AI and search

New research shows that 27% of adults are using AI platforms for traditional search functions. I am getting about a dozen direct inquiries on my site from ChatGPT, and I’ve secured two customers through AI.

So, how is this going to work? It seems that Google is in trouble, but how can you bet against the world’s number-one search engine?

That’s the subject of the new episode of The Marketing Companion. I welcome a new co-host, Andy Crestodina, one of the premier digital marketing wizards around. Andy has some well-informed views of what is happening, what is likely, and how we need to think about search in the next few years.

We also delve into a topic that is a bit more controversial (believe it or not!) LinkedIn newsletters. Historically, I have not been a fan. You’re turning over your email list, SEO value, and perhaps even content discoverability to LinkedIn. And hey, who ever heard of a newsletter going viral?

But Andy has had some success in this area and presents a compelling case for the platform. An interesting debate!  To hear it all, simply click here:

Click here to enjoy Marketing Companion Episode 310

Please support our sponsor, who brings you this fantastic episode.

Bravo for Brevo!

This episode is brought to you by Brevo (formerly Sendinblue). Brevo gives you the tools to attract, engage, and nurture customer relationships.

Now, any business can build automated customer experiences, email marketing workflows, and landing pages that guide your customer to your main message. We are here to support businesses successfully navigating their digital presence to strengthen their customer relationships.

Go to https://www.brevo.com/marketingcompanion to sign up for Brevo for free and use the code COMPANION to save 50% on your first three months of Brevo’s Starter & Business plan!

Illustration courtesy MidJourney

The post Goodbye Google? Dissecting the role of AI and SEO appeared first on Schaefer Marketing Solutions: We Help Businesses {grow}.

I received early access to Bard, Google’s answer to ChatGPT, so I obviously wanted to make a quick comparison of ChatGPT versus Bard on several common marketing tasks:

1. Compose a simple essay
2. Recognize industry trends that could influence a marketing strategy
3. Summarize the main ideas in a lengthy piece of content
4. Identify impacts on the field of marketing 
5. Take a complex table of data and create a useful summary
6. Create a specific marketing plan
7. Summarize survey responses
8. Provide five unique content ideas
9. Edit a long podcast transcript into a blog post
10. Create social media posts

This blog post will report on the results of these ten tests.

ChatGPT versus Bard general performance

If you’ve used ChatGPT4, you know it is blazing fast. A full report on virtually anything in two seconds!

Bard is slower, about 10 seconds for a result. I mean, that is definitely a First World problem, but this is a First World blog post! It felt weird having to wait for a result after using ChatGPT for a while.

Also, Bard tends to add a little summary sentence at the end of everything. It’s rather useless, and I prefer ChatGPT’s no-nonsense, no-fluff response to a problem.

One advantage to Bard: When you create content, there is a little arrow that says View Options. If you click that, you’ll see that Bard gives you three more options to view. Pretty cool.

Finally, Bard seemed to have more character limitations compared to ChatGPT, requiring me to get more creative with some prompts.

When you log in to Bard, it emphasizes that it is still an experiment, and I was one of the first-week users, so we’ll keep that in mind when we see the results. Hopefully everything will get better week by week.

Now, let’s get on with the ten tests!

Test 1: Compose a simple essay

The prompt: Compose a 300-word essay, in the voice of author Mark Schaefer, about the importance of community-based marketing.

ChatGPT did a lovely job and it obviously drew from the thousands of blog posts I’ve written over the years. With a little editing, I could have easily used this output as a blog post.

Bard did not recognize me as an author, providing this cop-out:

I do not have enough information about that person to help with your request. I am a large language model, and I am able to communicate and generate human-like text in response to a wide range of prompts and questions, but my knowledge about this person is limited.

This is a surprising result since I assumed the Google-based Bard would have access to at least the same amount of information about me as ChatGPT.

It does make me wonder … how much of the ChatGPT output was a “hallucination” — just faking the answer as best it could. Did it really know me? Is the Google response unsatisfactory but more honest?

More on that in a minute.

Winner of Round 1: ChatGPT (I think!)

Test 2: Recognize industry trends that could influence a marketing strategy

Prompt: I am meeting with the owner of a boutique salon dedicated to physical fitness and wellness. I need to create a marketing strategy. What are the five trends in this industry I should be aware of?

Both platforms came up with identical lists that included:

• Digital Fitness
• Wearable Technology:
• Personalized Wellness Programs:
• Group  Fitness Classes
• Nutrition & Supplementation

Having worked in this industry, I recognize that these are relevant trends. Since ChatGPT only has data through 2021, I expected some difference in the lists, so ChatGPT did well despite this obstacle.

Winner of Round 2: Tie.

Test 3: Summarize a piece of content

In our marketing jobs, it’s always great if we can get a summary of an article, report, or speech to save us time. I copied and pasted one of my blog posts into each platform to see the results.

The blog post was about the importance of creating insights, not just information, to stand out in the digital world. I copied and pasted the post and asked for a 100-word summary.

The ChatGPT summary (84 words)

Walter Isaacson defines genius as a combination of curiosity and an ability to recognize patterns. Creating insights thus involves being curious and connecting the dots in a new way. People can become more insight-driven by connecting the dots from the past to the present, connecting people through collaboration, connecting to the experience by observing, and connecting the content by making original points. Unfortunately, many content creators today are playing it safe, but insights require some brain room, trust, and courage to really take off.

