The Krehbiel Group - Something I Learned Yesterday

Bo Sacks distributed an article by his old friend and debating partner, “Mr. Magazine,” about new magazine titles on the newsstand. Some people will see that as the equivalent of celebrating new albums on vinyl at the record store. That is, desperately hoping for a flicker of life in a dying medium. I say that while the march to digital goes on, it’s a mistake to be too negative about print, which still makes up a sizeable part of publisher revenue. But let’s leave the demise of print for another day and focus on the bookazine phenomena, which isn’t new, but may see revived interest. Bookazines used to be called Special Editions, and they were typically associated with a regular magazine title. For example, Scientific American might notice a lot of interest in articles about the brain, so they’d do a special issue on that topic. I bought one of those at the train station a little while ago. Here are some advantages of the bookazine. They have a higher list price and a longer shelf life. They can serve as a marker of a significant social event – like a bookazine about Covid, or the new king. They can be a reference on a particular topic. You can give a bookazine as a gift with no strings attached. No publisher has the recipient’s mailing address. They have the laid back, relaxed feel of a magazine, with colorful pages, nice art, and interesting stories. You can publish a bookazine as a one-off with no promise of a second edition. In short, as Chris La Greca says in a post on LinkedIn, they “combine the things that people love about magazines with the niche subject matter and permanence of books.” But do they have sticking power when everything else is transitioning to digital? First, let’s not fall into the “everything is going digital” trap. A lot of things are going digital, but not everything in all cases. Second, perhaps bookazines help us to see an important dividing line in the ongoing print vs. digital debates. Maybe the bookazine is successful because it’s not expected to be up to the minute. News magazines are generally things of the past, because by the time you get a magazine, the news is old. Magazines that thrive in today’s market tend to be in niche topics that aren’t particularly time sensitive where the magazine experience is welcome – that is, it’s something you read in your easy chair, where you genuinely appreciate the ads. If I get a fishing magazine, for example, I want to see ads for the boats, where there’s hardly a website on the planet where I think of the ads as anything but an annoyance. However, magazines have suffered from publishers going on a a relentless pursuit of the bottom shelf. People now expect to get an annual subscription to a magazine for $10, which doesn’t even cover printing and mailing. Bookazines don’t (yet!!) have that relentless downward price spiral, so they seem like a great option for magazine publishers – who already have the infrastructure to create them. Resources The surprising success of the Bookazine and what it means for publishers https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/surprising-success-bookazine-what-means-publishers-chris-la-greca/

Are you sure your analytics mean what you think they mean? I saw a post on LinkedIn the other day asking why B2B companies don't talk to their customers. They look at analytics, the post claimed, and they'd rather believe data from Google than talk to real people -- or even listen to what they're saying. Is this true? If so, is it unique to B2B? Have we come to the point that we trust data more than people? Is this a personality thing? Are marketing reports created by introverts who don’t want to talk to real people? Or, on the other hand, are we data snobs, where we think data is more reliable than what real people say? I’m imagining a conversation where someone says, “why don’t you ask your customers what brought them to your service,” to which the “data-driven marketer” replies, "What good is that? They won't remember. I can get that number from my analytics.” But can you? IOW, there might be an attitude that cold, hard data from analytics is more valuable than people’s admittedly squishy and fallible memories. And there’s some truth to that, but attribution is very difficult to prove no matter how you go about it, and technology solutions aren't necessarily giving you the right answer either. As I thought about this it conjured up a few contrasts in my mind. Intuition vs. measurement Statistics vs. anecdotes Self-reported data vs. observed data Story vs. analysis So I started wondering about situations where data can mislead if we don’t have the human context. Here are some possible examples. We usually assume that a high bounce rate indicates a bad user experience. But what if users found exactly what they wanted on that one page? Maybe that’s exactly and all they needed. Turning that on its head, people often assume that lots of page views per session imply healthy engagement, but it might mean people can’t find what they’re looking for. If you measure the popularity of a page by its page views, it may be that lots of people are going to that page for some other, accidental reason, but nobody is satisfied with what they find on that page. (For example, maybe some quirk in your search results sends people to that page.) While we’re on search, your search function may be used a lot, which may indicate it is a valued feature, but it may be a reflection of bad site organization. Or let’s say you do a poll to rate “overall satisfaction” with your site, and you get a good rating. That’s great, but there might still be frustration with certain key elements or functions. The point is that you might be telling the wrong story with your data if you don’t have the human context. You need to check your assumptions against actual customer experience to make sure you’re not missing something. Resources The original post that piqued my interest. https://www.linkedin.com/posts/chriswalker171_marketing-b2b-sales-activity-7089227005321216000-VaEg?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop 5 Common Analytics Mistakes And How To Avoid Them https://www.forbes.com/sites/sisense/2021/11/01/5-common-analytics-mistakes-and-how-to-avoid-them/?sh=14aa04b0759c

How many kinds of “events” can you come up with? Brian Morrissey mentioned a “pivot to events” in his most recent post, which I link below. There are several interesting things about this. First, you can get very specialized. Niches are where it’s at. Second, they’re less dependent on platforms. As you know, I think publishers need to be as un-reliant on platforms as they can manage to be. Third, they can be very significant. For some publishers, events are their major source of income. But that got me thinking, what is an “event”? It’s almost as broad as “media.” Broadly speaking, we’re talking about a planned gathering of some sort that brings together like-minded people around a specific topic or purpose. What might that be? Here are some ideas. Please submit your own. Conferences, symposiums, and summits. This is probably what you think of by default when you think of events. There’s a keynote speaker, panels, breakaway sessions, PowerPoint overload. All that stuff. But there can also be events within events, which will be obvious as we go through the list. Webinars, although I’ve been told that the word “webinar” turns people off, and I did an article a bit ago about other words to use. Webinars are virtual events conducted over the internet, with a presentation, Q&A, etc. Workshops, or training, either online or in person, with a focus on building skills, although you can also do this sort of event around estate planning, or things like that. Dinners/Galas/Awards Nights: They can range from simple networking opportunities to formal events where you honor achievements or celebrate milestones. Lunch-and-Learns are an interesting mix. It’s usually an informal lunch with some kind of presentation, which might be a live podcast, some training, a brainstorming session, etc. Happy Hours/Networking Mixers are my favorite, of course, and I think there are a lot of untapped possibilities here. A brewery in my town rents out its tasting room for companies that are hiring. You could show a quick video about a new product, get feedback from a user’s group, and so on. Product Launches/Promotional Events. Obviously a lot of these can overlap. You can do a product launch at a happy hour before a live conference. Press Conferences are probably out of the reach of most of my audience. I think you need to be fairly big before the press cares about your new product, but maybe I’m wrong about that. Along those lines are Media Expos and Fairs, which are events where media companies can showcase their latest innovations, technologies, and offerings. A film screening might be an interesting way to introduce a new video podcast. At a happy hour. . Roundtable discussions are small, focused conversations about a particular topic. They’re fairly popular at conferences, but I think you could do them in conjunction with a lunch or dinner. Charity/Fundraising Events if your business has any charitable ambitions. Virtual Reality/Augmented Reality Events. If that’s not a thing now, it soon will be. As I said, you can mix and match among this menu of options, and what you choose will depend on your audience, the type of products you offer, and other factors. I encourage you to think about your own niche and your own market, and imagine how you can create events for them. Even if it doesn’t become an amazing new source of revenue, it can build community and enhance retention and renewal. Brian Morissey’s latest The Rebooting https://www.therebooting.com/p/the-pivot-to-events Is the word “webinar” holding you back https://krehbielgroup.com/2023/06/13/is-the-word-webinar-holding-you-back/

