Tim Peter & Associates

Apple told us at their WWDC that they’re seriously rethinking how they use AI on their devices, largely because they way they’s previously announced AI on their devices straight up didn’t work. You may also know that Apple has apparently begun looking at partnering with ChatGPT and others as the default search engines on their devices.

As you’re undoubtedly aware, Google is currently Apple’s default search engine on its devices. It’s also, arguably, the biggest player in consumer adoption of artificial intelligence.

Something’s got to give.

The point is that while any one member of Big Tech could (at least in theory) get pushed out of the club at any time, Big Tech itself will continue to roll right along. And that gatekeepers gonna gate, whether those gatekeepers are the companies we’ve competed with for years, or some new player in the game.

As the saying goes, though, don’t hate the player, hate the game.

As I’ve discussed many times, your business probably depends on Google for a lot of your traffic and revenues. And Google clearly cares enough about the traffic Apple provides it that they’re willing to pay roughly $20 billion each year for the privilege of being the default search engine. The question then becomes: If Google loses Apple’s traffic, what happens to yours?

Again, the point isn’t whether this is likely. The point is that you’ve got to change the rules of the game. You’ve got to ensure you’re not dependent on any one Big Tech player for traffic and revenue

Why does that matter for your business? And what can you do about it? That’s what this episode of the podcast is all about.

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

Tim Peter has written a new book called Digital Reset: Driving Marketing Beyond Big Tech. You can learn more about it here on the site. Or buy your copy on Amazon.com today.

You might also enjoy this webinar I 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: 18m 14s

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. I’m Tim Peter.

Apple’s WWDC conference was the other day and a TON of talk about Apple’s retrenchment around AI. Basically, almost everything that Apple has introduced around AI the last year has been, at best, wishful thinking if not outright bullshit. So, they’re now rethinking how they approach AI, who they partner with, and what the future of AI looks like on Apple devices.

One of Apple’s biggest partners of course is Google. And Google, of course, is arguably the biggest player in artificial intelligence. Which makes this as good a time as any to revisit the discussion around whether Apple might drop Google as its default search engine.

To recap, there’s a story going around that Apple may add artificial intelligence search engines to Safari as Google use drops. According to the story, Apple is exploring AI search engines like ChatGPT for Safari. This is all from Search Engine Journal. You may remember that Google pays Apple $20 billion to be the default in Safari on Macs and, more importantly, iPhones. So, this is, as I’ve said in the past, a BIG EFFING DEAL. It would dramatically reshape search competition.

Why is this a big deal? Why do you care? How does it potentially reshape what Big Tech means? And most importantly, why does this matter to you and to your business?

Let’s dive in and revisit “Is Apple Dropping Google and What That Means for Your Business.”

As Search Engine Journal’s headline probably reminds you, Google pays Apple something like $20 billion to be the default search engine in Safari and on iOS overall, on your iPhone and iPad’s operating system. You might also remember that the Department of Justice, the US Department of Justice, wants to prevent Google from paying anyone to be the default search engine as part of its proposed antitrust remedies.

Now to put this in context, $20 billion is a little bit less than Apple makes in profits most quarters. Or to put it another way, it’s essentially a full quarter’s worth of risk-free profit to Apple.

That is a big deal right there.

In part, this story feels a bit like a negotiating ploy on Apple’s part. For instance, Bloomberg has said that it’s Apple’s way of showing the Department of Justice they don’t need Google to pay them in hopes probably that the court will still allow Google to pay them. They want to make sure that they still get that full quarter worth of risk-free profit every single year. And that seems entirely plausible to me.

It also could be Apple presenting its asking price to one of the big AI players like ChatGPT or Proplexity. know, Apple could be saying, you want to get in front of our customers? You got to pay us. Remember, “gatekeepers gonna gate” even if it’s a gatekeeper like Apple charging another potential gatekeeper like ChatGPT or Perplexity. In other words, if the courts say that Google isn’t allowed to pay to be the default, Apple may be keeping its options open so that somebody else will pay to be the default.

And in any case, Apple apparently is going to add AI search as alternatives to Google regardless so that you can say, “You know what, I’d like to use ChatGPT or I’d like to use Perplexity instead of always using Google or Bing or Duck or one of the other ones.”

The question I think we need to start thinking about though is what if Apple doesn’t use AI as the alternative, but instead get ChatGPT or Perplexity to pay them the $20 billion? What does that mean to you?

As you’ve heard me mention many times before, any decline in Google’s business could lead to a huge decline in your business. Google accounts for a plurality, if not an outright majority, of many businesses’ traffic. When you think about organic search or paid search or local search and maps or metasearch in hospitality or product search in retail, those add up to a lot of traffic and a lot of revenue for most businesses. So much so that Google clearly wants to be the first choice on Apple. Otherwise, they wouldn’t be paying $20 billion a year to be there.

And the way you want to think about that is that if Apple is important to Google, then Apple is important to you too.

Let’s talk about how important that is. Just back in the envelope for a moment, Google made $350 billion in revenue last year and just a bit over $100 billion in profits. They paid Apple something in the ballpark of $20 billion to be the search by default in Safari on Macs and iOS. Now that $20 billion is about 6% of their overall revenues, which means if we’re doing this in an ROI calculation way, they had about a 16.5:1 ROI. In other words, for every dollar Google paid Apple, they made $16.50 in profits, at most.

In reality, it was lower than that because it assumes that everyone who clicked on an ad, everyone who used Google clicked on an ad and it also ignores the ads “only” accounted for 54% of Google’s earnings. And for those of you listening to this, I hope you heard the air quotes around “only.” 54% is a huge amount of traffic and a huge segment of Google’s business. It’s just in this case, that would mean that Google’s ROI from their deal with Apple is smaller than a 16.5:1 return.

So if we take the fact that ads account for 54% of Google’s earnings, then the real ROI was no better than 54% of 16.5:1, or maybe 8.9:1. We’ll round up and call that 9:1. And there would be nothing wrong with an ROI.

But wait, there’s more.

Customers don’t click on an ad every time they use Google search. Assuming customers only click on an ad, maybe between a third to half of the time, and it could be more than that, it could be less than that, but it would make Google’s actual ROI probably more like three to one to maybe four and a half to one.

I think it’s probably lower than that. Again, that’s still not a terrible number though.

But if you flip it around, it could mean is that Apple could account for a huge share of Google’s revenues and a huge share of Google’s profits and a huge share of the traffic that they get that matters to them. And what it all demonstrates to you is how much Google needs that traffic. Remember, Google represents a healthy chunk of your traffic. And if Google needs that traffic, so do you.

Up until recently, the potential hit to your business from a decline in Google search was one of my major concerns. And it was a driving factor behind my upcoming book, Digital Reset: Driving Marketing and Customer Acquisition Beyond Big Tech. Obviously, one of the things we have to remember is if that Apple share of that traffic goes away, that’s an even bigger problem for you because that will happen immediately.

So this remains something you need to think about.

What’s also true is that there’s another huge, highly related concern here. And that is, what is your brand experience? What do customers know about your brand if they don’t come to your website? Whether they, Apple, replace Google with Perplexity or ChatGPT, or something else happens, which I’ll talk about in a moment.

You may still have people who don’t experience your brand early in the process. Now you might think, “Yay, Google isn’t my biggest concern any longer.” That sounds good in the theory, except there’s a few issues that are big concerns that come from that.

One, you’d have to show up in ChatGPT or Perplexity’s answers for customers to find you.

Two, showing up in ChatGPT and Perplexity and other AI answer engines often don’t lead to clicks. The same is true for Google’s AI overviews, by the way, and in its AI mode that they’re testing with power users right now.

The third issue is that you’d also simply be trading one Big Tech gatekeeper for another.

And the fourth thing is that until one of those Big Tech wannabes won, whether it was Google, whether it was ChatGPT, whether it was Perplexity, your company could lose out on a lot of traffic and revenue.

Is that bad? Because it seems like it’s, you bad. The worst part is that it’s pretty likely we’re heading to that world one way or the other. It doesn’t matter if it’s zero-click search today—which we’re already seeing—or AI answer engines in the future, or AI agents in the future. We’re probably going to see fewer and fewer clicks.

My friend Stuart Butler talked about this brilliantly in his Destination Discourse podcast not long ago. And I think there’s a lot of merit in how we think about this.

The question we need to start thinking about, which is, what is brand experience if customers never come to your branded assets?

You know, “don’t build your brand on rented land” is great advice. It’s a key point in digital reset. We talk about how you do that. And I think that it still holds up. You know, the people who connect from your branded assets like website, email, SMS, and other CRM activities are going to be huge for your business for a long time to come.

My concern increasingly though, and the Apple story points to it and all this rest we’ve talked about points to it, is what happens if those branded assets don’t happen earlier in the process? Or worse, what if they don’t happen at all? I’ve argued, I still argue, that your website isn’t going away anytime soon. I think that’s going to be true for quite some time.

I also think we need to ensure that our branded experiences deliver that they connect right out of the gate every time whenever someone does engage with them. It doesn’t mean that they have to purchase. It doesn’t mean that they have to opt into everything. But they do need to connect. They do need to feel some affinity for your brand.

We need to be thinking about how brand works when people interact with those messages and when they interact with those channels.

I recently heard somebody who put it best when he said, “We implemented demand marketing, which only addresses the 10% of the audience that is ready to buy. We need brand marketing for the remaining 90% to stay so that we stay top of mind until they are ready.”

Brand is the sum of every experience our customers have with our business. And that includes our website or our email or our SMS messages or our content or our social presence or in real life presence. And yes, the experiences they hear about from creators and influencers or in search and AI answer engines. We need to remember that it’s OK for customers to find us through some other source the first time they come across our name, anyway. You know, even Google thinks it’s worth paying $20 billion a year so that they show up on Apple the first time somebody, I don’t know, looks to search. You’d think Google would have that one covered already.

Where it becomes a problem for your business, is if you have to pay every time customers connect with you. So we have to think about how we build the brand every time we have one of those touch points.

Now in the interest of time, I’m not going to belabor the point of how you solve for that right now. I’m not going to ignore it. I just want to hit on it at a high level. You’ve heard me say this before.

First, focus on what won’t change. And we know that what won’t change is that content is king, customer experience is queen, and data is the crown jewels. And I will provide a bunch of links in the show notes for past episodes where I covered how you use those in detail. I will admit we also don’t want to go too deep into detail at the moment because you can read about it in the new book if you’d like. I just remember that you can learn a bunch of this from links on this episode. You don’t have to buy the book when it comes out, though I hope you want to. Just keep in mind that this is a rapidly evolving space.

Google and Apple are showing why it’s possible even for Big Tech companies to lose and to have new folks take their seat at the table. Your job is to make sure you succeed beyond Big Tech. Keep learning about the situation. Keep thinking about what does it mean when guests and customers connect to us.

Your job is to make sure you succeed beyond Big Tech. Your job is to keep thinking about what’s going to happen, how we continue to build a brand if people don’t connect with us the first time directly.

And that some of the ways that you can do that is to:

Apply those lessons, learn from them, and then share your learnings with your friends and family and fans and followers too. I know for sure I’d love to hear what you think and I bet they will also.

I’m confident you’re going to crush it and I can’t wait to see how you put this to work for your brand and business.

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

I’m willing to bet that you might know someone who would benefit from what we’ve talked about today. Are you thinking of someone? Why not send them a link to the episode? Let them know what you think too, as I just mentioned. Share what you’ve learned.

You can also find the show notes for this episode, episode 460, as well as an archive of all of our past episodes, by going to timpeter.com/podcast. Again, that’s timpeter.com/podcast.

And, of course, be sure to like and subscribe wherever you get your favorite podcasts.

Thank you so much for listening today. I want you to know that this show would not happen without you. We’ll be back with a new episode next week. And until then, please be well, be safe, and as the saying goes, be excellent to each other. Take care. We’ll talk to you soon.

The post Revisiting Is Apple Dropping Google? What Does That Mean For Your Business? appeared first on Tim Peter & Associates.

Mary Meeker’s latest report is out and it’s all about artificial intelligence. It’s a brilliant report. But it’s missing why all of these changes matter for marketers and e-commerce/customer acquisition leaders.

That’s where this episode of the podcast comes in.

Tim asks:

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

Tim Peter has written a new book called Digital Reset: Driving Marketing Beyond Big Tech. You can learn more about it here on the site. Or buy your copy on Amazon.com today.

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 Heil PR-40 Dynamic Studio Recording Mic and a IK Multimedia iRig Pro Duo IO USB audio interface into Logic Pro X for the Mac.

Running time: 19m 52s

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.

You know, unless you’ve been living under a rock for the last, I don’t know, two or three or four years, you’re probably aware that AI is moving faster than anything we’ve ever seen before.

But underneath the hype, there’s a problem nobody’s talking about. Who’s going to pay for all of this? Like, where does the money come from? And most importantly, what happens to marketers when the bill comes due? That’s a really critical lesson that I think we need to think about as we go forward as marketing and customer acquisition folks.

This is episode 464 of The Big Show. Today we’re talking about how AI is eating the world, but who’s paying for dinner?

Let’s dive in.

So I’ve been reading the Mary Meeker report for the last 24 hours or so. Longtime listeners of the show and readers of the blog know how much I love Mary Meeker’s report. If you’re not familiar with Mary Meeker, she’s a venture capitalist. She’s been around for a long time. She was an early investor in Facebook. Super, super smart woman. Tremendously, tremendously smart team she’s put around herself. And I devour her report every single time it comes out.

It is a massive report this year. 340 pages almost entirely focused on artificial intelligence and what it means for the world today. Now, you know that this show literally started out as a place for me to think out loud. That’s where the title came from. This episode is going to be a little bit along those lines, in part because I’m going to be digesting this report for a couple of weeks. Again, this is a 340 page report. There’s a lot in there, some of which are not so relevant to marketers and e-commerce professionals, and some of which are very relevant.

But…

I want to talk about her key finding as it matters to you today, which is that AI adoption has outpaced the internet, mobile, and even cloud adoption curves. ChatGPT hit 800 million weekly users in just 17 months. That is faster than any technology we’ve ever seen.

So AI is not some future thing. You know that. It’s here. It’s now. It’s beginning to become baked into the customer journey.

What’s also true is that those numbers require some clarification. First, adoption is not constant by age group. Sam Altman, who is OpenAI’s co-founder and CEO, said this, he said,

“a gross simplification is older people use ChatGPT as like a Google replacement. People in their 20s and 30s, use it like a life advisor.”

That’s a big difference. That’s a huge deal in terms of how customers use these tools.

The second key thing that you want to take away is that adoption might not be as broad as you might think. People who listen to the show, people who I interact with on social media and the like, we’re all fairly early adopters. So I think we think people have really taken this too hard. And it’s not that they haven’t. Again, adoption has been huge.

But today they’re spending maybe 18 minutes per day on ChatGPT by “USA active users.” Now that’s up from roughly seven minutes per day in less than two years.

Side note, the Meeker report doesn’t show exact numbers, just ranges in 10 minute increments. The current number is definitely a bit below 20 minutes per day, but it’s getting close to there. And the earlier number was definitely more than five minutes per day, but far fewer than 10. So, you know, seven. Also, “active users” isn’t clearly defined in the report, so we’re not 100% sure how they mean or what they mean by active users.

Another chart in the report shows that the average session duration is a little over two minutes and that the average user has about seven to eight sessions per day, roughly double what it was less than two years ago. So again, tremendous growth. These are impressive numbers. My favorite stat that they show is that the Meeker report shows that searches for the term “AI agent” have grown almost 1,100% since January of 2024. So in less than 18 months, it’s grown almost 1,100%. That is genuinely remarkable. What is also true is that

A.) It looks like those searches may have plateaued as of maybe February this year.

Don’t get me wrong, one-tenth of 1% of 96 billion is still a pretty good-sized number. It’s also not everybody is searching for AI agents all the time. That’s a big deal. Also note, they’re searching on Google, right? Keep that in mind. We’re going to come back to it.

With no disrespect to Mary Meeker, far from it, I think she is brilliant. Part of her job is selling the world on the things she and her company have invested in, right? More than a few of her company’s investments are AI companies. So, you know, you can forgive her if she was to give you a glass half full look at the world. And again, I don’t think she’s wrong that this is a big deal. Because by any measure, AI adoption is already big and it’s getting bigger.

What it hasn’t yet done is taken over for Big Tech companies. And there’s a reason for that. And the reason is that the costs of AI are starting to show.

There’s a telling quote in the presentation from Microsoft’s vice chair and president, Brad Smith. He said,

“like electricity and other general purpose technologies in the past, AI and cloud data centers represent the next stage of industrialization.”

In other words, data centers, the cloud, and AI are just a cost of doing business, kind of like the internet was once upon a time. Meeker herself writes, “The world’s biggest tech companies,” — which quick aside, she calls “hyperscalers” and the rest of us call “Big Tech.” Anyway, she continues by saying that “…the world’s biggest tech companies are spending tens of billions of dollars annually, not just to gather data, but to learn from it, reason with it, and monetize it in real time.”