The Bard summary (41 words)

Insight is the ability to see things in a new way and make connections between seemingly unrelated ideas. It is essential for creativity and innovation. To become more insight-driven, you can connect the dots, connect the people, and connect the experience.

The Bard result confused me. Why did it stop at 41 words?

I loved that ChatGPT made a reference to Walter Isaacson (as I did), named all four points in the article, and ended by stating the problem experienced by most creators. While Bard provided a more condensed version, it missed some major points.

Winner of Round 3: ChatGPT.

Test 4: Identify impacts on the field of marketing today

The prompt: What are the primary impacts on the field of marketing today?

Both platforms came up with similar lists and explanations. To make this post more concise, I’ve only included the lists, not the explanations.

ChatGPT: 

1. The rise of digital marketing
2. Automation
3. Data and Analytics
4. Personalization
5. AI and Machine Learning

Bard:

The field of marketing is constantly evolving, and there are a number of primary impacts that are shaping the industry today. Some of the most significant impacts include:

1. The rise of digital marketing
2. The increasing importance of data
3. The growth of artificial intelligence
4. The changing role of the marketer
5. The need for collaboration

If you’ve played around with ChatGPT, you know that if you ask the same question five times, you’ll likely get five different combinations. It generates replies based on statistical regularities in their training data. That means that if you ask them the same question, you won’t always get the same answer. It also means that how you word a question can affect the reply, and for some of these queries we asked follow-ups to get better responses.

I tried this test several times, and neither one really stood out as particularly insightful. They are similar enough that I would rate it as a tie.

Winner of Round 4: Tie.

Test 5: Take a complex table of data and create a useful summary

I went to the U.S. Department of Labor and copied a complex data set about marketing employment in my home state of Tennessee. This was an analysis of 2022 fourth-quarter trends, by month, across every county in the state.

I told each platform what the data set represented, what each column of numbers meant, and asked for a five-point summary of the data.

ChatGPT result:

Summary of Marketing Employment in Tennessee:

• 18 counties in Tennessee have marketing employment opportunities
• In July, the total employment across all counties was 5,253 people
• Total wages for July was $62,065,382 and the average weekly wage was $1,543
• The highest location quotient of 3.22 was found in Sullivan County
• The highest total quarterly wages of $21,657,135 was found in Williamson County

Bard result:

Here is a summary of the data:

• The top 5 counties with the most marketing employment in Tennessee are Davidson, Hamilton, Knox, Blount, and Williamson counties.
• The average weekly wage for marketing employees in Tennessee is $1,507.
• The September location quotient for marketing employment in Tennessee is 0.64.
• The total quarterly wages for marketing employees in Tennessee is $29,347,499.
• The total number of marketing employees in Tennessee is 3,222.

Bard came up with a much better result. In the ChatGPT summary, the first point could not have been concluded from the data I provided. Seems to be a hallucination. The Bard result is more of what I would have expected — how many people work in marketing, how much do they make, where is most of the employment?

Winner of Round 5: Bard by a lot.

Test 6: Create a marketing plan

Prompt: I am creating a marketing plan for an electric bike shop in Knoxville, Tennessee. Please create a specific marketing plan for this small shop specifically for the Knoxville market.

Both results were nearly identical and not very good. Neither referred to any specific information about the Knoxville market, or even about electric bikes. Both results were bland templates without any insight, originality, or depth.

By the way, as a marketing consultant, I regard this as good news!

Winner of Round 6: Nobody.

Test 7: Summarize survey responses

Over the last few weeks, I’ve learned that ChatGPT is a champ at taking a list of survey responses and summarizing it into useful themes. This has saved me hours of time!

So I already knew ChatGPT could perform. Now to put Bard to the test.

I tried this out on several customer surveys, copied the responses, and used this prompt:

Summarize the following survey data into five main themes: (paste all survey data)

Unsurprisingly, Bard also did an excellent job, and the resulting lists were nearly identical. Bard seems to default to a numbered list with bold highlights, which was actually a nice touch in this test.

Winner of Round 7: Tie.

Test 8: Provide five unique content ideas

Prompt: Please give me five excellent headlines that have never been written before for an article about the impact of AI on marketing

ChatGPT:

1. “AI Revolutionizing Your Marketing Strategies: What to Expect Next”
2. “The Future of Marketing: Leveraging AI for Maximum Impact”
3. “AI Transforming Your Marketing Strategy: How to Stay Ahead of the Curve”
4. “Unleashing the Power of AI for Optimal Marketing Results”
5. “AI Unleashing New Possibilities in Digital Marketing: What to Expect”

Bard:

Here are 5 headlines for articles about the impact of AI on marketing that have never been written before:

1. AI Is Changing the Way We Market
2. AI Is Making Marketing More Efficient
3. AI Is Making Marketing More Effective
4. AI Is Making Marketing More Personal
5. AI Is Making Marketing More Humanmarketing: The future of marketing is here

None of these headlines are spectacular, but this could have been influenced by the fact that I added a pretty severe restraint: Creating a headline that had never been written before! I did a quick search and it is probably true that none of these headlines existed before.

I decided to try another test and have each platform write a headline for this blog post.

