Episode 15 - The End of the Apocalypse of SEO

Watch the YouTube video version above or listen to the podcast below!

Agenda

• Personal updates and activities

• The Evolution and Future of Social Media, Especially with AI Content

• Discussion of Rand Fishkin’s AI Apocalypse of SEO 5-minute Whiteboard Video

Episode 15 - The End of the Apocalypse of SEO Video and Podcast Transcript

[Disclaimer: This transcription was written by AI using a tool called Descript, and has not been edited for content.]

Dave Dougherty: I am welcome to enterprising minds, the latest episode. I am Dave

Alex Pokorny: and Alex, and

Dave Dougherty: today we're going to do a two topic discussion. Um, as Ruthie is not, not with us today. Um, so Alex, what's been going on over the last couple of weeks, anything new and exciting or, um.

Alex Pokorny: Not much. Um, then listen to a ton of different podcasts and, um, it's been interesting.

I mean, I'm, I'm trying to kind of get some grounding again. So when I've talked about it in the past, the marketer podcast, they have a daily one. That's fantastic. Um, and going through a bit of their archives along with some other ones, which has been pretty, pretty eyeopening. I don't know, even got into like some philosophy kind of life goals, this kind of stuff too, which was.

Dave Dougherty: I've been doing a deep dive into, uh, audio books, actually, um, rediscovering the public library, um, and, you know, not having to pay Amazon for everything, uh, which is a nice change. So, um, finding some interesting things, but then also my consumption of the audio books is not fast enough. Um, apparently. For books I want to read.

Yeah. So, you know, I'll be like really into something and then it's like, Oh, you have 20 other people that want this. I'm like, but I'm almost done. Um, so it's been frustrating that I haven't finished a lot of the books, but I've gotten like halfway through and then I'm waiting to get. Um, we didn't get them back to finish, um, but just it's been good to fill my brain with a lot of different ideas going in depth.

Um, so like the latest one that I just discovered is actually a, um, it's basically a history. Slash biography of the, um, the guys that were early pioneers for AI, um, like back to the fifties and sixties, and then like how it's built up through the eighties and nineties and then, you know, getting to where we are today.

Um, you know, and how, like the first versions of these things were built on computers that use vacuum tubes, you know, like, um, it's pretty crazy just how quickly that's Progressed and, you know, diving into a culture that is completely new to me, uh, is always really fun and exciting. Um, so yeah, that actually, uh, is related to the, uh, the topic that, uh, I'm going to bring up today is, um, you know, listeners of the podcast will know, uh, that we are fans of Rand Fishkin, uh, and what he's done over the course of his career and just.

Some of the ways that he thinks about digital marketing and SEO. And, um, he's restarted the whiteboard idea with his new company spark Toro. Um, this one is called five minute whiteboard. So it's great because it's just like a quick hit on a particular, you know, topic. Um, and just kind of want to respond to a recent one.

Uh, that's, uh, it's titled is generative AI, the SEO apocalypse. Um, I have some strong feelings on this, um, and, uh, and we can, we can mull that one over. So what'd you, what'd

Alex Pokorny: you bring? I got an interesting one. Um, and it was off a random phrase that someone was kind of talking about, and then I kept kind of turning it over in my mind until I kind of got to this point of The death of social media.

So speaking about the apocalypse of things, apparently we're in an apocalyptic podcast today, but basically what used to be a friend kind of connections based social networking has turned really into an entertainment swipe based. Viewing experience, which is not very social and if there's a social element of it is extremely fractured and mostly anonymous, it's not really like in real life or the IRL aspect of what used to exist and then you're trying to emulate that online.

Now it's completely online. It's very, very different than what it used to be. So I want to talk about that and then where we think it's where social communities online will go next because I still don't have a good answer on that one.

Hmm.

Dave Dougherty: Okay. This is interesting. Like the, the universe is aligning. First comment. Um, is Ruthie is definitely going to give us a hard time that, you know, she, she's here, she's not here. And we go immediately dark. The optimism is gone. Um, and then secondly, like I had breakfast with a friend the other day and we had, we were talking about online dating, which is something I have no experience with.

Um, but it is fascinating to me. Like you talk about the, um, in real life piece now just being a swipable experience. It seems like, um, choice paralysis is a thing, you know, um, Or just the, the idea that you have multiple choices, uh, if one doesn't work out, it seems to be a hindrance. So I'm interested to see if that relates to, uh, to that discussion at all.

Um, yeah, why don't you, why don't you kick us off with what you, what are you

Alex Pokorny: thinking? Oh, with the social media socially. Yeah, so it was just kind of a quick reflection on social media. That was and the social networking aspect of it. And then what it's turned into, which is much more of an entertainment value.

