Latest / #ContentChat / 2/23/26 #ContentChat: The State of Content Strategy

Transcript

2/23/26 #ContentChat: The State of Content Strategy · #ContentChat

• 0:01
  SPEAKER_02: Good afternoon and welcome to Content Chat.
• 0:04
  SPEAKER_02: I'm your host, Erica Heald.
• 0:06
  SPEAKER_02: And today we have a special guest, Robert Rose, somebody who I love getting into those kinds of weedy conversations in the corner of a conference, uh conference soiree, bourbons in hand.
• 0:21
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, we've had many of those conversations over the years, and this is gonna be kind of like one of those conversations.
• 0:29
  SPEAKER_00: It's gonna be geeky up in here for sure.
• 0:30
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, it's gonna be hella geeky because we're hearing everybody just is having a really rough time with figuring out what they should be doing content-wise when it feels like that content strategy that they spend all that time on, they can't execute against it, or it just doesn't feel right.
• 0:47
  SPEAKER_02: But before we dig in, Robert, why don't you share a little bit about who you are and what you do for people uh listening to the podcast or watching on YouTube who maybe don't already know you as well as I do.
• 0:58
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, sure.
• 0:59
  SPEAKER_01: I'll be very, very quick.
• 1:00
  SPEAKER_01: I'm I'm basically uh hi everybody.
• 1:02
  SPEAKER_01: I'm uh Robert Rose.
• 1:04
  SPEAKER_01: And and basically I work with brands of all sizes these days.
• 1:08
  SPEAKER_01: It used to be typically larger organizations, but even today we can see that evolving to even smaller and medium-sized businesses that are looking to optimize the way that they work with their marketing, which is ostensibly becoming more of a content uh-centered strategy, right?
• 1:26
  SPEAKER_01: So over the last we've seen 10 years, we've seen content become really the center of marketing, whether that's on your owned media, whether it's paid media, whether it's earned media, shared media across the gamut of different surfaces that we place that content on.
• 1:41
  SPEAKER_01: But certainly the rise of AI and everything has certainly uh changed the way that the operation and what we like to call the orchestration of content happens these days in any business.
• 1:52
  SPEAKER_01: And my role is typically to uh to help those organizations think those things through from a marketing strategy, communication strategy perspective, those operations, those orchestrations.
• 2:02
  SPEAKER_01: And yes, along the way, I've written a couple of books and also host a podcast and am generally pretty pretty prolific on LinkedIn and that sort of thing.
• 2:14
  SPEAKER_02: Love it.
• 2:16
  SPEAKER_02: Well, you're also pretty prolific with still um writing for the Content Marketing Institute website.
• 2:21
  SPEAKER_02: And I've been following along.
• 2:23
  SPEAKER_02: You just did um a four-part series kind of on this topic today of you know, what's really changed.
• 2:30
  SPEAKER_02: And something that you said that just, you know, it makes me happy and I recognize it makes a lot of other people hella nervous, is you know, content used to be about, you know, creating tons of tons of SEO optimized pages for your website and creating those gated assets and all this, you know, baloney um that was supposed to push people through the funnel.
• 2:53
  SPEAKER_02: But now finally, it's really changing and we're being measured on outcomes and you know, having something that we can reliably say content is how we really, you know, won this business.
• 3:06
  SPEAKER_02: This is how we built that relationship over time.
• 3:08
  SPEAKER_02: And to me, I love this shift, but a lot of folks really struggle because it is really different to go from being beholden to creating those, you know, 48 blog posts a year to having to, you know, actually have the business impact.
• 3:25
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, it's you know, it's it's an I mean, look, you know, it it it's it's been I think maybe 35 seconds, 40 seconds since we've talked about AI.
• 3:35
  SPEAKER_01: So yeah, so basically that is the sort of elephant in the room, as it were, and it has really gotten this all wrapped around the axle of what how marketing and communications and business is generally changing.
• 3:47
  SPEAKER_01: And certainly generative AI in that perspective has really created something I'm I'm calling the beige wall, um, which is ostensibly when everybody knows everything, when you know you can basically get the answers, the value of us putting those answers, those frequently asked questions and those that knowledge out really starts to move to zero pretty quickly here.
• 4:12
  SPEAKER_01: And you know, we talk a lot about answer engine optimization and being the answer and being found and being all discovered.
• 4:19
  SPEAKER_01: And the old paradigm was you would put your answer out, and it was scarce because it was your answer, but now it's it's just there.
• 4:27
  SPEAKER_01: It's that's you've got the answer engine optimization summarizing it all for you.
• 4:32
  SPEAKER_01: And so the value we have to create now is in deepening trust and in deepening alignment with the audiences that we are uh that you know that we're trying to attract in.
• 4:42
  SPEAKER_01: And and increasingly what that means is finding the things that will enable us to become part and add value to a community rather than sort of shouting into it.
• 4:54
  SPEAKER_01: And I sort of talk about this idea of moving from this monolith messaging, which is what we have aligned on for as content marketers and content strategists forever, sort of taking the brand message that is this monolith message, and taking that and basically creating those 48 blog posts or creating those email newsletters and creating all of that stuff to align with all of that and being measured on how much attention did it get.
• 5:20
  SPEAKER_01: And increasingly we have to move to a different way of thinking, which is we are there to figure out what individual audiences need and add value to those communities and move from those communities to communities to communities to become part of them, to become, you know, basically part of our audience's ecosystem.
• 5:41
  SPEAKER_01: And and that's just a different job than we've than we've had, certainly in in content and and even more broadly in marketing.
• 5:51
  SPEAKER_02: Well, I mean, that's why so many companies haven't even had those customer advisory boards in the past.
• 5:58
  SPEAKER_02: Like I thought, because I worked at Schwab for 10 years, you know, as a fairly young marketer, I went out into the world and I thought, surely every company has these, you know, advisory boards because you obviously want to know the struggles that your customers are facing and get their input and be putting out content that, you know, not just speaks to them, but uses their own language and shares their own stories.
• 6:24
  SPEAKER_02: And then, of course, I found out that that was an outlier.
• 6:28
  SPEAKER_02: Um, but it seems like we're moving towards where you have to know your customers really, really well and you have to be making helping them see themselves in the content you're creating.
• 6:41
  SPEAKER_02: Otherwise, they're not going to consume it, let alone share it, let alone tell somebody how wonderful they think you are.
• 6:46
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 6:47
  SPEAKER_01: It's the, it's the, it's, I mean, if you think about it, it it is, it goes back to our roots in content marketing, which is providing content that is actually valuable to the audience that you are, you know, despite you know, the the brand or the product or the service that you're actually selling in the marketplace.
• 7:04
  SPEAKER_01: It is the development of content that is truly valuable to that audience, to that community.
• 7:10
  SPEAKER_01: And the way things have really changed is that we have to even separate ourselves further from sort of that monolithic sort of buy now, sell now, calls to action, all those different kinds of things, which was a much shallower sea, if you will, in the you know, 10 years ago.
• 7:29
  SPEAKER_01: Now we have to get deep with value of content.
• 7:33
  SPEAKER_01: And that means it looks a lot different.
• 7:36
  SPEAKER_01: Those content experiences look a lot different than simple blog posts that sort of, oh, they kind of align with our product, or they kind of align with our brand, or they kind of that we now we have to really go out there and create distinctive pieces that are going to resonate with those audiences in very discrete ways.
• 7:56
  SPEAKER_01: You know, I use the example of ELF Cosmetics, right?
• 7:59
  SPEAKER_01: Is it's a great example of this.
• 8:01
  SPEAKER_01: They're doing a great job of they show up very differently on the content that they create for Twitch, for example, which is all about you know, women empowerment and gaming and and all of those kinds of things.
