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المحتوى المقدم من Tim Peter. يتم تحميل جميع محتويات البودكاست بما في ذلك الحلقات والرسومات وأوصاف البودكاست وتقديمها مباشرة بواسطة Tim Peter أو شريك منصة البودكاست الخاص بهم. إذا كنت تعتقد أن شخصًا ما يستخدم عملك المحمي بحقوق الطبع والنشر دون إذنك، فيمكنك اتباع العملية الموضحة هنا https://ar.player.fm/legal.
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1 638: What's the ROI on those Big Game Ads? Featuring Nataly Kelly, CMO at Zappi 28:17
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Much is made about the creative decisions in ads for the Big Game, but how does all that money, those requisite celebrity cameos, and everything else that goes into these multi-million dollar investments translate into Return on investment? Today we’re going to talk about what the numbers tell us from all those high-profile ads and who the winners and losers of the Advertising Bowl are in 2025. To help me discuss this topic, I’d like to welcome Nataly Kelly, CMO at Zappi, who unveiled their annual Super Bowl Ad Success report on Monday. We’re here to talk about the approach, the results, and what those results mean for brands that invested a lot of money - and time - into their campaigns. About Nataly Kelly I help companies unlock global growth For more than two decades, I have helped scale businesses across borders, as an executive at B2B SaaS and MarTech companies. I’m Chief Marketing Officer at Zappi, a consumer research platform. I spent nearly 8 years as a Vice President at HubSpot, a multi-billion-dollar public tech company, driving growth on the international side of the business. Having served as an executive at various tech companies, I’ve led teams spanning many functions, including Marketing, Sales, Product, and International Ops. I’m an award-winning marketing leader, a former Fulbright scholar, and an ongoing contributor to Harvard Business Review. I love working with interesting people and removing barriers to access. RESOURCES Zappi website: https://www.zappi.io/web/ Connect with Greg on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gregkihlstrom Listen to The Agile Brand without the ads. Learn more here: https://bit.ly/3ymf7hd Don't miss a thing: get the latest episodes, sign up for our newsletter and more: https://www.theagilebrand.show Check out The Agile Brand Guide website with articles, insights, and Martechipedia, the wiki for marketing technology: https://www.agilebrandguide.com The Agile Brand podcast is brought to you by TEKsystems. Learn more here: https://www.teksystems.com/versionnextnow The Agile Brand is produced by Missing Link—a Latina-owned strategy-driven, creatively fueled production co-op. From ideation to creation, they craft human connections through intelligent, engaging and informative content. https://www.missinglink.company…
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المحتوى المقدم من Tim Peter. يتم تحميل جميع محتويات البودكاست بما في ذلك الحلقات والرسومات وأوصاف البودكاست وتقديمها مباشرة بواسطة Tim Peter أو شريك منصة البودكاست الخاص بهم. إذا كنت تعتقد أن شخصًا ما يستخدم عملك المحمي بحقوق الطبع والنشر دون إذنك، فيمكنك اتباع العملية الموضحة هنا https://ar.player.fm/legal.
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المحتوى المقدم من Tim Peter. يتم تحميل جميع محتويات البودكاست بما في ذلك الحلقات والرسومات وأوصاف البودكاست وتقديمها مباشرة بواسطة Tim Peter أو شريك منصة البودكاست الخاص بهم. إذا كنت تعتقد أن شخصًا ما يستخدم عملك المحمي بحقوق الطبع والنشر دون إذنك، فيمكنك اتباع العملية الموضحة هنا https://ar.player.fm/legal.
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1 Revisiting “The Only Way to Succeed Next Year” (Thinks Out Loud) 25:16
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There’s only one way to succeed this year & and every year. Success is more than just what you do in digital or marketing. Success goes far beyond just your business. Of course success in digital and marketing and your business matters. But, business success often follows from success across multiple areas of your life. Successful people may seem like they’re accomplished in many areas… because they are. They’re not focused solely on being “their best selves” only at work or only in part of their lives. They bring that to every aspect of what they do. It’s the idea of being your best self that’s at the heart of the conversation I want to have with you this week. What does “being your best self” look like in practice? What can you do to achieve it? And how does it apply not only in business, but across many areas of your life? That’s what this episode of Thinks Out Loud is all about. Want to learn more? Here are the show notes for you. Revisiting “The Only Way to Succeed Next Year” (Thinks Out Loud) — Headlines and Show Notes Show Notes and Links The Only Way to Succeed Next Year (Thinks Out Loud Episode 444) Why New Year’s Resolutions Set You Up to Fail | Psychology Today New Year’s resolutions often don’t last. Here’s why they fail and how to keep them, according to an expert. – CBS News Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi – Wikipedia 8 Traits of Flow According to Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi AI Is Not the Future. You Are (Thinks Out Loud Episode 443) wheel of life – Google Search Navigating Life’s Spheres: Your Guide to the Balance Wheel | Love Light & Inspiration The Vor Game – Wikipedia "Touch Grass" (Thinks Out Loud Episode 358) Revisiting "What Are We Doing Here?" How Are You Holding Up? (Thinks Out Loud Episode 316) Lessons Learned: The TPA Anniversary Show (Thinks Out Loud Episode 420) Recapping 2023 Part 2 — Personal Lessons Learned (Thinks Out Loud Episode 407) You might also enjoy this webinar I recently participated in with Miles Partnership that looked at "The Power of Generative AI and ChatGPT: What It Means for Tourism & Hospitality" here: Free Downloads We have some free downloads for you to help you navigate the current situation, which you can find right here: A Modern Content Marketing Checklist. Want to ensure that each piece of content works for your business? Download our latest checklist to help put your content marketing to work for you. Digital & E-commerce Maturity Matrix. As a bonus, here’s a PDF that can help you assess your company’s digital maturity. You can use this to better understand where your company excels and where its opportunities lie. And, of course, we’re here to help if you need it . The Digital & E-commerce Maturity Matrix rates your company’s effectiveness — Ad Hoc, Aware, Striving, Driving — in 6 key areas in digital today, including: Customer Focus Strategy Technology Operations Culture Data Best of Thinks Out Loud You can find our “Best of Thinks Out Loud” playlist on Spotify right here: Subscribe to Thinks Out Loud Subscribe in iTunes Subscribe in the Google Play Store Contact information for the podcast: podcast@timpeter.com Past Insights from Tim Peter Thinks Technical Details for Thinks Out Loud Recorded using a Shure SM7B Vocal Dynamic Microphone and a Focusrite Scarlett 4i4 (3rd Gen) USB Audio Interface into Logic Pro X for the Mac. Running time: 25m 16s You can subscribe to Thinks Out Loud in iTunes , the Google Play Store , via our dedicated podcast RSS feed (or sign up for our free newsletter ). You can also download/listen to the podcast here on Thinks using the player at the top of this page. Transcript: Revisiting The Only Way to Succeed Next Year Right before the end of last year, we had an episode called “The Only Way to Succeed Next Year.” We’re roughly half way through the first quarter. 1/8th of the year is already behind us. And given that around 80% of New Year’s resolutions fail by the end of January, it felt like a good time to revisit this discussion. The key takeaways from the episode were around how you drive success. If driving success in your business — and your life — matters to you in 2025, you need to think beyond just business and marketing and digital. You need to think about the kind of person you want to be, in every area of your life. You need to think about the kinds of relationships you want to have, the people you want to spend your time with, outside of business as well as within it. You need to do the work to get better in those areas, to improve your relationships with the people that matter to you. Focus as much as you can on the areas and people that give your life meaning. Doing the work towards improving in those areas help you find flow in your activities, which help you feel more fulfilled overall. And finding greater fulfillment overall helps you persevere during the tougher times of your days and weeks and months. I think you’ll enjoy this discussion. This is Thinks Out Loud , let’s dive in and revisit “The Only Way to Succeed Next Year” Well hello again everybody and welcome back to Thinks Out Loud , your source for all the digital expertise your business needs. My name is Tim Peter, this is episode 444 of the Big Show, and I think we’ve got a really cool episode for you today. Most of what I’m going to talk about in this episode, on the surface, has little to do with marketing or digital or business strategy, the topics we typically talk about here. I don’t have any big predictions for 2025 yet, or any major recap of 2024, you know, those are coming. And if you only care about those topics, you might want to skip to your other favorite podcast right now and then check our future episodes for that content. I’d recommend against that though, because what’s also true is that what I plan to talk about today has everything to do with marketing and digital and business strategy. I suspect it will be obvious why shortly, but I’ll explicitly call out the reason at the end for you. The thing is, as we come up on the end of the year, I have a problem with the conventional wisdom that almost everybody spouts off about almost every holiday season. You know, you’ll hear people say that it’s time to look back at the year you just experienced and what went well and what didn’t go well and what did you learn from those experiences. They’ll tell you to look ahead at what you hope to accomplish, and your goals for the new year, and what you’re going to do more of, and what you’re going to do better. Most people, many people, will tell you to spend time with family and reconnect with old friends. People will say, “You really need to make the most of this time. You never know how much longer you’ll have with grandma or grandpa, or your parents, or whomever.” I hate this advice. Now don’t misunderstand, I don’t want to challenge the conventional wisdom around what you do for the next two weeks. You should look back. You should look ahead to what you want to accomplish, and you absolutely should spend time with the people you love, and reconnect with old friends, and enjoy this time with your family. My problem isn’t “Why aren’t you doing this during the holidays? “My problem is, “ Why aren’t you doing this every single day and week and month throughout the year? ” Seriously. Yes, we should all use every opportunity. To look back at what we learned, we should use every opportunity to look forward to what we hope to accomplish. And we all should spend more time with family and friends and the people we love. If I wanted to be funny, I would say, “Notice how I listed friends, family, and the people you love into three separate categories?” You know, in truth though, if they’re not the people you love, maybe the problem isn’t that, it’s that you maybe shouldn’t categorize them as family or friends. Maybe the reason they’re not the people you love is something you need to work on, and more on this in a bit. The reality though is don’t spend too much time with toxic people. And if everyone you know is toxic, Then I suspect they’re not the problem, and I will have much more on that a little later, too. At any rate, when we’re talking about how you use this time, I think you really need to set yourself up for success every week and every month all year long. And I mean success in a broader way than just what you do in your business. You may remember that I talked about a balance wheel or a wheel of life in last week’s episode. I’m not going to recap the whole process for you, but the idea is that this provides you a great time and a great tool to take stock of where you are in every area of your life that matters to you. Work? Sure. But also family and friends and your mental and physical and financial well being. The great thing about an exercise like this is that you get to decide which of those areas are important to you. You also get to decide how satisfied you are in each of those areas, and you get to decide, once you’ve taken a look at that wheel, which ones you want to work on, and the order you’ll do that work. That’s something you can do all year long, and that’s how you succeed next year. This isn’t about New Year’s resolutions, either, and it certainly isn’t about, you know, hustle culture, just “doing more.” Don’t get me wrong, hustle culture can be useful, to a point, but it’s usually focused solely on your work. It usually thinks solely in terms of, what are you going to turn out today from a work perspective? Success in work is up to you and obviously important. It’s something I talk about on this show all the time. Work often is a huge contributor to the meaning in our lives. It’s also not the only thing that gives our lives meaning. In fact, I would go so far to say it shouldn’t be the only thing that matters to give your life meaning. Instead, I’m talking about being the best version of yourself in all of the areas of your life that matter to you and that give your life meaning. And there’s a way that you can do this to drive improvement throughout your life, all year long, where New Year’s resolutions fail. New Year’s resolutions don’t tend to work for two reasons, for at least two reasons. I mean, one of the big ones is that they often aren’t necessarily seen as fun. But the two big reasons are, one, that there’s no consequence, really, if you break them. You might feel bad about it for a couple of days, but eventually it’s just something that happened and you move on with life. And the second is you have to wait an entire year for them to come back around again. If you didn’t accomplish this year’s New Year’s resolutions by, you know, if you haven’t made progress by the end of January, oh well, I guess it’s over. No big deal. We’re drawn to New Year’s resolutions because the first day of the year is symbolically important. And that symbolism has a certain power, one that our brains latch on to. It’s really important to our minds, that date, because it’s imbued with so much culture and tradition. There’s research that backs this up, by the way, that our minds just get wrapped around specific dates. Days like New Year’s Day or the first of the year as being hugely important. There’s also research that backs up what I’m about to share that’s just kind of crazy. Unfortunately, I can’t remember who to credit for this one. So while there will be links in the show notes for many of the things I’m talking about, there won’t be for this one. A Google search wasn’t helping me out. I will certainly update the links later if I can find it. In any case, the further we get away from January 1st, the less power it holds over us. Its symbolism dwindles. Here’s the funny thing about that research, though. It showed that January 1st, isn’t the only symbolically important date in our lives. Other dates have meaning, too. For instance, your birthday is a pretty big day. We give it a certain power in our minds. If you’re married, your wedding anniversary is another one of those days. If you have children, your kids birthdays have a certain power. And any of those can be used as days where you start something new or reassess or have the drive to start again, to renew yourself. Each of these are opportunities to reinvigorate and renew your focus on the things that matter to you. But brace yourself, because the research found something even stranger. It turns out almost any day can hold that same symbolic power, as long as that date matters to you. Which is crazy, because it really means that almost any day is an opportunity to reinvigorate yourself and renew your focus on the things that matter to you. That’s incredible when you think about it, because now we’re not talking about New Year’s resolutions. We’re talking about where am I starting from today. Now the funny thing is, if you find that too abstract a concept to get your head around, in terms of how you would execute that, there are two days that almost everyone recognizes as powerful And those are the first day of the month and the first day of the week, which means you don’t have to have New Year’s resolutions. You can have new month resolutions and new week resolutions. You can renew and reinvigorate every month and every week. You don’t have to think about what matters to you and what you want to change next year. Just think about what you want to change in January, and then again in February, and again in March. You can do the same every Sunday or Monday too, depending on what you consider the first day of the week. It could be the first day of the week, it could be the first day of your work week. You, all you have to do is take a few minutes and make a short list of what you’re going to work on from your balance wheel this week. Then do it again the following week, and the following, and so on. There’s this great hidden benefit to it, compared with New Year’s resolutions, by the way, that if a single week doesn’t go as planned, it doesn’t throw you off for the whole month or the whole year. You just reset on the following week, focus on what matters to you that week, and work towards becoming more completely yourself. And the great thing is, whether you do this 12 times a year, or 52, or some number in between those, I mean, we can all have a week that gets away from us, you will end up growing as a person. Over the course of those 52 weeks, you’ll end up building better relationships with the people who matter to you. Those outcomes, that focus, is what I mean when I’m talking about the only way to succeed next year. In this case, success isn’t just a business concept, it’s a life concept. It’s how you grow as a person. Now the funny thing is, that growth has other benefits beyond just the obvious. And that’s where this does have something to do with marketing or digital or business strategy. In fact, it has everything to do with marketing and digital and business strategy. Why? Because the greatest successes in marketing and digital and business strategy, and pretty much anything else in life, occur when you’re your whole self, when you feel good about yourself, when you’re able to bring your entire being to the moment and to the thing that you’re working on. I met somebody new and a client the other day whose approach just absolutely thrilled me, filled me with joy. He was so thoughtful and so present and so clear minded about his work and his life and what was important to him. He was so clear about what he thought he could do well and what he thought he couldn’t. He set appropriate boundaries with the people in the room without any argument or any drama. He simply wanted to focus on doing his very best work and supporting the team as a whole in the best way that he could. He is, already I’m finding out, just a delight to have met and work with. At least from what I can see on the surface, everything is going right for him. And I think it’s because he’s true to what matters to him. If you look at the people who constantly gripe that nothing ever goes right, they’re almost always at least a little bit at fault. Now, hang with me for a second. Because this is the internet, let me say right away, of course there are exceptions. Unfortunately, far too many cases exist where people are discriminated against or find themselves in abusive situations or have serious health issues. On a personal level, I’ve lost multiple family members and dear friends to things like cancer. I know people who struggle with mental illnesses and other very real problems in their lives. Situations like that absolutely suck. There’s no two ways about it. And I offer anybody going through anything like that nothing but peace and comfort and good fortune every day going forward, starting today. I’m not talking about those people. I’m talking about the people who you encounter from time to time — we all do — who really don’t have any major issues in their lives in any real terms and still find ways to bitch about everything in the world every day, right? In high school, by the way, one of my teachers, a priest as it happens, once told me the difference between bitching and complaining. It’s pretty big. Complaining is when you talk about your problems to someone who can do something about them, who can help you improve the situation. Bitching is when you talk about your problems to everybody else.* You know, and don’t get me wrong, there’s nothing wrong with bitching every now and again if it helps you move past something that’s bugging you. I bitch to my wife regularly about whatever things that are going on, whether trivial or significant, that has drawn my attention on any given day or in any given week. We all do. That’s normal. If you’re doing it all the time though, you know, maybe the problem isn’t with what’s going on in the world. Maybe it’s how you’re reacting to it. So with all I’m that out of the the way and speaking only about those who bitch about quote-unquote, “everything” — as well as those of you who simply want to find new ways to succeed — the simple fact is you can change your outcomes by changing your outlook. And I know that might sound trite. But it’s true, the groundbreaking work around flow, that is the state of operating at peak performance, you know, fully in the zone, identified by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, depends on three factors. And those three factors are, you’re working towards a single clear goal. That goal matters to you, it’s meaningful in your life, and the work challenges you without overwhelming you. It, it causes you to push yourself. When you’re working with flow, you feel energized across many areas of your, areas of your life. You’re happier as a person, you’re more fully yourself. In other words, working towards your goals will make you feel better in pretty much all the other areas of your life. So even if you don’t love where you are in your career, or maybe your company is struggling and you’re not in a position at the moment to do a lot about it. But if you imagine you’re spending time each week and each month learning from what you’d accomplished in the prior week or month, that would move you towards a meaningful goal of self improvement. Imagine if you were truly present for your family and friends and the people you love, that would move you towards the meaningful goal of building stronger and healthier relationships. Even when you can’t find flow at work, you can find flow in the other areas of your life, Which are areas that are going to continue to exist even as you change jobs and careers over the course of your working life. Working in this way on yourself helps you become a more fully realized version of yourself, which actually helps you become more focused and thoughtful at work. And quite possibly help you move forward as a digital marketer and strategist. And if not, you’ll still be fulfilled outside of work. You know, that’s really a great thing. It reminds me of a quote I love about strategy from the Lois McMaster Bujold book, “The Vor Game,” which you should totally check out. A character in the book says, “The key to strategy. Is not to choose a path to victory, but to choose so that all paths lead to victory.” Now, in fairness, she follows that up by saying, “ideally,” acknowledging that it’s not always easy to have all paths lead to victory every single time. Still, it’s worth choosing as many as you can that help. So, if you’re not necessarily having the best place at work, working on yourself is something you can control. Working on your relationships is something you can control. And that goes the other way, too. If you’re doing well in work, it allows you to say, “Okay, maybe I can’t control what’s happening with my relationships or a specific relationship, because the other person is not being everybody. They can’t control it. You would like them to be, but you can work on yourself and you can work on your work.” So ultimately, it’s working towards all paths helping you to succeed. If your success matters to you next year though, you need to think beyond just business and just marketing and just digital. You need to think about the kind of person you want to be in every area of your life. You need to think about the kinds of relationships you want to have, the people you want to spend your time with outside of business as well as within it. And then do the work in those areas to improve your relationships with the people that matter to you. Make sure you focus as much as you can on the areas and people that give your life meaning. Working towards improving in those areas helps you find flow in your activities, which will help you feel more fulfilled overall. And finding greater fulfillment overall helps you persevere during the tougher times of your days and weeks and months that undoubtedly will happen. Remember that you don’t have to think about New Year’s resolutions or wait for January 1st to roll around to make changes. You get to reset your objectives and renew your focus every month and every week. So the point I want to leave you with today is that your ability to be the person you want to be is entirely in your hands. And becoming the person you truly want to be is, in my book, The only real way to succeed next year, and every year after that. I hope you have a wonderful holiday season. I hope you get to spend it with people you love, and that everything next year goes really well for you. Just remember, a lot of that is within your hands, and I can’t wait to see what you do with it. Show Wrap-Up and Credits Do you know anybody that needs to hear this today? Do you know anyone who needs to hear what we just talked about. I’m pretty sure you just thought of someone. So be sure to share this episode with them. And of course, like and subscribe on YouTube, Spotify, or wherever you regularly get your podcasts. Until next time, I hope you’re well, I hope you’re safe, and I hope you take care of yourself. We’ll see you soon. The post Revisiting “The Only Way to Succeed Next Year” (Thinks Out Loud) appeared first on Tim Peter & Associates .…
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1 Will AI Kill Content Marketing for Customer Acquisition? (Thinks Out Loud Episode 449) 14:02
