Tim Peter & Associates

We’ve officially reached "the unofficial end of summer." What a great time to relax, recharge, and reset our "Day One" mindset before heading into the rest of the year.

What is a "Day One" mindset? And why does it matter to your business? That’s what this "Best of the Thinks Out Loud Podcast" episode is all about.

Day One is borrowed from Amazon and focuses on building your company as though it is your very first day of operations, every day. The brilliance of this approach is that you’re always allowed to think about how you might start "start over," how you can improve, how you can get better and provide your customers with better experiences, every day. It’s an amazing approach and a big reason why Amazon is one of the most dominant players in Big Tech.

What else can you learn from adopting a "Day One" mindset? And how can you apply it appropriately within your teams, within your company, and within your own career? Give a listen and let us know what you think.

And, if you 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: 20m 38s

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 387 of the big show. And thank you so much for tuning in.

I genuinely appreciate it. You know, my clients, my customers have an interesting reality. In that they cooperate pretty heavily. They rely upon companies like Google and Amazon and Expedia and Booking. com, Big Tech generally to reach customers just like you do, right? They also compete with Google and Amazon and Expedia and Booking.com and big tech generally Just like you do You know, there’s this old e-commerce term it goes way back to the early days of e commerce where people talked about co-opetition. You cooperate with these player; you also compete with them. You live in a world where they have an enormous amount of control, they have an enormous amount of power. You can’t simply ignore them. And you want their reach. You want their ability to reach customers that you may not be able to reach on your own profitably. You also don’t want to rely on them entirely.

Because then you don’t have a direct relationship with your customer. This is something we’ve talked about a lot, right? It’s the whole crux of the hub and spoke model that I’ve talked about many, many times where your hub are things you control and the spokes are the things you use to reach people you can’t reach more easily on your own.

The thing that I want to focus on today though, with regard to big tech, Is that what you can do in every case is learn from them. You can learn what works for them that you can apply to your business. And you also should learn what doesn’t work for them that you don’t want to emulate in your business or what might be working for them, but wouldn’t work for you and you don’t want to emulate.

And given that we’re about halfway through the year, I thought it would be interesting to talk about one place where I absolutely think every business can learn from Big Tech. And in this case, it’s not Big Tech generally, it’s one specific company. It’s Amazon. Amazon Has for years used what they refer to as a day one culture.

It was a big hallmark of Jeff Bezos’s time as CEO. I, I’m a little concerned they may be getting away from it a little bit, but their day one culture is genuinely brilliant. I talked about this on an episode of the podcast about a year and a half ago. Where Jeff Bezos wrote a letter to shareholders and talked about what he called a day of Amazon being what he calls a day one company.

As I said at the time, he’s always looking at it as if they’re starting from scratch from day one, if they were going to build a company that they wanted to be going forward. Yeah. What kind of company would they build and that’s a necessary component of digital transformation. It’s really brilliant and it’s something that I think lots of companies can learn from because you get to make it better.

Any day you want, every day you want, from wherever you happen to be, and then it’s an important question to ask how you can cultivate that mindset in your team, in yourself, and in your company at large. It starts with a vision of where you want to be. In episode 380 of this podcast, I’d used that quote, I’d mentioned that quote, that a society grows great when old men plant trees in whose shade they will never sit.

And I asked the question, What trees will you plant? Where do you want to be? What kind of society, and in this case I’m using that term more narrowly, when you think about your company, when you think about your team, when you think about yourself, what society do you want for you, for your team, for your company?

That’s how you grow great, is by thinking about that and beginning to do the work to quote unquote plant those trees. There’s also another quote that I like a lot that I’ve talked about before. In fact, I mentioned it in that same Amazon Day One post not long ago, where I talked about how culture eats strategy for breakfast.

Now, I only agree with this in part. You need to have a solid strategy. That’s why you want to start with a vision of where you want to be. If you don’t have a strong vision of where you’re going to end up, if you don’t know what kinds of trees you wish to sit under, or whose shade you want your company to sit under, then it’s unlikely you’re going to get where you want to be.

But a great strategy with a terrible culture is also doomed to fail. Because you’re not going to have people who embrace that vision and who work together to achieve that vision. Collaboration works way better than individual geniuses. So you want to make sure it’s a culture where people work together to achieve that vision.

Who are all pulling together to achieve that vision. You need to create a culture that embraces the changes that are necessary and embraces the learning that is necessary. You know, embraces failure, embraces the, you know, you learn something important from those failures so that you can get better as you go forward.

I recently worked with a client, not long ago, a few months back, where there was a real lack of trust within the organization. It was a really good company. But they had some culture issues, and they brought us in initially to help better understand their customers. Part of the problem that we discovered, though, was that senior management wasn’t sure that employees had the right skills to serve their customer needs.

And their employees didn’t trust that senior management respected the work that they did. They didn’t feel like senior management was connected closely enough to what was going on to do the right thing for the customers. Now, both groups had valid viewpoints and valid experiences. This was more about struggling to communicate and Very much about some missing pieces in how they measured the success of their work.

They didn’t have great success measures in place. They didn’t know what success looked like in a detailed way, or what elements that they did along the way led to greater success in the long term with their customers. They knew, generally, that their customers were happy. But they struggled to articulate the specific actions they took that led to happy customers.

Different parts of the organization, marketing, sales, product, technology, were all claiming credit for their happy customers. But no one could easily point to what actually mattered to the customer. One of the results of this was that they rarely celebrated wins. They didn’t know who to give credit to. So they didn’t credit anyone.