So going back a little bit. So there was friends or there was my space. Facebook, especially early days, all of those things were really trying to emulate your personal connections and relationships that you had Google plus trying to do this as well and then try to put that online so that you can communicate with those people in a different way.

You could connect with them, you know, do different things basically online, which you weren't able to do offline. And then now, if you look at like TikTok, you're swiping through videos, Instagram, you're swiping through videos, YouTube even is swiping through videos now with shorts. They never really were much for the social networking aspect, but they've definitely gotten on the swiping through videos aspect.

So. With that and how Facebook has basically declined, especially with younger populations, younger generations And Instagram, I mean still own the same company with Meta But it still has declined in terms of the connections kind of aspect and if you push into The reels and switching through swiping through videos piece.

Mm hmm. So I was trying to think of like, okay, what are other communities that used to exist online? And I think of, you know, forums used to be bulletin boards before forums. Um, that's still kind of out there. You're still behind a username. You're not really, uh, in real life kind of connection piece. Um, there's kind of sub communities a little bit with influencers that you follow that influencer.

So, you know, their personality, you know, a lot about them personally. They don't know anything about you. Um, maybe you're trying to be active in that community again, behind the username, I mean, heck there's like MMORPGs where you're online again, behind a character. I just, I don't know where that social network aspect goes in the future or where that social community piece goes in the future.

Maybe it's back to forums. I've been seeing a lot of resurgence and uh, Reddit, I mean, Google has been surfacing Reddit like crazy. Um, I don't know where it's going next. What's

Dave Dougherty: your thoughts? Yeah,

I do. I feel the benefit that social media had in the early days is that it was like the next evolution of the forums. Of the early internet, right? Like with guitar playing there was, um, there's one forum that still comes up. It's still a crap user experience, but it is a site that is devoted to seven string guitar players.

So, you know, the extra low string on the, on the bottom, um, they used to be very hard to find. So it was like, you were part of a niche if you were a seven string player, you know, tracking the day now you can get. Eight strings, nine strings. Um, you're just that type of player. Um, so, you know, and yeah, the,

I like the idea of social media where you can find a community of people who are interested in what it is you're, you're doing, or similar interests, you know, um, That is very powerful, right. To know that you're not alone in your, in what you're into. Right. Um, but yeah, I do feel like as it's changed and as shareholders get involved and, um, ruin anything fun, um, you, um, It has gotten, it has gotten weird and I, not to go crazy, but like, as I reflect on just all the changes with marketing AI and all the things that are going to be possible in the next like year, three years, you know, with, with the AI development, that whole influencer space, you know, is right now it's about trust, right?

You find somebody that is into what you're doing. They share similar views so that you can watch their content because It reflects some aspect of, you know, what you're interested in. Right. But what happens when that becomes an AI bot that's just trained on all of the podcasts and YouTube videos that they've done previously.

And now they're just, you know, they're not even having to show up to create their own videos because you just have the background that you put the AI bot on and, um, away you go with, with a script. Right. So there's, there's a trust element here where, you know, what are you optimizing for? Are you continually optimizing for views and clicks and, you know, view duration and all of that kind of stuff, because that's going to, that's going to impact the type of content that people put out there, right.

And what they're rewarded for. And that's what they're going to use AI to help generate the content for. Right. Um, and you've already seen that with the Snapchat. Influencer who's, it's something ridiculous. It's like a dollar a minute to interact with her AI bot as if she was your girlfriend or something like articles or whatever like that.

Like if we're already there and this is the dumbest AI that's in existence right now, like. That makes me sad, but it also

Alex Pokorny: Memberships that are the exact same thing. That's a mobile phone app. So you can interact with your AI girlfriend.

It's just

Dave Dougherty: not that hard to get a girlfriend. I just like the real one. It's just, you know,

Alex Pokorny: I've been into a bunch of different podcasts, including some philosophy ones. There was an interesting one that was really talking about the human technology interaction. Yeah, and some of the basically empty spaces that are still kind of out there.

So for 1. It's, we sit in front of a screen because it's convenient for the computer, not convenient for us. People like to move and throughout history, that's what we do all day long is we move and then we sleep. I mean, that's basically it. We don't really stay still at all. They think about even the act of drinking or eating, you're still moving.

Like there's always movement basically. But when you sit in front of a computer screen, you just sit there, which is not human. That's an artificial thing. So trying to design the interface maybe differently so that you could still have some elements of that, that movement in there, but it got kind of to the point of one of the main things that human beings are always looking for is to be recognized and no matter what that is in a relationship, you know, or even getting, you know, credit for emptying the dishwasher to, you know, some You know, your kids seeing you and them smiling to your dog waiting at its tail when they see you like recognition matters so much.