Yesterday I saw a post on LinkedIn about the success of Barstool Sports, with 5 lessons for B2B marketers. It raised some good points, which I’ll mention in a minute. But before I get to that I want to mention a strange experience I had yesterday. My site runs on WordPress, and some of my clients also use WordPress. Yesterday I was looking for a WordPress plugin that would read the content of an article and use Dall-E or Midjourney or something to generate an appropriate image for that article. I found one that I thought would work, so I downloaded it and tried it, but it wasn’t what I wanted, so I uninstalled and deleted it. I’ve probably done that a hundred times. What’s only happened once was this. Later in the day I got an email from the company that makes the plugin asking why I had uninstalled it so quickly. I explained. That’s pretty smart of those guys. Feedback like that can make a lot of difference to a company. In this case, it might help them clarify exactly what their plugin does and does not do. So here are the 5 recommendations from Barstool Sports. 1. Create a steady cadence of content releases What that cadence is might differ from company to company, but make it steady. 2. Make your content memorable with micro-franchises • Pardon My Take • Spittin' Chiclets • Pizza Reviews I don’t know any of these things because I don’t particularly care about sports, but the idea is to have a group of franchises and personalities under your main brand. People like personalities and points of view. 3. Use internal spokespeople as brand ambassadors and advocates I think that follows from #2. The point is that buying is an emotional process, and part of that means relating to the face of the brand. This doesn’t appeal to me, because I went to the Vulcan science academy as a lad, but for the rest of you …. 4. Recruit external influencers/creators to make content for your network I’m not sure how that fits with the idea of having a personality behind a brand, but … okay. 5. Craft a sense of belonging within your community. Barstool Sports has “stoolies.” Sometimes community-building initiatives are a little silly – Gainsight did a rap song about customer success – but the point is that people feel like they’re on the inside. People want to feel like they’re part of something. Resources The post on LinkedIn about Barstool Sports https://www.linkedin.com/posts/akennada_barstool-sports-is-the-playbook-for-the-modern-activity-7090001581235994624-zyZ3?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop

I like lists. I don’t like it when people go on and on about things. That’s the lazy way. It’s like that old saying, “Sorry for the long letter, if I had more time I would have written a short one.” Making a list forces you to distill your thoughts down to a pithy, short, descriptive saying. That’s what I’m going to try to do here, riffing off the article "Publishers: 12 ways to overcome common innovation roadblocks" by Damian Radcliffe, which Bo Sacks distributed recently. 1. Innovation has to solve a problem. It’s not a goal in itself. 2. And speaking of problems, the problems you should be most keen to solve are your customer's problems. 3. Find a way to quantify the problem so you know when you're fixing it. 4. Create a framework around #s 1-3 that you can communicate clearly to your staff. I’m going to take a small side note here and commend my former boss Jasper Simons who is a master at using models and frameworks. 5. Break through internal structures and mindsets that limit your success. 6. Commit for the long-term. This isn't one and done, or a quick summer campaign. With the pace of change in the market, you should make innovation a part of your corporate culture. 7. Create a process to make this operational. 8. You run the risk of making your employees, your accountants, and your business units think that "constant change is here to stay," which promotes an attitude of chaos and uncertainty. Acknowledge that fear and address it. 9. Get people on board from all levels of the organization. 10. Make it easy for people to leave if they don't like the new agenda. 11. This means you're going to lose some attachment to the past and some institutional knowledge, and that can be a bad thing. Prepare for the consequences. 12. The world is moving faster than it used to, which means that companies need to adjust to get comfortable with change. Resources Publishers: 12 ways to overcome common innovation roadblocks https://whatsnewinpublishing.com/publishers-12-ways-to-overcome-common-innovation-roadblocks/

What are the tells of a bullshitter? In the last few weeks I have had two radically different experiences with people trying to sell me their services to help me get better leads for my business. One was wonderful. He was honest, helpful, and came across as a decent guy who was trying to help me out. I’m happy to give you his name. It’s Jordan Ross from 8 Figure Agency. The other guy was awful. He came across as a slimy bullshitter. My subconscious was yelling at me, “Don’t trust this guy.” The Proverb spoke to me: “Leave the presence of a fool or you will not discern words of wisdom.” But feelings from the id aren’t very helpful. I wanted to quantify what I was feeling. What was the bullshitter doing that gave me this instinctive reaction of disgust? Could I explain it? I no longer had any interest in his presentation, except to come up with a list. I opened up a document and titled it “the tells of a bullshitter.” This is what I came up with. How do you recognize a bullshitter? They want you to affirm or compliment them in cringy ways. They frequently insist on their honesty or piety. They want you to “participate” in their presentation in condescending ways. Stuff fit for a 3 year old. They talk too damned much. It’s like they want to wear you out to break down your defenses so you’ll say anything just to get them to stop talking. They show all the signs of narcissism. Narcissistic individuals often display a need for admiration, a sense of entitlement, and a tendency to dominate conversations. They’re shameless. That seemed like a good start, but I wanted more, so I asked ChatGPT, which gave me a few more characteristics. They frequently make vague or exaggerated claims: Bullshitters tend to make grandiose or ambiguous statements without providing specific details. So pressing them for details is a good way to expose them. Along with this is a lack of consistency. It’s hard to keep your story straight when you’re making it up on the fly. This also causes them to dodge direct questions, and fail to provide supporting evidence for their claims. They tend to overuse buzzwords or jargon to create the illusion of expertise or knowledge. There’s an inconsistency in their body language. Bullshitters may exhibit signs of discomfort, such as fidgeting, avoiding eye contact, or displaying defensive body language when questioned or challenged. Although, frankly, when you see these things you’re dealing with a human who’s uncomfortable with his lies. The real problem is the person who shows no discomfort when he lies. Bullshitters tend to dismiss or invalidate perspectives that don’t go along with their narrative. And, as I said in my list, there’s constant self promotion. Which leads me to bullshitter tactics It’s one thing to recognize a bullshitter when you’re speaking to him, and can see him. You have lots of senses on the alert. But what about email? How do bullshitters abuse that channel? Excessive flattery. Pretended urgency. Ambiguity. Exaggerated promises. Misleading subject lines. Manipulative language. I asked some friends for their examples, and they suggested the following. “I’m following up on a call/email” when they never did. (From Bart Foreman) “Are you receiving my emails?” (from Scott Hornstein) “Don’t want to hear from me? Reply with ‘no.’” But they don’t honor that. (From Chris Elwell)

