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The Best SEO Podcast: Defining the Future of Search with LLM Visibility™
Digital Marketing Revolution: Adapting to AI's Takeover with Bill Rice
00:44:43
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- [00:00]
Bill Rice
You.
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Matt Bertram
This is the Unknown Secrets of Internet Marketing, your insider guide to the strategies top marketers use to crush the competition. Ready to unlock your business full potential? Let's get started. And welcome back to another fun filled episode of the Unknown Secrets of Internet Marketing. I am your host, Matt. Matt Bertram. I have a lot to share with you and I have a special guest here today to get into the nitty gritty of running a digital agency. What he seems working right now on the B2C side. What he's seen working on the B2B side. Welcome to the show, Bill Rice.
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Bill Rice
Hey, thanks for having me. I'm super excited about this conversation.
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Matt Bertram
Yeah, I think that there's a lot of things changing. I think Google's changed more in the last, let's say 36 months than they have in the last 15 years. You know, ads are changing, social's changing. There's so much that that's going on. And so I thought it'd be good to bring another fellow digital marketer on that's working in both spaces to talk a little bit about what's working, what's not. So welcome to the show, Bill.
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Bill Rice
Hey, thanks, thanks for the opportunity is super, super exciting. Like you said, it's, it's a fun time. I've been doing this for, you know, almost 30 years. Dates me a little bit, but, but man, we've been through so many cycles and this is another one of those transformational moments that's like so exciting to be a part of.
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Matt Bertram
Yeah. So what's most topical to you? What, what, what are you looking at? What's going on? What are you seeing? Would just like to start there.
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Bill Rice
Yeah, I mean I think there's no question that, that we're in one of those moments. I'll actually really date myself. So the last time I saw a moment like this was I was part of a team that was, seven of us got together, had some good funding and everything and built one of the first Internet only banks. And as we were doing that, Yahoo directories were like the thing, right. And lead generation, like LendingTree was like this little company that we started collaborating with and one of my developers on the team came to me and it's like, hey, you should take a look at this thing. And so it brings up on a screen this completely white page with a box in it and he's like, you just like type a keyword and it gives you like all the directory listings. So I'm again replicating the conversation. Like we didn't know what SERPs were or anything like this. And I was like, do you think people will do that? You know, because you would normally go to the directory, you kind of go into the section and find your thing. Anyways, it's one of those moments. Now we're in this moment. So what that did was it changed user behavior. We didn't go to directories anymore. We did a Google search. Right now we're in this moment where people are, they don't. I mean I'm on the leading edge of this, right? So I'm probably not reflective of this. But I often go to chat GPT far before I go to Google search anymore. And I think we're in one of those moments where people are enjoying not only going to ChatGPT to do prompts, but actually having conversations with it and having the response like they're talking to a human almost. So user behavior as a digital marketer is changing right in front of us and we're going to have to adapt. And man, this is, this is always fun when this happens.
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Matt Bertram
I mean, yeah, AI assisted search is absolutely huge. So I saw a tweet by Sam Altman that said they just onboarded a million users in like four hours or something like that. And previously it was like the fastest they ever did. It was like a million users and three, three weeks or I don't remember three days, I don't remember what the number was, but it was like it exponentially was a lot less. And so the uptake, the pickup people have started to use it. People are working on prompts. Like I think prompt engineering is, is becoming huge. A lot of the components. So yeah, search is getting eaten away and I think attention is also in different places. Right. So social media, organic social, how these algorithms are working now, I mean it's fun, it's all new. I think just like the Internet cycle happened and all these Internet businesses were built now I think it's just like how creative can you be? Because they even help with coding and everything else with AI. So I think there's going to be a whole new layer of businesses and offerings that are going to be super disruptive. And, and I think that social media, how the algorithm change where you don't have the followers, you didn't have to build a follower account like an email drip. It's just like you put out good content. It's opened up like it's a wild west again. No one knows what's going, going on or what's happening. And a lot of people don't change. I feel like Businesses start, they have something that works and they're working that. And I've been going to a lot of SEO conferences, I've been speaking, I'm in some private groups. You know, for a while it was like, what's happening? I don't know what to do. And you know, you have to get back out there. I got back out there, started doing SEO again. I'm doing organic social like myself, like not outsourcing it, not, not having the team do it. Like I'm doing it. I need to understand what's happening with the algorithms. I'm doing the SEO. Like it's just, it's a new era, right?