And this was leading the teams to believe that senior management didn’t care about their work. And it was leading senior management to believe that the teams were more worried about getting credit than doing a good job. Now, I have to be very clear. None of this was malicious. No one set out to do this.

This is why it’s called culture. Because culture grows. Culture is an organic thing that occurs. Over time, everyone in the organization wanted to do a good job. Everyone was working hard. And they were producing generally good results that generally made their customers happy. At the same time, the company was tripping over themselves a bit, and making it harder and more painful than it needed to be to take care of their customers and to do the very good work that they were doing.

We helped them, we helped kind of shine a light on this problem to help them define some simple success measures that were predictive of client satisfaction. We helped them account for where they were measuring up to those success measures, and in the cases where they didn’t, where they were falling short.

We encouraged senior management to celebrate quick wins in the places where they found them, and there were plenty. Which made the team feel more appreciated. It made them feel like they were being valued for the hard work that they were doing. At the same time, we encouraged the teams to find ways to fix the areas where they were falling short.

Which made them feel more engaged. And actually made their work easier. It also demonstrated to the company’s senior leaders that the team was capable of doing a great job and it demonstrated how willing they were to improve how much they wanted to improve, how much more they wanted to do their jobs better.

The engagement had started out about gaining a better understanding of the customers, helping them gain a better understanding of their customers. It morphed though into getting a better understanding of the company culture and where necessary making some subtle shifts in that culture to better serve customers.

Quick wins build on each other. They help you say, this is something that went really well. How can we do that again? How can we do that again? How can we do that again? Think about New Year’s resolutions, if you want, for a moment, and ignore the part where most New Year’s resolutions fail. Of course, there’s plenty of research, you’ve seen this over the years, that show that only about 9% of Americans that make resolutions complete them.

This is according to Ohio State University. In fact, research goes on to show that 23% of people quit their resolution by the end of the first week. And 43% quit by the end of January. First, let’s flip those numbers on their head for a moment. Another way to look at that set of numbers is that 77% keep going past the first week.

And 57% of people keep going past January. The question you need to ask is why do the people who stick with their New Year’s resolutions keep going? Well, it turns out that The same research from Ohio State University calls that out as well. They say you have to start, you have to set smaller objectives.

That’s where quick wins come into place. What can we accomplish right away? How do we build on that? You have to expect obstacles. You’re going to run into roadblocks. If those come as a surprise to you, it’s understandable that they may stop you short. But if you know that there will be obstacles, then they just become a thing you have to get over or around.

You have to assume accountability. When I talked a moment ago about setting the measurements of things that mattered, that’s where that comes into place. Are we actually counting what matters and holding one another accountable for those things? Are you measuring in the first place? That you’re accomplishing what you want.

And the last element, and for purposes of today, the most important one. Is they start at a time of change. Here’s the brilliance of Amazon’s day one culture. If it’s always day one, if we are always starting from the very first day of the company, then every day is a time of change. Think about it. If today is day one, it’s a time of change.

If tomorrow is day one, it’s a time of change. If the next day is day one, it is a time of change. The lesson is that you get to start over at any time. This is a weird psychological trick. I feel like one of those BuzzFeed articles right now. You know, this one psychological trick, this one weird psychological trick, but it’s well known that it is easy to, to inspire change in yourself and in others.

On dates that correspond with change, your birthday, the first day of the year, the first day of the quarter, the first day of the month, even the first day of the week, it’s a whole new beginning. That’s what Amazon’s doing. They’re saying every day is the first day. So the question I would ask you right now is we’re six months through the year.

We just started the second half. We just started a new quarter. We’re halfway through a month, but there’s a new month coming up. There’s a new week coming up. There’s a new day coming up. This is your opportunity to take hold of that first day of the week, the first day of the month, the first day of the quarter, even the first day of the year for some year today, right?

It’s a new day and it’s a great mindset to, to take hold of, to invest in, in your organization for yourself, for your team, for your company. Because if today is day one, and tomorrow is day one, and the next day is day one, then the only question that matters now is, how are you going to spend it? How are you going to take day one and make something new?

You get to do that every single day, because every single day is day one. How are you going to spend it? 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. 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 387.

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, Stitcher Radio, Spotify, Overcast, wherever fine podcasts are found.

I would also very much appreciate it if you could provide a positive rating or review for the show. 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 out on one of those services. They help other listeners find the podcast. They help other listeners understand what Thinks Out Loud is all about. They help build our community. And, of course, they mean the world to me.

You can also find Thinks Out Loud on LinkedIn by going to linkedin.com/timpeterassociates. You can find me on Twitter using the Twitter handle @tcpeter… at least for the next handful of weeks until Elon kills it for real.

And, of course, you can send an email to [email protected]. Again, that’s [email protected] if you want to chat directly.

Finally, I do want to say thank you so much for tuning in. I know I say this again and again and again almost every week, but I say it again and again and again because it’s so important for you to hear this.

I would not do this show without you. Your support, your listenership, your comments, your conversation, the community you are helping us build mean 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 Revisiting Day One — Today is a New Day (Thinks Out Loud) appeared first on Tim Peter & Associates.

Google has been remarkably transparent lately in telling marketers and brands and businesses how to rank better in search. The trick, of course, is not try to rank. It’s to think about what your customer wants to accomplish and creating authentic, outstanding content that provides them an excellent experience. Hmm… that sounds like something I might have heard somewhere along the way.

Anyway…

Google’s recent transparency suggests that maybe, just maybe, Google is de-emphasizing organic search in favor of paid media. There’s a strong argument to be made there; after all, that’s where they make their money.