• 8:13
  SPEAKER_01: And we're there with you, we're part of your team.
• 8:15
  SPEAKER_01: We're, you know, and it's all about gaming, of course.
• 8:18
  SPEAKER_01: And then how they show up on Instagram is completely different.
• 8:21
  SPEAKER_01: It's all it's lifestyle, it's fun, it's it's very interesting.
• 8:24
  SPEAKER_01: So how they're showing up in these various places is a very different story and very different value depending on where they're trying to move to.
• 8:33
  SPEAKER_02: And what's interesting to me about all of this is it is sort of an evolution of how for a while we saw so many brands trying to become media companies.
• 8:41
  SPEAKER_02: Right.
• 8:41
  SPEAKER_02: So we saw obviously Red Bull's the big consumer one, but Salesforce, they had this huge push because I they've been clients for both of us.
• 8:51
  SPEAKER_02: Um, so we both have seen behind the curtain there and seen how much of a big push they put towards having that kind of magazine experience on the website, having their TV channel, all that kind of stuff.
• 9:04
  SPEAKER_02: Um, and that was what everyone aspired to.
• 9:07
  SPEAKER_02: But I don't feel like, especially on the B2B side, I don't feel like people wanted that from their B2B folks.
• 9:14
  SPEAKER_02: They want great quality content, but they don't want another media experience because we're not going back to turning on ABC at you know seven o'clock on Wednesdays and watching for three hours.
• 9:25
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 9:26
  SPEAKER_02: We're used to streaming, we're used to binging, we're used to getting things in the exact format we want.
• 9:31
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 9:32
  SPEAKER_01: Well, and well, I think what I I might think of there is that they might want an depending on the audience, and and I, you know, certainly Salesforce is a great example of this where another media experience about the best practices of CRM is probably not, you know, like it's nobody needs another, you know, how to to do, you know, marketing automation or Salesforce automation, right?
• 9:56
  SPEAKER_01: A little better.
• 9:57
  SPEAKER_01: Um, so the media experience part of that might be might be okay, right?
• 10:02
  SPEAKER_01: In other words, if you could find a way to do content that is truly engaging on whatever platform, whether it's a shared media platform like an Instagram or a LinkedIn or even on a on an owned media platform, like a like you know, like their duplicate of Netflix that they tried to do, you might find something, but it's the story there, it's the content there that is important, right?
• 10:24
  SPEAKER_01: It's not just the that, it's finding that level of depth.
• 10:27
  SPEAKER_01: And I think to your point, another media experience typically lands in the fact of, well, another media experience is going to be expensive, therefore it needs to be as broad an audience as possible.
• 10:38
  SPEAKER_01: So you look at Salesforce's media experience as a great example of that, right?
• 10:42
  SPEAKER_01: It had to be hugely broad in order to scale the right way it needed to scale for the entire company.
• 10:50
  SPEAKER_01: When in actuality, they probably would have been better off in the long run, because this is certainly decisions that are made in real time, really getting into value niches with you know very specific audiences and becoming part of that community.
• 11:05
  SPEAKER_01: So why you can see the you know the move toward getting into Reddit, getting into you know other channels, getting into closed communities where our audiences are gathering and becoming part of those communities, especially you know, as we can.
• 11:20
  SPEAKER_02: I could not agree with that more because you know, nobody wants another monolith, nobody wants you know, another vaguely representative uh of what they're doing kind of uh place to go.
• 11:33
  SPEAKER_02: But when you do find that amazing niche community it that has all these tools and resources and things that you're like, oh my gosh, I can't wait to look at this.
• 11:41
  SPEAKER_02: You are gonna really dive in.
• 11:43
  SPEAKER_02: You know, for me, um, you know, on my my like fun project is my gluten-free blog.
• 11:49
  SPEAKER_02: And so I'm a member of the Food Blogger Pro community, and they have an amazing library of all sorts of conversations and tools and things.
• 11:58
  SPEAKER_02: I, whenever I go to their site, I spend hours there.
• 12:01
  SPEAKER_02: Hours.
• 12:02
  SPEAKER_02: And it's because it is 100% just focused on that specific niche.
• 12:08
  SPEAKER_02: So it is really, you know, something to think about.
• 12:12
  SPEAKER_02: What you can what you care about about enough that you know your audience cares about enough that they will want to spend that time.
• 12:20
  SPEAKER_01: That's exactly right.
• 12:21
  SPEAKER_01: And that's the challenge that we have.
• 12:23
  SPEAKER_01: And this is really the reason our job has changed so much, is because those things don't scale well, right?
• 12:31
  SPEAKER_01: They don't, they don't actually, they don't actually figure out a way to, you know, to sort of scale up to become, you know, one of three platforms that we have, or one, you know, so we're gonna end up with a portfolio that is much more diverse in sort of its its niche audiences that it's trying to address and the stories that it's trying to, you know, tell in each of those niche areas.
• 12:53
  SPEAKER_01: And so our job becomes a lot more complex in a world where we just don't scale very neatly, and it becomes less efficient and it becomes more, you know, more in need of human, you know, taste and discernment and all of those things that are kind of the counter-narrative right now to what we see with AI, with basically saying scale up your story in minutes and scale your story this way and tell tell it in 14 different ways that way, and you know, it's all automated and just send an AI agent out and it'll build your entire blog for you.
• 13:26
  SPEAKER_01: It's like, yeah, that's fine, but it's not gonna do anything.
• 13:29
  SPEAKER_02: It's like no, because the AI doesn't have any lived experiences, they don't have those crazy anecdotes, you know.
• 13:34
  SPEAKER_02: They they don't have that practical knowledge, they just have pretty bland basic capabilities, and that scaffolding might be okay for building a story around, but it's not publishable.
• 13:48
  SPEAKER_01: Exactly.
• 13:49
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, exactly.
• 13:50
  SPEAKER_01: And it's and it's and that becomes our focus, right?
• 13:53
  SPEAKER_01: As we as we sit inside our company and we're trying to figure out, okay, what do we do next?
• 13:59
  SPEAKER_01: Like what what how do we how do we organize ourselves and how do we do ourselves next?
• 14:04
  SPEAKER_01: The answer becomes a a little bit of we need to think more like a media company, but it's not necessarily how do we come, you know, the next universal with the next Marvel universe.
• 14:15
  SPEAKER_01: It is how do we become that niche, artisanal sort of place where a few customers will trust us deeply as becoming the source for the thing, like you know, like your blog is for you?
• 14:28
  SPEAKER_01: Like, how do we become that, that trusted source of interesting things for a small number?
• 14:34
  SPEAKER_01: And then the big question becomes how do I stitch all those little communities into something bigger that actually does work at scale?
• 14:42
  SPEAKER_01: Um, because obviously I have to, you know, I've got revenue to get and you know, profitability to maintain and all of those kinds of things.
• 14:50
  SPEAKER_02: Um, I just this just triggered for me, you know, usually in the past, when um Edelman would release their trust barometer, we would see a lot of people talking about it.
• 15:02
  SPEAKER_02: But this year, I really did not see that many people talking about it.
• 15:07
  SPEAKER_02: And I wonder if that's because we know how little trust there is in the world.
• 15:15
  SPEAKER_02: So it feels like it's a moot point now.
• 15:18
  SPEAKER_02: We know that we can't trust things that are being published on official channels or being shared.
• 15:25
  SPEAKER_02: We can't trust video, we can't trust photography, we can't trust words out of people's mouths.
• 15:30
  SPEAKER_02: So it was funny because we obviously have a trust problem.