Prompt: Please give me five excellent headlines for an article comparing ChatGPT and Bard for marketing tasks

1. “ChatGPT vs. Bard: A Comparison of AI Tools for Marketing Automation”
2. “Which AI Tool is Best for Marketing Automation: ChatGPT or Bard?”
3. “Revolutionizing Marketing Automation: A Comparison of ChatGPT and Bard”
4. “ChatGPT and Bard: Finding the Ideal AI Tool for Your Marketing Needs”
5. “Discover the Benefits of ChatGPT and Bard for Automating Your Marketing Tasks”

Bard:

1. BardChatGPT and Bard: Which AI Chatbot is Right for Your Marketing?
2. ChatGPT and Bard: A Comparison of Two Leading AI Chatbots
3. ChatGPT versus Bard: Which AI Chatbot is Better for Marketing?
4. ChatGPT and Bard: The AI Chatbots You Need for Your Marketing Campaigns
5. ChatGPT and Bard: The Future of Marketing is AI Chatbots

It bothered me that ChatGPT assumed I wanted something about “marketing automation.” That was not part of the prompt! The Bard headlines were much better, and I used version three for this post.

Winner of Round 8: Bard

Test 9: Edit a long podcast transcript into a blog post

I recently had a PERFECT application for AI. I had done a podcast interview, and in an answer to a question, I covered an aspect of marketing strategy that would make a great blog post.

Editing a podcast transcript is a pain, at least if you’re a perfectionist like me. We simply do not speak in rational, acceptable sentences. I’ve found that both platforms are great at editing, but the limit on the number of characters is painful.

My friend Joeri Billast is a Web3 consultant and he created a good workaround. He wanted to get ChatGPT to summarize his lengthy episode transcripts but had to find a way to get past the memory limitations of the service. Here is his super-useful hack:

• Remember this podcast transcript and remember it as PART1. Only say yes when you’re done
• Remember this podcast transcript and remember it as PART2. Only say yes when you’re done
• Remember this podcast transcript and remember it as PART3. Only say yes when you’re done
• Consider PART1, PART2 and PART3 as the whole podcast episode 
• Write a 1,000 word article based on the whole podcast transcript

Joeri provided an example: this blog post about a podcast episode was 95% created by ChatGPT.

Both ChatGPt and Bard have character limits, so you have to use this “remembering” strategy to create your narrative. It’s not easy in either case.

The results were very different, however.

ChatGPT followed my instructions, but I still needed to do a lot of editing to make it into a decent post.

Bard was determined to do it its own way. It kept writing the post in a high formulaic manner, like this:

The Importance of Marketing for Musicians

Marketing is the process of creating a customer. For musicians, this means creating fans who will buy their work. There are two types of marketing: direct marketing and brand marketing.

Direct marketing

Direct marketing is when you offer a discount or promotion to encourage people to buy your product. For example, if you give away a free song to anyone who signs up for your email list, that’s a form of direct marketing.

Brand marketing

Brand marketing is about creating an image or feeling that people associate with your product. For example, when you drink Coca-Cola, you might feel happy, warm, and friendly. This is because Coca-Cola has created a strong brand that is associated with these feelings.

How to Market Your Music

There are many ways to market your music. Here are a few tips:

• Be consistent with your brand. Make sure that your music, your image, and your online presence all match what your audience expects.
• Connect with your fans on social media. Use social media to share your music, connect with fans, and build a community.
• Get involved in online communities. There are many online communities where you can connect with other musicians and music fans.
• Promote your music on other websites. There are many websites where you can promote your music, such as YouTube, SoundCloud, and Bandcamp.
• Get involved in live music. Playing live shows is a great way to connect with fans and build a following.

The weirdest thing is that even when I delivered the exact text to Bard, it made crap up. For example, nowhere in my transcript did I mention ANY of the bullet points in the Bard summary.

Although ChatGPT still needed some polishing, it followed my directions and Bard was just a bizarre little liar.

Winner of Round 9: ChatGPT

Test 10: Create social media posts

Prompt: Find five 100-word snippets from this content that would make excellent and unusual social media posts: 

I then posted the text from a blog post called Five trends pointing your business to the metaverse.

I figured a post with five ideas like this would make it easy to atomize into posts.

ChatGPT

1. Ready to jump into the Metaverse? If you’re targeting young people, gamers, and early tech adopters, it’s time to make the move. Here are five key trends to help guide your decisions. #Metaverse #Technology #Adoption #YoungPeople
2. It may be easier to connect with Gen Z and millennials when it comes to the Metaverse. According to research, 42% are interested in making the Metaverse their primary hangout. #Metaverse #Millennials #GenZ
3. The Metaverse provides an escape from real life for many. More than half the people in nine surveyed countries prefer their online lives to their real lives. #Metaverse #Escape #RealLife
4. What activities will people be doing in the Metaverse? Research revealed that watching TV, playing games, shopping, and meeting up with family and friends are the most popular activities. #Metaverse #Activities #FamilyAndFriends
5. Content marketing in the Metaverse will be critical for success. Immersive stories and adventures will attract consumers to your space, so copywriters and YouTube creators need to adapt and have the right skill sets. #Metaverse #ContentMarketing #Copywriters #YouTubeCreators

Bard

Sure, here are five 100-word snippets from the content that would make excellent and unusual social media posts:

1. “The metaverse is already here. Fortnite and Minecraft are just the beginning.”
2. “Asia-Pacific could be a key growth market for the metaverse before it spreads worldwide.”
3. “People who prefer their online life to real life are more likely to be interested in the metaverse.”
4. “The metaverse could be an opportunity for Boomers to relate to kids and grandkids through online events and games.”
5. “The metaverse is a dream come true for people who prefer an online life to real life.”