But is that what’s happening? I’m not entirely convinced. Why not? What is Google (probably) up to? And what does it mean for your business going forward? Well, 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: 26m 27s

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 392 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 episode builds on a variety of things we’ve been talking about for the last couple of weeks and really the last couple of years with all the changes going on in search. And it was inspired by an email that I got from Denise. So Denise sent a couple of emails. We went back and forth a little bit. But, you know, she’s been asking about how Google has been more transparent in the way that they are talking about search and what people should do and the like. And she asked the question, "Is Google more transparent because organic search doesn’t matter as much as it used to?"

And that’s a fascinating question. I don’t know. And I think the answer is probably not. I don’t think that’s why it’s so. But hang with me in any case. There’s a lot to unpack behind that question. And it’s a thought provoking concept that really sets up how we might want to think about what we do in marketing for the next, you know couple of years.

Full disclosure, I don’t think of myself as an SEO. Like that’s not my primary job. I’m a digital strategist first and foremost. It’s also true that search tends to account for half of all traffic or more to most sites in most verticals and certainly in all of the verticals that I tend to work in. Talking about digital without talking about search and without talking about Google is like talking about movies without talking about Citizen Kane or _The Godfather__, right?

Even with all the change and disruption we’re experiencing around search today, if your digital strategy doesn’t take into account Google, the largest site on the internet, its benefits, its risks, its pros, its cons, you cannot possibly have a complete, coherent digital marketing strategy for your business. And at least from one perspective, we have to think about what Google means to your business, which we will get into a little bit deeper into the episode.

I want to start though by talking about Search Generative Experience (SGE), which is Google’s new generative AI… I don’t want to say powered; I want to say enhanced search experience. It is something where they’re incorporating generative AI, you know, generated text into the search results answering the customer’s questions much the way you might see from ChatGPT and above the search results. You can test this out today, you can go to Google, you have to do it in Chrome, but you can see it. More importantly, you can interact with it.

What I find really fascinating about this is that I’ve said for years that "customers don’t want a search engine, they want a find engine." They want something that simply answers their questions. And that’s what Google is increasingly offering.

If you think about it, that’s what many generative AI search focused tools do, whether it’s ChatGPT, whether it’s Bing Chat, whether it’s Claude 2 from Anthropic, they’re not pointing to you to where the answers are. They’re giving you the answer. And the folks who monetize search this way, like Google specifically, place ads alongside the answers within the search results. That’s how they make money. I suspect that’s how many of them are going to make money over the longer term. There will be subscription models for certain business cases, for certain use cases. But generally speaking, if it’s consumer facing, it’s probably going to be paid for by ads.

And this gets to the crux of Denise’s question. Wouldn’t Google want you to have high quality content because they’re going to downplay organic search and they’re going to up vote, you know, they’re going to put more prominence on the answers that they’re giving.

Now this is important because Google makes most of its money, 58% of its revenue, as we talked about a couple of weeks ago, from search specifically. And it’s absolutely true that Google wants those ads to represent good experiences, high quality offerings for their customers. They have to.

I recommend other service providers to my clients all the time. I’m sure you do as well. Do I recommend crappy service providers? Nope. Absolutely not. Never, in fact. When I make a recommendation, I want to be sure that the person or company I’m introducing my clients to takes exceptionally good care of my client. You undoubtedly do the same thing. Google can’t possibly want to provide a bad experience.

And when we think about ads, they don’t want "who pays the most" to be the defining characteristic of which ad they show. Google, they want to make sure that any ad they show works as a good answer. Then they might be able to say, "sure, we’ll put who pays the most up top." Because that will work well for the searcher and for Google. So there’s certainly some merit in them telling all of us how to better answer their customers’ questions — and the emphasis here is on their customers.

We think of the people who search often as our customers, as we rightly should. But Google thinks of them as their customers for sure. And Google’s been pretty transparent for some time about doing the right thing for those users, for those customers.

It’s become very trendy lately to say that "you shouldn’t write for a search engine, you should write for a user." "You should do audience research, not keyword research." And generally speaking, that’s true. What’s also true is that savvy marketers have been doing that for years. There are three and a half billion searches every single day.

Who do you suppose conducts all of those searches? The engine doesn’t ask questions on its own, people do. Savvy, sophisticated marketers have been focused for years not on the search engine, but on the searcher. Now ironically, that’s what Google wants you to do, and it’s particularly true when we talk about something like Search Generative Experience (SGE).

Because they can then recommend people freely, they can put an ad alongside their answer because they know whatever site they’re linking to that has taken that approach will provide a great experience to their customers. And then, who are we kidding, they can safely begin giving greater credence to those who pay the most, so they get to make more money.

In some ways, it becomes a win-win-win from that perspective. The reason that I don’t think they’re being more transparent, you know, solely because organic doesn’t matter, is because organic does matter to them. Even as they are driven more and more by ads, they need those ads to be a good answer to a customer’s question.

And they’re going to use, they undoubtedly have to use, a "trust but verify" system. Organic search algorithms are their verification method. They crawl the sites and preference those sites that give better answers and give better experiences. If you look at the work they’re doing with Core Web Vitals and some of the changes they’re making next spring, there’s a new there’s a new feature called INP. I don’t recall what it stands for at the moment. Again, not an SEO, right? But it’s all about better experiences.

So that’s true that it’s something that they want to do because they want to create great experiences for customers. And in this case, everything they’re telling you to do works for organic search as well. So it genuinely works to your advantage in either case.

