Gold Bangles At The Open, AI Blunders From HubSpot And All The Usual Mayhem – Episode 178

Hubspot's AI tool said: you need to go and try and get mentioned on a particular page because one of your competitors is mentioned on that page. When you put information into tools like HubSpot, you say like, you know, this is what we do. Obviously, your website tells it what you do. These are the people we're competing against, and it will do research and find out how they're getting in all these places and it'll look for opportunities for you. So the thing it found: the companies called Blend. You know, really good agency from what I can see. And the HubSpot tool decided that this piece of content mentioned them. So we should be in there as well. And the piece of content didn't mention them. It just used the word blend, which is utterly dumb and ridiculous. The problem, you know, which we've discussed many times with AI, is it just misses context and nuance. So welcome back to Digital Marketing From The Coalface. There has been somewhat of a hiatus. What have you been doing during the hiatus?

Um, I think I've been here. I think it was you that wasn't here, and Leslie wasn't here.

Yeah, well, I went down to the Open. As I volunteer at the Open. Went down to Southport, to Royal Birkdale and spent eight days volunteering. It was very hot. It was great. Shorts and t shirts every day.

Nice.

And the best golfers in the world.

Nice.

And yeah, I mean, I was, it's quite funny because when you say, oh yeah, I volunteered at the Open. Oh yeah, You were marshal? Are you controlling the cameras or? No, I was working in left luggage.

Oh, lovely. How exciting.

Do you know what it was actually alright. I mean, my shift was I was doing late to shift, so it was mainly sort of handing stuff back to people who've had a fantastic day at the golf. And they were either very drunk and quite funny, or they just had a brilliant day. There was a really funny thing on my last shift. So, um, for certain roles, when you volunteer, you get a nice, um, posh t shirt with a collar, polo shirt. Yeah. You get a nice polo shirt and a jacket and a hat and some of the roles, you just get like a hat and a water bottle and a random keyring, obviously, and a bib. So it's a bit like the.

Bib that, if you dribble your food it catches it?

It does double up as that. But it was basically, you know, like the bibs that caddies wear, except it says 'Left Luggage' on the bib and you wear that while you're on duty. I was labelled, I felt a bit like Paddington. Yeah.

Um please look after.

And on the last shift, uh, a guy was coming out and I don't know if his mate had picked a bag up or something. He was kind of in, you know, high spirits, really nice, just fun. And he said, can I have your bib? I said, it says 'Left Luggage', I don't care. It's a, it's a memento from the open. Can I have it? I said, yeah, of course you can. So chuck it off and give it to him. And that was I thought that was quite funny. Um, and we had another moment where a lady came round because left luggage and lost property. Now there was a G4S guy, Andy from Glasgow, who was lost property except from seven o'clock in the evening onwards, because that's when his shift finished, in which case we doubled up. So it was mainly glasses, sunglasses, bank cards.

And.

Random stuff. There was one or two phones. Yeah. But, um, someone had handed in a lovely sort of square, rounded square, whatever that's called gold bangle. Yeah. So it was like square, but with rounded corners.

Okay. Yeah.

Bangle, gold.

Oh, God. Actual gold. Yeah. Oh, someone's going to miss that.

And she came over and, one had been handed in, Andy came through and she said, "Oh, I don't suppose anyone's handed it in? I've had it for thirty years. It's gold." He said, oh, can you just describe it to me? So anyway, she described it and he just went, Bing!

Oh my God.

She was delighted.

What a moment.

It was really lovely. I mean, she was it was just kind of I mean, we did have quite a few people coming up saying I bought a brolly, you know, one of the open brollies and I've left it somewhere. Has it been handed in? No. I bought a bag of goodies from the shop. I've spent one hundred and thirty quid. One guy said. I put it down somewhere. Anyone know? No. So people weren't entirely honest. I mean, you buy a bunch of stuff, you find a bag with a bunch of stuff that somebody just bought, like a t shirt and a hat and a flag and various things. And people just kind of were oh I'll keep that, which is a shame.

But yeah.

But yeah, there was wallets and bank cards and all sorts. There was even, like, a money belt thing that was full of money and that was handed in.

So, a money belt that you put around you to keep your money safe.

So a money thing, you sort of put it in; it's like a money clip.

Oh, right.

Like a wallet. It's just money. Yeah. Because it's a cashless site, the whole Open site is cashless. You can't buy anything with cash. Right. But the number of people who lost their cards. But, um. Yeah, it was good. It was good fun. I enjoyed it. And it's really interesting, you know, from a tenuous link from a marketing point of view, obviously, because, you know, the Open is marketed really quite well and it's hugely popular three hundred thousand people over the week go to the Open.

Really?

Yeah. It's a big, popular event. You can't get tickets, the tickets for next year, which is at Saint Andrew's, they do a ballot like Wimbledon I guess.

Yeah.

Yeah. So you're not guaranteed to get tickets. The ballot opened in July, uh, just last month for next year. And it, you know, it'll be oversubscribed already. Um, and it's really fantastic event and, you know, it's all kind of everywhere sort of oozes quality and posh brands and all that kind of stuff. And I won a bottle of whisky actually, just, just a prize draw for volunteers on the second or third day I was there bottle of, um, Glen something. I don't know what it is, but anyway, it's, it's one hundred and fifty fourth, uh, Royal Birkdale Memorial Whisky or whatever. Yeah, it's quite nice. I'll put it with the other collection of unopened whisky I've got. I do like whisky, but I just hardly ever drink it. Um so that was good. But you've also got like Mercedes Benz are there and lots of random brands like Doosan and stuff like that. So there's a lot of business-type organisations like to be associated with golf.