And that's 1 piece that I keep seeing missing through all of this is if we're just on the outside looking in. No, it's kind of like looking at the animals in the zoo, like, we're always standing behind the glass and we're just kind of peering in, which is what we're doing with influencers and everything else.

They're not really looking at us and no one else is looking at us, which has got to feel pretty empty. And there has to be some way to communicate online, maybe it's forums or something, and maybe it's, you know, comments when, man, somebody finally, you know, upvoted my comment a hundred times, which makes me feel pretty good because of my empty internet points.

Has someone read what I wrote? I mean, it's like, again, it's this craving for this interaction that just doesn't exist.

Dave Dougherty: Well, yeah, I mean, there's the deeper psychological stuff that we could go into that we are, you know, clearly not experts in other than, you know, our lived experience. Um, yeah, but wanting, wanting to feel like you matter as is definitely the drug that social hits on for sure.

Um, you know, and then even if you look at what the social media strategies are, right, if you're going to go post stuff, um, you know, are you posting natively so that, you know, you do well on the platform itself, or are you doing the types of posts that the platform hates, but would be better for you, right?

Like I wrote this blog, come read my blog on my blog. Website, right? Um, or are you doing combinations of it so that, you know, you can actually get people to follow you and come over to your site and see, um, uh, see what's going on again. It goes back to that kind of incentive piece, right? Like if you are playing the, um, if you're playing the game of the platforms, or Your S.

O. L. Right. I mean, one of Joe Polizzi from Content Marketing Institute and the tilt has always said, uh, and I agree with the sentiment. Don't build your house on rented land, right? If you're even if you're an influencer or you're a big business or whatever it is, um, don't don't think that you own the relationship on social, right?

Because you just you just don't Um, you have to bring them into your, your email lists or certain things, right? And that's one of the things that I struggle with in terms of social or the influencer space, whereas the, okay, with AI, what's, what's going to be real? Like, what would be a signal that what you're doing is real?

And I was like, oh, well you could do podcast. No, you can clone the voice. You could do video. No, you can, you can do the robots. Um, it's like you have to purposely sabotage your background. Right. But even then you can probably. Do it like, you know, um, like if a car goes past my house, you might see the shadow behind me and that's how, you know, it would be live, right?

Like it's those little details where it's like, okay, they're not cheating. You know, um, trope

Alex Pokorny: with the hostages of holding up today's newspaper, showing the date. And like, yes, absolutely.

Dave Dougherty: And it's like, but at this point you have to explain what a newspaper is before you hold it up.

Yeah.

Alex Pokorny: Yeah, yeah. I just think it's an open space. That's maybe just where we leave the discussion is basically is there is still kind of a yet to be determined green space out there that is more fulfilling than what we're having now, which is gotten very close to basically we're just sitting in front of TV and just watching TV again.

We're kind of regressing. We're not really moving forward into new technology and new kind of things. We're just assuming the same media through a different lens. So,

Dave Dougherty: well, and it's also gotten to the point with how things are so targeted that

everybody shares this experience with, you know, streaming platforms, right. Where, you know, Oh, I was watching this thing on, you know, cat fluffer. Do you download, you know, have you downloaded cat fluffer? No, I haven't downloaded cat fluffer. What the hell is that? Like, you know, it's nothing but cats 24 sevens.

Like I'm not going to watch that, you know,

Alex Pokorny: I feel the same thing with Spotify. Like I. I can't really relate to people in their music taste anymore because it's so fractured that whatever they're listening to is so niche that it's like, if it's not, you know, music basically, which my gosh, FM radio has gotten pretty, pretty awful in terms of not much in terms of new music.

It's so fractured that it's like, I listened to these random artists that, oh, never heard of them. Never heard of them. Never heard of them. It's like, cool. Cool. That's. Yep.

Dave Dougherty: Right. Yeah. I mean, but you can, for the influencer side of things, like, you know, you can have somebody who's got 6 million followers and that's supposed to be a, a sign of, you know, doing well, but you'll never hear about 'em.

No. You know, until something happens, like they do a, like a massive screw up or something, and then it's, you know, influencer breaks, laws accidentally, or, you know, whatever the headline would be. So, um, yeah. Yeah, I don't know. I don't know. I, I know I would like it to be more of what it was, but that cat's out of the bag.

It's just not gonna go back to, you know, the shared interests, people acting nice to each other.

Alex Pokorny: Yeah.

Dave Dougherty: Um, I will say like the LinkedIn. I think for me right now is the place that I'm getting the most value for social. It, it is still targeted to people with common interests. Uh, there's still an unwritten rule that you are polite because it's your professional self that you're showing on LinkedIn and not just, you know, they're real.