• 15:34
  SPEAKER_02: Um, but that didn't get any, um, didn't really get as much traction as the Forester content intelligence report.
• 15:42
  SPEAKER_02: And I thought to myself, Robert must just be going, mm-hmm, content intelligence.
• 15:47
  SPEAKER_02: Now Forrester's talking about it.
• 15:50
  SPEAKER_02: A decade after we launched the content, you know, the content tech conference, and we're trying to talk to people about content intelligence.
• 15:58
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, it's uh uh yes.
• 16:01
  SPEAKER_00: Yes, yes, yes to what you just said.
• 16:04
  SPEAKER_00: Um, I mean, I'm shocked.
• 16:05
  SPEAKER_01: I are you so are you suggesting that I might take some of those companies to task for um you know, look, I am a I am an avowed and previously stated huge fan of the Eidelman Trust Barometer.
• 16:18
  SPEAKER_01: I think this is one of the the coolest projects that has existed for us long, and kudos to them for keeping it going as long as they have.
• 16:25
  SPEAKER_01: I think you're exactly right.
• 16:27
  SPEAKER_01: I think we're all like, we could probably just safely write the LinkedIn post now that trust is at its lowest level ever because we we kind of don't need them to tell us that this year.
• 16:37
  SPEAKER_01: Um however, I will tell you, I did go read it because I do every year, and it's really good.
• 16:44
  SPEAKER_01: It's really good this year.
• 16:45
  SPEAKER_01: There's really, there's really some good, some good insight uh in it this year.
• 16:49
  SPEAKER_01: And but I think you're exactly right about we don't need them to tell us that this happening.
• 16:54
  SPEAKER_02: What I think is always the most interesting um kind of chart that they have every year is the ranking different kinds of people and you know who they think is um more trustworthy.
• 17:08
  SPEAKER_02: And I think it was last year that government officials were ranked as more trustworthy than the media and a bunch of other folks.
• 17:16
  SPEAKER_02: And I was just like, are you kidding me?
• 17:18
  SPEAKER_02: Are you kidding me?
• 17:20
  SPEAKER_02: Um, I thought that was just astonishing, but then I I thought about it more, and I'm like, oh, it's also because people are considering a much wider swath of humanity to be the media than I would because I have a journalism degree.
• 17:37
  SPEAKER_02: I went to school for journalism, and what I consider to be journalists and the media is not what you know my partner's mom might consider to be the media.
• 17:48
  SPEAKER_02: She has a much broader uh definition of that.
• 17:51
  SPEAKER_02: So maybe that's part of it too.
• 17:53
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I I think so.
• 17:55
  SPEAKER_01: I I think so.
• 17:56
  SPEAKER_01: I think we're all look, we're all struggling with this, right?
• 18:00
  SPEAKER_01: We're all wrestling with this right now.
• 18:02
  SPEAKER_01: Nobody, you know, it it it it always amuses me how much on all the platforms we see so much certainty about what's going to happen, right?
• 18:11
  SPEAKER_01: You know, out there.
• 18:12
  SPEAKER_01: And and you know, even I mean, even over the weekend, you know, you had Sam Altman basically saying, well, you know, training costs for humans, you know, you have to you have to feed them, you know.
• 18:24
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, you know, I mean, there's a lot of there's a lot of there's a lot riding on the certainty of you know the future with regards to technology and and and all of the kinds of things.
• 18:36
  SPEAKER_01: And, you know, we're we are at the end of the day, marketers, our whole job is to try and predict the future as much as we possibly can to help guide clients or our you know bosses or our teams, you know, our boards, our senior management teams through a marketplace.
• 18:54
  SPEAKER_01: And and so we're inherently born to try and figure all this stuff out, but nobody does, right?
• 19:00
  SPEAKER_01: We're all dealing with this as it comes, and we really don't know what's going to happen.
• 19:06
  SPEAKER_01: So the best thing we can do is just react to what we have today.
• 19:11
  SPEAKER_01: Like re, you know, we have the ability to look and see where we are today, navigate for the future that we can see in front of us, and basically the the rest of it just has to, you know, just has to become trying to figure out our senses the best we can.
• 19:29
  SPEAKER_02: And that for me is why I've really doubled down on the whole content governance and helping cut you know clients build those content foundations.
• 19:38
  SPEAKER_02: Because if you don't have your defined brand voice, if you hadn't haven't put that stake in the ground about this is who you are and what you're trying to do with your content, this is who you're trying to reach, if you don't have all of that in place, you're just gonna be chasing after random topics, you're not gonna be able to build that trust because you're not gonna have any consistency, especially once you start using tools.
• 19:58
  SPEAKER_02: Because if you layer in tools when you don't have any documentation in place or any guardrails, you're just gonna get a bunch of crap.
• 20:06
  SPEAKER_02: And that's what we saw with the Super Bowl.
• 20:08
  SPEAKER_01: That's it.
• 20:09
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, that's that's so it, right?
• 20:11
  SPEAKER_01: Because in a world where we don't know, we have to have a standard.
• 20:14
  SPEAKER_01: We have to create the standard, right?
• 20:16
  SPEAKER_01: And this is why we focus so hard on governance and and workflow and understanding the true process by which we make our communications in business.
• 20:26
  SPEAKER_01: Because, you know, as was famously said, um, you know, with no standard, there can be no improvement, right?
• 20:33
  SPEAKER_01: If you don't know what you're doing and how your business does it, you can't improve upon it.
• 20:38
  SPEAKER_01: Therefore, anything is the right answer and everything is the wrong answer because there is no right standard to improve upon.
• 20:46
  SPEAKER_01: And so getting that part right, understanding just the basic mechanics of how your organization communicates and how it might standardize that and create a governance plan for doing that is such a smart thing to do because it gives you then the foundation to say, where might AI be improve this process?
• 21:09
  SPEAKER_01: Where might better content actually impact and move the needle?
• 21:13
  SPEAKER_01: Where might we have a skills gap or a knowledge gap or an insight gap where measurement is important?
• 21:19
  SPEAKER_01: And you start being able to answer all the questions that you want to be able to predict the future about, but can't because you have no standard on which to base it.
• 21:27
  SPEAKER_02: And can you imagine how so many people have just gone out, they've implemented AI in their organizations, told everyone to use those tools, and don't have any of that in place, which means they're relying upon a billionaire who doesn't know anything about them or their customers to have decided that for that, to have been the arbiter of this is what good looks like.
• 21:49
  SPEAKER_02: And you know, that's why AI gives such horrible results if you don't give it, you know, if you haven't trained it on your company and your standards, because no, you know, the person who trained.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_02: AI did not care about your company or you.
• 22:02
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 22:03
  SPEAKER_01: It's you get you end up with the situation that I see a lot now, which is you get teams sitting around a table, they've they've gotten their, you know, their their typical 360-degree review template, you know, form in their inbox that says, okay, you're supposed to rate yourself and tell, you know, tell us how you did so that we can grade you for a promotion or for all of that.
• 22:23
  SPEAKER_01: And the newest one is tell us how AI has basically made you 10% more effective or made you, and so everybody's just going, Well, uh, I used Copilot yesterday.
• 22:33
  SPEAKER_01: That was kind of cool.
• 22:34
  SPEAKER_01: I get met made me 5% more.
• 22:36
  SPEAKER_01: I'm checking the box.
• 22:37
  SPEAKER_01: You know, so it's like we're we're we're doing the thing that marketers are really good at.
• 22:43
  SPEAKER_01: We're gaming the system to make it work for us, depending on how the system is made.
• 22:48
  SPEAKER_02: And it's funny because, like, if you are being smart about it, you know, AI is gonna be really helpful for doing your job, but not for doing the creative parts of your job.