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We’re living through an evolving landscape around content marketing in the age of AI. This evolution raises the question of whether AI will kill content marketing for customer acquisition. What do we think? Nope. No way. AI absolutely has its place. But quality content without human connection won’t work for customer acquisition. While AI can enhance content creation, it should not replace the human element that customers actively seek every single day. Personalization and community play a key role in your marketing and customer acquisition strategies. And relying on AI to “be human” almost guarantees that your content marketing won’t work. Instead, businesses that prioritize genuine human interaction will thrive, regardless of technological advancements. Why is that so? Why does this matter? And how can you make sure that AI makes your content marketing more effective for customer acquisition? That’s what this episode of the Thinks Out Loud podcast is all about. Want to learn more? Here are the show notes for you. Will AI Kill Content Marketing for Customer Acquisition? (Thinks Out Loud Episode 449) — Headlines and Show Notes Show Notes and Links Deal With It: Digital Makes Marketing Easier for Everyone, Which Makes Marketing Harder For Everyone (Thinks Out Loud Episode 213) How to Put Big Tech and AI — the Biggest Threat and Biggest Enablers of Your Business — to Work (Episode 428) Digital Transformation is All About Customers (Thinks Out Loud Episode 323) – Tim Peter & Associates When people are your brand – Tim Peter & Associates Big Digital Marketing Trends: Who Speaks For Your Business? (Thinks Out Loud Episode 377) Belonging to the Brand: Why Community is the Last Great Marketing Strategy eBook by Mark Schaefer (Kindle Store) The Rebirth of Trusted Gatekeepers (Thinks Out Loud Episode 307) – Tim Peter & Associates Will AI Kill Your Brand (Thinks Out Loud Episode 435) When Will AI Get Good at Marketing? (Thinks Out Loud Episode 446) Will AI and ChatGPT Kill Your Search Traffic? (Thinks Out Loud Episode 381) Will AI Kill Emotion in Marketing? – Biznology What’s the Point of Your Website in an Age of AI? (Thinks Out Loud Episode 447) Are AI and Digital Evil (Thinks Out Loud Episode 438) Show Chapters 00:00 The Role of Content in Customer Acquisition 01:33 AI’s Impact on Content Marketing 03:45 The Importance of Human Connection 04:04 Personalization and Community in Marketing 07:45 The Future of Content Marketing with AI You might also enjoy this webinar I recently participated in with Miles Partnership that looked at "The Power of Generative AI and ChatGPT: What It Means for Tourism & Hospitality" here: Free Downloads We have some free downloads for you to help you navigate the current situation, which you can find right here: A Modern Content Marketing Checklist. Want to ensure that each piece of content works for your business? Download our latest checklist to help put your content marketing to work for you. Digital & E-commerce Maturity Matrix. As a bonus, here’s a PDF that can help you assess your company’s digital maturity. You can use this to better understand where your company excels and where its opportunities lie. And, of course, we’re here to help if you need it . The Digital & E-commerce Maturity Matrix rates your company’s effectiveness — Ad Hoc, Aware, Striving, Driving — in 6 key areas in digital today, including: Customer Focus Strategy Technology Operations Culture Data Best of Thinks Out Loud You can find our “Best of Thinks Out Loud” playlist on Spotify right here: Subscribe to Thinks Out Loud Subscribe in iTunes Subscribe in the Google Play Store Contact information for the podcast: podcast@timpeter.com Past Insights from Tim Peter Thinks Technical Details for Thinks Out Loud Recorded using a Shure SM7B Vocal Dynamic Microphone and a Focusrite Scarlett 4i4 (3rd Gen) USB Audio Interface into Logic Pro X for the Mac. Running time: 14m 02s You can subscribe to Thinks Out Loud in iTunes , the Google Play Store , via our dedicated podcast RSS feed (or sign up for our free newsletter ). You can also download/listen to the podcast here on Thinks using the player at the top of this page. Transcript: Will AI Kill Content Marketing for Customer Acquisition? Hi everyone, welcome back to Thinks Out Loud . I’m Tim Peter. I’ve built my career using digital channels to drive customer acquisition and in particular to lower customer acquisition costs for all kinds of businesses. I’ve long argued that quality content plays a key role in helping businesses like yours build a relationship with your customers to lower your customer acquisition costs. Content is your 24x7x365 customer service person. It’s your 24x7x365 sales rep. As we’ve all heard plenty of times, content is king, right? Or is it? The availability of AI makes producing quality content relatively cheap and easy. And as I’ve talked about a bunch of times before, when a new technology makes marketing and customer acquisition easier for everyone, it ends up making marketing and customer acquisition harder for everyone. Your competitors are now able to flood the zone with cheap, decent content on social and search and making it harder for you to cut through the clutter. That raises the question, will AI kill content marketing for customer acquisition? I’m Tim Peter. This is episode 449 of Thinks Out Loud . Let’s dive in. Okay, so let’s get the first question out of the way right up front. Will AI kill content marketing for customer acquisition? My answer is pretty straightforward. Only if we let it. If you’ve listened to this show for any amount of time, you know that I’m not an “either/or” kind of person. I’m all about “both/and.” AI absolutely has its place. This is about both AI and quality content. AI has a place in making that happen. That place, what it can do for us, will undoubtedly grow over time. AI is great for helping you brainstorm new content ideas. It’s amazing for helping you research your customers and their needs. AI can do a credible job, sometimes better than credible, at first drafts and editing. You can use AI to review your content and offer valuable feedback about how well you make your points, all from the point of view of your customers, as well as using it for more tactical items like grammar and style tips. It’s also able to automate developing and delivering personalized headlines and copy and imagery at scale. These are common features in all manner of digital tools today, not just large language models like ChatGPT, Claude or Google’s Gemini. They’re super helpful automating the time consuming and expensive parts of creating content at scale. I also think that you almost certainly don’t want AI to become the face of your brand. Why? Let’s start by remembering Jeff Bezos’ advice about what won’t change. What are the things we know aren’t going to change? One thing that’s not going to change is that your customers value companies that take care of them more than anything. They want to work with companies that make their lives easier. That’s true and it’s always true. Another truth is that people want to work with people. My friend Mark Schaefer in his book, Belonging to the Brand, Why Community is the Last Great Marketing Strategy , argues compellingly that customers continually seek a community that matches their values and concerns. To borrow a phrase, we all want someplace “where everybody knows your name.” That’s why personalization shows up every year on every list of the big trends shaping marketing and customer acquisition. This is actually highly related to the point about customers wanting to work with companies that make their lives easier. It’s not that customers want personalization. It’s that they want companies that understand and address their wants, their needs, their hopes, and their fears. They want to be seen and heard as individuals, as human beings. How many times have you heard people in marketing talking about using “surprise and delight” to drive customer acquisition and retention? The sad truth is that far too often, “understanding customers” and “meeting their needs” qualifies as surprising and delightful. At least in theory, no one should be better at doing that than another human being, and in particular, another human being who genuinely cares. My point here is that Mark is spot on. Community matters. And in a world where AI plays an increasingly prominent role in our lives, being human matters . It gives you a way to connect with current and potential customers in a real, live, human way. If you tilt your head and squint, it’s actually pretty easy to see how community itself is a sort of personalization. Community demonstrates that you’re talking to individuals who share the same values and concerns as they do. It’s a fundamentally human way of demonstrating your own humanity and your company’s humanity. I predict that the companies that do the best job of connecting with their customers as human beings, the companies who center human beings, will be the big winners over the next decade, whether they’re large businesses or small businesses. And that will be true even if they use AI under the hood or behind the scenes. So what has all that got to do with content marketing? Actually… EVERYTHING . No one wants to read or listen to or watch or experience machine-generated content. No one wants generic content that lacks a clear point of view or a style. They don’t want content that isn’t tailored to themselves or the communities that matter to them. They want to know you’re talking to them, both as individuals and as members of the communities that matter to them. They want to hear your voice, both literally and figuratively. Customers want to know who they’re dealing with. And if I could make another bold prediction, we’re going to see, I think, a very real, very serious pushback on AI-generated content. We’re already starting to see it. Your customers, the human beings that you talk to and with every day, want to hear from other human beings. They want to hear from people they trust. They want to see and hear from and connect with people, ideally a person, someone they know and trust. Part of creating quality content that matters for your customers is putting a human face to that content. So why not show them who’s behind it? If you’ve got a webinar or a podcast or a video, you want to be clear about who the people in these conversations are and what they share in common with your customers. There’s a reason that podcasts have the same hosts all the time. They’re all about building a personal relationship with their listeners, with their audience. If you’ve got written content, go ahead and list who the author is, who they are, and again, what they have in common with your audience. It’s about building that human relationship. And sure, you can use AI to help with the planning, with the outlining, with the drafting, and with the editing. You can use AI to help you repurpose the content for different audiences. Automation is absolutely part of both scaling up volume and lowering your cost of customer acquisition. You want to use the best of both worlds, both human and automation, to drive results for your business. That’s what I mean. This is about making sure we’re doing “both/and.” If you want to acquire customers, if you want to acquire more customers , you want to be more human. Not just “seen as human,” but actually “ be human .” You want your content to connect with your customers as people, as human beings, as individuals and as parts of the larger communities that they care about. You want to provide a human face that your customers can grow to trust. And yes, you also want to use AI as a valuable tool to produce and distribute your content more quickly, more easily, and in a more personalized way. It’s not “either/or;” it’s “both/and.” AI is not going to kill content marketing. There, I’ve said it. Let me plant a stake in the ground. AI will not kill content marketing. Bad content will. Boring, obviously machine-generated content that lacks humanity will. Content that fails to connect with human beings as individuals and as members of the communities they care about will kill content marketing. In short, AI will only kill content marketing if you let it. So let’s not do that, okay? Show Wrap-Up and Credits Now, looking at the clock on the wall, we are out of time for this week. I want to remind you again that you can find the show notes for this episode, as well as an archive of all past episodes, by going to timpeter.com/podcast . Again, that’s timpeter.com/podcast . Just look for episode 449. Subscribe to Thinks Out Loud Don’t forget that you can click on the subscribe link in any of the episodes that you find there to have Thinks Out Loud delivered to your favorite podcatcher every single week. You can also find Thinks Out Loud on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube Music, anywhere fine podcasts are found. Leave a Rating or Review for Thinks Out Loud I would also very much appreciate it if you could provide a positive rating or review for the show whenever you use one of those services. If you like what you hear on Thinks Out Loud , if you enjoy what we talk about, if you like being part of the community that we’re building here, please give us a positive rating or review. Reviews help other listeners find the podcast. Reviews help other listeners understand what Thinks Out Loud is all about. They help to build our community and they mean the world to me. So thank you so much for doing that. I very, very much appreciate it. Thinks Out Loud on Social Media You can also find Thinks Out Loud on LinkedIn by going to linkedin.com/tim-peter-and-associates-llc . And of course, you can email me by sending an email to podcast(at) timpeter.com . Again, that’s podcast(at) timpeter.com . Show Outro Finally, and I know I say this a lot, I want you to know how thrilled I am that you keep listening to what we do here. It means so much to me. You are the reason we do this show. You’re the reason that Thinks Out Loud happens every single week. So please, keep your messages coming on LinkedIn. Keep sending me things via email. I love getting a chance to talk with you, to hear what’s going on in your world, and to learn how we can do a better job building on the types of information and insights and content and community that work for you and work for your business. So with all that said, I hope you have a fantastic rest of your day, I hope you have a wonderful week ahead, and I will look forward to speaking with you here on Thinks Out Loud next time. Until then, please be well, be safe, and as always, take care, everybody. The post Will AI Kill Content Marketing for Customer Acquisition? (Thinks Out Loud Episode 449) appeared first on Tim Peter & Associates .…
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1 How Should You Think About Website SEO for AI? (Thinks Out Loud Episode 448) 20:15
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Google’s AI Overviews show up regularly for lots of search queries. Plenty of people also use ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, and others for “search” (albeit, with different behaviors than we’ve long seen on Google). This reality has plenty of people asking how to ensure their website and their content shows up in search results. What can you do to drive website SEO for AI? It’s a great question. It’s one that’s worth paying attention to. It’s also not necessarily the first question I would ask. What is the first question? Where should your focus be when it comes to AI and search? In short, how should you think about website SEO for AI? That’s what this episode of the Thinks Out Loud podcast is all about. Want to learn more? Here are the show notes for you. How Should You Think About Website SEO for AI? (Thinks Out Loud Episode 448) — Headlines and Show Notes Show Notes and Links What’s the Point of Your Website in an Age of AI? (Thinks Out Loud Episode 447) OpenAI launches Operator, an AI agent that can do tasks on the web – Ars Technica Ethan Mollik on LinkedIn when is the superbowl – Explore – Google Trends Trending Now – Google Trends Google AI Overviews Found In 74% Of Problem-Solving Queries Google Shares Insight On SEO For AI Overviews The Twiddler That Didn’t Twiddle – How To Track Clicks and Click Through Rate For Google’s AI Overviews (if you have a manual action) You might also enjoy this webinar I recently participated in with Miles Partnership that looked at "The Power of Generative AI and ChatGPT: What It Means for Tourism & Hospitality" here: Free Downloads We have some free downloads for you to help you navigate the current situation, which you can find right here: A Modern Content Marketing Checklist. Want to ensure that each piece of content works for your business? Download our latest checklist to help put your content marketing to work for you. Digital & E-commerce Maturity Matrix. As a bonus, here’s a PDF that can help you assess your company’s digital maturity. You can use this to better understand where your company excels and where its opportunities lie. And, of course, we’re here to help if you need it . The Digital & E-commerce Maturity Matrix rates your company’s effectiveness — Ad Hoc, Aware, Striving, Driving — in 6 key areas in digital today, including: Customer Focus Strategy Technology Operations Culture Data Best of Thinks Out Loud You can find our “Best of Thinks Out Loud” playlist on Spotify right here: Subscribe to Thinks Out Loud Subscribe in iTunes Subscribe in the Google Play Store Contact information for the podcast: podcast@timpeter.com Past Insights from Tim Peter Thinks Technical Details for Thinks Out Loud Recorded using a Shure SM7B Vocal Dynamic Microphone and a Focusrite Scarlett 4i4 (3rd Gen) USB Audio Interface into Logic Pro X for the Mac. Running time: 20m 15s You can subscribe to Thinks Out Loud in iTunes , the Google Play Store , via our dedicated podcast RSS feed (or sign up for our free newsletter ). You can also download/listen to the podcast here on Thinks using the player at the top of this page. Transcript: How Should You Think About Website SEO for AI? In last week’s episode, titled What’s the Point of Your Website in an Age of AI, I talked about the reality of AI agents. And at one point I stated, “let’s start with the idea that at the moment AI agents technically don’t exist. I mean, they’re a cool idea and they could turn up at scale 10 minutes after I record this, but they don’t exist right now.” Literally the same day that the episode dropped, OpenAI, the folks behind ChatGPT, launched a research preview of Operator. And this is what they called it, “a web automation tool that uses a new AI model called Computer Using Agent to control a web browser through a visual interface. The system performs tasks by viewing and interacting with on-screen elements like buttons and text fields similar to how a human would.” That’s from Ars Technica. So yeah, that happened. It might not have been 10 minutes after the episode, but it was damned close. I’d love to think I can manifest all sorts of things that easily. Like right now, I hope you hit the Powerball this week… OK, let me know how that works out for you. In any case, I stand by the overarching point of the episode and why I think you still need a website and why that will likely be true for some time to come, if not forever. I’m not going to rehash the whole episode here. I encourage you to check it out at the link in the show notes when you get a chance. At any rate, as a consequence of that episode, I got a couple of questions from folks wondering how they make their websites work better for AI. In short, how do you make your website show up in answers like Google’s AI Overviews or ChatGPT? It’s a fair question. New research shows that Google AI Overviews appear on roughly 30% of searches. I’m Tim Peter. This is episode 448 of the Thinks Out Loud podcast. Let’s dive in and give it a think. The idea of website SEO for artificial intelligence is a good one, generally. I am in support of this and I’m going to tell you as we go forward in this episode some things you can do to make sure you show up in those cases. What’s also true is that you don’t want to lose sight of the big picture. For instance, why do I keep saying website SEO, not just SEO, regardless of where the traffic goes? Because as I noted last week, “the point of your website in the age of AI is to create a deeper, richer brand experience and engage with human customers directly. A place where you can keep your content assets free from the dictates of big tech.” In other words, if you’re trying to do SEO for someplace other than your website, you’re building your brand on rented land. Sure, if you’ve got a YouTube channel or LinkedIn page, you undoubtedly want to follow best practices to ensure you show up there. But you also want to direct those folks to your own channels, your website and your CRM as often as possible. That’s where you ultimately have the most control with your customers. Second, if you’re only working on your website for SEO reasons, well, you’re doing it wrong. As Rand Fishkin once said, SEO is the reward for building your brand. In other words, the best way to beat Google at its game is to have customers search for you by name. Your marketing activities should be about building a brand that customers intentionally search for, not just showing up for every possible result in the search engine. You’re missing the bigger picture if you chase every new trend. And chasing every new trend, even ones as big as AI may prove to be, can be a massive waste of time. Questions like these pose a perfect case for focusing on “what won’t change.” You know the story, I’ve talked about this before. Jeff Bezos, when asked about what might happen in the future, famously said it’s more important to focus on what won’t change. He knew, for instance, that consumers would always want lots of selection, they’d always want fast shipping, and they’d always want low prices. In fact, he couldn’t imagine a world where they’d want the opposite. And then he built Amazon to meet those wants. Jumping to chase every single AI and SEO trend as they appear is chasing your tail. You’re spending too much time thinking about what will change and not enough time thinking about what won’t change. If you’re like most folks, I imagine that you have too much to do every day to waste time. And frankly, given that time is always our most finite resource, you never want to waste it. To get the bigger point out of the way, first, AI search is fairly limited today. I know, I know, you’re probably thinking, bull crap, lots of people search on AI. I even started by quoting a study that shows AI overview shows up for 30% of searches. Yep, guilty, lots of people do. OpenAI gets a bit over half a billion visits every month. To remind you of the numbers though, according to Comscore, almost 40% of Americans aged 18 to 64 have used generative AI. And the Census Department found that more than 24% of American Yorkers used it, quote, least once in the week prior to being surveyed. Another number is that roughly one in nine folks, or about 11%, use generative AI nearly every workday. So that’s a healthy number of folks who are using these tools. That also means that 60% of folks have never used it. 76% aren’t using it at least once a week. And 89% aren’t using it every day. Again, keep this front of mind. What won’t change? …or at least what isn’t changing too much yet. As for the research around AI Overviews, well, AI Overviews appeared for 29.9% of the 10,000 keywords studied, but those keywords made up only 11.5 % of total search volume. According to Search Engine Journal, “high volume keywords are less likely to have an AI overview than mid-range search terms with monthly search volumes between 501 and 2,400.” Here’s the thing, lots of the search queries that customers ask, whether in a traditional search or in AI tools, really aren’t worth anything to Google. In fact, they’re not really worth all that much to your business either. I’m recording this on Wednesday, January 29th and trending topics over the last seven days include: Nvidia stock Lunar New Year Medicaid Caroline Kennedy, and RFK Jr. I’m going to bet that most of these have no value to your business at all. know, lots of companies can probably do something with Lunar New Year, offering specific products, services, or specials to customers celebrating the holiday. That could be a great idea. And creative marketers may find some opportunities in other trending terms. But let’s be honest, monetizing many of these, given their connection to politics, for instance, is difficult and probably potentially risky for most folks. Second, the shelf life of many of these types of questions is incredibly short. Even when I narrow the view in Google Trends, to say the “travel and transportation” category, which is an industry I frequently work in, I get the following list: Spain Tourist Band Hotels Panda Cam Hotel News, and Indigo. Obviously, if we ignore how much competition you’re going to face there, some of these, like hotels or hotel news, for instance, might be worth exploring. But another feature in Google Trends shows how long the boost in search volume above their traditional levels lasted. On the long side, “Panda Cam” lasted for, say it with me now, one day and two hours. That’s the only term that lasted longer than a day. Four of the top 10 terms saw a boost that lasted for less than six hours. Again, you may be able to creatively find ways to use these terms. My point isn’t to discourage you to think outside the box. My point instead is to keep you focused on areas that have the most likely meaningful return. Short-term pops can help you from time to time. I’m not saying to ignore them. But usually, as the saying goes, the juice isn’t worth the squeeze. What tends to happen is that your customers hear about something trending, some topic, some area of interest. They do a search to find out what it’s all about, get their answer, and then move on with life. Trying to rank for those in search or in AI is not a winning strategy most of the time. Ask anyone, anyone , whose business somehow managed to rank for “what time is the Super Bowl,” how much business they gained from it. I’ll bet you the answer is not much. Sure there are exceptions. And if you’ve got a big enough team of incredibly skilled folks, you can probably make some hay there. But that’s not going to be the case for most businesses. What’s also true is that there’s a deeper lesson in that query, the query, “what time is the Super Bowl,” than I think we tend to realize. That query is a brand query . Customers are searching for a brand, “the Super Bowl.” Yes, it’s arguably one of the most famous brands in the world, so you’d think they wouldn’t need it. But it shows that the search happened because people care about that brand. They care about the Super Bowl. And because of that, it’s the Super Bowl — and its partners — whose business benefits. In an ideal state, that’s what you want your customers to do with your brand all the time, whether they’re searching in AI or whether they’re searching in traditional search. The data backs this up. Returning to the Search Engine Journal, the study that Search Engine Journal cited, “…navigational queries like searching for a specific website rarely resulted in AI Overviews. This shows that,” the article says, “that AI Overviews focus on general information rather than direct navigation… and that non-brand terms are more likely to produce AI Overviews.” The article continues to say that, “…about 33.3% of non-brand searches show an AI overview, while only 19.6% of brand searches do.” I mean that makes a ton of sense. This is about brand. This is about what do your customers really want to know. You want your customers to search for you by name. You want them to search for your brand. When you get to how people show up in AI, how you show up in those AI searches, well, if we’re being honest, nobody knows. And I want to be fair, that’s not true. I take that statement back. There are plenty of good tips and techniques out there for how you show up at the moment. For instance, we’ve consistently seen that sites showing up in Google’s Featured Snippets also tend to appear in AI Overviews, as well as in other AI-related search experiences. Again, I don’t want to discourage you from finding new ways and new creative ways to find new customers. If you’re doing this during your 20% explore activities as part of a core and explore approach, where 80% of your time is dedicated to your core marketing activities and 20% is dedicated to exploring new ideas? Well, then go off, friend. That’s exactly what you should do. At the same time, the big challenge at the moment is that AI itself, let alone search for AI, is changing incredibly fast. Again, note my point in the intro about agents showing up 10 minutes after the episode drops and then OpenAI releasing their agent about 10 minutes after the episode dropped. You’ve also undoubtedly seen the buzz around DeepSeek, a Chinese open source AI that gives near-frontier model performance, but allegedly cost only $6 million to develop. That’s opposed to the billions that others are investing to make AI the new standard for computing. The point is that most advice on the topic of website SEO for AI right now has the shelf life of unpasteurized milk. In Phoenix. In July. We just don’t know how long some of this advice is going to last or how much long-term benefit you can derive from this. And if we keep the focus on what won’t change, the one thing that appears to consistently be true is that brands win. As the Search Engine Journal article states, “websites with reliable voices, verified information and trustworthy content will likely be cited in AI Overviews.” Which makes sense. If you ask any AI about a brand, it’s going to tell you about the brand. Funny how that’s what customers want too. They want to know when the Super Bowl is. They want to know the answer to their question. And AIs want to give them those answers. So your focus should be on how do you become a great answer for the things your brand can deliver on. How do you create a great experience that your customers want again and again and again. The truth is we want our customers searching for us by name. We want our content and our websites and our experiences and our social media efforts to help customers to answer their questions, to build a relationship, to drive awareness and interest and desire and action. In short, we want to build our brand. And we want to do that whether our customers are using search or social or AI or search on AI or anything else. That won’t change. It shouldn’t change. That’s how I think you should think about website SEO for AI. Otherwise, you risk a lot more than not showing up in the answers. You risk that your customers simply won’t care about you. Show Wrap-Up and Credits Now, looking at the clock on the wall, we are out of time for this week. And I want to remind you again that you can find the show notes for this episode, as well as an archive of all past episodes, by going to timpeter.com/podcast . Again, that’s timpeter.com/podcast . Just look for episode 448. Subscribe to Thinks Out Loud Don’t forget that you can click on the subscribe link in any of the episodes that you find there to have Thinks Out Loud delivered to your favorite podcatcher every single week. You can also find Thinks Out Loud on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube Music, anywhere fine podcasts are found. Leave a Rating or Review for Thinks Out Loud I would also very much appreciate it if you could provide a positive rating or review for the show whenever you use one of those services. If you like what you hear on Thinks Out Loud , if you enjoy what we talk about, if you like being part of the community that we’re building here, please give us a positive rating or review. Reviews help other listeners find the podcast. Reviews help other listeners understand what Thinks Out Loud is all about. They help to build our community and they mean the world to me. So thank you so much for doing that. I very, very much appreciate it. Thinks Out Loud on Social Media You can also find Thinks Out Loud on LinkedIn by going to linkedin.com/tim-peter-and-associates-llc . And of course, you can email me by sending an email to podcast(at) timpeter.com . Again, that’s podcast(at) timpeter.com . Show Outro Finally, and I know I say this a lot, I want you to know how thrilled I am that you keep listening to what we do here. It means so much to me. You are the reason we do this show. You’re the reason that Thinks Out Loud happens every single week. So please, keep your messages coming on LinkedIn. Keep sending me things via email. I love getting a chance to talk with you, to hear what’s going on in your world, and to learn how we can do a better job building on the types of information and insights and content and community that work for you and work for your business. So with all that said, I hope you have a fantastic rest of your day, I hope you have a wonderful week ahead, and I will look forward to speaking with you here on Thinks Out Loud next time. Until then, please be well, be safe, and as always, take care, everybody. The post How Should You Think About Website SEO for AI? (Thinks Out Loud Episode 448) appeared first on Tim Peter & Associates .…
