Living in a Post-Search World

Tom Nixon (00:03.298)
Well, with all due respect to Brett Musburger, you are not looking live at episode two, season two of Bullhorns and Bull’s Eyes, but we’re back Curtis. Welcome back to the show.

Curtis Hays (00:14.256)
It’s great to be back. little hiatus, but as I would say, we’re back in the saddle again and ready to rock and roll. Let’s go for a ride.

Tom Nixon (00:23.511)
Hmm

Yeah, right. All right. Very good. Yes. So we kicked off season two in December. So if you missed that episode, we did go live. That was the reference to Brett Musburger and his catchphrase. So go back and listen to that one. One of the topics we touched on, Curtis, that I wanted to dive deeper today is a lot’s happening. A lot has happened with respect to search. It’s evolving with the advent of AI.

It’s caused me or brought me to this notion to ask the question. Are we living already in a post search world? And if not, will we soon be so, but you had an interesting stat that you’ve been sharing with clients in terms of search and what happens with the search results that I thought was interesting.

Curtis Hays (01:15.4)
Yeah, so what they’re calling zero click searches. with the advent of AI answers in Google, a large percentage of queries now do not lead to a click to a website. So the latest statistic is 65 % of searches within Google don’t lead to a click. And it’s

pretty much because, like I mentioned, with AI answers, knowledge graphs, those types of things, Google is providing an interface and an experience to users that give them answers to their questions right within the search results page. And I could see their logic behind it. You want to give a good experience to users. You want to keep them within your ecosystem. And if you have the opportunity,

to give them a quick and easy answer, and then they can go about their day. And they have to stay competitive with other AI platforms where we’re seeing people do search within ChatGPT and Google’s own product, Gemini or Perplexity. So they’re using these other tools as search engines, and Google has to stay innovative, right? So the search engine is turning into an AI interface.

basically.

Tom Nixon (02:41.878)
And Apple’s been doing this for a while now on their iPhones because they did not want to send users to a Google landing page, right? And give them all the traffic. So they would try to predict what they thought you were searching for and give you the answer. So this has sort of been a lot of years in the making, but now AI has gotten so smart. And Google’s fighting back now saying, no, no, you just need to come back to Google and we’ll give you the answer for you.

Curtis Hays (03:07.004)
Yeah, I think it’s probably even goes 11-ish years in the making. I think 2013, I might get my numbers wrong when Alexa came out. there was invented voice search. And then Apple, was Siri incorporated voice search. And of course, these AI tools like chat GPT have an AI voice interface so you can…

Essentially have a conversation with AI now, not just ask it a question, but more or less have a dialogue with it. So I might be pivoting in a different direction, but it’s not only changing the interface, but it’s changing the way that we interact in use search. So I’ll say the thing that I get out of it is

Tom Nixon (03:57.39)
that would be contracted in the next version of the school.

Curtis Hays (04:06.556)
think about natural language. If you’re doing voice search, the way that you speak is gonna be different than the way that you type. I mean, you’re the writer, so you tell, the way we talk and the way that we write is different, correct?

Tom Nixon (04:13.806)
you

Right.

Absolutely. Yep.

Curtis Hays (04:22.854)
So you now have to start thinking about search. If people are using more voice search, which they are, it continues to increase. The way that we look at search queries, let’s call them, aren’t just typed queries, but they’re also voice queries, which probably would incorporate more natural language, more conversational. And so you really got to start thinking about how those

queries are positioned and the languages that they’re using and then how you’re creating content to respond to those. we could dive more into that, but just thinking trend wise and kind of what’s happening in the ecosystem, voice search is not to be ignored.

Tom Nixon (05:08.022)
Yeah, absolutely. And you’re leading to really why this all matters is because what does this mean now for SEO is the question that a lot of our clients will ask us and are asking us. Some have even reported whether or not they think they’re talking about this topic or not. saying companies will come to us and say, some reason, our traffic to our site is down. Our search, we’re not performing as well in search anymore. And at the end of the day, I think what they’re trying to

to ask us is, well, now what? And so that’s kind of where you’re where we’re starting to take clients is, well, we need to think differently. I would submit SEO is not dead in the water per se, but we need to think differently, don’t we? And act differently on our own websites and elsewhere.