• 22:58
  SPEAKER_02: That's you.
• 22:58
  SPEAKER_02: You, that's why they hired a human being to do it in the first place.
• 23:02
  SPEAKER_02: That's where we're valuable.
• 23:04
  SPEAKER_02: But things like I don't write the recaps for doing the podcast, you know, I make my AI do it, but it's a well-trained AI.
• 23:12
  SPEAKER_02: It has the examples of, you know, the best performing recap posts that we've done.
• 23:17
  SPEAKER_02: It knows my style because I have my style guide with my brand voice uploaded into it.
• 23:22
  SPEAKER_02: And I've, you know, run it and tweaked it and messed around with a ton.
• 23:26
  SPEAKER_02: So it's not perfect, but it's, you know, pretty close to being there.
• 23:29
  SPEAKER_02: And then takes Alec on my team literally no more than 10 minutes to fact check the quotes because it tries to make me sound smarter than I am sometimes, or it remembers something that I've said somewhere completely different and tries to insert it.
• 23:43
  SPEAKER_02: But um, you know, 10 minutes of Alec's time versus two or three hours of his time writing up a recap.
• 23:50
  SPEAKER_02: And I don't know, I'm old enough.
• 23:52
  SPEAKER_02: I remember recording interviews with people on my handy little, you know, tape recorder and then having to hand transcribe that stuff.
• 24:01
  SPEAKER_02: I am grateful that otter can transcribe everything immediately.
• 24:06
  SPEAKER_02: That is wonderful.
• 24:07
  SPEAKER_02: I never want to go back to doing that.
• 24:09
  SPEAKER_02: So it's like, I love AI, but not for trying to have it do the core parts of my job.
• 24:15
  SPEAKER_02: I want it to be my assistant.
• 24:17
  SPEAKER_02: I want it to do the little things that I don't want to do.
• 24:20
  SPEAKER_02: That's what's the magic.
• 24:22
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah.
• 24:22
  SPEAKER_01: I it's as a business culture, we are literally, and I mean literally, literally in this particular case, we are literally being handed a new technology that is inviting us to slow down, be more thoughtful, be more creative, ask deeper and better questions, pressure test our thinking, and ultimately just be slower at what we can do.
• 24:47
  SPEAKER_01: It's literally inviting us to do that.
• 24:49
  SPEAKER_01: And we are taking the typical answer and going, how can this help me go faster?
• 24:55
  SPEAKER_01: How can this help me scale more?
• 24:56
  SPEAKER_01: How can this help me do more?
• 24:57
  SPEAKER_01: How can this and we just we just at some point have to stop ourselves and say, How fast is fast enough?
• 25:04
  SPEAKER_01: Like, how fast is fast?
• 25:06
  SPEAKER_01: Like, how will we know when we're at speed?
• 25:10
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and I've been focusing so much on that lately, that that question, because it ever just to your point, everything I use AI for slows me down, right?
• 25:22
  SPEAKER_01: It slows me it, but if I, you know, and the the bumper sticker that I usually say here is like I just look at everything coming out of AI with a question mark on it.
• 25:31
  SPEAKER_01: Like it's not there to answer anything for me.
• 25:34
  SPEAKER_01: It's uh it's there to ask me a deeper question that I have to go wrestle with.
• 25:38
  SPEAKER_01: And so it slows me down in everything from my writing to my looking at my meeting results to strategizing to helping clients think through problems and all of those sorts of things.
• 25:48
  SPEAKER_01: But it's helping me do that, but it's slowing me down at the same time.
• 25:51
  SPEAKER_01: And it's but it's making me, I hope, it's certainly enriching me in a way that I feel more valuable.
• 25:58
  SPEAKER_01: And we'll see if the marketplace senses that as well.
• 26:01
  SPEAKER_01: But that's really to me the the invitation that we're squandering right now.
• 26:06
  SPEAKER_02: It's such a great coach because it doesn't, you know, have to look you in the face and sit next to you at lunch.
• 26:12
  SPEAKER_02: Because, you know, so you can ask it, what have I forgotten?
• 26:14
  SPEAKER_02: What could I do better?
• 26:15
  SPEAKER_02: What am I missing in what I created here?
• 26:18
  SPEAKER_02: And it'll tell you.
• 26:19
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, it can be a little obsequious at times, but in general, it gives you good feedback.
• 26:24
  SPEAKER_02: And if you ask it to revise something and tighten it and make it be more on brand, it will do that.
• 26:29
  SPEAKER_02: And I found that people are so much more open to that kind of constructive editing and criticism from an AI tool versus if I've given it to them as a human being.
• 26:42
  SPEAKER_02: You know, if I say, Oh, this is what the AI said, they're like, fantastic, love it.
• 26:47
  SPEAKER_02: If I say, here's here's my feedback, then sometimes people want to argue.
• 26:52
  SPEAKER_02: Right?
• 26:52
  SPEAKER_00: That's very funny.
• 26:54
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 26:54
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I I have noticed that as well.
• 26:56
  SPEAKER_00: Yes.
• 26:57
  SPEAKER_02: And I know Ann Hanley's working on a whole book about slowing down, but she was, you know, in her newsletter this weekend, she was talking again about, you know, how important it is to slow down, that the AI should enable, should enable us to do that.
• 27:11
  SPEAKER_02: It's not about making us go faster and be more productive.
• 27:14
  SPEAKER_02: And I do really agree with that.
• 27:16
  SPEAKER_02: You know, in the case of the recap, okay, that's a speeding up because it's something that I like to do for people who are readers.
• 27:24
  SPEAKER_02: Like I'm a reader, I don't like to watch long videos.
• 27:27
  SPEAKER_02: Um, so I like doing that kind of thing and having the chapters so people can go right to where we're talking about whatever it is that's of interest to them.
• 27:35
  SPEAKER_02: That's something I value and I use it for that.
• 27:38
  SPEAKER_02: But it's like I otherwise wouldn't provide any of that.
• 27:42
  SPEAKER_02: So it's not even that it sped me up, it allowed me to do something that I wouldn't otherwise be able to do because I wouldn't take the time to do it.
• 27:51
  SPEAKER_02: Whereas I will spend endless amounts of time on, you know, all sorts of other things, including going back and forth and having the AI ask me questions to help me figure out is something that I'm putting out there into the world, specifically like when I'm putting together tools, because I like to create interactive, you know, interactive assessments and templates and things.
• 28:12
  SPEAKER_02: I am a total template dork.
• 28:14
  SPEAKER_02: And so I have it ask me questions and then it can tell me, hey, you know what you didn't think about.
• 28:19
  SPEAKER_02: You know, people need an example.
• 28:20
  SPEAKER_02: You need to have an actual example where you write the word example and have it, you know, in your template or they won't know how to fill it out.
• 28:27
  SPEAKER_02: Things like that that I don't always think of, the AI tells you because it sees what people complain about on the internet and it's trained on all that stuff.
• 28:36
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 28:36
  SPEAKER_02: So it can be so helpful.
• 28:38
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 28:39
  SPEAKER_01: It gets to the, you know, it gets to this notion of, you know, I mean, uh a debate I've had online before, you know, with regard to this stuff, which is, you know, the it's it's why I push back on the whole go get good at AI thing, um, you know, as your first task.
• 28:56
  SPEAKER_01: Um, you know, I think you should rather first focus on go get good at what you want to get good at, whether that's writing or strategy, or in your case, you know, the development of an interactive app that helps you configurate something or to helps you get to an assessment of something.
• 29:12
  SPEAKER_01: You get good at that because then when you use AI, then you recognize what good and excellence looks like, right?
