Transcript
Transcription of the video “The contradictory world of social media marketing and selling (and agentic AI)”
Heat Hello everyone. This is the Flow State podcast. I’m Stuart P Turner and I’m delighted to be rejoined by my good friend Melinda Stewart today. Melinda, hello. How are you? hello. Welcome back. Good. Glad to hear it. It It’s a pleasure. I was It’s been too long since our first conversation which was back in 2023 now which seems like a long time ago. Yeah I was gonna like I was gonna put you on the spot and do a bit of a a bit of a test on what we talked about last time but I thought that might be a bit a bit unfair given everything that’s been happening. Pretty sure we talked about AI. Yeah pretty sure there was a rant about something or other. I’m keen to bring those back today episode. I hope we saved a few up in the the interven the intervening time. Um so look today we’re here to talk about um the currently very contradictory world of social media for marketing and sales obviously under the umbrella of of AI my favorite subject at the moment. Um so I know your remit’s changed a little bit since we last spoke Melinda. Before we get into it and I gave you my intro spiel what are you what are you up to now where’s your current focus? You know what’s your what’s your day-to-day experience of the uh the robot revolution?
I’m back in telecommunications. Uh which is an an industry that is changing rapidly and I think it’s it’s due to the robots coming on board. Uh where you can take all of the internal conversations that people have had with customers with salespeople with other stakeholder groups and start to synthesize that through tools and then get back some sort of semblance of where they need to be headed in the market and how they need to position themselves in the market. So interesting part of my remit is really working with some of this technology and helping helping the end user understand how it’s going to be used for us by us. Um I think going forward as an industry. That’s cool. That’s We should We should talk about this in another episode actually. because one of my uh one of my colleagues in the other business the secret business is um business in a very similar. Well it’s not that secret to be fair but I was trying to trying to build a bit of build a bit hype about it. The the the product business. Um he’s also in similar similar sort of space but he’s in the real estate industry. Um obviously looking at a lot of like personalization. How do you how do you you know assess and aggregate all the data that they look at? Like I don’t I won’t speak out of school because I don’t want to say anything that’s going to get me in trouble. But I think it’s really interesting you know when you work in the kinds of companies that you were both in sitting on those huge sets of data. Um and obviously from your your previous world it’s it’s very familiar right? Like connecting it up is not not quite as easy as it sounds. You can’t actually just dump robots in there and be like “Oh guys just tell us useful stuff.” Right that’s the dream I know.
But Oh that’s the dream. And it’s funny because uh having worked in technology for I think it’s been close to 11 years now that people still they’re still ignoring their data. And I think I ranted about this last time we spoke and continues. So fun that we’re still having these conversations right? And and that your data is now more and more relevant because you need it to train you need it to train your own models you need it to build your own agents. Uh and then you need somewhere to deploy those agents. And so if you if you’re not taking care of your data there is no magician. Um if you look at Co-pilot and you try and get Co-pilot to work with I don’t want to look a Co-pilot. We’re going to have to all of us sooner or later. But if you if you get Co-pilot to try and clean the data it says I can’t help you. Like it can it can go in it can create formulas. It can start to slice and dice things for you. But when it comes to the quality of the data we’re still at this stage where we have to do the work. And a lot of people are all excited about what’s going to change their data. It’s not. You’ve got to do the work.
Yeah. And look this this is a conversation that’s very top of mind for for me because obviously it’s you know part of what we what we do with the flow state team is trying to trying to navigate that whole thorny challenge as easily as possible and not not get snared in the uh in the worst parts. But yeah I think it should be obviously should be top of mind for everybody right? It’s just um there’s a whole a whole huge uh wave of activity happening that’s all just based on pretty crap or very heavily assumed um information at the moment which is somewhat scary. But um look let me for once that was actually a pretty good segue. So thinking of data and challenging environments let’s get into what we’re here to talk about today. So social media I think is a great example of this. Um and without giving away our uh you know greater than we look ages Melinda obviously we’ve both been here for the entire the entire journey of social right? Like you were there at the birth of the the great networks of today. You know Facebook what was Twitter the horrible corpse of Twitter. The ones that have got the sadly ones have gone. And someone mentioned Map Quest to me the other day. That was a bit of Oh that’s awesome. Mention MySpace. MySpace. Yeah that was amazing. All those the weird forums I was talking to someone else about Newgrounds which was like the pre not anywhere near as horrible you know kind of like 4chan like you remember that place. Weird animations games all those great places we used to hang around. Um so look obviously now we’re stuck with with what we’ve got. There hasn’t really been any decent new social network for a very long time. I was really excited about Blue Sky and Mastadon but they just don’t. Me too. They don’t really seem to have gained the critical mass required to to really take off which is unfortunate I think but I’m behind them. I like it. Um but look let’s talk about the big challenges. So at the moment you know we’ve got Meta and we’ve got Elon and and XT Twitter and we’ve got Google who are playing around in social media. If you consider YouTube social you know they’ve got a they’ve got a finger in the game kind of. Um yeah I mean I think I think you do right? And then obviously we’ve got Microsoft with LinkedIn. Um the problem we have though as marketing and sales professionals or there’s a few big problems to to my mind that I want to talk about today. So one is as I’m sure you well know all the all the walls are going up everywhere. The port culuses are coming down. Garden gates are getting locked. You’re penalized for trying to take people off to your website. Like you know if you’re not pushing