Curtis Hays (05:53.255)
We do. So that doesn’t mean, at least initially, and when I look at my clients, they still rank well. It’s just that the answer that their website is providing is presented within the search result. So if you do have, a top four position, it’s possible that your article on your website is being sourced and referenced within the AI answer.

Tom Nixon (06:01.677)
Mm-hmm.

Curtis Hays (06:21.168)
It’s certainly there for somebody to click, but they don’t have to because the answer you provided has been paraphrased or exact copy is being presented there in the AI answer. The user gets their answer and they don’t have to click. What’s interesting is that’s also happening within, chat GPT and proplexity and these AI tools that it’s also referencing where it’s getting sources. And so we’re actually seeing small, but there’s some traffic leading to websites.

Tom Nixon (06:39.318)
Hmm.

Curtis Hays (06:50.813)
where we see it coming at the source being an AI tool like ChatGPT. So I think we still have to pay attention to search. think we still have to, well, obviously we pay attention to search, but I think we’re still creating content on websites. I think the KPIs we’re looking at need to be reestablished in what we consider traffic and our goals are.

Tom Nixon (06:59.022)
you

Curtis Hays (07:18.756)
and start to look at other channels and sources for traffic. Neil Patel, is kind of one of the I’d say probably top 10 SEO marketing people out there, at least from a brand personality perspective now is calling search engine optimization, search everywhere optimization. So he changed the E in the SEO because search is happening everywhere.

Tom Nixon (07:41.33)
Mm. Love it. Yeah.

Curtis Hays (07:47.433)
It’s happening on social media. We talked about that in our lives that you know people go and do a search for a business maybe on a Facebook and or Instagram Particularly that younger generation or a tick-tock they’re gonna do searches and those types of things that look up content Versus going to a search engine and so we have to think about search across the entire Digital landscape and not just Google and our website

Tom Nixon (08:11.822)
Yeah, and of course, what’s happening at the same time while search gets more competitive or more refined people the last year or two years, so much more content has been generated thanks to AI things like chat GPT. It’s quote unquote easier to create content and get it out there. I don’t think it’s any easier to create great content. In fact, it might be more difficult. So there’s two things I think at play here.

There’s the search everywhere notion, which I think we should dive into. And there’s the, you know, if they’re not coming looking for you, you need to go out there looking for them, meaning your ideal client. And you need to be in the places that they are either looking for answers or not looking for answers. But I think it’s this, an old SEO trope may have been, you know, if you’re doing a good job, the user will find you because you’re going to be at the top of the list. And now we’re saying, well, maybe they’re not even looking at the list. So.

Now what? So which of those two things would you like to dive into first? Like search everywhere or how do you get in front of your ideal client?

Curtis Hays (09:15.11)
Let’s start with how do you get in front of your ideal client? Yeah, let’s start with content and then let’s talk about how we and where we go to syndicate that content.

Tom Nixon (09:25.986)
Yep. My big thing on content. want to get your as a writer. Obviously, I see the temptation to go to a LLM and have them it write the content for you. The problem is, is all of that stuff is looking the same and I can sniff it out a mile away. I always joke that if the first five words are in the ever changing world of that was written by AI, I can guarantee it.

And it doesn’t matter if in the ever changing world of SAS and the ever changing world of search and the ever changing world of marketing. So it’s like, okay, we get, know, your copy should not read like a movie trailer, you know, in a world where anyways, so, but there’s other reasons. mean, I think, you know, it’s, it’s writing safe copy. It’s only knows what it can find. It’s learning from what exists elsewhere. Right. So

By its very nature, it’s not original. So when I look at content, I’m like, all right, how do we as a brand and as individuals scream to the world? This is not chat GPT talk chat GPT content. I don’t think people want to read that stuff. They can go write it themselves if they, if they want to. So, you know, to me, it comes back to authenticity and it comes to standing out. And there are ways that you could do that.

