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Searching in Cycles Podcast and Video Transcript

[This transcript has been lightly edited to ensure readability]

Dave Dougherty: Hello and welcome to the latest episode of the Enterprising Minds podcast. Again we're back with three topics. I'm going to follow up on our last show, on average marketing and a lot of the feedback we've been getting. 

Alex, what'd you bring? 

Alex Pokorny: Going to talk a little bit about the transition basically from agencies to big organizations, big orgs to small orgs, and kind of back and forth and how that transition kind of changes what you do on a day-to-day basis and what the demands are.

And Ruthi? 

Ruthi Corcoran: I want to talk about keywords and if they're still relevant. 

Alex Pokorny: That's a good question. All right, Dave, kick us off. 

Following Up on Ep 4 - The Average Age Marketing

Dave Dougherty: Perfect. Yeah. So I just wanted to say from the get-go thank you to everybody who has reached out after our last show on, The Age of Average and whether or not that applies to marketing.

I've had a lot of friends either reach out to me via email or text saying “I have some thoughts.” And our conversation sparked enough things in me, personally,  that I ended up writing another 1200-word blog post, following up on that. And it was a really nice change to have some really nice, thoughtful comments on big ideas and have a good dialogue on it. So that's a nice change from an average interaction online. So wanted to say thank you to everybody for doing that. 

We welcome any feedback on the topics, if you have any follow-up ideas, or again like we have said we're playing around with the ideas. So if you know of any research that we should look at or episode ideas or anything like that, you should let us know. Get in touch. I'm going to set up an email account, so it'll be easier for you guys to get in touch with us. So be on the lookout for that. 

But then along with that, it's funny because we talk about these ideas and you're kind of sitting and mulling on them, mulling them over and then you start seeing them in the world. Like when you go to buy a car and all of a sudden you see that particular car everywhere. 

So a little anecdote. I woke up the other day and I think any working parent can sympathize with this. My kid was refusing to go to school, just shouting "I don't want, I don't want to, I don't want to!" Meanwhile, I have an earbud in holding my work iPad while I'm trying to listen in on a meeting and get him out the door. Then I found my dog laying in a pile of his own throw-up and I ended up having to go to the emergency vet. 

 we talk about customer experience and brand experience both on- and offline. And I'm sitting in the waiting room after checking my dog in and off to the side is Bob Ross painting. That's actually a really nice touch, right? I mean, it's a stressful situation. You're worried about your animal and here's this really calming thing.

Then after watching about 10 or 15 minutes of it, I immediately thought of our conversation on The Age of Average and the painting section of that discussion, where we talk about how everybody loves landscapes. And what is Bob Ross painting? F-ing landscapes! 

So here I am surrounded by all of the things that we talked about. And yeah, I just thought, I thought that was funny. And it again just kept me kind of thinking along these lines of where you can be innovative and where you are kind of dragged back to the average.

And I think one idea that I'm mulling around on is the fact that, to Ruthi's point in that episode…Again, if you haven't checked this out, there are a lot of thoughts building on each other. So go back to episode four. Listen to that discussion and then come back to this section.

Okay. So Ruthi, to your point of commercializing new products and introducing things, you can be more creative on that front end. But then in the words of Clayton Christiansen who has that jobs to be done idea, he also has this great discussion on the fact that the things that allow companies to be successful and run successfully are inevitably the things that kill it.

And that is good management because creativity is kind of more chaos. You want more reproducible results, so you start putting these guardrails around it. More so of like, “Hey, we want to optimize this so that we can get 5% over the long term and, and feel more steady in the growth rather than these really creative bursts.”

[The creative bursts] could be a really, really strong campaign, but then they die off really quickly. So that's kind of the new lens that I'm using to think about these ideas because it is that kind of management piece and that de-risking that I think leads to that thing that we end up calling the average marketing.

Ruthi Corcoran: I want to play off that because it ties in very nicely with what I pitched last time, Greg Hoffman's Emotion by Design book. It's fantastic. And one of the standout comments from him in this book is the purpose of risk-taking. 

Risk-taking and marketing are really about creating completely new ways of engaging with customers. On a level that no one else is doing, which then it does two things. One, it serves almost as a game changer and it opens up new opportunities for engaging with those customers that potentially could lead to new revenue streams. But it's that risk-taking and the understanding that risk-taking is doing something more than just selling a product. It's creating different relationships with your customers. And that's different than optimization.

Alex Pokorny: Yeah, it's an interesting point there, Dave, especially about the kind of beginning, middle, end kind of aspect of the creativity die-off. But I was just, I keep mulling over my head, Red Bull and Red Bull's flugtag. Their ice skating racing thing that they used to always come to Minnesota...