“It’s still about data,” she continues, “but now the advantage goes to those who can trade on it faster, personalize it deepest, and deploy it widest.” I might add, again, to those who can monetize it.

What I find really interesting is that according to her research, Big Tech has increased their capital and R&D spending roughly 20-plus percent per year for the last 10 years or so. But they’ve seen their cloud computing revenues increase roughly 37% per year during the same period. And I’m gonna come back to this in a moment.

There’s this paradox she points out called Jevons Paradox. They note it was first proposed back in 1865. Jevon was an economist.

Anyway, it states that, “the technological advancements that improve resource efficiency actually lead to increased overall usage of those resources.” So in short, “costs fall, performance rises and usage grows all in tandem.” So as your costs fall, usage grows, which raises your costs.

They conclude by stating “this trend is repeating itself with AI.”

By the way, the people doing this a lot, are folks like OpenAI and Big Tech.

If you look at OpenAI’s various actions over the last bunch of months, they’ve been super busy:

Now these all could signal bold ambitions for OpenAI becoming the next Big Tech player, connecting customers across a variety of applications and platforms.

I think it also kind of signals their current reality, which is that they don’t have any way of recouping the billions of dollars they’ve already spent in developing their products. According to reports, they generated $3.7 billion in revenue in 2024 and lost $5 billion. That’s a neat trick. They’re on track for apparently $9.2 billion in annualized revenue in 2025… against the $64 billion they’ve already raised in funding. And that’s before you consider the fact that open source is coming.

This feels a little to me like the dot-com bubble where some companies invested in “the internet,” but not in things that they could actually make money; for products for customers and in the products and services that they offered. You know, when you think about OpenAI, they’re kind of selling “the internet…” but not the things on top of the internet that actually make money.

And I think there’s an implication for all of us in marketing and customer acquisition, which is if you’re building your marketing workflows or you’re building your go-to-market strategy solely around ChatGPT or GPT APIs, you may be betting on a shaky foundation. I’ll admit, I’ve kind of come 180º on this. I originally thought they were the biggest threat to Big Tech, and they may still be. They may find a way to turn this into a lot of revenue really quick.

But if you contrast what OpenAI is doing with Google or Microsoft or Amazon or Apple, our old friends in Big Tech, they’re using AI to enhance existing high margin businesses like ads or cloud computing or hardware. They have integrated monetization paths. They don’t have to make AI pay for itself directly. They own the ecosystem. They own the platforms. And they own the distribution of how they put this in front of customers.

For example, we think about Microsoft Copilot and its deep integration with Microsoft Office. I know they call it 365, but come on, it’s Office. And Azure, their cloud computing platform.

Amazon is using AI to empower how quickly it gets orders to you, how it improves its ads, and how it improves its shopping user experience. Again, growing the business they already make a lot of money off of.

Google’s AI overviews and AI mode enhance the search monetization as well as, again, their cloud computing platform.

And Apple’s on-device AI could reinforce their dominance in selling hardware where they make a boatload of money.

The key differentiator is that Big Tech is integrating AI into already highly profitable and diversified businesses with huge user bases and a ton of different monetization options. AI is enhancing these existing revenue and profit engines rather than being the sole engine for revenue generation that OpenAI has got.

And again, I think that’s got a broad implication for those of us in marketing and e-commerce and customer acquisition because the smart money isn’t just on cool AI, it’s on embedding AI into some sort of scalable profitable ecosystem. We have to think about how are we using these tools in a way that benefits our customers and our businesses.

So I think we need to really think about how we’re putting AI to work for real. And I’ve got five quick recommendations.

Now all of this said, I do want to say we are clearly in a period of breathtaking innovation. I mean, we have seen so much change in the way AI is shaping the way that our customers interact with our businesses and that in the way that our businesses respond.

But it creates a certain degree of uncertainty. So we need to keep learning and we need to remain flexible.

If I could leave you with one last thought though, is OpenAI may have built the rocket, they may have built the vehicle, but the companies who are gonna make money on this are the ones that are selling tickets, who are connecting with customers, and who own the fuel supply.

You need to think beyond the rocket. You need to think beyond the tool. You need to think about the system you’re building because the marketers who will win in this next era aren’t just using AI. They’re thinking about how it shapes their business — and structuring their business around how it helps their customers.

The future of marketing and e-commerce won’t just be about using AI, but about intelligently investing in the right tools and using those solutions that are built to support sustainable business models. I think it’s really critical we make sure we distinguish between the two. And if you do a good job of that, you’ll succeed no matter what happens to any of the players.

I can’t wait to see what you do.

Now looking at the clock on the wall, we are out of time for this week. I’m willing to bet that you might know someone who would benefit from what we’ve talked about today. Are you thinking of someone? Why not send them a link to the episode? Be sure to let them know what you think too. Keep the conversation going.

You can also find the show notes for this episode, episode 464, as well as an archive of all of our past episodes by going to timpeter.com/podcast. Again, that’s timpeter.com/podcast.

And of course, be sure to like and subscribe wherever you get your favorite podcasts.

By the way, if you’re looking for something new to read, something cool to read, the talks about Big Tech and how you can build your business beyond Big Tech, I’d love to suggest the number one new e-commerce book on Amazon.com Digital Reset, Driving Marketing and Customer Acquisition Beyond Big Tech and written by me. Please pick up a copy and let me know what you think. I would genuinely appreciate it.

Now before I go, I just want to say thanks so much for listening. This show would not happen without you. I’ll be back next week with a new episode and I can’t wait to talk about all the other cool stuff that’s going on in the world.

Until then, please be well, be safe, and as the saying goes, be excellent to each other. We’ll see you soon.

The post AI Is Eating the World, But Who’s Paying for Dinner? (Thinks Out Loud 464) appeared first on Tim Peter & Associates.

Google’s AI Mode in search, to put it bluntly, sucks. At least it does if your job is to drive traffic and revenue for your business. We all know that “gatekeepers gonna gate.” Well, AI Mode is a sure sing that Google is closing the gate on marketers. They’re removing access to the kinds of traffic we’ve taken for granted for years.

Will AI Mode kill your company’s traffic? Not exactly. It’s slightly more complicated than that. It does suck, mind you. But it’s not as simple as “AI Mode won’t link to you.”

What is the truth of AI Mode for your brand and your business? What do you need to do to ensure that AI Mode doesn’t kill your brand and business? That’s what this episode of the podcast is all about.

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

Tim Peter has written a new book called Digital Reset: Driving Marketing Beyond Big Tech. You can learn more about it here on the site. Or buy your copy on Amazon.com today.

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 Heil PR-40 Dynamic Studio Recording Mic and a IK Multimedia iRig Pro Duo IO USB audio interface into Logic Pro X for the Mac.

Running time: 15m 00s

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 the show. I’m Tim Peter. Google introduced a bunch of new features at its recent I/O event. And the one I want to talk about the most is AI Mode in search. You’ve probably been reading a lot about it. You’ve probably heard a lot about it. And the reason is because this is likely to be a huge deal from the perspective of your customers’ behaviors.

end from the perspective of your business results. We all know that gatekeepers gonna gate. You’ve heard me say that a lot.

AI Mode sure makes it seem as though Google is closing the gate on marketers, making it less likely that customers will click on links or visit your website after interacting with Google’s platform. Why? Well, for starters, there aren’t many links in it. It’s tough to click on a thing that isn’t there. For another…

they mostly link to companies Google business profile page. That’s not great. There is one huge exception coming though that we’ll talk about in a bit. So what’s really going on here? Is Google closing the gate on marketers? And if they are, what can you do about it? This is episode 463 of The Big Show.

Let’s dive in.

So today we’re gonna talk about AI Mode in the search. And Sundar Pichai was talking about this at I/O and he was talking about AI overviews. He said, since launching at IO last year, AI overviews have scaled up. These are quotes to over 1.5 billion users every month in more than 200 countries and territories. He said that as people use AI overviews, we see they are happier with their results and they search more often. He said in our biggest markets like the US and India.

AI overviews are driving over 10% growth in the types of queries that show them. And he followed that up by saying, what’s particularly exciting is that this growth increases over time. He also said that AI overviews are one of the strongest drivers of growth for visual searches in Google Lens.

He also said that AI overviews are one of the strongest drivers of growth for visual searches in Google Lens and that Lens grew 65% year over year with more than 100 billion already this year. He didn’t say whether those were 100 billion users or 100 billion searches. Regardless, one consequence that we’re seeing at the moment

is that Google is keeping most of the traffic from those searches to itself. There’s been lots of people talking about this. Lily Ray over on LinkedIn talked about how Google AI Mode keeps users in AI Mode. My friend Michael Goldrich said Google just killed the blue links. What hotels must do to stay visible and booked? I talked about the same thing where I’m

over on LinkedIn talking about how Google is slamming the gate shut in AI Mode for many businesses. But that’s not what Google’s saying. In a recent interview with Nilay Patel, the link will be in the show notes, Sundar Pichai said that this is a quote, Google is committed to continuing to send traffic to other websites and that users expect that from Google. He also says that this is a quote,

In five years, we will still send traffic to websites.

Some folks seem to think Sundar Pichai is lying. Right? They’re like, I don’t think so, buddy. For instance, Lily Ray, this is a quote from her LinkedIn post. said, in my opinion, Sundar didn’t have great answers to Neelay’s questions about why AI overviews haven’t driven more traffic a year after launch. He, and the seemingly every Google spokesperson, claims that it traffic.

to a broader set of websites. At least all the evidence that most folks are seeing right now suggests that’s not the case. Weirdly, I don’t think he’s lying. I think we need to remember how Google makes money. Google makes most of its money from ads, the overwhelming majority of its money from ads. Of

course they’re going to send the traffic to websites. The difference is that this traffic is going to be paid traffic, not organic and far from free.

We’ve seen this playbook from Google in the past. Think about how much they’ve increased ad loads and search results over the last bunch of years, over the last decade. For those in the hotel industry, Google introduced meta-search listings, that is ads by another name, paid meta-search listings, that showed prices from OTAs, online travel agencies, like Expedia and Booking.com.

If you were a hotel, you absolutely could have your hotel website appear there too, as long as you paid Google. Google replaced organic traffic with paid traffic. And ironically, most hotel owners and marketers thought that was a victory. They thought they’d won because suddenly we can compete against the expedience and booking dot coms of the world.

Just imagine how giddy we’ll all be when Google allows you to buy ads alongside AI Mode answers. We’ll be thrilled, right? And we’ll reward them. We’ll buy those ads. We will reward them for putting another gate between us and our customers. It’s what we’ve done every other time. By the way, just as a quick aside,

their ability to monetize these tools is going to slow down the rollout. It is probably the thing most likely to hurt their ability to beat chat GPT or perplexity or any other competitor. I don’t think that’s gonna happen, but that’s the thing most likely to make them stumble because they can’t get rid of the goose that lays the golden egg without replacing it with another goose. Anyway, I don’t wanna go down that rabbit hole this episode.

rabbits, goose, geese, pardon all the farm animals today. I promise I’ll come back to it another time. Back to the point at hand. Lily Grozeva has a great post on LinkedIn that says most marketers still think AI search is about content. It’s not. It’s about signals and most of them live off your website.

What Lily is talking about and what she’s saying here is that she says this a quote, if you’re not referenced somewhere else, you’re not understood by the AI, you’re invisible. And she advises people to, and again, I’m giving her a quote here, make a map of influence. Use tools like Perplexity or Peak AI or Spark Turo to understand where your audience hangs out and how the LLMs use this information to train themselves.

She then continues saying, then build your presence there in podcasts, LinkedIn, Reddit threads, guest quotes, third party coverage. And concludes, she concludes, you’re not trying to rank, you’re trying to be recognized. I love that phrase. You’re not trying to rank, you’re trying to be recognized. We need to keep this in mind. I agree with Lily’s point of view almost 100%. The key word there

is almost. Nothing that Lily uncovered in her research is wrong, so far as I can tell. I absolutely agree that you have to make sure your web presence includes places where your customers hang out. These are the spokes of your hub and spoke strategy. If you’ve listened to the show before, you’ve heard me talk about spokes.

You’ve heard me talk about the hub and spokes. I’ve got links in the show notes about how you can put these to work. Or if you want, you can see chapter five of my book available on amazon.com and also linked to in the show notes. The fact remains, you need to build direct relationships with your customers. You need to provide the kinds of human centered, helpful content.

that answers customers’ questions. And you need that content to exist where your customers are. That includes spokes like LinkedIn or Instagram or Reddit threads or what have you. You also can’t rely solely, and solely is the important word here, of third-party sites, or else you’re letting other folks control your access to customers.

By the way, this isn’t just Google’s strategy, right? We know that gatekeeper is going to gate. Many of the links in today’s show notes are from brilliant people who I admire and they’re posting their content on LinkedIn. But LinkedIn itself is part of the problem. You can’t see this content without a LinkedIn account. And most folks are duplicating their content and comments on their own sites. I know I’m not most of the time.

Instead, we are putting ourselves behind their gates and thanking them for the privilege of being seen.

What blows my mind is when you link to a post on LinkedIn, if you just copy and paste, the title of the link is Post Feed LinkedIn. Not who posted it, not what it’s about, just an anonymous, amorphous LinkedIn post in a generic LinkedIn feed on LinkedIn. Remind me again whose brand you’re building here. Again, it’s our job.

to be seen. It doesn’t matter if it’s Google doing this or LinkedIn doing this or Instagram doing this or TikTok doing this. Your content plays a key role. It has to be seen. But it has to belong to you. So not just the spoke and to be fair, not just the hub. This is hub and spoke. You need to make sure you’re using both or else it doesn’t

matter where you show up, you’re still not going to get traffic, you’re still not going get the kind of brand awareness you need, and you’re certainly not going to do it for free.

Once you get people to engage with you, you need to create deep, meaningful experiences that encourage your customers to search for you and recommend you by name to their friends and family and fans and followers. And as you build these relationships, you need to convince your customers that you’re worthy and trustworthy to share their data with you.

so you can keep the conversation going. Otherwise, you’re going to be stuck behind Google’s gate praying for them to introduce more ads so that you can pay to be seen. Or LinkedIn’s gates, or Instagram’s gates, or TikTok’s gates. Google and the rest are trying to close the gate on marketers. Your job is to make sure your customers are willing and want to jump over those gates to reach you.

And I can’t wait to see you do it.

Now looking at the clock on the wall, we are out of time for this week. I’m willing to bet that you might know someone who would benefit from what we’ve talked about today. Are you thinking of someone? Why not send them a link to the episode and let them know what you think too. You can also find the show notes for this episode, episode 463, and an archive of all our past episodes by going to timpeter.com slash podcast.

Again, that’s TimPeter.com slash podcast. And of course, be sure to like and subscribe wherever you get your favorite podcasts.

If you’re looking for something new to read, by the way, I’d love to suggest the number one new e-commerce book on Amazon.com called Digital Reset, Driving Marketing and Customer Acquisition Beyond Big Tech and written by me. Pick up a copy and let me know what you think. I would genuinely appreciate it.

With all that said, thank you so much for listening. This show would not happen without you. I’ll be back next week with a new episode, and until then, please be well, be safe, and as the saying goes, be excellent to each other. Take care now.

The post Google Closes the Gate on Marketers (Thinks Out Loud) appeared first on Tim Peter & Associates.

What is the point of technology? Does it exist solely for its own sake? Of course not. It’s to make our customers’ lives better. It’s really that simple. Which, happily, also plays a key role in building a brand. More importantly, it’s exactly how we build a human brand: By focusing on our customers.

Internet innovator and technology legend Marc Andreessen seems to have forgotten that fact in his latest piece of writing, "The Techno-Optimism Manifesto." Oh, there’s a lot of great ideas in the piece, and a lot we can learn from. There also are a few concepts that Andreessen gets terribly wrong. And each of those concepts is wrong for the same reason: Total disregard for the needs of people, for the needs of human beings.

How can you balance the potential of technology with the needs of human beings? How can you use technology, especially digital technology, to help customers meet their needs? And how can you align techno-optimism with building a human brand? That’s what this episode of Thinks Out Loud sets out to answer.

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:

Contact information for the podcast: [email protected]

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

Disclosure statement: As an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases. The team and I actively use the products listed above and purchased them based on our needs.

Running time: 22m 53s

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 399 of The Big Show.

Holy mackerel! How did we get to 399 episodes? Well, the answer is because of you. The answer is because you tune in, you listen, you download, you comment, you share. So, right out of the gate, thank you so much for that. I really appreciate you continuing to listen.

I think we have a really cool show for you today, and I want, to be fair, it’s going to range pretty far afield at points.

