You sort of hark back to a really persistent myth in marketing that I think everybody is familiar with, which is of loads of sort of like swotty geeky analysts sitting around and typing away and then, you know, sort of in blazes the like maverick head of marketing who's like, just forget about it, guys. Like I was talking to someone on the street and they said this, and we're gonna change the brand to green and it'll have a smiley face on it. And sales skyrocketed and we did three hundred percent turnover. And it was that that nonsense myth is really persistent, that if you just sort of throw away all the boring data and go with your gut, you'll definitely win. I just feel like now sort of people are trying to like sort of almost say, well, you know, we failed to deliver for you for the last sort of five or six years using this sort of very data driven approach. So now we're going to discard that language.
It's an appealing notion rather than analysing data.
I think part of it is just that the data is very complicated. We have, as an industry, been very guilty of sort of throwing spreadsheets and charts and graphs and things that people are expecting them to interpret.
Welcome back to Digital Marketing From The Coalface. I am delighted to say that I am being joined once again by my associate.
That sound quite so enthusiastic, Alex. I'm here under duress.
Not only is he not prepared for this podcast, he hasn't even bothered to bring his laptop with him so that he can pretend he's got some notes on it.
Well, I have something I want to rant about, but we'll get on to that. That's good.
Um, because you've, um, quite rightly got a couple of days off this week, I thought, well, rather than miss the opportunity of having a podcast, I thought I would hurriedly arrange for us to record a podcast because, you know, our armies of listeners would be, um, bereft. They would if we didn't serve up some of our, um, goodness. Goodness.
Without purpose.
Yeah. Their life would be without purpose. That's right. We are playing that game as well today where I'm playing the battery. Battery in the recording device game two at the moment, but I'm sure it was down to one and I meant to change the batteries, so it's kind of miraculously gone up to two, but I think it will quickly go down to one. See how desperate we are in this podcast. We're talking about the battery level. Do you ever play recording device.
Or have you grown out of.
That? Oh no.
You don't play petrol.
That's just a fool's errand because all you're gonna do is, well, if you played petrol chicken, it's gone horribly wrong because your car's diesel. Um, but if you don't really want to suck up all the stuff in the bottom of your tank.
You do not know. That is.
Correct. Apparently. Um, interestingly, talking about that, I needed to take my e-bike and I'll mention this in a minute. I need to take my e-bike up to Ballater, which is about eight miles away, and some guys working on the house just now, one of them I know really well, um, and I said, um, rather than move all your vans to so I can stick my bike in the back of the car, can you give me a lift up to Ballater?
Yeah.
Because that's then in the end he said, well, do you want a lift up to or do you want to just take the van? So I just borrowed his van, put the bike in the back of it and took it up to Ballater, and there's no fuel in his van. So not only did I. He lent me his van, which I was very grateful for, but I've also put twenty five quid's worth of diesel in it as well.
It was very kind.
Because he was running on fumes because I don't play fuel chicken.
You should. It's a great way to feel alive, you know, trapped in the sort of nine to five. And, you know, everything's just sort of closing in around you. Just nearly let yourself run out of petrol.
I'll tell you what. My e-bike needs it. It needed a service. And then yesterday the actual motor started, um, behaving quite dangerous. So I thought, right, I need to actually get the thing in for a service and some, and some work. So I've sent it off for that. But obviously I need to get to work. And because as you know, our road bridge is out of commission has been for the last thirteen months plus. No, um, sorry, I'm not going to go there. A Boyne bridge. Um, so I dug out the mountain bike out the garage, which isn't an e-bike. It's just a mountain bike. Uh, wow. What a.
Difference. You have to actually use your legs.
Me thinking, God, I'm still reasonably fit. I'm zipping around on my bike. No problem at all. E-bikes are incredible when you actually go back onto a normal pushbike. I actually felt like getting off and walking because it would be slightly quicker. And so I arrived at the office slightly out of breath on the non e-bike, um, which is sat over there.
So they're quite dangerous though aren't they.
E-bikes dangerous. Why.
I don't know, I seem to remember was it last year or the year before. I seem to remember somebody dying because they were charging one in the house and it blocked the entrance and the battery caught fire in my head. They're sort of quite dangerous, but maybe.
Well, if you're talking about charging, then, then I think the issue has been with cheap Chinese imports that like e-scooters and the like that have got really dodgy technology and they put them on charge and yeah, they set fire. And when, when an electric bike or an.
Electric.
Electric scooter or whatever catches fire, um, then basically stand back and watch the display because there's not a lot you can do about it.
I like that you whispered Chinese as if as if that would help make it.
Obviously we all, you know, all the devices we use, it's all coming from coming from China.
Um, probably the same one or two factories, to be fair, probably.
Yeah. But, you know, I think there is some spurious um, technology comes out of there as well. Have you seen the TikToks? You know, it's slightly digital digital marketing associated TikToks gone.
David. It's dead.
Have you seen the TikToks? Well, it's back already.
That was.
Quick. Have you seen the the TikToks, which are actually fake? But I mean, there's basically, um, videos of the TikTok CEO who's Singaporean, um, being grilled by the Senate in America. And clearly somebody put in because it's like an Irish accent asking some of the questions and it's just clearly just like being made up. Um, but some of the questions are.
