The Social Media Takeaway - Louise McDonnell

Stand Out with AI: Innovative Techniques by Andy Crestodina

• Louise McDonnell • Season 1 • Episode 15

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In this episode of The Social Media Takeaway, I'm excited to share my insightful conversation with Andy Crestodina, a world-renowned AI content marketing speaker, who is also the CMO and co-founder of Orbit Media Studios. With more than twenty years leading the way in digital marketing, Andy is a seasoned expert in using Artificial Intelligence (AI) to enhance and innovate content creation and marketing strategies. 

Here are amazing key takeaways: 

  • AI-Enhanced Content Quality: Explore how AI can be used to dramatically surpass competitor content quality, making every piece more engaging and impactful.
  • Persona-Driven AI Utilization: Discover the benefits of tailoring AI to produce hyper-targeted content that resonates deeply with specific audience profiles, enhancing both relevance and response rates.
  • Gap Analysis through AI: Learn about the strategic use of AI for gap analysis to critically assess and refine content, filling in the missing pieces to meet and exceed audience expectations.
  • AI as a Skills Leveler: Understand how AI democratizes content creation, enabling both novices and experts to efficiently produce high-quality content.
  • Customizing AI for Authenticity: Andy discusses the importance of customizing AI outputs to maintain a brand's unique voice and avoid generic content, thus preserving authenticity and personal touch.

This episode offers valuable insights into integrating AI into your strategy effectively. If you want to learn new innovative techniques in how you can use ChatGPT and AI to stand out in a competitive landscape, you won’t want to miss this episode! 

More about Andy: 

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Louise McDonnell:

Hi, welcome to the social media takeaway. I'm your host, Louise McDonnell and today I'm speaking with Andy Crestodina. Andy is CMO and the co founder of Orbit Media Studios, and he is at the forefront of digital marketing innovation for over two decades. He's an international speaker on the topic of AI. And I had the pleasure of hearing Andy speak at a social media marketing wars conference last February in San Diego. Andy, you're so welcome to the show.

Andy Crestodina:

Thank you for having me. I love the topic. I'm excited to be here.

Louise McDonnell:

Oh, thank you so much. So you have a keen interest in AI, but obviously that's not where all your background is. So do you want to tell us a little bit about your journey and how this came to be a keen interest for you?

Andy Crestodina:

Of course. Sure. Co founder of a digital agency focused on websites, started in 2001. And I knew right away, I had to understand search or we wouldn't be able to attract clients ourselves or help our clients. So I've been doing search ever since have been doing Google analytics since it's very early days, I use the precursor tools I used web trends and urchins, this is internet history. And then the web changed and content marketing appears and search and social and email and blogging and influencers and all the publishing stuff kind of converges in 2007. So when all in at that time and became sort of a content strategist, content marketer, and doing all the things. And have grown this business to 8 million in revenue with 55 employees without any advertising whatsoever. So built an entire company without any ads which is, it's good. It's one of many examples. It's hard work, but it works in the long run. And then when AI appears, I had to make a choice whether or not I wanted to continue to be relevant and have content that would continue to attract an audience and hold attention and keep us top of mind or wait, and I decided not to wait. So I went all in and started doing research and talking to friends and figuring out methods and what would work and what wouldn't work and how I could do my usual strategies and tactics. But, you know, could AI be helpful at this and at this. And it's gone very well. My perspective is maybe different than some, but I'm, I find it to be a useful tool, I guess, is the shortest answer.

Louise McDonnell:

Yeah. So in my experience, there's still quite a lot of people out there who aren't using AI at all. And then you have the people who are pumping out generic AI rubbish, and then you probably have the people in the middle ground. So, so what's your perspective? Why do you love AI? Why should people use it?