Curtis Hays (10:40.753)
There are. mean, what did I tell you the other day? I wrote it down here. Marketing is about connecting with people, right? And the best marketing doesn’t feel like marketing. And if your writing feels like either AI or it just feels like marketing, if you go and write a white paper and it feels like a white paper, you may not be connecting with your target audience. And if you’re going to talk about authenticity,

And being genuine and and and you know connecting Like that the content actually has to deliver on that if the content doesn’t deliver on that What’s the point? I’d say don’t even do content marketing Wait, I mean what what are your thoughts on that?

Tom Nixon (11:25.239)
Right. Yep.

I agree a hundred percent. and I think, so here’s, think the pro tip necessarily it’s going to differ by person, but if you can tell that the real person is somewhere in the room when you’re reading content, you’ve done a good job. If you could tell that, you know what this went through five layers of approval and intern started it with chat, GPT management, watered it down. We put in some buzz. People are going to ignore that. So now is, but if it’s something like

you know, a super funny anecdote or the whole reason we went live in episode one was to do something that chat GPT can’t do yet, which is to go live in front of people. So if you take that sort of hierarchy or overarching sort of premise and say, how do I get myself in the room? That’s what you have to do with your content. You have to get people in by showing your personality, maybe even showing a little bit of vulnerability. If you’re a funny person showing your sense of humor.

whatever it is, and it’s got to be authentic to the person. Otherwise, like you said, it feels like marketing.

Curtis Hays (12:32.019)
So I think the word that you use quite frequently and of course Josh has his own coin phrase storytelling and he calls it funnel driven storytelling. share with our audience like storytelling, like what does that mean to you? And if you had to like describe that to maybe how you do storytelling, I mean, I think we all know what storytelling is, but like as a brand, where do I even start?

Like how do I get better at storytelling?

Tom Nixon (13:04.146)
think it starts with guess what word it starts with the word why and knowing your audience is why so it’s going to widely vary depending on what what market you’re in, what your audience is like, etcetera, but let’s just take for an example. A home builder, let’s say, okay, so the home builder could

have JET GPT write all sorts of words like professionalism and experience and all of these things but they don’t craftsmanship. Yup. They they appear on every website, right? But the one that sticks out is going to be the one that says this home buying experience that you’re used to is horrible, right? It’s overruns. It’s delays. It’s surprises. We know that that’s baked into it.

Curtis Hays (13:37.874)
Craftsmanship.

Tom Nixon (13:59.746)
but we’ve already figured that part out the hard part out and we can we’ll fix that for you. So it’s now you’re appealing to the home buyer at an emotional level as opposed to you can tell stories you know, maybe even have a customer tell the story about jeez. This is the last thing I wanted to do. You know my wife wanted to build a new house. said there’s no way we’re going to do this right. This is going to be painful. It’s going to be costly. We’re going to want to divorce when this is done and people can relate to those sorts of stories right, especially married couples like

Curtis Hays (14:27.91)
Yeah. Yeah.

Tom Nixon (14:29.08)
take on a big project and this will end in a divorce. I didn’t use the word craftsmanship, professionalism, experience, any of that stuff. and now people are relating to the brand who tells that story in a way that’s authentic to the audience. but it isn’t going back to what you said, isn’t marketing language. It isn’t, you know, doesn’t feel like marketing. feels like story. So whatever it is for that company, it’s like finding out the emotional triggers that the prospect

is going to respond to and then serving up stories, real stories that exist. Now, I don’t think chat GPT, unless you’re a very good prompt engineer is going to come back with something like that because they don’t know your stories. They don’t know your personal stories. They can find stories on the web, but they’re not authentic to who you are to the actual customers you’re helping. So that’s one example. I’m going to share in the show notes, an example that I think is a spot on. And it’s a writer. You mentioned

Curtis Hays (15:18.994)
So.

