Surviving AI Search Results and Making the Right CMS Choice for Your Business – Episode 142

We use SEMrush to monitor the search. It's a tool that agencies use or anybody can use. If you want to subscribe to it, to check out what websites rank for and all that kind of stuff. It keeps showing that we are number one for the search. What is HubSpot? And the little star tells us we're in the AI results. It's obviously there a lot of the time, but then suddenly it'll be like, now you're at position ten and you're not in the AI results. It does seem to bounce around a lot. Tell me about the strategy. What did you learn when you when you researched for this edition of The Signal?

It was basically just about what to do in Google Analytics to find out if you are getting traffic or if your audience are coming to you via like AI engines.

Okay, welcome back to Digital Marketing From The Coalface that microphones at a funny angle because you're so small. Much, much smaller than Alex. As you might hear, Alex hasn't changed his voice. That is, in fact, Julie Mitchell, who's joining me this week because Alex is there. We'll learn that. Nobody will understand that. Well, we've got some Scottish listeners, I suppose, so they might.

Be aberdonian to understand.

That they would actually. Yeah. I'm delighted that Julie's joined me because she's very organised and she'll have a fantastic list of topics because mine are, well, shit.

Basically, I'm looking at a very blank piece of, oh, there are notes, there are secrets.

You see what Alex does? He doesn't prepare any notes. I put my notes there and he reads them even though they're upside down to him, because he on the other side of the table and he nicks. My ideas.

Are. Well, I'm not going to nick your ideas so you can show them. I can just like. Yeah, but.

If I show you them, then I can't surprise you and make you go, oh, like that when I ask you questions. So it's all about it's all about none of mine is about digital marketing anyway. It's all about the fire service and the council and all sorts of stuff.

Don't get me started on the council.

So you decided that you would cheat and use the most recent edition of our fantastic newsletter.

Newsletter went out today.

Tell everybody how they can get access to our newsletter.

Julie they can't yet because certain people haven't written the CTA to go on the blog to let people sign up for the newsletter.

So you've gone into jargon mode already.

I know.

People who listen to this don't know what CTA.

Is. They can get it on on LinkedIn if they follow Red evolution on LinkedIn. They will get it there.

Sounds like experimental stroke. Badly organised.

No, no. It's um, there are people, some of whom are in this room and some of whom are um, not well, are supposed to have written a CTA to go in the blog post to sign up for the newsletter.

You can't put that on me, surely. Um, anyway, this newsletter, it's basically your take on things that people are talking about related to digital marketing, and you kind of create a little synopsis and maybe link out if there's more information elsewhere, that sort of thing.

It's the, the stuff that's been going on in, um, in the world of digital marketing.

So people who listen to this, although it's called digital marketing from the coalface. They expect in-depth political debate, philosophical debate. They don't really expect digital marketing.

I know it's a bit disappointing. I lost their running podcast that I listen to um, a lot. It's my favourite podcast and they very, very occasionally speak about running.

Ah, so it's not just us.

No, no.

Okay, so it's not just us that do this self-indulgent tosh that nobody.

Listens to when they when they speak about running for too long, they kind of apologise.

For it.

And one of the hosts mothers, um, actually complained one week because it was far too much running content in the running podcast. So yeah, it's not just us.

It's kind of what we've, we've gone for you here, Alex and I record it. I won't, I won't flatter myself and suggest you ever listen to the podcast. You should. They're very good. Um, I listen to them and I like them and I'm in them. But yeah, we've kind of gone over the last, I guess six or seven months, maybe even the last twelve months. We've gone from like flirting with digital marketing subjects, which we talk about. And sometimes, you know, Alex especially have a real rant about something that's really annoyed him. Probably AI related knowing Alex. And so we do talk about digital marketing and stuff, but we've just increasingly found ourselves wandering off into all kinds of subjects, which is quite good fun.

I think that's better to listen to than because it's like listening to the radio, or it's like I have a podcast on in the car, or when I'm going out for a run or whatever, and it's like just having your pals with you to having a chat. And I think that's a really nice format.

I don't listen to Karen and I went to a dig, you know, we've started metal detecting and we went to a dig down at Strathmiglo in Fife. I'm pretty sure it's Fife. It's on the more or less fife, I think. No, it is Fife.

It may or may not be Fife.

Yeah. It's not.

It's.

Not. I'm sure it's not.

They call it clacks do they.

Clackmannanshire. Okay. Um anyway coming back she said oh it was a really good podcast. I fancy she listens to. The rest is history which she loves. They are, they are very good podcasts. If anybody wants a really interesting take on historical events, uh, the rest is history is very good. And it was about, um, like the real Downton Abbey, what it was actually like to work in the big houses, and it was brilliant. And they had a guest on talking about it. And it's a subject that I, I when Karen suggested, I thought, oh yeah, it might be all right that long drive. Well, not a longish drive. And that's to me ideal for podcasts, but I just got drawn in. And it is, I think the conversational style of podcast is what draws people in. I think it's, it's a tried and tested. It is it's like, well, you know, you and I, probably nobody else in this building except Karen, but you and I will remember. Parkinson. Yeah. And you know, it was planned. He had his notes, but it just felt like you were logging in on a fantastic conversation with really interesting people. Obviously the really interesting people, but is not quite what's happening here.

Lacking that here.

It's somewhat lacking that. Well, you know, there's only one interesting person at around the table at the moment that's Leslie. He said he said diplomatically. Um, but anyway, yeah, so I think it's good that you're going to kind of look at this thing. And if people want access to it, then at some point in the dim and distant future, there may be a mechanism that people can sign up in order.

To get.

Access. In the meantime, they could beg. The begging works, doesn't it? They could.

Beg, add them to the list.

If they. If they grovel suitably.

Yeah.

It's an exclusive newsletter and we don't allow people to sign up for it.

It's called The Signal and it is on LinkedIn. If you go to our page or yeah, we'll share it when it comes out on LinkedIn, just.

