Google is a reward for getting marketing right in all the other channels

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I shared earlier this year that we need to avoid the mistake of giving Google credit for when other sources are really where your company was found. A few years ago I shared the story of how we found our CPA firm, and how they could have wrongly attributed things to Google.

In a recent post from Rand Fishkin, he shared a simple statement that summarizes this all quite well. He said:

Google has become a reward for getting marketing right in all the other channels rather than the place to start.

While there are certainly many people that still begin their dive into a topic with a Google search, the numbers are continuing to fall. In most cases, people will hear about an idea, a product, or a company on some other platform (often social media or ChatGPT), and then go to Google to find details. This shift is unlikely to slow down.

There’s good news and bad news from this.

The good news is that when people search for you on Google, they’re searching for you. They’re not looking for “home builders in Atlanta”, they’re looking for your specific company. That’s a huge win.

The bad news is that you need to be in those other places in order to be found. If you decide that you don’t want to put the effort into showing up online in places like LinkedIn and YouTube and you just want to focus on SEO, you’ll be fighting over a continually smaller piece of the pie.

If you put in the work to be found on the internet, Google will be your reward.

Do you treat social media like junk food?

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I shared last week about finding the “middle place” when it comes to social media usage, and a recent comment I heard on a podcast helped shape that a bit further.

While listening to a recent episode of Adam Grant’s WorkLife podcast, his guest Jay Van Bavel made this comparison of social media usage to junk food:

“When I use social media, it’s like your diet. I think some people just want the junk food diet version of it. And other of us like actually make an effort to use it as a way to make ourselves smarter or more informed about the world.”

It’s a solid analogy. The food that we feed ourselves directly affects our body, just like the media that we consume directly affects our thoughts. In both cases it’s fine to consume a bit of junk food from time to time, but if that is your primary sustenance you’re gonna have a bad time.

Shut up and sing

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Through the election cycle, a lot of were people upset that celebrities were using their fame to endorse various political candidates, with shouts to “shut up and sing” or “shut up and dribble” — stick to their profession and stay out of politics.

I agree in theory, as political endorsements from my friends and people that I trust are worth far more than who a celebrity or athlete chooses to endorse. However, I don’t think it’s fair to ask them to “shut up and sing”.

The issue I see is one of inconsistency. The people that most often post things like “shut up and sing” usually have that wedged between various political opinions of their own that they’re sharing. They have a small audience of a few friends, and they choose to spend that engagement on political commentary. What do you think would happen if they became far more popular? I highly doubt they’d “shut up and sing”. Instead, they’d undoubtedly use their leverage to reach even more people with their opinions.

I don’t get much of anything out of celebrity endorsements, and I’d certainly find it a bit more peaceful if they stayed out of politics, but almost all of us would use our wider audience to continue to share our beliefs. To expect different out of singers and athletes seems like a short-sighted view of the world.

Finding the “middle place”

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Social media has some serious flaws, no doubt, but there is still a lot of good to be found on there. I enjoy seeing what my friends are up to and celebrating or grieving as we all go through life together.

The problem, as social media sites are specifically designed to do, is that we can get sucked in and spend way too much time on them. In her book “A Minute to Think”, author Juliet Funt offers a simple concept to fight this:

We need to find the middle place. Some way to take little compartmentalized sips in our social channels but not lose ourselves in the process.

In my world, thanks in part to that book, I’m noticing a pull in a few different directions. I’m generally pretty good about limiting my time on social media, but I often fill it all with different forms of learning — reading, Anki, Readwise, podcasts, and a bunch of other tools. Those can be great, but leaving some space for literally nothing can often be the best thing that we do.

Lately, I’ve been trying to spend some of my driving time in that “nothing” zone — no radio, no podcasts, just nothing. It’s a bit weird and unnerving, but can lead to some awesome trains of thought.

The balance between learning, social media, and doing nothing is a tricky one to balance, but it’s something I fight hard to do. I have great people in my life that are examples of all three, so finding the space between them can be magic in those times I’m able to do it right.

The Hamster Wheel of Social Media

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About a year ago, Jay Acunzo released an amazing concept called “The Idea Impact Matrix“, which was focused on creating higher-impact content.

As part of the matrix, he encourages us to stay out of the “commodity cage”, where you produce content that is very general and not too insightful. There is a ton of that content online, and AI is only making it worse. Here is a short clip from a session that Jay led that showcases how many people view social media today:

Creating content on social media is certainly a great move for many businesses, but doing it with purpose and insight is far more valuable than just churning out more and more generic stuff.

There are a lot of people that I follow on various social platforms that put out awesome, useful content that I love to see. Then there are others that are just pumping out whatever they can. The more you can lean toward the former, the better.

I encourage you to check out Jay’s two-part series for more.

Big fires aren’t started by big sparks

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This is one of those things that we all already essentially know, but I had never really thought about. If you see a giant fire blazing, you never think “wow, it must have taken a huge spark to start it“. A tiny spark can turn into a giant fire just as easily as a huge spark.

With social media, things are heading in the same direction. As I shared earlier this year, the value of having “followers” on social media is plummeting. It’s not a bad thing to have a lot of followers, and it can help a bit, but it matters less and less.

In his book “Contagious“, author Jonah Berger shares this thought from Duncan Watts:

“Describing why a small handful of cool or connected people (so-called influentials) are not as important to social epidemics as we might think, sociologist Duncan Watts makes a nice comparison to forest fires. Some forest fires are bigger than others, but no one would claim that the size of the fire depends on the exceptional nature of the initial spark. Big forest fires aren’t caused by big sparks. Lots of individual trees have to catch fire and carry the flames.”

