The AI Marketing Companion

Starting a new social network is a perilous prospect. The battlefield is littered with companies that had big ideas and little results ... Meerkat Ello Path Google+ It's a tricky business. A new social platform needs to solve a unique customer problem or find an under-served niche and then avoid assassination by Facebook (by having intellectual property and a huge war chest to protect it). It has...

Google search goes away? You might think this title is ridiculous. Maybe even sensational. But traditional web search is changing dramatically and it's a real concern for marketers and traditional SEO. Let me explain ... As consumers, we depend on a reliable list of products and references from Google to get through our daily lives, find the right dress, or answer a question in an argument. Google...

Back in 2010, I wrote one of the most fun and fascinating blog posts of my life. A new trend was coming into view, led by a company called Klout . By analyzing millions of bits of social media data and the reactions the posts caused, the company proclaimed it could estimate your social media influence. At the time, it was a revolutionary idea. My post, which projected some of the implications of s...

Like many digital marketers, I look forward to the epic internet trends report produced each year by venture capital firm  Kleiner Perkins . Better known as "The Meeker Report," the epic slide deck is an exhaustive summary of the relevant trends we need to be considering for our companies as the digital world moves forward. Over the past few years, Tom Webster and I have discussed this report on o...

My Marketing Companion co-host Tom Webster told me that within a few weeks, three of his clients all came to him with the same question: How do we get our content discovered? The answer you typically hear in our space is "create quality content and it will rise to the top" but that does not work any more. Perhaps it never has. There are content discovery algorithms and bots working behind the scen...

The inevitability of a business world dominated by artificial intelligence seems to be the headline of the day, and yet the notion for many marketers may seem distant and unreal. On our Marketing Companion podcast, Tom Webster and I have been toying with this subject for years and decided it was time to devote a full-blown episode to the topic. Artificial intelligence and marketing -- what's real,...

For decades, I've been a big fan of the sports channel ESPN. They have a great brand -- serious about sports, but not too serious about themselves. Their bold style of storytelling went far beyond the cable TV channel to web, print, apps, satellite radio, social media, and podcasts. They created exceptional content, bought into premium sports events, and seemed to be nurturing their brand as effec...

This headline is a bit misleading. In fact, you will probably receive far more than 20 incredible insights from our Marketing Companion conversation with BuzzSumo founder Steve Rayson . The episode posted a few days ago and we have already received more comments on this conversation than any other episode. Arguably, Steve Rayson analyzes more content than any other person in the world -- billions...

I recently had a conversation with pioneering blogger Chris Brogan and he mentioned that he had ended his latest podcast series and had begun a new one. "I just thought it was time to create something new," he said. This seems like such a simple idea, and yet it set my wheels spinning. Creating content means building equity in an audience and a body of work. What would make you decide to walk away...

In 2012, I escaped the crazy crowds of SXSW to have dinner with my friend Tom Webster and his wife Tamsen. We had a magical evening and at the end of our time together I commented that I wish we had recorded the conversation. A lot of people would have loved to hear that debate! A year later, I was thinking about starting a podcast. It was a difficult decision because I didn't want to begin anythi...

Is social media turning into a three-horse race? New research by Edison indicates that Americans are starting to migrate to three big social media platforms, while usage and preference is flattening out on secondary platforms. In this scintillating, 99th episode of The Marketing Companion, Tom Webster reveals a study 2o years in the making: The Infinite Dial. Some of the highlights of this show: T...

If you've been following popular culture at all, you've probably learned by now of the downfall (at least temporarily) of YouTube's greatest star, PewDie Pie . PewDiePie, a Swedish gamer and humorist, is the first person alive to hit 10 billion views on YouTube. He pulls in more money each year than most Hollywood movie stars and he's the epicenter of YouTube culture. And then it all went south. T...

Three years ago, I was working on what would be the biggest consulting contract of my career. It was a potential deal with a U.S. government agency and as part of the bidding process I had to be interviewed by their senior procurement professionals via Skype. It was a bit intimidating. The stakes were high and I was facing a table full of people I didn't know. I started to introduce myself but two...