Brainstorming doesn’t work that well, unless you follow these tips The typical “brainstorming” session involves announcing a topic and inviting people to propose their ideas in an allegedly non-judgmental environment. A bunch of people get together in a conference room and say whatever they think. There are several problems with this model. People don’t prepare their thoughts ahead of time. They assume the whole purpose is to be spontaneous and off the cuff and all that, which means they’re not bringing their best. Dominant personalities hog the floor, which means you don’t get the great ideas from the quiet person in the corner. Groupthink predominates. The leader says “there are no stupid ideas,” and they won’t be judged for what they say, but nobody believes that. The first ideas set the agenda for the discussion (anchoring bias). The lack of structure and goals makes it hard to evaluate success. Try this model instead. Outline the broad objectives of the effort – e.g., increase renewals, create a new product for nurses. Appoint a creative person to spend a day or two thinking about the topic individually. Make sure they think about the idea, then sleep on it, then think about it again. Your subconscious mind is a very powerful tool for creativity. Have that person record his ideas and distribute them to the larger group anonymously. Require everyone to read those ideas. Get them thinking about the topic ahead of time. On the following day, give each person in the group at least one brainstorming tool (see below) and ask them to write their own ideas and submit them anonymously. Organize all the suggestions in one list and distribute them to the group. Have a group meeting to discuss the suggestions. The leader reviews all the ideas and the discussion against the project’s objectives. One source for brainstorming tools is “52 Brainstorming Tools” by schoolofthought.org. Here are a few examples that I like. Mind map – put the objective in the middle and branch out nested and associated ideas to discover new perspectives as stimulus for new thoughts. Ask why – take any suggestion and be a 3-year old and ask why, why, why, to see where it leads you. Change of scene – take the list of ideas to a coffee shop, or better yet, to a bar. The change of perspective can stimulate ideas. Imagine you’re the devil – what would someone completely ruthless do? The tools in that deck of 52 cards address several different parts of the creative thinking process, including idea generation, evaluating ideas, operational considerations, the impact on customers, etc. Resources Creative Thinking Cards https://thethinkingshop.org/collections/products/products/creative-thinking-cards-deck Send your employees to New York https://krehbielgroup.com/2023/03/01/send-your-employees-to-new-york/

Summary: An improv exercise called "Remember that time we went to Mexico" can boost creativity. You’ve heard of WordPress, but have you heard of WordCamp? It’s a great opportunity to learn more about WordPress, but also to get some general ideas about content, publishing, e-commerce, and many more things. It’s worth your time even if you don’t use WordPress. I did a talk there a few years ago. I have a link to a recording of that talk in the Resources tab of KrehbielGroup.com, and I’ll link it below. One of the sessions I attended that day was something like “what developers can learn from improv.” The speaker led the group through a few basic improv exercises, one of which was “Remember that time we went to Mexico.” Everybody picked a partner, and the first person said, “Remember that time we went to Mexico,” and the second person had to reply “Yes, and …” then provide some additional detail about the trip, like, “Yes, and you wore that fabulous red dress.” You had to affirm everything the other person said, and in the process, you built a story about a trip to Mexico. One of the interesting things about this exercise is that you’re not just waiting for your chance to speak to push your own agenda. You have to listen to the other person, and you have to keep in mind all the growing details about the trip — because you’re not allowed to contradict any part of the story. You can’t dismiss the other person or his ideas. You have to incorporate them into the story you’re both working on. It reminds me a little of a comment I heard at a BIMS conference. One of the speakers said one of the biggest human needs is to be validated and understood. “Remember that trip to Mexico” certainly does that. But what does this have to do with publishers? Imagine scenarios in which you impose a “yes, and” rule on the conversation, where no one can contradict or dismiss anything any other participant said. What might happen as a result? Let’s say you’re working on a new website design, and someone says “we should make the whole site red,” which is, admittedly, a stupid idea. But you’re not allowed to say that it’s a stupid idea. You have to think of a “yes, and” reply — some way to un-stupid the suggestion. For example you might say, “Yes, and think of all the shades, tones, and textures we could employ that are all red.” What’s been accomplished here? You’ve moved from thinking about color to thinking about shades, tones, and textures, which might not have come up at all. Now people are thinking, “yeah, there are lots of ways to distinguish things visually even when you use the same color.” It might get you thinking about design for the color-blind, or … who knows what? An all-red site is still a dumb idea, but the “yes, and” mindset forced the people in the meeting to be creative, which brought up a new and useful concept. That’s what “remember that trip to Mexico” does — it forces you to be creative. It’s so easy to say no and shut something down. That’s the opposite of creative. It takes work to say “yes, and.” You have to try to find the jewel hidden in the garbage. Obviously, this is not the right method to reach a final decision on an idea. Sometimes you do have to say no. But it is a useful method to get new ideas, and as an added benefit, it’s fun, and people feel that their views have been heard. Resources WordCamp https://central.wordcamp.org/ My talk at WordCamp https://wordpress.tv/2017/11/03/greg-krehbiel-how-kiplinger-used-wordpress-for-a-paid-digital-service/

The Washington Post has discovered that personalized onboarding yields good results for subscriptions. Which isn't a big surprise. The fact that you bought something doesn't mean you'll use it. Think of all the idle exercise equipment in basements around the country. It's one thing to convince somebody to buy. It's another thing to convince them to use. And it's yet another thing to make that a habit. Sorry that the language sounds like drug addiction, but in some ways we're dealing with similar mental processes. Here's what the Post has found. 1. The first two weeks are crucial. 2. In that two weeks, subscribers who have made fewer than 4 visits are 10 percentage points less likely to stay than those who have made 15 visits. 3. Using the app is strongly correlated with retention. Here's what they do to encourage early use of their service. They're prompted to select their areas of interest, which turn into e-newsletter recommendations. Subscribers get a welcome email from authors -- I think the authors of the e-newsletters. The email series progresses with messages based on the recipient's preferences. In one example of an onboarding email, they say "Help us recommend content just for you," with a list of topics the user might be interested in. In reply to the recipient's choices, they recommend some e-newsletters. There's more to it, and if you're interested you should read the entire article, which I'll link below. The bottom line is that onboarding works. And sometimes it's very simple things. I saw a statistic on LinkedIn that said if someone signs up for your e-newsletter, and you reply with a welcome letter within 15 minutes, that has a noticeable influence on retention. A lot of these things aren't a matter of being brilliant, or writing excellent copy. Some of the ideas are rather simple and obvious. The difference is who executes more effectively. Operations matter. Resources Unlocking Customer Lifetime Value: The Power of Personalized Subscriber Onboarding at The Washington Post https://theaudiencers.com/inspirations/unlocking-customer-lifetime-value-the-power-of-personalized-subscriber-onboarding-at-the-washington-post-anjali-iyer/ Washington Post drives revenue through its subscriber investments https://www.inma.org/blogs/digital-subscriptions/post.cfm/washington-post-drives-revenue-through-its-subscriber-investments

