The Bacon Podcast with Brian Basilico | CURE Your Sales & Marketing with Ideas That Make It SIZZLE!

I have always been driven by three principles in life and business. Although I have not always been 100% successful in adhering to them, I have noticed that I am 1000 times happier and more successful when I do.   First , life is about motion, emotion, promotion, commotion, and finally, ethical motivation! “When you stop learning, you stop earning.” I have loved learning from others, and I be...

This time of year, the two weeks around Christmas and New Year’s, always seem like a blur. It’s hard to remember what day today is, especially when both holidays fall in the middle of a week. Business generally grinds to a halt with people and companies taking vacations. TV is filled with retrospectives of the past year. It’s mind-blowing when you realize all of the events that h...

One of the world’s great mysteries is the Bermuda Triangle. When it comes to any social media platform, people, features, and more are like the Bermuda Triangle. One second, they are there, and the next, they are gone. If you feel like your content is being swallowed up by LinkedIn’s Bermuda Triangle (algorithms), I am here to offer you hope. The two things I have mentioned are to conn...

We have officially transitioned from the information economy to the attention economy. The Information Economy has significantly transformed B2B business, driving a shift towards data-driven decision-making and digital transactions. In this paradigm, companies leverage information and communication technologies (ICT) to streamline business. The Attention Economy has profoundly impacted B2B busines...

In 1979, AT&T employed a marketing campaign aimed to soften AT&T’s image and promote long-distance calling as an essential part of everyday American life. It focused on “selling emotion” by emphasizing the human desire to connect with others. Phone numbers were designated to a person, an address, and even a desk when PBX systems were implemented at companies. With the advent of computers a...

“Time Warp” is one of the most recognizable songs from “The Rocky Horror Picture Show.” It was created as a time filler for the stage play but has exploded in popularity and become a central part of audience participation during film screenings and live performances. When the movie came out in 1975, things were very different. People read newspapers, listened to the radio, and watched TV to get th...

Have you seen the price of eggs? I have not, but I hear it’s high. It is a battle cry for those who go to the grocery store and see that their cart has less, yet they are paying more. My wife loves carrot cake. Recently, there was a recall of carrots. I wonder if that is why I am paying $6 for one slice instead of an entire cake. We all are looking for that one thing: to get people’s a...

Back in the 1960s, the TV program was called The Twilight Zone. It was an anthology series that explored fantasy, science fiction, horror, and psychological thriller elements. In today’s complicated new marketing and media world, it can feel like we are living in a Twilight Zone. Marketing is about getting people to become aware and engaged and building trust. If you work in a vacuum, then y...

If you watch broadcast TV, I am sure you are happy the election is over and all we have to watch now are pharmaceutical and Christmas commercials. One of the interesting things I heard in post-election analysis was that a billion dollars was spent on TV ads. At the same time, the most decisive information was distributed via free-to-access websites and apps. This was described as paywall and non-p...

AI has been part of our culture for a long time. Think about the movies that have predicted where we are now. Although this is Hollywood and entertainment, we have realized most of this already: 2001  = Self-Driving Vehicles Matrix  = VR Games and Headsets Her  = ChatGPT, Siri, Alexa, and more impressive versions coming soon The biggest thing holding AI back or impeding it’s progress is it k...

I have a problem. “Hi… my name is Brian… and I am addicted to tabs.” I normally have four Chrome browser windows open with 20 to 30 tabs open in each—that’s over 100 tabs. As you age, things slow down (I can’t run or jog as fast), and I believe your brain gets full. My memory is still sharp, but I have to admit that there are many more ideas, facts, and concepts that I had to remember...

I recently came up with a Billion-Dollar Idea. I am sharing it with you, so please don’t share it with anyone else. It’s going to make me rich, and I would not want anyone to copy or steal it. I created an app that will stop delivering snail mail, emails, texts, radio, and TV commercials once you have voted in an election. The only problem I have not been able to work out is that it do...