Type in red evolution and somewhere on that profile will be a link to our signal. Just is it the signal? Signal. Yeah. I should know this. I do know this. I do know it's called the signal. And I've got to be honest, I was I was a bit skeptical. As you know, I have I'm a bit skeptical about this stuff. Um, you know, email newsletters and all that. But when I did check it out, I thought, oh, actually this is very good. So hats off. A good job done. So pick a subject from this, this, this this month week. Is it monthly or weekly?

It's monthly.

That's this month's edition of the signal. And we'll have we'll have a look at that.

I was quite interested in the stuff about do you need an AI search strategy because okay, is this the whole thing where, you know, people type something into Google and instead of getting links through to other people's websites.

Or as well as.

Yeah, as well as, um, they get a little summary at the top. So they don't actually have to leave Google or people increasingly apparently are instead of going to Google or just going to ChatGPT or whatever and asking a question.

What's the new one called? The Chinese one.

Uh, deep seek.

Deep seek. That's right.

I haven't tried it yet.

Oh, well, I went to sign up for it and I thought, I'll use my Google account. It didn't work. So I thought, well, okay, I'll just sign up for it and use my email. That didn't work. Okay. So it was rubbish. It failed completely. I couldn't even sign up to it to use it.

So ChatGPT doesn't need to be that worried yet.

No. Or Gemini, which is the one I probably use more than ChatGPT these days.

I've been using Gemini because they've built it right into our Google workplace. And um, yeah, I've been, I've been using it. So like when you're doing a Google document, there's a bit up the side, um, with Gemini. So I've been using it today doing a storyboard for a video and then saying, right, use the format of this storyboard to do another storyboard that looks the same but with different content, and it did a reasonable job of that.

It certainly is advancing, and I think it is useful. Anyway, back to what you were saying.

What was I saying? So thinking about.

So how do we how do we develop a search strategy to leverage the AI results in the search engine results pages or SERPs?

Yeah. Or find out if people are just going to ChatGPT and then finding it from there or what they're doing. So it was basically talking about number one, you know, basically find out if your audience is doing that because some, some search results are still just showing links through to websites. Normal search results and other queries.

Is there any criteria? Is there any has anybody figured out when Google does and doesn't use. Is it is it informational stuff.

What is how do I.

Yeah.

Um, those sort of questioning, um, general informational rather than the ones that sort of have buying intent. The more informational queries tend to come up with the sort of built in answer. So people, because people aren't like, I want to buy a thing. If you want to buy a thing, they want to go to the website. But if they just want to have a vague idea what something means, then they can read it. They don't need to go anywhere.

What is HubSpot keeps bouncing in and out of the AI results, doesn't it? Which is hilarious because HubSpot is a billion dollar company, but yet little read evolution have been appearing in the. But we keep bouncing in and out of it. It's almost like Google's really experimenting with it.

If you ask like Gemini the same question twice, it won't give you the same answer. It starts.

Both times. It'll be wrong.

Pretty much. Yeah. It does sort of start again every time. So it doesn't it doesn't have a you know, this is number one.

Like if we use SEMrush to monitor the SERPs. So if we use SEMrush, which is a tool that agencies use or anybody can use, if you want to subscribe to it, to check out what websites rank for and all that kind of stuff, it keeps showing that we are number one for the search. What is HubSpot? And the little star tells us where in the AI results. Yeah. So it's obviously there a lot of the time, but then suddenly it'll be like, now you're at position ten and you're not in the AI results. And then the following week you're at position one and you are in the AI results. It does seem to bounce around a lot.

I think it is a bit of a strange.

So anyway, tell me about the strategy. What did you learn when you when you researched for this edition of The Signal?

It was basically just about um, what to do in Google Analytics to find out if, um, if you are getting traffic or if your audience are coming to you via like AI engines.

So simple as that. Like we normally do, like if we want to filter out what traffic's coming from, from Google ads, we can do that. If we've put a landing page on a subdomain or something, we can do that. And so we can say, just show me traffic that came from offers dot evolution dot com.

Because.

That's where we're still landing.

Referrers and seeing if any of your referrers are, um.

Referrers. That's the.

Word. Any of these, um, any of these, um, AI thingies. Word has completely escaped me and um, just the results. Yeah, that's kind of what the, what the article is about. Obviously, that's not counting the ones who look at the results. Read it. Go. Thank you very much. I've got my answer and never go near your website. I think that where you were talking about SEMrush showing you if you're repeating those answers, then that's a slightly different thing. But I think I think at the moment, it's, it's about finding out if your audience are doing one or the other and if there's a trend and it was talking about, you know, okay, somebody was saying, well, like naught point two percent of their traffic was coming from ChatGPT, but it was naught point one percent last month. So looking to see if, if there is a trend and following it, it's still very small. But being aware of what your audience is doing and being ready to, to work out, you know, who's appearing in the, the AI answers and, and why and trying to compete with that.

So, so the sixty four thousand dollars question is, is, is anybody offering advice on how to appear in the AI answers? Has anybody figured out what's good, what Google's doing in order to favor a piece of content and show it up in the AI results?

There were bits and pieces on that. Um, but it wasn't particularly, um, definitive.

You realise that's the interesting bit.

I do.

You've got no.

Answers. The interesting bit that I did read was that backlinks don't seem to help. It's more about the quality of the content than the.

Hell is Google measuring the quality of the content?

Well, we don't know if it answers the question, if it thinks it answers the question, but, um, because originally when I was experimenting with it, it was very much if you were in things like, um, directories and you were mentioned in lots of different places and you had PR somewhere and you had, you were in clutch or shortlist and all these sort of big directory places, then then you were more likely to show up because it kind of could find you in lots of different places, but which would make you think that backlinks then would help you show up in AI engines, because it was seeing you mentioned in lots of different places, but the last thing I read said that backlinks don't seem to help very much.

So the authoritative source that was saying, yeah.

Yeah.

One of the marketing guru types that Alex and I discussed in the last episode.

I was looking at when I was, um, putting together the newsletter.

Okay.

So yeah, I think the answer at the moment is that it's changing very, very fast and nobody has the faintest idea. But people will start figuring it out. There's certainly stuff out there about, you know, these are the things that seem to be helping. Um, and we can have another look at that.

