Rewiring the PESO Model in a Zero-Click World

Tom Nixon 0:07
Well, Curtis, here we are back with another episode of bullhorns and bulls eyes, and back for another opportunity for me to show the wizard behind the curtain, another person whom I quote often and a tribute often, to make myself sound smarter than I really am.

Curtis Hays 0:25
This is like the season for bringing those guests on. I think we’re gonna get, like, every single one of your heroes on this season.

Tom Nixon 0:33
I know, and I’m kind of like showing like I said, the wizard behind the curtain. We talked to Mark Schaefer, we talked to Brian Clark. Now we’re gonna welcome to the show. Person I do admire quite a bit, and that is Jenny Dietrich. Welcome to the show.

Gini Dietrich 0:46
Jenny is Hugh Jackman coming on next, because if that’s the case, I will be co hosting with you.

Speaker 1 0:53
Okay, all right. Well, if we get to reach for the stars,

Gini Dietrich 0:55
then let’s talk about, let’s look create a list.

Speaker 1 0:59
Yeah, exactly, exactly. Curtis, who

Curtis Hays 1:01
would be on you don’t know till you ask, that’s what we discovered. That’s right, yeah, so we might as well ask, right? I mean, he’s got a lot of stuff

Gini Dietrich 1:09
going on right now. He might want to talk about true. Yeah.

Tom Nixon 1:12
That gives me an opportunity to plug my yacht rock podcast on which I got Kenny Loggins as a guest. There. I did it, Curtis, yeah. Wait, is that real? That’s real. 100% real. Yeah, that’s awesome. He’s our Hugh Jackman, if we can get Michael McDonald, then my life will be complete,

Gini Dietrich 1:30
as Curtis says, You don’t know unless you ask.

Tom Nixon 1:33
Well, so the reason you’re here, other than you are our closest contact to Hugh Jackman, is that your name has been evoked many times. Your ears may be burning because of it. Curtis. And I talk about the PESO model all the time, mostly Curtis, because I introduced it to him a while back. And once he understood it, he became like this huge fanboy, and now we refer to it all the time. So welcome, and I guess let’s get the formalities out of the way for people who haven’t heard those countless episodes, just explain for our listeners what the PESO model is and how it applies to marketing strategy.

Gini Dietrich 2:10
Sure, Peso stands for paid, earned, shared and owned media, and it initially was launched as I wrote about it in the book spin sucks in 2014 and it was really launched as a framework to help me in my agency, help clients understand that there’s a lot of work that goes into what we do, and it’s not just the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal stories, and there’s actually a lot of other work that goes into it. But again, Curtis, you’ll appreciate this. One of the biggest challenges we were having is measuring that right? So you’d have huge spikes in media coverage, and, you know, lots of good traffic coming to the website and things like that, and then you’d have these valleys of nothing, because you were preparing for the next and clients were saying like they didn’t want to pay for the valleys, and they didn’t understand how to value the work that we were doing, and they didn’t understand impressions and advertising equivalencies and brand awareness, like, how does that translate to sales? And so I was trying to figure out how to fill those valleys, and the PESO model was one way that we were thinking about that. So I wrote about it in the books, and sucks, which I didn’t in. In retrospect, there are a lot of things I would have done differently, but it exploded, right? It took the industry by storm, and not just from a communications perspective, but from a marketing perspective too. And as AI has taken over, and you know, you no longer have media coverage that brings traffic to your website, because the AI is answering the questions without direct traffic. We’re looking at how that’s evolving PESO model now, and how it’s becoming more of an operating system inside your marketing and communications departments, versus a framework that you might use from a scientific perspective.

Tom Nixon 3:54
Yeah. What I loved about it, I’ll get your opinion too. Curtis, is it simplified at the time was becoming very complex. You know, I off air. I told you. I got my start at a PR firm, and then PR became so complex with social media, digital I didn’t call it old media at the time, right? But it was like, wow, this is, this is crazy. How do we, like get our arms around this for clients? And so the simplicity of the peso is like, Okay, now this all makes sense. Curtis, right away you were drawn to it. What was your like? Why did it click for you?