Have you seen the actual interview? Oh yeah. It's absolutely farcical.
Have you ever been a member? Where are you from? I'm Singaporean. What?
Have you ever been a member of the Communist Party?
Have you got any other nationalities? No. I'm Singaporean. Right? Yeah. Have you ever been a member of the Chinese Communist Party? Sir, I'm Singaporean. It's just. It's almost like. Have you ever thought about becoming a member? It was. It was hilarious. I mean, it was to talk about kind of contorting yourself to try and make somebody say something because you've decided and figured out the whole thing in your head. And then your first question shows that your entire hypothesis is wrong.
But the whole thing's really interesting, right? Because that was from a couple of years ago that they were questioning him.
Is it is it that long ago?
A rare opportunity to talk about both digital marketing and politics in the same space. So I think we have to take. Good. Yeah.
This isn't your rant, is it?
No, no, this isn't my rant at all. It's just an interesting sort of thought process I was having while you were telling that story. What's quite interesting about it is that the whole thing is a bit of a masterclass from Donald Trump on how to position yourself and how to move position really quickly because it was actually him that proposed banning TikTok. Originally, he called for it. All his little Republican friends in the Senate rushed off to build a case for banning TikTok, and they said, oh, it's an asset of the communist Chinese media, and they're using it to infiltrate is maybe.
But I still.
Like jury's out. It's fun. Um, and then, you know, so lo and behold, they put together this case. Uh, it goes through, it goes through, it goes through, it gets stalled. And then Biden rushes in and says, well, I'm Biden. I can get things done. I'll push it through. And then at the very last minute, all the Republicans have pivoted and are now very, very, very pro TikTok and think that Biden is evil for banning it. And it is brilliant. I think it's I think it's.
A bit of a reach to say that they're very, very pro TikTok.
I mean, I mean.
Trump said he'll probably reverse the ban, didn't he?
That's suddenly a free speech issue. And you know.
Do you think it is.
I can't see how I think it's a really.
Do you think that the bottom line is that TikTok is listening to us when we don't realise it. And we've discussed this before, like when Facebook doing the same thing, it's listening to conversations without, without, without telling us. And that information is somehow finding its way back to, I mean, you know, if people in the Chinese Communist Party want to know about, um, the fantastic veggie curry that Cameron made last night, and we discussed that at great length and, you know, all power to them.
I think you've got two things here. Haven't you said the national security angle is the angle that the Democrats.
Don't want on the on the battery. Go on.
Sorry. And to be fair, the Republicans are like some Republicans are very concerned about that. Like you say, it's listening to everything. And then on the other side of the fence, you've got a bunch of people that are somehow conflating this with free speech and saying, oh, if you ban TikTok, you've banned all the people on TikTok from having their say somehow. Although, again, I'm not really clear on how a platform is in any way important in any of that, because those people can just go on to Instagram or Facebook. But like I say, I do think it's quite interesting how this, you know, what was once very much a sort of like Republicans want to ban, TikTok has suddenly been spun very deftly. It's very clever. And then now, suddenly on the side of all the TikTokers fighting for their freedom. And it's a bit of political masterclass there.
Apparently, Biden welcomed Trump to the white House today for the ceremony and said, welcome home.
Yeah, it's a bit weird. Yeah, it's a little odd. They've taken this whole like, losing with grace and taking the moral high ground thing very, very, very seriously. And maybe it'll pay off, I don't know. I'm not a political commentator.
There's there's room in politics for that, for just being a bit more grown up about it. Will politicians ever realise that the childish, tit for tat type approach to politics is just people like you and I, and we're just kind of fed up with it. Just it's a massive turn off.
I think probably it's the majority.
fourteen.
Years of Tory.
Chaos, all that bullshit.
You know. Well, I think probably the majority of people it works on. I mean, maybe not the fourteen years of. But certainly what Trump and his ilk do that Democrats are trying to rob you of your essential freedoms. They're trying to ruin America. There's a border crisis. There's illegal aliens coming for your job. I mean, I think all of that stuff's really powerful, isn't it? Unfortunately it works. So being grown up works when both sides are grown up. But if you're there playing the grown up and somebody else is saying that man's trying to rob you, you lose again and again and again. And that's the bit that Democrats don't seem to realise.
It's been such an interesting sort of seven days, hasn't it? Yeah, maybe seven days, maybe slightly more than that. When did Trudeau stand down?
That was.
Last. Last week. Within the last seven days.
Yeah, I think so.
Trudeau's gone. A CEO Mark Carney's trying to become he.
Is making head honcho.
In Canada. Yeah yeah.
Yeah. The Liberal.
Party. Such a fantastic job at the Bank of England didn't they.
Did I just really like the segue. I like that you can go from economists like we're in such a like blatant late stage of capitalism that you can just go from like economists to a world Bank to prime minister of a country. And that's just everyone's like, cool, chill. Yeah, absolutely. Want bankers running the show?
What could go wrong? Yeah. Okay. So there was we kind of almost turned that into a chat about digital marketing. What, what interesting digital marketing things have you got to talk about today? Have you got anything at all?
Well, like I say.
I can talk about some of the trivial things I've got in my list. Before you move on to your big rant, if you want, I can move on.
Such a big rant. I wouldn't frame it like that because you'll be disappointed that.
You framed.