content that’s almost you know purely native You don’t get any organic reach. So you you’re stuck with pay-to-play. That that sucks. That’s not great. That’s given rise to um what uh the team at Spark Toro are calling zero click content which is just what we used to call native content in the in the olden times. Um I do like zero click. It’s a bit is a bit different to be fair. Like I don’t want to be too cynical about it. Um but you know also I’ve seen it before mate. Been here it for ages. Um organic reach as a result has shrunk massively. So um that obviously is a big challenge. There’s still places where you can get great organic reach but the problem now is like your audience might not actually be where where the organic reach is. So like LinkedIn’s still quite good for it if you can be bothered to to fight your way through the the rubbish on there. Tik Tok obviously still has massive organic reach. So does YouTube shorts. Um but obviously Tik Tok skews very much younger so it’s not relevant for everybody. And YouTube’s like I think probably the broadest uh audience-based network that you can get decent organic reach on but you have to do shorts. Um and look finally the end of this rant and then I’ll I’ll let you talk Melinda is um you know the result of all of that there is a question coming eventually. The result of all of that stuff is as we were saying before we jumped on right the networks even more than before are now dictating how we should go to market tactically. Because what they’re essentially saying is you have to use certain types of content formats. You have to structure your content in a certain way and you essentially have to spend all of your time optimizing big streams of your marketing or sales communications in the way that we say not in the way that you want to do it. So Melinda what do you think of all of that? Are you seeing these challenges happening in your current role or with people you’re speaking to? You know what’s your what’s your hot take on that situation and and how do you think we should be trying to address it?
Let’s get back. So let’s let’s park hot take because I need someone to define that for me. Off the cuff we used to call that off the cuff. Uh oh. So as opposed to a warm take? Yeah Yeah. Which is where I thought about it a little bit. I had to me it typically just means an ill-thought-out comment that just comes straight out of someone’s mouth without real you know any real consideration. So when someone said I had a warm take it was good.
Okay I appreciate that. Now I think so I think so. Either Yeah. Look I tell you what’s interesting for me because I started my digital journey a few years ago in SEO and that was that was where I trained. Uh and then just went forward from there in in marketing and communications. And back then like we had parameters that we had to follow and there were rules that were set down certainly by Google. And then Google became more and more powerful and said no this is absolutely what you have to do. And there was a time when Google was doing it to help you because there were so many people who were skewing what someone’s core business was and really they put the user at the heart of everything. And they said if the user can’t understand what you’re doing because you’re you’re trying to sell make your business look bigger than it is or sell additional service offerings that you don’t actually have any right to sell. I mean that was a that was a good thing but where we’ve come to now is absolute prescription. And what we’re going to end up with which goes against everything that the internet was is has been for for the past two decades is that organic growth is that connection with like-minded individuals is with having your own voice. I mean I keep hearing people talk about Tik Tok especially be authentic your authentic voice but is that where we’re headed? I don’t think so.
Yeah I think that’s a really interesting point actually because you know as as you as you well know coming from uh from SEO originally as well like you… you know you’ve seen the change in Google from oh we’re just trying to organize you know the internet like a library which is great to oh let us just tell you what’s important and what you should be looking at and how you should think about it. And like their injection I mean don’t even get me started on their injection of their absolute dog shit AI summaries of stuff that are like where are those coming from? Like that’s that’s where SEO is going at the moment. How do we optimize for the ads that’s the next frontier which is really scary. Because you remember in those days it was all about user generated content. So you had to make sure you were out there you were on Twitter you were on the tiny little forums. Um you were on what was it called a whirlpool? Oh yeah whirlpool forums Bloody hell God. Yeah Yeah. You were just you were made sure that you had a presence every one of those touch points that you could possibly reach and now it’s sort of Reddit is is the last resort for for people to go and have honest conversations.
Yeah. Uh yeah look I don’t know if you’ve noticed actually because I’m a don’t don’t judge but also quite quite a big Reddit fan for various um for various reasons but which I won’t go into now. But um that I I’ve noticed in a lot of the big subs on Reddit that there’s just loads of like karma farming crap like loads of AI generated slop there as well. It’s just like if you if you check into some of them over a few weeks you see the same post coming up over and over again. Like just to because you know it’s on the verge of being ruined by by people like us unfortunately I think. Um probably just like everyone feels like how we ruined the rest of the internet with our incessant need to uh to leverage every channel for for selling stuff. Um but I do agree I think it’s still one of those last bastions where you can get a decent opinion on something that isn’t skewed by you know external forces. Yes exactly. And you can I think you you almost feel like it’s a safe space where you can bring it to a group of people whereas you can’t do that anywhere else. Um not right now. I mean Instagram we we already knew what what that was going to be. What is even the point of Instagram now? Like I’m only on there cuz I’ve got um there you must be the same after you know after being across all the networks. Cuz like I’ve got few people like in every one. So I can’t really leave any one of them because I just know that there’s at least two or three people that I’ll just never hear from again if I if I ditch them. So like it’s I’m sort of stuck now. I’m like I still I really like message people but I’m like well do I want to just kill that friendship because like we’re not going to text each other? Like that that would just be unthinkable apparently to move to another messaging medium.
