Real Visibility for B2B Marketing Through Smart AI Workflows, Not Cringey LinkedIn Hacks – Episode 180

Welcome back to Digital Marketing From The Coalface with me and Julie. Yeah, I've been absent from the podcast, last one published with me in it was nearly a month ago, 10th of August. Mind you, there's only been one in the meantime.

Yeah. Leslie and me did one. I was away for odd days here and there, and Leslie's been away and you've been away. And now we're back.

And now we're back in the room. And hopefully, we haven't lost all of our listener.

Yeah, just half of our listener.

Half of our listener. Yeah, I've got a few things scribbled down. I'm not entirely convinced any of it's very interesting. Obviously we can talk about what we did other than digital marketing.

What we did on our holidays. Yeah, I've got the stuff from our newsletter because I do put a newsletter together for us once a month. So there is some stuff from that; assuming the listener isn't also the newsletter reader, then it might be interesting.

The holiday highlights first?

Holiday highlights. Um, well, I've only had like days off. I had a day in Edinburgh at the Fringe with my daughter.

See, I missed the Fringe again. That's at least the last two years. I haven't been to anything and there was loads I wanted to see.

We went. I just got the train down. She got the train out. We met for lunch and then we went and did our best of the Fringe, like pick of three comedians.

Okay.

You don't know who you're going to see. It's just whoever. And the first guy was like, tears rolling down your face. Funny, the second guy was slightly awkward, but pretty funny. And the third guy was kind of laugh-out-loud funny. So I think we were really lucky. They were all good, and then we just had a little wander around the shops and then got back on our respective trains.

I saw Simon Evans at the Fringe. I'm a big Simon Evans fan, and I went to see him at the Fringe because they're always nice intimate shows. You know,  you feel like you're just in a small room with one of your favourite comedians.

It was a room, but they put a marquee up inside the room. So you were in a tent, but the tent was completely unnecessary because it was actually a very small room.

Created an ambience, no doubt.

Yeah, they just made lots of jokes about why on earth being a tent in a room, you know? But that was good. And then I went to Edinburgh again the following weekend to see The Cure at Ingliston.

The Cure.

The Cure. So that was very good.

Posh people in England, The Cure. The Cure? Sounds like liqueur.

Drink liqueur and watch The Cure and drink beer and watch The Cure. That was very good, as always and then I had a long weekend down south visiting family. So, yeah, I've been dotting about, but mostly at work. But every week's been a short week. This week is my first full week for a very long time. Yeah.

Um, I was zooming around in the motorhome. Norfolk, Sussex, Devon, Dorset, Cumbria and the Scottish Borders.

Passing through many other counties on the way.

And then on the second day... it was good. I've never been to Norfolk. Well, I can't remember ever going to Norfolk and I quite liked it. I liked it a lot in fact. We didn't spend long there, accidentally went to Cromer. Well we accidentally went to the gala, the carnival at Cromer? We just thought, let's go to Cromer and as we were driving there, we were kind of committed and then suddenly there was a sign saying Cromer Carnival today.

And you were in a queue.

And i'm in a motorhome and you can't just go, oh, turn around sort of thing. So then we saw like a field to park in.

So you ended up in it.

Went in, said to the lady, we've accidentally come to Cromer and she said, oh well, you can park here, but it's £10. I said, that's fine. It was a free bus in. It was only half a mile or something like that. And we just sat in the motorhome considering like, right, let's get ready and actually walk into Cromer and do the carnival bit. And the Red Arrows went right over the top of the motorhome. So we got out the motorhome and just watched the Red Arrows. Obviously not in Cromer, but from a distance, which actually isn't a bad thing with that sort of thing. So that was good fun. Yeah. Oh, nice. And then did a metal detecting rally weekend thing in Sussex and then did some chilling out in Devon and Dorset. Then popped in to see my mother in Cumbria just for one night. And then went to the Scottish Borders and did another metal detecting rally weekend. But it's quite funny while we were away because we went fishing, caught fuck all, went metal detecting, found fuck all.

Okay.

What else? There was something else.

I hope you didn't play the lottery?

No. Well, oh, I won £150 with my premium bonds. There you go.

Well, that's all right.

But it was funny because I don't know if, this isn't even tenuously linked up to what we're normally talking about in this...

No marketing whatsoever.

Well not really, but I sometimes think the way that my life's geared. I mean, I like to go fishing but really catch anything. I like to go metal detecting but don't find very much. I like to play golf but rarely win. I like to play in a band, but we hardly ever get gigs. I'm thinking like I need to start and do something where something good happens.

But is it not about the experience.

It is. And I knew you were going to say that. So I'll go in metal detecting and I mean, we found stuff, but I haven't found anything nice.

Didn't find anything worth millions.

But you're out. You're walking around in fields for like eight or nine hours or seven or eight hours or whatever, it's great fun. Fishing, being outside, great fun.

That's the point.

But sometimes I just feel like there's nothing; I'm not getting rewarded. I want a reward, I want something.

Yeah. What can you take up? That's really easy, a quick way....

But that wouldn't be satisfying, would it? You know, guaranteed win.

It's like when we used to do ballroom dancing, competitive dancing. We used to drive all over the country. Hardly ever won. We made the final which in dancing terms was like winning. Because, you know, if there's like fifty or sixty people enter and you get down to the last six and come second, third, fourth, fifth or whatever. I think we won an odd thing now and again, but, you know, yeah, I think when I look back at the dancing career, it was like coming third at the British Nationals and second at the UK, they were like the best results we've ever had. So we never actually won anything. Um, yeah, and competing in dancing is very much like digital marketing.