Curtis Hays 4:28
Immediately it did. Yeah, I think we were a one trick pony, you know. And not what we did was constantly drive traffic through advertising or SEO or something like that. But as soon as you turn that spigot off, you know, then that traffic stopped, and it was like, okay, but there’s, there’s more to this. And I, and I felt like a lot of the activities we were doing were sales activities. They were like, generate leads, you know, get, get Add to Cart. Efforts and generate checkouts. And it was like, No, these are sales activities. Tom really helped me look at marketing as communications. It’s, it’s communicating a brand message, not necessarily trying to get people to buy. Getting people to buy is a sales activity. Marketing is a different activity. So that was, that was my big wake up call, and then just understanding there were frameworks associated like this, like yours, where, you know, I think I could compartment, compartmentalize the different activities that you can do.

Gini Dietrich 5:35
It’s interesting that you came from it a different angle, like I was trying to show how all of these things helped a business grow, and you’re helping grow, but it’s not it’s more sales activity than marketing. So it’s bringing the two of us together. I think is a nice, nice way to do that, nice compliment.

Tom Nixon 5:54
I think the way that we that sort of Curtis has framed it is the what he was doing was the result and not the process. Right? Well, they had companies coming to ask, coming in and say, you know, we need leads. Well, leads is at the end of the journey, right? What’s happening before all that? And that’s, I think, why the model really clicked for you. Curtis, but you mentioned AI, so now we’re totally different world, even I thought things were complex back in 2008 now here we are. So what has changed in how people discover brands and products and make decisions and ultimately purchase?

Gini Dietrich 6:28
It’s crazy, and it’s crazy how fast it’s happened. So it was November of 22 I remember that I was playing with chat GPT, and I thought, oh my gosh, this is so cool like this. There’s huge opportunity for for this, right? And but you had, people were like, wow, AI, just like you had with social media. Social media is for the kids. Businesses will never use it. And now you’re seeing that with AI. I think people are have begun to adopt it a lot faster this year than in the beginning. But we really, I was really looking at it from the perspective of, holy crap, if I can just ask chat GPT this question, and it gives me an answer. I don’t have to go to somebody’s website. I don’t have to scroll through 10 links on Google. I can get the answer. And at that time, it was very much like, how do I make German chocolate cake frosting, and it gives me a recipe, right? I don’t have to go and look at bon appetit and food and wine and Southern Living and all the other it just gives it to you. And now, I think three years later, we’re all looking at this going, wow. Okay, so now people are not clicking on links in Google. They’re getting the answer. There’s zero share. They’re not sharing it because they’re not going to the website. So what does this mean to us as marketers, where people are discovering about us, or maybe not, because we’re not showing up in the AI answers. What does that mean for the customer journey and how we build our programs around that? Yeah,

Tom Nixon 8:06
that answers that question relative to the PESO model, right? Because if they’re not going to your own media, and they’re not doing the shared and the paid might not even see them, what’s left? And I

Gini Dietrich 8:17
actually think it’s more important now, because the way they, the llms are learning, and the way that they, they’re the AI is answering the question is based on citation, ready content, so you so earned and owned, or even more important, today, even though you’re not driving people to your website, the robots are scraping that information and using that Right. So what they’re what it’s looking for is, are you credible and trustworthy? And we’re determining that that based on is, Are people sharing your content? Are they, you know, do you have a good reputation on the internet, kinds of things, and do you have media talking about you? So and we talk about media, not just from the traditional media, but sub stack authors and medium authors and LinkedIn authors and Tiktok news influencers, like all of these places, are they referring to your content? Are they referring to your business? Are they referring to your brand? And that’s how the llms are learning. So I I’ve started kind of down this path of the last few weeks of visibility engineering. How do we engineer that visibility? And that really is through owned and earned, first and then using shared to amplify to your audience and paid to amplify to a new audience. Yeah, Curtis,