It. I said I have a rant, I didn't say it was a rant. Let's make it the centerpiece of the podcast.
Is it something we can discuss or is it literally just a sermon?
No, I think it's something you'll have an opinion on. I hope it's something you'll have an opinion.
Opinion on most things. So yeah, go on.
Um, I'll try and explain it. It starts on LinkedIn. So we've bitched a lot about the kind of rubbish that people post on LinkedIn. I saw a particularly bad example this morning was the head of a large agency based in Leeds.
You keep talking about agencies in Leeds.
Manchester and New York.
Okay, I'm just gonna narrow it down, but mainly Leeds, but.
Mainly.
Leeds.
And they were basically like saying that their mind had been blown because they were in a sales call with their co-manager, co-managing director or whatever.
And a couple of people from the agency were in a sales call with a potential customer.
Yeah, right. And he'd said that they're different.
So everyone, I'll translate his gobbledygook.
The agency's difference, their differentiator was that they didn't they weren't led by data. They were led by what markets and people really thought and what people really wanted, which I thought sounded like. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. That. That's not a differentiation.
Must be quite busy people.
Yeah. It's but it highlighted something that sort of harks back to that whole Michael Gove thing about people are tired of experts that I've been hearing a lot recently, which is that people are tired of data. That data is misleading. Um, well.
Rory Sutherland, our messiah. Yeah, he does speak about this.
Yeah. And that you're better sort of running on sort of anecdotal. And I don't think that's what Rory Sutherland saying, by the way, but it's how a lot of people seem to be interpreting this new sort of soundbite in marketing is that you sort of rely on anecdotal evidence from quizzing a couple of customers and base your marketing strategy.
On that out to everybody.
And then you can just completely ignore the hard data, which is difficult to analyse and difficult to sift through. And you can just go with your gut. And that is, I think, deeply, emotionally resonant for a lot of people, business people and marketing people. I think it's a really easy sell. Um, I also think it's just weirdly dangerous. And, and what sort of brought this home to me was, you know, that we've been doing a piece of CRM analysis for a client where we've been sort of picking through their CRM and saying, okay, of all of your leads and enquiries over the last couple of years, which of them? Um, you know, what patterns or trends can we see in that? And how can we extrapolate from that? How should it guide your marketing strategy? So do people from certain industries enquire more regularly to. People from certain industries tend to buy from you more frequently, that sort of thing. Um, and, you know, we went into that project in a similar vein, you know, the people in the company had various preconceived notions of what would come out of the other end of it. They all had their sort of internal biases. They all said, oh, well, I feel like this is what you'll find. Um, and then what came out at the end of it was in fact, very, very different from all of that. And it's just that thing. And I don't know where you sit on this, where obviously you've got that sort of constant tension between do you, do you sort of like dive into the data and just try and prove everything, do everything very statistically? Is there merit in sort of saying, oh, well, actually our key differentiator is that we don't look at data. Um, it's the answer just that there has to be a middle ground. I don't know, it's just one of those interesting things that seems to be coming up in conversation a lot at the moment in marketing.
I think the chances are, um, and obviously I'm coming at this called, um, an interesting subject. Thank you for that. I'm coming at this cold, I guess. Um, my initial reaction is that you will win sometimes.
Mhm.
Um, but could you have won more often if you'd at least leveraged to use a modern word, the um the data. Yeah. So if you just outright guess, you know, and, and just have a hunch and let's face it, some of the best decisions people have made in business over the millennia have been nothing more than a hunch. And it's worked. Yeah. And it's been the right hunch. They just tapping into their experience. What they hear, the mood music, what the the way that they interpret data, whether it's media coming at them, whether it's, you know, um, conversations that are involved with coming at them and they interpret that data. It's data still, isn't it?
It is data. We're imparting.
Data now. I mean, it's gibberish and it's bullshit. Most of it. But we are giving giving out. We're providing data for people. So if you interpret the data around you as opposed to the data in the spreadsheet in the database by checking some SQL queries on it, um, maybe that's what they mean. Maybe maybe it's just a different kind of data that they're looking at.
I don't know, I think, but then, you know, you sort of hark back to a really persistent myth in marketing that I think everybody is familiar with, which is, you know, sort of like loads of sort of like swotty geeky analysts sitting around and typing away and then, you know, sort of in blazes the like maverick head of marketing who's like, just forget about it, guys. Like I was talking to someone on the street and they said this, and we're going to change the brand to green and it'll have a smiley face on it. And sales skyrocketed. And we did three hundred percent turnover. And it was, you know, I mean, that nonsense myth is really persistent that if you just sort of throw away all the boring data and go with your gut, you'll, you'll definitely win. And I just, I don't know, I just feel like now sort of people are trying to like sort of hark back to that and sort of almost say, well, you know, we failed to deliver for you for the last sort of five or six years using this sort of very data driven approach. So now we're going to discard that language and sell you this other thing, which is instinctive sort of market led. It just, I don't know, it just feels a little bit I don't really know where I sit on that because I've said some of those things too in the past. Um, I definitely think people do get dragged down sort of weird rabbit holes, looking at data in too much detail and trying to sort of infer insights that aren't really there. So I don't really know that I have like a sort of solution or a real problem with it. It just, it just seems like a very sort of, you know, current thing that everybody's decided they're going to peddle. And I don't really know how appealing notion. Yeah.