It's funny, I only saw her do one, I think it might have been on Tik Tok, and she's like (oh God, that's my phone ringing, suspected spam, piss off). Um, it was a girl/woman sat at a desk and she spilled some water on herself and then went, "oh, no!" and then she went, "ah, I just spilt water on myself and it really made me start thinking about leadership". And, and I just thought, yeah, absolutely on the money, where, LinkedIn posts are concerned.

Yeah.

Just, you know, this thing happened and it made me think about leadership or it made me think about personal development.

You probably never saw, there used to be a Scottish comedian. Was it Rikki Fulton? And he did a minister thing. He was doing the like "I have just spilled water on myself and it made me think that Jesus would have done such and such".

Rikki Fulton's minister.

Oh, IM Jolly.

That's it. Well done.

Yeah, the Reverend Jolly, it was the same thing. So it's exactly the same like, you can link everything back. Sometimes they were like really weird, like segues.

Yeah, you said you've got some stuff to talk about that's vaguely related to digital marketing. So come on, off you go, raise a subject.

Well we're kind of on the subject of LinkedIn, so I'll stick on that subject; really dodgy LinkedIn posts. So I was on a webinar about somebody's LinkedIn lead generating system, blah, blah, blah and it was basically just a sales pitch for what he did. And so, I signed up for his, like, lead magnet thing just to see what it was. So he said he uses AI and he'll analyse your LinkedIn profile and then he'll give you, thirty pieces of content to post on LinkedIn. I'm like, okay, let's see what comes up with. Oh, geez. Oh my God.

Was it like listicles and 3 ways you can do X, Y, and Z?

No, he's got it to go through my LinkedIn profile and see what stuff I'm posting, which is pretty much like reposting what we talk about on these podcasts. So it's supposed to be really tailored, but it's just like, really cringey and it's so obviously cringey.

But LinkedIn is really cringey for the most part.

This is worse and I just wonder, you're gonna get to the point where, I think I've said this before, LinkedIn, it's just like, no humans have been near it. But the thing that really, really bugged me is all the fake 'I spoke to a customer last week and this is what they told me' things and, you know, is everybody just making shit up to put on LinkedIn?

Yeah. I think because people feel that they have to post and nothing interesting happens to them in a work context. So they just make shit up and/or post inane drivel that nobody wants to read.

I've got some really good examples. So these are some of the things that they are suggesting that I post on: 'We audited a B2B account last month. Over a third of the ad spend had gone on searches that had nothing to do with the client's actual product' now it's not far off what's happened, but it's not accurate. You know, probably like 95% of the clients spend has gone on searches that have nothing to do with the client's actual product in some cases, but it's just a made up number. And he's suggesting that I post that on LinkedIn.

Um, the other one, 'Engineering buyers don't read content, that's what their sales team told me. Then I showed them the analytics' like, please, please, please, nobody ever post that on LinkedIn.

And 'The most read page on one of our engineering clients' sites isn't the product page. It's a case study from 2022'. Well, that might well be true, but again, it's just a made-up number, that's just completely made up. And oh, this is the best one, and you see this all the time. I don't know what it is about Tuesday, but 'The letter arrived on a Tuesday. The client had no idea that consent bar was non-compliant' and I've seen stuff like that, you know 'Oh, I got the email on a Tuesday', and that's just cringey and completely made up.

Well, don't we live in a world of made-up numbers?

But this is ridiculous. I mean, sometimes you can, kind of, grab a number that's close to the truth, but these are entirely made up and 'An AI visibility tool told one of our clients to publish twelve more blog posts this month; their existing forty blog posts were barely working'. Like, why are you telling me to put that on LinkedIn? It's completely made up.

Mhm. Mhm.

This stuff is just...

We live in a world where you've got to question everything.

Everything.

Thankfully, it's very easy to question everything. I was listening to LBC this morning, and I'm not taking a political stance when I say what I'm going to say, but the Labour government minister was on and getting challenged about the numbers of asylum seekers and the number of people coming in small boats and all sorts of stuff. And she said that, last year, I think it was last year, the number of asylum requests that had been rejected was much higher. As if like, we're not just letting anybody in.

Yeah.

You know, we are rejecting people. I was like, okay, fine, whatever. Whatever your stance is on immigration, that's fine. But it took me no time at all to do some research and find out that there was a new act of parliament came in 2022. It's the 2022 yada yada act.

Right.

That just started being used in 2023. This is before Labour got into power, which made it much more difficult for asylum seekers to get asylum. It made the bar much, much higher.

So of course they rejected more.

So yeah, but that wasn't in what she said. She just said it as if 'we've done this thing'.

What's that, the coffee machine shutting down?

No, don't talk about the coffee machine. Coffee machine dramas today.

We have indeed.

But yeah, it just feels like with AI, which we love and we use, etc., at the bottom, it always says this might be wrong. Go and check it. Fair enough. You know, so more fool you if you don't. But it seems to me that we are just now surrounded, and we are in a situation where we're surrounded by misinformation, whether it's visual, written, data, whatever it is, it's easy to go and check whether it's real or not. But we shouldn't have to. We shouldn't live in a world where.

You don't trust anything.

We just don't trust anything or anybody.