So in your sweatpants, you know, um, so I've liked, I like that and I hope that continues. Um, but I do think, you know, with AI and I'm going to kind of transition into my topic, cause it is related, but like with all of this AI stuff and reflecting on kind of the craziness that has been the last 10 months of just trying to make sense of it and keep up with it and how it's impacting digital marketing.

Um, I do feel like to your point with social, what's. Old is new again, because, um, so this video with, uh, you know, SEO apocalypse idea, you know, one of the first things that came out when, um, chat GPT was launched was a whole bunch of people saying, this is the end of Google and SEO. And no, that might be your desire.

Cause you don't understand it or you don't know how to do it. So you just want to burn it. That's fine. There's a portion of people that are like that. It's just going to change the behavior. Um, so in this five minute video, Rand does a really good job of saying like, from the beginning of Google in like 1998, 97 with the blue links, this is what.

Google did because it was in their best interest to get you to go to them and trust them and use them habitually for a resource for, you know, the information that's online then between like 2014 and 2021, now they're starting to do all of the different ads and they're taking the content through rich snippets and, you know, showing the rich snippet content with, uh, with a link, but maybe not.

With the link, you know, to the site that provided the content and I think the A. I. Generated piece. We'll only make that worse and you know, he has a hypothesis on that as well where it's, um, you know, with the SGE, I think is the new acronym, um, you will have that generated response for the quick answer depending on the query that you you type in.

So if there is a quick answer, you'll get that via the generated content with maybe a couple links. Um, you know, but they've been playing around with whether or not they do the citation links for the, like, here are the three things. And so it does just push those blue links, you know, further and further down, because if you have the generated response with ads with the blue links and it just, you know, you go down, yeah, you might get A reduction of organic traffic overall, however, in order to get into those search generated pieces in order to be cited into these responses or into all of the other blue links that might be associated with those terms, it is again, optimizing the full kind of zeitgeist of what it is you're trying to do, right?

Like doing PR, or. Um, that kind of Barnacle SEO strategy, you know, via channel partners or, uh, media partners that you could share content with or have them do reviews and, you know, all those kinds of things. So, you know, I think PR will have a higher, um. higher impact than it has recently, which is cool because I know a bunch of PR folks.

So, um, just because it is about finding that audience, getting your content in front of that audience, wherever they are. And because it is so fractured, you're going to have to go multiple places. Right. And be in a lot of the different places, um, that, that people are, um, so that you can rank for those terms that pop up or be in the articles that are cited by the AI things.

Um, so that you, you know, you appear to be everywhere and you're not just keyword stuffing a page to have the one little blue link, right? That is just one tiny little piece of your overall thing. You're going to have to have the YouTube shorts. You're going to have to have the tech talks. You're going to have to have the podcasts and the articles and the, um, announcements and.

You know, you have to do all the above in order to cast a wide enough net to be present wherever people are, um, to have that authority. That's kind of the hypothesis.

Alex Pokorny: Yeah, and you have to be the best resource still. I don't think that part changes. Um, so I've been part of the experimental version of the search generator experience with Google.

So it's the Google Labs piece. Yeah, they added a ton of SEOs all in one day. I still kind of wonder about that because like everybody on Twitter got access like the same time. It was really funny because there's like the way it kind of rolled out to different people who signed up for it, the beta. Um, so the other day I was searching and you know, I got the generated result for it.

It was about some landscaping question basically about this tree that I think has a disease and how to fix that. And it spat out a answer, but it wasn't necessarily one complete answer. It wasn't necessarily a convenient answer. And it didn't really tell me much more, which allowed me to actually take any kind of action.

It told me this particular chemical does that great. Where, how do I buy that? How do I apply it? Is there a better way to do it? Are there alternatives that I can do it? Is this the right time of year to apply it? Is the amount of wind if I'm spraying something matter? Is this toxic to my pet because it's located near my dog?

I mean, it's like there's so many other questions that I have that this wasn't fulfilling in terms of an answer. It was. This snippet, it was a snippet of an answer and that was the frustration point. So I still ended up scrolling down, visiting a few different web pages, and it was actually somebody on a forum who mentioned about this one particular technique that would actually work better.

I ended up searching for that and that ended up being a far better responsive. What my problem was and what my solution was, so it's, it's still providing more of a response. It's still ranking high in the search results because people will still be scrolling down the amount of traffic. I don't know. I don't know if the percentage if you look at the, like the pie chart of traffic coming to your site will organic drop.