I think that’s what’s happening and I think a lot of people are in the same position. Uh it’s like oh well I I can’t stop now because then I’ll lose. Yeah I’ll lose that connection over there. I’ll lose those people over there. Uh I mean I’m I’m not the world’s most sociable person but even I find it hard. Linda you do you do you I find it hard to keep in contact. So there there are some sort of channels that I use to to say “Yep still here Nice to see you”. Uh yeah. And look I think that’s coming back to your point around authenticity and and focus on you know your users or in in less robotic horrible language the customers who who make your business. Um that again Facebook great example of this. I’m sure you remember the dramas over the years where it started out it was actually once it stopped being a weird creeper network and you know turned into like real Facebook it was actually great. Like you could connect with people you could see what they were up to. You know there was a bit of a may maybe slightly nostalgia tinged couple of years where like you could be like “Oh I can just actually see what all my friends are up to You can kind of keep in touch with that peripheral group of people that you know you’re probably not mega close with but you’d obviously see every so often and do stuff with”. And then slowly you know you start to see less of that. And like now I like log on and like maybe it’s because I don’t use it very often but I’m just like it’s a real effort to like actually see stuff from anyone that I actually know on there now. Like and it just feels like a Yeah. They’re just shoving loads of crap at you. Like oh did you know that there’s this shit knee that you might want to buy oh did you know this group’s posted something that you haven’t been in for like 5,000 years and it’s like I just hate the I hate being told what to do on those on those networks. Like it’s just not a it doesn’t feel like a social network anymore. It feels like a you know heavily advertised forum where you can occasionally talk to talk to your friends if you fight your way through.
It’s not a social network. It’s a commercial venture. I think this Yeah some people just lose sight of those things. I mean I joined Facebook and Bibo on the same day. Bibo Bloody hell. And we all know what happened. If you don’t know what B if you’re too young to know what Bibo is I’m going to put the link under here. There’s probably a little obituary somewhere on on the internet for it. It’s probably I’ll put I’ll put that on there. Brilliant. Do you know that came that originally started in 2005? I’m just looking now until this bankruptcy in 2013. Tragic tragic time. Oh this was the one that everyone was talking about. This is this is the thing of the future. And Facebook’s nowhere near the same space that Bibo is. So this is I think when you’ve been in digital long enough you start to not get jaded not get cynical but be wary of some of the things that you see. And this is why a lot of this AI stuff that’s that’s being produced and pumped out through social channels I’m starting to think we’re going to have to live with this for another 12 to 18 months before we we move to a next level.
Because that’s a good positive spin I think I like that. Where do you think we’re going to go after after this current torrent of of nonsense recedes? Yeah pretty soon. It probably won’t be done by us or the people who who really feel strongly about it but it will happen at a technological level where that sort of content starts to be pushed down and anyone who’s got a new idea or a new thought is elevated up again. Cuz what I’m seeing already is yeah you you’ve got people who can make tons of videos um and post them on Tik Tok. They can write tons of content um like posts for LinkedIn and Facebook and just continually post and be out there which is skewing the algorithm somewhat. What they’re the ones who are who are sort of doing harm to not only to our industry and our profession but ultimately to themselves because there are still people who want to read thought leadership. And I’m going to be a pain in the neck and talk about myself here. Go for. But I I made a promise to myself at the beginning of the year that I would start to contribute and write because you don’t want to be part of that 95%. Uh if if you can help it you you don’t want to consume all the time. You want to actually contribute. And so for me being able to contribute I’m starting to see there are people who want to want to consume new ideas or new ways of putting thoughts together. So I think that’s important to remember and I think it’s important for us to keep saying it again and again. If if if our industry tanks like marketing it’s kind of on us for not standing up and saying governance ethics please have some oversight and please don’t give away your critical thinking. There are a lot of people right now and it’s got nothing to do with age. There are a lot of people who just think “Oh great I’m just going to tell this tool what to do in the basis possible terms”. And look it produces everything for me. But really where are you in the mix?
Yeah. And look I’m uh I’m glad you brought that up actually because there’s two things you said there that I’ve been talking about a lot recently that I think it would be interesting to dive into in a bit of detail. So the first one as you’ve noted is um you know that defense of marketing in particular. Because I like—and I don’t mean—I probably probably is going to be quite offensive to to most people in marketing—but like you know a lot of the conversations I have in C are like there’s loads of hand ringing about marketing. You know this conversation about getting a seat at the C-suite table’s been going on for years. Like I think half the problem and whether you love him or hate him but you know people like Mark Ritson do a lot of good work in defending the methodology and impact of good marketing. Um yes and I just want to caveat those by by saying like I’m not a marketer by profession I am like a marketing enjoyer but I’m like a digital guy right? So like you know I’m not trying to say I’m some sort of lauded marketing expert here I just listen to a lot of them. But I think what I what I find frustrating is like nobody’s got any you know sort of balls anymore to like to be crude about it to defend the job that they have chosen to do. And like yes the role’s under a lot of pressure at the moment and I feel somewhat in a very small way to partly to blame for this because being a big digital digital advocate over the years that is one of the areas that’s chipped away at like the sort of you know the record of marketing. Right we’re all saying no you don’t need to be don’t need to see all the old stuff anymore just digital stuff? Right which is not really right. Um but what I mean what do you think about that Melinda? Do you you know do you see the same thing? Like I just I just think people need to be more confident in building a brand properly that isn’t dictated by exactly as you said like what a tool tells you to do right?