AI agents may be the future of media I try to stick to the practical and operational, but I listened to Brian Morrissey’s Rebooting podcast yesterday, and it inspired me to go on a wild flight of fancy and predict the future. If you’re not already, you should listen to the Rebooting podcast and the people vs. algorithms podcast. Links below. Back to the topic. Think for a moment about the trajectory of media consumption. For example, compare what you did yesterday to what you did five, ten, or twenty years ago. Twenty years ago, you might have read a morning newspaper on your way to work, and then you were mostly insulated from news (as you did your job) until lunch. You may have read the paper again at lunch, and then you got back to work. In the evening, you might have watched the news on TV. Between then and now, these horrible spy devices have taken over our lives, and yesterday you probably turned off the alarm on your smart phone and immediately started reading your news feed, checked your email, looked at your social media notifications, then read a message on WhatsApp. You worked on a desktop or laptop computer, which has its own distractions, while your smartphone was buzzing in your pocket. In other words, your day was filled with media distractions. And you’ve become psychologically dependent on them. If you don’t check your smartphone every ten minutes or so, you probably feel nervous, and you almost panic if you can’t find the thing. Here’s my prediction: this trend can’t continue. We can’t keep increasing how much time we spend on media, and we’re never going to reach a point where every waking moment is spent consuming media. In fact, we already know this is bad for us, and like the drunk who keeps telling himself to quit drinking so much, eventually we’re going to come to a breaking point. We’ll admit to ourselves that it’s unhealthy and we’ll start dialing it back. If that prediction is true, the future will see us consuming less media. How will that happen? We’ll probably use AI agents – that is, in this context, routines that we can program to go out and collect the things we want, and bring it back and present it to us in the format we prefer. Some time in the near future we’ll realize that our obsession with our smartphones is killing us, and we’ll set reasonable limits on our daily media consumption. But at the same time, we’ll have amazing AI-powered tools that will increase the efficiency of the time we do spend. For example, we won’t waste as much time scrolling through things we don’t care about. Our AI assistant will know exactly what we care about, and it will also know what limits we want to place on our daily addiction. Let’s say, just for the sake of argument, that we realize our daily dose of media should be no more than 2 hours. We’ll program our AI agents to feed us 2 hours worth of content per day. We won’t be doom scrolling. We won’t be paging through feeds of garbage, looking for the nugget we find interesting. Everything our AI agent feeds us will be interesting. Now let’s imagine what that vision of the future portends for publishers. Subscriptions will change radically. The reader won’t want everything from brand X, but only topic 1 in brand X, along with topic 1 in brands Y and Z. This will require a re-thinking of traditional subscription models. Content creation will be focused on increasingly narrow demographics. Articles about topic 1 won’t be for general audiences, but for specific types of people who are interested in topic 1. Although it’s also possible that the content creators will simply provide a kind of fact sheet that the AI agent will use to format the content the way each individual reader wants it. Maybe you want Tom Hanks to read you your news, and maybe I want to have a dialog with the Star Trek computer. In any event, I think it’s certain that things can’t keep going on the current trajectory. So spend some time imagining what the future of media might be, and then ask yourself what threats and opportunities you can see in that future. Resources The Rebooting Show https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-rebooting-show/id1595625177 People vs. Algorithms https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/people-vs-algorithms/id1642958293

Most website owners worry about engagement, which they should do, because if people aren’t engaged with your site, they won’t do the things that you really want them to do. More on that in a bit, but first, let’s say you wanted to find the most engaged users on your website. How would you do it? You could start with a simple assumption about what “engagement” means, and you could assemble a list of factors that go into an engagement score. Then you’d assign point values to those factors, and you’d sum those points for each visitor. This is a relatively easy task for a customer data platform. We’d start this project by defining what we mean by “engagement.” It’s something like “frequent and repetitive use of your service.” So you’d make a list of things that indicate that. But some of those things might have more significance than others. For example, landing on an article page could be one point, but scrolling to the bottom is 3 points. Using the search function is 5 points, and answering a quiz is 10 points. And so on. This simply becomes a summing exercise for your CDP. It’s very straight-forward. But are you really capturing the right data? You have to wonder whether you have the right collection of factors and whether you’ve given them the right point value. Should search really get 5 points? Why not 4, or 6? And how do you know if you have the right answer? You’ve decided that people with top scores — based on your point system — are the most engaged, but how do you verify that? It would be nice if there was some objective way to determine engagement so you could test your scoring system. But there isn’t. So what you have to do is back up one step and ask why you care about engagement. Why is engagement valuable to your company? If you run an ad-based site, it might be as simple as page views. If you sell things, it’s how much does somebody buy, or do they subscribe, and then renew. Or maybe you want people to come to your restaurant or bar. “Engagement” itself is not the final metric. It has to correlate with something that puts money in the bank. Now we’ve taken a step beyond engagement. What we really want is some engagement-like score that correlates with a high-value customer. That’s a job for AI. Rather than assigning your own values to some limited list of factors, you start off with as many factors as you can imagine might be related to high-value customers. Be creative, because the thing that really matters might not be obvious. Then you let AI find the patterns and figure out what scores to assign to each factor, testing those scores against your actual goal, which is more page views, or more purchases, or visits to happy hour, or whatever it is you really want. If you’re interesting in pursuing something like this, give me a call. I can help you get started, and I have some friends who specialize in this sort of thing.

Sorry to be philosophical for a moment here, but it fits today’s topic. Human society needs two impulses: protection and exploration. Somebody needs to explore the great unknown, try the new food, make friends with the weird tribe on the other side of the river, and somebody needs to make sure we don’t burn the house down doing that stuff. This often plays out as the young against the old, which is a theme in an article Bo Sacks distributed last week called “‘Over-65s should be an advertiser’s dream’… so why aren’t they?” by Omar Oakes. People over 65 have money, and they spend it. People over 55 are two and a half times wealthier than the rest of the population. Isn’t that exactly what an advertiser wants? It turns out the older crowd is wise to your tricks. They don’t pay as much attention to advertising. But part of it might be that marketers are obsessed with young people. How many times have you heard a marketing expert talk about how to reach Gen Z? But as Bob Hoffman would point out, they don’t have any money. There’s much more to the article, so I’ll link it below and you can read it for yourself, but I want to get back to my theme, which is that a good marketing department needs creative, crazy new ideas – to find new markets and new approaches – but it also needs somebody to say “not so fast, Junior.” Think of the Metaverse. That was a stupid concept, and I’m glad I called that one early. But think of all the money that was wasted trying to make the Metaverse happen – investing in the Metaverse, buying NFTs for the Metaverse, reading endless articles about how to cash in on the Metaverse. “What are you doing about the Metaverse?” people would ask, and I’d say “I’ll ride there on my Segway, wearing my Google Glass.” As an old high school friend used to say, “meet you there.” Marketing conferences are all about how you should invest in the latest new gimmick – which, what a coincidence, is exactly what the speaker happens to do in his day job. The shiny new object is usually a piece of discarded aluminum foil from a hot pocket. But sometimes it’s a silver coin. How do you manage this? Hire the excitable young marketers who want to sell to Gen. Z and chase the latest craze, but make sure they report to a grizzled old skeptic who asks some simple questions like, “but do these people buy anything?” Resources ‘Over-65s should be an advertiser’s dream’… so why aren’t they? https://the-media-leader.com/over-65s-should-be-an-advertisers-dream-so-why-arent-they/ Dial back your expectations for the Metaverse https://krehbielgroup.com/2022/10/27/dial-back-your-expectations-for-the-metaverse/