Politicians have always taken numbers and used them. What that person said isn't untrue. It just isn't the whole story. Yeah, it's just not the whole story. So I mean that it's not untrue. Whereas this is totally made up based on things that may or may not have happened and they don't know. And, you know, yes, they're based on things that probably are reasonably near the truth, but they are entirely made up. Yeah. And somebody suggesting that lots of people are downloading this lead magnet and getting completely made up stuff and probably not even checking them and just putting them on their LinkedIn.

Yeah. Well, the thing about LinkedIn is, I get a lot of requests to connect on LinkedIn. I hardly ever connect with the people who asked me to connect. I do sometimes.

If I know them or if they give me a really good reason.

You don't need to know them, but you can look at what they do and you can tell straight away that if you accept the request, you're going to get sold to immediately. Yeah. But one of the things I use for vetting is like when it comes into the email, I think you get a little snippet of the profile. So it'll be like 'John Smith helping businesses, blah, blah, blah'. I think, right, as soon as I read helping businesses, I'm done because it's a one-person consultant who's trying to make a living out of selling some regurgitated shite that they read in a newsletter somewhere. Nine times out of ten, in my opinion, I'm maybe have a jaundiced view of it, but it's like that's all I need to read "Helping businesses" finished,  thank you, done! Yeah. Whereas LinkedIn could be a force for good. It could be people who are just, you know, like brand awareness.

Yeah.

If you're just genuinely sharing good information, that will be generally useful, you don't expect to get anything back and you hopefully help people. Then the chances are it'll generate business for you. But if you're just out there sort of grifting away, just post in any old crap like that guy's trying to make you do.

I don't have anything useful to say. So I'm gonna get someone else's AI model to generate stuff based on what they've seen on my LinkedIn so far and make up thirty posts for me. That's just horrible.

Anyway, was that one of the things that you've talked about in the newsletter?

No, no, I didn't talk about that in the newsletter.

Whats our newsletter called again?

The Signal.

The Signal. I knew that.

Much more interesting. Have you noticed? And I didn't make this up. I read this somewhere. All the AI engine logos all look like cat's bum holes. ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude.

Is AI poking fun at us?

Well, I don't know, but it's really, when you think about it, you then can't unsee it. I thought I'd just share that with everybody.

Yeah. Maybe we should refer to it as cat's bumhole instead of AI now.

Yeah. Basically.

Whats cats bumhole do you use? This has descended into ridiculousness very quickly.

I just thought that was very smart. Whoever saw that and thought. It totally wasn't me. I thought that was very, very smart and funny and perceptive. And that must have been a human and not an AI that thought of that.

I do love it when people observe things that had completely passed me by and it happens a lot. I'm always impressed, whether it's that, which is obviously a daft one or just the way that people sometimes will post a video and you're like, oh, why didn't I create that video? Because I can relate exactly to what you've just done in that video.

Like making connections or just spotting things and looking at things from a different angle. Oh, still on weird, horrible LinkedIn stuff, they've introduced personalisation for ads. Okay, so in your ad, you can go, "Hey Dave, would you like to buy us.." like, oh, no, no, please, please. I think that's just eugh.

You can understand why people might think that's good. You know, it's like with email personalisation, email newsletters that start with "Dear Julie" or whatever, because you're using the placeholders, you know, it's fine but even then, you know it's automated sincerity.

Particularly if your name's again in the body of the email. "And by the way, Julie".

It's also a brilliant red flag when you get dear square brackets X, Y, Z. Dear first name, I love that, I love it. It's just like, yeah.

Yeah. Oops.

Rule one if you can use personalisation, personalise it. I noticed that with HubSpot, they took out the personalisation tokens in the free package because I used the free package for a few things like the Aboyne bridge campaign and stuff like that. And you can no longer do. "Dear Julie".

Right. Okay.

They've done it because they know how handy it is. So it's a very easy way to get people to upgrade to like the £15 a month starter.

Quite surprised they even do the emails in the free package. So that doesn't surprise me.

They do and it's quite good. Last week I went to two hundred odd people and it was nearly all delivered. And it was very good.

That was very good actually.

Yeah, absolutely.

So yeah, lots of horrible things going on related to LinkedIn, which I'm not happy about. Your turn.

Oh, right. Okay. We have recently started using a connector. My knees are still sticky.

I think we need a little context.

I've got sticky knees.

Long story.

Provide the context.

There was a lot of milk spilt. Nobody cried over it. But nearly, a lot of milk spilt in our kitchen this morning. And it went. When I say everywhere, I mean everywhere. It went under the flooring.

It did under the lino.

Under the cupboards. It. Yeah.

Yeah.

It was neither.

And so I stripped the lino. What do they call it now? They don't call it lino, vinyl flooring! I ripped the vinyl flooring up and the milk was actually underneath it. But obviously the flooring is then sticky. So I've got my shorts on because it's still summer. Shut up, it is! And I'm kneeling on this sticky floor and I've just touched my knee there and it's still sticky. So anyway, that's the sticky knees. Anyway, I was talking.

And that reminds me of a marketing.

Sticky knees remind me of a marketing tactic, which you all should try. Take these three steps. One. Spill milk. Two. Rip your vinyl floor up. Three kneel on the sticky bit that's left underneath. And then you forget about the email you were going to send that nobody would have read anyway.

Oh yeah. Pretty much. That's kind of how this morning went.

We chose Windsor AI as a way to connect data sources, primarily for us, so that we can use the data sources when we're putting together information and reports, etc. using Claude. You can also use it to connect Looker Studio, for example, to various data sources.

We have used it to connect HubSpot via Windsor client into Looker Studio. And it's been been quite mind melting, but it's worked. When it works, it is actually really good.