Yeah. I mean, golfers are very popular target market.

You know, the common trope is like, you know, lots of business is done on the golf course, which it probably still is.

There'll be a lot of, like, MDs and business owners and that sort of person at it, I would imagine.

Quite often, people who can't play golf, but try and play golf, you know, and we all try to play golf. But I mean, a lot of people who are like, you know, impressive business people. Yeah, just a bit shit at golf. Yeah. But anyway.

They like watching other people do it properly.

They like watching other people do it properly and they like wearing the gear and they like being golfers.

Okay.

Which is fine. You know. Golf's. Yeah, it's a tryer's sport. It really is. I mean, as you know, me and your husband go out every Friday afternoon and try.

Try very hard.

Try each other as well.

So I believe.

Good fun. Yeah, it's quite funny, actually, because it was very sweet because Hitesh had a bit of a moment on the third tee last time we played because I was kind of helping Gordon, who's a beginner.

Yeah.

Take him down the range if you want to teach him how to play golf. Not here. It's like that. And I was like, what? Anyway, we exchanged pleasantries, but later on he apologised. I mean, he didn't need to. And we're good mates. He can say anything he wants to me. And he just like, okay, blokes, you know, blokes are just blokes. But he was like, oh, I'm sorry about my little. I was like, fine, give him a love heart and told him it was all good.

It's funny though, you saying that. And I've got a son and a daughter and boys when they're like having banter with each other, like playing on Xbox or whatever, they call each other the most Awful, unbelievable names. And they. They mean none of it. Yeah. Girls. Yeah. Say really, really nice things to each other and mean none of it. Mhm. It's really.

Oh, I didn't expect that. Okay. That is interesting. Yeah. Okay. No. Guys. Guys are brutal.

They're horrible.

Well, the first time Gordon played with us, um, he was probably owns the land your house is on. I don't know, it certainly owns land all over the place. But, Gordon, um, I bought a house off Gordon that, you know, the holiday cottage. We bought that off Gordon and, you know, I suppose I've got to know Gordon since then. And you know, he's a very forthright, kind of straight kind of guy, very successful businessman, bright guy. I think he's a PhD doctor Gordon Drummond and super guy. I get on with him fine. And you know, he's not everyone's cup of tea. I think he would probably know that himself, but, I get on with him fine now. But the first time he played with us, you know, he's learning to play golf, but that's no excuse. We sort of ripped into him and he was almost his lip was almost quivering, like, is this what it's always going to be like? I was like, of course it is. It's a bunch of blokes together. What do you expect? You know? Yeah, it's quite, quite brutal, you might say.

Yeah. I mean, you hear them on the Xbox and when it was lockdown, you know, when everyone was in the houses and you know, the only lifeline for these teenage boys was, um, you know, playing on the Xbox together every night, which was brilliant because it meant that they were, they were actually communicating and they weren't isolated because they were actually all playing together. But that language coming out of that room and the names, I mean.

Absolutely.

Oh, it was horrible.

I can't imagine. I don't know if women can be a bit blokey. I mean, if we were in a situation and one of your pals said, you absolute useless c-bomb, you'd probably be quite shocked, wouldn't you?

We do, you know, if you know somebody really well. Yeah. You can, you can take the piss out of them and call them names and just go, you know, you absolute idiot. But you wouldn't necessarily, like, call them as bad names as boys do. But I spent most of lockdown being lulled to sleep by the effing and blinding from my son's bedroom. And it was reassuring. I liked it because it meant that he was, you know.

Yeah.

He was actually communicating with his pals and having that sort of social life as best he could. And I, you know, I liked going to sleep to the effing and blinding, but, um, yeah.

Do you think from a marketing point of view then..

Oh let's try and bring this back to marketing somewhere.

Well from a marketing point of view it means that it's important to understand who you're trying to market to. Always, always. It's always important. But if you know, for example, B2B, it's predominantly workshop management managers in mid-sized engineering companies, then you could possibly get away with stuff that you wouldn't get away with if you were marketing to, let's say. Managers in a predominantly female dominated profession where, you know, you wouldn't be able to, I don't know.

Yeah, I think so. I mean, I think that I think the tone is different. If you're kind of wanting to be accepted, like almost like we're part of your team, the language you use and the tone of voice would have to be like quite blokey and, you know. Yeah. Part of the team, this is, this is how we speak to each other. Whereas yeah, in a female team, I think it would the, the language and the approach would be very different.

Because in engineering, um, and I worked in engineering one way or another my whole life, whether it's running this place or in actual engineering companies prior to running this place, it, you know, language and foul language at that. It's just commonplace. Yeah. You know what I mean? Even some of the terminology that's used Is, um, it's almost like technical terminology, but it also uses expletives, right? It's just, it's just the nature of it. And I, I've always found that women in engineering just seem to kind of either tolerate it or they don't even notice it because they're surrounded by it because it was, it still is predominantly male-dominated.

Yeah. I find when speaking to, like, a group of women or people I don't know that. Well, you're kind of waiting to see, like, how much they swear. Yeah. And, you know.

But do you not like being the pioneer sometimes?

Oh, absolutely. Sometimes you just throw it in there and see what happens. Yeah. Um, but sometimes it's like, oh, thank God, you know. Yeah. Because I could be quite sweary because I work here. Yeah.

What do you mean?