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1 What’s the Point of Your Website in an Age of AI? (Thinks Out Loud Episode 447) 25:16
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Do you still need a website in an age of AI? More broadly, what is the point of your business’s website in an age of AI? As AI becomes more prevalent, we’re hearing more people suggest that maybe your website isn’t important any longer. To put it mildly, that’s a load of crap. In some ways, your website becomes more important in an age of AI. Why is that? What do you need your website to do for your customers, your brand, and your business now more than ever? Most importantly, what is the point of your website in an age of AI? That’s what this episode of the Thinks Out Loud podcast is all about. Want to learn more? Here are the show notes for you. What’s the Point of Your Website in an Age of AI? (Thinks Out Loud Episode 447) — Headlines and Show Notes Show Notes and Links U.S. Smartphone Penetration Surpassed 80 Percent in 2016 – Comscore,… – Comscore, Inc. Demographics of Mobile Device Ownership and Adoption in the United States Americans are using AI at fairly high rates. What does this mean for the economy? : Planet Money : NPR Worldwide AI tool users 2030 | Statista MrBeast MrBeast – YouTube 4 Reasons Why Google Metasearch in Maps Matters (Travel Tuesday) – Tim Peter & Associates Why Google is the Beast That Scares Your Industry’s 800-lb. Gorilla (Thinks Out Loud Episode 238) Google is Changing Search. How to Build Traffic and Revenue Beyond Google — Part 1 (Thinks Out Loud Episode 424) The CORE Methodology: How to Build Traffic and Revenue Beyond Google — Part 2 (Thinks Out Loud Episode 425) – Tim Peter & Associates An AI Day in the Life of a Marketing and Digital Strategy Consultant (Thinks Out Loud Episode 434) Revisiting How to Diversify Your Marketing Mix When There’s Too Much to Do (Thinks Out Loud) Will AI Kill Your Brand (Thinks Out Loud Episode 435) Revisiting Why Digital Gatekeepers Kill Organic Traffic (Thinks Out Loud) – Tim Peter & Associates Diversifying Your Marketing Mix When There’s Too Much to Do (Thinks Out Loud Episode 430) Why AI Makes Customer Experience Even More Important for Your Business (Thinks Out Loud Episode 427) Building a Human Brand in the Age of AI (Thinks Out Loud Episode 398) Do You Still Need a Website? (Thinks Out Loud Episode 400) What Connects TikTok and the Hub and Spoke Model of Digital? (Thinks Out Loud Episode 299) How To Run Your Business As If Google Didn’t Exist (Thinks Out Loud Episode 298) – Tim Peter & Associates You might also enjoy this webinar I recently participated in with Miles Partnership that looked at "The Power of Generative AI and ChatGPT: What It Means for Tourism & Hospitality" here: Free Downloads We have some free downloads for you to help you navigate the current situation, which you can find right here: A Modern Content Marketing Checklist. Want to ensure that each piece of content works for your business? Download our latest checklist to help put your content marketing to work for you. Digital & E-commerce Maturity Matrix. As a bonus, here’s a PDF that can help you assess your company’s digital maturity. You can use this to better understand where your company excels and where its opportunities lie. And, of course, we’re here to help if you need it . The Digital & E-commerce Maturity Matrix rates your company’s effectiveness — Ad Hoc, Aware, Striving, Driving — in 6 key areas in digital today, including: Customer Focus Strategy Technology Operations Culture Data Best of Thinks Out Loud You can find our “Best of Thinks Out Loud” playlist on Spotify right here: Subscribe to Thinks Out Loud Subscribe in iTunes Subscribe in the Google Play Store Contact information for the podcast: podcast@timpeter.com Past Insights from Tim Peter Thinks Technical Details for Thinks Out Loud Recorded using a Shure SM7B Vocal Dynamic Microphone and a Focusrite Scarlett 4i4 (3rd Gen) USB Audio Interface into Logic Pro X for the Mac. Running time: 25m 16s You can subscribe to Thinks Out Loud in iTunes , the Google Play Store , via our dedicated podcast RSS feed (or sign up for our free newsletter ). You can also download/listen to the podcast here on Thinks using the player at the top of this page. Transcript: What’s the Point of Your Website in an Age of AI? I’ve seen a number of people talking lately about why websites aren’t as important in an age of AI. That with the rise of AI and the coming of AI agents, your customers aren’t going to visit your website and that it’s a waste of time and effort to focus too much on your website now. Cover your kids ears and let me be abundantly clear how I feel about this. Bullshit. That is terrible advice. I believe that saying your website is unimportant in an age of AI is complete and utter nonsense. Why is that? Why do I feel so strongly about this? And what’s the point of your business’s website in an age of AI? This is episode 447 of Thinks Out Loud . Let’s dive in. Do you still need a website or is AI taking over? Let me get this out of the way right up front. Yes. Yes, you need a website. Your customers are going to need a place they can go to learn more about your business, your products or your services, even in the age of AI. More to the point, you want a place where you control the customer experience and have the opportunity to create memorable brand interactions with potential customers. You want a place where you can keep your content assets free from the dictates of big tech. And you want a place where customers can visit when they think of you first, no matter how they’ve heard of your brand, so they don’t always have to ask an AI or search for you. That last point is particularly important because those alternatives are also where your competitors live. Your customers may start out thinking of you, but end up somewhere else because your competition may do a better job of optimizing for the algorithm. Don’t play that game. Don’t build your brand on rented land. That’s been true for years. It doesn’t stop now. Do the work necessary to get customers to come directly to you. If you think that I’m delusional about this or that I don’t understand how the world works or how the world is going to work, spare me, right? This is far from my first rodeo on this point. We have heard this many times before when it comes to new technologies coming around. A few of these technologies come immediately to mind. Y’know, social media… there was lots of advice around building your presence on Facebook or Instagram or TikTok or YouTube. “There’s no need for a website. Social gives you everything.” Uh-huh. Sure. What about Google Local and Google Business Profiles? Yeah, definitely. Let’s let Google decide. There were also products like Google’s Accelerated Mobile Pages, which technically were still your website. But I think we’ve learned over time those tended to be better in practice for Google than they were for your actual business. If you don’t believe me though that you need a website and that you will still need a website, maybe you’ll believe one of the biggest, most successful social media creators in the world. Did you know that Mr. Beast has a website? The big YouTuber? He has several. In fact, he’s got a bunch of websites. Yes, YouTube and Amazon and Instagram and X play a major role in his company’s web presence. But he still has an e-commerce website. He’s still got a place for people to get jobs with his production company. He has a site for Mr. Beastburger. Plus, there’s a single website, MrBeastInfo.com , that connects all of these and directs his customers to whichever one best serves their needs in a particular moment. It’s the hub at the center of his digital universe. Many of the links on that site do link to various YouTube channels that he controls. But here’s the point, he gets to control where those links point and he can change them at any time he wants to serve the needs of his brand and to serve the needs of his business and to serve the needs of his customers. Again, it’s the hub at the center of his digital universe. I’ve talked about using a hub and spoke strategy for some time. The idea is that you’ve got a hub which consists of your website, your CRM, and if you have one, your app. Those are the assets that you control. Technically, the big ones are your website and your CRM because even Apple and Google control the App Store, they can control those over time. Your hub provides the assets that your customers can always visit if some gatekeeper like Google or Facebook or Apple or Amazon changes the rules on you. And then you’ve got the spokes. Those are the channels where your customers can find you and interact with you. They should absolutely help you grow your brand’s awareness. They should absolutely help you grow your brand’s engagement. They might be a major source of traffic, engagement, revenue, or profits for your business. But at the same time they should lead over time back to your hub to let you connect with those customers directly, whether they’re using your site, your app, or through various CRM channels like email, snail mail, and SMS. If you think about it, the people most interested in telling you you don’t need a website are the ones who benefit the most from using the alternative they provide. That includes social media platforms. It includes Google. It includes Amazon. It includes Apple with the App Store. And when we think about AI, it’s the VCs backing AI companies who are saying, “You don’t need to worry about the website. You only need to worry about being there in the AI.” Now don’t misunderstand, I’m not saying you don’t want to use these channels as spokes in your hub and spoke strategy. I’m saying that you always want a hub, too, just in case the folks in charge of those spokes change their minds about how they should work, or as happened many times before, shut them down completely. Think about what happened with TikTok over the last couple of weeks. First it existed, then it was banned for a day, now it’s back. We don’t know if it will stay back. What if you built your entire brand on TikTok and it simply went away? That’s happening even as we speak. Ultimately, your hub, your website and your CRM is for your business and your customers. Yes, your website will need to support AI broadly and AI agents specifically in time. But you’ll almost always want it to support human beings too. In fact, that’s where I think you should focus first. Why focus on humans? Aren’t people turning to AI more and more? Won’t agents really change the game? Well, let’s start with the idea that at the moment, AI agents technically don’t exist, right? I mean, they’re a cool idea. And they could turn up at scale 10 minutes after I record this. But they don’t exist right now. We don’t really know what building a website for agents means in practice yet. I suspect that’s going to be true for at least a little while after they do exist too, which I’ll explain in a minute. Building for a technology that doesn’t exist yet is expensive and frankly a distraction from making things better for your customers that actually use or are trying to use your site today. We know, for instance, that cart abandonment on B2C sites is generally pretty high. We know that large numbers of website searches on B2B sites fail outright. People simply can’t find the information they’re looking for. We know that engagement rates on most sites tends to be fairly low, regardless of whether they’re targeting consumers or business customers. Why not fix those things now instead of creating something new for a tool and technology that’s at best just a little bit over the horizon? Second, because if and when AI agents exist, their job will be to serve the needs of their person. An agent is going to need to get answers to questions their person asks. An agent is going to need to find solutions to a problem their person has. An agent is going to need to present images of what those solutions look like. An agent is going to need to show videos of those products or solutions in action. Especially at first, agents may need to point their people to a place where they, the person, can see all of these for themselves. Doesn’t that all sound like something your website should do? In fact, shouldn’t it do that already? Think about it. Where is the agent going to get these answers, these solutions, these images, and these videos? Don’t you want to make sure you have content and images and videos to provide those answers? And hear me out. Wouldn’t it be convenient if an agent could go to, I don’t know, one place to find what it’s looking for that addresses its person’s need? Something like, I don’t know, a website? Sure, at some point the agent may simply present the one and only answer that perfectly meets the needs of their person. That could absolutely happen. How soon do you think that’s likely to happen though? How soon do you think that’s likely to get adopted at scale? How much are you willing to bet on the answers to those questions? I don’t mean to malign any of the possibilities that agents offer. Agents sound genuinely cool in theory. I’m a relatively early adopter. I use AI regularly today and I have a series of tests I run regularly to see how much I can outsource to any artificial intelligence I’m using. At the moment, the vision is compelling. But in practice, the results so far are far from letting them simply take care of everything. And if we look past adoption curves, those suggest we’ll have some time to adjust once agents hit the market for real. Smartphones took nearly four years to reach 50% market penetration and almost 80 years to reach 80%. That’s Comscore data. Even if AI agents cut those times in half, you’ll have probably a year to meet the needs of the earliest adopters, a couple of years to meet the needs of the top 50%, and probably three to five years to meet the needs of the top 80%. And you’ll still also need your website to accommodate 20 % of your customer base after that three to five year period. Hell, here we are in 2025 and roughly 9% of the US still doesn’t have a smartphone. Some of that is tied to income, so those might not be your customers. Some is tied to education, so some of those folks might be your customers. And some is tied to a rural-urban divide, which could go either way. The point remains that you’re likely going to be serving the needs of 5% to 10% of your customers, and probably a lot more, through — a good lord, this pains me to say — traditional website for years, if not for decades. If we broaden our discussion from agents to AI more generally, recent numbers show that almost 40% of Americans ages 18 to 64 have used generative AI. More than 24% of American workers used it, “at least once in the week prior to being surveyed.” This according to an NPR story on a study conducted by the Census Department. Further, that roughly one in nine folks, or about 11%, used generative AI nearly every work day. Again, those are compelling numbers. They’re also not a majority of your customers, at least not yet. And we’re two plus years in two and a half years in, since the launch of ChatGPT. One other reason that gives me constant confidence about this reality, inertia. Inertia is the toughest thing in the world to sell against. People are going to do what they’ve always done unless they’re given a compelling reason that makes change worth the effort. There are still 9% of the population who don’t have a smartphone. Why? Because they don’t work better than what they have today. That’s going to be completely true for websites too. There’s something like 1.9 billion websites in the world and over 200 million websites that are actively updated. Customers aren’t going to adopt agents if they have to wait for every website in the world to become AI agent friendly. If the agents can’t provide good answers from the web as it is, people aren’t going to use them. I’m reasonably confident that agents are going to have to work with the web as it exists today versus everyone else making websites that meet the needs of agents right away. It just doesn’t seem likely to me. I could certainly be wrong. And obviously those that figure out how to work better for AI and for agents will have an advantage over those that don’t. But I’d be willing to bet that that process is going to take a little time and that you’ll be able to move fast enough when the time comes. Of course, I want to be very clear. You need to pay attention to your data. I’m seeing clients get small but growing amounts of traffic, referral traffic from ChatGPT, from Gemini, from Perplexity and others. Agents are coming. Your customers will use AI agents to find what they need. Feel free to disregard everything I just said if you find that your traffic from these sources has reached critical mass. I’m not being sarcastic. There’s no such thing as “best practices” if your data tells you a different story. To wrap up this point, I am absolutely bullish on the idea of AI and agents. I use the former all the time and I’m very eager for the latter to arrive. I’m very much in that 11 % who use AI nearly every day for work. But don’t let the hype distract you though from doing what’s necessary today to take care of your customers today. You have time to get ready for these tools. And there are things you can and should do now to be ready. What are those things? What should you do? Well, I’m glad you asked. First, don’t rebuild your website from the ground up. At least not yet. That’s usually not necessary. Unless your website is older, and I’m talking more than roughly four to five years, it’s probably modern enough for now. I’m gonna have a little sidebar on this in a minute. It’s likely mobile-friendly. It’s likely accessible for visually impaired people or those with low vision. It’s hopefully relatively fast. This is the one I’m gonna take a quick detour on, then get back to the original point, but to the point of modern enough, you should regularly work to make your site faster and more accessible. I’d recommend that “regularly” means taking action at least once a year. A faster, more accessible website is better for customers. A faster website is better for search. It’s almost certainly going to be better for AI agents. Either your IT team or your marketing operations team, assuming you have one, should have website performance improvements baked into their budgets every year. If they don’t, or if you don’t have those teams, you should make sure you’re including that in your budget and taking those actions, again, at least once a year. The alternative is a site that’s worse for search, worse for AI, worse for accessibility, worse for customers, and worse for your business. Now, how do you make your existing site work better? Start by remembering what a website is. It’s your 24x7x365 salesperson. It’s your 24x7x365 customer service rep. Its job is to help your customers find the information they need and to help your customers buy your products and services. Period. Your website is not its visual design. It’s not the layout. It is the content and experiences you offer. Focus on your core customer experiences and your core content to make a better website. What are the questions your customers need answered? What are the problems your customers need solved? How effective is your website at answering those questions and solving those problems? Your analytics can help you find out. Start with a content audit. What are the top pages customers visit on your site? Which ones have particularly low engagement rates? Which ones do customers never see? That’s where you start. Look for opportunities to improve poor performers — that is, pages that get lots of traffic but have low engagement rates. When you find yourself in a hole, the first thing you want to do is stop digging. Don’t keep sending tons of traffic to pages that don’t perform. Then, look for opportunities to get more traffic to high engagement rate pages. Build an action plan for how you’re going to improve those poor performing pages and how you’re going to drive more traffic to the high engagement pages. Use heat mapping tools. Try something like Hotjar or Glassbox or Microsoft Clarity to see where your customers struggle with your site. And then build a plan to make your content more effective and more available to your customers. Then… execute against that plan. Make sure you’ve got structured data in place that makes it easier for AI tools to understand what your page and your content is all about. The point here isn’t to ignore agents or AI. It’s that you’re building the right content that can help AI answer its people’s questions, its users’ questions. You’re building solutions that meet the needs of AI and of your customers. And that you’re setting yourself up for long-term success. So yes, AI is coming. And it’s going to change the way we do some of our web development, some of our website management. Most of those changes though are yet to be determined. You’ll have time to adjust. Just keep paying attention to your customers and your data so you’re ready to move and that you know where to go when the time comes. That notwithstanding, the point of a website in the age of AI is to be the place where anyone and everyone, human or AI, can find the answers they need. The point of a website in the age of AI is to be the place where you can create a deeper, richer brand experience and engage with human customers directly. The point of a website in the age of AI, as always, is to bypass the gatekeepers who want to get between you and your customers. The point of a website in the age of AI is to build your brand and build your business, just like it should have been doing all along. Show Wrap-Up and Credits Now, looking at the clock on the wall, we are out of time for this week. And I want to remind you again that you can find the show notes for this episode, as well as an archive of all past episodes, by going to timpeter.com/podcast . Again, that’s timpeter.com/podcast . Just look for episode 447 . Subscribe to Thinks Out Loud Don’t forget that you can click on the subscribe link in any of the episodes that you find there to have Thinks Out Loud delivered to your favorite podcatcher every single week. You can also find Thinks Out Loud on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube Music, anywhere fine podcasts are found. Leave a Rating or Review for Thinks Out Loud I would also very much appreciate it if you could provide a positive rating or review for the show whenever you use one of those services. If you like what you hear on Thinks Out Loud , if you enjoy what we talk about, if you like being part of the community that we’re building here, please give us a positive rating or review. Reviews help other listeners find the podcast. Reviews help other listeners understand what Thinks Out Loud is all about. They help to build our community and they mean the world to me. So thank you so much for doing that. I very, very much appreciate it. Thinks Out Loud on Social Media You can also find Thinks Out Loud on LinkedIn by going to linkedin.com/tim-peter-and-associates-llc . And of course, you can email me by sending an email to podcast(at) timpeter.com . Again, that’s podcast(at) timpeter.com . Show Outro Finally, and I know I say this a lot, I want you to know how thrilled I am that you keep listening to what we do here. It means so much to me. You are the reason we do this show. You’re the reason that Thinks Out Loud happens every single week. So please, keep your messages coming on LinkedIn. Keep sending me things via email. I love getting a chance to talk with you, to hear what’s going on in your world, and to learn how we can do a better job building on the types of information and insights and content and community that work for you and work for your business. So with all that said, I hope you have a fantastic rest of your day, I hope you have a wonderful week ahead, and I will look forward to speaking with you here on Thinks Out Loud next time. Until then, please be well, be safe, and as always, take care, everybody. The post What’s the Point of Your Website in an Age of AI? (Thinks Out Loud Episode 447) appeared first on Tim Peter & Associates .…
