I spent the day speaking and attending the Stone Temple Consulting Next10X conference. Three key insights I took away:
- Social and search dine at separate restaurants, on the analytics side
- Consider web analytics to measure social
- Intent matters most across all digital marketing because AI is optimizing for intent
Big thanks to Eric Enge, Mark Traphagen, and the Stone Temple team for having me!
Watch the video for details on each of these insights and stay tuned to the Trust Insights blog for the video of my talk, coming very soon.
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Machine-Generated Transcript
What follows is an AI-generated transcript. The transcript may contain errors and is not a substitute for watching the video.
some reflections on the next 10 x conference I had the opportunity to address the conference yesterday in Boston and what a terrific event Stone Temple consulting really put on a terrific show some amazing speakers, we saw, of course, Ann Handley Rand Fishkin
we saw Larry Kim there and a bunch of other really good folks also really interesting two presenters from the two leading smart speakers companies. So Emily from Amazon the Alexa division there and gosh, I can’t remember her name, but her Twitter handles typewriters from Google, getting to hear about each of the smart speaker platforms. But the real goods
actually came from both Rand
and Eric Enge the, the CEO of Stone Temple and three or four things I think stood out that are worth paying attention to, we’re thinking about and our marketing one thing which
we had found out a while ago and it’s only continued to be reinforced with the data that we all have as an industry is social media metrics are not in any way search metrics and there’s no correlation between the two. These two
buckets of metrics dinette million died in separate tables. They don’t separate restaurants and so if you’re trying to use one to predict or calibrate on another it’s not going to give you the results you want
in some of the software I run,
have we have search metrics
social media metrics.
Then click through metrics and
in a lot of cases they’re all different. The click through metrics more closely relate to search, but not by much. It’s not, it’s not like saying oh if this then absolutely do that all the correlations are very weak
or non existent or statistically insignificant. So
be aware of that one point that Eric and Rand both brought up, which I thought was really insightful was that think about what metrics,
the social networks are no longer sharing right so we saw Twitter took away its its tweet shares
a couple years ago, LinkedIn, just removed, there’s this past February and the premise behind this the the expression was
if you if the social networks themselves don’t value these metrics and they’re not giving them to us. Maybe we shouldn’t either. And I think that’s a really important point.
If you want to measure social media and the impact of social media one probably more effective way to do that
would be to focus on
what you see in your web analytics and your marketing on instead of where the results actually begin to come through. So it may be great to get a lot of awareness and brand and reputation.
But those social metrics by themselves are not enough, especially as
those as social platforms is particularly Facebook
switch over to much more of an AI based algorithm and they’ve always they’ve always had a habit. Now it’s getting really really complex and so because of the way deep learning works. There’s no way for us to be able to reverse engineer easily what their own AI has come up with as valuable and because it’s deep learning because it’s constantly retraining itself over time what may be happening this week,
what’s
working this week is not what’s going to work next week or the week after because the algorithm changes and learns as we provided more data. So
that’s one aspect focus on what’s driving traffic
rather than
the vanity metrics or the even the the social engagement metrics as a more reliable proxy and also because think about it this way. It’s an apples to apples comparison right your Google Analytics date and what people do once they come to your site should be relatively stable in terms of what’s working, what’s not once they get there because I’m guessing you’re probably not rewriting every page on your website every single day. So keep that in mind. The other thing that was really important is, while the book the presenters talks a lot about intent based SEO, making sure that your content on your page fulfills the intent of a search, not just the keyword, which is insightful, there’s a bigger picture at work here again as artificial intelligence calibrates and learns what we as people, as customers and consumers want
it’s going to optimize for us it’s going to optimize for our behaviors and so that means that intent matters not just for SEO, but for social for referral traffic for any form of digital marketing for any for a marketing period that intent is what matters and the more you use AI and machine learning in any given channel, the more that intent is going to matter because the machines will be optimizing for our intent, not for our narrow query,
think about, for example, you know, we’ve been talking a lot about influence on analytics,
what is our intent
for that influencers outcome is it brand is it reputation is recommendation is it connection. We’re going to need to use different analytics and different algorithms and different tools and concepts to generate each of these outcomes and the best and smartest influencers and and vendors and companies will have separate methodologies for each of these possible outcomes, because the intent has to be measured
and managed
differently. So give that some thought as well intent is what AI is optimizing for across these channels which means that intent is what we have to to be very focused on in all of our marketing
next next was a terrific event would definitely recommend you go and attend it when it comes around this time next year. Sign up for it when they when it becomes available and and
lots and lots of good stuff and definitely follow all the folks that were presenting this tweet floating around of all the folks who were speaking yesterday.
Lots of good stuff to share.
So as always thank you for watching please subscribe to the YouTube channel and the newsletter and I will talk to you soon. Take care.
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