The big story this week, at least in the online discourse, is that Marc Andreessen has written this manifesto where he makes the case for techno optimism. Marc Andreessen, you probably know, is the guy who founded Netscape. He built Netscape Navigator. He then founded Andreessen Horowitz, which is a very large venture capital fund. And he’s a big deal. He’s one of the people who can reasonably claim to have invented the internet as we know it today.

I’m not going to do a point by point takedown of Andreessen’s manifesto. You should absolutely read it. What I will say is that he makes the case for techno-optimism and that technology will make our lives endlessly better. He also outlines the enemies to that endlessly better future, which include things like "existential risk," and "sustainability," and "social responsibility," and "risk management," and "tech ethics."

And if I sound a little skeeved by some of those, that’s intentional. Because, holy crap man, really? Hang with me for a second. I am a techno optimist too. I agree with Andreessen on many of the points in his manifesto. I love what technology offers us. And I’m going to come back to that in a minute. I want to point out that his manifesto provoked reactions from people as diverse as economist Noah Smith, Daniel Drezner, who’s a professor of international politics at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University, and Dave Karpf, who is a professor of media studies at George Washington University and an internet activist.

And their reviews sort of range all along the spectrum from "there’s good here" to "there’s total lunacy here." You should read all of them. I will link to them in the show notes.

I want to make a very specific point though. My core problem with Andreessen’s manifesto and with some of the things that he lists as enemies is that what we do, what we do in digital, what we do in business is not about technology for its own sake. It’s about technology for the benefit of people.

I’ve been doing this a while and this comes around again and again. Periodically, we can easily lose sight of why we do what we do. You know, right now people are talking about the alignment problem with artificial intelligence. They’re afraid of machines that will kill all of humanity. That seems like a reasonable concern to me, you know? I think AI is pretty cool, I think we’re going to do some neat stuff with it. And also, if there’s concern that it’s going to kill all of humanity, it doesn’t mean we should stop using AI. It doesn’t mean we should pull the plug. It does mean we maybe should have a conversation about it. How do we prevent that from happening? Are there things that we should be considering that prevent that from happening?

I have talked multiple times about Facebook’s many errors over the years — and happily, they haven’t had one in a while — but where they did things because they were cool. And didn’t consider the people implications. And took a beating for it, sometimes in the press, sometimes with regulators, sometimes in the stock market, and many times with customers.

Because we need to be thinking about how what we do affects people’s lives. The question I’ve asked more than once on this show is why are we more afraid of the machines than we are of the people who run them? And when somebody says, you know, we should get rid of things like "risk management" or "tech ethics" or not be worried about "existential risk," the machine isn’t the thing that scares me. We’ve got some real problems we should be talking about there.

And to give a very real world scenario that’s happening right now is that there’s an enormous rise of misinformation on Twitter or X or whatever you want to call it that we’ve been seeing through this war in the Middle East. That environment has been entirely enabled by Elon Musk’s decision to replace verified users with paid users.

The folks with the blue check that used to be called verified. Actually they’re still called verified but I have a problem with that. The system that used to exist depended on an actively curated group of people. And you can reasonably and absolutely take issue with how Twitter determined who deserved that blue check or who they chose or whether there was enough transparency and enough diversity within that process. That’s a reasonable criticism. At the same time, it was also absolutely a curated system.

Today, the only verification for people with that blue checkmark is that the people with the blue checks have paid for the privilege. And this is a problem because people with blue checks get their replies boosted. You see their replies to tweets first before any non verified folks. And it only costs people $8 per month to have their messages spread widely.

Now, let’s be clear, it only costs bad actors, as well as good actors, 8 bucks a month to have their messages spread widely.

And we are absolutely seeing, there’s tons of evidence to support this, I will link to this in the show notes, that that system is being manipulated right now. The level of disinformation being shared by blue checks, whether it’s intentional or inadvertent, is adding to the fog of war and creating more problems than it’s solving.

The new blue check system is good for Twitter’s bottom line, but is it good for the general public? Is it good for people? As you can probably gather, I’d argue not so much, not at the moment.

Now, to bring this back to marketing, and to bring this back to something we have to live with every day, you’ve heard me say for years that data is your crown jewels. I talk about this as part of our Royal Court framework where "content is king, and customer experience is queen, and data is your crown jewels."

What does it mean when I say data is your crown jewels?

That’s awesome, but notice it starts with understanding what your customers want. It also means that because you’re collecting that data from people, from human beings, it means that you have to protect that data like your business depends upon it. Because it does.

Some of the data and all of the insights that you’re able to extract from that data belong to you. They are a strategic differentiator for your business. But, some of the data belongs to your customers. You don’t own it. You’re just a custodian of that data for whatever period they allow you to have it. Obviously laws like GDPR and the CPRA kind of make that explicit, but we should just kind of know that generally.

We’re custodians of this data. If you think of the actual crown jewels of the United Kingdom, King Charles can’t sell the crown jewels. He’s just taking care of them on behalf of the people of the United Kingdom.

You need to protect customer data as well as you would your own. You don’t own it. You’re just taking care of it for the people who allow you to hold it for a period of time. And if you think of the very many companies who suffered data breaches, or security breaches, or had data stolen, customer data stolen, and both the reputational risk that that has caused them, and the economic risk that that has caused them, that’s kind of a big deal. You don’t want that to happen to you. So, you really, really want to protect this data like it matters, because it does.

You also want to think about it the way a curator would, or the way that a custodian would, when you want to deploy that data, when you want to put it, when you want to put it to work for your business.

We have long promoted a three step process for how you can put data to work safely and securely:

And if you do those things, "Think Big Mother, Not Big Brother," "Think Devil’s Advocate," and "Test," you’re probably not going to get yourself in trouble with your customers or, I don’t know, the law… or anybody like that if you learn, "Oh, this didn’t work the way we expected it to."

I will tell you, I’ve done marketing for a very, very long time. You really don’t want your CEO or, you know, some major person at your company having to talk to the news and say, "Well, technically it wasn’t illegal." Like, that’s not a winning argument. You’re gonna sound like you’re terrible people. And you’re probably not.

So put some guardrails in place that make it make sense. Because it’s great for your business when you do that. Oh, and also, because people come first.

Now if what I’m saying sounds hopelessly naïve to you, remember that Big Tech reached the heights that they have reached first by focusing on customers. Google had the best search results. Amazon offered everything you could want to buy for a reasonable price and they could get it to you quickly. Facebook connected you with friends and family you may have lost touch with.

And at least for a time, we all thought this was great, more or less. So we gave them our attention, we gave them our business, we gave them our money, and we gave them our data.

Now? They’re facing antitrust suits and increased competition and backlash from regulators and customers because they’ve squandered that trust. They started acting more in their interests, in the interest of quarterly earning calls and, you know, shareholder reports, than they acted on behalf of their customers.

How many innovations can you point to in recent years that truly were for the benefit of customers? Go ahead, I’ll wait. I’m half kidding, I’m sure there are some, but the reason that they’re facing the troubles they are is because they’ve kind of lost sight of that.

You will never lose in the long run by focusing on customers, by taking care of people, by, as we talked about last week, being human. Digital allows customers to connect with any company, anywhere in the world, at any time. It empowers them and gives them a choice. Yes, a lot of people simply choose the defaults, they just go to Google, or they just go to Amazon.

But many, many, many people look for something better, continually. There’s something like 4.3 billion people in the world who now have access to the internet via smartphones or computers, and even a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of that number is a large market. A million people is 2 percent of 1 percent of the people with internet access. 100,000 people is 0.2 percent of 1 percent of the people with internet access.

Could you live with 100,000 customers? Lots of businesses can.

And it all starts with focusing on the people. Focusing on what it is we’re trying to accomplish.

You’re probably familiar with the Simon Sinek book "Start With Why." What is our why? Why do we do what we do? Why does it matter? Think about his "golden circle" of "why, how, and what." It’s not about changing what you do necessarily, it’s changing how you do it to focus on people. Who are we trying to serve? Who are we here to help?

When I talk about customer experience is queen, it’s because it’s how you get customers to want to come back to you again and again and again.

Yes, we’re in business. Yes, we’re capitalists. Yes, we love technology. And that demands that we remain focused on driving our business forward. But, for the sake of humanity, and I mean our own as well as humanity at large, we should be thinking about why are we doing this and who are we doing this for? Are we treating people like people? Are we thinking about why we care about technology or why we care about business and why it matters in the lives of people?

So, you know, read Marc Andreessen’s manifesto and read it with a critical eye because he’s right that we should be optimistic about how technology can make lives better. But the point we should be thinking about is not the technology, but the lives. We shouldn’t just be thinking about the tech, we should be thinking about the people whose lives could be endlessly better, and how we actually work to make that a reality.

When we focus on that, when we put people at the center, then yeah, I’m super optimistic about the future. And I just can’t wait to see what you do with it.

Now, looking at the clock on the wall, we are out of time for this week. I want to remind you that you can find the show notes for today’s episode, as well as an archive of all past episodes, by going to TimPeter.com/podcasts. Again, that’s TimPeter.com/podcasts. Just look for episode 399.

Don’t forget that you can click on the subscribe link in any of the episodes you find there to have Thinks Out Loud delivered to your favorite podcatcher every single week.

You can also find Thinks Out Loud on Google Podcasts, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, 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 our community, please give us a positive rating and 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 very much for doing that. I really appreciate it.

You can also find Thinks Out Loud on LinkedIn by going to LinkedIn.com/TimPeterAssociates. You can find me on Twitter or X or whatever you want to call it — at least while it lasts — by using the Twitter handle @tcpeter. And of course, you can email me by sending an email to podcast(@)timpeter.com. Again, that’s podcast(@)timpeter.com.

Finally, since I’ve talked so much about people in this episode and about being human, I want to say to you, as a person, as an individual, I very much appreciate the fact that you listen to the show. I would not do this without you. It’s that simple.

Your support, your listenership, your comments, your conversation, the community you are helping us build here means so very much to me.

So please, keep your tweets coming, keep your messages coming on LinkedIn, keep your emails coming. I love getting the chance to chat with you and hear what’s going on in your world and learn how we can do a better job building the kinds of content and insights and information and community that works for you and benefits you.

With all of that said, I hope you have a fantastic rest of the week. I hope you have a wonderful weekend, 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 Techno-Optimism and Building a Human Brand (Thinks Out Loud Episode 399) appeared first on Tim Peter & Associates.

Is AI going to strip all brands of their humanity? Or is it possible to build a human-centric brand in the age of AI? Here’s a bigger question: Why should artificial intelligence be any different than everything that’s come before? Can corporations build human brands? Or are they constantly beholden to psychopathic tendencies?

The answer to those last questions, I think, give us the answer to the first ones. How can we apply the lessons we’ve learned about building human-centered brands to artificial intelligence, to automation, to technology at large?

How can you build a human brand in the age of AI? How can you connect with customers at scale using the tools available to us and make that connection human? What do you need to do? That’s what the 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:

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 36s

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 398 of The Big Show, and thank you so much for tuning in. I very much appreciate it. We have been having lots of discussion around marketing and AI in the last few weeks, the last few months.

I mean, we talked last week about rethinking search marketing in the age of AI. We talked about anticipating radical shifts in your customers behavior when they’re all carrying AI with them wherever they go. We’ve talked about how to add AI to your team. And we’ve talked about the implications of AI in terms of, you know, does marketing have a future and the rebirth of trusted gatekeepers and Taylor Swift’s playbook for bypassing gatekeepers, how you can escape from big tech’s web.

And the thing that I want to try to do today a little bit is to try to connect to those threads. How do we think about AI? How do we think about using AI to build a human brand, a human centric brand? You know, in other words, can you build a human brand in the age of AI, in the age of artificial intelligence?

There were two different sources that triggered this topic for me this week. The first was Mark Schaefer’s excellent, excellent podcast, The Marketing Companion, where he and his guest, Dennis Yu, talked about human centered marketing at scale. They really were referring back to Mark’s book Marketing Rebellion, that talked about, again, why the most human company wins.

It’s an amazing discussion. You should definitely listen to it, and I will, of course, link to it in the show notes. Mark’s core thesis, which I just stated a moment ago, is that the most human company wins. I want to be clear. I completely agree. I think that there are so many particular aspects of marketing that depend on the experience that we give our customers and the experience that our customers have with us every day.

You have heard me say many, many times that customer experience is queen and that your customers make up your secret sales force. This is exactly what I’m talking about. And you absolutely should give a listen. At the same time, I saw an example of this being done in reverse this week. How you can make an inhuman company.

How you can be inhuman as you’re trying to build a brand. You all probably know, I’ve talked about this plenty of times on the show, that I’m an amateur musician. I’ve played music for years. I was a music major in college. I am still an enormous music fan. And a lot of money. A personal time, a lot of my private time I spend either playing music or listening to music or listening to things about music.

And there’s a podcaster I love on YouTube named Mary Spender, who has a video this week that blew my mind. Absolutely. Knocked me out of my chair in a negative way. She talked about Warner Music Group signing the world’s first quote unquote AI pop star, a character called Noonouri. You may be aware of this.

If you’re not, I encourage you to check out at least some of Mary Spender’s video. It’s well worth watching. And I want to be clear. I’m not going to say much here that Mary Spender does not say in her video. Noonouri is not an AI pop star. It’s a lie. Warner Music Group has signed no one. They’ve built an AI character that they’re positioning as an AI artist, an AI pop star.

Now I’m putting artist very much in air quotes. I don’t think this is an example of an artist at all. This is an example of commerce, pure and simple. Even the AI part appears to be a lie. They don’t seem to be building an AI. They’ve paid employees, creative individuals, to create an artificial person who they, the record company, Controls.

The artists are the people behind the curtain. The AI doesn’t appear to be creating much. Oh, though, if I’m being fair, it’s unclear exactly what the AI is doing versus the people are doing. There may be more than I’m aware. Warners, for obvious reasons, is somewhat coy on the specifics. From a purely business standpoint, This makes total sense.

I get it. Everything that the quote unquote artist creates is a work for hire. The company owns the end product free and clear. You know, if you look at, if you look at what Taylor Swift is doing with re recording her songs, re recording her masters so that she controls the end product, Warner is…

Basically doing something here to ensure that that doesn’t happen. The creators behind the scenes get paid once for their work and then never again. Assuming, of course, that they haven’t negotiated some ongoing rights. Though, let’s be serious. Do you think that’s what’s happened here? Or do you think that the company, the record company, has said, No, no, we want to own this free and clear.

I’m going to bet it’s that one. So, from a business standpoint, it makes sense. From a human standpoint. I think it’s gross. The actual creative people are getting paid to some degree, but they don’t own their creative output. And I have a tough time viewing what’s happening with Noonouri through any lens other than the recent Hollywood actors and writers strikes.

Just replace the artists, the writers, the actors, the singers, the performers, with computer animated contract laborers, focus grouped and A B tested to death, and you, the company, can control the output forever. Again, I suppose it’s fine as commerce, but it’s not art. And it’s exactly what everyone who’s worried about AI taking their job should be worried about.

They’re turning creative roles, they, Warners in this case, are turning creative roles into outsourced, low wage, fungible, replaceable, automated tasks. That’s not cool. It’s really interesting, and I, I use this in the negative sense, but it’s really worth watching. Because it’s exactly what people who worry about what AI can do should be worried about, right? It’s replacing people.

And this starts to get to the point. Can you build a human brand at scale? Can you build a human brand in the age of AI? That’s the lesson we’re seeing here. Because what is happening isn’t really new. We have a model that we can use to review artificial intelligence against.

Corporations have been doing this activity for years. If you think about bands like the Monkees, if you think about… Cartoon characters, animated characters, where they can replace the voice actor from time to time, or need to, right? Mickey Mouse obviously hasn’t had the same voice actor for his entire existence.

What they’re doing is creating these artificial constructs, these artificial characters, to have a voice in the marketplace that can be replaced, right? And, again, from a purely business perspective, it makes a certain amount of sense. What we have to ask ourselves is, is this creating a human experience that anybody is going to want, or is good for the world at large?

And we can look at it this way. When we think about an AI, we can think about corporations. Because corporations, like AIs, are artificial people. Corporations also can be, in one sense, psychopaths. Hang with me here for a second. Corporations are self centered, driven only by their own objectives, profits and returns to shareholders, and they have no innate moral impulses.

The company itself can’t feel bad for its actions. It has no guilt. It has no remorse. It has no sense of moral good or evil as a corporation. By the way, I didn’t invent this notion. Psychology Today came up with this more than a decade ago. I’m not trying to bite the hand that feeds. Of course, I do a lot of work for corporations.

I’m stating the reality of what a corporation can be. Happily, I’m fortunate to work with a number of large corporations filled with incredible people who keep those corporations human focused. I work with small businesses in some cases, and the owner of the business are closer to the same thing, so the business, by definition, is somewhat more human.

But the reality is the corporation is this artificial entity that is driven only by its impulses to grow and to drive more profit unless people play a role in instilling it with that, that morality, in instilling it with a focus on human beings and not just How do we make as much profit as we possibly can?