Um, you know, it's kind of second nature, but not everyone behaves like that. So it's quite interesting to sort of gauge it.

I think being the pioneer in conversations is actually quite good, but it's. You have to be careful. Obviously, if we are courting a new customer and you're just not sure. But yeah, you just wait for them.

Your a bit careful to kind of.

Drop a few swear bombs and then you go, all right, okay, so we're okay to swear. But yeah, generally in engineering environments, it's rarely frowned upon.

What kind of pisses me off is if we're talking to some like customers or a bunch of blokes or whatever, and they swear and then they apologise to me for swearing, I'm like.get a grip, you know.

Pardon my French. Yeah.

I'm not Mary Whitehouse. You know, it's like I can cope with a bit of effing and blinding. You know, it lulls me to sleep. As I said earlier.

I was reading something quite recently and it was,  somehow, suggesting that people who swear a lot tend to be quite intelligent.

Yeah, I've read that.

Did you read it? I don't know what it was based on.

It comes up every now and again. It must be a study because I've heard it comes back every now and again. But whether it's true or whether it was just written by somebody who likes swearing, I don't know. I don't know what the source is.

I mean, I must admit, I do like swearing. I think it's I think it's both funny and it helps to communicate. Yeah. You know, whatever it is you're talking about, it just does. But I must admit, I do sometimes listen when I'm at say I'm in the fire station. Yeah. We have got a female firefighter with us now, but the fire station, like sometimes, I mean, blokes will break words up.

Yeah. Fan f*cking tastic.

Exactly. Stuff like that all the time. And sometimes it's like somebody says twenty words.

Yeah.

Seventeen of them.

Yeah.

With, you know, f*ck or similar words. It's hilariously funny, but yeah, I just don't mind it at all.

It could be quite creative. It can be the way people use it, you know, and it can be.

I tell you swears a lot and he does it really well. He's Rory Sutherland. I mean, we speak about Rory Sutherland. Love his content. Yeah. It doesn't matter what the audience is or where he is, he just.

Yeah he does swear. Yeah.

And I think But it's not gratuitous. It kind of just it works. It just works. Yeah.

Because he's kind of quite posh and I know.

Yeah. And you know. And isn't his wife like a bishop or something?

Yes. Yeah.

She's a, she's of the cloth a woman.

Yeah. Bishop or something. Yeah. Something high up in the.

Something non sweary you'd expect. Yeah. I don't know. Maybe when you get a bunch of bishops in a room, they swear like f*ck, I don't know. I don't know how we got there. If you know whether bishops swear a lot when they're just alone in a room, could you please let us know.

I you have any idea what we're talking about on this podcast at the moment, please.

Also more interesting than the bullshit we normally talk about.

That's true. Yeah, I think we should go and talk about it. Well, go on marketing or something better.

I don't even think we can shoehorn it in. I think.

We just have to.

Pause.

And breathe.

Full stop and start a topic.

We could vaguely shoehorn it in in terms of, good manners and bad manners in business.

In business.

Yeah. Okay. Because um, we had a, we had a meeting with these people who we thought they might be able to like, get us relevant leads and.

Oh yes. Yes. Yeah yeah yeah.

Nice.

It was.

Good. Good business concept. Everything else. And we were like, oh, that sounds quite interesting. It might be a way of like reaching more people.

It was going to cost us what, six, seven grand a year if we decided to go for it. It wasn't peanuts.

So they sent us over some information and we looked at it and we were like, actually, I think we're a bit too niche for them and it's not really going to work for us. Um, we're not going to get enough. You know,  exposure for the money. Yeah. So we said, right, okay. We agreed that I was going to get back to him. Um, so I got back to him and said, look, you know, thanks very much and great concept, but not for us. And he came back and went,  thanks for the transparency. Thanks for getting back to me. It makes a change from some of the agencies I've chatted with recently. Yeah. It makes me think that people never get back. You know, people don't don't come back and go, you know, thanks for your time. But I've decided. No. Which saves you wondering, it means you can.

Like you can take it out of the CRM, you can delete the deal. You can do all that.

You don't need to like, yeah, have a note to follow up and everything else. And it's just good manners. People don't really do it. And I think people are quite, you know, lacking in manners a lot of the time.

Mhm. I think for us, probably the most common, example of that would be putting a bit of time and effort into discussing a potential piece of work with a customer, giving them lots of good advice and free consultancy effectively. And then they just kind of ghost you. We had that one. I mean, I went down to London just before Christmas, if you remember to go and see that engineering company. Yeah, red hot lead, meeting couldn't have gone better after the meeting all over us like a rash. Christmas came and went. They went quiet. Yeah. And then just. That's it. They just don't even reply to emails now. And it's like, why would you do that? Just like, you know, sorry, Dave, things have changed here. If we need you, we'll get back to you. But for now, can you just leave it.

Or you.

Know where I am, you know.

And we're still. It's still on the cards. Give us a shout in six months or yeah, everything's changed and we've decided to go a different direction. But let us know because we don't know if it's like, are we going to have a big chunk of work in a couple of months time or not?

You know, I know it's right.

It's, it's not difficult to go back to somebody. I mean, it's not like you even have to see them face to face and let them down. You literally send an email saying, no, thank you. It doesn't matter. It's not difficult. It's not awkward. You're literally writing from a distance.

It's just business. You know, if somebody decides you're not the right solution and you know, that's fine. You know, just let them know and everybody moves on. Yeah, I agree. Um, but I don't know people. Oh, I'm so busy. It's really hard to write a paragraph and send an email.