Andy Crestodina:

My obsession is to produce content that is just of disarmingly surprisingly higher quality than my competitors. And I publish on some very competitive topics, things like, you know, content marketing and SEO and analytics. So to publish things that are like 10 X quality, I find AI to be useful to help me find things that I missed to suggest subtopics and answer related questions. So what I've learned to do, and I think works best in my main recommendation for all of our listeners, anyone who's who I can get to pay attention for a minute, I tell them this first train AI on your audience by uploading your personas or by using a persona prompt to teach you who your target audience is. Then give it a draft of an article or give it a webpage or give it an email or give it a social post or whatever you're doing and ask, what are the ways in which this meets or does not meet the expectations of my audience. And it will tell you, it will tell you if you missed something. So persona driven AI powered gap analysis is a fantastic way to just see if, you know, to make every article a little better. It's not writing anything for me. It's simply finding opportunities to improve quality. I don't know why I wouldn't do that. it's fast in many cases, but my point isn't to save time. In my experience, 10x quality gets 100x results. And there's many different approaches to research and tools that will help you do that and AI is one of them.

Louise McDonnell:

And of course you can use AI to help you create the persona in the first place.

Andy Crestodina:

That persona prompt, Louise, is my, like the magic trick for me I could, and it's not that complex. Maybe I can even, I mean, if anyone wanted to kind of play this back in slow motion the prompt sounds like this, " build me a persona of a job title with roles and responsibilities at industry company geography, this person is looking for help with challenge or problem or task and is considering product or service." So just fill in those blanks. And then the second half of the prompt says this, "list their hopes and dreams, their fears and concerns, their emotional triggers, and their decision criteria for selecting a company like mine."

Louise McDonnell:

Wow.

Andy Crestodina:

It will tell you 80 percent correct, 20 percent garbage. It will be inaccurate. That's fine. And then tell, and improve it, right. It'll, but it'll give you a persona. It will probably, I'm doing this in chat GPT, which for some reason always names the persona, Alex, it'll probably be named Alex. I do this for clients every day or just people I meet and you do it. And then, and then start prompting it with. You know, share, you know, help me with ideas or, you know, review this, review this webpage or tell me what topics this person might like or what social streams that, you know, they might be watching or what keywords they might search for. Everything else that you do is far greater quality because it's focused on your audience. Prior to this, I joke AI might as well stand for average information because it's super generic. Louise, you know, this, I think that's maybe how we, that was the context where we first talked, right? It's like, that's the idea. So yes I mean, we're doing marketing here, right? So teach it on your target audience. And then just as you would with anything else, you know, you have a chance of, of connecting in a much better way.

Louise McDonnell:

So every time you create a lead magnet, an ebook, a gift, a landing page, a webpage, a product, a service.

Andy Crestodina:

A social post, an email, an article, a headline, an ad. I don't do ads, but I've used this. You can see how you can, and it, it will just give you a perspective and you're the expert. It may not be useful. You may totally disregard it, but it took you four minutes. If it did find, I did this yesterday with a company. They are A school for chiropractors and the number one concern of the persona was accreditation. Of course, my client's school has accreditation, but it was literally the last thing on the page. It was a tiny logo at the bottom before the meeting ended. They updated that page to put the word accredited right below the headline.

Louise McDonnell:

Yeah

Andy Crestodina:

Number two question, how long does it take? It's a three year program before the meeting ended. They put right, right at the top of the page, you know, become a chiropractor in three years. If those are the two most important decision criteria and information needs of the visitor and AI in seconds, identify those as gaps and you add those to the page. I'm sorry, but I can't think of a reason not to do that.

Louise McDonnell:

Absolutely.

Andy Crestodina:

Let's all do that.

Louise McDonnell:

Yeah, exactly. So what I find as well as that, it just means that I can get through way more work and my team, like our productivity is just skyrocketed you know, tools like Descript. com for like editing video. I mean, wow. You know, it just blows the mind or taking the transcript from a video and using it to create multiple, multiple pieces of content.

Andy Crestodina:

Repurposing transcripts is brutal. It's brutal. It's brutal. To do by hand. It's so slow. It's very hard. Just look at this, like. There's 5, 000 words. What am I going to do with these huge monologues and paragraphs? So I completely agree. Efficiency is one of the big gains and everyone's excited about that. Another way to put what you just said, though, is that AI is a skills leveler. So someone who's not a Louise or an Andy can quickly do things that we can do, like identify gaps or, you know, repurpose content or, you know, find the best soundbite. That's another fun trick. If you take a transcript and upload and say, Hey, this is what is the most compelling soundbite from this conversation? And then go use that as the social post. You could take this transcript, upload it to AI and say, tell me what the most counterintuitive perspective that Andy and Louise talked about, or tell me what is the juiciest soundbite or the most unexpected statistic or the, you know, the thing that will most likely trigger engagement and attention because it is unexpected or surprising or funny. It analyzes the text. It's lovely at that, right? It's an incredible tool for pulling out those juicy nuggets.

