced on mobile. There, Google receives 19 times more queries than all of its other rivals put together. And the court notes that the data comes, that comes from those queries gives Google a powerful tool for making search better. Bing struggles to get better, DuckDuckGo struggles to get better because they just don’t have as much data as Google does.

One of the expert witnesses during the trial testified they analyzed, quote, 3. 7 million unique query phases on Google and Bing Showing that 93 percent of unique phrases were only seen by Google versus 4. 8 percent seen only by Bing. And that that disparity was even greater on mobile. It’s awful tough for Bing to make a product that’s much better than Google.

When they just don’t get near as much distinct data. The court noted that, quote, Google has used its scale advantage to improve the quality of its search product. At every stage of the search process, user data is a critical input that directly improves quality. One of my favorite quotes about data in this ruling states that, quote, 13 months of user data acquired by Google is equivalent to over 17 years of data on Big.

I mean, holy crap, that is a wild way of pointing out Google’s advantages. All of that, by the way, is before they started using AI. And none of what I’ve just described is illegal. They’re just building a better product that improves the more that people use it. That’s smart business. The ruling says that breaking the law, quote, the offense of monopolization requires proof of two elements.

One, the possession of monopoly power in the relevant market, and two, the willful acquisition or maintenance of that power as distinguished from growth or development as a consequence of a superior product, business acumen, or historic accident. Okay, simplifying that, they’re saying it’s okay to gain and maintain monopoly power by building a better product, or by having better execution, or by just plain luck.

But if you then maintain that power in any other way than those three things, then you probably broke the law. And as a quick note about markets, To be a monopoly, there has to be a defined market. The court found that, quote, general search services is a distinct market. That’s using Google and Bing for search versus, say, what the court calls special vertical providers, or what I’ve always called vertical search engines, Yelp, or things like that.

Or social networks like Facebook and Pinterest for search. Obviously, all of those examples of SVPs and social networks allow searching, but they’re not, in the court’s view, general search services. And I think this is interesting and worth talking about for a moment. The court gave multiple reasons. I’m only going to focus on three.

Most of the SVPs and social networks, they, the court noted, only search their own content. They don’t typically search the whole web. That feels like a reasonable distinction to me, and something we want to keep in mind when we think about our own businesses, which I will come to later. The second factor, Google’s expert witness testified, quote, that there is relatively limited user overlap between the general search engines.

So, users see Google and other GSEs as substitutes, such that using Google obviates a need to use another GSE. In other words, most users use Google for general search and Amazon, Expedia, Indeed, and Pinterest, let’s say, only when they’re searching for products, travel, jobs, and images. They’re not using those tools to replace Google itself.

So, you might use Google or Bing. Along with Expedia, Indeed, Amazon, and Pinterest, but you’re not using Expedia, you’re not using Google and Bing along with those. And then the last reason that the court found is kind of funny from a, from a darkly funny perspective, especially if you’re Google. Google also only looked at general search engines internally when it compared itself to its own competition.

This is a quote from the ruling. When Google has evaluated its quality against other platforms, it has done so primarily against other GSEs. In the next sentence, the court writes In addition, internal Google documents show that Google, as early as 2009, tracked its, quote, market share, unquote, relative only to other GSEs.

Whoops, the court didn’t define the market, Google did. They said this is who our competitors are and these are the only ones we care about. That’s not great if you’re Google, right? You basically told the court these are the folks who we see as the market. So, you know, that’s kind of a pretty telling detail.

The court also ruled that Google has monopoly power in the general search text ads market. And without getting too deep into the specifics, again, not a lawyer, Google’s own actions, again, apparently played a role. The judge noted that Google does not consider competitors pricing when it sets text ad prices.

They said that’s something a firm without a monopoly would have been unable to do. Make sense, right? If you’re gonna set prices, you’re kind of gonna pay attention to what your competitors price things at. Google didn’t do that. So, they’re kind of saying they’ve got power over pricing that very other few, that very few other people would have.