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1 When Will AI Get Good at Marketing? (Thinks Out Loud Episode 446) 19:04
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Artificial intelligence is part of marketing today. But, to hear most people tell it, it’s a frustrating part. AI is either the thing that will put all marketers out of work or it’s a useless collection of vaporware, continually overpromising and underdelivering. While it’s impossible for both of these to be true at the same moment, it’s clear that we’re facing a question: When will AI get good at marketing? When will it live up to the hype — or its potential — and deliver meaningful results for our businesses? The reason why AI isn’t ready yet probably isn’t what you think it is. So what is? What is preventing AI from producing the results we want to see? And, ultimately, when will AI get good at marketing? That’s what this episode of the Thinks Out Loud podcast is all about. Want to learn more? Here are the show notes for you. When Will AI Get Good at Marketing? (Thinks Out Loud Episode 446) — Headlines and Show Notes Show Notes and Links AI Is Not the Future. You Are (Thinks Out Loud Episode 443) Diversifying Your Marketing Mix When There’s Too Much to Do (Thinks Out Loud Episode 430) AI is the Bear: Learning to Be a Better Marketer in the Age of AI (Thinks Out Loud Episode 422) Will AI Kill Your Brand (Thinks Out Loud Episode 435) An AI Day in the Life of a Marketing and Digital Strategy Consultant (Thinks Out Loud Episode 434) Is AI Destined to Make Marketing — and Music — Worse? (Thinks Out Loud Episode 432) Press release: The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2024 – NobelPrize.org Press release: The Nobel Prize in Physics 2024 – NobelPrize.org Researchers use AI to design proteins that block snake venom toxins – Ars Technica Switched-On Bach – Wikipedia Hit Men: Power Brokers and Fast Money Inside the Music Business by Fredric Dannen The Only Way to Succeed Next Year (Thinks Out Loud Episode 444) Are AI and Digital Evil (Thinks Out Loud Episode 438) Is AI a Gatekeeper? Or is it a Key? (Thinks Out Loud Episode 437) How to Put Big Tech and AI — the Biggest Threat and Biggest Enablers of Your Business — to Work (Episode 428) Why AI Makes Customer Experience Even More Important for Your Business (Thinks Out Loud Episode 427) What Marketers Really Need to Know About Putting AI to Work (Thinks Out Loud Episode 426) Google is Changing Search. How to Build Traffic and Revenue Beyond Google — Part 1 (Thinks Out Loud Episode 424) The CORE Methodology: How to Build Traffic and Revenue Beyond Google — Part 2 (Thinks Out Loud Episode 425) – Tim Peter & Associates The Best AI is Now Free For Everyone: Revisiting Will Your Customers Use AI? (Thinks Out Loud) You might also enjoy this webinar I recently participated in with Miles Partnership that looked at "The Power of Generative AI and ChatGPT: What It Means for Tourism & Hospitality" here: Free Downloads We have some free downloads for you to help you navigate the current situation, which you can find right here: A Modern Content Marketing Checklist. Want to ensure that each piece of content works for your business? Download our latest checklist to help put your content marketing to work for you. Digital & E-commerce Maturity Matrix. As a bonus, here’s a PDF that can help you assess your company’s digital maturity. You can use this to better understand where your company excels and where its opportunities lie. And, of course, we’re here to help if you need it . The Digital & E-commerce Maturity Matrix rates your company’s effectiveness — Ad Hoc, Aware, Striving, Driving — in 6 key areas in digital today, including: Customer Focus Strategy Technology Operations Culture Data Best of Thinks Out Loud You can find our “Best of Thinks Out Loud” playlist on Spotify right here: Subscribe to Thinks Out Loud Subscribe in iTunes Subscribe in the Google Play Store Contact information for the podcast: podcast@timpeter.com Past Insights from Tim Peter Thinks Technical Details for Thinks Out Loud Recorded using a Shure SM7B Vocal Dynamic Microphone and a Focusrite Scarlett 4i4 (3rd Gen) USB Audio Interface into Logic Pro X for the Mac. Running time: 19m 04s You can subscribe to Thinks Out Loud in iTunes , the Google Play Store , via our dedicated podcast RSS feed (or sign up for our free newsletter ). You can also download/listen to the podcast here on Thinks using the player at the top of this page. Transcript: When Will AI Get Good at Marketing Well, hi everyone. And welcome back to Thinks Out Loud . I had a conversation with some folks over on LinkedIn the other day about whether AI is genuinely useful in marketing at the moment. And the consensus was… not really. Which leads to the question, when will AI get good at marketing? The answer to that, as I see it, is that AI will get good at marketing when we require it to do so. I mean, if you think about it, the problem isn’t necessarily AI. The problem is, how are we using AI to make marketing meaningful in the lives of our customers? What are we doing to make marketing meaningful in the lives of our customers with or without AI? You could almost ask, when will people get good at marketing? And then it becomes a question of, how do we use AI to improve our marketing? What’s it going to take to make AI work for our brands and our businesses? So when will AI get good at marketing? This is episode 446 of the Think Out Loud podcast. Let’s dive in and find out. So what we’re talking about today is when will AI get good at marketing? AI will get good at marketing when we require it to. Part of the reason that AI isn’t good at marketing is because too many folks either reject its output as “not good,” quote unquote, or worse, accept it as it is. They just take the image or the copy or what have you and release that into the wild without exercising any judgment or any sense of value around it. Both of these approaches are wrong, of course. Let’s start with those second set of folks. Because a better question to ask is, “when will people get good at marketing?” If you think about it, AI isn’t “good at marketing” or “bad at marketing.” Marketers who use AI &mdash or better yet, misuse AI — are the reason that we see bad AI marketing. And I think there are a few reasons for this. First, there’s the very real case where marketers are increasingly asked to do more with less. This is hardly a new problem, but I genuinely believe it gets worse every year. It’s no secret that your company’s C-suite regularly challenges their team — that is you — to be more efficient. They reduce headcount or drag their feet on open roles. They cap budgets, or worse, reduce them for training and tools. And they insist on driving more results despite these other challenges. I’m actually totally okay with the last of those. We should hold ourselves accountable to produce better results all the time. What’s also true is that it’s usually important to invest in people, training, processes, and tools to help folks deliver those results. Second, I think we lack for appropriate standards of what “good at marketing” means. Your marketing should be designed to help you deliver against a clear set of objectives. For too many marketers, especially those that are hands on with these kinds of tools, one of those objectives often is “ MORE ,” right? More content, more awareness, more engagement. I’m not saying that those items are bad by themselves. I’m saying that they’re not always clearly tied to what your business actually wants, which should be more customers , more profitable revenue . When we think about content, or awareness, or engagement, how is MORE helping us drive more customers and more profitable revenue? Is MORE what we want, or should it be BETTER? If it’s not clear, I believe BETTER should be the answer. When you’re focused on what BETTER means, you’re then in a, well, better position to assess if AI is helping you get there. The next reason — and I can’t decide if this is 2B or 3 in my list — but I also think the lack of those appropriate standards are tied to unreasonable expectations. And those expectations can cut in both directions. On the one hand, we’re starting to hear from folks who say that “AI can’t deliver.” And on the other, we’re hearing from folks who believe “AI will replace all marketers.” I believe that both of these narratives are false. There are plenty of examples of AI doing all kinds of amazing things outside of marketing. Just last year, researchers were awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for their use of AI to predict how proteins form, and the Nobel Prize in Physics for their development of artificial neural networks. The chemistry one has had a more practical application recently, where one of the researchers used AI to design proteins that block snake venom toxins, which apparently is a really hard thing to do in the wild. This is from the article: “The University of Washington’s David Baker, who picked up his Nobel in Stockholm last month, used software tools to design completely new proteins that are able to inhibit some of the toxins in snake venom. While not entirely successful, the work shows how the new software tools can let researchers tackle challenges that would otherwise be difficult or impossible.” At the risk of sounding naive, you can’t tell me that AI can handle chemistry, and you know, physics, at a Nobel Prize winning level, but not help marketers connect with customers more effectively. That just sounds absurd to me. And that’s especially true when a ChatGPT or Google Gemini subscription is in the tens of dollars per month per seat. These aren’t expensive tools. Clearly, science doesn’t rely on immediate economic results, where business definitely does. I suspect the problem is more around what’s economically viable at this immediate moment, coupled with the last big reason, which is… Reason three or four, depending on how we’re counting these, is that I think too many marketers have dived into AI without learning how to use these tools well. Part of this absolutely comes back to training and marketers being given the time necessary to learn how to master whatever platform they prefer. There’s also some degree of companies who’ve taken the head in the sand approach and barred their people from using these tools — an approach which, in my experience, pretty much never works. And, of course, there’s some small number of folks who aren’t putting in the time whether they’re supported by their companies or not. I’ll come back to that in just a moment. Now, for the final reason, and for reasons that will soon be obvious, one that I’m not going to spend too much time on, too many vendors have over promised and under delivered on what their AI can do to make you more efficient, more effective, or both. Why won’t I spend too much time on this one? Well, since I’m talking to an audience of marketers, I mean, are we surprised that A.) marketers are selling the idea of ”faster, better, prettier” , and B.) that vendors maybe got a little ahead of themselves? Yeah, me neither. So let’s move on. What’s funny about this to me is that there’s an entirely separate set of people still arguing that marketing is doomed and AI will put all marketers out of work. Clearly, the “AI sucks at marketing” and “AI will put every marketer out of work” arguments can’t both be right at the moment. You know, in theory, the “AI will put every marketer out of work “argument could be right in the long term. I doubt it though, and the reason is — for those who aren’t aware — I started my career in the music industry. I was an amateur musician beginning more or less when I was 15 or so in the 1980s, and started working in the industry while I was still in college later in the ‘80s. The burning argument of the day was whether synthesizers and computers were going to replace quote-unquote “real musicians.” This debate was endless. Many musicians hated synths and hated computers. I remember one of my professors coming into our college’s brand new computer music lab where I was working part time, ostensibly so he could learn about these new tools. And in one of the most childish displays I’d ever seen from an adult, randomly slammed his hands around on a MIDI keyboard, making a total garbage collection of sounds, and then said, “That’s all I need to hear.” When we asked him whether he wouldn’t rather try and play something more artistic, he replied, haughtily, “Why would I bother? I’m not going to sit here and pretend these toys will ever produce art.” Mind you, Wendy Carlos’s legendary Switched on Bach album was already 20 years old at the time. The professor was old though, right? I mean, you’d expect that older folks would hate something new that challenges the way they see the world. (Ironically, by the way, he was roughly the same age then that I am today.) What might surprise you is that his reaction to those tools was far from uncommon even among my college classmates, folks aged 18 to 23 or so who also thought synthesizers and computers were sent directly from the devil and would spin on the end of music for all time. Fast forward nearly 35 years and near as I can tell there’s plenty of music being made. In fact, I’d argue that synthesizers and computers more generally have democratized the creation and distribution of music. Yes, there’s a lot of crap out there. And yes, it’s hard for musicians to make a living making music. But A.) there’s always been a lot of crap. We just tend to remember the very best stuff and forget all the crap stuff. B.) it’s always been hard for musicians to make a living. Spotify may be today’s example of the music industry taking advantage of artists. If you ask folks who signed a bad record deal 25, 30, or 50 years ago about their experiences, though, and you’ll find that the music industry has always taken advantage of artists. Dig up a copy of the book Hit Men: Power Brokers and Fast Money Inside the Music Business , published in 1990, and you’ll read stories dating from the publication date back to the 1940s and 1950s of musicians getting screwed by the industry. This falls into the category of, don’t hate the player, hate the game. It has always worked this way. And sure, we can absolutely debate whether it’s possible for musicians to make a living, but it’s also absolutely easier for more musicians to make at least some money making music. Many of my favorite bands these days are independent folks, who would have had a tough time breaking out of a regional following in the past and almost certainly not getting any kind of major label distribution. Today, they can put their music up on Spotify and YouTube and grow a following on social more broadly to promote their performances and at least make a little bit of money. 25 or 30 years ago (or more), if you weren’t on an established label, getting your music on the radio or into television, films, commercials, what have you, the nascent video game industry, was effectively impossible. The point is that technology hasn’t made musicians or writers or painters go away. Art is still mostly made by humans for humans, using technology or not as it suits them during the creation process, and only requiring technology when it comes to the distribution side of the equation. As a friend of mine noted recently on LinkedIn: “I want AI to take care of my dishes and laundry so I can create art and music. I don’t want AI to take care of art and music so I can take care of my dishes and laundry.” To bring this back to marketing, that’s a good rule of thumb to keep in mind overall. We want to automate the boring stuff. We want to automate the simple stuff, the stuff that gets in the way and free up our time to create, to think, to think big. Obviously, AI is already changing how marketers work. Otherwise, we wouldn’t be having this discussion, would we? It’s those changes that I want you to think about. And what that means for marketing and practice, again, goes back to standards. AI will get good at marketing when we require it to get good at marketing. AI will get good at marketing when we exercise our creativity, and our knowledge, and our judgment to make it good. If we’re okay with crappy text and images and video, AI’s contribution to our marketing will be, well, crappy text and images and video. We need to focus on AI making our marketing truly better. And better in the sense means creating more customers, not just creating more content. We need to use AI to help us put together more effective plans. And then we need to exercise judgment about whether those plans will help us reach our goals. Yes, we will undoubtedly use AI to help us automate actions that can and should be automated. We will absolutely use AI to help us analyze the performance of how our marketing works. We need to focus, though, on learning how to use these tools to improve our skills and our judgment. For me, it’s not a question of when will AI get good at marketing. It’s when will we require AI to get good at marketing? And I think the answer to that should be today. Show Wrap-Up and Credits Now, looking at the clock on the wall, we are out of time for this week. And I want to remind you again that you can find the show notes for this episode, as well as an archive of all past episodes, by going to timpeter.com/podcast . Again, that’s timpeter.com/podcast . Just look for episode 446. Subscribe to Thinks Out Loud Don’t forget that you can click on the subscribe link in any of the episodes that you find there to have Thinks Out Loud delivered to your favorite podcatcher every single week. You can also find Thinks Out Loud on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube Music, anywhere fine podcasts are found. Leave a Rating or Review for Thinks Out Loud I would also very much appreciate it if you could provide a positive rating or review for the show whenever you use one of those services. If you like what you hear on Thinks Out Loud , if you enjoy what we talk about, if you like being part of the community that we’re building here, please give us a positive rating or review. Reviews help other listeners find the podcast. Reviews help other listeners understand what Thinks Out Loud is all about. They help to build our community. And they mean the world to me. So thank you so much for doing that. I very, very much appreciate it. Thinks Out Loud on Social Media You can also find Thinks Out Loud on LinkedIn by going to linkedin.com/tim-peter-and-associates-llc . And of course, you can email me by sending an email to podcast(at) timpeter.com . Again, that’s podcast(at) timpeter.com . Show Outro Finally, and I know I say this a lot, I want you to know how thrilled I am that you keep listening to what we do here. It means so much to me. You are the reason we do this show every single week. So please, keep your messages coming on LinkedIn. Keep sending me things via email. I love getting a chance to talk with you, to hear what’s going on in your world, and to learn how we can do a better job building on the types of information and insights and content and community that work for you and work for your business. So with all that said, I hope you have a fantastic rest of your day. I hope you have a wonderful week ahead. And I will look forward to speaking with you here on Thinks Out Loud next time. Until then, please be well, be safe, and as always, take care, everybody. The post When Will AI Get Good at Marketing? (Thinks Out Loud Episode 446) appeared first on Tim Peter & Associates .…
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1 Predicting the Future of Your Business (Thinks Out Loud Episode 445) 20:46
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“It’s tough to make predictions, especially about the future.” These words from one of the 20th century’s most sagacious philosophers, Yogi Berra, take hold of my mind every new year as I think about the days and weeks and months ahead. Far be it from me to reject Yogi’s wise words, but I’m not sure he’s right. Oh, don’t get me wrong the wrong. The future’s not always easy to see. But we can work to make it what we want. I generally think that instead of predicting the future for your business, you should take steps to create a future that works for you. How can you do that? How can you make a future for your business that exceeds any prediction? And how can you plan for a bold future no matter what happens over the next few years? That’s what this episode of Thinks Out Loud is all about. Want to learn more? Here are the show notes for you. Predicting the Future of Your Business (Thinks Out Loud Episode 445) — Headlines and Show Notes Show Notes and Links The Only Way to Succeed Next Year (Thinks Out Loud Episode 444) AI Is Not the Future. You Are (Thinks Out Loud Episode 443) Is AI a Gatekeeper? Or is it a Key? (Thinks Out Loud Episode 437) Will AI Kill Your Brand (Thinks Out Loud Episode 435) Four Big Threats (Plus a Bonus Threat!) To Google’s Dominance Next Year (Thinks Out Loud Episode 436) An AI Day in the Life of a Marketing and Digital Strategy Consultant (Thinks Out Loud Episode 434) Diversifying Your Marketing Mix When There’s Too Much to Do (Thinks Out Loud Episode 430) How to Put Big Tech and AI — the Biggest Threat and Biggest Enablers of Your Business — to Work (Episode 428) Why AI Makes Customer Experience Even More Important for Your Business (Thinks Out Loud Episode 427) We Owe It To Our Customers to Make Their Lives Better (Thinks Out Loud Episode 361) Revisiting You Get to Make it Better (Thinks Out Loud) Revisiting AI is the Bear: Learning to Be a Better Marketer in the Age of AI (Thinks Out Loud) Building a Human Brand in the Age of AI (Thinks Out Loud Episode 398) Anticipating Radical Shifts in Consumer Behavior from AI Adoption: A Look into the Future (Thinks Out Loud Episode 396) Google is Changing Search. How to Build Traffic and Revenue Beyond Google — Part 1 (Thinks Out Loud Episode 424) The CORE Methodology: How to Build Traffic and Revenue Beyond Google — Part 2 (Thinks Out Loud Episode 425) Content is King, Customer Experience is Queen (Thinks Out Loud Episode 188) You might also enjoy this webinar I recently participated in with Miles Partnership that looked at "The Power of Generative AI and ChatGPT: What It Means for Tourism & Hospitality" here: Free Downloads We have some free downloads for you to help you navigate the current situation, which you can find right here: A Modern Content Marketing Checklist. Want to ensure that each piece of content works for your business? Download our latest checklist to help put your content marketing to work for you. Digital & E-commerce Maturity Matrix. As a bonus, here’s a PDF that can help you assess your company’s digital maturity. You can use this to better understand where your company excels and where its opportunities lie. And, of course, we’re here to help if you need it . The Digital & E-commerce Maturity Matrix rates your company’s effectiveness — Ad Hoc, Aware, Striving, Driving — in 6 key areas in digital today, including: Customer Focus Strategy Technology Operations Culture Data Best of Thinks Out Loud You can find our “Best of Thinks Out Loud” playlist on Spotify right here: Subscribe to Thinks Out Loud Subscribe in iTunes Subscribe in the Google Play Store Contact information for the podcast: podcast@timpeter.com Past Insights from Tim Peter Thinks Technical Details for Thinks Out Loud Recorded using a Shure SM7B Vocal Dynamic Microphone and a Focusrite Scarlett 4i4 (3rd Gen) USB Audio Interface into Logic Pro X for the Mac. Running time: 20m 53s You can subscribe to Thinks Out Loud in iTunes , the Google Play Store , via our dedicated podcast RSS feed (or sign up for our free newsletter ). You can also download/listen to the podcast here on Thinks using the player at the top of this page. Transcript: Predicting the Future of Your Business Well hello again everyone and welcome back to Thinks Out Loud , your source for all the digital expertise your business needs. Happy New Year! This is episode 445 of The Big Show and our first episode of 2025. I am so thrilled you’re here. I think we’ve got a really cool episode for you today. It is early January 2025 as I’m recording this and Everyone is out with their predictions for 2025 around marketing, around digital, around artificial intelligence, and all of these things. You know, here’s the top trends for you to watch. Here’s what you need to know, that kind of thing. Most of these predictions go out on a limb, they posit big ideas, the things you absolutely have to know, you know, as you go into 2025, as you go into the new year. I’ve done plenty of that myself, many times. I will again in the future, for sure. I’m going to talk more about artificial intelligence and digital marketing techniques and the like over the course of this year. I guarantee that’s true. What’s also true is that I think there are a bunch of big ideas that matter beyond just trying to predict the future. For starters, you need to remember that predicting the future isn’t the point, right? The point Of any of these exercises is to make sure you’re ready for whatever comes to you in the future, whatever is coming down the road. To me, that’s the point and that’s what I really want to talk about today, which are three surefire ways to be ready for whatever’s coming your way. And they’re really pretty simple. The first of them is being clear on what won’t change. And I’m going to talk about each of these in a little more detail. The second of these is Scenario planning and making sure you’ve thought through the scenarios that are most likely to occur next year. And the last of these, if you don’t mind, I’m going to keep in reserve for a moment. I will come back to it before the end of this episode, I promise you. But I want to, you know, get through the first two first. So, I want to talk first about what won’t change. You’ve heard this story before, either here or elsewhere. Our good friend, good friend of the pod, Jeff Bezos, Space Cowboy, says that when he started Amazon, he thought about what wouldn’t change. And then he built his company around those ideas. He was very confident that customers would always want broad selection. They would always want fast shipping. They would always want low prices. And that those three things would never change. He even joked, I can’t imagine anyone asking me for fewer choices that take a long time to get here and that cost a lot of money. And generally speaking, he’s right. Yes, when you’re talking about commissioning a piece of fine art or a luxury experience, a high priced item in limited supply is often worth the wait and worth the cost to many customers. But Bezos was absolutely right at scale. So as you head into the new year, what are the things in your business and your world that won’t change? We know for sure that customers want you to care about them. The best branding is a brand that people feel like is part of their lives. It’s one of the reasons that I always say that customer experience is queen. I won’t belabor that point here, I’ve talked about it many, many times over the course of this show, but by far the most effective marketing ever invented is customers telling their friends and family and fans and followers online and in person about the products and services they love. The more you take care of them, The more likely they are to share that story with the people in their lives. And happily, the people in their lives generally tend to have many of the same attributes as your existing customers, which makes them great potential customers for your business. One of the best ways to care about them is to think about how busy they are. Remember, your customers are every bit as busy as you are, if not more so. You need to make their lives easier when they work with you. I’ve said before that we need, that we owe it to our customers to make their lives better. And if you think about the companies and the brands that you love, the ones that are most effective at doing that for you, those tend to be the brands that other people love and return to again and again and again. You’re putting the needs of your customer first. That’s never going to change. Another thing that won’t change? Well, we live in a world where you always have to do more with less. As I’ve mentioned, you’re busy too. www. larryweaver. com So we need to think about how to do that most effectively. I’ve talked before about how to prioritize and focus when there’s too much to do. And I’ll link to that episode in the show notes. The basic idea though is A, to focus on the core elements of your strategy. B, maybe leave 10 to 20 percent of your time to explore new ideas. We call this core and explore. And C, Create a to don’t list for all the things that you are simply not going to do. They’re not going to help your customers. They’re not going to help your customer experience. They’re not going to help your business. Don’t spend your time on those. Just set them aside. Maybe you’ll come back to them later. But focus on core, and focus on explore, and make sure everything else is on a to don’t list. They’re a distraction. Now, this is one of the places when we talk about, you know, doing more with less, it’s absolutely one of the places where artificial intelligence can be a huge boost to your work. I use AI constantly for brainstorming, and planning, and writing, and editing. It’s an external brain. It’s, it’s an intern that I can rely upon to help me be more effective and be more efficient. One of my favorite techniques with AI is to coach it. While thinking through a wide array of ideas, I find that many people, when using AI, prompt it to develop, you know, three to five ideas. And I think that that’s not necessarily the best way to approach it. It can generate enormous number of ideas. Why not have it generate 50? 