Your very first post on TikTok could get a million views. The next post from a big influencer might only get 10,000. Your tiny spark can turn into just as large a fire as a huge spark from an influencer. Their big sparks are more likely to catch, but that’s changing quickly.

The quality of every piece of content matters more than the name behind it, so produce great things and hope that some are able to light things up.

Fake photos have been a problem for a long time

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In the past few weeks you’ve probably seen this photo of a little girl holding her puppy during the flooding from Hurricane Helene. You probably also know that it was AI-generated.

This type of thing seems like a growing problem, and it is, but I was surprised to see how far back the problem of fake images goes. A recent post on Techdirt dives into the history of fake photos, going back more than a century! There was actually a bill introduced to the Senate in 1912 that was “to prohibit the making, showing or distributing of fraudulent photographs“, but it never got passed.

Just a year after that bill was proposed, a fake photo of President William Taft went around that showed him riding a Carabao and “it was thought to have been part of an effort to buy goodwill with a nation seeking independence from the United States”.

Photoshop brought editing to the masses, and AI is taking it a step further, but this is not new at all. Passage of the 1912 law would have helped in some ways, but crimes are still crimes. As they point out in the article, attempts to “legislate against fake nude images would be unneeded – those would be illegal already“.

The future of fake photos will get very interesting in the next few years. The image of the girl and her puppy at the top of this post is easy to spot as being AI-generated, but the “easy to spot” will be disappearing very soon as the tools get better. Determining real vs fake will becoming increasingly difficult, and I don’t know how it will be solved, but it was very interesting to me to see just how long this has been a problem.

I encourage you to check out the full article from Techdirt to learn more.

Hatred for outgroups is the best way to go viral on social media

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I have a great tip for you today to help you go viral more often on social media: show a lot of hate. While we all say that we want to more uplifting content on social media, hate spreads much more quickly.

I know you’ve all seen it, often from very “nice” people online that show outright hatred for certain groups. In a recent podcast from Adam Grant, Jay Van Bavel shared a massive study that made the numbers very clear:

Analyzing posts from news media accounts and US congressional members (n = 2,730,215), we found that posts about the political out-group were shared or retweeted about twice as often as posts about the in-group. Each individual term referring to the political out-group increased the odds of a social media post being shared by 67%.

The idea of “ingroups vs outgroups” is something that I first shared a few months ago, but it’s something I notice all the time now that I’m aware of it. As Jay points out in that show, we also see similar actions at the Olympics, when “patriotism” goes too far and turns into “nationalism”. Rooting for your side to win is great, but actively working against others is where the problems come in.

Jay’s solution?

“Just because you identify with the group doesn’t mean you’re going to discriminate against outgroups. If the norm is inclusivity, the more you identify with the group, the more inclusive you become, and the more you embrace other people and differences in other groups and cooperate more, it’s not a bad thing as long as we have healthy norms.”

Fight for your side and fight for what you believe in, but be a good human.

Who are you working for?

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People talk about “the algorithm” incessantly, and for good reason. If you’re sharing content online you want it to be seen, and the algorithm is a big piece of that in many cases.

Chasing the algorithm is one way to approach business, and it’s one that we certainly take from time to time. Depending on your goals, that might be a necessity. However, there’s another choice that should be considered every time. From a recent post by Seth Godin:

“The alternative is to be uncomfortable. To create remarkable work and leave scale to others. To figure out how to show up in a way that is generous and distinctive, and to refuse the bait that others take when they decide that feeding the algorithm is their best option.“

As he shares throughout the post, you can’t serve both the algorithm and your users. Are you going to be generous and distinctive, or are you just going to feed the algorithm?

I’ll end this post sharing the same words he ended his with, which I think is a fantastic question:

“If you’re posting on social media or any platform with an algorithm, the real question is: do you work for the algorithm or are you committed to working for the people who want to go where you hope to take them?“

Almost all word of mouth is still offline

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There are a lot of influences in our lives, but word of mouth is still the top reason why people buy products and services. Ads are important, marketing is important, but people buy most often based on what other people have to say.

Of that word of mouth, how much happens online? Most people guess 50% or more, given the popularity of social media, but the real number is much lower. In the book “Contagious“, author Jonah Berger shares that it’s just 7%. In other words, 93% of word of mouth suggestions actually come directly from those around us.

However, that book was written a decade ago and things have certainly changed. What’s the real number today? I’ve researched this a bit, and most people end up suggesting that around 20% of today’s word of mouth happens online, still leaving a massive 80% offline.

The frustrating part of this is that word of mouth is hard to control. You can ramp up your marketing, and that’s likely to help, but you can’t insert yourself into private conversations that are happening off-line. The solution? Make your product or service compelling enough that people want to tell others about it.

The two parts of being compelling

Getting people to share about a product can come from two places.

First, if someone is using their product and it’s making their life better, they’ll tell their friends about it. You’ve probably seen some of my posts on here that share about products and services that I love.

Second, if a promotion for a product is interesting enough, they’ll also tell their friends about it. Classic examples include things like the Dove Evolution campaign, or the series of Blendtec “Will it blend?” videos from a few years ago.

People are going to be talking about the products that they love with their friends. How do you make sure that yours will be part of those conversations?