I also think it’s notable that the court Google, quote, recognized a separate market for search ads, it found that Google did not have monopoly power in that market, it also rejected a separate general search ads market, unquote. So, we’re only talking about Google as a monopoly in the general search services market and the general search ads market.

Text ads market, and that again, being a monopoly in those markets itself is not illegal. This is the thing I said I would come back to later about, you know, Google has a great product. The court said, this is a quote from the document, Google has long been the best search engine, particularly on mobile devices.

Nor has Google sat still. It has continued to innovate in search. The judge flat out goes on to say that Microsoft and DuckDuckGo have tried to beat Google, but quote, These firms have not succeeded in part due to their inferior quality. I mean, jeez. That’s harsh, man. That is rough. You know, Google’s being found to be breaking the law and you’re getting dragged at the same time.

That’s crazy. In another kind of brutal takedown of Microsoft, the judge wrote that, again, a quote, Microsoft acknowledges that it was slow to recognize the importance of developing a search product for mobile and it has been trying to catch up unsuccessfully. Ever since, oof, I mean, geez, that’s some rough stuff.

Where Google went wrong here, where it broke the law, according to the court, is that it used its dominance when it paid Apple, Netscape, and Android phone manufacturers To make sure they wouldn’t switch to another product, or wouldn’t invest in developing their own. They paid Apple around 20 billion in 2022 to prevent Apple looking at alternatives, and apparently based that price in part on what they felt it would cost Apple if they were going to invest in making their own search engine.

That’s not a good thing. When the court asked why Google pays billions in revenue share when it already has the best search engine, former Google Senior Vice President of Ads and Commerce, Dr. Ramaswamy, said that the payments provide an incredibly strong incentive for the ecosystem to not do anything.

They effectively make the ecosystem exceptionally resistant to change. And their net effect is to basically freeze the ecosystem in place. The judge followed up by saying, No one would ever describe a competitive marketplace in those terms. This is me now, not the judge. Freezing the ecosystem in place?

That’s the illegal bit. You’ve heard me say plenty of times that gatekeepers gonna gate. We’re seeing that right here in this case. Gatekeepers gonna gate even if it’s illegal. Now, I’ve talked about this before. I mentioned at the top of this episode that I’ve talked about this for at least five years.

Because it matters to your business. And the reason it matters to your business is that you get a lot of traffic and a healthy share of revenue from Google. Most businesses receive a plurality, if not an outright majority, of their traffic and revenue from Google. In the ruling, they had a fact that the special vertical providers that I mentioned before, so folks like Amazon, Expedia, Indeed, Yelp, and so on, Received between 33 percent and 88 percent of their traffic from Google search.

I strongly suspect, and the data that we see with clients, shows that you’re likely getting numbers very much within that same range, that same very rough range. The court also found that, quote, not surprisingly then, SVPs are Google’s top advertisers. That’s a big deal. Right? You are probably also paying Google for some of the traffic that they drive to you.

If Google is forced to change its behaviors, then your business can suffer. Anything that hurts Google can hurt you. That’s why you care. That’s why this matters. This isn’t about Google. This is about your business. It’s also true that the search ecosystem is not as frozen as it was. We’ve probably seen more innovation in the last 10 months than we’ve seen in the last 10 years.

Google faces more threats, whether they’re new entrants, More AI competitors, this anti trust ruling, similar cases working their way through other state courts, movement in the European Union regulation, than at any other time I can recall. And that’s even going back to when I first started talking about this five years ago.

There are lots of ways that Google can stumble, and lots of ways that any of those stumbles can hurt you. That’s what you need to prevent. Now, I want to be very clear, there’s a ton of good news here, too. The court rulings actually contain a ton of insights into why other channels are good for Google, and again, by extension, good for you and your business.

Google had an analysis in 2019 that they called Project Charlotte that showed users who engaged with SVPs, Special Vertical Providers, so people like Amazon, people like Expedia, people like Yelp, were more likely to search on Google. And that was also true on mobile apps. If people used a mobile app, they were more likely to actually search on Google.