Tom Nixon 9:35
you’ve been seeing this with your clients, right? This whole notion of zero click and traffic may be down to websites, but that doesn’t mean your website is irrelevant. I actually, I don’t think she’s a listener. So I could go ahead and say this. I was in a call today and somebody said, Well, websites are irrelevant. Now, aren’t there? My business coach told me, websites are irrelevant, interesting, but so you’re seeing what are you seeing from a data standpoint, and what conclusions are you drawing?

Curtis Hays 9:58
Well, I could tell you for. First off, the reason why your website isn’t irrelevant is because if the LLM references your website and then somebody clicks, that’s like three times more likely to be a high quality visitor who’s more likely to convert and so, yeah, it’s still it still matters, right? Still that front door digitally to your business. And our whole last conversation was, you know, on how to tell that story, right? And so that website is that opportunity to tell that, that brand story to a to a prospect, and so they can understand why, why does this brand matter to me? And they’re going to do that, that learning there, right? I think where I struggle is, you know, we, we’ve viewed websites as this place to put content, blog, educational things, but I think a lot of small businesses Ginny, don’t, they don’t know how to syndicate that, I guess, right? So it’s like, oh, we don’t have news to share. That’s a that’s necessarily a press release or something that some news media is going to going to pick up. So, you know, what are, what are some things that businesses need to start thinking about? And I mean, even the 10 to $50 million companies, right? It’s like, yeah, every few years they might do an acquisition, or they’ve got some big change that allows them to put out news. But, you know, in these valleys, like you’re talking about, like, how do you create? Like, come up with ideas where you can create media that you can get out there that’s outside of just your website.

Gini Dietrich 11:30
I don’t want to go back to 2008 Tom to your point earlier, in terms of content. But there are some things that you can be thinking about like that, that the llms will learn from and train on, which are, like the top 10 things that you can think about from a data perspective, or, you know, answering the questions that customers and prospects ask. That’s the kind of content that you can create, and then that becomes, it’s not necessarily, quote, unquote, newsworthy, but it does demonstrate to a journalist or an influencer what your thought leadership is and where your subject matter expertise is, and then they may be they may quote you, they may pull you in as a source. So it starts to work itself and becomes really cyclical. So it’s the kinds I would really sit down and say, what kinds of questions do we get from sales, from customer service, when we’re talking to customers, when we’re talking to prospects, create a list and then build thematic clusters around those lists that will allow you to create content that the llms will learn from

Tom Nixon 12:31
Yeah. Now, now I’m reminded of 2008 when people like us were trying to advise clients to think like a publisher, right, to think like a publisher, and I think that’s more true now than ever, really, it is. You mentioned, I read somewhere that you’re kind of described this notion of replacing the funnel, which you and I have talked a ton about funnels, Curtis this season with a discovery to trust fly will explain what that what you mean by that, and what it is, and why people should adopt that framework.

Gini Dietrich 13:02
One of the things I’ve really been thinking about, and this is happening a lot in our client work, is, you know, we have clients who have a really linear customer journey, right? They go from awareness to interest to, you know, they go, it’s very linear, but that’s not how people buy anymore, right? Like they may very well see a video on Tiktok and go, huh? That’s interesting. And buy immediately, or they go through, you know, eight or seven, eight or 10 or 15 different iterations to buy. So I’ve been thinking a lot about the lines between marketing and communications, and how blurry it’s been lately in the last several years, and almost that we shouldn’t be thinking about it as two different disciplines anymore, that we really should integrate more fully, because that’s how the customer makes a decision. So you have to almost be in all places for all of your prospects, depending on how they’re making a decision. So if you know, we have one client with the very linear customer journey that’s on Reddit, because that’s where people are making decisions, which is insane to me, but that’s where they’re making their decisions. So you have to really think about where are people hanging out? Where are they getting their information in all of these fragmented media bubbles. Where do they reside? And they may reside in more than one and how are we there so that we can begin to build that trust and credibility that both the human and the robot need to be able to make a decision. Do

Tom Nixon 14:49
there. And I thought about it, I thought, Well, to me, the funnel is really a series of mind states, and that kind of is linear, but the journey that a customer takes to go through. True, though, that evolution is completely wild, wild west now, and unpredictable and a linear and different for every customer. You think that’s accurate?