Yeah. I mean, I was talking about this with Steve, you know, my pal over in Australia, we had a catch up last week and I was chatting about it to him and he used I'm not saying that if you know people who know how to use, um, what's it called? Uh, Power BI, for example, and the language that you have to use in Power BI to get the reports. Now, I'm not saying that's defunct, but the nice thing about connecting up data sources using Zapier, Windsor or whatever to your favourite AI is you can just speak like we're speaking now. Go and find this information and tell me this information. Go and look at this and tell me this. And we were finding that there was some tools like Search Console, for example, where you can export and import. So you can export it out of Search Console as a CSV or an Excel spreadsheet, dump it into AI and say, use this data and go and do this thing. But there's no MCP server. Certainly Google hasn't put one up yet. Um, same with GA4 and, and various other things. So, you know, by getting one of these tools to talk to GSC, Google Search Console, Google Analytics, and for example Google Ads. You can just ask plain English questions and then get all this fantastic information back in at the speed of light. I mean, it's just so useful. I've blogged about it and talked about in this podcast about the power of MCP servers. And I know from a technical point of view, some people argue with justification that they're very inefficient and they're not a good idea, etc.. But to the rest of us who just really don't want to spend our time writing SQL queries or learning Power BI or any of that stuff, we know what we want. But previously maybe didn't quite know how to ask the question in the required language. It's just game changing. It's fantastic.

It's like the new HubSpot report. You can just say, I want a report showing the number of people that did this, split by source or split by month or whatever. And it goes away. Mostly it actually gives you the thing you want, which would have taken ages to figure out with filters.

Well, the problem I always found with HubSpot reporting was that I did it infrequently. So every time I had to do it, I was like, oh shit, you know, it's not all I do. I do lots of other things. And so every time I used it, it was like. It's like with programming, you can become a whiz at programming and then don't do it for six months and you're just back to square one. And I think, that's kind of where the non generative side of AI, if you like, is at its most powerful. You don't need to necessarily know the lingo. It's almost like, you can put your AirPods in and use that app and someone can speak in French and it'll in real time translate it into English in your head.

Yeah, it's a bit like that.

So I'm not saying you could hold meaningful conversations doing that, but it's just the way these tools are making communication. If you like, more accessible, either person to person, or person to machine. Person to software, rather.

Yeah, definitely. You can just let it go.

And so we looked, we were going to use, what was the expensive one, which we didn't go for? There was Windsor, which we've gone with. There was another one which was similar to Windsor, similar pricing. Um, and then there was one that i think you mentioned Supermetrics, which I think is probably more powerful, but it was also a bit more expensive wasnt't it?

I didn't actually look at the pricing.

I mean, I think there was a free option with Windsor and we just went for the cheap option, which just cost us like less than two hundred dollars for twelve months access. It only allows you to connect to three data sources. But it allows you to connect to three data sources and then 75 accounts within each data source so connect it to Google Search Console. There's a data source. Connect it then to 10 of the accounts. Some of the people listening. If they're not in agency land, they don't need to do that because.

They've got one account.

Yeah. Sort of thing, Search console with their property and that sort of thing. Unless you're on multiple sites.

The free one might even work for that.

Yeah. The free one might even work, but definitely give them a try. They're dead easy to set up. Very effective. Dead easy to connect to your favourite AI.

Yeah. And if you've got like a board members that need dashboards and things, it's a really good way to pull all the data together and into Data Studio, which is what Looker Studio is now. It used to be called Data Studio and then it was called Looker Studio. Now it's called Data Studio again. Okay. Which is just confusing.

Yeah. That's not like Google to confuse people.

No. Never happened before.

All right, your turn.

Okay. I've got a load of statistics that may or may not generate a bit of conversation. Um, apparently ChatGPT refers out to other websites in only five percent of sessions. And Google refers out in thirty one percent.

The free one or the one you pay for.

That I don't know.

Yeah. It could be that the free one.

Could be the free one.

Yeah. It's free. And so they've got to reserve like bandwidth and resources and everything else. So that will rely on the data it learned on.

Yeah. It's training data.

Which could be out of date.

Yeah.

I think I might be wrong, but I think that might be the case with ChatGPT and then go on the other ones.

Yeah. And ChatGPT has now got unlimited text chats in the the free one. So it's not like it used to be, like twenty a day or.

Oh was it?

Yeah. But now it's unlimited. So that's gonna get more people using it.

I wonder if there's gonna be a shakedown of these at some point, you know, because they're offering all this free stuff, free stuff with the promise of jam tomorrow for investors. Yeah. But like, you know, I don't know I'm not sure.

Well, will Gemini buy Claude or Claude buy ChatGPT.

What were the stats for the others that you said? So you said 73% of...no, I'm reading it upside down.

ChatGPT refers out in five percent of sessions, Google refers out in thirty one percent of sessions. So it's got more links. But then Google...

Did you get Claude, what was that?

No, the data was just comparing just those two. Claude I don't know.

Okay.

But only four percent of the URL cited by Claude overlapped with the URL cited by ChatGPT.

So when you the models the same question.

They're giving you basically completely different answers.

Or they're using completely different sources.

Depending on the question, the answer might be the same, but they're not referring to the same URLs. So just because you're visible in one doesn't mean you're visible on the other. So whatever that means to the world.