You know, Copilot or whoever will do it for you. You don't even have to make it up.

People still use that.

Copilot.

Yeah.

Microsoft. I mean, if any business who's got all the Microsoft stuff, they're using copilot all the time.

That explains a lot.

There you go.

Mhm. So that was it. You just wanted to rant about people being impolite.

Yeah. I think it's.

After talking about how much you like swearing and actually using some very naughty words, then you talk about people being impolite.

Excuse my French.

Oh, not that one. Yeah.

Yeah, like. No it's not French. Next time someone says that, I'm gonna say.

What is the derivation of French?

That was not French.

We need to find the derivation of. Pardon my French. Yeah. It sounds like it would be something from the war time. Probably something like that. And I don't know why I think that. I just think that, but.

Maybe I'll just.

Ask Caron. Caron will suss that out.

Yeah she loves all that.

She'll be good at that.

Next time. I'll do it. Im gonna say no if it was French, it would be this. I'll just do it in French instead.

Right. Hubspot's AI tool.

Yeah. Yeah.

Brackets Beta.

Just as well, really.

Yeah. Kind of. Um.

Yeah.

What's your experience of it? Because I can tell you my experience of it if you want.

Oh, yeah.

Do you have anything to say about it first?

I don't think it's as good as Otterly, we used both, and I think Otterly is better. I think hubspot's a bit.

Explain what it does to people who are listening, thinking, what are these idiots talking about now?

Yeah. Um, it kind of guesses what sort of prompts people would be writing in AI engines in order to find the things that your website talks about. So it's sort of generating typical prompts. And then it measures how often you show up for these prompts.

And then tells you kind of what you need to do to make sure you appear more when people type that phrase or something like that phrase into one of the AI engines.

That suggests content and things like that. I think it's a bit of a blunt instrument. I don't think it's refined enough at the moment. Otterly is also kind of not great on the recommendations, but I think it's marginally better than HubSpot.

Mhm. Um, yeah, I think they're all kind of struggling a little bit because.

The data's good, but the recommendations are a bit. Yeah. It really can't.

I mean, I haven't got my phone with me. I'm just trying to think of some of the prompts, some of the things when I, I mean, I use AI for lots of things, but I now I do occasionally use it for search. And when I do what I ask it, I usually I ask as if like I'm asking you. Yeah, you know, I'm thinking about this and that and that and what do you think about this? And how would I do?

Yeah. If I'm using it for search, I use ChatGPT's voice thing on my phone. So I actually literally ask it by voice.

Yeah. So every prompt about, you know, if somebody's looking for an accountant in Edinburgh, I've used that example before. They might say, tell me who the best accountant in Edinburgh is. Or they might say, I run an engineering company. I need to outsource my accounting. Who should I go to? Yeah, you know, completely different searches. The only common bit is the accounting bit and what these tools are trying to do is help you understand broadly what people are actually saying to their phone or typing into the thing. And I think, yeah, with some success, but.

Yeah.

I'm not sure. I'm not sure the, the HubSpot AI tool does that. So it gives recommendations. I mean, for example, um, it'll give a recommendation, for a blog post based on there's a phrase that people are using or similar to this that people are using. You're not sure and you're not showing up. So probably a good idea if you put a piece of content together.

Yeah and also you put in different competitors. So you can say maybe like these people are showing up and you're not. So you need to fill that gap.

Yeah. If somebody searches for, you know, the best marketing company in Timbuktu, then,  you're based in Timbuktu, but you're not actually showing up. Maybe you should be looking at that. They also provide, places to go, to carry out outreach. And by outreach we mean looking for links. So a piece of content that exists somewhere online and really you should be mentioned in it and with a link back to your website in order to boost your authority, because the authority, the links and everything link based authority is still a thing in AI, in AI engine land.

Yeah it quite often says, you know, a lot of the source material for this answer came from this directory or this magazine or whatever it was.

Yeah. And the thing about AI stuff is it doesn't always have to be a link either. It could just be a citation. And this is where this little point, which you and I have discussed prior to recording this, Hubspot's AI tool said you need to go and try and get mentioned on a particular page because one of your competitors is mentioned on that page. So when you put information into tools like HubSpot, you say like, this is what we do. Or say your website tells it what you do, what you say. These are the people we're competing against, and it'll do research and find out how they're getting on in all these places, and it'll look for opportunities for you. So the thing it found, the company's called Blend.

Yeah.

You know, really good agency from what I can see. And the HubSpot tool decided that this piece of content mentioned them. So we should be in there as well. And the piece of content didn't mention them. It just used the word 'blend' and then it came to us saying, you need to go and try and get mentioned on this page because your competitors getting mentioned on this page.

It was just a blend of this and that. Yeah.

Which is utterly dumb and ridiculous. And then another one that it gave us was there's a really good article on this website and you're not mentioned in it. It'd be really good if you could get mentioned in it. And the article was on a company who would be would be classed as a direct competitor, another digital marketing agency who'd written a blog post. And so they expect us to go to them and say, hey, could you talk about us in your blog post and give us a link back to our website. Again? You know?

Yeah.

The problem, you know, which we've discussed many times with AI, is it just misses context and nuance and stuff like that is a really good example of how AI is, you know, still very much in a learning phase. However amazing it is, and I truly believe it is amazing. I don't think there's any argument in this office about how amazing it can be and how it can help with production. And a lot of the work that we do.

It can just miss the point completely.

Just utterly, utterly miss it and yeah, those two examples I just thought were interesting.

It's just getting the wrong end of the stick.