Dave Dougherty: Crashed ice.

Alex Pokorny: Yeah. I mean there were some really unusual events and then they had, I can't remember the guy's name, [Felix Baumgartner], who fell from basically did diving from space almost all the way down to the ground and setting records and sort of thing like that. Which worked more in a kind of COVID era where you couldn't really do big events with tons of crowds.

But their mentality. Definitely seems to be that maybe there are guardrails and if you look at any of the events and their logos and design stuff there are a lot of guardrails and brand standards going on. There isn't a variety of Red Bull logos. There's one, but their creative standard, or their brand standard, is to be creative and to create these unusual events that are social media-worthy talking points, unusual events where you build a random potential flying object and throw it off the top of a ramp in the middle of a lake and see if it crashes or not. And that's still success no matter what happens related to it, you know that that's a mentality that they've basically been able to maintain. And that's a variety of different events, a variety of different actions, and they've still been able to maintain that this is the Red Bull brand. 

And there's some element to all of those pieces, which I really can't even name it, that is this extreme of normality kind of event. It's not skydiving, it's skydiving from space. It's not ice skating, it's ice skating down or ramp with obstacles. It's always some level beyond normal is kind of their thing, but, they're able to maintain it, even though those are very unusual and very different events. You can think of a company like Ford or any of the car commercials. Yeah. I'm right there with you on the averages in the averages all over the place.

Ruthi Corcoran: And playing off that Alex, and tying it back to what Dave was talking about and this sort of idea of good management isn't necessarily…Well, maybe it is, but good management traditionally maybe isn't in favor of such crazy risk-taking. If we think about what's the ROI of somebody jumping out of a plane from space.

What's amazing about some of these organizations is that they're able to pull those off and cultivate the teams and cultivate the culture that enables those things to happen, to have deeper brand engagement, and to do things differently. The trick is how do you create that sort of environment to begin with? And how do you keep it going? 

Dave Dougherty: Well, I think the key thing that we're dancing around here is the brand. You can't necessarily justify jumping out of a plane if you're looking specifically at, “Am I selling 20,000 extra drinks?” But if you look at it as our brand is associated with this, that, and the other for the accountants it would be the intangible assets. Which yay.

How to say that what you did impacted the intangible asset value? It's an interesting play there because if you look at the brands that are doing these types of things like the Red Bulls or Apple who's made a stand since 1984 basically, and have had a very similar brand feel since ‘84.

It's almost at the get-go you have to have that idea. I don't think you quote, “Innovate into this idea,” right? It has to be at the beginning.

I don't know. I don't have the answers. I'm still thinking this over. Clearly, it's hitting you guys in a similar way. I can see the wheels turning. 

Alex Pokorny: Yeah, it's... 

Ruthi Corcoran: It's a good question. I'm trying to think of examples. Maybe this is something I'd love to hear from a larger group of people. Are there examples of brands that have innovated into this? That have started in a very different spot than what we think of traditionally with the Apples and the Nikes coming out from nowhere and I don't…I can't think of any off the top of my head.

Alex Pokorny: Yeah, that's a tough question. Yeah, I mean there's the piece of it that's branding. There's the piece of it that's also kind of internal culture and management. I think of that as well of. 

I think directly aligned to that, do you have a diversity of thought within your company? Well, look at your teams. Did everybody come from the same places, or do you actually have a diverse team? Or does everybody have pretty similar shared experiences? And if they are all similar shared experiences, maybe you should shake it up. 

Maybe that's an outside agency helping to pitch some radically different ideas and trying to be open-minded enough not to shoot them down because it's too far out of the norm. But trying to actually be creative and have that managerial leeway to be creative.

And I think that's one of the difficulties we get into is nobody wants to shake up the numbers enough that they might go down. So, you take really, really safe bets over and over and over again because that's the easy thing to do and it's the stable thing to do, which you're going to keep your job basically.

So that's hard to put a stake out there and say, “This is the new direction we're going to go and try it.” And I mean, there are a lot of big marketing campaigns and ad campaigns out there that have completely failed. And they tried, they tried to shift things up, go a different direction, and they went in the wrong direction based on the market response at that time.

Might be different nowadays from what they did, but at the time it didn't work. 

Dave Dougherty: Timing is an important thing that you can't really take into account. 

Alex Pokorny: Yeah. And understanding, I mean, there is the base marketing aspect of understanding your audience. Red Bull understands their audience well enough of this is a normal-ish person who is looking for more than just coffee. Are they all the way out there into some extreme element? No. They've pulled back from that and they're kind of a more moderate, more socially acceptable middle-range kind of energy drink. 