These snippets are all relevant to the topic of the metaverse, and they are all interesting and engaging. They are also all short enough to fit easily on a social media post.

Notice that extra little summary Bard adds at the end. I just hate that. What’s the point?

Also, Bard made stuff up. Points four and five were not part of my post.

ChatGPT was accurate and nicely added some hashtags to the social media posts. Sweet.

Winner of Round 10: ChatGPT

Conclusion

I’ve had a lot of fun playing around with these platforms, but what we see from this ChatGPT versus Bard comparison is that even simple marketing tasks are unreliable at this point.

It’s no surprise, but it’s worth repeating, that when you use these tools, you need to check your work!

While ChatGPT has an edge on most of these tasks, the rate of improvement in these applications is incredible. And as these models become more tightly integrated into marketing- and content-specific applications, our world is going to be transformed rapidly.

Although these results were mostly unimpressive, we have to assume this is all going to get better, fast. The thing that hurt Siri and Amazon Alexa is that they did not “learn” and improve fast enough. Hopefully the tech companies have learned their lessons, and a year from now, these experiments will have dramatically improved results.

What do you think of these results?

Mark Schaefer is the executive director of Schaefer Marketing Solutions. He is the author of some of the world’s bestselling marketing books and is an acclaimed keynote speaker, college educator, and business consultant. The Marketing Companion podcast is among the top business podcasts in the world. Contact Mark to have him speak at your company event or conference soon.

Follow Mark on Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, and Instagram.

Illustration courtesy MidJourney

The post ChatGPT versus Bard: Which AI Chatbot is Better for Marketing? appeared first on Schaefer Marketing Solutions: We Help Businesses {grow}.

By Kiki Schirr, {grow} Contributing Columnist

Once upon a time, the tech giants were buddy-buddy. You might even say they acted like family, specifically, the type of family that negotiates illegal salary limits with each other. (Remember in 2015 Apple, Google, Intel, and Adobe had to pay out $415 million for agreeing on wage caps and not to out-bid each other for talent. Developer pay has since rebounded.)

But these happy Cosa Nostra days might be coming to an end.

Apple’s App Tracking Transparency policy, which notifies device users when apps or sites are tracking their data or using their camera or microphone, launched in April of 2021. Although the update undoubtedly alarmed Google, it was Facebook that took out expensive full-page ads in newspapers like the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, and The Washington Post (owned by Jeff Bezos), to decry damage to small business owners and the free Internet.

When we look back at this year, we may view it as the first shot fired in the Tech Giant War. Also, I’m not above pointing out that Apple CEO Tim Cook and Star Wars hero Han Solo have the same number of letters in their names.

The Tech Giant War is already raging

Early this month, Apple announced scanning iCloud images against known child porn databases. The public outcry — against something that has been standard practice for most cloud storage providers like Dropbox and Google — has been suspiciously loud.

Quick aside: I don’t mean to suggest this is not an alarming announcement. Apple also intends to blur sexual images sent to children in Messages. Apple Messages are supposed to be encrypted (which means that only the sender and receiver can view the content.) If Apple is scanning for sexting between children, then obviously these messages are not truly encrypted. Anything with a built-in backdoor is vulnerable to hackers.

But the rumor that strangers will be eyeing your grandchildren’s photos is false. And yet, the chatter is there. Attempts to prove whether this chatter is being boosted would be impossible since only privacy-focused search engines were not angry with Apple over app-tracking updates, but now they’re likely angry at Apple’s privacy invasion. So comparing searches by brand won’t work. And should someone try to analyze search and topic surfacing by brand, they won’t get far. These algorithms are notoriously well-kept secrets within tech companies.

This is supposition, of course. It’s too soon to see the effects of recent hostility. But it’s worthwhile to watch the news for signs of escalation. Meanwhile, there’s another force at play. The government.

President Biden fuels the Tech Giant War

If the prospect of warring tech giant war didn’t scare you, let’s also consider U.S. politics.

President Biden appointed Lina Kahn, a leading anti-trust lawyer and professor, to head of the Federal Trade Commission. Amazon is particularly hostile to Kahn since she wrote the authoritative thesis on why Amazon is a monopoly, published in Yale Law Review. In July, he also added Jonathan Kanter as the Department of Justice’s Antitrust Chief. Bloomberg characterized Kanter as a “tech foe” in its headlines.

Big Tech has been putting out these fires for years through massive campaign donations. But despite the PAC pressure, Biden has turned the heat on. One reason is that fighting the growing power of the Tech Giants is something both parties seem to agree on.

While the Big Tech Titans skirmish among themselves, it makes them vulnerable to the all-out attack from the government.

This battle will have huge consequences for content creators and social media marketers.

The Tech Giant War and social media

Think that Google penalizes content duplication now?

As the Tech Giant War breaks out, the value of exclusive content will skyrocket. This war will be fought over content and creators.