I had the privilege of sitting down with Dave Schneider, the CEO of shortlist.io, to talk about SEO for publishers, and how artificial intelligence might disrupt the game. Dave encourages publishers to focus on creating good content for their audience but also recommends a backlink strategy to increase the authority of their content and brand. The conversation covered several interesting topics that publishers and media companies could benefit from. Learn more about Dave and the work he does at shortlist.io.

You probably spend a lot of effort to get new email addresses on file, because email is still a fantastic tool for keeping in touch with your audience. But how much effort – and money – is justified? To know this, you have to calculate the value of a new email address. To do this, follow these five steps. 1. Identify all the ways you make money from email. That could be … Ads in the email itself, Ads on web pages that the email sends people to, Direct sales You might have other sources of revenue too, like if you rent your list. 2. For each of these revenue streams, create some basic calculations. For example, let's say you're a subscription publisher and you sell new subscriptions through email. If the value of a new subscription is $500, and every campaign gets a 0.1% conversion rate, then every name on your list is worth 50 cents for each send. That raises the question, how many sends do you get out of a typical email address -- before that address becomes undeliverable. 3. Calculate the approximate life of a new email address. How long does a new email address last before the person unsubscribes, or the email otherwise becomes undeliverable. With those three steps you can make a decent estimate of the value of a new email address. But it gets more complicated. 4. Think about different ways you get new emails, and the different types of emails. Company emails vs. personal emails Emails you get with a paid transaction vs. emails you get from a free transaction. Different titles or categories of people behind those addresses. Some emails come in from different offers It’s somewhat obvious that each of these groups would have a different value. For example, a business email address that you acquire along with a subscription purchase is probably more valuable than a hotmail address someone gave you to get a free white paper. But how do you track that? You could use a customer data platform to get close to the right answer, but it’s a pretty big task, which leads to step 5. 5. Avoid Analysis paralysis The more you think about this question, the more categories and exceptions and caveats you'll discover. If you let it, it will drive you crazy. There are a hundred rabbit holes you can fall into. You have to get comfortable with the idea that close enough is close enough, and that not all efforts to collect email addresses will result in high-quality names. So if you decide that an email address is worth about $3, adjust your expectations up or down for different efforts.

Zain Kahn's "Superhuman" email says workers want to use ChatGPT, but bosses aren't so keen. Why? Don't they want people to be more productive? Of course they do, but there are some legit dangers in using ChatGPT. Which sent me on a bit of a search. What can go wrong? 1. Let's say you're a programmer and you can't get a certain routine to work right, so you upload it to ChatGPT and say "fix this for me." Yes, ChatGPT can do that sort of thing. But now you've uploaded your company's intellectual property, and possibly some trade secrets, to ChatGPT. The boss won't like that. 2. In a similar way, most companies have strict rules about how they manage their data, and they have to report on who has access and under what circumstances. ChatGPT is an invitation for some of that data to escape proper channels. 3. Sometimes ChatGPT makes stuff up. You don't want your employees relying on its answers. 4. ChatGPT doesn’t have the most current information. Version 3.5 is only updated through September 2021. 5. ChatGPT has a point of view that might differ from your company's point of view. Its answer might violate company policies or guidelines, or maybe even the law, like EEOC issues. Some state laws have placed limits on employee use of ChatGPT. 6. Employees might get lazy and become too reliant on easy answers from AI. These are all legit concerns, but some of them aren’t all that different from employees relying on other things they learn from the web – from a search, or from Reddit. I think the better approach is training and clear guidelines. Tell employees what they can and can’t post to AI chatbots, and why. Tell them what issues can and can’t be referred to ChatGPT. For example, you can’t have ChatGPT review a bunch of resumes because there are concerns about discrimination. Remind employees that the Chatbot is not the Enterprise computer and might be full of baloney. Remind them to check what they hear from the AI bots, just as they would any other source. It’s an interesting conundrum because ChatGPT is definitely a productivity enhancer, but it comes with some risks as well. Resources Employers Should Consider These Risks When Employees Use ChatGPT https://news.bloomberglaw.com/us-law-week/employers-should-consider-these-risks-when-employees-use-chatgpt

I recently learned about “Gall’s Law,” which is a principle in software development, but I think it’s far more applicable. I absolutely love it. It goes like this. “A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be patched up to make it work. You have to start over with a working simple system.” This reminds me of so many things. Organizational structures. Planned cities. Languages created by linguists, rather than by people who actually speak it. (Does anybody speak Esperanto?) Healthcare reform. Five or fifty or a hundred geniuses in a room will never invent something that actually works – if it’s a complicated system. You have to start with something simple that works in the real world. There are several reasons for this. One is that we don’t completely understand our own desires and motivations – let alone the desires and motivations of other people. But also … Complex systems have emergent properties that evolve from the real-world interactions of actual users. They’re not always predictable. Many of the success factors are simply unknowable. They’re too complex to predict. Feedback and iterative development is essential. Real world usage is better than somebody’s great idea. Practical constraints might limit scope. Building to address an actual need and then modifying the product based on feedback is going to beat making guesses. Here’s an example. People who know way more about video technology than I do say that betamax was a better format than VHS. So imagine 10 geniuses designing a complicated business around betamax, based on the premise that it’s the best format. The product would have failed because you have to start with something that works. Like VHS. Publishers often follow this rule with the MVP concept – that is, the minimal viable product. Start with something simple that works, then build on it. McDonald’s started with a very simple menu. Amazon started as a bookstore. Google started as a search engine. Facebook started as a networking platform at Harvard. By starting with a simple system that works, these companies gathered feedback, learned from users, and iterated gradually. This evolutionary approach allowed them to adapt, refine, and expand their services over time. The lesson is to start with simplicity. Gall's Law serves as a reminder to approach complex problems with a focus on simple solutions that work in the real world – and not only in some genius's mind.