By a country mile. And I don't know, you know, the tool is in beta. Yeah. So they could probably turn around and argue, um, about that. But you know, it was, it still felt very wrong.

Yeah. I mean some of the stuff even in Otterly, some of the suggestions that's coming up with. It's like, you would never write a blog post on that. It's just, I mean, for anything else, they've all got exclamation marks at the end. Like, no.

No, no. And the thing is as well, a lot of the stuff it's suggesting to us is like, write an article, which is eight ways you can, five ways to blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Six things you must. Be listicles, basically and yes, I'm sure they were.

I did do one listicle. I couldn't bear doing any more.

Yeah. That's right. And what I have been doing, when I've been picking out those subjects is, there is a big button there in HubSpot. You just press the button and it'll write the blog post for you. Yeah, I don't do that. I go in and work on it with my fave tool. And then when I'm happy with it and ready to publish it, I just go back into HubSpot and say, right, that's now been done. You didn't do it, but it's been done sort of thing. Yeah.

Hubspot's writing is better than it was to begin with. It used to be. I mean, just awful.

It's still pretty awful.

Yeah.

It's still pretty awful. I mean, that's the danger, you know. I mean, I just made a note for the podcast that, AI plus subject matter expertise is where the real value sit's. So using it as your very cheap personal assistant because you're all over your brief like a rash is a fantastic use of AI, in my view. Relying on it to write content because like most people, you're rubbish at writing. And I say that because most people are rubbish at writing. They don't like it and they're rubbish at it. Um, and so using it and because, if you're not very good at writing, you will use AI. It'll write something. The fact it's written fifteen hundred words for you in three minutes and given you two or two or three hours of your life back or whatever is enough to excite you to like, great. Just publish it. Great. It's done. Tick.

Yeah, exactly.

But I think, just to sort of square that circle, if you like, the use of AI in the right hands is pretty formidable.  And it's equally appalling in the wrong hands.

When I'm using it, like go and check your sources. If you quote a URL, go and make sure it really exists. You've got to get it to check its own work in several ways before it's even worth looking at. Yeah.

That's right. I mean, one of the things I've been working painstakingly with Claude is to get my own personal tone of voice improved and picking up because, most AI does it. The they've got all the names of these things that it does. Yeah. But you basically have to just painstakingly pick through them and say, don't use these, don't do that. Never do this. Like one of the things that AI does a lot is like, I'll be honest with you, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Now I know people who do that. So it's not like AI is kind of completely alien.

No, no, no.

But it's like we're in business, you know, why would we be anything other than honest with you? We just are honest. I don't want to tell people I'm honest, I am honest, so that's good.

Yeah, that's good enough to like pick up on something and do it. If you ask it to humanise it and make it sound more human, it throws the word actually into every sentence. Which is fine because again, people do use the word actually a lot. Yeah.

But and the training data has obviously been biased towards America because there's probably more American, American English out there than anything else. I'm just guessing, but I'm assuming. And so it'll use a lot of Americanisms that you just. So you have to say, I never say that. I would never say this. You said this. I would say that. Yeah, but it will it does learn. I mean, it does improve;  the outputs keep improving. The more time you invest in training the software that you're using. Yeah. Um, but enough on that.

Um, Search Console.

Oh.

It's still AI related, but I think we spoke last time or the time before that Search Console was going to start showing you, where you showed up in AI engines. Yeah, it's getting rolled out. We're seeing it for ourselves. We've seen it for a couple of clients.

I haven't seen it for ourselves yet. I must go and look at that. Oh well. Oh yes. Yes, yes it was, it did. It didn't give you prompts did it.

No. It just shows you impressions and it generates.

And is it just by page?

It doesn't say. It just says generative AI. It doesn't really tell you what it's telling you. But you can see impressions and you can see for each page the impressions.

That's when we were having the discovery session with a company. I'll talk about in anonymised terms shortly. That did come up because we said, I don't know if you've realised yet in Search Console, but you can now see AI impressions. And we did look at it. You're absolutely right. I was getting confused there because I was thinking about it now let's you see data from search from social properties.

YouTube, TikTok, Instagram.

X.

X. I don't think it has LinkedIn. I've hooked up ours.

But probably wouldn't have LinkedIn though because LinkedIn's meta isn't it?

It's Microsoft.

Oh is it. Yeah, of course it is. Yeah that's right.

But yeah, it's trying to make itself a bit more useful, you know. Certainly trying to own the space.  So yeah, there's more data in there. I mean, at least you can see which pages are getting cited. Mhm. Um, showing up. I mean, seems to be a couple of hours that are showing up more than others. One about engineering metalwork.

Yes. That's come up a lot. That's now we really need to dig into that a bit more and figure out why it's getting in an insane number of impressions.

Yeah. And the other ones are like, what is HubSpot blog, which you wouldn't expect to show up because HubSpot should be doing that, but that's the one that we've actually got some backlinks to.

Yeah.

Which is interesting, which we just played with a few years back. Getting a few backlinks just to see what happened. And that is getting shown up.

We also regularly update that. And I think it's probably attracted links because it's a very simple, you know, plain English guide to, um.

To HubSpot.

To HubSpot and what it does and everything else. As opposed to the convoluted bullshit that HubSpot spout about it. So, um, yeah, I guess it's not surprising.

Yeah. There's certainly a couple that are showing up more than others. So it is quite interesting. I mean, I think the data will probably get better over time. But it's interesting to see which of your pages are actually, showing up more often than others. And it's going to be more accurate than the people that are sort of just guessing at prompts.