There are those out there that definitely push this “You're living on the edge of life. This is the drink for you,” sort of thing. That's not Red Bull at all and it hasn't been. So they've been able to basically play into this and create this kind of safe space, middle ground that is away from like the early 2000s, 2010 kind of era of energy drink ads.

Which was extreme sports and there was no, E. Just started with an X. Xtreme sports. I mean, it was everything, every event possible and there was every energy drink possible tied to that. They [Red Bull] found a good middle, safe area. That is their brand and they're still allowed to have enough leeway to do some interesting, unusual things.

I don't know, I have to imagine though, that that's a cultural thing, or else they would just do the same event every year for 10 years and eventually realize that “Yep, it's been dying off. Maybe we should finally kill it off.” You know? That's right. That would be the other option. But I have to imagine there's a culture there that says, “Nope, this is us. We gotta keep doing new things.” And that's a part of us, or who we are, is doing new things. 

Ruthi Corcoran: I think that's huge and I think back to a previous organization that I worked at in the past that had sort of two different marketing teams working on different projects with very different cultures. One more the sort of traditional, we make brochures, we go to events. Just sort of playing it safe, I'll call it. Then the other was sort of doing more new, out-there things. 

It was always a clash and they saw the way of looking at the world in completely different ways. So when a new idea came up there, depending on which team it was, there weren't necessarily fast followers.

And it's the fast followers in the culture who said, “Yeah, that's excellent. Let's try it and let's be okay if we fail. Because if we're not failing, we're not pushing the boundaries.” 

Which reminds me of another anecdote, I guess. Steve Jobs at Apple, the first time around wanted the PepsiCo CEO to come in and take over over Apple because PepsiCo at the time had a, if you're not failing, you're not innovating enough sort of mentality.

And that's what you need to have and it's really hard to have that. It's hard to sell it, and you have to have the culture to support it because people have to be comfortable to say, yeah, we're going to try something crazy, and we might fall flat on our face. 

Alex Pokorny: Yeah. It's okay to put a whole bunch of company money behind it.

Ruthi Corcoran: To really go big, or at the very least, like put a little bit so that you can make a big impact, even with a small budget like that is possible too. But you, you still have to be all in, culturally, emotionally.

Alex Pokorny:  There's an interesting point too, speaking of Dave, to the transition piece. I'm still kind of playing around with that in my head because when I switched organizations, I did a bunch of interviews with companies that weirdly had the same story. And it became kind of strange to me, but I realized that there was a definite pattern there. But basically, it was product-led marketing, there was no CMO at the company, and they reached a hundred employees or about a hundred million in revenue. 

They hit this point and then they stagnated and the growth aspect of the founder, CEO, you name it, either was on his way out or recognizing that they needed some kind of fresh ideas, new ideas. So they would bring in a CMO, and then within six to nine months, it was always the same date range they decided they needed to bring in somebody who was going to be the head of digital marketing. And that was the roles that I was interviewing for. And it was the same story over and over again. So there was this initial growth, based on just a good market-fit product.

And whoever the internal sales network, personal networks, you name it, power connections, experience in industry experience, whatever it was that enabled those sales, they got to a certain level and then they stopped and everybody kind of apparently stopped out around the same level, and then they wanted that switch. They wanted that change. And in some cases, it sounds like the C-suite got wiped out and they started rebuilding from scratch. From a top-down management standpoint, that was a pretty common story too, that the initial team, the initial leaders, weren't a good fit for this next stage.

So maybe that is going to be a new safe stage because they were experiencing some loss some stability, so they needed something new. 

Dave Dougherty: Because as soon as you have investors, there's an expectation on returns because you've signed a contract for the investment.

Alex Pokorny: Yeah. And then, I mean, there's also pain creates change. That's the other piece of it. Like it's hard when things are really easy and good and you're growing at a steady but not great, but steady rate to say, “Yep, this is the time for change.”

Ruthi Corcoran: Right. If you've reached that a hundred million mark you’re taking risks, all of a sudden you have a lot more to lose than when you were at half that or a quarter of that. And now you've got all of your people that you want to make sure are, are good, happy working. That's, yeah. It's harder to take those risks. 

Insights from Transitioning Between Big and Small Organizations

Dave Dougherty:  So speaking of transitioning between things, Alex, why don't you jump into your big org, small org experience? 

Alex Pokorny: Yeah. It's a little bit of my own career experience of going from agencies to in-house, back to agencies, freelancing back and forth, basically through that.