It's a strange situation, I think, in many respects because and other industries have been through this because industries like the air travel and hotels have been through this where they've invested probably millions to create these web properties that they want people to land on. So they've made sure that they come up in search and they're using paid search and nailing organic search. So if somebody says like, you know, I'm looking for a hotel in Manchester. It's like hotels dot com and booking dot com and they're all there. But increasingly you're also getting options where Google's actually doing it and.

Google straight from Google.

Kind of feels like that. Yeah. So this is this is like, you know, Google is taking other people's content that they've created in order for Google to send them traffic, which they can then monetise, generate enquiries from, etc.. But instead Google saying, well, it's okay, we'll take your great content and we'll just give it to people, answer their question using your content and our AI tools. And so they don't have to visit your website. Yeah, that's.

Exactly what they're doing.

There's it's Google's biting the hand that feeds it, it seems.

Yeah.

But I could understand why they're doing it. And it certainly doesn't bother me. I mean, we make money from helping people get found. Um, you know, it's part of what we do. A big part of what we do, I suppose. Um, so it doesn't really bother me, but, you know, it's not like I'm scared of it or anything, but I don't know, it just seems it just seems like a strange one.

Yeah. I mean, it's it's the exact opposite of what Google started out doing, which was a search engine so that people could find other people's websites. And now it's going, yeah, you don't even need to bother. We'll just yeah, kind of put all this information together and, and put it out there. And we won't, we won't sort of reward you in any way unless you pay for adverts.

Yeah. But what isn't it. It's putting the AI results above adverts as well. Is it or not. I can't remember, I can't remember, I should really go and do a search to see what.

It.

Does.

The results.

HubSpot, the AI results at the top, but are there some paid search results?

Not sure. Or does it only do it when there's not paid results? I don't think so. Um, yeah, we'll look into that as well.

Good subject really. It's interesting.

Yeah. I mean otherwise it's it's sort of competing with itself by giving you an answer above the places that want you to click, which is through to the, the ads. So it probably doesn't do it.

I suppose for the informational stuff, we don't really. People don't really want to pay for clicks when somebody types what is or how do I. You can do. And it's. It's possible that you answer a how do I, what is question and people land on your website and they might actually go, oh, these guys look interesting. Maybe I can give them some business or maybe I can have a conversation with them or something.

That you download and they might, they might want you.

To go to that, but it's all getting vanishingly.

Small.

Potential for generating business, isn't it? You know, it's all becoming like, oh, they might do that, might do this, might do that. And this might then result in a, in an opportunity which you might convert. And it's like, oh, vanishingly small probabilities, it seems, it seems like it's something obviously that we have to wrap our heads around. And um, yeah, maybe that article will stimulate some thought, some debate.

A starting point.

Okay, so we had, um, staying with all things digital marketing kind of it's not just just digital marketing agencies that go after B Corp status. But I think I've mentioned in some of our previous previous podcasts that we are actively pursuing B Corp status, which is, you know, basically, um, putting in place where they're not already in place procedures, processes, operating methodologies, etc., um, just to, to illustrate, to show, to prove that we are a company who care not just about making money, but we care very much about our employees. We care about the planet. We're trying to do the right thing and run a responsible business. And before we started the B Corp process, we felt like we were probably ticking a lot of the boxes. And and we were.

And that's that's good to know. Yeah.

So, you know, it's a rigorous process and it takes about a year to get it. It's not one of these like, you know, one of these certifications that you can get by doing a quick Swot. You know what I'm talking about. Yeah. I'm not having a go at you because I know you're very good at doing these, but like, we have to do certain things.

To keep our Google.

Badge and like, yeah, you know, dedicate an hour, a couple of hours, you can generally get like a, a pass and move.

On. Yeah, I just, I did just pass mine again, but it was touch and go because they change it and yeah, they change. How dare.

They? How dare they not ask the same questions every six months.

So like every couple of years, you kind of have to go through some of the courses, but you can can get the certification.

But we all know that there are things online that you can just go and get a certificate or, you know, five minutes later sort of thing. You don't do that with B Corp. It's a rigorous process. It takes about a year all told to go through it. And it's, we actually were lucky because we, we could just sit as Stu. Right? Do this, take care of this, take the lead on it, make sure you know, you can come to me, ask me questions, you can drill into my, um, you know, my corporate knowledge, if you like, and, but you also had to do a lot of research and everything else. And we were also because we're part of the Edinburgh five hundred where they want to get five hundred B Corp in Edinburgh by twenty thirty. We were in the first cohort to get assisted in that. In the process of doing it, we we attended a couple of workshops down in Edinburgh, which was great, but we're well on with the process now if you want to look at it, if you if you just search like business impact assessment, BIA, you can go and sign up for free and start working through the B Corp business impact impact assessment to see what impact your company is having on your community, the planet, your employees, your customers, a whole nine yards.

Yeah, there's like different areas, isn't there, that you've got to measure your impact.

Process where you've got to accrue in excess of eighty points. And that sounds like a bit of a strange way to do it. But you know, some of the things that you do, you literally get point one of a point for ticking this box and you get point one of a point for ticking that box. And but it's also the process involves verification. So we have to change our memorandum of articles at companies House as part of the process to, to show that we are committed to this better way of working B-corp is like better corporations.

That's what that's what the B stands for.

Yeah. And so that's, that's, that's the, the thinking behind it. And you've got to go through the process of like saying, you can't just say, yes, we do this. Or if you do, they could well come back during the verification process and say, show us.

Prove, prove, prove.

That you do it. How do you do it? Where's the procedure? Where's the, where's the tool that you use for, um, collecting and reporting on customer feedback, for example, and that kind of thing. I think we're ready to submit, in fact. Stu. Stu. Yeah. Stu sent me the thing. So we've got to now do the first submission to get everything moving. Couple of hundred quid or something like that. The next phase is a bit more involved financially. Um and I think at the end of the day the size of business we are, it'll cost us about fifteen hundred quid a year to maintain the certification. And then you have to go through the whole certification process again in three years time, which will be different because they're currently reviewing it all. So it's going to.