Tom Nixon (15:26.57)
some of the you know, Patel, but this is a writer who I follow who contrasted. He asked chat GPT. I’ve read this before on this podcast as chat GPT to write a description of the day I saw my daughter born and it was authentic. I know it wasn’t authentic. It seemed plausible. It was well written. The grammar was okay. And then he said, now let me show it. Tell you how it actually went and he tells this little story by the end of it. You’re in tears. That’s the difference between just

generated AI filler in true authentic storytelling. So look for that in the show notes. You’ll like it.

Curtis Hays (16:03.666)
So you’re telling me we need to talk to our customers if we’re going to do storytelling. Yeah.

Tom Nixon (16:09.09)
Yeah, right. Yeah, exactly. Meaning, so explain what you mean by that.

Curtis Hays (16:17.084)
Well, I think the biggest thing that I’ve learned from this and where I think we’ve activated storytelling, I guess, if I’m going to put myself in the customer shoes is this podcast. Like we’ve invited people on to tell their stories. They haven’t all been customers. know, some of them have been, you know, colleagues and partners and different people that we’ve had, that thought leaders, right. That is a, that is a form of storytelling. It’s not in a written form.

Tom Nixon (16:28.024)
Mm-hmm.

Tom Nixon (16:35.758)
Thought leaders.

Curtis Hays (16:45.117)
But it is a form of storytelling. And so I think there’s a lot that we’ve created now that we could turn around and create into written if we felt it was appropriate. You could certainly take some of this and turn it into a video or case study or something of that nature. But you really can’t begin to do that or I guess do it effectively and really connect with people unless you go and talk to those.

those original people who were affected by the product or service that you’re, you’re offering, right?

Tom Nixon (17:20.162)
Yeah. So you’re describing, you know, what we do. It seems old fashioned, but it’s client conversation. It’s focus groups or client interviews. And we ask them to tell their stories, right? Tell us the story about what mind frame or mindset you were in frame of mind before you even knew about this company. What problem were you looking to solve? And you and I, work with a, well, Mario’s company, Mario was our first guest in, right. And we talked to some of his past customers.

Curtis Hays (17:30.172)
Right.

Curtis Hays (17:43.112)
Mm-hmm.

Tom Nixon (17:49.142)
and they do assisted home care, assisted living, and these people would tell would bear their soul to us and say and be in tears and say they changed my life. Like I I was felt like I was going to school and I was so overwhelmed and I one conversation with Mario’s team and I felt like I got my life back.

That’s way more powerful than a list of services that we provide or a blog post or whatever it is on, you know, 10 tips for seniors coping with memory loss or something like that. It’s a real story that people can relate to. And so we had to go talk to Mario’s customers to figure this out. And then we just let them retell their story. And that’s going back to your word authentic. You know, people can respond to that, especially if we can put that person on camera and have them tell the story. So we’re not even telling it, but.

Curtis Hays (18:38.236)
Right.

Tom Nixon (18:39.052)
And I think just hammer home that point. That’s what’s gonna be needed. The on camera, the authentic like I love the written word. I’m a writer. The written word is great, but we’re gonna need to show people. I think in the future, real people, right? Not stock images. What’s that? Show me. Don’t tell me. Yeah, that’s right. I don’t remember exactly what great it was, but I remember when I was just kind of cutting my teeth and

Curtis Hays (18:53.896)
Show me, don’t tell me.

Show me, don’t tell me.

Where did you learn that? Did you say fifth grade?

Tom Nixon (19:07.854)
wanting to be a writer, fifth, sixth grade, something like that. And I got back a paper that I had turned in and in the margins in red over and over again was pointing to a paragraph where I was describing how a person felt. The teacher said, show me, don’t tell me. Like, don’t tell me the person felt sad. Show me that the person reached into her pocket, pulled out Kleenex and wiped away a tear in the corner of her eye, which is more impactful, right?

Curtis Hays (19:36.84)
you

Tom Nixon (19:37.174)
It’s like, so, and that’s what marketers need to do. Show me, don’t tell me, you know, you could tell me you’re trustworthy, but show me. And then I’ll believe you.