How do we do whatever we can without having any moral guidance whatsoever? The thing that’s really interesting about that to me is that’s the playbook. That’s the guideline we can look to for people, as people, for how to make our companies more human, and how we can make artificial intelligence more human.

The thing that I would ask very often, and I understand the bias problem, I understand the alignment problem, and I’m not going to go into a long digression here about this, you can look those up. But we can apply those same playbooks, those same guidelines, in how we use AI. To help our customers, how do we apply those lessons to technology, to AI, to automation?

That was part of the discussion of the Mark Schaefer podcast and something that I think is really worth talking about here. There are a number of things we know to do when we’re working within the realm of a corporation, when we’re working in the realm of a company. To be human in our activities. So how do we apply those to our artificial intelligence?

Well, it starts with the idea of taking care of your customers. I’ve talked about this before in the In the arena of privacy, you know Julie Ask of Forrester Research talks about "think big mother, not big brother." Are you using these tools to help your customers to create a better experience? To do what’s right for them?

Or are you doing it because you can and it’s cool and it’s neat? One of those is, you know, the right thing to do. You’re looking out for your customers. The other is creepy and really kind of horrifying, right? Is Warners using Noonouri because that’s actually going to create great music for their customers?

Or are they doing it because it allows them to create more music cheaply without having to pay as much for it? One of those is cool. One of those, less so. Of course, the advantage of taking care of your customers, and Mark Schaefer references this in the book The Marketing Rebellion, is if you take care of your customers, they’ll do the work for you.

I call it your secret sales force, or empowering your secret sales force. The best form of marketing that has ever existed is always word of mouth. When you take care of your customers, when you put your customers first, they will come back to you again and again and again. And they will tell their friends and family and fans and followers about you and help you drive more business.

Ultimately, that’s the thing we always want to do. The second thing that I would encourage you to think about in this term, in these terms rather, is that you want to love your market, not your product, not your service. It’s not about you. It’s about the customer. It’s not about your needs. It’s about the customer’s needs.

When you put the customer first, they can see that. When you use AI, when you use automation, when you use technology to help, because you’re trying to help, they can see that. And that will help you build trust. Of course, you know this, you gain trust over a long period, you lose it in a second. So, if you’re just doing these things to be cool, or you’re just doing these because, well, it’ll save us a bunch of money, or things like that, without passing along those benefits to the customer, without doing it for the benefit of the customer, they’re going to see that, and they’re going to seek others who actually care about them.

The next thing that I would encourage you to think about, Is, and I’ve said this many times before, that the modern marketing team is a media company. Well, what does the media do? We think of them as broadcasting. We think of them as, you know, telling stories. All of which is true. But it starts by listening.

It starts by interacting. What is it that the audience cares about? What is it that your, your customers care about? You listen to your customers. You interact with your customers, which will enable you to tell stories that matter to your customers from the viewpoint of your customers. That’s how we want to use AI.

We don’t want to just say, Hey, churn out a bunch of crap content. We want to say. How can you help me enhance this story that I’m telling? How can you help me better understand the needs of my customers? Such that I’m doing what’s valuable to them. I’m doing what’s beneficial to them. Notice we keep going back to the same place of putting the customer first.

Another one from Mark Schaefer specifically that I love, though I’ve talked about in a different way. is that technology should be invisible. I’ve talked about the movie Her, and what they got right is that the AI just works. It just exists in the background of the lives of the characters. If you think about it, light switches are technology.

But they’re completely invisible to most people. We don’t think about them, we simply turn on the lights. If you’re like me, you may have had the experience of holding your hands under a faucet in a restroom, waiting for the water to come on, because we’ve learned to put your hands under the faucet, the water comes on in public places.

Well, obviously, that’s because they’ve made the technology invisible. Putting the AI front and the center. Only work if it actually benefits what your customers are trying to do or what your customers want to accomplish. Otherwise, keep in the background. Don’t worry about the AI. Don’t worry about making that the source, worry about does it help the customer accomplish their goals?

And can we do it in a way that it doesn’t even have to be something they think about? There’s a terrific book by Steve Krug called Don’t Make Me Think that’s about building websites. And the same is true for any customer experience. If your customer has to think about it, then you’re probably making it too hard for them.

But if it just works, if it just exists, if it just happens, then that’s how people get surprised and delighted. That’s how you create the kinds of customer experiences that people will want to tell their friends and family and fans and followers about. You may have noticed as I talk about these things that this aligns with a framework that I’ve mentioned many times before where content is king, customer experience is queen, and data is your crown jewels.

Content is how we interact with our customers. A modern marketing company is a media company. A modern marketing team is a media company. We’re creating content that meets the needs of our customers. Customer experience is queen. Well, that’s almost everything I’ve talked about in this episode. And data is your crown jewels.

Data is how you inform the artificial intelligence so that it gets better at doing a good job for your customers. None of this is new. We need to remember that the machines work for us. The machines work for our customers. If they don’t… Then they’re not doing their job. We are doing what companies can do when they get it wrong, of letting them be psychopaths as opposed to human centered and human centric.

I shared this idea a few months ago that these, these two concepts that I kind of hold as North Stars, what is a quote? Then Eleanor Roosevelt said that the future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams. And the other is so old, nobody knows who said it first, but it says society grows when old men plant trees in whose shade they’ll never sit.

We get to build the future we want. We get to put these tools to work the way we want, just as we do with great corporations. Do you want to build the future that Mary Spender railed against, where we’re just letting the machines replace people? Or do you want to build the future that Mark Schaefer talked about, that I talked about?

Do you want your company to be a psychopath? Do you want your marketing to be a psychopath? Do you want your artificial intelligence to be a psychopath? Or do you want those to be human? Building a human brand in the age of AI requires that we think long and hard about being human centric in everything we do.

It’s about putting humanity first. It’s about leading with our own humanity. I know which one I want. I can’t wait to see which one you do.

Now looking at the clock on the wall, we are out of time for this week. As always, I want to remind you that you can find the show notes for today’s episode, as well as an archive of all past episodes, by going to timpeter.com/podcasts. Again, that’s timpeter.com/podcasts. Just look for episode 398.

Don’t forget that you can click on the subscribe link in any of the episodes you find there to have Thinks Out Loud delivered to your favorite podcatcher every single week. You can also find Thinks Out Loud on Google Podcasts, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, 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 our community, Please give us a positive rating and 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 very much for doing that. I really appreciate it.

You can also find Thinks Out Loud on LinkedIn by going to linkedin.com/timpeterassociates. You can find me on Twitter, or at least while it lasts, by using the Twitter handle @tcpeter. And of course, you can email me by sending an email to [email protected]. Again, that’s [email protected].

Finally, I want to say thank you so much for tuning in, and for participating, and for being part of the community we’re building here at Thinks Out Loud.

I know I say this every week, I know it might sound like it’s… Trite, but it’s not. I would not do this show without you. Your support, your listenership, your comments, your conversation, the community you are helping us build here means so very much to me. So please, keep your tweets coming, keep your messages coming on LinkedIn, keep your emails coming.

I love getting the chance to chat with you and hear what’s on your mind and learn how we can do a better job building the kinds of content and insights and information and community that works for you and benefits you. So with all of that said, I hope you have a fantastic rest of the week. I hope you have a wonderful weekend.

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 a Human Brand in the Age of AI (Thinks Out Loud Episode 398) appeared first on Tim Peter & Associates.

Artificial intelligence is going to dramatically change customer behavior. Businesses like yours beginning to see the effects of this shift because Big Tech gatekeepers are already adapting to the way customers expect the new world to work.

If your business depends on search marketing — and I bet it does, at least to some degree — then you need to rethink search marketing for the new age of artificial intelligence. What does that mean? What do you have to do? How can you make search marketing work for you in a world where consumers carry AI with them everywhere they go? That’s what we’re talking about in this episode of the Thinks Out Loud.

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:

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 54s

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 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 397 of The Big Show. And thank you so much for tuning in. I think we have a really cool show for you today. This is a bit of a follow up to last week’s episode where I talked about why we need to get ready for the way consumer behavior will change as AI becomes more universal, as more people carry an AI in their pocket, much the way they carry a mobile phone in their pocket today. We’re getting closer to that every day. And we’re seeing this in lots of the arenas, lots of the areas where marketers traditionally work.

One of those that’s probably the biggest and it’s the biggest on a lot of levels is search. Search is evolving in some ways dramatically in just huge, huge ways from where we have been or how we think search has worked for a long time. Whether we’re talking about Google’s Search Generative Experience, or Bing’s AI Chat or ChatGPT, or the integration of generative AI assistance like Copilot and Bard into Microsoft 365 and Google Docs, or potentially Google’s new Gemini model.

Search engines have a very different meaning than they once did and are beginning to have a very different meaning than we’ve ever known them to have. For years, I’ve said consumers and customers don’t want a search engine; they want a find engine. And we’re starting to hear people like Google talk about being an answer engine, which is kind of the same thing, right? They’re giving you the answer.

That reality has enormous downstream impacts on your business, especially if you’ve built any of your marketing strategy around content marketing. I have said for a long time that "the modern marketing team is a media company" because of all of the emphasis we put on content, and because of the way you need to think about the emphasis you put on content.

But what’s happening is the search engines, the machines, increasingly know what good content is. So all of the things we’ve always thought, or all of the things you hear the SEO gurus out on the web talk about in terms of how to rank in Google, don’t necessarily matter the way they once did. I’m going to give you some examples of these in just a moment.

The machines though, the algorithms, the AIs, are learning to understand what people want, and they’re much further along than we’re seeing in day to day products. They understand customer intent and what it is people actually are looking for, what they actually care about. And then they’re favoring that content.

You know one of Google’s analysts, a guy by the name of Gary Illyes said at a recent search conference that links are no longer a top three ranking factor. In fact, Google doesn’t need links to know what’s good content or bad content. They also don’t need links to understand whether those links are coming from good sites or bad sites. They already know that, which is a huge shift. If you’re doing lots of like link building, thinking that’s going to help you rank better, it may not. The fact that representatives of Google are saying out that links don’t matter as much as they used to and aren’t a top three ranking factor leads me to believe they’re probably a lot lower on that list than we’ve historically thought.

We’ve also seen that Google has put out some new updates. They have a recent "Helpful Content Update" that has really devalued quite a few sites. A lot of sites have been hit by this. And Google’s focus here is not to hurt your business if you’re one of the folks who got hit here. Instead, they literally said in a blog post authored by Danny Sullivan, that this is about "content for people, by people."

Google is doing a better job at understanding not only your content, but who created it, and whether they’re truly expert in what your content is talking about. What they themselves are talking about.

One of the things that, you know, you may have seen in the past, Google has referred to something called E A T. Expertise, authority, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness. Or expert, authority, trust, if you prefer. Well, they’ve recently added another E to that model. Now they’re talking about Double E, A T. And the E they’ve added actually goes at the front. So it’s "Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness."

They don’t just want to know that the person who’s writing this as an expert, they want to know that the person who’s writing your content — or I don’t know, making your podcast or speaking on your video or whatever type of content you’re creating — they want to know that that individual actually has relevant experience in the topic they’re referring to.

So if it’s travel, have they gone to the place? If it’s a recipe, have they actually cooked that before and other things like it? If it’s money advice, do they have experience managing people’s money? If it’s medical information, do they have experience treating disease or illness or various conditions?

They want to know you have experience. One of the reasons they want to know this is because they know better than anybody that there is a lot of AI generated crap out there. I have said many times that content is not expensive, content is cheap. And that content that doesn’t attract customers, content that doesn’t convert, content that doesn’t work for your business is expensive content.

Well, the thing that I never really thought about or never really talked about is content is expensive… for Google. They have to go and crawl it. They have to archive it. You know, they have to store it in their index. And they don’t want to store garbage content. Because it doesn’t help anyone. It floods the zone with crap.

So Google, rightly, increasingly ignores it. They’re saying we don’t want that in the search results. It’s bad for our customers. It’s bad for the overall experience. And let’s be fair: They make their money on search ads, a lot of their money on search ads. It’s bad for their business if they’re highlighting information that nobody wants or needs.

Now, of course, it’s easy to hear this and say, well, maybe search doesn’t matter as much. Maybe search isn’t as big a deal. I myself have asked the question a lot lately about what happens if Google changes dramatically or Google goes away. And I want to start by saying at least right now for most businesses, search is still a big deal.

The idea that search is going away today or tomorrow probably is bullshit. I mean, frankly — and I’ve asked the question because I think you need to be prepared for it when and if it does happen. I also think we have to acknowledge that search is pretty big for most people. I looked at a whole range of clients and companies that I know well, and organic search is no less than 26 percent share for most of the folks I looked at. And it’s the largest share, I would add, for most of the folks I looked at.

If you add paid search, it frequently brings the total up to 45 percent or more for companies I see and work with. And again, it’s the plurality if not the outright majority of their traffic. I will tell you, for my site, 52 percent of my website traffic in the last year — and climbing — came from organic search.

The people where I see search traffic declining are the folks who are trying to game the system. They were creating lots of content for things that they themselves, they, the company, they, the individuals, weren’t expert at. They didn’t have the experience. They didn’t have the expertise. They gamed the system and figured out how to rank well for it.

But Google has recently, you know, has increasingly been saying, "That’s not useful. It doesn’t help anybody." To use the title of my friend Mark Schaefer’s book from some years back, the people creating that content weren’t "Known" for it. They were trying to ride a wave of interest in a topic that wasn’t their core area of expertise, and now they’re getting hurt because Google has said we don’t value that content any longer.

If you’re not the expert, if you don’t have the experience, we don’t want to show it to anyone. The other place I see folks and companies having a problem are those who aren’t getting a decent share of branded traffic. They’re hurting because they were top of funnel for things that again, not their core area of expertise, and no one’s looking for them for their own name. So they kind of get hurt a bit there.

Customers don’t seek them out by name, so they aren’t able or haven’t been able to build a community. They haven’t been able to build an email list. They’re not building a social following or taking advantage of a hub and spoke strategy to reach customers where they are and then bring them back to a hub like their website or like an email list that allows them to build a direct relationship with those customers.

There is, of course, a huge downside to getting, you know, a major share of traffic from one source like Google or like search, you know. And I’ll just use my own business for this. If something happens to Google, as I’ve suggested could happen, I’m kind of screwed, right? I could be in real big trouble from that perspective.

Google could go away. Lots of ways.

They could lose in the marketplace. Amazon is absolutely trying to beat them in the ecommerce space, every day. ChatGPT and personal AI assistants could absolutely usurp Google’s role, especially at the top of the funnel. We know for sure that some young consumers are using tools like TikTok more regularly. So Google could lose in the marketplace, that could happen.

They also could lose in court. I don’t want to go too deep down this rabbit hole, because this is an episode or 12 unto itself, but the U. S. Department of Justice is going after them hard in a current court battle that’s supposed to last another, oh, eight weeks or so. That could end up with Google potentially being broken into pieces. Obviously they’re going to fight that. And it’s going to take a long time for this to work itself out because if they lose this case, they’re undoubtedly going to fight this all the way to the Supreme Court. It’s existential for them.

At the same time, they’ve also had a number of fines and judgments against them in the European Union. So Google’s… facing some headwinds. I won’t say they’re "in trouble" in the sense of they’re screwed or they’re doomed. I’m saying they’re in trouble in the sense of they’re swimming upstream at the moment in the courts and that could have long term implications on them.

That’s why you want to attract a community of users who care about your brand — and more accurately the benefits you offer them. It’s why I keep building my email list. It’s why I keep growing my LinkedIn network. It’s why I keep growing my podcast community. Because if you rely on Google, for instance, or search, for instance, for everything, you could end up in real big trouble if Google goes away.

The other thing I want to say here is if Google goes away is it doesn’t mean that there won’t be gatekeepers. There is a reason why Facebook or Instagram is the social network. Why YouTube is the video site. Why Amazon is the ecommerce site. Why LinkedIn is the business social network. And why Google sits above them all as the search engine.

People don’t want to have to go to 50 different places to find what they need. They want one source of information. And sure, maybe one source of information for this type of information, one source of information for a different type of information. But they don’t want to have to go 5 or 15 different places for that type of information.

I also think it doesn’t mean there won’t be search. Who sits atop the search space, or any of these spaces, could change. But I think it’s pretty likely consumers, people, will want to be able to go and just ask a question and get an answer. It’s why ChatGPT and BingChat and all of those tools excite me so much. Because we’re seeing a big difference in the way customers behave, or we soon will.

In any case, no matter what happens, you want customers to be able to find you. It’s not about ranking. It’s about building a brand that matters in your customers lives. And I’ve said this before, but I want to be explicit about it right now, that the best way to win at search is to have customers seek you out by name.

That’s got lots of benefits beyond search, too. You know, people who look for you by name will be willing to find you no matter what happens to Google or any other big tech gatekeeper. They want to connect with you.