Rather than analyzing data, you just kind of go, hmm, I reckon, yeah, yeah, let's do.
This and that. You know, if you do get dragged down into the data, you'll lose some of that. So it's better to stay completely apart from it. I mean, I think part of it is just that the data is very complicated, isn't it? I mean, we have as an industry been very guilty of sort of throwing spreadsheets and charts and graphs and things that people are expecting them to interpret it so well.
Yeah, you've got situation where we've got um, a surfeit of data. We've got so much data that we are struggling maybe to sift it to just filter out the bits that are important. And there's a danger, I think maybe as well that you, you, you filter out the bits that are important, but then go, but there must be more to it than this. You know, I must be missing something because there's so much data there. Surely this bit that I've filtered out isn't the really important bit. And maybe it is. Um, I'm not sure. Um, it's there must be so much data stored in the cloud. Yeah. You know, around, uh, every, you know, around us all everywhere that, that just never sees the light of day, you know, we, we store it, we, we capture certain certain data points because we can. And I think we've, we've, we've had this toy where we can capture ever more data points. Um, and yet, as you've said before, when we've talked about, um, attribution. Yeah. Sometimes, you know, with all of this data, we still don't really know how that person became a customer because.
So the data.
Is huge gaps in it. Yeah.
It is data is flawed and the data is complicated. And like you say, it's a bit of a maze and you can accidentally discard really useful bits without realising it. And, and I think all of that has sort of combined to lead people to a place where instead of saying, I'm going to be a bit skeptical of data, they're sort of saying, well, I'm just going to throw it all out with the bathwater.
And I've mentioned before, um, a SaaS project that I'm involved with, it's been on the go for years now. It's got customers, it's doing okay. It's nothing doesn't set the heather on fire. It's called alert eyes. So it's like the word alert with I s e on the end.
So I was gonna say subtle plug, but then it turned into.
No, I'm not. It is a plug. I mean, why wouldn't I plug it? I own half of it. Uh, alerts dot com. So it's a, it's a strategy execution tool. Sure. but one of the bits of it are that once you've established what you want to do, where to play, how to win, you can then use data from the ONS or the Australian Statistical Society or whatever it's called, or the whatever the one called in America. I can't remember the name of it, but you can use data to back up.
Yeah.
So we think this and then you go and look at the data and yeah, the data is maybe not conclusive, but it's supporting what we think is going to happen. If we do X, we think Y is going to happen. The data supporting us. That's a really good use of data I think.
I think so as long as you're willing.
Another example that we often use when we were talking about it is, for example, a company might, we might look at, say, um, our income and we say, well, you know, in our industry say, and we say, oh, it's sort of gradually declining. What are we doing wrong? Then you go and look at the data. Yeah. That's about the industry in general, and it's falling off a cliff, and our gradual decline is actually bucking the trend. So you can use, you know, you can use data and it's useful in lots of ways. I don't think this company, this other agency in with offices in Leeds, Manchester and Madrid, but mainly Leeds, I are necessarily wrong. I kind of admire that ballsy approach.
I mean, I was mainly annoyed by the fact that they were like, my mind was blown by this insight. And the insight was that you want to ignore data. And I was like.
Yeah, that's hardly an insight, is it? I mean, that's just somebody trying to spin something and trying to kind of conjure up a guru esque persona for themselves.
Yeah, absolutely. But I mean, I think you point to a couple of really interesting things there. And the first is that like, yeah, like context is everything with data. Like you can find something that appears to demonstrate a trend. And then as soon as you sort of zoom out one level, it's like, oh, actually the opposite is true. Or like you say, if you look at it compared to the industry as a whole or whatever. Yeah. And the other thing is just that whole idea of sort of, um, drawing conclusions from data where you want the data to say something. So you go and find data that backs up your assumption or your theory. And I think that's really dangerous, right? It's like data for research is fantastic, but what a lot of marketers do. And to be fair, in the past I've been guilty of this trap too, is you want to say to somebody, well, this is going to work for you. So you go and find statistics to back it up. And as we mentioned before, there is a lot of data out there. So you will find statistics to back pretty much anything up really, as long as you look at it in a certain way.
There's a guy on TikTok, an engineer guy that I follow. Um, and he makes good humor comedy out of being an engineer. And he was talking about statistics and he was talking about how you can use statistics. And he said, like, apparently one in five babies born in the world are Chinese. So if you've got a friend who's got four kids, the chances are their next kid will be Chinese. Statistically speaking, I thought that was quite funny.
Yeah. Um, but yeah, I think they are. It's a useful research tool for sure. I think you just have to be very careful not to sort of accidentally prove your own incorrect assumption.
Yeah. The flip side of all that talk about data is that we very often, um, start engagements with new customers and they are blissfully unaware of some very useful data that's at their fingertips, like search console data, for example. It's a simple example. Or the data hiding underneath the, the hood of their PPC campaign that's been running itself for the last six months or twelve months or whatever. Do you know what I mean? There's so there's, there's two. Yeah, there's, there's a flip side to it. There's to, to like, we're not going to use data, but like some, some of this stuff is just sat there and it's just, it's silly not to use it.
I suppose at the end of the day, it's always about finding the middle ground, isn't it? Unfortunately, there's no sort of like nice sort of you can't take a view one way or the other. Sometimes it's useful, sometimes it's not.