Yes or no. Maybe the whole pie shrinks because that information is being surfaced already and people don't need to go to any of your, you know, traffic sources, maybe the effort that you put behind your content needs to change so that you provide more of a full response, understanding more of where the user might be if they're searching this kind of question and kind of information that they're going to need to actually follow through on it.

There's a lot of pieces there. I don't know. It doesn't seem to still stray too far away from just providing a really good answer. Content and user experience on your site. And there's also like, if you think about conversions also, I mean, the bottom of the funnel stuff, you still can't buy a pair of shoes off of the snippet.

You can learn about them, but you got to go to a different site to buy them. So there's still pieces here and there that still present the same kind of questions and kind of

Dave Dougherty: problems. Yeah, and that's where, you know, at least the early days where people were saying, this is the death of SEO.

I, you know, I just don't believe it because A, 20, You know, years, almost 30 years, right? Um, so people are going to continue to go there, but for certain things like Urgent care near me, right? Like that, that is a quick, easy answer, uh, that you can get on your phone. Um, I think for consumer products, again, it's a similar thing where it's going to be more of the shopping ads to your point, you have to click off to go somewhere else, um, if you're not going to Amazon or the straight to the company.

Right. Like I find I go straight to the company's site first, um, but I know I'm in the minority trying not to buy on Amazon unless I have to,

Alex Pokorny: um, I keep finding the pricing being higher on the actual manufacturer's website, you know, it's the MSRP versus what they're actually selling it at to be competitive.

Right. That's the shipping cost. It gets frustrating. I'm with you though.

Dave Dougherty: Yeah, but I mean, at least at least they're not gonna lie about their products if they're a huge brand. I mean, I know that that sentence is mildly naive, but I'm just gonna leave that there as it is. Sure. And we can move on. Um, but yeah, the behavior does change, especially when it comes to the thought leadership piece or the b2b side where it really is about expertise.

It really is about depth of knowledge. Thanks, You know, you see the explosion in leadership coaches. You know, where it's like, were you laid off? Do you have some, you know, three to five years of social media experience? You can be a leadership coach. Um, I know that it's a valid thing. Um, I'm making fun of I'm out of love, but the, um, you want to see that.

Okay. There are tiers of experts, right? You have the people who are just claiming that they are because they've watched some videos or read a couple articles or the people who've, okay, now they've done a little bit of certifications. Maybe they've done some schooling on the thing, you know, maybe they have some longevity within the industry.

And then you have the top tier where it's, you know, leadership positions. Maybe they wrote a book, they're doing public speaking at the trusted conferences, like there are these tiers of experts that you would want, you would want to see, you know, so as we talk about trust and believability and all those things, all of those.

Side pieces become those tangible, you know, bits of evidence. The

Alex Pokorny: authority piece, I mean, experience and authority, going back to the E EAT, kind of acronym from Google. Right. Those pieces are big. I, to throw in one random thought, just with the AI and the E EAT piece, I do have a concern that it's going to over index

And minority opinions, because it will be so much different than the rest of the content that's out there. If we have a lot of content regurgitating the exact same answer, I really won't be of any interest. It'll be of, you know, here's maybe the most popular answer, but here's some random side answers that seem to be a little bit different.

And maybe that's the content that gets surfaced a little bit more. The authority piece is interesting too, because I was just thinking about with the SGE. I mean, in that particular experience that I had just searching about that tree. So I read the snippet. It wasn't quite enough. I scrolled down. I cannot tell you the websites I clicked on.

I mean, it was information from three, four sources. I maybe if I keep searching, oh, I did keep searching. And I still don't remember any of the names of the websites. I do kind of wonder if like. Because of that snippet, did I lose some of my attention paid toward, you know, who that brand was, who that site was?

Because typically you'd search for something, you'd scroll past the, maybe the paid ads and you immediately find, Oh, this is this brand. I click on it. I search again, I see the same brand at the top. I click on it. And there are studies out there that show about people having high trust into things that Google brings highly.

So, there's that piece too.

Dave Dougherty: Yeah. And for, you know, for years we've had brands as a trust signal, right? Yeah. Except it's so easy just to start a company on Amazon and sell whatever products you can find. Yeah. You know, that, that kind of dilutes, you know, your ability. Like once you do have an established brand.

It is absolutely an asset once you put in the work for it. Right. But if it's, you know, good trees. com that you went to, well. Is that really is am I going to trust that? I don't know. I don't know. It does seem kind of spammy. It's overly optimized. It's overly targeted, right? It might be totally valid and good intentions, but, you know,

Alex Pokorny: it's pretty close to all the review site spam that's out there and has been out there.

It's like, you know, You know, best headphones, 2023. com. And it's like, okay, people like, you're going to give me a top 10 list with a whole bunch of affiliate links. And I don't, there's any research involved in any of this.