Louise McDonnell:

I also agree with you, which is say that if you don't prompt it properly, it just gives you average information too. So I know what, let's say when I have a transcript of a video, if I ask it to give me something, it's usually absolutely rubbish. Whereas because I've, I have had the benefit of going through the conversation. If I say, prompt it to say, what did Andy say about, or, you know, if I ask very specific questions, especially if the transcript is quite long you tend to get, that's when you get the, you're like, Oh, look at this. Look, this is gold dust. This is going to save me so much time. It's not that you couldn't have done it. It's just that it would have taken you. It would have taken you a few hours,

Andy Crestodina:

hours, literally. Yeah. I find that social media actually is. If you ask it to write social media posts, they're very spammy. I mean, they're, they're sort of aggressive, like, over the top emojis and, you know, words that I would never write. Like, so I have in, I use chat GPT almost all that's my main tool, of course, but there's a way to give it a tiny custom instruction to tell it words to avoid, because I don't ever write. Unlock the secrets of AI for podcast transcript, like unlock the secrets. Like I don't, I don't write that way. That doesn't sound like me. So I have a list of words.

Louise McDonnell:

It's mad about the word mastery. And I'm like, I always say, please don't ever use that again. Ever, ever, ever.

Andy Crestodina:

So you put it in there, right. And then you train it. So you train it to on two things, train it to be like your audience and train it to be like you. Yeah. And when you do that, it, it works quite well. My I have a list of avoid words that I could pull up or it's kind of because those are things that I just don't ever want to see in a response again. It's too much,

Louise McDonnell:

but mine, mine, even though I tell it, please don't use that word. Ever again. And then a few days later it'll crop up again. I'm like, stop it,. Andy Crestodina: Unleash synergy. I don't I don't write the word synergy. I don't ever wanna hear word. People don't want it because the more that people use tools like ChatGPT, the more that you can spot it, you know, it's

Andy Crestodina:

Exactly.

Louise McDonnell:

And if you can spot it, or if your customer can spot it, they just won't, I wouldn't even read it. yeah, that would be one of the things. So how can you differentiate your content from AI? How can you stand out?

Andy Crestodina:

I've talked about this recently. I'll give you an answer that I've used lately. First of all, AI, AI can't throw a punch. It doesn't have a perspective or an opinion. So take a stand, share a belief. So for example, I just said the word synergy synergy is a dumb word. It's garbage. It's corporate jargon. It's we should all stop using the word synergy that sentence, that sentence AI could never write because it's, it's my point of view and AI has no opinions, number two, collaborate, do what we're doing now, reach out to people, talk, schedule time. Let's include others in our content, use interviews and contributor quotes and roundups. AI can't really do that because AI has no friends. Number three, press the record button, start talking to your, you know, share a summary of that thing you made or make a video of you with your genuine body language, tone of voice. You're it's a, AI can't do that because AI has no face. So that's, those are three ways that anybody can differentiate their content. Make strong opinion statements and publish op ed or at least just take a stand, even on a mundane topic collaborate with others and produce video. So those are three ways when you see it, you know, that's not AI. That's Andy, that's Louise. That's a, that's a point of view, or that's a conversation as generating texts. Oh, very well. And that's lovely. But it doesn't, it doesn't produce collaborative and highly visual content well at all.

Louise McDonnell:

Yeah. I love chat GPT, love it, but I'm allergic to any image creation AI tools, because I don't know if it's just that I'm not able to write the prompts, but anything that I ever try and use it for, it just comes out looking with two heads and three arms and looks a bit weird. So I think another way that you can stand out in an AI world is to have a photo of you that doesn't look perfect. I think real, you know, I think when you put up the real photo, I had a conversation with a lady recently and she, she had published a video on Instagram I think it was. And she said, Oh my God, Louise, that video went viral on me. I was just so happy, but I was just a bit disappointed that I hadn't done my hair properly that day, you know? And I was like, well, I think that if you'd done your hair properly, it mightn't, it mightn't have performed as well. So I think that's another way to stand out in, in 2024. What do you think of the the image generation tools like. In general.