I’m currently at an agency and used to be at an enterprise organization, so I was just realizing some of the significant differences between those sizes of companies as well as what's expected from an SEO standpoint. So we can throw in a little SEO in this episode. So toss that in there.

One piece with the big orgs, when you have tons of teams every role is split. It seems into five different people's roles. So now you have to get five people's buy-in versus the one person who may be in charge of web development, right? So things become a little bit more difficult and definitely, the soft skills become a bigger emphasis. You prove with your technical skills that you have some idea of what you're talking about. Then it's heavy on the soft skills to get the project done.

The agency world, it's far smaller organizations. Typically there are large organization types of agencies out there. I've never worked for one that's like a hundred, 200 person size company. I’ve always done something like that might have been a hundred or less, 50 or less kind of size. But with those organizations, you don't have enough time and enough people to do everything. So if you have an idea, you just go do it and move on and keep moving on and keep doing the next thing. And we're going to keep pushing and keep doing stuff because you're working with a ton of different clients who end up being a bunch of different bosses, right?

And with anything SEO-wise, it takes time, it takes a lot of research, and eventually you get to a point of like, “This is the idea, we should do it.” No one has enough time to say no to it or enough time to say, well, let's question this. Let's talk about this. Let's meet next week again and talk about it again instead.

It's “Sure, yeah, sounds good. Let's get it done.” And then a few hours later, it's done. What's next? And then suddenly, as an SEO I was like, What's next? I was expecting a whole bunch of nos. I was expecting at least a week, and you got it done the same afternoon. So I guess I need new ideas. 

The speed of implementation changes and you get very much into a tactical mindset and it's hard to get to step back a little bit and get back in the strategic mindset, which is the other thing I found is everybody gets so tactical that.

I mean, it's taking some emails, some meetings to get people to step back a little bit, look at a current project, something that's already been live and say, “Can we do better? Is this a good strategy in comparison to competitors? Are we positioned correctly?” Are there elements that we should change and update conversion rate, optimization elements UX elements, you name it.

So that's been one significant shift between the two. I was curious from the two of you and your experiences from small organizations to large organizations and the differences from a job day-to-day demand standpoint, have you noticed that kind of shift that it used to be more of a fast reaction speed and now it's much more of a slow, long-term strategic speed? Or have you seen some pockets where there have been some changes?

Dave Dougherty: When I was in the agency side, at least in listening to your descriptions and your setups, the best projects that I did work on were when we had the postmortems. Like with the agile methodologies, right? What made this successful? Why did this work? Or conversely, why did this fall flat on its face? Why was it our execution? Was it the speed with which the client would get back to us? 

I mean, project managing agency stuff for sure is the like, "Hey client, we do want to do this, but It's taken you six days to get back to us." I've been on both sides of that equation so I have sympathy for both sides. But when you're trying to do good things and trying to do good work it can be frustrating with that speed differential.

Your point about soft skills does hit me because there is a lot more politicking, at least in my experience and it's only compounded when you get up to the global level too. 

Alex Pokorny: You're saying in a large org? That's the case in a large org? 

Dave Dougherty: Yeah. Because it's not just convincing one boss, it's convincing bosses in multiple regions or countries or whatever else. And it's all fine and it's all good and everybody…the thing that I had to learn ultimately, was that everybody is coming from a good place. Fundamentally. And I'm still working on that.

But that ultimately does affect the speed. I think there are benefits to both, but when I first joined the large org, especially in the SEO-type role, I had a realization one day where I was like, “Okay, the search engines trust this organization enough that we can do basically whatever we want and we won't be dinged.”

Because on the agency side, when you're talking about those services, it really is get them [search engines] to trust you. Get them to trust you, like build up the domain authority, whether or not that's a valid metric, we're not talking about that today! But find all of the different signals that will impact your ranking ability, right?

That was really kind of at the heart of it. But yeah, there's enough room to screw up, which allows you to be slower and allows you to do things that may not be best practice. But again, everybody's coming from a good place. I think. I hope.

Ruthi Corcoran: Such growth, Dave. 

Dave Dougherty: I know! It is possible!

Ruthi Corcoran: It's great. It's great. 

Dave Dougherty: The more you know!

Ruthi Corcoran: Here's what I've been thinking a lot about. A lot.

Great teams have a few attributes about them or the inputs to great teams, I would say have a few attributes. One is that they're autonomous. They're able to, given a set of objectives, figure out the best way to do it. Two is that they have the necessary skills within the team, so they're not, the dependencies are limited. Not none, just limited. And three is that there's a strong sense of purpose in what you're doing. 