Dave Dougherty: That is one of my problems with programmatic things. Like I understand why people do it.

I understand the value of it. It doesn't make me feel good. And yeah, it, I was, I was thinking about that this week, actually, of what is it about that solutions like programmatic that just make me feel icky and it's because of. My philosophy of how a business or a person should go to market, right? It is that relationship piece.

It is that trust price. And if I'm just slinging tchotchke at you because I think I can make a buck at it, I've, I've, you know, I don't deserve trust, you know? Um,

so while it can be a really powerful thing, you know, like we talked about the travel sites. In a previous episode about, you know, building the content moat. Um,

there's, there's sort of an integrity piece for me where it's like, if I had a travel site, maybe that's your MVP, you know, maybe you, you send somebody to, you know, economical walk, Wisconsin, five years after you wrote the programmatic article about traveling to economical walk. And then you have an experiential piece to follow up your programmatic piece with.

You know, because then at least then at least it shows you're doing something, you know, I mean, like, um, just because you can doesn't mean you should and just because every little small town exists doesn't mean you have to write about it. Yeah, I think that phrase right there

Alex Pokorny: because you can doesn't mean you should is like a key piece against.

You know, mass content creation and pure AI just for the heck of it.

Dave Dougherty: Cause the thing that I haven't been able to get around, even with all the stuff that I've done with AI, is that you still need a strong copy editing background. So anybody who didn't pay attention in English class is screwed because you won't, because if you don't enjoy editing, you're just going to have really bad content.

That's not going to have the same voice is going to be overly general, even if you, you know, I mean, you can train it a little bit, but even, even though I've gone through, and this is true with four or five different platforms that I've been playing around with, you know, so I'm not just, I'm not just doing chat GPT or, you know, barred or whatever, it's like a bunch of them.

Every single one of them, like there might be one or two sentences in the 800 word copy that it outputs that I would want to keep the rest of it is just like, Oh, okay. That's interesting. Um, it's pretty fluffy, but. You know, this one particular idea is what I might might build off of, you know, so then you add three or four sentences of your own based off of the, like, the starter sentence or, you know,

Alex Pokorny: yeah, that's been my constant response to most of these two is Claude.

You name it. Um, it's really great at that entry level information. The very shallow list of the pool. If you're just looking for, I know nothing about this topic, teach me something, it will teach you something and it's good at doing that. After that thin little layer though, it's, it's just a wash. I mean, it's, I'm with you in terms of how much content you'd probably save off of it because there's a whole bunch of events.

Potentially invalid and incorrect. There was a bunch of it that just is kind of clunky and kind of odd that it it's in there. There's a bunch of copy that for the most part is just extremely bland and doesn't really pass a lot of information and it keeps hitting that level so fast. I mean, the, the shallow end of the pool, yeah, it's, it's great.

But beyond that, it, it just can't handle the deep

Dave Dougherty: end. Yeah, it's, it's funny. Cause so I was at the playground with my kid the other day and, um, As kids do a random four year old walked up and just, you know, I like squirrels. Okay, good. Thank you for sharing. All right.

Alex Pokorny: That was similar experience recently.

Yeah. Yeah. Picks up a watermelon. It's like, it's not heavy. I'm like, okay. Um, struggling, but okay, I'm sure it's okay. Yep.

Dave Dougherty: Yep. Yeah. Funnily, that added that behavior does not change, you know, when you're 35 or 40, uh, year old male. Um, but so, but I realized after that experience was to your point with the AI piece, you know, you talk about the hallucinations or the random outputs that come out or whatever else it is, you know, it is kind of like that.

With, yeah, um, you know, this particular field of economics started in 18, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Squirrels are awesome because they shovel away, you know, their nuts before the winter. Wait, where'd that come from?

It can speak really authoritatively on, I think that's, that is, that is the benefit of it. Is that it speaks authoritatively and gives you an authoritative first draft. If you are unsure about it yourself, but you still need, you still need a lot of copy editing, you know,

Alex Pokorny: you know, it kind of feels like, like a scammy consultant, you know, like a social media consultant actually doesn't know what they're talking about, but can talk, they don't actually know, but they can talk about it or an SEO one who I keep thinking of actually this example is the mall of America got scammed by this SEO consultant.

Who claims a whole bunch of different things and then eventually someone looked at it and was like, you haven't done a single thing that you've claimed you've done on this site and a lot of things you're talking about are completely wrong. Right. Guy quickly disappears and there's a whole bunch of warrants out and all the rest of that kind of stuff.