On a recent “people vs. algorithms” podcast, the boys talks about “dark patterns.” I’m not sure where that phrase came from, but it refers to the tricks companies use to manipulate consumers to do something the company wants them to do. An example from the publishing world would be a very low introductory rate that autorenews at a much higher rate, and then making it hard to cancel before the renewal. Another would be the various tricky ways publishers make advertising dollars look like circulation dollars. On the web side of things we can see “dark patterns” in phony statistics about traffic, views, reach, and so on. Not only is most web traffic from bots, but sometimes you hear claims about users that would require every human on the planet to have seen something or done something. Here’s a quote from Brian Morrissey. The Federal Trade Commission [has] signaled a move against dark patterns … to show “how companies are increasingly using sophisticated design practices … that can trick or manipulate consumers into buying products or services or giving up their privacy.” The FTC goes on to name such horrors as disguising ads to look like independent content, making it difficult for consumers to cancel subscriptions or charges, burying key terms or junk fees, and tricking consumers into sharing their data.” Here’s the worst part of the quote. Morrissey says, “This sounds like just another day in the media business.” He’s exactly right. Too often it’s an adversarial relationship. Publishers need to quit doing this stuff. The wise man says “One who digs a pit will fall into it, And one who rolls a stone, it will come back on him.” But leaving karma aside, some people doubt publishing can survive without these dirty tricks. Maybe we’ll have a chance to find out about that, because it’s not just the FTC that’s coming down on these “dark patterns.” Apple is positioning itself as the defender of user privacy against these forces of wickedness in high places. It started with their initiative to block a sender’s ability to get meaningful open rates on emails, and it’s continuing with new efforts to block tracking codes. See the articles below for the details. Publishers will gnash their teeth, but hey … what goes around comes around. If publishers hadn’t been such sneaky bastards for decades, maybe they wouldn’t have this trouble now. But the past is the past. What do we do now? Here are three simple suggestions. Don’t try to hide the ugly parts of your offer. Make the offer plain and intelligible. Don’t make it hard to cancel. There’s nothing wrong with reminding people of what they’ll be missing, but don’t do something horrible like requiring people to call, or making people have to hire a detective to find the cancel process. Explain why you’re collecting customer data, and why it’s a benefit to the user for you to have that information. For example, let’s say you promote your e-newsletter on your website. There’s no point in promoting it to people who already get it, so it’s perfectly reasonable to set up some tracking and data capture for that purpose. Or how about a really simple rule, like do unto others as you would have them do unto you? Resources https://www.therebooting.com/p/dark-patterns https://www.niemanlab.org/2023/07/for-better-and-for-worse-apples-about-to-make-your-readers-harder-to-track-again/ https://painepublishing.com/measurementadvisor/your-guide-to-measuring-events-and-experiential-marketing/ https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/impressions-arent-impressing-anyone-katie-delahaye-paine/

Are you tired of changing your business because some programmer has tinkered with an algorithm? They say it’s for the sake of the users, but we all know it’s to increase their ad revenue. LinkedIn recently changed how they promote content on their site. They say they want to make our feeds more relevant and informative, not just “engaging and sticky,” and they don’t want to chase the latest “viral” content. According to the article I link below, there are two big changes. * It’s more likely that your followers will see your post. * Posts that share “knowledge and advice” are prioritized. How can an algorithm pick out “knowledge and advice”? Apparently they’re looking for people who are building a community around content. But … isn’t that a touch circular, since you can only build a community if people see your content in the first place? The article points to four things. * The post speaks to a distinct audience. LinkedIn looks at every post and asks “Who is this relevant to?” * The author is writing in his core subject area. LinkedIn evaluates whether you’re an authority on the topic. * The post has meaningful comments. Again, this seems like a chicken and egg problem, but I think the point is that they don’t want “true,” and “this is great,” and that sort of thing. * The post has a perspective. It’s not just generic goop. LinkedIn allegedly wants content creators to focus on reaching the right people with relevant content, rather than just reaching lots of people. I’ll believe it when I see it, I guess, but the larger question for me is whether content creators should allow themselves to be subject to platform rules and changing expectations. If you live by the algorithm, you die by the algorithm. Now I’m not into comics, but I heard a very interesting interview yesterday with Eric July, who has built his own empire that the tech platforms can’t destroy by suddenly changing their rules. He controls his entire process. That sounds very appealing – and exhausting. Most of us use platforms because we want to see what other people are doing and what they’re saying. We want to interact with them. But then people try to game the system, and the platforms have to respond. It’s a weird sort of a war, reminiscent of the SEO battles. My recommendation – and my personal strategy – is to use the platforms for their reach until you can build enough of a connection with your customers that you don’t need the platforms any more. Don’t build a long-term strategy that relies on the platforms, because when they change the rules, you’ll be in trouble. Resources LinkedIn Changed Its Algorithms – Here’s How your Posts Will Get More Attention Now https://www.entrepreneur.com/science-technology/linkedin-changed-its-algorithms-heres-how-your-posts/454728

Happy 4th of July!! Bo Sacks distributed an article by Peter Bale titled, "New book by Jeff Jarvis uses lessons from media’s print history to frame the digital future." It reminded me of a rather cynical communist I used to work with who said, "Freedom of the press, for everyone who can afford a press." Jarvis says the era of mass media is over, and he gives several reasons. There's no need for big, capital-intensive investments, whether in printing plants, TV studios, or distribution networks. All those things have been disrupted. We no longer need typing pools. Layout is getting easier all the time, and AI will continue to make it even easier, lowering the cost of entry into the market. Capital-intensive investments required scale. The new media landscape is very different. Desktop publishing brought about a surge in newsletter publishers, the internet allowed for blogs and digital publications, and AI is going to allow individual creators to have their own studios. Does Megyn Kelly or Tucker Carlson even need Fox News? The path forward, Jarvis says, is to rethink the value proposition and what service you are offering. I agree with that. Free commerce means people pay for things they want. He also says we need to stop thinking of the public as audience and start thinking of them as participant. At first that reminded me of the old 1970s nonsense about "everybody has something valuable to contribute." Whoever said that hasn't met everybody. Some people are morons. But that's not what he's saying. He's contrasting the mass-produced widget (or content) that's supposed to work for everybody with the personalized widget (or content) that does exactly what somebody needs. Jarvis says "we have to return to a time when we take individual responsibility for the credibility of what we read." I don't know when that time was -- content has always been curated -- but even if there was such a time, I don't think that's practical. We need reliable editors. Curators. He says “We delegated that responsibility to institutions that came along of editing and publishing a newspaper.” And yes, the institutions have proven to be garbage. But we'll still need trusted people to vet things for us. I simply don't have time to chase down the truth on every issue that interests me. As you might expect, he seems pretty down on print, and he has to be to make his case. We may not need huge newspapers any more, but creating a glossy magazine still requires some instrastructure, and people still like magazines, no matter what the tech boys tell you. We are definitely in a transition from print, through print plus digital, into something else, and Jarvis is one of the people who’s thinking ahead about those things. Resources New book by Jeff Jarvis uses lessons from media’s print history to frame the digital future https://www.inma.org/blogs/newsroom-initiative/post.cfm/new-book-by-jeff-jarvis-uses-lessons-from-media-s-print-history-to-frame-the-digital-future