Be in three years time.

Different, but it does seem to be becoming more prevalent in the UK. Bought some sausages from the co-op and they were the company that make these sausages a B Corp certified.

I think who.

Was talking that they were. They bought some gin. He was saying that.

Surprisingly, surprisingly, it wasn't me. It's usually me.

No, you're being ridiculous. Uh, I think it was. Was it Stu? He bought some gin and it had a peacock certified distillery. So, you know, it's it's, um, famously, as I've said before, BrewDog were b-corp certified and then they had it taken off them.

Did they actually get they got it.

Taken off them. Yeah, absolutely. Because of the employee, the way that they were engaging with employees wasn't necessarily in line with the B Corp philosophies, I believe. Do you see James is actually doing, uh.

A new.

Reality TV.

Show, Dragons Den, a.

Bit like that, only not that tired format of smug rich people like laughing at poor people, which is. I stopped watching that programme about.

fifteen years.

Ago. Just dreadful television. It's quite funny, actually, because some of those some of those early dragons turned out to be, uh, not particularly good themselves, did they? I'm not gonna.

Name names because.

They might still have enough money to sue me if I did. But yeah, there was, there was some of them were, I think the kind of big up themselves.

Let's just say I suspect the new ones are along the same lines in some ways.

I guess that's what people want to watch. So that's, that's what it was. But anyway, I digress. The stuff is.

Moving on.

And I feel that if we, I think by, I don't know, July, August, September at the latest, we could be B-corp certified or something like that. Yeah. And that'll be about a year since we started the process. We went.

To the.

Launch party about September last year, I think, and then started the workshops in, I think, October, November. So yeah, there's still a lot of work to do. There's some of the things that we do that we've still got to provide, you know, the verification and the proof.

What surprises were the surprises that we were like really good at something or really bad at something.

Um, we've scored really well on the whole employee engagement.

Thing.

You know, like, because, because we have like, we have the all staff, which is all the employees, everyone who works here who isn't an owner of the business or you, me and Karen are not involved in that. But we, you know, that's slightly chaired by one of the guys, they feed it back to us so we can understand what's working, what isn't working and all that. There was that, I think the flexible working, which we've always had. I mean, that is a big subject just now. Flexible working. It's starting to bite companies on the arse. And I think it's I think it's going to be a very difficult task to get people to come back to the office. I kind of hope they succeed, because I think my gut feeling is there'll be a lot of people out there taking the piss. I really believe.

That. I've heard of people.

We're a small business. If you were working at home and a lot of our guys do. Leslie is in the office today doing all the recording, but Leslie works predominantly at home. But if Leslie wasn't actually doing her job, we would know in a heartbeat.

Yeah, but.

With bigger organisations and public sector organisations, you can imagine there are people utterly swinging the.

Lead. I mean, what.

Was that teacher that teacher got to? She nearly got struck off because it turned out she was at a spa when she said she was working from home.

Yeah, it happens a lot.

And if that's somebody at that level in, you know, in an organisation, the head teacher of a school.

Head teacher.

The head teacher of the school. Yeah. It wasn't like just somebody who'd just come out of college and there was learning to be a teacher. This this lady was the head teacher.

That's crazy.

I think all the details.

I think you've got to.

Have got struck off.

Have rules and, you know. Yeah, you can work from home. But we expect this, that, and the next thing, it's not just like you're at home and you do your work whenever you want. Or is that, you know. Yeah. You're at home, you do your work, but you do it whenever you want or you're at home and you do your work. But we want you to do your work still and your working hours. And I think you've got to be really clear with people what's expected.

I think what's happened maybe is, is maybe some people have got into the, you know, fitting work in when they can manage. Yeah. Sort of thing, you know, and that that's just bullshit. That's never going to work. Not unless you do work in isolation, not unless your work is not connected to anybody else at all. And as long as you get it done in that week, it doesn't matter. Like maybe if you were writing and you know you've got a Friday deadline. So I guess I guess journalists have always done this Friday deadline for their piece in the Guardian. And like, you know, and if they write it at two o'clock in the morning on a Tuesday, nobody cares because it just needs to be delivered.

If you're servicing clients, then you've got to actually be available. But I mean, it's always happened. I remember a story of somebody who it was somewhere in Europe and they would go into their office, hang their coat up, go back out, out the office and go do a different job. So they got paid for two jobs, one where the coat was, and they would just juggle between them. And the company was so big or so bureaucratic that nobody actually knew that they weren't. Their coat was there, so they just thought they were somewhere in the building.

That reminds me. And I'm pretty sure. Sorry, everybody. I'm pretty sure I've said this before, but as soon as we were talking about B Corp in the in the launch event for the B Corp for the Edinburgh five hundred thing, a company said that who are now B Corp, um they said that they tried all kinds of things to be really a really kind of forward thinking company. And they did the you've heard of the zero holidays thing where you get zero holidays, but you take whatever you want. You haven't got an allocation. And so that's exactly what happened. They did. They basically found that half of the staff did nearly all of the work. It's my watch ringing. Um, half of the staff did nearly all of the work because other people said, oh right, I can have as many holidays as I want and just utterly took the piss. One person took every Friday off and got another job and worked somewhere else every Friday. And you know, they might turn round and say, but you said we could, you know, without any kind of sense of like, you know, impropriety. Yeah.

Just like.

Yeah.

It's, it's to make people. Yeah, if people treat it properly. Yeah. And then it's like, well, you take holidays when you need a holiday. Yeah. Um, but there's got to be a balance. Like people have got to treat it in the way it's intended. Um, and you're going to get people as well who like feel so bad that they'll never take any holidays because they're like, well, I'm a bit nervous about taking holidays, so they would just not go anywhere.

It's what the lady said. She said that some of the team were like, well, if I take holidays, if I got to do this won't get delivered. You know, the company will not deliver this piece of work. And so they just said, right, well, I better do it then, you know, and that's what that's.

What it's that should be how it works. Like, okay. And, um, but I want to take a holiday that day. So yeah, I'll, I'll make sure I'm on top of things, but it should work like that. People just being sensible. But people take the piss out of it then, then it's not going to work and it's not fair on the other people.