• 29:19
  SPEAKER_01: You can actually understand why something is good and why something is valuable.
• 29:25
  SPEAKER_01: And then reading the book is is really just reinforcing that.
• 29:31
  SPEAKER_01: Read you know, reading the long piece is reinforcing that, rein, you know, understanding the long form that the AI is actually giving you a book report of or a you know, identifying the summary of a meeting and a transcript, you read that, you go, that's a good summary, right?
• 29:45
  SPEAKER_01: Otherwise, if you don't know what actually happened in that meeting, yeah, you know, then you don't know what the summary is that summary good, or is it not a good, you know, but by experiencing the thing, you know whether the summary of the thing is good.
• 30:00
  SPEAKER_02: Exactly.
• 30:01
  SPEAKER_02: Um, are you using anything?
• 30:05
  SPEAKER_02: Are you using any AI assistance like as a regular part of your work, or are you just building, you know, your own bespoke GPTs, or how have you kind of um how are you interacting with it?
• 30:16
  SPEAKER_01: Honestly, you know, right now what I do is is is I it it's it's the broadest way to think about it is pressure testing.
• 30:23
  SPEAKER_01: So um I do have some so it so the funny thing is is that I've been moving off of uh open.
• 30:31
  SPEAKER_01: I used to be a chat GPT sort of only, you know, pro a big uh pro user.
• 30:36
  SPEAKER_01: So the the$200 a month version of it.
• 30:38
  SPEAKER_01: And I had custom GPTs that did some workflow for me and did some pressure testing and research, and you know, and I found it terribly helpful for like we've been talking about research and all those kinds of things, but it's really, I don't know what's happened, but it's to me, and maybe it's my perception, it's just fallen off a cliff lately in terms of quality.
• 30:58
  SPEAKER_01: So I've been using a lot more of Gemini and Claude.
• 31:03
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and Claude has come a long way in the last six months.
• 31:06
  SPEAKER_01: I I would, I would, you know, I would pose.
• 31:09
  SPEAKER_01: So I use all three that the major uh you know of the major platforms.
• 31:14
  SPEAKER_01: Gemini, I use the most for the stupid stuff like Joe and I on our podcast, we have like ads, images, silly videos, and those sorts of things.
• 31:25
  SPEAKER_01: I Google Flow is my choice and nano banana with the imagery creation because it's just great at it um and fun.
• 31:33
  SPEAKER_01: So that's typically I'm where I'm where I'm using it is something, you know, when when the content doesn't matter, like the ads, it's I'm using it for content generation and for fun and for interest.
• 31:44
  SPEAKER_01: Uh, where it does matter, where I need to wrestle with it, like thought leadership and those sorts of things, I'm using it as a pressure test.
• 31:51
  SPEAKER_02: That's interesting.
• 31:51
  SPEAKER_02: I've been using perplexity for research forever because I like the way it can give me my citations and how I can really direct it, like to look only at peer-reviewed journals or, you know, um firsthand research, things like that.
• 32:07
  SPEAKER_02: Um, but I've also been finding I think it's specifically um the current release of Chat GPT 5.2 was giving me issues.
• 32:17
  SPEAKER_02: And I think part of it is because it can't access the internet.
• 32:21
  SPEAKER_02: And they've turned off all of the old um, all of the old, you know, versions.
• 32:27
  SPEAKER_02: So the only other versions you can use are like 5.1 and 5.
• 32:31
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, sorry, yeah, 5.0 or something, whatever it is.
• 32:36
  SPEAKER_02: The two prior versions you can use, but the current version does not have the ability to access the internet.
• 32:44
  SPEAKER_02: And I think that that, you know, they made that decision for whatever reason, but it makes it almost unusable and it's defaulting everybody's GPTs to that new version.
• 32:55
  SPEAKER_02: And I think that's just a huge, huge gap.
• 32:59
  SPEAKER_02: And it doesn't tell you that up front.
• 33:01
  SPEAKER_02: You have to be like, why didn't you reference this URL before it'll finally cough up?
• 33:06
  SPEAKER_02: Oh, yeah, I can't access the internet.
• 33:07
  SPEAKER_02: So they don't make it easy for the user to even see which version um will be able to do what it is they need it to do.
• 33:16
  SPEAKER_02: So they're like, Oh, there's the deep thinking and the quick one.
• 33:18
  SPEAKER_02: I'm like, which one has internet access?
• 33:21
  SPEAKER_02: Which one is actually online that can uh see things in real time?
• 33:25
  SPEAKER_02: And they're like, We're not gonna tell you that.
• 33:28
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 33:28
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 33:29
  SPEAKER_01: I just find that it's it's got the, you know, it's it's sort of it's it's now defaulting to that sort of you see this all the time on LinkedIn, that sort of beat poetry, sort of, you know, punchy, you know, sort of um poetry.
• 33:41
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, it's not this, it's that, you know, it's like all the hashtag all the cliches um that um uh you know, in its responses to me.
• 33:51
  SPEAKER_01: And it's like I I don't need a companion, right?
• 33:53
  SPEAKER_01: I don't I don't need it to tell me that I'm a genius, and I don't need that, you know, to you know, and I yes, I know I can train it to be more pushback and all that kind of stuff, but Gemini, I just find to be more sort of a you know, more of a of a thinking partner, right?
• 34:08
  SPEAKER_01: It it it you know, the deep research piece that it can do and the deep thinking that it does, I just find to be of much higher quality.
• 34:15
  SPEAKER_01: And that might be perception.
• 34:17
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know.
• 34:18
  SPEAKER_01: I'm not good enough to know, you know, like I'm no Chris Penn.
• 34:21
  SPEAKER_02: I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna be able to be one is better than the other.
• 34:25
  SPEAKER_01: It's just a it's just a gut.
• 34:28
  SPEAKER_02: Totally.
• 34:29
  SPEAKER_02: Uh what really bums me out though is uh frequently my enterprise clients are stuck in the Microsoft ecosystem.
• 34:39
  SPEAKER_01: So as a result, that's genuinely the worst.
• 34:42
  SPEAKER_02: It's so sad because they're like, well, how can I do you know they're like, well, your framework works for for gems, it works for GPTs.
• 34:49
  SPEAKER_02: They're like, but how am I how can I do this in copilot?
• 34:52
  SPEAKER_02: I'm like, well, first you need to ask your CTO to give you one, don't use copilot.
• 34:58
  SPEAKER_01: This is how you get the best out of copilots.
• 34:59
  SPEAKER_02: I'm like, really, you need an exception.
• 35:01
  SPEAKER_02: And they're like, no, we can only use this.
• 35:03
  SPEAKER_02: I'm like, well, the problem is is you have to have their copilot studio uh account see.
• 35:09
  SPEAKER_02: And I have no idea how much money that must be, but it's gonna be a lot.
• 35:14
  SPEAKER_02: And then it's gonna be painful.
• 35:15
  SPEAKER_02: I'm like, so I can't, I can't help you with that.
• 35:18
  SPEAKER_02: I just cannot.
• 35:19
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, they've they've definitely they've they've Microsoft has definitely Windows the uh their their AI application.
• 35:26
  SPEAKER_01: It's like, man, it is it is I mean, they can't even say you can't even search for an email and outlook, much less use copilot to find anything valuable.
• 35:34
  SPEAKER_02: Isn't that silly?
• 35:37
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, the the value of it should be that if you have everything Microsoft and you're using their AI tools, it should be like the ultimate corporate um you know, corporate knowledge retention, right?
• 35:52
  SPEAKER_02: It should be able if you've worked somewhere for two decades, it should be able to pull all these things and create that narrative.
• 36:00
  SPEAKER_02: And instead, it's just like, nope, I can help you write an email.