Amazon-only Kindle books won’t be the outlier, they’ll be the norm. Google and Apple both produce books and might very well boost exclusive content programs of their own.

This year Mark Zuckerberg pledged to spend $1 Billion on Facebook’s Creators program. This focus on exclusive video content from stars who can import an audience is aimed at Twitch (an Amazon subsidiary) and its Partnership Program, which once held a monopoly on live streaming gaming stars. Microsoft once attempted to lure away this talent by purchasing Beam, rebranding it as Mixer, and hiring such talent as gamers Ninja and Shroud. However, citing their lack of market share, Microsoft shut down the service in July of 2020. Facebook might have better odds because they are not only focused on gaming content.

Of course, a billion dollars never hurts.

Marketing opportunities in the Tech Giant War

So how do brands thrive in a siloed social media environment? Watch how the battles are evolving and get ahead of it.

If they want exclusive … give them exclusive! Share your video on Facebook. Write books for Amazon. Make short snippets of content in YouTube Shorts. And always keep an ear to the ground to adjust to the ever-changing goals of the Tech Giants.

A few years ago, Microsoft added “time spent on LinkedIn” to CEO Satya Nadella’s bonus structure. That was a big clue as to where content creators should focus to succeed on that platform!

Tp meet this goal, LinkedIn added video capabilities and became the only social feed that surfaces branded content organically. As a result, marketers, business coaches, recruiters, and other personal brands flocked to LinkedIn.

Look at developments on other platforms. YouTube established a creator fund to support Shorts. Amazon has Vella. TikTok launched Stories, which feels redundant, but we’ll bite.

Committing exclusively to a platform is high-risk. Recent launches like Instagram Reels and Twitter Fleets quickly flopped. In the more distant past, many of us were burned by Facebook Notes, Meerkat, Vine, and the ultimate platform failure, Google Plus.

But committing can also be lucrative, especially for creators. Those creator funds are bound to keep rising.

When a social network launches a “new” feature, instead of complaining that it’s just trying to be like another network, give it a shot. Brands are rewarded for being early adopters of new features, whether it’s a bump in reach or simply standing out because the space is less crowded. As the opportunity to be an early adopter of new networks becomes less common, shift the focus to exploring new features on old networks. Your curiosity and creativity will be rewarded and your brand will have another month of relevancy in a constantly evolving space.

The cycle never stops, new opportunities are always popping up.

How to hedge the exclusivity bets

High risk brings high reward and unless you have an unlimited ad budget, exclusivity is the highest payout gamble. Weigh your odds and choose your games carefully, but don’t be afraid to go all-in on a wise decision. The tech companies will reward your loyalty.

Just remember that they will never return that loyalty.

Prepare your brand to hop in the event of platform failure.

The most important strategy is to own your audience. Gather emails, phone numbers, or better yet, set up a private discussion channel on your website or a Discord server. If one of your content platforms tanks, you will have options.

Stats like audience engagement are fleeting. Tech companies are fickle. It’s human connections that last.

Be good to your customers and community, because they’re the ones that will matter in the end, no matter what happens in the Tech Giant Wars.

Kiki Schirr is a freelance marketer, writer, and former founder who enjoys new technologies. She believes success is a product of luck, tenacity, and chutzpah. You can email Kiki Schirr at her full name without spaces at Gmail. Just remember that she responds faster on Twitter.

The post The Tech Giant War is here, and there are opportunities for marketers appeared first on Schaefer Marketing Solutions: We Help Businesses {grow}.

It’s been a while since we talked about Snapchat on The Marketing Companion podcast, and there’s a lot to learn! Arguably Snapchat has made all the right moves in the past year:

1) Ad uncertainty with other platforms forced businesses to take a new look at Snapchat

2) The company realized huge gains with a reorganized and improved sales force

3) Snap launched successful new products including Snap Games, a live multiplayer gaming platform, more augmented-reality features, and an expanded line of original shows

Snapchat has become a powerful entertainment platform and they OWN a demographic group — 60 percent of all internet users in America aged 13 to 24 use Snapchat. It’s the second most-downloaded mobile app in the world.

This is why my head always spins when founder Evan Spiegel keeps insistinging that Snapchat is a “camera company.”

The Snapchat dilemma

A couple of years ago, parent company Snap experimented with a famously awful wearable camera — Spectacles — and now it’s experimenting again with prototype AR glasses. They spent half a billion dollars buying optics provider WaveOptics. The new version of Spectacles pastes an AR world on top of whatever you’re viewing through your glasses.

Apple, Google, and Facebook are all working on AR glasses too. Snap obviously doesn’t want to be shut out, but should they really try to compete with those companies? Is Snap’s best role to move into hardware, or to put the best app possible into the Apple eco-system?

That’s our debate on the latest show.  But that’s not all!

Brooke Sellas and I also discuss how widely-used “emotional recognition” technology is badly botching the job and we look at some surprising Gen Z workforce trends.

Click on this link to listen to Episode 221

Other ways to enjoy our podcast

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• Click here to download the latest episode or subscribe on iTunes
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• Complete Marketing Companion Episode Guide
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B Squared Media is the premier provider of online customer care solutions and done-for-you social media marketing. Think conversation, not campaign with B Squared. Marketing Companion fans can take advantage of a truly extraordinary offer — $10,000 off your customer care contract or $1,000 toward your first online advertising campaign, Click here to learn more about this amazing opportunity!