So when you think about content and how you help your customers, You want to start by thinking about what are the kinds of questions AI can’t answer. You know, is there original research you can do? Is there opinion you can offer or perspectives on things that are going on in the world that are genuinely helpful to your customers where they are? Some of these may be more relevant, or not, depending on the kind of business you’re in. You know, if you are a hotel, let’s say, you should be able to talk about your local market better than just about anybody. So that would be really helpful content. If you’re creating just some generic restaurant guide where you merely list the addresses and names of restaurants in your area, that’s not super helpful. People can find that anywhere. But if you’re talking about the restaurants you really enjoy because of a specific reason, well that might be really useful, really interesting content. If you’re a manufacturer of a piece of machinery and you’re explaining why this machinery solves a particular use case, well, again, you’re going to be more expert there than most other people. So you want to think about what are the things that you are truly the expert. You really have the experience.

Your people’s brand’s story matters too. There’s a certain level of making sure you’re doing personal branding for the people creating your content. Whether it’s the marketers on your team, or whether it’s the subject matter experts that those marketers rely upon, or if it’s the subject matter experts themselves. You need to think about what are you expert at? What is your company known for? What is your team known for? What are you known for? Double down on that, triple down on that, lean in hard to this. While we’ve known this for some time, Google’s recent behavior is telling us that that’s what customers want.

They want a trusted source. We kind of have been talking about this for a little bit, going back to an episode almost three years ago, talking about the rebirth of trust in gatekeepers. It’s clear. Customers, people want people they can trust and that they can believe in.

Activities like keyword research matter, but probably not as much as they once did. Instead, if you’re thinking about keyword research, you want to think about understanding the language your customers use. How can you speak in their language more effectively, rather than worrying about finding this specific keyword that everybody else is ranking for, so you need to rank for it?

Google and Bing and everybody else is getting much smarter about synonyms, so it’s not as important as it once was to get every term precisely the way your customers search for it. Writing for people though, in their language, in their terms, makes for a better experience. It’s about using the words they use to make it easier for your experts to be understood. And that will (probably) help you rank better. That will (probably) help you show up in search better. That will (probably) help you attract customers who want to interact with you more easily.

Which brings me to my last point. You really want to think about why you do what you do., whether it’s creating a piece of content, or offering a product or service to the marketplace.

Why do you do that? Why do you do what you do? You’re creating content. Why? Who is it you’re creating that content for? Why are you creating that content? Who benefits? Why are you creating the product? Why are you creating the service? Who benefits?

If your answer for these questions is search, is Google, then even Google now recognizes that’s not terribly valuable to anyone.

But if your answer is your customer, or better yet, people more broadly, your community, your neighbors, humanity, then you’ve literally got a better shot at showing up in search. You’ve literally got a better shot at getting people, and customers, and your community, and your neighbors to seek you out, to want to work with you.

Search marketing in the age of AI is not about ranking, it’s not about traffic. It’s not even about ROI — return on investment. It’s about "ROU" — "return on you", return on Y O U. On your experience, your expertise, sure, all of those things. But also your humanity, your ability to help your customers solve their problems, to be meaningful in their lives.

And if you do a really good job of that, then it won’t matter if you rank in search or not. It won’t matter if you, you know, post on social. Customers will want to engage with you, will want to find you, and will want to work with you for a long time to come.

When you do that well, everybody benefits. You, your business, your customers, and the world. We need to remember that we’re not going to beat the machines by being more machine like. We’re going to win in the marketplace, we’re going to win in society, we’re going to make the world a better place when we focus on our humanity. So don’t think about ROI. Think about R O U. Y O U. And think about how you help your customers.

And then the AI will like you just fine, as will all the other people you want to reach, too.

Now, looking at the clock on the wall, we are out of time for this week. As always, I want to remind you that you can find the show notes for today’s episode, as well as an archive of all past episodes, by going to timpeter.com/podcasts. Again, that’s timpeter.com/podcasts. Just look for episode 397.

Don’t forget that you can click on the subscribe link in any of the episodes you find there to have Thinks Out Loud delivered to your favorite podcatcher every single week.

You can also find Thinks Out Loud on Google Podcasts, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, 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 our community, 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. I just want to say thank you very much for doing that. I really, really appreciate it.

You can also find Thinks Out Loud on LinkedIn by going to linkedin.com/timpeterassociates. You can find me on Twitter while it lasts by using the Twitter handle @tcpeter. And of course, you can email me by sending an email to [email protected]. Again, that’s [email protected].

Finally, I want to say thank you so much for tuning in and for participating and for being part of the community we’re building here at Thinks Out Loud.

I know I say this every week, and I know it might sound like it’s right, but it’s not. I would not do this show without you. Your support, your listenership, your comments, your conversation, the community you are helping me build here means so very much to me. So please keep your tweets coming, keep your messages coming on LinkedIn, keep your emails coming.

I love getting a chance to chat with you and hear what’s on your mind and learn how we can do a better job building the kinds of content and insights and information and community that works for you and benefits all of us. So with all of that said, I hope you have a fantastic rest of the week. I hope you have a wonderful weekend, 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 ever, Take care of yourself.

The post Rethinking Search Marketing in the Age of AI (Thinks Out Loud Episode 397) appeared first on Tim Peter & Associates.

Microsoft’s Satya Nadella recently showcased the company’s vision for "your everyday AI companion." This genuinely represents a remarkable vision of the future. And one that seems likely to occur. Fortunately, many marketers recognize the value (or threats) to their work from incorporating artificial intelligence into their work.

The question I’d ask, though, is this: Have you begun to think about the radical shifts in consumer behavior we’re likely to witness when every one of your customers uses an "everyday AI companion" every day?

The internet and mobile and social media dramatically changed customer behavior. Universal AI adoption will drive radical shifts in how your customers discover and decide the products and services they use in their lives too. We’re already seeing changes in customer behavior, and AI is far from every day use.

Are you ready for this shift? Have you started thinking about the changes you’ll see in customer behavior once we achieve universal AI adoption? And, if not, how can you get ready for the changes we’re likely to see? That’s what this episode of Thinks Out Loud aims to uncover.

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

This is the Microsoft Copilot event:

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:

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 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 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 396 of the big show and I think we have a really, really cool show for you today. I was watching Microsoft’s Surface launch last week where they’re introducing their new products their new tablets, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

At least that’s what it was supposed to be, except that’s not what it was at all. Instead, they really were showing where they think AI is going, where they think their Copilot, as they call it, is going to take their customers. And of course, for so many of us, their customers are our customers. And I don’t know that we’ve grappled with how much the emergence of artificial intelligence as part of our daily lives is going to cause Radical shifts in customer behavior.

We’re going to see an explosion of changes in customer behavior that we’ve only seen a handful of other times previously. So my goal here today is to provide a look into the future. I don’t expect to get everything right. I don’t expect to get half of it right. The idea instead is to try to give a sense of the kinds of things we might see and how you can prepare for it so that you’re ready as it happens for your business.

I want to start by talking about what they actually talked about at this Microsoft event. Satya Nadella opened with saying a handful of just lovely, delightful quotes. Satya Nadella spends a lot of time crafting his words. He came up with the phrase that I’ve used many times over the last few years, where he said, we’ve seen two years of digital transformation in two months.

Now he’s referring to us entering the age of Copilots and talking about their Copilot, which is their product name, but artificial intelligence generally as quote, "your everyday AI companion." It’s "a handshake between you and technology." And what they showed was their, quote, "vision for an everyday AI companion" for you, how "it adapts to you," and how "you no longer have to be the orchestrator of apps and devices."

And I gotta tell you, it was cool. Now we all know tech demos, when they’re choreographed as well as these are, may not reflect how it’s going to work in practice. But I would encourage you to watch at least some of the video. You know, when you’re on YouTube, hover over the video. I will link to it in the show notes. I will embed it in the show. But hover over and you can see the most watched parts of the video. And I would encourage you to watch those, at least those. Because there was some really cool stuff.

The other thing to be aware is this is going to be introduced, as they say, seamlessly in, again, their quote, the apps and OS you use most every day. This started dropping in the latest Windows release September 26. When I’m recording this, that’s actually today. And that includes Copilot by default, the latest version of Windows. Outlook, Microsoft’s mail client, is going to incorporate Copilot. And they’re also integrating this into tools like Office 365, excuse me, Microsoft 365.

They’re updating Designer in Word to improve its ability to add and refine images. Now this wouldn’t be so interesting if it was only Microsoft doing this. The thing you have to remember is that lots of changes are coming lots of places. ChatGPT is introducing voice chat to its apps. There’s discussion about whether ChatGPT is going to develop a phone.

Google is incorporating BARD and its Duet feature into Gmail and Google Docs. I’ve been using that a lot lately and it’s really impressive. And we know that Google’s new AI model, Gemini, is certainly going to try to accomplish even more impressive tasks as it becomes available.

I have talked a number of times on this show about how you, as marketing and business professionals, can use AI or think about AI. And I’m going to be doing more of that today, a little bit. I have been testing a number of tools like Copy.ai, Anthropic’s Claude, Lately, Descript, SEMrush’s AI Writing Assistant, ChatGPT, BingChat from Microsoft, Google’s BARD, and a few others to improve my workflow and output. I’m ignoring the ones that I haven’t tested from people like Adobe with their Sensei product, HubSpot, and a ton of others out there.

As you’ve heard me say, these are incredible time savers and generally produce pretty good quality. I workshopped the title of today’s episode using SEMrush’s AI writing assistant. I wrote the final title. But the assistant I used as, you know, an assistant. It helped me craft ideas that turned into the final title for this show.

And the image for today’s podcast, which I do want to highlight for a moment, I generated using Microsoft’s Bing Chat AI, which is their implementation of Dall-E, as well as ChatGPT coupled with their Prometheus AI engine. I want to be clear, it’s not the greatest image. It’s that what you see, it created after just a few quick prompts.

I spent literally seven minutes to find an image that worked, that was good enough. And the reason I’m telling you this specifically, is it’s a sign that the average output of your competitors is about to get a lot better.

There’s research that shows that artificial intelligence really doesn’t help top performers all that much. But it makes mediocre and poor performers much, much better. Case in point, I didn’t ask my designer to find an image today. I just made one. I am not a graphic designer, not in the least. But the image is, you know, "okay." It’s not necessarily the best, but it’s certainly "good enough," created — so to speak — by a non-expert in minutes.

I am absolutely confident that my designer would have come up with something better. That’s not the point. The point is that anyone, even a yutz like me, with the most modest levels of talent — and I am really stretching the boundaries of the word talent here — can produce something that’s pretty good, that’s "good enough."

Whereas before, my output, if I tried to do something like this, would have been considerably worse than "pretty good." And it frees my designer to work on higher value work for the company. We’ve immediately gotten more productive and better at what we do because I didn’t have to pull them to work on something that isn’t, you know, tremendously high value the image for a specific podcast episode because I was able to just get something done on my own.

Now, if we want to make it better, I can give it to them and have them punch it up even further. But the idea is that suddenly the mediocre performers become better than average. Which means the average overall is going to get better, is going to improve.

Think about the tasks that Microsoft demoed if you’ve had a chance to watch the YouTube video. They showed the AI summarizing documents. They showed it creating content. They showed it finding information across apps and the internet at the same time. But my favorite part Carmen Zladeff, who is Microsoft’s Vice President of Windows, showed Copilot searching her texts for flight information, found plays in New York City, and texted her husband information about those plays with just two typed commands. There’s no reason, by the way, that this won’t be voice or can’t be voice-enabled pretty soon. They also showed it doing shopping.

Essentially, the AI was providing assistance and helping organize, your calendar, your schedule, and frankly, your life. That’s really what got me so jazzed about this and thought it was so important to talk about today. What we do as marketers is try to connect with people, with our customers, to help them at the points in their life where they need help. And here, I just watched this AI do many of the things.

Without necessarily guiding people to an answer on the internet, for instance, that’s just a massive, massive shift, it is going to shift customer behavior dramatically, radically. AI is going to change your customer’s behavior. Probably forever. We have seen, I mentioned this earlier, we have seen customer behavior shift dramatically and radically over the last two decades.

The internet absolutely changed the way people do things, the way people do the things they do. Mobile absolutely changed the way people do the things they do. The introduction of carrying a camera or a video with you everywhere you go has changed the way people do what they do. And social has changed radically the way people do what they do.

We are incredibly likely to see customer behavior change as much or more from using artificial intelligence in their day to day lives as well. Remember. ChatGPT has become the 28th most visited site on the entire internet. And it’s done that in about 10 months.

It’s probably even larger than that, by the way. Its traffic has declined the last few months. What you have to remember is it’s very likely that most of that decline is due to college students and high school students being on summer break. I expect we’re going to see its numbers jump up a bit in September and October as those become available. (I’m using SimilarWeb numbers, by the way).

The other thing you want to remember is that most people have never used it yet, right? Most people haven’t consciously interacted with an AI in their day to day lives yet in any meaningful sense. The people who have are using it a lot. The people who haven’t is still, you know, a ton of people. We’re still in the early innings of AI.

We’re still in the early innings of using these tools. I was originally going to call this episode, "We’re soooo not ready for AI." Because it feels in some ways like we’re not. Then I realized it’s far better to talk about the radical shifts in customer behavior we’re going to see. And to explore what you can do about it right now.

So what can you do about it right now? First, you’ve heard me talk before about "content is king, customer experience is queen, and data is your crown jewels." The original version of that phrase did not list customer experience as queen. Instead, it was "context is queen." And we’re about to explore a whole new series of contexts.

We have to take that into account. Here’s an example. A friend of mine just got a new car, an electric car. It’s the first one that I’ve ever seen close up. I know they’ve been around for a while. I know a lot of people have them. But I just hadn’t really ridden in one or spent much time around one.

And I live in Florida. We’ve had a brutally, brutally, hot summer here. My friend is doing things that completely blew my mind in terms of how we think about cars. For me anyway. For some of you, you might be like, well that’s really silly, of course you should have seen this coming. I didn’t.

He uses the car’s app to turn on the air conditioning while the car is parked in his garage and alert him when the car has reached the right temperature, a comfortable temperature.

My framing of what you can do with a car simply did not account for that reality until I saw it. Not because remote start is new, but because you can’t run your car in your garage. You don’t want to waste gas. You don’t want to pollute the environment. But most immediately, you don’t want to have a buildup of CO2 in the garage and suffocate yourself.

An electric car has none of these problems. The car also has built in video games and a web browser, so that you have a way to entertain yourself while you’re waiting for the car to charge. Again, that’s not something you could do with an internal combustion engine for all the same reasons I just mentioned.

And sure, it’s something you probably wouldn’t need to do in an, with an internal combustion engine car, because pumping gas is faster than charging. Both of those examples though, are examples of the context changing completely, changing radically.

That’s what we’re talking about as people incorporate AI into their lives. They’re going to do things we never expected that they would do as they figure out how this fits in their lives most appropriately, just like they did with the Internet. Just like they’ve done with mobile. Just like they’ve done with cameras and video. Just like they’ve done with social.

What you want to start doing is paying attention to see, are you seeing these shifts among your customers? And to start, you want to pay close attention to your web traffic. Are you seeing a rise in referrals or browsers or apps from unusual places, places that you haven’t seen before?

For example, I’m seeing on my site and on client sites, small but noticeable upticks in traffic from Google Lens, the company’s augmented reality search tool, from Bing, from Perplexity AI, and even in a couple of cases from Microsoft 365. Again, these are small numbers. But the fact that they’re not zero is absolutely worth watching, right?

Anytime you go from zero to one, that’s a big deal. Particularly if you then see it go from one to ten, and ten to a hundred, and a hundred to a thousand. So you want to keep an eye on those. So you can sit on that traffic and see if you’re seeing anything that changes anything that’s new.

You also want to start testing these tools for yourself. You want to create content. You can use AI to draft text or headlines or social posts. I’ve used tools like Lately or Copy.ai or SEMrush’s AI Writing Assistant or Bing Chat or ChatGPT and there are plenty of others.

You can use AI to create images with Dall-E which there’s a new version of Dall-E 3 coming in October. You can use Stable Diffusion or Midjourney or Bing Chat again.

You can test various tools as assistant, as assistants in your day to day life. Google’s BARD, especially in Gmail and Google Docs. You can use Microsoft Copilot, which is coming November 1st or so, depending on your version of Microsoft 365 and Outlook.

And you can use ChatGPT for some features, you know, you can upload data and have it give you information about it. You can shop using AI, try, you know, Google Bard or Microsoft Edge for shopping. You can test Spotify’s AI DJ tool called Xavier or sometimes called X to discover new music that you like, or I don’t know, maybe you hate.

And you can do searches and find other AIs that connect with your day to day work. I’m just sharing the ones that I know, that I’ve worked with, that I’ve tried. I’m confident that there are a whole bunch that I’ve never used. Just to give one small for instance, I’m an amateur musician, and I’ve tried out a tool like Soundraw to see how I can make better music using AI. Think about your own daily activities, your hobbies, other areas of your life where AI can help you do more, better, and faster.