Gini Dietrich 15:08
I think that’s totally accurate. And I like the idea that the mindset is linear. That’s interesting. Yeah.

Tom Nixon 15:13
I mean, you’re not going to be aware before you were unaware, right? So it’s like that sort of thing is right? So, but totally agree. Let’s talk about anything you wanted to add on that.

Curtis Hays 15:23
Curtis, no, I think yes. So I do the the funnel is a framework, I think is what you said. And we have to work from a framework in order to build a plan. And then I think, see how people take that journey, if we can measure it along the way and make adjustments right to what we’re doing to to get people, you know, through that funnel that we’re trying to create. But it’s typically an emotion that triggers them to actually buy right so where they when and where they experience that emotion you can’t predict. So you just kind of need to be there any at any time, at any moment, almost right, and then now you’ve triggered something. Now they’re ready. They’ve had a life event or an emotional experience, or or or hate. I just that problem is familiar now. It wasn’t familiar to me six months ago when I first interacted with your brand, but all of a sudden, oh, I just experienced that. I need that. So, so, yeah, I mean, I’m looking at a product right now. I’ve been experiencing the problem for this. This is for my tractor, and my gas cap is on the top of my tractor, okay, right? So on the top, front of the engine. So you get a gas can, five five gallons of diesel up there that weighs, I don’t know what that weighs, 25 pounds at least. And then you got this button you got to hold down with your finger. By the end, you’re you got real pain in your thumb. You’ve got real pain trying to hold this thing up there. And it takes forever to, like, get Yeah, you’re up there for five minutes. What just so happened in my Facebook feed today? I’m experiencing this issue for three years having the tractor. There’s a product out there with this, like, nozzle on it, and you literally tip it up, and it self does it. And if it gets too full, it auto shuts off. It’s all mechanical. It’s all just plastic, and everything that does it and it, it auto feeds, it doesn’t, like, under a minute, and I’m gonna buy it. They’re actually the color that I want. But, like, I’m gonna buy it right now, different colors even, yeah, it’s one of the examples you gave. Jenny of like, hey, but then I need a land rake too. Well, that’s $1,500 it’s like, do I really need this land rake? And I’m going to keep, like, browsing, and I might wait for yupon or whatever, but there might come a day where I’ve got a project and I’m like, man, you know what? I just trigger on this, and I got to get it right. I’m done messing around or borrowing my neighbors. So So you, I think you have to think about that in the in any complex sale that you know, not everybody’s not everybody’s ready to listen to what you’re saying right now. But as long as you’re accessible and you’re available, that’s right, and they know where to go, that’s what you’re trying to do.

Gini Dietrich 18:14
Yeah, it’s, it’s the communications, one on one being top of mind always right?

Tom Nixon 18:19
Which is why I like what you say about peso being an operating system more than just a framework, because if you’re operating your business or your marketing department on this the fundamentals, then you will be there, top of mind at the right place. But your tractor example, Curtis kind of segues into this other topic, which is attribution being broken, murky, unreliable. You said I’m going to buy it. You didn’t say I did buy it. So some marketing guru in wherever they are has no idea that they made a sale in that their little customer journey that they tried to predict worked, because you’re going to go buy it later, you’re going to go right to the website, you’re going to buy it, and no attribution whatsoever, right? So probably, yeah, right. So here we are in this world where marketing could be working we don’t know it, or marketing may not be working, and we don’t know that. So this has gotten more complex and more confusing. So if attribution is broken, Judy, like, how are we measuring success?