Yeah, we're still in sort of snake oil territory, I think with the whole, AEO, artificial engine or whatever it is.

Yeah.

That stuff. Um, so I'm a bit distracted. Um. No reason. There's nobody out there that's distracting me. I'm just.

Nothing happening out the window.

Yeah.

Just sort of, like, drifted off.

I'm in a bit of a daze because, um, as you know, but people listening don't, people listening who listen regularly know that I'm an on call firefighter as well as.

Been a bit of a mad week.

And there's been a big wildfire over in Cairngorm. And we've been getting called over to it from a boy. So first of all, it's like an hour and forty five minutes driving over there in the lorry and getting paged at half past three in the morning, getting back at half past three in the afternoon and yeah, getting half past eleven at night and getting back home at half past ten the following morning and stuff like that's been happening quite a lot over the last two weeks. Not complaining, you know, shit happens from time to time. But I kind of throws you. Yeah.

I'm just yeah, last week was a bit a bit sort of bitty.

Yeah. Last week I was hardly here.

You werent here much at all.

And then Monday I was over again. Should have gone again today. But we couldn't get enough crew here in Aboyne to allow the pump to go out. So we got away with it. But no doubt we'll get paged at some point. Five four three two one. I'm worth a try. It was worth a try.

Yeah. It's bound to happen again.

Yeah. So we landed a new piece of work yesterday.

Really nice.

Yeah. Really nice gig. A company based down in Stafford looking forward to the project. Now, this started from a Google, I think a Google paid search.

Was it not ChatGPT?

It was. You're absolutely right. I just remembered at least the one we can trace it to. It started from a ChatGPT search and around HubSpot web design development, etc. and we had a conversation with them. They then sent us the document, which was comprehensive.

Really.

Probably one of the most comprehensive we've seen. Yeah.

Seventeen pages long.

It was. Yeah. So I said, would you be up for a no obligation pro bono discovery session, which they were really did that. It was good, really interesting. So we learned lots about the business and we then put together a proposal and we won the work. I think there was three agencies that had been approached. I don't know who the other agencies were, but they chose us and it was because we'd taken an interest in them. Why wouldn't we. Learned about their business, challenged them on some of their assumptions, and they liked all that. Now that to me is the only way to do business. However, it doesn't always resonate.

Sometimes people just want someone who does what their told.

They're not interested. Sort us out with a new website. Can you just tell me how much for a website or whatever it is? How much for a paid search campaign or whatever? Yeah, yeah.

We go back and go, there's a better way to do it.

Talking about paid search? Oh, right. Okay.

Um, yeah, some people just like, no, no, we want it to do this. We don't care if you think it's not the best way of doing it, but this is what we want at thats is, which isn't as rewarding to work on.

It isn't. It's just not thing. I mean, if you want somebody to execute your badly thought through plan, get somebody else to do it.

Basically. Yeah.

I know it sounds, a little bit arrogant to say it that way, but, you know, we've been doing this a long time. We're good at it. And yeah, I think, I guess what I'm trying to say is when businesses, sorry, when businesses like want to listen, recognise you're the expert, want to work with you, want you to help them. It's just so, so rewarding. Yeah, it makes it all worthwhile.

Yeah. Because we can add value. We can say, well, our experience is that this is a better way. And, you know, hopefully, make a difference and make it better than it would have been.

Yeah. And leading on from that, one thing we often do when we get a new client is we'll send them those brownies. It's like a box. It's got like chocolates and brownies. It's a company down in Glasgow. Great company, lovely people. And, um, we've used them a lot. You know, when we land a new piece of work, we send this, send this box off, nine times out of ten we get a oh, a thing just arrived. Thank you very much. One of our favourite clients at the moment and we love him to bits. We never heard a peep out of them, so we still think that when it landed, somebody in the office saw it and thought, oh, I'll have that and just took it home and nobody else ever knew about it.

I have a feeling.

But the point I'm making is I went through that process today and sent off, a box of treats down to this new customer. Um, just to say thanks for your business and looking forward to working with you and the process of ordering it was. Oh, yeah, no, it was absolutely awful. First of all, I've done it many times, but the site doesn't remember me. There's no way for it to remember me. And then one of the things that really interested me, and there is a point to all this, is that. Did everything put the card details in, press the button. And it, like says, no, you can't go forward yet. There's a required field required. One is well, no, the required field was. How did you find how did you find us? Required field! That stopped me buying the goods that I had already put like in card details.

That is the number one rule of e-commerce is no friction.

Well, well, not just e-commerce. I think.

Anything.

I think anything where you're wanting people to fill a form in in order to start the conversation. And that's the point. The reason I'm telling that story is because I think the point is we see it quite a lot with customers where, you know, they'll build a form out, they'll build a landing page, send paid search to it, or, you know, a page that attracts organic traffic or traffic from AI engines, etc.. And then they put this ridiculous big form in there and people just go, egh, I'll do it later. And then maybe they don't. And you've got to remove all that sort of friction. You cannot be that self-indulgent that you insist on, you know, first name, last name, telephone number, required field email address. You know. All right. Name. First name. Last name. Email. Start a conversation. It's all you really need.

If it's a company. The chances are that email address will tell you what the company is anyway. You don't really need the company name at that point. No. You know.