But speaking about data in a in a only slightly different way, I suppose. Did you read at all and see last week that that the Serp scraping agencies. Sorry. Serp scraping companies and I'll explain what that is in a minute. Um were being blocked by Google. Has that been. Have they now been unblocked by Google. Has it now been fixed. Nobody basically tools like SEMrush which we use and Ahrefs, etc. you can put like a bunch of keywords in there and these tools will go and carry out search. The robots will carry out the searches, scrape the results, and report back. Ah, you're currently at position three for this phrase. You're at position four. And they'll do that very rarely. Every twenty four hours they'll go and scrape and scrape and do it. And Google apparently has been fed up with this. And so tools like SEMrush and I guess all of the all of them Ahrefs, a lot of them, they've basically blocked the robots from scraping the Serp results. So you can no longer do the rank tracking.
Well, what I'd heard about it, and I don't think as of now, I don't think there's a sort of confirmed Google statement about it. But what I was reading about it basically suggested that what Google had tried to do is stop a load of the AI language models from scraping search results and in doing so, inadvertently, or perhaps sort of coincidentally, blocked. Well, yeah, maybe for them it was a sort of like, oh, well, what a shame. You know, I don't think they set out to block SEMrush and people like that. If they'd wanted to, they could have done that a very long time ago. I think probably what's more likely is that this sort of explosion of large language models that people are building and variants of ChatGPT and putting their own spin on it and then asking them, oh, go and crawl the web. Well, yeah, absolutely. But that's different because it's Google, you know, sending them out to go and crawl. The web was probably putting a tremendous strain on Google. So what I'd read about it was basically suggesting that they'd tried to figure out a way of sort of cleverly blocking that from happening and had inadvertently blocked a load of other stuff. But it was certainly yeah, everybody was very doom and gloom about it for a while last week, weren't they? They were sort of up in arms because all the tools were saying that there wasn't much volatility in the in the sort of SERPs and that everything was hunky dory. And then people were saying, but my website's dropped thirty places in two hours, you know, what's going on. So yeah.
I was, um, watching a bit of TV at the weekend. Um, it could have been the last Kingdom, could have been and an advert came on, I think it was an advert came on. Oh no, no, because that's on Netflix. I was watching something else and an advert came on advert. Well on streaming TV as well I know. Yeah.
Tell me about it.
And it was talking about it was it was demonstrating the Gemini app, which I for some reason I hadn't downloaded to my phone. We do use Gemini, we use Google workspace and we use Gemini. You know, fans, you might say maybe you're not. Um, but there's an app I haven't showed these people using the Gemini. Oh, it's silly not having it. So I downloaded it. Great. So I'll keep it simple. Gemini what's the weather going to be like in Aboyne tomorrow? And it told me what the weather was going to be like in a completely different place somewhere in Milwaukee or Massachusetts or somewhere like I mean it. So, you know, it was quite funny. Um, and, you know, other people will, will recognise, I mean, I'm, I'm English and I've got an English accent, northern English accent. You've probably got a northern English accent as well, you know. Leslie sat there and she speaks French with a lovely, lovely. Speaks English with a lovely French accent. I don't know how you find them, but like when you're trying to ask these tools to help you, it's always been the same. I mean, to be fair, I've had problems with humans as well. It's not just AI, um, not understanding the language, the accent. Yeah. And therefore really struggling to be anything other than a complete joke.
The difference is if you ask somebody a question in your northern English accent and they don't understand you, they will generally say, sorry.
Hey, where's your.
Whippet? I didn't.
Usually, why haven't you got a flat cap on?
Sorry, I didn't understand you or, you know, please, could you repeat? Yeah.
No, no, I didn't do that.
Confidently giving you an incorrect.
Give me the weather in a completely different place on the other side of the world.
Today, I am a big fan of Gemini because just before this podcast, Julie and I were in a meeting and she asked her Gemini assistant to sit in and she said to her Gemini assistant, please assign all the tasks for this job to Alex. And at the end of the meeting, it did the opposite. Pretended I didn't exist and assigned them all to Julie, to which I said, fantastic.
That is quite funny. That is good. Yeah. So the Google blocking, um, Serp scraping, um, thing might be affecting people because I am guilty of, of cross checking, um, Serp results, SERPs in SEMrush to see, you know, if we are broadly speaking, progressing or broadly speaking, in decline or whatever for certain areas of the business that we're trying to improve in search.
See, again, you know, back to the whole data thing, that's a fantastic way of using that data, right? Because that data is it's not hugely accurate, but it does, it does suggest trends and that's useful. Yeah. Where it's not wise to use SEMrush is when you log on to your SEMrush account and see that your website has dropped one place for something in Zimbabwe and decide to ring your SEO agency and shout at them because you've lost a ranking that is not a good use. And again, it's just that thing, isn't it? It's like people drill right in and they think this data must be true or it must be false. And the idea that it's sort of suggestive of a trend and that you need to look at it in aggregate, it's just completely foreign.
Working on some stuff just now with Phil, our team almost tame.
Not really tame.