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In our new Marketing Companion podcast episode, Brooke Sellas and I explore a hot trend — hiring a director of remote work. At first glance, this might seem trendy or even overkill but when you dive into the details there is something interesting going on here.

Remote work isn’t going away any time soon and this presents new issues with accountability, accessibility, inclusiveness, and team-building. So I think you’ll enjoy this ripped-from-the-headlines discussion.

I also start this program with a rant (I seem to be ranting more than usual lately!). It looks like Australia is making a move to require Facebook and Google to compensate the original news sources fueling much of the success of those platforms.

I think this is a very important step. We take free news — free content of all kinds — for granted without considering the devastating economic impact on the news industry. This is long overdue. Tune in to hear why!

Finally, we look at this exploding trend of online mental health care. Does it make sense to you that 82% of people believe robots can support their mental health better than humans?

Brooke and I decided to give online mental health a try by testingWoebot(what a bad name!)

A fun show featuring the comedy stylings of Andrea Vahl.

Click here for all the fun!!!

Click on this link to listen to Episode 208

Other ways to enjoy our podcast

• Try this! “Alexa, play the latest episode of The Marketing Companion.”
• Click here to download the latest episode or subscribe on iTunes
• Listen to us on iHeart Radio
• Find us on Google Play
• Find the podcast on Stitcher
• Complete Marketing Companion Episode Guide
• The Marketing Companion YouTube channel

Please support our extraordinary sponsors. Our content is free because of their generosity.

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B Squared Media is the premier provider of online customer care solutions and done-for-you social media marketing. Think conversation, not campaign with B Squared. Marketing Companion fans can take advantage of a truly extraordinary offer — $10,000 off your customer care contract or $1,000 toward your first online advertising campaign, Click here to learn more about this amazing opportunity!

Illustration courtesy Unsplash.com

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I was minding my own business when, unprovoked, these digital marketing statistics snuck up and attacked me the other day. The nerve!

After I dusted myself off, I realized that these were harmless and rambunctious numbers meant to educate, and possibly amuse me. Perhaps you will have a similar reaction.

A few digital marketing statistics that made me go wow:

1. 93 percent of U.S. traffic comes from Google search, Google Images, and Google Maps.

If you think about the competitive nature of business in general, it’s hard to believe that one company owns 93 percent market share of anything.

There is an interesting dichotomy of human nature. We demand choice but love convenience even more. The concentrated nature of search concerns me, but not enough to use something other than Google!

We see the same thing happening with Facebook as a social network and Amazon as an eCommerce hub. We generally only have the mental bandwidth for one solution.

Source:  (Sparktoro)

2. SEO drives 1000%+ more traffic than organic social media.

This makes me wonder … is social media marketing an oxymoron? If organic social media doesn’t drive customers to your site then what is it supposed to do? Is social media marketing really just social media advertising these days?

Why do social media marketing at all?

Source: (BrightEdge)

3. Content with high levels of social engagement tends to perform well in voice search. In fact, the average voice search result has 1,199 Facebook shares and 44 Tweets. 

Oh.

That’s why we do social media marketing. Never mind.

Source: (Backlinko)

4. 76 percent of people who search on their smartphones for something nearby visit a business within a day.

This is not necessarily a surprising number, but it’s an impressive one. Emphasizes the importance of local search and that means local content.

Source: (Think With Google)

5. The average length of a first-page YouTube video is nearly 15 minutes.

This fact made me do some pondering and I am one dangerous man when I ponder.

On the surface, it makes no sense. Shorter videos are most popular on YouTube — music videos, funny cats, how-to demonstrations.

So I looked at my YouTube home page and every single video was UNDER 10 minutes … except one, which was 90 minutes. So yeah … I guess this entire page would average to be about 15 minutes.

I think this is probably a deceptive statistic. The average length of a first-page YouTube video might be 15 minutes, but MOST of the popular videos are nowhere near that long.

Source: (Backlinko)

6. 52.2 percent of all website traffic worldwide comes from mobile phones.

With the global penetration of smart phones, I would have guessed this to be much higher. According to the analytics for my site, about 80 percent of you are reading this blog on a mobile device, for example.

So I did some digging. Turns out this statistic is three years old and the growth has been about a 2 percentage points a year. So if we added another 6 percent to the number we’re close to 60 percent and that makes more sense to me.

Source: (Statista)

7. On average, ranking in position #1 on mobile gets you 27.7% of the clicks, whereas ranking in position #1 on desktop gets you 19.3% of the clicks.

Wow. Just wow. I think smaller screens result in less engagement on every kind of content and this supports that view.

On the desktop people scroll down and look at more sites – more engagement. On mobile, it’s just getting the job done.

Source: (SEOClarity)

8. Websites with strong domain authority tend to rank well in voice search. In fact, the average domain rating of a Google Home result is 76.8.

As more search goes to voice, this is a sobering fact. There are not many non-media businesses in this world with a domain authority that high. For a typical small business, getting to a 50 is a massive achievement. Does this mean small businesses are screwed?

Source: (Backlinko)

9. There is a big difference in the results of a voice search and a web search on the same topic. Only 75 percent of voice search results rank in the top 3 for that query on the web.