What occurs to me is that in smaller organizations, it's much easier to end up with those environments. Simply because you don't have a lot of people. So by necessity, people kind of have to do everything and they have to be autonomous cause you just don't have the layers.

And oftentimes with smaller organizations, they're doing less, fewer things, which means that the sense of purpose just naturally might be tighter. Simply because there are not as many potential purposes that could be competing with each other. Whereas as you have a larger organization, the autonomy goes down as you have more people who potentially get more specialized.

The necessary skills, again, with more specialization goes away. The autonomy too. If you get layers of middle management, for example, all of a sudden you have layers of complexity there. And the sense of purpose becomes fuzzier because there are so many different purposes you could be going toward.

And unless you have somebody with a very tight vision and a sort of leading the way, it's hard to get. So I think that's the biggest shift in an enterprise or a larger organization, you're less likely to have those naturally occurring within teams as you do within a smaller company. And it's not to say none.

So going from a small organization to a large organization, it's more about making sure you maintain those three parts of the stool of having a great team or finding a team that already has those if you're doing it. So that's, I think for me the biggest difference between the two.

And one thing related to that I do tell any interns that we work with is to find a small organization because you're going to be able to get your hands in more things than if you're at a very large organization where you might get to do one part of one process of one capability. And that's all you get exposed to. 

I think that's true across organizations, whether you're in an agency or the client side is just what are the circumstances within which the teams are playing and what's elevating them to be successful.

Alex Pokorny: What's the point there that I think we've talked a little bit about, even with Dave, your first topic of ownership. That's the piece that I keep coming back to in different ways. I mean, there are some different facets to it. Basically from one, it's the small business owner who has the feeling of ownership to be able to risk it all and says “Yes, we'll do some crazy creative thing that may work or fail and I've got five people with me and we're all just as crazy with this idea of a startup, which we all know might fail.”

So we're accepting of that risk and we're tolerant of that risk to such a degree that they feel they have the ownership to make that decision. And when they hit the hundred person, that large size company, they start to lose that feeling that they can risk it all because now people's pensions are in effect and people's plans of growing their families based upon them still having a job and being able to buy a house and all the rest of those elements so that changes. 

The other piece that I keep thinking about is from an agency standpoint, you are always on the side of being in service to your client, and the client has the ability to basically fire you at will. Within a large organization that doesn't exist. So there is…

Dave Dougherty: By the time you're up for firing, your boss has probably forgotten about your crap project in Q1 anyway. 

Ruthi Corcoran: Well, I think the difference is in a big organization, you still have internal customers are clients.  You still have stakeholders, but they can't fire you as easily. I think that's exactly, that's the difference. 

Alex Pokorny: Yeah. And they don't have as clear, there aren't as clear ownership lines over anything. Like, if you want to make a change to the website, does the web developer own the website? Does the business person who has something with a product that happens to be on that webpage, do they own it? Who gets to quote-unquote own it? And then who also is quote-unquote fireable tied to the performance of that? And the answer is, seems to be nobody, or nobody knows.

I mean, and that just kind of weakens the impetus of every meeting, the excitement or risk-taking or desire to get anything done. I mean, it changes so much when you remove those elements of my performance, my personal career is tied to X. And, that's it. 

Dave Dougherty: Through ownership comes accountability.  I don't think that those, like you, have to have one to have the other. One of my favorite books that I've read in the last year was Principles by Ray Dalio. And if you're not familiar, he founded BlackRock Consulting. No. Bridgewater Associates. There we go. Not Blackwater, Bridgewater.

But this book is awesome and he has basically made a bunch of YouTube videos and all this stuff free. He was the one with the idea of radical transparency. And you talk about a culture that is very specific to a certain type of person that you have to be comfortable getting any kind of feedback at any point.

Based on the organization and how they're doing. But at the absolute center of that is ownership and being held accountable for whatever happens to that. And it doesn't matter if the idea came from the most junior person or the CEO. It only matters who has the best idea, he's trying to go towards what he calls an idea meritocracy.

And this, from a purely theoretical standpoint, I think I would love that. I but it won't work for the big organizations. That again, like the creativity, like the Red Bull stuff, was founded with that idea, right? Because you have that big leader, like Ray who instituted that and built teams around that and set up processes around it to weed out the people who didn't really like that setup.

Ruthi Corcoran: Yeah, an addendum. It won't work overnight and it won't work with big change. Without big changes. 

Dave Dougherty: Correct. 

Ruthi Corcoran: You don't get there with the status quo. 