Andy Crestodina:

Well, you're changing my perspective on it. Quite honestly, my current LinkedIn headshot is AI generated. I made it on secta. ai. It was kind of an experiment. And I wrote a post about doing it and it created 300 headshots and they were all very beautiful. I mean, they sort of like make you look better than you would have looked. But you're right. Authenticity is more important than production quality or perfection. Authenticity is what connects. That's why stock photos look disingenuous. That person's clearly a model. The image generators, I think it's, it's very interesting. They are clearly AI. They stand out in a second because humans don't pay that much attention to every corner of the image. Sometimes there's just so much detail. they're too vivid. I think it's a, here's a an opinion statement. I honestly believe it's almost like a new form of art. And not a, not an important 1 culturally, but it's in, but it's, it's clearly something new. I think it's disruptive in certain categories, like game designers and concept artists all over our are at risk now. But I don't know. I mean, it's you know, the camera also was disruptive because 100 years ago, newsrooms were filled with illustrators. And all those people who drew pictures for newspapers lost their jobs when the camera arrived. I guess that was about 120 years ago. So, yes, it's a great example. I think it's an interesting topic. But I'm sort of with you, I don't actually use them unless I'm kind of making a point about them themselves.

Louise McDonnell:

Exactly, exactly. So what jobs in the future do you see being, being affected by AI?

Andy Crestodina:

Yeah so many I mean, currently the most popular application, so AI will change a lot. It's still very, very new. I think about this famous quote from a computer scientist, Decades ago, Roy Amara said that we overestimate the impact of technology in the short run and underestimate the impact in the long run. So, right now, we're kind of in this, in the middle of this sort of hype cycle and everyone's very, very excited about it. But mostly these models right now are separate from each other. One is popular for generating text and another is popular for generating images. So, currently, who's clearly under threat is the jobs that are where people create words, like the writing type jobs, like that's attorneys marketers, journalists any job where you're creating content of any sort in written form is obviously impacted. And it's incumbent upon each of us who does that to look for ways to use AI to stay relevant, regardless of our approach, even if it's to differentiate ourselves from it. As we mentioned, game designers and people who create images and do concepting, it's extremely good for that. There'll be new, new things like the dry, you know, truckers probably will lose their jobs as soon as there's a super safe, efficient, you know, reliable, long term, you know, long haul trucking, you know, robot cars. You see huge impact in call centers right now, right? There's two and a half million call center workers in the United States. And air AI is apparently extremely good at that. You know, they just produce language. So people that produce language or answer questions. So I think that it will there's going to be all kinds of disruption that will feel new. It's not new. You know, there used to be millions of people who would unload ships. They were called longshoremen and containerization. Nuked that whole section of the economy containerization means you have only a very few people who run giant ports, you know, cause it's all automated. what's strange to us now is that repetitive physical tasks were automated and that felt disrupted to some, but now that repetitive cognitive tasks are being automated it's suddenly shocking to us this is just been, you know, 200 years of evolution and it's. Just just be ready and adapt and you know, keep keep a close eye on it and focus on quality. In the end, that's what matters. Anyone who's in service, you know, in the end, our jobs are to make people feel special and humans are better at that than A. I.

Louise McDonnell:

Yeah, that's actually one of the things I was thinking of actually on my journey home from the social media marketing world because I had a long, a long journey home was, I was even thinking of my children. You know, I have two teenagers, they're going to be going into third level education within the next few years. And I was thinking, you know, how is this going to impact the decisions or the choices that they should make? Now one of the areas, I don't know why I thought about it was like even healthcare. I said, are we, are we at some stage going to go into a hospital in the future? And it won't be a person, it will be a robot who comes and analyzes us. And then I thought about it and I was like, Oh, that's terrible. And then I thought, Oh, but they won't make a mistake and they'll have lots of information and they won't be tired at two in the morning and they won't want to go on a break and they won't want to go on holidays and they won't want, you know, will it give us a better service and will we just pay the humans to hold our hands and tell us we're going to be fine? So, you know, these, I, I suppose I really started thinking, gosh, you know, the world is going to change. There is no doubt about it.