Well I’m I’m going to start by disagreeing with you on digital overtaking traditional marketing. Traditional marketing marketing Sorry. Um you’re probably going to have to edit that because I didn’t say the word properly. I’m leaving everything I’m leaving everything. That’s how it is being live. Was at all It’s the way to do it. But if if we if we ignore the theory and go back to traditional marketing tactics they were very expensive and they had limited reach. And it was also very hard to understand who your end customer was. Digital unlocked so much information unlocked such an incredible ability. I mean I think of co I think because of both of the lockdowns we had and how I was able to work with media publishers and events agencies to do some really incredible stuff and keep a conversation with our customers going through digital. Uh I think where we want to talk about and and as marketers we do talk about this a lot especially in technology especially in B2B which is integration. So every time you go out to market with something you have to look at the initiatives and tactics that you’ve got. What’s live what’s um you know an old an a an email that you can not an email they call it direct mail. You know what’s a thing that you can touch what’s the tangible aspect to that what’s public relations? You know So you just go through this whole list until you you get a mesh of marketing tactics that support your strategy why you’re doing this in the first place.
Yeah Yeah. Look I think that obviously is a fair point. And uh I think um as you noted earlier that’s I guess that’s where we’ve come kind of full circle right with with digital. Is like there was that big period where you were like “Oh my god you can track everything You can see everything”. But you know coming back to where we started with our current social media challenges that that in itself has become the issue now right? Where like how as you said about AI how accurate is that information? Like are we really getting like um a more accurate view of where our customers are? Like do do those interactions mean anything or not? And I think that’s to your point that’s where a lot of the critical thinking a lot of the effort is lacking. Um just because we’ve got into this routine of being like look you can easily pull a ton of data and present a load of charts that look nice right? But you know that that whole blinding people with science approach I feel like is is partly to blame for the maybe the lack of faith in where things are going. Because if that doesn’t turn into actual money at the end of the day like what is the what’s the point of all of it I guess.
So and this is where people have been talking for past six or seven years about next best action. So AI in a CRM is not new. Uh there have been CRM like like PGA like Salesforce who were already operationally training language models to be able to create some sort of predictable roadmap of where your marketing communications should go next. And what we’re seeing now is we’re just seeing an explosion of that everywhere. But I think what we have to ask ourselves because now there are tools that you can it’s all your own data you run your own data to be able to create that next best action model. But for people who want to pick and choose cloud-based tools and they’re operating as a startup or they’re operating um as as a smaller enterprise which can’t pay for a huge CRM and they’re buying models externally where where are those models trained or what are they trained on or to the point and I think that’s where we could get ourselves into trouble.
Yeah I completely agree. And look that’s where again I think where the the sort of agenda of these companies is is very much not aligned with with you or I or anyone else. Is like you know as you were saying like Salesforce fair enough. You’ve obviously got a load of your proprietary first party data in there. Any any CRM you you kind of feel like the permission’s there for them to you know to train a model maybe right? Whereas like people like Meta and Google have just been shoving their AI models down our throats. Like I was winging about Gemini and that that roll out with um with the guests on one of the last shows. Where you like they launched it they tried to make us pay for it separately. They realized that no one wanted to do that. They rolled it back and then they’ve just pushed it out into workspace now. So I like actually can’t get rid of Gemini easily because it’s just been pushed out into my Google workspace. Um and I’m what now? Like they’re training their model and all my business data? Is that how that’s working? Like that is a you know serious concern for me because I don’t really want them to be doing that but it seems very hard to actually turn it off in any meaningful sense. Um so like how how would you I mean how do you think you should be approaching that risk because we mentioned governance and you know just to sort of having a sense of protecting your own IP and your own data? Like what are you um what are you sort of talking to people about at the moment to try and address that that issue?
Well it really comes down to training models internally using using models that aren’t connected to external systems. Uh I went through a whole period where I was trialing Chat GPT and I would just I would I would play with the prompt I would use it and then I would just delete the thread and just keep deleting it. And I know that that goes against everything that generative AI is meant to do. It’s meant to but it is it’s learning from you. And I think there are lots of things that you can do at a corporate or a higher level in terms of governance in terms of how you allow employees to use these external tools and then how you sort of integrate um your models internally to get to that point where you’re building agents that can then automate tasks inside your own systems. But really the other part is every one of us thinking okay this is not a closed system. So what what am I doing to ensure that I’m not filling the internet with rubbish or just provide providing? It’s the same with Co-pilot. And I think I think Google has learned their lesson from Microsoft. Microsoft regularly would roll out um updates of software that people weren’t ready for. Yeah. Apple Apple does it all the time. And there are there are sort of parts of their technology that you can’t even use because you haven’t upgraded. Yeah. And so Google’s just learning from their peers I guess it but it would be nice if someone came along in that sphere and said you’re allowed to turn this off you know.