I think we're just at the start of what will be quite a contentious debate around the whole flexible working thing and what people should be and shouldn't be allowed to do, and whether they should spend some time in the office. But some very big companies are now saying that they want people in the office either all the time, or at least three days out of the five working days, three days.

That's unreasonable.

I don't think it's unreasonable.

I think for young people starting out.

Because we're a small business. So people have to work, they have to deliver or it would be noticed very quickly.

It's really nice when people are in the office.

It is.

And things, things move along and people pick up on more stuff if they're here, and I think it makes a difference.

I think it's really important when you're at an early stage in your career.

I mean.

I know everybody knows this, but yeah, definitely they will listen to conversations and are.

They going to learn.

two second chats or two minute chats with with a more senior colleague to try and solve a gnarly problem or whatever. And it's really you just learn by osmosis.

By how the company, how the company is operating. You see what happens in different situations. You, you kind of figure out what other people's jobs are. If you're just sitting at home by yourself, you don't know what everyone else is doing. And so you won't know. Actually, I quite fancy doing that job next. Or um, oh, I want to get promoted. So that's what the person above me does. And you're never going to find out that stuff if you're just sitting at home.

So are we advocates of flexible working. And we're doing it way before Covid and we've been doing it forever. Um, it has presented us with challenges as well. We have had people go through periods of being completely disengaged. You know, they're just getting their silo. They don't come into the office. They produce work. They they do what they're supposed to do or mostly what they're supposed to do. But, you know, it just takes it does take quite some managing. I think it does. I'm a big supporter of it. I've, I've done it since forever. Um, and, you know, I am not one of the people saying everybody should go back to the office tomorrow and then homeworking should be banned or anything else. Because like I said, we've been doing it since, certainly since the company started in two thousand and three. Yeah. So like we're, we're before Covid and I was doing it myself before that as well. So I'm not in any way against it. But I always said this will all come home to roost when it became the best thing since sliced bread, when Covid came along and everyone started working from home. Oh wow. Guess what? We can be just as effective working from home. I just thought, you can't and this will come home to roost. And I think here we are in twenty twenty five. I think this will be the big year for home working, Coming home to roost and people. The problem is people will find it as challenging to go back as they did. To not go in in the first place, to get set up with the tech at home and and work from home and find a space, all that stuff. They're going to find that really challenging. And it will be, I think, probably more challenging to flip it back than it was, I think. Yeah.

It's hard. It's harder to leave your house than to stay in your house.

I think, I think one of the one group of people, and thankfully, I haven't been in this group for a long, long time. I used to be maybe back in the nineties, and people who really don't like their job, it suits them because they can do a bit, phone it in and then toss it off. Yeah, you know what I mean? And I think it suits them.

But I tell you what's, what is, um, telling is that people have to like log sign in at the beginning of the day and then they're like the computer like measures their mouse movements and things. So people are actually checking to see if they're working. And it's all just a bit.

If you have to do that, then you shouldn't be doing remote work.

Exactly. If you're checking up, if your people are actually at their desks, which means you don't really believe they're actually at their desks, then they should really be in the office.

Yeah. We used to have a system, didn't we, that we called it peak cam. Yeah. After peak. Yeah. God rest his soul. Who worked, who worked to develop a great guy. And he developed this thing for us. And basically he took a snapshot every 30s. And it wasn't Big Brother, it was purely saw somebody in a boy and could see if the person working from home down in Glasgow or somewhere was actually there, if they wanted to talk to them, it was, yeah, but eventually we phased it out because it did feel a bit intrusive. And so we stopped using it. But but we built that because we'd been using a tool called squiggle.

Before.

That, which was, which did the same thing, but it went belly up. So it went away and we were like, oh, that's a shame because we quite liked it.

Yeah, it's really handy just to know if somebody at their desk or not. Or are they at lunch or are they in a meeting?

Well, right now we have the issue where we're big advocates of Google Workspace. We moved away from Slack and started using Google Chat and everything else. And it's worked out really well. But we've we've had people getting quite pissed off. Yeah. Because somebody who apparently is working right now, they've spent ten, fifteen minutes trying to contact them. So they're clearly not at their desk. You know, I'm not saying they're not working. They maybe got to make a cup of tea or whatever, you know.

But some people.

It's frustrating when you need to speak to somebody that goes back to what you were saying, like in the office, it's like, swing the chair around, Julie, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Oh yeah, I remember now. Thank you. And then that's it. That can take ten minutes.

With remote work in the office. If Dave's sitting there with his headphones in, then he's obviously trying to concentrate on something and I'll leave it and bother him in half an hour when he's not got his headphones in. Or you can see if somebody, somebody like on another chat or, you know, concentrating. But I mean, some people work from home because they want to get their heads down and focus on a bit of work and that's fine. But I was talking to somebody in the office the other day and said, well, just put in the chat. Look, I'm going to concentrate for an hour. Please leave me alone. Don't disturb me and I'll, um. I'll surface in an hour and. And then I'll speak to you and just leave me alone.

Pomodoro. Is it?

Yeah. The Pomodoro technique. That's twenty five minutes.

Is it? Oh, I thought it was whatever you wanted it to be, like forty five minutes, whatever it is.

Yeah. It's twenty five, twenty or twenty five minutes. And you set a timer and then.

Well, I mean, one of the things we do, I mean, I've encouraged others to follow suit is time boxing. Yeah. And so you can actually, like, go, go to the group calendar and say, ah, well, you know, Alex is working on some piece of content. You know, I'll leave him alone just now because he's free in twenty minutes.

Well, that's the calendar really helps. It's all to do with systems and communication. Yeah. If you put something in the calendar saying, you know, doing this, don't disturb me then, then that's fine. But if you don't say that and then somebody's trying to get hold of you and they don't know not to disturb you and you doesn't look like you're in a meeting, then, well, like, where are you? Because you're supposed to be working. Mhm. I think most with most things in the world, most problems come down to communication.

Oh, totally.

Absolutely. Nearly everything can be solved by communicating.