Yeah. I mean, we found, I think, we are getting a reasonable amount of exposure in the AI engines based on the traffic we see coming in etc. but it's what is, um, I have no idea what I was going to say. What you have to be mindful of is like you say, which ones do you go after? In theory, it shouldn't matter, should it? You should be putting out good information, that's well structured, or structured at least in a way that you are being told to structure data for the AI engines, even if it turns out that it's complete horseshit. But at least trying to do what you think should be the right thing? And then it's a bit kind of hit and hope after that, because we've no real way of knowing how proprietary the systems inside these engines is.

Yeah.

In terms of how they try and provide the best answer because it's really like Google, Google is always trying to provide the best answer, the best response to a search query that it can. Why would it do that in order to retain market share? Because people keep going back to Google because it gives...

Well, I mean, have you used have you ever used Bing recently?

I've not used Bing for a long time. No.

My husband was using Bing for something.

And did you slap him?

Basically, yeah. Because he's like, why can't I find the thing? I was like, because you're using Bing, go and use Google. And then he found it immediately. Bing doesn't seem to be very good at all. I mean, it's never been as good as Google. But I mean, whatever he was looking for, it just wasn't doing the job.

Yeah. Do you think Bing didn't evolve because it was no good or because not enough people used it, so they didn't get the data required in order to learn to make it better?

Which came first, the chicken or the egg, I don't know. I mean, yeah, why? Why does no one use Bing? Because they were already using Google and Google's kind of the Hoover of search engines. And people just talk about, you never say, "Oh, I'll go and bing that".

I sometimes force myself to say, I'm going to vacuum.

Yeah.

But I very rarely say that like most people, I say, I'm going to go and hoover. Yeah, I'm going to Hoover. With my Dyson.

Yes. So you're not going to go and Bing an answer. You're possibly going to Google an answer. Even if you're using Bing, you're 'googling' an answer.

I mean, we've often spoke about this with corporate customers. Well, you know, B2B type customers, which is pretty much all of our customers because some corporates tie their users into Bing. But I imagine if unless you're working like my sister works ,in the defense industry and she's not supposed to take her phone into the office, I don't think. But I mean if you were working at a corporate where you weren't working in quite such a sensitive area, you would just get your phone out, wouldn't you, and just go, right, I need to know this thing. I'm not going to piss around on here with Bing and get the wrong Answer because I mean, I'll go and Google it.

We suspect that a lot of people are using Bing and don't even realise they're using Bing. They just think they're using Google because they're just doing a search. It's just not paying. They're just assuming, I think, I'm gonna just do a search and they end up on Bing and then they wonder why they get a stupid answer, but it is definitely not as good. You think, "Well, one search engines the same as another", but they're not. And I guess the same with with AI engines. They're going to give you, obviously give you, completely different answers.

One that I do sometimes pull up to actually experiment with is the rather ridiculously named Duck Duck Go.

Oh yeah.

To try and see what its search results look like. I mean, certainly if I've seen a search result that's for some search term that we're trying to rank for. And I see, oh, we're on page one of Google for that. I might go and check in Duck Duck Go. But I very rarely, if ever, go and check Bing at the same time. And again, maybe I can't remember the last time I did. So I don't know why I would go and check this. I mean the Duck Duck Go one is supposed to like, you know, not track you, not follow you, not do anything sinister. So I suppose it's just a different experience. So I go and check it just to see what's happening.

Yeah. And I think in some markets, if you had like an audience that was very sensitive to things like that, then that would be one to track. And again, if your audience is completely like corporate, then Bing's obviously going to be the one to track. Yeah. But on the whole, Google's still got like ninety odd percent of the market share. So it's always going to be the main one to look at.

Yeah. Okay. Is it my turn or your turn? If you've got something, feel free.

Um. Oh, yeah, back to what I was saying earlier. These statistics, forty one percent of content on LinkedIn is completely generated.

Did you share that with me earlier this week in the office? Because either that or I read it somewhere. It was a very scary fact.

I think I put it on my LinkedIn. Yeah.

Oh you did? That's right.

That's where I read an article about it. So yeah, I did an article that wasn't AI generated on LinkedIn, about forty one percent of content on LinkedIn being completely AI generated. It's like, oh, forget that.

But that's, you know, as I'll mention in the next thing I was going to bring up, I'm not averse, I was going to say adverse just to annoy people, but I'm not adverse to. It's annoying when a client says that you can't really correct them because they're a client, you just think, you idiot. It's adverse, not adverse. But you can't say that. No you can't. If you're, you know, I'm not adverse to. I'm not, I'm just being specific.

That's the other one.

I'm not adverse to the use of AI at all. Love it. Not in a deceitful way. As in like I wrote this when I didn't, I wrote it, I don't do that shit, so I don't necessarily think AI generated content on LinkedIn is a bad thing unless people are setting autopilot and it's AI driven.

Completely AI generated.

This isn't as in they're just sort of like using a tool which just does something.

And it's just the garbage that I was talking about earlier, I think that was what I was posting about, like either coming up, helping, getting AI to help you come up with an idea or get an AI to kind of formulate an idea into sentences or get an AI to check your spelling or whatever. Great, but completely AI generated. What's the point?

Yeah, I don't know why, but that just brought to mind, a play or something I saw on TV many, many, many years ago. It might have been play for today or something like that. Play for Today. Kisses at Fifty. You can get it on YouTube. Bill Maynard's in it. It's brilliant. It's really is good. I just kind of like stuff based in northern towns.

Yeah, gritty and stuff.