Yes Yeah. And it just reminds me of I mean it’s like you say I guess it’s standard operating procedure for businesses isn’t it? Where you just like just sign this massive terms and conditions document that we all definitely read when we sign up for stuff and then they’re like yeah we just do whatever now. But look I think it’s interesting because coming back to the point you made earlier we are in danger of you know big brain drain in the um particularly the sort of digital side of of the industry because if we do lose that critical thinking sort of piece or as as my colleague Ross likes to call it the human in the loop element. Um you know are loads of companies just going to collapse tomorrow because they built all these shoddy apps and you know vibe code solutions that nobody knows how to run possibly? Um and are you going to be sitting here in um in a couple of years time if you’re in a big corp suddenly realizing I can’t remember the exact stat but there was something like 30 to 40% of people… um I think you’re uploading confidential data to AI tools with you know without really being allowed to. So data is like leaking out the door everywhere already. Are you suddenly going to realize that loads of your staff have been breaching your data policies and you know because you haven’t trained them or you haven’t provided any any actual guidance? So I think I think those two issues is quite real. Um there doesn’t seem to be a huge amount of concern about at the moment from a lot of people.
There’s not a huge amount of concern because we and again we’re coming back to governance. We we keep coming back to I think the the thing with Chat GPT was it’s here. It’s free. Let’s go. Yeah. Everyone got so excited and and there were some voices. There were some voices but these these were sort of deep technologists who because of LinkedIn’s changing algorithm couldn’t really raise their voices high enough. But there were voices saying “Hang on before you do this we should do this”. And I think what’s happening is especially in America if you’re a commercial corporation of that size with that much influence no one’s going to stop you and say “Hang on hang on hang on Where are your policies where are your guid’s guidance on this where’s your They’re not helping”. No they’re not. And and you can see a scenario can’t you where people are getting fired because they’ve been using like Chat GPT for example when there’s been absolutely no guidance or you know official sort of training about it? Um because people are getting fired now for no reason right? So like it’s not going to not hard to imagine that you get fired for that and they’ll the you know the company will just blame you because you didn’t think that you shouldn’t upload whatever like a document. Because I just I just think that’s the that’s the challenge for people not in the industry right? Like they don’t know that all this weird training is going on behind the scenes. Like they’re the assumption is that these tools are secure and that it should be fine to use them unless someone tells you otherwise right? I mean it’s perfectly reasonable to to assume that unless you’ve been informed otherwise by your employer isn’t it?
Well yes and no. I think if you don’t work in our industry okay yes. But I think and what I was talking about before is these large corporations because we know who owns Open AI deliberately not taking that step because these these corporations… um and the companies that we’re talking about now there’s that downstream effect they need help. So imagine and I’m thinking about the um European Union’s AI governance and ethics board that they they’re still trying to cobble together. All of this should have been put in motion long before. And so before when we would we talk about um large language models creating artificial intelligence getting to automation the deployment of agents it would be at a theoretical university level. So the government around the place never got in front of it. So really yeah when when people do end up being fired for the misuse of Chat GPT I think what we’ll see is those companies should have been helped. Yeah and there will be some sort of backlash and maybe that’ll kick some governments into action. Um but I talk about AI governance and ethics from the point of view that we’re the ones especially in marketing who could end up talking ourselves out of a job if we don’t start being the vanguard of this.
Yes. And how do you look and again I think this is you raised this point where we were chatting before we jumped on. Like how do you um how do you see that sort of shaping up if you’re in a marketing role right now? Like you know obviously your team’s probably all just like all over AI right now. You might have your own internal tools. Like how should you be thinking about it if you’re in you’re in one of those roles to actually make sure that you still have a job in 12 months time and you’re not getting chucked on the scrappy with with everyone else? Oh lovely. What a lovely analogy. Thank you. I mean I don’t mean I mean the royal you not like you royal me. We never ever give up your critical thinking. Never ever give up your strategic um thinking. And these are conversations that I’ve had with a lot of people over the past few months. Is and I’ve had I’ve had a saleserson say this to me. You know it’s amazing. You just you just ask Chat GPT for give me a go to market strategy and it just gives it to you. How do I sell? I said that’s lovely. It scraped it from from you know the collective knowledge of the internet. But where’s your take on it where’s your perspective where are your observations and is it correct and yeah I think that’s it. If you don’t if you keep questioning it. If you like these people who write posts about oh I challenged Chat GPT today. Well you’re not a hero. Challenge yourself.
