Derek Flint’s Post

Great discussion about the future of the Internet with AI if you're inclined to think beyond, "AI looks promising" - https://lnkd.in/gvNW9_mP Maybe this AI thing is the ticket to breaking the current internet faster so we can get to a better or bifurcated version between commerce and information. 🤷♂️

One of the most empowering realizations as you gain more experience in life is that you can quit anything at anytime that isn't getting you to your goal. I'm a little type A so school was always about trying to get an A. Do all the work and do it super well. But that approach, while fine if you don't necessarily have a clear objective, can slow you down unnecessarily if you have an idea of where you're going. For example: I mentioned taking art courses at my local college. My goal is to become an illustrator/penciler. The final assignment for one of my classes is essentially turning in a sourcebook where you've written out your own personal definition for 150 terms we covered throughout the semester. I'm not going to do that assignment. From the unique format requests, to the time spent writing and refreshing my brain on each term, finding visual examples of each, it'd probably take me about 12-14 hours to complete this book. The assignment itself is a lot of busy-work. Why is it okay to let that go? Because I also have a personal mentorship with a Disney animator that IMO functions as both a networking opportunity plus I'm always compromising how much practice I get illustrating when my traditional college courses veer toward a fine arts media I don't want to get good at. I'm not on a GPA-centric, checklist-all-the-assignments journey. And you don't have to be either.

Pro tip: Next time someone releases a report (Cough... SEMrush) about the impact of AI and content, copy and paste that report into an AI tool and ask it to list all the potential biases. Might be the coolest way to start clapping back at companies that produce "data" that make their products, tools, and industry category look more important than they actually are.

SaaS Marketer: "We really need to start developing trust with people who interact with our brand." Self-Respecting Marketer: "Makes sense. Do you have anything in mind that you think will show off how you can be trusted?" SaaS Marketer: "We were thinking about starting with our content." Self-Respecting Marketer: "Oh fun. I imagine there are plenty of creative ways you could go about that." SaaS Marketer: "...We were thinking about changing the author on all our blog posts to the CEO." Self-Respecting Marketer: "Did they write all those?" SaaS Marketer: "Oh no no no, they're much too busy and important to create content." Self-Respecting Marketer: "...so...the plan is to start building trust with a lie?" SaaS Marketer: "No one wants to know that various freelancers from outside the company created 1000s of pieces of content for us. That comes off as untrustworthy and lazy." Self-Respecting Marketer: "But nobody from your team worked on that content. Not only are you lying, you're screwing over the actual people who worked hard to build that content for you by not giving them credit." SaaS Marketer: "Yeah, but all our competitors do this. And we hear it's better for SEO if it looks like an expert wrote it." Self Respecting Marketer: *Stares in disbelief* "I have no idea why people struggle to trust companies in this industry 🙄" SaaS Marketer: *With sincerity* "I know right? People are so unnecessarily skeptical of everything we do"

The only way to gain a significant productivity advantage with AI is to remove or loosen your QA requirements. You can romanticize what AI will be capable of in the future. But right now, you're basically saying, "Good enough for who it's for," regarding your audience and prospects. And if your argument is: "Right now, we actually don't notice a huge difference between our freelance writers and AI so we're all in." I'd put money on you having a talent acquisition and budget problem and not that you have an AI advantage sitting in your lap.

SEO is less content marketing and more performance marketing. Teams who talk about their SEO strategy as it relates to a blog like it's more content than performance marketing often unintentionally do themselves a disservice. Content marketing, IMO, has a lot to do with building: -Affinity -Connection -Personalities -An identity with opinions about current events in addition to the evergreen knowledge within your own space Those things are great. Content managers strive to hit these often tough to achieve goals. *Mostly because it's rare to have a truly unique mixture of IP, useful info, and charm/charisma to grow around. For SEO, while it's not impossible to achieve a morsel of those above content goals, generally has a completely different superpower. You get to turn on a faucet of organic traffic into your website before anyone cares about your company or the people in it. It's an exposure channel where you become an educational resource. You're going to have low conversion rates on anything that's not BoFu, MoFu and your goal is to hit traffic volumes that make that low conversion rate worth it. *Not mention to mention CAC over time is often better with optimized articles. Yes, you can burn the midnight oil trying to psychologically architect the perfect set of topics to cover about your product and customer interests. And you can design a variety of systems to work in POV, SME, and additional assets as your bank of content grows. But no one has to care about you, for SEO to work for your company. On the flip side, they do have to care about you for content marketing to work.