Is your head spinning over the prospect of digital transformation and marketing? Certainly the change ahead might seem dizzying. Social media and social selling, Big Data and analytics, new listening platforms, and artificial intelligence are just a few of the ideas gaining momentum. How does a marketing leader manage through this level of change? In this new episode of The Marketing Companion, To...

The polish is off the Apple. One tech commentator said there was something missing from the recent Consumer Electronics Show: Nobody was saying they were the "next Apple of ..." Paypal founder Peter Thiel told the New York Times that the age of Apple is over. Provocative? Sensational? Or is there a kernel of truth there? The company seems to be focusing on incremental change instead of bold new li...

I've been in marketing more than 30 years and I think we're facing the period of greatest change in my experience, probably the greatest period of change in the history of marketing. In this new episode of The Marketing Companion, Tom Webster and explore the bold ideas that will have a profound impact on marketers including smart speakers, artificial intelligence, and the "streamification" of cont...

No list of hot technology trends is complete without a mention of the Internet of Things (IoT). But as we go into a new year, how does this become real to us as marketers? How is IoT going to show up in our daily worklife? Tom Webster and I thought this would be a fascinating topic for an episode of our podcast but frankly the subject is over our heads! Not that this has stopped us before ... but...

In the next episode of The Marketing Companion Tom Webster and I explore three rich and timely topics: The "Gig economy" -- The ability to match buyers and sellers in order to monetize incremental time has revolutionized the economy. As much as 2 percent of the U.S. economy may be gig-based. But there is a seedy underbelly to this trend. Conversational marketing -- This is beyond the social media...

America has been through a tumultuous election cycle, perhaps the strangest and most divisive time in the country's political history. What does it all mean? Sure, a lot has been written about this, but it's rare to get a behind-the-scenes glimpse from a person who was in the very heart of the process. This week in our new Marketing Companion episode, Tom Webster provides extraordinary insight int...

I want to share a statistic that kind of blew my mind. In 2011, about 20 percent of non-game Internet revenue came from content subscriptions (to stuff like Hulu, Spotify, Amazon Prime, and Netflix). The bulk of the revenue has historically derived from advertising. Today, that number has completely flopped with subscription-based revenue at 80 percent -- in just five years! And content-based subs...

There has been nothing short of an intense debate about the marketing skills needed for career success today. Gurus like Gary Vaynerchuk have decried college educations, claiming they are a waste of time and money. In an excellent and thought-provoking post , the brilliant Christopher Penn scolds the profession for falling behind, and warns that we need to keep up with topics such as cloud computi...

We talk a lot about influence, but what is the true goal of influencing? Persuading. While I was far afield in South America for the past few weeks, Tom's wife Tamsen sat in for me in this episode of The Marketing Companion. Tom and Tamsen talk about the relationship between influence and persuasion, and what it really takes to not only make an impact, but to change behavior. Persuasion has a numb...

In our latest edition of The Marketing Companion podcast, Tom Webster and I explore a couple of fascinating topics. The first is that marketers seems undeterred by the fact that most corporate content is not working, at least in a measurable way. Various research reveals that content marketing is not seen as effective by a majority of marketers, yet content creation budgets continue to rise dramat...

It's not often that you see a blog post that makes you think, discuss, and maybe even a little sick to your stomach but that's what Steve Rayson of BuzzSumo achieved with his controversial post " The Future is More Content ." Steve has put out some thorough, well-developed thought leadership pieces over the years and this post is among his finest because he brings up an ugly topic we choose to ign...

I received a pretty big shock recently, a discovery that made me re-think who I am and what I know. For many years I have enjoyed digging into my family history. For many of us in the U.S. -- nearly all of us immigrants -- our family tree has tangled roots and uncovering where we come from can be an obsession. Most of the Irish side of my family came over during the potato famine of the mid-1800s....