Yeah exactly. Yeah you’re like brilliant. Like you sat on the toilet with your phone just chatting on the app were you like brilliant? You know again with the with the visuals that kind of a mood this morning. Sorry I’ll try and be more civilized for the remaining. But it’s so true. It’s so true. And I think especially when you know there are customer success roles at risk where… um recruitment it seems like the entire recruitment industry has gone backwards and only operating through AI tools. And a lot of people who think that they can do exactly but a lot of people who think that they can do marketing conceptually everyone’s a marketer until it comes to execution. This this is where we um especially as senior marketers speak for yourself. I know. Yeah Yeah. I am 28. But where we can we have to say our experience everything that we’re seeing and learning and and in our large language model counts for something. So Yeah. It’s it’s imperative that more people do that.
Look I think um it’s really interesting to hear you talk through that because… um you know obviously coming from a philosophical background… um I’m very much an advocate of that approach. And I think um back to your point at the very start this is this is the thing that is annoying me the most at the moment… um in in many ways just you know one of the things this week is is exactly that. The like you know the what annoys me about these like grifters who are pushing all these AI businesses. I know you wanted to talk about agentics so let’s talk about that in a minute as well. But you know they all push the the tool is the solution and then managing the tool becomes your job right? So even the massive Six Sense does it. You know Oracle does it all these startups do it. They’re like “Oh this tool is going to solve all your problems you know just put it into your marketing tech stack or your sales stack and it’ll just work”. And you’re like “You are not you are not Apple It does not just work“. Like none of it just works. It works even worse than when we introduced the tool before because none of it talks to anything else. So look I won’t rant on all about it. Melinda talk to me about what you think about that situation.
Yes. My favorite thing at the moment Agentic AI and people dropping that phrase. And I was listening to a podcast and there was a woman talking about how she’s created agents for everything. Yeah Yeah. And for the life of me I was waiting for her to get to the end. I was like “Okay so where are you deploying this”? Yeah. What it turned out that she was doing was she was just creating spaces in in chat or in Claude. So it’s just like a little folder and you’re accessing that folder. What you’ve done there is you’ve made a folder. Well done. Great stuff. And like I think in in in that world she thought that this is agentic agentic AI. And so I thought okay well obviously I can say that my digital training or my digital knowledge is out of date. It’s not really but I can pretend that it is. So let let me try to build an agent in Claude. And I did I did that. And it delivered me all of this code which was no surprise. It’s what I expected cuz that’s what you’re doing. These things are pieces of code that you are then directing or instructing. It’s like it’s like the old school days of marketing automation which is exactly the same today as it was 10 years ago. You have to create the logic strings to get the outcomes you want and then the machine will do the work. That because automation is nothing new for us as digital marketers.
Well exactly. Yeah. You know it’s been around for years right? And it is it is to a point. Uh Bernard Mah just wrote this amazing article… uh that I then wrote a post on on LinkedIn about agent washing because I um I work in ESG environments as well where there’s all of that reporting where it’s mandated especially in Southeast Asian countries. And it’s called greenwashing and it’s really saying that you you know you’re capturing more carbon than you put out and you don’t really or you’ve you’ve got all of your um energy under control and your emissions and you’re not. And so it’s this thing here too which is now called agent washing which is people talking about they’re creating AI agents and you’ve really got to be careful about this if you’re a first-time investor into AI startups because they’re not. Because they don’t have an the code is created and that’s your agent full of all the directions you’ve given it. You then have to take that code and deploy it into a platform that will then run that automation. And companies like Salesforce like Marquetto uh they exist for a reason. So you need to be wary of this and it really is frightening the way people are moving through that.
Yeah I I agree with you because I you know obviously as you’ve described I think we’re both big advocates of automating the basics right? That’s just makes perfect sense to not do the same repeatable jobs over and over again because that’s that’s stupid. Um why do that? Exactly as you said. I’ve I’ve seen one of the worst things I see regularly is people posting I’m sure you’ve seen this as well like a picture of what looks like a huge map of like an N you know process that they’ve built and then they’re just selling that. They’re like “Look look at how much money this must be worth because of all the steps”. And you’re like “Yeah but what does it actually do like how is that useful to me”? Just because you’ve made a really inefficient super long process does not make it worth you know two grand or five grand or whatever they’re trying to sell them for. And going back to what you were saying before like if you’ve got like a Marquetto why do you even need it? Like the the purpose may well be served with your old boring existing technology because if you’re just trying to automate processes there’s not there’s not that many different ones that we’re all trying to do right? We’re just trying to capture information from one place transform it into something and then spit it back out in another. So um yeah I’m with you. I just think it’s a bit of Emperor’s New Clothes going on at the moment and people being like “Oh look a new name thing Everyone’s talking about this thing Like does isn’t it great”? And you’re like “Well yeah you know if you want to spend a week rebuilding something that you know like to your point Salesforce have put millions of dollars behind then you go for it but you’re not going to win that particular battle are you”? So that’s that’s fine. You know if you if you feel like a while we’re coming back to where we started which is data. So yeah. Yeah. Don’t talk to me about predictive um AI agents because and I’ve had this I actually have had this discussion in real life. Someone saying to me he’s got predictive AI agents. And my question back to them and I I was probably being unfair… uh was where’s the data coming from who’s training it? Yeah. Because they just the word predictive agent AI is just the perfect storm when you’re like what are we what are we predicting and how are we predicting it and how is that actually relevant to what we’re all doing collectively? Is it does it know any of that? Probably not. No no it doesn’t know that because it doesn’t know what what we want.