Gini Dietrich 19:15
I mean, we, I think we still have to measure success in some of the traditional ways that we’ve become accustomed to in the last five or six years. I think AI adds another element of frustration there, because there’s no way to automate that right now. So we don’t know if we’re showing up in AI answers unless we actually ask the AI right? And we have to do it manually. So there’s not a not right now. There’s not an automated way to do that, and we have the privacy issues too. So even if people are coming to the website, we don’t know, necessarily know where they came from. Did they come from? Direct, you know, from, from Curtis’s perspective, but again, he saw a video, or he saw social media ad, whatever happens to be, we don’t know that. Because he came direct. So what kind of how do we attribute that, right? So it is really murky. It’s really challenging. We work with some of the world’s largest brands, and they don’t have it figured out. And you know, one of the things that we have found, which I find fascinating, is some of these big, huge, huge brands who have gigantic data teams and gigantic data science teams, and they have all the analytics in the world. They can only do last touch attribution. They can’t do multi touch.

Tom Nixon 20:32
Yeah, yeah. Curtis, I gotta share, like, telling myself a little bit because I’ve been doing, or I used to be doing SEO poorly for companies, and so long ago that I would show these reports, right? And I would show, oh, this first result here, that’s direct traffic to your website. Don’t worry about that. The next 10 keywords are all your company name or product name. Don’t worry about that. Now let’s get down to these long tail keyword phrases that show you that our SEO is working right.

Speaker 2 21:02
Hay, right,

Curtis Hays 21:08
yeah, this, oh, it brings up another topic that really hits home on the fact that we as writers were so focused on keywords and weren’t focused I mean, I mean, I’ve, well, you were just kind of admitting to that. No, but you’re not the writer. No, but I’m the person who advises the writer on what should be included. And everybody says, Hey, what keywords should we include? Sure. And now I don’t say, don’t, don’t, don’t worry about the keywords. Worry about the customer you’re writing for. The customer you know as well. You just talked about this hero’s journey and rewriting a homepage Tom it’s like, I’m looking at the h1 first heading on the page in the hero section, and me two years ago, I would have been like, you can’t use that. It doesn’t it doesn’t contain what you do. Doesn’t contain the keyword that I would want on this page. It’s like, why am I so concerned with Google, we were fed this, you know, notion that, oh, if we focused on Google, we’d get sales, instead of focusing on the customer and saying, no, if we actually really emotionally connect with that user, actually lands on this page. Now we have this opportunity to actually sell them a product or service, you know, and connect with them on a different level. And so my whole mindset has shifted away from, I guess, I guess tactics, which all of this is really just tactics, and at the end of the day, just getting back to, like, what is true marketing and sales, right? And how do we effectively communicate and sell to human beings, and not algorithms, right?

Tom Nixon 22:42
Communications, as you put it right, it’s like one whole thing. Now, it’s not just four different it’s not sales, then marketing, then, you know, branding and then PR. It’s all one thing. What I mentioned that my SEO for dumb, dumbs, what were, what are some of the trash and traction signals that matter to you now. Jamie, for your clients, what are you telling them to pay attention to? If you can’t just show a list of attributions and put dollar signs next to it, how are you showing them that something’s working?

Gini Dietrich 23:11
Yeah, we’re looking at, I mean, we’re looking at aided and unaided awareness. For sure. We’re looking at branded search lift. We look at, you know, whether or not they’re showing up in AI answers. You know, if you you search some what’s the best type, the best drug for type two diabetes, are they showing up in those? Right? So you’re, we’re looking for all of that, but it really is, Can does somebody mention you without me prompting you by name. Can they mention you if I give a list? So that’s an aided and the aided awareness, right? Are you showing up in search? So is that? Is there that lift? Are they coming direct? Are they search? Are they coming from the branded keywords? It’s all that kind of stuff. I think that we’re having to pay attention to now, because we just don’t know anymore where they’re coming from, directly.