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Bill Rice
Yeah.
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Matt Bertram
So what are you seeing? But this, this show is about you.
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Bill Rice
Yeah.
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Matt Bertram
And what you're seeing. So tell me what, what you've seen with clients and what you're looking at.
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Bill Rice
Yeah, I mean I think there's a whole bunch of themes and you, you like, you kind of rattled through a whole bunch of them. So maybe some, some of the, the larger trends that we're seeing. You mentioned social media and things like that. So I have a blog post that I did and believe it to be true is, you know, we always say so many times we call the death of something. Right. And I think, you know, blogs as an SEO strategy, like used to, you could, you could do a bunch of blog posts and you would inherently do SEO. Right. It would just work. Google was really good kind of working through those and if you did a half decent job, you're going to get some results, you're going to move the needle, you're going to do well for a client. I think now to move the needle for the client, going out into these social audiences, particularly on the B2B side in particular, going out there with your executives, with your leadership and having them produce content. These AI, large language models love rich content. They love videos, they love, you know, posts that are in there. The, the, the indicators are not necessarily the backlinks as much as they are kind of the, the followers and the engagement and, and some of those other metrics. AI can really consume that better than, than Google's algorithms. You know, in a kind of monoline. Having to first force everything back to a search engine result page, I think was a real limiter and probably caused Google to have a bit of a blind spot because they, they were, their constraint was on the delivery, the front end ui, whereas chat GPT doesn't have that. So they're, they're, they're consuming a lot. So I think that's one trend, the type of content that you're doing is, is changing to that point of like individuals contributing. One of the biggest, and this is a big thing that we've been focused on for LLMs is looking for gaps in what LLMs know. So what LLMs have been consuming for the last several years is blog post and publicly available content. The moment that I put Bill Rice's personal experience into a place where the LLM can grab it, the LLM just kind of like Google. They, they pro. They like that because it feels more personal. It's unique, it's a gap. They suck that kind of stuff up. So we're constantly looking for gaps. It's a big opportunity for organizations because usually organizations have some thought leadership, have some unique angles or whatever. So producing content that gets them into ChatGPT, LLMs usually what works. And we've had some really kind of fast successes. If you look for those gaps and those unique things that your organization knows about your marketplace, that's not just the drivel that most SEO people point out. And then I guess the last big trend that you and I both probably experience is the best SEO people used to be spreadsheet jocks. I mean, they knew like how to do a pivot table, how to do a lookup table like no other. And that's changed because AI can be a force multiplier and just analyzing massive amounts of data and helping us to, to, to create strategies to look for opportunities. So AI is playing a big role in just being our data analysis inside of there and just really leveling up what we can see and observe.
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Matt Bertram
Well, you know, speaking of like Excel jockeys, right. I'm going to Mike King's SEO week and I'm excited to see what they're working on, right, because he's always just, you know, for any of those that don't know who Mike King is, Ipool Rank is. He's awesome. He's a thought leader in the space. So I saw what Brighton is doing and what they're doing across the pond and then what Mike's doing is really always cutting edge and it's evolving, right? The AI assisted search is totally evolving, how people are using it, what they're looking for. I think Google, from what I heard, I don't know if it's true. They're losing money on the AI generated overviews because they have to spend so much energy and compute to do that because they're just trying to keep people there. And what that's doing is it's pushing and compressing the leads that actually typically would come to a website. Right. So people are not really consuming website information as much anymore if they're getting their answers in the people also ask or the AIO reviews. And so for me it's becoming about developing the brand and owning everywhere. Right. And you did talk about YouTube and people are consuming a lot more videos than they did and Google does own them. And you know, people spend more time on YouTube than probably anywhere else. You know, depending on, oh, if you're listening to a podcast or if you're just heavily invested in the dominant dopamine hit from you know, a TikTok related video, which that is up there but still YouTube owns it and then YouTube shorts. So you know, that's, that's one of our big initiatives is to, to move over to YouTube because I think that that's how buyer behavior is changing. And that's something that theoretically we, we understand the algorithm, we understand what to do it, but to operationalize it and to scale it for clients.