Dave Dougherty: No. I would, I'm going to go on a limb and say that it's, it's too big of a change for incumbent cultures, and I'm happy to receive pushback on that. 

But I did have two other points to get to Alex's thing. Between agencies and enterprises or larger companies or mom-and-pop versus public, or whatever. However you want to, you want to slice it? 

I do think, Ruthi, to your point with the interns, I think starting your career at the agency side is wonderful. And is definitely some way to go, not just because you have the time to have like the crazy agency lifestyle because you don't have kids or mortgages or nightlives or whatever else.

But you get to be exposed to a plethora of go-to-market models, industry types, client types, and the different personalities of the client so that you can kind of suss out like I fit within these cultures with I'm intrigued by these particular types of industries. I have no desire to work with these other ones, right?

So you can weed out all of that and really kind of hone in on where you want to focus because through that specialization is where you will build your career, right? And you also have to play with the market dynamics. We're not set up with that. The switch between agency and in-house I think is just going to be cyclical because as soon as companies want to cut costs, what do they do?

They kill Marcom and then everybody goes to the agency side, and then over time, the accountants again are like, “Hey, why are we paying so much? We should just bring these people in-house.” And then everybody goes back in-house and then you're there for a time and then you get cut again. That just happens over and over and over again, so being able to read those tea leaves will set up your career pretty well too. 

What Is the Role of the Keyword in SEO Today?

Ruthi Corcoran: All right. I'm lobbing the final question. What is the role of the keyword in SEO today?

Alex Pokorny: If I was going to take a stab at that. I would say, no. I mean, basically, what Google used to have was the exact match, the keyword doesn't really exist anymore. The entity, the idea of that keyword is what exists today. 

Kind of a ridiculous story, but way back when, so a dozen years ago or so, looking at SEO for basically a furniture company, we're looking at brown chair versus brown chairs. We were thinking about two different pages because we wanted to go after brown chair and we wanted to write for brown chairs. At that time, it was exact match, it mattered. 

Now you type a brown chair and you're probably going to end up with IKEA because they're furniture related, and that has more to do with the entity that basically is a chair versus the exact match keyword that is a brown chair.

Exact match domain names used to be a thing that for the most part has died off. So you don't really have to own brownchairs.com anymore. You can just own, whatever, Ruthi.com, and have a furniture store on it and they'll be fine. I mean, those have changed so drastically that we're after that entity now versus anything else, and to be honest, I think that was always probably the smart play anyways, was to basically go after everything that was related to that and covering off on those topics. Becoming the best resource on Google for that particular topic. I mean that would've set you up well today, but it also would've given you a bunch of other related search phrases that you weren't necessarily going after, but your content's about it.

So you're probably going to get that kind of traffic. Your overall organic traffic belts would be supported by people at least close to the right market versus one term, one page, and then moving on from there. That's, I guess, that's my stance. I can go a whole bunch into vectors and how NLP (natural language processing) works, but I guess we can stay away from that for the moment.

Dave Dougherty: I largely agree. You do the best with what you have when you have it. So, like at the time, the brown chairs to your example, you had to. Now, in thinking about it, the only time it would be appropriate to maybe target a single chair would be like a Facebook ad for the recently divorced. Because you don't need two, right? You only need one. 

Privacy concerns aside. Yeah. How sad is that? You have a brown chair. 

Alex Pokorny: Nothing. 

Ruthi Corcoran: Just the one.

Dave Dougherty: Yeah, I don't know. I think the, or at least where my head is now and has kind of always been, even when you would target specific terms like that, it is always been the psychological forces behind what they're trying to do. I think that's why in all of our discussions, the conversations around behavioral economics are really fascinating to me.

Or even persuasion guys like Robert Cialdini are really interesting to me because it goes to the decision-making of the consumer. How and why are they making these decisions? What are they trying to do when they are executing that search?

Yeah. And then you build the experience around that. I'm of the belief that the fundamentals don't change. The tools and the way in which you use them, they change all the time. Like organic social used to be a thing. Now forget it. That's a pay-to-play for sure.

But if you were to develop an audience, find the audience, and work that audience. It may make sense. I think an example to showcase where I'm going and maybe not well, but this is at least where I'm going, was when Rand Fishkin was talking to Will Reynolds, and one of the things you shared, Alex, the fireside chat, he brought up the idea that when he started Spark Toro, he and his colleague literally could not find any key terms to target. Because nobody is targeting, or nobody is searching for a tool that finds where their audience is hanging out and speaking to each other online. That just doesn't exist. 

