Greetings from 2022, the last time we sent a newsletter to you. We’ve been a bit distracted building a presence on Mastodon, Post, Spill, Bluesky, and Threads.
That’s right tooters, we’re still tweeting. And we’re doing it while being serenaded by the trumpet player at the Czech beer garden in Queens.
But since we sadly can’t be drinking Czechvar and eating kielbasa every day, we’re coming back to your inboxes to talk about what you care about. Nope, not the Grimace shake… Something even worse.
On to the #content:
Yet another opinion about AI
Before AI destroys humanity, it’s going to make content marketing irrelevant. Or so you might believe after spending 30 seconds on LinkedIn.
But spend 30 more seconds scrolling and you’ll read that well actually marketers can harness the power of AI to bring themselves fame, fortune, and a promotion to the C Suite. t (Spend 30 more seconds scrolling after that and you’ll wonder when Chat-GPT will replace all the crap you read on Linkedin… or if it hasn’t already.
The truth is somewhere in the middle. AI likely won’t destroy humanity (we’re doing a pretty good job of that ourselves, thankyouverymuch). And it likely won’t lead to companies laying off every marketer. It will, however, change how companies approach content creation.
You can expect to start hearing things from execs like:
- Why should we pay writers when AI can do the work in less time?
- Have AI optimize the article so we can rank #1
- Whatever happened to Haley Joel Osment, star of the 1999 movie, A.I: Artificial Intelligence?
To which you can respond:
- “AI tools are really good at making up facts. And if everyone outsources content creation to AI, and AI uses that content to create new content, we’re dealing with the high likelihood that we’re all just regurgitating the same bad info. Is misinformation one of our key brand values?” Ed note: do not use this argument if you work at Meta.
- “While that sounds great in theory – who knows an algorithm better than an algorithm? — rumor has it Google will consider automatically generated content to be spam. Why? Well, Google is only as useful as its results. And if it’s suddenly flooded with repetitive articles written by and for algorithms, it’ll lose users. No users = no ad clicks = Google employees have to bring their own lunches.”
- He does a lot of voice acting now.
While keeping on top of ‘90s child stars may feel daunting, determining what to do with your content shouldn’t be. Rather than focusing on all the AI what-ifs, let’s focus on what we know today: Your content drives traffic and it drives trust. You want it to continue doing both. Google is testing a thing called Search Generative Experience (SGE) that may impact your traffic.
The TL;DR of SGE: Exploratory searches will trigger an AI-generated response compiled from many sources that sits at the top of the page.
As The Verge stresses, it’s still in experimental mode which means no one knows how exactly it’ll impact your organic search ranking and traffic. As with any Google change though, you can assume it’ll have an impact. In an article on the topic, Newzdash thinks it’s unlikely to impact “Your Money Your Life” content, but it could drive down traffic on evergreen hits.
Our advice? Don’t upend your SEO strategy yet. Instead do a content audit to see where you can strengthen your strategy:
- Do you have a healthy mix of content types that drive organic traffic?
- Do you have a varied channel strategy that would buffer any organic search drops?
- Would Google consider your content high-quality?
- Forget your brand voice: Is your content truly unique enough to stand out?
The stronger your yes to these answers, the more confident you can be that whatever SGE is in its final form, it won’t lead to a precipitous drop in traffic overnight.
Department of self-promotion:
Being as how we haven’t sent this newsletter in like a year, we’ve got no shortage of fun client work to showcase. One of the cooler projects we’ve done lately is this new website for our homies at Fanatics. They’d recently completed an acquisition of the card company Topps, and tasked us with building out a new brand and website from scratch.
The brief: create a brand that broadens the appeal of cards in general. Per the client “we need to 10x cards”.
The result: Topps Ripped – complete with a new website, editorial calendar, card glossary, and videos series starring Boardwalk Empire’s Vincent Piazza… with more features to come.
But no, this did not get us an invite to CEO Michael Rubin’s white party. There’s always next year, though!
Enjoy Barbenheimer everyone!