Tom Nixon 24:08
Curtis, what about you? Same question, are there? Are there pet traction signals that you like to direct clients attention toward, away from the long tails

Curtis Hays 24:18
we have the main page of our dashboards that we provide for our clients, we call it a user journey report, and for a couple years now that the first two metrics they look at are branded and non branded impressions in Google. So is that increasing month over month? Does it kind of give that indication as Do you have a brand lift happening right now? And compare that year over year to with seasonality? And then, you know, you’re non branded. How are other, you know, SEO, keyword type, search terms and those types of things. How are those doing? So we separate those two. Those are the first thing people look at, and that that’s not traffic, that’s. Just are people actually searching for your brand within the search engine? It would be nice someday if AI gives us some of that information to know whether or not people are actually searching for brands, let alone your brand showing up. That’s one metric. But do people actually mention my brand? Tell me more about this brand in in inside of the llms. That would be interesting info to get.

Gini Dietrich 25:23
I really want to know why the tractor company has such a bad design flaw. So I would ask chat. GPT that, right?

Tom Nixon 25:32
Yeah, what are people using to ease some pain when they’re filling up their tractors?

Curtis Hays 25:37
Right? So the, I think the current administration has removed legislation, safety legislation on gas can so we the problem is part of the problem is gas cans in general, that the all the safety regulations on gas cans makes it very difficult to operate the nozzle. That’s part of the problem. So a lot of people, they just, they buy the gas can, and then they buy some off the shelf, different nozzle, but the manufacturers of the cans themselves, they have to ship with these, like high safety nozzles. And you know, they have some locking mechanism, almost like a lighter, right? You got to push, push something else down first in order to get it to actually escape gas. And that’s just cumbersome

Speaker 1 26:22
level of education. This is like two podcasts in

Gini Dietrich 26:25
one. I’m fascinated, right?

Curtis Hays 26:28
So this other company has this real nice, easy to lift. You know, is it like, who is the nozzle that just no so they do have one with a nozzle, but this one specifically lifts. It becomes a gravity fed but then it has a funnel nozzle at the bottom that when the weight is met with the not or the lid, I guess, of the gas tank in the tractor, right? So that force pushes their nozzle up, and now it’s able to escape gas, but they have some patented nozzle that also allows the air to flow right if you normally vertically, take something and put it upside down, the liquid doesn’t escape because it’s not getting air replacing the liquid. Well, they’ve developed a nozzle, yeah, but they were able to explain this in a two minute video to me, and I immediately understood it, would you see it YouTube, or it was a Facebook ad. It was Facebook. And then I was like, so I clicked to the Facebook ad, I got a pop up that said, Get 10% off your first order. Before I went any further than that, I did put my email address in. Was like, Okay, if that’s the best I’m gonna get, I’ll take the 10% but then I went on, what I’ve been doing lately is go to YouTube and I do a brand search on YouTube, and I look for user generated content. So I went to shorts, and I found other farmers using the product. You know, here’s an old guy holding the phone, and his son’s picking it up and doing the exact same thing, and they’re having a conversation. I was like, Man, that thing really does work. It does work. It does what they say it could do. And, you know, these are videos that get like, 50 to 100 views. I mean, you know, so I’m not, I’m not watching some huge influencers trying, you know, getting some money from the product. I was like, Okay, let’s see how much it costs. I went back to the store, went into the product list, there’s an orange color I want, because I have a Kubota which is orange. I’m like, Okay, I want a brand on brand color. They’ve got like, 10 different colors, but they’re sold out of the orange. So I’m gonna wait. But it’s like a $35 product, and I’m gonna wait until it comes back in stock. I don’t know if I’ll use the 10% or maybe I’ll wait a little while till they have a holiday deal or something. Maybe, you know, we’re getting close to Black Friday, maybe I’ll have a 25% off or something, and I’ll buy two or three. I’ll buy one for my lawnmower, which actually does have the nozzle. And the cool thing for that is, like all of those, they have a safety off, and oftentimes, like my wife, likes to push mow the lawn. It’s just something. She puts on headphones listen to a podcast. It’s her thing to do around the house, and I’m in the big tractor getting, you know, the field, and she always ends up spilling the gas, because it’s a little thing, and you got a big it’s like, well, if it’s got an auto shut off, like, on your, you know, when you’re using the gas at the at the gas station in your car, that’s sweet. And so now you don’t have to worry about spilling it. So, I mean, it’s just innovative,