• 36:06
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, well, yeah.
• 36:07
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, the default there is though, you know, it's like, you know, they lost me at SharePoint.
• 36:12
  SPEAKER_01: So, you know, that's SharePoint.
• 36:15
  SPEAKER_02: Oh god.
• 36:16
  SPEAKER_02: Oh, you're giving me hives, Robert.
• 36:19
  SPEAKER_02: There you go.
• 36:21
  SPEAKER_02: You said the bad word.
• 36:22
  SPEAKER_02: Um let's go back and talk about content intelligence for a minute.
• 36:27
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 36:28
  SPEAKER_02: Um what when you think about content intelligence and current teams, and you know, with all of this stuff going on, you know, what is content intelligence now versus what it was when we were talking about headless CMS and you know, all of the technology aspect, because it's not the same as what the conversation was a decade ago.
• 36:54
  SPEAKER_00: No, I mean, you know, I mean, you know, what is it like uh basically intelligent content, which is what we used to call it back in the day.
• 37:03
  SPEAKER_01: Um, you know, and then it became content intelligence, you know, you sort of have sort of pieces to that, right?
• 37:08
  SPEAKER_01: Which is, I mean, this goes all the way back to some of the earliest debates that we had back in 2008, 2009, 2010, sort of the difference between what content strategy was versus uh content marketing, right?
• 37:24
  SPEAKER_01: Whereas, you know, so you looked at, as I as I very two cutely said at the time, I said, you know, well, content marketing is basically, you know, writing on the wall with big magic markers, and content strategy is using fine-tip pens, right?
• 37:36
  SPEAKER_01: You know, it's like, you know, trying to figure out the the governance, the operations, the measurement, the plumbing, basically, and you know, and the and the governance structures around content.
• 37:48
  SPEAKER_01: And the intelligence, I think, has been the thing that really is switching the most.
• 37:53
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, the vast lion's share of organizations, biggest companies on the planet, are still not really realizing the benefits of things like headless and things like you know, atomic content and componentized content and you know, and and swap swapping out, you know, content blocks um in truly structured taxonomic ways.
• 38:19
  SPEAKER_01: They're just not, they're just not doing because it's such a different way of working for people who write words and make pictures for a living.
• 38:27
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 38:27
  SPEAKER_01: And so it's it for the most part, it tends to be very basic uh in terms of what is it you're really trying to do, whether it's A-B testing or whether it's you know some kind of personalization or content targeting, you know, looking at content blocks and getting the intelligence about what's performing and what's going on there is still a very, I mean, even here in 2026 is a very nascent thing for for most organizations.
• 38:59
  SPEAKER_01: And now layer into that the idea that AI is going to somehow optimize all that for you.
• 39:05
  SPEAKER_01: And it's just like, no, no, it goes back to our governance conversations.
• 39:09
  SPEAKER_01: Like, we don't even know, right?
• 39:10
  SPEAKER_01: You don't, you don't even know what, you know, uh there was the famous uh uh story about the the Air Canada, I think it was, that their giant corpus of customer help content was so old that the AI bot that they put over the top of it that was surfacing things was surfacing things that were not true, like they just weren't true anymore because the you know the the the content was so old, but nobody ever bothered to go in and check it, right?
• 39:36
  SPEAKER_01: To see if it's so you're seeing a lot of these customer help bots sort of fail be not because the bot itself is failing, but because the content is old and not intelligent anymore.
• 39:47
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, people think they can just set it and forget it, and that's such a mistake, or that oh, of course, if I layered on something new, it'll know to ignore the old stuff.
• 39:57
  SPEAKER_02: It's like that's not how it works.
• 39:58
  SPEAKER_01: No, right, exactly.
• 40:00
  SPEAKER_01: So going in and looking at, you know, and that and that gets to everything from the best practices that we talk about and pruning your websites, and you know, do you do you actually have an archive state in your content management process where uh based on a time, the art the content comes off the website and gets archived because it needs to be reviewed, or it there's expiration dates on all of this stuff.
• 40:21
  SPEAKER_01: You know, we just we still look at, I mean, this is 2026, and we were having this conversation, you know, 15 years ago, where it's like your website's just a giant repository that never gets any smaller.
• 40:33
  SPEAKER_01: It just continues to get tens of thousands of pages to it added every year.
• 40:37
  SPEAKER_01: And you wonder why 15 years later it's still finding information that's not relevant anymore, buzzwords that you don't use anymore, you know, terms that you're ranking for that have no relevance to your business anymore, all because you have a 75,000 page word site that, you know, or website that is not what represents you anymore, simply because you never added an archive statement to your CMS workflow.
• 41:02
  SPEAKER_02: And what's so dangerous about that is AI is going out and it's looking at your website and it's judging you, it's creating that summary of who you are and what you do, and it's spitting back that information.
• 41:13
  SPEAKER_02: So if you have really outdated, wrongheaded information still findable on your website, you could be shooting yourself in the foot because the AI now thinks that you're a pretty incompetent old company that doesn't know what's going on now.
• 41:30
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, that's exactly right.
• 41:31
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, we we get so lost around and wrapped around the.
• 41:34
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, I actually wrote about this in January, I think it was, where it's like we get so wrapped around the axle of how do I get our content found that we're stopping, we're not asking the question, what are we actually teaching it?
• 41:44
  SPEAKER_01: Like, what are we actually teaching AI about our, about our, you know, what what does it what does it think we do?
• 41:49
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 41:50
  SPEAKER_01: I I have this problem personally.
• 41:52
  SPEAKER_01: I I have this problem in a very personal way, right?
• 41:56
  SPEAKER_01: Where, you know, as a consultant out there helping brands, et cetera, et cetera, that's not what AI thinks I do.
• 42:03
  SPEAKER_01: AI thinks I'm an author, it thinks I'm a speaker, it thinks I'm a teacher, which is lovely and like nice.
• 42:08
  SPEAKER_01: And I think that's nice.
• 42:09
  SPEAKER_01: But if you go look for the best consultants in, you know, whatever field that I'm in, I don't show up at all because I didn't bother teaching AI that that's my so I have to really focus on that now and create that level of content and that education because what I was teaching the AI isn't optimal for what I do.
• 42:29
  SPEAKER_02: And what's funny is when you do those searches, when you ask AI who the top B2B um content strategy consultants are, it'll tell you that it's Neil Patel, it's Dan Handley, and it's Joe Polizi.
• 42:41
  SPEAKER_02: Three people who are in fact not B2B content strategists or B2B content consultants.
• 42:47
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, uh I need to I need to not comment on that.
• 42:50
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 42:51
  SPEAKER_02: But I mean it's hilarious, right?
• 42:53
  SPEAKER_00: Because indeed it's it's yeah, it's hilarious.
• 42:56
  SPEAKER_00: Um we need we need different beverages for that question.
• 43:01
  SPEAKER_02: Yes, yes.
• 43:02
  SPEAKER_02: But um getting back to proving our outcomes, proving that content strategy, that it is moving the needle, that we are doing the right content, like how do we even get started with that because everything is so messy?
• 43:19
  SPEAKER_01: It's hard.
• 43:20
  SPEAKER_01: It's it's really hard.
• 43:21
  SPEAKER_01: And it, you know, I what I've and I'm actually my series for March that I'm gonna be writing is on measurement.
• 43:27
  SPEAKER_01: Um, so thinking about the the changing nature of especially B2B, um, which is the space that I know best.
• 43:36
  SPEAKER_01: Um thinking about measurement of how do you start measuring the relationships that you're creating?
• 43:41
  SPEAKER_01: Because I think that's the new foundational element.