Curtis Hays (19:40.519)
Yeah.

Curtis Hays (19:44.413)
So I want to stay on this topic, but maybe jump ahead a little bit. this is just to connect the dots. Is this why influencers work so well in a lot of marketing? Because they’re telling your stories for you, basically. mean, and it’s coming from them. It can come across. I mean, the good ones. It’s authentic and those types of things.

Tom Nixon (20:03.907)
Yep.

Tom Nixon (20:07.234)
And they’ve already earned the trust of a devoted audience where most businesses haven’t done that. Right. They’re trying to do that. That’s the whole reason they’re doing marketing in the first place is they want to build an audience, gain trust, gain authority. And influencer has all of that baked in. So influencer marketing is all about buying that influence and having that person tell our story because people will believe it.

Curtis Hays (20:29.254)
Let’s, let’s, I think this is important. I’d like to find an inf, like somebody who knows something about influencing for season two. Cause I think it, I get influencer marketing when it comes to retail consumer products. But what does it look like for a lot of our clients who are service industries, professional services, or B2B sales?

Tom Nixon (20:38.68)
Mm-hmm.

Curtis Hays (20:57.161)
Like I know influencer marketing exists there, but it exists in a different way. So I’d like to make that commitment here now that like, let’s figure out influencer marketing this year and let’s bring somebody on that. Is there anyone in your network? I don’t have no anyone specifically, but I might know some people I can reach out to that can introduce us.

Tom Nixon (21:03.656)
Yeah.

Tom Nixon (21:07.702)
All right. Yes. You’ve set it on air.

Tom Nixon (21:20.588)
Yeah. Well, we’ll think about that for sure. Now it’s on the agenda.

Curtis Hays (21:22.844)
Or if our guests know, or if our listeners know of anybody, you know, send over the name. So staying with this topic of authenticity, I want to add a point and Neil Patel here, he’s done some research on this. They specifically wrote human generated content and AI generated content.

Tom Nixon (21:29.377)
Absolutely.

Curtis Hays (21:50.483)
published thousands of articles and then measured those articles for ranking and traffic and, you know, SEO. And while both did well, the content written by humans noticeably outperformed the AI. So, you know, go look at Neil Patel and look him up. You can find the article in the reference to all of that. But he is saying that, and why

it is performing better is because Google has something called EAT as part of their algorithm. you heard this term? E-E-A-T. EAT. I can’t remember if I brought it up before, EAT stands for experience, expertise, authoritiveness, and trustworthiness. And ChachiBT can’t really put their name on all those types of things. So real quick, how you do that?

Tom Nixon (22:29.518)
No, no, no.

Curtis Hays (22:49.115)
with say a blog post is you put an author to it where that author has a name, they have a job title, they have a short bio that explains why they have the ability to author this type of content in this topic. Maybe there’s a photo or an avatar of some sort. There’s a link from that short bio to maybe a longer form bio.

There’s maybe a link to their LinkedIn page where it has all their experience and all the rest of their thought leadership and those types of things. And now Google knows, and Google’s looking for this type of stuff, now Google knows there’s a human and an expert behind this piece of content. essentially, if this was a point system, you’re getting points for having experience. As far as a 20 years experience in, you know,

The builder example, we got 20 years experience in building your expertise, authoritativeness. I think that along with the trustworthiness is gonna start to get out into your social network. So if you’re like a blogger and you don’t have social and you’re not actively engaging in conversations there and you don’t have a good bio and you don’t have a photo on your LinkedIn and you’re not commenting and posting, like I do think.

Tom Nixon (23:44.75)
think good place to hold it. I heard experts case. Of course, if this, I think, happens on the business world, it’s gonna start to get out into the first possible number of specular flight.

Tom Nixon (24:11.15)
More than that.

Curtis Hays (24:11.43)
Like Google knows our names and, and, if I’m going to, if I’m going to put an author behind a piece of, of content, like Google knows who Curtis Hayes is and knows that I have, a business that I manage specific Google business listings, that I have a LinkedIn profile that I write there, that I have a YouTube channel and I put content there. Like Google knows all these things. And so I think that’s just.