You know, quite an interesting history to him. But it kind of feels like that because it's basically being able to kind of puff up and have this confident voice around a particular topic. But then after that, it quickly falls apart, especially if you start poking holes into it. I asked chatgpt, well gpt4, about some random trivia question and I was asking for this kind of percentages based response and it gave me one.

I said, great, what, what's the source? Can't find a source. I'm not sure what the result was. I apologize, um, here's some other information. No, like where are these percentages coming from? Because honestly, I was trying to Google at first. I couldn't find it. So I was trying to figure out if it knew of any of it.

And no, it completely made up, completely made up numbers. And eventually I found some stats online and they were not even close to what it showed. Right,

Dave Dougherty: right. Yeah. I mean, you just, you gotta be careful with it because you know, there are the, um, you know, I think about the, the lawyer that. Oh, yeah. I had to apologize for writing the brief because he didn't know things were being made up, you know.

Um, I don't want that for my career at

Alex Pokorny: all. Yeah, and you also don't want it for your brand. I mean, kind of circling back to the programmatic piece. That's exactly it. This is this trust question of, after creating content with AI, is it a good idea for your brand and business? And the answer is No, quite frankly, um, if it's completely unmoderated, especially not if it's moderated, copyedited, reviewed by somebody who actually knows what they're talking about.

Sure. But that is darn close to the exact same kind of mass content mills that have been out there in the past. the eHow, wikiHow kind of chunk that's been out there that It's mass produced by people who have absolutely no idea what the particular topic is, but they can put together a top 10 list and then submit it for their 50 cents, their dollar, their 2.

And then nobody else looks at it and it gets published. Right. And also it's why eHow and Wikihow are a joke. I mean, that's, it created their brains to be a joke. I mean, that's what it did to them. Right.

Dave Dougherty: Which Is a kind of a perfect phrase to circle back to where we began with a lot of the the social media influencer spaces now where it is the entertainment value so it is now you know who's willing to be like the jackass movie in order to get clicks and views or whatever else right like there's a certain game you have to play To play up the algorithm,

Alex Pokorny: you know, um, or you stay true to your splintered and small audience,

Dave Dougherty: and it's a slow build over time, right?

But you can get there eventually. Um, as all of the other things that you do around that topic, that area of authority ladder up.

Alex Pokorny: So it always takes time. I think that's always a constant message, which is painful. Whenever you try to do the, oh man, this person made a mailing box by doing this kind of YouTube short strategy, or this person did so great doing this and you realize, man, they've been at this for 10 plus years, they're finally starting to break through.

Dave Dougherty: Yeah, which then, you know, if you, I feel bad for the people who, you know, five years ago were like, all right, I'm finally going to build my audience on Twitter. Yeah, I

Alex Pokorny: know.

Dave Dougherty: And then you look at all of the things that have changed and then you have. 600, 000 followers that, you know, a tiny percentage of them might follow you to a different channel.

And even if you were to get them to go to another channel, you're just never going to have that reach again. And you got to spend that same amount of time building up on that other channel.

Alex Pokorny: I always think of Facebook when they started changing the newsfeed and people realize that when they post, it's like 1% of their followers may see their posts and their newsfeed.

And the only way to increase it was strictly through advertising. And just the painful aspect of that, where people have built up these huge followings and thinking that this is it, you know, I'm spending tons of money just to get more followers, like, literally, that was the point of ad campaigns was just to increase the follower count.

And then you realize you built it up for

Dave Dougherty: what? Well, and that was when I graduated college and I was, you know, doing the, the musician thing like a lot. At the time, a lot of people were saying, well, I don't need to build a website. I just, I'm going to have a Facebook page. Even back then, you know, 2009, 2010, I was saying, that's dumb.

Like, you need to have your own spot. Um, and a lot of them just went, they didn't, they didn't want to do the heavy lifting and have their own thing until, until it was too late with, you know, Facebook making those changes, you know, again, don't build on rented land. You know, have that, have that full stack of things that you're doing that impacts everything.

Um,

so we started dark. Do you see an optimistic future for any of these things? Or how would you put everything we've talked together into some kind of strategy or, or some kind of, um, vision for how you might go to market now?

Alex Pokorny: Excellent question. Great way to wrap up and I'll pose the same back to you after my response.

Um, for one, I think it's still all about the user experience that really has not changed. It's quality content and the quality bar just has risen. Uh, easy to create mass created content. That's very, very shallow and honestly, not very fulfilling. It's a lot harder to get expertise and to really show you understand the audience.

You understand what this person is searching for from and where they're at the education level that they might be at and then where to kind of lead them deeper and allow them to experience and learn about. The things that they need to know next, which starts to build up that trust in your brand and starts to make you a good destination for whatever topic content service product line that you might have, um, when it gets to the social media standpoint, I think it's an ever changing spectrum and landscape and that hasn't really ever stopped and anybody in that industry knows that.