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Bill Rice
Yeah.
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Matt Bertram
When we need content from them is very difficult. Right. So you know that rich content that you get from clients, I think the thought leadership, Depending on the B2B side, they understand it on the B2B or on the B2C side, like getting more products, like you know, getting the differential information. That's new. Right. Because even people that are using these LLMs, you're just spitting out the same thing over and over again. And something like what is the Internet theory or, or that Google says, I think something I read again, I don't, these numbers, I, I, I should be writing them down, but it was like something like 48, 46% of the Internet today is AI generated.
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Bill Rice
Yeah.
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Matt Bertram
Okay. Or bots. Right. So, so, so there's there, there's a, they're always looking for that rich content. I think that's why they did the deal with Reddit. Right. Because you got the biggest, like, oh my gosh, like real, real people for the most part are on Reddit. And I think that that's why Elon Musk bought Twitter, you know, because, and then he had, he even posted about, he had to scrape out all the bots. And so I, I don't know, I mean, what, what did I share that you might want to add to or that resonated with you?
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Bill Rice
Yeah, I think, you know, the, the fact that you kind of zeroed in on brand and Google's been talking about this for a long time, but I think a lot of times people misinterpreted why Google thinks brand is so important but you kind of highlighted it there. Again, if so much of the Internet is generated, you know, by AI or you have bots or this ability to sort of take humanity out of things and be very efficient at producing content and this race to the bottom with content, brands become critically important. And I'm talking about like brands in the sense of like organizations, but also personal brands because again when brands speak, they bring a unique voice and tone and approach and experience to that content marketplace and that really stands out. And I think that's what's going to get gobbled up by these LLMs. We had just, just yesterday had kind of a, a point in case example of this. We, we had one of our clients roll out a new product. We put up a quick landing page that we wanted to rank and we wanted to get it into LLMs. And then there were kind of two activities that happened. One, it was somewhat unique, so I've never seen this happen before. But it jumped to number two within the first day and it moved to number one within two days. So to me more important than the ranking thing because it is again unique and sort of niche marketplace. So that's not terribly unsurpr. But it showed the rate at which Google is consuming. Like for it to take a brand new landing page and shove it forward that fast in that market is really interesting. And then on the LLM side we kind of did this thing and this is experiment so it could be like a weird sort of, you know, one example. So it is, so it is a, you know, no statistical significance significance. But we went out to a free version of LLM and, and we asked some questions about our, you know, who is the best provider of this product. It had our company, our client in that mix. But then we started to coach it up and what it said in the mix is it's like oh well of these people, these are the people who do it, this person kind of does something like it, but they don't have this specific product, you know, in their mix. And then we could say well oh, interestingly enough it looks like they do. Like literally this is a conversation with, with ChatGPT. Interestingly enough it looks like they do have it. And here's a page and it took a look at that page and it's like oh yeah, this seems to be a new thing. And then subsequently when we asked some more questions it essentially kind of like reset itself. And again this could be a flash in the pan, but we basically coached it on the product and then subsequently when we did some other things, we had some other people test it. The LLM had learned about our company and new product and kind of pushed it forward in the responses. So that was kind of a, like, can we influence and coach up LLMs? Is that, that was, that was a test?
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Matt Bertram
Yeah, I, I've actually heard people talking about doing that. I know people are trying to do that I think when the, the software updates. And so I've been actually using a lot of chats where I'm like don't update the software, you know.
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Bill Rice
Yeah, yeah, for sure.
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Matt Bertram
You know, but then there, then, then there, there's, there's, there's ones that it'll update the software and I feel like that's when it's learning and it's in its long term database. The question I had for you was back at your first example, it getting indexed so quickly. Was this a new domain or was this a like, you know, a page on an existing website?