One of my favorite April Fool's jokes agency side was building a full content brief for the keyword "how to pick up dog poop with your feet" and waiting for the editorial lead to review it for our writing team. It was carefully placed in an Asana board of real briefs for a dog food brand. Yes, it was worth the 45 minute thorough build out between 3 of us and the slack message toward the end of the day that read, "WTF is happening right now? Is this real?"

At 22, I found it insanely challenging to articulate the value of a rigorous and specialized Arts and Humanities degree. At 33, I know exactly what it does/did, and I wish it were mandatory for everyone. I was a part of a very small specialized, residential college inside of Michigan State University. In this program, we studied different cultures, languages, behaviors, policies, and activism with a hands-on focus. We travelled, we learned languages, we marched, we taught, we wrote grants, we hosted artists and we played the role of artist in real world situations, we lived in and documented goings-ons for community foundations in foreign countries. Think peace corps, not traditional college. Lectures were brutal debates facilitated by some of the most well-read, and real-world practiced humanitarians. You couldn't show up and troll the class. You had to bring receipts and you had to respect each other. So what did that degree do for my classmates and myself. It gave us: 1. A broad awakening to the nuances involved across people and customs when working at the local, national, and on a global scale. 2. A sincere appreciation for living life in the "grey" complication that is any social interaction and shared space. 3. The understanding that cross collaboration/cross-functional work isn't an option. It's how you do things best. You can't leave out perspectives or you're leaving out vital information/context/data to make better decisions. 4. You learn that numerical, spreadsheet data, especially about human behavior and relationships is biased to all hell. And not only is it biased, it offers such a one-dimensional view or explanation of what's going on, that you should really pause before you consider using it. I bring this up for two reasons. 1) It feels like too many people in marketing are hiding behind spreadsheet/software data decisions so they're not on the hook. "I'm just doing what the numbers tell me so that I can't be blamed." 2) Relying on something as one dimensional as numerical data is leading people to overcomplicate what is going to make their businesses grow. You take the numbers so you can make a decision on what to do next, but before you make the decision, you'll only proceed with an option that can then be supported and measured with more numbers. And it's this level of adherence to spreadsheets that is simply, perhaps obviously, tanking startups. People are quite tough to predict no matter what social sciences or data analytics professionals tell you. Yes, we can make some generalizations that are useful, but about your little company? No. Most likely we cannot. That's why people who read, socialize, network, and develop a feel or a "sense" of the pulse in your space are going to be your best marketers. *I'm not saying throw the data in your spreadsheets out, but I am saying that often times that data tells you more about the context of history than helps you to decide on what to do in the future.

Things I don't know but I feel. That's where I start with social topic ideas. This is where resonance often lives in my experience. I can either tease out the final iteration by: 1) Doing a more thorough investigation of why I "feel" like this is happening based on my experiences. It's usually helpful to be self-critical about your very specific experience. For example, instead of proclaiming something to be universal, look across your sample size of experiences and ask if there are threads of similarities. E.g. This was true of Series A B2B SaaS startups with teams of fewer than 3 people - rather than assuming all marketers feel the struggle. 2) Doing a more thorough investigation of why I "feel" like this is happening based on data/other people's expressed opinions. Grab some screenshots of other people who also feel that way. Find reports/podcasts, etc. where people with adequate experience also acknowledge it's happening. 3) Feel pretty strongly about it, but use your audience as an indicator of agreeing or disagreeing. People (esp. your audience) will generally have mixed feelings about this approach. The danger is that you've entered into waters where you're not really an expert so, "what are you really doing in this space?" However, if you're okay with some potential backlash and sounding ignorant AF, the response can be a healthy cue that the topic is worth pursuing if you can find a way to do so responsibly. Aka can you do the proper digging to offer an insightful take and share that. *What's funny about some of the outrage related to this last approach is how many people will say, "you have never done this so sit down," while simultaneously hiring agencies and writers with no experience in their industry to create all of their brand's content. Just saying. Anyways, if you want to resonate, I recommend digging into your feelings and emotions as a starting place.

Seriously, if you really want cheap content, just f(*(ing go run your campaign on cheap content. I've never convinced someone who thinks content should be cheap to pay realistic prices. And if you make it feel feel like I'm twisting your arm because the rates are set correctly to pay for my time, the writers' times, the often undervalued PM and administrative time to go back and forth with you, and provide a reasonable margin, then chances are you're going to suck to work with. You'll learn the hard way that it's expensive to clean up any damage done, even if you avoid brand damage, and that you'll spend more going back to hire the services of people who do good work. But very honestly, I concede that you also don't owe any content service your business. And for a lot of heavy-ego managers, learning the hard way is going to prove most effective. So please, test your hypothesis about how to shortcut everything and get it out of your system first. Then, only when you're convinced that you came up with the idea yourself because you're a sage, seek help at the proper investment level.