Back in the day (circa 2013), I spent a lot of time networking. I attended up to 20 events per month. It has slowed down since, but I have always found some value in networking. That all changed in 2020. The pandemic shut down in-person events and everything went virtual via Zoom. While it decimated some groups, others thrived due to the ability to network with others not within driving distance....

It’s incredible how fast things change. Do you remember that slogan? “You’ve Come A Long Way, Baby.” That phrase was used in an advertising campaign for  Virginia Slims , a brand of cigarettes marketed specifically to women. The slogan was introduced in 1968, and cigarette ads were banned in 1971. It lasted only three years but was so successful that it’s still remembered and use...

I confess that I try to simplify things down to binary choices: good and evil, easy and hard, the boogeyman and Superman. But I think that in our ever-polarized world, there is becoming a blurred line between truth and opinion. When it comes to marketing, I tend to think of Google and Search as the boogeyman and content marketing as Superman. Yet, like energy, they are a symbiotic and correlated e...

A question often asked is whether it was easier to reach your buying audience in the past or today. My answer is both. Less choice meant you had less to learn but took a more significant risk. With more choices, you have more to learn and often have to use more marketing platforms to reach the same audience, but you run the risk that multiple could fail simultaneously. The one thing that has never...

There is a debate about whether and when AI content will be as good or better than human-generated content. I believe that it will always be a mix of both. Two Truths The two lists above (the binary choices and 3 options) were generated by AI. I rearranged and edited them to my liking so they fit better with the concepts I am trying to get across today. Although there are people in marketing who w...

One of my all-time favorite jokes is about babies… “How many babies does it take to screw in a lightbulb?” “None – they neither have the cognitive or motor skills to perform such a task!” You could imagine a baby holding a lightbulb and trying to insert it into a lamp or socket. But if you wanted to see it, you could log into an AI image generator to create one....

If you manage your own or other business websites, I imagine you are using Google Analytics or another data manager to explore the traffic to your website. Generally, you measure how much traffic you get, how long people stay, and which pages or posts get the most traffic. Another key indicator is where the traffic is coming from. This includes organic search (Google searches), direct (typing or c...

I could easily take my old blogs and ask AI to rewrite them to reflect today’s business environment better. That would certainly be faster than my two-finger typing, re-working sections, and asking a VA to proof and post, but would it or could it be more successful or effective? Most businesses will ebb and flow between profit and deficit, and you sometimes have to cut expenses to offset a d...

I was listening to a podcast interview with comedian Mike Birbiglia. I was not familiar with him, but I found his take on comedy interesting. He believes that comedians have a one-on-one relationship with their audiences. Social media and podcasts can help to create a more intimate relationship with fans. Some influencers lose that connection because they become an outsized version of themselves....

I want to do something a little different today. I want to share with you my why. If you can figure out your why, I believe you are halfway to success. Simon Sinek tells us to start with why. But I believe that why is not all-encompassing and as simple as finding one why on your way to the top. I believe there are a series of whys. Why are you in or running a business? Why are you in the niche or...

How do you define success? Success is not measured like temperature with a static scale or counting system. It is an abstract system that is different for every person and business. With today’s Attention Economy, you may think that likes and clicks are the most important metric. But I am here to tell you that profits are the main thing to measure in business. Profits come from sales. In thi...

AI is machine learning. It’s great for repetitive tasks. It collects knowledge and synthesizes it into useful compilations. AI machine learning can be predictable. “I” learning is what we do when we interact with people. It’s as unpredictable as an amateur golf swing. Interacting with humans requires empathy, psychology, self-awareness, and patience. It is time-consuming and can have d...

In business, we need to embrace systems to align people with processes. Companies spend time and money on systems to speed up or simplify processes. The one thing that stands in the way of business systems being effective is people. You are working with a group of people with different life experiences, goals, and beliefs. As much as we try, we can’t dig deep into each individual and try to...