• 43:43
  SPEAKER_01: It's we've we have to move beyond the transactional of clicks and downloads and links and and you know, visits to our website, which are just can continue to be disrupted by everything we just spent the last 40 minutes talking about.
• 43:58
  SPEAKER_01: So it's really the depth.
• 44:00
  SPEAKER_01: Of relationships that we have with audiences, with our uh vendors, with our customers, with our partners, with our distribution, you know, partners, whoever those that sort of portfolio of different audiences, communities, as we talked about it earlier.
• 44:15
  SPEAKER_01: So it's that it's the depth of those relationships.
• 44:18
  SPEAKER_01: And how are those measured?
• 44:19
  SPEAKER_01: Well, you know, jumping way up to the two tactical levels just for a second.
• 44:24
  SPEAKER_01: I love how Ann Handley suggests measuring email newsletter effectiveness, right?
• 44:29
  SPEAKER_01: By the number of responses that you get to your to each email.
• 44:32
  SPEAKER_01: That's that's a sign, right?
• 44:34
  SPEAKER_01: That's an indicator of real depth of relationship when you actually have a relationship with someone who is willing to respond to your email newsletter and comment on it and have a discussion with you.
• 44:44
  SPEAKER_01: And again, measuring that depth of relationship is another aspect of our marketing and our content that doesn't scale neatly.
• 44:51
  SPEAKER_01: Right.
• 44:51
  SPEAKER_01: Sending having our CEO send five in-depth emails to five prospects doesn't scale and neatly as sending 5,000 emails through MailChimp or something out to 5,000 prospects that he doesn't know and putting the CEO's name behind it.
• 45:10
  SPEAKER_01: So those things don't scale very neatly, but they may become the foundational elements of qualitative measurement that will really start moving the needle.
• 45:20
  SPEAKER_01: And, you know, and it's it's tough to make that shift because all of our thermometers and dashboards and everything are gonna are gonna start shifting again into these much smaller, but hopefully much more meaningful measurements.
• 45:33
  SPEAKER_02: Which is great because every time you send out a an email about something and you put a person's name on that on that signature field, and it comes from a no-reply email address, or like I posted in LinkedIn last week, I got a notification from a company I've done business with for a decade about how some pricing changes were going to be happening that didn't say what they were, where I could find out, you know, how much it was going to change, or what would trigger any of the pricing updates.
• 46:04
  SPEAKER_02: And they had a note underneath the person's name that said, This comes from an unmonitored email, you know, box, you don't reply to this.
• 46:11
  SPEAKER_02: And I'm like, so you gave us no information and no mechanism for replying because they're like, Well, but it's not scalable.
• 46:20
  SPEAKER_02: And you know, putting on my Christopher Penn, tinfoil hat, you know what he would say?
• 46:25
  SPEAKER_02: Well, duh, you just create a, you know, person's name, newsletter, email, you know, account, and you have all of those email responses go into that account and you pull them out and you dump them into notebook LLM and you have it summarize all of that.
• 46:41
  SPEAKER_02: And then you, you know, segment it out, you understand what people are saying, and then you send out, you know, batch responses after you've segmented those those um incoming emails.
• 46:52
  SPEAKER_02: It's not, you know, pretty, it's not no work, but if we're using the excuse of, oh, it's just impossible, we don't have enough time, it's like you're gonna lose those customers because you've told them that you don't value that relationship that they had with you, that it's just one-sided.
• 47:12
  SPEAKER_01: That's right, that's right.
• 47:13
  SPEAKER_01: And and the only nuance I would put on that is that a human should do the last part.
• 47:18
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, what it doesn't, what and and this is a you know, put the yet, you know, because everything we say with AI has to have a yet associated with it.
• 47:26
  SPEAKER_01: But as of yet, I don't see them creating those personal communications in a way that is meaningful and identifies the humanity in it.
• 47:34
  SPEAKER_01: I see them doing the most probable answer, you know.
• 47:38
  SPEAKER_01: So I I literally got an email the from from and I it was clearly from an AI bot who had scanned my LinkedIn profile, you know, and seen my title as chief troublemaker.
• 47:50
  SPEAKER_01: And literally the first line of the email was as chief troublemaker of seventh bear, you love chaos, right?
• 47:57
  SPEAKER_01: Because it it assigns troublemaker with the most probable world that comes out of that, which is chaos, which of course is not true.
• 48:03
  SPEAKER_01: I don't love chaos.
• 48:04
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, of course, but of all the people I know, I can't say that you are who comes to mind with when I think of chaos.
• 48:11
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, and so it's like the the the it's just it's technically correct because it's it's most probably that's that those two things, those two concepts would work together, but it's actually humanly incorrect, right?
• 48:25
  SPEAKER_01: And so that emotional, that emotional atonality is something that really, and again, yet is something that a human needs to look at.
• 48:33
  SPEAKER_01: So I love the put it into notebook LLM and do the thing and do the thing, and then have a human look at all 70 of them that responded and and basically edit every single one of them and look and find out what the personal really is.
• 48:46
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 48:46
  SPEAKER_02: And I mean, I've done a lot of that.
• 48:48
  SPEAKER_02: Um, when I went um back to Schwab for my second tour of duty there, I actually did internal comms for um a division head.
• 48:56
  SPEAKER_02: And I wrote the emails that went out, and I was the person who owned the email box where people replied to.
• 49:03
  SPEAKER_02: I was the one seeing all that feedback, bubbling it up, and you know, figuring out the responses because they, you know, our leader understood the importance of doing that.
• 49:14
  SPEAKER_02: And it just, it's always it always just makes me go, really, guys, when you get those situations where they don't want any feedback.
• 49:22
  SPEAKER_02: And it's just such you're you're missing out because the feedback is a gift.
• 49:26
  SPEAKER_02: Even if it's something you don't want to hear, even if it's an idea you can't put to, you know, I take and and actually activate, it's still valuable to understand what people are thinking, what how they feel about the communications that you're putting out there.
• 49:43
  SPEAKER_02: So it always amazes me when I get that kind of stuff.
• 49:50
  SPEAKER_02: We don't have a lot of time left, but I'd love it if you know, if you were um advising a new client who was sitting there with their content strategy and trying to think about, okay, how how can I really activate this?
• 50:05
  SPEAKER_02: How can I make make an impact next quarter?
• 50:09
  SPEAKER_02: What would you ask them to like think about first and to focus on first?
• 50:16
  SPEAKER_01: I think the first thing I would say is that, and this is generally true.
• 50:20
  SPEAKER_01: So this is it's gonna, it's gonna be a little bit of a uh of a you know, of a it's generally true, but it's not always true, which is when I talk with clients, the biggest challenge that they feel like they have is that they create too much content.
• 50:38
  SPEAKER_01: And that that's the biggest problem with their lack of a contest strategy is they don't have time because they create too much content.
• 50:45
  SPEAKER_01: And when we actually dig in, one of the things that we typically find is is that they're not creating too many ideas, they're not creating too much content, they're actually just creating too many digital assets, right?
• 50:55
  SPEAKER_01: So they've they've the they're the over time the content strategy has become an asset, a digital asset production machine rather than an idea factory.
• 51:05
  SPEAKER_01: And so the uh so the first step we usually say is how can we reduce the number of ideas to a few big ideas and don't worry about container yet?
• 51:18
  SPEAKER_01: Like just don't don't worry about what containers they're going to be in.
• 51:21
  SPEAKER_01: Let's let's figure out the story, the value, the distinctive way we're going to tell that story, and then figure out all of the different places that we can or should tell this particular thing to fill whatever asset calendar we have to fill.