30, you know, a some broad number that really cause you to think and might lead you in a new direction you hadn’t considered before. Take a minute to read through those ideas, then ask it to drill down on the 5 or 10 that you like the best. Then have it rank which of those it likes best and have it explain why. Think through its reasoning. What holes did it make? What, what mistakes did it make? What didn’t it think about? Ask it to do the same. You know, what we’re trying to do here is create more, open up new possibilities, more possibilities. You want to use these tools to make yourself more efficient, but you also want to use these tools to make yourself more effective. To deliver results you maybe couldn’t get to on your own. There’s the joke. You’ve heard this before about two guys hiking in the woods who suddenly run into a bear. And the first guy quickly pulls running shoes from his backpack and starts putting them on. And the second guy says, what are you doing? You’ll never outrun that bear. And the first guy responds, I don’t have to outrun the bear. I just have to outrun you. Right? I mean, that’s what we’re talking about here. AI is one of the ways that you can outrun the other guy and, consequently, the bear. That’s a great place to be. It’s a great way to help you run faster. And you can use AI. As the next part of predicting the future, which is scenario planning. One of the easiest mistakes you can make when trying to predict the future is assuming that there’s only one possible answer. You know, this is absolutely what’s going to happen next year. Well, that’s not true. There’s a lot of different things that can happen next year. In simple terms, we know that there are at least three. One of them is the best case scenario. You know, your marketing works perfectly, your customers love your new product, your team all performs at their best, you reach or exceed your targets for revenues and profitability. You know, yay you, well done, everything went perfectly. On the flip side, of course, it’s the worst case scenario. Your marketing falls flat, your customers hate your new product, your team hates each other’s guts and, you know, exhibit behaviors that would make survivor producers jealous. You know, you’re miles away from your revenue and profitability targets. I don’t mean to laugh, but I mean, that would be, you know, a disaster, right? That would be terrible. You definitely don’t want that. And the third scenario is, of course, your baseline. Everything you do more or less looks like it did last year, give or take a few percentage points. Everything it produces is more or less like what you produced last year, give or take a few percentage points. It’s not a drag, it’s not a bummer, it’s not a party, it just kind of is. Well, using those three scenarios, you can plan for each. Think through what would cause each of these scenarios. Define the measures that help you recognize which path you’re on. And develop at least some high level plans around what you would do if you’re on each path. What would you do to continue making it better if you’re on the best case scenario plan? What would you do if you absolutely found yourself on the worst case scenario plan? And what would you do to make things better if you’re on the baseline scenario? How would you move yourself in a more positive direction? Pay attention to the metrics that indicate to your, your business which way you’re heading, so you can put those plans into action as needed. It’s all about setting yourself up for success. It’s not about predicting the future so much as it’s about being ready for any number of possible futures. There are other ways to do scenario planning, of course. You can use your Explorer actions to test which scenario is coming true. You can use AI to help you workshop your ideas or simulate more nuanced versions of these broad stroke best worst baseline case scenarios. The point here is about ensuring that the future is what you want it to be. And that, by the way, leads to the last way to predict the future. I told you I was going to come back to it. Here’s what it is. That is taking charge of your future for yourself. I talked about this a few weeks ago in an episode called AI Isn’t the Future, You Are. The future does not need to be something that happens to you. It can, and should, be something you make happen. Scenario planning is one way you do that. It helps you visualize what are the possible futures that exist, and what would you do as those came to pass to move them in the direction you want to go. Setting big goals that matter to you and your business. Which I talked about in that AI isn’t the future episode, is another one. What is it that you want? What is it that you’re working towards that matters to you and your business? And in your life more broadly? Have you taken a moment to look at what stands between those goals and where you are today? Do your plans all account for how you’re going to get from where you are to where you want to be? And have you put together scenario plans to help you understand if you’re on target and how you’ll adapt if you’re moving off the path. Another great tool you could use to help yourself do that, very, very much related to scenario planning, is what’s called a pre mortem. You select one of your goals and then picture yourself a year down the line. Imagine the worst case scenario. You did not reach your goal, you didn’t succeed, and it could be a product launch, it could be a campaign, it could be whatever you’re trying to accomplish, but you came up short. Now, either with your team, or with an AI, or on your own, ask. What went wrong? Now, I find the more people you can bring into this exercise, the better, because you want some diverse viewpoints, and you want some people who might think of things you won’t. So, if you don’t have a team, use an AI. If you do have a team, use your team and an AI. But try to understand the things that would get in between you and the success you’re looking for. These could include internal issues, you know, you don’t have the skills, you have you know, some sort of legal issue that you need to deal with, etc. It could be external pressures like the economy or shifts in the way big tech manages their algorithms, you know, for a specific campaign. It could just be mistakes that you make along the way, even if you’ve got the right talent, you just don’t execute properly because of some reason. Make a list of all of those things, and then review the likelihood and impact of each of those obstacles that you’ve identified. Once you’ve got that list, you’re ready to go. Develop plans to mitigate or eliminate the most likely and the most impactful obstacles. And then again, put measures in place that help you identify when it’s time to put those mitigation plans to work. You know, don’t let them sneak up on you. Be ready for them in advance. Once you’ve got this planning done, then get to work at launching your product or your campaign, or moving towards your goal. Monitor what you’re doing along the way so that you can adjust to stay on track if you find yourself straying from the path, so that you reach your goal. Or better yet, exceed it, right? The point here is that you’re in control. You’re not just trying to predict the future, you’re making the future you want happen. So to recap, there are three things you can do to predict the future properly next year, to predict the future you want properly next year. First, identify what won’t change and what matters to your customers. Second, plan for at least a few different scenarios. And third, most importantly, take charge of your future. Ultimately, you get to decide the future that works for you, that works for your business, that works for your life. I know you can make the future you want happen. I can’t wait to hear how you do. So please make sure to tell me what you find out over the course of the next, you know, month and year. Show Wrap-Up and Credits Now, looking at the clock on the wall, we are out of time for this week. And I want to remind you again that you can find the show notes for this episode, as well as an archive of all past episodes, by going to timpeter.com/podcast . Again, that’s timpeter.com/podcast . Just look for episode 445 . Subscribe to Thinks Out Loud Don’t forget that you can click on the subscribe link in any of the episodes that you find there to have Thinks Out Loud delivered to your favorite podcatcher every single week. You can also find Thinks Out Loud on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube Music, anywhere fine podcasts are found. Leave a Rating or Review for Thinks Out Loud I would also very much appreciate it if you could provide a positive rating or review for the show whenever you use one of those services. If you like what you hear on Thinks Out Loud , if you enjoy what we talk about, if you like being part of the community that we’re building here, please give us a positive rating or review. Reviews help other listeners find the podcast. Reviews help other listeners understand what Thinks Out Loud is all about. They help to build our community and they mean the world to me. So thank you so much for doing that. I very, very much appreciate it. Thinks Out Loud on Social Media You can also find Thinks Out Loud on LinkedIn by going to linkedin.com/tim-peter-and-associates-llc . And of course, you can email me by sending an email to podcast(at) timpeter.com . Again, that’s podcast(at) timpeter.com . Show Outro Finally, and I know I say this a lot, I want you to know how thrilled I am that you keep listening to what we do here. It means so much to me. You’re the reason that Thinks Out Loud happens every single week. So please, keep your messages coming on LinkedIn. Keep sending me things via email. I love getting a chance to talk with you, to hear what’s going on in your world, and to learn how we can do a better job building the types of information and insights and content and community that work for you and work for your business. So with all that said, I hope you have a fantastic rest of your day, I hope you have a wonderful week ahead, and I will look forward to speaking with you here on Thinks Out Loud next time. Until then, please be well, be safe, and as always, take care, everybody. The post Predicting the Future of Your Business (Thinks Out Loud Episode 445) appeared first on Tim Peter & Associates .…
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1 Revisiting Is Google Doomed in 2025? (Thinks Out Loud Episode 440) 28:53
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Your business likely depends on Google, whether you like it or not. The whole reason I’m so focused on the role of gatekeepers — and how you can bypass them for marketing and customer acquisition — is because of their dominance in the marketplace. And no company is more dominant than Google. Most businesses get at least a plurality of their traffic and usually a significant chunk of their revenues downstream of Google. That could include traditional web search. It could include local search. It could include metasearch, product search, YouTube recommendations, and a host of other channels within Google’s ecosystem, all adding up to traffic and revenue for you. That’s why anything that hurts Google can hurt your business. And, right now, Google faces more challenges than they have in years. Those include competition from AI startups like ChatGPT and Perplexity, antitrust and other civil litigation in the US and Europe, pressure from users more interested in social, and, of course, its traditional competitors for mindshare like Amazon, Apple, and Facebook. It’s easy to assume then that Google is doomed in 2025. I’m not so sure, though. What does worry me is whether their responses to these pressures works in your business’s best interests. In other words, even if they manage to continue their dominance in the market, you still could find yourself with lower traffic, reduced revenues, higher costs, or all of the above. That’s… no bueno. So, whether or not Google is doomed, what should you do as you move into 2025? That’s what this episode of Thinks Out Loud is all about. Want to learn more? Here are the show notes for you. Revisiting Is Google Doomed in 2025? (Thinks Out Loud) — Headlines and Show Notes Show Notes and Links Is the new ChatGPT Search a significant threat to Google? The Future of Computing? Big Tech Earnings and the State of Digital Q3 2024 (Thinks Out Loud Episode 439) Four Big Threats (Plus a Bonus Threat!) To Google’s Dominance Next Year (Thinks Out Loud Episode 436) Trump says Google has ‘a lot of power’ and he would do ‘something’ about it — but stops short of favoring a break-up Trump’s admin puts new light on Google’s potential breakup JD Vance Live at RemedyFest – YouTube Digital Markets Act – Wikipedia DOJ says Google must sell Chrome to crack open its search monopoly Google Earnings Release PDF link OpenAI Shifts Strategy as Rate of ‘GPT’ AI Improvements Slows — The Information OpenAI and others seek new path to smarter AI as current methods hit limitations | Reuters OpenAI, Google and Anthropic Are Struggling to Build More Advanced AI – Bloomberg Revisiting Why Digital Gatekeepers Kill Organic Traffic (Thinks Out Loud) Revisiting How to Diversify Your Marketing Mix When There’s Too Much to Do (Thinks Out Loud) Google Loses its Antitrust Case: Why That Matters for Your Business (Thinks Out Loud Episode 429) What Marketers Really Need to Know About Putting AI to Work (Thinks Out Loud Episode 426) Google is Changing Search. How to Build Traffic and Revenue Beyond Google — Part 1 (Thinks Out Loud Episode 424) The CORE Methodology: How to Build Traffic and Revenue Beyond Google — Part 2 (Thinks Out Loud Episode 425) Is Google Doomed in 2025? (Thinks Out Loud Episode 440) You might also enjoy this webinar I recently participated in with Miles Partnership that looked at "The Power of Generative AI and ChatGPT: What It Means for Tourism & Hospitality" here: Free Downloads We have some free downloads for you to help you navigate the current situation, which you can find right here: A Modern Content Marketing Checklist. Want to ensure that each piece of content works for your business? Download our latest checklist to help put your content marketing to work for you. Digital & E-commerce Maturity Matrix. As a bonus, here’s a PDF that can help you assess your company’s digital maturity. You can use this to better understand where your company excels and where its opportunities lie. And, of course, we’re here to help if you need it . The Digital & E-commerce Maturity Matrix rates your company’s effectiveness — Ad Hoc, Aware, Striving, Driving — in 6 key areas in digital today, including: Customer Focus Strategy Technology Operations Culture Data Best of Thinks Out Loud You can find our “Best of Thinks Out Loud” playlist on Spotify right here: Subscribe to Thinks Out Loud Subscribe in iTunes Subscribe in the Google Play Store Contact information for the podcast: podcast@timpeter.com Past Insights from Tim Peter Thinks Technical Details for Thinks Out Loud Recorded using a Shure SM7B Vocal Dynamic Microphone and a Focusrite Scarlett 4i4 (3rd Gen) USB Audio Interface into Logic Pro X for the Mac. Running time: 28m 53s You can subscribe to Thinks Out Loud in iTunes , the Google Play Store , via our dedicated podcast RSS feed (or sign up for our free newsletter ). You can also download/listen to the podcast here on Thinks using the player at the top of this page. Transcript: Revisiting Is Google Doomed in 2025? Well hello again everyone and welcome back to Thinks Out Loud , your source for all the digital expertise your business needs. My name is Tim Peter. This is episode 440 of The Big Show. And thank you so much for tuning in. I think we have a really, really cool show for you. I want to start by saying, A, this is a follow up to last week’s episode that looked at the future of computing and Big Tech’s earnings for Q3 of 2024. And what I didn’t do last week was spend much time talking about Google. With everything that’s going on with the world of artificial intelligence and the competition that Google is seeing from AI based startups and the like, the question that people keep asking me is, will next year be the end of Google? And I want to get the big question out of the way right up front. There is no way that Google is dead by the end of 2025 . And I don’t think it’s terribly likely that they are anything other than the dominant player by the end of next year. I’m not going to predict that SEO is dead. I will not predict that Google is dead. No way. At the same time, I’m fairly certain that Google will be a vastly different company at the end of 2025 than they are today. In fact, I’d be willing to bet a decent amount of money that Google is not as dominant in your world by the end of next year as they are today. Let’s put this in terms that you can easily see. Go to your website’s Google Analytics traffic acquisition report and change the duration that you’re looking at for the last 90 days or the last 12 months. You pick. It doesn’t matter to me. First, take a look at the total sessions you’ve received during the period you’re reviewing. Then, instead of just looking at the default view, which groups traffic by Session Primary Channel Group or something similar. Click the dropdown that shows Session Primary Channel Group, and change that to Session source/medium. Now, in the little search box after you do that, in the report, type "Google" and hit enter. This will show you how many sessions you’ve received during the selected period and, importantly, the percentage of traffic that Google, and especially Google/Organic, represents to your business. I want you to make a note of three numbers. First, write down the number of sessions from Google/Organic. You can also note the total traffic from Google and its share of your total traffic. If you’re like most businesses, I’d expect Google’s overall share to be somewhere between 25 and 65% of your traffic, and Google Organic’s share probably to be no less than, say, 10 or 12%, and could be as high as 60%, depending on how much advertising you do or how much you rely on organic search. I doubt it’s at the top end, though there are certainly edge cases where that could be true. The actual volume of traffic you get varies too widely by business and industry for me to hazard a guess at what the actual number will be. So right now I’m just talking in percentages. For my hospitality industry friends, keep in mind that traffic for Metasearch shows up under a different source/medium. It could be Sabre or Amadeus or Mirai or Siteminder or DerbySoft, ROIback, folks like that. We’re not going to worry about that traffic today. Here’s the bet I’d be willing to make 12 months from now. The share of traffic that comes from Google/Organic will be down no less than 5 percent from where it is today, if not more. Your Google traffic overall and your Google/Organic traffic level might increase, but the share of organic traffic, that is, free traffic that you get from Google today, will almost certainly decline by the end of 2025. And I have four big reasons for thinking that Google will be a different company and that as a consequence, your organic traffic will decline. The biggest is that Google needs to keep monetizing their search engine results pages. If your overall Google traffic goes up in the next year, It’s probably because you’ve traded some type of paid search, whether traditional CPC ads, metasearch, or something similar, For what is today free, organic search. The second reason is because Google continues to increase the number of zero click search response pages. Those pages provide answers to customers and don’t drive clicks through to the sources of those answers. I’m really confident that will drive down the amount of organic traffic you get over the course of the next year. The third reason that Google will be a vastly different company is what I started the show with. Google faces competitive challenges from alternative search engines and search experiences. One set of alternatives includes AI based options like ChatGPT’s new search feature and Anthropic’s Claude. Another is dedicated search engines like Perplexity and Bing. You have things like Apple Intelligence and iOS. And yet another alternative comes from consumers conducting more searches on social sites like TikTok or LinkedIn where we’re seeing a definite uptick, no pun intended — good thing because that’s a terrible pun — but we’re definitely seeing an uptick in that behavior. And the fourth reason that Google is definitely going to change is that Google is facing some serious antitrust threats that might prevent them from responding as quickly as they traditionally have. Don’t misunderstand, I would be very surprised if their various antitrust cases wrap up by the end of 2025. I also don’t think that those cases will reach a conclusion that will force Google to change their business model or anything that we’ll talk about in a moment. What I do think is true is that those cases will represent a distraction that will hurt Google’s ability to respond quickly to changes in the marketplace. It is awfully tough to run forwards when you’re looking over your shoulder with worry. Now, before I address the first three reasons in more detail, I do want to spend a moment on Google’s antitrust situation. Remember, I’m not a lawyer. I could be stupendously wrong about what I’m about to say here. My sense, though, is that the antitrust thing is a big honking deal. It is, you know, huge. There are reports that the DOJ apparently wants to strip Chrome away from Google as part of its proposed remedies to the case. That’s a rumor at this point. We don’t know if that’s true, but that’s the kind of thing people are talking about. They’re talking about major substantive remedies, major substantive structural remedies to the way Google operates as a business. And that’s just the cases that Google faces in the U. S. Obviously, the UK’s Competition Markets Authority, EU regulations like the Digital Markets Act and the Digital Services Act, and lawsuits across an array of jurisdictions also affects the reality of how Google does business. Sticking with just the U.S. for now, in any normal election year, you would expect that in an incoming Republican administration. would favor a hands off approach toward big business and that Google might be able to, you know, negotiate a settlement that’s favorable and quickly. At the same time, this obviously is not a normal incoming Republican administration. Instead, they’re a highly populist one, and there’s plenty of evidence they’re no more fond of big tech than a typical Democratic administration might be. The consensus I’ve read from people who seem to know what they’re talking about is that the Trump administration isn’t going to simply walk away from this. I’m going to read you a slightly lengthy quote for a moment here. This is a quote the speaker said, "I think my argument is actually even if you believe that there are network effects that make Google more powerful or make Gemini a more powerful tool within Google, There are actually some real, real issues here with just the integration. So does Google need to have YouTube? Does Google need to have all those other platforms that are built on top of or built underneath the Google umbrella?" The speaker continued by saying, "I think there’s a really good argument that if we want to be pro innovation, we want to ensure that new insurgents can change these things up. That you want to promote as much competition as possible, and you actually want to separate all of those market verticals as much as possible. That’s where I think antitrust is probably the most useful way to think about a solution to what we face." Would it shock you if I told you that that quote is from incoming Vice President JD Vance? That’s not the kind of rhetoric you typically hear. Would it further surprise you that Vance also said, "One final observation I’ll make just about this intersection between competition and innovation. If there’s a person within the Biden administration, obviously the FTC is an independent agency, but Lina Khan is the person that I would point to as the best person, in my view, within the Biden administration." Now, Lina Khan is the person in charge of the FTC, and the FTC is the folks who’ve been going after Google in many cases. So, yeah, that’s not what you might typically expect. Now, maybe the Trump administration will be more, well, let’s call it transactional, and Google can, for lack of a better term, "buy them off" by paying fines or God help us, making changes favorable to Trump’s policies or something. Trump’s rhetoric himself on the topic is decidedly mixed, so who knows, really? I’m going to link to a lot of this in the show notes. I do want to be fair, I’m not remotely going to make any bold predictions here, other to say that it seems unlikely that Google’s antitrust situation will simply go away without the company making some significant concessions or changes to how it does business. My confidence level on exactly what form those concessions and changes might take, I don’t And when they might occur, is pretty low. So, you know, take all of that with a grain of salt, but it does seem unlikely that those cases simply just, you know, vanish. Turning back to my actual topic of expertise, which is the digital marketplace itself, there was a recent discussion at HospitalityNet and on LinkedIn about whether startups like ChatGPT and Perplexity pose a threat to Google. First, there was no consensus among the panel of experts convened by HospitalityNet about whether or not others will beat Google. Personally, I lean towards Google continuing its dominance, at least in the intermediate term. If we return to last week’s look at big tech’s