Yeah. It was like this sporting life and all those kind of things. But Kisses at Fifty with Bill Maynard, who I spoke to once. Oh yeah. I was in a pub and this person said I'm his manager. I was like, yeah, get lost. And do you want to speak to him? I was like, yeah. So she rang him and said, there you go. And I was like, hello? And it was him. I was just chatting and it was on Christmas Eve and I had a real chat with Bill Maynard. I was thrilled. Selwyn Froggitt if anyone doesn't know who Bill Maynard is or he was also in, uh, what was that police thing set in the sixties called?

Nick Perry.

Huh?

Oh. Oh. That one.

Yeah. That one. He was one of the characters in that as well, wasn't he?

Yeah. I know which one you mean.

Right. So remind me. Go on.

No idea.

Oh, we're talking.

About what we're talking about. Yeah. Obviously I'm missing.

Oh. That's right.

Completely. Oh, you watched something that was related to things being AI generated or not?

No, I was saying that I don't have anything against stuff being AI generated as long as like, a human's reading it, checking it, they're happy with it, they're editing it, etc.. But if you're saying that this is just literally automated horseshit that's just getting churned out. That's right. Play for today. Got that?

That reminded you of a play.

Yeah. So and I can't remember what it was about, but I remember and it was just this annoying thing. It was annoying for the characters, but it wasn't like central to it. But they lived in a world where when you went outside, everything had an advert pasted on it like billboards, you know, you get some areas of some cities where it's a free for all. The council don't take them down and people just put adverts up like, I suppose if you think about the salacious adverts in phone boxes back in the day, just like if there's a square inch there, pin my advert there. And one of the things was like flyers and I just remember they were in the house and like the morning post arrived and it was just this sack full of flyers. So there were that many flyers. You didn't do anything except gather them up and put them in the bin.

Yes. Because there were so many.

Yeah. So like, if you're thinking of content, I mean, that's if you're not coming up with original thought, if you're not posting stuff that people are genuinely looking for, if you're not doing something that makes you laugh, cry, have some emotion or something, then you're literally just doing that thing where you're producing this stuff and kidding yourself that it's anything close to effective.

Yeah.

And I don't, I just, I kind of don't get it.

No, I don't get it either. But I mean.

We've been guilty in the past of churning content out,, remember when I used to produce like so many blog posts that were like five hundred words of crap.

Just to get something off your chest?

They were. I mean, it wasn't like, "yeah, yeah, that's right". Which sort of brings me on to this sort of furore, if you like, that's been going on over the last month or so since it became clear that AI content was going to be watermarked.

Yeah.

Which, you know, kind of didn't bother me, faze me at all. I mean, here's my production process for some of the content that I produce. So I'll get AI to research it. I'll then structure what I need and check the research. I'll get AI to write a first draft. I'll then work through the draft, correcting it, making sure that I get the tone right and everything else. And when I'm happy with it, I'll then put it to the client. The client will read it, and when they're happy with it, it'll get published. For example, if it's not content for ourselves, it's content for ourselves. One, I'm happy with it. I'll publish it. Yes. I don't have any issue with that. I mean, we live in a world where you have to produce content in order to have a chance of being found in a search engine, in an AI engine, in social media or wherever. And I don't think it's unreasonable that we don't entirely use human capital to generate that content, because it serves a purpose to attract attention, provide some information, and hopefully start a conversation, a human conversation. I mean, that's what it's there for.

Doing it pre AI would be getting a topic, from agreeing a topic with the clients, going on the internet, doing your research, finding information on the internet, putting it together, rewording it, summarising it, restructuring it, and then adding some original thoughts, which is exactly the same as you're doing with AI. But AI is doing the research and putting it together in a basic form for you. And then you're fiddling with it and making it make sense and adding bits in and tidying it.

But I think the key to it is if you're not reading every single word and you're not happy with every single word then you probably need a kick up the arse.

Oh totally.

You know, but if you're using AI to help you write content, but you're doing all of those things, you're applying editorial control and making sure that it's a piece of content that you would actually enjoy reading yourself or in fact, read it through and see if you enjoy reading it. I don't care if it's got an AI watermark. I'll bet you could write some content completely not using AI, and it would have an AI watermark in it because the watermark is based on word associations and things. It's specifically based on the way the AI thinks. Well, if you use that word there, then nine times out of ten it's going to be this word next. So it does that and then it's going to be this word next. And so there's a pattern there. It's not a watermark in the traditional sense, but I think humans do that anyway. And I think the thing that's been missing from the debate is the absolutely appalling writing that humans have been doing for millennia.

Yeah.

You know. People hate writing. I know we've said this in a very recently in a podcast. A lot of people, most people, maybe don't like writing, and most people are probably pretty awful at it. And the content they produce is shit. And so if you can produce much better content, even if it's got an AI watermark in it, as long as you're not saying to the client, oh yeah, I wrote that whole thing, researched and wrote the whole thing, and it took me twenty hours. And here's a bill for, you know, £2000 or whatever. You know what I mean? If you're not doing that, then yeah, frankly, you deserve all you get. But assuming you're not doing that, then, if a client comes back to us. I mean, first of all, our clients know we're using AI to help to assist with the writing because that's a way of getting more for the book, more bang for the buck. But secondly, I just don't have an issue with it. And maybe I've got this spectacularly wrong, I don't know.