That’s hugely important and shows the values of diversifying your mix into other channels. They also had some more dated evidence that Facebook use correlated to more searching on Google. So again, It sometimes drives people to Google, but it helps people find you lots of ways. The question you should be asking is where your traffic and revenue come from if Google loses in court or loses its way more generally.

How are you diversifying your web traffic? How are you connecting with consumers and customers more broadly beyond Google and the rest of big tech? How are you building a brand that customers return to again and again? This episode is already getting on the long side, so I’m not going to go into huge detail about this.

But there’s a ton of episodes we’ve done here about these very questions. Last week’s episode alone, how to put big tech and AI, the biggest threat and biggest enablers of your business, to work. We had an episode shortly before that called, Google is Changing Search, How to Build Traffic and Revenue Beyond Google.

Another called, The Core Methodology, How to Build Traffic and Revenue Beyond Google, Part 2. We’ve asked you still need a website and how to escape big tech’s web, and can podcasting help your business bypass big tech gatekeepers? We’ve talked about how you can rethink search marketing in the age of AI, and what Taylor Swift can teach you about bypassing gatekeepers.

We’ve asked, will AI and ChatGPT kill your search traffic? We’ve said, does marketing have a future? And explained why the word of the year is integration. All of these will be linked to in the show notes. Those episodes offer a playbook for what you should be thinking about. And more importantly, doing. To prevent Google’s troubles from becoming your troubles.

I also want to acknowledge one other point. This ruling does not mean this case is final or is over. Google will appeal. They have to win this in the long run. It is existential to your business. Remember at the top of the episode when I talked about the 57 percent of revenue that comes from search? How would you like it if someone ruled that you had to change the product that drives 57 percent of your business’s revenue?

I bet you wouldn’t like it very much. I bet you would do a lot to ensure that you could keep moving your business forward the way you wanted to. Google is no different here. I suspect they’re either going to win. Or at least reach a favorable settlement in the long run. And I think this is going to take a little time to play out still.

I’m not, again, a legal analyst, so I can’t actually make strong predictions as to for how long this will take. But from a business perspective, they’ve got to find a way to come to an agreeable settlement here. They’ve got too much riding on it otherwise. I also want to point out that none of this is meant as, you know, the death of SEO or the death of search.

None of this means abandoning Google. Think about everything we’ve talked about here and the things that I mentioned a moment ago as Google and other channels, not Google or other channels. You can use the many alternatives referenced in those episodes to drive more traffic and revenue for your business no matter what happens to Google.

If they lose and their traffic declines, then you’ll have built other ways of driving traffic and revenue to your business. If they succeed, you’ll get as much search traffic as you ever did, plus the benefits of the alternatives you’ve built along the way. It’s a win win for you, and in either case, you’ll be fine.

The thing that you want to remember is that Google might have a monopoly on search. That doesn’t mean they should monopolize your marketing spend or your customer acquisition. I hope this ruling and this episode serves as a wake up call that you’ve got the ability to make your own decision about how to create customers for your business.

No matter what happens to Google in court or in the marketplace, it’s up to you to take the next step to make that work in practice for your business.

Now, looking at the clock on the wall, we are out of time for this week.

And I want to remind you again that you can find the show notes for this episode. As well as an archive of all past episodes by going to timpeter.com/podcast. Again, that’s timpeter.com/podcast. Just look for episode 428.

Don’t forget that you can click on the subscribe link in any of the episodes that you find there to have Thinks Out Loud delivered to your favorite podcatcher every single week. You can also find Thinks Out Loud on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube Music, anywhere fine podcasts are found.

I would also very much appreciate it if you could provide a positive rating or review for the show whenever you use one of those services. If you like what you hear on Thinks Out Loud, if you enjoy what we talk about, if you like being part of the community that we’re building here, please give us a positive rating or review.

Reviews help other listeners find the podcast, and we’ll see you Reviews help other listeners understand what Thinks Out Loud is all about. They help to build our community. And they mean the world to me personally. So thank you for taking the time to do that. I very, very much appreciate it.