So how does that change the way you market? You can't do SEO. You have to do the content and the outreach to where the audience is. So that's why he's been on every single podcast, and every single webinar for the last like three years because he is trying to reach these audiences, convince them with the ideas, and showcase the product in different use cases. And they're doing great. I think a lot of us with SEO backgrounds can convince ourselves that SEO has to be involved all the time.

No, sometimes it's not the way. 

Ruthi Corcoran: Thinking about your comment about the fundamentals too, I always go back to that. I'm highly skeptical about keywords in our current technological situation. Google is quite advanced. It's quite good at knowing what people are looking for. Not perfect. 

And now we have large language models which are starting to answer questions as well. It just seems more and more that are you providing answers to the things your customers are looking for? Are you adding value to what they're trying to do on your website with your social channels?

And if you're solving for that, you're probably going to be okay. And it could be that. Keywords are helpful in the sense of understanding what people are searching for, how they're appraising their questions, how they're asking their questions, and then responding to what they're looking for. Less so about responding to the specific words that are being typed into a search box.

Alex Pokorny: Yeah. How the behavior around search is also changing. Like the idea of walking up to a human being and someone on the street and saying restaurants near me. It's bizarre. You don't do that, but you type that into a search engine.  

If you're doing a voice search, you probably are saying something that's a lot longer. If you're using an assistant like Siri, you're probably saying something far longer. I mean, that's, that changes too. If you're asking ChatGPT. It's far longer than that now. So how we're searching is becoming more human, to be honest, and becoming more natural. 

From the keyword standpoint, we look at large language models, search engines, and all the rest, they're all still basically playing upon keywords. They're changing how they understand them and they're becoming more complex and again, just more human about how they understand things. But, the terms are still basically there. I mean, maybe you search for brown chairs and you get IKEA because you're looking for furniture and they kind of understand that you're looking for furniture overall and probably want more selection. You're, the one I always like to use is like for…I am going to nerd out. Sorry, we're going to get into vectors. I apologize. It won't take long. 

Ruthi Corcoran: Go for it, Alex. 

Dave Dougherty: Own the nerdiness. 

Alex Pokorny: But it's a good way to understand large language models, search engines, and a bunch of these things because it's so natural.

Language processing is a very fancy term that basically covers the field. But if I were to type in a search engine, how big is a queen? That would not be the now past Queen of England. That would not be Freddie Mercury from the band Queen. That would be probably a queen-sized bed. 

How tall is Queen? That might be Freddie Mercury's height. How tall was the queen? That's the Queen of England. So you've got the phrase queen, which now is close to the entity. The idea of music bands Queen, you've got the idea of royalty, the Queen of England, and you've got the idea of sizes of beds and furniture. We're still somehow hitting furniture with this example.

So now you have the phrase queen. If I were just to search queen, that is somewhere in the intersection of at least three little bubbles of music, royalty and furniture. And when I start to add little helper words around that, it kind of pushes me in one direction or another direction, and there's a lot of things. 

If you were to try to plot that onto a piece of paper and you had three bubbles and you try to plot this in the middle of it gets pretty complex because I'm sure there are probably maybe 10 other things I'm not thinking about. So really it's, it's 3D. Instead, think of a 3D space.

Ever heard of a plot? I'm going to put at least three numbers up, down left, and right. You're going to have three numbers to basically say this is the coordinate of where the word queen lives. because it lives here in between these bubbles that are these other ones and those that live at these coordinates. So now what you've done effectively is you've taken all of the language and you turned it into math.

And that's natural language processing because you could assign that phrase a four number, five number, six number, whatever coordinate of math and say it is 0.1 away from this phrase and 0.5 away from this phrase. So those are now related phrases, and that's basically if you consider all those little points within a giant map, those are called vectors.

And that's where all the entities, the ideas live. And that's where natural language processing basically works off of, is trying to understand how close is this phrase to this phrase. How different are these from these things? And when we start to understand how these little helper words, how is and big, all those other why questions, then it starts to push you in different directions.

That's it basically. 

Dave Dougherty: This is the thing that makes me sad and nervous about large language models and people's reliance on them. Because it uses the standard definitions of the predominant language version. If you start talking about regional dialects, those terms will start to have very different meanings or even different spellings.

Now granted, if we want to go in into the philosophical debate, the philosophical practice of logic has always been turning language and stuff and meaning into math so that you can do all the if-then and yeah, buts, and alsos. But it doesn't capture everything. You know what I mean? It's an approximation. 

Ruthi Corcoran: Dave, you're such a downer. 

Dave Dougherty: No, I'm not. 

Ruthi Corcoran: I'm ready to make a t-shirt that says, plot the queens with a little infographic on it. 