And the most important thing you want to do here is you want to observe and track how your behavior changes. What are you doing differently? How are these tools, these Copilots, shaping your behaviors, shifting your behaviors?

To give one example, because I think that ChatGPT and Claude and Bing Chat currently are better than — at quite a few tasks — than BARD. I’m noticing that I tend not to go to Google quite as often. Questions that may have once been searches, you know, for example, updates to our content calendar, or social media post ideas, emails to clients or prospects.

I’m instead asking an AI assistant for help, just like I did with the title today, just like I did with the image today. That could easily change back to Google as they incorporate Gemini into Bard’s integration with Gmail, as they integrate it into Google Docs, as they integrate it into Search Generative Experience.

I also can see at the moment, I’m definitely searching less, at least if we use the traditional definition of search, if we think about it in those terms. Your mileage may vary. You may have a different reality. So pay attention to how your use differs from mine, and, more importantly, how it differs from what you’ve always done.

Of course, the last thing you want to do is you want to keep learning, and there are a ton of great resources out there for you.

Check out Ethan Mollick, who’s a Wharton business professor on Twitter. Check out his Substack. I will link to all of these in the show notes. Read Benedict Evans newsletter. Subscribe to Ben Thompson’s Stratechery email. Follow Joanna Stern and Paul Graham and M. G. Siegler on Twitter. Also, given that Twitter or X or whatever you want to call it is becoming the most anti-social social network, you probably want to follow them on LinkedIn and Threads or Bluesky or wherever they’re posting more frequently, too.

Check out the people that they follow and follow some of them as well. I’d also recommend taking a look at TechMeme and The Verge every week or so. Just, you know, dip your toe in and see what they’re talking about.

Of course, you should talk with your customers, too. What are they doing differently? And are you using any social listening to see how they’re talking about these tools — or if they’re talking about these tools?

And, of course, you could keep listening here, right? This is a trend and topic I expect we’re going to cover regularly over the next months and years as we watch this shift in customer behavior.

You don’t have to agree with all of these people that I just mentioned. Sometimes I think that one or more of them may be completely wrong, including me. I know, shocker, right? What they’re doing, though, is providing an array of ideas around how these tools and technologies will shape the world we and our customers will all live in over the next bunch of years.

The emergence of artificial intelligence, as I said at the top of the show, as part of our daily lives is going to cause radical shifts in customer behavior. My goal was to try to provide a look into the future. We may be in the early innings here. We may have a long way to go from where we are to where we will end up. But the thing I can tell you for sure, is that it’s not too soon to get in the game.

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

As always, I want to remind you that you can find the show notes for today’s episode as well as an archive of all past episodes by going to timpeter.com/podcasts. Again, that’s timpeter.com/podcasts. Just look for episode 396.

Don’t forget that you can click on the subscribe link in any of the episodes you find there to have Thinks Out Loud delivered to your favorite podcatcher every single week.

You can also find Thinks Out Loud on Google Podcasts, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, anywhere fine podcasts are found.

I would also very much appreciate it if you could provide a positive rating or review for the show when you are using 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 our community, give us a positive rating or review if you would.

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 I would just want to say thank you very much for doing that.

You can also find Thinks Out Loud on LinkedIn by going to linkedin.com/TimPeterAssociates. You can find me on Twitter while it lasts — and yes, I still call it Twitter — using the Twitter handle @TCPeter. And of course, you can email me by sending an email to [email protected]. Again, that’s [email protected].

Finally, I want to say thank you so much for tuning in and for participating and for being part of this community.

I know I say this just about every week, but I would not do this show without you. Your support, your listenership, your comments, your conversation, the community you are helping us build means so very much to me. So please keep the tweets coming. Keep the messages coming on LinkedIn. Keep the emails coming.

I love, love, LOVE getting a chance to chat with you and hear what’s on your mind and learn how we can work together to make this a better community for all of us.

So with all of that said, I hope you have a fantastic rest of the week. I hope you have a wonderful weekend. 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 of yourself.

The post Anticipating Radical Shifts in Consumer Behavior from AI Adoption: A Look into the Future (Thinks Out Loud Episode 396) appeared first on Tim Peter & Associates.

Big Tech, the Gatekeepers, the AGFAM (Amazon, Google, Facebook, Apple, and Microsoft), the Frightful Five. We’ve got lots of names for the "bad guys" in our marketing story. They are frightening. They are troubling. They are expensive. And they really do have a plan for getting a bigger piece of your marketing budget every year; it’s not paranoia if they’re really out to get you.

What we don’t seem to have often enough is a plan to escape Big Tech’s web. We don’t have a clear-eyed, systematic approach to reduce the impact Big Tech has on our brands and businesses & or, too often, the patience and resilience to see it through.

How can you do this for your business? How can you escape from Big Tech’s Web? How can you build a brand that customers search for by name? That’s what this episode of the Thinks Out Loud podcast is all about. We take a look at the necessary steps you must take to use Big Tech the right way… and begin to connect with customers without paying tolls to the gatekeepers of Big Tech.

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:

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 30s

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 395 of The Big Show. And thank you so much for tuning in. I genuinely appreciate it. I think we’ve got a really cool show for you today. So, there is a lot to talk about.

If you’re like many people, if you’re like many businesses, it can feel sometimes like you are caught in Big Tech’s web. And what’s really important is thinking about how do we escape from Big Tech’s web? How do we escape from being caught this way? Think about it. You depend on some member of Big Tech — the AGFAM, whatever you want to call them — or several for traffic and revenues to your website.

Maybe you get organic traffic from Google or Facebook or Instagram or TikTok. Maybe you buy ads for them. Again, that could be Google or Facebook or Instagram or TikTok or Amazon if you’re doing a paid placement or, you know, Expedia or Booking.com or DoorDash if you’re doing a preferred placement. Maybe you sell products through them, whether it’s Amazon or Facebook or Booking.com or DoorDash or, I don’t know, TikTok or Google.

Wait, notice how the same names keep coming up again and again and again?

There’s a couple of reasons why you want out. The first is, You never want to put all your eggs in one basket. You never want to put all your business in one party’s web. It’s just not a good way to live, right?

Don’t build your brand on rented land. By the way, you know, there are people who will tell you don’t build your band brand on rented land. I’m one of those people. That doesn’t mean don’t use them to reach customers you can’t reach on your own or you haven’t figured out a better way to reach on your own.

It’s okay to connect with customers the first time through these tools. What’s also true is that they are expensive. If you’re using them to connect with your customers the second time, and the third time, and the fourth time, that’s really going to eat into your profits. One study found that Amazon’s share of sales from merchants on its platform can reach as high as 50%. YouTubers might only get 42 percent of the money that they make after YouTube and Apple take their cuts. And the same is true whether you’re using people like Google, whether you’re using people like Facebook or Instagram, you’re paying to reach those customers.

And again, if you’re paying once, no big whoop. But if you’re paying again and again and again, it’s just slowly, slowly eating away your profitability. The other challenge that you could have with having all your eggs in one basket or all your business on one web is that they could fail, they could stumble. I have talked before about how would you build your business if Google didn’t exist?

And my point isn’t that Google’s going to go away or that Facebook’s going to go away or that, you know, Amazon is going to go away. It’s that if they take a hit, you could take a big hit, too. Let’s look at Google just as one example. Why Google? Well, one, they’re the biggest. You’re probably doing something with them regardless of any other channel you use.

And in fact, whatever channels you use that aren’t Google, they themselves be relying on Google. So you’ve got some exposure there regardless. We know for sure organic traffic is going down. We see this in the way Google manages its search results, where organic placements are getting shoved further down the page for things like ads or the knowledge graph.

We know that things like Search Generative Experience, Google’s new AI tool, is making that more likely with more promoted placements within the results and more answers in the results. And that almost certainly leads to fewer clicks for you. Similarly, we know that Google is raising their CPCs. This just came up the other day in a discussion with investors, and I will link to this in the show notes.

But they are raising the CPC, the cost per click that companies pay, because they want to make more revenue. They need to make more revenue to further their own growth. Well, where do you think those CPCs come from? They come from you, or they come from the providers who you’re selling through, or who you’re marketing through, which is only going to raise your cost in the longer term.

So no matter how you slice it, that’s going to have an effect on you. They also face increased competition. Again, I’m talking about Google at the moment, but think about this. This could be true for anybody. We’ve seen Amazon do an enormous amount of work to try to get better at getting customers to start their search with them.

We’ve seen that ChatGPT has grown dramatically since its introduction, what, maybe eight, nine months ago. We’ve seen that Bing is making enormous inroads in its product capabilities to offer a better experience and pull people away from Google. Thank you. And we know that there are a lot of younger users who reach for TikTok first, and I’m going to come back to this more later, but Google’s facing huge competitive threats in a way that it really hasn’t for the last, oh, I don’t know, 15 years or so, that make them more vulnerable than they’ve been.

Separately, they’re in the middle of a really large antitrust trial. That even if they win is likely to distract them. And again, I’m going to link in the show notes to some really good write ups about what’s happening there. You should definitely pay attention to it because it could have an effect on your business.

What’s undoubtedly true is that it’s, it is a distraction for Google, one way or the other. And of course, the last big threat to Google is complacency. Now, to be fair, I don’t see this happening to Google at the moment. I think their competitors, whether it’s ChatGPT or Amazon or Big or TikTok, have shaken them out of any slumber they may have been in prior to now.

What’s also true is that they’re going to have to figure out how to monetize new types of search. Again, I was mentioning search generative experience a moment ago. They haven’t quite figured out how to make money there yet. And they haven’t quite figured out the balance. Sundar Pichai was just talking about this the other day that they haven’t quite got that solved.

And that could cause problems for them in terms of the revenues that they make or the profits that they make and could really emphasize that they’re going to put it could really force them to put more emphasis on paid within it, which again is only going to raise your costs. I’ve talked about this on several episodes in the past.

But one of the things you want to remember is that Microsoft or ChatGPT don’t have to win for Google to lose. Google gets so much of its money from one or maybe two sources, you know, advertising and especially search advertising, that those revenues could take a big hit even if they retain the lion’s share of search traffic.

Bing, ChatGPT, or somebody else eating 10 to 15 percent of their traffic would be a massive blow to Google’s revenues and profits and they would need to do something either increase the share of ads that they show the ad load in any search result or emphasize those ads more, more aggressively or jack up the price they’re charging for any ad within that specific ad load.

Or some combination of all of the above to make sure that they offset any hit to their profits. All of those mean less organic traffic for you, more cost for you, and a tougher time reaching your customers for you. And that’s the reason we’re talking about this. Now, you might be saying right now, Tim, you’re crazy.

This isn’t going to happen. And you might be right. Google, for instance, has one huge thing in their behavior. They have customer behavior in their favor. It has been true for quite a few years that customers start on Google. They reach for their phone and they search for what their need is.

Traditionally, they have searched for an answer to their problem. You know the saying, "your customers don’t want a drill, they want a hole." What’s also true is that increasingly they’re searching for something they’ve seen elsewhere. This is where TikTok is a bit more of a threat than I let on a moment ago when I first brought them up.

Lots of young people are starting their day on TikTok. They’re not reaching for Google first. They’re not looking at Google News. They’re not, you know, searching for something to do. They’re not watching as many videos on YouTube. And I want to be fair, YouTube is still growing like crazy, but it may not be their first destination.

They’re using TikTok to see what’s cool, what’s happening, what’s trending. In relatively short order, TikTok has become the 14th most visited site on the internet. By contrast, Amazon is 12th, and they’ve been at this a lot longer. Right? So is TikTok a threat to Google’s dominance? Possibly. You know, probably not.

But possibly, and in a way we haven’t seen before. The reason I’m not all in on TikTok is one, it’s great for entertainment and commerce, but it’s not likely to be the place people go for everything. You know, if there’s an example where, oh, where’s the nearest hospital or I need help right now, or, you know, I need gift ideas or things like that.

Usually something like Google or Amazon might be a better answer. Second, Google also owns YouTube. That is the second most visited site after Google itself. YouTube absolutely captures some of the same audience and some of the same traffic that TikTok does. For that matter, so does Instagram, which is also among the top five sites people visit.

And then last, of course, is their ownership situation. You know, there is some concern about Tos ownership, the, the relationship of the owners between TOS owners and the Chinese government. I don’t think that’s going to be a huge deal, but people are getting more concerned about privacy. That could be something that hurts them.

Given TikTok’s moves into commerce and shopping, they actually seem more like a threat to Amazon than Google, at least in my view. That, I could change my mind about this, and I certainly will if the data shifts. But right now, I would think that’s the bigger, you know, head to head battle. It’s also another reason that I think Amazon is likely to launch even more consumer oriented search features.

They just announced a whole host of interesting search features over the last couple of weeks on mobile, and I will link to those in the show notes, with the idea being that they want customers to go there as opposed to going to Google or, I suspect, TikTok. The point is, depending on any one gatekeeper, whether it’s Google or whomever you might want to substitute, is not sustainable for your brand or business over the long term.

It’s getting more expensive, it’s getting harder to reach people organically, and it’s going to cost you a lot more money in the long run. You don’t want to put all your eggs in one basket. You don’t want to put all your business in one web. So the question becomes, what do you do about it? What do you do to escape from their web?

Well, to start with the most obvious, don’t depend on any one site. You don’t want to think in terms of Google, or TikTok, or YouTube, or Amazon, or Booking. com, or LinkedIn. You want to think in terms of Google and TikTok and YouTube and Instagram and.do? Do you get the idea you want to? You want to try to reach customers in all of the places that they are, and I don’t mean every single place, but the right set of places for your customers.

We’ve talked many times on this show about a hub and spoke strategy. Where are the spokes where your customers live, and are you there so that you’re not dependent on any one spoke, but you use all of those to lead traffic back to your hub, to your website, to your mobile app, to your email list. The next thing you want to do is get customers to search for you by name.

You want to build content that makes you the trusted authority in your area of expertise. You want to be known for what you do. You want to be seen as the company that helps solve your customers problems for the things that you do well. You’re trying to get customers to seek you out because they know you.

And only you are the right answer for the problem that they have in this immediate moment. Yes, you’re going to get some top of funnel search where people are searching for, to solve a specific problem. But when you, when they’re ready to buy, you want them to ask for you by your name specifically. One of the ways you do that is you’ve got to take great care of customers who connect with you already.

Thank you. That’s how you build a community. That’s how you build a relationship with people who come back to you again and again and again without having to go to a gatekeeper, without having to go to one of the big tech firms. It’s how you build a secret sales force. Your customers tell a positive story on your behalf.

I use the example all the time. Imagine you get 10 customers a day and they buy from you, you know, 350 days out of the year, right? You’re going to have some days where you’re closed or things along those lines. Well, those customers have about 200 friends and family and fans and followers on social media.

So 300 people. Excuse me, 10 sales a day for 300 days reaching up to 200 people gives you an enormous, enormous audience. You’re talking about a potential audience of nearly 600, 000 people. Now we all know that really, maybe only 10 percent of those people will post something. And maybe only 10 percent of their friends and family and fans and followers will see something.

That still means you’re going to reach an audience of 6, 000 people because you took good care of your customers. And if only 1 percent of those folks buy, that’s about 60 sales. Now remember, if you’re doing 10 sales a day, that’s the equivalent of maybe a week’s worth of sales just by taking care of your customers.

That’s how you build a secret sales force. The last thing I would say here, and this is going to sound crazy coming from me, but don’t depend too much on analytics. I’m going to be honest, this is a tough one for me to say out loud. I have built my career on analytics and measurement. I’m using those tools to get smarter and get better at what my company does, what my clients companies do.

I’m not suggesting to completely ignore your analytics. Not at all. I’m saying let a thousand flowers bloom. Don’t feel like you need to be able to get the exact ROI down to the penny on every single different tactic, especially when you’re first trying them out. Try a bunch of different tactics and see what happens to your business overall.

Is your overall traffic going up? Are you seeing an increase in people searching for your brand name using things like Google Search Console? Are your revenues and profits going up? Right? Those are going to tell you whether or not your marketing is working. I had a discussion the other day with a potential client who said, I see you everywhere.

Not! I read that one post on Twitter or that one post on LinkedIn. No, he said, I see you everywhere. Why? Because we’re trying to be a lot of different places where our clients congregate. Clients of mine see the same thing. Some of their paid ads don’t have a great return on investment, don’t have the best ROI.

But we’ve measured and proven that when we turn those off, sales suffer in the longer term. They’re buying traffic at the top of the funnel that quote unquote doesn’t convert. But that traffic returns closer to purchase using a branded term, or coming direct to their website, or clicking a link in an email they’ve received.

None of which would have happened. If the customer hadn’t clicked on a quote unquote non performing ad earlier in their process. In short, you’ll know when your marketing works when you can’t tell where all of your business comes from. I know that sounds strange, but it’s true. You’re not trying to measure every penny.