Gini Dietrich 29:23
like, journey, yeah, so you see a Facebook ad, you click, you get a coupon. You’re like, I’m not quite ready. You go to YouTube shorts to see influencers who aren’t necessarily paid influencers. It’s organic, right? They’re not huge influencers. They this whole that’s journey is a PESO model journey.

Tom Nixon 29:44
That’s what we’re talking about, exactly. And there’s no way we’re not getting retargeted by John Deere sometime this week.

Speaker 2 29:53
No way, right? As soon

Gini Dietrich 29:54
as that ad comes off, I’ll let you know.

Tom Nixon 29:56
Yeah, same here, same here. Well, all right, so you. Mentioned so people know the book was, is called spin sucks. The website is spin sucks.com. I wanted to ask you to me, I feel like, for any comms leader, an intro to the PESO model is a non negotiable. You least need to understand it and figure out how it applies to your own situation. But it goes all the way through to you could become now certified peso. So explain for the comms leader who’s like, yeah, this sounds like my cup of tea. What is available to them.

Gini Dietrich 30:29
So we actually have three. I would say pillars. One is licensing. So if you, if you want to have it inside your organization and use it, there’s a license for that. If you’re a professor and you want to teach it education wise, there’s a license for that, if you are blogging about it, or, you know, there’s license for that. I just actually granted a license to a book publisher, so, like, that kind of stuff. So there’s licensing, there’s training. And training can be in person, it can be virtual, it can be multi week. It can be the certification. The certification is through University of Southern California’s Annenberg Center for PR so you get a certificate when you finish from that, from them and from us, that provides you an opportunity to say, Yeah, I understand the science behind this and can implement it internally, and then we have implementation where we actually do it for you so, but the certification itself is eight weeks. I think it’s eight modules, eight and then there’s several lessons underneath each. And it really teaches you. There’s, we’ve spent a lot of time on the like, the science behind it, so the measurement, the data, ensuring that you’re using AI effectively, all of that piece. So you learn that, and you learn how to do it for your organization, for a nonprofit, wherever it happens to be. And then at the end of the eight weeks, you’re certified for two years.

Tom Nixon 31:55
Nice, cool. Well, check that out at Spin sucks.com, right? You have links to all that stuff. Yeah, perfect. All right.

Curtis Hays 32:02
Told us she was certified, right? Her

Tom Nixon 32:06
whole agency’s getting certified for her.

Gini Dietrich 32:09
They invest in students as well, so they’ll put students through the certification as well, which is pretty

Curtis Hays 32:15
cool. Yeah, that is cool.

Tom Nixon 32:17
Cool. All right. Final thoughts and takeaways, Jenny, what’s one experiment comms leader could try this week to see some sort of traction or positive signal in this zero click world in which we now live.

Gini Dietrich 32:30
I would absolutely, you know, you can go incognito into the AI tools. Now just click that button, go incognito and and ask it questions about your brand or your product, and see if you’re coming up, and if you are coming up, what kinds of information it’s giving if it’s accurate or not, we find that a lot of times the message is inconsistent across the web. So if the if, if what’s coming up is inaccurate, you have some work to do to make sure that everything’s consistent. And if you’re not coming up, then if you’re not showing up in those answers, then you have some work to do with I would start with owned and earned share. Owned and earned media for sure.