Well that’s the funny thing right? I mean and again not um I’m saying a lot of things I probably shouldn’t this morning so not to not to get myself in trouble on going to be so many. This is going to be a 15-minute podcast. 15 minutes of me saying stuff that I shouldn’t be saying. Shameless plug of what we’re doing in the other company right? So we’re obviously building a software business that is has AI in it because they have to now. But all the work we’ve been doing over the past year is on exactly the area you just described which is obviously we can get tons of data from everywhere. However the challenge in producing something that is actually useful is what 10% of all of that garbage is actually effective interesting intelligence that is going to be useful for like you know for you. Because we could fill it full of like everything that’s available on the internet right now but we don’t want to do that because we don’t need to one… um and two it will be 90% absolute rubbish back out which is what you get out of a Chat GPT now. Right it’s the and again coming back to where we started on social I think that’s where um the utility of those spaces from a a customer intel perspective has just reduced so dramatically. Like it’s still there but it’s a massive effort now to sort of really get down to a to your point earlier like a meaningful action that can then help you to understand what your next meaningful action should be. Um and yeah look I I agree with you. I think that’s where the promise of all this magic AI automation is just really letting everyone down because we’re just still in process automation particularly in the B2B space. Like I just think it’s like it doesn’t add anywhere near the amount of value that everyone’s pretending it does. And if they’re pretending that it does they’re probably just trying to sell you an AI business. Yeah exactly. And sorry that wasn’t that wasn’t a question but feel free to.
It wasn’t a question. So I’m trying I’m trying to uncover the question and maybe I’ll just sit back and wait for the question. Well once you’ve uh once you’ve done your next round of media training Melinda or if you’ve watched the film Zootopia you can I’ll give you this one for free. Just ask a question that you want to answer yourself and then just answer that question. Think great points J. Thank you for thinking about insert my question. Let me let me tell you about that. No I think I’ve done that already. Even I was shocked. I was like “Wow you you did have communications training back in the day”. Brilliant. It’s good. It comes comes back to you Melinda. Comes back to you. Um but look I know um I know we’ve talked around uh talked around a few areas from where we started right. So um if you were going to sort of sum up… like if uh and I won’t use the uh I won’t use the phrase hot take. But if you had a a sort of some takeaways from your sort of recent interactions on this whole like social media AI data conundrum… like what are what are the main things that you think or or that you’re focused on and you think other people should be focused on and where do you think the potential pitfalls are that we should be wary of I guess? Um it’ll be interesting to hear what you think on that front.
This is this is not going to be earthshattering. So we’ve we’ve already… Look it doesn’t need to be. Doesn’t need to be. By all means put your posts through Chat GPT but just read it first. Just I I can’t. Especially if you’re doing this on behalf of a company. And and this is really thinking about those guys who set up their social media agency overnight and are servicing 80 to 100 clients and they’re just pumping out the same rubbish for each client. They’ve got a truckload of emojis. I mean even normal people now I say normal because they don’t work in our industry but even the normals the non the non they know this now. Uh and I someone who you and I have in common but I don’t think either of us know him… uh is an influencer on LinkedIn and you’re going to fill in his name for me at the appropriate time because I’ve completely gone blank. Tom Goodwin. Yes the funny complainer Tom Goodwin. But he was right. He said um I never I never knew that AI would become a conversation. And that’s what it’s become. And so I think that’s what you need to take. Stop jamming it and pushing out a post full of uh stuff you haven’t read. Use it as a conversation. And you’ll see like LinkedIn’s doing some really scary things with it algorithm right now. And it is sort of trying to appease the US government. But I really unless someone can come up with an alternative and trust me I have been putting it up out to enough people please develop an alternative. It’s it’s going to be the platform that everyone uses and it could change in the next 9 to 12 months. Like it could get back to where we were we were comfortable with it. But right now yeah use use it as a conversation and and especially if you’re doing it on behalf of clients. Um take care because we’re going to see some sort of overhaul whereby all of that stuff that um is homogeneous starts to get pushed down. So yeah you’re making money now but that’s not going to last.