The bigger question I would be saying is how does this change the way we think about marketing? Does it change the way we think about marketing? And if you’ve been thinking about your customers this way all along, if you’ve been thinking about customer experience this way all along, then I hope not.

I don’t think it will change what we’re doing. I’ve talked for a while about a three step process that you want to think about for your business. I call it the "Royal Court Framework." You’ve heard me refer to this many times. "Content is king. Customer experience is queen. Data is your crown jewels." That’s exactly what we’re talking about here.

Look at what Google recommends. They’re saying create great content that solves a customer’s need. There was a recent podcast, Google’s Danny Sullivan, basically said that Google provides information to help people improve their content for people, not just to chase rankings. This is a direct quote:

"Now, more than ever, having that authentic content that you created because you have an actual audience in mind that you know would come to it directly, that is your way forward as you try to navigate this world of how ranking systems are evolving."

Again, that’s a direct quote. They also provided advice related to their August core update, which just launched in the last couple days and will be rolling out over the next few weeks. They gave very specific tips. "Look closely at pages that aren’t performing well. Check what search terms led people to those pages. Compare your content to the questions Google provides on its help page." And I’ll link to this in the show notes. So you’ll have access to that.

What are they talking about there though? They’re talking about content. They’re telling you that content is in fact King.

Why do they want this? Well, because customer experience is queen. Google knows that if a customer has a bad experience on your site, that bad experience reflects poorly on Google as well as you. There are no areas of Google’s business that A.) require customers to use their service and B.) generate meaningful revenues or profits for the company.

We talked about this a couple of weeks ago when assessing the state of digital in Q3. I mentioned it at the top of the show. Google makes 58% of its revenues from search and 78% from advertising overall. Virtually all of its profits come from just those two categories, search and advertising. Yet their customers could use Bing Chat or ChatGPT or Claude or Amazon’s Alexa tomorrow, simply by opening a different app or typing a different URL.

Google’s vulnerability here is why I’m still convinced that Amazon will launch its own consumer facing search engine one of these days. I could be wrong. But Amazon has to recognize that Google may be strong, but that its strength is brittle. Google has to give customers a great customer experience, or it will lose those customers to people who do, to companies who do. The switching cost isn’t effectively zero. It is zero. For Google, more than just about anyone, customer experience is queen because it’s the only way that they get customers to keep coming back.

Of course, if you take care of content and make sure content is king and treat it as such, if you take care of customer experience and treat it as such, it’s fair to ask what you get out of it. Well, you get a variety of things out of it. Obviously, you get satisfied customers. You get repeat business. You get more traffic. You get more positive word of mouth.

You also gain data. You get understanding of what matters to your customer. You learn more so that you can do a better job. It becomes a virtuous flywheel. In some ways, Google is providing more of these insights, more of this data, more understanding than they have around how to produce great content and deliver customer experiences that our customers expect. Because they recognize that’s what’s going to keep them in business. You know, if you get to stay in business, that’s a nice plus… but that’s not the part that matters to them. The part that matters to them is "How do we, Google, stay in business?"

Now, they give you lots of data. They give you things like Google Search Console and Google Analytics. I mean, they’re free, right? You can use these today and they’re becoming more transparent. Because they recognize they need the overall experience to be more positive.

I don’t want to be naive. Denise may be right. Over time, they may devalue organic search. But I think they will always need to rely on it to know what are the best sites. So that they know which advertisers to prioritize; not just which organic rankings to prioritize. So one of the things you want to do is think about the data that you have that Google doesn’t have.

Now obviously you have your analytics data, which is great. You should use that. You also have things like site search data. I’ve talked about this in past episodes. But what are people looking for on your site? If you have a search engine, what are they searching for? We’ve got research, we’ve seen, working with a variety of companies, that people who search on your website convert roughly 40% more often than those that don’t. And it can be as high as 200%.

Now I want to be fair, they’re not buying, they’re not downloading, they’re not signing up, they’re not doing what have you because they’re searching. They’re searching because they are ready and willing and able to buy or download or sign up or what have you. And they’re telling you what they think is most important.

They’re asking you to help them navigate to the places that will let them do what they want to do. They’re literally saying, I want to buy, help me, call me crazy, but I’d want to keep an eye on those searches and on that data. Data is your crown jewels, and I simply don’t see any evidence that this "Royal Court Framework," that "content is king, customer experience is queen, and data is your crown jewels," is changing anytime soon.

In fact, I would strongly suggest that all of Google’s activities really do support that notion, that that is the world in which we’re going to be living for some time to come.

So, is that it though? Well, not really. There’s at least one other thing I would add. One, on the content side, we have to think about content distribution.

We cannot just rely on Google because we know "gatekeepers gonna gate." By the way, we shouldn’t just rely on any one source. Gatekeepers are going to gate. However, as I said at the top of the episode, Google is the biggest site on the internet. They are probably half of your traffic, if not more. So we definitely want to not rely on them more than anybody, right?

They have a lot of power and a lot of ability to really hurt your business if they make dramatic changes in the way things work. And this is something we’ve talked about before, but it’s worth repeating. You need to make content distribution part of your ideation process. You need to be thinking about content distribution from the moment you start thinking about creating new content.

And ironically, Google can be the source of some really valuable information right here. You can use Google to see what kind of content works best. You know, when you’re creating new content or you’re thinking of creating new content, look and see what Google is showing for searches around those kinds of terms.