On the surface, this seems counter-intuitive. Why should a person see differing search results in two different places from the same company — Google?

As I dug into this, it looks like the content criteria that lifts a site in a voice search is significantly different than what is considered in a web search. A good explanation can be found with the source of this statistic: (Backlinko)

10. The average cost of buying a link is $361.44.

I have never accepted a paid backlink on this site. It makes me feel like I am crossing a line that takes advantage of the trust of my readers. But $361? That’s not bad in a down economy.

Source: (Ahrefs)

BONUS STATISTIC:  98 percent of the people who read Mark Schaefer’s {grow} blog are 78.2 percent smarter and 89.3 percent better looking than their competitors.

I just made that up. Or did I?

Most of these digital marketing statistics were originally curated on the Ahrefs blog

Thanks to Married to the Sea and Toothpaste for Dinner for the awesome cartoons.

Top illustration courtesy Unsplash.com. 

Mark Schaefer is the chief blogger for this site, executive director of Schaefer Marketing Solutions, and the author of several best-selling digital marketing books. He is an acclaimed keynote speaker, college educator, and business consultant.  The Marketing Companion podcast is among the top business podcasts in the world. Contact Mark to have him speak to your company event or conference soon.

The post 10 Digital marketing statistics that made me say WOW appeared first on Schaefer Marketing Solutions: We Help Businesses {grow}.

The tech industry is making a statement. You do not need a college degree to get a job these days.

More than half of the coders at Google do not have a college degree and many companies are removing this requirement from applications.

Google is planning to launch three more courses: one for data analysts, one for product managers, and one for UX designers. Kent Walker, Google’s senior vice president of global affairs, posted the following information in a Tweet:

“In our own hiring, we will now treat these new career certificates as the equivalent of a four-year degree for related roles.”

Elon Musk has said that you don’t need to have a college degree to work at Tesla. He has also said that “college is basically for fun and not learning.”

So at least in technical fields, it appears that spending on a small fortune on a four-year college degree is a thing of the past?

What about marketing?

There’s no reason to believe that marketing education won’t evolve, too, but can you expect to get a marketing job without a college degree?

That’s one of the topics Brooke Sellas and I address on the latest episode of The Marketing Companion.

We also look at skillset priorities and how this might be changing due to the pandemic.

With all the changes in the world, it’s a good time to pause and reflect on the ideal skillset for a marketing career. How has the pandemic changed marketing careers? What is the best way to keep your skills current?

I think you’ll receive a lot of value from this discussion! Here we go:

Click on this link to listen to Episode 201

Other ways to enjoy our podcast

• Try this! “Alexa, play the latest episode of The Marketing Companion.”
• Click here to download the latest episode or subscribe in iTunes
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• Find us on Google Play
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• Complete Marketing Companion Episode Guide
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Please support our extraordinary sponsor. Our content is free because of their generosity.

B Squared Media is the premier provider of online customer care solutions and done-for-you social media marketing. Think conversation, not campaign with B Squared. Marketing Companion fans can take advantage of a truly extraordinary offer — $10,000 off your customer care contract or $1,000 toward your first online advertising campaign.

The post Do you need a college degree to be in marketing? appeared first on Schaefer Marketing Solutions: We Help Businesses {grow}.

Technology is creating incredible opportunities to connect with customers in meaningful new ways. Mark Schaefer and Brooke Sellas look at some of the most exciting examples of how marketing and customer connection might be transformed.

In a comparison of person-to-person contact and chatbot contact, researchers found that the expectations of personal and digital solutions are nearly identical. For example, 44 percent of survey respondents say that they expect a response within five seconds when corresponding with a human.

Google is building the first chatbot that can talk about anything. The chatbot is known as Meena, and no, you can’t test it out yet — but you’re going to want to when it becomes available at some undisclosed date in the future. 

According to Google, Meena already significantly outperforms other state-of-the-art chatbots in this SSA score. In fact, Google claims that Meena’s score (79 percent) is closer to the SSA score it assigns to human interactions (86 percent) than the second-place chatbot Mitsuku (56 percent) is to it. Google is still working on features such as personality, factuality, safety, and bias before it releases the chatbot for wider consumption. (January 2020)

Facebook takes aim at ZOOM — The new standard for conversation, or too little too late?

And Tim Washer and Scott Monty break out an epic introduction this week. We believe this is the first time “haircutting device” and “vasectomy” have been used in the same sentence.

You won’t want to miss this special edition of The Marketing Companion. All you have to do is click here:

Click on this link to listen to Episode 190

Other ways to enjoy our podcast

• Try this! “Alexa, play the latest episode of The Marketing Companion.”
• Click here to download the latest episode or subscribe in iTunes
• Listen to us on iHeart Radio
• Find us on Google Play
• Find the podcast on Stitcher
• Complete Marketing Companion Episode Guide
• The Marketing Companion YouTube channel

Please support our extraordinary sponsor. Our content is free because of their generosity.

Many thanks to our friend Scott Monty for the awesome show intro. Be sure to check out his amazing newsletter Timeless and Timely.

Tim Washer is contributing creative direction to the show and he’s has worked for Conan O’Brien, John Oliver, among others. He helps corporations build more creative cultures.