But the thing I read was that it could watermark it as AI, even if you've got AI to go through and you've written the whole thing yourself, but you've got AI to go through and like check the grammar, then it might sort of rephrase stuff and it would still come up as AI. Or it could be something that AI has written, but you've gone through and really edited it with AI. So it's not just saying this entire thing was done by AI. It's saying AI was involved in this somewhere along the line. Yeah. So it's in the newsletter, I was referring to a, really nice article by Mark Ritson. And he's spoken about very much the same thing, his process for writing content would be very similar, backwards and forwards, like draft something, get AI to do it, get research. And it was like a joint effort. And he was like, how much AI has to be involved before you say it's AI and it's not human because nearly everything now is going to be a bit of both?

Mhm. Because we were all doing it the long handed way. The long handed way now wouldn't involve going to the library. It would involve using Google and searching for information.

Which Is exactly what Claude's doing.

And getting references. Yeah. Well that's you'd expect.

So it's neither here nor there. You're finding information on the internet and then using that piece of information to write an article. So yeah.

But people on TikTok and the like have been getting very excited about it. And immediately there's been tools brought out. This is the watermark removal tool, which, it's almost like it's more important to remove the watermark, even if the end result is a completely awful piece of content than it is just to, you know, just to have. Yeah, if you want to check it, you will see an AI watermark in there because AI was definitely used to help create it. And why wouldn't you do that?

Yeah. And I think the only time it would get people twitchy as if they're like students and they're writing essays and things and they've been told not to use AI and then they use AI and well, there you go.

It's dead easy to use AI badly. It really is. There's a craze going around at the moment, and you'll have seen it on Facebook and the like, posters for events. Oh my God, they all look exactly the same. Yeah. I mean, there's a lot of...

These jagged, jagged edges.

That's yellow and black and yeah it's just like, all of the people who, a lot of the people who run metal detecting digs, they're not very I.T literate. And it's just the best thing since sliced bread for them because they can create a really professional looking posters in their view.

Yeah, I mean, it's better than nothing.

It just looks like, you know, just every single one looks the same.The same. There was one advertising metal detecting dig. There was one saying, you know, like we, we buy motorhomes any condition. And it was exactly the same again, this black and white styling with the jaggedy stuff.

And the bright yellow.

Bright green.

That's right. Yeah.

It's really. Yeah.

Yeah. It's weird. They're all the same.

It is, it is. Well, I don't know.

It's not weird.

I don't know.

Yeah.

Um. Okay. What have you got? I've been blithering away for forty three minutes. Did you know that?

Really? I think we've covered much ground in that time. Um.

Does it matter?

Oh, yeah. Another another good, good. Um, article that I put in the newsletter.

It's very modest of you.

Good article. Not a good newsletter, just a good article.

That's what I like to hear, self-deprecation.

We're in the 'everybody's in marketing now' era.

Okay.

But it was really interesting. So the guy, Robert Rose, he's the....

I grew up with a lad called Robert Rose.

Probably not the same one.

Um, it definitely isn't.

So he's saying at the moment, like everybody's doing stuff in AI and then telling marketing to go and like post it or.

Oh yeah. Okay.

Yeah, I've written a thing. Go and do it. I've designed a flyer. Go and get it out there. So, like, everybody's a marketer.

Um.

Because it's just so easy, you know, I've designed a new logo!

This is a pattern though, isn't it? Everyone became a designer when DTP software came out. Yeah. You know, everyone's a marketer because they can.

They can get ChatGPT to do it for them.

But you know, the real sort of stuck record. But the real power of these tools is when they're in the hands of the person who would have done it without the tool.

Yeah. So what he was saying was, instead of everybody going away and doing random acts of marketing and giving them to the marketing department. Marketing needs to be creating a strategy and guidelines and saying like, here's the strategy. Go and do stuff that fits this. Don't do random stuff. If you're going to go and do random stuff, make it within this framework that somebody who's actually thought it through has created. So this is the direction the business is going. This is our marketing plan. These are our objectives. This is how we're going to get there. If you want to do stuff, it's got to be in that box. Yeah. Don't just do stuff.

Yeah.

So marketing needs to take back control.

Well, AI has just made doing stuff, easy. That's why. And it's a nice toy to play with. And it can look superficially impressive.

Absolutely. You make those posters look. Look at the poster i just made!

That's right. Yeah, absolutely.

So yeah. But those who are, here's our brand guidelines. There's no yellow and black in them anywhere along the line and no jagged edges. So please try again. So it's it's that but on a whole marketing scale, you know, have some guidelines and feel free to be creative, but do it within the strategy and within the marketing plan rather than making shit up. So yeah, that was quite interesting.

Um, this week I learned what forty eight sheet posters...

Oh yeah and six sheet.

Six sheet advertising is. Billboards and things.

It was funny because the guy was talking about poster advertising and he was like, yeah, that's six sheet and that's a forty eight sheet. And I'm like, oh yeah, that used to be the language I spoke before we had like digital marketing.

Did you notice that Leslie made a bit of a bit of an ass of setting up this slot today. It's not nice. You don't know what she didn't do.

Well, apart from the cable into the thing.

Didn't clip the cables in, which was played havoc with my OCD. Didn't turn the heater off either. Now these microphones are pretty good, so they don't really pick up background noise like an air blowing ages ago. Don't give me that. You forgot to do it.

We'll see if it picks up the coffee machine turning itself off.

Oh, yeah. It'll pick something up in the background. Same as my phones rang twice. And it'll pick that up in the background.

I think last time we did a podcast, we were talking about getting a coffee machine. And then here we are with a coffee machine.

I must admit, because I picked the one that's got two hoppers, so I've got one for my decaf.

Decaf and the other.

One decaf beans and the other one. Yeah. Dennis. Claude.

Claude and Dennis.