Andy Crestodina:

And if health outcomes are better, we should be happy about that.

Louise McDonnell:

That's what I thought. That's the conclusion I came to. I was like, this is actually good.

Andy Crestodina:

That's right. Yep. If people go home sooner, there's a shortage of healthcare workers. Yeah. We're not prepared. We don't have enough, enough healthcare workers in the world for, for the age of our population. We just did a survey about this it's about AI readiness and consumers. And a year ago, we asked like, what doctor sounds best to you, doctors who never use AI doctors who use AI to make good decisions or AI making decisions, but checked by a doctor or just a pure robot doctor. So four questions with four degrees of AI involvement from zero AI at all to a hundred percent robot doctor. And it's the majority of people want AI involved in healthcare decisions to some extent. It's like 2 3rds, 2 3rds. People want AI involved in health care. And why wouldn't you? I mean, if a doctor looks at a bone scan and can identify an issue. Great. But they're good at that because they've seen hundreds, but AI can be trained on a million bone scans. And give a more accurate result. I think I would still like a doctor to look at that and talk to me and be able to answer my question. I want to feel, I like getting service, most people do. And bedside manner matters. And there's an emotional component for myself, so someone can maybe be there, you know, in this moment, whenever I'm getting my result. But, no, I think that for, for lots of categories, I mean, from doctors to programmers, if it gets you a better result, if it's a more error free bug free code, or, you know, it's a better, a better diagnosis, more accurate diagnosis we should embrace that even at the cost of labor market impact.

Louise McDonnell:

Absolutely. And actually, you know, when you're abroad in a foreign speaking country and you end up in the hospital, that's terrifying. You know, and sometimes we've been given information and you're like, I hope I understand this properly. So, but if you could get that information in, in your own language, no matter where you were, I think that's again, another application of it. So in terms of that, in terms of that survey that you did, was there any other findings that stood out apart from the healthcare? Was there any other findings that stood out?

Andy Crestodina:

Well, one thing that was interesting, we repeated the survey a year later, this was just a few weeks ago, and found that apparently the trusted AI maybe has declined a little bit. I was surprised. I sort of assumed like, oh, we're going to embrace this and people will want this and as time goes on, adoption and trust will increase. Not really almost across the board, the percentage of people who want AI to take over things, nudge down a little bit. It's sort of within the margin of error. It's not a strong, it's not a, not a strong finding yet, but in the years that come, we'll, we'll see. And it's a choice that we should make as, as a group. my prediction is that in the future, this may diverge. We're obviously in a giant era globally of polarization and division. Sadly this might be one of those topics. Doesn't AI doesn't seem to be dividing down any political or ideological lines yet. But, but watch this, right? Watch this space. It will be interesting. It will come. It will definitely come. I wonder, you know, you, you have to wonder. But, but probably there will be camps as with many technologies. You know, people who are sort of, it's like social media, right? Social media is mostly bad. I don't really like social media. I'm personally I, I deleted most of the social media apps from my phone because I thought it didn't, wasn't good for my productivity. I don't want notifications on. I use it deliberately and with purpose and strategically. But there's other people who are strong defenders right now. There's legislation in the U S about the future of Tik Tok and people are very passionate about this. So probably it will split. And some people will be sort of pro AI for everything, even blindly. So I worry and others who will be anti AI, no matter what against it at any cost Luddites blindly. So I worry but let's just try to stay reasonable. Think about outcomes have a humanist ethos, but not be afraid of technology.

Louise McDonnell:

I also think what's going to happen, Andy, and I think it's happening already is that AI is creeping in and people don't even realize that they're using AI. You know, the. You know, people think, Oh, I don't use AI, but then they're like, you know, like, well, do you do this? And you do, you're using Grammarly and you know, when you're writing your email, is it predicting all your, what you're going to say? And it's just, it's just creeping in everywhere. And I, I don't, I don't even think people will even notice it's AI.