Give us another subject of the signal.

Oh, goodness. Oh, okay. What about the TikTok ban? The American TikTok ban that lasted about three minutes and then got unbanned again.

Yeah, I don't know where I am on it, but if you start, I'll see where I get to.

I don't know whether it's a security threat or not. The thing that made me laugh was that I put it in the newsletter. The, um, the UK government's stance was, well, videos of cats dancing aren't a big security risk.

So they think that's what TikTok.

I think that's what TikTok is. Even though like maybe like five years ago, that's what TikTok was. It isn't like that anymore. So they're making decisions about national security based on not having a clue what the app does. So that's quite worrying.

And I don't think that's like Labour conservative Lib Dem thing. It's just it's just out of touch government, whoever they might be.

So I don't think you can you can make decisions based on not having the right knowledge. I genuinely don't know whether um, the Chinese are, you know, gathering all our data and spying on us via our videos on TikTok or not. I'm not quite sure what they're going to glean from, um, most TikToks.

Alex and I in previous podcasts have discussed this thing where you discuss something. Maybe Karen and I have a chat about something, and then suddenly you start to see adverts for it on Facebook and, and, and I guess Tik Tok, what Tik Tok clearly does if you sometimes like I'll, I just love, um, short video format. I love it, I devour it. I've learned so much and yet some of it's just funny, but a lot of it is educational. Interesting. Um, and I just love what people do with video. I love when I see somebody and it might just be somebody doing a stupid dance, or there's this South African lady and she uses some video technique, which obviously cuts frames out, so it makes it a bit jerky. And she pulls some weird faces and that's all it is. But something. It's entertaining. It's good. Yeah.

It's amazing what just grabs your attention.

And grabs your attention, educates you, whatever. But sometimes I'll like, I'll just like, rather than listen to the radio when I'm, when I'm, when I'm brushing my teeth and flossing and everything, I'll, I'll have Tik Tok and I'd just be like brushing my teeth. Yeah, I do, I, you know, I'm brushing my teeth and I'm like, flick. And then maybe I'm just kind of involved flossing and I can't go like that. So I accidentally let a video about something I'm not interested in run for a bit longer. And then suddenly it's showing me loads more videos like that, which I have to go zoom, zoom, zoom. No, I'm not interested. Not interested until I get back to, you know, cats dancing, obviously. Yeah.

Um, yeah, my, I don't really use.

It's fascinating how it works. It is.

My, my algorithm on Tik Tok doesn't know who I am, but I use Instagram a lot. So my algorithm on Instagram knows who I am. And I, I pretty much just get stuff I want to see. And it's really.

See, I don't use it. I've been very, very, very slow on the uptake with Insta. I don't know why because it is now basically short form video as well, isn't it?

Pretty much. Mostly reels and stories. So yeah, it's nearly all video.

Yeah. And obviously that's on reels on Facebook isn't it. Short form video again. So you know that format I, you know, and you've been experimenting with it in a personal capacity. Oh, tell me about that.

Yeah. Yeah. Well, I um, basically.

People find that.

They don't want to, but um, yeah, no, I, uh, I, I hurt my ankle last year when I was running and wasn't able to run, and then I was sort of easing back into it and I just thought, how am I going to sort of document my, my journey, which sounds ridiculous, but, um, just really record for myself for my own benefit, how I got back into it and also motivate myself to sort of keep going when it's like, yeah, you're only allowed to run for five minutes or whatever the physio is saying. So I was like, I could put it on Instagram, but all my friends follow me on Instagram and it felt a bit like.

Look at.

Me, here's me running. I ran for five minutes and today I ran for six minutes. I was like, that's just really tedious. So I thought, well, you know what? I'll put it on tick tock because nobody knows. No, none of my friends use tick tock. And nobody I know follows me on tick tock. I don't really use tick tock. So I'll put it on there. You know, it's um, it's fairly anonymous, but it's just a way of sort of recording what I'm doing. AM I running.

Anonymous?

Yeah. It was fairly.

You talking to the camera is anonymous. If you had a mask on I could understand you saying it's anonymous.

Anonymous. So I'll put on tick tock.

Yeah.

But just it's not putting it in front of people I know.

Yeah, yeah.

It's just putting it out there.

But people, you know are probably finding it now.

Yeah, I am, I was having a night out with some friends and um, one of them who doesn't use Facebook or Instagram or anything said, oh, I've been watching your videos on TikTok. I'm like, what of all the people?

So it's surprising who uses it. I was late to the tick tock party, but I very much I love tick Tock. TikTok. So yeah, we're going back to what you were saying about what the American government did for ten minutes by banning it for ten minutes. Yeah. You know what their rationale was that we think China is using it as a device on our phones to listen to conversations. And therefore, if you're a government employee and you've got TikTok on your phone and you're having a conversation with the, with the president about like, you know, the nuclear weapon, but somebody lost the nuclear weapon weapons button save, you know, like the big red button. We can't find it anywhere. And suddenly China's going to know that. Is that is that is that what they were getting at? I mean, what was it?

Because I think government departments have never been allowed to have social media on their their like work devices or whatever. I mean, I think that that's pretty common and I don't.

But if you've got it on their personal devices and their personal device is in the pocket while they're at work, which it could well be.

Have they not, have they not had that ban in place for a while? I mean, I don't know.

You're not supposed to have a you're not supposed to use social media, etc.. Yeah, my sister works, but they do. People do.

Yeah. So maybe, maybe it's about that. But I mean, the UK government, they have banned it for like government employees in work or on work devices. But I mean, I get it. If you work in a secret sort of workplace, a secret workplace, you know, if you weren't.

I suppose there are secret workplaces.

But if you work in something that is a security risk, then obviously you wouldn't want people having it on their phones. But the likes of me recording myself running for five minutes. Is that a security risk to the country? I suspect not.

Sorry to reiterate, you said the British government said they were not worried because it's just pictures of cats dancing. Yeah, yeah. Which which which is actually way more embarrassing than than what the American government did by banning it for ten minutes. Yeah, probably.