Maybe you’re better served offering a video or an image or an infographic than just a text page. Google is clearly showing you these are the kinds of content, these are the kinds of experiences that customers expect when they’re looking for an answer to a specific question. Use that to say, I want to make content in that format because that’s going to help me be seen and help me provide a better experience for my customer.

Doesn’t mean you can’t do the other versions too. Content reuse is a big deal. Take a video and use the script and make that a text piece or part of it. Take some images from that and make that an infographic for sure. But you want to think about how do we get this content in front of people beyond just search.

Remember too that social media is your friend. As we discussed last week. Social media is far from antisocial. So you want to think about how do I repurpose whatever content I’m creating? How do I make it work on whether it’s Facebook or Instagram or LinkedIn if you’re B2B? What is the appropriate social media channel for these, or social media channels for this piece of content to get it to the broadest audience beyond just search?

You all know if you’ve listened to this show for any length of time, I’m a huge fan of email. Get your content directly in your customers inboxes. Which means that it’s also really important that you grow your email list over time. We’ve calculated the value of email addresses for lots and lots of different companies over the years.

An email address can range in value to you in terms of future value from as little as two to three bucks and as high in my experience as a few hundred dollars or more depending on the size of your purchase and what your, your conversion rate tends to be over the life cycle of owning that email address.

So when you’re thinking about conversion on your website, when you’re thinking about conversion on your social channels, think about are you creating ways to connect with customers directly, to engage with them directly. We also tend to recommend segmenting your email lists into all kinds of different people. So your regular customers, but customers based on their recency, their frequency and monetary value. Past customers, if they haven’t connected in a while. Prospects, both current and past. Are you sharing content with them that might be relevant to them?

And then your friends and family. And what I mean by that, I mean friends and family of your business. Who internally among your employees, your advisors, and actual friends, actual colleagues you have in your industry, can you share it with? And more importantly, who will share that content on your behalf? Also, you want to make sure you’re linking to your new content from somewhere on your site. Give people a way to navigate to it. And finally, think about the influencers or creators who might also want to share content who might want to share your new content with their audience, with their friends and family and fans and followers on social. Those can all be great ways to build your network, to build a broader community, and to get your content seen by more people.

So, do I think that Google is more transparent because organic search doesn’t matter as much? Not really. At the same time, we want to learn from what they’re telling us, where they’re being transparent, because it underscores that "content is king, customer experience is queen, and data is your crown jewels."

It underscores the need to think about content distribution from the beginning, so that we can show up in front of our customers, no matter where they find us, whether it’s search, whether it’s social, whether it’s email, whether it’s our broader community as a whole. All of those together work together to ensure that you can still be seen and you can still be heard and your customers can still find you and come to you and buy from you.

And ultimately, that’s what we always want to be doing so that as gatekeepers try to gate, we’ve got a whole other set of roads we can walk down to get to our customers. And I don’t know how to be any more transparent on that topic than that.

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

I want to remind you, you can find the show notes for this episode, as well as an archive of all past episodes, by going to timpeter.com/podcast. Again, that’s timpeter.com/podcast. Just look for episode 392.

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 Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Stitcher Radio, Spotify, Overcast, anywhere fine podcasts are found.

While you’re there, I would also very much appreciate it if you could provide a positive rating or review for the show. Ratings and reviews help new listeners find the podcast.

They help new listeners understand what the show is all about. They help get the word out, they help us grow our community, and they mean the world to me. So thank you very, very much for doing that. I really appreciate you helping to make Thinks Out Loud a better place for everyone involved.

You can also find Thinks Out Loud on LinkedIn by going to linkedin.com/TimPeterAssociates. You can find me on Twitter — yes, I still call it Twitter — using the Twitter handle @TCPeter. And as always, just like Denise did, you can email me at [email protected]. Again, that’s [email protected].

Finally, I know I say this every week, but I so appreciate the fact that you listen. And I so appreciate the fact that you tune in to hear what’s going on in our little corner of the world every single week. I would not do this show without you.

It means so much to me that we can have a conversation and that we can build this community together. It means the world to me that you listen. It means the world to me that you comment. It means the world to me that you reach out to me on social. It means the world to me that you email. (Thanks, Denise!)

I just love that we get to keep the dialogue going. So please let’s keep the dialogue going. Keep your emails coming. Keep pinging me on LinkedIn. Keep pinging me on Twitter or X or whatever we’re calling it this week. I love hearing from you. I love getting to chat with you about all of these topics every single week.

So with that said, I hope you have an amazing rest of your week. I hope that 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 Is Google Telling Us That Organic Search Doesn’t Matter Any Longer? (Thinks Out Loud Episode 392) appeared first on Tim Peter & Associates.

Given all the bad news and bad actors we’re seeing pop-up on social lately, it’s fair of you to ask if social media is anti-social for your brand now. So, is it?

As with most things in life, it’s a bit complicated. While it’s true that there are plenty of people in social who seem like you might end up with a social disease, there’s also lots of ongoing opportunity to grow your brand and business.

How do you navigate this tricky situation? How do you use social to connect with content and customers in the current reality? How can you make social truly work for your business today? 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 24s

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 391 of The Big Show. And thank you so much for tuning in. I can’t believe we’re closing in on 400 episodes. I say this at the bottom of the show, at the end of the show a lot, that I wouldn’t do this without you.

And I really wouldn’t have done 390 episodes plus If you weren’t giving a listen, if you weren’t telling me what you think, if you weren’t engaged. So thank you so much for participating and making this a really strong community of folks that I get to engage with on a daily basis. So I really appreciate that.