Tom Nixon 33:06
Could you also so is a more advanced version of that to maybe go insert something relative to your category and see if you’re appearing because people aren’t necessarily looking for your company. All right, cool. I’m going to try that. So that was

Curtis Hays 33:19
actually an experiment I did. I can’t remember if I talked it on the talked it on the talked about it on the podcast here or not, but we had a company in the construction space, and one of the things that brands have to remember is that AI has a memory. Yeah, right. So this whole idea of knowing your audience, well, the AI knows your audience. They know who these people are, because we’re giving them so much information at a personal level. So if I go into AI right now and say, I’m interested in building a new deck on the back of our house, well, AI knows probably how much property I have. Maybe it has pictures at my house. You know it has, maybe has some dimensions. If not, I can give it to them. Now we start it knows my tastes and styles. Say, Okay, do we want natural wood? Do we want a manufactured wood like TRex? So here we go on this journey. We’re having this long, complex conversation that normally would have happened in the search engine with a bunch of different clicks, and now it happens in very complex but interactive, conversational way that eventually gets to the point where I say, Now, well, are there any builders near me who could help me do this? Who would you recommend? Give me a list of five and why. And not only is it going to match some of those, like technical preferences, but it knows some personal things about me, maybe what I value, and those types of things that might match me to the values of those organizations as well. So we did this with with a builder, builder that works with Dex, and they weren’t listed in my first experiment. So we got five. Listings. And I said to the AI, well, why not? So I said, Well, you know, you listed five great companies. I’m personally aware of this company here. Why didn’t you recommend them? And so it went back into a thinking mode. It did its little research across the internet. Came back and said, Oh yeah, that is a great company. I would normally recommend them, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, but we actually noticed their name is inconsistent. They’re listed under a different name on the trex dealer website. So the AI told me why it wasn’t a recommendation. Continue on with your recommendation. Jenny, if you don’t see your brand listed, ask, ask why it’s not listed, because it’ll give you some insight and tell you why, whether it’s complete unfamiliarity or it says, well, your competitors are doing X, Y and Z, so it might tell you they’ve earned more trust from Ai versus you because of the things that your competitors are Doing that you’re not. That’s amazing.

Tom Nixon 35:59
Yeah, good idea. Okay, cool. All right. Well, my final thought is just how we’re sort of back to 2008 again in terms of everything. I feel like in our industry is cyclical. 2008 was a time when everything got so complex that I feel like the specialist I started in PR, the specialist had to become generalist. And I feel like, if you wind the clock back five years ago, there was more more of the energy was going towards specialization. And there were professionals who would say, I’m just in lead gen, or I only do demand gen. And I feel like that pendulum has swung all the way back to say, no, no, that’s not how it works anymore. You need maybe you’re not a generalist, but the approach you need to take to your marketing is more holistic, more peso, and not just one bullet, one shot. So absolutely cool. Any final thoughts, Jenny, we should leave our listeners with

Gini Dietrich 36:50
no but I will, as soon as I start getting those John Deere ads, I will let you know, because it’s happening. My phone’s right here, so I’m sure

Tom Nixon 37:02
it’s I need to put little tape over my camera and turn my microphone off at all times. That’s my final takeaway. Curtis, it

Curtis Hays 37:13
happens, it happens. I’m getting served Yap rock now in my YouTube feed. All thanks to you

Gini Dietrich 37:21
awesome. I hope I get that too well.

Tom Nixon 37:24
As much as we can try to control the machines, the machines are ultimately going to win. So Jay, thanks so much. So great to finally meet you for years come back sometime, once it gets complex all the more, next year, we’ll have to do it all again.

Gini Dietrich 37:38
Amazing. Sounds great, great. And we’ll see y’all next

Tom Nixon 37:41
time on bull horns and bullseyes. At bull’s eyes.