Claude Hopper, not Claude, the AI tool. Yeah. I'm a convert. I mean, they're a bit big. I won't get one for home because they do kind of dominate, but yeah, in the office. Because I tell you, it makes a fab cup of coffee.

It does, and it really does. Its so less faffy and fiddily than messing about with the cafeteria and cleaning it out.

The Swiss water decaffeinated beans that they sell up at Strachan's.

Oh, yeah.

I made coffee in a Cafetiere or French press as I started calling it for some reason, and it wasn't great. In fact, I've gone back to the Lavazza stuff that we did get, or sometimes the tailor stuff in that machine that those very same beans make a fab cup of coffee.

Just the way their ground or something.

I don't know why. Yeah, it's the way it's made. But anyway.

Very exciting times in the office.

Red Evolution moves into the twenty first century.

With a coffee machine.

Yeah. One hundred years too late. Um, you were saying something?

No.

You were and then Leslie came in to reset the cameras.

I don't think I had anything else.

Okay. Well, yeah. That's right. I was talking about the forty eight sheet and the.

Oh yeah, you were talking six sheets of bus stop poster.

So we got an email just like a random cold call email, but it was nice and short. It was really nicely put together. And it was dead easy to consume it. I just went all right. And the guy was basically saying, this company, Ad Frame are kind of buying up the defunct redundant real estate, not real estate.

Um.

Advertising billboard.

Yeah. The actual physical.

The actual physical, the non-digital forty eight sheet and six sheet. So the six sheet ones are the little ones. You get outside co-op's and the like, and maybe bus shelters and things. They're six sheet as well. And then the forty eight sheets, the big one. Yeah. And you know, they were basically saying is it worth having a conversation? And I thought, well, you know, it's a string that we should have to eyeball. We've done a bit of outside advertising for clients, but we don't do a lot of it. And in my tiny little brain, I often thought, if you want to put like a forty eight sheet, as I now know it's called, billboard to everybody else, including me, six days ago, the big billboards. Fortune. Absolute fortune. And it isn't.

The thing is you don't buy one. You buy a heap.

So unless there's one place somewhere, like for example, it was an industrial estate.

Yeah.

And there was one on the entrance to an industrial estate. We might take that one and spend literally hundreds of pounds to have it there. And what did he call it when there's nobody buying the billboard after you, you get is it overexposure you get or something like that?

Something.

So if there is nobody else coming in they often don't go and put white on they just leave it.

Just leave it until it peels off in the rain.

And I could see, from a brand awareness point of view, that sticking some strategically placed, ads, billboards, stuff up. But, um, I just thought it was good. I thought the pricing was not expensive, like you said. I mean, if you were going to go for a bigger company and you wanted to splatter, you know, a hundred billboards around the country, and then yeah your going to spend a lot of money.

But if your looking for just local awareness because they were opening a branch in a specific town. So they were looking for local awareness and we did bus stop posters for them, but it was just a smallish town. It wasn't that many bus stops. But yeah, for something very like geographically targeted, when you're trying to reach a kind of wide range of people then. Yeah, I think. In addition to other things, when we did the bus stops, but we also did, Radio at the same time? No, we did I think Facebook ads at the same time. So that you're seeing the bus stop and then, you're at home and then you're sort of seeing it again. So the reinforcement thing.

Mhm. Okay. All right. I've got another bunch of stuff written down, but I'm quite happy to save it because obviously we'll be doing this nonsense again next Monday. If not, well, not Thursday because I'm down in Stafford and I'm going down to see our new client. Exciting times. Nice new client, nice chunky budget and an exciting project. So yeah, Going down. Decided to go on the train in the end. Okay, I booked my train. Yeah, I got it a bit cheaper than I said. It was going to be close to four hundred quid or something, because I'm a snob and I only travel first class. It's a lot cheaper than that, so it's fine. I think I've just picked exact trains, so if it goes horribly wrong, I'll finish up spending a fortune hiring a car to come home.

There's always that. Yeah.

It's not because I'm a snob. It's because you can work better in first class, that's all.

And it's easier because they're trying to. If you've got a little tray and you're trying to type and your laptop keeps falling off the tray, it's not that easy.

Yeah. That's right. So I'm quite looking forward to that. And I haven't booked my hotel yet, but there's Premier Inns quite close to where the client is. So I'm going to book that soon.

Its near the M6 so there's going to be plenty of places to stay.

But yeah, down to Edinburgh and then Edinburgh to, and then it goes to the um what's, what's the train called that goes like you've got LNER.

You've got the cross country.

Yeah. It's not cross country. No it's.

The.

Avanti West Coast. Yeah. So it's a long time since I've been on the West Coast mainline. I used to go down from Barrow to London to buy my shirts on Saturday mornings.

I haven't been I haven't been on that for a very long time. I've been on the East Coast.

I see it quite a lot because we drive down that side of the country quite a lot, so it'd be quite nice just to see that same bit of country and not be driving but from the train. Yeah, absolutely. So I'm looking forward to that. Go down on Wednesday, back up on Thursday and off to see a potential new client in Aberdeen tomorrow. And then we had that enquiry came in from that, um.

Industrial company.

In Edinburgh.

So yeah it's been a busy month. Or it could be a busy month.

Could be, things have been a bit perkier definitely. Anyway, so we'll save.

The rest for.

Other gibberish. Yeah. So much there, but I'll save it for next time. Uh, so you've been listening to Dave and Julie on Digital Marketing From The Coalface. Um, feel free to tell your friends.

Please.

All right. Bye.