• 51:37
  SPEAKER_01: What we usually find is that there is a massive reduction in the number of digital assets that are created, and basically an increase in the number of ideas that can get explored, bigger, bigger and more valuable and more distinctive and creative ideas that can be explored.
• 51:54
  SPEAKER_01: Because most people don't, most businesses I visit with, they don't have a shortage of creativity, they don't have a shortage of imagination, and they don't have a shortage of anything regarding subject matter expertise or depth.
• 52:07
  SPEAKER_01: What they have is a shortage of time because they're so wound up against the axle of producing more PDF files and more blog posts and more emails and more social posts that are all reinvented from scratch that they're that they're that they're stressed, their bandwidth level is at a ceiling where they can't that.
• 52:26
  SPEAKER_01: So it's it's typically just take a beat and figure out what it is we're actually doing and then and then and start over basically.
• 52:36
  SPEAKER_02: I love that.
• 52:37
  SPEAKER_02: And it is really great, um, great advice because you know folks get used to, well, you know, every time we, you know, every quarter we have a new ebook, and then that ebook becomes a webinar, and then we also do, you know, eight blog posts from it, and then we also do an email series, and people get so set in the you know, the hamster wheel that they're on that they can't figure out, well, did this topic deserve all those things?
• 53:02
  SPEAKER_02: Right.
• 53:02
  SPEAKER_02: Did anyone ask?
• 53:03
  SPEAKER_02: Exactly right.
• 53:04
  SPEAKER_01: I've seen amazing ideas get trapped in a PDF file simply because that was the way it was that was the you know, it was like I need a you know, the product manager said I need a PDF file, I need a you know, ebook tomorrow.
• 53:15
  SPEAKER_01: And it's like, all right, well, what are we gonna put in it?
• 53:17
  SPEAKER_01: Well, let's think of this idea.
• 53:18
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, it's an amazing idea, it should be a huge campaign, but it gets trapped in the context of a PDF file simply because that's what we needed on Friday.
• 53:26
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, and nobody ever goes back and minds the good ideas from those PDF files.
• 53:30
  SPEAKER_01: That's right, yeah, yeah, because sales says, Well, if you didn't create it in the last 90 days, it's not new enough, and I need something new.
• 53:37
  SPEAKER_01: It's like, really?
• 53:39
  SPEAKER_02: That's so terrible.
• 53:40
  SPEAKER_02: Because really, if it's good content, yeah, repromote that stuff with people, it doesn't matter.
• 53:47
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, I have I have blog content that is very old that I go in and I update every so often, and that people are still looking at it.
• 53:59
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, it amazes me sometimes when you look back at some of that stuff, you know, on one of the blogs that I manage, because I'm a gamer.
• 54:07
  SPEAKER_02: So when you're talking about Twitch, I'm like, yeah, I've seen some of the off stuff on Twitch because I am they're a demographic on Twitch.
• 54:14
  SPEAKER_02: And I'm like, I have stuff that I've written on my gaming website that I published more than 15 years ago.
• 54:23
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 54:24
  SPEAKER_02: That people are new incoming links are coming into it.
• 54:28
  SPEAKER_02: People are sharing it occasionally on Reddit because it is so opinionated and so useful for very specific niche use cases.
• 54:37
  SPEAKER_02: Because guess what?
• 54:38
  SPEAKER_02: I I talk about personal accountability and responsibility and workflow and all that kind of stuff in a gaming context.
• 54:44
  SPEAKER_02: Big surprise, Robert, right?
• 54:47
  SPEAKER_02: Um, but that like like that one specific blog post, and there are others too, it's still alive.
• 54:53
  SPEAKER_02: I would have archived it, you know, years ago, but literally it gets traffic every single month.
• 54:59
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, exactly.
• 55:00
  SPEAKER_02: It's insane.
• 55:02
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I've got a few of those too, but my mine are mostly very, very cringe-worthy posts, like from 2008, 2009.
• 55:10
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 55:10
  SPEAKER_00: Mine are like, ooh, did I really write that?
• 55:12
  SPEAKER_00: Or maybe I should delete that.
• 55:15
  SPEAKER_02: That's always the decision that's hardest to make.
• 55:19
  SPEAKER_02: So, Robert, if folks want more from you, uh, where can they find more words of wisdom and where are we gonna see you speaking next?
• 55:27
  SPEAKER_02: All that good stuff.
• 55:28
  SPEAKER_01: Sure, sure.
• 55:29
  SPEAKER_01: I I, you know, um funny enough, I'm actually going to South by Southwest, but it's it's for an educational summit, I guess.
• 55:35
  SPEAKER_01: And so I'm gonna be speaking to a bunch of college kids.
• 55:38
  SPEAKER_01: Um, and and so I'm I'm actually super excited about it.
• 55:41
  SPEAKER_01: Um and so so I've got that coming up.
• 55:44
  SPEAKER_01: But basically, uh, seventhbear.com is our website where we talk about all the best practices and all those kinds of things when it comes to content strategy and content governance and those sorts of things.
• 55:54
  SPEAKER_01: And then my weekly column, which we were largely referencing um, is on uh uh is on Content Marketing Institute's website where I still serve as chief strategy advisor for that organization.
• 56:05
  SPEAKER_01: Um and then LinkedIn, if you uh and LinkedIn is I I'm I'm I love LinkedIn, I I interact on LinkedIn, it is my community of choice.
• 56:14
  SPEAKER_02: I love it.
• 56:15
  SPEAKER_02: I I definitely love your LinkedIn content.
• 56:17
  SPEAKER_02: Um, especially, you know, every week I listen to the sold marketing or I watch it on LinkedIn because it just it's part of my you know weekly routine and it has been, you know, forever.
• 56:31
  SPEAKER_02: And I love your guys' rants and raves and hot takes.
• 56:35
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I'm not sure how much you'll learn on that, but it's entertaining nonetheless.
• 56:38
  SPEAKER_02: It's very entertaining.
• 56:40
  SPEAKER_01: Juckleheads just talking about what's going on in marketing and media.
• 56:44
  SPEAKER_02: But it's fun, it's like the conversations we all used to get to have with our colleagues over lunch.
• 56:49
  SPEAKER_02: Like that's how I always feel.
• 56:50
  SPEAKER_01: That's what it is.
• 56:51
  SPEAKER_01: That's it's it's the Joe and I started it now 13 years ago, and and that was the that was that was the impetus of the whole thing.
• 56:58
  SPEAKER_01: It's like we would get together and just gossip about the industry and just kvetch.
• 57:02
  SPEAKER_01: And then and so it's like, hey, Joe goes, maybe we should make this a show.
• 57:06
  SPEAKER_00: Like, all right, maybe somebody will listen.
• 57:09
  SPEAKER_02: Well, I'm a loyal listener, and I know lots of other people are too, because it's super fun.
• 57:14
  SPEAKER_02: All right, well, we're out of time for this week, but thank you so much.
• 57:18
  SPEAKER_02: This has been so much fun, Robert.
• 57:20
  SPEAKER_02: Hope to have you back again.
• 57:21
  SPEAKER_02: Um maybe once we get another book from you.
• 57:25
  SPEAKER_02: Although we never talked about valuable friction.
• 57:27
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, it's okay.
• 57:28
  SPEAKER_01: Valuable friction is there.
• 57:29
  SPEAKER_01: It's the valuable friction.com if you're interested in learning about slowing down, pivoting more, all that kind of stuff.
• 57:34
  SPEAKER_01: I'm super proud of that little book.
• 57:36
  SPEAKER_02: I love it.
• 57:38
  SPEAKER_02: All right, catch you guys next week.
• 57:39
  SPEAKER_02: Bye everyone.
• 57:40
  unknown: Bye.