Dave Dougherty: By all means, go do it. But I think we have an overreliance on data as the correct thing. And it's not like anything, it's an approximation. Right? 

The thing that makes language so rich is not that it is point five status updates of this. It is within the context of a culture and a heritage, and a way of being that makes it alive. Not math.

Alex Pokorny: I don't think you could say the word with any much more disdain than that. 

Ruthi Corcoran: That was beautiful. 

Alex Pokorny: I mean, Dave, that gets perfectly into your point too about the use of keywords. I mean, they're overreliance on keywords and keyword data. For any SEO, if you just believe what Google Keyword Planner told you, you're going in the wrong direction.

The numbers are wrong. They're averaged and bucketed, and there are huge amounts of seasonality to all of them. And you're only going to get a tiny percentage of them no matter what per whatever ranking position you're in. You're not going to get all that number anyways. So those numbers are false. They're maybe leading you in the right direction, but they're still false.

And it's also limited. I mean, you know that man, people search a heck of a lot more around this topic. I mean, they search 10, 11-word phrases and keyword planner, I think even stops you if you were trying to figure out even the vole of a 10-word phrase. It won't even give it to you. Right? So all that data are missing.

I mean, there are huge gaps when we become myopically, data-reliant. And I think you're absolutely right in that there are severe limitations to that. Which I think gave help to the rise of tools, like Also Asked, and the other related tools where you're starting to query, again, still Google data, but it's people's longer questions. More in-depth questions and the questions that follow those questions. That informs you of the mental state and the topic and the needs and wants of the audience, which gets beyond Queen, 1200 searches a day. You know that that doesn't teach you much.

Dave Dougherty: And again, like the creative writer in me, what lens are you reading things through? Right? Or what are you focusing on?

I think on the tech side of what it is we do, the data is nice. And “Oh my God, a new shiny toy. Isn't this wonderful? I can do this to convince my bosses to do more of what I do. This is great.” 

If we were to take that focus and then turn it into any kind of global campaign that you might have worked on, what is the first thing you do? Or at least I hope, what is the first thing you do? You ask, “Will this be culturally okay to use this messaging in your country?” And they'll say yes or no because of the difference between saying…I'm not going to go super specific, but like if the there are differences where, even within Spanish-speaking countries, in one country might be okay to say something and the other, it might be insulting your grandmother's cooking in the in the same way.

And you can't do that. You can't launch that because it's going to unintentionally tank your campaign. Right? But the data said it was okay because it's Spanish speakers in the world.

No. Grandmas empanadas do not deserve that. 

Ruthi Corcoran: Just take us to an optimistic note before we end. 

Dave Dougherty: That's not, not optimistic! That's just…

Ruthi Corcoran: I just want to put in a bit of a plug for how amazing it is. That language as math. While it comes with some asterisk and some watch out, it is so powerful. I mean, the fact that we can find the world's information so easily because of what Google and other companies have been able to do is quite phenomenal. That's all. 

Dave Dougherty: It is unbelievable. The amount of skill and thought that has to go into even the most basic setup that we have. I'm not discounting that. I am not capable of doing anything that they have done to set up this instance. Right? I fully recognize that. 

However, part of me wonders if we're still just at the Mad Lib stage, right? Like it feels like you're pulling a slot machine and it's like an adverb, a verb, a pronoun, and then you have your little story. Like that is kind of how ChatGPT feels to me. Like Create a story around this, that, and the other and say something that would insult your sister. 

Like, everybody's road trips as a kid, you can think back to… 

Ruthi Corcoran: MadLibGPT.

Dave Dougherty: Exactly! But I don't know. Again, it's just me trying to make sense of the world, and I'm dumb enough to share it publicly, so I'm owning my foibles. But it is really awesome and it's exciting to see where it goes. Even with the commentary of don't just trust tech and don't just idolize San Fran. 

I think luckily, I think we're stepping away from that a little bit, but just because you have a tech hub doesn't mean you believe everything that comes out of it, you know? I hope. 

Ruthi Corcoran: Full circle. Don't be a lazy marketer. 

Dave Dougherty: Exactly! 

Ruthi Corcoran: Use your brain.

Dave Dougherty: And on that note, we're going to cancel..No we're not going to cancel this show. We are going to stop this show before we're canceled.

Thank you, everybody, for making it this far and listening. Please like, subscribe, and share so that we can get more people involved and more ideas involved in the discussions. More to come on how we will make it easier to get in touch with us and we're having enough fun that we might make this more frequently. So another announcement on that. 

Stay tuned and we will see you in the next episode of Enterprising Minds.