It's very easy for anybody to find it. So you're absolutely right. But similar thing happened today because I got an email in from AO.com. You know, they sell electrical goods. I bought quite a lot of stuff from. And they say, oh, they've got some clearance stuff. And I've been thinking about getting a coffee machine for the office. So I finished up on their site and I thought, you know, it wasn't actually mega cheap in the sale, but it looked like the sort of machine that would work well here. Bean to cup thing, you know, which would be quite nice.

Would be great.

Yeah. So I looked it. So I thought, right. Yeah, I'll just buy it. Great. Started going through the process and I gave up.

Damn. We nearly got a coffee machine.

We will get a coffee machine. But it was AO.com and it was just like.

And they're usually quite easy to deal with.

And where I'm going with this, just to just to finish it off is on Monday, I decided I wanted some new golf shoes. I tried the pro shop at the golf club, didn't have quite what I was looking for. And, I saw some Footjoy. I've already got some Footjoy, so I know that the Footjoy nine and a half UK will be a good fit. So it wasn't like because I'm always a bit reluctant buying stuff if it's not going to fit, because sending it back is easy, but it's a pain. Yeah. And I literally went yeah, them and then pressed one more button to get it sent to me because they use shop, which I think is shop.

I think it's Shopify. It's brilliant.

You just press one button and it just arrived.

Yeah, I bought it was football boots for my son. Yeah. Um, and yeah, went on to Pro Direct and it was literally, again, I didn't even have to sign in or anything. It just kind of knew who I am because I've got my details saved in shop and all the tracking works through there, and it's so easy.

Yeah, I mean, you could argue it's too easy, but it's not. It's just I didn't want to create an account. Contradicting myself because I said about the people, they didn't know who I was. But if they use shop again, it wouldn't need to.

Exactly.

You know, they would have to ask for more details. Like, where do you want them sent and when do you want them sent and all that. That's fair enough. I don't mind that because I don't expect them to know. But yeah, it's amazing how you can get situations like web forms on B2B websites, or you can get simple e-commerce sites, you know, introduce friction into any of those situations. You drastically reduce the chances of doing business.

People get used to the shop thing where it all just works. Or Amazon, Amazon have made it complicated again because it now has to log into your bank and come back.

That's right. Yeah. Do the verification.

So, um, it's not as easy as it was, but the shop, you know, anything like that when it's really straightforward, that raises the bar for everyone else and people's expectations. You know, people expect things to be delivered in a couple of days. People expect it now to be really, really easy and not have to keep filling in forms. Yeah. So when you have to, you know, you're going to lose them. Mhm. But I still want a coffee machine.

I will get one, I will. Don't worry. I will get one and bean to cup. Is that the way to go? But how does that work? Because I drink decaf and nobody else does. And if it's a hopper.

Absoluetly. A hot one I've got at home.

You've got the hoppers.

No, you've got, you've got the bean bit at the back and you've got a little funnel at the front, and you just put your um ground coffee grounds into the bit at the front.

It's got to be beans for going bean to cup. I'm not going to be a second class citizen where you guys all have bean bean to cup and I have to have ground to cup. I mean I'm an outlier. Everybody else drinks normal coffee so I don't mind. I don't know I guess. Yeah, I just have to take the beans out and put the other beans in.

The one I've got you can't take the beans out once they're in.

Okay, well, I'll just go for bean to cup, and.

We just have to work out how many how many beans it uses exactly to the number and put in just put in the right amount of beans and then yeah, I'm sure we can figure it out.

I'm sure we can figure it out. Yes, I will make that happen. Exciting. Good. Exciting. Christ, you need to get out more. Go on. What else have you got? Because we're ploughing on forty two minutes. And, you know, at least three minutes of that was digital marketing.

Um, talking of Otterly AI, the people that can measure.they do a webinar.

Did we mention that we're Otterly AI partners at all.

We don't get any money from them, but they do these experiments and they have a webinar every now and again, they sort of report back and just different experiments they've done just to, to see how things work. Because obviously things, everything's new and people are just figuring it out. So they did an experiment with like slop. AI slop blogs to see if having authors and not having authors made a difference. So they created two blogs on just something, I think it was about capybaras or something, just a random topic and one had very similar, blog posts and one had author names and author bios and one didn't. And they got a thousand blog posts done in like five minutes and just chucked them up there. Um, just to see which one works best. Um, they got indexed, they were visible on Google. A few weeks later, they both just vanished. Both of them vanished off Google completely. They weren't. They got de indexed completely.

Well, they did preface that by saying that they were just churned out crap.

Yeah. And they got de-indexed because they obviously were like thought to be not adding anything to the conversation. So that was interesting. They really do get de-indexed for crap.

So one thing I remember I said to you, what was it last week or the week before I wrote a post, I put it up and it was indexed within an hour. Indexed within, not crawled, indexed within an hour as in Google would potentially serve it up in a result.

Yeah. Well, these ones got indexed quickly and then de-indexed. So, I think it is indexing very quickly.

After struggling because we wrote a post about why is Google taking ages to index? I think Alex wrote it yonks ago. But you know, certainly I've noticed, I mean we have been publishing more but we're finding, certainly with our site, it used to be indexed very quickly and it kind of went a little bit, not so quick.

Slowed down.

Yeah. But it's now certainly blog posts anyway because a lot of our traffic is blog traffic.

It is, a lot of it is.

You know, we do get a lot of blog traffic.

But yeah keep an eye on the de indexing because.

Yeah. And are they saying it's been de indexed because it's just clearly AI slop.

Well, that's the assumption. Yeah.

Okay.

So that. Yeah. So it didn't tell them what they wanted to about the author or no author. But it did show them that, that sort of stuff isn't really working for Google. Yeah.