You can also find Thinks Out Loud on LinkedIn by going to linkedin.com/tim-peter-and-associates-llc. You can find me on Twitter or X or whatever you want to call it this week by using the Twitter handle @tcpeter. And of course, you can email me by sending an email to podcast(at)timpeter.com. Again, that’s podcast(at)timpeter.com.

Finally, and I know I say this a lot, I want you to know how thrilled I am that you keep listening to what we do here. It means so much to me. You are the reason we do this show. You’re the reason that Thinks Out Loud happens every single week.

So please, keep your messages coming on LinkedIn, keep hitting me up on Twitter, sending things via email, I love getting a chance to talk with you, to hear what’s going on in your world, and to learn how we can do a better job building up the types of information and insights and content and community that work for you and work for your business.

So with all that said, I hope you have a fantastic rest of your day, I hope you have a wonderful week ahead, and I will look forward to speaking with you here on Thinks Out Loud next time. Until then, please be well, be safe, and as always, take care, everybody.

The post Google Loses its Antitrust Case: Why That Matters for Your Business (Thinks Out Loud Episode 429) appeared first on Tim Peter & Associates.

Big Tech and AI are the biggest threats to your business. At the same time, they’re also the biggest enablers of your business. Putting them to work for your business is a tricky balancing act. But it’s one that you can manage. The trick is building from five key themes that Big Tech and AI bring to the market.

What are those five key themes? How can you balance the threat and benefit of Big Tech and AI? And, most importantly, how can you put Big Tech and AI to work to build your business? That’s what this episode of Thinks Out Loud is all about.

Want to learn more? Here are the show notes for you.

You might also enjoy this webinar I recently participated in with Miles Partnership that looked at "The Power of Generative AI and ChatGPT: What It Means for Tourism & Hospitality" here:

We have some free downloads for you to help you navigate the current situation, which you can find right here:

You can find our “Best of Thinks Out Loud” playlist on Spotify right here:

Contact information for the podcast: [email protected]

Recorded using a Shure SM7B Vocal Dynamic Microphone and a Focusrite Scarlett 4i4 (3rd Gen) USB Audio Interface into Logic Pro X for the Mac.

Running time: 22m 47s

You can subscribe to Thinks Out Loud in iTunes, the Google Play Store, via our dedicated podcast RSS feed (or sign up for our free newsletter). You can also download/listen to the podcast here on Thinks using the player at the top of this page.

Well hello again everyone and welcome back to Thinks Out Loud, your source for all the digital expertise your business needs. My name is Tim Peter, this is episode 428 of The Big Show. And I think we have a really cool episode for you today.

A big part of this podcast, something we talk about a lot, is the relationship between your business and big tech. And that includes a particular focus on how you can improve customer acquisition and ultimately lower the cost of doing business with big tech for your business. As a consequence of that discussion and of where Big Tech’s focus has tended to be lately, we’re also spending a lot of time talking about artificial intelligence, how Big Tech uses it, and increasingly how you can put it to work for your business.

For instance, if you think about some of the more recent episodes we’ve put up, you know, we’ve talked about how AI is the bear, how it’s running you down, and how AI makes customer experience more important, what marketers really need to know about putting AI to work, the reality of how big tech and lots of businesses bundle and unbundle and the role that that plays in customer acquisition.

And how Google is changing search, and because of that, how and why you need to build traffic and revenue beyond Google specifically, and big tech more generally. What I want to do today is highlight five big themes that each of these past episodes call out and how you can assemble them into a working plan, a useful strategy to make your business more successful.

And these five big themes are that Big Tech remains the single biggest enabler and the single biggest threat to your business. The second is that AI is changing customer behavior, and the biggest change is around customer expectations. The third is that AI makes it easier for your competitors to create great content and amazing experiences for customers.

The fourth is that failing to use AI to improve your content and your customers experience at all gives your competitors a massive advantage. And the fifth is that failing to use these tools well hurts your customers experience and drives them back to big tech to find someone else who can help them.