An extra thing that you can do work with your web developer to implement schema markup to to get, you know, your bio and your, your, information up alongside of articles to, help, you know, create the trust and the authenticity to your content.

Tom Nixon (25:01.58)
Yep. And LinkedIn knows all of that stuff too, or at least it’s trying to learn it. Interesting because LinkedIn and Google both released details of an algorithm update that favored what they call helpful content, which they’re trying to sniff out. I’m sure they have algorithmic detectors that can sniff out what’s been generated by humans and what’s been generated at least by chat GPT. And I think they’re going to they say, and they your Neil Patel data backs us up that they will favor the content that’s written by human.

a helpful human for another human. So to the extent that you could bake that into your content, that’s great. Going back to LinkedIn though, LinkedIn is they have their own algorithm that determines what content sort of bubbles up to the top of people’s feeds. And what the best thing that you could do is to create content on the platform that doesn’t take people to other platforms. And that might be a long form.

post, right? So thought leadership and over time, LinkedIn starts to understand what you know, what you write about and who is influenced by those things, meaning who engages with the content, who comments on it. And you’re doing a number of things. One of which is obviously you want to sort of raise your content to the top of people’s feeds, but you also want to send those signals to LinkedIn and to people what you know.

Curtis Hays (26:01.074)
Mm-hmm.

Tom Nixon (26:26.146)
going back to your authority, like what, does this person know? What does this person, the thought leader on? And then when there’s somebody who has an inclination to consume that type of content. Well, I know what Tom writes about. He writes all the time. Not only is he, he writes frequently, but he writes in a certain style. He writes posts that are helpful because we’re free, you know, he’s trying to help. So now people who are in search of marketing content or writing content,

they’re more likely to serve up Tom’s than the person who’s never been on LinkedIn only has a profile, doesn’t share any content. So that’s one of the ways going back to the initial premise is that if people aren’t coming looking for you as much, or they’re doing it differently on search, this is another way where you need to go out and get you in front of the people who may someday be looking or maybe be looking right now or might not be looking at all, but there they could be an influencer referral source or something like that.

Anyways, that’s one of the things. So going back to this authorship is you have a LinkedIn profile that chat GPT does not. So that’s one way to create some authenticity and then send those signals again to LinkedIn specifically. But then Google looks at that stuff too. And now they’re trying to tie authorship back to, know, they know who Curtis Hayes is I’m sure for both good and bad reasons, but you know, we want to make sure that they know you for the good reasons.

Curtis Hays (27:45.34)
Bye.

Curtis Hays (27:49.914)
Right and

You can easily connect those together. Again, you’re just thinking schema, talk to the developer if you can, but linking to your profile on your website, making sure you’re linking to your brand pages. And there’s sort of behind the scenes things you can do as well that Google crawls via links. So I’m mentioning links as Google puts context together via those links.

It silos content together and looks at where all the reference points are and where the incoming and outgoing links are and creates context around all of that information. you shouldn’t silo your content out in the ecosystem. You really need to find those relationships that allows Google to organize itself around everything that you’re publishing because it’s crawling the entire internet except some areas where it can’t.

you know, on a baseline, you know, now it understands those relationships to better inform it as to how it should provide search results, as well as, you know, understand more about who you are and where you are an expert on certain types of things. And then when I should put you up in front of your target audience.

Tom Nixon (29:12.184)
So here’s an illustrative example of what we’re talking about. could, Curtis Hayes could go to chat GPT or Gemini or some other LLM and ask it, give me some updated relevant data about the current status of search engine optimization. And he would spit something back to you and you may or may not find it useful. How do you know who Neil Patel is?

Curtis Hays (29:37.864)
Yeah, because I follow Neil and I watch his videos and read his blogs and follow him on social media. You know, I listen to what he has to say.

Tom Nixon (29:45.581)
Right.