That is actually somewhat relevant to the discussion today. Originally, when I started outlining this script when I started outlining this episode, It was going to just look at Facebook or Meta’s earnings, whatever you want to call the company these days, which to get that out of the way, they were great.

They had a fantastic quarter. At the same time, I’ve been getting a lot of bad news from leaders lately. Talking about how social media is troubling them, how they’re concerned about whether or not they want to be affiliated with some of these companies or have their brands associated with some of these companies or on some of these sites.

Led largely by the dumpster fire that is Elon Musk’s management of Twitter. For the record, by the way, I will stubbornly resist calling Twitter X. It’s a stupid name. I don’t know what’s going through that guy’s head, but for the love of God, it’s Twitter. The question I would ask though, is social media increasingly anti social towards business?

And right out of the way, I want to say, not exactly. You know, Twitter, the site itself, has been flooded with bad actors and bad content. They’re struggling to attract big brand advertisers, and I don’t blame a soul. Business or individual who chooses to stay away. I’d also say that that behavior seems mostly contained to Twitter.

Most of the other social networks have done a much better job on this, and I will come back to this a lot in a moment. The other unfriendly thing that we’re seeing with social, the other thing that makes us say, is social anti social towards business, is that social is getting more expensive. There is absolutely a "gatekeepers gonna gate" scenario here.

They have the traffic, and they’re going to charge you for it. Recent research that I just saw the other day, I will post a link to it in the show notes, from SparkToro, shows that items posted on social media that contain links Don’t get boosted by social algorithms. The same way as content that keeps people on the platform does.

Assuming, of course, they allow links at all. Snapchat and TikTok don’t. YouTube kind of doesn’t. So, sure, none of that can be called great news. At the same time, most of the major social players are doing a lot of work to clean up their houses. And in particular, I want to give kudos to Mark Zuckerberg and the Meta team here.

Full disclosure, I’ve done work for Meta in the past. I’m writing a research project a couple years ago on behalf of an industry association in partnership with Meta. It was low compensation work during the pandemic and I’ve been reading their, their quarterly earnings and they’ve definitely seen a shift in tone here.

I do want to point out I’ve been critical of Zuckerberg and his team for a long time because they consistently have treated their massive audience the way a toddler might drive a Ferrari. You know, I don’t think they’re ill intentioned. I do think they’re… Sometimes kind of dumb. However, they’ve definitely worked to reduce the reach of posts that are blown up because of so called rage clicks.

And at least publicly, they’re stating that they’ve open sourced their artificial intelligence tools, a llama, specifically to be safer and more secure. This was Mark Zuckerberg on their earnings call. He said safety and security, that’s a very important issue in AI. In open source software overall, we’ve just seen through the history here that open source software gets scrutinized more and therefore ends up being more secure and safer, and we think there’s a very good chance that that’s the likely outcome here.

This approach hasn’t always been their hallmark, so credit where due. They seem to finally be realizing that they were losing users to a bad overall product experience, and that is an incredibly healthy development. There’s also lots of innovation in social. Lots of AI work from meta. Again, this is from their earnings call.

Mark Zuckerberg said, AI is driving results across our monetization tools through our automated ads products. I’m going to skip ahead. We’ve also deployed MetaLattice, a new model architecture that learns to predict an ad’s performance across a variety of data sets and optimization goals. And we introduced AI Sandbox, a testing playground for generative

AI outcropping. Snap, formerly known as Snapchat, has this new thing called MyAI, which despite some growing pains, including some bad news in the last 24 hours about a glitch that was causing some weirdness, does look like a very cool, interesting tool. Channels on WhatsApp are really neat. And if I’m reading this right, looks a lot like Twitter or if you prefer Facebook’s Threads app built into WhatsApp.

You know, for all of Elon Musk’s talk about making Twitter the Everything app meta is much closer to delivering on that promise, and it’s already carried in the pockets of almost 4 billion people around the globe. So, you know, that’s something. Which, all of this leads to the question of how should senior leaders think about and address social media for the business?

How does this fit into your strategy, your marketing strategy, your digital strategy? Well, I think the news is good news here. I think the state of social is actually quite friendly. I don’t think it’s anti social at all. With the obvious gatekeeper’s going to gate situation. There’s tons of tools out there in terms of TikTok, or YouTube Shorts, or Instagram, or Facebook Reels, or Meta’s new Threads platform, or Discord.

They all have value, at least if they’re right for your brand. You know, when we talk about some of these tools, like Facebook Reels, Instagram Reels some of the things like YouTube Shorts, we know that they contribute to various algorithms for discovery. Again, I’m going to cite Zuckerberg in their recent earnings call.

Quote, Reels is a key part of this discovery engine. Reels plays exceed 200 billion per day across Facebook and Instagram. He also said the annual revenue run rate across our apps now exceeding 10 billion up from 3 billion last fall. So, A, They’re helping people get seen and B, customers seem to want to see that stuff.

You should look at these. You should have your team look at these. At least if they feel right to your brand. And we’re going to come about, come back to that in just a second. With any of these new tools. You always want to start with listening. The best advice I ever got about social is the same advice I used to get from my folks when I was a kid.

That you have two ears and one mouth, and you should use them in the same ratio. You should mostly be listening. You should talk only when you have something valuable to share. And valuable tends to be things that are, you know, funny, smart, insightful, that make you laugh. Your customers feel good that validate them within their peer group or their in group.

People share the information that makes them look good. If you’re not sure what to do at all, at least start with a defensive strategy. If you’re not sure about these tools, grab a handle for your business name and hold it while you figure out what to do. In terms of actually starting to think about where you want to go with these, I’m a big fan of the reverse mentoring approach and thinking in terms of who, not how.