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Bill Rice
Yeah, this was an existing domain, has some good credibility. Product was similar to other products so it was rolling out kind of a new related product. So there was leverage in the site for sure. And we'd had success with launching new products before on this site, but we'd never seen it happen that fast. It's usually weeks. In fact it was so fast that we went to. Because we were like okay, how many serps did we get? So we went to Ahrefs and we went to Semrush and like nothing. Like it didn't. Even though, you know, those things are pretty fast. It had no knowledge of our indexing and it wasn't even in Search Console. But if you just went out to the raw, just did the search, it was popping up. So it's, yeah, it's, it's interesting our normal sort of ways to, to look for things, we're not indexing fast enough.
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Matt Bertram
So what I'm, what I'm seeing is like the, the, if you're in the topical authority, right. If you're already in the category and, and you feed it new information and, and this could be an offshoot of like the, the caffeine algorithm, you know, because it seems to be running a lot faster but it seems like there's kind of like a swarm of bots, if you will, that kind of come look at it. They, they all have maybe, they're maybe like little agents that all have like different things that they're looking at and then you get this kind of spike in attention pretty quickly and then it'll kind of settle back down to where it thinks it is and then it'll start, you know, building more data around that. But yeah, I've seen. And if you're in that, you know, category already and you know, something happens, it could happen really quick and then it kind of backs off and starts to normalize it and it kind of levels out. But yeah, things are happening a lot faster. I mean the long term database from everything that I've read turns over about every two and a half months. So that's kind of why we do, we do quarterly engagements and stuff like that to kind of cat to kind of catch that update because things will go from not ranked at all to position two or whatever it is really, really quickly based on certain things to that point.
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Bill Rice
You know, again, a lot of our tools are third party observations of Google in particular and we don't have any real tools to observe what's happening in the LLMs. So I think that's from a client engagement standpoint becomes difficult because like I said, there's nothing I can show them in a standard AHREF report that we give out to them like that we've had any success. But I know it's there, right? And then LLMs, like I have to do like I literally have to do screenshots or, or ask them to do some things to, to see what's there because there, there are no tools around success in that regard. And it's, it's going to be important but we don't have a way to measure it or even to attribute it yet.
- [19:21]
Matt Bertram
Well, I, I think that that's something that, that is probably one of that we talked about the, the new products or the, the new businesses that come out of this because right you, you said okay, who's the best service provider or who has the best product for xyz and it'll give you like a list or it might give you one. I think some of that's getting pulled from schema but, but it's weighing it, right? So it's weighing it against everything else that knows. And I do think pointing out information and you know, when you, when you say check out this website, pull the information it'll certainly learn in that chat and then if it's brand new, I see kind of an update happen and I think that it is learning and everybody's feeding it. Interestingly enough I asked it what are the rules that you abide by? Because I want to understand like what kind of answer you're giving me. And people talk about Kind of jailbreaking certain things. And I asked it to notify me when I'm hitting a guardrail on certain things, you know, But I, I, it would be good to have tools to understand where you sit in that, because how are you supposed to provide reporting to this or that? I, I've found a lot of the tools, I, I keep testing out different tools and a bunch of people sponsor the show, like, but you know how, like I haven't found the right tool, you know what I mean? Like I, I'll pull this from over here, I'll pull this from over here. And then now it's all going to like a token based system, which is not necessarily a bad thing. I mean, what are you using from a technology stack standpoint when you're doing this work for clients? And I know it will be different for B2B versus B2C.
