Good morning!
Here are today’s highlights:
Instead of hiding AI from their clients, maybe marketing agencies should be teaching them how to use it.
Got an EIDL loan? Ami Kassar warns you to be very careful about how you manage it.
Jane thought her business was getting a lifeline. Three months later, her assets were frozen.
Thinking about investing in software? Gene Marks says this is NOT the time.
MARKETING
The Wall Street Journal’s periodic reminder that the rules of search are changing: “For instance, with traditional SEO, getting a single link from a very authoritative site meant more for ranking purposes than hundreds of mentions on other sites. But experts say AI favors tons of customer reviews and comments, drawing heavily on sites like Reddit, G2, and Quora. For instance, Reddit is ChatGPT’s go-to source for consumer electronics, followed by Tom’s Guide and then Wikipedia, according to marketing-software company Semrush.”
“‘AI search is inextricably linked to user-generated content, what people are saying about your brand,’ says Andrew Warden, chief marketing officer at Semrush. ‘AI favors firsthand experience, specificity, and continuously refreshed discussions. So the more activity that is happening around your brand, the more likely you are to be propelled into the conversation.’ To gin up that kind of visibility, companies are likely to engage more with customers online, like answering people’s questions, or encouraging them to leave honest reviews.”
“AIs focus on facts they can easily grab and include in their answers. So companies will try to give their sites a clear structure that makes information easy to identify. For instance, traditional SEO strategies advise users to put plenty of subheads in their content. But AI chatbots want even more subheads, along with bulleted lists, FAQs, and quick ‘TL;DR’ summaries of the article’s main points.”
“Different chatbots also rely on different sites depending on the industry or type of search. ‘In e-commerce, social channels like Reddit play a huge role, but in fintech, we see [articles on a company’s own website] being successful,’ Cadwallader says. So a financial firm could benefit from adding authoritative articles to its own website, while an ecommerce firm might be better off asking customers to leave reviews and start social-media conversations about the products.”
“AI models get updated far more frequently: every 17 days on average, according to Jesse Dwyer, chief communications officer at AI company Perplexity, and that pace will increase as AI models increasingly update themselves. So what works today may not work even a few weeks from now, let alone a few years. READ MORE