earnings, Google grew its revenues 15 percent year on year to $88.3 billion, and its profitability almost 34 percent to $26.3 billion. It was a record quarter for Google, both in revenues and in profits. The company is sitting on $97 billion in cash. They own one of the most powerful computing infrastructures in human history. They have one of the deepest pools of AI talent in the world. There’s also some evidence, including articles in Reuters and The Information and on Bloomberg that improvement in new AI models is slowing down. In other words, it’s getting harder for AI companies to show improvement versus existing models like GPT 4.0 and Gemini. If that slowdown holds true, success in the marketplace is not going to go to those with the most impressive model, because after all, the frontier models today are pretty good. You’re going to need to see dramatic improvement to separate yourself there. Instead, success will belong to those who do the best job of providing a useful product. To their customers, and Google definitely has the edge there. Remember the revenue numbers I just said like 10 seconds ago? Google has an amazing existing revenue model that simply prints money. No disrespect to ChatGPT or Perplexity or Claude. But none of them today has a plan that makes anywhere near enough money as fast as they’re spending it. That’s not a formula for long term success. So, you know, I’m not, I’m not bullish on Google maintaining its dominance necessarily because I think they’re the most innovative or because they’ve done the coolest things. I think they’re the ones that have the deepest pockets and the deepest pool of talent to keep turning to, as well as a model that already pays for itself. That’s just going to be tough for folks to dislodge without a truly disruptive product. Obviously, if a new model comes out that, you know, blows up what we’ve seen to date, then all bets are off. But that doesn’t appear to be the direction we’re headed, at least at the moment. Barring any wildcards, I’m still going to put my chips on Google in this case. Now, at the same time, Google must keep finding ways to monetize their search engine results pages. They’re not going to drive double digit growth year on year without it. And that’s not great for your business, because they’re continually converting formerly free traffic into something you pay for. That’s their right. But that doesn’t mean it’s good for you or your business in the long term. Google keeps increasing the number of zero click search response pages, too. With its AI Overviews product, they’re giving customers answers without driving clicks to the sources of those answers. Again, that’s their right, but again, it’s not great for you or your business. Now, maybe customers will find that they prefer ChatGPT’s answers or Perplexity’s answers or Claude’s answers. My question is, is that any better for you? I don’t think so. If they’re not linking to you, if they’re not driving traffic to you and driving clicks to you, that’s a problem for you. And because of that, I want to go back to the bet I opened this episode with. I said I can pretty much guarantee you that your organic search numbers will decline. That doesn’t mean SEO is dead, by the way, it just means it’s going to be harder to drive traffic from those clicks where you used to get them. And all of those reasons I just gave are the reasons I’m fairly comfortable making the bet that your organic traffic will decline. What I neglected to say, of course, was that you have more than a little control over what happens there. You don’t have to take that as a given. You don’t have to let anything bad happen to your business, even if Google’s position in the marketplace drops or they change how they’re routing traffic to you. Quite the opposite, in fact. I am absolutely, 100%, recommending that you take action, today, to make sure that nothing bad happens to your business. As I said in my Hospitality Net panel response, who cares what happens to Google? The real question is whether those changes represent a threat to your business. Now is the time for you to consider how to diversify your channel mix, the mix of business that comes to your website and drives traffic and revenue for you. You need to start by working to improve conversion rates when traffic arrives on your web and mobile channels. I know I’ve been talking to this point about traffic, but what happens when traffic shows up is even more important. Assume, for instance, that your digital channels produce 100,000 per month in revenue. If your current conversion rate is, say, 3%, even a 5 percent to 10 percent increase in that number equates to an extra 5,000 to 10,000 per month from the traffic already visiting your site. More importantly, it gets you more data about your customers that you can use to connect with them through other channels. That’s also why you need to expand your horizons when talking about what conversions are on your website. For instance, conversion isn’t just a sale. It could be customers opting into your email list, or downloading a whitepaper, or following you on social media. Each of those has an economic value to you. Imagine, for instance, that your average sale is 100. It could be 1,000, it could be 100,000 too. But for now, let’s make it a hundred bucks. Consider that maybe 5% of all email addresses you collect will turn into a sale within a year or so. That is what we tend to see at a minimum over time. That means that every email address is worth at least $5 to your business in future revenue. Even a social media follow is worth a buck if 1% of those folks turn into a sale over time, too. There’s tremendous long term value in turning your traffic into connections who can later come back and buy from you. So you want to put some focus there. And those conversion events increase the return on spend from your paid media activities, too. So it’s a win on that level also. And, of course, email and social can then become a larger share of your traffic over the long term so that you’re less dependent on Google. It’s a win on every single part of the scoreboard. Next, you want to think about the core and explore method that I’ve talked about before and will link to in the show notes so you can check it out. But put most of your efforts, maybe 80 to 90%, into core activities that drive the majority of your traffic and revenues today. So that could be things like content marketing, that could be things like SEO, that could be things like paid search. At the same time, you’re going to use the remaining 10-20% of your time and your energy and your budget to explore new opportunities. Those could be referrals from influencers or creators. It could be testing a new social platform or content campaign, something you haven’t done before. The idea is to try to improve your overall traffic and revenue from new sources and diversify the mix of sources driving traffic and revenue to your business. One place you’re going to want to start exploring in 2025 is ranking in these alternative AI search engines as well. You can ensure you show up the places that your customers are starting to test so that if, in fact, people do switch to ChatGPT or do switch to Perplexity, you’ve got a shot at capturing those customers as well. I’m already seeing clients getting small numbers of visits from those channels. And in my own case, we’re getting a very small but growing number of visitors each month from Perplexity, from ChatGPT, and from Microsoft Copilot. None are huge yet, but it’s a start. And it’s a sign that we’re doing the necessary things to capture customers who are making a switch. Now the best part of taking an approach like this is that these actions ensure you win whether Google stumbles or whether it continues as the market leader. If Google makes changes that impact your traffic, you’re already working to offset those declines. If Google gets beaten in the marketplace by an AI startup or its antitrust challenges kick it in the butt, again, you’re already working to offset those declines. And if they maintain their dominant position, you’re still growing your traffic and revenue from no sources. That’s a formula for success in any case, and it’s the place you want to be. So I want to go back to where I started. I cannot see any way that Google is dead by the end of 2025. Next year will not be the end of Google. I still think, though, that they’re going to be a vastly different company at the end of 2025 than they are today. If you assume that Google’s share of your traffic, and certainly your share of unpaid traffic, is going to decline, and assume that Google’s going to be okay with that, then the right activity today is to take actions now that diversify the sources driving your traffic. Position yourself to win no matter what happens to Google. Ultimately, that’s a bet you should be willing to make. And if you take the right actions now, Google. A bet you’re almost certain to win. Show Wrap-Up and Credits Now, looking at the clock on the wall, we are out of time for this week. And I want to remind you again that you can find the show notes for this episode, as well as an archive of all past episodes, by going to timpeter.com/podcast . Again, that’s timpeter.com/podcast . Just look for episode 440. Subscribe to Thinks Out Loud Don’t forget that you can click on the subscribe link in any of the episodes that you find there to have Thinks Out Loud delivered to your favorite podcatcher every single week. You can also find Thinks Out Loud on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube Music, anywhere fine podcasts are found. Leave a Rating or Review for Thinks Out Loud I would also very much appreciate it if you could provide a positive rating or review for the show whenever you use one of those services. If you like what you hear on Thinks Out Loud , if you enjoy what we talk about, if you like being part of the community that we’re building here, please give us a positive rating or review. Reviews help other listeners find the podcast. Reviews help other listeners understand what Thinks Out Loud is all about. They help to build our community and they mean the world to me. So thank you so much for doing that. I very, very much appreciate it. Thinks Out Loud on Social Media You can also find Thinks Out Loud on LinkedIn by going to linkedin.com/tim-peter-and-associates-llc . And of course, you can email me by sending an email to podcast(at) timpeter.com . Again, that’s podcast(at) timpeter.com . Show Outro Finally, and I know I say this a lot, I want you to know how thrilled I am that you keep listening to what we do here. It means so much to me. You are the reason we do this show. You’re the reason that Thinks Out Loud happens every single week. So please, keep your messages coming on LinkedIn. Keep sending things via email. I love getting a chance to talk with you, to hear what’s going on in your world, and to learn how we can do a better job building on the types of information and insights and content and community that work for you and work for your business. So with all that said, I hope you have a fantastic rest of your day, I hope you have a wonderful week ahead, and I will look forward to speaking with you here on Thinks Out Loud next time. Until then, please be well, be safe, and as always, take care, everybody. The post Revisiting Is Google Doomed in 2025? (Thinks Out Loud Episode 440) appeared first on Tim Peter & Associates .…
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1 Revisiting Is AI a Gatekeeper? Or is it a Key? (Thinks Out Loud) 23:24
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One of the big themes behind Thinks Out Loud over the course of its 400-plus episodes is how you can bypass gatekeepers and still grow your business. The emergence of artificial intelligence in marketing and customer acquisition introduces an entirely new way to approach that goal. Or does it? Does artificial intelligence provide you a tool kit that allows you to bypass Big Tech? Or does it allow Big Tech to place more gates between you and your customers? In this episode of the Thinks Out Loud podcast, our company founder and president, Tim Peter, takes a look at the role artificial intelligence might play in helping you bypass gatekeepers. He also looks at how AI helps Big Tech maintain its market dominance. And, finally, this episode posits some ideas for how you can start connecting directly with your customers no matter what happens down the road. Want to learn more? Here are the show notes for you. Revisiting Is AI a Gatekeeper? Or is it a Key? (Thinks Out Loud) — Headlines and Show Notes Show Notes and Links OpenAI – Wikipedia Anthropic – Wikipedia Perplexity AI – Wikipedia When you give a Claude a mouse Google and Kairos sign nuclear reactor deal with aim to power AI – Ars Technica Microsoft deal propels Three Mile Island restart, with key permits still needed | Reuters The Rapid Adoption of Generative AI PDF link The Value of AI in Today’s Classrooms Google is Changing Search. How to Build Traffic and Revenue Beyond Google — Part 1 (Thinks Out Loud Episode 424) The CORE Methodology: How to Build Traffic and Revenue Beyond Google — Part 2 (Thinks Out Loud Episode 425) Revisiting Why Digital Gatekeepers Kill Organic Traffic (Thinks Out Loud) Revisiting How to Diversify Your Marketing Mix When There’s Too Much to Do (Thinks Out Loud) The Best AI is Now Free For Everyone: Revisiting Will Your Customers Use AI? (Thinks Out Loud) How to Put Big Tech and AI — the Biggest Threat and Biggest Enablers of Your Business — to Work (Episode 428) Why AI Makes Customer Experience Even More Important for Your Business (Thinks Out Loud Episode 427) Revisiting Bundling, Unbundling, and Customer Acquisition (Thinks Out Loud) What Marketers Really Need to Know About Putting AI to Work (Thinks Out Loud Episode 426) AI is the Bear: Learning to Be a Better Marketer in the Age of AI (Thinks Out Loud Episode 422) An AI Day in the Life of a Marketing and Digital Strategy Consultant (Thinks Out Loud Episode 434) You might also enjoy this webinar Tim Peter recently participated in with Miles Partnership that looked at "The Power of Generative AI and ChatGPT: What It Means for Tourism & Hospitality" here: Free Downloads We have some free downloads for you to help you navigate the current situation, which you can find right here: A Modern Content Marketing Checklist. Want to ensure that each piece of content works for your business? Download our latest checklist to help put your content marketing to work for you. Digital & E-commerce Maturity Matrix. As a bonus, here’s a PDF that can help you assess your company’s digital maturity. You can use this to better understand where your company excels and where its opportunities lie. And, of course, we’re here to help if you need it . The Digital & E-commerce Maturity Matrix rates your company’s effectiveness — Ad Hoc, Aware, Striving, Driving — in 6 key areas in digital today, including: Customer Focus Strategy Technology Operations Culture Data Best of Thinks Out Loud You can find our “Best of Thinks Out Loud” playlist on Spotify right here: Subscribe to Thinks Out Loud Subscribe in iTunes Subscribe in the Google Play Store Contact information for the podcast: podcast@timpeter.com Past Insights from Tim Peter Thinks Technical Details for Thinks Out Loud Recorded using a Shure SM7B Vocal Dynamic Microphone and a Focusrite Scarlett 4i4 (3rd Gen) USB Audio Interface into Logic Pro X for the Mac. Running time: 23m 24s You can subscribe to Thinks Out Loud in iTunes , the Google Play Store , via our dedicated podcast RSS feed (or sign up for our free newsletter ). You can also download/listen to the podcast here on Thinks using the player at the top of this page. Transcript: Revisiting Is AI a Gatekeeper? Or is it a Key? Well hello again everyone and welcome back to Thinks Out Loud , your source for all the digital expertise your business needs. My name is Tim Peter, this is episode 437 of the Big Show and I think we have a really cool show for you today. We know that gatekeepers gonna gate. You’ve heard me say this many, many times on this show. I’ve also heard a number of people proposing that artificial intelligence might bypass the gatekeepers. It might be the way that we finally get to take gatekeepers and shove them completely out of the way. You know, connect directly with our customers in every single situation. For instance, the hospitality industry is continually looking for something that will bypass gatekeepers like Expedia or Booking.com or Google. By far, the most likely use case where that could occur in the next bunch of years is the emergence of AI agents. And I’d like to dive into that use case for a moment so you have a sense of what we’re talking about. Because this could apply beyond just travel, beyond just hospitality. This could be something you see in retail, this could be something you see in a B2B context. There’s all kinds of places where, in theory, this could take the place. This could let you connect directly with your customers. And the premise here is that customers would have one or more agents that would search for, in this case, travel on their behalf. For instance, I’m taking a trip to New York City in a few weeks for work. I need a hotel near the offices of the company I’m visiting. I’m also having dinner with colleagues while I’m there, so I’ll need flights and ground transportation that get me to my hotel and then back to the airport in time for the meetings that I have and in time to make my flight. I need all of the options that I choose to comply with my client’s travel policies. I need flights and hotel stays that also get me the most points in my preferred loyalty programs; if I’m traveling, I want to accrue my benefits. And of course, I want to optimize my time during the trip so I’m not out of the office or away from my family any longer than is necessary. That is a case that I would love to outsource to an agent. Seriously. I would absolutely love to have this in my pocket or on my desktop right now. I’d love to be able to type a prompt that says, “Hey, agent, go do this. You know my preferences. You know what I need. Here’s where I’m going. Here is roughly when I need to go. Make that happen and report back to me with a couple of options I can simply say yes to or try again.” I mean, wouldn’t that be cool? And there are some interesting beta projects that I’ve seen. But an actual agent that I could give a simple prompt to and that understands my preferences does not exist today. Period. We’re probably a couple of years away from that existing in real world terms. Probably. Maybe by the end of next year. Maybe by the end of 2026. But today, it doesn’t exist. And keep that in mind. Another great agent use case that I’d love to see, this is my own personal one. I’d love a robust, cross device, cross platform search engine. If you’re like me, you have conversations with customers, and with family, and with friends, across an array of devices and apps. You’ve got email. You’ve got social media, both public and DMs. You’ve got text and WhatsApp. You’ve got MS Teams and or Slack. You’ve got articles and newsletters you’ve read on Substack or LinkedIn or Twitter or Instagram, and a wide array of websites. And you probably find yourself asking from time to time, “Where did I read that? Was that in an email? Was it a text? Was it an article?” I know I do. Wouldn’t you love to have a way to search across all of those sources? Not for possible answers, not just a regular Google search, but for the actual thing you read or sent. Maybe make it time bound, like only things you’ve interacted with in the last couple of weeks. Based on conversations I’ve had with others, I don’t think I’m alone on wanting something like this. And despite some good work in this area, the solution I’m proposing does not exist today. One of the reasons is there’s nothing that connects all of the various data sources of the two use cases that I’ve just given you. The one thing that might is something like the operating system either on your laptop or on your phone, and we’ll come back to that in a second. The last use case where AI could have a major impact on the way people interact with brands and businesses in the future — or at least one last use case I’m going to explore today — is extended reality. So that would include things like virtual reality and augmented reality. Some folks refer to this as the final computing platform. This is what everything will be like at some point in the future. Think things like smart glasses or other wearables. That provide data about the real world as you interact with it in real time, creating content and immersive experiences on the fly, virtual reality games and education that continually update using generative AI to deepen the experience. There is no question in my mind that generative AI undoubtedly will provide huge benefits in these areas. They can pull content from a wide array of sources. They can generate content on the fly and narrate it or provide visual cues as needed. Today, these types of experiences are definitely limited by things like robust connectivity, which is getting better all the time, the weight of the device, And very much related to that, battery life. We are probably — I’m going to make a guess here; I’m clearly not the expert here, but I’m basing this on what other folks have said — we’re probably 6 to 10 plus years away. We’re talking the 2030s in all likelihood before this becomes a reality. Which is not that far from now. I go back to the Bill Gates quote that I’ve used many, many times that we always overestimate the change we will see in the next two years and underestimate the change we will see in the next 10. So what things might look like in the middle of the 2030s, which shocker, is only 10 years away, could be a dramatic difference from where we are today. Think about where we are relative to 10 years ago. In 2014, in late 2014, if I was talking to you about artificial intelligence and how people would be using it in their day to day lives, the fact that 1 in 9 people use it every single day and 24 percent of workers are using it at least once a week. That was unthinkable 10 years ago, now we talk about it very much like a commonplace thing. So, we’re going to have technology challenges to overcome. We, I mean, we as a society are going to have technology challenges to overcome. Battery life and weight plus the ability to stream heavy visual content quickly are likely the big barriers that have to fall. We also know it’s true that 6G mobile connections will start rolling out commercially in 2030, which could fix at least the streaming question. If battery life and battery weight and device weight fall pretty quickly as they are doing, you know, what we’re likely to see in 2034 seems plausible. And much like I talked about with agents, I’ve seen early stage companies working towards all of these. I want to be clear, I absolutely welcome their potential success. I’m confident that somebody will eventually succeed at all of these. I also think it’s true that these tools simply don’t exist in any real form in the real world today. It doesn’t mean they won’t. But the thing where I think we need to be really conscious is that none of these tools seem likely to come from some unknown startup. Some of the pieces, sure, but probably not the overall experience. And there’s a major reason why this is likely to be so, in my view. The simple fact is that, at least right now, artificial intelligence favors gatekeepers. AI is expensive as hell. You need lots of money to make these models work. You need lots of data, which is expensive as hell. You have to have significant computing power, which, say it with me, is expensive as hell. You require brilliant researchers who are expensive as hell. And you consume massive amounts of energy to make these things work, which, again, is expensive as hell. Google and Microsoft literally are signing contracts for their own nuclear power plants to meet their energy needs. That’s not a joke. That’s a true story. These things require a ton of expensive resources in terms of money, in terms of data, in terms of compute, in terms of researchers, and in terms of actual power. That’s crazy. So it’s not super likely you’re going to see small companies come out of nowhere with these things. Probably. If you think about who the huge big, uh, if you think about who the big AI players are, well, we’ve got Google. Obviously, they’re a big time gatekeeper. We’ve got Microsoft. Again, a big time gatekeeper. We’ve got Amazon. Ditto. Facebook. Ditto, ditto. We’ve got OpenAI. Who is the parent of ChatGPT? Well, they’re a disruptive startup, for sure, originally set up as a non profit, with massive funding from, uh, Microsoft, who’s a big time gatekeeper. Okay, so what about Anthropic, the makers of Claude? They’re another disruptive startup, featuring a bunch of ChatGPT alumni, and they got massive funding from, oh wait, Amazon and Google. Huh. You’ve got Perplexity. Perplexity is another disruptive service, and it features founders from Meta and OpenAI, and they’ve had significant investments from, among others, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, the late YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki, and Google’s chief scientist Jeff Dean. Huh. That’s kind of interesting, right? And if VR, AR, and extended reality, XR, come along at scale in the next 5 to 10 years, well, who do you think is going to provide that? I mean, let’s see, the current VR devices come from Facebook and Apple. Augmented reality on mobile phones mostly comes from Apple, Google, and Samsung, the last of which runs on Google’s Android OS. Smartwatches, which are another potential AR delivery mechanism, come from Apple and Google and Samsung. Again, more or less running Google software. And the most popular smart hearing devices, another potential AR or XR delivery mechanism, come from Apple and Google. Are you beginning to notice a pattern here? The reality is, big tech is working to remain a gatekeeper. They’re trying to close off all the avenues by which someone else could come in and shove them out of the way. Even the startups are deeply connected to big tech players. In addition to their own efforts, Amazon, Google, Facebook, and Microsoft have invested in organizations like Amazon, OpenAI, Anthropic, and Perplexity that are most likely to shove them out of their membership in Big Tech. Almost all of these folks, plus the other players in AI, are also using either Amazon Web Services or Microsoft Azure or Google Cloud to run their servers. Again, Big Tech still collects a toll in those cases. And remember how expensive it is to run a real, robust, and relevant artificial intelligence. Even if OpenAI, Perplexity, or Anthropic wins, they’re still going to need to fund their ongoing operations. I also don’t think Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Jeff Bezos, and their other investors Put all this money into these startups without expecting a return on that investment. They’re going to want some payback here. In other words, if OpenAI, Perplexity, or Anthropic wins, do you think it’s likely you’re going to be any better off than you are today? In short, there isn’t a white knight coming to rescue you from big tech with artificial intelligence. AI isn’t a key to unlock the gatekeeper’s gates. It’s just another way gatekeeper’s gonna gate, even if it turns out to be a different gatekeeper. It’s unrealistic to expect some new technology to suddenly disrupt and completely bypass Big Tech. It doesn’t matter what industry you’re in. Big Tech has a lot at stake. They’re gatekeepers. They’re not going away without a fight. If you want to bypass Big Tech, you’re going to have to take a lesson from Jose Serrano, a character in the classic baseball comedy Major League . And to paraphrase his famous line, “do it yourself.” It’s up to you to create a direct relationship with your customers. It’s up to you to create memorable experiences