Charlotte Tobitt wrote an interesting article called “How to keep subscribers: What’s working at Hearst, Immediate and Mark Allen Group,” which Bo Sacks distributed recently. It’s not one of those annoying mystery articles. She gets to it right away with three things: “Friendly friction; personal phone calls, and positive reinforcement.” The first example is from Gardeners’ World Premium, which offers exclusive digital content, including expert advice, a monthly Q&A, ad-free podcasts, videos, newsletters, discounts, and competitions. It’s £4.99 a month but it’s also free for all print subscribers. I’m curious whether they try to drive people to the digital content from the print magazine, because generally speaking that’s a hard thing to do. You can use QR codes and such, but when people are reading a magazine they seem to be in non-digital mode, so those efforts don’t alway work well. However they’re doing it, the online service not only adds value to the print subscription, but creates a way to measure engagement, and also creates a way to personalize content for the reader. Half of their print magazine subscribers have unlocked this online premium offer, and that group renews at nine percentage points higher. The numbers get better depending on how engaged people are with the online content. Immediate Media, which owns Gardeners’ World, has tried similar options with its other brands. Next we have Seema Kumari, the senior director of consumer marketing and CRM at Hearst, who suggests using such “positive reinforcement” as reminding people about their engagement with your product. For example, they tell subscribers how many newsletters they have opened and how many stories they have read. She says people love it, which surprises me, because it might also sound a little creepy. Seema also encourages “friendly friction” in the cancel process, and refers to how Audible keeps winning her back, when she tries to cancel, with the offer of a free credit. Audible also reminds subscribers how much they use the service. Finally Tony Hill from the Mark Allen Group recommends something straight out of 1950, which is picking up the phone and calling subscribers as they approach their renewal date. The conversation is not about the renewal. It’s just a chat on a subject the subscriber is likely to care about. According to their tracking, people will get off the phone and renew from some letter that’s been sitting on their desk for a few months. My key takeaway from all of this is that engagement is the key to renewals. You can’t wait until the end of the year and try to get people to renew based on your genius marketing copy. You need to start the renewal process early with a focus on engagement. Links How to keep subscribers: What’s working at Hearst, Immediate and Mark Allen Group https://pressgazette.co.uk/publishers/subscriber-retention-hearst-immediate-mark-allen-audible-spotify/

I saw this headline: “How ELLE is using a dynamic paywall and continuous optimization to increase subscriber conversion rates.” That’s an article by Pierre de Villiers, distributed by Bo Sacks. This is another article that came out of the FIPP World Media Congress, which some rich sponsor needs to send me to next year. ELLE’s paywall strategy came out of three strategic challenges. * Diversify revenue * Enlarge the audience * Make them younger I’m very interested in how they made people younger. ELLE worked with Poool, which is a French startup that focuses on audience conversion strategies and gives publishers the tools to monetise their content. Poool has found that half of a site’s visitors never see premium content, and therefore never see the offer for the paywall. Note that this assumes a certain paywall model, so I’m going to take a minute and summarize the major paywall models. A hard paywall restricts access to most or all of a website's content. With a metered paywall, users get some number of views before they get the subscription offer. The freemium model offers a combination of free and premium content. Some articles or content are freely accessible to all users, while others are restricted to subscribers. That’s the type ELLE used. A dynamic paywall uses a flexible approach to restrict access based on various factors. Smart publishers should connect a dynamic paywall with AI, to figure out what those factors should be. An article pass, or maybe a one-day ticket, allows users to pay for a particular article, or access the site for a very limited period of time. This is similar to pay-per-view. A membership or subscription bundle might grant early access to content, ad-free browsing, or special community features. Finally, there’s the hybrid model, which isn’t a model at all, but a collection of some of these other options. ELLE’s challenge was to get more people to see the subscription offer, because they were using a freemium model, which means some people might never see the premium content, and therefore they wouldn’t see the paywall offer. They did this by promoting premium content – very visibly – with a call to action. Another challenge is making sure people actually see the paywall offer once they get to the premium content. This is a question of balancing frustration and engagement. You want to engage the user enough to view the content, but then you frustrate them with the paywall. ELLE’s editorial team works to ensure that the premium article is eye-catching and compelling. They also found a few very interesting techniques for better conversion. * Move the paywall up the webpage * Change the paywall regularly – like the color of it * Adapt the paywall to the user’s level of engagement, their location, and whether they’re on mobile or desktop * Shrink the registration page and make sure it’s just one page Links How ELLE is using a dynamic paywall and continuous optimisation to increase subscriber conversion rates https://www.fipp.com/news/how-elle-is-using-a-dynamic-paywall-and-continuous-optimisation-to-increase-subscriber-conversion-rates/ Poool https://www.poool.fr/products/dynamic-wall Bo Sacks https://www.bosacks.com/

A few episodes back I applied the Gartner Hype Cycle to AI. (I’ll provide a link below to that article.) I thought we were still climbing towards the peak of expectations, but there are signs we might already be heading towards the trough of disillusionment. At least with large language models. In fact, I might be late to that party. Wired had an article back in April titled “OpenAI’s CEO Says the Age of Giant AI Models Is Already Over.” (Link below.) Sam Altman – he’s the CEO just mentioned – says the research strategy that led to ChatGPT is already played out, and people will need to come up with new ideas to move things forward. Simply building bigger models is not an option. The costs are enormous, and there are diminishing returns. "Nick Frosst, a cofounder at Cohere who previously worked on AI at Google, … says that new AI model designs, or architectures, and further tuning based on human feedback are promising directions that many researchers are already exploring." But don’t count on it being under the Christmas tree. Tech advances don’t arrive predictably, or on schedule. So what do we do right now? AI is already here, and it’s already disrupting the publishing business. We need to build based on what we have, warts and all. Large language models aren't perfect. They still hallucinate, and say stupid things from time to time. But even at that, ChatGPT is pretty useful. Here’s an example of what publishers can do now. Skift built an AI chatbot for their site based on ChatGPT. It took off with a bang, but that might just have been curiosity over the new shiny object. They’ll be incorporating it into their subscription offering. You get three queries for free, but then you have to sign up. The interesting thing about that story is that it didn’t cost hundreds of millions of dollars, as ChatGPT did. It took two programmers eight weeks. They’ll have to tinker and refine, because it still has some limitations, but that’s not an insurmountable cost. Publishers should be able to manage that. As I argued in a previous podcast, publishers need to start doing this. Readers are going to expect answers to their questions, not just a bunch of articles. But don't make the mistake of assuming that ChatGPT, or Midjourney, define AI. There are still a lot of things coming, so it's possible we'll see waves of Gartner Hype Cycles stacked on top of one another as different iterations of AI come on the scene. Links OpenAI’s CEO Says the Age of Giant AI Models Is Already Over https://www.wired.com/story/openai-ceo-sam-altman-the-age-of-giant-ai-models-is-already-over/ AI and the Gartner Hype Cycle https://krehbielgroup.com/2023/06/16/ai-and-the-gartner-hype-cycle/ Collect data today for AI wonders tomorrow https://krehbielgroup.com/2023/06/20/collect-data-today-for-ai-wonders-tomorrow/