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Bill Rice
Yeah. So I'm so when AI, you know, when the chat GPT sort of sprung on the scene, like one of the first things that I noted right off the bat and has become like a core philosophy. And I share this with everyone. And my youngest right now is in, in college. She's, she's so, she's like right in the middle of like, how does this, you know, affect education and academia and all this kind of stuff. And so one of the things that, because she was in college, this is probably why I came up with this is you will always fail. If you ask ChatGPT or these AI things to do your homework right. It will always fail you. It will get things wrong. It will give you like the worst, you know, quality. And so it is better as augmentation, as an assistant, as a collaborator, as a colleague. Anytime you use it in those sort of modes, you'll have the best success or you iterate through things with it. So when I'm thinking about tools, I extend that philosophy. So the worst tools that I played with are tools that try to bake in and do your homework for you. Right. And this is the, this is the worst in SEO content creation. The tools for SEO content creation are some of the worst because they've essentially gone like anti AI. They baked in some like you know, hard, hard. This is my vision of it, what they've done, baked in hard coded prompts.
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Matt Bertram
Yep.
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Bill Rice
And then you run things through it. You say, hey, write me an article about this. It puts all those prompts that are probably not wonderful and then it bakes out something that's just trash. Right. So, so to that philosophy, most of what we're using are the core tools. ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Gemini. We like to, like to start with those. We want to learn how to use them. I think that better abstracted tools will come eventually that will allow a lower skill set to work with those. But just like the spreadsheet jockeys that are so successful with SEO, the people that understand like how these things work and how to manipulate the data and the underlying prompts and the things that make it give you the best quality will be the winners. So we're putting a lot of time and energy into just using the, the base level tool and, and, and working with custom chat GP, you know, custom GPTs, learning how to, to be better at giving prompts, using our own prompt databases where we create something that, that works and then we, you know, hold on to that and reuse it and iterate on it. Spaces have been really powerful, especially as an agency. We have clients, we always put them in spaces and now we have the ability to kind of organize, have some, some baked in safe history. So anyway, those, so, so right now, yeah, we're using the fundamentals and, and we're doing the hard work to, to learn how to make them great.
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Matt Bertram
Yeah, no, I, I had to step back into it. This is not something that you got to have a good operator. Right. You got to have somebody that knows what good looks like to, to, to help drive some of this. Like you can't just give it all over to it. It's not autopilot just yet. You know. What are you seeing as far as the mix for clients of different channels, paid social. How do you look at that mix right now? Are you, you know, are you staying from a traditional SEO standpoint? Okay, no, we're going after prompts. We want to show up, you know, in AI assisted search. Like what does the, the sphere look like for you of the marketing mix?
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Bill Rice
Yeah, so we are a full service agency and, and generally folks engage us for the specific purpose of generating high volume of leads. So our mix generally, and I think this is changing a little bit. So this is a great question. So our generally first in PPC because we got to generate traffic, we gotta, you gotta push them to landing page, you gotta get high intent. We got to start cooking leads because leads bring revenue. And then we usually layer in SEO and content which has a longer, you know, usually again there's a reason it's called earned media. It takes three to six months to earn your way in to those similar positions that we're already taking with ppc. But are costing us a lot more. And then we layer in things like email and social media for, for the kind of the remarketing aspect of that or the lead nurturing. So, so that's the stack where this is changing and I think it will change more is we're going to have more engagements where we start to lead with SEO, I think or what SEO will become because it is becoming faster and it is because of Chat GPT and we do hear clients coming in leads, even our own leads where people say I, you know, I did an se, I did a Google search and it was trash. And then I went to Chat GPT and it recommended you guys and it made sense. That's the other thing that Chat GPT does. Back to one of your other points. It's increasingly becoming more transparent. It's telling you why it made the decision or it's giving you the rubric for how it like sorted this list. Like this is why I gave you these three people which essentially pre sells like people like Kaleidico and, and Bill Rice strategy group. So that's, that's kind of interesting. But I think because of the speed and because of the user behavior and more of this like especially the conversational AI and component people like talking to their phones and expecting responses, I fully believe that that shift to like I said, what SEO and content becomes probably will start to heavily encroach on our PPC one, because it's moving faster. But two, because traditional PPC, the SERPs and that MO, that AD model I think is going to deteriorate over time. So I think ppc, we're going to have to relearn that channel as well because it will either have to be just to your point of Google losing money on the AI results, it's going to have to be re engineered and we don't know what that looks like. So we're probably going to have to make an adjustment. But before that adjustment happens, I guarantee you the model itself will deteriorate and the types of results that we can generate.