So I want to talk about each of these in a little bit of detail. First, Big Tech remains the single biggest enabler and the single biggest threat to your business. Big Tech are the channels by which you can reach your customers. That’s a huge benefit. They help you find customers and a wider array of customers that you often can reach on your own.

They make it easier to reach people you can’t reach on your own. They’re also gatekeepers. And as you’ve heard me say many times before, Gatekeeper’s got a gate, right? All of your competitors use these tools too. Your competitors live right alongside you on these channels. And big tech increasingly charges you for the privilege of showing up.

Alongside your competitors, right? When I say gatekeepers go to gate, that’s what I mean. They’re charging you just to show up. They’re raising the fees. They’re raising the price. They’re raising the tolls that you have to pay to actually show up. And you’re still showing up alongside competitors right next to them.

That’s not always great, right? So it’s something we want to be very conscious of, that there, there’s a lot of benefit to big tech, and there are some downsides there, and we have to find the right ways to balance them for our businesses. I mentioned the second one is that AI is changing customer behavior, and the biggest change is around customer expectations.

If you think about how customer behaviors are changing, it often happens without customers even being aware of it. And I’m, I’m talking about how Big tech is using AI to improve the experience customers have. Think of features like AI curated feeds on Instagram or Facebook or TikTok or LinkedIn or Pinterest.

Think about Google’s AI overviews. Think about Amazon’s use of artificial intelligence in its recommendations and its logistics operation. Big tech is using AI under the hood to improve their customers experiences. The customers don’t even realize what’s being done, they just know that it’s better. And it’s changing the expectations that customers have for what good experience looks like, what it feels like.

This is actually how this always works. If you think about when Amazon started offering free shipping, suddenly free shipping became something customers expected, pretty much from everybody. The same thing happened when they went to two day shipping. In hospitality, this is a known reality. It’s called amenity creep.

At various times, things like breakfast buffets, or flat panel TVs, or curved shower rods, or free Wi Fi were luxuries. Now, pretty much every hotel in the world has them, if not better. Customers just expect that those are things you’re going to get everywhere. The third big trend, the third big theme, is that AI makes it easier for your competitors to create great content and offer amazing experiences.

You’ve heard me say, A billion times on this show that content is king and customer experience is queen. Together, content and customer experience help you connect with customers directly and bring them back to you again and again and again. Content and customer experience are two sides of the same coin.

Content is your 24x7x365 salesperson and it is your 24x7x365 customer service rep. Great content is the first leg of the stool towards providing your customer with a great customer experience. If they can’t find what they’re looking for, if they don’t get good answers to their questions, they’re going to go looking for a better answer.

And, as you know, the place they’re going to look is on Google, or Facebook, or Instagram, or Amazon, or Copilot, or LinkedIn. In other words, Big tech, right? It becomes this vicious cycle. By contrast, great customer experience drives loyalty. It’s what causes customers to seek you out by name. My favorite brands, think about it, your favorite brands, aren’t ones you need to search for.

You don’t have to go searching for a solution to a problem that your favorite brands already solved. You know who they are. You look for them by name. That’s the position you want to be in. Because that’s one of the ways you bypass big tech. That’s one of the ways you drive down your cost of customer acquisition by building loyal customers who come back to you.

I mentioned the fourth big theme is failing to use AI to improve your content and your customer’s experience at all gives your competitors a huge advantage. Many companies are now using AI throughout the customer journey to improve their content and improve their customer experience. I mentioned this a moment ago in terms of big tech, but you’re seeing it with plenty of smaller companies too.

Just to give some examples, AI allows you to better identify customer segments. We know who we want to provide a message to. Artificial intelligence also allows you to create a greater variety and more targeted messages for those customer segments. It enables a more personalized experience. It enables a better experience because you’re speaking to the specific customer you need to.