He's not really tame and he's doing some fantastic stuff for a client. And it struck me, you know, when you run a business and other business, people listening to this might might be able to identify with it, but, you know, it doesn't have to be in our space in the digital marketing software type space that we're in. Um, but we're doing some software development for this company who are a billion dollar company. And very quickly, we've solved some gnarly problems for them and given them some dashboards. And, you know, we're taking live data that's coming in from national infrastructure. I won't go into any more detail than that and creating these fabulous dashboards and things. Um, and it struck me like how fab it is when you're a wee business, like twelve of us all told, you're a wee business and you're producing stuff that these big companies have been really struggling with. Yeah. And it's down to people at the end of the day. I mean, Phil is a whiz when it comes to, you know, not only writing code, but the speed with which he can produce results and write nice software that does genuinely useful stuff. And so much so that the guy's taking it to somebody more senior than him. And when he showed him it, he was blown away and said, ah, I've got this other thing. I this other problem I need solving. Um, can I throw that at you as well to have a look at? Um, but you know, I'm not here. It's not, it's not a brag. It's not meant to sound like that.
He never lavishes this much praise on me, but. Correct, Correct.
Moving on. Um, yeah. So it's not really it's not bragging, but it's just like a warm fuzzy feeling when, you know, when little tiny businesses do really useful, fabulous work for massive businesses and the massive businesses, you know, appreciate it usually, uh, not always. Um, and yeah, I just, I'm sure all the people listening will get, you know, identify with that. There's nothing really more much to say about it. I mean, I could go into more detail about the project, but, you know, we rescued it, we fixed it, we've turned it into something way better than it ever was. Um, completely rewritten this software, if we're honest. Um, but it's been, it's been, it's been a really enjoyable process.
I mean, that's the thing, isn't it? Ultimately, at the end of the day, it's just people helping other people solve problems. And that's, you know, that's the nice bit, isn't it? I think all of us as humans get a real buzz out of either sort of directly helping or being the cause for a problem being solved. It's a nice feeling.
Agreed. Yeah. What else have you got on your list? Oh. That's right. Nothing.
No. Absolutely.
Um, we, um, are currently in conversation once again with a potential investor, which I think you're aware of. As I mentioned it last year. Um, and the most recent conversation I had with him, I've had various conversations with them and the picture that was painted was that we would be joining a network of agencies.
The picture that's being painted now.
They are trying to build a network of agencies and haven't yet bought any agencies.
Fantastic.
They're they are definitely they're genuine people. The investment company behind the people I'm speaking to are genuine. I mean, nice people. Don't get me wrong, I don't imagine for one second they listen to this, but this podcast, um, so nice people and and it's not dead in the water. It just.
Takes.
Time. Why would people, when you're trying to build trust and this does directly relate to digital marketing. Why? When you're trying to build trust, would you do something that, when challenged, meant that you had to do a volte face and say, well, yeah, no, actually we there is no urgency. I mean, I kind of said, look, I believe, you know, you've acquired some agencies. They're all now part of this, the main agency nor the major agency that was at the core at the start. They're all basically subsumed, consumed whatever by that, that single entity. And it's like, no, no, we haven't actually bought any agencies. I mean, you know, I didn't imagine it. They definitely said this.
So it's I think the answer is unfortunately, there again, it's people being people, isn't it? We want the immediate dopamine rush of being able to say, we're big boys and we're doing something cool. Don't you want to be part of that? And then when they realise that they actually have to do something. It all fizzles out.
I mean, surely they would have realised, you know, during due diligence. But this you know what, I guess where I'm going with that, if probably nowhere but where I'm going with it is like the digital marketing that we do is a lot of it is storytelling. Some of it is like producing content, which it does tell a story, but primarily it kind of talks about expertise, social proof, case studies, that kind of thing. But broadly speaking, it's it's storytelling, isn't it? A lot of the work that we do is storytelling.
I think all of.
Them, if you're going to tell stories, just tell stories that are true, that you can that you can back up.
But they're boring. I think this is the honest truth. I think this is what's happening, isn't it? It's like if you if you're post-truth means, yeah, we're in a Trump world now and we can totally like, um, not.
Quite yet, but probably in the next ten minutes.
Give him ten minutes. Yeah. Let him climb the stairs. Yeah. Um, I think the part of the problem is that if you're primarily fixated on the first impression, was it you I was talking to about first and last impressions recently?
It might have been. It does ring a bell.
But if you're primarily fixated on the first impression, as in like wowing somebody, you know, blowing their socks off, making them think, wow, these guys are really cool. I definitely want to work with them. Then you will tell whatever sort of like, um, vaguely twisted version of the truth you need to tell to get an enquiry. And a lot of the time you do see business owners, marketing managers, people like that sit and sort of have these conversations and they'll sort of like amp themselves up and be like, do you know what? We should just, we should just sort of, uh, overemphasise the truth a bit, you know, and we'll just tell a better story, a cooler play.
Fast and loose with the truth.
And if all you want is the initial enquiry, then that probably works quite well. I think what a lot of people forget is that there's a follow up where you then have to start working with someone and they will say, how come you said you could do this, but it doesn't look like you can? Or have you ever really done something on this scale before and you have to backtrack or explain it away? It's easy to put yourself in that position. Yeah, I think we've all done it.