Okay.

Um.

I've blogged about and spoken about lead forensics and the one we use Lead Info for quite a lot. And when I've spoken to customers about it in the past, they've said, oh yeah, we tried it, it wasn't really very useful, blah, blah, blah. And I broadly agreed with them. We use Lead Info, which is considerably cheaper than Lead Forensics. Some would probably say that their IP lookup table isn't as comprehensive, so it's not as effective. But I like it. I really like it. And where I'm finding it particularly useful is seeing, just from a curiosity point of view, competitors looking at our website.

Which we get quite a few.

Which is quite interesting. Yeah. But where it gets more interesting is to see, for example, GKN, were on our website, massive engineering company. They're on our website this afternoon. You know, we may or may not hear from them. They were looking for something quite specific, something that we could help them with, but we may or may not see them. That's kind of nice, but sometimes frustrating. But once you've.

Its nice to know you've started getting found by exactly the types of company you would want to work with, which means that something's going right.

But it's what's been really interesting for me is, the job I said that we'd got, it was really interesting to see them pawing all over our site prior to receiving the proposal, but then after receiving the proposal as well, because it helps you understand, you know. I understand that customers have a very difficult job deciding who to pick to work with.

Because.

They don't want to get it wrong. The person in charge, maybe the marketing manager wants to pick an agency that's going to make them look good, that's going to vindicate their choice, I get all that. Oh, yeah. And it's really interesting seeing. Okay. So they've, we've had some good conversations with them. We've produced a great proposal for them. They've received the proposal. They're now looking at our website again.

Checking. It's that reassurance trust, you know.

But where it's also been useful is earlier today, I noticed a company that we've had some conversations with, but they'd gone quiet, but not in a bad way, we knew they were going to go away to look at stuff. And they said, you know, leave it with us. They were very nice about it. We've got to figure some stuff out internally and everything else. I noticed they were back on the website today, so I immediately sent the contact a message saying, do you need anything else and blah blah, blah. And I got a really nice email back saying, you know, thanks so much for reaching out. We're nearly there. And when we get there, we'll certainly be in touch. Please do keep in touch, etc..

It helps you with the timing follow up. Whether it's appropriate or not.

So I would say like, if you're dismissing Lead Forensics or, you know, we're leading for partners, if you're dismissing that software, and I would certainly suggest trying Lead Info because they don't tie you in. It's month to month and it's a lot cheaper than Lead Forensics. You know, give it a go because if your sales team could see that Acme Engineering have been on the website and they're really quite keen to speak to Acme Engineering. And they've got a contact at Acme Engineering because they're doing account based marketing or whatever. Then you can do some really quite nice, you know, timely contact.

Yeah, we think these would be great customers, but we just don't know if they're looking right now, they, we don't know if they're actually in the market. If you see them looking, then you know it really helps you. Yeah.

Um, if you want a free trial of Lead Info, complete no obligation, free trial of Lead Info, then just reach out to us and we'll sort that for you. Um, but I'm genuinely impressed by it because it's not expensive and I'm, and I do find it really useful. I mean, there's the voyeuristic stuff, you know, like, oh, look, so-and-so such and such a competitor's been on our website, but it's really proving to be way more useful now. With prospects who you've had conversations with and when you can see them coming back and what they're looking at and, you know, again, trying to build a picture of what's important to them based on what they are looking at.

Yeah what people are making decisions. That's right. What they need in order to actually decide that we're the people for them.

Mhm. That's right. Yeah. Uh, playing tennis tonight, are we?

I, um.

I hope you are, because you brought a tennis racket. And if you're not playing tennis tonight. I'm going to be quite worried about you.

Yes, I am hoping it doesn't rain.

It's not going to rain. I don't think, is it? Don't think so. Who are you playing tennis against? Is it.

It's just a it's just a hit about with a friend who, um, she broke her arm and she wants to find out if it's working or not yet.

Oh, no.

So she just wants a gentle hit about, to just try it out before she goes into any sort of match situation.

No I'll . But yeah. Okay.

So yeah, we'll we'll see how that goes.

Good. I've got a golf match at half past five so I'm looking forward to it, it's a foursome which is alternate shots. Okay. So i T off and then Colin hits the second shot and it's like that all the way around. It's good. It's quite good fun.

It's against someone.

Against. Yeah. Me and Colin are playing and Lorn you know Lorn McDonald. No. Yeah. Ian's son. Lorn and Bryn, I can't remember. Bryn. Bryn Carter, is it? Both very good golfers. But they both play for about three. Colin's a scratch golfer, but I play off like eleven. So we will get a few shots off them, but it's, we could beat them, but they could also annihilate us. We'll see. I'm looking forward to it. Yeah. Good fun. It's nice to get outside. Im playing a game with your husband tomorrow afternoon. Yeah. And then playing in the Captain's Day competition on Saturday. So golf features over the next three days. Yeah. Looking forward to that. In between other stuff. Um, I've got nothing else really. I think we've blathered on for long enough.

For me to stop.

Yeah, I think so. But it was, um. I don't know if, because we had that break that we had plenty to talk about, but um, I quite enjoyed that. It's quite good. I don't care if nobody else does. We enjoyed it. That's what we do it for, us. At the end of the day, we do do it for ourselves and anyone who's along for the ride. You're welcome. We're doing it primarily for ourselves. All right. You've been listening to... What have you been listening to?

Digital Marketing From The Coalface by Dave and Julie.

That didn't sound wooden. I think we'll leave it there.