Andy Crestodina:

It's an excellent point. You use Google, you use Amazon, you use Netflix. You've been using AI, right? Did you ever take a Netflix survey on what movies you like? You never did, right? Because you didn't have to because it predicted that. I'm not actually like a AI scientist here, but there's, there's pretty, what we're talking about mostly marketing is generative aI. Those other applications that have been run in front, you know, in the behind the scenes for 10 years is more predictive AI. Like the bone scan review, that's not, that's just analyzing bone scans or the Netflix recommendations, you know, or the Google search results. There's machine learning that's predicting what you're going to engage with. TikTok, all these things. where AI suddenly became this giant cultural phenomenon was when it was generative and it was accessible. And now it's, we can all, you know, free account. You can have it you know, do little things for you. Explosion on the scene. It's just massive sociological impact, but no, AI is it's not new at all.

Louise McDonnell:

Okay. I was going to say, what's your predictions. I don't think there's any point in saying in five years time, it's just far too far away, but like, even for this time, 12 months. Based on your knowledge and where you are in the marketplace and the surveys that you do, what are your predictions? We won't hold you to them.

Andy Crestodina:

One of the biggest things that will change in the next year is that Google will try to adapt to head off. The change in user behavior toward AI every day people are realizing that Google is very noisy and websites are kind of spammy and we're tired of accepting cookies and dismissing pop up windows and scrolling through ads and search results, especially if you're just looking for an answer. So we're more and more people are just saying, I can just get this answer quickly. on perplexity, or I can get this answer quickly from chat GPT. So for information, intent, queries, and simple questions and answers, humans are going to move away from search toward AI, where the experience is cleaner, more private, faster lower bandwidth. You know, you're not tracked everywhere. It's not like lots of JavaScript. So Google needs to adapt in that context. They're adapting by creating AI search results at the top of search results. It's called SGE, the search generative experience. This is a mega trend and the conference topic and, you know, just a, a big disruption. And then the SEOs are going to ask, like, how can we adapt to this? How can you appear in SGE results? You know what does that mean for click through rates to organic listings and, and the placement of ads? How will Google or anyone monetize this person who just wants a short answer? Can that person be monetized anymore? The same way that the value of, of newspapers crashed after the internet appeared, it's possible that the, the value of search engine companies will decline as people begin to change behavior and use apps instead. If that's true, the use of browsers may actually decline the value and importance of websites may actually decline and this mostly affects content marketing, which is about publishing answers. I believe that the internet will still be critically important for people making big decisions. Websites need to sell because people want to go to websites to disc to explore that company as an option. So ranking for commercial intent queries, building high converting pages that work for all kinds of sources of traffic. But in the future, no one will really make much money or, or have to look at ads or dismiss pop ups or accept cookies. If you're wondering, you know you know, how old is David Hasselhoff or whatever, all, all the, you know, the simple, dumb answers that will be cleaner and faster and we'll be happier. I don't know why I thought of David Hasselhoff. Yeah, I hope that made sense.

Louise McDonnell:

Okay. That, that is absolutely made sense. So in a few, in 12 months time, Google's going to be, well, it's probably years already, less relevant. SEO is majorly affected. And- Andy Crestodina: SGE at the going to see AI and Google is going to Google is not going to be retrieving information. They're going to be generating answers based on search results. That's called the search generative experience. And it's rolling out in less than 12 months. Okay. But yeah, over 5 years longer. I think that that the use of search engines may actually decline. Okay. Okay. Wow. That, that, that is, that is a serious prediction. So for anybody who has depended on organic search or blog traffic to bring people to their website and bring them into their funnels, they've got to start thinking of other ways to do it.

Andy Crestodina:

It will, it won't go away but it will decline and it's not the end of the world anyway, because AI will also send people to your website. If I look at my Google analytics, I can see I'm getting lots of traffic from perplexity. AI is another source of traffic. so just like we've had search engine optimization, probably there will be AI optimization and people like me will teach everyone who's listening like, how to get AI to recommend you, your content, which I have thoughts on.

Louise McDonnell:

But does it, like, normally AI just gives you the answer, but it doesn't tell you where it found it.

Andy Crestodina:

ChatGPT it doesn't really have citations or footnotes or annotations perplexity does. Okay. And I get traffic every day from perplexity.ai, which amazes me. it actually, if you use perplexity, which is designed to be sort of a Google killer. It has citations. It shows where it got that information and people do click through. So AI is not the end of content discovery. I think that's the way to think about it. We all thought of like, Oh, getting discovered. It's all about search. Yeah, search was, and is still, but you know, that, that maybe it's peaked. You know, this was for decades, the most powerful companies on the internet were search companies. Mostly there's a big search company in every category, but in the future for information, tech queries for simple, short answers, not for everything. We're going to have a different way to use the internet. It's going to be an app. It's going to not retrieve information, but it will generate information. You're not going to query, you're going to prompt, and that will lead to reduce traffic to websites and content programs. But there'll still be lots of benefit to content marketing. There's more to life than search.