You’re trying to measure the overall pot of gold. Now, if any of this sounds familiar to you, it’s something I’ve talked about before. It’s this idea of content is king. Use it to tell a story about what you do better than anybody. Think in terms of customer experiences queen, because that’s how you build a secret sales force and how you build a community of people who care about your brand as much as you do.

And data is your crown jewels because that’s what we’ll show you when you’re getting it right. It doesn’t, you don’t have to have perfect data, you just have to have data that gives you a good sense of are we moving in the right direction. And if you do all of those things well, Then you’re setting yourself up to escape from big tech’s web.

You’re setting yourself up to build a sustainable business for the long term that does not depend on gatekeepers. And you’re setting yourself up for long term success.

Now looking at the clock on the wall, we are out of time for this week. As always, I want to remind you that you can find the show notes for today’s episode, as well as an archive of all past episodes by going to timpeter.com/podcasts. Again, that’s timpeter.com/podcasts. Just look for episode 395.

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

I would also very much appreciate it if you could provide a positive rating or review for the show when you’re on 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 our community, give a positive rating or review if you would.

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

You can also find Thinks Out Loud on LinkedIn by going to linkedin.com/TimPeterAssociates. You can find me on Twitter while it lasts — and yes, I still call it Twitter — using the Twitter handle @tcpeter. And of course, you can email me by sending an email to [email protected]. Again, that’s [email protected].

Finally, I want to say thank you so much for tuning in and for participating and for being part of this community.

I know I say this just about every week, but I would not do this show without you. Your support, your listenership, your comments, your conversation, the community you are helping us build here means so much to me. So please, keep the tweets coming, keep the messages coming on LinkedIn, keep the emails coming. I love getting a chance to chat with you and hear what’s on your mind and learn how we can make this a better community together.

So with all of that said, I hope you have a fantastic rest of the week. I hope you have a wonderful weekend. 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 Escape Big Tech’s Web (Thinks Out Loud Episode 395) appeared first on Tim Peter & Associates.

The Thinks Out Loud podcast celebrates its eleventh anniversary this year. And, overall, I couldn’t be happier about that. This podcast, and podcasting more generally, have been a huge component of this company’s content marketing strategy since its inception. Which is why I think it makes sense to examine Thinks Out Loud as a podcasting and content marketing case study.

Is podcasting a good idea for your business? How does a podcast fit into your content marketing strategy? Does it work? Does it generate meaningful business results? That’s what this 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:

Contact information for the podcast: [email protected]

Recorded using the travel rig: Shure SM57 Cardioid Dynamic Instrument Microphone and a IK Multimedia iRig Pro Duo IO USB audio interface into Logic Pro X for the Mac.

Running time: 25m 34s

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 394 of the big show. And thank you so much for tuning in. I really appreciate it. I think we’ve got a cool show for you today. This is our anniversary. This is the 11th anniversary of Thinks Out Loud, which blows my mind.

I, I have to be completely transparent about this. We are on episode 394. We’ve been doing this for 11 years now, and I’m as shocked as you are that that’s the case. You know, it, it puts me in a somewhat. Not contemplative mood, but you know, I thought it would be a good time to revisit podcasting and why we podcast and why it could be part of an effective, I feel like it’s a breakfast cereal commercial right now, why it’s part of a healthy breakfast.

No, why podcast could be part of. A really effective content marketing strategy for your company. I want to be fair, this one’s going to get a little inside baseball, it’s going to get a little, you know, into what I do specifically and whether it’s a good idea or bad idea for us. So that you can learn some lessons, you know, a case study about whether or not it might be a good idea for you.

So one of the first questions I get asked all the time is, why do you podcast? And some of you may know this story, I’ve talked about this before, but it started as a mobile strategy. We’d looked at the analytics for our company’s website for Tim Peter and Associates, timpeter. com, and saw a very large share of mobile traffic, an increasing share of mobile traffic.

Traffic. That had terrible engagement metrics, you know, bounce rate was much higher time on site was much lower pages viewed was much lower and, you know, the team and I kind of figured out people on mobile weren’t getting what they need. We were writing. I was writing and some other folks on the team were writing some lengthy blog posts that were, you know, we thought pretty high quality and the metrics seemed to suggest they were high quality for people on desktop.

But on mobile, it was a lot to take in. And so the goal was to come up with a solution that allowed our content marketing to continue to work well. While also accommodating people on mobile and the podcast was it we thought well people listen on their phones People listen in the car. This could be a really, you know Useful way to engage with people and 11 years later.

I can honestly say this has worked. We’re very happy. I’m very happy with The results we get from this both in terms of our reach and awareness perspective, but also in terms of a business perspective. This does drive some leads for us and a sufficient number to make it worthwhile to do. Which you obviously know this, but all content marketing initiatives really do need to tie back to some business objective as well.

Yes. You know, I was doing this podcast if the team was working on this podcast and there was no business upside that we could discern in any way, then, you know, I probably would say, you know what, we need to try to find something else. I love doing the show. I love everything that the show does, but it does also have to tie back to some business results.

Any content marketing you do should. And we get generally in the range of hundreds of downloads per episode, sometimes into the thousands, we’re well over a thousand listeners every month. So it’s working out really, really well from that perspective. Another reason why we do this is content distribution.

Now, you know, previously people would come to the website, or I would put things on LinkedIn. But that was pretty much it in terms of how people could find out about the business and what we had going on and the like. Now we can put things on Apple Podcasts and Google Podcasts and Spotify which have broad audiences.

One of these days real soon now we’re going to figure out how to get the podcast up on YouTube in some meaningful and useful way that’s appropriate to that channel. And again, this leads to people finding me, it leads to people finding the company, it leads to people learning what we do, and it gives back to the community.

It helps people learn better how to do what they want to do. So it works out really well. And people find us either on, you know, our site on timpeter. com, or they find us on one of those other sites, whether it’s Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, etc., Spotify. So that’s been hugely beneficial in terms of content distribution, getting more content in front of more people to grow.

The brand and the business. Another reason why we do this is content itself. You’ve heard me say a million times on the show that content is King. This podcast is an opportunity for me to test ideas, to take them out for a spin and see how people react to them. Do they get a good reaction? Do they get a bad reaction?

Do we, you know, get people engaged with what we have to say, or do people go that or do people go. Well, not really, you know, they listen, but they kind of come back and say, that doesn’t make any sense at all. So it allows me to kind of think through things in a way to produce stronger content. I gave a talk earlier this week at a conference and almost every idea in that talk was created and then refined and then honed and polished for this podcast.

This, this show is called Thinks Out Loud for a reason. Because sometimes that’s what I’m doing. I’m thinking out loud. I’m figuring out, does any of this make any sense at all? And with your help, with all of the listeners help, with the community’s help, I’m finding out sometimes, absolutely, that makes total sense.

And sometimes I’m finding out, eh, you gotta go back to the drawing board on that one, buddy. So that’s hugely, hugely beneficial in terms of making our overall content marketing more effective and more useful all the way around. Another factor, of course, is content reuse. The talk was one place, the talk I gave this week was one place I reused this content.

That, that, that podcast, excuse me, that presentation rather, at some point likely will be a podcast episode of its own. LinkedIn will be another place that we can reuse the content in another week or so in terms of some of the social posts that I put up. Our email, our email newsletters generally build off one or more of these weekly episodes and blog posts and writing assignments and occasionally even client reports contain ideas we’ve worked on here.

Content reuse is an enormous component. Of any kind of effective content marketing strategy. So, having a format that readily lends itself to reuse, as this does, is a huge benefit and a huge bonus of podcasting. We can use this as audio. We can use this as text. We can build some of the pithy phrases that I come up with here, or that the team comes up with here, in images, you know, as an overlay.

And of course in presentations and slides, so it’s a win on a lot of different levels there and really, really, really beneficial. I, I would always be remiss if I, if I left out the fact that one of the reasons we do a podcast, and this is a personal thing, I had the gear. I am a musician, I have been a musician for years, that’s what I do as a hobby, so I own some stuff.

It made sense, it seemed to make sense to me to try to put that stuff to use for the business in a beneficial way. So when you see, you know, when I list the microphone that I use, or I list the, the interface that I use, some of that gear is a little better than you probably need. I shouldn’t say probably, is a little better than you, than you need for most people and most businesses to do a podcast.

In my specific case, I had the gear anyway, so I figured why not put it to use. In the spirit of full transparency, I’m using my travel rig. I’m on the road this week, and that should tell you something about my gear habits, that I have a travel rig. Heh heh heh heh. But I’m using something called an iRig Pro Duo IO as the interface, because it’s small and it travels well.

And I’m using a Shure SM57 microphone today. And together, those two pieces will run you You know, maybe 250 bucks to do this. I’m recording using Logic for the Mac, which is about a $200 piece of software. So, I mean, all in, this rig that I’m using this week, you’re looking at about a $450 lift, not counting cables and headphones and all that other kind of things.

And I want to be very transparent, this is the travel rig, I’ve got an entirely different setup at home with a better mic a different interface and the like. So, you know, I’ve put some money into this because I enjoy it for other reasons as well as for its benefits to the business. That doesn’t have to be true in your case, you can get started with a, you know, hundred dollar mic and interface all in one.

And software that’s, you know, less expensive or the like. Though I’m a huge, huge Logic fan. You can do this with GarageBand for some, or something like that. Much more economically. You may have noticed when I listed the reasons why I do this, that I put content distribution ahead of content. And you might ask, why did I do that?

And the reason is because that’s how it works. If we’re tying this back to a content marketing strategy, If we’re tying any content marketing initiative back to a content marketing strategy, we need to think about how do we get that content in front of an audience. Yes, you want it on your website. I’ve talked many times about a hub and spoke strategy where your website and your email list is your hub.

And all of the other places where your content can show up or be promoted are the spokes. But you often have to think about the spokes first. How do I get my content in front of people, so it can lead them back to my website, or lead them to sign up for my email? That is the only way content will work for you.

My my very, very, very good friend Mark Schafer, the brilliant Mark Schafer, always talks about the fact that the value of content that nobody sees is zero. Right? There’s no benefit to you at all if no one ever sees your content. So if you don’t have a place to distribute your content, don’t create it.

Period. I’m going to stop right there. If you don’t have a place to distribute your content, don’t create it. When we started podcasting, we knew Apple Podcasts was a good place for us to be. We saw in our mobile traffic that most of the people who came to the website, most of the people who came to the blog, We’re coming on iPhones, so we thought, well, how do we get in front of not just people on mobile, but people using iPhones and again, Apple podcasts made a perfect place to do that and again, has worked out really well for us today.

We get most of our lessons on Spotify. But, but the point was we started with what existed at the time. And did we have a way to get in front of that audience? And the answer was yes. So, podcasting it was. And of course continues to be. The next question that I would think of, of course, is what have I learned, what has the team learned, what have we gotten from this, that I would pass on to other people who are thinking about doing a podcast.

I was talking with the leader of a company earlier this week and he mentioned that podcasting is hard. You know, someone on his team was suggesting they look at doing a podcast and His take was it can be really hard and I want to be clear It’s no harder than any other form of content marketing Once you have the equipment once you make the investment It’s a little more expensive to start than putting things on LinkedIn or putting things on Twitter or putting things on Instagram It’s a little harder a little more expensive to get started than you know, putting things on your website Or doing an email marketing newsletter or something along those lines.

So that’s absolutely true. As I noted, you can get the equipment you need for maybe about a hundred bucks, give or take. Maybe, you know, find a decent room to do it in. It’s not super expensive, but it’s not just, you know, point your camera at something, take a picture, put it on Instagram, and you’re done.

What is true, and what is true of all content marketing, is doing it once is easy. Sustaining it is where the work comes in, is where it gets challenging. And this is true for any type of content marketing, it doesn’t just have to be a podcast. You have to commit to doing it for real, or I wouldn’t suggest doing it all, you know, at all.

If you put one photo on Instagram or you put one post up on LinkedIn and you see no engagement, that shouldn’t shock you. That’s how it works. These platforms reward consistent effort. You post regularly, you’ll start to get more traffic. That’s a drag on one level. But it makes sense on another, they want to promote content, the algorithms want to promote content that will keep people coming back.

And if you are not consistent in any of your content marketing efforts, then none of these platforms are going to reward to that behavior. So you have to think about if you’re podcast or again, any other type of content marketing. Are you ready to make a commitment to sustain it? We’re at 394 episodes.

At this point, putting it together a new episode that brings a new perspective takes work. And it’s harder than it was in the first episode. It’s easier in the sense that we have some muscle memory and we know what we’re doing. It’s harder in the sense that it takes more thought to bring a new perspective to something we may have talked about before or that I may have talked about before.

It’s work that I’m happy to do, because it forces me, and it forces the team, to think harder, to go a bit deeper into the topic than just hitting the highlights. If you notice over the years, if you’ve listened for some time, our episodes have gotten longer. We used to run around 12 to 15 minutes an episode, and now we’re typically around 20 to 25.

That’s okay. It’s just an unexpected consequence of nearly 400 shows. We can’t hit on a topic and do it justice in 12 minutes because we’re going a little deeper than we used to do. I also believe there’s no way we could have known that 400 episodes ago. We couldn’t have known that 11 years ago. I don’t think.

It’s just this unexpected consequence that we’ve learned. And it’s a perfectly good learning. It’s something that’s working for us now in a way that’s a little different than we would have thought, you know, if you’d asked me 10 years ago. Another thing that we’ve learned is you have to pace yourself.

Maybe we could have only learned this by doing. We probably could have looked at long running TV shows or radio shows or something along those lines to figure out that it is important to pace yourself. The fact is, sometimes you need a break. I need a break. The team needs a break. We need time sometimes to do a better episode and so we have to have a way to break that up.

You’ve seen this, we do reposts of prior episodes when schedules require. We’ve gotten a lot better, I think, at planning around those, around when those are going to occur. If I’m being completely honest, sometimes in the past it was more, “we don’t have anything to talk about… oh crap! Repost! Repost!” Today we’re getting better at scheduling those in advance and knowing, Hey, we’re going to legitimately be able to produce maybe 36 to 40 episodes per year.

I don’t like to post two from the archives episodes in a row. The exceptions being late August and late December. We don’t get a lot of listenership then anyway. So if we want to post a show every week, and we don’t want to post a archives episode two weeks in a row, Then we know that we’re going to do roughly, maybe a 10 to 12 show run, followed by a repost.

If we do that four times per year, plus two weeks off in August and two weeks off in December, then that gets us to 52 weeks per year, 52 episodes. In full fairness, in full disclosure, things like COVID or, you know, crazy travel schedules have occasionally thrown a wrench into that. But you get the idea, you need to plan ahead to make sure you have a schedule that works, not just for the content you want to put out, but for the people involved in creating that content in a way that doesn’t, you know, make everybody want to, you know, punch themselves, right?

In a very related way. It really goes back to having a quality content calendar. We’ve tended to do a pretty good job there over time. We’ve also learned that how to get each episode, we’ve also learned how to get each episode planned out in advance to give enough time for research, building an effective outline, building a script when we want to go deeper.

And again, especially as we go deeper, you know, the 10 to 12 minute shows could be put together relatively quickly. These 20 to 25 minute shows by default take more time to write and record and edit and transcribe. We’re planning to add some interviews from time to time and simply coordinating the discussions with the person we’re talking to, the guest, takes time.

Before you research the guest or read their book or their blog post or listen to their podcast or come up with questions and ideas to discuss with them, even if the team is doing some of that, It takes a certain amount of time, and we need to be very clear about that. You need to plan for that. The last thing I want to put on this point that we’ve learned is that transcripts are super helpful, but they also take a little bit of time.

We’re using a tool called Descript, D E S C R I P T, which is an AI powered tool. We’ve used Rev in the past, R E V. We’re also going to test a couple of others as we add interviews. But the transcripts help with SEO, they give us content and text for email newsletters and social posts, they’re super worthwhile.

The thing you want to be aware is that editing transcripts takes time. The AI based tools help, but they’re far from perfect. They are, they are not as accurate as you would like them to be. Or, if I’m being more precise, they’re not as accurate as I would like them to be. I want the transcripts to reflect what was said.

They don’t have to be perfect, they just have to be good enough, and good enough takes a little bit of time. So, as you’re doing these, if you’re thinking about doing a podcast for your, for your company or for your business, be aware that you’re going to put some time into this. Just to take you behind the curtain a little bit, total production and post production of this show, After outlining the script, which is a whole separate exercise, takes probably an hour and a half to two and a half hours per week person hours per week.

Which includes my time to record the episode, so, you know, this is, this is something that takes a little bit of effort. Obviously, I have argued many times that content is cheap, that it is a myth that content is expensive. So those two hours might cost, let’s say, let’s say that we have somebody who makes $40,000 a year working on the episode just to make the math easy.