There’s a reason why most social media managers are, you know, 25 years old. Technology and pop culture are hereditary. You get them from your kid. One of the reasons I’m the right messenger for this specific topic is that this is where I live in my day to day. I’m active on a number of social tools. I’m by no means native on sites like TikTok.

My social team for my business consists of people who work for me and a couple of reverse mentors who I mentor about leadership and then they teach me about how they and their friends use various social tools today. I mentioned a moment ago. There’s a reason why social media managers are 25. There’s a reason why their bosses are 34.

You know, in round numbers, right? You want these folks to bring different skills to the table. And I don’t mean to be ageist with any of this. Obviously, this is a stage, not age situation. There may be people who are 50, who are every bit as connected as somebody who’s 25, and there may be people who are 25, who are every bit as strategic as folks who’ve been around in business for a lot longer.

The point is, you want to put The emphasis on the people who have the best connection to what’s actually going on on these tools and then learn from them and provide them the larger context. The other thing you want to remember with any of these is that you’re trying to build community, not just short term gain.

This is all about how you grow a community that matters. And at least at the outset, scale and community may be antithetical. Scale itself is not terribly social. Think of the Dunbar number. Most people have 200 friends and family and fans and followers that they connect with in real life regularly. That number holds for social platforms.

And so growing this massive community may not be the simplest thing or the most desirable thing, at least at first. My very good friend Mark Schaefer has written a great book called Belonging to the Brand. And he shares in that three traits of a community. One, they have a connection to each other.

Two, they have a shared purpose, they have some larger purpose to which they all connect. And three, the community is relevant in their lives. If you look at those three traits, connection, shared purpose, relevance, that doesn’t necessarily lend itself to a huge group. The biggest community I can recall Mark mentioning was somewhere around 70, 000 people, which, don’t misunderstand, that’s a big, big, big group.

To provide some broader context here, though, Facebook has over 202 million daily active users in the U. S. and Canada alone. That’s out of 2 billion daily active users globally. And they have over 3 billion daily active users across Meta’s entire family of apps, as they call them, things like Instagram and WhatsApp.

If those 202 billion daily active users belonged to just one community each of 70, 000 people on Facebook, They have over 3, 000 communities that would have to be supported. And of course, we know that most people belong to multiple communities of various sizes. For some additional context, the biggest Taylor Swift community on Reddit, I mean, Taylor Swift is as big as you can get right now.

And the biggest Taylor Swift community on Reddit has over 853, 000 members and is in the top 1% of all Reddit communities. So your community likely isn’t going to be that large. The other thing I would suggest is my sense is that these most active communities Aren’t communities in the sense of an active membership?

What do I mean by that? There is a very, very well known rule of 1%, 9%, 90% when it comes to social and digital more broadly. 1% of users create. 9% comment and 90% consume. Loads of research and my own experience strongly suggests that that’s the case across these very large communities. I completely agree with Mark’s views about community.

I’d also argue that most communities only consist at most of the creators and commenters. So maybe 10% of whatever number that is that you come across. That’s okay. You don’t want to confuse a large audience with an engaged audience. Both have values, and ideally you will have both, large and engaged. When in doubt, though, you want engaged over big for your business.

It’s not the size of your network. It’s who’s in it that matters. Engaged folks listen more. Engaged folks share more. Engaged folks buy more. Thank you. And engaged folks sell more, meaning they talk to their friends and family and fans and followers that help bring more people into the community and lead to more sales for you.

I’m going to give you a real world case study. I’m going to talk about my business for a second here. I don’t have a massive audience. 4, 000 to 4, 500 connections on LinkedIn and Twitter and listeners to this podcast. And I’m talking each, right? I’m But many of those are not followers. They’re legitimate connection.

Here’s a stat that may shock you. I get the majority of my business through referrals, through word of mouth. My business is built from the ground up on social. And when I say that, I mean that in the same sense as when I say social is people. It’s connecting with individuals that actually drives my business.

Yes, I rank in search. Yes, that generates leads, and those leads do turn into business. What’s also true is how many of those folks that start on search start their customer journey with my business. As consumers of content, they’re part of that 90% I outlined before. Then, usually after a while, they connect.

They subscribe to my emails, or they send me a LinkedIn connection invite, or they follow me on Twitter. It’s only then that they move from the 90% to the 9%, to commenting, to talking with me. And it’s after that that they turn into customers, or at least as often, given my B2B connections, introduce me to customers.

They realize how I can help people they know, their customers, their friends, and so on, and make the introduction. Does anyone find me in a search and then buy? Sure, all the time. But I haven’t run a successful business for more than a dozen years based solely on that behavior. Obviously, I’m in a B2B business with a high consideration purchase.

In B2B or low consideration, the split isn’t nearly going to be so extreme as I see with my business. My hotel and retail clients, for instance, get lots and lots and lots of business from search. But the basic premise holds. If you ignore the simplified framework I just described, search and social are part of an integrated strategy for connecting with customers throughout their journey.

And that’s true across all the myriad sorts of businesses I work with. Social is also a key part of my content marketing strategy, both for me and my customers. It’s what we learn from interactions on social that makes it into the content that goes on to my site or that my clients put on their sites.

It’s where you take ideas for a test drive. Some will crash. Sometimes, rarely, people will hate them. Far more common is that some ideas simply never take off. The world’s reaction is, meh. You ever notice how there’s no like, meh, thumbs up button on Facebook or LinkedIn or any of those other tools? Right?