I think the I think the underlying thing from that is just, you know, honesty is the best policy. Just just tell it like it is because we we were talking about that earlier. Like one of the, I think one of the things that's brought us the success that we've had, uh, with red evolution is we just straight easy. Well, I know I had on my list, you know, about am I tricky to deal with? And we took what we were talking about. I said to you, I sometimes think there are people out there, probably more than one person out there, a few people out there who might think I'm a bit tricky to deal with.
To which I said, we have a fan club. Yeah. That's right. Yeah.
Well, I, I know, I dispute.
It.
I dispute being the fact that I'm tricky, but I'm, I'm straight talking and honest and I don't mean. Oh, I don't suffer fools gladly and all that bullshit, which. Because like when people say I just.
Excuse for being a bitch.
Yeah, yeah. I just think they're dicks. And people, when they say, oh, yeah, we'd be very careful. He doesn't suffer fools gladly. Oh, he's obviously a fool. Um, because it's just such a I don't know, it's such a wanky thing to say, but, um, but I think there's a difference between that and being straight talking, telling it like it is, you know, saying, I don't know when you don't know something and saying, I think this is I think this is the direction we need to go in because and it's, you're not trying to bullshit people and pull the wool over their eyes or, you know, it's just just straight, you know, this is this like, don't do that because it's not going to work, do this instead kind of thing. Um, and so yeah, I kind of lost my thread a little bit, but you know, this idea of just like not being tricky as in being economical with the truth in order to try and get something. And we're not talking about digital marketing agencies. I'm talking about any business, just sales people. Be be honest, you know, be, be straight talking and honest. Surely that's in the, in the, in the time that we, that we are living, the times that we are in which we are living. Surely there's room for that when when we are surrounded by people who will bend over backwards to communicate something that's untrue and try and make it sound true. I consume a lot of talk radio, and when people call in with obviously with an agenda and they're trying to bend something to suit their point of view, and you just think, oh, you know, so in business, if you're trying to kind of develop your messaging, develop your website, all that kind of stuff, you know, then start with like straight talking, no nonsense approach. I think.
I think it's just tricky because it's different with, with web marketing to talking to people because there's less sort of it's not a conversation. You're talking at somebody with a website, right? But I think certainly like in conversations that you have with people, I think one of the things I would say is I do think, and this isn't me brown nosing. I think it unfortunately does require quite a lot of bravery to do something like. Well, actually, I'm not sure this is the right direction, because when you do that and people are in a conversation and they're all getting along and everyone's agreeing with each other, and they're all saying getting excited about something and enthusiastic, and you feel like you're pulling in the same direction. And then somebody pulls the brakes and they say, whoa, hang on a second. What if what if all this is wrong? What if we've made some really stupid assumptions here?
You checked the data and you give. Oh, I know the data says this, but I don't think the data's right and we're going to ignore it.
We looked in your search console and Jesus Christ.
Superstar.
But, um, you, you, you pump the brakes, you give everybody a, you create a moment where everybody can reflect. And often the outcome of those situations is that people say, oh, I no longer want to continue this conversation. You know, they're like, oh, this was a bit shocking. I didn't expect the conversation to go in this direction. I now feel uncomfortable. I've lost faith in the process. I'm not excited. I'm not enthusiastic. So I'm going to back out. And I think a lot of people are just very frightened of creating those moments. You know, I catch myself doing it a lot. You know, I know somebody saying something that is categorically untrue. And I have a limited window to tell them that what they're saying is wrong. And it's like, you can feel it coming up and you're like, I really don't wanna do this because it's going to be really awkward. You have to. But I think it is difficult, and I think a lot of sales and marketing people are very guilty of this. You know, they they've got the client on side. They don't want to turn around and say, well, actually just sort of hold on a second. Yeah. But yeah, like you say, you can't really get away. You have to then live with the consequences of doing that, I think.
Okay. Um, I have got some other stuff on the list. Like we've done some work on our, um, agency management system. We wrote our own agency management system that gives me and everybody else, for that matter, a heads up on the financial situation, i.e. what work have we got? What's it worth? What's the billing this month looking like? All that kind of stuff. I might talk about that next time because I was going to suggest like maybe just talking about what we've created with that bit of software, because I think it would, I think it would probably work for most professional services businesses. I'm going to park it for now anyway, but I might, um, that might come up in the next in the next podcast perhaps. So I think we've been blabbing on now for about forty minutes, which is short for us, but there's no point keeping talking just for the sake of it, is there? Oh, maybe we should.
Maybe we should. What would you like to talk about? Is there anything on your mind?
Metal detecting was fun at the weekend.
Was it? Did you find anything?
Ice forming on my shaft?
Oh, yeah. Well.
This is that funny?
Disuse will do that.
It's quite amazing being out as it gets dark and it starts to get frosty because it was fairly cold on Saturday night and yes, last night as well. And being aware that, you know, the metal detector is starting to form ice on it.
You actually.
Feel the temperature.
Dropping.
The grass is starting to become crunchy. And it was, it was really special because it's, you know, pitch black apart from the head torch, turn the head torch off, look at the stars and everything else. Because although and if anyone is a metal detectorist, um, no, we weren't nighthawking we were actually metal detecting on some land we've got permission to detect on Nighthawking.
Is that a.
Thing? Yeah. Nighthawking is when you metal detect, you need permission from the landowner to go metal detecting.
Dig up.
Wherever it.
Is.