Louise McDonnell:

And so what about companies then that would have always like, when you're trying to rank high in certain categories and then you have like the leader who has such authority and it's very hard to beat them in terms of the rankings because the authority of their websites there for years and years, and it's so high. And if you're, if you're new to the marketplace, does AI kind of level that off?

Andy Crestodina:

Probably because AI ingest a huge chunk of the Internet and doesn't pay attention to the links in the same way that Google does sites with more links to them, have higher authority and a big greater ranking potential is just reading everything. so, for example if an article that's very detailed about the services you offer on a less popular website. Maybe very important for, for training AI about your brand more important than a hugely famous website that just mentioned you briefly the SEO today would, would favor the famous website that mentioned and linked very briefly, but the, the person tried to train AI cares much more about the less popular blog, but with this super detailed transcript that says everything about your brand and what you're good at, and you're setting your, you know, your specialization and your, you know, years in business. So I don't know that AI is that biased toward high domain authority websites, the way Google is, I don't think it is at all. Mhmm. That it's an interesting adaptation to just have a giant digital footprint, even if they're on less famous websites. SEOs don't think that way,

Louise McDonnell:

probably not better. Usually authoritative websites have authority for a reason.

Andy Crestodina:

Right, yeah. But links don't matter to, you know, domain authority and link popularity. SEOs obsess about this. I don't think the AI optimizer cares as much. In the end, probably we should just, the effort comes down to old school marketing and PR. So be everywhere.

Louise McDonnell:

Yeah.

Andy Crestodina:

Right, right for everyone.

Louise McDonnell:

And be clear on your message, be clear who you're targeting and be everywhere

Andy Crestodina:

and be everywhere. Yeah. Be present, be, you know, right. For all kinds of sites and be part of other people's lists. Now, if you're on a list, like, Oh, these are the top 10 podcasts for, you know, AI insights. You're more likely to get mentioned when someone says, what's the best podcast for AI insights. Well, you were on a list that said that you're one of the top 10. So I think listicles may be, I hate hearing myself say it, listicle, like stuff like that may actually be very, very useful at training AI.

Louise McDonnell:

Or every time you talk about yourself, you say, I am the top blah, blah, blah about you. You,

Andy Crestodina:

that's right.

Louise McDonnell:

The AI will believe you.

Andy Crestodina:

That's right. Here's how I'll, I'll, I'll do like a real world example and I recommend everyone does this any chance they get to do anything that where there's a transcript or a written, a written paragraph. Orbit Media Studios is a web design and development company that builds high ranking, high performing websites for B2B lead generation. Okay, great. All done, right? But that elevator pitch, you want that to be everywhere for your brand, because if there's 500 instances of that for you and only 20 for your competitor, Which one do you think AI is going to recommend when someone says, you know, who builds high converting websites? That's the idea.

Louise McDonnell:

Okay. Brilliant. Look, I have found this fascinating. I'm fascinated by the topic in general. If anyone's tuning in here and you have any perspective to share, be sure to tag me. Be sure to tag Andy. We'd love to hear what you think. Andy, any, any final comments before we sign off? Where can people find you?

Andy Crestodina:

LinkedIn is my best social network. The blue button right now says follow, but you can click the three dots and connect with me, of course, where we can chat and you can ask me anything. Orbit Media Studios or orbitmedia. com is where I, I publish an article once every two weeks. I really enjoyed this conversation. It was I do a lot of little podcasts and, and this one actually somehow, I think you asked the better, you asked great questions, Louise.

Louise McDonnell:

Oh, thank you. That's really nice. I was actually really nervous.

Andy Crestodina:

This was fantastic. I, I never get to talk about the big picture and, and I feel like we covered a lot.

Louise McDonnell:

Oh, great. Look, it's been a pleasure. Thank you so much.

Andy Crestodina:

Thank you.