Yesterday I saw a post on LinkedIn from Jay Schwedelson with an interesting ChatGPT prompt, as follows. Repurpose the Newsletter below into a: Top 10 Checklist 7 Pitfalls to Avoid List Quick Start Guide with 8 Bulleted Ideas Linkedin Post with Less than 100 Words Twitter Post with Less than 280 Characters Blog post with less than 500 words Script for TikTok Post And here is the newsletter to repurpose PASTE NEWSLETTTER HERE!!! I tried it, except for the TikTok part, because I’m a grown up. This idea is useful to me because I create a daily podcast, do a weekly e-newsletter, and produce a monthly print newsletter. If you haven’t signed up yet, please do. I don’t want to put the same exact content in each medium, but I also don’t want to have to create brand new content each time. Using a prompt like this, I can feed ChatGPT the script of my daily podcast and get a lot of ideas about how to transform that content for my e-newsletter. I didn’t particularly love any of the responses I got from AI, but it’s not too much work to take the top 10 checklist, the 7 pitfalls to avoid, and the 8 bullets in the quick start guide to come up with my own checklist. I can use that list in my e-newsletter. This general strategy gives me an idea for all the content I’m creating for publishers. The podcast can have one format – more of a narrative. The e-newsletter can focus on practical bullet points. I’d like the print newsletter to focus on strategic insights, frameworks, mental models, and that sort of thing. If you know of a tool that helps to create those, please let me know. My go to for this sort of thing is to do some Google image searches for “strategic frameworks” and such and glean ideas from the images I find. That works decently well. Now here’s a final word from Jay. ChatGPT is super useful as the start of content creation or repurposing. It is rarely the final product. Leveraging it for repurposing content into various forms is a fantastic way to scale your marketing programs...and it spurs lots of new ideas. I agree with that, although I’d adjust it just slightly to say “marketing and editorial programs.”

Today marks the 50th episode of my “Something I Learned Yesterday” podcast, so … I guess I’ve learned 50 things. And if you’ve been coming along for the ride, so have you. So congrats. Bo Sacks distributed an article by Matt Turner titled “A top CMO reveals how AI is going to change sales and marketing across every company within 12 months.” It paints a nice picture of marketers using AI to create individualized ad campaigns, “where each potential customer receives a different message at a different time that’s tailored to their needs and behaviors.” It’s time to start planning for that now, because AI isn’t magic. You can’t just say, “hey, AI, make some individualized messages for these people.” “Based on what?” the robot will reply. Start thinking now about what kind of data you’ll want to have in place to power these lovely AI customizations. And this doesn’t only apply to marketing. It applies to content creation as well. You’ll want a few different kinds of data. The simplest is behavioral data on your website. How people found your site, what they did when they got there, what topics they read about, whether they commented on articles, and so forth. You’ll also want to track how they interact with your brand in email and on social media. You might consider collecting what some people call “zero party data” through polls, questions, surveys, and so on. If it’s possible, you might use 3rd-party sources to get additional information about your market. All this data will have to be stored in a central repository where it’s all tied to an individual, so you can link it all together. That’s what customer data platforms do. But you have to start with some use cases. What do you want to collect, and what do you want to do with it? So let’s walk through an example. I’m a homebrewer, so let’s say I owned a website that sells homebrewing supplies and equipment. There are all sorts of things I would want to know about my customers. Is he a hobbyist or a professional? (I’m saying “he” just because it’s easier, not because homebrewers are all men.) Does he do extract brewing or all-grain brewing? Does he have the equipment to do lagering, or does he stick with ales? How often does he brew? Does he brew with friends? Is he a member of a club? Etc. But more important than that, I need to think about what I’m going to do with information. Someone who’s in a homebrew club is probably going to be a better customer than someone who isn’t, so I could give discounts to club members. Then I could start to form relationships with the clubs, find out where they operate geographically, and even promote club membership to customers based on their location. There are a hundred things to do, but my point today is that if you want to make whizbang customized AI wonders for your market, you need to start thinking about that now, and start collecting that data now, so when you get the technology, you’ll have the data you need to create the customizations you want. By the way, if you need help with this sort of planning – coming up with your own use cases for your market – that’s what I’m here for. Give me a call. Links https://www.businessinsider.com/twilio-cmo-says-ai-will-change-sales-marketing-2023-6

Last week Bo Sacks distributed an article with the compelling headline, “Barry Adams on why AI will not kill SEO.” That piqued my curiosity because I have said that AI threatens to disrupt Google’s business. Once people can simply get an answer, rather than getting a list of homework to do, they won’t be following links to webpages quite as much. Note that these are two slightly different but related questions. I was addressing whether AI would disrupt the search engine business while Barry is addressing whether AI will make SEO irrelevant. Barry makes three main arguments. First, the AI engines require more work. You have to write a longer, more detailed prompt to get what you want. People are used to writing very brief queries in Google. So it’s better for lazy people. I’m not buying that. People have learned to write short queries in Google, but they can learn to write longer queries. Also, a little bit of work up front, writing a better query, eliminates a lot of work sorting through all the pages you get in the response. Second, Barry says the large language models don’t have access to current information on the web. News publishers are (generally) promoting current content. This makes news more valuable rather than less valuable, because it’s the information people can’t get through AI search. That is a very good point. Access to recent information will continue to be moderated by search engines, so it will still be important for people who produce recent content to optimize for search. Third, Barry points out that the large language models are not intended to create factual representations of the real world. They’re just predictive text. They make stuff up. And you can influence the answer you’ll get by the way you frame the question. That’s true, but (1) the AI people are working on fixing that, and (2) for many types of search, what you get from the large language model is quite good enough. Barry does say something towards the end of the podcast that is very good advice for publishers. Think beyond Google. Get loyalty. Build a brand, so you’re not dependent on Google or any other platform. That’s good advice. I stick to my original prediction that ChatGPT and similar services will disrupt Google’s business. Barry is right that search will continue to be relevant, particularly for recent content, but I think the large language models will take a very large bite out of the search engine business. Links Big Noises: Barry Adams on why AI will not kill SEO https://voices.media/big-noises-barry-adams-on-why-ai-will-not-kill-seo/ Is Google in danger of being displaced? https://krehbielgroup.com/2023/06/16/is-google-in-danger-of-being-displaced/