Yes, Snapchat didn't exist 10 years ago, and 10 years from now, I don't know if it will. So you got to kind of keep on moving, and if you're going to play that game, you need to understand what it takes. They basically capitalize on the effort right now, and that's going to change in two years. That's going to change two years from that.

And to get back to your point, it's all rented land. So you need to be building up something of value outside of the following on Instagram. Is it building up your email list? Is it bringing more users to your site who has your products? Or maybe it's bringing more people to Amazon that sells your products and your, your invention, whatever it is.

You're building trust in that product. You're building trust in that brand. You're not building a follower count Because you know that that's going to disappear eventually and if you spent a lot of money and time on it It was good for what it was and you need to recognize that that's it. It's good for what it is.

What about yourself? So,

Dave Dougherty: so I remember in high school when I was all, you know, when I was into guitar playing and going all into it and go, you know, realizing that this was going to be like a major thing for my life. I was reading one of the guitar magazines and it was an interview with Carlos Santana in it.

And, um, you know, there was a year or two period where I was like super into it. What what he was doing. Um, but the particular line that he talked about was in looking over his career. The one thing he wished he would have asked himself when he was younger, when he was recording songs. Was will I be happy playing this song for 30 years?

Because there are certain songs that he wrote, you know back in the day Where he just has no emotional connection to him anymore. He doesn't like playing on that, but the audience loves him So he just he has to continue playing them which on the one side is yeah, that's just part of the gig You know, that's You have to do some of those songs, so you have to rediscover it for yourself, right?

As the performer. But I think that idea of will I be happy talking about this thing over the longterm, you know, it doesn't have to be 30 years, maybe even just, can I be all about this particular thing for five, 10 years? You know, um, if you're willing to go that deep into a topic where your person is associated with it, you might be onto something and you might be willing to invest the time, you know, doing all the social media things, doing all of the podcasts and speaking and blog things and, you know, doing the work because you're into it.

I think the nameless, thoughtless brands where you can just spin it up quick for a quick dollar, those will continue to exist. I mean, they'll always exist, but, um, they will forever fail on trustworthiness and, um, quality experiences.

But that, you know, that's a question that people have to ask themselves before they even start the side hustle or start the business or, or, you know, do a rebrand, you know, in an established business, you know, what are we going to be known for? Um, and if you don't know, figure that out first. Because that's going to affect your communication strategy.

That's going to affect the content you create, the logos you design, like all of that stuff that, that really matters. Um, so that's, that's my frame for it is, you know, yeah. And it quickly narrows the field for me in terms of what I'm interested in potentially doing. There

Alex Pokorny: was a challenge going around. I don't know if it was TikTok, Instagram, who started it, but the question of.

You can get paid a million dollars, but you need to pick a topic that you can speak for at least an hour on has to be a niche topic that, you know, about what would that topic be for you? I think that's a great way to start from. If you look at the content perspective of an hour, a full hour, maybe multiple hours.

What is that topic? Can you speak to it at that length? Or do you lose interest in it? Do you only really know a shallow bit of information on it? You quickly run out of things to talk about. Um, probably not a good area, probably not a great area, or you need to do a heck of a lot more research to really dive into it.

And then you need to question, am I going to be happy speaking at this typing? You know, thinking about this topic for hours upon hours.

Dave Dougherty: Well, and this is the other thing about speaking gigs, too, and any kind of, any kind of performance media. You are going to bomb. You will not have good presentations.

Every time. So it's not just, are you willing to speak an hour for it, but are you willing to speak for an hour to an audience that is stone cold and, and actively ignoring you and you have to do the 60 minutes because you said you would do the 60 minutes. If you can walk away feeling good about the presentation you gave to a hostile audience.

That's the topic you should go for because you're going to have to get back up on a different stage and do that speech again over and over again. Yeah,

Alex Pokorny: you know, that's a good mental model. That's a good mental test to be against something to.

Dave Dougherty: Yeah, because you know, that's something that's ingrained with comedians, right?

You know that you're going to bomb and you're just going to have to do that same set in the next town, or maybe it was just because Tuesday audiences suck. You just don't, you don't know until you do it over and over and over and over again. because you're willing to do the work. So yeah, yeah. I think interesting, interesting place to end.

Uh, interesting discussion. Thank you for hanging around. Please like, subscribe, share, um, you know, email for the show is in the description. So if you have episode ideas, questions, comments, you know, Um, drop us a voice memo. You can email those to us, um, you know, or GPT write out your first draft and send it to us, who knows?

Um, uh, so yeah, we take care, we will see you in the next episode.