In their voice and in their language and doing it far more economically and far faster. I think about this a lot generally, but I’m thinking about it a lot specifically these days. I don’t know about you, but I’m watching the Olympics a lot right now. I’m a big fan of the Olympics. It’s, it’s always so much fun to see these.

Amazing athletes do the peak of human performance, perform at the peak of human ability. And, you know, if you’re watching something like track and field, if one of the runners switched to riding a bicycle, and we’ll pretend for purposes of this discussion that using a bike was legal in track and field, Then everybody else who was just running would lose.

It would no longer be track and field, it would be cycling. But bicycles literally would change the game. If swimmers raced against folks in boats, again, they’d lose. It would literally change the game. Technology is a game changer. AI specifically is a game changer, or at least it is when it’s used well, and I’m going to talk more about this in just a moment.

Years ago, though, we had an episode called Deal With It. Digital makes marketing easier for everyone. Which makes marketing harder for everyone, right? AI repeats that mantra. AI makes marketing and customer experience easier, easier for everyone. Which makes them harder for everyone. We need to be using the technology appropriately.

We need to be using it well if we want to compete in the same race that our competitors are running and that big tech is running. They’re all using bicycles or cars or jets to create better content and create better experience. If we’re not, we’re stuck at the starting block. We’re not even running in the race.

Now, the fifth big theme, and this gets to the core of it, a moment ago, as I said, if you fail to use these tools at all, that’s going to create a huge advantage for your competitors. If you fail to use these tools well, then that hurts your customer experience and drives them back to big tech to find someone else who can help them.

And this is, this Maybe the key point I want you to think about, as I noted in our episode about why AI makes customer experience more important, it’s not about the tool. And let me be clear, AI is just a tool. It’s really no different from your CRM, or your CDP, or your mobile app, or your website, or anything else you use to connect with your customers.

If that tool is not focused on providing a great experience, if you’re not using these tools to improve your customers experiences and truly their lives, then you’re not really helping your customers. The funny thing about how you can do this well, though, is that Big Tech might be providing a playbook here, as they so often do.

A few minutes ago, I mentioned that Big Tech was building these capabilities behind the scenes, under the hood of their customers experiences. Sometimes the customers aren’t aware. That these companies are using big tech, excuse me, using artificial intelligence, rather, to improve the experience. And there may be a reason why they’re doing that.

There was recent research published in the Journal of Hospitality Marketing and Management that shows that, and this is a quote, the inclusion of the artificial intelligence term in descriptions of products and services decreases purchase intention and that emotional trust mediates this relationship.

In other words, customers want the benefits of AI, but they want a human face attached to it. They want to deal with people. They want to deal with people who treat them really well. So, you need to be thinking about How you can treat your customers as human beings to provide the experiences that they increasingly expect.

No matter what tools you’re actually using under the hood to serve those customer needs, you want to make it friendly. You want to make it human. As my friend Mark Schaefer says, the most human brand wins. And he is so right when it comes to that. If you’re not thinking about how to treat your customers as human beings, Regardless of the tools, then you’re actively encouraging them to keep looking for a better service, a better product, a better company who is focused on their needs.

Which means that you’re going to have to pay the gatekeepers again and again and again for the privilege of talking with your customers. Which is not the place you want to be. So, obviously, I didn’t lay out these themes just to scare you. We also want to talk about what you can do with it. And it always starts in the same place.

It’s where I just left off a moment ago. You focus on your customers as people and focus on what they care about. You’ve probably heard me tell this story before on the show about former Amazon CEO and current Space Cowboy, Jeff Bezos. Always saying, when people ask him about what would change over the next five years or the next ten years, he liked to ask, what won’t change?

What are the things your customers always care about? Start there. We know customer experience is one of them. Think about and answer the question of what customer experience means for your business. Obviously, customer experience means different things if we’re talking about a hotel, or a restaurant, or financial services, or retail, or software as a service, or manufacturing, or on and on and on.