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Matt Bertram
So, so here's a really interesting piece of data that I read like a day or two ago. Neil Patel put this out and I agree with you. So I agree with everything you said. What was interesting in the data is everything was growing. Oh, Google was up, ads were up, searches were up, people were using every and all things. So everything was up. So it was losing market share comparatively to everything because the whole market's growing, the whole market's just growing faster than Google's growing. But it's still growing, which is, which was kind of mind blowing, right? Because I, I mean now AI is only about 4% of all searches and not all those searches have like commercial intent. So that number is probably a lot smaller. But I do believe it's going to grow. I think that those things are important, but everything's growing, which it was really fascinating.
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Bill Rice
I hadn't thought about it that way, but I wonder if some of that, and I kind of said this the other day in a conversation that I was having is so before and again, this is where behavior changes and this is why so exciting for me when we, when I see one of these things is before if you had to solve a problem, you probably went to your experience first and then you did a Google search or maybe you did a Google search to kind of get you started and then you had to kind of read through a bunch of stuff. I bet in general we're doing more queries and true augmentation of ourselves because of ChatGPT, because of things like Siri, which I think will. I'm in this moment where I think it's getting dumber before it gets smarter. But I think at some point, because one queries and augmentation will be so accessible, we'll just talk to it or have a conversation and it'll become normalized. I wonder if that's why it's growing because we're just. I know, I do personally, like I'd probably do a Google search, you know, half dozen times a day. ChatGPT, like I'm quite honestly in it all day as I'm working, I'm using it to produce materials to summarize calls, to do roll ups of, you know, follow up emails to help me, you know, brainstorm a new campaign to analyze some data. Like those are not Google search queries. Those are like, like literally like exponentially more queries.
- [30:29]
Matt Bertram
Yeah, I, I think that I had two really good things to say and I needed to write them down because right when you were about to finish, because I'm listening to you, they just, they left my head. So they'll have to, they'll have to come back. But I can, I wanted, I wanted to hear what, what you're doing on social. Okay. Because I, I think a lot of the attention is being driven on social. Okay. Oh, here's, here's actually what I was going to say. So the number of searches, this is at least one of the things to say. So the number of searches that are converting are eight plus words on average. That, that was an interesting little fact. So long tail key phrases. And so if you think about like the queries that you're making, if you're talking to chat gbt, how many words is that? Right? So you're like that, that, that question is like, I don't know, a paragraph of words easily. So, so it's getting longer and longer. And so people are understanding how to use these things to get the answer they're looking for. And so I, I just think that that's super interesting. And if you're thinking about long tail key phrases and you know, a lot of people in certain industries are just hitting on those major keywords and the long tail key phrases is actually where the conversion comes in. Okay, yeah, here's the second thing. So there was a study that I reread a while ago. It was called the Zero moment Study. It was back, it was done back in 2011 with Google. And what it reminded me of was, was the user's search or the user journey or the customer journey search of when they convert is not the straight line. It's not even linear up and down or anything like that. It's kind of like a atom. And everybody, you go out, you come back to center, you go out, you come back to center, you go out and come back to center and you're bringing back that information. Just like if you're prompting ChatGPT, right. You ask it a question, okay, come back to center. Nope, refine it. Come back to the answer, refine it. Like, that's how people are searching. And so, you know, it's just fascinating to me about user behavior of like, what people are doing. And I'm finding that happen even more and more on social platforms. And now the content finds who you're looking for. So then now you're getting instantaneous feedback of the content you're producing. And I'm just curious, you know, how much you've dabbled in that or played with that. Because I'm now back to working on stuff like, like I'm, I'm like doing a lot of the work to operationalize how we need to do it going forward. Because some of those models change every time, like something new comes out. You got to kind of re. Refigure what, what you're doing and what those strategies are for, for clients and for yourself. So I'm just curious what you'd like to respond to out of that. And then anything about social.