So yeah. I don't think it's going to get banned. But with them, with the new president, it is really hard to tell what's going to happen next.

It was really interesting because a lot of content creators, they were posting their farewell messages on TikTok, weren't they? Yeah. they were like, there's a guy who is a singing coach. And, uh, I somehow saw some of his videos and he crops up in my timeline quite a lot. He's very good, um, youngish guy. And he, you know, he's, uh, because I sing in the band, so he's helped me think about like some of the higher notes and singing the higher stuff, like what to do, what not to do and that kind of thing. I haven't, uh, paid a lot of attention, but, you know, it's certainly been helpful. But he was kind of bleating away saying, you know, this has allowed me to start my own business and now it's.

All making a lot of money off.

It. Yeah, yeah.

So I mean, it's a part of the economy.

If you're making a lot of money from it, then clearly you're going to say it's not fair. They're taking it away. You're not going to give a toss about like whether a fact, whether or not it's, um, you know, a security risk, I suppose. So they're the people that we probably should listen to the least. But, you know, in the rational debate, I mean, it's Alexa listening to us, probably.

Almost certainly.

You know, I have a an echo, which is it's not in the bathroom, but it's right outside the bathroom door. So I sometimes pick it up and put it on the bathroom floor just inside the door, and I'm having a shower just to listen to the radio and stuff. And then when I'm coming out of the shower, dried off, walk away. Alexa, stop. So it's like Alexa blue light stopped, walked away, just came on again. Just like Alexa must have thought, to hell with that. I'm going to come on again.

I still want to listen to this.

And you know, a really funny thing I sometimes like will be quite rude to Alexa. And Karen looks at me like, you can't say that I was.

I told you that I said my, my default. If she doesn't do what she's told, I am like, shut the.

Up.

Alexa and it works. It is obviously programmed to understand that that that also means.

Mine was really, really, um, gratuitous. Like stop. Alexa.

You okay? That's probably.

Gratuitous term.

Gratuitous idea.

Well, why isn't it? It's just it doesn't matter. It's a machine. I'm not speaking to a lady called Alexa who's very nicely turned the radio on for me. And now I'm swearing at her and using horrible words to make her stop.

It's got a person's name.

Well, this is the thing, isn't it? It isn't a person.

If you've got an animal with a name, you then can't eat it. You know it's the same idea. If it's a thing with a name, you can't be horrible to it. But, um, I read somewhere if you if you say please to ChatGPT and Gemini, you get a better answer.

You think you do?

I have been experimenting with it. I'm not.

Sure.

I've gone back. I've gone back to because I started off saying please and thank you to it just naturally. Then I thought, this is really stupid, it's a computer. And then I've kind of gone back to saying please and thank you again. Um, I did read something else today. It was like, you know, when the robots come to get us, the people who say please and thank you are going to be the last ones to get zapped. So I think we should all say please and thank you to them just in case.

Yeah. I'm just getting zapped. Definitely just getting zapped. Um, okay. Just just slightly changing subject. You earlier this week, uh, we had to put some content into a client's site, which is built with Joomla.

Uh, yeah.

Now Joomla is a system is an open source content management system. It's a fantastic system. We've been using it since God was in short pants and we're wizards with it. We get gigs because we're good at it and etc. so it's great. At the other end of the scale, we're also big advocates of Hubspot's Content Hub, which costs about four hundred quid a month. Yeah, Joomla is free. It's free as in speech, not as in beer, because you still have to learn how to use it, put it on a server and all that kind of thing. But it's, it's, it's open source free and, uh, does a fantastic job, which is great. But I did hear you cursing and swearing as you were putting two or three blog posts in into Joomla.

Make a very large drama about it because I was really hacked off.

Yeah. And we often have conversations with people about, you know, whether we use some free software like WordPress, Joomla, and any other number Drupal, there's loads of them out there. Like why on earth would you pay three or four hundred quid a month for a system like Hubspot's Content Hub, which does way more than just allow you to build web pages. I hasten to add, and we love it. We use it and we love it. And I know, but is it? Do you love it? Because although you. You know, you're a clever lass. Um, you've.

Got.

Technical qualifications, but you're not a geek. You just want to communicate with people and you just want line of least resistance to get a great blog post out there. Obviously something I've written not what you've written. You just want a great blog post out there, or you want to create some social media content and, and then and schedule it to go out and all that kind of stuff. And what is it about HubSpot? That's lovely compared to WordPress and Joomla and these open source content management systems that we've been using for a long time.

For putting blog posts in. I don't mind WordPress because it was designed to put blog posts in so.

Fundamentally blogging platform.

Everything's all in one page and you can pretty much do what you like. HubSpot is the same. You put it there, you fill it in, you go to the settings box and you fill in all the other boxes, and it's all in the same place and you can see what you're doing with Joomla. The really, really the thing that I actually end up not even being able to do and having to get someone else to do for me, because it would have taken them longer to show me what to do, is once you've done it, you've got to add a menu link, which means you've got to go to a completely different bit and go to menu and add bits into the menu and look at all the different boxes and tick different boxes.

So easy.

But until but somebody has to explain that. I know where it is, but I don't know which boxes to tick. And it just was just like.

But the way, the way Joomla does that compared to the way WordPress does it, I think Joomla is fantastic. It makes absolute sense to my brain.

But it's fiddly, it's fiddly. You've got, you've got to.

It gives you absolute control to write the great page title, the meta description, the menu, the right name. Yeah. No, no, no, I prefer HubSpot. It's all in the I'm not saying that. I'm just saying.

The way Joomla does it is is really fiddly and it depends who set it up and how it's been set up, what what boxes you've got to tick and things. And, and I just think it's.

But the difference, The reason for that is, is that with HubSpot, if you put a blog into HubSpot, it just does everything for you. You know, it doesn't you don't blog posts, don't have menu items, but they do have sensible URLs. Yeah. Whereas in Joomla, they don't. And the reason you put when you put a blog into Joomla, you're adding in a menu item because if you don't, you get this weird slash item slash two.

Slash numbers.