Tom Nixon (29:50.71)
and he’s earned your trust, correct?

Curtis Hays (29:53.673)
To a degree, yeah. There’s some other people who I trust as well, but I trust him enough to hear what he has to say, for sure. Yep.

Tom Nixon (29:54.691)
Yeah.

Tom Nixon (30:01.494)
The point being there’s value in knowing what Neil Patel thinks, right? And whether or not you agree with it or don’t agree with it, you consider him authoritative, right? It’s a lot easier. You don’t have to listen to his videos. It’s a lot easier to type in a query and you’ll have your answer, but there’s something different about the authenticity in the, the, personality, the individualism that comes from Neil that you can’t get. And that’s what we’re trying to tell people to do is to think like Neil.

Create a personality around yourself so that people are willing to trust you they’re coming to look for you. They’re not going to a search engine or a AI to get the answers, right?

Curtis Hays (30:42.291)
Well, let’s segue using Neil, which he also is talking a lot lately about communities. And so if you’re going to be authentic and try to be trustworthy and those types of things, and you’re marketing too, which we talked about in episode one, a younger demographic now, those, that demographic wants authenticity.

We’re coming post COVID where we were limited on events and personal interaction face-to-face things and Audiences are asking for that again, right? So we’re seeing Reddit increase right so now all of a sudden Reddit is blowing up again, and there’s lots of conversations happening there. You’ve got conversations happening on

You’ve got conversations happening on LinkedIn and it’s expanding its platform. YouTube continues to grow as a platform and you see comments and there’s a lot of viral things I’ve noticed happening on YouTube with podcasts and just people having conversations. And then that conversation leads to another conversation that two people over here now have. And then there’s shorts that are responding to this and you’re creating community in a digital world.

Tom Nixon (32:08.076)
right in micro communities. I think that’s not my phrase but that’s somebody else’s which is it’s not just going to Facebook. It’s finding the Facebook group that’s of most interest to you, right? And again, you you can go to those communities like you could in real life like you could go to an event and you could stand in the corner and just watch and that might be useful. or you could be the type of person who has something to say. It is up on the dais, right?

delivering a keynote or just a workshop or whatever, and now people care about what you have to say. So this goes back to, yes, you still need content. You still need content authentic to who you are and what you believe and where you have expertise. But that content needs to be out there. Otherwise, you’re just a spectator in a community where you want to be a member of the community, a participant, right?

Curtis Hays (32:57.767)
Yeah, and I think at the very least you want to be a member and be involved in participating, I guess, and that way you are engaging and having meaningful conversations with other people in the community. I think the other thing that I got from that and what I was hearing Neil say was that there is an opportunity in the marketplace right now

to potentially start creating communities. So there’s some basic examples I’ve seen of this where like I sign up for a software platform and they give me access to a Slack channel where all the other customers are.

Tom Nixon (33:43.842)
That’s crazy. That’s awesome. Yep.

Curtis Hays (33:43.901)
There’s a community. It’s a community. So, you know, we can go and hey, has anyone run into this problem before? Not even particular to the software platform, just we’re all providing the same service basically to clients. And we might be running into market issues that we can leverage each other’s expertise and

I think you did call it micro communities, right? As micro as that may be, it’s valued amongst the ecosystem that they’re creating. And now you feel like you’re a part of something, you’re having conversations, but you’re now seeing those conversations, you’re able to be a part of it. And you can now listen, which is probably more important than you actually talking, right? We got two ears and one mouth. Now you can listen.

Tom Nixon (34:34.402)
Yeah.

Curtis Hays (34:37.234)
proactively about what’s being said within your community and respond to it appropriately. Whether that’s your product innovation or thought leadership or whatever it might be, those problems or aspirations you mentioned where you want to understand what’s going on with your customers, they’re just freely giving it out.