- [33:34]
Bill Rice
Yeah, I think on, yeah, so there's a lot of, a lot of interesting threads to Pull there. So let me start with the social stuff. So again, I think it goes back to brands and in particular personal brands. So a lot of the social stuff that we're seeing work well are things that are staying in line with social, meaning that, you know, people on social platforms like to interact with people versus brands. This is why LinkedIn, you know, companies has never worked. Right. If you post to a company page, it's just like it's worthless. Right. You need the individuals to work. So, so that's working effectively. And so what we're doing there, especially at the executive level, I think there's this resurgence of the concept of sort of ghost writing and what we can do with executives. Certainly we can do ghost writing to, to actually do, you know, the more traditional post and stuff like that. But ghost writing in the sense that we spend a lot of time collecting whatever material we have around those executives and those leaders to understand. Yep. Their voices. Yeah. Their personal brand. We load that in and then from there we start to give them frameworks that we want them to fill in. Right. And it's like, okay, like, this is the marketplace we're in. We want you to comment on this. We want you to kind of like podcasts. Like, I mean, if we could get them all to podcasts and we could just take. Take the results of that, it'd probably be wonderful content. But we're essentially trying to seed that and we're saying, hey, we want your commentary on that. We want you to, you know, hop on your computer on a loom and, and have this conversation. Or we have this, we have this product called Guided Content Creation, which is essentially like a podcast, but we just take the one side of it, right. So we'll get them on a tool like Riverside and we'll coach them through it. We'll ask them some questions, we'll get their feedback. Then our video. Video people take it and toss it. So that gives that, that unique nuanced, I like perspective that. That works so well on, on social. So that's. That's social. And then I think the other thing, to your point of like the user behavior, I did want to pull on this right there. I heard an interesting thing that changed the way I do a lot of prompting. So I think the other thing that's happening inside of these tools is we're asking the tools to help us work better with the tool. So, like, one of my little hacks now is chat. GPT has kind of two types of models. They've got this 0103 series and then they've got the more traditional chat, you know, GPT4, 4.5 or whatever they're on now. So the, the hack is the, the 0, you know, 0.3 or O3s or whatever is essentially a, a reasoning engine. And so I will kind of work through, and this is for the more complex and sophisticated things you do. I'll work through a prompt, then I'll give it to O3 mini and I'll say write me a better prompt for this and it'll rewrite a prompt which, to your point, eight plus words. No, it's like a full paragraph. Take that prompt, put it into 4 or 4.5 and have it do the work. And so I think the serialization of the, you know, of the tools and those sorts of things. Again, user behavior. Right. As we, and I heard on one of your other shows, you, you guys got really deep into talking about creating and using agents that you're going to kind of string together. So the agency aspect of using AI is, is definitely going to be the future. We're just going to have these little AIs built, these little agents built and we're going to set them in motion and it's really going to kind of open our day.
- [37:26]
Matt Bertram
Yeah, I've been, I've been playing in the evenings when I have time with, with, with some next level stuff. I even just brought, brought in a AI influencer agency that I'm playing around with.
- [37:40]
Bill Rice
Nice.
- [37:41]
Matt Bertram
Right. And so going to be playing around with that a little bit. See, see how that's happening. We're starting to do a lot more on social and you know, I'm really trying to come in and help build the overall strategy and it's tough because things keep, keep moving. So you got to stay on the very tip of the spear with that can. You know, I know we're kind of limited on time. I would love to hear kind of as we start to move to close, you shared the prompt engineering of where the AI is writing the prompt and kind of flowing it or waterfalling it down from the logic to the improving the AI. So it gives you the best answer. I love that that's actually something I'm not doing. So kudos. I'm gonna have to test that out now.
- [38:25]
Bill Rice
Yeah.
- [38:26]
Matt Bertram
Awesome. And you know, what is one unknown secret of Internet marketing that you're seeing today that's maybe underutilized that, that people aren't taking advantage of?