Yeah I think that’s a very reassuring point to make actually because… um one of the many benefits of being somewhat more more aged as you as you know… um is that you see these trends come and go right? Like and I’m not saying we’ve seen that many but you know as you’ve noted like you you see them don’t you? There’s a there’s a wave of stuff everyone gets really excited. You know loads of people who don’t really understand anything invested it and probably just lose a ton of money… um and then you the wave recedes and then something else comes comes in. Right? So it is I think that is a great point. Like we’ve obviously we’re you know probably just past peak hype I would say of of the stuff that was all happening last year. So hopefully we’re on the you know the receding part now to something more sensible which would be nice. But look I I totally agree with you. Like I’m no huge fan of like LinkedIn particularly… um objectively speaking but like obviously as you know we talk to this about our clients all the time. Like as a as a destination and as a place that you can actually communicate effectively it is still really good. You just need to focus on what you want to be saying and the right people instead of getting distracted with all the crap that they’ve thrown in there. So I think um I think that’s one of the few places where that approach still works. Whereas Facebook like you know it doesn’t now right? Like they’ve just sort of so actively depressed the organic side that it’s not even worth worth the effort really. Um unless you’re doing short form video which they obviously love. Everyone loves that now. Um yeah No look really interesting Meinda. I think um I think it’s as you’ve noted it’s a challenging time. But I feel like if I if I’m misquing you please uh please correct me but I think you’re… Oh I will. Don’t worry. I would expect nothing less. I think you’re um you know you what you’re saying was like look we got to hold hold fast to the principles that we know work right? Which is a common theme from everyone I’ve been speaking to. Like if you adopt the correct methodology and you have some form of human focused critical thinking in mind you’re not going to you’re not going to go wrong are you right? Um and I think the second point you were making throughout which is just you know remember tools are tools people are people. Don’t don’t make a tool your entire job unless that is what you want your job to be. That’s fine obviously. No but Chat GPT is never going to become your job. Like being a Salesforce admin is a job right? Because you know that it’s just universally accessible. You just don’t need there’s no expertise required. Like the bar to entry is basically on the floor right? So it does feel like that’s going to be very shortsighted if that’s your entire shtick. He’s like “Hey I’m good at AI”. You’re like “Well my mom’s good at AI so so what”?
Yeah it’s it’s pretty much I because one I have a very good friend who doesn’t work in this industry and I think she her the way she utilizes AI tools is better than me. Yeah Yeah. I think we know too much to be honest. Like you you can you like I know from my own use I’m like second-guessing stuff and trying to be like oh if you do this what about that? And you know all the stuff we talked about actually gives you a a weirdly worse result… um which is annoying than someone who’s just like oh I just asked it this and it told me this. I’m like fuck it right? I’ll just go and try and do that myself brilliant. Yeah it’s the curse of too much knowledge I think. Too much knowledge. Yes. Whoever said knowledge is power is um was sadly mistaken because knowledge knowledge is every self-doubt you ever have and questioning every decision you ever make. Yes Yeah there is that. Yeah Yeah. It was Francis Bacon I think who uh who originally said that Melinda. Um although the original the I’m just looking at now the original quotes it was translated is knowledge itself is power. Interesting. So it’s been misquoted through the years. So what was the original language that it was in? Some old one latin wasn’t he? Just gonna say Latin. Latin or I think wasn’t he French? French was spacing. Um it probably was Latin I think. Yeah they were all speaking that weren’t they back in the day they loved it. Um sorry bit of a distraction. They all loved it. Oh no. He was English. Idiot. Clearly I need to go back to school there. Um he would have spoken French though when he was alive because that was all the rage as well for the gents and ladies of the of the time the 1500s and 1600s. Well it’s only it’s only up until about 50 years ago that French stopped being diplomatic language. It’s quite ironic because they’re not a very diplomatic people the French. It’s quite funny. Not all of them obviously. Think we should cut it there don’t you? Just kidding. I love the French I used to live next door to him didn’t I for years? Um all right Alan. Thanks a lot. On that on that bombshell… um apologies friends. Uh I think that’s a good point to wrap Melinda. Bit of bit of shameless self-promo which I know you’re not a big fan of but how can if people want to have a chat to you how should they get in touch with you? You mentioned you’ve been contributing beyond your presence on this podcast. What have you been writing how can we find that? You know what what are you up to and how can we find it?
Uh there’s so I am a guest writer for The Interpreter which is part of the Loey um Institute. And one of my hobby horses that I like to get on from time to time is because of data centers and because of how much they’re going to play a role in AI… um in the future and how people are now racing to build even more and more. This region this part of the world Australia Southeast Asia Asia Pacific in general really should should be an example to the rest of the world about making clean data centers that are built on sustainable or renewable energy sources. So that’s one place but then all of my other antics are often on LinkedIn because I do I do have strong opinions and thoughts about change management and leadership and that’s where I hang out and I’d like to talk to people.
Love it. Awesome. Well look I’ll drop those links below this episode. I’ve got your uh interpreter articles here and obviously chuck your LinkedIn profile in there. Um thanks so much for coming back Belinda. It’s been a pleasure as always to chat to you. A great wide-ranging conversation as always. Um and look you keen to come back dig into it again? Without a doubt I would love to. Excellent Excellent. Well look thanks for coming on Melinda. It was a pleasure. Um and I’ll hopefully speak to you again soon. I guess just try not to uh we’ll both try not to be fired in the inter what I can’t say anything this morning in the period before we speak again. Could we remain positive? Let’s remain positive. That would be lovely. All right. No let’s end on a positive note. What’s What have you got give me one positive thing and then and then we’ll call it a day. What’s your positive take on everything we just spoke about?
My positive is human in the loop. I refer to it as human in the machine. I like it. Stay in there. Stand your ground. Hide away there inside the Terminator. That’s always I like that. I like that. Just do just do human stuff. All right I like it. Well give up critical thinking. Awesome. Well thanks again Melinda. Thank you for joining. Still don’t have a good sign off. So this is the end. Bye everyone.