Tom Nixon (34:58.754)
Yeah, exactly. so creating the community is that’s an innovation. I think that’s a great idea. Just what we joked in our prep notes that I was going to bring up Yacht Rock in today’s podcast. And I now I am going to bring up Yacht Rock because as listeners may know, I have another podcast that’s a labor of love called It was a Yacht Rock podcast. It was all about the history of Yacht Rock, how it started, why we love it. You know, we interview some of the artists actually. And we knew that

we needed to be part of the community if anyone was going to listen to that podcast, right? So very first thing we did is we found out where are the super fans and the super fans were on Facebook and they had a Facebook group, 5,000 members at the time that we joined, which is in 2020. That group now has 146,000 followers participants, all of which are hearing about our podcast each and every week when we pod, when we

produce episodes, we put them into the conversation. We didn’t have to build the community. So this is the alternative. If you can’t build a community, find out where your brands super fans in your category already are very active. It be Facebook. It might be LinkedIn, might be something else entirely. Go where they are and be a part of the community. And then you don’t have to, could we have built an audience, 146,000 for a podcast about Yacht Rock? Probably not, but we didn’t have to because it already existed.

organically and authentically, going back to those two words. So quick anecdote.

Curtis Hays (36:28.68)
Yeah, I have a good business example there. I think your example is awesome and congrats on the podcast too. I didn’t know that many people liked to yacht rock. yeah, for sure. So I’ve worked with quite a few HR and talent management software companies. So in the HR sort of ecosystem.

Tom Nixon (36:41.134)
And growing. Thanks, Docs.

Curtis Hays (36:58.033)
And in every single one, I’ve asked the question, do you guys know what SHRM is? SHRM is the Society for Human Resource Management. It is a community of certified HR professionals, and there is a forum within SHRM. You can’t get access to SHRM unless you are a certified professional. And most of these organizations have a certified human resource person that’s either consulting for the software company, advising.

you know, or somebody internally that does. And I always ask like, so whether it’s product type information you need, or if it’s just information about marketing, because you want to do thought leadership, is anyone currently logging into SHRM and monitoring the forums to see what HR professionals are talking about? And in every single case, the answer was no, yet they had access. Nobody was reading the forums, nobody on the marketing or sales team.

So whether or not you engage in conversations there, there are communities probably in every single sector or industry where people are having conversations about your product or service and you need to be monitoring those. And frankly, if they don’t exist, it’s a great opportunity for you to go and create one because people want community.

Tom Nixon (38:19.071)
Absolutely. Well, we should probably wrap things up and going back to the beginning. We started this conversation talking about do we live in a post search world? We didn’t say yes or no to that, but if we are in when we are perhaps we will soon be. I think what we’re just advocating for is we just sort of zoom out is there are things that you need to do. Whether you’re a search first type of business or marketer, there are things that you need to do to think differently.

We’re trying to touch on a few of those today. Final thoughts.

Curtis Hays (38:49.181)
Yes, I think in this digital world, we’re going to become more more digital. But I think what we’re saying is despite us being more digital and using more technology, people still want to connect with people. authenticity means that you’re connecting with them. You’re having meaningful conversations. And I think when you’re doing whatever marketing activity, the person on the other end,

it to them it shouldn’t feel like marketing. It should just feel like a conversation. And that’s when you know you’ve like really hit the mark.

Tom Nixon (39:26.245)
Yep.

Tom Nixon (39:31.406)
Exactly. And I’m going to conclude with a little teaser for a topic that we’re going to come back to. This is your words. So I think we would just let it lay after I say it, which is brands, marketers, whoever stop hiding behind your logo. We’re going to come back and talk about what that means and why people are doing it and shouldn’t be doing it anymore. 2025 sound like a deal.

Curtis Hays (39:58.983)
Let’s do it, partner.

Tom Nixon (40:00.79)
Alright, well, let’s buck this Bronco. I’ll leave the puns to you. How do we get out of here? We we gotta Okay, well, we’ll dismount the steed and until next time, we’ll thank people for tuning into this episode of Bullhorns and Bulls Eyes and we’ll see you on the next episode of Bullhorns and Bulls Eyes, Curtis.

Curtis Hays (40:06.406)
I’m not good with puns. You’re the expert with puns.