that will bring your customers back to you again and again and again. It’s up to you to create a brand that customers will seek out by name. Think about it. I regularly quote Jeff Bezos famous question, “What won’t change as we go forward?” Even if the platforms and technologies and tools that your customers use change, They’re still going to seek out businesses and brands that they trust… or not. You’re still going to need to separate yourself from your competition… or not. You’re still going to need to find a way to get customers to connect with you directly… or not. You get the picture. AI isn’t a key. It’s another lock if you’re not continually looking to build direct relationships with your customers. You’re helping the gatekeepers keep their gates in place. You’re helping them build those locks. Your job is to get customers to connect with you directly. That’s the key to unlocking gatekeepers’ gates. I’m going to link to a couple of episodes in the show notes where we talked about how you can do that. And yes, you can and should use AI to help you do that more efficiently and more effectively. I’m going to link in the show notes to a few episodes on how you can do that too. The last thing that I would encourage you to do is to keep listening for more ways you can build those connections with customers. Because the other big key to bypassing big tech is to keep learning. I’m confident you can do it. I’m confident you can bypass Big Tech. And I’m looking forward to seeing how well you do it. The thing you have to remind yourself is AI is just one more place the gatekeepers gonna gate. If you want to unlock those gates. You’re going to have to do it by connecting with customers directly. Show Wrap-Up and Credits Now, looking at the clock on the wall, we are out of time for this week. And I want to remind you again that you can find the show notes for this episode. As well as an archive of all past episodes by going to timpeter.com/podcast . Again, that’s timpeter.com/podcast . Just look for episode 437. Subscribe to Thinks Out Loud Don’t forget that you can click on the subscribe link in any of the episodes that you find there to have Thinks Out Loud delivered to your favorite podcatcher every single week. You can also find Thinks Out Loud on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube Music, anywhere fine podcasts are found. Leave a Rating or Review for Thinks Out Loud I would also very much appreciate it if you could provide a positive rating or review for the show whenever you use one of those services. If you like what you hear on Thinks Out Loud , if you enjoy what we talk about, if you like being part of the community that we’re building here, please give us a positive rating or review. Reviews help other listeners find the podcast. Reviews help other listeners understand what Thinks Out Loud is all about. They help to build our community and they mean the world to me. So thank you so much for doing that. I very, very much appreciate it. Thinks Out Loud on Social Media You can also find Thinks Out Loud on LinkedIn by going to linkedin.com/tim-peter-and-associates-llc . You can find me on Twitter or X or whatever you want to call it this week by using the Twitter handle @tcpeter. And of course, you can email me by sending an email to podcast(at) timpeter.com . Again, that’s podcast(at) timpeter.com . Show Outro Finally, and I know I say this a lot, I want you to know how thrilled I am that you keep listening to what we do here. It means so much to me. You are the reason we do this show. You’re the reason that Thinks Out Loud happens every single week. So please, keep your messages coming on LinkedIn. Keep hitting me up on Twitter, sending things via email. I love getting a chance to talk with you, to hear what’s going on in your world, and to learn how we can do a better job building on the types of information and insights and content and community that work for you and work for your business. So with all that said, I hope you have a fantastic rest of your day, I hope you have a wonderful week ahead, and I will look forward to speaking with you here on Thinks Out Loud next time. Until then, please be well, be safe, and as always, take care, everybody. The post Revisiting Is AI a Gatekeeper? Or is it a Key? (Thinks Out Loud) appeared first on Tim Peter & Associates .…
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1 The Only Way to Succeed Next Year (Thinks Out Loud Episode 444) 26:05
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As far as I’m concerned, there’s only one way to succeed next year. And, truth be told, it goes beyond success just in your business. I don’t mean to say that business success isn’t important. Of course it is. But, business success often follows from success throughout your life. Most successful people seem like they’re accomplished in many areas… because they are. They’re not focused solely on being their best selves only at work or only at a given hobby. It’s the idea of being your best self that’s at the heart of this conversation I want to have this time around. What does “being your best self” look like in practice? What can you do to achieve it? And how does it apply not only in business, but across many areas of your life? That’s what this episode of Thinks Out Loud is all about. Want to learn more? Here are the show notes for you. The Only Way to Succeed Next Year (Thinks Out Loud Episode 444) — Headlines and Show Notes Show Notes and Links Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi – Wikipedia 8 Traits of Flow According to Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi AI Is Not the Future. You Are (Thinks Out Loud Episode 443) wheel of life – Google Search Navigating Life’s Spheres: Your Guide to the Balance Wheel | Love Light & Inspiration The Vor Game – Wikipedia "Touch Grass" (Thinks Out Loud Episode 358) Revisiting "What Are We Doing Here?" How Are You Holding Up? (Thinks Out Loud Episode 316) Lessons Learned: The TPA Anniversary Show (Thinks Out Loud Episode 420) Recapping 2023 Part 2 — Personal Lessons Learned (Thinks Out Loud Episode 407) You might also enjoy this webinar I recently participated in with Miles Partnership that looked at "The Power of Generative AI and ChatGPT: What It Means for Tourism & Hospitality" here: Free Downloads We have some free downloads for you to help you navigate the current situation, which you can find right here: A Modern Content Marketing Checklist. Want to ensure that each piece of content works for your business? Download our latest checklist to help put your content marketing to work for you. Digital & E-commerce Maturity Matrix. As a bonus, here’s a PDF that can help you assess your company’s digital maturity. You can use this to better understand where your company excels and where its opportunities lie. And, of course, we’re here to help if you need it . The Digital & E-commerce Maturity Matrix rates your company’s effectiveness — Ad Hoc, Aware, Striving, Driving — in 6 key areas in digital today, including: Customer Focus Strategy Technology Operations Culture Data Best of Thinks Out Loud You can find our “Best of Thinks Out Loud” playlist on Spotify right here: Subscribe to Thinks Out Loud Subscribe in iTunes Subscribe in the Google Play Store Contact information for the podcast: podcast@timpeter.com Past Insights from Tim Peter Thinks Technical Details for Thinks Out Loud Recorded using a Shure SM7B Vocal Dynamic Microphone and a Focusrite Scarlett 4i4 (3rd Gen) USB Audio Interface into Logic Pro X for the Mac. Running time: 26m 05s You can subscribe to Thinks Out Loud in iTunes , the Google Play Store , via our dedicated podcast RSS feed (or sign up for our free newsletter ). You can also download/listen to the podcast here on Thinks using the player at the top of this page. Transcript: The Only Way to Succeed Next Year Well hello again everybody and welcome back to Thinks Out Loud , your source for all the digital expertise your business needs. My name is Tim Peter, this is episode 444 of the Big Show, and I think we’ve got a really cool episode for you today. Most of what I’m going to talk about in this episode, on the surface, has little to do with marketing or digital or business strategy, the topics we typically talk about here. I don’t have any big predictions for 2025 yet, or any major recap of 2024, you know, those are coming. And if you only care about those topics, you might want to skip to your other favorite podcast right now and then check our future episodes for that content. I’d recommend against that though, because what’s also true is that what I plan to talk about today has everything to do with marketing and digital and business strategy. I suspect it will be obvious why shortly, but I’ll explicitly call out the reason at the end for you. The thing is, as we come up on the end of the year, I have a problem with the conventional wisdom that almost everybody spouts off about almost every holiday season. You know, you’ll hear people say that it’s time to look back at the year you just experienced and what went well and what didn’t go well and what did you learn from those experiences. They’ll tell you to look ahead at what you hope to accomplish, and your goals for the new year, and what you’re going to do more of, and what you’re going to do better. Most people, many people, will tell you to spend time with family and reconnect with old friends. People will say, “You really need to make the most of this time. You never know how much longer you’ll have with grandma or grandpa, or your parents, or whomever.” I hate this advice. Now don’t misunderstand, I don’t want to challenge the conventional wisdom around what you do for the next two weeks. You should look back. You should look ahead to what you want to accomplish, and you absolutely should spend time with the people you love, and reconnect with old friends, and enjoy this time with your family. My problem isn’t “Why aren’t you doing this during the holidays? “My problem is, “ Why aren’t you doing this every single day and week and month throughout the year? ” Seriously. Yes, we should all use every opportunity. To look back at what we learned, we should use every opportunity to look forward to what we hope to accomplish. And we all should spend more time with family and friends and the people we love. If I wanted to be funny, I would say, “Notice how I listed friends, family, and the people you love into three separate categories?” You know, in truth though, if they’re not the people you love, maybe the problem isn’t that, it’s that you maybe shouldn’t categorize them as family or friends. Maybe the reason they’re not the people you love is something you need to work on, and more on this in a bit. The reality though is don’t spend too much time with toxic people. And if everyone you know is toxic, Then I suspect they’re not the problem, and I will have much more on that a little later, too. At any rate, when we’re talking about how you use this time, I think you really need to set yourself up for success every week and every month all year long. And I mean success in a broader way than just what you do in your business. You may remember that I talked about a balance wheel or a wheel of life in last week’s episode. I’m not going to recap the whole process for you, but the idea is that this provides you a great time and a great tool to take stock of where you are in every area of your life that matters to you. Work? Sure. But also family and friends and your mental and physical and financial well being. The great thing about an exercise like this is that you get to decide which of those areas are important to you. You also get to decide how satisfied you are in each of those areas, and you get to decide, once you’ve taken a look at that wheel, which ones you want to work on, and the order you’ll do that work. That’s something you can do all year long, and that’s how you succeed next year. This isn’t about New Year’s resolutions, either, and it certainly isn’t about, you know, hustle culture, just “doing more.” Don’t get me wrong, hustle culture can be useful, to a point, but it’s usually focused solely on your work. It usually thinks solely in terms of, what are you going to turn out today from a work perspective? Success in work is up to you and obviously important. It’s something I talk about on this show all the time. Work often is a huge contributor to the meaning in our lives. It’s also not the only thing that gives our lives meaning. In fact, I would go so far to say it shouldn’t be the only thing that matters to give your life meaning. Instead, I’m talking about being the best version of yourself in all of the areas of your life that matter to you and that give your life meaning. And there’s a way that you can do this to drive improvement throughout your life, all year long, where New Year’s resolutions fail. New Year’s resolutions don’t tend to work for two reasons, for at least two reasons. I mean, one of the big ones is that they often aren’t necessarily seen as fun. But the two big reasons are, one, that there’s no consequence, really, if you break them. You might feel bad about it for a couple of days, but eventually it’s just something that happened and you move on with life. And the second is you have to wait an entire year for them to come back around again. If you didn’t accomplish this year’s New Year’s resolutions by, you know, if you haven’t made progress by the end of January, oh well, I guess it’s over. No big deal. We’re drawn to New Year’s resolutions because the first day of the year is symbolically important. And that symbolism has a certain power, one that our brains latch on to. It’s really important to our minds, that date, because it’s imbued with so much culture and tradition. There’s research that backs this up, by the way, that our minds just get wrapped around specific dates. Days like New Year’s Day or the first of the year as being hugely important. There’s also research that backs up what I’m about to share that’s just kind of crazy. Unfortunately, I can’t remember who to credit for this one. So while there will be links in the show notes for many of the things I’m talking about, there won’t be for this one. A Google search wasn’t helping me out. I will certainly update the links later if I can find it. In any case, the further we get away from January 1st, the less power it holds over us. Its symbolism dwindles. Here’s the funny thing about that research, though. It showed that January 1st, isn’t the only symbolically important date in our lives. Other dates have meaning, too. For instance, your birthday is a pretty big day. We give it a certain power in our minds. If you’re married, your wedding anniversary is another one of those days. If you have children, your kids birthdays have a certain power. And any of those can be used as days where you start something new or reassess or have the drive to start again, to renew yourself. Each of these are opportunities to reinvigorate and renew your focus on the things that matter to you. But brace yourself, because the research found something even stranger. It turns out almost any day can hold that same symbolic power, as long as that date matters to you. Which is crazy, because it really means that almost any day is an opportunity to reinvigorate yourself and renew your focus on the things that matter to you. That’s incredible when you think about it, because now we’re not talking about New Year’s resolutions. We’re talking about where am I starting from today. Now the funny thing is, if you find that too abstract a concept to get your head around, in terms of how you would execute that, there are two days that almost everyone recognizes as powerful And those are the first day of the month and the first day of the week, which means you don’t have to have New Year’s resolutions. You can have new month resolutions and new week resolutions. You can renew and reinvigorate every month and every week. You don’t have to think about what matters to you and what you want to change next year. Just think about what you want to change in January, and then again in February, and again in March. You can do the same every Sunday or Monday too, depending on what you consider the first day of the week. It could be the first day of the week, it could be the first day of your work week. You, all you have to do is take a few minutes and make a short list of what you’re going to work on from your balance wheel this week. Then do it again the following week, and the following, and so on. There’s this great hidden benefit to it, compared with New Year’s resolutions, by the way, that if a single week doesn’t go as planned, it doesn’t throw you off for the whole month or the whole year. You just reset on the following week, focus on what matters to you that week, and work towards becoming more completely yourself. And the great thing is, whether you do this 12 times a year, or 52, or some number in between those, I mean, we can all have a week that gets away from us, you will end up growing as a person. Over the course of those 52 weeks, you’ll end up building better relationships with the people who matter to you. Those outcomes, that focus, is what I mean when I’m talking about the only way to succeed next year. In this case, success isn’t just a business concept, it’s a life concept. It’s how you grow as a person. Now the funny thing is, that growth has other benefits beyond just the obvious. And that’s where this does have something to do with marketing or digital or business strategy. In fact, it has everything to do with marketing and digital and business strategy. Why? Because the greatest successes in marketing and digital and business strategy, and pretty much anything else in life, occur when you’re your whole self, when you feel good about yourself, when you’re able to bring your entire being to the moment and to the thing that you’re working on. I met somebody new and a client the other day whose approach just absolutely thrilled me, filled me with joy. He was so thoughtful and so present and so clear minded about his work and his life and what was important to him. He was so clear about what he thought he could do well and what he thought he couldn’t. He set appropriate boundaries with the people in the room without any argument or any drama. He simply wanted to focus on doing his very best work and supporting the team as a whole in the best way that he could. He is, already I’m finding out, just a delight to have met and work with. At least from what I can see on the surface, everything is going right for him. And I think it’s because he’s true to what matters to him. If you look at the people who constantly gripe that nothing ever goes right, they’re almost always at least a little bit at fault. Now, hang with me for a second. Because this is the internet, let me say right away, of course there are exceptions. Unfortunately, far too many cases exist where people are discriminated against or find themselves in abusive situations or have serious health issues. On a personal level, I’ve lost multiple family members and dear friends to things like cancer. I know people who struggle with mental illnesses and other very real problems in their lives. Situations like that absolutely suck. There’s no two ways about it. And I offer anybody going through anything like that nothing but peace and comfort and good fortune every day going forward, starting today. I’m not talking about those people. I’m talking about the people who you encounter from time to time — we all do — who really don’t have any major issues in their lives in any real terms and still find ways to bitch about everything in the world every day, right? In high school, by the way, one of my teachers, a priest as it happens, once told me the difference between bitching and complaining. It’s pretty big. Complaining is when you talk about your problems to someone who can do something about them, who can help you improve the situation. Bitching is when you talk about your problems to everybody else.* You know, and don’t get me wrong, there’s nothing wrong with bitching every now and again if it helps you move past something that’s bugging you. I bitch to my wife regularly about whatever things that are going on, whether trivial or significant, that has drawn my attention on any given day or in any given week. We all do. That’s normal. If you’re doing it all the time though, you know, maybe the problem isn’t with what’s going on in the world. Maybe it’s how you’re reacting to it. So with all I’m that out of the the way and speaking only about those who bitch about quote-unquote, “everything” — as well as those of you who simply want to find new ways to succeed — the simple fact is you can change your outcomes by changing your outlook. And I know that might sound trite. But it’s true, the groundbreaking work around flow, that is the state of operating at peak performance, you know, fully in the zone, identified by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, depends on three factors. And those three factors are, you’re working towards a single clear goal. That goal matters to you, it’s meaningful in your life, and the work challenges you without overwhelming you. It, it causes you to push yourself. When you’re working with flow, you feel energized across many areas of your, areas of your life. You’re happier as a person, you’re more fully yourself. In other words, working towards your goals will make you feel better in pretty much all the other areas of your life. So even if you don’t love where you are in your career, or maybe your company is struggling and you’re not in a position at the moment to do a lot about it. But if you imagine you’re spending time each week and each month learning from what you’d accomplished in the prior week or month, that would move you towards a meaningful goal of self improvement. Imagine if you were truly present for your family and friends and the people you love, that would move you towards the meaningful goal of building stronger and healthier relationships. Even when you can’t find flow at work, you can find flow in the other areas of your life, Which are areas that are going to continue to exist even as you change jobs and careers over the course of your working life. Working in this way on yourself helps you become a more fully realized version of yourself, which actually helps you become more focused and thoughtful at work. And quite possibly help you move forward as a digital marketer and strategist. And if not, you’ll still be fulfilled outside of work. You know, that’s really a great thing. It reminds me of a quote I love about strategy from the Lois McMaster Bujold book, “The Vor Game,” which you should totally check out. A character in the book says, “The key to strategy. Is not to choose a path to victory, but to choose so that all paths lead to victory.” Now, in fairness, she follows that up by saying, “ideally,” acknowledging that it’s not always easy to have all paths lead to victory every single time. Still, it’s worth choosing as many as you can that help. So, if you’re not necessarily having the best place at work, working on yourself is something you can control. Working on your relationships is something you can control. And that goes the other way, too. If you’re doing well in work, it allows you to say, “Okay, maybe I can’t control what’s happening with my relationships or a specific relationship, because the other person is not being everybody. They can’t control it. You would like them to be, but you can work on yourself and you can work on your work.” So ultimately, it’s working towards all paths helping you to succeed. If your success matters to you next year though, you need to think beyond just business and just marketing and just digital. You need to think about the kind of person you want to be in every area of your life. You need to think about the kinds of relationships you want to have, the people you want to spend your time with outside of business as well as within it. And then do the work in those areas to improve your relationships with the people that matter to you. Make sure you focus as much as you can on the areas and people that give your life meaning. Working towards improving in those areas helps you find flow in your activities, which will help you feel more fulfilled overall. And finding greater fulfillment overall helps you persevere during the tougher times of your days and weeks and months that undoubtedly will happen. Remember that you don’t have to think about New Year’s resolutions or wait for January 1st to roll around to make changes. You get to reset your objectives and renew your focus every month and every week. So the point I want to leave you with today is that your ability to be the person you want to be is entirely in your hands. And becoming the person you truly want to be is, in my book, The only real way to succeed next year, and every year after that. I hope you have a wonderful holiday season. I hope you get to spend it with people you love, and that everything next year goes really well for you. Just remember, a lot of that is within your hands, and I can’t wait to see what you do with it. Show Wrap-Up and Credits Now, looking at the clock on the wall, we are out of time for this week. Before I get into the credits, for the show, a quick programming note. We’ll be posting some of the best of Thinks Out Loud over the next couple of weeks during Christmas and the New Year’s Day holidays. I hope you’ll enjoy those. And we’ll be back with entirely new episodes for you the week of January 6. In the meantime, I want to remind you again that you can find the show notes for this episode, as well as an archive of all past episodes, by going to timpeter.com/podcast . Again, that’s timpeter.com/podcast . Just look for episode 444. Subscribe to Thinks Out Loud Don’t forget that you can click on the subscribe link in any of the episodes that you find there to have Thinks Out Loud delivered to your favorite podcatcher every single week. You can also find Thinks Out Loud on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube Music, anywhere fine podcasts are found. Leave a Rating or Review for Thinks Out Loud I would also very much appreciate it if you could provide a positive rating or review for the show whenever you use one of those services. Thanks for hanging with me as I ventured a little further afield. I’ll be back to our regular topics. But let me know what you think of the episodes we do here. If you like what you hear on Thinks Out Loud , if you enjoy what we talk about, if you like being part of the community that we’re building here, please give us a positive rating or review. Reviews help other listeners find the podcast. Reviews help other listeners understand what Thinks Out Loud is all about. They help to build our community and they mean the world to me. So thank you so much for doing that. I very, very much appreciate it. Thinks Out Loud on Social Media You can also find Thinks Out Loud on LinkedIn by going to linkedin.com/tim-peter-and-associates-llc . And of course, you can email me by sending an email to podcast(at) timpeter.com . Again, that’s podcast(at) timpeter.com . Show Outro Finally, and I know I say this a lot, I want you to know how thrilled I am that you keep listening to what we do here. It means so much to me. You are the reason we do this show. You’re the reason that Thinks Out Loud happens every single week. So please, keep your messages coming on LinkedIn. Keep sending me things via email. I love getting a chance to talk with you, to hear what’s going on in your world, and to learn how we can do a better job building on the types of information and insights and content and community that work for you and work for your business. So with all that said, I hope you have a fantastic rest of your day, I hope you have a wonderful week ahead, and I will look forward to speaking with you here on Thinks Out Loud next time. Until then, please be well, be safe, and as always, take care, everybody. I hope you have a happy New Year and we’ll talk with you soon! The post The Only Way to Succeed Next Year (Thinks Out Loud Episode 444) appeared first on Tim Peter & Associates .…