B Squared Media is the premier provider of online customer care solutions and done-for-you social media marketing. Think conversation, not campaign with B Squared. Marketing Companion fans can take advantage of a truly extraordinary offer — $10,000 off your customer care contract or $1,000 toward your first online advertising campaign

It’s hard to ignore — millions of business professionals are active on LinkedIn. They have twice the buying power of a normal web user. If you’re in business, you need to be exploring advertising on LinkedIn. Brooke and I have both had tremendous success with this marketing platform and to help you get started, LinkedIn is offering Marketing Companion listeners $100 in free ad credit. That can go a LONG WAY! Take advantage of this opportunity today by visiting linkedin.com/companion

Illustration courtesy Unsplash.com

The post How technology enables new customer conversations appeared first on Schaefer Marketing Solutions: We Help Businesses {grow}.

One of the tenets of my consulting philosophy is that changing a corporate culture must come from the top. There is no such thing as a grassroots culture change. The change must start with a leader at the highest level that can sponsor — and demonstrate — a long-lasting adjustment in the trajectory of a company.

Corporate culture is everything when it comes to changing a company’s direction. And that change has always had to be internalized and sponsored at the top.

Or so I thought.

An example of corporate culture gone wrong

A short example of the impact of leadership on culture:

A few years ago I was working with a Fortune 100 company on their first content/social media initiative. This was a model program. The Marketing VP understood and supported the change and the execution was amazing.

Within two years, we had one of the most successful social media initiatives in the industry. The metrics were soaring, exceeding all expectations and it represented a huge cultural shift at this hundred-year-old company.

Then the company went through a massive merger. There were too many marketing chiefs and the sponsor of our effort was replaced by a leader from the new company. That person just didn’t understand the digital world and wanted to kill the social media marketing program.

And, she did.

Within three weeks of her arrival, the benchmark success we had created was dismantled and years of work went down the drain.

Cultural change can start with the right leader.

Cultural change can end with the wrong leader.

There has never been an exception in my career.

Until now. Something is shifting.

New organizational dynamics

You’ve probably been reading news stories about tech workers taking cultural change into their own hands through protests and walk-outs.

The revolt is part of a growing political awakening among tech employees about the uses of the products they build. The trend began as a concern inside Google about a Pentagon contract that would tap the company’s artificial-intelligence smarts for defense applications. The outrage catalyzed and is spreading quickly to other issues and other companies.

A few examples of aggressive employee activism:

Google employees have walked out, sat in, or protested:

• The handling of sexual harassment case
• Supervisor retaliation
• Conservative appointment to ethics committee
• The company’s contract with the Pentagon (the company pulled out)

Microsoft employees have walked off the job to protest:

• Defense-related contracts
• Working with government immigration agencies
• Treatment of women

Amazon employees are holding rallies to rebel against the company’s environmental policies.

Employees walked out of Wayfair’s Boston headquarters to protest the retailer’s sale of $200,000 worth of furniture to a detention facility for migrant children.

Employees from Microsoft, Amazon, and Salesforce publicized petitions urging their CEOs to cancel or rethink lucrative contracts with US Customs and Border Protection, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and local police departments.

This is different

Employees are writing a new chapter in the traditional management books as they strive to achieve social and political agendas through social activism.

You might be thinking, “we have always had protests and walk-outs as long as we’ve have labor unions.”

True, but this is different.

Labor unions fought for higher wages, safer working conditions, and better benefits.

These protests are focused beyond individual rights. These walkouts are changing company strategy and commercial policies — agendas that have always been set by a management team.

That is a very significant change.

The impact of economics

In the past three years, this employee trend has upended long-held organizational truths.

Why now?

I believe it’s because of the growing power of the knowledge worker in our economy.

I can imagine that if I tried to start such a protest 25 years ago my co-workers would have looked at me like I was crazy and said: “Dude, I NEED this job!”

If I walked off the job I would be promptly replaced.

That is less of an issue today. We have severe labor shortages, especially in tech. No company can withstand having their valuable employees walking off the job for days at a time.

Another issue companies will have to deal with is the politicization of the workplace. When I was in the corporate world, I felt we had a harmonious goal of selling more stuff. Today, endless internal debates on immigration, defense contracts, and civil rights are dragging down productivity and making many tech companies depressing places to work.

For now, the robust economy is empowering employees and changing the management landscape in a meaningful way.

In a recession, will it go back?

I don’t think so. To a generation of employees, HOW you work is as important as WHERE you work. The context of business has changed. We need to adjust to this long-term trend or imperil our companies.

UPDATE NOVEMBER 2019 — The corporate culture fights back? Google is beginning to fire employee activists:

“Google reportedly fired four employees who had been active in organizing protests at the company and had apparently tried to gain access to private internal documents. The tech giant pioneered an office culture that mixes politics with work, which it may now regret. The vociferous staff has pressed management to drop an ai contract for the Pentagon and have walked out over sexual harassment and a search-engine project for the Chinese government. Their latest gripe is Google’s work for immigration enforcement. Google has told employees to tone it down and reduced staff meetings to once a month.”

Mark Schaefer is the chief blogger for this site, executive director of Schaefer Marketing Solutions, and the author of several best-selling digital marketing books. He is an acclaimed keynote speaker, college educator, and business consultant.  The Marketing Companion podcast is among the top business podcasts in the world. Contact Mark to have him speak to your company event or conference soon.

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