Because… Nobody’s going to put a, put a comment on something that just doesn’t inspire them. That’s okay, by the way. We’re not necessarily into this solely for the clicks. This isn’t about clickbait or an attempt to be, you know, an attention monger. Part of the reason that social media is so anti social these days, and I mean this in the broader, you know, public sense, Is that folks have found that they, the best way to get clicks on their content is to piss people off.

The media part of social media is flooded with bots and bad actors chasing engagement by pissing in the pool. Do me a favor here, do the world a favor here, don’t be that guy. Instead, what I’m looking for is content that aligns with A, my business objectives. B, engagement goals, like subscribers and followers and leads.

And C, my personal values. And you can do the same with your business. What’s the kind of content that A, aligns with your business objectives. B, aligns with engagement goals that you care about that lead to business. And C, represents your brand value. That’s going to be true no matter what happens with social.

That’s going to be true consistently. You know, and your social media manager, your, your reverse mentor, whomever you’re working with, they can help you hip it up. They can help you make it more pop culture relevant. They can speak on your behalf, sometimes in a very authentic human way. I love, I love, my favorite, my favorite follow on Twitter is Slim Jim.

Slim Jim’s social media folks are hilarious. I want to point that they’re doing advanced stuff here. This is not 101. They’re very, very on brand because the brand itself is a little edgy and fully gets, Hey, we’re here to have a good time. It works really, really well, but it works not because they’re going for attention or just the clicks.

It works because they’re speaking just like their customers speak. They’re connected in a very real, very human way, which is what makes it truly social. Their social media isn’t anti social at all. It’s incredibly social because they talk like their customers. They act like their customers. They engage with their customers in a very, very human way.

And as such, they’re building a community that is really committed to their brand, which is leading them to have better business in the long run. So social media is not anti social. If you’re using it in a very human and very authentic way that aligns with your values and your goals in a very real way, there’s all kinds of innovation going on here.

There are all kinds of opportunities to use tools like YouTube Shorts or Instagram Reels or threads potentially or Discord to connect with your customer in a meaningful way. And if you want to connect with your customers in a meaningful way, if you want social to work for you, then the key is to be human yourself.

And then you’ll find that social media is not anti social even in the least. Now looking at the clock on the wall, we are out of time for this week. I mentioned this may was going to be a long one, right? I want to remind you that you can find the show notes for this episode as well as an archive of all past episodes.

By going to tim peter.com/podcast. Again, that’s tim peter.com/podcast. Just look for episode 391. Don’t forget, you can click on the subscribe link in any of the episodes you find there to have. Think out loud, delivered to your favorite pod catcher every single week. You can also find Thinks Out Loud on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, overcast, anywhere fine podcasts are found.

While you’re there, I would also very much appreciate it if you could provide a positive rating or review for the show. Ratings and reviews help new listeners find the podcast. They help new listeners understand what the show is all about. They help get the word out. They help us grow our community. They also mean the world to me.

So, thank you very, very much. I really appreciate you helping make Thinks Out Loud a better place for all of us involved. So I really do want to say thank you again. You can also find Thinks Out Loud on LinkedIn by going to linkedin. com slash Tim Peter Associates. You can find me on Twitter using the Twitter handle at TC Peter.

And as always, you can email me at podcast at timpeter. com. Again, that’s podcast at timpeter. com. Finally, I know I say this a lot. I say it pretty much every week. But I very much appreciate the fact that you listen. I would not do this show without you. It means so much to me that we can have a conversation and build this community together.

It means so much to me that you listen. It means so much to me that you comment. It means so much to me that you reach out to me on social. And I just love that we get to keep the dialogue going. So please, let’s keep the dialogue going. Keep your emails coming. Keep pinging me on LinkedIn. Keep pinging me on Twitter.

I love hearing from you and I love getting to chat with you about all of this every single week. With all of that said, I hope you have a wonderful rest of the 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, please, be well, be safe, and as always, take care, everybody.

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 this episode as well as an archive of all past episodes by going to timpeter.com/podcast. Again, that’s timpeter.com/podcast. Just look for episode 390.

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 Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Stitcher Radio, Spotify, Overcast, anywhere fine podcasts are found.

And while you’re there, I would also very much appreciate it if you could provide a positive rating or review for the show. Ratings and reviews help new listeners find the podcast. They help new listeners understand what the show’s all about. They help get the word out. They help us grow our community and they mean the world to me.

So thank you very much. I really appreciate you helping make Thinks Out Loud, a better place for all of us involved. So I really, really do want to say thank you again.

You can also find Thinks Out Loud on LinkedIn by going to linkedin.com/timpeterassociates. You can find me on Twitter using the Twitter handle @tcpeter. And as always, you can email me at [email protected]. Again, that’s [email protected].

Finally, I know I say this every week, but I very much appreciate the fact that you listen. I would not do this show without you. No way, no how. It means so much to me that we can have a conversation and build this community together.

It means the world to me that you listen. It means the world to me that you comment. It means the world to me that you reach out to me on social. And I just love that we get to keep the dialogue going. So please, let’s keep the dialogue going. Keep your emails coming, keep pinging me on LinkedIn, keep pinging me on Twitter or X or whatever we’re calling it this week.

I love hearing from you. I love getting to chat with you about all of this every single week. With all of that said, I hope you have an amazing rest of your week. I hope that 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 Is Social Media Anti-Social for your Brand Now? (Thinks Out Loud Episode 391) appeared first on Tim Peter & Associates.