Nonsense, nonsense. And that's not the best, you know, most the most efficient from a, from a search marketing point of view, it's not the best thing to do. So I guess that's what makes it fiddlier. Yeah, probably. I mean, I to be honest, if there's any aspect of WordPress, sorry, HubSpot, which is a bit fiddly and doesn't make an awful lot of sense to me, it's their menu system. It is a bit.

The menu for pages is a bit weird. But yeah, but blog posts, it kind of just blog posts.

It just does it. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. And it is just, just much nicer to use. I mean, that was the first time I'd actually used Joomla five and it looks prettier, but it's, um, it's still quite fiddly the way it's been set up and there's almost too many options, so you can't, you've got lots of places you've got to put things and lots of different places, rather than just having one place to put it all in.

So it definitely feels like HubSpot has been created for marketing people like you, communicators like you who don't really want to bother with all the nonsense. They just want to be able to put good content out there and do it really quickly, efficiently. Is it also the case then like, you know, we I'm going to talk very briefly. We had an enquiry in today. And no, actually they actually just went went to on our website and they, we've got an option to just book a meeting if you, if you like, I don't want to fill a form and I just want to speak to somebody. So just book a meeting. So they did that. And then I said, I got back in touch with them and said, just give me a heads up so I can prepare for the meeting. And anyway, it turns out that they are a firm of architects, which is a red flag. They use WordPress.

Okay.

The devs don't like it. Well, they use Elementor, which is a plugin for WordPress, which is very good. Amazing. But from a dev's point of view, it just creates bloated, crappy websites.

And when it.

Starts to break a lot.

When it updates automatically, it breaks other things on the website. If you've got anything that isn't elementary.

And it was just red flag, red flag, red flag, and, um, you know, we went back to them and said, we're sorry, we're not your guys, you know, this isn't this isn't the right gig for us. So, um, which is fine. I mean, you know, without putting too fine a point on it, we've worked with quite a lot of architects over the years, and it has.

Never, ever.

Gone well there for whatever reason. And I wish they weren't, because I know architects and friends with some architects and they're lovely people, nice people to work with. From a business point of view, maybe it's because of the creativity involved in web stuff, and they believe that they are the most creative people in the world, despite the built environment around us. Contradicting that assumption.

I think they've got very strong eye for design. And then.

Yeah.

But not web design.

And I think.

Anyway, yeah, it never works. No, it never works.

It doesn't. But, you know, one of the, I can't remember where I was going with this, but one of the things. About that gig is it was it was WordPress, it was Elementor, which in theory is a bit like HubSpot in that you can drag and drop and, and you can make a right pig's ear of things because it's so easy.

I think the trouble is that that we have, you know, inherited quite a lot WordPress websites with Elementor, badly built WordPress all got really big issues. And they've all got things that don't work because they've kind of been been put together probably by people who aren't developers and they.

Does HubSpot, in your opinion, as a non-geek kind of not allow you to make as big a pig's ear of a web page as, say, WordPress with Elementor?

I don't, I don't know, because pretty.

Much I'm not having you back on the.

Show.

Rubbish.

Trying to trying to give a balanced viewpoint rather than just like throwing opinions out.

That's why we're here. Yeah, opinions are fine.

I yeah, the only word, the only HubSpot websites really that we've worked on are ones that have been built properly. So I, I haven't either we built them or nearly all of them we built.

Um, well, to be honest, the ones we've inherited that we didn't build, we have almost always had to rebuild them. So I think it is maybe, maybe was more than is possible to build HubSpot.

Websites.

Badly.

Make a mess of it. But, um.

But fundamentally, if anyone's listening to this, and I doubt it by now, but if anyone's listening to.

This.

And, you know, they're thinking like, why would I pay three or four hundred quid a month for a system, you know, when I can get WordPress for free? Uh, your view is like, as soon as you start using it, you'll realise why it's better. It just works.

It means that you don't have to keep going back to your developers to get content added and things. It means you're marketing.

You shouldn't have to do with WordPress.

Well, yeah, but it's more, it's, it's definitely messier and it's definitely not as easy to use. So, um, yeah, we, I mean, I, when we were building our website, I actually put a lot of the content into the pages and things.

Yeah, I know.

It took me weeks, but it meant.

Yeah, I know.

If I hadn't done it, it would have taken a lot longer because it would have just been fewer people putting the content in. Um, and it was perfectly straightforward and I was able to pick image sizes and get it all done the way it was planned. And it's just really easy to follow if you're, if you're not a techie person.

Yeah. Okay.

Well, that's enough of a plug for HubSpot. Certainly, certainly we like it and we're doing more and more gigs for people that, you know, also like it. Interestingly, we're getting people coming to us because they find us online because we're quite good at marketing ourselves online. Surprise, surprise. They find, you know, they're coming to us saying, yeah, we want to move into HubSpot. We use HubSpot for our CRM, we use it for them. And, you know, we really want our website in there as well. And then there are some that use HubSpot CRM and they're like, no, no, no, we're not going to use the CMS too, too expensive, too expensive, kind of isn't when you add it all up. But yeah, I know, um, I have got other things on my list, such as like impending visits to Yorkshire and Somerset to see potential customers. It is. Um, but I think we've been talking now for like fifty odd minutes, fifty three minutes, so I don't think I'll bother with that. I think we'll maybe do that next time. Yeah. Um, any other burning issues you want to cover before we wrap this one up?

No, I think that's enough for one day.

Yeah, I think so. Okay, so you've been listening to Dave Robinson and Julie Mitchell meta instead of Alex. Um, I think we'll have you back. Julie.

Alex.

I think Alex, he's on he's on thin ice. I think he is.

Can't do the grumpy old man thing if I'm here, can you?

Yeah we do. I mean, you know, Alex is half my age or nearly, you know, slightly older. Slightly older than half my age. But he's he's about half my age. But we do come across as a couple of grumpy old men sometimes.

Yeah. He he, um, I think he's, um, he's old for his age, sometimes.

Somewhat curmudgeonly for his age. Yeah. All right. Um, thanks for listening. And we'll be back with another episode. Um, when can, when, when can we, when we can be arsed. Got there in the end.