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1 AI Is Not the Future. You Are (Thinks Out Loud Episode 443) 27:01
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I’m having a ton of conversations lately about how AI will affect the future of work and employment. Many of these conversations start off with questions like “What will AI do to my job?” And, of course, “What happens to my job in the future?” AI is a big deal. No two ways about it. But, here’s the thing: AI is not the future. You are. You have control of what your future looks like. Sure, AI could affect pieces of your life. It already does. But you have lots of say in terms of what your life looks like overall. How will that work? How can you ensure that AI plays the right role in your life? And how do you make sure that your job — and more importantly, your life — reflects the future you’re looking for? That’s what this episode of Thinks Out Loud is all about. Want to learn more? Here are the show notes for you. AI Is Not the Future. You Are (Thinks Out Loud Episode 443) — Headlines and Show Notes Show Notes and Links Ikigai – Wikipedia Ikigai: The Japanese Secret to a Joyful Life — the Government of Japan Madam C. J. Walker – Wikipedia Wheel of Life/Balance Wheel Co-Intelligence: Living and Working with AI: Mollick, Ethan: 9780593716717: Amazon.com: Books Giving Thanks 2024 (Thinks Out Loud Episode 441) The Future of Computing? Big Tech Earnings and the State of Digital Q3 2024 (Thinks Out Loud Episode 439) Are AI and Digital Evil (Thinks Out Loud Episode 438) How to Put Big Tech and AI — the Biggest Threat and Biggest Enablers of Your Business — to Work (Episode 428) An AI Day in the Life of a Marketing and Digital Strategy Consultant (Thinks Out Loud Episode 434) "Touch Grass" (Thinks Out Loud Episode 358) Revisiting "What Are We Doing Here?" How Are You Holding Up? (Thinks Out Loud Episode 316) Lessons Learned: The TPA Anniversary Show (Thinks Out Loud Episode 420) Recapping 2023 Part 2 — Personal Lessons Learned (Thinks Out Loud Episode 407) Revisiting "We Owe it to Our Customers to Make Their Lives Better" (Thinks Out Loud) Revisiting "Touch Grass" (Thinks Out Loud) You might also enjoy this webinar I recently participated in with Miles Partnership that looked at "The Power of Generative AI and ChatGPT: What It Means for Tourism & Hospitality" here: Free Downloads We have some free downloads for you to help you navigate the current situation, which you can find right here: A Modern Content Marketing Checklist. Want to ensure that each piece of content works for your business? Download our latest checklist to help put your content marketing to work for you. Digital & E-commerce Maturity Matrix. As a bonus, here’s a PDF that can help you assess your company’s digital maturity. You can use this to better understand where your company excels and where its opportunities lie. And, of course, we’re here to help if you need it . The Digital & E-commerce Maturity Matrix rates your company’s effectiveness — Ad Hoc, Aware, Striving, Driving — in 6 key areas in digital today, including: Customer Focus Strategy Technology Operations Culture Data Best of Thinks Out Loud You can find our “Best of Thinks Out Loud” playlist on Spotify right here: Subscribe to Thinks Out Loud Subscribe in iTunes Subscribe in the Google Play Store Contact information for the podcast: podcast@timpeter.com Past Insights from Tim Peter Thinks Technical Details for Thinks Out Loud Recorded using a Shure SM7B Vocal Dynamic Microphone and a Focusrite Scarlett 4i4 (3rd Gen) USB Audio Interface into Logic Pro X for the Mac. Running time: 27m 01s You can subscribe to Thinks Out Loud in iTunes , the Google Play Store , via our dedicated podcast RSS feed (or sign up for our free newsletter ). You can also download/listen to the podcast here on Thinks using the player at the top of this page. Transcript: AI Is Not the Future. You Are Well hello again everyone and welcome back to Thinks Out Loud . Your source for all the digital expertise your business needs. My name is Tim Peter. This is episode 443 of The Big Show and thank you so much for listening today. I am so thrilled you’re here and I think we’ve got a really cool show for you today. This one’s going to be a little bit weirder than normal, because I’m kind of in a philosophical mood. I’ve got a bunch of stuff on my mind that, you know, is a little outside of what I normally talk about on the show. I’ve been having just a ton of conversations lately with people about their careers, and the effects of artificial intelligence on their personal development, and where things might be going on a personal level for them, and for me, and probably for you. And so I thought it was okay to talk about this. You know, part of my Rutgers Business School Exec Ed classes focus on AI in marketing and AI in customer service, which is partly what led to this, and I’ve been having a bunch of different mentoring and reverse mentoring conversations that have really brought this to the fore. And I thought it made sense to start with a few baseline predictions for where artificial intelligence will be in the next year, as relates to you, as relates to your job, as relates to your career. And I want to be really clear. These are assumptions. They are, I think, solid assumptions. I think they’re well grounded assumptions. But I’m not a hundred percent confident on any of these. I’m like sixty to seventy percent confident, some a little more than others. But you know, there’s obviously room for things to move here if, if we see AI models continuing to plateau, I will be more confident that these will hold true. If somebody comes out with a big breakthrough that we’re not expecting, you know, GPT 5 or something like that, then maybe I, these get a little more uncertain. But nonetheless, it seems obvious at this point that AI probably isn’t going to take your job. There are, of course, exceptions to this, but if you were listening to this show, if you’re a marketing professional, if you’re a content creator, if you’re somebody who focuses on, you know, connecting with customers using digital tools, here’s what you’ll Your job isn’t going away in the next year. No two ways about it. The current generation of tools simply exhibit too many hallucinations and too many inherent biases to completely replace most of the knowledge work that I run into regularly. Sure, obviously, lots of folks are already outsourcing a wide array of tasks within jobs. And some leaders are starting to ask, okay, can we use these tools to outsource specific jobs? That is absolutely happening. But most of the marketing and sales and business development roles that are common among the show’s listeners are supported by AI, they’re augmented by AI, and they probably will be for a while. They’re not outright going to be replaced by artificial intelligence. Sure, that could change. I also suspect we’re going to have some reasonable amount of heads up if that starts to happen. I’m paying some attention to various financial analyses that suggest we can do more with less and, you know, handle losses by attrition. But the likelihood that your job’s going to go away is pretty slim. I’ve been doing this kind of work for quite a while and that approach of how do we do more with less and how do we, you know, deal with loss by attrition, you know, we shrink by attrition, let people Migrate themselves out over time. That’s not even remotely new. Folks have been doing that for a long, long time. I don’t see why this time around is any different. We will absolutely see more artificial intelligence in people’s lives. Almost certainly baked into existing tools more so than through the exact acquisition of lots of new tools. You’re undoubtedly seeing that right now. I mean, when’s the last time you had a conversation with a vendor of anything where they didn’t bring up AI at some point in the discussion, right? I mean, that’s just the way it works right now. Another thing that I think you can easily expect is we’re undoubtedly going to see some AI backlash in the next 9 to 12 to 18 months. I’m already seeing this. I don’t think this is much of a prediction. This is happening now. I’m not predicting the future. I’m, you know, I’m broadcasting the present. CEOs and CFOs have been signing off on a huge number of pilot programs, a huge number of tests. And they’re starting to demonstrate impatience for results. The joke I keep hearing from senior executives right now is, “I’ve got more pilots than Delta. I want outcomes.” That’s just the reality of the world we live in. And, you know, obviously there’s a macro economy that we’ve got to think about. There’s if you live in the United States, there’s going to be a change in presidential administrations. Who all knows what happens there? I mean, that will certainly swing this in one direction or the other. On that one, I’m not going to make any huge predictions because it’s tough to tell. But the backlash is definitely coming. People want to see more results, and we should expect them to be asking for more results. very much. But here’s the thing I know about the future and here’s where I’m going to take a hard left turn in this discussion. Because it’s not about artificial intelligence. When you think about your career and you think about where you want to be, AI is not the future. You are. You get to decide if you’ll use these tools and how you’ll use these tools. You get to decide what you want your work to look like And you get to decide what you want your life to look like. You get to decide how to make that happen. I know that might sound crazy, but it’s true. You can do something today that has nothing to do with AI. Or you could do something that absolutely leans into AI, if it really matters to you, if you really find that interesting and valuable. You get to decide. So I would suggest, ignore the predictions. There’s a, there’s a quote that I love that says, “History will be kind to me, for I intend to write it.” Which, okay, obnoxious, arrogant, but true. You get to decide. The question I’d ask you, the question I ask folks when I’ve been having these conversations is, what do you want? What are your goals? What matters to you? Where do you want to be five years down the road, and ten years down the road, and fifteen years down the road? And I don’t mean in exactly what job or exactly what your work day will look like, because that’s too hard to tell when we get down the road. But what excites you? What gets you out of bed in the morning and makes you say this is some place I want to spend my time. It doesn’t just have to be about work, by the way. This is true for life generally. This could be about relationships. It could be about health and fitness. It could be about money. It could be about personal growth. It could be about your community. What are the kinds of things that you want to do that interest you? What are the kinds of things that make you happy, your life worth living for you, make you feel valuable? You may be familiar that there’s this Japanese concept called ikigai, which refers to your sense of purpose, what’s your reason for living. And it’s a really simple concept, right? When you think about it, it’s, it’s the intersection of four things. It’s what do you love? What are you good at? What is the world value? And what will it pay you for? That’s it. How do you find the spot that works for you? Not just today, but longer term, over the course of your life. There’s lots of ways you can do this. There’s, there’s a great tool, there’s a technique using something called a balance wheel or sometimes a wheel of life. I’ll post a couple of links in the show notes or you can Google at your leisure. To assess where you are on six to ten attributes and see where you’re feeling pretty good about where you are and where you feel like you’re falling short in terms of achieving balance. You basically rate yourself on a scale of, it depends on which one you use, you might do it on a scale of one to five, you might do it on a scale of one to ten. But as you think of the various things in your life that matter to you, your, your personal life, your personal growth, your. Health, your money, your relationships, your community, and you rank yourself, and you kind of draw this picture of, Oh, do I have a nice circle here? Or do I have, you know, sort of this lumpy, bumpy mass that says, I’m falling short in some areas in my own life. You then use that to say, cool, this is where I want to set my goals. This is where I want to improve this year and next year and the next. I want to go ahead and move forward and grow and get, you know, a better shaped wheel here. The most successful people I have ever known always have self directed goals in more than one part of your life. And success isn’t just about goals. A case of financial success or professional success. It means where do you feel like you want to do well? It’s thinking purposefully about what matters to you and then working towards it. What is the future you want? The future can’t just be something that happens to you, it’s something you work towards, it’s something you strive for, it’s something you reach for. And you don’t want to worry about how you’re going to make that future happen. Believe it or not, that’s, that’s Not the way to do it. It’s easy to find ways to shoot down ideas when you’re thinking about what you’d like it to look like. Don’t do that. Seriously, ignore that. Think about what you want, what really matters to you. Think big, right? I see people far too often, you know, in mentoring relationships, especially where people talk about their goals in incremental terms, and that’s okay. That’s totally okay, especially if we’re talking about where do we want to be a month from now. But if you’re thinking about your life, if you’re thinking about the next few years, whether it’s a year from now, three years from now, five years from now, ten years from now, What would it look like if your goals were 200 percent or 300 percent or 1000 percent larger than where you are today? Think about what your world would look like. Think about how you would live and act in that world. Yes, your goals should be achievable in some reasonable time frame. The fact is though, you’re undoubtedly a thousand percent better today than you were at some earlier point in your life. You’re almost certainly making more money than you did ten years ago, and probably more money than you ever thought you might make ten years ago. If you think 3 percent raise every year over the last decade, you’re Today, you’ve increased your income more than 34%, right? That’s a pretty big lift. You’ve already achieved that, so why not increase your salary by 34% in five years or three in many cases? I bet you’re making 10 times what you made at some earlier point in your career or in your lifetime. And that’s just the financial side. I bet you’re 10 times better at something you used to struggle with. I know I am in lots of areas. I’m sure that’s true of you. People grow. We get better at things over time. The best part of thinking like this, by the way, is Is that if you fall short when striving for something ten times bigger or better than what you’ve done in the past, you’re still gonna end up in a much better place than you are today. Okay, maybe you don’t achieve a thousand percent growth. Cool, you only achieve five hundred percent growth. That’s still pretty great, and that’s still where you wanna be, regardless of what happens in the world around you with artificial intelligence or anything else. I obviously have to acknowledge that it’s not always easy to do this once you’ve set those goals. That’s okay. You want to have the goals as a guiding light, as a signpost, as something you’re moving towards. And of course, not everyone has the same advantages in life. It’s one of the reasons why I’m always inspired by people who manage to overcome great challenges in their life. I was reading the other day about a woman who I’ve heard about many times over the years, and I find her to be one of the most inspirational figures ever was this woman named Madam C.J. Walker. Madam C.J. Walker was born two days before Christmas in 1867, so 157 years ago. She was a black woman and the first member of her family ever to be born outside of slavery in the United States. Right? So this is somebody who came from some serious challenges compared to many people. Over the course of her life, she developed, marketed, and sold a wide range of cosmetics and hair care products for black women in a very different environment, right? We’re talking about the early 1900s. And according to Wikipedia, this is a quote, “She is recorded as the first female self made millionaire in America in the Guinness Book of World Records.” The Guinness Book of World Records recognizes her as the first woman self made millionaire in America. That is genuinely remarkable. What’s more remarkable to me, is that she also built schools and training centers. Again, according to Wikipedia, in addition to training in sales and grooming, Walker showed other black women how to budget, build their own businesses, and encouraged them to be financially independent. Again, that’s remarkable. She didn’t just build her business. She helped thousands, possibly tens of thousands of other women, build successful businesses and successful lives. She’s an icon. I mean, it’s absolutely remarkable. And she did all of this as the child of formerly enslaved people. Imagine the world she worked in and lived in, day in and day out. Now imagine all the possibilities that are out there. I am being dead serious. I could not be more serious about this. When I say I’d rather live in a world when I’m competing with artificial intelligence, when I’m competing with a computer, than with the racism and sexism in the world that Madam C.J. Walker had to deal with every day. I’ve never experienced anything remotely like that. Bring on the robots, man. They do not scare me. And I would say they shouldn’t scare you. Seriously, there are much bigger problems in the world for lots of people, and there have been much bigger problems in the world for lots of people in history than anything we’re dealing with right now. I just don’t see it as a huge issue in terms of how it’s going to affect your day to day. If you think about it from a certain perspective and if you work at it from a certain perspective. And the last thing that I want to say about this, the last thing that I want to focus on and really remind you is that as the saying goes, It’s a marathon, not a sprint. It’s a long race. A boss of mine used to say that your professional life roughly lasts for 40 years. From roughly, if you think about it, you start your career more or less when you’re 25, you end your career more or less when you’re 65. So that’s a 40 year period. And you can divide that into four 10 year quarters. If you’re listening to this show and you’re 30 or younger, you’ve just barely started the first quarter of your working life. You have so much time ahead of you. So no matter where you are at the moment, if it feels like it’s a, you know, Too hard or there’s, you know, too much change going on. You got a long way to go. Just take a breath and keep moving forward. You got a long, long way to go. If you’re in your 30s, you haven’t yet reached halftime of the game, right? You’ve got, again, a ton of ways to go. If you’re in your mid 40s, you still have another 20 years ahead of you, or roughly double your career to date. Think of everything you’ve done over that 20 year period and what you still can accomplish in the next 20 years. The best part is you can apply this to adulthood more generally. You don’t have to just think about this from a work perspective. That covers everything from about 15 to maybe 85. You could divide that into, four quarters of 17-and-a-half years a pop. You get my point. The point is you’ve got a lot of time in terms of that. Think of what you can accomplish during those periods. You’ve got a ton of time ahead of you and an immense amount of time to become anything you want to be, whomever you want to be multiple times over. In fact, don’t let one day, or one year, or one decade define you. Keep moving, keep growing, keep learning. The only direction is forward. The best thing about our lives is that we’re time travelers. We move forward one day at a time, every day. We move forward one year at a time, every year. You can’t go back. You get to go forward. I turned 56 this week, and I’m about to add “published nonfiction author” to my bio for the first time ever. I also have plans to finish a novel, probably by early 2026, to boot, just because I want to. Because it’s an itch I want to scratch, it’s something I want to do. Who knows what else I’m going to do in the fourth quarter of my career, and the next 25 to 35 years of my life? I am as excited for this as anything I’ve ever done. So when I sum all this up, am I worried about AI? Not really. I’m not. I think about it. I recognize that the world will undoubtedly change, and probably dramatically in the next decade, whether AI is the cause or — something else is that we haven’t even seen yet. I keep learning, and I keep preparing, and I keep planning in case things change quickly. I can’t necessarily predict everything that’s going to happen, but I can make plans to be ready to adapt to things that I haven’t thought about yet. You know, there’s the old quote you’ve probably heard, “Plans are useless. Planning is essential.” I also keep learning about the people around me and what they need and how I can help them. I use AI as a tool, too, to help me learn and grow, not just about artificial intelligence and the internet and digital, but about a whole host of topics. You should absolutely read, you should absolutely check out Ethan Mollick’s book, “Co-Intelligence, Living and Working with AI.” In particular, check out Chapter 7, AI as a Tutor , and Chapter 8, AI as a Coach , for more on how you can use AI to learn and grow. Just remember, though, that there is so much possibility in the world. Connect with customers and with people. And with their humanity, let the machines be the machines, be a good human, learn what people need and how you can help them achieve it, enjoy where you are as best as you can every day. Life is hard, trouble will find you on its own, you don’t need to go looking for it. Enjoy the moment you’re in as best as you can. Build strong relationships with the people who love you and people you love. Make the best choices you can with the information you have available to yourself. And then the rest will take care of itself, mostly. As I said at the top, AI isn’t the future. You are. And that’s going to be true as long as you let yourself do it. Personally, I can’t wait to see what you do. Show Wrap-Up and Credits Now, looking at the clock on the wall, we are out of time for this week. And I want to remind you again that you can find the show notes for this episode, as well as an archive of all past episodes, by going to timpeter.com/podcast . Again, that’s timpeter.com/podcast . Just look for episode 443. Subscribe to Thinks Out Loud Don’t forget that you can click on the subscribe link in any of the episodes that you find there to have Thinks Out Loud delivered to your favorite podcatcher every single week. You can also find Thinks Out Loud on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube Music, anywhere fine podcasts are found. Leave a Rating or Review for Thinks Out Loud I would also very much appreciate it if you could provide a positive rating or review for the show whenever you use one of those services. If you like what you hear on Thinks Out Loud , if you enjoy what we talk about, if you like being part of the community that we’re building here, please give us a positive rating or review. Reviews help other listeners find the podcast. Reviews help other listeners understand what Thinks Out Loud is all about. They help to build our community and they mean the world to me. So thank you so much for doing that. I very, very much appreciate it. Thinks Out Loud on Social Media You can also find Thinks Out Loud on LinkedIn by going to linkedin.com/tim-peter-and-associates-llc . And of course, you can email me by sending an email to podcast(at) timpeter.com . Again, that’s podcast(at) timpeter.com . Show Outro Finally, and I know I say this a lot, I want you to know how thrilled I am that you keep listening to what we do here. It means so much to me. You are the reason we do this show. You’re the reason that Thinks Out Loud happens every single week. So please, keep your messages coming on LinkedIn. Keep sending me things via email. I love getting a chance to talk with you, to hear what’s going on in your world, and to learn how we can do a better job building on the types of information and insights and content and community that work for you and work for your business. So with all that said, I hope you have a fantastic rest of your day, I hope you have a wonderful week ahead, and I will look forward to speaking with you here on Thinks Out Loud next time. Until then, please be well, be safe, and as always, take care, everybody. The post AI Is Not the Future. You Are (Thinks Out Loud Episode 443) appeared first on Tim Peter & Associates .…
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1 How Google Loses (Thinks Out Loud Episode 442) 23:06
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Google faces the most serious challenges in its history right now. And any stumble Google suffers also hurts your business. Organic search, paid search, local search, metasearch, product search, and… The post How Google Loses (Thinks Out Loud Episode 442) appeared first on Tim Peter & Associates .…
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1 Giving Thanks 2024 (Thinks Out Loud Episode 441) 17:51
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It’s Thanksgiving time again. Which means it’s time for me to share what I’m thankful for in 2024… and what I’m looking forward to in 2025. What am giving thanks… The post Giving Thanks 2024 (Thinks Out Loud Episode 441) appeared first on Tim Peter & Associates .
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1 Is Google Doomed in 2025? (Thinks Out Loud Episode 440) 26:21
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Just a few months after its 26th anniversary, Google faces more threats heading into next year than ever. The rise of artificial intelligence provides users with an alternative way to… The post Is Google Doomed in 2025? (Thinks Out Loud Episode 440) appeared first on Tim Peter & Associates .
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1 The Future of Computing? Big Tech Earnings and the State of Digital Q3 2024 (Thinks Out Loud Episode 439) 23:03
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It’s time for Big Tech’s earnings once again. And, this time around there were some notable updates, particularly from Meta Platforms (i.e., Facebook) and Microsoft that hint at the future… The post The Future of Computing? Big Tech Earnings and the State of Digital Q3 2024 (Thinks Out Loud Episode 439) appeared first on Tim Peter & Associates .…
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1 Are AI and Digital Evil (Thinks Out Loud Episode 438) 21:13
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Do artificial intelligence and digital more broadly scare you? Do their potential harms keep you up at night? In short, are these tools evil? I don’t think they are. Truly.… The post Are AI and Digital Evil (Thinks Out Loud Episode 438) appeared first on Tim Peter & Associates .
مرحبًا بك في مشغل أف ام!
يقوم برنامج مشغل أف أم بمسح الويب للحصول على بودكاست عالية الجودة لتستمتع بها الآن. إنه أفضل تطبيق بودكاست ويعمل على أجهزة اندرويد والأيفون والويب. قم بالتسجيل لمزامنة الاشتراكات عبر الأجهزة.