- [38:39]
Bill Rice
Yeah. I think what's going to get rewarded because of, of AI and all these sorts of things is bringing personality and creativity back to marketing. Right. We got very programmatic about marketing and, and you know, data driven these sorts of things. So one of the things I was recently on, it's kind of a, a podcast is a little bit more focused on leadership. And one thing that I think AI and this, this goes to that secret, right? I think if you can intentionally think about how to leverage AI and the increasing sophistication of these tools to reclaim a significant part of your day, to then take that time intentionally instead of just doing more and having more capacity and doing more of it with AI is to take that particularly as leaders and managers and startup founders and organizations, take that reclaimed time and invest it in your people to help them be more creative, to teach them how to take risk and just spend more time investing in our people and becoming more human with our teams to encourage them to push and innovate and do those things and make those teams stronger. I think that's going to be a secret weapon because marketing, the marketing that's going to win when AI takes over the world is that little bit of creativity that looks, is going to like shine like the sun because it's going to, it's going to be so different because you know, creativity and we already got it, we've got faceless YouTube channels, right? And it's like so that little bit of creativity, that little bit of human touch is going to shine so bright. So I think that starts with us reclaiming some time with these tools and becoming a little more personal and, and just doing the old fashioned like team building and working with people.
- [40:43]
Matt Bertram
No, I love that And I think that that's what technology, that was the promise of technology. When email came out, right, you were going to be able to reclaim time and just everybody started to work more. And I've kind of found giving that space, going to the gym, walking the dogs, being outside that that's where creativity happens, right? Maybe there's some movement associated with that. But if you're, all you're thinking about is this, that the other thing, it doesn't give your brain any room to be creative or your team anytime to, to learn or grow. And, and that's what I found is going back to even what I said at the beginning. A lot of businesses that start like I can look when I come into a business, I know roughly when they started because they're still operating on the same principles they were that were cutting edge at the time when they started it. Interesting. And very few businesses continue to kind of Stop. Look around, look in the mirror. Like, what are the competitors doing that are, that are gaining market share? I think that these brands, moats are getting eroded. Everybody's eating off the brand. And some of these companies that are coming out of nowhere and, and they've exploded on social media is going to be happening more often. And I think the bigger brands need to go on the offensive and, and start to invest in some of these things. And I would tell you, the bigger brands have that moat. They have the money and they have the time. The smaller brands and the smaller companies got to do it now because they got to get ahead because the big boys are coming. It's almost like crypto. It's like retail gets in first, like when the big boys come, like, it's done. You know what I mean? And so I think that people need to establish building a brand now. They need to understand where things are going. SEO has always been a moving target, and I think it continues to be. It just changes and evolves. And you got to take that time to, to, to learn these tools and to get these tools implemented or the people that are, are going to pass. Ask everyone. Bye. So, Bill, love having you on. Love the conversation, want to continue it. How do people get in touch with you best if they want to find out more? I know you're out there on podcasts and talking and blogging, so how, how do people best find you?
- [43:04]
Bill Rice
Yeah, I, I'm a big believer and I actually started this newsletter out of kind of a, you know, scratching my own itch. I think it's really important to be up on these trends and to have a mechanism to kind of curate. So I started my newsletter, myexecutive brief.com which is just that it's, it's a lot of, it's my reflections and philosophies and things that we've talked about here, but I am trying to curate and give you an executive brief that you can consume once a week that keeps you on top of everything that's moving so quickly. So that's one easy way. The second one, of course, Billricestrategy.com is my main website, so if you want to engage directly with me, I'd love to have you there. And then to the point of social media, probably the place that I'm the most active and happy to engage in conversations, you can get my attention the fastest is on LinkedIn. If you just look for Bill Rice. I was one of the early guys there, so it's just Bill Rice. And I'll pop up in there and happy to have either a DM conversation connect with me, whatever and then lots of content goes through that channel.
- [44:06]
Matt Bertram
Awesome. Okay, send me those links so I can add it to the show notes and everyone, hopefully you enjoyed the conversation. It was definitely enlightening. I learned some things and if you want to grow your business with the largest, most powerful planet on the Internet or which is the Internet, sorry, reach out to EWR for more more revenue. If you got any value from this, please comment. Like share. It really helps. And until the next time, my name is Matt Bertram. Bye bye for now. Sat.