But think about what it means to your customers and your business. One technique that we’ve found valuable The goal is to use ChatGPT or Google’s Gemini to test ideas about customer experiences and test customer service before putting them in the field with actual human beings. These tools provide a solid way to conduct user testing, air quotes, easily and inexpensively.

We can understand things, we can kind of brainstorm what it is the customer might expect and make it work. Another thing that we know that customers want are answers to their questions. What are the questions that your customers routinely ask? Again, we’ve used a variety of AI tools from Microsoft or Google or SEMrush or HubSpot to process our clients data and understand what customers are actually looking for.

We can then use those tools to brainstorm new content ideas, build out functional content calendars, and in some cases, improve drafts of content designed to answer those questions. We’re also using AI tools from, among others, Google and Microsoft and Meta, to promote that content so that customers know it exists.

Notice, by the way, what are we talking about here? Content is king. Customer experience is queen. Because they don’t change. The specific answers might change. The expectations might change. But the need to provide great content and a great customer experience Doesn’t change. There are of course other things that won’t change that are specific to your business.

Take some time to think those through. Use ChatGPT or Gemini or Claude to brainstorm your ideas and see how you can identify how to leverage those for your business. Notice though, That those tools, and yeah, big tech, are also the instruments by which you improve your content and your customer service.

They are a threat, but they can be a massive enabler. So to wrap this up, remember that there are five big themes you want to keep in mind that we’re all dealing with. One is that AI is changing customer behavior. Two is that AI makes it easier for your competitors to create great content and amazing experiences.

Three, failing to use AI to improve your content and your customers experience at all gives your competitors a huge advantage. Four is failing to use these tools well hurts your customers experience and drives them back to Big Tech to find someone else who can help them. And five, big tech is the biggest threat and the biggest enabler of your business.

Use them wisely and use them well to see your business grow. Use Big Tech to help create great content and great experiences so that your customers will want to work with you. They’ll come back to you again and again and again. And then you won’t have to rely on Big Tech quite so much to find those customers.

Instead, customers will find you. I can’t wait to hear how you do.

Now, looking at the clock on the wall, we are out of time for this week.

And I want to remind you again that you can find the show notes for this episode. As well as an archive of all past episodes by going to timpeter.com/podcast. Again, that’s timpeter.com/podcast. Just look for episode 428.

Don’t forget that you can click on the subscribe link in any of the episodes that you find there to have Thinks Out Loud delivered to your favorite podcatcher every single week. You can also find Thinks Out Loud on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube Music, anywhere fine podcasts are found.

I would also very much appreciate it if you could provide a positive rating or review for the show whenever you use one of those services.

If you like what you hear on Thinks Out Loud, if you enjoy what we talk about, if you like being part of the community that we’re building here, please give us a positive rating or review.

Reviews help other listeners find the podcast. Reviews help other listeners understand what Thinks Out Loud is all about. They help to build our community and they mean the world to me. So thank you so much for doing that. I very, very much appreciate it.

You can also find Thinks Out Loud on LinkedIn by going to linkedin.com/tim-peter-and-associates-llc. You can find me on Twitter or X or whatever you want to call it this week by using the Twitter handle @tcpeter. And of course, you can email me by sending an email to podcast(at)timpeter.com. Again, that’s podcast(at)timpeter.com.

Finally, and I know I say this a lot, I want you to know how thrilled I am that you keep listening to what we do here. It means so much to me. You are the reason we do this show.

You’re the reason that Thinks Out Loud happens every single week. So please, keep your messages coming on LinkedIn. Keep hitting me up on Twitter, sending things via email. I love getting a chance to talk with you, to hear what’s going on in your world, and to learn how we can do a better job building on the types of information and insights and content and community that work for you and work for your business.

So with all that said, I hope you have a fantastic rest of your day, I hope you have a wonderful week ahead, and I will look forward to speaking with you here on Thinks Out Loud next time. Until then, please be well, be safe, and as always, take care, everybody.

The post How to Put Big Tech and AI — the Biggest Threat and Biggest Enablers of Your Business — to Work (Episode 428) appeared first on Tim Peter & Associates.