That’s $20 an hour. If it takes that person two hours to put the episode together, that’s 40 bucks. That’s actually super cheap, especially for something that’s going to stick around for, you know, anywhere between three months and twelve months, and in some cases much longer. Usually the life cycle of these shows tends to be Not super short, but you know, you get a few months before the traffic starts to die off in a really appreciable way You know, it starts to get down to onesie twosie numbers we do have episodes from five years ago that people listen to all the time So it varies widely but assume that you’re going to get you know, a month or two or three out of it still Forty bucks for something that’s going to take a month or two or three of utility to your business is not expensive at all.

And I think is very very worthwhile. Obviously your specific economic situation is going to drive that decision. It’s not cheap, but it’s not terribly expensive either So just make sure you’re thinking ahead budget wise for what makes sense to you So those are the things we’ve learned, you know, we’ve talked about, you gotta pace yourself.

We’ve talked about how you have to have a good content calendar. We’ve talked about how you have to make sure that you have transcripts. We’ve talked about making sure that you’ve built out a content calendar that works for your needs. And we’ve talked about why we do this overall. Of course, when I talked about why we do this, I left out one reason deliberately.

And that reason is you. I say this on the show all the time, but I wouldn’t do these episodes, we wouldn’t do the work if you didn’t listen, if you didn’t comment, if you didn’t share, if you didn’t reply, if you didn’t engage. I don’t want this ever to be speaking into the ether and hoping for the best. I want people to get value out of it, I want people to engage with it, I want people to feel there is use to it.

And my sense is, based on the emails we get and the tweets we get and the LinkedIn messages that we get, that you do. So I want to say thank you very much for listening for 11 years and 394 episodes. I want to thank you for all your support. And I want to tell you, we’ll keep doing this as long as you keep listening.

So thanks very much. Obviously, you can find the show notes for this episode on timpeter.com/podcast. You can find us on LinkedIn, you can find us on Twitter, go to timpeter.com/podcast. You’ll find, figure out where all the details are from there. Just look for episode 394, okay? And with all that said, I want to say thank you so much for listening.

Thanks so much for everything you do. I hope you have a wonderful week. I hope you have a great weekend, and I will look forward to speaking with you here on Thinks Out Loud next time. Until then, take care, everybody.

The post A Podcasting and Content Marketing Case Study (Thinks Out Loud Episode 394) appeared first on Tim Peter & Associates.

Don’t let her reputation fool you. Taylor Swift prints money like a Mint. Maybe even more so, if I’m being honest. Her concerts have not only made her a ton of money, they have helped boost the economies of towns in which her tour played.

But what might be most impressive about her actions is the way that she’s bypassing the gatekeepers between her and her fans. There’s no bad blood there. Instead, it’s nothing but a love story. Swift has crafted a hugely successful songbook. But she’s also developed playbook for bypassing gatekeepers and connecting directly with her customers, one that we can all apply to our businesses, too.

How can we do that? What can we learn from Taylor Swift’s playbook? How can we bypass the gatekeepers in our industries and escape from Big Tech’s web? That’s what this 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:

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 17s

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 393 of The Big Show, and thank you so much for tuning in. I really appreciate it. I think we’ve got a really cool show for you today.

I was listening to a podcast the other day called Offline with Jon Favreau, where he talked to Nora Princiotti and Nathan Hubbard about the media empire that is Taylor Swift. And there has been some enormous Taylor Swift news in the last couple of days. All of this collectively reminded me of an episode we did a couple of years back about "Why the modern marketing team is a media company."

We’re always looking for ways to help you avoid being caught in Big Tech’s web, Ways that you can bypass the gatekeepers and connect directly with your customers. And if there’s one thing we’ve learned over the course of this year, it’s that Taylor Swift has a winning playbook for doing this. That was the point of that episode that I mentioned a moment ago.

She’s also continued to update that playbook. She’s continued to say, how can we expand that playbook and do something really interesting? And I thought that was worth looking at today.

First, a couple of facts. You’ve probably heard that Taylor Swift is in the middle of a massive, massive tour. The Wikipedia article about the tour notes that the Wall Street Journal reported that the Eras Tour, "is on track to become the biggest in concert history with the potential to gross over $1 billion. Conservative Pollstar estimates projected that a $1.4 billion gross. And Bloomberg News reported that the average gross per show on the U. S. leg is $13 million." That’s huge. That’s massive.

One of the crazier parts of this story is that it’s not just Taylor who’s making money here. There’s evidence that suggests it is good for local economies. CBS News said that the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia announced this month that Taylor Swift’s tour helped boost travel and tourism in the region. This is from the article on CBS News. "Santiago Carado, who’s CEO of Visit Tampa Bay, said, I would say on the hotel side of things, pretty much similar to a Super Bowl." Which is wild when you consider that she’s doing 130-140 of these dates in a year. So, you know, 130 Super Bowls in the course of one year… by one artist.

Well, to add to the fun, now there’s going to be a movie. That’s the big news story that came out over the weekend. That’s pretty wild. "The Taylor Swift Eras Tour film." She partnered with AMC Theatres and with their distribution arm to put the film in AMC’s movie theaters and other movie theaters directly. There was a note in Variety that "the Taylor Swift Eras Tour film earned a record breaking $26 million in pre sales." That’s just pre sales. That’s not the number of tickets it will sell.

Fandango also said that the movie broke its record for the biggest first day ticket sales, though they didn’t cite an actual figure. But they said, "Pre sales ranked among blockbusters like Avengers Endgame, Star Wars The Force Awakens, and Spider Man No Way Home at similar points in their sales cycles."

Again, this is from the Variety article. "Exhibitors privately believe a $100 million plus opening weekend is possible, which is unprecedented business for this kind of movie. In fact, only five films this year, Barbie, the Super Mario Bros. movie, Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3, Spider Man Across the Spider Verse, and Ant Man and the Wasp Quantumania, have hit triple digits in their debuts." Remember, this is on top of the money she’s making from the tour itself.

And she bypassed the film studios doing this to deal directly with AMC. By the way, AMC bypassed the film studios. This is great for AMC. They get a bigger cut of the film’s revenues, plus all the revenues from the popcorn, the soda, and the limited edition merchandise attached to the film that they can sell to the millions of fans who’ll come to sing along with their favorite songs.

The timing’s pretty wild too, and particularly savvy given that we’re in the middle of a major film industry strike. So, Taylor Swift and AMC kind of look like the good guys by not putting any more money in the pockets of the big bad evil film studios in the middle of this strike. Very, very, very smart. Brilliant.

And it points to one of the ways that we can consistently bypass the gatekeepers. You’ve heard me say many, many times on the show that content is king. Well, I need to remind you that content isn’t just king. It’s a strategic product for your business. It is core to the overall experience that customers have with your business.

Again, you’ve heard me say that content is king, customer experience is queen. I don’t care what kind of business you operate. Digital channels are the first, and for many customers, only interaction they have with your business. Your content is the first part of that customer experience. It is your 24x7x365 customer service rep.

And you need to think about, is it doing a good job of that? Swift and AMC are partnering on this content in a way to reach new fans to, and, and get a greater share of wallet from existing fans to deepen the experience that they may have had either because they saw the tour or because they wanted to see the tour and couldn’t get the ticket because the thing’s selling like crazy.

This is also a great reminder that content is cheap. You’ve also heard me say on this show that the biggest myth in content marketing is that content is expensive. It’s not. Creating new content is pretty straightforward. Obviously she’s doing this by filming the tour she’s on, but she’s repurposing existing content, the tour itself, in a new medium. The way artists in years past might have done live albums, she’s doing with a film.

Content that doesn’t convert is expensive. Content that doesn’t drive revenue for your business is expensive. Content that doesn’t help your customer is expensive. But if you create a new piece of content that costs, let’s say, a thousand dollars, and it works for you as a 24x7x365 customer service rep, or a 24x7x365 salesperson, then that’s actually super cheap for something that’s going to work for you for six months, a year, 18 months, two years.

Conversion can mean lots of different things, of course. Did they buy? Sure. But did your customer find an answer to their question? Did they ask to hear from you directly? One of the things that is brilliant about what Swift has done here, with the film and with the tour and everything else, is she connects directly to her customers every chance she gets.

And when people engage with your content on your website, or on your mobile app, or in person in a community event, it becomes much easier to bypass the gatekeepers to not be caught in their web when customers ask you to talk directly to them. They give you an email address, they sign up for mobile alerts or updates, they download your app. They’re basically saying, we don’t want an intermediary between you and me. We don’t want an intermediary getting in the way of that conversation. We want to hear from you directly.

We’ve done research for many of our hotel clients that show the value of an email address is about 5 to 25 bucks in terms of future reservations value based on, you know, the amount you charge per night, based on how long people stay, based on how many people stay in the room for each hotel, etc. But anywhere between 5 and 25 dollars for an email address in the hotel industry. We’ve seen with B2B businesses that an email address can be worth $100 or $200 or $500 again depending on the value of the product that you sell.

You’re using content to drive a deeper connection and a deeper relationship. That’s what she’s doing with her tour. That’s what she’s doing with her film.

Now, you also need a certain amount of content distribution. She made the film, but she said, "I need a way to get this in front of people." So, Swift did a deal with AMC. And that does raise a question of, is it enabling a new gatekeeper or who are the gatekeepers that you have to worry about?

And this is one that varies widely based on the kind of business you’re in, the kind of industry you’re in. There are all kinds of different potential gatekeepers. And they’re driven by the question of where your audience lives.

So for many of us, Google is always a gatekeeper. It is the most visited site on the internet. It is the place where many customers start their activities when they’re online. When they have a problem they need to solve. And of course, the other big sites play similar roles. YouTube is the second most visited site on the internet. Facebook is the third most visited. Instagram is the fourth most visited.

So those are probably places you need to be if you’re in a B2C industry. If you’re in B2B, LinkedIn, which is… quote, unquote, only the 16th most visited site is still probably, — and certainly for the, in the U. S. for B2B marketers — the biggest company you need to be thinking about, the biggest place where your audience lives… alongside, potentially, YouTube.

Now, one of the things that a lot of music artists are doing is, and I’m not the first person to bring this up, but obviously TikTok, it’s, it’s the 14th most visited site on the internet globally. But it’s still growing and it’s where the music industry is generating hits today, not in the old fashioned web counter sense, but in the older sense of top hits on the radio, what are people listening to? It is an immense, immense component of how the music industry is breaking new artists or breaking new songs.

It’s also where tastemakers like Taylor Swift are learning what her customers are listening to, what are her fans listening to. We’re going to come back to that in just a moment.

There is lots of debate in the music industry whether TikTok pays enough royalties and you hear the same on Spotify and YouTube. So this is an existing problem. And of course this film industry strike I referred to earlier, a lot of the conflict is due to questions about, do streaming services generally — though in their case they’re thinking about Disney+ and Netflix and the like — are they compensating artists appropriately for their work?

First, I want to say, of course artists should be paid for their work. I don’t want to suggest otherwise. I’d also think about this in a slightly different way, and in the way that I think Taylor Swift does look at this. There are lots of ways to monetize your offering. You don’t just have to make money from your content. Remember, Taylor Swift, in theory, is selling music, her songs, her records.

But look at all the revenue streams she produces and uses the music to merchandise all the other stuff: the concerts, the movie, the merchandise that you can get in these places. The 1.3 or 1.4 billion dollars the tour will make does not include merchandising revenue. Her label Universal Music said in their most recent earnings call, "…merchandising revenue grew 12% in the quarter, fueled by a strong performance from Taylor Swift." That’s crazy. She also has things like perfumes and endorsements. If I’m being fair, fragrances from other pop stars like Ariana Grande, Rihanna, and Billie Eilish appear to sell much better, according to British Vogue magazine. But still, there’s revenue there. And endorsements are advertising, right? That’s companies paying her to advertise their products.

You get to do the same thing. There are lots of ways that you get to monetize the traffic that your content drives for you. It could be ads. Obviously, lots of people do that. It could be partnerships with other companies. It could be merchandising and marketing your own products and services. Of course, people do that. But the point being. That you’re not trying to sell the content. You’re trying to let the content sell your thing.

Taylor Swift is somebody whose business is the content and is saying, "We’re going to use that as a platform for other revenues." You get to do exactly the same thing.

Don’t think of Taylor Swift just as a person. Think of her as an enterprise. Nathan Hubbard, in Offline podcast episode I mentioned at the top of the show, referred to Swift as the "CEO of a direct to consumer brand." And she succeeds in that role by understanding her customers, her fans better than anyone. This shows up in the success of the ten albums she’s put out — plus the four she’s re-recorded as "(Taylor’s Versions)" — across her 17 year career.

Pop stars tend to age out of the marketplace faster than fruit flies. Clearly, Taylor Swift is doing something worth watching. One of those things she’s done, as Nora Princiotti noted, is "scaled intimacy." She’s not creating customers. She’s not even creating fans, really. She’s creating deep relationships, at least in the mind of her customer, with those individuals.

She interacts with fans on TikTok and Instagram to listen as much as promote. Mostly, she doesn’t promote. She’s listening to what matters to her fans. And yeah, it could be people on her team. It might be Taylor herself. I don’t really know. The point is that she’s staying connected with the sounds and feelings and cares and concerns of her customer, her audience. She’s using social media to connect deeply with that audience. I mentioned this a couple weeks ago, social isn’t anti-social for businesses if you use it widely.

Swift is building a community, one in which she’s an active participant. And that’s another way of bypassing the gatekeepers. No one is filtering the message that she receives.

I’d compare and contrast this with Elon Musk’s recent moves. His actions suggest to me, anyway, that he’s searching for evidence that confirms his beliefs. He’s modifying Twitter, or X, or whatever you want to call it, to share more of what he likes and less of what he doesn’t.

What leads me to this conclusion? Why do I think that? Well, the dude got in a fight this past weekend with the Anti Defamation League about anti-Semitism. I haven’t followed the whole thing that closely. Maybe I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt and say he’s not anti-Semitic. Maybe he’s being taken out of context for his brief tweets. But you don’t have to be a marketing or PR genius to know getting in a fight with an organization that literally exists to fight anti-semitism is never going to be a good look. I mean, really. That’s like 101-level stuff.

Swift, by contrast, appears to hear what her fans want and give them more of that. Earlier this year, she collaborated with the hip-hop star Ice Spice on a remix of her track "Karma." Now, she received some allegations at the time that it was a PR move to distract from controversy around (maybe?) racist comments made by her (maybe?) boyfriend at the time.

Again, to be completely honest, I’m not deep enough in the lore, legends, or facts to know exactly what happened. What I do know is that Swift knew that Ice Spice was a hot up and coming star, and that she had a fan base Swift could reach out to. How? By listening to what her fans cared about. If the worst thing you can say about this action is that it was "a calculated PR move" or "a savvy business move," well, we should at least learn from that, right? I mean, that’s something we should be trying to do all the time.

The point remains that Taylor Swift has provided a playbook for envisioning a modern marketing team as a media company. It’s about bypassing the gatekeepers to connect directly with your customers, your community, your fans. To create what Nora Princiotti calls "scaled intimacy." To create, nurture, and grow that community, and grow your fans. To use these tools to listen more than you speak. To learn what matters to your market, your audience, in the places that they already congregate. And then to use those learnings to inform your future messages and your market offerings. To monetize those relationships. You have tons more opportunity to make money from your content and your customer experience than Taylor Swift does. And she’s the highest paid woman in entertainment.

By the way, this all assumes that you’re not a pop star, you’re not selling music. And that you’re looking for a longer commercial life than a fruit fly.

If you want to avoid getting caught in Big Tech’s web, don’t let them charge a fee every time you want to talk with your customers. Build those connections directly. And don’t build a marketing team. Borrow Taylor Swift’s playbook. Build a media company. Bypass the gatekeepers — just like she’s doing with her tour and her film and her merchandise — when you listen, and when you speak.

I can’t guarantee you’re going to generate a billion dollars in a year like Taylor Swift is doing. But if you follow this playbook, if you use it to bypass Big Tech and escape from their web, I am very confident you will end up as a marketing superstar, and that you won’t suffer from a cruel summer… or any other time of the year.

Now, looking at the clock on the wall, we are out of time for this week. As always, I want to remind you that you can find the show notes for today’s episode, as well as an archive of all past episodes, by going to timpeter.com/podcasts. Again, that’s timpeter.com/podcasts. Just look for episode 393.

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Finally, I want to say thank you so much for tuning in. I know that I say this pretty much every week, but I say it pretty much every week because it’s so important for me that you hear this. I would not do this show without you, your support, your comments, your conversation, the community you are helping us build here at Thinks Out Loud means so much to me and the other members of this community.

So please keep the tweets coming, keep the messages coming on LinkedIn, keep the emails coming. I love getting a chance to chat with you and hear what’s on your mind and learn how we can make this a better community together. So with all of that said, I hope you have a fantastic rest of the week. I hope you have an amazing weekend.

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 What Taylor Swift Can Teach You About Bypassing Gatekeepers (Thinks Out Loud Episode 393) appeared first on Tim Peter & Associates.