Jeff Frick: AI, Asynch, Discovery, Conte | Turn the Lens #13

>> Okay, now the A-6400 is recording. Let's get some sync. (clapping) This should be good. Alright, let's do this.

Hi welcome Jeff Frick here with Turn the Lens back in the home studio. You know it's time for episode 13 and I'm not that superstitious but I'm just enough superstitious that I thought maybe it was probably best not to have a guest for, for segment 13. So I thought I'd do segment 13 and you know I've been talking a lot about the manifesto on LinkedIn. So you can go to MenloCreek.com, click on the manifesto link. Think I have 13 different chapters of the manifesto. So you can go through it in detail, but I think Christopher Lockhead and other people said Jeff, you got to shorten it up, you got to shorten it up. So let me shorten it up.  >> An increasing portion of the content we consume is consumed asynchronously. And what that means is the time that it was created, distributed, and consumed are all different. So unless you're sitting in a live keynote or you're at a live play, or you're at some type of live event, which is sometimes, most of the other stuff was created at a different time, distributed at a different time, and consumed at a different time. Even Saturday Night Live we don't really watch it live.

>> An increasing proportion of content discovery comes via AI Push (notifications) versus UI Pull (search). So what does that mean exactly? It's all about discovery. Why is Spotify successful? It's all about discovery. How do you find new things? And discovery is really what you want. And even in a professional B2B content situation, how do people discover your content? And let me tell you that the old way was to expect them to come to your location. Like the old way was to expect them to come to your store or your restaurant or your location.

Now it's a new way. You need to go to them, go to them. Increasingly they're just on their phone, wherever their phone and they happen to be. And the way that they discover things is going to be via AI push notification. You get a thing on your phone, check LinkedIn news, you get a notification from Instagram, from Twitter, from LinkedIn, from Spotify. Check this out and you might like it.

>> Next, again the situation, content consumption is bifurcating. It's bifurcating. Some people want a little, some people want a lot. Either binge watch an entire season of a Netflix special, or you watch two minutes or 90 seconds on a Tik Tok or 60 seconds or 30 seconds on the Tik Tok. But nobody wants average, nobody wants in the middle. So if people want some, they want a lot. If they want a little, just give them a little. But being in the middle is not the place to be, average is not the place to be. No one wants to watch average length content.

>> And finally, for the situation, one is greater than 1% of a hundred. Say it again. One is greater than 1% of a hundred. And what that means is that rather than the old way, where it was a broadcast model with a shitty conversion percentage, and you've hopefully got to the people that matter to you, now really the challenge who are the people that matter to you? Can you list them? Can you write down 200 names of the people that matter to you and your business? Potential customers, partners, prospects, investors, et cetera, who are they? And really in 2021 it's all about reaching them directly by name. So list them down.

>> What can we learn from 21st century creators?

>> What can we learn from what's happening on Spotify? What's happening on YouTube? What's happening on Amazon? 'Cause it's all ultimately recommendation engine. So let's take a couple of lessons that we can learn.

>> Lesson number one, Conte's law number one. Jack Conte, founder and CEO of Patreon. Check him out. Publish don't finish. Publish don't finish. Continue to kick out content. There's no change state. It's just another piece of content. He has a great video. This is the short version, go check it out.

>> Conte's corollary law number two is the funnel is your friend. Which means you don't know which piece of content is going to connect with your audience in, in a particular way that's going to be super fruitful. And the bad news is it has no correlation to the stuff you think is important, to the stuff that you put a lot of time and effort, and the stuff that you're most proud of. It could be something short and simple that just got thrown out. So use those things together. The funnel is your friend.

>> So what should you do? Actions, simple.

>> You should optimize your content for asynchronous consumption which means make it more evergreen. Value the content consumption based on the lifetime consumption of that content, not just who watched it at nine o'clock on Tuesday.

>> Number two, feed the AI. So put tons and tons and large quantities of metadata all around your primary asset, across media types, across platforms, across durations. So you want text, you want audio, you want photos, you want video, you want short content, you want long content, not so much medium content, but you'll have some medium content. You want it on Twitter. You want it on LinkedIn. You want it on a medium. Yes, you want it on your home blog but go to where the, your consumers are. Don't expect them to come to you. So do that, publish it all over the place, and put in a ton of metadata.

>> And the third piece is train the AI, train the AI. What does that mean? That means make the direct connections with the people that matter to you. Do it, comment on their stuff that they publish, react to the stuff that they publish, like what they publish, reach out to them, invite them to your conversations. Help the machines learn that you and these people that matter to you are connected. By drawing, by hand drawing the lines between you and the people that matter.

>> So what are the results?

>> The results basically is that as the AI gets better and as the AI is sniffing all of your content and all the metadata that's around it, on the other side is a consumer, a consumer of content. And everyone is trying to optimize the attention of those eyeballs basically on their phone. And so the AI is all going to be working for you to deliver your content, assuming it's relevant, to the moment, to the person, to what they're experiencing in their feed, so that they will see it in the right context at the right time when they're ready for the message. It's not great yet. It's going to get better and better.

But if you stay a little bit ahead of the curve and start thinking about your content this way and start designing your content this way so that it is more evergreen, it does have a lot more metadata, you're going to where your customers are, your consumers of content are, which is across all the different platforms, not just come to my website. As the AI gets better and the algorithms get better, and the compute just continues to get faster, and the networking continues to get faster, you're going to be ahead of the curve in taking advantage of this new world. So now the AI is your friend in helping you deliver your content to the people that matter. You might call it SEO 2.0, it's kind of the same thing, but it's not because it's not based on search. It's not based on search, it's based on AI recommendations. It's really recommendation engine 2.0 applied to content.

>> So that's a short and sweet episode 13. I don't know if it's short enough. I have a hard time being too short, but hopefully that's helpful. Again there's a lot more detail at MenloCreek.com/manifesto. Please do take a visit, spend a little bit more time in the assets. I appreciate your feedback. What do you think about this? Not everybody agrees and that's okay, but I feel pretty strongly about it that this is something that you should really start thinking about and integrating into your content strategy.

>> And specifically for leaders, you know, this is where you're going to start putting your positions around big trends, around your foundational principles and values, around culture and leadership, and start populating that into the ether so that the people that matter to you again, as a leader, employees and potential employees, customers, prospects, partners, potential partners, investors, potential investors.

>> Let them know what you're all about by putting that content out into the either. So I think I'll wrap it there. I want to keep it short, episode 13. Hopefully we'll increase the pacing of these a little bit, but thank you for watching and we'll see you next time. Take care. (clapping)

‍