In Scotland. You've got a right to roam. But not so you could walk across fields and do whatever you want, but not to metal detecting dig. And there are some sites that are actually scheduled. There's a couple of scheduled sites not a million miles from where we're at right now. If you go on them with a metal detector, um, then you finish up in prison, right? Um, and certainly with a hefty fine as well, but there are people who take that risk and rather than try and get permission, they'll do some research, establish the sites of historical interest, and it might be worth detecting, and they'll wait till the dead of night and they'll go out with no torches or anything and nighthawk.
And dig in the dark. Yeah.
Well, I mean, we do we go out digging in the dark, but we have a head torch on.
Yeah.
And it's actually quite good. I've always liked night fishing. The world is such a different place when there's nobody else there and it's pitch black.
I do feel it's fantastic.
It's really, really special. So, you know, relatively new to metal detecting. So I mean, to do it to do that then is fab. Didn't find anything exciting at the weekend.
You probably did, but you just tossed it behind you in the dark, a.
Few toasted coins and things like that. But I found I found this, you know, the reason my e-bike I got this problem with my e-bike is that's where I'd gone. I'd done some research and established this place, which is right next to a scheduled site. Um, and I cycled up there to see if I could find the landowner and have a chat, which I did, and found them. And because it's right next to a site that's of particular interest is scheduled. And um, a very old coin was found ten years ago in the paddock in the field from um the reign of King David II of Scotland. So I think it's fourteen hundred and something. So I really wanted him permission. And, and one of the hard things about metal detecting is getting permissions, as they're called permissions in the parlance of metal detectorists. So you're like, oh yes, I've got one of my local permissions or I've got a new permission, which is from the landowner. But it's tricky.
Do you, like, hoard them like you do?
Guard them? I mean, because if you what you've got to do is you've got to go and ask a complete stranger if you can walk around on their land digging holes.
And once he's granted it to one of you, he granted it to.
That's just that's just it. If if I get a permission, which we've got permission from the farm's right adjacent to our house and we've got permission on there. But that doesn't mean I can just say, oh, come on, guys, there's a couple of guys.
You probably want to do the opposite.
You kind of do because you don't want to spoil it for yourself. But if you want, if I wanted to take anyone on, I would then I would say, I would say to Graham, like, can I invite, um, Matthew and Dave to come detecting with us on Sunday on, on your fields that you've given me permission to go on. Yeah, yeah, that's no problem kind of thing. But one of the things about metal detecting is you've got to, you know, you've got to start conversations with strangers. You see what I did there? Do you see what I did there?
Yeah.
Just like digital marketing. You've got to start conversations with strangers and you've slightly different digital marketing now. But I mean, around here, there aren't many detectorists. So the chances are you go and speak to a farmer or a landowner and they'll be like, I'm not really keen or yeah, no problem. Yeah. You know, and you'd always like.
Do they understand? Do they, do they know the.
Recommended ways to take your kit with you and some of the things you've found in the past. So you say, I've got my detector here, I can show you it. I can show you some of the things I've found and so on. But you have to be prepared to start a conversation with a stranger. And that conversation might go something like, no, bugger off. You know what I mean? They might, they might just like you like. And it happens a lot down in England in certain places like East Anglia and Norfolk and all around there, because there's like lots of activity been down there. There's Anglo, Saxon and Roman and all sorts of stuff down there. And the farmers just sick to death of being asked. So they are likely to be quite rude. So it is a side of this hobby that I've really kind of become quite enthusiastic about, which isn't great, but this idea of starting conversations.
With strangers, this idea of nighthawking, there's like these rogue metal detectorists creeping around at night. Yeah.
No, they genuinely do. I mean, it's that side of detecting that archaeologists get really fed up about.
But if you found anything, surely at some point somebody would ask, well, where did you get that? Ah.
I can tell you how they do that now. My brother in law has been a detectorist for about twenty years, and he was on a dig once because you get organised, digs, rallies. So he was on a dig once and he said this guy had disappeared way off in the corner. And then lo and behold, he found, I found this golden cross. And, and it was, it was all very suspicious. And what they think had happened is he's basically taken it with him, dug a hole, chucked it in. I mean, I don't know if you watched the series detectorists that happened on that series, right. He found some gold in a field and then and didn't declare it because he didn't want like the archaeologists to say, right, you've got to stay off it now or anything else. And then realised he'd done the wrong thing. So he took it back to the field, reburied it just before a rally, and then tried to find it. But somebody else found it, which was quite funny. But so yeah, so that's, that's hawkers. If they found something really valuable rather than trying to sell it on the black market, they would then sort of, um, launder it by finding it again sort of thing, you know.
Amazing.
It is a really enjoyable holiday. I tell you who's more enthusiastic. Me almost is Caron.
Yeah. Well that's an excuse to be outside.
It is an excuse to be outside and in the winter you need them, you know. And it is a hobby you can do in the daylight or in the dark, which is great. Very good. Lots of other hobbies like that. But we won't go into that right now. Yeah. I can't think of anything else other than I should stop talking.
Now before we move on.
You've been listening to Dave and Alex. I think there was a tiny little bit of digital marketing in there amongst all the other stuff, uh, in amongst the politics and the metal detecting and everything else and the, um, philosophical rants from Alex. Anyway, thanks for listening and, uh, speak soon.